fog, friction, and talk

the subtle dangers of languages and non-talk

The latest close near miss between the People’s Liberation Army and the U.S. Air Force over the South China Sea Friday was yet further evidence that our two militaries encounter each other regularly. Concerns about Chinese pilots impeding our activities in the South China Sea seem likely to multiply as Beijing stiffens its resolve on ‘rightful defensive’ actions to deter ‘illegitimate’ U.S. activities. Washington, on the other hand, continues actions to advance our position regarding the openness of international waters and air space.

I cannot see this ending soon nor easily.

Coincidently, news indicates Xi Jinping is reminding the PLA to prepare for ‘worst case’ scenarios which we assume means war over Taiwan, if not something grander and more dangerous. The news take on, unsurprisingly, fairly dark implications.

Militaries around the world regularly receive taskings by their leaderships to prepare for the worst case because that is what militaries do. One ought never send the armed forces out into a conflict without recognising that mishaps frequently happen. Carl von Clausewitz reminds readers that the easiest things become so hard in war. Additionally all conflicts also have the twin problems of ‘fog’ (such as the misinterpretation, uncertainties, and overall poor clarity such as weather, taking a wrong path, or mishearing a verbal transmission) and ‘friction’ (e.g., leaders who get sick rather than lead, weapons systems failing, and other unpredictable changes in force deployments due to a transit system breaking down). When fog and friction alter the course of decision-making and a battle, consequences can be devastating or small but they are unintended and unforeseen in their particulars. Thus the course of warfare does not follow an entirely predictable path.

The United States and China have two further factors multiplying risk. One is language, especially with the ‘telephone game’. Are we sure we heard what we heard? For our two forces, lots of transmission points make friction possible as occurred when we were kids moving a tale around a room of people by method of whispering into the ear of the person to our left. How often did the final message differ pretty substantially from what originally was said?

Both English and Mandarin are two of the toughest languages on the planet (along with Japanese the third). For you and me, English is not that big a deal because we have been speaking it for a while. But, the longer I taught international officers, the more I came to appreciate how bloody complex it is for a non-native speaker to communicate really well in English. Verb tenses are a bear but we are also pretty sloppy with vocabulary. We use the same word for many somewhat close meanings, plus we have those lovely homonyms (words that sound the same but have multiple meanings). It’s just a hard language but we make due with it as our own (and many of us think the world should speak nothing but English but that is another topic). That says nothing of the regional pronunciation, either.

Mandarin is a ideographical language made of tens of thousands of ideographs. Yes, there are some roots shared by many words but it requires a great deal of memorisation, knowledge of those ideographs, and recognition that Mandarin is the written language in China. South of the Yangtze River the predominant spoken language is Cantonese with 6 tones while Pudonghua, a ‘national’ language the central government insists is what we call Chinese, has a distinctly Beijing sound with 5 tones. Tones make the world go round as the pronounced tone alters the meaning of the ideograph. It’s not uncommon to ask someone about a name only to have the Chinese speaker throw her hands up until she sees the character or hears the pronounced vocabulary word. With slightly under 1.3 billion speakers of varying fluency (56 ethnic minorities guarantees the same number of distinct languages across the geographically challenged country), this is a complex language as well.

Communications during encounters between our military and the PLA are in broken English but that is fraught with potential friction. Additionally, as China’s nationalism continues spiking, how long will it be before Beijing demands those in ‘China’s’ waters or air space begin using Pudonghua? Are we preparing for that or assuming only that they will continue addressing us in English? we are notoriously stubborn about learning other languages yet this could matter a great deal for our military at work.

We have language speakers but it’s not always those deployed on a ship or in an air squadron. Evene with linguists, it takes vital time in a crisis to play the telephone game to assure what was actually said over communications channels.

The second danger is at a higher level where we tend to assume China’s words mean the same to them as they mean to us. That may or may not be true and that can be a tremendous danger. As discussed a couple of weeks ago, Xi Jinping is building on the 74 year old (as of 1 October) CCP obsession with maintaining power, defining threats to China’s security as threats to the CCP itself. Xi’s recent demand to ‘prepare for the worst case’ takes on a somewhat different meaning if his reference point is about threats to someone else ruling the nation rather than a thermonuclear exchange with the United States. Neither definition provides us much comfort but the focus of the remarks indicates how the Party prioritises threats to China.

The primary objective stated repeatedly by China’s leadership for decades has been maintaining the Party’s control because the CCP views itself as the mechanism for liberating a failing nation from its humiliating relationships with colonisers, then earning global respect. Retaining leadership is more important than anything else, although threats to that leadership do appear to include anything leading the public to overthrow the regime, such as losing Taiwan or control over the land features of the South China Sea. CCP leaders never want a situation where the people demand accountability for their failings.

It is not surprising, however, that we assume China’s national security mirrors our own: an externally driven threat. We look at domestic issues as resolvable through the electoral process (at least perhaps until 6 January 2021). China’s leaders traditionally found their security threatened by an inability to address domestic challenges rather than foreigners.

This difference is merely interesting in times of peace, marginally more important in times of competition but downright dangerous in minutes of crisis. We and China both need experience, fluent speakers of each other: our differing governments, cultures, languages, objectives, fears, and histories. Without those fluent speakers we run terrible risk that in conflict, the fog of assuming incorrectly the intention of the other side in an unclear incident can lead to a catastrophic response while the friction of feeling desperate when a system goes awry in any given situation can additionally escalate the danger. Dr. Bernard Cole’s Red Shark at Sea makes that case powerfully, albeit as fiction.

We are ironically in the midst of a paucity of interactions with our Chinese counterparts. News that China refused a meeting with Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin at the Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore is a case in point. While no one seriously believes that meaningful resolution of the substantial differences between our two countries would result from such a brief encounter, meeting with the other side remains a valuable exercise in sizing up our adversaries. Their talking points and our own are well known to each other but it never hurts to hear them again, to take even a short time to probe, to embrace every opportunity to assure a common usage of terminology, and to remind one another that as military women and men, the fog and friction Clausewitz discussed almost two centuries in On War remains true today.

In both of our countries, civilian political leaders decide on war and peace rather than the military. But the dangers of miscalculation, friction, and fog only proliferate as both the PLA and the U.S. militaries so rarely encounter each other anywhere other than a few hundred meters apart in tense situations. The ability to see anything human about each other is rapidly fading into the past as mil-to-mil encounters are viewed as worthless opportunities rather than chances to learn even a glimmer about the other side. Perhaps that would make war more tolerable but it also signifies hardening positions on both sides which, if our concerns about PLA capacities are accurate, are unlikely to lessen the damage if either an unprovoked or full scale conflict were to erupt.FIN

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Carl von Clausewitz, On War, Indexed edition, edited by Michael Eliot Howard and Peter Paret (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989)

Bernard D. Cole, Red Shark at Sea: A Novel on the People’s Liberation Navy (Amazon Books, 2023) retrieved at https://www.amazon.com/RED-SHARK-AT-SEA-CHINESE/dp/B0BYBF7YBK/ref=sr_1_1?crid=2TWHKXP4D5HAL&keywords=bernard+d.+cole%2C+red+shark+at+sea&qid=1685564592&sprefix=red+shark+at+sea%2Caps%2C1145&sr=8-1