Guermantes Lailari
I disagree with the article written by Major Rick Chersicla, "Stop Talking About a 'Chinese Way of War'" in The Diplomat on 14 March 2023. This article commits the mirror-imaging error, which in trying to understand the adversary, is one of the biggest mistakes any military planner, strategist, policy and decision-maker can make. I will identify errors in his arguments and highlight why the Chinese Communist strategy is different from the Western model.
Similar and different strategic thinkers
A cursory review and comparison of US military doctrine with Chinese Communist military doctrine reveals that US military doctrine refers almost exclusively to Western military strategists. Sun Tzu receives a token footnote. In contrast, the People’s Liberation Army’s (PLA) strategy fuses Western and Eastern military, political and economic thought.
For example, the Science of Military Strategy (2013) cites 28 sources: twenty of these sources are not mentioned in US military doctrine, such as Lenin, Marx, Mao, Deng Xiaoping, Jiang Zemin, Chinese strategists, and PLA authors. Eight Western sources were translated into Mandarin, and include Clausewitz, Jomini, Liddell-Hart, Sokolovsky, and the US Military Academy’s Military Strategy.
This initial comparison of Chinese and American doctrinal instruction materials should not calm concerns. I have attended all levels of US professional military education (PME) and these PME schools did not teach adversary strategy to any level of competency. Underlying the Chinese approach to adversary strategy is Sun Tzu’s often quoted guidance in The Art of War 3:18: “If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat.”
Mirror imaging
The absence of instruction on adversary strategy in American PME is compounded by the propensity to commit the analytical error of mirror-imaging. In Psychology of Intelligence Analysis (2009), Richards J. Heuer, Jr. describes mirror-imaging as a source of error in describing the thoughts and actions of an adversary:
“Be Wary of Mirror Images. One kind of assumption an analyst should always recognize and question is mirror-imaging filling gaps in the analyst’s own knowledge by assuming that the other side is likely to act in a certain way, because that is how the US would act under similar circumstances.” (p. 70)
Mirror-imaging, as a way of thinking, is dangerous because it prevents analysts from accurately describing adversary thinking and behavior. Heuer cites former Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral David Jeremiah, who headed a review of the intelligence failure to predict India’s 1998 nuclear weapons test, and named the failure: “everybody-thinks-like-us mind-set. … the ‘underlying mind-set' was that India ‘would behave as we behave,’ … ‘We should have been much more aggressive in thinking through how the other guy thought.’”
Replace India in the above reference with China or Russia and you understand my point. For example, Edward Luttwak, one of the greatest grand strategists of our generation, noted that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) predicted the invasion of Ukraine in 2023 would be a cakewalk for the Russian military. The CIA and the FSB were wrong; they did not understand Ukrainians and their will to fight.
Red teams and alternative assessments
The Indian government developed and conducted an elaborate denial and deception plan to prevent the US from applying pressure on it not to conduct the tests. The Jeremiah Report recommended two correctives to mirror-imaging: (1) engage outside regional experts to provide expertise in describing an adversaries’ history and worldview, and (2) conduct red team and alternative assessments to apply regional and country-specific knowledge to a hypothetical situation.
According to the US military’s Joint Publication 5-0 Joint Planning (2020), “red team complements intelligence efforts by offering independent, alternative assessments and differing interpretations of information. This includes critical reviews of intelligence products, considering problem sets from alternative perspectives, and helping contribute informed speculation when reliable information is lacking.”
Chinese deception
Just as the US intelligence community failed to predict the Indian nuclear tests, the US has failed in its analysis of the intentions and capabilities of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the PLA. Such failures are not accidental. Deception permeates PLA’s military doctrine and all efforts by the CCP and its subordinate elements.
The Chinese communists employed deception and subterfuge—to compensate for inferiority in training and equipment—during their war with the Imperial Japanese and the Chinese Nationalist forces from 1 August 1927 until 7 December 1949. The West is not adept at using deception beyond the military arena, whereas the CCP has practiced employing deception in every dimension of the struggle.
Michael Pillsbury realized late in his long government career the vast extent of the CCP’s strategic deception. In The Hundred Year Marathon (2016), Pillsbury identified the following elements of deception in the Chinese strategy to defeat the US:
1. Induce complacency to avoid alerting your opponent. Chinese strategy holds that a powerful adversary, such as the United States today, should never be provoked prematurely. Instead, one’s true intentions should be completely guarded until the ideal moment to strike arrives.
2. Manipulate your opponent’s advisers. Chinese strategy emphasizes turning the opponent’s house in on itself by winning over influential advisers surrounding the opponent’s leadership apparatus. Such efforts have long been a hallmark of China’s relations with the United States…
4. Steal your opponent’s ideas and technology for strategic purposes. Hardly hindered by Western-style legal prohibitions and constitutional principles, China clearly endorses theft for strategic gain. Such theft provides a relatively easy, cost-effective means by which a weaker state can usurp power from a more powerful one…
7. Never lose sight of shi [national vitality]. … two elements of shi are critical components of Chinese strategy: deceiving others into doing your bidding for you, and waiting for the point of maximum opportunity to strike…
9. Always be vigilant to avoid being encircled or deceived by others. In what could be characterized as a deeply ingrained sense of paranoia, China’s leaders believe that because all other potential rivals are out to deceive them, China must respond with its own duplicity… (pp. 35-36)
Pillsbury’s description of the principal elements of Chinese strategy to defeat the US are unlike those used in Western states. The CCP’s focus on deception is key to their goal of defeating the US.
Sun Tzu and Mao
Major Chersicla provides many good examples of Western applications of military deception, yet his article lacks examples of how Mao—and his successors—applied deception.
Mao’s famous speech given in 1938, On Protracted War, states unequivocally that “’There can never be too much deception in war’, means precisely this.” He added, “to achieve victory we must as far as possible make the enemy blind and deaf by sealing his eyes and ears and drive his commanders to distraction by creating confusion in their minds.”
These concepts correlate to Sun Tzu’s “All warfare is based on deception.” Mao and Sun Tzu agree on the key role of deception in all conflicts which contradicts Major Chersicla’s claim that “[i]n terms of military theory, however, these two strategists [Mao and Sun Tzu] – as enduring as their legacies are – do not align on key points, let alone represent an unknowable Chinese way of war.” The CCP seeks to confuse the rest of the world about its true intentions and goals.
Unrestricted Warfare
Chinese deception is not only key to military operations: deception must inform all aspects of the struggle, especially political warfare and other types of warfare cited in Unrestricted Warfare, authored in 1999 by two senior PLA Air Force colonels.
(Unrestricted Warfare, p.146)
The PLA colonels used the above list of warfare to explain how “warfare” goes beyond the kinetic or classic shooting war. Instead, “[a]ny of the above types of methods of operation can be combined with another of the above methods of operation to form a completely new method of operation” (p. 146).
The emerging Chinese Communist revolution in military affairs uses combinations of warfare types (from the columns, military, trans-military, and non-military) to achieve the CCP’s objectives. The list enables CCP and PLA planners to conceptualize novel and specific configurations of capabilities, at tactical, operational, and strategic levels, against their adversaries. In contrast, the West, including the US, lack the intellectual tools to identify, describe, assess, and counter the challenges posed by the CCP and PLA. Thanks to Dr Mark D. Mandeles for his thoughts on this subject.
Spying
The main reason the Chinese Nationalist forces (Kuomintang) were defeated by the Chinese Communist forces was that the US made the Kuomintang forces concentrate on fighting the Imperial Japanese military instead of the Communist Chinese forces so that the US could prosecute a Europe first policy.
At least three additional factors aided the Chinese Communists during the Chinese civil war: corrupt Nationalist officers, ill-treatment of Nationalist soldiers and civilians under Kuomintang control, and the vast infiltration of the Chinese communist network of spies into Chiang Kai-Shek’s military. Many analysts discuss CCP’s intelligence operations successes, including Nicholas Eftimiades, Roger Faligot, William C. Hannas, Alex Joske, Matthew Brazil, and Peter Mattis.
The PLA used Sun Tzu’s dictum of never fighting your adversary’s strengths and always using your strength against the enemy’s weakness. The PLA exploited the corruption and the dismal morale of the Kuomintang forces. Today, the CCP and the PLA continue this tradition of subterfuge, deception, and manipulation.
Spying for the CCP
PRC citizens are legally obligated to participate in information and intelligence collection. Article 7 of the National Intelligence Law (2017 and amended 2018) requires every Chinese citizen and organization to spy for the CCP. The relevant passage states:
“All organizations and citizens shall support, assist, and cooperate with national intelligence efforts in accordance with law, and shall protect national intelligence work secrets they are aware of. The State protects individuals and organizations that support, assist, and cooperate with national intelligence efforts.”
Article 14 specifies that CCP intelligence agencies can legally insist on this support:
“The state intelligence work organization shall carry out intelligence work according to law, and may require relevant organs, organizations and citizens to provide necessary support, assistance and cooperation.”
Mobilizing ethnic Chinese overseas to collect information of all types for the CCP is a feature of everyday life in the Chinese diaspora. The National Intelligence Law uses “language that does not limit these demands on individuals to Chinese citizens.” The CCP expects nationalist sympathy or threatened coercion against relatives and friends living in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) to motivate every ethnic Chinese person in the world to uphold this law.
The Western view of spying is limited to political and military intelligence. For example, CCP economic espionage seeks to gain economic and military advantage against non-Communist Chinese competitors. These efforts are conducted by CCP intelligence collectors from the Ministry of State Security, United Front Work Department, Ministry of Public Security, and the PLA. Western intelligence agencies do not pursue this kind of intelligence on behalf of western private corporations to enhance their corporate advantage against their competitors. These CCP’s actions reveal a new kind of intelligence warfare designed to strengthen their comprehensive national power.
Conclusion
Major Chersicla’s article focuses more on the similarities than the key differences between Western and Chinese Communist concepts of warfare. In this article, I tried to highlight those differences and to familiarize readers with the key areas of divergence and the dangers of mirror-imaging.
I encourage Major Chersicla and other military strategists, policy and decision makers to visit Taiwan and meet with ROC military and academic experts that have been studying the CCP’s and PLA’s way of war. In the future, I hope we do not read a case study of a mirror-imaging failure regarding how the CCP’s plan for global domination succeeded.
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