This chapter has solidified my belief that China is THE adversary in the Great Global Competition. With all of their foreign investments, one belt one road and the new maritime silk road initiative has China created a vulnerability to strategically targeted advancement of Socialism/Nationalism where their assets are seized by a country they have invested in? I don’t know, just thinking out-load.
Our book discussion continues on David Kilcullen’s latest book, The Dragons and The Snakes: How the Rest Learned to Fight the West, today we will discuss Chapter 5. If you need to get caught up, Part One of the discussion can be found here, Part Two can be found here and Part 3 can be found here. We originally discussed this project here and here, the book summary from Amazon can be found here. I have completely blow up our schedule for this book but I should be able to finish it next week:
June 19, 2020 – Chapter 6, Epilogue, Wrap Up and Questions I would ask the Author
I have also included some of the terminology from this and all of the previous chapters at the end of this article for reference.
Chapter 5
Chapter 5 kicks off with a discussion about Chinese investment in strategic locations where military movements can be monitored. Kilcullen admits that he does not have concrete evidence of malfeasance but there is a pattern where China invests in commercial properties, hotels, ports etc. in the vicinity of western / adversaries ports. This has the potential to provide electronic monitoring and advance warning should tensions rise.
He then introduces the concept of Conceptual Envelopment prior to discussing the history of the Chinese Military and how it has evolved. For me, the most important point that Kilcullen notes was that China has a history of Naval power and they quickly realized in the 80s and 90s that they were way behind the U.S. in overall capabilities. And perhaps most importantly, there are two seminal moments in U.S. – China relations: the Belgrade bombing of the Chinese Embassy during the war in Kosovo framed the U.S. – China relations as a zero-sum rivalry and the Taiwan Crisis in 1996 where the US sailed a full carrier strike group and an amphibious task group through the Taiwan Strait. China could do nothing to stop it. In addition, Kilcullen also notes that:
85 percent of China’s international trade is moved by sea…with littoral industrialization and the reliance on maritime trade came the need to protect trade routes, guarantee supply chains, and control sea lanes, which in turn implied the need for a capable navy.
Honestly, there is so much to take in in this chapter I probably have to reread it! Kilcullen covers the island campaign and unsinkable aircraft carriers and introduces us to a book written by two senior PLA colonels titled Unrestricted Warfare also known as War Beyond Rules.
But the book’s most salient feature is that it dramatically broadens the definition of war beyond battlefield dominance, suggesting that war no longer means “using armed force to compel the enemy to submit to one’s will” but rather “using all means, including armed force or non-armed force, military and non-military and lethal and non-lethal means to compel the enemy to accept one’s interest” and the “non-war actions may be the new factors constituting future warfare.” The authors write of “trans-military” and “non-military war operations” in which all aspects of society, technology and the international system (whether directly under a protagonist’s control or not) are leveraged to achieve war aims. These might include financial disruption, currency and stock market manipulation, trade wars, exploitation of humanitarian aid and foreign assistance, cyberwarfare and information warfare, narcotics trafficking, smuggling, and other criminal activities, ecological warfare (including the creation and exploitation of artificial earthquakes and tsunamis), capturing control of key technologies or of standards for future technologies), and “lawfare,” or the manipulation or rules and norms for advantage in war or a substitute for armed conflict.
Kilcullen continues:
Alongside an extension of the scope of conflict, Qiao and Wang argue for a geographical expansion: they suggest the “the battlefield ins everywhere” and the “all the boundaries lying between the two worlds of war and non-war, on military and non-military, will be totally destroyed…and even that the rules of war may need to be rewritten. The goal set forth in URW is “to use all means whatsoever–means that involve the force of arms and the means that do not involve the force of arms, means that involve military power and means that do not involve military power, means that entail casualties and means that do not entail casualties—to force the enemy to serve one’s own interests.
The book also identifies some on the key U.S. weaknesses that include a dependence on technology, aversion to casualties, and the need for international support. Kilcullen then quotes one of the books critiques at length:
[The] Americans’ unlimited extravagance in war has already become and addiction…even if the American generals knew as soon as they began [the Gulf War] that they need not spend so much on the unrestrained battle banquet costing US$61 billion, using such an ostentation battle style of “attacking birds with golden bullets,” their over-extravagance would still not have bee prevented. An American-made bomber is like a flying mountain of gold, more costly than many of it targets…What you must know is that this is a nationality that has never been willing to pay the price of [loss of] life… “Pursuit of zero casualties,” this completely compassionate simple slogan, has actually become the principal motivating factor in creating American-style extravagant warfare. Therefore, unchecked use of stealth aircraft, precisions ammunition, new tanks, and helicopters, along with long distance attack and blanket bombing [made the Gulf War] a sumptuous international fair of high technology weapons wit the United States as the [sales] representative and, as a result, began the spread of the disease of American style war extravagance on a global scale.
Kilcullen then briefly touches the Chinese promotion of Marxist thinkers but interestingly talks about Zimbabwe and the potential for a Chinese promoted coup there in a reaction to Mugabe’s move to nationalize several Chinese owned mines. This got me thinking, has China invested so heavily in so many regions that they would actually be hurt by the promotion of Socialists and Nationalist that would seize their investments? This is something that the U.S. has traditionally stood up against but could it be used in limited targeted areas?
Ultimately, Kilcullen seems to believe that the U.S. and China have a fundamental misunderstanding of each other and maybe things are not total unlimited war. He seems to suggest that this miscalculation could actually lead to war. I do not know that I agree. I believe that the influence and the danger posed by an ascending China is real and that they are THE adversary that should be confronted at almost all costs.
Terminology (Chapter 1-2)
The West or Western – (All definitions are quotes or summaries taken from Kilcullen and should be used when discussing this book:)
is used to describe a particular military methodology that is an approach to war that emphasizes battlefield dominance, achieved through high-tech precision engagement, networked communications, and pervasive intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance. It is characterized by an obsessive drive to minimize casualties, a reluctance to think about long-term consequences of war, a narrow focus on combat, and a lack of emphasis on war termination-the set activities needed in order to translate battlefield success into enduring and favorable political outcomes.
Dragons – Capable state adversaries exemplified by Russia, China (big) North Korea and Iran (little dragons)
Snakes – Weak or failing states and non-state actors such as Libya, Iraq, Iran and various terror and transnational crime organizations.
Convergent Evolution – The way in which unlike actors confronting a similar environment can come to resemble each other.
Offset Strategies – policies implemented to ‘side step’ our conventional power or to stay below the threshold of a massive response.
James Woolsey – CIA Director 1993 – 1995
Terminology (Chapter 3)
Democratization of lethality – lethal capabilities that were formerly utilized almost exclusively by nation-states, i.e. cyberspace, the urbanization of war, the connectively explosion and transformative technologies, utilized by non-state groups and hyper-empowered individuals.
Fitness Landscape – the combat environment where adaptation occurs…a fitness landscape maps the potential combinations of characteristics for a given organism in that environment, so that any point on the landscape represents a particular combination.
Terrorism – (not in the book verbatim but I think is necessary to understand the overall conversation) from Oxford – The unlawful use of violence and intimidation, especially against civilians, in the pursuit of political aims. [emphasis mine] from FBI.gov :
International terrorism: Violent, criminal acts committed by individuals and/or groups who are inspired by, or associated with, designated foreign terrorist organizations or nations (state-sponsored).
Domestic terrorism: Violent, criminal acts committed by individuals and/or groups to further ideological goals stemming from domestic influences, such as those of a political, religious, social, racial, or environmental nature.
Terminology (Chapter 4)
Liminal – “comes from the Latin word for a threshold and is used in anthropology to describe the ambiguity experienced by people or societies transitioning between two states of being. Things that are in limbo, transitioning, or on the periphery, that have ambiguous political, legal, and psychological status—or whose very existence is debated—are liminal.”
Liminal Geographies – “recognize thresholds not as sharp lines but as transitional zones, while in warfare guerrillas, militias, terrorists, and resistance movements are all liminal actors.”
Liminal Warfare – “exploits the character of ambiguity, operating in the blur…” grey zone,”” the fog of war.
Liminal Maneuver – “it is neither fully overt nor truly clandestine; rather it rises to the edge, surfing the threshold of detectability, sometimes subliminal, at other times breaking fully into the open to seize an advantage or consolidate the gains before adversaries can react.”
Terminology (Chapter 5)
Conceptual Envelopment – a situation in which an adversary’s conception of war becomes so much broader that our own that two dangerous things can happen
Vertical escalation – increasing intensity of action with a given location, category of competition, or environmental domain
Horizontal escalation – expanding the geography. Categories, and scope of actions, with or without increasing intensity in any one location
A2/AD – anti-access and area denial
“The Side Principle Rule” – warfighting that encourages a superior adversary to expend its strength by a series of frontal efforts before responding with a decisive blow…all military means of any kind whatsoever can be considered
“Three Warfares” doctrine – psychological warfare, public opinion warfare and legal warfare