Lower-ranking U.S. service personnel will now have the same opportunity before entering combat that their Eastern European and Asian counterparts have had since WWI--to accurately predict what their adversaries will do.

China Is Once Again on the Move Now at the dawn of the 21st century, China is trying to reclaim its “former position at the center of the civilized world.” Unfortunately, with the Korean incursion of 1950, brutal annexation of Tibet in 1951, war with India in 1962, punitive expedition into North Vietnam in 1979,32 and border clashes with the Soviet Union, past regimes have demonstrated expansionist leanings. Just since 1996, a Maoist uprising in Nepal has claimed over 2000 lives.33 While traveling across the Indian subcontinent in 1999, a retired U.S. Marine noticed how happy, well fed, and gainfully employed the Nepalese people were in comparison to their southern neighbors. He could find no internal justification for the uprising.34 There is evidence that China expects its sphere of influence to encompass Japan and all of Southeast Asia within the next ten years.35 To become the next superpower, China needs only to better its aerial sensors and supporting arms. To fully appreciate its potential for technological growth, one must only view, firsthand, the modernistic skyscrapers and bustling commerce of present-day Shanghai.36 Sadly, some of this growth may be channeled toward other-than-peaceful purposes. China has continued to use its military to reassert what it sees as its sovereignty over Taiwan and the Spratly Islands. Twenty years of economic reform have created the competitive spirit and cash flow on which military establishments thrive. Already there have been improvements to China’s sea, air, and missile capabilities. First tested in August 1999, the long-range Dongfeng-31 ballistic missile could be Beijing’s answer to any missile defense system that the U.S. might deploy in the region. More agile than its predecessors, the multiple-warhead Dongfeng can better penetrate an antimissile curtain. With these and other technological advances, the Chinese believe that they can regain their lost glory as the greatest military power in Asia, if not the world.37 What Appears to Differentiate the Styles of War When it comes to a subject as complicated as warfare, generalizations are risky. Each nation develops its own way of fighting based on unique circumstances. Still there are trends. If one were to summarize the differences between Eastern- and Western-style armies, one might say that the former generally do a better job of harnessing the perceptions and common sense of the people in contact with the enemy. Deceptive and multifaceted, this alternative “style of war” is difficult for the Western, “top-down” thinker to comprehend. At times, it employs massive firepower; but more often, it relies on surprise. Its essence lies not in established procedure, but rather in flexibility to change. It encourages its practitioners to shift rapidly between opposites — to alternately use one maneuver as a deception and its reflection as a follow-through. During the first half of the 20th century, the tactical successes of armies using the Eastern method have been overshadowed by their overall defeat. Only with the Korean stalemate of 1953, did the U.S. public first start to suspect that the Eastern way of war had substance. Now, 25 years after the unsettling end to the Vietnam conflict, few Americans continue to blame Congress. Many who were there believe the problem to have been one of overcentralized control and outmoded small-unit infantry tactics. [S]ince the tragic, inevitable fall of Saigon, there has been no major, honest post mortem of the war. There have been critiques dealing with the big picture . . . but none has addressed the lessons learned the hard way, at the fighting level, where people died and the war was in fact, lost.38  — Col. David H. Hackworth U.S. Army (Ret.) If U.S. citizens were now to more closely examine the Eastern style of war and possibly even demand its assimilation, they might still give meaning to the 58,000 American lives lost in Vietnam. There is evidence that this alternative way of fighting is not only less risky, but also more moral. Without the political subversion and summary executions that have so often accompanied it, the Asian method shows great promise. But these are emotionally charged issues that need not be resolved here. What is important is that the current crop of American servicemen and women come to better understand potential adversaries. Of the world’s major armies, only the French, British, and American have yet to develop something similar to the Eastern style of war. Few, if any, Americans who fought at Belleau Wood, Bataan, the Chosin Reservoir, or Khe Sanh were adequately briefed on their opposition. God only knows, how many more could have come home if they had been. So, in the interests of preserving America’s greatest asset — its youth — the following treatise on Oriental war is respectfully submitted.