The Illusion of Peacetime

[davidbfpo]

The character of these wars vary considerably, but it can still be viewed as war. Chinese military theorists in "Unrestricted Warfare" wrote...

The discussion on Chinese military theories was awhile ago, there is a 2007 thread where this post appeared and is added for reference:

Unrestricted Warfare was written by two Chinese Colonels in 1999. The CIA translated the text and its been an ongoing area of concerned discussion ever since.

URW doctrine is a means by which a weaker opponent can defeat a stronger opponent through widely distributed attacks across multiple domains (i.e., computer networks, communications, financial markets, media, terrorist acts) and without abiding by any commonly-held rules of engagement.

There have been two symposiums held so far on URW, both organized by Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab and sponsored in part by DARPA and the National Intelligence Council, among others. Here are the links to the original book, as well as the papers presented at each symposium.

Unrestriced Warfare by Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui
Unrestricted Warfare Symposium Proceedings 2006
Unrestricted Warfare Symposium Proceedings 2007

There are many threads with 'unrestricted' in and only a few refer to the Chinese viewpoint.

[Bob's World]

"Political Warfare" "Gray Zone Conflicts" "The Long War" "Unrestricted Warfare" etc., etc., etc.

To what end? To what purpose? What do we possibly gain by allowing those who work within the military profession to convince us to label and think of all forms of competition between powerful organizations with diverse interests as some form of "war"?

Is peace so frightening? I have never seen a nation that is both so desirous of, and at the same time fearful of, peace as is the United States of America. It is an odd dichotomy.

Peace has always been a messy business. Are we still so mentally abused by our experience in Vietnam that we now must insist that every time our national leaders feel the need to employ our military forces in dangerous and violent competition that we must also burden our nation by making each of those situations also a "war" that we therefore must win?

We must not be Pollyannaish about peace, but nor need we fear it. Those who wish too hard for perpetual war may find to their chagrin that prophesies of that nature are all too often self-fulfilling.

Seeing every revolutionary insurgent and insurgent group as some form of "terrorist" has been a strategic disaster for the US over post 9/11 era. To see every state competitor working outside the lines of the rules and policies we have put in place to shape the global competition in our favor promises to produce strategic backlash of an even greater nature.

We have defined an approach to the world that has us in a posture of playing not to lose, while our competitors are all playing to win. We do not need a grand strategy of perpetual warfare, but we do need a grand strategy that defines a game we too can play to win.

[Compost]

Professor Michael Howard covered the subject well in The Invention of Peace, Profile Books, 2000.

[Bill Moore]

Professor Michael Howard covered the subject well in The Invention of Peace, Profile Books, 2000.

Yes he did, and basically said it was an illusion, a condition we attempt to construct via social engineering, but that process itself leads to war. The bottom line is we're not at peace and to pretend that we are can be likened to Chamberlain's willfulness blindness. To treat the lower end of war as strategically as important as the high end of war is a better way to prevent to escalation than pretending we're at peace. The post is intended to be provocative, because I'm searching for a more comprehensive lexicon that can describe the full spectrum of war. As for peace, that is easier (it isn't messy), we're at peace with Canada, we're not at peace with Russia and we're not in all out war with Russia. We're at war with al-Qaeda.

[Bob's World]

America is a nation at peace. Period.

We have interests in competition with a wide range of actors in a wide range of forms. But we are a nation at peace.

This call for perpetual war is far more dangerous than a naïve belief that peace means absence of conflict. If everything is war, then nothing is war.

America's biggest problem is not perpetual war; our biggest problem is that we think being a global leader means being in charge of everything and enforcing a family rules made up by us to facilitate our success.

We need to change our scope. We need to stop leading like the worst 2LT in the battalion who makes rules he is either unable or unwilling to enforce; attempts to exercise control over everything in his domain; delegates nothing; and is constantly telling everyone that he is in charge.

America's problem is not that we are at war with the world, or that the world is at war with us. Our problem is that we don't know how to be America in the world as it actually exists.

[Bill Moore]

America is a nation at peace. Period.

We have interests in competition with a wide range of actors in a wide range of forms. But we are a nation at peace.

This call for perpetual war is far more dangerous than a nave belief that peace means absence of conflict. If everything is war, then nothing is war.

America's biggest problem is not perpetual war; our biggest problem is that we think being a global leader means being in charge of everything and enforcing a family rules made up by us to facilitate our success.

We need to change our scope. We need to stop leading like the worst 2LT in the battalion who makes rules he is either unable or unwilling to enforce; attempts to exercise control over everything in his domain; delegates nothing; and is constantly telling everyone that he is in charge.

America's problem is not that we are at war with the world, or that the world is at war with us. Our problem is that we don't know how to be America in the world as it actually exists.

Our adversaries love view points like this. As for war, that is word that has lost its meaning decades ago when we quit declaring it. Al-Qaeda declared war against us, we don't have the option of sitting it out (we tried to prior to 9/11). Other actors, much like we do, are conducting undeclared war against us. Call what it you will, but so far you have managed to dodge the challenge of defining war, but it is evident we're not at peace. Peace is peace, it isn't messy. When it gets messy it transforms into something else entirely. Again peace is a relationship between specific actors, not a general condition.

our biggest problem is that we think being a global leader means being in charge of everything and enforcing a family rules made up by us to facilitate our success.

This comment is logical, but on the other hand as both Kissinger and Colin Gray have said, order is not self-sustaining, it must be enforced. Considering who the alternatives are for enforcing an international order, I'm quite happy with the U.S. doing it within reason. We just haven't found the sweet spot yet. What must we enforce? What can we allow to change without it threatening our interests? I'm still not sure why we state Iraq must continue to exist within its current borders, yet we promoted the separation of Sudan into a North and South Sudan? Since peace is a socially constructed reality, it would seem we could get there if we allowed some borders to change.

[Bob's World]

Bill, I am trying hard to grasp how smart, reasonable people are coming to this position that you are advocating. I just can't get there. The logic of it escapes me. More importantly, what escapes me is how anyone would thing that seeing all things as war helps solve the problem that we face. Problems, which by the way, compared to being at war, are really quite small. But then anyone living in a nation truly at war would quickly point that out. When one is truly at war, one knows it, and there is no debate.

How can you declare that "peace is not messy"? When has peace ever not been messy?? Far more Americans died at the hands of the Comanche in our own gray zone effort to wrest the Southern plains away from native Americans than AQ has ever killed. And far more viscously to boot. ISIL looks like a bunch of school girls compared to the Apache, yet we battled them primarily with civilians as well. In the first half of the last century we beat up on every weaker place we could reach out to where we thought there was a military interest to serve, or profits to be made; and don't even start on all the coups and revolutions we either fomented or attempted to block as the bloody back story to our Cold War containment of the Soviets. Peace is messy.

As to what our opponents love? AQ had to love it when we declared war on a tactic and went absolutely bat#### crazy, invading countries to topple dictators on one hand, and wrecking all manner of chaos in a dozen other countries to keep our protected dictators in power. American influence plummeted, and AQ influence soared on our confused quest to declare peace to be war and treat it as such.

We are lost as a nation. We have been treating peace as war for so long that we can't simply accept the reality of our situation. We are incredibly secure as a nation. Our security is the envy of nearly everyone else, yet we squander it with Quixotic expeditions in hot pursuit of noises in the dark.

George Washington had it largely right in his farewell address. An address as valid now as it was the day he penned it. We were never an isolationist nation, but were always a maritime nation dedicated to the pursuit of global commerce. We need to get back to the principles and perspectives we were founded upon. There will always be Kings and Pirates who violate the rights of others to advance their own selfish ends. Sometimes that will be our business and demand our firm response - but mostly it is business we do not make better by putting our noses in.