【Lecture Hall】
Author:Lin Dong (Professor, National Defense University)
As economic globalization encounters the anti-globalization movement, on the one hand, the historical trend of peace and development has increased the constraints on the damage of war, and on the other hand, the competition for global interests has brought about a new growth space and growth mode of war. Therefore, the current war breaks through the historical framework of local war with limited purpose, local region, and military confrontation, and reconstructs the form of war conflict with the comprehensive war appearance of "mixed war + high-dimensional war + local war", and it can be said that a new era of comprehensive war is coming.
Special combatants of the Yulin Detachment of the Guangxi Armed Police Corps carried out anti-terrorism drills. Photo by Yu Haiyang/Guangming Pictures
The focus of national interests has shifted from the right to subsistence to the right to development
Since the 2007 financial crisis, the main historical trend of peace and development has been hit by the anti-globalization movement. Under the international system dominated by capitalism, contradictions such as overlapping sovereignty over development space, unbalanced development of various countries, and insufficient development resources have gathered and erupted, and have been exploited by hegemonism, terrorism, separatism, and extremism, resulting in the general crisis of capitalism coming with the general crisis of industrialization and manifesting itself in the form of a crisis of globalization, of which the exclusive competition of overlapping rights to development and survival has become the most active driving force for war.
Every war is integrating the right to military control and the right to development, breaking through the demands of local wars to focus on territorial sovereignty. The war in the era of globalization has an unprecedented historical background, that is, the focus of national interests has shifted from survival competition to development competition. This is because the two sides of the war are in a globalized economy and society that is open and interconnected with each other, and the development contradiction has become the main contradiction, and the state and social actors have jumped from survival competition to development competition, driving the war from the traditional struggle for land to the struggle for new development space. To this end, in the 21st century, there is no war of pure military significance that is not separated from the theme of development, especially the major powers, and every war is related to its own global and regional development initiative. From its own point of view, every war has the highest purpose of changing the global development trend, and at the same time faces the huge risk that all strategic opponents in the world will join forces to use war to contain development. Therefore, every war needs to complete the dual demands of development around containment and counter-containment, and survival around territorial sovereign aggression and counter-aggression.
The purpose of war is to achieve the comprehensive political-economic-military objectives and to break through the framework of the limited political-military objectives of local wars. Since ancient times, war has been the highest form of political struggle, highlighting political-military objectives. However, in the era of globalization, the purpose of war rises to the trend of winning the development of one's own side, rather than taking a single military victory as the criterion, thus expanding the political-military purpose of local war to a comprehensive political-economic-military purpose, which is the inevitable result of the injection of development demands into war.
The proportion of non-military objectives of war has increased, and the objectives of war fall between limited and comprehensive objectives. The essence of war in turning to the pursuit of the least military cost and the highest comprehensive political and economic efficiency is to lower the military indicators for killing and injuring the enemy's living forces and expand the political and economic indicators for undermining the economic and social order. The purpose of war is transformed into the goal of war, which is embodied in a comprehensive goal cube composed of three dimensions: political, economic and military. Among them, the belligerent dimension plans to defeat the enemy's multiple political, economic, social and military objectives, not just to design territorial areas and military demarcation lines; The goal of changing the strategic competitive situation in the dimension of the competitor is not only the strategic arrangement of the enemy and us, but also the consideration of the strategic opponent outside the battlefield, how to pry the balance of great power competition through a war; Stakeholder dimension design changes the multi-party strategic relationship, loading the regional strategic goals and global strategic goals to be achieved in this war. In this regard, the ongoing Russian-Ukrainian conflict is a good footnote. From the perspective of the belligerents, Russia's initial attempt to simply seek military control and attempt to solve all problems militarily at one time proved to be unworkable, so it expanded the war goal to destroy the strategic passage of Ukraine, and at the same time, fought the "ruble war" against strategic competitors, and natural gas exports were settled in rubles, breaking through the pattern of dollar domination, thus promoting a great change in the situation on the battlefield.
In short, in the era of globalization, if you fight for the political-military purpose of territorial sovereignty, you will not be able to achieve it quickly, and if you open up the political-economic-military vision of fighting for development, and if you cooperate with the political and economic purpose of military purposes, you will achieve more with less military efforts. In the future, the struggle around containment and counter-containment, as well as the control of new fields and new spaces and the right to develop resources, will become a new theme of war.
Army special combatants participating in the "Western United-2021" exercise surrendered and quickly attacked in the "Bobcat" all-terrain vehicle. Xinhua News Agency
The time and space of war are extended, and the boundaries between peacetime and wartime are blurred
Although the first nature of war as a continuation of politics has not changed, the global and social nature of war has grown violently and unprecedentedly, which is determined by the need to go deep into the economy and society around the struggle for the right to development. As a result, the spatio-temporal extension of war, the blurring of peacetime and wartime boundaries, and the unfolding of peace often occurs in a state of peace.
War transcends specific time limits, weaving a gray area where war and peace overlap. In the era of globalization, under the threshold of local wars, those political and economic actions and military operations are combined into mixed wars, forming a gray area where peace falls into low-intensity conflicts. Compared with local wars, which start with the first shot and formal declaration of war, mixed wars can be launched in peacetime and undeclared. The escalation from a mixed war in a gray area to a local war has become a major trend in the evolution of war. Looking back at the panorama of the comprehensive war between the United States and Iraq, the 12-year embargo, economic sanctions, and turmoil after the Gulf War are the early stages of the comprehensive war against Iraq, the "shock and fear action" is the middle stage, and the stabilization action is the late stage. Both the early and late periods are more than 10 years old, but they are low-intensity armed conflicts and mixed wars; The short period of high-intensity combat in the middle was only 1 month, which was a local war. As a result, the United States issued a national action plan for the participation of the military in defeating the enemy country, and planned six stages, including the shaping stage in peacetime, the stage of seizing the initiative in times of crisis, the stage of deterrence, the stage of domination (high-intensity strikes), the stage of stability maintenance, and the stage of consular support.
The war transcends local geographical restrictions and promotes the battlefield from closed to open. In the traditional sense, local wars have clear combat zones, and the enemy and us easily do not expand the battlefield, but high technology has changed the battlefield, promoting the expansion of war from the physical domain to the information domain and the cognitive domain, and the new high-dimensional space of the network, space, and electromagnetism dominates the traditional physical space, which is open, not limited by geography, and can attack the whole region. As a result, high-dimensional warfare breaks the restrictions of local regions in the information domain and cognitive domain, crosses the military boundary line, infiltrates the economy and society, and realizes the globalization of the battlefield. For example, in 2010, Iran's nuclear reactor was paralyzed by the "Stuxnet" virus attack, which is a cyber attack instead of a military strike, bypassing the military defense system and directly attacking the key point.
In the future, the conditions for launching a formal local war will be more demanding, but it will be more convenient to launch mixed wars and high-dimensional wars. Thus, the initial stage of a comprehensive war may not be a great war of the kind of grand array, but a state of mixed war and peace, through the accumulation of mixed wars, cut into high-dimensional wars, and then suddenly change, or end the war, or jump to a large-scale local war between military groups. Therefore, embedding the war module into peace and achieving the purpose of war under the deterrence of local war has become a new point in the art of war.
From the information revolution to the intelligent revolution, the scientific and technological revolution provides richer and more advanced means for war, and also opens up new interest space, and the competition of new and old interests pushes the world into a new stage of competition and cooperation, drives war into an active period, and war becomes a variation of peace. As a result, human society has shifted from a history of war and peace to a new history of war and peace mixed and symbiotic, that is, a new picture of war attached to peaceful development.
Political, economic and social struggles will be transformed into forms of direct warfare
With the purpose of war, the expansion of time and space, and the transformation of the nature of war, the basic contents such as the main body of war and the mode of operation are also breaking through traditional cognition and broadening the "spectrum" of war operations. Comprehensive warfare has become a composite war in which comprehensive national strength based on armed forces is systematically opposed in all fields under the guidance of grand strategy.
In the past, the focus of wars for the right to exist was to eliminate military forces, but the focus of wars for the right to development shifted from eliminating military forces to paralyzing the state apparatus, thus forcing the enemy to submit. This follows the principle of the barrel of the national development, and the whole collapses from the short board. The war machine is a "barrel" composed of political, military, economic, and social systems, and when a system is broken, the war system collapses. To this end, in the 1990s, the US military put forward the "five-ring target theory", that is, the center of gravity of the war system was divided into a war system composed of five target rings, including political leadership, production system, infrastructure, people, and army. The practice of war shows that it is smarter to break the state system and make the enemy strategically compromise than to crush the army. Thus, the victory shifted from focusing on the indestructibility of military power to focusing on the overall endurance of the country's administrative, economic, social and military systems. From fighting the enemy as an iron plate, to decomposing the enemy into different targets, and adopting different means to treat them differently, and focusing on disintegrating and paralyzing the shortest board of the enemy's state apparatus, we can first draw money from the enemy's war system, accelerate the weakening of the enemy's combat system with the overthrow of the pillars of war, and even directly compromise the enemy without paralyzing the combat system.
With the information revolution pushing the information domain cognitive domain to become a new combat domain, high-dimensional attack methods such as hackers, viruses, and electromagnetic pollution have been weaponized, and a high-dimensional offensive style of connecting the economies and societies of various countries through the network and satellites has evolved. Among them, social warfare uses cyberspace to attack public safety such as transportation and water and electricity systems; Economic warfare includes financial warfare, trade warfare, food warfare, energy warfare, and using the connectivity of Nettime to break the capital chain industrial chain supply chain innovation chain from within; Political warfare includes diplomatic warfare, legal warfare, and public opinion warfare, and the international political chain and media communication chain of the global destruction of opponents. After the practice of mixed warfare, the confrontation of the military system has changed to the system confrontation of "military strike + color revolution + economic sanctions + network warfare + cognitive public opinion warfare". System warfare is a modern overall war, beyond the traditional general warfare of the multi-field loose coordination situation, can achieve centralized decision-making, cross-border coordination, synchronous control of military warfare and non-military warfare, can be cleverly selected and integrated means of use, such as can choose both military warfare to firepower to attack the power system, can also choose social warfare to carry out network attacks, can also be a composite strike of both, and can be flexibly adjusted like playing the piano, to avoid falling into a military duel. As a result, systematic warfare has become the overall form of comprehensive warfare, low-intensity systematic warfare constitutes mixed warfare, system warfare that highlights high dimensions is upgraded to high-dimensional warfare, and systematic warfare that joins high-intensity joint operations is upgraded to local warfare.
Under the modern informationization and open system, the potential of traditional warfare has risen to combat strength, become a direct combat force, and play the main role in wars in different fields. Among them, local war joint operations still take the armed forces as the main body, but economic warfare is dominated by financial analysts, energy experts and other economic offensive and defensive professional teams, and political warfare shows the characteristics of combining government departments and military departments. The development trend of comprehensive warfare is that the firepower war has not yet begun, the army has not yet attacked the city, and the political war and economic warfare may be victorious. Therefore, the whole government action has become the organizational form of comprehensive warfare, with grand strategy guiding multi-field specialized operations of comprehensive warfare, while the national war command of comprehensive political, military, economic, and social cross-field and cross-major departments assumes the role of strategic command.
Today, the comprehensive war that is in the process of fusion, compared with any previous historical period, transforms the political, social and economic struggles into direct combat forms and integrates them with military operations, thus opening up a new stage of war development. In this new era of war, local wars are part of comprehensive warfare and the ballast stone of institutional confrontation, but the notion that war is the sum of a series of campaigns and tactical actions, and the idea that war is a military confrontation, will undergo an unprecedented reconstruction.
The era of comprehensive war in which war and peace go hand in hand has arrived
Each era of development has its own special technical conditions, economic and social forms and contradictions of interests, which determine the special appearance of war corresponding to it. The comprehensive wars that have evolved since the end of the Cold War correspond to the era of globalization of great power competition.
For a long time, there have been two strategic threads in the theoretical circles, one is to emphasize the preparation of war - to win the clues to local wars, and the other is to advocate military struggle in peacetime - to win local wars, and the times have promoted their integration into comprehensive wars; on the one hand, the concept that peace is a period of war interval in the past has become obsolete, on the other hand, military struggles in peacetime still exist, but they are only applicable to general military frictions and territorial sovereignty disputes. In the future, seven-point mixed wars and high-dimensional wars plus three-point local wars will emerge with grand strategic benefits. The highest realm of comprehensive warfare is to decompose and implement the general objectives of all-out war and achieve the overall strategic goal with a combination of mixed war, high-dimensional war, and local war. The interdependent economic relations of the great powers in the era of globalization determine that all-out war cannot be fought, but this does not mean that the hegemonic congress abandons the goal of all-out war, and it will be obtained in a decompositive way. Just as the United States won the Cold War, it was achieved by decomposing and implementing the goal of all-out war to contain the Soviet Union into a number of phased local war and political and economic action goals, such as the strategy of new appearance, the strategy of peace, the strategy of détente, and the strategy of transcending containment. Today, the Cold War mentality has revived in the 21st century, and it has become more intense, and an important reason is that the motives of war under the global open system are intertwined, it is easy for a war to break out and multiple powder kegs respond, and the benefits of war are superimposed and amplified, which provides conditions for major powers to launch comprehensive wars.
What is worth vigilance is that in the future, the hegemonic powers will create a "clash of civilizations" by occupying a high-end war position, provoke nation-states to go to war with each other for land and sea resources, provoke the "three forces" to create civil unrest, and break the political and economic sectors of the mainland and the sea, thus playing the role of "offshore balancers" in interfering. The new Cold War will be a global comprehensive war, and the hegemonic powers will concoct multiple enemies, multiple natures, and various forms of war threats. The mindset of trapping a local war will blind the vision of strategic attack and defense and tie up one's hands and feet to win the battle.
To sum up, in today's world, the era of local wars since the end of World War II has begun to come to an end, but mankind will not return to the era of all-out war in which all nations are dueling, but will step into the era of comprehensive war in which war and peace go hand in hand. This is the result of the evolution of the root causes, nature of war, and war methods under the action of multiple factors such as technological revolution, economic integration, and social openness in the era of globalization.
Guangming Daily ( 2022-07-24 07 edition)
Source: Guangming Network - Guangming Daily