The Navy Has Good Reason To Focus on Cyber Warfare With China

James R. Holmes

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Released last month, the Department of the Navy’s inaugural Cyber Strategy starts off with a startling claim, namely that “the next fight against our major adversary will be like no other in prior conflicts.” Why? The strategy’s framers go on to prophesy that “the use of non-kinetic effects and defense against those effects prior to and during kinetic exchanges will likely be the deciding factor in who prevails.”

In other words, brute force might not make the difference.

Now, it’s long been plain that antagonists can do not-strictly-violent things in the cyber realm to unhinge an opponent’s fighting forces. Even pop culture has gotten into the act. Think about the 2004 pilot episode of Battlestar Galactica. The Cylons, a cybernetic species created by humanity, recruit a traitor among the government of the human “Twelve Colonies” to gain access to the Colonial Fleet’s “defense mainframe,” or fleet-wide battle-management computer. The Cylons learn how to smuggle a virus into the Fleet’s networked defenses, disabling navigation, command-and-control, propulsion systems and weapons. Then they launch a sneak attack against the hapless force. After disabling the Colonial Fleet, the Cylons destroy it, to almost the last ship of war, at their leisure.

Only vintage human ships without networked systems survive and escape. The virus can’t leap from system to system. Hope is almost, but not wholly, lost.

That’s the premise of the Galactica saga, and it’s ripped from the headlines. Consider China. China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) has deployed a strategic concept dubbed “systems-destruction warfare.” By that, PLA strategists mean that if China squares off against a combatant such as the U.S. military that fights as a “system of systems,” whether that refers to a naval fleet, squadrons of warplanes, or ground armies, it should concentrate on disrupting whatever networks that system of systems together, rather than physically destroying the hostile force.

If disruption is enough, disruption should be the goal.

Here’s the logic: If the PLA can break the bonds connecting the nodes constituting the enemy system, whether through cyberwarfare, electronic warfare, or some other means, it can go after individual, isolated clots of combat power as need be. Or maybe not at all, if PLA commanders are content with hobbling U.S. forces to gain time. After all, an uncoordinated enemy tends to be an ineffective enemy, easy to defeat.

Like the fictional Cylon virus, then, Chinese systems-destruction warfare aims more at incapacitating and defeating an enemy force as a fighting force than at destroying it wholesale. If the PLA could cripple U.S. naval and joint forces in the Western Pacific for long enough to accomplish its goals in the Taiwan Strait, South China Sea, or elsewhere in maritime Asia, it would have accomplished enough militarily. It need not venture a decisive conventional battle, courting all the risks and dangers entailed by a toe-to-toe engagement against a nuclear-armed foe.

In short, cyberwarfare could supply China a decisive advantage during a Western Pacific war while holding peril at bay. Hence the sense of urgency radiating from the U.S. Navy’s Cyber Strategy.

This 2018 photo shows J15 fighter jets on China's aircraft carrier, the Liaoning, during a drill in the East China Sea.AFP via Getty Images

But there’s more to the story. The Navy Department’s major claim — that “non-kinetic effects” could prove decisive on future battlegrounds — goes well beyond the technical intricacies of cyberwarfare. That makes it worth parsing. Let’s rewind and review the terminology deployed by the strategy’s coauthors.

“Kinetic effects” is Pentagon slang, a riff on basic physics. In physics, kinetic energy is the form of energy an object or particle possesses by virtue of its motion through space. In the martial realm, the adjective “kinetic” offers a cool- and sophisticated-sounding way to describe the actual — as opposed to potential, or threatened — use of force against an adversary. Kinetic actions involve missiles, bombs, and gunfire in the usual understanding of combat.

So kinetic effects are tactical, operational, or strategic effects produced by objects in motion, chiefly weapons and the platforms that unleash them against hostile forces to inflict physical destruction.

Then there are “non-kinetic effects” used to shape events in a combatant’s favor without actually using destructive force. The difference between kinetic and non-kinetic effects equates to the difference between kinetic energy and “potential energy” in physics, meaning energy that could be but has not yet been put to kinetic use.

In diplomatic and military affairs, the trick is to convince hostile leaders you could and would tap that potential under certain circumstances, and that they wouldn’t like the consequences if you did. Communicating power and resolve is crucial to harvesting non-kinetic effects.

Think about deterrence. If you want to deter an antagonist from taking some action you deem unacceptable, you don’t instantly blaze away with gun- or missile fire. Those would be kinetic measures with potentially grave repercussions. Instead you issue a plausible threat to use kinetic measures to defeat the action, or to impose unbearable costs on the antagonist should it defy your threat. You display the military capability to carry out your threat, and the political resolve to use that capability under circumstances you say you will.

And, just as critically, you need to make the antagonist a believer in your capability and resolve. An unbeliever will go undeterred if — rightly or wrongly — it pooh-poohs your capability, your willpower, or both. Persuasive military diplomacy is a must, lest the opponent miss the point.

The same basic formula — capability, resolve, belief — applies when trying to coerce an opponent into doing something its leadership prefers not to do. The effects are not kinetic, but the effects of virtual force are real nonetheless.

And, it bears noting, the formula also applies to cordial relations with allies, partners and friends. Flourishing the capability to keep your commitments to their security, displaying the willpower to do so, and thus making friendly capitals believers in your capability and resolve gives them solace that you will be there for them when the chips are down. In turn, they will keep their commitments to you. And all will be well.

So, Navy leaders are more right than they know. They’re correct to focus on the technical dimensions of cyberwarfare and related disciplines. That is their writ. But non-kinetic efforts — deterrence, coercion, reassurance, routine diplomacy — likewise shape strategic competition and warfare.

Larger efforts have always permeated human competition and always will. And yes, they could be the deciding factor in a conflict. Let’s hope so.

James Holmes is J. C. Wylie Chair of Maritime Strategy at the Naval War College and a Distinguished Fellow at the Brute Krulak Center for Innovation & Future Warfare, Marine Corps University. The views voiced here are his alone.