Margaret Peters 3:48

Welcome back. I know it feels like January started 4000 years ago, and I hope you all are doing well, and everybody here in LA has survived the fires. Okay, I'm very excited to have Fiona Cunningham here today. Fiona Cunningham is an assistant professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania, and she studies technology and international security, and with a focus on China, her book that we're going to discuss today under the Nuclear Shadow, China's Information Age weapons and International Security. Well, she will talk more. She also she's had fellowships at all sorts of prestigious universities, Yale, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Stanford, Harvard and Renmin University in China. And she earned her PhD from MIT in 2018. Before she was at Penn she was at GW University in Washington, DC. So thank you very much for joining us all the way from Australia at 730 in the morning tomorrow on Thursday. So she's already living in the future. We're very excited to have you, so I will let you take it away.

Fiona Cunningham 5:17

Fabulous. Thank you so much, Professor Peters, for that very, very warm welcome. I will share my slides so I have a little bit of a visual aid. Is everyone able to see those? I'm going to guess that. So, yes, okay, well, it is an absolute pleasure for me to be talking about my book under the Nuclear Shadow, China's Information Age weapons and international security. It was just published a couple of weeks ago by Princeton University Press, and it's now available either from Princeton and at the end of the talk, I'll give you a flyer with a discount code, and also from Amazon. And so what I thought I would do is to spend about 20 minutes to give you a sense of what the book is about, why you should read it. And so I'll begin by telling you the research question that is driving the book. I will then go through two key ideas, strategic substitution and Information Age weapons. In the book, I'll briefly explain my theory of strategic substitution. I'll then tell you a little bit about the research design and the sources that I use in the book, and I'll tell you a little bit about each of the empirical chapters that cover China's decision making, about its nuclear weapons, about its conventional missile force, its offensive cyber operations and counter space capabilities, and I'll conclude the talk with an evaluation of how China's foreign policy decision making about this issue, area of strategic deterrence looks now that it's been about 25 years since it adopted the approach that I'll talk about in this In this talk and some of books contributions to the IR scholarship. So the book is essentially about how states cope with the dilemma that the nuclear age has created for all of them if they want to continue to use military capabilities to coerce their nuclear armed adversaries. And that is, how can they actually do that without triggering a catastrophic nuclear war, and specifically in the case of China, how can they gain coercive leverage against their adversaries if they haven't done what it is that most other nuclear armed states have done when they're coping with This dilemma? So most states have either relied on very sophisticated, large conventional military capabilities that enable them to threaten to achieve decisive conventional victories against their adversaries. And the kind of arch typical case of this is the US and the post cold war, or alternatively, they've gone the route of countries like Pakistan or Russia, as we've seen quite viscerally in the case of Ukraine, where they threatened to use nuclear weapons first and escalate a conflict. And China hasn't taken either of these approaches. And this led a lot of commentators to be quite suspicious of China's nuclear strategy, thinking that it had a kind of secret posture that looked like Pakistan's or Russia's. But in this book, I argue that China actually took a third approach, which I call strategic substitution, represented up there on the slide as what it might look like if a country decided to conduct a cyber attack that shut down portions of the electricity grid in Manhattan. But this picture, I assure you, was from one that was accidental rather than deliberate. Okay, so what is strategic substitution? Strategic substitution, at its core, involves threatening to use non nuclear weapons that can have strategic effects. So that's effects at the kind of decision maker level, rather than effects that occur at a kind of tactical battlefield level in a military conflict. And those threats to use those non nuclear weapons are paired with a posture for a country's nuclear weapons that threaten retaliation only in the event of a nuclear attack, and so that's often referred to as an assured retaliation posture, or a no first use nuclear policy. And combining these two capabilities in that way enables a country to increase the risk of escalation, including all the way up to the nuclear level, but to do so without making explicit nuclear threats. In fact, what strategic substitution actually does is to dare an adversary armed with nuclear weapons to be the first one to take that major step of crossing the nuclear threshold in response to these provocative non nuclear attacks. So as a result, this approach promises to serve as a substitute to those two more traditional options that I laid out on the previous set of slides of either threatening nuclear first use or to impose these decisive conventional victories. And so this is an unproven approach. The only country to have adopted. It is China, and China chose to gamble on this unproven approach for two reasons. First, the capabilities that it had developed in the Cold War period prior to facing this limited war dilemma in the post Cold War period actually didn't thumb the scales in favor of either a nuclear first use option or a conventional victory option. Secondly, is that whenever China was searching for ways to increase the level of coercive leverage it had, it was prioritizing capabilities that were going to give it that leverage quickly and credibly. And as I'll explain later in the talk, those kinds of priorities of speed and credibility favor Information Age weapons over these traditional options of nuclear first use or decisive conventional victories, which are slower and less credible than searching for these substitutes. But it's important to highlight what strategic substitution is not. It does not mean the country only uses its information age weapons for coercive leverage. It can use them for war fighting as well. It just is primarily pursuing them these for these coercive functions. And it also doesn't preclude a country from building up in the background conventional and nuclear capabilities that eventually could enable it to adopt these more traditional options in the future. So another key idea in the book is that information age weapons can be used to implement this option of strategic substitution, because they can provide states with coercive leverage. Information Age weapons is my shorthand for precision conventional missiles that are going to rely on information networks or radars, satellites, etc, for guidance to their targets, and that's represented by the central kind of image on the slide and on the left and right hand side of the slide for counter space or offensive cyber capabilities that disrupt an adversary's use of its satellites or its computer networks, respectively. But I do just want to quickly highlight I'm not here talking about cyber attacks that are used for espionage or alternatively to steel data. This is about disrupting the user of a computer networks ability to continue to use it in its normal function. So what all answers to the limited war dilemma must do is to give states coercive leverage, or bargaining leverage, the ability to impose costs on an adversary in ways that are going to shape its future. Decision making in peace time, in a crisis or in a conflict and Information Age weapons look promising for this role, because some but not all of them share three key features that enable them to threaten escalation and have these effects at the decision maker level, these strategic effects. The first is that they can have large scale damaging effects on an adversary's military, its society, its allies, that can't be defended against very easily. The second feature is that they cross salient thresholds, and so these the kind of tacit thresholds that are too belligerents involved in a conflict might place on the intensity, the geographical scope the parties are to a conflict. And finally, the use of these capabilities can increase the risk of nuclear war, because each one of those weapons are up on the slide there can be used either to deliver nuclear weapons, in the case of conventional missiles, or in the case of all three capabilities, to make attacks on an adversary's nuclear weapons or their supporting capabilities. So they can kind of manipulate the risk of nuclear war because of these technological linkages. Together, these three features enable some of those information age weapons to enable states to use them to threaten escalation without actually using their nuclear weapons, but they need to be postured or sort of arrayed, organized explicitly to create those escalation risks. And states can either dial up those escalation risks by selecting what I call a brickmanship posture, or dial them down by adopting what I call a calibrated escalation posture that really tries to manage those escalation risks more carefullySo this strategic substitution idea might sound like a really fantastic way of sort of walking the line between too much and too little coercive pressure on an adversary. To some of you, it might sound like a terrible way to either massively under calculate how much pressure to apply to an adversary or over calculate to some of you. So this is one of these options that like the conventional and nuclear options for coping. With a limited war dilemma has pros and cons. It's not a silver bullet, but rather one that countries will select when they have a certain set of assessments about the options available. So why would China prefer this option over the others? In the book, I develop a theory of strategic substitution that explains why, as with most political science theories, has three basic components, a leverage deficit, the independent variable that initiates a search for coercive leverage, which is the mechanism and the gray sort of nodes in the on the chart on the slide, and that results in the pursuit of an information age weapon, which is the dependent variable on the right hand side of the slide. So to explain those variables in a little bit more detail, leverage deficits emerge when a country's threat environment changes, perhaps because of a crisis or a conflict with an adversary, and that can reveal a problem to them, that their existing military capabilities are going to be inadequate for the type of war or type of adversary they're going to face in the future, and ignoring that leverage deficit means that if some dispute with that adversary arises in the future, they're either going to have to make humiliating diplomatic concessions, or they're going to have to fight a war that they're most likely to lose. So most countries in this circumstances will go and search for additional leverage, and when searching for additional leverage to redress these deficits, different priorities that China had have left it down to, or sort of let it down a different pathway from its nuclear peers that might have selected those two options that are kind of grayed out in the middle of The slide of nuclear first use or a conventional build up. And the reason for this is that some states are particularly sensitive to the disadvantages of the conventional option or the nuclear option. In China's case, it was sensitive to the disadvantages of both, because in the conventional case, it was conventionally inferior to the United States its primary adversary, and in the case of the nuclear option, it doubted the credibility of threatening nuclear use when faced with a nuclear armed adversary. So given these sensitivities information age, weapons become appealing substitutes, because their advantages are actually the precise opposite of the disadvantages of the conventional and nuclear options. You can acquire them much faster than correcting an unfavorable conventional military balance, and threatening to use them is going to be more credible than threatening nuclear use because they're simply far less destructive. So after a state decides it's going to pursue one of these information age weapons are for coercive leverage. The next thing they need to do to successfully complete that search for leverage is to adopt a coercive force posture. And you'll see on the slide there some nice little icons of the brinkmanship and calibrated escalation options. So I test the theory of strategic substitution in the book, using comparative case studies of all of the substitutes that China has pursued since it began to face the limited war dilemma in 1995 that year, the Taiwan Strait crisis had faced confirmed China's leaders that they were going to need to fight are prepared to fight a limited war in their periphery, in which a nuclear power with a very powerful conventional military, the United States was going to intervene. Before that, there was actually some ambiguity of what might happen if a Taiwan straight contingency were to occur. Would the United States come to Taiwan's assistance, or would it let that kind of ambiguous commitment lapse, and so that crisis confronted China's leaders with a pretty severe leverage deficit. It then, and I'm here sort of looking at the center column of table up on the slide the leverage deficits underneath the Taiwan Strait crisis, you'll see the Belgrade embassy bombing. That was the second leverage deficit China faced in 1999 and it revealed even more extensive gaps in its capabilities after the US accidentally bombed its embassy in Belgrade during the Kosovo air war. And to this day, many Chinese leaders continue to believe that this was actually an intentional attack rather than an accident. So my analysis in each chapter actually begins much earlier than the year of pursuit listed in the second column of the table on the slide. And I do so for two reasons. One is to demonstrate that China's leaders didn't face leverage deficits before they actually encountered these Taiwan Strait crisis or Belgrade embassy bombing, but also that they had the technological basis to actually make a decision to pursue Information Age weapons prior to those leverage deficit, which helps me to sort of rule out the possibility that this is just a story of technological availability that drove these decisions, to adopt these capabilities. Moving on to the posture column, which is about four for long on the slide, I also look at how China planned to use these capabilities, since an important part of the argument is to show that China was primarily pursuing these weapons for coercion, even if it was also planning to use them for war fighting, and this is part of how I test the theory against the alternative explanation that China was simply seeking the conventional answer to the nuclear, sorry, to the limited war dilemma, or that we can better explain the pursuit of these capabilities using alternative explanations of military innovation or diffusion. The final thing I did is to pair each of the Information Age weapons together with a shadow case that had a similar military effects and could also have plausibly being pursued for coercive leverage. And these shadow cases provide a point of comparison for what it looks like when China pursues the capability for war, fighting and not coercion. And they also highlight some of the more contingent factors that led China to pursue certain capabilities as the substitutes that it did rather than others. So the book draws on a really unique set of sources to offer some, I think, unprecedented insights into decision making in Beijing and I acquired many of these sources during field work in China before the pandemic. I analyzed hundreds of Chinese language sources, like this chronology of military and political leaders, lives of former Central Military Commission vice chairman, Liu Huaqing. I also looked at biographies of decision makers, like that of nuclear scientists and defense industry Leader Zhu Guan Yang, on the slide and in the center of the slide research publications from China's People's Liberation Army. But I conducted interviews with over 50 Chinese experts to inform my theoretical claims, and also to provide context for some of the empirical analysis based on the documents. So I'll give you some highlights from each of the empirical chapters, rather than kind of giving you the full set of content. The first empirical chapter of the book establishes the two constraints on China's search for leverage, which was that it was both conventionally inferior to the United States and its leaders, judged that China's nuclear threats wouldn't be credible to an adversary if it adopted a first use nuclear posture. It also examines three instances in which China's experts actually debated its nuclear policy, two that occurred concurrent with its leverage deficits in 1995 96 and 1999 and one debate as the Cold War ended. And actually that first debate about what China should do with its nuclear weapons as the cold war was ending, is well documented in the existing literature by a landmark article from Harvard professor Alistair Ian Johnson, he documented advocacy within China's People's Liberation Army of a limited nuclear deterrence posture that essentially was looking like one well geared towards threatening nuclear first use. But in the more recent sources that I was able to examine for the book, it shows that China's leaders actually also considered and debated whether actually, nuclear weapons were going to become obsolete in the post cold war era, because of what they were observing from us Soviet arms reductions. And when they finally decided to continue the nuclear posture that they had into the post cold war era, they downgraded a number of missile bases in the missile sorry, the military hierarchy because they had too few weapon sorry, too few personnel or weapons of too short a range, so sort of really materially demonstrating that this was not their capability of choice for the future that they anticipated facing in the post cold war era. So the first Information Age weapon that China pursued in the midst of the Taiwan Straits crisis in December of 1995 was a missile force that could hold at risk targets in both Taiwan as well as US forces in the region that Taiwan Strait crisis emerged when the US issued a visa to Taiwan's President Lee Teng Hui, China protested that visa issuance with missile tests that it launched into the Taiwan Strait. And following that, China's military leaders actually assessed that this was a pretty good way of deterring for the most towards independence, by Taiwan keeping the United States out of the conflict, if one were to occur, and it decided to build up a larger, longer range, more accurate missile, first armed with conventional warheads. But the reason why China actually had these missiles to test in that crisis in the first place is a more complicated tale. Organizational interests play an important role, which is part of, I think, the kind of contingency that influenced which information age weapons China ended up choosing to pursue. So in this case, the US pressured China to cancel short range conventional missile exports to the Middle East, and the second artillery, the organization that was tasked then only with operating China's nuclear missiles seized on this opportunity to find a role for itself in what it anticipated would be a future local war that wasn't going to go nuclear, and they wouldn't have a role in that, and that, as the missile based commanders, quote on the slide, said, would be not only his missile base, but also the whole missile forces gauntling Shame and deep humiliation if they couldn't do anything to assist. And so that was the kind of case they made, organizationally for acquiring this capability. China then pursued offensive cyber capabilities to gain coercive leverage after the Belgrade embassy bombing in 1999 a common judgment in China's People's Liberation Army at the time was that nuclear weapons weren't credible or useful, but information age, sorry, information deterrence involving cyber attacks against a more advanced and digitally dependent adversary would generate a lot of coercive leverage, and it would do it cheaply and quickly. Initially, China's cyber force posture had been pretty disorganized, lacking in oversight, and it's actually the only information age weapons capability that China adopted, delegated command and control arrangements that gave its operators quite a lot of free reign to do what they wanted, and that became a problem for ensuring that if China conducted cyber attacks, any blowback that it would receive, would it be only for things that its leaders had authorized? And this was an issue as China became more digitally dependent itself around 2010, onwards, and the cost of any blowback increased. And so at that point, we see a change in China in its force posture, from one of these brinkmanship postures, dialing up the escalation risks to a calibrated escalation posture that really tried to dial them back and get them under control, as the assessment of the military officer in the quote on the slide suggests, finally, I open the book with China's Dramatic test of an anti satellite weapon in 2007 was actually one of the reasons I got interested in this topic very long time ago, and that followed a decision a couple of years beforehand, as indicated on the slide by John zerman, China's top leader in the early 2000s to invest in counter space weapons for coercive leveraging conventional conflicts. And unlike China's other information age weapons, it has always envisaged using them in this more calibrated escalation manner, even before it had the capabilities and the organizational structures in place to do so, Chinese sources about counter space capabilities are actually the most explicit in their substitution logic, and they state quite clearly that space deterrence is much more credible than nuclear deterrence because it's more flexible, it focuses on military targets, and it doesn't directly cause a loss of life. So moving to wrap up, China has been doing strategic substitution for more than a quarter century now. China's leaders might see this novel answer to the limited war dilemma as a success, something they want to keep on doing, a stop gap until their conventional modernization is completed, or a failure that prompts it to actually think more about the nuclear option, the two big constraints on the effectiveness of Information Age weapons coercion that I've evaluated in the book are first that US responses have been designed to blunt China's coercive leverage, such as its greater investment in its space capabilities, standing up space the US Space Force, and in the missile sort of domain, its withdrawal from the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty. The second big constraint is that there's growing entanglement among China's Information Age weapons with nuclear forces. That makes it, I think, more difficult for China to manage escalation risks no matter how it postures these information age weapons. And this is clearest in the space case, as China has started to build out a satellite early warning system for its nuclear forces. So I'll wrap up just by I think emphasizing some of the key contributions of the book for the IAR scholarship. I think first, the book demonstrates how states can use emerging technology to plug gaps in their existing military capabilities. One of the second contributions is that it updates the literature on coercion among nuclear powers to account for changes in technology and an expansion in the number of states and the different characteristics in the nuclear club. And in doing so, it identifies a third way of coping with the limited war dilemma, this strategic substitution approach. And finally, I think it offers one of the most complete accounts you'll find of China's strategic weapons decision making in the literature and in IR. My final call, and the one reason I'm proud of this book is because I think we need more complete theories that can explain China's behavior, rather than treat it as an outlier, and this book, I think, attempts to do that, and I'm pleased with my efforts, even if they work more broadly in progress within the field. So here is a discount coupon if anybody is interested in purchasing the book, but I'll look forward to the discussion. Thanks.

Margaret Peters 30:44

Wonderful. Thank you so much, Fiona for the great presentation I'm going to give you. I'm going to ask some questions that are mostly things that you know, many of which are in the book, but we'll give you time to, like, highlight a little bit more about what's in the book versus what you can talk about in a short presentation. So my first question was thinking about brinksmanship versus calibrated escalation, and I was hoping you could one for our audience, just talk a little bit about those two different strategies a little bit more and then, um, just go over a little bit about why China decided to move from one posture to another at times?

Fiona Cunningham 31:29

Sure, so the difference between these two postures and again, um, not, not something I could have gone into in the talk, but very happy to expand it on, on it in this situation. Um, they build on, I think, pretty well established kind of logics of how you use military capabilities to escalate in the existing international relations literature. So one of them being this idea that escalation occurs like a slippery slope where basically you are trying to get both parties to lose control of that process of escalation. So that's the brinkmanship option. And then the other way of thinking about escalation is something that's much more controlled, where basically each of the two parties is going to make decisions to escalate the level of pain or risk that they're willing to tolerate until one of them reaches a run on the ladder where they're like, look, I simply cannot tolerate this anymore, given what's at stake, what we're barganing over. And so they're two quite different ways of using escalation risks to exert influence over your adversary's decision making. But we don't have a good sense of how you would actually engage in those sorts of methods of generating escalatory risk with these information age weapons. So in the book, I actually spend a little bit of time in each of the chapters explaining what does it actually look like, what does it require to use these capabilities in one way or another. And I break that down into sort of four components of the posture that you can adopt with these information aid weapons. So what kinds of capabilities do you need if you want to generate this rapid risk of escalation versus if you want to have this kind of calibrated and controlled escalation ladder? What kinds of doctrines like how you actually going to use these capabilities? What targets will you attack? Will you start with your calibrated escalation posture, with something that's pretty low level as a signal that you're going to go up the chain, up that ladder to more valuable targets, or are you going to, very quickly start doing provocative attacks in the brinkmanship space to try and get everybody as close to that cliff as possible? To use a sort of shelling analogy, sort of puff of wind comes along, both of you are going to fall off the edge, and your adversary is going to say, look, I simply can't tolerate this. There's organizational practices as well. How much authority you're willing to delegate to low level operators. In the case of space and cyber, you can also do so to private companies or vigilante hackers, rather than military forces, who have very tight levels of control over there are signaling aspects of how much you reveal to your adversary about your capabilities, how you plan to use them that in the case of brinkmanship, are very opaque. In the case of calibrated escalation, a much clearer so your adversary knows what's going on for the whole way up the ladder. So that's the kind of concept of what these these postures look like. I'm in the book. I don't provide a theory of posture choice. I instead suggest a couple of factors that might drive states towards one posture rather than another, and simply because that's too much to do in one book, but also that might be the kind of project that you're going to gain more bang for your buck doing if you actually look at a cross national suite rather than looking in a deep dive at one country. In China's case, though a couple of things influence their choices of one posture versus another. One of the very obvious ones is the availability of technology. So the calibrated escalation the latter posture requires very sophisticated capabilities where you can sort of tell what the effect of your missile strikes were, and for that, you might need a satellite that can image what military base you just attacked in Japan, or something like that. The other reason why China might have selected certain postures and not others has to do with civil military relations, or what in the China context, we often say, is party army relations, and that that is a function of the fact that China is a country that assert, or basically, the Chinese Communist Party asserts quite a tremendous degree of control over its military officers. And so all things being equal, it's going to prepare for a calibrated escalation posture that exerts a lot more control over how military force is going to be used, rather than delegating a lot of authority to its military operators, which is much more common in the brinkmanship sort of posture. The third reason, which I think is more novel that I identify in the book, though, is that if I myself, am very vulnerable in in particular space or insider space, then I'm going to be much more cautious about how I might actually want to use these capabilities, because I'm scared of the blowback that I might receive. And while a country can retaliate in any way, they don't have to retaliate for a cyber attack with another cyber attack. There's a kind of logic, if you like, or excuse me, an ability to limit the signal that you're sending if you retaliate in the same sort of language or the same set of capabilities in which you're attacked. And so as a result of that, if you happen to be very vulnerable in using these capability in this domain and to the similar sorts of capabilities you suggest yourself, then you may be much more cautious about using them. And we actually see this influencing China's decisions a lot in cyberspace, in which it switches its posture in 2012 through 2014 from a brigmanship to a calibrated escalation posture, because the country becomes more digitally dependent, and also in the counter space area, where China is always planning to have a very substantial space component for its military. And so it builds a force posture that kind of keeps that vulnerability in mind, as it's thinking about, at the same time attacking us space capabilities as well.

Margaret Peters 37:42

Great. Yeah, yeah, that was Thank you. That was a really awesome explanation of that. And so one another thought I have when I was reading the book that I think could also be good for the audience is, is there like a hierarchy, you know, in use of these different tools. Like, when I think about it, I feel like people are doing cyber attacks all the time. But like, of course, there's a lot of like, malicious actors and stuff who are just like trying to like malware, like, get information. Um, but it feels like cyber has become not as like, it's just sort of like a regular part of the game these days. It's almost like war games, like people doing joint exercises or something like that, versus like, I feel like, you know, doing anything in space would be sort of revolutionary in many ways, because space is so been so not weaponized for a long time. And then, of course, if you were going to actually launch a missile, that would be very provocative. But I was thinking, you know, is it the case now that is it harder to use cyber for deterrence or for compellants than it used to be because there's just so much noise in the cyberspace?

Fiona Cunningham 38:59

So I think it's a it's a terrific question, and I think it's helpful in answering this question to cast our minds back to about the year 1999 2000 if you were alive back then, and some of those listening may not be, but I was certainly alive at the time, and I At the time, we didn't really know what cyber attacks were going to look like, and Chinese decision makers wrote about them in that way, like this could be the sort of society paralyzing like Y2k, type of attack. And even back in I think it was around 2010 the US Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, and one of the first times the US has really spoken very publicly about cyber operations, talked about the risks of the US suffering what he called the cyber Pearl Harbor, where there would be large scale coordinated attacks on US critical infrastructure that would sort of paralyze the country. We have since learned exactly what it is that you just said that actually most of the cyber activity is happening below the threshold of armed conflict. It's a kind of gray zone to everyday nuisance sort of thing. And so hence, a lot of the cyber scholarship, as well as the US Cyber Command, has sort of discussed that the strategic effects like that. The big picture takeaway on cyber attacks is not cyber Pearl Harbor and these conflict sort of uses of the capability, but it is about the cumulative effect of these lower level cyber activities. Maybe they're attacks, maybe they're just intrusions, maybe their data theft, but it's adding all of that up that creates a lot of friction and ends up draining a lot of resources from digitally sophisticated countries to try and defend themselves from this kind of death by 1000 cuts. So what's interesting is that China's experts still so China expert community has read that literature, has looked at that data, and they seem pretty convinced that actually, the US has kind of got the right idea about them, and the scholars, of course, have the right idea about cyber capabilities and their you know, what effects they can have. But as I detail in the book, the People's Liberation Army has not got on board with this attitude towards cyber attacks just yet. Interestingly enough, they were watching the Ukraine war very carefully, and some of the publications that are starting to trickle out from Ukraine, that I was able to collect in really recent field work since I've been back to China after the pandemic, basically detailing like, well, there was never a cyber Pearl Harbor, and cyber capabilities have never had this decisive effect on a conflict. So why is that? Is that something with the capabilities, something about how the Russians use them in Ukraine, but there's this kind of doubt creeping into their calculations based on what they're observing and conflicts, and so that leads me to think we need to watch this very carefully, because that's a key pillar of strategic substitution. If China loses confidence in that, they may lose confidence in the entire approach and whether it can really give them the leverage that they want. But at the same time, China has also engaged in a spate of quite serious cyber intrusions across the United States and its allies, critical infrastructure called the vault typhoon intrusions. Salt Typhoon is another one, another one, but that leads to more of the kind of surveillance and espionage piece that I carve out in the book. But the vault typhoon attacks really look like they're carrying out the cyber doctrine that the PLA has been writing about for some time. So they're watching, they're thinking, but they're still behaving in ways that suggest they see this as a useful tool of leverage. So I think that you are absolutely right that this might have fallen out of the kind of strategic capabilities in that regard. But at the same time, I think it also depends a little bit on what types of capabilities you're going to end up targeting, because I still think if you talk about, for example, intruding in parts of the country's nuclear command and control infrastructure, even with a cyber attack, that's going to look quite provocative. So the targets are also are going to matter quite significantly. But that hierarchy of how destructive these capabilities are, how s literary they are, sometimes Information Age weapons attacks are not even going to rise to the level of what a normal, conventional attack could look like. But what they o do is create these kind of uncertain, escalatory pressures that are linked in some ways, to crossing that nuclear threshold, because of the types of things that they can target and because of the kind of Rubicon cross by using these capabilities rather than, you know, the air strikes or other types of capabilities where we're much, sort of more familiar with watching how adversaries are going to react when they're used.

Margaret Peters 44:06

I'm going to move to a question answered by the posed by the audience, which is very similar to one of the questions I had, and just a reminder for our audience that please put your questions in the Q and A.Sothis question is, can you comment on how the Taiwanese leverage their own asymmetric challenges to engage in information gray zone activities against Beijing? Are there common tactics and the Are we the Taiwanese share with what Beijing does, and how would that help American policy makers better identify future attacks from Beijing? And I'll just add to that. So I also had this sort of, like, typical, sort of comparative question of, like, external validity, so, like, how much does this apply to other states? And I was actually thinking. About, not Taiwan so much, but I was thinking about, like, Iran's behavior and how a state, because there's another state that is very active in the cyber realm, although I don't there's something I don't know enough about, about whether they are active also in space or those other realms. I don't believe that they're super active in those realms. So just thinking about, you know, is this a model that other states can follow and like which other states might be able to follow this model?

Fiona Cunningham 45:33

So I, for anyone out there who is writing a book, writing a dissertation, who is like in early stages of your career. I do want to just share that this was, this was one of the questions I grappled with the most for a long time with this project. Is, is this a China phenomenon, or is this a more general phenomenon? And I came down after investigating a lot of other cases, thinking quite hard about, you know what the structure of China's choices look like that? China is the only country that has this sort of full package of decisions, capabilities and preferences that have led to strategic substitution, but these ideas that you worry about, the credibility of nuclear threats that you struggle to be able to build up conventional capabilities that are going to give you the leverage you want against your adversary. These are not China specific concerns. They are very, very, very common concerns and drivers of state behavior, and they even go outside of the sort of bucket of nuclear armed states to consider countries like Iran that have the desire to be a nuclear weapon state, or like Japan that sits under a US extended deterrence umbrella, and so therefore it cannot, or has chosen not, to acquire nuclear weapons of its own, but still wants some sort of leverage that it's going to be able to level, on its own against other countries. So the sort of exact piece where you're pairing these escalatory posture postures for Information Age weapons together with a very defensive nuclear posture, that's a China combination. Perhaps India might move in that direction, because it's the other nuclear armed state that has a similar nuclear posture, that is one of assured retaliation, with, I guess, a slightly more conditional no first use policy than China. But moving further afield from that, we see that Russia, for example, has a nuclear first use posture, but it also had concerns about the credibility of using nuclear threats. Built up a significant conventional precision strike capability, so the missile piece, it also is active inside, but it has also reinvigorated a counter space weapons program. So it has these rungs in the ladder, but they interact a bit differently with its nuclear weapons posture, because it's not trying to force another country to use nuclear weapons first, but rather using these rungs on the ladder underneath the nuclear threshold to sort of make the possibility of nuclear use of its own more credible and leave an adversary guessing about at what point it might sort of go up to that stage. But when it comes to the non nuclear weapons states like Iran and Japan, you see Australia, you know, in Present company, South Korea and Japan are all looking at acquiring precision strike capabilities that they are looking to sort of replicate aspects of China's use of missiles to sort of keep other countries out of its periphery. These kinds of porcupine or hedgehog strategies that some people will sometimes talk about, but they also create leverage, because they're going to potentially engage in strikes on, in Japan's case, the Chinese mainland, that could end up generating nuclear threats from China, depending upon what targets they hit, and catalyzing US involvement in any given conflict. So the mechanisms up the top with the nuclear piece are a little bit different, but the desire to develop these more credible and accessible capabilities is quite similar in I think recipients of extended nuclear deterrence, you are absolutely spot on that. Iran is a very active country when it comes to cyber capabilities. It has an extensive regional missile program as well. So it has invested in at least two of these capabilities when it has been difficult for it to go right up to the nuclear level, given that it has the sort of sanctions and the threat of military action if it ends up crossing that proliferation threshold, to go to the Taiwan case in particular, I have to confess, I haven't looked really deeply into what Taiwan itself. FIFA is taking out of China's playbook, because in many ways, it's actually thinking about how you, rather than replicate this strategy, how you defend against many of these types of attacks that can be leveled both at the US to keep it out of the Taiwan contingency, but also at Taiwan itself. And so that comes down to things like its cyber resiliency, and that's one of the things that I think Taiwan is really a leader in, is thinking about how you make all of your information networks more resilient, better defended against these kinds of cyber attacks, thinking a little bit about also, sort of Taiwan's ability to withstand extensive missile strikes, which I think they can expect, would happen in a conflict. So how do you make sure that you have fuel reserves that you can continue to kind of communicate with the outside world so you can reconstitute? So there are different ways, I guess, of approaching strategic substitution when you are the target of some of those types of attacks, and replicating exactly the same sort of strategy may not be the best way of defending against it, but we do see some of the I think us regional allies, really thinking about how they can develop similar capabilities. Taiwan does, I believe, have some of the short range missiles that would also enable it to strike back against China's mainland, but not in kind of numbers that are significant in as in the PLA case, towards Taiwan.

Margaret Peters 51:33

So we have another question, which is about how US China relations have been affected by strategic substitution, and how does the US retaliate in these zones, and what weaknesses do they identify? And then, of course, that probably leads to a feedback loop with, you know, how does China then retaliate? And as part of this, I was also curious, you know, as you were reading from the Chinese side, you know, what did the Chinese think about what the US was doing? Do they think the US is lagging them in these areas? Do they do that? Where do they see the US catching up? Because, of course, as the leader, you have sometimes the the incentive to like, not train as hard, not work as hard, not always push that frontier in the way the Challenger often has the incentive to push the frontier in technology. So I was just curious, you know, how did they view both, you know, how to, how do you think the US responded? But also, how did the Chinese view the US response to this?

Fiona Cunningham 52:39

So I think the lead times are pretty long from a doctrine being penned, and let's say the early 2000s to having mature capabilities and organizations in particular that can carry out these capabilities. So China starts to sort of put some of these capabilities online, in some ways, at the earliest, in sort of the mid with the with the exception of the missiles, which do come online a little bit earlier, but sort of in the mid, the mid 2000s and so the United States is sort of designing its response, actually quite a lot before the US China relationship started to deteriorate, in a broader political sense, in the kind of late Bush and Obama administrations, but some of the ways the US has responded in the missile sense, it has been thinking about both the resilience of its own basing in the Indo Pacific, so we're simply just going to disperse our capabilities more try and put out our military assets in lots of different places. So China has a targeting dilemma. It can't just simply strike one base and get everything so that's one approach. But the United States also eventually decided in 2019 to formally withdraw from the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty it has with the Russians, which limited its ability to deploy ground based, medium range missiles of the similar type to what China was deploying in large numbers to target it in the region. And so with that, it is now starting to place its own missiles in allied territory, so the typhoon missiles in the Philippines and to assist its allies to acquire some of these conventional strike capabilities back at China. China's response to that is to basically say, you know, this is very destabilizing, and to view it sort of more in a in a kind of strategic space, if you like. They complain about it in the in the United Nations. But initially, I think Chinese strategists were pretty skeptical that US allies would accept these capabilities on their territory. So I think in some ways, they've been surprised by the willingness of the region to go along with some parts of the US response. I think in cyberspace, the US has thought about using its cyber capabilities, perhaps in a slightly different way. Than China, because it doesn't have a need to fill out this, you know, next best strategy, if you like, of strategic substitution, because it had very sophisticated conventional capabilities and also has very sophisticated nuclear capabilities. And so it has less of a need to have these escalatory rungs in the ladder because it has good capabilities for coercive leveraging in the other two areas, but its response to China, I think, in the cyber arena, has come to essentially view cyber attacks quite differently. So rather than being very restrained because it's concerned about escalation, as we already discussed, seeing the strategic effect of cyber operations happening below the level of armed conflict as a result of that. Around 2017 2018 the United States actually changed its approach to cyber operations very significantly, such that it started to essentially go into other countries networks and try to take down, you know, and create problems for the infrastructures they were using to conduct cyber operations. It's called a persistent engagement, defend, forward type of approach. And the China's response to that has been to sort of look at that and say, you know, maybe we need to do something that's relatively similar to that develop those kinds of capabilities as well. So there's a little bit of an emulation piece to it, but not necessarily, as we discussed a little bit earlier, in the context of those lessons from Ukraine, a wholesale abandonment of this idea of cyber operations as being for coercive leverage. And actually, the United States response to those vault typhoon intrusions on critical infrastructure has been one of quite significant alarms. So you see the leverage kind of working in peacetime and finally, in the space domain. This one, I think, is particularly interesting, because the United States has sort of moved to change the architecture of its space capabilities at satellite constellations, from having these big, exquisite, what you might call a juicy target, to having those very sophisticated satellites, but also having more or less valuable, what we call proliferated or distributed satellite constellations, to reduce The value of conducting counter space operations at any given satellite, and that really changes the kind of dilemma for China in thinking about using counter space capabilities, it's also talked about developing its own counter space capabilities, and hasn't been specific as to whether they're going to be kinetic, so, you know, things That hit other things or non kinetics. So electronic warfare, lasers, that kind of thing. And China has looked at that response, and they are quite concerned about the US is increased reliance on private space companies concerned about its development of counter space capabilities. And so there's sort of a lot of watching quite carefully, of what the US is doing in the space domain. And I think the sort of thing to watch going forward is, how is China going to sort of continue adjust, potentially move away from strategic substitution, if it sees its leverage in these three areas as having been fleeting and short lived, because the United States has worked very hard to blunt the capability. So that's that's coming in the future. But that's what I would sort of be looking for as I think about the action, reaction dynamic with the United States.

Margaret Peters 58:36

Yeah, and I was going to lead to my lap, my sort of last question of thinking about, how much longer can China do this? Because it sounds like the strategic substitution is losing as the US realizes like this is what China is doing instead, we have the resources to try to counter this, and so does this just lead us back into China, building up a conventional armed forces, and going back to, you know, back to the past, where we're going to have these conventional forces and large scale forces.

Fiona Cunningham 59:14

So I think in some ways, another way to sort of look at exactly this question is, how do China's options look today? So when it was making decisions to adopt strategic substitution, it had pretty serious constraints on either of the two other options, both because of concerns about credibility with the nuclear option, and because it was recognizing, essentially in the early 2000s like look we need to modernize our military, but this is like the first milestone we're going to hit at, like 2020 and the second milestone will be 2030 and by 2050 maybe we'll be able to feel the force that can be equivalent to the best in the world. But that's really going to depend upon our economic progress. And China's conventional military modernization has made very significant progress. I would argue that it still does not have the capability to conduct or to sort of have a divisive conventional victory across the Taiwan Straits, but it looks a lot better now than it did 20 years ago. So one thing China could do is to say, look, you know, this is kind of a gamble with strategic substitution. I've lost them leverage because of the US responses. But actually I'm doing a bit better in the conventional space. So maybe I don't need as much leverage from strategic substitution. What I need these escalatory capabilities for is, rather than, you know, when I'm conventionally inferior, I'm going to use these escalatory capabilities to overturn a conventional defeat. Maybe, if I end up in a conventional stalemate, I'll escalate into these areas to sort of tip things over and get myself into the realm of a conventional victory. So the conventional option can reduce the need for leverage. I guess, that China derives from strategic substitution, but it can also give it better options to invest more, sort of rely more on that space. The other option, though, is if China looks at its conventional capabilities and says, these really aren't ready for prime time, it just doesn't give us enough, they may reconsider the nuclear option. And to me, that's the more concerning sort of piece. I think with China's recent nuclear modernization, there's been a lot of speculation as to whether or not this is China adopting a first use strategy with a bigger, more sophisticated arsenal. My own research, which is ongoing in this area, suggests that there is not that motivation driving China's nuclear modernization, but it certainly now has the capabilities to switch to that much more quickly if it wants to. So the future of strategic substitution, I would say, is uncertain. China doesn't have the constraints it used to on the other options, but for the time being, it looks like it's been a successful strategy up until this point.

Margaret Peters 1:02:04

Well, and it's 130 so kind of end of everybody's time, or 830 in Australia. I think I want to thank Fiona again for coming to discuss her book. This was super interesting. I learned a lot. I hope you all did too. Definitely take if you're interested in these sorts of topics, or Chinese foreign policy and military strategy, definitely take a look at her book again. She put a discount code. We put it in the chat. It's p 327, at the Princeton site. And look at that beautiful book. It's so nice when you finally get to hold it in your hands. Well, actually, absolutely, yep. And we'll be back next week with Aaron Snyder on marketing democracy, the political economy of democracy, aid in the Middle East. So we'll be back next week, and then we're, I think we're digging a couple weeks off, but then we'll be back with some other great talks, some of them in live and in person too. So look out for in your email box for those events. And thank you again, Fiona, so much for making time.

Fiona Cunningham 1:03:09

Thank you again, so much. Maggie. I had a wonderful time. And thank you all for the terrific questions. I hope that you have a chance to check out the book.

Margaret Peters 1:03:15

All right. Thanks again, Fiona, and have a Good day, everybody. Bye, bye.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai