Unconventional Warfare

[pmaitra]

U.S. General George Washington was appreciative yet cautious about France's offers of assistance. Like smart bombs and laser-guided munitions today, cannon and military engineering were the advanced technologies that America needed to defeat the British. He even made the energetic Lafayette his aide-de-camp—to the delight of the French court. However, Washington was aware that France's efforts were not wholly altruistic. "I am heartily disposed to entertain the most favorable sentiments of our new ally and to cherish them in others to a reasonable degree," he said, "but it is a maxim founded on the universal experience of mankind, that no nation is to be trusted farther than it is bound by its interest."[vii]

I would invite DFI members to read and appreciate the wisdom in this paragraph thoroughly, in particular, @Peter, @SajeevJino, @Casper, et al..

 

[Zebra]

I would invite DFI members to read and appreciate the wisdom in this paragraph thoroughly, in particular, @Peter, @SajeevJino, @Casper, et al..

Please elaborate in what context you are pointing it out.

 

[pmaitra]

Please elaborate in what context you are pointing it out.

Just put India in place of the US, and you will get the context. If you still don't get it, then don't worry about it.

 

[Zebra]

Just put India in place of the US, and you will get the context. If you still don't get it, then don't worry about it.

OK, let me put India in it, in a context of India and Russia strategic partnership.

And apply this in it --> no nation is to be trusted farther than it is bound by its interest.

 

[pmaitra]

OK, let me put India in it, in a context of India and Russia strategic partnership.

And apply this in it --> no nation is to be trusted farther than it is bound by its interest.

I think most of us agree with what you said. Nobody sucks up to Russia and calls for India to become its ally. The same cannot be said if you replace Russia with US.

 

[Zebra]

I think most of us agree with what you said. Nobody sucks up to Russia and calls for India to become its ally. The same cannot be said if you replace Russia with US.

That is wrong.

No US ally trust US.

And we should not trust US either, if we become their ally.

 

[pmaitra]

That is wrong.

No US ally trust US.

And we should not trust US either, if we become their ally.

We should trust nobody, and we should ally with nobody. We should remain neutral, and stay friendly with all.

The idea of becoming an ally of XYZ-country and not trusting XYZ-country is an oxymoron.

 

[Zebra]

^^

I think this is good topic and good thread.

Better let it remain as it is.

 

[Zebra]

We should trust nobody, and we should ally with nobody. We should remain neutral, and stay friendly with all.

The idea of becoming an ally of XYZ-country and not trusting XYZ-country is an oxymoron.

Feel free to name it as "oxymoron" or whatever.

But countries feel it is good for them and to be safe they prefer to be with few other countries for their own betterment only.

Nothing wrong in it.

It is one of the most practical thing they are doing in real life.

Easy to break one stick, but hard to break a bundle of sticks.

 

[pmaitra]

Feel free to name it as "oxymoron" or whatever.

But countries feel it is good for them and to be safe they prefer to be with few other countries for their own betterment only.

Nothing wrong in it.

It is one of the most practical thing they are doing in real life.

Easy to break one stick, but hard to break a bundle of sticks.

I would call the assortment of littoral states in Eastern Europe a bundle of sticks. A large country is not a stick. It is a piece of log.

 

[power_monger]

The idea of becoming an ally of XYZ-country and not trusting XYZ-country is an oxymoron.

Allies are created for common intrest,mutual benifit and increase of combined strength to deter enemy.Its a proven tactic all round the world. Yes,you cannot blindly trust your ally,but benefits of being in an ally far outbeats the advantages neutrality brings in.

Ex: Recently when India started to take side with Japan,it is showering India with investments.This would have not occured if you were neutral. being in Alliance bring certain benefits which if used properly can be grate advantageous to you.

 

[sorcerer]

Neutrality is good to an extent, but not in an all event- same way being an ally too. The posturing of a country, whether as "neutral" or "ally" depands on what kind of factor we as a country is dealing with. Each country can offer our country only a specific set of skiillsets, lets say, Investment , technology, consultancy, international influence, human intel etc.
We need a "whole host" of countries to fill our pallet of requirements.
THe "whole host" of contries will have their own interest with each other ; as well as disagreements with each other. This will affect the service they offer to us.
When the criticality of requirement of a particular country overshoots the objections of defensive posturing, they become ally.

As a rule no country should trust no other country outright. Thats a foolish thing to do.
Its not just human factors that decides country to country relationship always..Even natural calamity, the most unpredictable can turn the tables.
Only when relationship outweigh the purpose of relationship, can it be called an ally, but the world is damn huge and everyone got a whole lot of choices and manipulation skills.

 

[pmaitra]

Allies are created for common intrest,mutual benifit and increase of combined strength to deter enemy.Its a proven tactic all round the world. Yes,you cannot blindly trust your ally,but benefits of being in an ally far outbeats the advantages neutrality brings in.

Ex: Recently when India started to take side with Japan,it is showering India with investments.This would have not occured if you were neutral. being in Alliance bring certain benefits which if used properly can be grate advantageous to you.

Alliances are indeed created for mutual interests.

I fail to see any mutual interest in case of an alliance with the US in the backdrop of a conflict with PRC, which is being put up as a reason for such an alliance from certain sources. I feel that it is against the US interests to help India fight a war with PRC.

Trade Map: https://www.americansecurityproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/Trade-MAP.jpg
Official Data: https://www.census.gov/foreign-trade/balance/
Treasury Securities Pie: http://www.hermes-press.com/securities1.gif

At this moment, there is no major country with which an alliance can benefit India. India needs to avoid being used as a pawn in the global game of geopolitics.

India so far has done the right thing. India stayed out of any alliance, and only when there was a genuine need, did it enter into an alliance in 1971/72. That should be our strategy going forward.

Engaging SE Asian nations is a good thing. Alliance? No.

Regarding Japan, them showering investment is not a fruit of India taking Japan's side. Japan has very low interest rates. Japan desperately needs to invest in various development projects outside of Japan. That benefits them. Japan is doing what it is doing because it benefits them. India is accepting their investment because it benefits India. Deals work only because of mutual interest.

This is just my view.

 

[pmaitra]

@sorcerer,

This is a great thread. If you think I am deviating too much off topic, please let me know.

 

[sorcerer]

@pmaitra

Regarding Japan, them showering investment is not a fruit of India taking Japan's side. Japan has very low interest rates. Japan desperately needs to invest in various development projects outside of Japan. That benefits them. Japan is doing what it is doing because it benefits them. India is accepting their investment because it benefits India. Deals work only because of mutual interest.

Thats a good deduction. It underlines the fact that nothing is 'as it is' in this world. We as a country should stay away from the schemes of powerful enemies else we become another Pakistan or NoKo.

 

[sorcerer]

@sorcerer,

This is a great thread. If you think I am deviating too much off topic, please let me know.

No,,.Not at all. Lets have some serious discussions on UW and its means, cuz this is what we see around and read everyday in news papers. The real war is hidden behind a lot of layers. As citizens of the mighty India, we should be well aware.

 

[sorcerer]

Peaceful Rise through Unrestricted Warfare: Grand Strategy with Chinese Characteristics

Fighting power is but one of the instruments of grand strategy – which should take account of and apply the power of financial pressure, of diplomatic pressure, of commercial pressure, and not least of ethical pressure, to weaken the opponents' will... Unlike strategy, the realm of grand strategy is for the most part terra incognita – still awaiting exploration, and understanding. --B.H. Liddell Hart, Strategy (1954)



As countless observers have pointed out, the American-Chinese rivalry in the early 21st century bears more than a passing resemblance to the Anglo-German antagonism that led to world War I. In these conditions, it is not surprising if a consensus has emerged, among International Relations (IR) academics, around the proposition that the U.S.-China relation is bound to be the most important bilateral relation in the coming decades. Yet, the degree of certainty regarding the salience of this bilateral relation is only matched by the degree of ertainty surrounding its dynamics and its eventual outcome.

When it comes to answering the question "Is a conflict inevitable?," all three IR schools (realism, liberalism,constructivism) hedge their bets by offering both a pessimistic and an optimistic variant – a tacit admission that, on the most burning issue of the day, the predictive value of IR theory is close to nil.

For the outside observer, the most disconcerting aspect of this academic debate is that optimists and pessimists alike share the same unexamined otions of conflict and war, as if "conflict" was a self-explanatory concept, "war" was a trans-historical category. In particular, both proponents and critics of Power Transition Theory PTT) – the most popular theory about China in academe today - keep arguing about the factors conducive to the initiation, timing, severity, and consequences of "major wars" without iving much thought to either the singularity of Chinese strategic culture or, a fortiori, to three global developments of the past fifty years: the waning of "major wars," the declining " fungibility" of military force as such and, last but not least, the transformation of "war" itself.

In the military world, by contrast, the defining feature of the present era is precisely the impossibility of coming up with "a coherent concept of war to animate and focus our military efforts" (LTG David Barno, Ret.). Since 9/11, the strategic debate in America is been marked by a "war over war" and a seemingly endless proliferation of war modifiers: unconventional war, irregular war, asymmetric war, wicked war, criminal war, war of the third kind, non-trinitarian war, new war, counterwar, war amongst the people, three-block war, fourth-generation war, compound war, netwar, insurgency, global guerrilla, econo-jihad, not to mention information warfare, financial warfare, resource warfare, lawfare, cyberwarfare and chaoplexic warfare.

Few strategists, to be sure, are likely to subscribe to British General Rupert Smith's view that "war no longer exists." But while conventional, state-on-state, force-on-force, war, is unlikely to disappear any time soon, the fact remains that never before has the concept of War been surrounded with so much "fog and friction." As Lieutenant General David Barno USA Ret.) candidly admitted recently:

"In the aftermath of the relative certainty ...of the Cold War, our military today is in a sense operating without a concept of war and is searching desperately for the new "unified field theory" of conflict that will serve to organize and drive military doctrine and tactics, acquisition and research, training and organization, leader development and education, materiel and weaponry, and personnel and promotion policies in ways that could replace the legacy impact that Cold War structures still exert on all facets of the military. Today, no agreed-upon theory of conflict drives all of these critical vectors toward a commonly understood paradigm; the result is a profusion of disparate outlooks leading toward the risk of professional incoherence."

Lacking a "unified field theory" of war, military analysts in a status quo power like America are prone to adopt a "defensive realist" intellectual posture, and settle on a minimalist concept on which an inter-service consensus can be reached, if only by default. For the past three years, the most satisfactory – or least unsatisfactory – organizing concept in the US. has been that of Hybrid Threat.


As put forward notably by Colonels Frank Hoffman and Nathan Freier, the concept of Hybrid War is meant to emphasize the convergence of the physical and the psychological dimensions of war, the blurring of the distinctions between conventional and irregular, kinetic and non-kinetic, combatant and non-combatant, and even - in view of what could be called "neo-warlordism" – of the erosion of the once-obvious distinction between organized crime and irregular warfare.


More often than not, though, the conversation on "hybridity" takes place in a geopolitical vacuum, which explains why it has until now been limited to the elaboration of a grammar of
hybrid threats and has yet to tackle the question of the logic of hybrid wars.

By contrast, military strategists in a revisionist power like China have proven more inclined to adopt an "offensive realist" intellectual posture, and elaborate a "unified field theory" of war – though one in which, in keeping with Chinese strategic culture, the kinetic dimension is no longer dominant. The most articulate example of such theory to date remains the manifesto published in 1999 by Colonels Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui and translated in English under the somewhat misleading title of Unrestricted Warfare (Chao Xian Zhan, literally 'War Beyond Rules'). In a nutshell:

"It is becoming obsolete to automatically consider military action the dominant means and the other means the supporting means in war...Liddell Hart also noted this point. He
referred to the approach of selecting the line of least resistance and the direction of action the least expected by the enemy as the "indirect approach." As the arena of war has expanded, encompassing the political, economic, diplomatic, cultural, and psychological spheres, in addition to the land, sea, air, space, and electronics spheres, the interaction among all factors have made it difficult for the military sphere to serve as the automatic dominant sphere in every way. War will be conducted in nonwar [i.e. non-military] spheres...If we want to have victory in future wars, we must be fully prepared intellectually for this scenario, that is, to be ready to carry out a war which, affecting all areas of life of the countries involved, may be conducted in a sphere not dominated by military actions."

As the quote above ought to make clear, the concept of Unrestricted Warfare is closer to British strategist Liddell Hart's concept of Grand Strategy than to German strategist Ludendorff's concept of Total War. Not only do the non-kinetic aspects take precedence over the kinetic dimension, but the modus operandi is not all-encompassing mobilization so much as variable- geometry combination. In addition, while the choice of means and ways is in theory unrestricted, the ends are said to be limited. As our two colonels explicitly warn: "Do not pursue objectives which are unrestricted in time and space."


Contrary to the catchy subtitle of its English-language translation, then, Unrestricted Warfare is not "China's master plan to destroy America." All the same, it would be a mistake to reduce it to just an intellectual exercise designed to force Chinese officers to think outside-the-box. Placed in its proper context, Unrestricted Warfare is perhaps best defined as the operational code for the kind of "grand strategy on steroids" that befits a rising hegemon, or, alternatively, as a blueprint for "total cold war" in the age of the declining utility of military force.

Unrestricted Warfare is an "experimental" work whose institutional significance in China remains the subject of an ongoing debate. Though some observers have argued that unrestricted Warfare constitutes only one of four competing schools of military thought, a closer examination suggests instead that it actually takes the best of the main three schools and, as such, transcends the divisions between People's War Traditionalists, Power Projection Neo-Traditionalists, and High-Tech Revolutionists.

As for its influence in civilian circles, not only was the book read at the time by President Jiang Zemin and Defense Minister Chi Haotian but, if the record of the past seven years of the Hu Jintao administration is any indication, the contradiction between the official "Peaceful Rise" diplomatic doctrine and the unofficial "Unrestricted Warfare" military doctrine is in fact more apparent than real.

Thus, in 2003, the same year that saw the emergence of the concept of Peaceful Rise in official circles, the Communist Party Central Committee endorsed the concept of Three warfares (clearly inspired by Unrestricted Warfare) which calls for "a reinforcement of political work in terms of media warfare, psychological warfare, and legal warfare." That same year, the Chinese government launched the "Go Abroad" program, a sophisticated neo-mercantilist offensive involving strategic investments abroad; meanwhile the PLA organized its first units for cyber warfare, and the magnitude of the so-called "Titan Rain" offensive by Chinese hackers raised the question of the degree of involvement of the Chinese Government itself.

By 2008, the U.S. State Department's own International Security Advisory Board tacitly admitted that the three-pronged non-kinetic war was already underway: "It is essential that the
United States better understand and effectively respond to China's comprehensive approach to strategic rivalry, as reflected in its official concept of "Three Warfares." If not actively
countered, Beijing's ongoing (sic) combination of
Psychological Warfare (propaganda, deception, and coercion),
Media Warfare (manipulation of public opinion domestically and internationally), and
Legal Warfare (use of 'legal regimes' to handicap the opponent in fields favorable to him) can precondition key areas of strategic competition in its favor."

By 2009, mounting concerns about China-generated financial warfare and cyber-warfare capabilities prompted the Pentagon to conduct a major financial war game (in which China turned out to be a better player) and to set up a unified cyber-command within U.S. Strategic Command.



Psychological warfare, media warfare, legal warfare, financial warfare, cyber warfare: a decade after the publication of Unrestricted Warfare, while all the twenty-four logical lines of
operations identified in the book are obviously not pursued with equal intensity (nor along similar timelines), it is clear that China's revisionist grand strategy appears to be making full use of an ever-widening range of non-kinetic means.

Outside Pentagon circles, though, Unrestricted Warfare largely remains what Donald Rumsfeld would call an "unknown unknown." The unclassified literature is scattered in obscure military journals and governmental reports, which does little to increase the situational awareness of the civilian world.

This essay is simply meant as a workmanlike first attempt to both bridge the academic-military gap over the "China Threat," and to increase the situational awareness interagency grunts regarding Unrestricted Warfare (URW).

 

[sorcerer]

Power Transition Theory: Academic Bull in the China Shop?

Just as there are two ways of conceptualizing History in general, there are two ways of conceptualizing the history of warfare in particular: linear or cyclical.

In a cyclical conception, major wars are called "hegemonic wars," and considered a recurrent phenomenon of every power transition throughout history: the Greek Peloponnesian Wars, the Thirty Years' War, the Napoleonic Wars, and the two World Wars which Churchill and De Gaulle, sharing the same cyclical conception of history, referred to as the "Second Thirty Years' War."

It is this cyclical conception of history which is at the base of Power Transition Theory (PTT) – a theory that has been all the rage in International Relations (IR) since the publication in 2000 of the collective manifesto Power Transitions: Strategies for the 21st Century, and has become the
main lens through which to analyze the rising antagonism between America and China.

On the face of it, the allure of PTT rests on the promise of a policy-relevant "unified theory" of war in the context of power transitions: "Of all theories at the international level," its proponents claim, "Power Transition has the most tightly integrated and internally consistent explanation for why, how, and when war occurs. In addition, it provides evidence about the costs, intensity, duration, and consequences of war." Upon closer examination, though, the appeal of PTT rests less on its theoretical sophistication (more on that later) than on a compelling, and seemingly self-explanatory, historical narrative contrasting the Anglo-American and Anglo- German power transitions a century ago. In a nutshell:

"The key difference – from the perspective of power transition theory – is that the United States shared British political and economic institutions, liberal democratic culture, and the British version of the desirable political, economic, and legal international order. The U.S. was a satisfied state and believed that its interests could be served by a change in the hierarchy within that system rather than a replacement of that system with a new order. British leaders understood what kind of order the United States was likely to construct when it ultimately achieved a dominant position, and they were willing to accept a somewhat diminished role within that order. In the Anglo- German transition, however, Germany was politically, economically, and culturally different than Britain, and had a different conception of the desirable international order. Thus Germany was a dissatisfied state. British leaders understood this, and consequently they were willing to make fewer compromises and to accept greater risks of war rather than accept a peaceful t ransition to a different international order in which British interests would be poorly served."




Not only is this "tale of two power transitions" questionable in itself , but even more problematic are the two key variables said to determine the probability of major wars: "power parity" between the status quo hegemon and its revisionist challenger, and the latter's "degree of dissatisfaction" with the existing order.

The first problem is that, in the age of the declining fungibility of military power and of the rise of asymmetric strategies, measuring "power parity" has never been so problematic. Leaving aside the question of the lack of transparency of official statistics (China's real defense budget is
estimated to be three times the official budget), America and China have different ways (quantitatively and qualitatively) of assessing Comprehensive National Power (CNP). If anything, it is not power parity, but power incommensurability, which may increase the risk ofmiscalculation and, by the same token, the risk of war initiation on the part of either player.


The concept of "power" adopted by PTT is just as antiquated as that of "parity" itself. Though the theory pays lip service in one sentence to the modern, relational definition of power ("power is defined as the ability to impose on or persuade opponents to comply with demands"), it moves
on to assess power in the pre-modern sense of resources: "In the lexicon of Power Transition theory, power is a combination of three elements: the number of people who can work and fight, their economic productivity, and the effectiveness of the political system in extracting and pooling individuals'contributions to advance national goals." The net result is a bean-counter's version of Thucydides.

Military power? Unlike PTT theorists, China has not forgotten that the Soviet Union went bankrupt trying to keep up with Reagan's military build-up in the 1980s. In Deng Xiaoping's "four modernizations" program, military modernization therefore came explicitly last, behind agriculture, industry, and science and technology. More important still, "a key distinction between Wilhelmine Germany and [Hu's] China is that Germany was trying to develop a symmetric capability to deal with existent British power. China is going asymmetric." Rather than attempt to, e.g., reach power parity at sea by building eleven aircraft carriers, China prefers to focus (for now at least) on an anti-access strategy relying on a whole range of asymmetric means from satellite warfare to mine warfare, and from anti-ship ballistic missiles to "maritime lawfare."

Economic power? In this day and age, a theory focusing on the dynamics of power transition should logically drop any reference to "productivity" as such and take into account instead the radically different salience and dynamics of industry and finance. China still has a long way to go before reaching productivity parity with America; but with its estimated 2.4 trillion dollar reserves, China is already the main global financial player when it comes to determining the future of the dollar as a reserve currency – the very linchpin of America's global supremacy.


Soft power? There is curiously no attempt in PTT to take into account the "power shift" of the past two decades, and the increased salience of soft power – an omission all the more puzzling since the Chinese conception appears to be closer to the maximalist German concept of "civilian
power" than to the more minimalist American concept of "soft power." For the Chinese, "soft power means anything outside of the military and security realm, including not only popular culture and public diplomacy but also more coercive economic and diplomatic levers like aid and investment and participation in multilateral organizations"



Second, when it comes to defining the "degree of dissatisfaction" with the existing order, PTT is as impressionistic as it is materialistic when dealing with the question of "power parity." There is simply no way to assess the degree of dissatisfaction of any given power without a closer examination of both its "strategic culture" and "grand strategy" – two questions on which PTT has practically nothing to say.

Strategic culture: if, as the foundational narrative of PTT puts it, the problem with the Anglo-German transition was due to the fact that "Germany was politically, economically, and culturally different than Britain," then one would expect PTT to highlight the fact that China is even more politically, economically, and culturally different than America. While the Anglo- German antagonism, to a certain extent, did take the form of a "clash of cultures" , the two countries nonetheless belonged to the same civilization. By contrast, China and America represent to two distinct civilizations, and one can only assume that PTT's silence on this civilizational difference is motivated mostly by the desire to avoid having to confront that much-dreaded thesis in academe: Samuel Huntington's "clash of civilizations."

In that respect, missing from Power Transition theory are two key elements. First, the realization that, in contrast to previous power transitions, the transition currently happening at the national level (America vs. China) takes place against the backdrop of a broader civilizational transition (from the Atlantic to the Pacific in geopolitical terms, or from the West to the Rest in both geo- economic and geo-cultural terms). Second, the realization that the traditional Asian state-system, unlike its European counterpart, favored a logic of hierarchy (tribute system) over a logic of anarchy (balance-of-power), and that the 64-million dollar question today is to what extent will China's neighbors favor "balancing" (as expected by the euro-centric IR theory) over "bandwagoning."

Grand strategy: Logically and chronologically, the first priority of any self-respecting power transition theory should be to assess what kind of revisionist Grand Strategy increases or decreases the risk of major wars, hastens or delays their outbreak and their termination, with what consequences for the parties engaged. From such a study, the theory could then try to advance general propositions regarding timing, duration, severity, and consequences of major wars. But there is no room for the concept of grand strategy in PTT (by "political capacity," PTT means the ability to mobilize resources at home, not the ability to devise and implement a grand strategy abroad). What PTT proponents fail to realize is that, all things (population, production and "political capacity") being equal, the timing, severity, duration, and even outcome of both the Anglo-German and American-German transitions would have been much different, had Germany's Grand Strategy not been such a colossal "comedy of errors."

Finally, PTT is as long on measuring "power" as it is short on assessing "purpose." Based on PTT, you would never know that, far from being interested in competing with America for the title of global hegemon, China is in fact more interested in riding the global wave in favor of multipolarity – an "indirect approach" of sorts which, more than anything else, makes the prospect of a "hegemonic war" unlikely.



Where, then, is the much-touted policy relevance of PTT?

At best, the theory offers time-tested truisms presented as profound insights, like "War is most likely, of longest duration, and greatest magnitude, when a challenger to the dominant power enters into approximate parity with the dominant state and is dissatisfied with the existing system" - the kind of banality that has led diplomatic practitioners for the past thirty years to dismiss much IR theory with a derisive "tell me something I don't know."

When warning about the possibility of major conflict, PTT proponents can only conceive of "war" as a transhistorical category. In the Power Transition manifesto published in 2000, there is no evidence that PTT theorists are aware of the evolution of the debate over "war" in the past
twenty years, nor is there any hint that, in the post-modern age, a "major war" could actually take the form outlined in Unrestricted Warfare a year earlier.

In fairness, when it came out a decade ago, the main virtue of the PTT manifesto resided in the fact that, in arguing for the distinct possibility of a "hegemonic war," the theory provided a cautionary tale for those Western observers only too willing to believe in an "end of history," or in a pre-existing "harmony of interest" which could lead, over time, to the rise of a peaceful condominium (G-2 or "Chimerica").

While conceding the obvious point that the nuclear era has radically altered the costs and benefits of "major wars," PTT proponents rightly warn that there is no absolute guarantee that major wars won't happen among nuclear powers. But it is a right warning issued mostly for allthe wrong reasons ("the choice for war will relate to the twin pillars of power parity –determined by a nation's population, economic development, and political capacity – and opportunity for redress of grievance."

Because PTT gives no thought to the importance of strategic cultures, grand strategies, the waning of major wars, the declining utility of force, and the transformation of war itself, the theory has only the crudest explanatory power. Because it does not take into account the different dynamics of industry and finance, PTT is dangerously misleading as a predictive theory. Last but not least, because it overestimates the possibility of major wars, its prescriptive value is even more dubious.

For the ultimate irony of PTT is that an excessive awareness of previous "hegemonic wars" leads its proponents today to advocate peaceful change a outrance to the point where"engagement" becomes synonymous with "appeasement." At times, the policy recommendations put forward by PTT proponents border on sheer lunacy:

"In the case of China, an expansion of NATO to include this nation may help in creating the conditions for a peaceful overtaking, should that occur, thus reducing the possibility of global war."

China in NATO, or else Global War? Hel-lo?

A decade ago, at the peak of the "unipolar moment," it was not unreasonable to examine the rise of China in the context of a bilateral power transition. A decade later, though, it should be clear that the Post-American World (Zakaria) is upon us, that the evolution of China will be shaped by ASEAN, Russia, and the EU as much as by the U.S. itself, and that the PTT framework has essentially lost its relevance.

There is nothing inherently wrong in a cyclical conception of History, and the Chinese themselves, in recent years, have been carefully studying the rise and fall of the great powers. What is wrong is the Western social scientists' use of History as a mere "arsenal of arguments," their infatuation with pseudo-scientific methods, and their concomitant neglect of area studies . That a new generation of theorists is willing to "bring policy relevance back in" is a welcome development. But if IR academics want to regain among diplomatic practitioners the credibility they lost a generation ago, they will have to do better than use half- baked historical analogies to deliver goofy policy prescriptions.

 

[Ray]

@sorcerer

Fascinating collection.

And painstakingly compiled.

Keep up the good work.

I will read them carefully and assimilate.

Thank you.

 

[Ashutosh Lokhande]

@sorcerer; just droping by to say that your posts wrt unconventional warfare were very informative :thumb:. i enjoyed reading it thoroughly specially the chanakya's arthashtra parts