Russia’s and China’s Political Warfare Campaigns: How the West Can Prevail

The Russian and Chinese regimes have made substantial progress towards these goals during the last two decades without conducting conventional military operations. Rather, Moscow and Beijing have employed sophisticated political warfare strategies and a wide range of mostly non-military instruments. Until recently, these operations were often viewed by Western leaders to be unconnected, mildly irritating, and of limited consequence, falling below the threshold of warranting direct confrontations with the authoritarian regimes or escalation to major conventional conflict.

Here is the first section of the CSBA report:

The Political Warfare Challenge

The highest realization of warfare is to attack the enemy’s plans; next is to attack their alliances; next to attack their army; and the lowest is to attack their fortified cities. Thus one who excels at employing the military subjugates other people’s armies without engaging in battle, captures other people’s fortified cities without attacking them, and destroys other people’s states without prolonged fighting… For this reason, attaining one hundred victories in one hundred battles is not the pinnacle of excellence. Subjugating the enemy’s army without fighting is the true pinnacle of excellence.

Sun Tzu, ~500 B.C.(1)

The United States and its allies are facing an unprecedented challenge: two authoritarian states possessing substantial human, economic, technological, and other resources; armed with conventional and nuclear forces that, in many respects, rival those held by the Western allies; and working actively to undermine the core interests of the West. Their operations are designed to subvert the cohesion of the Western allies and their partners; erode their economic, political, and social resilience; and undermine the West’s strategic positions in key regions.

The Putin regime has made clear that it aims to force Western acquiescence in Russia’s reemergence as a great power. As Dmitri Trenin stated, “Russia’s military doctrine makes clear that even if the West is not officially an adversary, it is a powerful competitor, a bitter rival and the source of most military risks and threats.”(2) The leadership in Beijing, for its part, aims to equal, if not surpass, the United States in global power and influence. As Aaron Friedberg testified before Congress, one of Beijing’s core goals is “to become a truly global player, with power, presence, and influence on par with, and eventually superior to, that of the United States.”(3) The Director of the FBI, Christopher Wray, reinforced this judgment by stating, “China’s goal, simply put, is to replace the U.S. as the world’s leading superpower—and they’re breaking the law to get there.”(4)

The Russian and Chinese regimes have made substantial progress towards these goals during the last two decades without conducting conventional military operations. Rather, Moscow and Beijing have employed sophisticated political warfare strategies and a wide range of mostly non-military instruments. Until recently, these operations were often viewed by Western leaders to be unconnected, mildly irritating, and of limited consequence, falling below the threshold of warranting direct confrontations with the authoritarian regimes or escalation to major conventional conflict.(5)

The primary instruments used by Moscow and Beijing have been intense information campaigns, diverse espionage and cyber operations, the theft of vast troves of intellectual property, the use of economic inducements and economic pressures, programs of geostrategic maneuver, the seizure and militarization of contested territory, coercion by military and paramilitary forces, and the assertive use of legal and paralegal instruments, all backed by well-coordinated propaganda programs to help justify their international interference and their re-writing of history and international laws.(6) These operations are being conducted by Russian and Chinese organizations that are directly controlled by regime leaders and carried out by well-trained personnel who possess extensive experience in these “gray zone” operations.(7) As noted in a previous CSBA report, the conceptual and doctrinal foundations for these activities are shared by the Russians and Chinese and are deeply etched their respective strategic cultures.(8)

The idea of subverting, undermining, and eventually defeating an opponent without fighting can be traced back at least as far as Sun Tzu in 500 B.C., but the concept developed new prominence early in the 20th century through the intense study of Clausewitz’s writing by Vladimir Lenin, Leon Trotsky, and Joseph Stalin.(9) These Soviet revolutionaries were taken by the logic that if war was politics by other means, then the reverse was also true: aggressive political action could be considered war by other means. This thinking helped them conceptualize how proletarian revolutions could be fostered in other countries at relatively low risk. They could see great scope for exploiting the gap between what capitalist societies called “war” and what they called “peace” to conduct offensive political operations that stayed below the threshold that would trigger major conventional conflict.

Keen to foster revolutionary change in Europe while avoiding an invasion from the Soviet Union’s stronger neighbors, Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin developed a first-generation form of political warfare.(10) They decided that Russian foreign policy would employ revolutionary propaganda tailored to achieve the greatest traction in each targeted country. For example, in countries possessing few Russian speakers, they would encourage a revolt of the working classes and generate dissension within the ruling government. In countries containing significant Russian-speaking or multi-ethnic populations, they would make strong efforts to foster a “fifth column” to operate in support of Russia’s interests within the society.(11) The Communist International, run out of Moscow, helped establish local communist parties and raised cells to conduct unconventional operations. Extensive training, funding, and other support started to flow from Moscow, normally via indirect routes.(12)

Lenin and his colleagues appreciated from an early stage the great potential of what they called their “indirect strategy.”(13) Their political warfare campaigns would exploit contradictions in capitalist societies and distract enemy governments, forcing them to focus on domestic troubles. They believed that if they could drive changes in neighboring states, strengthen Moscow’s political leverage, and eventually force some opposing governments to collapse, they would succeed in their core mission of propagating the global socialist revolution

One person who took an intense interest in this Soviet thinking was Mao Zedong, who worked to combine the deep Chinese tradition of unconventional intelligence- and subversion-heavy strategic culture with insights from Clausewitz, Lenin, Stalin, and Trotsky. Indeed, Mao rephrased Lenin’s thinking by stating that “Politics is war without bloodshed, while war is politics with bloodshed.”(14) Drawing further on this logic, he developed, tested, and refined a new concept of revolutionary war to overthrow the nationalist government of Chiang Kai-shek and defeat the Japanese invaders. The importance of early political operations throughout the theater of operations, including in enemy strongholds, became the foundation of Chinese military doctrine for revolutionary and unconventional war, as well as for a broader range of operations.

From the 1950s to the 1970s, the communist regime in Beijing applied these revolutionary and political warfare skills offensively in other countries by funding, supplying, and helping to train the leaders and key functionaries of revolutionary movements in Southeast Asia and South Asia.(15) Robert Taber, a leading counter-insurgency analyst of the mid-20th century, summarized how the Chinese undertook these political and propaganda campaigns in “enemy countries”:

Usually the revolutionary political organization will have two branches: one subterranean and illegal, the other visible and quasi-legitimate.

On the one hand, there will be the activists—saboteurs, terrorists, arms runners, fabricators of explosive devices, operators of a clandestine press, distributors of political pamphlets, and couriers to carry messages from one guerrilla sector to another, using the towns as communications centers.

On the other hand, there will be sympathizers and fellow travelers, those not really of the underground, operating for the most part within the law, but sustaining the efforts of the activists and, of themselves, accomplishing far more important tasks. The visible organization will, of course, have invisible links with the revolutionary underground, and, through it, with the guerrillas in the countryside. But its real work will be to serve as a respectable façade for the revolution, a civilian front … made up of intellectuals, tradesmen, clerks, students, professionals, and the like—above all, of women—capable of promoting funds, circulating petitions, organizing boycotts, raising popular demonstrations, informing friendly journalists, spreading rumors, and in every way conceivable waging a massive propaganda campaign aimed at two objectives; the strengthening and brightening of the rebel “image,” and the discrediting of the regime.(16)

This extensive historical experience of offensive political warfare is a strong pillar of Chinese strategic culture. Although the circumstances of mid-20th century revolutionary war differ from those in most theaters today, the habitual Chinese practice of offensive political operations bears a close relationship to Beijing’s recent international operations. Indeed, from the perspective of a Chinese strategic planner, it is difficult to conceive of large-scale operations against foreign powers that do not involve intrusive political and psychological operations from an early stage.

In the first decade of this century the regimes in Moscow and Beijing reaffirmed the potential for harnessing offensive political warfare to undermine the United States and its Western allies and partners.(17) Most obviously, it provided an opportunity to exploit the successes and exceptional depth of experience in political warfare that both regimes had inherited from earlier eras.

The conduct of political warfare against foreign countries is an inexpensive instrument of foreign policy that can potentially yield a great amount of leverage to be used against multiple targets simultaneously and sustained for extended periods. The diversity of instruments avail-able for use in political warfare campaigns also allows operations to be tailored to suit a range of situations. But perhaps the greatest attraction for Moscow and Beijing in launching a 21stcentury version of political warfare was that it exploited serious weaknesses in the West.

Strategic culture in the United States and its Western allies is characterized by a sharp distinction between “peace” and “war,” with very little scope for active conflict in between. In this Western conception there is scope for debates, disputes, demands, tensions, and major geostrategic contests without compromising the fundamentals of peace. War only occurs when formal or informal armed forces engage each other using kinetic force. This is markedly different to the conception held by the regimes in Moscow and Beijing, which views their struggles with the West and its partners as being existential, continuous, and, at present, being fought primarily by political means.(18) They see the role of military and paramilitary forces as mostly confined to shaping the international environment and, periodically, contributing coercive power.

One of the clearest explanations of this way of thinking appears in the 1999 volume Unrestricted Warfare, written by two serving PLA colonels, Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui:

As the arena of war has expanded, encompassing the political, economic, diplomatic, cultural and psychological spheres, in addition to the land, sea, air, space, and electronics spheres, the interactions among all factors have made it difficult for the military sphere to serve as the automatic dominant sphere in every war. War will be conducted in nonwar spheres … so that people’s dream of winning military victories in non-military spheres and winning wars with nonwar means can now become reality.

Warfare is now escaping from the boundaries of bloody massacre, and exhibiting a trend towards low casualties, or even none at all, and yet high intensity. This is information warfare, financial warfare, trade warfare, and other entirely new forms of war, new areas opened up in the domain of warfare. In this sense, there is now no domain which warfare cannot use, and there is almost no domain which does not have warfare’s offensive pattern… . 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.(19)

Western and partner societies are remarkably open to infiltration by these types of “nonwar” campaigns. There are, for example, few constraints on using embassy and consulate staff in targeted countries to recruit and train local agents, establish front organizations, fund political candidates and parties, and even to mount espionage operations and steal troves of intellectual property. Hence, the Russian and Chinese regimes have found the conditions for employing new-generation political warfare tactics in the West to be permissive and enticing. There are several reasons why the United States and the other close allies have been slow to focus their attention on countering political warfare operations.

One reason is that in the early years of the 21st century, the United States and its allies were heavily distracted by operations in the Middle East, the demands of counterterrorism, and a deep sense of war weariness. This meant that the appetite in Washington and all Western capitals for directly confronting Moscow and Beijing was weak. It has also been argued that Western thought leaders severely miscalculated the strategic trajectories of the major authoritarian states over this period by assuming that over time they would transition from being revisionist to status quo powers.(20) In combination, these factors meant that there was little Western interest in a prolonged “peacetime” struggle with the rising authoritarian regimes; to the contrary, there was a deep sense of risk aversion.

In this situation, so long as the regimes in Moscow and Beijing did not trigger Western governments to switch from “peace” to “war” and confront them directly with conventional force, they could dominate the political warfare battlefield with little, if any, serious resistance. The means and modes they have employed to exploit this permissive environment to win many tactical victories during the last twenty years are detailed in the case studies in Annex A.

The lack of recent preparedness to confront authoritarian political warfare sits in contrast to the fact that the United States and its allies conducted quite sophisticated political warfare operations in both world wars and during the Cold War. Indeed, one of the most insightful definitions of political warfare was penned by the U.S. State Department’s first Director of Policy Planning, George Kennan, early in the Cold War. Writing in 1948, he described the Soviet and allied operations he was observing as follows:

Political warfare is the employment of all the means at a nation’s command, short of war, to achieve its national objectives. Such operations are both overt and covert. They range from such overt actions as political alliances, economic measures…, and “white” propaganda to such covert operations as clandestine support of “friendly” foreign elements, “black” psychological warfare and even encouragement of underground resistance in hostile states.(21)

By the 1980s, the United States and its allies conducted political warfare operations that achieved numerous successes. The Active Measures Working Group in Washington and its companion organizations in allied capitals proved to be effective in exposing and rebutting Soviet political warfare operations and thus helped undermine the credibility and authority of the Russian leadership globally, including within the Soviet Union itself.(22)

With the end of the Cold War, however, the United States and nearly all of its allies and partners dismantled their political warfare capabilities, closed relevant agencies, and redeployed nearly all of their highly skilled and experienced staff. In the period since, most of those with first-hand experience in political warfare have left government service. The limited political warfare capabilities that remain are mostly located in military and associated intelligence units and, with rare exceptions, have been engaged in the narrow tactical support of military operations.

The aggressive political warfare operations launched by Moscow and Beijing during the last two decades have all been, in Western vocabulary, “left of launch,” or “phase zero activities.” Because they have not involved the use of significant kinetic force, they have not been seen to constitute a form of warfare. Nor, until recently, have such actions been perceived to be part of carefully crafted campaigns designed to undermine the West and win strategic advances. Rather, they have been perceived as individual, unconnected actions of limited consequence. This situation poses serious challenges that require the Western strategic community to re-conceptualize its understanding of conflict. Encouragingly, there has been increasing recognition that Moscow and Beijing have been engaged in an intense struggle with the West for years, even if the primary weapons they have been using have been political and non-kinetic.

The leaders of the United States, its close allies, and their international partners need to think deeply about the nature of Russian and Chinese political warfare operations, consider the full implications for Western and partner security, and agree to a coherent strategy to deter, defend against, and ultimately defeat these campaigns. This report aims to contribute some relevant insights and ideas.

A good place to start is the lessons from the political warfare operations conducted by the Soviet Union and the United States during the Cold War. What types of operations were conducted? How did they evolve? What worked and what didn’t work during this extended political warfare struggle? These key questions are addressed in Chapter 2.

1. Sun Tzu and Sun Pin, The Art of War, translated with a historical introduction and commentary by Ralph D. Sawyer (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1996), p.50.

2. Dmitri Trenin, “Russia’s New Military Doctrine: Should the West be Worried?” National Interest, December 31, 2014.

3. Aaron L. Friedberg, hearing on “Strategic Competition with China,” testimony to the House Armed Services Committee, February 15, 2018, p. 3.

4. “FBI Director Christopher Wray’s Remarks Regarding Indictment of Chinese Hackers,” prepared remarks, FBI.gov News, December 20, 2018, available at https://www.fbi.gov/news/pressrel/press-releases/fbi-director-christopher-wrays-remarks-regarding-indictment-of-chinese-hackers.

5. Political Warfare is defined in this report as “diverse operations to influence, persuade and coerce nation states, organizations and individuals to operate in accord with one’s strategic interests without employing kinetic force.”

6. Programs of geostrategic maneuver include the Russian and Chinese initiatives to support ideologically aligned distant states such as Venezuela, Cuba, and some Middle Eastern and African states. Another notable example is Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative. These and related programs make Moscow and Beijing serious players in parts of the world in ways that can significantly alter the global strategic balance. All these operations are discussed in some detail in Thomas G. Mahnken, Ross Babbage, and Toshi Yoshihara, Countering Comprehensive Coercion: Competitive Strategies Against Authoritarian Political Warfare (Washington, DC: Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, 2018), pp. 10–13.

7. For details of the relevant command, control and administrative arrangements in Russia and China see Mahnken, Babbage, and Yoshihara, Countering Comprehensive Coercion, pp. 23, 28–31.

8. For details see Ibid.,pp. 9–15, 25–27.

9. See this discussed in Jacob W. Kipp, “Lenin and Clausewitz: The Militarization of Marxism, 1914–1921,” Military Affairs, October 1985, p.189.

10. See this discussed in Mahnken, Babbage, and Yoshihara, Countering Comprehensive Coercion, pp. 20–23, 35–40.

11. Stephen J. Blank, “Class War on a Global Scale: The Leninist Culture of Political Conflict,” in Stephen J. Blank, Lawrence E. Grinter, Karl R. Ware, and Bryan E. Weathers, Culture and History: Regional Dimensions (Maxwell Air Force Base, AL: Air University Press, 1993), pp. 10–12

12. For details see Jeffrey V. Dickey et al., Russian Political Warfare: Origin, Evolution, and Application, thesis (Monterey, CA: Naval Postgraduate School, 2015), pp.44–52, available at https://calhoun.nps.edu/bitstream/handle/10945/45838/15Jun_Dickey_Everett_Galvach_Mesko_Soltis.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y.

13. See this discussed in Mahnken, Babbage, and Yoshihara, Countering Comprehensive Coercion, pp. 11–15; and Dickey et al., Russian Political Warfare

14. Mao Zedong, On Protracted War,3rd revised edition (Beijing [Peking]: Foreign Language Press, 1966), Section 64.

15. These operations are discussed in detail in Franklin Mark Osanka, ed., Modern Guerrilla Warfare (New York: The Free Press, 1962).

16. Robert Taber, The War of the Flea: A Study of Guerrilla Warfare Theory and Practice (London: Paladin, 1970), pp. 32, 33.

17. These developments are described in Clive Hamilton, Silent Invasion (Melbourne: Hardie Grant Books, 2018), pp. 1–5; Michael Pillsbury, The Hundred-Year Marathon: China’s Secret Strategy to Replace America as the Global Superpower (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2015), pp. 201–213; and Mahnken, Babbage, and Yoshihara, Countering Comprehensive Coercion, pp.15–18.

18. Dickey et al., Russian Political Warfare, pp. 10–15.

19. Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui, Unrestricted Warfare: China’s Master Plan to Destroy America, translation(New Delhi: Natraj Publishers, 2007), pp. 17, 144, 162.

20. Hal Brands, “The Chinese Century?” National Interest, February 19, 2018.

21. Department of State, “The Inauguration of Organized Political Warfare,” Policy Planning Staff Memorandum, May 4, 1948, available at https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1945-50Intel/d269.

22. Fletcher Schoen and Christopher J. Lamb, Deception, Disinformation, and Strategic Communications: How One Interagency Group Made a Major Difference (Washington, DC: Institute for National Strategic Studies, National Defense University, 2012), pp. 97–107.

— Read more in Ross Babbage, Winning Without Fighting: Chinese and Russian Political Warfare Campaigns and How the West Can Prevail, Vol. 1; and Vol 2: Case Studies (Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, 2019)