What If The World Is At War And Didn't Know It?

Richard Fernandez recently posed the question: "What if the world were at war and didn’t know it?" As the readers of this blog know, I've been attempting to follow the developments of the war of Ragnarok since just before its beginning on February 22, 2014. Since then, we have seen Russia secretly support the separatist civil war in Ukraine, while simultaneously increasing its provocations against NATO and the United States. 

That, of course, is the subject of Fernandez's article, cited above, called "The War of the Little Green Men." Fernandez suggests that the United States and Russia are, in fact, at war with another through indirect warfare (a type of proxy warfare). He writes:

Since the ability to attack without actually triggering a response confers a distinct advantage, Russia has actually designed a form of warfare to evade the threshold of cultural psychology and avoid the detection of legalistic minds like President Obama’s. The approach is called hybrid warfare. ”Hybrid warfare is a military strategy that blends conventional warfare, irregular warfare and cyberwarfare. … By combining kinetic operations with subversive efforts, the aggressor intends to avoid attribution or retribution.”

The Kremlin has already employed this mode of conflict in the Ukraine. ...

This merely  continues a trend since WWII to obfuscate war by not calling it by its name (instead we have interventions, peace keeping, police actions, and kinetic action) and not officially declaring it.

But there is more. Michael Ledeen asks who (or what) is ISIS, and concludes that if it is not a Russian puppet, it certainly has ties with Russia. He observes in his article, "Who is IS?" that the ISIS leadership is dominated by former Baathist leaders under Saddam Hussein. Ledeen further opines:

Those of us who have studied states run by the SS or the KGB see familiar patterns in these accounts, and suspect that there are still active connections between the IS leaders and the men who trained them. We know that there is long-standing activity by the Russians in Syria–Assad is a principal client of Putins’s–and that Syria is strategically imperative for the Russians, as for the Iranians, another piece in the pattern. Our suspicions become stronger when we see the presence of Russians and their neighbors in ISIL. Indeed, the top IS military commander, Abu Omar al-Shishani (the red-bearded jihadi frequently misidentified as a Chechen), is a former Georgian military officer, and IS just recruited a former Tajik special forces colonel. They’re not all Iraqis. Moreover, the Russians are exploiting their strategic position in Ukraine to set up transit facilities for IS. Ukrainian security forces recently arrested five IS volunteers: three from the ‘stans, two from Russia.

So I think the Russians are involved, in tandem with the Iranians, who have had their own troops on the Syrian battlefield for years. It’s part of the global war, of which Syria is only one killing field, and IS is one of the band of killers. A big band, at least for the moment. But still just one army, at the service of a totalitarian caliphate, itself helped and guided by two much bigger totalitarian states.

If we only focus on IS, we will not see the real war. Nor the global alliance amassed against us.

 But it is not Russia alone that is attacking us. China, likewise, has entered into its own hybrid warfare against the United States; if not in concert with the Russians, probably with at least some common design. China has followed three primary means of attacking the U.S. or its interests.

First, China has been directly attacking us technologically, either through cyber attacks designed to funnel off critical information, or through old-fashioned spying. The recent hacking attack that netted it information on millions of current and former Federal employees suggest that it is using the cyber attacks to support its spying: not only does the information allow it to mine the data to determine who works for intelligence agencies or hold key positions, but probably to identify persons that would be vulnerable to being turned into Chinese intelligence assets.

Trade Routes (source)

Second, China has been attempting to bully its way into controlling the South China Sea and the important trade routes through it. Control of those trade routes would grant China significant influence over Korea and Japan--the only countries other than the U.S. that could possibly challenge its supremacy in the region. However, China's military is confident that the United States will not successfully be able to stop Chinese expansion. Due to American weakness (which I return to below), Japan is beginning to step up to take a more active role in its own defense, including strengthening military ties with the Philippines. Thus, according to Richard Fernandez, in another article entitled "The Vast Pacific," it will likely fall to Japan to militarily defeat China in another war for control of the western Pacific; and the Philippines, because of its geographic location, is critical to the success of any such venture.

In writing about such a conflict, Fernandez observes:

Both Japanese and Chinese naval strategy are dictated by these basic facts [of the need to control shipping lines]. If Japan can hold the First Island Chain it can starve out China. If China can take the First Island Chain, it will starve out Japan. The Japanese counterstrategy to China’s is exactly symmetric: control the chain. In Japanese nomenclature, the First and Second Island chains are called the Tokyo-Guam-Taiwan Triangle or TGT. You can see how this works in a map and analysis by the RAND Corporation. First note how the TGT line forms a triangle of undersea mountain ranges which break the Pacific’s surface as island chains. It is widely believed that the TGT is heavily wired with sensors. It is certainly patrolled by ASW assets (in which most of Japan’s naval investments consist) and possibly by UUVs and other wizard devices.

Blockade Map (Source)

 It will be instantly clear from the map that if Japan can defend the interior of the TGT, it can do two things at once: 1) prevent Chinese SSNs and aircraft from significantly cutting its lifeline to the Americas and the Middle East (though via the north of Australia) and 2) blockading China into the bargain. ... Hold the TGT and the survival of Japan is assured and the near-blockade of China becomes a powerful threat. Lose the line and Japan is probably finished.

From here all the crucial points are easy to understand and can be identified in relation to the map above. China is claiming the Senakaku islands because they lie on the TGT line, between Okinawa and Taiwan. If they can take that, they can move around the south of Okinawa to mine and blockade Japan. In preparation for that they have created the largest mine warfare force in the world.

Defensively the United States is developing Ulugan Bay in Palawan to block access to the Sulu Sea. The Camilo Osias Naval Base on the extreme tip of Luzon has the potential to become crucial. The Sunda and Malacca straits are important chokepoints. And of course there are the bases in Guam, Japan and Okinawa. But the keys to whole defense are Taiwan and the Philippines. Japan has an existential stake in holding these. Without them the whole TGT falls and Japan must reconcile itself to being a vassal of China.

But does Washington have any such stake? Or more to the point, does Obama? The USN arguably has the fallback of distant blockade from the Indian Ocean. It can interdict the Chinese supply route from much further back than Japan. This is an inferior strategy. But the point is that the national survival of the United States does not directly depend on the survival of Japan — or even Australia.

Third, China--and Russia--have been acting to weaken the U.S. and its allies in the Middle-East. Both the Russians and Chinese supported the Assad regime in Syria (and, hence, Iran) because they knew the U.S. would expend considerable resources to contain Iran rather than focus on Russia and China. I would not be surprise if China--which has been investing heavily in Pakistan of late--is behind Pakistan's public pronouncement that it will not be providing nuclear weapons to Saudi Arabia.

Behind this all, though, is our weak leader, completely out of touch with the reality of the situation. As Fernandez points out in his "Little Green Men" article, "None of this has escaped Russian, Chinese or radical Islamic notice.  They have got the president’s obvious limits down pat. Obama’s approach to aggression is to give proxies a bunch of weapons and training at arms length, then 'run out the clock'." More to the point is J.R. Nyquist, who writes:

The poor blameless Chinese and Russian militarists are Obama's “victims.” Yet if Obama is so wicked, then why did the “excellent Polish analyst” cited by Cernea say the Russians must act before Obama’s second term is up? Perhaps Obama isn’t an imperialist after all. Perhaps, for Russia and China, he represents an opportunity, a strategic opening, that Moscow must soon act upon. And yes, there is danger of war. But this danger is not because of Obama’s imperialism but on account of Obama’s weakness.

The rural roads in the Ukraine and Russia will soon dry out to be passable to armored vehicles, so perhaps the next few weeks will show us if this indirect war will become more direct.