Former Australian Army officer David Kilcullen has been over the years Chief Strategist ofOffice of the Coordinator for Counterterrorism to the US State Department in 2005-2006, staff member of General David Petraeus in 2007-2008 e Special Adivisor for Counterinsurgency by Condoleezza Rice, also distinguishing himself as one of the most important world experts in guerrilla and counter-insurgency techniques.
In March 2020 Kilcullen published the book "The Dragons and the Snakes: How the Rest Learned to Fight the West" (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2020) which basically drew an important line to take stock as much as possible objective of the last twenty years of military history and of the western decline - undeniable - in the primacy of weapons and strategic doctrine.
The end of the Cold War, military commitments in the unipolar world (above all the 1991 Gulf War), the fight against international terrorism and the transformations of the globalized world have radically changed the approach of the United States, and with them of European allies. , compared to the Kriegsphänomen of Klausewitzian memory.
The conduct of the war, or rather its strategic conception on the American side, is expressed through the technological dominance and the inter-force integration of the land, naval and air components; Darwinism applied to plology and military strategy - which represents the specific and interesting element of Kilcullen's approach to the historical-military "problem" - shows, however, that the evolution of the war concept of the American superpower and its allies triggers a “Survival instinct” and the consequent “counter-evolution” of the strategies and tactics of the adversaries, whether they are state actors (Russia and China above all) or non-state actors (terrorist groups such as the Islamic State and organized crime).
La Liminal Warfare chosen by the Russian Federation is a strategy that is linked to the "Darwinian" evolution of US war theory and the tools to counter it, in an equal but parallel way to the "war without limits" theorized by Chinese officers Quiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui.
Compared to the Chinese model, which is the expression of an all-encompassing doctrine of the concept of "conflict" and therefore also extended to non-military or extra-military sectors of political action, what Kilcullen calls Liminal Warfare it is a strategic option that bases its success on the "calculated risk" of the opponent's reaction. What this strategy is based on is soon said by simply reporting the definition of "liminal" according to the vocabulary: fact or phenomenon at the level of the threshold of consciousness and perception.
La Liminal Warfare has the fulcrum of the action in a "transition phase" which is, in essence, the preparatory one for the opponent but which for the Russians constitutes not the beginning of the conflict but the principle of "decision" and that is the culminating moment .
Some examples: in the conflict against Georgia in 2008, Russian troops had illegally crossed the border before 7 August, that is the day on which the Georgian forces, responding to the attacks of the Ossetian separatist militias, had officially created the "casus belli" between Moscow and Tbilisi. Consequently, even before the war itself began, the Russians found themselves in an advantageous position not only to crush the Georgians militarily along the border of the breakaway regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, putting them at risk of being bypassed, but even politically such as to induce Western powers - in particular the USA, the United Kingdom and France - to avoid any reaction that went beyond generic diplomatic condemnations.
In 2014 in Crimea the protests of the civilian population against the central government of Kiev were "induced" not only by pro-Russian elements but directly by the men of the Moscow services, to then favor the arrival of the so-called "green men", teams of armed men and also equipped with heavy vehicles without identification marks (but in fact regular Russian soldiers) who in a few days occupied the main strategic points (institutional headquarters, civil and military infrastructures) of the Crimean peninsula.
In October 2015 in Syria, the Russians officially intervened on the ground to fight - moreover successfully - against the Islamic State but also supporting the government of Bashar al-Assad, at that time in crisis in the face of the defeats suffered against the rebels. and leading to the reconquest of Aleppo, a strategic city in the hands of the Free Syrian Army. Not to mention that the military campaign in Syria has allowed, albeit to a limited extent, the Russians to strengthen their presence in the Mediterranean Levant also from a military-naval point of view with the maintenance of "warm seas", a strategic objective historically pursued by Russia since time. of Peter the Great.
Now, if it is true that war responds to the physical principle according to which every action provokes an equal and opposite reaction, so that an offensive effort provokes a similar defensive effort to neutralize it, the Liminal Warfare it tends to subvert the "physical laws" of the war by anticipating the moment of decision, and therefore the annihilation of the defender, and making him precede the formation of the opponent's reaction. It is clearly a strategy that structures, in the most classic Clausewitzian form (in continuity with the massive study that the Prussian general and war theorist has been doing especially in the Soviet Union), its action in the context of a "vertical escalation" of the conflict by setting the limit - always calculated in advance - not to trigger military responses from the enemy. This is always true - or in any case it has always been so far - when by "enemy" we must mean the USA and its main allies while the reaction of the "territorial" enemy is always considered and the aim is to neutralize it before it happens. or annihilate it if it occurs. In this the cases of Georgia and Ukraine are emblematic.
Likewise, it must be considered that the "liminal war" is not a strategy conceived for the immediate achievement of the political ends that a state - in this case Russia - sets itself but fully responds to the theory of limited conflict and that which the general and geopolitical Italian Carlo Jean has renamed "artichoke theory" and that is the achievement of objectives through intermediate stages. In this case, the Russian military commitment in Syria was emblematic as it is also that implemented through the mercenaries of the Wagner Group in Libya which, in essence, allowed Moscow to dictate the times and methods of pacification in Cyrenaica and therefore to play a important game at the negotiating table.
What is the purpose of the Liminal Warfare it is easy to say: allow Russia to always negotiate from a position of strength with the West. This is because Moscow strategists are well aware that, at least in the current state and in the medium to long term, it will be impossible for Russia to challenge the US on a conventional level.
It is a compromise solution for Russian politics but one that has its proven effectiveness in the global scenario of imperfect unipolarity.
Photo: Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation
