Irregular Warfare Podcast - Gray Zone: China’s Political Warfare

Episode Date: September 21, 2023

Be sure to visit the Irregular Warfare Initiative website to see all of the new articles, podcast episodes, and other content the IWI team is producing! What are the fundamental tenets of China's political warfare? What does it look like when Beijing employs political warfare in the real world? And how is it different, in both theory and practice, from traditional Western conceptualizations of warfare and its political component? This episode explores those questions and more. It features a conversation with two guests whose deep expertise gives them important perspectives on the subject. Dr. Ross Babbage is a nonresident senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, served as the head of strategic analysis in Australia’s Office of National Assessments, and is the author of the book The Next Major War: Can the US and its Allies Win against China? David Stilwell is the assistant secretary of state for the Bureau of East Asian and Pacific Affairs, a retired US Air Force officer, and former director of the China Strategic Focus Group at US Indo-Pacific Command. Together, they examine China’s practice of political warfare and how other states can counter it. Intro music: "Unsilenced" by Ketsa Outro music: "Launch" by Ketsa CC BY-NC-ND 4.0

Their goal really ultimately is to encourage fierce dissent, build on the dissent that already is in the United States and some of the allies. If you like South Park, if you don't like crude humor, watch season 23, episode two. It's called Banned in China. It is awesome. It's the first time that an American media group has gotten in front of American people and gone, this is the real China, and they got it exactly right. Welcome to Episode 88 of the Irregular Warfare Podcast.

I'm your host, Adam Darnley-Stewart, and my co-host today is Julie McLennan. This episode is the second in a series of podcasts dedicated to Project Grey Zone. Our guests begin by defining Chinese political warfare and how it differs from Western approaches to warfare. They then discuss examples of China's information operations in the context of global security challenges. Our guests conclude with recommendations on how to combat and counter Chinese political warfare efforts by building resilience against subversion and coercion. his political warfare efforts by building resilience against subversion and coercion. Dr. Ross Babbage served for 16 years in the Australian Public Service, holding several senior positions, including Head of Strategic Analysis in the Office of National Assessments and Special Advisor to the Minister for Defence during the preparation of the 2009 Australian

Defence White Paper. Ross's book, The Next Major War, Can the US and its Allies Win Against China, is the focus of this podcast. David Stilwell is the Assistant Secretary of State for the Bureau of East Asian and Public Affairs. Prior to this appointment as Assistant Secretary in 2019, he served in the Air Force for 35 years. Most recently, David served as the Director of the China Strategic Focus Group at US Indo-Pacific Command in Hawaii, and an Adjunct Senior Fellow at the East-West Centre in Honolulu. You are listening to the Irregular Warfare Podcast, dedicated to bridging the gap between scholars and practitioners to support the community of irregular warfare professionals. Here is our conversation with Ross and David.

Here is our conversation with Ross and David. Ross and David, welcome to the Regular Warfare podcast. Well, thanks for having us. It's great to be here. Same. Happy to join you here. Well, jump straight in, Ross. What was the motivation driving you to write the book, The Next Major War? Well, look, I think developments over the last decade have made it pretty clear that the risk of a major conflict in the Western Pacific between China and a couple of others on one side and the United States and its allies

and friends on the other has become really quite serious. And the risk of this actually happening is such that we really need to focus much more intently on the sort of conflict that this might evolve into. It's also very clear that we're talking about a lot being at stake. This is not a trivial thing. This would be a really huge crisis globally. And obviously, it's something we need to avoid if we possibly can. But if we can't avoid it, and we've got to fight, we've got to make sure that we win. I think just doing some preliminary research on this and the sort of dynamics that would be at stake here and would be happening, it became pretty clear that there were misperceptions, particularly in parts of the West,

about what such a conflict would look like, how it would evolve and so on. And also, in particular, how the Chinese were actually preparing for the possibility of a major conflict. And it seemed to us that it was really important to sort this out, to research it really thoroughly, and be able to explain the differences between the Chinese and American and allied approach to this sort of challenge. And I guess, finally, in discussing these dilemmas and what we might do about it and what we should do about it, I ran the whole idea past a number of very senior officials, very experienced people,

and they all said that they were not aware of a comprehensive assessment of this that is beyond the military, dealing with the economics, dealing with the political warfare, dealing with all the dimensions of such a conflict. They were not aware that a net assessment of this had really been attempted at any level of classification. But it was really badly needed, and they were very encouraging for us to get on and do it. And that's really what drove it. And so we knuckled down and got cracking. And really briefly, Ross, could I please get you to define political warfare? Political warfare is the use of a wide range of instruments to coerce, or persuade, coerce, but go further, to undermine, divide, or really weaken an opponent prior to the

extensive use of kinetic force. And there's a long tradition, of course, of this going back literally hundreds of years, particularly in China, but also in other authoritarian states. And, you know, it can be pushed and pulled in different ways with different emphases in different circumstances. And certainly the Chinese masters at this. The West used to be pretty effective at it, but has given away most of that capability at the end of the Cold War. And we've got to really get wise and be much, much more effective in this domain than we have been in recent times. Dave, would you add anything to that definition or that description? I would simply add the historical precedent in the Chinese case coming out of the Warring States

period, the period when Sun Tzu wrote Bing Fa, the Law of War, that if you look at the example of those seven states and how the squabbling turned into the Qin dynasty winning, where they created discord, hate, discontent inside other societies where they were busy fighting themselves. And then when the time came, they were so exhausted from fighting themselves that then the Qin just walked in and took over. That's exactly what's happening today. So he got it perfect. I like that example from the Chinese historical model. I think that sets the conditions really well to understand broadly what political warfare is before we dive deep into the mechanisms that we're seeing occur in the Indo-Pacific. Just one last one for you, Ross. You obviously described in your book China's approach

holistically to warfare in a very unconventional, non-Western-centric manner. Could you briefly explain the differences in how China views warfare compared to the US specifically, and a bit more broadly, how the West approaches warfare? Well, the United States and the West generally currently regard themselves at peace, peace broadly defined. Whereas I really think there is a sense in which the Chinese regard themselves already in an intense struggle with the West, a form of warfare that they often use the term, in fact, political warfare and various synonyms for that. And what we've got from the very start is a mindset which is different, that the Chinese, I think, really do feel as though they're in a combative state. It's just that it's not kinetic

at the moment. So they're already doing this. So if we ever get to a major kinetic conflict, they're preparing to prepare the ground, prepare the battlefield, if you like, by very much in the way that David has just explained from Sun Tzu, that is really weakening the opponent before kinetic operations take place. Their preference is for the opponent to fall over through weakening, dividing, corrupting, harassing, coercing in all sorts of different ways, using all sorts of means prior to the actual use of kinetic force. And what we see today is a lot of that activity, and that includes things like the cyber operations and a lot of espionage and so on, intelligence gathering

operations, but also penetrations of Western societies, placing agents and corrupt software and all sorts of things into the West in such a way that it can be manipulated much more severely in a crisis to bring much greater confusion, disruption, let alone what might be happening in the kinetic phases. So there are a number of other things that really set the Chinese approach apart. One is they plan to operate on a much broader range of fronts than the West generally tends to focus on. We tend to focus on dime, diplomatic, information, military, economic. Sometimes we add science and technology to that or something other else my experience in reading a lot of chinese material on this and related matters

it's clear that they often consider more than 20 different dimensions and they include a lot of ideological ones they include a lot of measures of cohesion in different areas in different sectors etc etc this is quite different it is it means that they're operating and preparing and planning on a broader front, a much larger canvas, whereas in the West, we tend to think of a future war as being largely, or almost entirely, in fact, in many cases, military. Well, actually, it's much more than that, and the Chinese are looking to operate against us in many other ways, and effectively, I'd argue, outflank us. And we need to be wise to this and to prepare in a similar sort of way.

I think they're also, one of the big differences, they're preparing their society, have been doing it for some time for this possibility. They talk about it, they debate it. There's a lot of things being done to actually prepare their whole society and their economy for a crisis. And we are not really in the same way. We barely talk about it to our people. We're scared of doing it, I think, and politicians in particular are scared of doing it. They have a different pattern of a defense investment and security investment to us. The most obvious thing, of course, is in the Western Pacific, the very heavy emphasis on theater ballistic and cruise missiles and other related systems to dominate the Western Pacific in a kinetic sense, certainly in the early phases of a major conflict. That's quite different to where the United States and its allies are at

the moment. They're also preparing, very importantly, they are quite explicitly preparing for a prolonged war. They realise that the prospect of them winning quickly is limited. It is very unlikely. Whereas in the West, we tend to think about the military phases and we aim to win quickly. And if we don't win quickly, the Chinese believe we're at a greater disadvantage because they believe that we will not be able to sustain a protracted war politically, that we will be divided domestically, there'll be huge dissent, and a bit like in the Vietnam War, eventually we'll crumble and have to come to terms largely compatible with those that are Beijing's. Dave, I love the example that

you gave just a moment ago. I'm wondering if you could elaborate on that example or maybe others in terms of explaining the differences in how China views warfare compared to U.S. or the quote unquote West. Well, I'm a career military guy. I mean, I retired a few years ago. And to my either credit or discredit, I have focused entirely on the kinetic role of interstate interaction, which is if they don't do what you want, you blow them up. And to our both credit and discredit, the United States military is pretty freaking good at killing people and breaking their stuff. And the problem is we focus too much on that aspect of conflict and not nearly enough on

all the things that Ross just discussed. And so here we are, as you mentioned, at the end of the Cold War, we had become really good at deterrence, deterrence theory, more thoughtful and cerebral approaches to conflict. And because we've been so good for the last 30 years, because we had no peer competitor until recently, well, we didn't recognize it. We've trusted the military to take care of all these things while the information and economic and other aspects of national power have been allowed to molder. We're going to have to resolve this soon. And I mean, I got a million examples for a thing, but let me just go with one here.

The solution is easy. You know, all the things that Ross pointed out are exactly right, but we are too narrowly focused on one theater, one area of the PRC. And I hope as we go on, and the one thing I bang this drum on all the time with maps is to show that there is an entire half of China that is really weak, very vulnerable and begging for us to do something. I'm sure in Beijing, they're asking themselves, why is the U.S. not in Tajikistan right now making trouble for us with the East Turkestan Independence Party and other things? other things. It's because we have a problem with the way we draw maps in the United States under what's called the Unified Command Plan, the UCP, that tells Central Command sitting in Tampa, Florida, that you are primarily a counterterror and violent extremist organization activity.

They don't even look beyond their eastern border, which happens to be on China's western border, to see can we do something in the area of great power competition to influence the PRC. Well, again, it's opportunities like this that you present that I can get that message out because I cannot get anyone to listen to this. I take the whole map, throw it away, redraw that map based on the new Cold War, similar to what we drew between 1960 and 1989, 1991. Redraw that map. So CENTCOM is looking at China's Western Front, China's weak Western Front, where Pakistan is a massive area of opportunity. Afghanistan is another area. And guys like me who've spent their entire life getting really good at our craft out of the way and out of the principle approach and bring in the information warfare experts and the economic experts and all that. So we are shooting behind

the target and it wouldn't take a lot. Here's an example and I'll be quiet. But when I got into my office at State Department, East Asia and Pacific Bureau, the map that encapsulated my area of responsibility, it ended on the longitudinal line between Bangladesh and Burma. And it went straight up and it cut off the entire western half of China, Tibet and Xinjiang. So the very first thing I did was I had a giant map made that went all the way to Central Asia, because I think that's where we should be putting our effort. And these cognitive tools, these are simple things. Earlier, we were talking about language.

You know, we use the wrong terms. Warfare in the Western mind means violence, bloodshed, and damage. In the PRC lexicon, it's totally different. Warfare applies across the spectrum, as Russell was saying, and that's where political warfare comes into play. So through a couple of simple changes that start with our education system, and I'm going to talk about that later, where we have to get serious about education and, again, defending our young minds from Chinese information warfare, from TikTok, from all these things and games, et cetera. The solution is actually pretty easy, but we have to broaden the scope, and that's where

this podcast is really helpful. Thanks, David. I think we broadly agree that we've all been very myopic on our focus over the past few years pertaining to China's influence game in the Indo-Pacific. And it reaches far broader than a Taiwan flashpoint, especially into the rest of the world and their levers into the Middle East, into Europe and into Africa.

That's a nice segue onto relationship fracturing and disintegration. Ross, before you spoke about the prospect of winning quickly, which is a Western-centric concept of winning violently, which runs counter to the Chinese concept of protracted warfare, which is primarily executed in the information domain. Could you please unpack the concept of disintegration that you mention in your book? Could you specifically go through some really meaty examples on how the Chinese view disintegration and why it's so critical to their strategy? Well, really, the core thing in many respects, and it's pretty clear that Xi Jinping himself believes this. He refers to the weakness in the West. He talks about

the United States as being, you know, yesterday's power. He talks about, uses all sorts of different language to describe it. And sometimes I think they believe their own propaganda a bit too much, but nevertheless, they think the West is gone or going and that the East is rising, and of course, led by China. So there is this narrative, which is a very powerful narrative, and they really regard ethnic Chinese, no matter even if they've been in the United States or Australia for two centuries, still part of their empire, if you like. And the way they describe this, and the way that they try and enmesh these people in their campaign is really interesting to perceive. What I'd say is that for the Western mind, it's hard for us to fully comprehend the depth of what I'd call the Sun Tzu heritage

of this whole idea of undermining in-depth, undermining unity, undermining the whole state and undermining creative activity in opposing states weakening so much that they almost fall over just at the sight of kinetic force it's deeply etched in the way that the chinese tend to approach all of these contingencies and we don't fully understand that and it's really important and the way they do it is using many, many means. The aim is, of course, to divide, disrupt, weaken, confuse, corrupt psychologically, and induce collapse. Induce collapse, everything from turning a blind eye to things like fentanyl going into the United States to make life very difficult domestically. And then at the same time time penetrating, developing networks of supporters, fellow travelers, networks that can be penetrated in a sort of precautionary way,

and this includes some corporates getting into their electronic systems and so on, but not necessarily doing very much, conducting, if you like, electronic reconnaissance, doing very much, conducting, if you like, electronic reconnaissance, but also saddling systems up in ways that are not easy to detect, which can be exploited. And so that if and when the use of kinetic force becomes needed, actually before kinetic force arrives, suddenly a whole lot of things just go down and collapse in command and control, in civil infrastructure, in all sorts of things. So what we see now, and we're seeing sort of elements of it, is we're seeing a lot of these elements taking place now. And the patterns in everything from cyber operations to intelligence operations and so on, most of them fit into this mold. So what's more, we're seeing them conducted not only against the United States, which we are,

of course, seeing, but we're seeing them conducted against most of the Western, all the Western allies, and in fact, a range of other countries as well. So what they're doing effectively is positioning themselves so they can win militarily, I don't believe, in most situations. I just do not believe it. So they've crafted this concept of weakening dramatically the West in advance, having the option of going a long way towards collapsing domestically systems in the West in a crisis, and then conducting a prolonged campaign, which includes what they call active defense operations, which are short or relatively short, some often surprise offensives that are designed not so short, certainly to win tactical victories on the battlefield to some extent, but really to cause casualties and impose costs to drain the West and to drain the United States. Their goal really ultimately is to encourage fierce dissent, build on the dissent that

already is in the United States and some of the allies. They really want to see people on the streets. They really want to see people demonstrating for an end to the war. They are already taking steps and financing dissent in a range of campaigns that we've seen in recent years. This is actually one of the more difficult events like this I've participated in. I did a debate with Graham Allison over his disease trap theory. And that was fun because I can't argue with this. I mean, I agree completely with the logic. So for today, I think my role is going to be comic relief or color commentary. So I think first off on the idea of disintegration, another in this book by Kerry Grishanik called Political

Warfare, which is a great compliment to my counterpart's book, that he defines disintegration as subversion. It's a nice, another way of understanding it. And I, in my sort of knuckle-dragging way, would abbreviate that to trolls. And if you watch what goes on in social media and seeing Chinese trolls is really easy once you've understood how they operate. You can't go by the name or the photo because they borrow those. But if I say yes, they say no. And it's what he was saying about politics. They don't care if Biden wins or Trump wins. They don't care if any of them win. What they want to see is the discord and the discontent and the friction that comes from that. And so just while I'm on that, we too can create friction. And the first place I would start would be Russia and China. Everybody sees those two as long-term counterparts

and friends. That is absolutely not the case. Here's an example. While Xi Jinping was in Moscow recently, basically dictating terms to Putin, there were reports in Chinese media, official media, saying here are the eight areas of traditionally Chinese territory that Moscow, that the Russians have stolen from us, starting with Vladivostok. Vladivostok was Chinese. It was a port called Haishanwei between 1689 and 1860. So the Chinese people are very aware of these things. What I'm saying is we look for those areas of friction and we play their game back. We can do it if we would just try. And so if you've noticed, there was an announcement last week that Chinese ships would soon be operating out of the port of Vladivostok, giving them access to the Sea of

Japan, which they need. But that's okay. The closer that Chinese people, companies and all that operate in Russia, you just need to be patient, sit back and watch because sparks will fly. The second point is, you know, my esteemed colleague here has demonstrated the painful ability of nugging through what the volumes of stuff that the PRC writes about its strategy. It's strategically very transparent. They tell you exactly what they're going to do, but you have to have the stamina to get through this stuff. You're talking a lot about subversion. So noting that resilience against subversion and coercion

is a key component of any strategy regarding competition with China. In your view, what are some of the key Indo-Pacific resilience building activities we could be or should be pursuing? It all, to me, comes down to education. And it comes down to, one, educating our own population, but two, leveraging those populations that have figured it out. And I am not sucking up here, but I'm telling you, I always talk about John Garneau, Malcolm Turnbull, Clive Hamilton, the silent invasion. It's out there. Every one of those put out some really useful information on what you're up against. The opening line in the silent invasion, it talks

about how the PRC embassy in Canberra rallied its own students, people to beat up peaceful, democratic Australian citizens who were protesting against the 2008 Olympic torch run. You know, when you put that out there, when you show Dastyari and others who are taking money from the PRC to undermine the interests of their own people for their own interests, when you can put that out there publicly, that's when you win. So again, I point to Australia as the folks who are on the leading edge of this and who have been very useful and helpful in exposing political warfare and how it looks in that area. The second part of that is the threat of PRC response and retaliation. Again, the Australian story here, I think, is useful, although this part has not been

advertised as successfully as it could be. But when the PRC embargoed Australian exports, iron ore and coal, everybody thought that was going to be in because the Australian economy is very much dependent on those two things. But what we found is that markets are fungible, that the Indians could use that stuff just as well. And that in the end, the big loser in the PRC utilizing its giant economic cudgel, which we all feared because we didn't have a response. Well, they ended up hurting themselves when they did that.

Because if you looked at two winters ago, the Northeast froze to death because they didn't have coal to power the electric generation capability. We need to put these stories out there very publicly. And we're just not doing it yet. Again, as I said, I love opportunities like this, but we need a lot more of them to get to people who don't tune in podcasts. We need our media to step up and tell these stories. But unfortunately, to the point of educating our population, our media is also very much beholden to the, as a comedian on US late night TV said, that sweet and sour Renminbi. That money is good

and our media isn't doing a good job of taking these stories and putting them out there where they need to be. So where do we start in the region? Well, we figure out a way through maybe Voice of America or through others. Australia is doing fantastic work. Japan is similarly doing really, really good work in this regard. A lot of my time was in Japan in the fighter world, but also in the diplomatic world. And for the longest time, it was us pulling. Well, now Japan's pulling, and we're behind them, and we need to help support them. The language on the Senkakus, Abe's statements about that we might have to go nuclear. Abe's statement that we are in the Senkakus, regardless of where the Americans are.

Morrison's statement that it would be inconceivable that Australia would not be involved. Those are simply rhetorical flourishes, we think. But one, they tell your population you're serious. And two, they tell the PRC that we're serious. The one thing they cannot defend against is allies, partners, and like-mindeds. And we have that in spades. We just got to take advantage of it. Ross, I think I'll throw to you now, mate, as our resident Australian expert, to either reinforce or provide an alternative point of view to what Dave just brought up about Australia being at the leading edge of some of the domestic resilience tasks against subversion and coercion. Well, to some extent, we have been in the lead. And I think what Dave has highlighted with John Garneau's work in particular, and also

some of our leaders have been pretty upfront, not only on COVID and looking for an independent international review of the origins of COVID very early on and the price that Australia paid. I think also the decision, very clear decision, the pretty intense work that was done in Canberra about Huawei and the risk that that posed in 5G communications leading it into the Australian telecommunications network, and for that matter, into the regional telecommunications network, was very powerful. And in fact, that message was then communicated in a series of briefings, in fact, in some surprising parts of the world, all over the place. And that had a fairly important impact, I think. What this sort of shows is you're like the sort of official community in this country, but working very closely, obviously, with the United States and other friends and allies has actually been pretty active and, I believe, very effective, including in places like parts of Eastern Europe and through Southeast Asia. Where I think the biggest gap is, I agree with Dave, education is a big issue and we've got to get better, but I think there's something that can be done really quite quickly. Sure, it's education, but it's not formal education so much. I think one of the big problems in both of our societies is that our politicians do not want to tell the story

in writ large. And I don't quite understand it. I think they really want to maintain some sort of balance or whatever you want to describe it in their relationship with Beijing. They only want to go halfway, if you like. So again, in the realm of color commentary, I give you a couple of anecdotes here. One, we kicked 60 Chinese so-called journalists out of the country. There were 160 total on legal visas in the US. There were 32 in China. And they had just kicked out one of the better ones, Anna Pfeiffer.

So we go, that's enough. Matt Podger was a journalist, Wall Street Journal. He and I thought about this. OK, we're going to kick out 60 of them. I got a call from a network, a media outlet, I don't say who. He wasn't angry. He wasn't yelling at me, but he was almost pleading going, please don't do anymore because you're hurting my bottom line. Here's the problem. I appreciate the thought that some don't know, but I would suggest that many more know what's going on, but they're just turning a blind eye to it because we're still making money. And the second part of that is we've had CEOs tell us that we know all this is going on,

but I am beholden to my corporate structure, to the chairman of the board, to the quarterly reports, and to the shareholders who demand that they continue to profit from this. And their suggestion is that if you can get Mike Gallagher in the Congress, who has been incredibly outspoken, and others, to pass a law to make it difficult, like CFIUS, the Committee for Foreign Investment in the United States, and other laws like that, that prevents these people from doing the wrong thing, you know, stop me before I steal again. That's the request that they make. And I think in many ways, it is reasonable, given the way our economics are structured that we have to give industry, Wall Street especially, tools that they can use to fight back from this. They know what's going on.

We're a little afraid if we put it out in the public space because they're going to have to react to it. And let me give you one more anecdote. In June of 2019, July of 2019, the general manager of the Houston Rockets, a guy named Daryl Morey, put out a very simple tweet. He retweeted something that said, I stand with the people of Hong Kong. It seems like not that important a deal and all that. Well, the PRC overreacted and they basically canceled all NBA activity in the PRC, which threatened the bottom line of a lot of big name NBA players, you know, who already make way too much money and whose social justice stance does not comport with their support of shoes made with slave labor. And they know that's there, but again, they have financial interests and they don't want those touched. So the NBA did the wrong thing, but had we been patient on this, had we continued, had we not said Daryl Morey needs to educate himself,

had we let this thing play out, we would have let the Chinese people have a say, Had we let this thing play out, we would have let the Chinese people have a say because the most popular sport in China is the U.S. National Basketball Association. It is not the China Basketball Association. And so if we let it play out, there would have been a hue and cry and uproar from the Chinese people saying, you know, I want my NBA. There are a lot of NBA exhibition games were scheduled to come through Shanghai and other places that people lost their money, they lost their tickets, and they didn't get to see this team that they've wanted to see their whole lives. And if we had let this play out a little bit longer, had the NBA not caved immediately, you'd have seen the Chinese people pressuring Xi Jinping. That's the ultimate solution. Get his own people to pressure him to withdraw that embargo on this thing that the Chinese people like.

This is an area where we need to do more assessment, more deep thinking, and take advantage of these natural forces that go on inside the PRC before we impatiently go in there and help out. Compare that to the Women's Tennis Association response when Peng Shuai was locked up, disappeared for admitting that a senior Chinese official named Zhang Gaoli had raped her. She disappeared. What did the WTA do? They said, we're not doing business with China anymore. That is the best way to go. We should hold these examples up and praise them. And we should speak ill and definitely criticize the NBA and others who can't get past their own creed. Your insights so far have been fantastic. I think it's worth now unpacking the whole of society and whole of government component of phase zero and phase one operations and the comparative views between what

China views as being already at warfare in the information domain and what we think is simply phase zero operations. I'll throw to you first, Ross, for the question. What do you think are the opportunities to start driving a wedge between the two components, the first one being the population of China and the CCP? And are there any opportunities to continue to drive this wedge between the CCP and the PLA? Well, these are pretty demanding things. I think it is possible to conduct psychological operations against the CCP,

but in a really complex and difficult set of circumstances because, of course, you're facing the Great Firewall of China, very tight internal security systems within China, and actually getting information through normal means is going to be rather challenging. Having said that, I think we do have some options. And there are options that are available in my view now, which would involve Chinese influencing and messaging Chinese who travel abroad. And there's still a lot, in fact, increasing numbers of those. I think it's also possible to reach the diaspora and have the diaspora communicate in various ways. Some of them are very clever at doing this into China,

some key messages. But I think also we ought to be planning and maybe even contemplating demonstrating capacities to penetrate the Great Firewall and in other communication modes and making it very clear to the Chinese leadership that we can actually talk directly to the Chinese public if we choose to do so. And that, it seems to me, could be, if done well, and in a fairly subtle way, perhaps, leaving some doubts in their minds, play a key role in our deterrence posture and in our overall deterrence posture. I think the other thing I'd say is, and this is a really important part of it, I think if we show and demonstrate, as we did in the 1980s, offset capabilities,

military offset capabilities, that is what I'm talking about here, capabilities, military capabilities that are new, they're partly technological, but partly operational concepts, which have the potential to what I'd say kneecap key PLA capabilities, really make it impossible or very difficult, extremely difficult for the PLA to achieve the sort of operational objectives that have been set for it, then I think you're going to have much greater dissent within the PLA about pursuing it. We saw this in Russia or the Soviet Union when it became obvious that air-land battle and a raft of other things, assault breaker and so on, were demonstrated,

although I must say with a bit of fake activity as well, were demonstrated to make it very clear to the Soviet high command that a major combined arms offensive into Eastern Europe through to the channel was simply not going to be workable and would be a disaster for them. Then they were telling the Soviet political leadership, we can't do that anymore, and we're basically outflanked. I think also the missile defense systems and high frontier and all the discussions that were taking place in a similar time frame, it became pretty clear to the Soviets at the same time that they were outflanked in that domain as well, and that their ICBM force was becoming of questionable utility, potentially downstream. And essentially, I do believe those factors generated debates within the Soviet Union that led to or contributed to the end of the Cold War. No question about that in my mind. I think we have the potential to do something similar, and I think we should.

I do believe right now, and I think there's evidence that there are senior members of the PLA who are really deeply concerned about the feasibility of actually pulling off and sustaining an operation against Taiwan. We have ways of making that really crystal clear. And if we do, I think it's really worth doing it. And I think that's something which can be done by the close allies if we really focus on it. I think the other thing I would simply say, and it's a really key element of this, David's touched a bit on this, is we are not doing a very good job, in my view, and I mean our societies, not just our governments and government agencies.

We're not doing a great job at exposing the true horrors of the Chinese regime, the CCP, and what they've done. And what they've done historically, you know, the extraordinary human price paid at the Great Leap Forward, in the Cultural Revolution, in a range of other awful situations. So, shifting a bit to the information operations, information warfare domain, to the information operations, information warfare domain. Dave, I want to turn to you for a moment. Noting that the IOSphere is a whole of government and a whole of society challenge, what do you think are the key areas we need to focus on to compete better in the information space, particularly against China? I'll go from least technical to most technical, if I can. Least technical. I really enjoyed working for Mike Pompeo as a

Secretary of State. And when I did my interview, he says, give me one thing we should work on. And I said, you need to stop saying China and you need to start saying CCP. If you know, after that, he never said China again, because they use that against us. He would say China, they say, oh, you're racist. China's not a race. Oman's a race. But never mind. Let's not let the facts confuse things.

So it starts with really simple things like picking your words better in a way that they can't twist and manipulate. And if you look at to Ross's point about driving wedges between the people and the party. If you look at the PRC response to that in the summer, fall of 2018, they lost their minds. You're saying you're trying to divide the party from the people. They are one. Well, we know they're not. 1.3 billion Chinese people know they're not. And it's only the 94 million CCP members that get it. So that's a simple thing we can do to start driving those wedges. And it was really effective, by the way, because now they have to explain to their people that no, no, no, it's not, it doesn't work that way. On that note, if you look at the language, they say in the

Chinese lexicon, you know, in the Chinese party constitution, that the people support the party. And then you compare that to the American Constitution, Declaration of Independence, say governments are established by the people and govern at the consent of the people. If you just look at the model of where you've got the government on top of the people in China and the government supporting the people in the U.S. and the West, I think that's another great image and a message that you can send to undermine what the PRC says is a better system of governance than this chaotic and messy democracy.

As far as splitting out the CCP and the PLA, it's worth noting that in terms of information warfare, it's worth noting, if you remember the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, where the government buildings were built with rebar and the schools were built without rebar because they stole the money. And guess what? All the schools collapsed. All those children died. All those single child families basically got cut off in a Confucian society where family is everything. You know, Ai Weiwei did his famous display of all those backpacks of all the dead children. That's another thing we can keep talking about. It gets into the Chinese system.

It's just more and more risky for the people to view those things before it gets censored. The other thing on the PLA is, Ross mentioned, they are definitely not prepared. And there are things we can do in terms of real-world capability and in terms of messaging, disinformation, military deception and things. This report just came out from a group called SCSP. It's a pretty useful topic. It's called Offset X. And it follows up with the third offset,

which is AI coming out of Bob Work and the Pentagon. And this is the fourth one. And it's just an expansion of using information to our benefit. So we can undermine confidence of the PLA. We can get at them. The PLA, if you didn't know, of course, doesn't have access to the internet. They don't trust their people enough to actually give them access or give them passports that they can hold. So that's also worth considering. And then finally, in information warfare, we have the ultimate tool, and it was demonstrated by Elon Musk in Ukraine, and it's called Starlink. The reason why Starlink isn't a great option right now is because the ITU has been run for the last eight years by a Chinese citizen named Zhao something, who made it illegal to land signals from space into a non-cooperating country. And so Starlink legally, from the

International Telecommunication Unit, cannot actually use its system inside China. But that's the only thing that prevents the Chinese people from getting access to low latency, high speed 5G internet access in the PRC. Now that the PRC no longer runs the ITU, now that we need to go full court press, and we have to do this, we have to go full court press with our friends and allies to stop the PRC from subverting the UN, which they've done quite well. And this, again, points to the information space. We've got to get serious in demanding representation in the UN. I can give a lot of stories, if you're interested later, about how the PRC uses personnel. They don't necessarily have to run an organization.

They simply get their people into key areas inside UN organizations. And like the World Health Organization, completely reversed. I mean, the World Health Organization during the pandemic made the world sicker, not healthier. This is why we defunded them. The money that the $500 million we were giving them per year went to better things. They didn't take the 80% tax that the World Health Organization takes for travel. We were actually making the world healthier in that regard. Okay, let me get one funny conclusion here. When the Chinese ambassador at Sui Chiang Kai, one Sunday I'd had enough. He was all over the Sunday talk shows. He had published an op-ed in the Washington Post,

and our ambassador, Branstad in Beijing, couldn't get a word out anyway. So we had him draft a simple, bland op-ed, and then he sent it to the People's Daily. He says, I want this op-ed placed in People's Daily on this date. And they said no, as we knew they would, but they sent a rejection letter. That was just beautiful. And so we published the op-ed and the rejection letter side by side. And guess what? New York Times, Washington Post, none of the major media outlets actually took us up on that one.

They did not repeat that. Sadly, it went out on Twitter, but it's there. It's available for you to look at. If you want, I'll send you a link. It's just an elegant, thoughtful way that we can demonstrate the truth, the reality of living in the PRC. But our societies don't get it yet. They're starting to wake up to it. And this is where governments need to do a better job of not being hysterical.

I'm oftentimes told that by my wife, who is my best advisor, that I need to tone it down, Dave. You're coming across as unhinged and fair enough, but we do need to get our people to understand threat. This is what I'm doing at the Air Force Academy, by the way. I'm the Fox Fellow for Future Pacing Threats. We can't say China because we can't say China, but in the national defense strategy, China is identified as the future pacing threat. And my job is to get cadets here to be as aware of the problem that they may face as soon as they graduate that I was aware of the Soviet Union when I graduated in the 80s, getting ready to go cross-fold the gap, drop my single nuke and all that stuff. So working backwards on that, yeah, economic policy matters. Globalization, in my opinion, was a terrible idea. It briefed well, but you could have foreseen what was going to happen to the middle class of our societies when you offshore all of your manufacturing capability.

And so the Australian submarine is a symptom of this. We don't build ships in the U.S. anymore. We certainly don't build cargo ships. We still build some Navy ships and all that stuff. But imagine what we would have going here if we didn't have a middle class that at best could hope for working as a barista at Starbucks. I mean, we really have hollowed out the middle class. We should have recognized what globalization impact was going to be when we did that. In my travels in Southeast Asia, you mentioned Indonesia, our best diplomats are in fact our businesses, our companies. Where the Chinese companies come in, Huawei shows up in Indonesia,

they bring in Chinese engineers, technicians, and all that stuff. What we do is we bring in the guts and then we train locals to work on these things. Then we send them back for graduate work. And if you're in Vietnam working for Starbucks, after a certain point, you can do online bachelor's degree work for free. This is what the U.S. brings. And we need to talk more about that. Our best diplomats aren't diplomats. It's all those other Western, not just American, but Western activities that go on inside those countries. On information issues, we need to keep a running log of all the dogs that don't bark. Australia, you have a journalist who's been locked up in China for way

too long. She's ethnically Chinese. I can't remember her name. But we should be mentioning that every time we talk to the Chinese diplomats, when we talk in public to the press. Why don't we talk about the two Michaels, Spavor and Kovrig, who were taken hostage and the PRC was unapologetic about its hostage diplomacy when Meng Wanzhou, the heiress for Huawei, was arrested quite legally in Canada. Well, it's so easy for the Michaels to be forgotten that whenever I am on Twitter, I mentioned the Michaels. Whenever I can, just to remind people of all those sins, they need to accumulate. We need to keep a stack of those things in the front and center on people's memories so they do recognize that genocide is real. And I'll finish on celebrities, As you mentioned, Hollywood is just despicable.

I mean, Brad Pitt made seven years in Tibet and he was thoroughly beaten up for it. Good for him. He stood by his guns. But since then, we can't suck up to the Chinese censors fast enough. If you like South Park, if you don't mind crude humor, watch season 23, episode two. It's called Banned in China. It is awesome. It's the first time that an American media group has gotten in front of American people and gone, this is the real China,

and they got it exactly right. Thanks, gentlemen. We've been through some very dense subject matter today. I think one key takeaway today is we are underutilizing industry to support whole government narratives and storytelling to leverage tasks such as counter-subversion and coercion against adversaries within the Indo-Pacific. To wrap up, Ross, for policymakers and practitioners, is there a core or one key takeaway regarding Chinese political warfare that pertains to the Indo-Pacific? I think for me, the key message, the absolute vital message is that this is really important and it's going to be equally important, perhaps more important in a major crisis and war. And we have to prepare right across all these domains and be much better organized to cope

with them. And I think we've really got to shine a lot more sunlight on the Chinese activities in this space because they're vulnerable. And unless we tell the stories, they will not pay the price that they should pay for doing the sorts of, frankly, nefarious activities that they're doing daily. And I think the final thing I'd make, and it's really critical, I think it's well past time that we brief our publics seriously about what's going on. I think we've really got to be honest with them and just tell the stories. And governments can do some things.

Ministers and congressmen can make speeches on some things. But a lot of things can be done independently by think tanks and by media personalities. And we need to do it and encourage it and reinforce those messages in a much more active way. We are not scared and shouldn't be scared of telling the truth. And it's about time we made a habit of doing it more frequently. Dave, turning over to you, what would be your key recommendations overall to compete better against Chinese political warfare strategies? all to compete better against Chinese political warfare strategies. I echo Ross's point on education and telling people and being very clear with our own people about what's out there. And don't pull back because you're afraid someone's going to call you racist because the PRC,

frankly, Han chauvinism is the most racist force on the planet. If you've ever lived there, you know what I'm talking about. Them pointing fingers at our society as racist is just god-awful. It's not ironic. It's so much worse. It's perverse. Don't flinch at that. Just say what needs to be said. That's the first thing. Second thing is classification of our intelligence collection and reporting. We over-classify that stuff. You know, a lot of that stuff on that balloon that we shut down is classified something secret. Why? China knows what was in that balloon. We know what's in that balloon. Why can't the American people know what was in that balloon?

Who are we hiding this from? Someone explain to me why this has been so badly overclassified. Frankly, a thorough scrub of how the intelligence community deals with this information needs to be really done. Unless it compromises sources or methods that denies us the use of that intelligence in the future, we should be as open as we can be to help the American people understand what we all know is the problem, because we've seen it up close and personal, but they don't. They actually listen to CGTN and Global Times, and they are taking that on board. And the third point there is then we should just shut all that stuff down and block it in our country. And I say we can't do that because then we become them.

So the idea of somehow closing our open systems to prevent the PRC from taking advantage sounds desirable. It sounds like it might be useful, but then we become fairly anti-democratic. And we've seen a couple attempts at this with this burgeoning social media as it's created more and more problems. Disinformation governance boards and those things. Man, when you start going down that path, you've lost. So we have to trust the American people to be conscious, sentient, intelligent enough to sift truth from fact, to operate on the Internet in a way that they can recognize propaganda and figure it out. And that's why instead of closing down. and figure it out. And that's why instead of closing down, and my main goal here is to get true critical thinking education back into our colleges, but actually to get into K-12 education.

So when the kids get online, when they're young, they're not subject to cyber bullying and all the rest. And they're definitely not subject to propaganda because they ask, they're inherently skeptical and they question all assumptions. We're in a world now where that's got to be the norm anytime you pick up a paper, your telephone, anything. And if we can do that, we can sift at least half of the stuff that's coming out of the PRC, and then the rest will die of its own dead weight. Ross, David, thank you for coming on the Irregular Warfare podcast. Well, it's been a great pleasure, and these are important topics. We ought to be talking more and encouraging the community to do just that as well. This is a great format where you can actually expand and explore a lot of these nuances because otherwise we're just in soundbites. So I really like this format. I hope you invite me back.

Thank you again for joining us for episode 88 of the Irregular Warfare podcast. us for episode 88 of the Irregular Warfare podcast. We release a new episode every two weeks. In the next episode, we discuss hostage diplomacy with Ambassador Roger Carstens and Dr Danny Gilbert. Be sure to subscribe to the Irregular Warfare podcast so you don't miss an episode. The podcast is a product of the Irregular Warfare Initiative. We are a team of all volunteer practitioners and researchers dedicated to bridging the gap between scholars and practitioners to support the community of irregular warfare professionals. You can follow and engage with us on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube or LinkedIn. You can also subscribe to our monthly e-newsletter for access to our content and upcoming community events.

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