Confronting a Global Pandemic in a Deteriorating Security Environment | David Kilcullen Yes, we have slain a large dragon, but we live March 12, 2020 now in a jungle filled with a bewildering variety of poisonous snakes. And in many ways the dragon INTRODUCTION was easier to keep track of. — James Woolsey Lt. Col. (res.) David Kilcullen is a theorist and practitioner of guerrilla and unconventional warfare and counterterrorism, with extensive operational experience over a 25-year career with the Australian and U.S. governments as an Army , analyst, policy adviser and diplomat. He served in as senior advisor to U.S. General , was senior advisor to U.S. Secretary of State , and has served in , , Somalia, Libya and Colombia. Kilcullen serves on the Board of Advisors at the Center on Military and Political Power at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. He's professor of international and political studies at the University of New South Wales, Canberra and is CEO and President of Cordillera Applications Group, a research and operations firm providing geopolitical analysis, remote observation, fieldwork and related support to government, industry and NGOs. He is the author of five prize-winning books on terrorism, and future warfare as well as numerous scholarly papers on urbanization, conflict and future warfare. Kilcullen received a PhD in politics from the University of New South Wales at the Australian Defense Force Academy in 2000. WHY DO I CARE? Only weeks after finishing Peter Zeihan’s book on the coming “global disorder,” I’m not quite sure where or how to rank “The Dragons and the Snakes.” I’ve never quite read a book like this before. It is steeped in military history and theory, which I am certainly no expert in. Much of what I’ve learned in the last year about the various militaries of the world, their formations, equipment, skillsets, etc., has come from my episode with Peter Zeihan. If I had to categorize this book somehow, I’d say that it is a manual for helping people understand the logic behind how modern war is waged and the perspectives that various actors in that war carry with them. Its historical overview provides a grounding for this analysis by telling us where we have been and how got here. Its theoretical framework forms a sort-of map that can help us understand where we are going. Unlike Zeihan’s, this book doesn’t spend much time on the Cold War or pre-Cold War period (it may reference either of these periods, mainly in passing). Kilcullen pulls from theories of evolutionary biology (including eusociality), anthropology, memetics, creative- destruction (Schumpeter), Minsky’s instability hypothesis, psychology, theory of mind, etc. The book’s central insight is that conventional

1 notions of military dominance (like the idea of full-spectrum dominance) are chimeras. “If there is one takeaway,” writes Kilcullen, “it is that the military model pioneered by US forces in the 1991 Gulf War—the high-tech, high-precision, high-cost suite of networked systems that won the Gulf War so quickly and brought Western powers such unprecedented battlefield dominance in the quarter century since then—is no longer working. Our enemies have figured out how to render it irrelevant, have caught up or overtaken us in critical technologies, or have expanded their concept of war beyond the narrow boundaries within which our traditional approach can be brought to bear. They have adapted, and unless we too adapt our decline is only a matter of time.” Ironically, the question of “who the enemy is” never seems to be raised by David. In this new world full of mass psychological warfare, non-state actors, and shifting national identities (Britain-EU, post-Soviet breakup, civil wars in the , etc.), this doesn’t seem like a question with a straightforward answer. In the end, this book does not seem to offer much in the way of solutions. Rather, it attempts to challenge any notions of permanence that may still linger in Western minds about the security landscape in which we find ourselves (even challenging notions of how nations behave or how to distinguish between nations and other militant organizations). The solution, if there is one to be found, is to “embrace the suck,” as David calls it. In his estimation, the United States and its Western allies and partners can no longer afford to evolve their systems largely in isolation of the rest of the world. They must embrace the forces of co-evolution, adaptation, and creative- destruction. They must learn to act a bit more like snakes, perhaps borrowing both from Russia’s use of liminal maneuvers and from China’s willingness to expand the surface area of conflict to include things like economic, information, and other forms of warfare. In essence, what David seems to be saying is that we are now in a truly Hobbesian world of “all against all,” and that to pretend otherwise (e.g. to pretend that we are the sovereign in an increasingly anarchic landscape). PERSONAL BACKGROUND Life Experience — Q: Can you give us a sense of who you are and how you got here, including your relevant military, intelligence, and diplomatic experience? Military History & Theory — Q: What do you love so much about military history and theory? Q: How did you get into studying this subject? Q: Was it an outgrowth of your service in the military? DRAGONS vs. SNAKES Why Dragons, Why Snakes? — Q: Where did this name come 2 from and what does it mean? Q: The proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and ballistic How did the ideas in this book missiles to carry them; ethnic and national hatreds that can evolve, borrow from, or add to metastasize across large portions of the globe; the those of your previous books: international narcotics trade; terrorism; the dangers inherent “The Accidental Guerilla,” in the West’s dependence on Mid-East oil; new economic “Counterinsurgency,” “Out of the and environmental challenges—these and a number of other Mountains,” and “Blood Year”? important threats to our security and our interests present Security Environment of the intelligence problems that are extraordinary in their 1990’s — Q: What was the complexity and difficulty. And these challenges, if unmet, can immediate aftermath of the decidedly affect our daily lives for the worse. Our two breakup of the USSR like? (e.g. surrounding oceans don’t isolate us anymore. Yes, we have Russian units leaving the service slain a large dragon, but we live now in a jungle filled with a vehicles, weapons, aircraft, and bewildering variety of poisonous snakes. And in many ways equipment, and setting up shop the dragon was easier to keep track of. — James Woolsey as commercial traffickers.) From a Woolseyan Era to the Modern Day — Q: Can you lead us through the transition from the “Woolseyan Era” or “Woolseyan Security Environment,” to the world of “Dragons and Snakes” of today? Q: How did we go from the “Highway of Death” to the high-water mark of “Dora Farms?” “The Western” Way of War — You use the capitalized term “Western” or “the West” to describe a particular military methodology, along with the group of countries whose warfighting style is characterized by that methodology. “In essence,” you write, “it is an approach to war that emphasizes battlefield dominance, achieved through high-tech precision engagement, networked communications, and pervasive intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR). It is characterized by an obsessive drive to minimize casualties, a reluctance to think about the long- term consequences of war, a narrow focus on combat, and a lack of emphasis on war termination— the set of activities needed in order to translate battlefield success into enduring and favorable political outcomes.” Q: Who is “the West?” Q: What is the “Western” approach to war? Q: What are the origins or roots of this military methodology?

3 Dragons Learning — Q: When did the Dragons start learning from us and what were the lessons they drew? (Was it as soon as the 1991 Gulf War?) Q: How did the Russians incorporate those lessons? Q: How did the Chinese incorporate these same lessons? Q: What about North Korea and Iran? Q: While these countries were learning from us, how were American policymakers learning from them (Were they even paying attention?)? Military Evolution in Post-Cold War Russia — Q: How has the Russian Federation evolved its warfighting methodology in the years since the fall of the USSR? (nuclear, conventional, asymmetric) Russia’s Wartime Evolution & The “New Look” — Russia’s wartime evolution in Chechnya and the Caucasus, plus the peacetime innovation of the New Look after Georgia, formed the basis for Russia’s resurgence. Q: How did the war in Georgia impact Putin and change the Russian military mindset? Q: Where did they do well, and where—like at the tactical level—did they do poorly? Q: How did the Georgian campaign prompt the need for Defense Minister Anatoly Serdyokov’s “New Look”? Q: What is the theory or set of theories that underpinned Russia’s military evolution? Theory of Liminal Warfare — Q: What are some examples of liminal warfare strategies in action? Q: How do we think about liminal warfare in special sense? You have written that “fostering a fragmented, polarized political and media environment can become a military objective in its own right, since it increases the scope for maneuver by widening the zone of ambiguity. Q: How important is it to foster ambiguity and why? Liminal Maneuver Space — Q: What is “liminal maneuver space” and how do enemies exploit it? Information Warfare Dimension — Q: How does Russia use information warfare as part of this larger liminal warfare strategy? Q: How are social and legacy media used in service of this objective and how centralized or decentralized is the planning and execution? Q: Is the objective to “simultaneously entertain, confuse, and overwhelm the audience,” as Christopher Paul and Miriam Matthews write? Q: Is this “firehose of falsehood” really a “remarkable evolution in Russia’s approach to propaganda” as the authors claim?

4 Temporal Dimension — From the book: “Beyond these signature-management and political- warfare elements, if all operations are eventually but not immediately compromised then there is also a temporal dimension to liminal maneuver: to achieve key goals, liminal actors and their sponsors do not need permanent deniability, just temporary ambiguity. In this context, reaction time has five components, each of which can be quantified by planners or affected by operators. These are shown in Figure 4.2, and they include (1) detection time (the time it takes for ISR assets to detect the existence of an operation), (2) attribution time (the time taken by analysts to identify the operation’s perpetrators and sponsors), and (3) decision time (the time needed to convince political leaders to act, decide what to do, and build public and international support for action). This is the longest component of reaction time, and it is both highly variable compared with other components and inherently political. Hence, this is the window in which political action—including reflexive control, political subversion, cyberattacks, and diplomatic negotiation—has its greatest effect. And that effect may be critical, since delaying a decision by twenty-four hours, or creating enough ambiguity that it takes an extra day to convince alliance partners to act, buys time to achieve goals while slowing, hampering, or preventing the enemy response. … The last two components, (4) mounting time and (5) launching time, depend on military factors, including readiness, time to mobilize, deployment speed, and survivability of assets in-theater, and are harder for an external actor to influence because they tend to be hardware-dependent. Thus, of the five components, the first two (detect and attribute) are intelligence-related, the middle component (decide) is primarily political, and the last two (mount and launch) are mainly military. Q: How is the temporal dimension exploited in liminal warfare? Q: Can you walk me through an operation from the standpoint of an attacker and what he would want to achieve? Q: Can you explain what “escalate to de-escalate” means and give some examples? Q: How does the joint US-Israel Stuxnet operation against the Iranian nuclear program fit in this diagram? Q: How about the din of “Russiagate?” Q: How has Russia exploited such tactics and methods in Ukraine (2014) and Syria (2015)? Q: What role does this methodology play in shaping or preparing the environment? Q: Is this necessarily a strategy for the player with the weakest hand?

5 China’s Evolution & Expanding the Battlefield — You have made the point that China’s adaptive response to the external environment—the “fitness landscape,” with its combinations of traits and pressures to adapt—created by US military dominance since the Cold War has involved not just military modernization, territorial expansion, cyberwarfare, and economic-technological competition. It has also involved a widening of the very definition of warfare, to the point where Western planners now risk what I will call “conceptual envelopment,” a situation in which an adversary’s conception of war becomes so much broader than our own that two dangerous things can happen. First, that adversary may be acting in ways it considers warlike, while we with our narrower notion of warfare remain blithely unaware of the fact, so that by the time we realize we are at war, we have already lost. Second, and what is even more dangerous, we can be taking actions that we define as normal peacetime competition, while a rival with a broader concept of conflict sees these as acts of war and responds accordingly. At worst, each of us may completely misunderstand the other’s motivation, strategy, and outlook, risking lethal miscalculation. Strategists distinguish vertical escalation (increasing intensity of action within a given location, category of competition, or environmental domain) from horizontal escalation (expanding the geography, categories, and scope of actions, with or without increasing intensity in any one lo- cation). In this framework, the liminal warfare Russia pursues is a vertical maneuver, a form of brinkmanship that manipulates the intensity and detectability (the vertical “signature”) of actions, seeking just enough intensity to achieve key goals but not enough to trigger a timely military response. By contrast, the Chinese approach is a horizontal maneuver—posing a bandwidth challenge for a rival by expanding the spectrum of competition beyond that rival’s capacity to cope, generating a multitude of simultaneous small challenges that hamper its ability to respond effectively to any one action, or perhaps even to conceptualize the overall situation as warlike at all. The danger of conceptual envelopment is that, through mis- calculation or misinterpretation, we might end up unintentionally going to war with China, sliding imperceptibly into confrontation or subconsciously losing a subliminal conflict we don’t even realize we are fighting.

6 Chinese Military in the 1980’s & 1990’s — Since the 1990s, China—across all areas, driven by its evolving internal circumstances and shifts in the external landscape, and spurred by a series of shocks and humiliations—has undertaken a conventional modernization that directly challenges US primacy in the Pacific and increasingly lets China compete globally. This has been the most widely discussed aspect of Chinese evolution over the past quarter century. But a smaller, less prominent group has simultaneously sought to sidestep US superiority altogether, following a different, more asymmetric path. Let’s discuss the conventional evolution first. Q: What was China’s military like under Mao and how did it evolve (and what prompted that evolution) in the period immediately afterwards? Q: What sorts of reforms did China implement after Tiananmen and what were the pivotal events in the 1990’s that served as catalysts for these reforms (like the Belgrade Embassy Bombing of May 7th, 1999, the Third Taiwan Straight Crisis of 1995-96, or the Hainan Island incident of April 1st, 2001, when a US EP-3E ARIES II collided with a PLAN fighter jet in mid- air)? Unrestricted Warfare — In February 1999, two PLA senior colonels—Qiao Liang of the air force and Wang Xiangsui of the ground forces—published a short book on war. Written after the Third Taiwan Strait Crisis and the Asian financial crash of 1997–98 but before the Kosovo campaign, the Belgrade bombing, Y2K, the dotcom collapse, and the 9/11 attacks, Chao Xian Zhan (Unrestricted Warfare, also known as War beyond Rules) is a product of its time, a turn-of-the-century period piece, yet also a remarkably prescient document. The book transcended the three main schools of thought in that debate—traditionalists seeking a return to people’s war, neo-traditionalists pushing for the A2/AD and power-projection capabilities just discussed, and technologists advocating a “revolution in military affairs with Chinese characteristics”—instead presenting a response to the transformative impact of the Gulf War on war itself. … The book’s most salient feature is that it dramatically broadens the definition of war beyond battlefield dominance, suggesting that war no longer means “using armed force to compel the enemy to submit to one’s will” but rather “using all

7 means, including armed force or non-armed force, military and non-military, and lethal and non- lethal means to compel the enemy to accept one’s interest” and that “non-war actions may be the new factors constituting future warfare.” The authors write of “trans-military” and “non-military war operations” in which all aspects of society, technology, and the international system (whether directly under a protagonist’s control or not) are leveraged to achieve war aims. These might include financial disruption, currency and stock market manipulation, trade wars, exploitation of humanitarian aid and foreign assistance, cyberwarfare and information warfare, narcotics trafficking, smuggling, and other criminal activities, ecological warfare (including the creation and exploitation of artificial earthquakes or tsunamis), capturing control of key technologies (or of standards for future technologies), and “lawfare,” or the manipulation of rules and norms for advantage in war or as a substitute for armed conflict. Alongside an extension of the scope of conflict, Qiao and Wang argue for a geographical expansion: they suggest that “the battlefield is everywhere” and that “all the boundaries lying between the two worlds of war and non- war, of military and non-military, will be totally destroyed…and even that the rules of war may need to be rewritten.” The goal set forth in URW is “to use all means whatsoever—means that involve the force of arms and means that do not involve the force of arms, means that involve military power and means that do not involve military power, means that entail casualties and means that do not entail casualties—to force the enemy to serve one’s own interests.” The difference between this vision and the US view—epitomized by Cortez Cooper’s comment about a new way of war, characterized by battlefield dominance through precision strike and advanced C2 and ISR—is stark. Indeed, URW elides the distinction between armed conflict (traditionally defined as organized violence among states) and competition short of war. Q: Can you walk me and my listeners’ through this concept of “conceptual envelopment” or what strategist call “horizonal escalation?” Q: What are some of the methods of unrestricted warfare? Q: Can you give us examples of where the Chinese either have implemented or are suspected of having implemented such a strategy?

8 Flip Side of Conceptual Envelopment — If Unrestricted Warfare represents one aspect of conceptual envelopment—where an adversary may be engaging in actions it considers warlike, while we remain oblivious—then the flip side of the same phenomenon is that an adversary may be interpreting our behavior as warfare, while we consider it mere peacetime competition. Two sides may so misunderstand each other’s concept of war that they end up fighting one another by accident. Q: What are some examples of how China’s leadership may well be misconstruing or misinterpreting Western actions as warfare, when we see these same actions and peacetime competition? Q: What might be examples of the opposite, where we see Chinese actions (like BRI, the purchasing of hotels near naval bases, the leasing of strategic ports of entry like Piraeus, etc.) EBB TIDE OF THE WEST You write in that “future historians may decide that the high tide of the West, the culminating point for our post–Cold War military supremacy, came at 5:30 a.m. local time on 20 March 2003 at the Dora Farms complex on the southern outskirts of Baghdad. At that moment the United States launched a “decapitation strike”—a preemptive attempt, in the final moments before the Iraq War, to kill Saddam Hussein and his sons Uday and Qusay. It failed.” In this same passage, you recount where you were when you learned of this attack and how it actually caused you to miss your flight back to Army Headquarters in Canberra, Australia. I too remember where I was. I was in Madrid, Spain glued to a television watching CNN at my friend’s apartment High-water Mark — Q: Can we talk about our mutual experience of this event and why we both seemed to have had such a profound reaction to it? Q: Why do you feel like this event represented the beginning of the end of Pax Americana? Q: Was this inevitable? Strategic Responses — Q: What are the three different strategic responses that the West can enact going forward? Q: What would doubling down look like in the third decade of the 21st century? Q: What strategy did Obama follow? Q: Which response do you think is best and how do we proceed to implement it?

9 NON-STATE ACTORS When writing about post-9/11 Afghanistan: in evolutionary terms, the fitness landscape favored actors who combined characteristics such as stealth, dispersion, and modularity, especially small semiautonomous bands that presented fewer and smaller targets for attack. It also rewarded autonomy (the ability to operate without orders and therefore avoid communications that might be detected by enemy sensors) and the ability to blend into the background, which we could call “adaptive coloration.” In urban environments in particular—and the battlefield, as we have seen, is increasingly urban—it rewarded the ability to “infest” urban terrain (the Israeli military’s term for disappearing into and maneuvering wholly inside buildings and underground or internal passages). Entities with these characteristics tended to be more survivable under air attack. Conversely, the environment punished size, overtness, anything that generated a sustained contrast against the human or physical background, large troop concentrations, active communications, and hierarchical organizations. Snakes Learning — Q: When and how did snakes begin learning from us? Q: How does their learning differ from that of Dragons? Technology & Institutional Learning — Q: How has technology impacted learning and institutional learning among the snakes? (Google Earth, Commercial Drones, Pamphlets, etc.) Fitness Landscape — Q: Can we talk about some examples of where this is relevant like in post- 9/11 Iraq or Afghanistan? Q: What are the elements of the fitness landscape for Western adversaries and how have snakes exploited/adapted to this? (e.g. air supremacy, self-imposed legal & political constraints, information intelligence overload) Q: Are there ways to shift this landscape in order to advantage Western allies and if so, how would this be done? Al-Qaeda’s Evolution — Q: How did Al-Qaeda evolve from its pre-9/11 days to today? (guerrilla terrorism, expeditionary terrorism, urban siege, remote , leaderless resistance Hezbollah’s Evolution — Q: How did Hezbollah evolve?

10 ISIS Evolution — Q: How did ISIS evolve and how did it’s taking on of state characteristics hurt its ability to survive? Migrant Warfare — Q: What do we make of Turkey’s use of migrants as weapons? KEY CONCEPTS Convergent Evolution — the way in which unlike actors confronting a similar environment can come to resemble each other. Combat Darwinism — Vast numbers of small adaptations can add up to astoundingly rapid and far-reaching change in wartime, especially compared with the slow-moving, top-down processes of peacetime change. Conceptually Driven Innovation vs. Combat-Driven 'Growth Spurts’ of Wartime Adaption — As the military theorist Stephen Rosen points out, innovation during peacetime is fundamentally different from adaptation in war: whereas peacetime innovation is driven by perceptions of change in the external environment, as well as conceptual hypotheses about the new technologies, organizations, and tactics needed to prevail in future conflict, wartime adaptation is a direct response to enemy action. As a result, military organizations—whether state-based militaries or nonstate armed groups—tend to engage in steady, self-generated, conceptually driven innovation for long periods in peace-time before undergoing sudden, rapid, combat-driven “growth spurts” of wartime adaptation. Combat losses—deaths and injuries—are inseparable from these wartime adaptation spurts. Self-Destruction Cycle — This selection-destruction cycle means that a force with too high a proportion of elites—an army with too many special forces units, a navy that diverts too many of its most aggressive junior commanders into the submarine arm, or an air force (like that of imperial Japan) with aircrew standards that prove unsustainable over a long war—can actually damage its adaptive potential. Such a force experiences a brain drain, where individuals who would have been leaders in regular units (and would likely have survived to spread their knowledge to others) are instead segregated into subgroups where, even if they survive, their talents are lost to the wider force. Meanwhile, major combat formations can cease to be much more than feeders for specialized units, providing the recruiting base for elite forces that increasingly usurp normal combat roles, exacerbating both the brain drain and the selection-destruction cycle that Roger Beaumont describes. Local, Bottom-up Adaption Social Learning — Learning from others through shared information Observational Learning — Learning that happens by watching the enemy engage with one’s compatriots in battle. Blind Variation & Selective Retention (BVSR) Methodical selection — whereby a breeder consciously attempts to modify a plant or animal population by selecting for specific traits; the breeder has some definite aim in mind and the knowledge that exaggerating traits over multiple generations will cause the breed to diverge from its original form.

11 Unconscious Selection — whereby a farmer or gardener, weeding out inferior specimens and breeding the best, may (with no intent to change the breed, but simply by seeking to maintain the available stock) end up creating remarkably different sub-breeds, or new ones altogether. This second kind of artificial selection is particularly relevant to evolution in irregular warfare. Predator-Prey Model — The basic predator-prey model produces a sequence of peaks and troughs in the population of both predators and prey, with predator peaks lagging behind those of prey (since an increase in prey drives the next growth cycle for predators, while a collapse in the prey population triggers the next fall in predator numbers). Fitness Landscape — Today’s fitness landscape—created by background changes like urbanization, , and connectivity, and further shaped by Western countries’ own actions after the end of the Cold War—reflects a set of selection pressures that forced armed actors to adapt. It incorporates (in its current configuration) a series of “fitness peaks,” — combinations of traits that confer a survival advantage on actors. The more adaptive (i.e., the more conducive to survival and success) a given combination turns out to be, the higher its elevation as plotted on the fitness landscape, making altitude a metaphor for fitness. Kilcullen has identified the following characteristics as conferring survival advantage to adversaries: Stealth, Dispersion, Modularity, Autonomy, Hiding in ‘electronic plain sight’, Hugging, Media Manipulation, Political Warfare, Technology & Connectivity Hacking. Stealth — the ability to blend into the physical, social, and informational background, adopting “adaptive coloration” to disappear when threatened. Dispersion — the ability to move and fight dispersed, either without having to concentrate at all (using connectivity and remote-warfare tools) or concentrating for specific operations to overwhelm a weaker enemy, before dispersing again. Modularity — the ability to operate in small bands, employing combat groups that can survive the destruction of other groups and self-healing networks that can regenerate new combat groups if necessary.

12 Autonomy — the ability to operate for long periods without orders or communications, thereby reducing the electronic signature of the group and improving its survivability. Hiding in electronic plain sight — the ability to hide within gigantic volumes of electronic traffic, adopting low-profile behaviors to avoid attracting analysts’ attention or triggering an operational response, even while accepting the reality of pervasive surveillance. “Hugging” — the ability to get close to protected populations or sites or to piggyback onto systems (GPS, Google Earth, smartphones, the internet) that opponents cannot disable without harming themselves Media manipulation — the ability to goad, provoke, or trick an adversary into inflicting disproportionate civilian casualties or property damage, and then exploit such errors through a manipulated media backlash. Political Warfare — the ability to manipulate and mobilize supporters through mass communication, social networks, weaponized diasporas, and online networks, using protest movements and agents of influence to undermine an opponent’s operations, unity, and legitimacy. Technology & Connectivity Hacking — the ability to rapidly repurpose consumer systems, use civilian devices in combat settings, and develop precision or collaborative-engagement systems that are better than those available to state opponents (using both hardware and software skills) Liminal Warfare — The term “liminal” comes from the Latin word for a threshold and is used in anthropology to describe the ambiguity experienced by people or societies transitioning between two states of being. Things that are in limbo, transitioning, or on the periphery, that have ambiguous political, legal, and psychological status—or whose very existence is debated—are liminal. Liminal geographies recognize thresholds not as sharp lines but as transitional zones, while in warfare guerrillas, militias, terrorists, and resistance movements are all liminal actors, as are refugees and diasporas. Thresholds that seem sharply delineated from a distance (say, the Russo-Norwegian border) turn out to be fuzzy and ambiguous up close—and as we will see, a lot happens inside

13 those blurred lines. Liminal warfare exploits this character of ambiguity, operating in the blur, or as some Western military organizations put it, the “gray zone.” As a form of maneuver, it is neither fully overt nor truly clandestine; rather, it rides the edge, surfing the threshold of detectability, sometimes subliminal (literally “below the threshold” of perception), at other times breaking fully into the open to seize an advantage or consolidate gains before adversaries can react. Likewise, the approach exploits undefined or legally ambiguous spaces and categories—using these as cover for action without retaliation. As such, liminal warfare is a survival mechanism for a power that lacks the capacity to compete directly with the West and faces a limited window of opportunity to carve out tradespace for its future interests while rebuilding its conventional capabilities. Vertical Escalation — This form of escalation increases the intensity of action within a given location, category of competition, or environmental domain. It is a form of brinkmanship that manipulates the intensity and detectability (the vertical “signature”) of actions, seeking just enough intensity to achieve key goals but not enough to trigger a timely military response. Horizontal Escalation — This form expands the geography, categories, and scope of actions, with or without increasing intensity in any one location. It poses a bandwidth challenge for a rival by expanding the spectrum of competition beyond that rival’s capacity to cope, generating a multitude of simultaneous small challenges that hamper its ability to respond effectively to any one action, or perhaps even to conceptualize the overall situation as warlike at all. The Side-Principal Rule — An approach to warfighting that encourages a superior adversary to expend its strength in a series of frontal efforts before responding with a decisive blow that comes from an unexpected direction, takes an unexpected form, or applies elements that an enemy has not considered. The defensive but frontal aspect (the principal) does not deliver victory but rather absorbs an enemy’s strength before the decisive but indirect blow (the side element) defeats the now-weakened enemy. KEY EXCERPT

14 Darwinian [i.e., natural] selection weeds out poor performers and propagates good performers, thus leading to a cumulative increase in effective adaptations over time . . . as long as three conditions are in place: variation, selection, and replication. Applied to asymmetric warfare, Darwinian selection predicts that, counter-intuitively, stronger sides may suffer a disadvantage across all three conditions: (1) Variation—weaker sides are often composed of a larger diversity of combatants, representing a larger trait-pool and a potentially higher rate of “mutation” (innovation); (2) Selection— stronger sides apply a greater selection pressure on weaker sides than the other way around, resulting in faster adaptation by the weaker side; (3) Replication—weaker sides are exposed to combat for longer (fighting on the same home territory for years at a time), promoting experience and learning, while stronger sides rotate soldiers on short combat tours to different regions. — Dominic Johnson In other words, through selective pressure on its leaders, over an eleven-year period between 2002 and 2013, alleged US drone strikes helped turn a loose collection of local tribal militias, with no real goal other than to be left alone, into a unified, transnational terrorist group affiliated with other extremist organizations and directly targeting (even operating inside) the United States. … By picking off leaders roughly every five years, thereby causing three generations of leadership turnover, the alleged US strikes generated enough selective pressure to create the TTP and then make it fitter through adaptation, but not enough to destroy it. Less intense pressure (say, leaving the tribes alone in 2002 or using lower-key intelligence and policing approaches or political engagement rather than a full-scale military invasion of the FATA) may have kept selective pressure low enough to keep the group stagnant or to enable the natural centrifugal tendency of the tribes’ fractious family-based social organization (what anthropologists call their “segmentary lineage structure”) to reassert itself, rather than the coalescing effect of outside threat. Conversely, more intensive targeting—killing leaders every five weeks, for instance, rather than every five years—might have created intense enough pressure to collapse the group by posing an adaptation challenge that it simply lacked the agility to meet in time. Q: Are you describing a kind of “Goldilocks” war environment for evolution?

15