Persistent competition and the competition continuum

Persistent competition and the competition continuum are dated strategic frames that reject a clean binary between peace and war. They allow cooperation, rivalry below armed conflict and armed conflict to coexist across issues and relationships. The frames can help locate economic statecraft within long-running campaigns, but they do not make every interaction hostile or specify an economic transmission mechanism.

United States formulations

Joint Doctrine Note 1-19, issued by the United States Joint Chiefs of Staff on 3 June 2019, set out a competition continuum spanning cooperation, competition below armed conflict and armed conflict. Its preface expressly described the note as non-authoritative guidance intended to inform doctrine development. It was therefore an official conceptual intervention, not binding joint doctrine or a universal allied position.

The Joint Concept for Competing, signed on 10 February 2023, developed a later Joint Force approach to competition. Service-level documents, including the United States Army's 2021 paper, also used competition vocabulary for their own purposes. These texts must be attributed to the issuing institution and date rather than assembled into an undifferentiated doctrine.

The January 2026 United States National Defense Strategy superseded the 2022 strategy. It does not retain persistent competition, competition or campaigning as organising terms. That change does not erase the earlier documents, but it prevents their presentation as the current National Defense Strategy's organising language on 29 July 2026.

United Kingdom formulation and status

The United Kingdom Ministry of Defence published Integrated Operating Concept 2025 on 30 September 2020. It treated operating and campaigning across a continuum as part of a new approach to the utility of force. The government withdrew the publication page on 12 June 2025. The document remains historical evidence of a national concept, not current doctrine by virtue of its original 2025 label.

The 2025 Strategic Defence Review and National Security Strategy provide the later strategic setting. Their priorities and terminology must be read directly. They do not prove that every formulation from the withdrawn Integrated Operating Concept survived unchanged.

Statecraft relevance and roles

The category's state nexus is contested. Joint staffs and defence ministries can officially issue concepts, while scholars and practitioners also develop related frames. Strategy setters and campaign coordinators may use them to sequence diplomatic, informational, military and economic instruments. No target, authority or mechanism follows from the frame itself. A particular campaign must still identify the state objective, object, legal instrument, intermediary and transmission channel.

Economic statecraft may operate during cooperation, rivalry, crisis or armed conflict. Sanctions, export controls, investment measures, financial restrictions and resilience programmes retain their own authorities and effects. The continuum organises time and relationships; it is not the action.

Adjacent concepts and contestation

Persistent competition is not synonymous with grey-zone activity, hybrid war, political warfare or campaigning. Each has its own genealogy and threshold problem. Broad competition language can encourage cumulative planning, but it can also militarise commerce, weaken prioritisation and obscure the legal difference between ordinary policy disagreement and hostile action.

Claims about adversary doctrine require the same discipline. Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui's Unrestricted Warfare is an influential work by two People's Liberation Army officers. It is not, without separate official evidence, authoritative Chinese doctrine. The proposition that China or Russia arrived at persistent competition earlier therefore cannot rest on that book or a Western label alone.

This page remains context because the frame helps readers understand temporal orientation and cumulative campaigns. It routes analysis to concrete instruments and cases rather than treating permanent competition as an independently transmitting weapon.

See also

Dissolving peace-war boundary · Grey-zone competition · Hybrid warfare · Unrestricted warfare · New Generation Warfare (NGW) · Economic statecraft · Economic warfare

Sources

1. Joint Chiefs of Staff, Competition Continuum, Joint Doctrine Note 1-19, 3 June 2019.
2. Joint Chiefs of Staff, Joint Concept for Competing, 10 February 2023.
3. Mark F. Cancian, "The U.S. Joint Chiefs' New Strategy Paper on Joint Concept for Competing", Center for Strategic and International Studies, 17 March 2023.
4. United Kingdom Ministry of Defence, Integrated Operating Concept 2025, 30 September 2020, page withdrawn 12 June 2025.
5. United Kingdom Government, Strategic Defence Review 2025: Making Britain Safer, Secure at Home, Strong Abroad, 2 June 2025.
6. United Kingdom Government, National Security Strategy 2025: Security for the British People in a Dangerous World, 24 June 2025.
7. United States Department of Defense, 2026 National Defense Strategy, January 2026.
8. Michael J. Mazarr, Mastering the Gray Zone: Understanding a Changing Era of Conflict (United States Army War College Press, 2015).
9. Donald Stoker and Craig Whiteside, "Blurred Lines: Gray-Zone Conflict and Hybrid War, Two Failures of American Strategic Thinking", Naval War College Review 73, no. 1 (2020).
10. United States Army, The Army in Military Competition, Chief of Staff Paper No. 2, 1 March 2021.
11. Jonathan P. Klug and Earl J. Catagnus Jr., "Integrated Campaigning in the Pacific, 1918-1948", Parameters 50, no. 4 (2020).
12. Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui, Unrestricted Warfare (People's Liberation Army Literature and Arts Publishing House, 1999; Foreign Broadcast Information Service English translation).