April 11, 2014
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Asia Pacific editor for Fairfax Media
Tony Abbott greets Chinese Premier Li Keqiang at the Boao business forum. Photo: Alex Ellinghausen
The US and its military partners are reaching for new tools to counter an unconventional ''three warfares'' strategy that China is using to advance aggressive territorial claims, according to a Pentagon report.
It says the People's Liberation Army is using what it calls ''legal warfare'', ''media warfare'' and ''psychological warfare'' to augment its arsenal of military hardware to weaken the resolve of the US and its regional partners to defend islands and oceans in the East and South China seas.
''They have introduced a military technology which has not previously been considered as such in the West,'' says the report, China: The Three Warfares, which was commissioned by the Pentagon's most senior strategist, Andrew Marshall, and circulated to the US Pacific Fleet. This technology has ''sidestepped the coda of American military science,'' it says.
The report's warnings of China's use of ''coercive economic inducements'' and other non-traditional methods underscores Prime Minister Tony Abbott's challenge in balancing economic and security interests, as he prepares to meet China's President Xi Jinping at the Great Hall of the People on Friday night. This week Mr Abbott signed a landmark agreement to develop military technology with China's arch-rival, Japan, while Australian business leaders joined a forum at Bo'ao that was initiated by representatives of a PLA ''influence'' platform, as revealed last year by Fairfax Media.
The ''three warfares'' stratagem is rooted in ancient Chinese strategies of ''perception warfare'' as well as the Communist Party's origins as an underground and guerilla organisation.
It was modernised and codified a decade ago but appeared to escape serious Western military attention until China began to adopt a far more muscular stance over its contested borders from 2009.
Some well-placed Western defence strategists question the efficacy of Chinese ''three warfares'' and broader ''political warfare'' strategies, saying efforts to intimidate have been counterproductive and that military contests will continue to be determined by traditional capabilities.
But the lead author of the report, Stefan Halper, told Fairfax Media that Western military strategists had been slow to respond because they were unduly fixated with the PLA's traditional military hardware.
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