People’s Liberation Army Revises
The Art Of War
February 4, 2000
’Asymmetrical, warfare’: terrorism, computer hacking,
economic sabotage, assassination of U.S. citizens - is the Chinese
military,’s strategy to defeat the United States.
Should U.S. financiers whose trading adversely affects
Chinese "red-chip companies" be assassinated? China’s People’s
Liberation Army, or PLA, is discussing the concept. Should Beijing
covertly fund political-influence operations in the United States? A
new PLA book openly asks the question. Facing a potentially huge
nuclear-weapons buildup as well as an even bigger high-tech
conventional-arms race to reach parity with the United States and
Russia, members of the echelon of senior colonels who will be among
tomorrow’s PLA flag officers are looking beyond the nuclear age to a
new and more stealthy form of war.
The book, titled Unrestricted Warfare, is part of a
larger effort within the PLA to develop a means of challenging the
United States through "asymmetry " not by trying to match the United
States missile for missile, but by turning the strength of China’s
adversaries against themselves as a judo artist subdues a larger,
stronger foe. "Understanding and employing the principle of asymmetry
correctly allows us always to find and exploit an enemy’s soft spots",
PLA senior Cols. Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui write in their 1999
book. They say they got the idea for the book during the 1996 Taiwan
Strait
crisis when Beijing stood by helplessly as two U.S. aircraft-carrier
groups made a show of force during Beijing’s mock missile attack on
Taiwan. Insight has obtained a CIA translation of the volume.
Unrestricted Warfare, according to a CIA commentary,
"proposes tactics for developing countries", in particular China, to
compensate for their military inferiority vis-à-vis the United States
during a high-tech war. Accordingly, "Hacking into Websites, targeting
financial institutions, terrorism, using the media and conducting
urban warfare are among the methods proposed." In an interview with
the official daily of the Chinese Communist Party youth league, the
44-year-old Qiao said, "The first rule of unrestricted warfare is that
there are no rules, with nothing forbidden."
The book implies that the infrastructure for such
warfare should be built and in place well in advance of any possible
military confrontation. "From this point on, war will no longer be
what it was originally," the colonels write, but will be
unrecognizable as it is waged in the heart of American society. "Does
a single hacker attack count as a hostile act or not? Can using
financial instruments to destroy a country’s economy be seen as a
battle? Did CNN’s broadcast of an exposed corpse of a U.S. soldier in
the streets of Mogadishu shake the determination of the Americans to
act as the world’s policeman, thereby altering the world’s strategic
situation?"
The colonels have laid an intellectual framework for
such warfare with high-level sponsorship in the Chinese military and
the ruling Communist Party. "The PLA has placed special emphasis on
the modernization of its info-war capabilities, in accordance with the
emphasis on information dominance in the classic book Art of War by
Sun Tzu, according to Al Santoli, editor of the China Reform Monitor
bulletin. "The rationale for this approach, Santoli says, is
articulated in Unrestricted Warfare." "The PLA decided it cannot match
the United States in conventional weapons. Instead, it is emphasizing
development of new information and cyberwar technologies and viruses
to neutralize or erode an enemy’s political, economic and military
information and command-and-control infrastructures," according to
Santoli.
Much of the debate is out in the open. The PLA is
encouraging officers to think more about unrestricted warfare in
general and information warfare in particular. Last year it also
published a companion work, Introduction to Information Warfare, "as
part of its integrated combined operations for fighting future wars,
Santoli says. The book "was approved by the PLA General Staff
Department and the powerful Central Military Commission, and was
recommended for reading by the
PLA newspaper Jiefangjun Bao."
The PLA authors are explicit in Unrestricted Warfare,
arguing that China can outmaneuver U.S. high-tech sensors, electronic
countermeasures and weaponry by employing different methods entirely.
"If the attacking side [i.e., China] secretly musters large amounts of
capital without the enemy nation being aware of this at all and
launches a sneak attack against its financial markets," they write,
"then after causing a financial crisis, buries a computer virus and
hacker detachment in the opponent’s computer system in advance, while
at the same time carrying out a network attack against the enemy so
that the civilian electricity network, traffic-dispatching network,
financial-transaction network, telephone-communications network and
mass-media network are completely paralyzed, this will cause the enemy
nation to fall into social panic, street riots and a political
crisis."
Or so the PLA hopes. Unrestricted Warfare calls for
widening the very idea of warfare to nearly every aspect of political,
economic, cultural and social life in Western countries. The elegant
CIA translation reveals an extremely well-reasoned approach and a
profound understanding of the U.S. military, the U.S. political and
economic systems and American popular culture.
Unrestricted warfare, the PLA colonels write, "means
that all means will be in readiness, that information will be
omnipresent and the battlefield will be everywhere. It means that all
weapons and technology can be superimposed at will, it means that all
the boundaries lying between the two worlds of war and nonwar, of
military and nonmilitary, will be totally destroyed."
While paying great respect and open admiration for the
far-superior U.S. weaponry, logistics and military doctrine, the
authors believe China could defeat the United States on the new
battlefield. "Viewed from the performance of the U.S. military in
Somalia, where they were at a loss when they encountered [warlord
Mohamed Farah] Aideed’s forces, the most modern military force does
not have the ability to control public clamor and cannot deal with an
opponent who does things
in an unconventional manner, the colonels argue. "On the battlefields
of the future, the digitized forces may very possibly be like a great
cook who is good at cooking lobsters sprinkled with butter, but when
faced with guerrillas who resolutely gnaw corn cobs, they can only
sigh in despair."
So the weaker side indeed can defeat the United States,
the PLA colonels maintain. U.S. military thinking, they argue, has not
kept pace with the amazing leaps in military technology. "The
Americans have not been able to get their act together in this area."
This is because proposing a new concept of weapons does not require
relying on the springboard of new technology, it just demands lucid
and incisive thinking. However, this is not a strong point of the
Americans, who are slaves to technology in their thinking.
Americans, in the Chinese colonels, view, are too wedded
to "weapons whose immediate goal is to kill and destroy." In
unrestricted warfare, "there is nothing in the world today that cannot
become a weapon." So the war should be brought into every aspect of
American life: "As we see it, a single man-made stock-market crash, a
single computer-virus invasion or a single rumor or scandal that
results in a fluctuation in the enemy country’s exchange rates or
exposes the leaders of an enemy
country on the Internet can be included in the ranks of new-concept
weapons. A new concept of weapons provides direction for new-concept
weapons, while the new-concept weapons give fixed forms to the new
concept of weapons. With regard to the flood of new-concept weapons,
technology is no longer the main factor; the true underlying factor is
a new concept regarding weapons.
This argument gives new urgency to those in the United
States who are pressing for greater vigilance of Communist Chinese
penetration of the United States stock and bond markets. Roger W.
Robinson, who served on President Reagan’s National Security Council
and now chairs the William J. Casey Institute at the Center for
Security Policy, has been
behind a transparency initiative to allow U.S. investors to know what
their pension funds and mutual funds might be financing in China (see
"China Cashes In, Dec. 20, 1999).
Unrestricted Warfare, in Robinson’s view, "should give
pause to those who believe that China’s integration into global
financial and trading systems is an entirely benign and civilian
development. It likens currency speculator George Soros to Saudi
terrorist Osama bin Laden, the late Colombian cocaine kingpin Pablo
Escobar and the Japanese Aum Shinri Kyo cult that in 1998 attacked a
Tokyo subway with sarin poison gas. Soros is named at least a
half-dozen times as one who has waged "financial warfare and
"financial terrorism on East Asia. Financiers such as Soros, the
colonels suggest, could be legitimate targets of assassination.
Contrary to the conspiratorial worldview fostered by
one-party systems such as that in China, the PLA colonels recognize
that individual speculators and other nongovernmental actors are
indeed independent and not necessarily agents of Western capitalism or
appendages of the U.S. government. Such individuals and groups, they
say, are threats in their own right: the "nonprofessional warriors.
And they must be dealt with.
"This person is not a hacker in the general sense of the
term, and also is not a member of a quasimilitary organization, the
colonels argue. "Perhaps he or she is a systems analyst or a software
engineer, or a financier with a large amount of mobile capital or a
stock speculator. He or she might even be a media mogul who controls a
wide variety of media, a famous columnist or the host of a TV program.
His or her philosophy of life is different from that of certain blind
and inhuman terrorists. But they might as well be the same: "Who can
say that George Soros is not a financial terrorist?
The colonels blame Soros for an attack on the Chinese
economy by causing a run on "red-chip stocks " companies listed on the
Hong Kong stock market but controlled by Communist Chinese interests.
"The main protagonist in this section of the history book will not be
a statesman or a military strategist; rather, it will be George Soros.
After Soros began his activities, [Taiwan President] Lee Teng-hui used
the financial crisis in Southeast Asia to devalue the New Taiwan
dollar, so as to launch an attack on the Hong Kong dollar and Hong
Kong stocks, especially the red-chip stocks., In such a case, the PLA
officers argue, why not assassinate people such as Soros? The question
is explicit: "When protecting a country’s financial security, can
assassination be used to deal with financial speculators?
The colonels appear to endorse the idea of the
"traditional terror war, such as the bombings of U.S. embassies in
Kenya and Tanzania by Saudi terrorist bin Laden. "The advent of bin
Laden-style terrorism has deepened the impression that a national
force, no matter how powerful, will find it difficult to gain the
upper hand in a game that has no rules.
But bin Laden’s terrorism doesn,t go far enough, the
colonels argue. Bombings, kidnappings, assassinations and hijackings
"represent less than the maximum degree of terror against the target.
"What really strikes terror into people’s hearts is the rendezvous of
terrorists with various types of new, high technologies that possibly
will evolve into new superweapons. The casualties from Aum Shinri
Kyo’s sarin nerve-gas attack "accounted for just a small portion of
the terror,
according to the PLA officers. "This affair put people on notice that
modern biochemical technology had already forged a lethal weapon for
those terrorists who would try to carry out the mass destruction of
humanity.
Such thinking, experts say, provides an intellectual
framework for Beijing’s sale of technology to make weapons of mass
destruction to regimes supporting terrorism.
The book argues that it is better to control than to
kill. "Technological progress has given us the means to strike at the
enemy’s nerve center directly without harming other things, giving us
numerous new options for achieving victory, and all these make people
believe that the best way to achieve victory is to control, not to
kill. The approach of using uncontrolled slaughter to force the enemy
into unconditional surrender has now become a relic of a bygone age.
Sowing fear and uncertainty in military and civilian
ranks will become increasingly important weapons in unrestricted war,
the colonels conclude. "We can create many methods of causing fear
which are more effective than killing. "Even the last refuge of the
human race " the inner world of the heart " cannot avoid the attacks
of psychological
warfare. There are nets above and snares below, so that a person has
noplace to flee.
The PLA authors see the United States as vulnerable to
such unrestricted warfare. The U.S. military is culturally unequipped
to deal with the problem, they argue; "they have never taken into
consideration and have even refused to consider means that are
contrary to tradition and to select measures of operation other than
military means. The United States, the Red Chinese officers say,
should be better prepared: "What is surprising is that such a large
nation unexpectedly does not have a unified command structure to deal
with the threat.
by J. Michael Waller