On “Unrestricted Warfare” and the Generations of War Framework

The book Unrestricted Warfare (or Total Warfare in some translations) written by PLA Colonles Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui covers a wide range of possible conflict methods. It is available at Amazon.com or free on the internet via as a PDF. I read the book in early 2004.

I started writing about this earlier in the day in this post, but I realized I was going off on a tangent. The Hacker/Botnet post got me thinking about the book some more.

What I got from the book was a broader thinking on the range of methods of conflict, and in the interesting ways that different methods can be combined.

The following methods are listed:

• Atomic warfare
• Diplomatic warfare
• Financial warfare
• Conventional warfare
• Network warfare aka Information Technology Infrastructure warfare (not to be confused with Netwar or Network-Centric warfare)
• Trade warfare
• Bio-chemical warfare
• Intelligence warfare
• Resources warfare aka Natural Resources warfare
• Ecological warfare
• Psychological warfare
• Economic aid warfare
• Space warfare
• Tactical warfare
• Regulatory warfare
• Electronic warfare
• Smuggling warfare
• Sanction warfare
• Guerrilla warfare
• Drug warfare
• Media warfare
• Terrorist warfare
• Virtual warfare (deterrence)
• Ideological warfare

This list should not be thought as of definitive and final.

Offhand it might be useful to add the following to the list:

• Culture warfare
• High Energy warfare
• Infrastructure Systems warfare (e.g. roads , power – think Russia turning off gas pipelines)
• Lawfare aka Legal Systems warfare (was implicitly stated)
• Meme warfare (kind of covered in Ideological warfare)
• Meteorological/Geophysics warfare
• Nanotech warfare (future)
• Netwar
• Network-Centric warfare
• Open Source warfare
• Population / Immigration Warfare
• Reputation warfare
• Robotic warfare

The authors suggest that different methods can be combined in interesting ways.

For instance, the John Robb's Global Guerrillas idea could be constructed as guerrilla warfare + infrastructure systems warfare + financial warfare + open source warfare.

Many of these conflict types resemble Nye's Soft Power ideas in that they are non-kinetic and indirect.

The conflict methods cut across the Generations of War categories.

For instance Atomic Warfare:

• 2GW: Strategic Nuclear Weapons
• 3GW: Tactical Nuclear weapons to take out, redirect, and neutralize large Soviet armored formations
• 4GW: The threat of nuclear terrorism and blackmail
• 5GW: Actor A convinces actor B that actor C is planning nuclear terrorist activity against actor B, so actor B needs to take out actor C before actor C has the capability ready; Or actor A does the nuclear terrorist attack but frames actor C for it (same result in both cases)

So I am picturing a conflict matrix:

Left to Right: Hard Power methods / Soft Power methods.

Top to Bottom: 0GW, 1GW, 2GW, 3GW, 4GW, 5GW

One thing that is very noticeable, most of these methods are outside that of what is normally though of as the national security establishment. Also, the time-frames often are longer then that of a two-term president.

Ok, I should write more now, but I have to pack for a trip. Future Purpleslog will followup sometime later.