I’m filled with admiration for Ukraine’s daring and imaginative strike this weekend at high-value targets across the length and breadth of Russia. I don’t for a moment believe that, by itself, this one strategic blow will change the outcome of the war, but if the Ukrainians can continue to find fresh ways to extend the scope of the conflict, to inflict damage deep inside Russia, and to force the Russian armed forces to defend as well as attack, then the entire conflict might well take on a new and entirely different dimension. (RELATED: Russia’s Aerial Assault on Ukraine)
It’s much too early to judge the larger impact of the Ukrainian attack on the outcome of the war, or even, more narrowly, on the currently planned Istanbul negotiations. But it’s not too early to step back and consider what it signifies in terms of an emerging “new warfare,” one capable of challenging the Russians, to be sure, but also one that will surely challenge us as well.
I’m not talking about swarms of weaponized drones, although that’s been the focus of so much of this morning’s commentary. Every day they prove their worth, and the Ukrainians have leapt to the forefront in finding tactical — and now strategic uses — for what were once dismissed as mere toys. But instead of focusing our attention on the tools, no matter how cleverly developed and deployed, we should focus on the concept of attacking critical facilities, not just military facilities, but also crippling, well-orchestrated strikes at critical civilian infrastructure. (RELATED: Drones: We Aren’t Ready for the Next War)
The Guerrilla Warfare Myth
We once called it “guerrilla warfare,” and, while it exerted a powerful fascination, serious military professionals always dismissed it as merely a “sideshow,” a useful distraction for enemy forces, but never decisive. My childhood hero, Lawrence of Arabia, certainly did much to undermine the Ottoman Turks on the Arabian peninsula, but World War I in the Middle East was won by General Allenby’s regular forces, not Lawrence’s colorful band of Arab irregulars.
Winston Churchill delighted in notions of “setting Europe ablaze,” and, at a time when, after Dunkirk, Britain lacked the wherewithal to do anything other than pinprick attacks against Nazi-conquered Europe, commando raids and resistance movements commanded his attention — but he never mistook them as decisive. At war’s end, General Eisenhower fulsomely praised such outfits as the SAS and the OSS and the resistance fighters they enabled, but he also understood full well that the war was won by fleets of tanks and bombers and, in the end, the pounding of artillery and the grinding sacrifice of infantry.
Since World War II, a fiction has emerged to the effect that the guerrillas are undefeatable, be they Mao’s forces in late 1940s China, the Viet Minh/Viet Cong through two Vietnam Wars, or in any array of other conflicts across the globe. But Mao conquered China, not with guerrillas, but with divisions of regular soldiers armed with captured Japanese weapons — captured by the Russians when they swept into Manchuria in 1945. General Giap crushed the French at Dien Bien Phu with regular troops and, above all, a massive concentration of artillery, including modern U.S. 105mm howitzers captured by Mao from the Chinese Nationalists.
And contrary to carefully cultivated myth, the Viet Cong guerrillas didn’t win the Second Vietnam War. Instead, they were largely broken during and after the Tet Offensive, ceasing to be a significant military factor. The ultimate defeat of South Vietnam came at the hands of North Vietnamese regulars in a conventional invasion led by hundreds of modern Russian-supplied tanks, an assault invited by the withdrawal of U.S. support for our South Vietnamese allies. You can’t fight tanks when your anti-tank weapons lack ammunition and your attack aircraft lack spare parts.
The guerrillas, or insurgents, or whatever one wishes to call them, have triumphed in Third World countries largely because the battles were being fought in Third World countries, countries in which, in the end, no one but the locals cared deeply enough about the outcome to go on fighting. Walking away from Afghanistan was unfortunate, and the manner of the Biden-orchestrated final departure was a profound national embarrassment. But two decades after 9/11, we’d long passed the point where the American people cared deeply enough to make a difference.
The ‘New Warfare’
The “new warfare,” however, is very different, and not just because it’s sometimes pursued with drone attacks or exploding pagers. The real difference lies in the changing nature of modern society and the availability of truly crippling targets for irregular warfare. Consider, for example, the recent attacks on electrical infrastructure in southern France. Just over a week ago, saboteurs destroyed two electricity substations, one in Nice, one in Cannes, the latter blacking out the final day of the Cannes Film Festival, and, overall, depriving nearly 200,000 homes and businesses of power. The leftist saboteurs proclaimed adherence to a grab-bag of causes, starting with support for Hamas, but ranging across the usual progressive preoccupations.
These attacks were the work of amateurs, albeit well-organized amateurs. They shouldn’t be dismissed for this reason. As we’ve witnessed recently in this country, from the murders of Israeli embassy staff in D.C. to this weekend’s firebomb attacks in Boulder, Colorado, there is a rising tide of lethal violence being perpetrated by such amateurs. Moreover, at the next level, the various permutations of Antifa can no longer simply be viewed as amateurs — within their ranks, there’s a growing cadre of genuine terrorists. (RELATED: ‘Broken Windows’ and the Terrorism of Small Things)
Arguably, the larger concern must be the potential for multi-level organized attacks akin to what the Ukrainians have just carried out in Russia. While they had to smuggle their attack drones into and across Russia to put them into position, what about the swathes of agricultural land and other properties purchased in this country by Chinese government front organizations, some of them within easy striking distance of some of our most vital military facilities? It’s not hard to conceive of these as the bases for similar drone attacks.
China and ‘New Warfare’ Strategies
I’ve written before in these pages about the need to think about a potential Pacific war in broader terms than a simple naval gunfight around the Taiwan Straits. That’s scary enough, and, as Xi Jinping’s 2027 deadline for “resolution” of the Taiwan issue looms, the U.S. Navy is scrambling to prepare for such an eventuality.
But what if the prelude to such an attack takes place, not in and around Taiwan, but through a wave of deniable attacks across the U.S. homeland?
The Ukrainian intelligence service, we are told, spent some 18 months preparing this weekend’s attack. The Israelis devoted a significant amount of time and they’re much-vaunted intelligence capabilities in putting together the pager attack. We kid ourselves if we assume that the Chinese Ministry of State Security is incapable of such things, and potentially on a much grander scale.
We also kid ourselves if we assume that they wouldn’t try, or, at the very least, that they’re not in the business of crafting a novel kind of deterrence. A current American Spectator essay, Kevin Cohen’s “Cuba Now Represents a Major Threat,” makes this very point. Writing of the expanding Chinese, Russian, and Iranian presence in Cuba, Cohen observes: “They are constructing real-time capabilities within reach of the U.S. mainland. Their combined presence suggests a new doctrine of proximity-based deterrence and hybrid warfare emerging just offshore.” Cohen further notes that Cuba now offers “a frontline concern” and “an active platform for adversaries.” (RELATED: Cuba Now Represents a Major Threat)
We would do well to heed Cohen’s warning, and we would do better still to view it in the context of steadily expanding Chinese, Russian, and Iranian influence operations across Africa and in Latin America. Even Antarctica now seems to be a target of expanded Chinese interest.
In other words, we’re a long way — a very long way — from a localized conflict on the far side of the Pacific Ocean. Xi Jinping has made no secret of his desire to reorder China’s place in the world, sweeping the U.S. aside, a prospect that assumes a greater military dimension even as China’s economy runs increasingly into trouble. If you can’t supplant the U.S. through economic competition, then recourse to “other means” becomes more urgent.
But whether we think in terms of suffering an actual attack or simply having our hands tied via Cohen’s “novel kind of deterrence,” we should think very clearly about the challenge demonstrated by Ukraine’s action this weekend. In his book, Hue: 1968, journalist Mark Bowden (of Blackhawk Down fame) quotes an arresting exchange between a congressman and an air force general. The congressman asks the general what he needs to whip the North Vietnamese, and the general simply answers, “Targets — we need targets!”
Bombing easily rebuilt bridges, wooden bridges on the Ho Chi Minh trail, required resources all out of proportion to the results. So, too, bombing caves in Tora Bora. A modern, highly-integrated, highly electrified, and computerized society such as our own, however, offers the most target-rich of target-rich environments. An open society where military assets exist cheek-by-jowl with interstate highways makes the Ukrainian achievement look like child’s play.
It’s not drones, then, or any other clever device that should arrest our attention, but rather the degree of our interdependency and the vulnerability of our critical infrastructure to even the simplest of attacks. The “new warfare” answers the general’s plaintive quest for targets with a richness of which he could never have dreamed, targets accessible by the simplest of weapons. By all means, let’s see if we can build a “Golden Dome” to protect ourselves against nuclear-tipped missiles, but let’s also reckon with drone attacks on our own air force bases, or any of a hundred and one other simple scenarios. (RELATED: Could Trump’s Golden Dome Fulfill Ronald Reagan’s Dream?)
Witnessing what the Ukrainians just did to the Russians, we’d best start thinking hard about what we’re going to do to protect ourselves — before it’s too late.
READ MORE from James H. McGee:
Mirrors Instead of Windows: America’s Failed Foreign Policy Perspective
Splitting Xi From Putin: A Comfortable Delusion
James H. McGee retired in 2018 after nearly four decades as a national security and counter-terrorism professional, working primarily in the nuclear security field. Since retiring, he’s begun a second career as a thriller writer. His 2022 novel, Letter of Reprisal, tells the tale of a desperate mission to destroy a Chinese bioweapon facility hidden in the heart of the central African conflict region. A soon-to-be-published sequel, The Zebras from Minsk, finds the Reprisal team fighting against Chinese and Russian-backed terrorists who’ve infiltrated our southern border in a conspiracy that ranges from West Virginia to the forests of Belarus. You can find Letter of Reprisal on Amazon in both Kindle and paperback editions, and on Kindle Unlimited.