By Anthony H. Cordesman
For much of the last year, the Burke Chair at CSIS has been developing a comprehensive analysis of U.S. strategic competition with China and Russia. Previous versions have been working papers, which focused on developing an overview of military, economic, and civil competition. The analysis is accompanied by two separate chronologies, which have been issued to describe Chinese and Russian activities in detail.
The Burke Chair is now issuing a comprehensive revision of this analysis that reflects a wide range of outside comments, and that addresses each major area of competition in depth – providing some 30 different graphs, tables, and maps that illustrate or compare U.S., Russian, and Chinese actions.
It addresses the following major aspects of strategic competition between the U.S., Russia, and China – highlighting their impact on other nations and America’s strategic partners in the process:
The Broader Structure of U.S. Strategic Competition with China and Russia
Competition and the Impact of Nuclear Forces and Mutual Assured Destruction.
Global vs. Real-World Uses of “Conventional” Military Forces
Competition in Military and National Security Spending
Economic Competition: Military Competition is Only Half the Challenge
Civil Competition: Competing in Other Areas that Do Not Involve the Use of Military Force
Shifting from Competition to Confrontation
The Need to Integrate U.S. Military and Civil Strategy and Focus on Global Competition.
The analysis does not take ideological or partisan stands, and it highlights the many areas where the data are uncertain or conflicting, where unclassified or “open source” material are inadequate, and where future trends are unclear. It remains a working document because there are so many key areas where further data and research are needed.
“Victorious warriors win first and then go to war, while defeated warriors go to war first and then seek to win…The greatest victory is that which requires no battle…To win one hundred victories in one hundred battles is not the acme of skill. To subdue the enemy without fighting is the acme of skill.”
― Sun Tzu, The Art of War
The new National Security Strategy (NSS) that the White House issued on December 18, 2017, called for the United States to focus on competition with China and Russia in order to focus on the potential military threat they posed to the United States. This call to look beyond the current U.S. emphasis on counterterrorism was all too valid, but its implementation has since focused far too narrowly on the military dimension and on providing each military service with all of the U.S. military forces that are needed to fight “worst case” wars.
This focus on fighting major wars with China and Russia is a fundamental misreading of the challenges the U.S. actually faces from Chinese and Russian competition as well as a misinterpretation of their strategy and capabilities. It ignores the fact that China and Russia compete on a diplomatic and economic level as well as a military one, and that this competition is equally serious.
At the military level the U.S. ignores the fact that much of this competition will be to influence other nations, their conflicts, and gain strategic leverage – a competition which involves far less risk of escalation and one where China and Russia can pick their targets on a global and regional basis, limit their intervention (often to a spoiler role), and achieve gains at minimum cost and exposure.
It fails to recognize that major wars between China or Russia and the United States – particularly wars that escalate to the use of nuclear weapons – can end in doing so much damage to both sides that they become the equivalent of “mutual assured destruction” (MAD). China and Russia understand that the only winner in a major nuclear conflict would be the power that could actually find a way to stand aside from a major nuclear exchange – or a high level of conventional theater warfare – between the other two. To quote a passage from the movie War Games, “the only way to win is not to play.”
This military and “worst case” war approach to shaping a U.S. strategy to compete with China and Russia ignores the fact that China and Russia have already found ways to compete effectively using gray area and hybrid operations which rely on non-military political and economic competition or can involve unpredictable mixes of more limited forms of military and civil forms of “warfare.” These operations are summarized in two working chronologies covering China and Russia that support this study: One is entitled Chronology of Possible Chinese Gray Area and Hybrid Warfare Operations and is available on the CSIS website here. The second is entitled Chronology of Possible Russian Gray Area and Hybrid Warfare Operations and is available here.
These chronologies show that China and Russia’s dual focus on military and civil competition had a critical impact long before the Coronavirus created today’s massive uncertainties in global economics. Understanding gray area and hybrid operations is far more critical now.
China and Russia have not only benefited from the fact that the U.S. has not focused on such forms of competition, they have also benefited from their state-driven systems that allow them to shape their economies to serve their strategic objectives just as well as their military forces. While there are many areas where China and Russia do not directly compete with the United States, there are many other cases where their strategy for such competition now applies to ongoing civil and military competition on a global level.
If the United States is to deal effectively with such competition, then the U.S. must refocus its military strategy and forces to give gray area and hybrid conflicts at least the same or even more priority as it does to higher levels of warfare. Above all, the United States needs to refocus its national security strategy to address key global developments at a national and regional level, and it needs to integrate its military strategy and operations with its political and economic strategy operations.
Other factors also create major uncertainties as to how the U.S. will compete with China and Russia. It is still far from clear how much the Coronavirus crisis will affect the relative competitiveness of the United States versus China and Russia. All three countries have suffered a major shock. The U.S. has reached unemployment levels equal to those of the Great Depression, and it has already spent more than $3 trillion dollars in an effort to ease the economic strain on its people and help prepare for recovery. It will certainly face problems in both maintaining its planned levels of national security spending and meeting its new economic needs.
China too has suffered a major blow in terms of employment, trade, and economic growth – although the data available prove to be uncertain – and the same is true of Russia. Both China and Russia have the potential advantage to use their state-driven systems and enable their leaders to directly allocate resources and to keep funding competition in ways that may demand more sacrifices from their peoples. Both are almost certain to keep competing with the United States and will continue to seek and exploit any new opportunities in other states that are facing political and economic crises.
At the same time, conflicts between lesser powers, civil wars, and extremism create new windows of opportunity throughout the world with sustained areas of local and regional competition that have an impact on the major powers. North and South Korea, Iran and the Arab Gulf, India and Pakistan are just a few long-standing examples. Syria, Turkey, and Libya are more recent cases that illustrate that exploiting new and unpredictable opportunities shaped by outside events can have a major and unpredictable impact on U.S., Chinese, and Russian civil and military action that may or may not fit prior models and any formal definition of different kinds of warfare.
This makes it even more important that the U.S. can refocus its efforts to compete. It means that the integration of the military and civil aspects of competition must occur at a wide range of levels. Whether one calls it “warfare” or competition, the true meaning of “joint” and “multi-domain” has now become the need to integrate military and civil operations in every major region where the U.S. competes with China and Russia and in every relevant aspect of politics, technology, and trade.
The U.S. must focus the combined use of military forces, economic resources, and political tools to maintain deterrence, shape its strategic influence, and control war fighting. In practice, this also means that the U.S. will deal with strategic partners, other countries, and non-state actors by treating them to be just as important as dealing with China and Russia.
China and Russia have already recognized these needs and are now competing with the United States at the civil level with “gray area” tactics or indirect uses of force, in low intensity military operations involving third countries and non-state actors, and in deterring and fighting at higher levels of conflict. Where possible, China and Russia use their military power in what might be called “wars of influence” and in ways that do not involve actual fighting. When they do use force, it generally takes the form of limited or demonstrative uses of their own forces; covert operations; or the support of the forces of other states, non-state actors, or factions.
This means the U.S. now needs to reshape its approach to great power competition to fully recognize that it cannot afford to focus solely on China and Russia. They already compete by creating ongoing mixes of political, economic, and national security competition that actively involve other states and non-state actors. In many cases, the center of such competition is indirect and driven as much by information warfare as by any form of physical action. In other cases, it focuses more on the civil dimension than on the military one. It will use “multi-domain” operations at the civil level and exploit civil technology in hybrid and asymmetric ways.
The two chronologies that support this analysis illustrate the complexity of these Chinese and Russian operations over the last two decades. They show both their civil-military character and their efforts to limit the use of their own national forces and exploit those of other countries and non-state actors. They also provide a range of partial cases that warn that the global impact of the Coronavirus and the resulting economic and political crisis in country after country will offer many new opportunities for China and Russia to challenge the U.S. and exploit the civil dimension and third country conflicts.
Even in those cases where some form of actual combat is involved, it is likely to be a limited part of a broader focus on winning without actual major warfare – China and Russia pursue the strategies advanced by Sun Tzu in The Art of War – while the present U.S strategy focuses on classic forms of conflict war as defined by Clausewitz in the earlier chapters of On War.
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