Military Review English Edition May-June 2016 | Page 21

UNCONVENTIONAL ART

asymmetrically and stupid.”4 While the implication of
this statement is that no military should ever engage
the U.S. military in a balanced, conventional fight, the
U.S. military always has organized its staffing, equipping, and doctrine around a symmetric threat. U.S.
military forces conduct what historian
Russell F. Weigley dubbed in 1973
“the American way of war,” based on
“a strategy of attrition.”5 Although it
evolved into what Max Boot would describe in 2003 as “a new American way
of war,” U.S. forces, nonetheless, still
organize around a symmetric threat.6
The American way of war now emphasizes technological overmatch, overwhelming precision firepower, and the
offense. This understanding treats war
as a narrow and specific activity of violence in isolation from other elements
of national power.7
Returning to McMaster’s belief that
no rational actor, of a nation-state or
any other group, would go toe-to-toe
with the U.S. military, asymmetric
warfare suggests that weaker adversaries will counter the United States’
power by excelling in areas where the
United States performs weakly. In
many instances, adversaries seek to
exploit U.S. reluctance to deviate from
relying on technological overmatch,
overwhelming firepower, and the
offense—which the United States considers its strengths in conventional war.

Though disavowed by the PLA after an international uproar, unconventional ways of war such as
those described in Unrestricted Warfare have been on
parade around the world—Russia’s seizure of Crimea
in 2014, the disintegration of Syria since 2011, the

Adversaries Probably Will
Fight Like They Paint
Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui,
colonels in the Chinese People’s
(Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)
Mona Lisa (1503–06), oil on poplar wood, by Leonardo da Vinci.
Liberation Army (PLA), argue in
Unrestricted Warfare: China’s Master Plan to
Destroy America (an English summary translation
various Paris attacks in 2015, PLA Unit 61398’s
based on a 1999 Chinese publication) that “hacking
theft of intellectual property throughout the past
into websites, targeting financial institutions, terrordecade, hacktivism against Sony in December 2014,
ism, using the media, and conducting urban warfare”
and irregular warfare by Muslim African radicals
are all potential ways unconventional warfare could
such as Boko Haram since 2009.9 The United States
asymmetrically match conventional militaries.8
has struggled to establish a lasting grand strategy to
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