The TWS ties in with China’s overall strategy, which is based on cost, efficiency, and cumulative long-term payoffs. China’s continued refusal to vacate at least two key areas it occupied in April-May 2020 demonstrates the success of the TWS in making gains at low cost. The growth of Chinese power has facilitated China’s actions in Ladakh and the polar regions. As power grows, it generates new goals, interests, and opportunities for tremendous and near-great powers. The TWS is aligned with the Chinese strategic tradition of being calculative and patient and exploiting opportunities to secure gains with the least resistance from opponents and low exertion on China’s part. The expansion of Chinese power has further reinforced and enabled these elements.
The origins of the TWS are rooted in ancient Chinese strategy, with its most fundamental tenet conforming to Sun Tzu’s proclamations that “the skillful leader subdues the enemy’s troops without any fighting” and that “All warfare is based on deception.” The TWS ensures this while guaranteeing efficiency by keeping costs low. It plays a crucial role in shaping the information environment in the run-up to and the conduct of an operation or mission. The modern TWS concept can be traced to the 1999 book Unrestricted Warfare, published by two researchers from the People’s Liberation Army (PLA). By 2002, the PLA’s position had evolved, and the TWS was expanded to cover legal, psychological, and media warfare.
Assessing Chinese conduct highlights that deception and efficiency are central to the TWS and has motivated the US to demonstrate considerable urgency in preventing the seizure of territory in the Arctic. The US military has deployed forces for multidomain operations in Alaska, which connects to the Arctic. This deployment is part of a more significant effort to counter Russia's and China's attempts to establish a territorial and military presence in the Arctic. Antarctica is also another likely zone for strategic competition. China’s actions in Ladakh and the Sino-Indian border are harbingers of territorial seizures in Antarctica, which is ripe for ‘salami slicing’. This issue is particularly relevant because China’s use of military power for land-based threats is often ignored in favour of its maritime expansion and naval threats in the Indo-Pacific. Antarctica is attractive because it lends itself to salami slicing and more significant territorial seizures through sufficient military means, with a distinct possibility of little to no resistance.
Despite China’s tenuous attempts to consolidate its position at sea, its artificial islands in the South China Sea (SCS) remain vulnerable to attack and would be ripe targets, especially from rival navies such as the US. China’s attempts to consolidate its hold on the sea and control the movement of shipping through the SCS and the East China Sea are challenging due to Beijing’s adoption of an anti-access/area denial strategy, which aims to achieve sea denial and sea control by pushing the US and allied navies away from its shores. Therefore, China’s growing navy and contentious maritime claims are attracting much attention.
This paper analyses how the TWS has been applied in Ladakh to seize territory. Further, it examines the potential application of the TWS in the Arctic and Antarctica, which the US Army appears to be alert to or preparing to tackle. The TWS lends itself to territorial salami slicing, achieving fait accomplis with greater ease. Fait accomplis involves using military power to seize contested territory without precipitating war and allowing the attacking state to make a “unilateral gain” without evoking a retaliatory response from the defender to undo that gain. Consequently, fait accomplis are implemented in increments and tend to be decisive. Thus, the TWS has broader implications beyond India’s experience in Ladakh and the Sino-Indian boundary.
Understanding China’s ‘Three Warfares’
From a military standpoint, the TWS aims for information supremacy—or information warfare—making it critical to successful military outcomes. Information warfare prioritizes gaining a first-mover advantage to secure an objective. While the TWS is fundamentally a derivative of Chinese strategic culture, which places a high premium on deception and efficiency, in its contemporary form, it is derived from the lessons that China has drawn from American military campaigns such as the first Gulf War (1991) and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization-led military campaign against Kosovo (1999).
