Ferran Stefan Ghatti (3:41)

Thank you so much for having me.

Adam McCauley (3:44)

So for many of our listeners, the Damoclean sword of potential conflict between the US And China will be familiar, but more opaque is what this kind of conflict or what this conflict might look like. So I was hoping you could tell us a little bit about the impetus for this book and how it contributes to that conversation.

Ferran Stefan Ghatti (4:01)

Well, the impetus for this book essentially was a conversation I had many years ago in London where, where a colleague of mine at the think tank I was working at the time asked me, how do you envision essentially the future of warfare and United States Armed forces being the preeminent military force in the world when it comes to also trying to figure out how essentially to fight future wars? My immediate response was, well, I have to try to figure out what the US Military is thinking about the future of warfare. And then it turned turns out fairly quickly after beginning my research that all of it in all the different service branches of the United States Armed forces in the US Navy, Air Force, Marine Corps, even the Army, China played a huge, huge role. And within that competition with China, military competition with China, it was first and foremost a potential attack on Taiwan that preoccupied US Military thinking about the future of warfare. And that's why I started thinking, focusing on this question, how a war around the island of Taiwan in East Asia might unfold, because essentially the US Armed forces are premising their entire conception of future warfare around this idea, how to effectively deter and if necessary fight a war against the People's Liberation army over Taiwan at some point in the future.

Adam McCauley (5:39)

So I think while the conversation around this potential clash between great powers in our present moment is more or less clear, many of our viewers and listeners won't be familiar with, let's say, a force structure of a military or perhaps the interplay between doctrine, strategy and the ultimate ends in the military domain. So I wonder if you could just outline a little bit what you used in terms of sources and documentation, how you went about constructing what you required to assess in some ways to sketch the contour of this potential future conflict in the book.

Ferran Stefan Ghatti (6:13)

That's a very good Question, Right. And it really centers around this question, what really is the best way to analyze military power? First of all, it's important to understand that military power is always relative, right? So you compare your armed forces not to some absolute value essentially, but to a relative value that is really the most likely opponent that you're facing, right? So even if you have, let's say, a pretty bad military in some ways, if it's still good enough to beat your opponent, right? It's a pretty good military, so to speak, Right. So there are no real absolute values in many ways. Of course, there are certain permanent characteristics that are good for your armed forces, right. If you are, you know, very good in terms of targeting, picking up a firefighter, being able to project a lot of firepower onto the battle space if you minimize your own casualties and at the same time increase the casualties on your opponent's side. All of this of course plays a role, right? And this is pretty good. But I think the most important thing to understand about all of this is that all of this is relative. So even if I write about the US Armed forces and how they would face China, and even if they down the road would beat China in a military conflict, it doesn't necessarily mean that they would be good in beating the next opponent, potentially opponent, right? So it's all relative, it's all fairly situational and fairly context specific. I went about essentially looking at this huge topic about a potential future great power war between the United States and China and how to best look at it and analyze it. And I came up essentially with a domain based approach, right? So if you look at my book, I focus on all the so called important war fighting domains, right? Which is cyber, space, air, sea, land, right. These are the most important war fighting domains for essentially a clash between the United States and China. And these two opponents would fight it out in all those domains. And in my book I consciously put cyber first, space second, followed by the air and sea domain and only the land domain last. Why? Because cyber and space are so called enabling domains. This is essentially, these are the two most important domains of warfare in this context. Just because all these networks, essentially the way how the United States would fight or how modern militaries are fighting, which is essentially based on precision strike warfare, so precision guided munitions that you fire at your opponent, they require networks, they require what's called ISR capabilities, intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance capabilities. That's either drones, aircrafts up in the air, radars on the ground, or satellites in space, essentially. Right. And all these systems need to be linked with one another, right? And the space domain and the cyber domain are essentially linking these capabilities. They're enabling essentially these types of warfare and they're permeating all other domains of warfare, right? They're permeating the land domain, the air domain and the sea domain. And I put them first because these are sort of the really two most important elements in this fight. And it really depends which of the two sides, China or the United States, can dominate cyberspace or gain at least a temporary advantage in the space domain in order to determine really a potential outcome of a conflict between the two parties, or at least the outcome of the initial clash between the United States and China, which would most likely be fought really from standoff distances over hundreds of kilometers, with both sides essentially lobbing precision guided munitions at each other. So I chose a domain based approach. And within all these domains, I looked at the individual service branches of the United States Armed Forces. So for the cyber domain, essentially Cyber Command, the US Cyber Forces, for the space domain, the United States Space Force, for the air and maritime domain, the US Air Force, the US Navy, and for the land domain, the US army and US Marine Corps, and tried to look at what's referred to usually as capabilities, so technological capabilities, weapon systems, platforms, right? That's, you know, ships, tanks, missiles, or cyber effects, right? What kind of cyber effects can be achieved? Satellites, anti satellite weapons and so forth. So capabilities, essentially the technologies of war, right, Weapon systems. To sum it up, a second category that I looked at was the structure. That is how, how do you really organize all these different and weapon systems? What kind of structure do you build up around these systems? And the third element that I looked at was organizational concepts and doctrines. Organizational concepts are essentially discussions or ideas how the United States think it would employ certain technological capabilities, also emerging technological capabilities down the road over the next couple of years. And these operational concepts, after they are tested and experimented with, usually turn into doctrine. And military doctrine is really sort of a how to guide, right? How do you employ these capabilities? How do you really move around that force structure? What kind of tactics do you develop and so forth, right? And these are sort of the categories that I looked at in the individual service branches, the war fighting domains, how the United States would really go about and fight China? I also looked at essentially the character of war fighting in each chapter, right? So what's the character of war fighting in the cyber domain? What's the character of war fighting in the space domain? And here essentially to summarize the character in all the domains by and large, it's fairly attritional, which I know is not a great word in the English language, but it means essentially. It means essentially that you take. You would take a lot, a lot of losses when you fight it out in those domains, right? Both sides would lose a tremendous amount of hardware, manpower. Most likely that would be immense destruction. And it was important for me to really describe that, though, in detail, and also say a lot of how we are thinking about a potential future war between the United States and China really concerns the outset, the first couple of days and weeks. And we are not really focusing on what such a conflict would really look like, let's say day 30 or 60 into the conflict, and what kind of destruction and suffering and catastrophic consequences a war like that could actually entail.

Adam McCauley (13:28)

So there are so many avenues that we can explore in this book, and I'm cognizant of the fact that I could keep you here all day. So I'm going to try and make our way through in some orderly fashion, perhaps. But a credit to the book itself is that it's very rigorous. It's extensively researched. For anybody like myself who has had many questions about the how war fighting may or may not emerge and what it might look like in the Indo Pacific, this book is an incredible asset. But I wonder if you could unpack. Let's think of this as maybe some framing architecture for how we think about the future conflict or a future conflict between great powers. And so persistent throughout this narrative is this idea of systems warfare. And I wonder, you know, because you write that this systems warfare approach is really the narrative that's shaping an emerging American way of war. I wonder if you could explain what systems warfare sort of captures how it might be different than, let's call it military strategy or military imagination of the past and what the implications of this change are. You know, how. How is this posturing in service of fighting the future war, how is this different?

Ferran Stefan Ghatti (14:39)

The basic thing to understand about how we in the United States and Europe, that is the west, for the lack of a better word, thinks about warfare or how to maintain an advantage in warfare is essentially through technology, right? So the basic premise essentially of the United States preferred war fighting approach is that the United States will always fight a war as the technologically superior power. And as a result they can experiment with different approaches to warfare that essentially shorten wars and that potentially reduce the destruction necessary to defeat an adversary. And so the idea is essentially that you try to look at your adversary through superior technology as a system that Is essentially you map the adversary in a systematic manner, that is his armed forces, his command structures, his political structures and so forth. And you essentially build out this adversary system through superior ISR intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance capabilities, maybe some other capabilities as well. And you map essentially his system. And by mapping the system you identify knots or centers of gravity, if you use a clause term called from. Clausewitz was a Prussian military theorist from the 19th century, and he's sort of the doyen of military theory in Western military academies and staff colleges. And the idea behind identifying the centers of gravity is that rather than having to destroy the entire system, you just focus on those particular knots in the system and that you identify as centers of gravity. And by identifying these knots, let's say a command and control knot, such as a military headquarters somewhere that's overseeing battle space or certain units in the battle space, that is maybe commanding a division, if it's in the land domain or a flotilla, a number of submarines, whatever you can think of. And in order to paralyze these submarines or these ground forces, you don't necessarily need to destroy the submarines. You don't need to take out the entire enemy division, all tanks, all the men and so forth. You just need to destroy or disable blind, paralyze essentially that particular command headquarters. And by doing so, you make essentially the mass of military capabilities of your adversary leaderless. And by making it leaderless, you can cause or induce panic, you can cause essentially the system to collapse, right? And the idea behind the American way of war, of precision strike warfare, essentially, is by targeting many of these knots, right, with precision strikes, with Tomahawk cruise missiles, with ballistic missiles, with other means of destruction that are maybe non kinetic, that is offensive cyber effect, you essentially win on the cheap, so to speak, and you win relatively quickly. And that's the idea also behind the subtitle of my book. It's essentially this idea that United States Armed forces, despite some recent changes, are always pursuing essentially a rapid, decisive warfare approach aimed at rapid, decisive results in order to shorten a war. And that's essentially the idea behind systems warfare. Now, what you need to understand also is that the Chinese, the People's Liberation army, also have a concept of systems warfare, and that's fairly similar. And I think that's often the case between two competing militaries. There's a lot of mirror imaging going on. One side copies the other side back and forth and so forth. So you have two sides essentially trying to collapse the adversary system.

Adam McCauley (18:54)

So what's fascinating about sort of the systems approach is that these are obviously action producing sort of concepts here. And at the heart of the thinking is this idea of decision or information dominance. And I think that's probably evidenced quite well by the structure of your book leading with cyber and the space domain to really provide that operational picture. But I just wonder because a lot of lot is made, I think, in rhetorically and publicly in the American context around this, you know, decision or information advantage. I wonder if you could just define what this means in the context of, you know, a military contest and then explore whether or how it could be achieved by either Washington and Beijing. I think so much of your assessment really centers on whether or not this is the appropriate assumption to make about how conflict in, in this domain in this instance is actually going to emerge.

Ferran Stefan Ghatti (19:47)

Yes, and I think you're raising a very important point here. The key also to systems warfare is essentially this idea that the United States armed forces would be able to achieve what they refer to as information superiority, information dominance, that is essentially having more information about the adversary than the adversary has about you, and also actively limiting the adversary's access to information and intelligence and so forth. And again, by essentially achieving information superiority through a common operating picture, for example, you can map the system, you can identify the centers of gravity, and you can essentially target the adversary and collapse the system. Now, the problem is that if you think that the adversary consists of a system based on, of various networks that are not necessarily hierarchical, it's a challenge to really identify so called centers of gravity. And that's the main criticism in my book essentially behind the United States systems warfare approach, is that it is difficult to make a case that you can actually identify adversary centers of gravity. And the second point is that even if you would identify centers of gravity, it would be extremely dangerous perhaps to target them. And I speak about vertical escalation also a lot that is an escalation of a military conflict from the conventional air sphere to the nuclear realm. And that's something that you always need to keep in the back of your mind, obviously, when you have two great powers going to war armed with nuclear weapons. And if this war intensifies and escalates and you climb up the escalation ladder, and at some point nuclear weapons are playing, you know, could potentially play a larger role on the battlefield even. And information superiority is essentially the key to unlocking this United States warfare approach. And I point out in the book, first of all, pursuing information superiority actively requires that you essentially blind the adversary, you blind the People's Liberation army, you blind certain Command and control knots. That's rather dangerous up to a point, for multiple reasons, one being that the People's Liberation army could potentially intermingle conventional and nuclear command and control knots, for example, that is, by essentially attacking the People's Liberation army conventional capabilities, you could also threaten the Chinese nuclear deterrent, which could trigger all kinds of escalation dynamics. The second point about information superiority, or trying to achieve information superiority, I'm not that sure that the United States can actually do that, right? And that's a challenge because if the United States is not capable of essentially establishing this information superiority, and as a result, actually information as a result, cognitive dominance, for example, which is a fancy way of saying that the United States military can actually just identify targets faster, it can make decisions in the battle space faster than the Chinese, and by doing so essentially can hit more targets more effectively and destroy more of the People's Liberation Army. If the United States is not capable of doing that, it will have a real problem because the US doesn't have the mass in comparison to the People's Liberation Army. It's an expeditionary based military. It has to travel thousands of miles to the area of operations, to the battlefield. It has less combat aircraft, it has less ships, it has less men, it has less missiles and so forth. And all of this in combination makes it very difficult to essentially balance out your loss of information superiority if you're not capable of more effectively identifying and hitting your targets than your adversary, if you also are suffering from a quantitative advantage. So the point is, it's known not only that there are escalation concerns that should be looked at. On the other hand, there's also no plan B essentially when it comes to the United States not actually able to achieve information superiority. And that's sort of the dilemma that I tried to outline. So the United States has really fixed itself one of the most challenging military problems out there, essentially. And I'm not so sure that the United States armed forces are really up, up to the strike challenge, to be honest.

Adam McCauley (24:51)

I think what's quite evident in terms of certainly your answer there in the book more generally is that there are some domains, as you've put it, that are far more important than others. Right. And so if information, the access to information or the denial of information to your adversary is so essential to the American way of war, largely because of the deficiencies in terms of mass and or capabilities that they can bring to bear in this same sort of theater, then there's a lot. It's essentially like that first stage is A no fail stage because it's unclear what, what might come next. Or if they do fail there, then the character of conflict, to your point, perhaps earlier, becomes far more attritional. Right. This is just going to be a long and slow fight, I think Hal Brands has talked about this fight in the Indo Pacific is essentially being like a pickup game, right. That everybody around is going to have to join in and it could get quite messy because there isn't an organizing sort of structure other than, you know, how long can we endure and how long can they endure in response. But I wondered, and not to give away too many sort of secrets in the book before our listeners sort of read it, but I wonder if you could take us a little bit through the different service branches and maybe just give us an insight from the space and cyber domains, an insight from the air and sea domains, and maybe an insight from the land domain in terms of key findings or questions that your analysis sort of revealed, which begs further reflection perhaps in terms of how the machinery, as it were, of war is really going to tackle some of these persistent questions and recognizing, as you've just laid out, that information dominance and decision dominance and speed, as it were, are the key enablers here, but may not be achieved. So what is it that these other service branches really have to be attuned and attentive to if that's going to be the case?

Ferran Stefan Ghatti (26:48)

I should point out that I'm not in any way discussing specific tactics and plans in my book. Right. So you're not going to find like, okay, this is how I envision the United States actually defending Taiwan in stages. Right. And these are the amounts of troops that United States armed forces are, you know, going to need to defend Taiwan or actually defeat China and you know, on what specific islands on the first island chain the United States will need to deploy such and such an amount of troops and missiles and so forth and how many aircraft, Right. There are some discussions around this. I mean, my book is really mostly about trying to start a discussion on first order questions, right? That is what's really happening if you are not capable of achieving information superiority, how do you actually fight a war between two great powers under the nuclear umbrella with taking into account that this conflict could potentially escalate to the nuclear dimension. Right. Have we really thought through and have we actually, by accident or maybe even by design, created operational concepts or military doctrine that are actually accelerating escalatory trends in a military conflict? And I would argue that, I mean, that's the gist of my argument that the preferred U.S. war fighting approach actually accelerates nuclear escalatory dynamics in such a conflict. Now, specifically to your question, first off, I should also say that in terms of character of warfighting, in all of the warfighting domains, what you are going to see is at the beginning, maybe a big flash, a lot of activity, a lot of resources, capabilities being spent, whether it's missiles, offensive cyber capabilities, operations in space and so forth. And then after the initial clash, right, you're probably going to see a lot of like a period where both sides essentially are running out of ammunition of capabilities. They need to reorganize, restructure. What you see in a lot of great power wars is that in the first couple of days and weeks you tend to lose the best people in your military, as terrible as this sounds, because you do lose your best units, most likely at the beginning because they are at the forefront. You are trying to achieve decisive results at the beginning of a military conflict. So you need a phase of reconstitution, of rearmament and so forth. And it's particularly difficult in a war between China and the United States, because a war like that would be fought over long distances, primarily on the maritime, in the air domain, space domain and cyber domain. And especially for the air and maritime domains, you would use a lot of precision guided munitions over long distances. So don't think what you see in the war in Ukraine where you have thousands of FPVs, essentially first person, few drones with 40, 50 kilometer ranges, well, actually anything from 12 to, to, to 30 kilometers is more realistic. If I think about it, you, you wouldn't see that unless there would be a real invasion of the island of Taiwan and the United States actually also deploying troops to the island of Taiwan. Or you would actually have what's called a horizontal escalation fighting on the first island chain along different islands there between Chinese and American troops and, and troops allied with the United States Armed Forces. Right. But to cut it short, essentially, what do I see or like some key takeaways from the individual domains? I think for the cyber domain, what's interesting to me when I was doing research is that, and I began research on this book already in 2020, was the initial idea that cyber would actually be a much more decisive domain, as it turns out to be, I found very little evidence, frankly, that cyber could actually have a strategic impact on the fighting. So I see cyber as, or the cyber domain as principally an intelligence domain at the same time also as an enabling domain. So you do need to have strong cyber defenses But I find it unlikely that you can launch devastating cyber attacks that are going to permanently disable a lot of the Chinese critical information infrastructure. Having said that, I don't obviously know what's in the cyber arsenal of the United States and we shouldn't draw wrong conclusions from other conflicts about this. Right? Because I do think cyber is fairly individualistic and dependent on the main actors involved. Because you essentially are creating the battle space by your own networks and the capabilities that you create in that particular domain, which is a bit different from the ARC and LAND domains. Right. And the other point that I see in the cyber domain, it's also that I don't really see a huge advantage after the initial clash of the offense in cyberspace. It's going to essentially peter out after a while because both sides are going to deploy a lot of offensive cyber capabilities and it takes actually time to rearm. Right. There's this idea of cyber strikes in milliseconds and so forth. Well, it takes a long, a long of preparatory time to conduct cyber operations, really. And it's going to be much more difficult to conduct these operations in wartime for various reasons, because network operators are going to be much more alert to cyber intrusions. Right. It's going to be much more difficult to actually catch your opponent off guard. And you always need an attack vector. And these attack vectors can close fairly easily if there's an update in the software and so forth. And it's not going to be that easy. So these are sort of the key takeaways from the silo domain when it comes to the space domain. I think the most interesting change in my research over the last couple of years has actually been the privatization of the space domain and the emergence of mega constellations. And I think here the idea or my main conclusion actually from mega constellations is that you're going to have a deterrent effect in cyberspace. So this idea that you're going to have a space Pearl harbor essentially where the Chinese can launch an out of the blue lightning strike attack against US space assets, or vice versa, I think that's not something that military planners believe in any longer as a real possibility. Just because you have so many constellations up there, so many space based assets in all the different layers of the space domain, that data in one way or the other is always going to get through. And that also by essentially destroying a lot of your adversary space asset at certain altitudes at least, you're also risking your own space based assets. Right? So there's a certain deterrent effect that I think would prevent the space domain from becoming this all out warfare domain. And that generally speaking, this leads to a more attritional character of the space domain. Rather than both sides trying to gain a decisive advantage by destroying the other side, you're going to see much more cyber operations in space, electromagnetic interference rather than kinetic destruction, and maybe a more careful targeting plan than we might have envisioned only a couple of years ago. When it comes to the air and maritime domains, I think I can summarize the two. I think here the essential issue is that the United States, but also China, would fairly quickly run out of precision guided munitions. And in particular, what the US Navy has as a challenge is how do you essentially rearm your ships in theater Logistics for both sides. I mean, for the maritime domain and the Navy domain, it's the logistics really that's going to be the most challenging aspect, right? How do you maintain your forces in the field, in the theater? And it's going to be much more challenging for the Americans than for the Chinese. And it's all about enabling capabilities. For the Air Force, it's strategic air refueling here. The United States has a fairly limited amount of tankers who are also not very well protected. They essentially need to conscript in the event of war, civilian tankers to support the U.S. air Force and U.S. navy aircraft. And the same is actually true for the US Navy. There are not enough resupply ships, and it's going to be very difficult for US Navy destroyers, guided missile destroyers and other outer surface warships to rearm essentially in theater, that is getting new missiles after they fired their entire arsenals. Hugely important issue in all of this is also the underwater domain, right? Submarines, unmanned underwater vehicles. And I don't want to go into too many details here, but I do see it as quite significant development and as quite probably one of the most effective US Military assets to combat the People's Liberation Army. And a lot of it will depend how quickly the United States can actually deploy submarines, where it's going to deploy submarines and what kind of other assets it can deploy underwater, such as smart mines, and prevent the People's Liberation army from breaking out from the first island chain, right, and attacking, for example, the US Merchant Marine, or try to cut off American convoys, right, going out from the west coast or going out from Hawaii to the west, right, into the western Pacific and East Asia. So I think the underwater domain is going to be quite important. I don't cover it in too much detail and there's a lot of debate happening also. What really the role of submarines is supposed to be, there's, I think, a consensus that you wouldn't likely deploy US Submarines into the, into the Taiwan Strait, for example, but I'm not so sure about that, to be honest, because there also might be political considerations in the early phase of a conflict and so forth. But in any case, so these are sort of some of my takeaways from the air and maritime domain. When it comes to the land domain, what's interesting is that the United States Marine Corps especially, and I do think when it comes to discussing the future of warfare, it's always important to look at what the US Marine Corps is doing because it's the only service branch and one of the few service branches in the world that constantly, constantly has to justify its existence. Right. I mean, in reality, you don't need the US Marine Corps, Right. You basically cover all, I mean, most other capabilities and capacity in all the other service branches of the United States Armed Forces. Right. So I think the US Marine Corps essentially always is trying to fight for its existence, and by doing so, they always identify or are early adopters to existing trends and so forth. Right. And they're constantly shape shifting every couple of years or decades. Right. And the U.S. marine Corps, again, in this instance, I think, have been spearheading an important change with a new force structure and a new force design that they've been experimenting with that really takes into account that United States may, United States Armed Forces may not be able to attain information superiority. And what that would actually mean, what the United States Marine Corps could actually do as a land force in a potential war that's really dominated by the air and maritime domains. And in combination with the U.S. army, they came up with a couple of fairly innovative concepts. How to support essentially the Navy and the Air Force and how they also can actually deploy ground based capabilities, ground ground based missiles and other weapon systems to engage the Chinese along the first island chain and if need be, also on Taiwan proper. And here I think the main takeaway for me is that the land domain obviously is traditionally the most decisive domain and that the role of the U.S. army and the U.S. marine Corps essentially is still going to be fairly limited in comparison to the U.S. navy and U.S. air Force, unless really there is going to be extensive fighting on Taiwan where the United States is actually engaging Chinese forces on the island itself. And I think I would see the U.S. army and the U.S. marine Corps in a war like that sort of as a support asset for the U.S. navy and the U.S. air Force. And I should say that this doesn't really cover the entire U.S. marine Corps. It covers certain units that are being transformed into units that would be more capable of fighting in the Pacific. But essentially what they're trying to do is become additional sensors for the army and Navy and project additional firepower onto the battle space. Essentially.

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Adam McCauley (43:09)

So I think what's evident in your retelling there, and there's some incredible insights in terms of, let's call them inflection points or perhaps breaks from the past in terms of how we think about each of these service branches and their contributions or really their suitability, as it were, for a conflict of this kind with this breadth and depth, as it were. So one of the things that's evident through your assessment is that if these service branches are to be ready for a fight that may look, let's say, attritional and not lightning fast, the technological sort of blitzkrieg concept, perhaps, that the Americans would like it to reflect, then whoever is steering, whether it's procurement or force development in different ways really has to be attentive to that now in order to enable any type of ability to sort of contest in these spaces in the future. And it's where I think your book is obviously so valuable that you should be paying attention to this today if you want something to work tomorrow. But I think one, one of the things that's most striking is that if, if you know, going back to this idea that there aren't great plan B's right, as being discussed, and so much of this is contingent on this no fail first and second layer of really achieving the ability to, I mean, ideally blind permanently your adversary in a way that allows you to do grievous destruction to get them to back down from the fight to begin with, or certainly a temporary blinding that allow you to assert a certain degree of dominance and again get them to back down from the fight. What's striking about this argument is that the risk of escalation, and this is where I kind of wanted to take us in our closing minutes, the risk of escalation is there whether you win or you lose or whether the Americans sort of do this well or do this terribly, right? You can even by attempting or at least having your adversary know that this is what you seek to achieve. That alone, especially because we're talking about a clash between great powers the size of which we've perhaps never seen, and the technological complexity of which we don't fully understand. This has all the makings of a rapidly escalating conflict that quickly gets away from all of the decision makers and planners that might be involved in the decisions in and around these events. So I just wonder if you could talk about kind of the uncomfortable truth at the heart of the strategic approach on either side right now, which is that is there even a way to imagine high intensity conflict that doesn't push us so close to, if not over the threshold of nuclear exchange?

Ferran Stefan Ghatti (45:45)

First off, I want to emphasize that there is no automaton when it comes to climbing the escalation ladder and rarely are wars running out of control. Wars are always the result of very deliberate military and political decisions. And I think you can seek off ramps, right? The issue is, however, that you may not know what exactly is going on in your adversary's mind, right. And rather than escalating, you're only, rather than de escalating, you only escalate your adversary's response through specific actions. Right. So I understand your concern here and it's also a concern in my book, but I do think there's a difference between like an accidental nuclear war and a nuclear war by design, so to speak. And I do think that the latter is more dangerous to a certain degree because I think the idea here is that, yes, okay, there are escalatory dynamics involved, but we still think they are manageable essentially. Right? And there will be off ramps even if we are provoking the Chinese or even if we are backing them into a corner to a certain degree, right. By pursuing certain actions on the battlefield, there is a way how to assure that cooler heads are going to prevail. And I do think that's sort of the underlying assumption behind a lot of these concepts. Right. To a certain degree. And when you talk to US Nuclear war planners or nuclear strategists, they also emphasize that they strongly believe in nuclear deterrence and essentially that the Chinese are going to be deterred by the US Nuclear arsenal from escalating, which is essentially something that's non falsifiable at the end of the day, Right. Because deterrence happens in your adversary's head. And how do you measure what's really going to go, what's really going to be going on in Xi Jinping's head? And my major point is that we have created a structure, a war fighting approach that makes it more likely that you could actually vertically escalate and that there are better ways to essentially fight this war. Right. If we take the right steps now. And I think major question behind all of this is, and I think this is not very often discussed in my opinion, and perhaps actually that's some of, you know, that's one of the qualities of the new administration in the United States is asking the first order question, is it really worthwhile going to war with China, potentially a nuclear war over the independence or potential independence or semi independence, or to maintain the status quo of the island of Taiwan? What is exactly the US national interest in conducting this war? Is it worthwhile fighting this war if it means perhaps not going nuclear, but losing a third two thirds of the US Navy, the US Air Force? The United States is a global power. It is involved in many regions of the world. It has interests everywhere in the world. What's the point of wrecking your force? Essentially to preserve an island thousands of miles away of the Chinese mainland, Right? These are first order questions that you need to ask because only once you have a clear answer to that first order question, what's our interest here? Why are we actually going to war against China over Taiwan? And don't give me a domino theory type of explanation, by the way. Be very specific. And only then can you really start weighing the risks. And I think there is a disconnect between our war fighting approaches and political leadership. Because let me tell you, I think if political leaders in the United States would really genuinely understand how the United States is really thinking, envisioning to fight China over Taiwan, they would be concerned, right? If they look at the consequences, I don't think they would be concerned if you just said, oh no, we're going to fire, I don't know, 3,000 missiles at the Chinese and we're going to sink their invasion fleet and we're going to destroy the command and control knots and so forth. You know, okay, the logistics basis and. Okay, I understand, right. But the consequences, you know, only if you had. Well, listen, there could be potential consequences, right? There's conventional nuclear entanglement, maybe on the Chinese side. There is a potential that if you win too quickly, too decisively, Xi Jinping will feel that the Chinese Communist Party rule is under danger. What are they going to do then? Are they going to enter a situation where they think the nuclear deterrent is compromised? Would they actually use nuclear weapons? Would there be a demonstration strike of a tactical nuclear weapon? If that's the case, what would be the United States response? So these are all these, you know, all. There are all these scenarios. And very often, and I've been part of war games around this and, and other discussions, a lot of these things are waved off right now. That has been changing over the last couple of years. There have been numerous games, also war gaming, various nuclear scenarios, But I think to me it goes back to the original question. What would we be willing to risk in a war against China? And can this war be genuinely limited between two great powers with nuclear weapons? And this is essentially, if you go through all the data that's in the book, and I spent a lot of time researching it, that's sort of the quintessential question. First, why do we have a system or a war fighting approach based on information dominance, based on systems warfare that's actually more conducive to escalatory dynamics in the war? And second, why are we actually contemplating this military confrontation with China? Have we really thought this through at the strategic and political level? And I think these first order questions are usually where a lot of people trip up. Right. And that's usually where a lot of historically the United States foreign policy disasters over the last couple of decades have also occurred by simply not asking or caring to listen to the answer to some of those first order questions. And first order questions are very basic questions. They often come across as fairly stupid, uninformed questions, but sometimes they really prove that you maybe need to go back to the drawing board with your approach.

Adam McCauley (52:28)

Yeah, I'm so glad we got here because I recognize your book very much focuses on the how and not the why or the weather questions about this clash. And I think to all your previous points right there, there's good reason to avoid that, largely because those in positions of power seem perhaps not to have taken a fulsome look at why precisely we would find ourselves in a scenario where we're saying yes or no to a potential conflict with China. One of the things that certainly comes out in your own research, to the limited extent that you sort of engage this question, is as you write, the deep ambivalence about engaging in a direct war with China. Right. You referen essentially 51% of Americans would support a counterstrike if the Chinese struck an ally, 59 if the strike resulted in American lives lost, for instance. But that doesn't suggest an overwhelming or groundswell of sort of support for a fight in any meaningful sense, and certainly at the cost of a likely contest between two states like the US and China. And if we think too that war is at base a battle of wills, the stakes for both of these parties are fundamentally different, particularly over, as you've pointed out, an island so far in the middle of the Pacific like Taiwan, with very different valences, as it were, for Beijing versus Washington. One of the things that's interesting about kind of the empirical insight then that you make is that it might become more or less clear to Beijing that there isn't going to be the will to defend Taiwan. Right? And this can sort of play out, I guess strategically in any number of ways. Number one, perhaps the hurry up and wait game that China is currently playing, essentially a competition trap of a particular kind with America, is actually the right strategy. Get them to tie themselves up in knots about trying to achieve kind of lightning success in the Indo Pacific, all the while knowing that when push comes to shove, it's highly unlikely that they're going to want to pull that trigger anyway. And there might be some strategic gains in the interim. But the other thing it sort of signals, and this is where it kind of cuts to the heart of this question of international order in a really interesting way or the changing order, is that we might think of the American interest over Taiwan as being one of two things, right? It might be materially interested. There's something about that island that matters in terms of emerging technologies. And that might not be something we're willing to give up. It may be something that the current administration is trying to replicate elsewhere, right. And thus decreasing the value of Taiwan one in a material sense over time. But there's also a huge, and especially for the American, let's call it international project of the past, there's a huge normative question here at heart, right? It cuts to the heart of the American credibility in terms of promises that it might make to friends and allies, but also the value in terms of defending a more or less democratic enclave from an authoritarian regime that seeks to unify it's a country as it sort of understands it. So I just wonder from your perspective, you know, is it the case that we're just kind of, we're stuck on so many of these hard, harder to answer questions that we don't and can't really imagine a more honest and fulsome assessment of how we might think about a fight in the Indo Pacific. Or, or do we think that the, the American machine in this case is, is sort of patterned by a set of assumptions that just haven't been challenged yet in some way. And that's why we find ourselves kind of in this quo of the present?

Ferran Stefan Ghatti (56:05)

Well, I think that it's always important to reassess pre existing notions and also assumptions about our policies, right? And also how we envision that our military would, in the event of a military conflict in East Asia, fight, deploy and what the most likely results would be. So I think you constantly need to challenge and revise your assumptions, essentially, Red team any of your conclusions when it comes to these larger, larger military questions. But I think what you're really pointing to is, on the one hand, this idea of deterrence, which in many ways looks like it's terribly complicated if you look into deterrence theory, but it's actually fairly simple. Right. I mean, deterrence is about credible threats and the idea that you actually deter an adversary from certain actions by threatening him with doing something. Right. And that's extremely difficult to gauge. Right. And the question is, what kind of actions cause your adversary to be deterred? Right. It's usually not the military balance, to be honest. Right. That's not how political leaders make a decision. Well, if you have 1200 tanks and I have only 800 tanks, because I have 1200 tanks, I'm going to try to attack you. Right. I mean, that's not how it's done usually. Also historical, historically, from case studies. Right. So it plays a role. But I think, particularly analysts like myself, I think very often are exaggerating the importance of certain weapon systems and capabilities. For example, a debate about reintroducing tactical nuclear weapons or tactical cruise missile into the Asian theater of operations or the European theater of operations. Yes, it plays a role. You can make an argument, but I don't think that's ultimately going to be a deciding factor for a political leader, whether to start a war or whether to pursue a certain course of action. To be honest, I think there are larger questions that can't be answered here. And I think on a strategic political level, it's really a fundamental question about what the role of the United States is going to be, not just in Asia, but in the world. And I think what we're seeing is that the United States is turning from status quo power to a revisionist power. It wants to change this global liberal world order that it has created after 1945, that's for sure. It's reassessing allies and partners across the globe. So all of this leads to questions about the United States credibility at the end of the day, and whether they actually would be willing to defend the island of Taiwan in the event of Chinese military aggression. Now, I do think that the preferred approach of the Chinese is still a peaceful unification. It's also not entirely clear to me how willing the majority of the Taiwanese population is to actually endure a long attritional contest against the Chinese. And I think it's also, frankly, a little bit not unfair, but I think problematic when you have U.S. delegations traveling to Taiwan, telling them that they need to embrace an asymmetric strategy and focus on certain capabilities without properly knowing that the United States would actually come to help them in the event of a military conflict. And I think one important point that I want to make here also regarding the book is that obviously I don't cover the Taiwanese forces. And I do make it clear at the beginning, though, that it would be extremely difficult for the Chinese also to cross that border in the Taiwan Strait and conduct a proper amphibious assault on Taiwan. And it's unclear to me also how successful the PLA would actually be because they don't have experience in these types of joint warfare operations. Amphibious operations are extremely difficult to pull off. So I think it's much more likely, rather than a full scale invasion, which is sort of of the subject of my book, that the United that the Chinese would actually try various coercive measures short of war to get Taiwan to capitulate. Information warfare campaigns, perhaps even a blockade at some point. But even a blockade is an act of war. Right. And here it's also not entirely clear to me that the People's Liberation army maybe would be capable of pulling that off over a long period of time, but it remains to be seen. Right. I think there's a of lot of stuff that you only find out about armed forces after the first shots have been fired that has been true with the war in Ukraine, for example, when it comes to the Ukrainian armed forces and the Russian armed forces, it's also going to be true about the Chinese military and the United States armed forces. A lot of the stuff we only will find out a few days, a few weeks, a few months into the war. And no matter what we think how this war is going to be fought, most likely it's going to be fought somewhat differently. So that's the reason why I also really focus on larger questions in my book and discussions. Right. Of course, it's filled with data points and capabilities described in detail and operational concepts discussed and so forth. Right. Four Structure outlines But at the end of the day, the larger question, as I said again pertains to vertical escalatory dynamics. The idea whether actually there is a Plan B for the United States Armed Forces forces after its preferred war fighting approach collapses and whether the brittle, whether there are certain elements of brittleness when it comes to the US Force structure as a result of this preferred warfighting approach that makes it unlikely that the United States armed forces can endure a war of attrition. Having said all of that, it's not going to be easy for The Chinese and the Taiwanese obviously also have a word in all of this.

Adam McCauley (61:54)

So just to close and again, recognizing that so much has been invested in Plan A here, towards the end of your book, you at least let's say soft offer, if I can frame it that way, a couple of recommendations in terms of corrections that might be strategically useful for the American posture. You talk a little bit about protracted smart denial approaches in the Indo Pacific instead. One of the interesting things about that is that that requires almost immediate investment in different ways in sort of preparing that space for a kind of defense of Taiwan in a non kinetic sense. Right. You know, moving the right people into position, having the right relationships, being there left of bang. And all of those things also have their own sort of escalatory sort of dynamics. If, let's say Beijing thinks that this is precisely the intention here, that there is something afoot even if we don't see it yet. So I just wonder if you can take us just through a couple of suggestions, perhaps from your perspective, after this analysis has been done, in terms of ideas for changes to American thinking, if they meaningfully want to reinforce and engage kind of in this protective approach towards Taiwan in the instance that Beijing decides to reach out.

Ferran Stefan Ghatti (63:15)

So I mean, the first premise that I make in that chapter is essentially that I want to try to do everything to avoid vertical escalation of this conflict and at the same time guarantee that U.S. military objectives, which I identify as essentially preserving an independent Taiwan that's free from Chinese occupation and that's also pro Western and is not in the orbit of the Chinese Communist Party. So in order to do that, I essentially say that the United States, instead of focusing, and that's something I missed at the beginning. I should have mentioned the basic preferred war fighting approach of the U.S. armed forces, but also NATO Western militaries generally is decisively shaping the battle space essentially by conducting a so called deep battle, long range strikes, long distances before there's actually real contact between the two opposing forces when it comes to close combat. And by doing so essentially already coming to or forcing a decision already in the deep battle, right. That sort of has a direct impact on the close, close battle, right. And that to me has a lot of escalatory dynamics baked in, as I outlined. Right. And so my recipe essentially is for the United States, in order to avoid chances of an increase in vertical escalatory dynamics, to focus on the close battle, focus on the battle in the Taiwan Strait. And here the United States would essentially be supporting what the Taiwanese are already doing in terms of trying to fight, fight a battle in the Taiwan Strait and essentially focus on destroying Chinese military assets in the Taiwan Strait and around Taiwan without necessarily striking targets deeper into China or potentially also targets where you have the potential that you would actually jeopardize or compromise the Chinese nuclear deterrent. And here it's really about capabilities that you need for the close fight. So, so it's stuff like smart mines, it's actually unmanned underwater vehicles, it could potentially be submarines around Taiwan as well. It's certain shorter range missile capabilities, anti ship missiles and so forth. It's tough essentially to sink the Chinese invasion fleet, to sink Chinese ships, to shoot down Chinese aircraft and drones. It's what one US Military commander described as essentially the idea of turning the Taiwan Strait into a hellscape for the People's Liberation Army. And I think we need to double down on that essentially. Right. And that's the recipe. That or that's my main recommendation in the book. Fully aware that the United States is unlikely to embrace this approach alone. I think they are most likely going to want to outsource that to the Taiwanese military. But I put it in the book in order to trigger a discussion within the US Armed forces about this. To be honest, the reason why they're not interested most likely in doing that is because it's still frankly unclear also what the United States commitment in all of this is, which is to me very interesting if you see what the United States Marine Corps is doing, the Navy, all these other service branches are doing, where they identify China as the pacing threat, essentially. Right. And still you have this policy in place about strategic ambiguity and you can come up with all these scenarios where the United States would collapse with China in the South China Sea, the East China Sea, a potential attack on Taiwan, where the United States would jump in, maybe an escalation on the Korean Peninsula. But I think if you essentially say that we are going to build a force structure and develop capabilities to defend an island, but by the way, we are not actually quite sure whether we are going to do that. We are going to decide ad hoc, so to speak. Right. I mean, once the Chinese, you know, fire the first shots, we are going to get together and then, you know, make a determination what the next course of action is going to be, I don't think that's going to be sound strategy here. And I understand that there is a virtue in strategic ambiguity. Understand all the diplomatic background and maintaining the status quo and so forth, that's important. But just in terms of military planning, it would make it a lot easier and a lot more credible, frankly. And that's, I think my last word on that. It would make US Military commitment a lot more credible in terms of in the eyes of the Chinese, I think, although there are discussions back and forth that the Chinese assume in any case that, you know, United States would intervene militarily, I'm not so sure anymore under the Trump administration, to be honest. I think that axiom was sort of true maybe a couple of years ago. Right. But I think that's also changing. So I think changes in the US Political system, the role of the United States in the world would also mandate maybe changes in certain policies of the United States that may have had value over the last couple of decades states, but no longer do so just from pure military perspective. I think you need clarity and you need to give the Taiwanese also the clarity. What's really going to happen in the event of a military confrontation? Should they pick up weapons or not or should they capitulate alone? It's going to be very tough for them to withstand the red onslaught. And so that to me, again, some of the first order questions that need to be answered in all of the.

Adam McCauley (69:05)

Yeah, I think it's essential and it's the right sort of note to end on. It's almost impossible to design a map if you have no idea where you're going. So, friends, I just wanted to thank you so much for being with us today. We've been speaking with Franz Stefan Gaddi, author of how the United States Would Fight China, which is available now online and in stores near you. I'm Adam McCauley and you've been listening to Intelligence Squared. Thanks so much for joining.

Ferran Stefan Ghatti (69:30)

Joining us. Thanks for listening to Intelligence Squared.

Adam McCauley (69:33)

This episode was produced by me, Mia.

Ferran Stefan Ghatti (69:35)

Sorrenti and it was edited by Mark.

Adam McCauley (69:37)

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