Stealth fighters in a liminal war

Military mastery has not prevented Western forces from suffer­ing humiliating defeats.

A firefighter helps a wounded Chinese embassy staff member out of the burning Chinese embassy in Belgrade after it was hit during a NATO air attack in 1999. Picture: AP

Private Herbert Tucker and Corporal William R. Walsh were unlucky wights. On the night of April 15, 1953, in the final months before the Korean war armistice agreement was signed, they became the last US ground troops to be killed by enemy aircraft. From that day to this, the US has enjoyed unchallenged air superiority on every battlefield to which it has committed troops.

Yet such mastery has not prevented Western forces from suffer­ing humiliating defeats, or at least lack of victories, in all manner of places, from Vietnam to Afghanistan. The Russians run rings around us in hybrid warfare. China flexes its military muscles.

David Kilcullen traces all this back to the day in 1993 when James Woolsey, director-designate of the CIA, told a Senate committee that after the end of the Cold War, “we have slain a large dragon, but we live now in a jungle filled with a bewildering variety of poisonous snakes”. The West was finding it far harder to contend with a disparate range of enemies than it was to confront the Soviet monolith.

The author is a former Australian Army officer of advanced egotistical tendencies, reflected in his scattering the personal pronoun like confetti through his books. But people such as Condoleezza Rice, US secretary of state in George W. Bush’s administration, and US Army general David Petraeus have listened to his counsel. He commands military audiences around the world as a guru on counter-insurgency. It is worth overcoming irritation about his cheeky-chappie style because he has interesting and provocative ideas.

David Kilcullen’s The Dragons and the Snakes.

Threats and enemies evolve in a Darwinian fashion, he writes. Terrorists of all hues concluded after the Gulf War that it was madness to engage the West militarily on its own terms. Each generation of our foes is learning new lessons: for instance, how to communicate with each other in the ocean of social media, so vast and deep that no Western intelligence agency can monitor it all. The Israelis have discovered that however many enemies they eliminate by assassination, these are always replaced; it is futile to use such a tactic as a substitute for political engagement. The long era of Western air superiority is likely soon to end: within a few years, unjammable drones will enable non-state adversaries to field swarms of flying killers, terminating Donald Trump’s gleeful monopoly on predation.

Kilcullen has coined the phrase “liminal warfare”, from the Latin word for threshold, to describe methods used by the Russians and Chinese to make mayhem, just short of those that would provoke a Western military response: militias, surrogates, cyber attacks, fake news, “little green men” (non-uniformed Russian personnel). Such expedients circumvent Western conventional dominance and command domestic support: the entire Russian people have grievances about the arrogant eastward expansion of NATO.

The author observes that overt combat is “a tiny component of conflict, the tip of the iceberg, whereas the vast majority of the action takes place below the waterline, well away from violent contact with an enemy”.

He highlights a 2013 article by Valery Gerasimov, now chief of the Russian general staff, who called for a “roughly 4:1 ratio of non-military and military measures” in any given confrontation. Kilcullen also salutes the “undeniable genius of Vladimir Putin, who has played a very poor hand extremely well”.

Meanwhile, China is reaching out in the most unlikely ways and places; for instance, purchasing through civilian companies properties all over the world that offer surveillance potential over Western military facilities.

If NATO is Russia’s big beef, the author says Beijing’s derives from the 1999 US stealth bomber destruction of its Belgrade embassy. They are determined never again to find themselves impotent in the face of such a Western insult. He cites an influential book by two senior Chinese colonels, Wang Xiangsui and Qiao Liang, who outlined a future definition of war far beyond any battlefields, “using all means, including armed force or non-armed force … to compel the enemy to accept one’s interest”. The colonels mocked America’s defence resource extravagance, the folly of “attacking birds with golden bullets … an American-made bomber is like a flying mountain of gold”.

A limitation of Kilcullen’s book is that he writes exclusively about military perspectives. It seems essential to set this debate within the context of a recognition that battlefield victories over insurgents are meaningless unless achieved within a framework of effective social engagement with local societies.

It also seems important to explore the difficulties of securing support for defence within democracies. Few political leaders explain threats to voters, save the obvious one from terrorists. Thus, who can be surprised that most people are indifferent to national security issues?

Kilcullen admits that we cannot foreclose on our armies to pursue cyber warfare because our dragon enemies continue to expand their conventional forces. We need security across a full spectrum. But we must understand that warfare is changing and also, for want of a better alternative, pursue what he brands a Byzantine strategy. The Byzantine Empire survived for almost 1000 years after Rome fell. The West may be able to hold its own against the rising forces arraying against us by playing for time, and by adopting affordable and sustainable defence technologies.

Our enemies use surrogates against us. Should we not do likewise? Why do we continue to purchase ludicrously expensive weapons systems, such as the F-35 strike aircraft, when Ikea-style platforms can do the business?

Kilcullen argues that we need to break out of our strategic-thinking comfort zone and accept that absolute Western dominance is gone. Our best hope is to manage and contain our foes, and abandon fantasies about spreading democracy. Instead of demanding victory, we must learn to be content with escaping defeat.

Max Hastings’s books include The Korean War.

THE TIMES

The Dragons and the Snakes: How the Rest Learned to Fight the West

By David Kilcullen. Scribe, 325pp, $35