Liminal Manoeuvre and Conceptual Envelopment: Russian and Chinese Non-Conventional Responses to Western Military Dominance since 1991

Abstract

This article summarises key arguments from the author’s work, in The Dragons and the Snakes: How the Rest Learned to Fight the West, on adaptive responses to Western conventional superiority since the end of the Cold War in 1991. It argues that US and Allied dominance in one particular, narrowly-defined, extremely expensive and extraordinarily technology-dependent form of battlefield manoeuvre forced all adversaries, state and non-state, to adapt in order to survive. The Russian response produced an emerging form of ambiguous warfare the author describes as ‘liminal manoeuvre’, which seeks to ride the threshold of detectability and present an ambiguous signature to Western intelligence systems and decision-makers, before launching rapid combat operations to seize key objectives, then de-escalate tension. The aim is to enable a negotiated solution, using objectives seized as bargaining chips. The Chinese response, which the author calls ‘conceptual envelopment’, expands the definition of war to include trans-military and non-military activities that Western planners may struggle to recognise as warfare at all, until too late. The implications for future inter-state warfare include greater risk of miscalculation, declining effectiveness of the Western military model, challenges in prioritisation of threats, and the need for a mix of conventional and non-conventional capabilities as part of the Western response