Max Boot: China's challenge
Threats to nuke America may be just the start
12:03 AM CDT on Saturday, July 23, 2005
Maj. Gen. Zhu Chenghu of the Chinese People's Liberation Army caused quite a stir last week when he threatened to nuke "hundreds" of American cities if the United States dared to interfere with a Chinese attempt to conquer Taiwan.
This saber-rattling comes while China is building a lot of sabers. Although its defense budget, estimated to be as much as $90 billion, remains a fraction of the U.S. defense budget, it is enough to make China the world's third-biggest weapons buyer (behind Russia) and the biggest in Asia. Moreover, China's spending has been increasing rapidly, and it is investing in the kind of systems – especially missiles and submarines – needed to challenge U.S. naval power in the Pacific.
The Pentagon released a study Tuesday of Chinese military capabilities. In a preview, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld told a Singapore audience last month that China's arms buildup was an "area of concern." It should be. But we shouldn't get overly fixated on such traditional indices of military power as ships and bombs – not even atomic bombs. Chinese strategists, in the best tradition of Sun Tzu, are working on craftier schemes.
In 1998, an official People's Liberation Army publishing house brought out a treatise called Unrestricted Warfare, written by two senior army colonels, Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui. This book, which is available in English translation, is well known to the U.S. national-security establishment but remains practically unheard of among the public.
Unrestricted Warfare recognizes that it is practically impossible to challenge the U.S. on its own terms. No one else can afford to build mega-expensive weapons systems such as the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, which will cost more than $200 billion to develop. "The way to extricate oneself from this predicament," the authors write, "is to develop a different approach."
Their different approaches include financial warfare (subverting banking systems and stock markets), drug warfare (attacking the fabric of society by flooding it with illicit drugs), psychological and media warfare (manipulating perceptions to break down enemy will), international-law warfare (blocking enemy actions using multinational organizations), resource warfare (seizing control of vital natural resources), even ecological warfare (creating man-made earthquakes or other natural disasters).
The two write approvingly of al-Qaeda, Colombian drug lords and computer hackers who operate outside the "bandwidths understood by the American military." They envision a scenario in which a "network attack against the enemy" would be carried out "so that the civilian electricity network, traffic dispatching network, financial transaction network, telephone communications network and mass media network are completely paralyzed." Only then would conventional military force be deployed "until the enemy is forced to sign a dishonorable peace treaty."
There are signs of this strategy being implemented. The anti-Japanese riots that swept China in April? That's psychological warfare against an Asian rival. The stage-managed protests in 1999, after the United States accidentally bombed the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, fall into the same category.
The bid by China's state-owned CNOOC Ltd. to acquire Unocal? Resource warfare. Attempts by China's spy apparatus to infiltrate U.S. high-tech firms and defense contractors? Technological warfare. China siding against the United States in the U.N. Security Council over the invasion of Iraq? International-law warfare. Gen. Zhu's threat to nuke the United States? Media warfare.
Once you know what to look for, the pieces fall into place with disturbing ease. Of course, most of these events have alternative, benign explanations: Maybe Gen. Zhu is an eccentric old coot who's seen Dr. Strangelove a few too many times.
The deliberate ambiguity makes it hard to craft a response to "unrestricted warfare." How do we respond to what may or may not be indirect aggression by a major trading partner? Battling terrorist groups such as al-Qaeda seems like a cinch by comparison.
This is not a challenge the Pentagon is set up to address, but it's an urgent issue for the years ahead.
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