Operation Desert Storm – an Analysis

Introduction

“Conventional warfare” is a relative term: what counts as conventional warfare depends on the time the war was fought, and frequently depends on the weapons or tactics used. Still, lessons learned in previous conflicts are applicable to subsequent wars: The Greeks at the Battle of Thermopylae used phalanx formations which have not withstood the test of time, but they also used delay tactics, feign retreats, and use of geography to constrain the enemy, all of which are timeless. So, while the phalanx eventually became obsolete, the other aspects were fundamental in all future military operations.

Thousands of years after Thermopylae came the trench warfare of WWI, followed by the mechanized warfare of WWII, with its blitzkriegs and tanks. The Gulf War was primarily a technological war, with weaponry so advanced that those used in previous wars appeared to be as anachronistic as the phalanx formation. Thus the Gulf War became the “conventional” war of the day.

This paper examines the operational components of the Gulf War and the interpretation of that war by American military analysts as well as by near-peer competitors.

Goals of the Gulf War

The Gulf War had both strategic goals and strategic constraints. The goals were to remove the Iraqi invasion force from Kuwait, and to degrade the military to prevent it from attacking Saudi Arabia, Israel, and other nearby countries. The constraint was to not degrade the military so far that it wouldn’t be a credible deterrence to Iranian invasion.

To accomplish this, combined air and ground operations were employed. The air operation was designed to destroy Iraqi air power, weaken its ground forces, and prepare the way for the ground invasion.

The precursor to Operation Desert Storm was, of course, Operation Desert Shield. Desert Shield allowed the George H. W. Bush administration to assemble the Coalition forces, and to position those forces for what would come next, should Saddam not withdraw from Kuwait. It gave time for the economic sanctions placed upon Iraq to have an effect. Finally, it allowed Coalition forces to train in a desert environment.

Demolished vehicles line Highway 80, also known as the "Highway of Death", the route fleeing Iraqi forces took as they retreated from Kuwait during Operation Desert Storm. Photo by Tech. Sgt. Joe Coleman, 18 April 1991.

Operation Desert Storm was divided into four phases¹. Phase I was to be a strategic air campaign designed to disrupt Iraq’s command and control over their forces, and to destroy NBC weapons research and production facilities. Phase II was to establish air supremacy over Kuwait. The goal of Phase III was to isolate Iraqi forces in Kuwait from reinforcement and resupply. Finally, Phase IV was to evict Iraqi forces from Kuwait.

The first three phases were air campaigns and will be treated as a whole.

The Air Operation

The air operation lasted from 17 January 1991 to 23 February 1991, during which Coalition forces performed over 100,000 sorties and dropped 85,000 tons of bombs.

The air campaign began with the destruction of enemy radar sites near the Saudi-Iraqi border by American Apache and Pave Low helicopters. If left intact, those sites would warn Iraq of upcoming attacks. Following this, the weapons of choice were Tomahawk cruise missiles launched by ships positioned in the Persian Gulf, stealth bombers dropping “smart” bombs, and F/A-18 Hornets carrying anti-radar missiles. These latter homed-in on radar antennas, destroying them. This completed the destruction of Iraq’s radar system, thereby degrading their air capability. It further blinded Iraq from observing and responding to Coalition activities. Bombing continued using television-guided and laser-guided missiles.

At the time, Iraq’s air force was the sixth largest in the world. This changed due to three factors: first, aerial combat in which 36 Iraqi aircraft were downed; second, destruction of 254 aircraft while on the ground (either in standard or underground hangers); and finally, relocation of military assets into Iran.

It was originally thought that this movement of aircraft was a result of pilot desertion, but it was later proven that this was Saddam’s attempt at preserving Iraqi air power. This was confirmed from documents captured during the occupation of Iraq following the 2003 invasion². The US did not capture all the documents, however – some fell into the hands of Iran or Iranian-backed groups; these documents included the names of Iraqi pilots from the Iraq-Iran War, and those pilots were targeted for execution³.

Commercial aircraft were moved into Iran as well. Iraq’s deal with Iran for sheltering aircraft covered only civilian and transport aircraft, so it came as a surprise that Iraqi military aircraft were crossing into Iranian airspace.

When questioned over this, Iranian officials promised to keep Saddam’s aircraft until the conclusion of the Gulf War. Many of the aircraft would be incorporated into the Iranian Revolutionary Guard’s Aviation Division and would never be returned⁴.

The Ground Operation

Following the destruction of Iraq’s radar and communication facilities, their command-and-control ability was thereby lost. This included Iraq’s logistic capabilities, leaving their ground forces in and around Kuwait unsupported. The ground operation began on 24 February 1991 when Marines began heading towards Kuwait City. Within the first 24 hours of the ground operation, 10,000 Iraqi troops surrendered (by end of operation, a total of 50,000 prisoners were taken). The large number of surrenders were caused by the incessant bombing operations of the Coalition forces, the inability of Iraqi ground troops to communicate with their commanders, and the shear lack of logistical support.

The opening hours of the land operation would also see the creation of a forward operating base (FOB Cobra) deep within Iraq territory. FOB Cobra would serve as a staging base for the tank war that followed.

Approximately 1,900 tanks, mostly M1A1 Abrams were brought in to battle Soviet-built T-72s, manned by Republican Guard members. Coalition forces destroyed over 3,300 of these tanks through air and ground attacks in what were some of the largest tank battles in American history. At least 100 tanks were destroyed by AH-64 “tank-killer” helicopters, which challenged the prevailing belief that the best weapon against a tank was another tank.

Iraq withdrew from Kuwait almost immediately, but not before setting fire to 700 Kuwaiti oil wells, some of which they surrounded by mines.

All Coalition military operations were halted 100 hours after the start, but under four conditions: all Iraqi military operations must stop, including Scud missile attacks; all Coalition military prisoners and Kuwaiti civilian hostages must be immediately released; Iraq would comply with all relevant UN resolutions; and the Iraqi army must assist in locating and removing all land and sea mines.

On 27 February Saddam surrendered, and on 3 March 1991 Iraq signed the official cease fire agreement.

Consequences – Interpretation by American Analysts

Taken together, the air and land operations achieved the war’s strategic goals: it removed the Iraqi occupation forces from Kuwait, it degraded Iraq’s military so that it could no longer attack Saudi Arabia and Israel, but it didn’t degrade them to the point where they were unable to defend themselves against Iran.

Operation Desert Storm has been described as an “effects-based operation” (EBO) in that the purpose was to neutralize the enemy without necessarily destroying their forces. While this is true at face value, EBO was reformulated as a “software approach to warfare” when it was systemized by the United States Joint Forces Command (JFCOM). This introduced considerable baggage: computer-modeling software, operational net assessment, and system-of-system analysis.

The EBO doctrine was criticized by Lt. General Paul Van Riper and General James Mattis⁵ because operational control moved from commanders to staff; it entailed centralized decision-making along with consequent micromanagement; and that the doctrine gave the illusion of complete knowledge of the enemy’s present and future states. Finally, it overemphasized the importance of air power and minimized the usefulness of ground forces.

The EBO interpretation of the Gulf War was rejected, as was the entire concept of effects-based operations.

The “naïve” formulation of EBO was retained, however, and is now called “effects-based approach to operations” (EBAO) in Air Force doctrine⁶. EBAO is no longer a strategy but instead a “way of thinking.” While annihilation and attrition are still viable options, “the ultimate aim in war is not just to overthrow the enemy’s military power but to compel them to do one’s will.”⁷

Interpretation by Near-Peer Competitors

The success of Operation Desert Storm was noted by our near-peer competitors. Both China and Russia realized that it was impossible for them to compete against America in conventional conflicts, so they began considering alternative means of warfare.

Russia pursued what Kilcullen called “liminal warfare”⁸ which involves covert actions operating below the threshold which a military response would be warranted… until it was too late. It is a refined version of gray zone warfare. A good example of this strategy was the Russian take-over of Crimea⁹: Russians created and supported sympathetic unions and political parties; Cossacks and Serbian paramilitary groups were imported, which appeared to destabilize the region. Russia responded with “relief columns” in response to this “humanitarian crisis,” but the true goal was to support pro-Russian forces already inside the country. By the time the true purpose of Russia’s “relief” became clear, a military response from NATO was not possible because there apparently was no military invasion.

For China, the new warfare was called “unrestricted warfare” (UW) which consists of cultural, economic and political moves as forms of warfare¹⁰, either applied individually or in combination. UW is founded on the belief that “everything that can benefit mankind can also harm him.”¹¹ Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui, the authors of Unrestricted Warfare, the text that gave us the name UW, state that “the best way to achieve victory is to control, not to kill.”¹² The similarity of goals with the Air Force’s conception of EBAO is striking.

The clearest example of UW in action is the Belt and Road Initiative, in which China loans money to a host country to build infrastructure in that host country. These loans included predatory interest rates and backed by unconvertible Chinese currency. The actual construction requires that only Chinese labor be used so no local jobs were created. If the country defaults on the loan, ownership of the new infrastructure goes to China; if the host country does not default, the country must repay the loan to China. Either way the host country becomes a vassal state.

The direct correlation between the results of the Gulf War and unrestricted warfare is explicit: the text Unlimited Warfare has an entire chapter describing the Gulf War and the lessons Americans learned and what we did not learn. The connection between the Gulf War and liminal warfare is not so clear, though the ease at which American M1A1 Abrams tanks destroyed Soviet-made T-72 tanks surely made an impression on the Russians.

Both liminal warfare and unrestricted warfare build upon elements of past techniques. Liminal war is similar to Soviet attempts to undermine Western institutions, and unrestricted warfare – in particular the Belt and Road Initiative – is like the tributary system practiced by the Chinese during their dynastic era. Much as the tactics used by the Greeks at the Battle of Thermopylae served as the foundation for future battles, these historical precedents underly Russia’s and China’s new approaches to warfare.

Conclusion

The Gulf War left Saddam Hussein in place – regime change was not part of the UN mandates and it was expected that he would be toppled by internal rebellions. Insurgencies by Kurdish and Shiite groups within Iraq lead to crackdowns by Saddam, and in response, US and British forces established two no-fly zones: one in the north to protect the Kurds and one in the south to protect Shiite Muslims. These no-fly zones would remain in place until the 2003 Iraq War.

Something else that remained in place were the economic sanctions imposed on Iraq by the US and the UN. Because they were still in effect at the time of the later invasions, those sanctions could not be used to pressure Saddam to leave office.

The Gulf War became the model of conventional warfare due to its success, speed of execution, and relatively small number of Coalition casualties. It was a “textbook” war, but that textbook was studied by Russia and China. In response, they devised their own counterstrategies: liminal warfare and unrestricted warfare, respectively. If these are the future forms of warfare, then what counts as “conventional warfare” must be updated.

Footnotes

1. Snow & Drew, From Lexington to Baghdad and Beyond: War and Politics in the American Experience.
2. Michael Brill, “Remembering Desert Storm and the Gulf War(s) Odyssey of Iraq’s Air Force, Part 1”
3. Ibid.
4. Michael Brill, “Remembering Desert Storm and the Gulf War(s) Odyssey of Iraq’s Air Force, Part 2”
5. James Mattis, “USJFCOM Commander’s Guidance for Effects-based Operations.”
6. John T. Correll, “The Assault on EBO.”
7. U.S. Air Force, AFDP 3-0 Operations and Planning, p. 19.
8. David Kilcullen, The Dragons and the Snakes: How the Rest Learned to Fight the West.
9. Robert Leonhard, Little Green Men: A Primer on Russian Unconventional Warfare, Ukraine 2013-14.
10. Dean Cheng, “Chinese Lessons from the Gulf War.”
11. Qiao Liang & Wang Xiangsui, Unrestricted Warfare.
12. Ibid.

 

Bibliography

U.S. Air Force, AFDP 3-0 Operations and Planning, 4 November 2016. Retrieved 23 November 2024 from https://www.doctrine.af.mil/Portals/61/documents/AFDP_3-0/3-0-AFDP-OPERATIONS-PLANNING.pdf

Brill, M. “Remembering Desert Storm and the Gulf War(s) Odyssey of Iraq’s Air Force, Part 1” Wilson Center Sources and Methods. 14 January 2021. Retrieved 22 May 2024 from https://www.wilsoncenter.org/blog-post/remembering-desert-storm-and-gulf-wars-odyssey-iraqs-air-force-part-1

Brill, M. “Remembering Desert Storm and the Gulf War(s) Odyssey of Iraq’s Air Force, Part 2” Wilson Center Sources and Methods. 15 January 2021. Retrieved 22 May 2024 from https://www.wilsoncenter.org/blog-post/remembering-desert-storm-and-gulf-wars-odyssey-iraqs-air-force-part-2

Cheng, D. “Chinese Lessons from the Gulf War.” November 2011. Retrieved 22 May 2024 from https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/resrep11966.8.pdf

Correll, J. “The Assault on EBO” Air Force Magazine, January 2013. Retrieved 23 May 2024 from https://www.airandspaceforces.com/PDF/MagazineArchive/Documents/2013/January%202013/0113EBO.pdf

Kilcullen, D. The Dragons and the Snakes: How the Rest Learned to Fight the West. Oxford University Press, 2020.

Leonhard, R. Little Green Men: A Primer on Russian Unconventional Warfare, Ukraine 2013-14. United States Army Special Operations Command, 2015. Retrieved 21 May 2024 from https://www.jhuapl.edu/sites/default/files/2022-12/ARIS_LittleGreenMen.pdf

Mattis, J. “USJFCOM Commander’s Guidance for Effects-based Operations.” Parameters 38, no. 3 (2008), doi:10.55540/0031-1723.2437. Retrieved 23 May 2024 from https://press.armywarcollege.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2437&context=parameters

Qiao L. & Wang X. Unrestricted Warfare. PLA Literature and Arts Publishing House, Beijing, 1999.

Snow, D. & Drew, D. From Lexington to Baghdad and Beyond: War and Politics in the American Experience. Routledge, 2009.

Spalding, R. War Without Rules: China’s Playbook for Global Domination. Sentinel Press, 2022.

Unrestricted Warfare: A Near-Peer Approach to Modern Conflict

Introduction

The Gulf War has spurred our near-peers China and Russia to consider radically different concepts of warfare, warfare that fits into the broad model specified by Sun Tzu but bearing little resemblance to contests of military force. This paper examines the new model of warfare coming from our nearest of peers, China. This new model is called unrestricted warfare, which is also the name of the text in which this this model is formulated.

The origin of unrestricted warfare is described in this paper, and the tactics it employs are examined along with the concepts upon which they rest. The Chinese authors of Unrestricted Warfare have been either denounced as “pseudo profound” or hailed as the best thing since Clausewitz, and this spectrum of responses by members of the US military will be surveyed. Finally, a general approach to counter unrestricted warfare tactics is outlined.

Genesis of Unrestricted Warfare

The Chinese colonels Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui developed and wrote Unrestricted Warfare in response to lessons learned from America’s victory in the Gulf War. The saw us as immensely capable of conventional warfare that features the combined use of land and air forces. They understood how mastery of this type of warfare required a dependence – maybe an overdependence – on technology. They conjectured that this dependence on technology combined with our spectacular success in the Gulf War would lead us to think that this was the only way to fight wars and would blind us to other forms of warfare.

They took away other lessons, too: that Americans have become extremely averse to casualties. They saw the advantages to hastily arranged alliances of convenience over long-term alliances such as NATO and the Warsaw Pact, and how those alliances could be rapidly solidified by the UN. They saw the importance of media coverage in shaping public opinion of the war – and that the concept of “media objectivity” gave it more gravitas than official propaganda.

Finally, they realized that when confronted with the type of military force displayed in the Gulf War, that China could never ever win.

Qiao and Wang did what any smart individuals would do: they changed the battlefield. Thus, unrestricted warfare was born.

Redefining Fundamental Concepts

One of the most interesting things done in Unrestricted Warfare¹ (hereafter abbreviated as UW) is to redefine fundamental concepts.

The word “victory” used to mean that an enemy is forced to accept one’s will. Qiao and Wang redefined it to mean that an enemy is forced to serve one’s own interest. “The best way to achieve victory is to control, not to kill,”² they wrote.

A battlefield used to be a region of land or the surface of a body of water. Current battlefields can also be air, space, underwater, psychological, cyberspace, and anywhere reachable by long-range missiles. “Where is the battlefield?” the Chinese colonels asked. “Everywhere,” they answered.

The traditional warfighter working for a traditional (Westphalian) state can now include hackers working for non-state actor.

The dictum that "war is a continuation of politics" or "war is politics with bloodshed", has been extended by the US military to include information warfare, precision warfare, joint operations, and military operations other than war (MOOTW). The Chinese colonels now include “non-military war operations.”

What is a target? Just War Theory distinguishes between combatant and noncombatant and requires that only combatants should be targeted. In unrestricted warfare, the distinction between combatant and noncombatant is dissolved³.

Qiao and Wang give us a new concept of weapon. Instead of a tool to kill or destroy, they note that:

Everything that can benefit mankind can also harm him⁴. This is to say that there is nothing in the world today that cannot become a weapon, and this requires that our understanding of weapons must have an awareness that breaks through all boundaries.

The goal of these “new weapons” is to paralyze and undermine, not to cause casualties. The bloodless wars that result are essentially stealth wars⁵.

How do new weapons relate to their targets? Qiao and Wang write that "new weapons… are closely linked to the lives of the common people," and go on to state that

The new concept of weapons will cause ordinary people and military men alike to be greatly astonished at the fact that commonplace things that are close to them can also become weapons with which to engage in war. We believe that some morning people will awake to discover with surprise that quite a few gentle and kind things have begun to have offensive and lethal characteristics.

As the Chinese colonels write: “the war god’s face has become indistinct.”⁶

The “New Weapons”

What are these new weapons? They are essentially economic means of control. UW contains the following list of these new weapons for non-military war operations:

• Financial
• Ecological
• Psychological
• Smuggling
• Media warfare
• Drug warfare
• Network warfare
• Technological warfare
• Fabrication
• Resources
• Economic aid warfare
• Cultural warfare
• International lawfare

To demonstrate their operation, several of these weapons will be examined in detail.

Financial Warfare

Financial warfare is the easiest to understand. There is no single tactic, but the idea is to solidify economic ties with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to the point where exit becomes impossible. For example, China could nationalize foreign assets and return them only should their owner perform certain actions. Requiring that transactions between Chinese and foreign companies take place using Chinese yuan renminbi freezes the foreign company into a relationship with the Chinese one, since China’s yuan is a non-convertible currency.

Media Warfare

A very blatant example of media warfare is the way Hollywood kowtows to China. Consider how the plots or characters of Hollywood films are altered to present China in a positive light, or at least in a non-threatening manner⁷. An example of this is with the movie called “Red Dawn”. In the 1984 version, the US is invaded by the Soviets. The original script to the 2012 remake involved the Chinese invading the US. In the final release of “Red Dawn”, it was the North Koreans who did the invading.

The 2018 film “Bohemian Rhapsody” told the story of Freddie Mercury and the band he fronted, Queen. All mention that Mercury was gay was removed for the version of the film released in China. The net effect of erasing this aspect of Mercury was to shift focus to the band.

Three movies, “Barbie” (2023), “Uncharted” (2022), and “Abominable” (2019), all included brief scenes showing a map of the South China Sea depicting the “nine-dash line,” a maritime border which China uses to indicate its claims over that area⁸. “Abominable” was a co-production between DreamWorks and the Chinese production firm Pearl Studio. The Chinese connections with the other movies are not clear.

There are product placements: in “Transformers: Age of Extinction” (2024), one character (while in Texas) withdraws cash from a Chinese ATM, while another character purchases Chinese protein drink (in Chicago).

Even movie posters have been altered to appease to China. For example, the movie poster for “Star Wars: The Force Awakens” was altered to minimize photo of the main Black character in the film.

The Chinese market for movies is an even larger market than all of North America⁹. That in part explains the appeasement coming from Hollywood.

Drug Warfare

Of the methods of unrestricted warfare examined here, drug warfare is the easiest to quantify. China is the source of multiple illicit drugs commonly used in the United States including xylazine (“tranq”), methamphetamine, and of course fentanyl. This latter has been a scourge on America, with the number of fentanyl-related overdoses rising at a staggering rate over the past decade.

There have been attempts to force China to stop the export of fentanyl, but they have come to naught. For example, in retaliation for Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan in August 2022, Beijing suspended collaboration with the United States to halt the manufacture and export of fentanyl precursor chemicals either directly to the United States or to Mexico cartels which then traffics the drug into America.

Economic Aid Warfare

The best example of economic aid warfare is the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) which is a massive infrastructure investment program to create networks of highways, railways, and pipelines through former Soviet-bloc countries as well as throughout south and southeast Asia. Announced in 2013, the program has since expanded into Africa and parts of South America. The infrastructure programs are funded by loans from China. The debt financing contracts frequently prevent restructuring, and China retains the right to recall the loans at any time. These give China the power to enforce their interests using financial controls¹⁰.

The BRI is not simply a physical infrastructure program – it also involves the creation of streamlined border crossings as well as special economic zones that encourages industrialization and the adoption of Chinese technology. This network expands the use of Chinese currency and thus the political influence of China.

As of 2023, 147 countries have either began work on BRI projects or have shown interest in doing so. This accounts for 40% of global GDP and two-thirds of the world’s population.

When economic factors force a country to default on BRI loans, the county results to sovereign default, which happened in Ghana and Zambia. When Pakistan defaulted, they were bailed out by the International Monetary Fund. When Sri Lanka defaulted on a $435 million BRI loan to build a harbor there, China enforced a debt-for-equity swap giving China 70% stake in the harbor.

For countries that do not default on BRI loans, they become vassal states to China.

New Weapon Commonalities and a Comparison to Liminal Warfare

These examples of unrestricted warfare tactics – financial warfare, media warfare, drug warfare, and economic aid warfare – show a variety of methods of operation, a range of precision, and a common goal.

The mechanisms of financial warfare are obvious: China essentially “locks in” a business owner by nationalizing assets or conducting transactions in non-convertible Chinese currency. This gives the CCP leverage over the business owner, forcing him to work to China’s advantage.

Media warfare works by the using the profit motive of Hollywood executives to produce movies that serve as propaganda in the east Asian markets and to soften and elevate the image of China in Western markets. Should a Hollywood executive not alter one of his films for Chinese consumption, the film is banned by Chinese sensors, and its earnings are greatly decreased. Here, the object of control is not America itself but rather one of its industries.

With drug warfare, China permits the manufacture of fentanyl and fentanyl precursors which, when imported to America, directly harms Americans. China is perhaps the most pernicious surveillance state ever to exist, and their protestations that they cannot limit its manufacture and export are simply that: protestations. China never intends to control fentanyl export, but they use promises to do so to either influence American politicians to operate in their favor, or punish politicians when they don’t, as illustrated by China’s reaction to Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan. Given that China has no intention of limiting fentanyl export, their reaction was as staged and hollow as their promises.

Of all the weapons listed in UW, the Belt and Road Initiative is closest to the tributary system practiced by China during certain parts of its dynastic period: both involved turning other nations into vassal states. Enforcement of the tribute was by stick: the threat of invasion. With BRI both the carrot and stick are used: the carrot is in the form of loans, and the stick is economic ruin in response to either defaulting on the loans or taking some action contrary to the CCP. The BRI is the weapon that least directly harms the United States, but it does certainly decrease Western influence on the global stage.

These new weapons and indeed all the weapons listed in UW have several things in common: first is that China gains leverage over the economy, politicians, or businesses of a target country and uses that leverage to its own advantage. Second, they operate at a level below which military reprisal would be seen as just. Third, the weapons operate along a continuum – the “pressure” can be turned up or down depending on the victim’s level of compliance. Fourth, the weapons do not operate in covert or clandestine manner, to a certain extent.

This last commonality is a way unrestricted warfare differs from the liminal warfare practiced by Russia¹¹. Liminal warfare depends on secrecy to operate, and a particular liminal operation comes to an end once its existence and perpetrator become known. Unrestricted warfare is carried out in public, but if the extent of, say, the BRI should become known all at once, the pattern would be clear, and resistance would be universal. Thus, unlimited warfare is subject to thresholds (one being the threshold for which a military response is acceptable, the other threshold being the discovery of the entirety of the operation), and maneuver between the thresholds is necessary for success¹², just like with liminal warfare¹³.

Analysis of Unrestricted Warfare by the U.S. Military

Before reviewing some of the evaluations of UW made by members of the U.S. military, it must be asked: how does China itself evaluate unrestricted warfare? As seen from the above examples, China is using the new weapons listed in UW, but that isn’t necessarily the same as taking UW as a far-reaching military policy. The best proof that they are considering UW seriously are the careers of the two authors following the text’s publication.

At time of publication, Qiao Liang was a colonel in the People’s Liberation Army Air Force. He retired with the rank of major general and is now secretary general of the Council for National Security Policy Studies. His co-author Wang Xiangsui was a colonel in the PLA when UW was released. He had since retired with the rank of senior colonel and is currently the director of the Center for Strategic Issues.

Qiao and Wang have both advanced in rank since the publication of UW and now hold leading positions at security institutions in China. It appears that they are indeed taken seriously by the CCP.

Wang Xiangsui and Qiao Liang

The response to UW by either current or former members of the U.S. military has been mixed. At the one extreme is Major John A. van Messel, who in his 2005 master’s thesis¹⁴ for the Marine Corps University, concludes that “Unrestricted Warfare, as it is currently written, is less of an executable doctrine than a collection of tactics, techniques, and procedures for future war adversaries.” His appraisal is that “Unrestricted Warfare is neither a revolution in military thought nor an executable doctrine for future warfare…”

To justify these conclusions, van Messel notes that most if not all theoretical concepts in UW, from the idea that new weapon systems can alter the form of war to the idea of non-military weapons, have been in circulation prior to the publication of UW. He also notes that the Chinese colonels’ analysis of the Gulf War was taken from various DoD documents.

Van Messel then conducts thought experiments, simulating the success a large nation (China), a small nation (Taiwan), and a non-state actor (Abu Sayyaf) would have in using the particular “new weapons” of unrestricted warfare against an adversary. He concludes that only a large nation such as China would have the ability to use all the “new weapons.” He adds, correctly, that unrestricted warfare does not explain how a nation would organize, train, and equip the necessary elements of national power to implement these “new weapons.”

He concludes that China would have the most success in applying the “new weapons,” but the operationalization of these weapons would be negatively “impacted by adhering to rules of law and the effects of globalization.”

Van Messel’s position can thus be summarized as “nothing to see here.” At the other extreme is retired Air Force Brigadier General Robert Spalding, who explains in his 2022 book titled War Without Rules¹⁵ that the weapons described in UW pose a major threat to the United States.

Spalding does not examine the originality of the theoretical framework presented in UW, but he does take note of it.

Spalding’s position on operationalizing the “new weapons” is directly opposite from van Messel’s: the new weapons depend on globalization, and that China does not adhere to international rule of law. Spalding justifies these conclusions by describing how recent Chinese foreign relations and economic policies demonstrate the “new weapons” in use, including the Belt and Road Initiative.

Spalding concludes by listing very concrete steps we can take to limit the harm the new weapons can have on the United States and the world. These steps include increasing the cybersecurity of critical infrastructure, strengthening our currency, and monitoring the security implications of Chinese land and business purchases.

Other authors mix the extremes represented by van Messel and Spalding. Take, for example, Dave Maxwell, a retired Special Forces Colonel, Editor-in-Chief of Small Wars Journal, and Vice President of the Center for Asia Pacific Strategy. The position he put forward in a 2023 paper¹⁶ is that discussions of the underpinning theoretical concepts of UW are a distraction from addressing the actions of the People’s Liberation Army.

The sinologist and Executive Assistant at the National Defense University Josh Baughman completely dismisses UW, stating that it is not China’s “Master Plan.” After doing a chapter-by-chapter study of UW, he concludes¹⁷ that it is “pseudo profound.” His opinion is based on a chapter of UW that attempts to apply Chinese numerology to warfare, and that one chapter poisons the rest of the book.

An Alternative Analysis

The problem with the analyses described above is that they all miss the most important part of UW: its reinterpretation of fundamental concepts like “victory”, “weapon”, “target”, and so on. These redefinitions explain the choices of “new weapons” presented in the text.

More importantly, the new definitions of fundamental concepts allow us to predict future weapons - future means of control - not mentioned in UW. Examples of the weapons missed by Qiao and Wang include control of medicine, the Chinese purchase of American land and businesses, and mass migration.

By focusing on fundamental concepts, we can defend against a wider class of weapons. The key to doing so lies in Qiao and Wang’s statement “everything that can benefit mankind can also harm him.” The accurate rephrasing should be: “everything that can benefit mankind and that we control can also harm him.” This makes clear the two conditions that make unrestricted warfare effective: globalization, and the omnipotent CCP - unrestricted warfare requires “everything within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.”

These observations point to a fundamental way to stop unrestricted warfare: rigorously enforce private property rights, especially in financial transactions. This, combined with strong currency and rational fiscal policies, would go a long way to block new weapons, both those mentioned in UW as well as those yet to be invented.

Conclusions

In summary, UW is quite important both in that it describes the economic and foreign policy decisions currently being made by China, and that it provides a conceptual framework explaining why those decisions are being made.

By understanding this conceptual framework, strategies and tactics to counter unrestricted warfare become apparent. Spalding’s recommendations block the effects of unrestricted warfare only in a piecemeal fashion, but shoring-up property rights counters China’s influence on America in one swoop. Considering the extent that politicians and corporations benefit from cooperating with China¹⁸, though, one must wonder if they are willing to take these steps and counter China’s “new weapons.”

 

Footnotes

1. Qiao & Liang, Unrestricted Warfare.
2. Ibid, as are all quotes in this section, unless specified otherwise.
3. This is similar to a "Realist War Theory": instead of combatants/noncombatants, RWT has combatants/enablers or combatants/supporters.
4. Emphasis added.
5. Kerry Gershaneck, “To Win Without Fighting”.
6. Qiao Liang also happens to be a fiction writer, and this may explain odd phrasings like this that occur at numerous places in UW.
7. Morgan Martin and Clinton Williamson, “Mapping Chinese Influence in Hollywood”
8. Chad Guzman, “Barbie is Just the Latest Hollywood Film to Get Caught in the Crossfire of Asian Geopolitics.”
9. Terry Gross, “Hollywood relies on China to stay afloat. What does that mean for movies?”
10. Qiao, “One Belt, One Road."
11. David Kilcullen, The Dragons and the Snakes.
12. Octavian Manea, “Liminal and Conceptual Development: Warfare in the Age of Dragons.”
13. A similar point is made by McFarlane and Paterson in ”Is America Ready for Chinese-Russian Liminal Warfare?”
14. John van Messel, “Unrestricted Warfare: A Chinese doctrine for future warfare?”
15. Spalding, War Without Rules.
16. David Maxwell, “The First Rule of Fight Club and Irregular Warfare Should be the Same.”
17. Josh Baughman, “’Unrestricted Warfare’ is Not China’s Master Plan.”
18. Robert Spalding. Stealth War: How China Took Over While America’s Elite Slept.

Bibliography

Baughman, J. “’Unrestricted Warfare’ is Not China’s Master Plan.” China Aerospace Studies Institute, 25 April 2022. Retrieved 8 May 2024 from https://www.airuniversity.af.edu/Portals/10/CASI/documents/Research/CASI%20Articles/2022-04-25%20Unrestricted%20Warfare%20is%20not%20China's%20master%20plan.pdf

Gershaneck, K. “To Win Without Fighting”. Expeditions with MCUP. Marine Corps University, 2020. https://doi.org/10.36304/ExpwMCUP.2020.04

Gross, T. “Hollywood relies on China to stay afloat. What does that mean for movies?” NPR Fresh Air, 21 February 2022. Retrieved 7 May 2024 from https://www.npr.org/2022/02/21/1081435029/china-hollywood-movies-censorship-erich-schwartzel

Guzman, C. “Barbie is Just the Latest Hollywood Film to Get Caught in the Crossfire of Asian Geopolitics.” Time, 4 July 2023. Retrieved 7 May 2024 from https://time.com/6292066/barbie-ban-nine-dash-line-china/

Kilcullen, D. The Dragons and the Snakes: How the Rest Learned to Fight the West. Oxford University Press, 2020.

Manea, O. “Liminal and Conceptual Development: Warfare in the Age of Dragons.” Small Wars Journal, 26 May 2020. Retrieved 8 May 2024 from https://smallwarsjournal.com/jrnl/art/liminal-and-conceptual-envelopment-warfare-age-dragons

Martin, M. & Williamson, C. “Mapping Chinese Influence in Hollywood” Kennedy Papers on Indo-Pacific Security Studies 4, January 2023. Retrieved 7 May 2024 from https://www.airuniversity.af.edu/Portals/10/AUPress/Papers/KP_04_Martin_Mapping_Chinese_Influence_in_Hollywood.pdf

McFarlane, R. & Paterson, A. “Is America Ready for Chinese-Russian Liminal Warfare?” The National Interest, 7 May 2022. Last retrieved 9 May 2024 from https://nationalinterest.org/feature/america-ready-chinese-russian-liminal-warfare-202205

Maxwell, D. “The First Rule of Fight Club and Irregular Warfare Should be the Same.” Small Wars Journal, 22 January 2023. Retrieved 8 May 2024 from https://smallwarsjournal.com/jrnl/art/first-rule-fight-club-and-irregular-warfare-should-be-same

Qiao L. "One Belt, One Road." LimesOnline.com, 17 July 2015. Last retrieved 10 May 2024 from https://www.limesonline.com/en/regions/one-belt-one-road-14720766/

Qiao & Liang. Unrestricted Warfare. Shadow Lawn Press, 1999.

Spalding, R. Stealth War: How China Took Over While America’s Elite Slept. Penguin Publishing Group, 2019.

Spalding, R. War Without Rules: China's Playbook for Global Domination. Sentinel Press, 2022.

Van Messel, J. “Unrestricted Warfare: A Chinese doctrine for future warfare?”, School of Advanced Warfighting, Marine Corps University, 2005. Retrieved 6 May 2024 from https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/pdfs/ADA509132.pdf

A Review of David Kilcullen’s The Dragons and the Snakes

Kilcullen’s “Dragons and Snakes,” hereafter abbreviated as “D&S,” is quite ambitious: it describes the evolution of warfare during and following the GWOT, arguing that state and non-state actors have undergone coevolution, with the end result that our adversaries’ warfighting techniques have changed in ways our military is currently unable to match.

D&S begins with a quick overview of the vast hinterland that was the time between the end of the Cold War and the earlier parts of the Global War on Terrorism. The important aspect of this overview is the relative sophistication of five of the dominant politicians of that era: Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Vladimir Putin.

When Putin came into office, he inherited the shambles that was Russia after the fall of the Soviets. To rebuild his country, he proposed to Clinton that Russia be allowed to join NATO. Other than the presidents and the prime minister, politicians at the time regarded that proposal somewhere on the spectrum between absurdity and incredulity. None of those politicians recognized what Putin was really doing: in popular vernacular, he was “trolling.”

Putin was taken seriously, with Tony Blair proposing to create a NATO-Russia Council to have Putin’s representatives meet with NATO leaders before making key decisions. Bush proposed a nuclear cooperation agreement with Russia. After all, Bush said that he “looked the man [Putin] in the eye. I found him very straightforward and trustworthy – I was able to get a sense of his soul.”

Eleven weeks later, Russia sent tanks into Georgia.

The Obama Administration then suggested a “reset” and created a commission to strengthen and expand security cooperation between us and Russia. Russian special forces were trained by US special forces, Russian officers received NATO training, and so on.

Yes, Putin was indeed trolling, and at a masterful level.

Kilcullen then moves into the period starting with the GWOT and leading up to today. Using a metaphor by former CIA Director James Woolsey, the author divides our enemies into “dragons” and “snakes.” The dragons are state actors (in the Westphalian sense) mainly China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea. The snakes are either collapsing states or non-state actors, principally Islamic terrorist organizations.

All throughout the GWOT, both the dragons and the snakes were keenly interested in our presence in Iraq and Afghanistan, and they were doing two things: observing and evolving.

Observing other countrys' wars is nothing new: the French, British, and Prussians sent observers to watch the Civil War, with interest in tactics, strategies, and technologies. Currently, everyone is watching the Russia-Ukraine war, with keen attention paid to the use of commercial-quality drones and other tactics.

From these observations, two critical events serve to shape the evolution of military thought amongst both the dragons and the snakes: the US invasion of Iraq in 1992, and America’s difficulties in the asymmetric wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The 1992 invasion proved that the US was masterful at a particular style of war: conventional force-on-force battles with integrated land and air operations. China and Russia observed this and deduced that America cannot be dominated using this form of warfare. They also deduced something else: that Americans, in part due to the smashing success of the invasion, had constrained itself into believing that the type of war demonstrated during that invasion was the only type of warfare.

The second observation was the difficulty the US had in fighting insurgent forces in Afghanistan and Iraq as the GWOT switched from being a symmetric to an asymmetric conflict. This was also nothing new, as Russia saw in its own involvement in Afghanistan and during the Chechen Wars. What made the American experiences in Afghanistan and Iraq different was that it was America that was involved: the insurgents were able to hold their own against the same military that won so easily the pre-insurgent phase of the Iraq war. If Russia had suspicions that their losses in Afghanistan and the First Chechen War were due to military inadequacy, then America’s experience, with its preeminent military, dispelled those suspicions.

Faced with this, Russia and China had to evolve, to discover new types of warfare.

The route taken by Russia was to pursue “liminal warfare,” which adds cyber, economic, and psychological tools to the kinetic weapons endemic to conventional warfare. The idea is to operate using those new tools below a threshold (what Kilcullen calls the “response threshold”) that America and other Western nations would resort to conventional warfare. The bulk of the desired outcomes are achieved below this threshold (the luminal stages), and these desired goals are primarily to “shape” not only particular actions of the Unites States but also to provide cover or at least plausible deniability should the response threshold be crossed.

Kilcullen provides numerous examples of liminal warfare in action, the most important one being Russia’s capture of the Crimea in February 2014 – the world didn’t know what Russia was doing until it was too late.

Russia’s new approach to warfare is “vertical” in that the stages of war are cumulative, determined by the extent the US recognizes that clandestine activities occurring and our ability to determine who is performing these acts; Russia attempts to minimize the operational signatures of their operations, move the thresholds, and so on.

In contrast, Kilcullen portrays China’s approach as “horizontal.” China’s approach is to use “unrestricted warfare” as described by Qiao and Liang in their book with the same name. (Kilcullen notes that the title “Unrestricted Warfare” would be better translated as “Warfare Beyond Rules”). Unrestricted warfare uses several non-lethal tactics including international lawfare, economic aid warfare (think Belt and Road Initiative), drug war (fentanyl in particular) and so on. These tactics aren’t used in isolation, instead they use a “diversity of tactics” as Antifa would say. The number of available tactics is what gives unrestricted warfare its horizontal quality.

It is interesting to compare luminal and unrestricted warfare, but it is more illuminating to compare those forms of warfare with the way warfare is conceived in the West. The primary difference is that the West considers warfare to be strictly one involving military action, whereas liminal and unrestricted warfare involve both military and non-military forms of action.

We essentially have a mismatch in the concepts of warfare. There are three consequences to this mismatch:

1. Many of our actions (in particular, economic policies related to international trade) we think of as peace time competition but are considered to be warfare, especially in unrestricted warfare.
2. China and Russia can be engaging in warfare, but we don’t know it and we cannot respond militarily.
3. Because we don’t know we’re being attacked, we cannot predict escalation.

What can be done about all this? How do we fight the ascension of these dragons? With regards to foreign policy, Kilcullen offers several options:

1. Double down - continue interventionalist foreign policy, strengthen our military accordingly, and incorporate new technology along the lines of the Pentagon’s “Third Offset Strategy.”
2. Go with a “managed decline” approach (presumably only regarding foreign policy).
3. Take a Byzantine approach, meaning, delay until something better comes along.

Kilcullen’s recommendations on foreign policy are as follows:

“…return to offshore balancing, disengaging from permanent wars of occupation, ceasing any attempt to dominate rivals or spread democracy by force, and focusing instead on preserving and defending our long-term viability.”

This is very reasonable, except the part about “offshore rebalancing.” Continuing with his recommendations:

“Rather than dominating potential adversaries, our objectives can and should be much more modest: to prevent them from dominating us, to do so at an acceptable and sustainable long-term cost, and to avoid any action that harms the prosperity of and civilizational values that make our societies worth living in.”

Thus, by quitting our “forever wars,” we get a type of peace dividend: we get a chance to focus on societal resilience and attempt to reconcile our current domestic political differences.

D&S is extremely readable, even by someone lacking deep knowledge of foreign policy. The most valuable part for me was the discussion of liminal warfare. My only criticism is that it didn’t go into sufficient depth on liminal maneuvers. This is a minor complaint, and quite understandable given the text’s wide scope.

 

Bibliography

Chase, S. “Marketing Violence: A Closer Look at the “Diversity of Tactics” Slogan.” Minds of the Movement Blog, 2017. Retrieved 28 April 2024 from https://www.nonviolent-conflict.org/blog_post/marketing-violence-closer-look-diversity-tactics-slogan/

Kilcullen, D. “The Evolution of Unconventional Warfare.” Scandinavian Journal of Military Studies 2 (no. 1), 2019.

Kilcullen, D. The Dragons and the Snakes: How the Rest Learned to Fight the West. Oxford University Press, 2020.

Nadeau, R. "Justus Scheibert and International Observation of the Civil War". The Gettysburg Compiler, 2014. Retrieved 28 April 2024 from https://gettysburgcompiler.org/2014/12/12/justus-scheibert-and-international-observation-of-the-civil-war/

Qiao L. & Wang, X. Unrestricted Warfare. Albatross Publishers, 2020.

Recent Technological Developments Relevant to Espionage and Information Warfare

Introduction

In Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui’s “Unrestricted Warfare,” written in 1995, they describe how militarily and politically weak Communist China can triumph over a stronger power such as the United States. They do this by using an extremely broad concept of weaponry, to wit: "Everything that can benefit mankind can also harm him. This is to say that there is nothing in this world that cannot become a weapon.” They go on to give examples of these new types of weapons: stock-market crashes, computer viruses, and rumors or scandals on the Internet. They argue that four fundamental elements of war - soldiers, weapons, battlefield, and purpose – “have changed so that it is impossible to get a firm grip on them. When that day comes, is the war god’s face still distinct?” (Liang, Q. & Xiangsui, 2015).

This paper examines two examples of this expanded type of weapon: a Russian troll farm called the Internet Research Agency used to create dissent and conflict within the United States, and social network analysis and graph databases that could be used to track employees and recruit assets from inside Iran’s Natanz Uranium Enrichment Facility.

 

The Internet Research Agency

The Internet Research Agency was a Russian company operating from July 2013 to July 2023 that maintained social media accounts for the purpose of spreading propaganda, altering public opinion, and sowing dissent. It was owned and financed by Yevgeny Prigozhin of Wagner Company fame (Volchek, 2021) and was used to influence European public opinion of Ukraine and the upcoming invasions. In the United States, the IRA’s purpose was to influence social media with the goal of eroding trust in American media organizations, spreading distrust in American politicians and political parties, and generally to inflame tensions.

The IRA created user accounts and various Facebook groups with titles such as "Heart of Texas," "United Muslims of America," "Being Patriotic," "LGBT United," "Don't Shoot," "Blacktivist," "BlackMattersUS," and "SecuredBorders", among others. The IRA then used these groups to organize protests or even dueling protests/counterprotests including:

• A Black Lives Matter protest (not organized by IRA) and a Blue Lives Matter counterprotest (that was organized using the "Heart of Texas" group) held in Dallas, Texas, on 10 July 2016.
• A "Safe Space for Muslim Neighborhood" rally in Washington, D.C., on 3 September 2016 was organized using the "United Muslims of America" group.
• As mentioned in Zegart (2022), the "Heart of Texas" and "United Muslims of America" Facebook groups were used to organize dueling protests on 21 May 2016 in Houston, Texas.
• "BlackMattersUS" and "United Muslims of America" groups were used to organize anti-Trump protests.
• The "Being Patriotic" group was used to organize multiple pro-Trump rallies throughout Florida.
• "United Muslims of America" was used to organize the "Support Hillary, Save American Muslims" rally.
• A vigil for the Pulse nightclub shooting victims was organized using the "LGBT United" group.
• Etc.

The supposed ultimate goal of the IRA in the United States was to influence the 2016 election. While this may be true, supporters of this supposition make several assumptions that must be explicitly stated:

• Social media platforms allow anyone to create groups and use them to organize meetings and protests.
• For each group IRA created, numerous non-IRA groups with the same concerns existed.
• It is likely that the IRA groups were used by Americans for our own purposes, e.g. to schedule our own rallies.
• The influence of the IRA was small in comparison to the biases enforced by various social media companies.
• The various problems the IRA supposedly tried to inflame were already concerns for multiple decades, including:
  • The growing influence of Islam and other foreign cultures.
  • Illegal immigration.
  • Fear of government overreach and doubts of its legitimacy.
  • Contempt of elected officials and other government employees.
  • Contempt that elected officials and other government employees have of their constituents.
  • Doubts about the intentions of US intelligence agencies.
  • Distrust of traditional and social media outlets.
• For people concerned about those problems, the IRA was doing nothing but "preaching to the choir."

For those of us who already distrust mainstream media, it is not clear if the IRA had any influence on us, since we rely on other methods for gathering information and arriving at conclusions (multiple alternative news sources, discourse and debate, historical reference, plausibility, consistency, evidence of the senses, correspondence with reality). Further, the ultimate responsibility for an individual's beliefs and actions lies with himself, despite the "NPC" (non-player character) description that is often applied to those that continue to trust media and government.

This does not mean that the IRA did not have an impact: the Mueller Investigation lasted from May 2017 to March 2019, and though the final report of the Investigation "did not establish that members of the Trump campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities" (Mueller, 2019), the pretext for the investigation was used by various politicians, government employees, and media outlets to foment dissent on their own. This wasn't obviously a part of the IRA's plan, but it was certainly an example of how certain politicians and news agencies are willing to create a tragedy so as not to let it go to waste. Was it an unintended consequence?

 

An Emerging Technology Useful for Espionage

An emerging technology that is useful for espionage is the field of social network analysis with the support of graph database technology.

Traditional relational databases store data in one or more tables, and each table consists of rows (records) and columns (fields). Graph databases store data in nodes (also called vertices) and edges (lines or arrows connecting nodes). (Robinson, et. al., 2015) This organization is perfect for storing data about social networks.

[Illustration comparing data organization in relational vs graph databases]

What the nodes and edges in a graph DB represent depend on the application. For example:

• For navigation, the nodes can be cities and the edges can be roads.
• For an e-commerce recommendation engine, the nodes can represent products and two products are connected by a directed edge if a customer who purchases one product is likely to purchase the other.
• The nodes can be people and the edges can be various types of relationships (familial, coworker, etc.)

Nodes do not need to be all the same type: one type of node can represent people, and a second type can represent organizations, and an edge connects a person-node to an organization-node when that person is a member of that organization. Similarly, there can be different kinds of edges: besides the membership-edge, there can also be familial-relationship edges linking two people who are of the same family.

By itself, a graph database is useless without a source of data. For social network analysis, populating a graph DB usually involves manually entering specifically chosen people or organizations to seed the graph DB, then augmenting that with data pulled from social media sites.

The investigative applications include:

• The process of “doxxing” was studied using graph DBs in (Lee, 2022).
• Relationships between Antifa, journalists, and university professors were investigated in (Lenihan, 2022).

If Antifa were to be designated a criminal organization, graph databases would be immensely useful for investigating that organization. (Jaccourd, et. al., 2023).

 

The Definition of "Importance" in Graph Databases

For sake of discussion, suppose we are investigating terrorism, and the nodes in our graph DB represent individual terrorists or terrorist organizations, and edges between those two types of nodes represents membership. We also assume that terrorists can be linked with an edge if they are of the same family.

Once our database is populated with terrorists, organizations, and the relationships between them, how do we extract information from all that data? The most obvious approach is to pick a target (a known terrorist), and then investigate all the people related to that target and all the groups (terrorist organizations) to which that target belongs. There are situations where this approach is applicable (like should a terrorist be captured), but in general this approach begs the question: how is a target of interest chosen? This is not a trivial question since there may be tens of thousands of terrorists in our graph database.

This problem - determining which nodes (terrorists or organizations) are most important or influential - is solved in various ways through what are called "measures of centrality." There are numerous measures of centrality, the most basic one being "degree centrality" - the nodes with the most edges are most important, i.e. the terrorists with the most connections to other terrorists or terrorist organizations are most influential.

A different measure that is perhaps more useful is "betweenness centrality". This involves finding the shortest path between all distinct pairs of nodes and counting the number of these shortest paths that pass-through a given node. The nodes with the highest betweenness centrality can be thought as the ones through which the most information passes.

In terms of espionage, it would then make sense to prioritize intelligence-gathering on terrorists with the highest betweenness centrality, since the most information would pass through those terrorists. In terms of counterterrorism, eliminating a terrorist with a high betweenness centrality would cause the most disruption in information flow.

An example of this kind of social network analysis was performed independently by Kieran Healy (Healy, 2013) and Shin-Kap Han (Han, 2009) using data found in David Hackett Fischer's "Paul Revere's Ride" (Fischer, 1995). Fischer includes data on 254 individuals involved in the American Revolution (among them John Adams, Samuel Adams, and Paul Revere) and their memberships in seven Whig groups, including the Tea Party and the London Enemies. Using only this data, it is possible to determine:

• the number of groups to which any pair of people both belonged (for example, John Adams and Sam Adams both belonged to two groups)
• the number of people any pair of organizations have in common (the Tea Party and the London Enemies had 10 people in common).

Notice that the starting data (membership lists for the organizations) did not include data about which individuals knew each other, but a social network can be derived from the membership lists - two individuals are related if they share membership in an organization. (Breiger, 1974).

[Illustration from (Healy, 2013)]

Centrality measures can then be calculated on that social network. Healy and Shin-Kap Han found that Paul Revere has the highest betweenness centrality of the 254 individuals and ranks high in several other centrality measures. Shin-Kap Han describes Revere's role as a "broker" between not only the people in Fischer's analysis but also between the various classes - artisans and gentlemen, patricians and plebeians, and to make the American Revolution a success, for those people,

"both the identities and interests needed to be articulated and organized as in any effort at extensive, robust, and sustained mobilization. For that, the movement needed men whose socioeconomic status and cultural outlook allowed them to move among the various ranks of society. As a man whose contacts reached deep and wide into the social and political networks, Revere was one of the few who were comfortable in all of these places, each of which became an important part of Boston’s revolutionary movement." (Han, 2009).

 

Past, Present, and Emerging Technologies for Espionage

Past and current espionage-related methodologies and technologies could be used to recruit individuals working inside Iran's Natanz nuclear facility. For example, wiretapping could have been used to monitor the telephone calls of employees of that facility, and from the conversations, potential assets could be chosen. This would have worked before calls were encrypted. Combining satellite photographs with on-the-ground presence, individuals working in the facility can be identified, traced, appraised, and recruited. Realtime satellite imaging may not be needed, but considerable collaboration between satellite reconnaissance teams and in-person reconnaissance would be necessary.

Another current technology that is applicable are mobile applications such as TikTok, Facebook/Meta, etc. These applications track the user's location, the people the user interacts with, and can be used to build a psychological profile of the user. Further, by manipulating the popular trends displayed by those apps, the companies owning these applications can attempt to influence user opinions.

Can social network analysis be used to recruit an individual working inside a highly secure location, like the Natanz facility? Natanz employees may not be allowed to have applications such as TicTok on their phones. All hope is not lost, however... As described above, Kieran Healy and Shin-Kap Han were able to build a social network using only a list of names and membership lists for organizations – they built a social network using data that predated social network analysis by centuries! The same can be done today, and examples of the organizations that would be helpful in the case of the Natanz facility include:

• Universities, for their graduation lists and list of faculty members
• Mosques
• Fraternal organizations

Additional sources of information include marriage announcements, graduation announcements, flight logs, and so on.

 

Conclusion

These two examples of contemporary espionage technology – troll farms and social network analysis – represent two examples of the new types of weapons envisioned by Liang and Xiangsui. The Internet Research Agency was effective (in some way) in spreading dissent in the U.S., though they were dwarfed by the attempts at manipulation and “nudging” used by social media companies. Social network analysis would certainly be useful for investigating the operations of criminal organizations and should also be relevant for identifying intelligence assets and evaluating the importance of individuals in facilities like the Natanz Uranium Enrichment Facility.

 

References

Breiger, R. (1974). The duality of persons and groups. Social Forces 53(2)
Retrieved from: https://pdodds.w3.uvm.edu/research/papers/others/1974/breiger1974a.pdf

Fischer, D. H. (1995). Paul Revere’s ride. Oxford University Press.

Han, S-K. (2009). The other ride of Paul Revere: The brokerage role in the making of the American Revolution. Mobilization: An International Quarterly 14(2): 143-162
Retrieved from: https://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/polisci/faculty/chwe/ps269/han.pdf

Healy, K. (2013). Using metadada to find Paul Revere.
Retrieved from: https://kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/2013/06/09/using-metadata-to-find-paul-revere/

Jaccourd, L., Molnar, L., & Abei, M. (2023) Antifa's political violence on Twitter: A grounded theory approach. European Journal on Criminal Policy and Research. 29, 495-513 (2023)
Retrieved from: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10610-023-09558-6

Lee, Carmen. (2022). Doxxing as discursive action in a social movement. Critical Discourse Studies, 19:3, 326-344, DOI: 10.1080/17405904.2020.1852093

Lenihan, E. (2022). A classification of Antifa Twitter accounts based on social network mapping and linguistic analysis. Social Network Analysis and Mining (2022) 12:12
https://doi.org/10.1007/s13278-021-00847-8
Retrieved from: https://link.springer.com/epdf/10.1007/s13278-021-00847-8

Liang, Q., Xiangsui, W. (tr. 2015). Unrestricted warfare. Echo Point Books & Media.

Mueller, R. S. (2019) Report on the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 Presidential Election. U.S. Department of Justice.

Robinson, I., Webber, J., Eifrem, E. (2015). Graph databases: New opportunities for connected data. 2nd Edition. O'Reilly Media.
Retrieved from: https://web4.ensiie.fr/~stefania.dumbrava/OReilly_Graph_Databases.pdf

Volchek, D. (2021). Inside the ‘propaganda kitchen’ – A former Russian ‘troll factory’ employee speaks out. Radio Free Europe/RadioLiberty.
Retrieved from: https://www.rferl.org/a/russian-troll-factory-hacking/31076160.html

Zegart, A. (2022). Spies, lies, and algorithms: The history and future of American Intelligence. Princeton University Press.