A foothold in a water utility or a power network is a switch that someone else can flip in a crisis, with panic as the intended result, and no army has to cross a border to do it.

This is the legal and public-relations trap that strategists call “lawfare,” and it can paralyze a militarily superior power without a single shot.

They can be pieces of the same strategy, aimed at reshaping the balance of global power from the ground up.

Pick up your phone. Glance at the thermostat on the wall, or the price of tomatoes at the supermarket. Ordinary things, you would say: the small conveniences of a connected age. To people who think about power for a living, they look like terrain.

In 1999, two colonels in China’s People’s Liberation Army, Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui, published a slim and radical treatise called Chāoxiànzhàn, later translated into English as Unrestricted Warfare. Their argument unsettled readers then and looks uncomfortably prescient now. A weaker power, in a world stitched together by trade and technology, would never need to match the United States missile for missile. It could turn the stitching itself into a weapon.

The book’s central rule is blunt. No rules. Nothing off limits. The authors held that the conventional battlefield was fading, and that the real contest would run through finance, trade, technology, law and the human mind. Twenty-seven years on, the idea has plainly left the staff colleges. China’s rise owes less to conquest than to patient, many-sided pressure of exactly the kind the two colonels described.

The Invisible Infiltration of Our Civilian Systems

For generations,........

© Minute Mirror