“The nature of war is constant change.”
-Sun Tzu
June 12, 2025 — In a Zero-day war, you have already lost the moment the war starts.
A decade ago, while doing some writing and thinking for the CJCS (Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff), I came up with the concept of the Zero-day war. The Zero-day war concept leveraged my earlier work on Global Guerrillas (see my book “Brave New War” for more). It combines;
- infiltration (deep penetration of an enemy’s territory, systems, and society),
- technological leverage (leveraging and modifying commercially available technology to super-empower small groups/individuals), and
- amplification from systems disruption (the ability to easily disrupt large, tightly coupled, and interconnected networks through small attacks, causing cascades of chaos)
to completely overwhelm an adversary for a short period (a couple of days or weeks) by catastrophically disrupting the complex and tightly interconnected networks (energy, transportation, communications, etc.) a modern society is completely and utterly dependent upon.
How it is used
The disruption generated by Zero-day wars isn’t sufficient in and of itself to achieve a complete victory over an adversary. They are used to:
- Incapacitate an enemy to make it vulnerable to a conventional invasion that will achieve a complete victory.
- Decisively delay an enemy’s ability to mobilize in response to maneuvers, actions, or invasions taken against other foes (by the time they do, it’s over).
- Force an enemy to overreact in ways that will critically damage them.
Let’s dig into some of the mechanics used.
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Infiltration
The first step to a Zero-day war is a profound penetration of the target country by a small number of infiltrators, bypassing defenses and security precautions. For best effect, this is done slowly and with care to minimize detection. There are three types of infiltrations:
- People. Individuals and small teams enter the target country, spread out, embed themselves, and prepare for the event. The tasks required to prepare for an attack would disaggregated and commercialized to reduce exposure. We are now acutely vulnerable to this.
- Drones/AI. Advanced drones (air, sea, and underwater) would travel (slowly to avoid detection), bury themselves in a defensible area, intelligently gather information and adapt, and wait (potentially for years). We’re not quite there yet with this tech, but we’re close.
- Software/AI. Logical weapons would drift over the internet (with or without active help), propagating themselves and infiltrating systems (think Stuxnet). They would deeply embed themselves in systems of interest (SCADA systems controlling electricity grids, etc.) and await activation. This could take years.
Technological Leverage
Zero-day wars rely upon technological leverage from three sources:
- Dual-use technology.
- Weaponized commercial technology.
- Machine Intelligence (increasingly).
Systems Disruption
A Zero-day war uses the amplification gained by disrupting systems to achieve outsized results.
- Small disruptive attacks on critical points (systempunkt) in large, interconnected systems can create cascades of failure that can topple an extensive network and the networks dependent upon them.
- If the attack is done correctly, reconstituting these networks (the networks that modern life entirely depends on) can take weeks, creating chaos.
- Due to the leverage provided by systems disruption, attacks on systempunkts can generate disruption worth millions of times more than the cost of the attack itself.
By disrupting systems, Zero-day wars leverage all three dimensions of warfare (Boyd);
- Psychological. Zero-day wars generate the ambiguity, deception, and novelty needed to disrupt, disorient, and overload an opponent’s mind (like Blitzkrieg). It makes coherent decision-making impossible. “What’s happening?” “Who is attacking?” “Why don’t they answer me!”
- Moral. Zero-day wars shatter the moral cohesion of the target by generating alienation, fear, and anxiety. “Why did you let this happen?” It can also provoke an overreaction that causes the target to damage itself (see last month’s report, “The Tactics of Mistake,” for more).
- Physical. Zero-day wars can also provide temporary attrition (making the opponent physically incapable of action) by halting a mobilization due to network failures (communications, energy, etc).
What this Means
The US is now vulnerable to a Zero-day war due to:
- an undefended southern border that has let eight million people enter illegally over the last three years,
- recent successes in weaponizing commercial drone technology (Ukraine/Arabian Peninsula), and
- the rapid deterioration of the US security position globally.
Let’s use the threat posed by an invasion of Taiwan as a foil to explore this (the threat is by no means exclusive to China, given our current level of vulnerability).
- China decides to take advantage of US overextension and weakness to invade Taiwan.
- Surprised, the US mobilizes to oppose the invasion, but it is stopped by a sudden and debilitating attack that disrupts critical networks across the nation. The attackers leave the country within days of the attack.
- By the time the US reconstitutes its networks, the invasion is complete, and Taiwan is now under Chinese control. Unable to take meaningful action to reverse the invasion, still reeling from the effects of systems disruption, and unwilling to admit that its border policy created the vulnerability, the US capitulates, marking the end of the US-led global system.
John Robb
Global Guerrillas & Grey Swan
P.S. from Addison: John originally wrote that on Substack in February 2024, and appears prescient today.
Grey Swan members got a masterclass from John Robb today, where his zero-day war concept came into play, reviewing Ukraine’s audacious drone attacks against Russian targets.
But the ideas didn’t stop there. John discussed the Musk/Trump feud through the power of networks and tribes, showing how today’s “Red Team” is a coalition of different ideas and has to compromise to stay in power.
Plus, John shared his views on the next great resource race – the push into space – and several investment themes that gel with our recent research – and will push it still further in the months ahead. We’ll have the video on our member site in the morning.
With the metals space in mind as structural fiscal spending issues remain, our portfolio director, Andrew Packer, will be attending the Rule Investment Symposium in Boca Raton FL, July 7-11, 2025.
The Symposium is Rick’s continuation of the Agora Financial Symposium we co-sponsored in Vancouver with him for a decade in the early 2000s.
Now, in Boca Raton, it’s a five-day affair featuring in-depth research from dozens of small-cap resource companies, including gold and silver mining companies, but also copper, uranium, and other critical commodities we’ve explored in-depth in our research over the past year. Click here to view the stellar speaker line up and learn how you can attend yourself.
Your thoughts? Please send them here: addison@greyswanfraternity.com
