Interview with Professor Arduino Paniccia, professor of strategic studies, director of the School of International Economic Competition of Venice - ASCE and analyst of the Military Magazine, on issues of foreign policy, asymmetric warfare, negative peace, sufficient victory and BRICS.
The general theory of systems is a concept formulated to analyze the processes of social actors in the context of their own environmental contexts. The study of international dynamics is based on the authoritativeness of foreign policy and on the economic stability of each individual state, namely the geopolitical condition, the impact of technology on the economy, communications, transport and the implementation of weapon, and how much these affect the distribution of power. This seems applicable to the Russian Federation, but the latter will be able to complete the viaticum to rise to the status of superpower?
Strategy is a method that inevitably leads to formulate a perimeter of the reality in which we operate. This reality is a system where the whole is superior to the sum of the parts, and therefore can not be traced back to a mere set of elements. But it would be a mistake to assume that the strategy to be followed and the final result can be deduced from the strategic method and from the model.
The strength of a state within the international system is therefore given not only by its military strength, but by a much larger set of factors where elements of a not necessarily military character, such as those mentioned, become fundamental. However, we consider that neither China nor Russia nor the United States has renounced the maintenance of not only nuclear arsenals but also powerful conventional armed forces. They give them a significant contractual weight at the political-diplomatic level and, increasing their international prestige, they also increase their credibility on a financial and monetary level.
As for the Russian Federation, we must first of all say that it has directly inherited from the Soviet Union a global nuclear capacity that, even if weakened, has not disappeared. And the Russians liked to remember it in March and September last, with the launch of an ICBM and an SLBM. Even the Russian conventional forces are far from disappearing, and for Russia the war industry is a fundamental voice of exports, which are not based solely on energy or raw materials supplies. Currently, the Russian strategy seems to be more a "great tactic", based above all on the containment of the western drive towards the east in Ukraine and in Georgia, and on the creation of a new system of "buffer states" between the West and Russia. But certainly, Russia aims to maintain its role as a power. For the United States and Europe, the worst case scenario is emerging, which is the Russian Federation, which is increasingly part of a Euro-Asian block along with China. It is necessary to have the courage to admit that the Russian-Chinese alliance now has more strategic than tactical aspects.
The effectiveness of the strategy of terrorists in the asymmetric war is based on the ability to convert time and space to its cause, combined with a competence in the use of free technologies, made available by the processes of globalization, which minimize costs and at the same time they amplify the effects of the attacks. Has Isis therefore learned the right strategy to oppose the West?
The "asymmetric war" is an ancient concept (David-Goliath), but it certainly took on new meaning after the "stalemate" between the two superpowers due to the nuclear option that made it impossible to resolve the conflict at the traditional military level, which had made to rediscover the guerrilla as a viable option, see China and Cuba. But today I think that more than "asymmetric war" we should talk about "unconventional war".
As non-conventional weapons of war, in addition to the classic terrorism, we must consider above all economic competition, information warfare, cyberwarfare and media manipulation. These are elements that can and are generally used in the context of a common strategy. The terrorist fact has always been strongly intertwined with media manipulation, which is why the more bloody it is, the more effective it is. The 11 September 2001 was a blatant example. Or the obscuring of "moderate" Muslim sites by Islamic hackers. Here we are at the information war: getting information for oneself and denying information to the adversary.
One of the most serious mistakes of the past American strategy of "war on terror" was the belief that it could fight terrorism with traditional military interventions. Here a certain media component and public internal and external consent, on the emotional wave of "one must immediately do something" and "one must be paid immediately to someone", was important in the beginning of the Afghan adventure, which took undertake despite the teachings of the nineteenth-century English wars and above all the Soviet intervention of twenty years earlier. The intervention in Iraq was the result of more elaborate geopolitical theories, due to the fact that it wanted to create in the area a pro-western oil country that would be a counterbalance to the real countries that should have been occupied and that they were, yes, the real "sanctuaries" of al-Qaeda. And then there is all the talk related to the passage, so well argued by Rupert Smith, from the industrial war to the "war among the people": occupying a territory nowadays is more a passive than a gain.
Unconventional war is not recognizable as a war as such: terrorism, cyberwar, economic competition do not have a declaration of war and a peace treaty. It becomes rather a generic condition of daily conflict, interminable. The cyberwar in particular has become and will become more and more decisive, within the framework of the "war without limits" conceptualized by the Chinese Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui. In short, the unconventional war has led to a gray area where there is no longer the white of peace and the black of war, but a mixture of the two.
In his book "Transforming the Future", he mentions Sun Tsu in the quote that "a state without strategy is a dead state". An assumption that refers to the war, and in fact to the use of force. Does this mean endorsing the concept of "negative peace", referring to those states that are not able to correctly regulate the public force against the common delinquency and the subversive elements?
Here we must consider two points well.
First point: the "force" is an unavoidable factor of civil coexistence: without the monopoly of force by law enforcement, and the play on words is revealing, there would be chaos. This also at the international level. I do not think it is possible for merchant sailors to defend themselves against Somali pirates without navies or contractors on board. History has so far always shown that, no matter how idealistic we want to be, we always inevitably end up in the "si vis pacem, para bellum". Looking at reality with disenchanted eyes, we can not but see that conflict is always a "continuation of politics by other means" in the life of nations.
Second point: the strategy has nothing inevitably related to arms. Summing up as much as possible, strategy is a method to achieve an uncertain goal within a complex environment. For decades, we are talking about "strategies" of management, marketing and communication. Italy today is declining above all because it does not have a real and concrete strategy of economic and industrial policy projected in the long term. But the strategy we are talking about here is not military, it's cheap. I wrote a book years ago with Luttwak, "The new leaders", in which I showed how concepts that superficially consider themselves "military" then they are not at all, indeed they even influence the life of individual companies, individual organizations and the companies themselves.
The new world order is a direct consequence of globalization and multipolarity, with the affirmation of once weak economies such as those of China and India. It is probable that the areas of influence will spread to Central Asia, the South China Sea and the BRICS, where the new balance of the planet will develop in a stage of financial, political and military fluidity. The radical political, social and cultural differences do not seem to allow a coherent integration between the emerging and the dominant countries, therefore the not easy coexistence will disperse the power in different centers. Will the birth of the apolar world, or the incapacity of the Great to manage the logic of economics and politics?
In my last essay "Transforming the Future", I affirmed the world is not going from unipolarity to multipolarity, but from unipolarity to the oligarchy. Globalization as a positive force of unification, as conceived by many after the fall of the Berlin Wall, has not come true: globalization has remained unfinished, indeed, there has been a return of states and nations.
There are three world hegemonic powers, the one I wanted to define as the "major triad": United States, China and Russia. The first characteristic that distinguishes them is that, although having to take into account the presence of the other global and regional players, they do not suffer from the hegemony of other powers. These three powers each have a factor that makes them particularly strong: for the United States it is about the ability to project its military force anywhere in the globe in the space of not days, but even hours. China has become the first industrial power in the world, and this is essentially its strength. Russia bases its power above all on energy supplies and raw materials.
There are also three other realities, which instead form a "minor triad". These are India, the European Union and Japan. It is a "minor triad" because the power of these states (even if the EU is not a state, indeed, it is not clear what it is), is limited by structural situations: India by the presence of a very strong minority Muslim, Japan from the proximity to China and the European Union from all the contradictions and problems that we know well. These realities can not express an international politics and totally free power.
So, in my opinion, we will not go towards an unpopularity, we are not dealing with a group of subjects all more or less endowed with the same power; there will still be stronger entities that can exercise a hegemony over weaker entities, and therefore, however confused, a certain "new order".
Israel's "sufficient victory" over Hamas in the "Protective Flag" operation, and the withdrawal of Russian soldiers from the Rostov region on the Ukrainian border, seem to be the practical application of John Nash's game theory. Are these acts of distention or a precise strategy to assert their regional power?
I am not in favor of a mathematization of the strategy. As Sun Tzu used to say, strategy is the path of paradox. You choose to advance along the Ardennes because military logic wants them not to be suitable terrain for an offensive. And you win.
I am clausewitziano, not Jominiano. Let's not forget McNamara and Vietnam. The computer models of the Pentagon, based on game theory, were defeated by an enemy who referred to strategic concepts hundreds and hundreds of years old. Any mathematical model, however logically consequent, is always based on assumptions, on indispensable axioms to simplify and make the reality so comprehensible so as to be able to mathemize it, through a process of abstraction from the accidentality of details. A minimum change is needed in those that in mathematical analysis are called "boundary conditions" because the exact same equation leads to totally different results.
Furthermore, the concept of "rationality" should be defined. The Cartesian, abstracious and mathematical rationality of the West is certainly not the rationality of the Confucian Orient, not to mention the Islamic East. The pay-off of the game for an opponent is oil, for the other the Paradise. A difference not just.
Giovanni Caprara
