Just as military adopt new technologies, they must also continue to adapt to the new means presented by contemporary political warfare.

Doctrinally, political warfare is an abomination. The foundational definition of political warfare in the West comes from United States diplomat George Kennan, who dubbed it ‘the employment of all the means at a nation’s command, short of war, to achieve its national objectives’.^[1] Kennan asserted that political warfare is the ‘logical application of Clausewitz’s doctrine in time of peace’, but scholars such as Lawrence Freedman have persuasively argued that warfare without bloodshed is an oxymoron.^[2] Moreover, warfare short of war contradicts all the theoretical and procedural frameworks that Western militaries have developed in the transition from conscript to professional forces. These frameworks are characterised by a clear delineation between the government, the people and the military, and a dichotomy between war and peace. Political warfare blurs these distinctions. The term ‘political warfare’ is so unpalatable to Western militaries that several alternatives have been proposed, such as ‘grey zone’, ‘hybrid warfare’ and ‘psychological warfare’.^[3] However, political warfare cannot be ignored as a distinct form of warfare for two reasons. First, major powers such as the People’s Republic of China have embedded the concept in their theoretical and procedural frameworks. Second, domestic political considerations in contemporary Western democracies increasingly mean that almost all plausible military options are ‘short of war’, and thus are a form of political warfare. This has been described as ‘politicised’ warfare, where the national objective is achieved through niche contributions to coalitions with heavily restricted rules of engagement. ^[4] This paper will address both issues in turn, arguing that while existing procedures for planning military campaigns do not currently enable consideration of political warfare, they are capable of adaption to do so.

Western frameworks are capable of adaption because political warfare is nothing new and has been part of planning and conducting previous military campaigns. In introducing the concept to the Cold War milieu, Kennan noted that the ‘creation, success and survival’ of the British Empire was centred on political warfare.^[5] For instance, the East India Company adopted what would now be described as ‘salami-slicing tactics’, using private militias to gradually erode the sovereignty of Indian princely rulers.^[6] While Kennan’s definition focuses on the employment of means short of war, political warfare was also a key tool in declared conflicts such as the Second World War. For instance, Britain’s Political Warfare Executive harnessed non-military organisations such as the British Broadcasting Corporation to produce covert and overt broadcasts and publications.^[7] During the Cold War, the remit of political warfare was extensive, extending to bankrolling anti‑communist poets and artists. The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has been described as ‘America’s Ministry of Culture’, funding publications, exhibitions and political parties from the 1940s to the1970s.^[8] Influence activities extended into the intellectual life of close allies such as Australia—for example, the magazine Quadrant was funded by a CIA proxy.^[9] A common thread in Western political warfare is an ambiguous—and at times adversarial—relationship with military organisations. Leadership of Britain’s Special Operations Executive (SOE) vacillated between Foreign Office intelligence officials and seconded military officers, while CIA lethal drone capability was transferred to the US military in 2013, a decision reversed by US President Donald Trump in 2017.^[10] It is not, however, necessary for the military to have organisational control of political warfare instruments to incorporate them into planning. Rather, contemporary military planning should be abreast of concurrent whole-of-government efforts.

A challenge in adapting to contemporary political warfare is the predominance of the operational level of war in Western military planning since the 1980s. For much of the twentieth century, political warfare can be categorised as either tactical—such as small SOE cells supporting local resistance movements in the Second World War—or grand strategic, such as the ‘cost-imposition strategy’ developed by the US Department of Defense’s Office of Net Assessment.^[11] The US pursued a vast military modernisation program, forcing the Soviet Union into a spending contest it could not win with its smaller economic base. A by-product of this strategy was the development of the AirLand Battle operational concept, which closely integrated air and land forces using high-end platforms with a view to countering Soviet numerical superiority in any renewed European conflict.^[12] However, following the end of the Cold War, the political warfare genesis of the strategy was neglected, with technological superiority adopted as an end in itself. Chinese strategists have identified Western reliance on high-end platforms as an operational liability, describing modern US fighter aircraft as a ‘flying mountain of gold’, more valuable than their targets.^[13] Overall, political warfare was instrumental in giving rise to the operational level of war in the West, but has not been operationalised under current planning frameworks.

The risk for Western militaries is that authoritarian powers such as Russia, and in particular China, successfully employ political warfare at both the strategic and operational levels. David Kilcullen has observed that China is pursuing a ‘combination’ strategy entitled Unrestricted Warfare, in which military modernisation is only one element. ^[14] Chinese doctrine has expanded the scope of warfare beyond any Western definition. For example, Chinese strategists have flagged the prospect of ‘drug warfare’, under which the Chinese government declines to interdict illicit manufacture of synthetic opioids intended for the US market.^[15] Such drugs kill over 30,000 Americans per year.^[16] Kilcullen argues the West faces ‘conceptual envelopment’: a twofold risk whereby Western planners fail to respond to political warfare due to their definition of warfare as intrinsically violent, while an adversary treats Western strategic competition as warlike due to their wider conception of warfare.^[17] With such divergent escalation thresholds, the risk of miscalculation leading to major power conflict is heightened.

An additional challenge for Western militaries is that Chinese operational planning employs a very different notion of time and space. China’s ‘Three Warfares’ doctrine identifies psychological warfare, public opinion warfare, and legal warfare as key capabilities.^[18] These components of political warfare are omnipresent in China’s international activities and are not tied to the timing of any particular military operation. Unlike in the West, the political nature of such activities does not present a structural tension between partisan interests and the enduring interests of the state, as the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) expressly exists to serve the Chinese Communist Party, not the state.^[19] In addition to eliding the distinction between peacetime and wartime, Chinese doctrine makes a distinction between ‘combat space’, the geography in which physical conflict occurs, and ‘war space’, which encompasses political, economic, informational and human terrain as well as physical terrain.^[20] Western procedures such as defining a Joint Force Area of Operations are ill-equipped to address this expansive conceptualisation of terrain. Similarly, if it is accepted that political warfare is a constant—as it was for most of the Cold War—it is difficult to see how existing procedural frameworks such as the Australian Joint Military Appreciation Process (JMAP) can identify and estimate the sequencing of adversary Decisive Points for political warfare operations.

China’s Unrestricted Warfare doctrine problematises the Western notion that China has had limited experience of combat operations since the 1979 Sino‑Vietnamese War.^[21] In its chosen ‘war space’ of political warfare, campaigning has been constant. The progenitor of the Unrestricted Warfare doctrine, PLA Major-General Qiao Liang, has contended that US global influence is founded in ‘three world systems’—the United Nations (UN), the World Trade Organisation (WTO) and the International Monetary Fund/World Bank.^[22] It is therefore unsurprising that China has sought to either shape or circumvent such institutions. China has assiduously sought leadership positions in UN bodies, continued to claim preferential terms as a developing country under WTO procedures despite being the world’s second largest economy, and has set up parallel financial institutions such as the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank.^[23] This presents a conundrum for Western military planners, as influence within institutions such as the UN and WTO largely rests on diplomatic and economic power, rather than military might. While some contemporary Western campaigns, most notably the Iraq War, have been conducted without UN Security Council endorsement, such actions undermine Western rhetoric about the rules-based order. Meanwhile, China has leveraged its participation in UN peacekeeping and sanctions enforcement to give the PLA some deployed experience: for instance, of the five permanent Security Council members, China is the largest contributor of personnel to UN peacekeeping.^[24] Furthermore, China has been able to make a virtue of its lack of operational experience, promoting its ‘peaceful rise’ narrative while prosecuting political warfare on its preferred turf.^[25]

The first half of this paper argued that despite jarring against the Western theory that warfare is inextricably linked with violence, Western militaries will need to readapt to political warfare. The second half will consider the second meaning of contemporary political warfare, which political scientist Richard Betts has dubbed war by ‘half-measures’: risk-adverse deployments designed to achieve domestic political effects rather than national strategic objectives. ^[26] Dutch military officer George Dimitriu has contended that under this definition of political warfare, ‘power in domestic politics increasingly replaces policy objectives as the primary purpose of war’. ^[27] Instead of a military strategy flowing from a theory of victory, parliamentary tactics dictate military strategy, with victory at the next election being the priority. Dimitriu gives the example of the Dutch deployment to Afghanistan in 2011. The Dutch parliament extensively debated the mission, with no less than six political parties adding caveats to the rules of engagement.^[28] If such commitments are not described as political—or politicised—warfare, they can scarcely be described as warfare at all. The obvious objection to this additional meaning for the term political warfare is that in an electoral democracy, it is wholly appropriate that domestic politics sets the scale and scope of the commitment. However, there are electoral and technological reasons to suppose that contemporary politics presents new challenges to planning military campaigns.

Firstly, wars in Western democracies are now shaped by electoral cycles. This contrasts with existential conflicts such as the Second World War, where even the most robust democracies deferred or bypassed their electoral procedures. In the US, Franklin D. Roosevelt broke the unwritten convention of limiting a presidency to two terms by contesting the 1940 and 1944 Presidential elections.^[29] In Britain, an all-party government was formed and general elections suspended, leading to a 10-year parliamentary term.^[30] Even in New Zealand, elections were delayed by two years.^[31] In contrast, the contemporary electoral cycle can significantly elevate strategic risk—the ‘lame duck’ period that arises when a US president is defeated at an election but a new president is not yet inaugurated is recognised as a high-risk period for the initiation of conflict.^[32] However, the incorporation of such political risks into the JMAP is usually facile, often consisting of little more than plotting regional election dates on planning timelines. This may reflect the bipartisan consensus that has developed around Australian defence policy in the twenty-first century. Bipartisanship is not, however, the historical norm—the Australian Labor Party fought several elections campaigning for a withdrawal from the Vietnam War and abolished national service and withdrew training teams from South Vietnam within three days of taking office in 1972. More recently, Labor went into the 2004 election with a pledge to withdraw Australian forces from Iraq by Christmas.^[33] While the Department of Defence prepares subtly different Incoming Government Briefs in the event of a change of government, it is unclear if operational planners are empowered to prepare alternative Courses of Action anticipating a change in political direction.^[34] This is a planning lacuna in an increasingly polarised, politicised society.

The second challenge presented by contemporary politicised warfare is that technological advances create a public expectation of contactless conflict, with an extremely low tolerance for Western casualties. ^[35] Thomas Waldman argues that the contemporary American way of war is a form of ‘risk management’; instead of seeking ‘victory’, global basing and periodic drone strikes are used to calibrate commitments to domestic political requirements. ^[36] Betts asserts this leads to strategic objectives which are impossible to fail at. For instance, the stated objective of the 1998 Operation Desert Fox was to ‘degrade’ Iraqi military capabilities. ^[37] Betts observes: ‘Any combat action would do that’.^[38] Light-footprint Western interventions, such as the 2011 French and British-led bombing of Libya and the Australian contribution to airstrikes against Islamic State, could be described as ‘hit and run’ warfare, where ground forces are eschewed in order to avoid responsibility for reconstruction.^[39] Such operations are predicated on the target lacking the technological capability to respond. For instance, Australia faced no plausible risk of military retaliation from Islamic State for its airstrikes. Opportunities for low-risk warfare are likely to decline as technological proliferation makes capabilities such as weaponised drones available even to non-state actors.

The third challenge to planning politically-aware military campaigns is that existing procedural frameworks assume ‘no-win, no-loss’ funding of operations.^[40] Supplementary funding allows Western military planners to avoid trade-offs between current operations and future capabilities. This creates a disconnect in the ways-ends-means principle that underpins Western military planning—militaries focus on personnel and platforms as their ‘means’, without having to consider the national financial trajectory which underwrites these means. In addition, while strategic objectives like protecting sea lines of communication are often couched in economic terms, militaries do not have the expertise to model their economic importance. Nor is there academic consensus over the relative importance of particular trading routes. For example, estimates of the proportion of Australian trade which passes through the South China Sea range from 20 to 66 per cent.^[41] Responsibility for economic policy in the Australian system is diffused across multiple departments, such as the Treasury for revenue, the Department of Finance for expenditure and Austrade for international trade. None of these agencies are structured to provide input into the JMAP. This is a significant gap because in political warfare economic influence and coercion are key terrain. For example, none of the ‘14 demands’ the Chinese Embassy in Australia released to the media in 2020 related to military activities: top of the list was perceived discrimination against China in Foreign Investment Review Board (FIRB) decisions.^[42] FIRB chair David Irvine has been explicit that foreign investment in critical infrastructure ‘has become an element of global warfare’.^[43] Yet this is a type of warfare in which militaries have limited sway—for instance, the Treasurer is the sole authority for FIRB decisions.^[44]

To conclude, theories and procedures for planning and conducting military campaigns are capable of adaption to incorporate political warfare, just as they did in the Second World War and the Cold War. This may be a difficult relearning for Western militaries, which alternate between decisive battle with overwhelming force (such as the Gulf War) or unopposed interventions (such as airstrikes on Syria), depending on the requirements of political leaders. However, such a transition will be necessary because China has a holistic theory of political warfare, which draws upon both Confucian and Maoist thought. Thomas Marks and David Ucko have summarised the challenge: ‘China enjoys unity of command, with a consistent theory of victory being implemented along predictable lines of effort operationalised through a swelling inventory of means. This cannot be said for Beijing’s opponents’.^[45] China’s centre of gravity—the continued legitimacy of the Chinese Communist Party—largely lies outside the remit of planning processes such as the JMAP. Similarly, most of China’s critical vulnerabilities, such as its reliance on economic growth founded on liberalised trade with the West, are ill-suited to attack by military force.

Western military thinkers have generated theories to enable adaption to contemporary political warfare, such as Kilcullen’s call for a ‘Byzantine’ strategy of recognising weaknesses and trading space for time, ideally over decades.^[46] New procedures are harder to develop and implement. An initial step could be to inject greater awareness of domestic political considerations into the working level of operational planning. There is no unit within Defence with the authority or independence to critically analyse blue-force political structures in a manner akin to the US Office of Net Assessment, or the Australian Army Directorate of Research and Civil Affairs during the Second World War. This will need to change, especially if the bipartisan consensus around Australian defence policy disintegrates and domestic political volatility becomes a risk to mission. While moves to better understand and operationalise political warfare may seem to undermine the identity of Western militaries as ‘managers of violence’, it is in fact a reassertion of the Clausewitzian notion of war as the ‘continuation of policy by other means’. ^[47] Just as military adopt new technologies, they must also continue to adapt to the new means presented by contemporary political warfare.

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Footnootes

¹ George F. Kennan, ‘The Inauguration of Organized Political Warfare,’ Wilson Center Archive, 30 April 1948, https://digitalarchive.wilsoncenter.org/document/114320.pdf?v=941dc9ee5c6e51333ea9ebbbc9104e8c.

² Lawrence Freedman, ‘Defining War,’ in Yves Boyer and Julian Lindley-French (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 5.

³ Linda Robinson et al, Modern Political Warfare: Current Practices and Possible Responses (Santa Monica: RAND Corporation, 2018), 3.

⁴ George Dimitriu, ‘Clausewitz and the Politics of War: A Contemporary Theory,’ Journal of Strategic Studies 43, no. 5 (2020): 674.

⁵ Kennan, ‘The Inauguration of Organized Political Warfare.’

⁶ Heather M. Bothwell, ‘Gray Is the New Black: A Framework to Counter Gray Zone Conflicts,’ Joint Force Quarterly 101, no. 2 (2021): 26.

⁷ Tim Brooks and Philip Taylor, British Propaganda to France, 1940-1944: Machinery, Method and Message (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007), 17.

⁸ Robinson, Modern Political Warfare, 20.

⁹ Thomas William Shillam, ‘Shattering the “Looking-glass World’: The Congress for Cultural Freedom in South Asia, 1951–55,’ Cold War History 20, no. 4 (2020): 442.

¹⁰ M.R.D. Foot, SOE in France (London: Frank Cass, 1999), 20; Gordon Lubold and Shane Harris, ‘Trump Broadens CIA Powers, Allows Deadly Drone Strikes,’ Wall Street Journal, 13 March 2017.

¹¹ Donald Stoker, Limited War and US Strategy from the Korean War to the Present (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 142.

¹² Dima Adamsky, ‘The Conceptual Battles of the Central Front: The Air–Land Battle and the Soviet Military–Technical Revolution,’ in Leopoldo Nuti (ed.), The Crisis of Détente in Europe: From Helsinki to Gorbachev 1975-1985 (London: Routledge, 2008), 150.

¹³ David Kilcullen, The Dragons and the Snakes: How the Rest Learned to Fight the West (Melbourne: Scribe, 2020), 203.

¹⁴ Kilcullen, The Dragons and the Snakes, 209.

¹⁵ Kilcullen, The Dragons and the Snakes, 206.

¹⁶ Kilcullen, The Dragons and the Snakes, 206; Kim Parker, Anthony Cilluffo and Renee Stepler, ‘6 Facts about the US Military and its Changing Demographics,’ Pew Research Centre, 13 April 2017, www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/04/13/6-facts-about-the-u-s-military-and-its-changing-demographics/.

¹⁷ Kilcullen, The Dragons and the Snakes, 175.

¹⁸ Kilcullen, The Dragons and the Snakes, 211.

¹⁹ Joel Wuthnow and Phillip Charles Saunders, Chinese Military Reform in the Age of Xi Jinping: Drivers, Challenges, and Implications (Washington: National Defense University Press, 2017), 2.

²⁰ Edmund Burke et al, People's Liberation Army Operational Concepts (Santa Monica, RAND Corporation, 2020), 12.

²¹ Michael S. Chase et al, China's Incomplete Military Transformation: Assessing the Weaknesses of the People's Liberation Army (Santa Monica, RAND Corporation, 2015), 52.

²² Kilcullen, The Dragons and the Snakes, 212.

²³ Thomas Lynch III and Phillip C. Saunders, ‘Contemporary Great Power Geostrategic Dynamics: Relations and Strategies,’ in Thomas Lynch III (ed), Strategic Assessment 2020: Into a New Era of Great Power Competition (Washington: National Defence University Press, 2020), 60.

²⁴ Yongjin Zhang, ‘China and Liberal Hierarchies in Global International Society: Power and Negotiation for Normative Change,’ International Affairs 92, no. 4 (2016): 812.

²⁵ Zhang, ‘China and Liberal Hierarchies,’ 802.

²⁶ Richard Betts, ‘Is Strategy an Illusion?’, International Security 25, no.2 (2000): 43.

²⁷ Dimitriu, ‘Clausewitz and the Politics of War,’ 667.

²⁸ Dimitriu, ‘Clausewitz and the Politics of War,’ 665

²⁹ Roger Daniels, Franklin D. Roosevelt: The War Years, 1939-1945 (Baltimore: University of Illinois Press, 2016), 83.

³⁰ Paul Addison, ‘By-Elections of the Second World War,’ in Chris Cook and John Ramsden (eds), By-Elections in British Politics (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1973), 166.

³¹ Jonathan Fennell, ‘Soldiers and Social Change: The Forces Vote in the Second World War and New Zealand’s Great Experiment in Social Citizenship,’ The English Historical Review 132, no. 554 (2017): 73.

³² Thanassis Cambanis, ‘Lame-Duck Maneuvers in the Middle East,’ The Century Foundation, 15 November 2016, https://tcf.org/content/report/lame-duck-maneuvers-middle-east/.

³³ Stephanie Kennedy, ‘Latham Renews Iraq Withdrawal Pledge,’ ABC News, 12 July 2004, https://www.abc.net.au/news/2004-07-12/latham-renews-iraq-withdrawal-pledge/2008370.

³⁴ Jennifer Menzies and Anne Tiernan, Caretaker Conventions in Australasia: Minding the Shop for Government (Canberra: ANU Press, 2014), 53.

³⁵ Dimitriu, ‘Clausewitz and the Politics of War,’ 648.

³⁶ Thomas Waldman, Vicarious Warfare: American Strategy and the Illusion of War on the Cheap (Bristol: Bristol University Press, 2021), 11.

³⁷ Betts, ‘Is Strategy an Illusion?’ 9.

³⁸ Betts, ‘Is Strategy an Illusion?’ 9.

³⁹ Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000), 12.

⁴⁰ Joint Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade, Funding Australia's Defence (Canberra: Parliament of Australia, 1998), 11.

⁴¹ Rebecca Strating, Defending the Maritime Rules-Based Order: Regional Responses to the South China Sea Disputes (Honolulu: East-West Centre, 2020), 14.

⁴² Jonathan Kearsley, Eryk Bagshaw and Anthony Galloway, ‘“If You Make China the Enemy, China will be the Enemy”: Beijing's Fresh Threat to Australia,’ Sydney Morning Herald, 18 November 2020.

⁴³ Patrick Commins, ‘Clamp on Foreign Investment Not Targeting China,’ The Australian, 15 October 2021.

⁴⁴ The Treasury, ‘Guidance Note 8: National Security’, 9 July 2021, https://firb.gov.au/sites/firb.gov.au/files/guidance-notes/GN08_NationalSecurity.pdf.

⁴⁵ Thomas Marks, and David Ucko, ‘Gray Zone in Red: China Revisits the Past,’ Small Wars & Insurgencies 32, no. 2 (2021): 189.

⁴⁶ Kilcullen, The Dragons and the Snakes, 178.

⁴⁷ Ilmari Kaihko, ‘The Evolution of Hybrid Warfare: Implications for Strategy and the Military Profession,’ Parameters 51, no. 3 (2021): 121; Bernard Brodie, ‘A Guide to the Reading of On War,’ in Michael Howard and Peter Paret (eds.), On War (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976), 642.