What’s Up With That Balloon? Dr. Mackubin Owens
Wednesday, February 08, 2023
It has been clear for some time that the People’s Republic of China (PRC) seeks to displace the United States as the leading power within the global order. China has sought to do so in a number of mutually reinforcing ways by employing all available tools, from military means to trade and technology.
In 1999, two Chinese political officers published a book titled Unrestricted Warfare that offered something of a blueprint for doing so. Observers made more of the alleged originality of the book than it deserved but it did describe how China would subsequently seek to negate the technological advantage that the United States had displayed during the First Gulf War. The authors, Colonels Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui did not discount direct military action but suggested that other means, including political warfare, psychological warfare, legal means—sometimes called “lawfare”—trade and economic tools could prove decisive in a struggle with a technologically superior United States
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According to the authors, war now meant “using all means, including armed force or non-armed force, military and non-military, and lethal and non-lethal means to compel the enemy to accept one’s interests.” Accordingly, China’s goal was to deploy legal, media, and psychological means in order to shape the political and strategic environment in its favor. The notion of unrestricted warfare, especially its psychological aspect, helps us to understand something about the recent actions by the Chinese in launching a stratospheric surveillance balloon over the continental United States, blatantly violating US airspace.
Of course, we know that Chinese satellites in low-Earth orbit (LEO), which operate at an altitude from 160 km to 1,000 km, allow Beijing to harvest a great deal of intelligence about US military installations, including missile sites, and to collect data from the electromagnetic spectrum, intercepting radio communications and radar transmitter data. Although a stratospheric surveillance balloon can do what satellites can so with much higher fidelity, the question arises: why risk a confrontation with the United States by violating its airspace? The downing of a US U-2 reconnaissance/surveillance aircraft by the Soviet Union in 1960 triggered a serious Cold War crisis. When tensions are high, as they were in 1960 and are today between the United States and China, what is to be gained?
The simplest but also the most paradoxical answer seems to be that Beijing was being purposely provocative in order to determine what the US reaction would be. China will use what it learned from the reaction not only of the Biden administration but also of the American people to sharpen its future strategy in pursuit of its goal of displacing the United States as a global hegemon. As Sun Tzu observed in The Art of War, "If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle."
Mackubin Owens is a Senior Fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. He previously served as editor of Orbis: FPRI’s Journal of World Affairs (2008-2020). From 2015 until March of 2018, he was Dean of Academic Affairs and Professor at the Institute of World Politics in Washington, D.C. From 1987 until 2014, he was Professor of National Security Affairs at the US Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island.
He is also a Marine Corps veteran of Vietnam, where as an infantry platoon and company commander in 1968-1969, he was wounded twice and awarded the Silver Star medal. He retired from the Marine Corps Reserve as a Colonel in 1994.
Owens is the author of the FPRI monograph Abraham Lincoln: Leadership and Democratic Statesmanship in Wartime (2009) and US Civil-Military Relations after 9/11: Renegotiating the Civil-Military Bargain (Continuum Press, January 2011) and coauthor of US Foreign Policy and Defense Strategy: The Rise of an Incidental Superpower (Georgetown University Press, spring 2015). He is also completing a book on the theory and practice of US civil-military relations for Lynne-Rienner. He was co-editor of the textbook, Strategy and Force Planning, for which he also wrote several chapters, including “The Political Economy of National Security,” “Thinking About Strategy,” and “The Logic of Strategy and Force Planning.”
Owens’s articles on national security issues and American politics have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, International Security, Orbis, Joint Force Quarterly, The Public Interest, The Weekly Standard, The Washington Examiner, Defence Analysis, US Naval Institute Proceedings, Marine Corps Gazette, Comparative Strategy, National Review, The New York Times, The Christian Science Monitor; The Los Angeles Times, the Jerusalem Post, The Washington Times, and The New York Post. And, he formerly wrote for the Providence Journal.
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