Episode Transcript
[00:00:02] Speaker A: The essence of hybrid warfare is to achieve political objectives through minimum armed strikes with a focus on winning public support.
The PLA expected Russia to run the same playbook it did with Crimea on a larger scale, and it didn't work.
I think the most important thing that the Department of War can do to address some of these threats is to keep its eye on the ball and continue prioritizing ongoing initiatives. Initiatives.
[00:00:34] Speaker B: This is the Convergence, the Army's Mad Scientist podcast. I'm Matt Sanispert, Deputy Director of Mad Scientist, and I'll be joined in just a moment by Kunal Chohan. Mad Scientist is a US army initiative that continually explores the future of warfare, challenges assumptions, and collaborates with academia, industry and government.
You can follow us on social media armymadsci or subscribe to the blog the Mad Scientist Laboratory.
Today, Kunal and I are talking with proclaimed mad scientist, Dr. Howard Wang from RAND. We'll talk with Howard about China's approach to hybrid warfare, the implications of their win without fighting strategy, and what this all means for the US Army.
As always, the views expressed in this podcast do not necessarily reflect those of the Department of Defense, Department of the army, or the Transformation and Training Command.
Let's get started. I'm joined today by Howard Wang, our expert, who, if you didn't see our Great Power competition in the age of authoritarian collusion, he was one of our experts on that event. I encourage you to go to the blog, pull up our YouTube page and check out his panel that he was on. Then I'm also joined by Kunal Chohan, our intern extraordinaire from William and Mary Kunal. Hello. Welcome to the show.
[00:01:46] Speaker C: Thank you for having me on. Thank you, Howard, for coming on. We're definitely excited to hear some insights. Just short intro on me, I guess. I am a senior currently at the College of William Barry, majoring in International Relations, minoring in econ. Pretty interested in defense stuff. So this has been a great experience so far.
[00:02:05] Speaker B: And now he's a podcast host.
[00:02:06] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:02:07] Speaker B: And Howard, welcome to you as well.
[00:02:08] Speaker A: Thank you for having me.
[00:02:09] Speaker B: All right, so we're going to get started here. So like I said, you were with us at our our virtual event, but why don't you tell us, you know, who you are, what you do, and how you got to where you are today?
[00:02:19] Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely. I'm Howard Wang. I'm a political scientist at the RAND Corporation, where I mostly do primary source research on ideas and how they develop within the Chinese Communist Party or the CCP as an organization.
Right. Most of that work is discourse analysis. I figure out the channels that carry information up and guidance down from party leadership. And then I use that process to assess how perception, strategy and doctrine change in the People's Liberation army, the pla, or within the Party writ large.
For my career, I actually pivoted into China research about 10 years ago. I had a past life doing state health care policy. I figured that was too hard and I needed an easier challenge and China seemed like the correct one.
So I went to grad school, got my doctorate.
I used to work on the staff of the U.S. china Economic and Security Review Commission, supporting Congress, then transitioned over to rand, wrote a bunch of reports, and most recently completed a one year rotation from RAND to osw China policy.
So it's really been a privilege to support the Department of War by spending all day reading stuff from China. And it's especially a privilege now that I've done the conference. It's especially a privilege to be an army mad scientist.
[00:03:37] Speaker B: That's right. Howard is an officially proclaimed army mad scientist.
[00:03:42] Speaker A: I'm still getting the Declaration framed on my wall.
[00:03:44] Speaker B: Excellent. That's what we like to hear. We like to hear when people, you know, tweet it out or there's actually an individual has it on the front of his door to his office so that when anybody who comes by to knock or open the door will see that he's a mad scientist. Right.
[00:03:57] Speaker A: We'll have the Declaration that I'm a mad scientist. Then the picture of me with the presidents and then some of my degrees.
[00:04:03] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:04:03] Speaker A: In order of importance.
[00:04:04] Speaker B: That's the good order.
[00:04:06] Speaker C: All right, now kind of getting into more grim, grim nitty gritty stuff. You know, we want. We read your report, we obviously heard your comments and you know, we wanted to sort of direct the conversation a little bit about PLA's views on hybrid warfare. So first question, you know, we would love if you could walk us through a little bit on PLA thinking about hybrid warfare leading up to the Russia Ukraine war.
[00:04:32] Speaker A: Yeah. So hybrid warfare is kind of a dated, at least as an American. Hybrid warfare is kind of a dated concept in US Thinking. Right. I think Frank Hoffman's credited with proposing the idea in 2006. And at least from the US side, we see it talked about in the 2010 and 2014 QDRS, the quadrennial defense reviews, and they talked about hybrid threats and hybrid contingencies in terms of proxy actors and the asymmetric threats that they could impose on a conflict.
I think we get probably from a blue side the clearest articulation is from the 2015 National Military Strategy where they say, I'm going to read it off here, overlapping state and non state violence. There exists an area of conflict where actors blend techniques, capabilities and resources to achieve their objectives.
So the core of the idea is hybridizing state and non state actors and threats. And that's the context in which the PLA first encounters the idea of hybrid warfare. I'll cover a little bit of the intellectual history in the PLA here because it's really the shift in their thinking during the Russia Ukraine war that matters here for U.S. interests.
So the PLA picks up on the idea in 2006, but it becomes more focused on the capabilities that non state actors that don't feel the traditional military can bring to bear. In PLA thought, the defining aspects of hybrid warfare for I think the first 15, the 10, 15 years or so, is actually the Russian military's experience incubating it and then experimenting with the idea in Crimea and Syria.
What the PLA learned from those operations and then what their, their academy of Military science actually wrote about it is that the essence of hybrid warfare is to achieve political objectives through minimum armed strikes with a focus on winning public support.
The PLA had assessed that Russian Chief of the General Staff Valerie Gerasimov proved hybrid warfare theory by seizing Crimea using a force that was only 20% military and 80% non military.
And that demonstrated the promise of hybrid warfare, that you too, you can achieve war outcomes without paying war costs.
And that this was now possible, although it had been discussed at length, although things like winning without fighting or with minimal fighting had been discussed at length in prior PLA thinking or traditional Chinese military thought. It was now possible because information age developments like the Internet and like mass communication gave states new vectors to attack directly into the heart of a society.
Now that's all the the 2010s where things stood was that the the PLA acknowledged that Russia had made some version of hybrid warfare work for their purposes.
But the PLA still needed to figure out what it meant for them.
So it's not until 2021 that we see the PLA start to advance its own definition that hybrid warfare is warfare at the strategic level that comprehensively uses political, economic, military, diplomatic, public opinion and legal means.
Not exactly a breakthrough, right? US defense thinkers considered the same things way before 2021. But what I think is notable here are the implications that the PLA draws from that and then the implications to the implications.
They identify four main implications that operations under hybrid warfare Conditions means number one, blurring boundaries between war and peace, number two, diversifying the forces that would fight in such a war.
Number three, increasingly flexible operational control over these forces and number four, increasingly concealed objectives about the conflict overall.
Now, when they considered these four implications, PLA theorists explained that under hybrid warfare conditions, regular military forces would only play a supporting role, like demonstrating national resolve with an exercise near another country's borders or maybe supporting fifth column forces.
Right. This was an idea meant to push away the prior paradigm of high end warfare.
For this question, I want to highlight just two more points about all of this.
The first is what hybrid warfare entails. PLA theorists said that because hybrid warfare is hard to label as a state action, it's hard to really grasp at all of the edges, where it stops and where it starts and who is participating in the action. It opens up a path for war between great powers within the constraints of nuclear deterrence and economic interdependence.
That means that what might have been a high end war previously could now in 2021, PLA thinking be an international crisis that constrains most of the actual fighting to the economic and informational domains may be supplemented by a smaller scale armed conflict. Right. What they observed in Russia or Russia doing to Crimea and Syria as minimal strikes.
The second is where the PLA said this.
This gets a little bit into discourse analysis, nerd talk. But the, the content I've described was published in the PLA's newspaper, the PLA daily, the Drifting Paul, under the column called Study Military Affairs, Study War and Study War Fighting.
The column was established in 2017 with a mandate to, quote, investigate scientific laws for the people's army to prevail against the strong enemy, which is their euphemism for the United States.
So, so just putting all of that together, we see that the PLA's definition of hybrid warfare in 2021 presented it as a way to prosecute and prevail in a conflict against the United States while firmly controlling the risk of nuclear escalation or economic catastrophe. Right. It was a way to win without fighting or to win with minimal fighting against the United States, the PLA strong enemy.
[00:10:39] Speaker B: So I want to get back to win without fighting or winning with minimal fighting. But first I want to talk about the Russia Ukraine war. We obviously have been observing that war in great detail. We're gleaning insights about war fighting and about large scale combat operations through that. But what are the Chinese learning? What's the PLA observing from the Russia Ukraine war? And what are they taking on?
[00:10:59] Speaker A: Yeah.
So the PLA expected Russia to run the same playbook it did with Crimea on a larger scale.
And it didn't work right. The version of the story in the pla, their after action reports, what they published openly about this is that they think that Russia thought cyber attacks and coercive messaging would dissolve Ukrainian resistance, so Russian forces could just sweep through the country unopposed in the first couple of days.
And that also meant that the first waves of Russian forces that entered Ukraine, they'd be meant for rapid presence and signaling, not high end combat operations. They weren't sized or shaped to achieve local overmatch and actually prosecute against an armed resistance. They would simply take Ukraine the way that they took Crimea.
But then Ukraine resisted and after a lot of intellectual teeth gnashing, PLA thinking began to start converging on the idea that Russia had really overestimated the effect of non military tools.
Maybe it worked on a smaller scale. Maybe it worked when states were not as connected with other states and alliance networks like NATO as Ukraine was. But for whatever reason, hybrid warfare didn't work in Ukraine the way that it worked in Crimea.
But when they were confronted with this, though, the PLA didn't throw hybrid warfare away as a concept entirely. As of 2026, they still talk about it publicly.
They still say that future wars with the strong enemy will be hybrid wars. But what did change was the way that they talked about what hybrid warfare was. From late 22 onward, we see a shift in PLA discussions of the use of military force under hybrid warfare.
As A reminder, in 2021 it was just demonstrations of resolve or support for fifth columns.
In 2023, Xinhua's PLA News and Communication center, which is basically one of the load bearing nodes within China's internal military propaganda analysis system, it started widening that list of military missions to include things like airborne or amphibious landings, key point seizure, urban warfare, a lot more application of military force than was previously conceived.
There were a couple of other changes too. PLA research around this time started highlighting what they characterized as US hybrid warfare tactics. While they had learned from The Russians in the 2010s, they were now learning from the Americans in the Russia Ukraine war.
These tactics, reportedly they enhanced lethality. They argued that US intelligence declassifications and deceptive messaging were designed to disrupt Russian decision processes. And further, that these steps were coordinated with Ukrainian ground operations in order to maximize Ukraine's lethality against Russian forces.
I can't say from my report whether these assessments are accurate, but I can say that the PLA seems to have taken these lessons to heart.
In 2023, former Western Theater Command commander General Wang Haijiang announced that after the outbreak of the crisis in Ukraine, a new form of hybrid warfare began to emerge.
He doesn't elaborate on what this new form means, but timing it with other shifts that we are seeing in PLA disc, it seems to suggest that he's referencing this broader intellectual shift away from thinking about hybrid warfare as a way to minimize or avoid military conflict altogether, and toward thinking about hybrid warfare as a way to improve battlefield outcomes. Right. In 2021, the military supported non military tools, but in 2023, the focus is on how non military tools can support the military.
[00:14:54] Speaker C: That's really great stuff and kind of going back to what you mentioned earlier, going back to winning without fighting or winning with minimal fighting. In your report, you mentioned that the PLA and PRC overall leadership is resigning itself more and more for just an open conflict with the US and less of that win without fighting mentality. They're kind of getting ready for the inevitability that it could be a shooting war.
So the question here is, with China's own societal pressures, do you believe that the CCP will have the political will for a protracted conflict with the stronger enemy?
[00:15:32] Speaker A: There's a couple of things that I want to touch on here.
I want to first say that absolutely China's leaders would prefer to win without fighting. You know, I too simply like to get what I want without paying for it. But hybrid warfare, as the PLA initially conceived of it, was a way to do that. And nothing has really filled its place since its demise in the Russia Ukraine war. The central point that they presented in 2021, that hybrid warfare opens a path for war within the bounds of economic interdependence and nuclear deterrence. This was hugely important in context of how party leaders saw US China competition.
And that's because for decades party leaders had said that China was leading a global trend toward multipolarity, while the US was on the other side, trying desperately to hold on to its hegemonic status of unipolarity, and that these forces were absolutely going to come to a head. Hu Jinta, Xi Jinping's predecessor, even announced that because of these trends, confrontation between the US and China was inevitable.
But confrontation doesn't have to mean conflict. The common party assessment is that despite that the US would probably choose conflict under Xi Jinping. Party officials updated Hu Jintao's assessment of inevitability by adding that China was closing the gap with the US and that as the two countries get closer to the point of power transition, the United States is more and more likely to resort to military force even by instigating a war to preserve its status at the top.
In fact, they argue that the US Instigated the Russia Ukraine war for precisely this reason.
So if hybrid war is what the PLA thought it was in 2021, then the supposedly inevitable U. S. China confrontation could be a hybrid confrontation. And then China would be able to.
China would have a high level concept for how to prevail over the US in that confrontation without paying the catastrophic costs of allowing it to escalate to major war.
But after hybrid warfare failed for Russia In Ukraine in 2022, the PLA is probably not telling party leaders that hybrid warfare can thread that needle. Right? In fact, some parts of the PLA are pretty resigned to conflict. As you had mentioned, there's a piece by professors in the PLA's Joint Operations Academy. This is where the PLA officers take their qualifications courses for Joint Staff or Commander billets.
Their professors are writing and telling them.
I'm going to read this off. Almost all military leaders hope to achieve winning without fighting through deterrence rather than going to war.
But most of them will fail even if they achieve a partial success. This is a low probability event.
You must not place your hope of victory on this lest you fall into passivity.
Instead, you must be mentally prepared for a difficult battle with huge casualties.
That's pretty stark stuff.
As to whether China will have the political will for a protracted conflict, it's impossible to say, right? Nobody knows what political will for a war looks like in the first month, much less the 10th, the 20th, the 30th if it becomes a protracted conflict.
What I can say is that they're certainly preparing for it. Right? China's leaders have been calling on their populace to prepare for total war. Zhongti not saying that total war is imminent, but calling on every Chinese citizen to mobilize now in peacetime to contribute to building war fighting advantages that party leaders can harness and realize in a future military conflict.
Now, I want to be clear here that total war is not birthed from the Russia Ukraine conflict, right? Total war in China strategy predates the Russia Ukraine war. It was baked into China's national security strategy for 2021 through 2025, which was passed in late 2020.
But the party sharply stepped up its emphasis and discussions on total war. Public speeches about total war in 2022 after the first few months of the war and whether total war will successfully build enough political will in order to prosecute a high end protracted war, I don't know. But certainly they, they're planning for it.
[00:20:04] Speaker B: Let's follow up on that. So if, as you say, total war or just conflict is inevitable, how do you see them? The PLA using the cognitive domain to create an advantage over the U.S. yeah.
[00:20:16] Speaker A: The PLA has talked about conducting cognitive domain operations in the US by sowing discord and inciting opposition to try to wedge the US away from its alliance partners, to break down its command system and to undermine domestic political cohesion.
They already do this in a couple of ways. Right. Chinese diplomats constantly deride the US and international fora as inciting or exacerbating military crises.
And Chinese propaganda outlets in China and other countries criticize US allies and partners as puppets or errand boys having no agency of their own because it's entirely dominated by the United States.
When they talk about amplifying discord, this is actually something that's taught to PLA officers. It's been around in PLA thinking for a couple of decades. Professors, most recently professors at China's National Defense University, they've publicly written that it is necessary to quote as many controversial views as possible, release opposing messages, divide and collapse and, and break down piece by piece, the US Western discourse alliance.
Right. And to that end, we see China's propaganda apparatus amplifying English speaking outlets, especially former officials and think tanks that criticize U.S. policy.
And we see them not so surreptitiously flowing resources to organizations like Code Pink. And their goal isn't to make sure that these messages win the day. It's not to convince anybody of Code Pink's position or any think tank's position.
It's just to create enough domestic discord within the United States so that it's a. It's a complicated decision making environment for US political leaders when they think about competitive actions. With regard to China, when the PLA talks about breaking down its target's command system, I think this is the most underexplored topic of their cognitive domain operations. Overall, they haven't published a lot, at least not that I've seen on this topic. But it's always on the list of cognitive domain operation objectives.
I could imagine this being something simple like cyber attacks on C2 nodes degrading the US ability to communicate in a crisis. It could also be something more sophisticated like deep faking somewhat high up in the US chain of command to give fake orders Just like amplifying discord. The goal here doesn't have to be for a fake message to actually be executed to to the fullest extent.
It only needs to create enough doubt to gum up the system to slow the US OODA loop, break down the cognitive domain so that the PLA achieves decision. Decision advantage or decision superiority.
[00:23:06] Speaker C: Yeah, I mean, our next follow up covers a little bit about what you just talked about, but more specifically on the political will piece now of the, you know, you've talked about how first the PLA wants to grind down US exquisite defense capabilities and then they want to go for our political will right after. And what ways do you think specifically would the PLA try to go for societal fracture within the US and how could they use the cognitive domain to do this?
[00:23:36] Speaker A: Yeah, on this I'm confident that the PLA will be actively, not just the play, actually. All the all forces involved in the new type of hybrid warfare will certainly be looking for avenues to inject messaging to create discord and break down communication systems within the United States.
I think one new piece that I didn't already mention that I'd probably highlight is an enduring theme in PLA literature about political warfare, about public opinion warfare is to attack ethnic cohesion or otherwise cause ethnic strife. This is something they constantly come back to in any publications, any research materials about social cohesion, cognitive domain operations, decision making.
Most examples of the PLA's attacks on or attempts to create ethnic strife in the last 10 years at least tend to be PLA commentary about Japan.
The pla, we have documents, public news articles where the PLA is arguing that Japanese people quote, carry invaders genes.
Xi Jinping has also leaned in heavily on some of these ethno nationalist terms. Right. He's announced in public speeches that there are no expansionist genes in Chinese blood. So in a crisis or conflict, it's possible, even likely, that the PLA would try to coordinate deep fakes, conduct media amplifications, whatever tactic is, is new and useful at the time to target topics of ethnicity for the purpose of trying to create strife in the United States.
[00:25:11] Speaker B: So switching gears a little bit, we've written a lot about, in our operational environment, assessments about the transparent battlefield, how we believe because of the ubiquity of sensors and networking and everything that it will be much harder to stay hidden on the battlefield. But you've talked about how there's kind of an asymmetry in the transparency of the modern battlefield, or at least the PLA views there. There being an asymmetry There specifically a one way transparency for the US with Starlink. In what ways will China try to counter that perceived advantage that we have when we have access to something like Starlink?
[00:25:45] Speaker A: The, the PLA has some really inflated analysis and perceptions of Starlink and its capabilities, right? They're like very serious Chinese military analysts that have argued that Starlink missions include intercepting ballistic missiles and hypersonic glide vehicles, providing information support for a nuclear first strike, and conducting suicide attacks against enemy Havas, the high value asset satellites. You know, I just, I, I want to talk about the counter, the, the countermeasures. But just to paint a bit of a picture on how overinflated Chinese threat perceptions of Starlink are some of their researchers. These are top researchers at BTT in the aerospace force, the pla, in their Beidou Research Center. These researchers have explicitly claimed that Starlink is the realization of brilliant pebbles, the 1980s notional space based ballistic missile defense system.
Multiple Chinese authors, including from the Academy of Military Science, which is the organization that writes their military strategy, they reference a 2020 PLA simulation where they found that Starlink satellites.
I'm going to read the quote. Intercepted 350 ICBMs from orbit with a 100% success rate and 5 to 7 interception opportunities for each missile.
I don't know if Starlink can do that, but I don't think it can. But it's a perfect example of the worst case thinking or the extreme thinking that Xi Jinping has ordered the PLA to adopt.
So in this environment, right throughout the PLA in China's broader space analytic enterprise, researchers also believe, as you've noted, that Starlink enables one way battlefield transparency.
Because according to them, Starlink satellites can be equipped with a variety of payloads, modular payloads that enable real time sensing, processing and transmission of battlefield data, that then seamlessly integrates data links from military and commercial systems using laser communication links that, and I don't know how they measure this, are 30 times faster than traditional connections. Starlink payloads, according to the pla, can perform functions of communication, imaging and remote targeting, providing precise PNT position, navigation and timing and target surveillance.
I'm a strategy and doctrine guy. I can't speak with any sophistication on whether Starlink or Star Shield actually has the capability to do these things.
But this is the extraordinary threat picture from the PLA's perspective.
Moving to countermeasures. What would be a viable countermeasure actually remains to be seen.
When Ukraine first started using Starlink to conduct operations in 2022 Chinese researchers, especially from BTTT, they appeared shocked, saying we don't even know where to begin developing countermeasures.
They also noted that Russian cyber and electronic warfare could temporarily disrupt Starlink services, but that the constellation overall appeared so decentralized that these disruptions were quickly mitigated.
So my guess is from reading everything that they're writing is that the PLA will adopt an all of the above strategy for countermeasures. Right? Cyber and electronic warfare are almost certainly part of the package.
Lasers too. Public media reports have shown China testing anti satellite lasers at their bases in Bohu and Corla. And there was a news report I think in 2022 that claimed China was developing a megawatt laser useful for hard kills, not just dazzling, that could be mounted up on a satellite and could probably conduct co orbital anti satellite operations.
PLA researchers have also talked about developing high power microwaves that can destroy Starlink payloads en masse to cover a wide area effect. The last item I think is that China's also developing a couple of mega constellations of its own.
But one of them, Project SatNet, sometimes also called Guo, was regularly cited in PLA analysis as potentially being able to counter Starlink by physically competing for a limited number of orbital tracks in LEO and possibly also carrying short range anti satellite payloads.
We've already seen that they have satellites with robotic arms, maybe something like that.
Now launching a proliferated LEO Constellation to counter another proliferated LEO Constellation doesn't strike me as the most cost effective option. But there's a lot of other reasons China would want its own project SatNet.
And so this option has stayed on the on the board of potential countermeasures in PLA discussions.
[00:30:46] Speaker C: Wow. I mean, I think maybe we should invest in some of these capabilities that the Chinese think we have with with Starlink. But kind of, you know, getting a little bit into the wrap up of the more serious stuff with the idea that war is increasingly likely and China will try to degrade the US in a protracted conflict. How can the US leverage its alliance system and shore up its industrial base to win in this sort of protracted conflict? And then a little bit beyond that, how can we actually stop Chinese efforts to degrade our alliances and will to fight?
[00:31:23] Speaker A: Yeah, I want to be a little bit cautious here.
My research has shown that the PLA probably sees fewer opportunities to deter the US from picking a fight. But that doesn't mean that Xi Jinping will necessarily agree.
The PLA in 2021 being able to say, boss, hybrid warfare is a way that we can thread this needle to 2022 saying, just kidding, boss, we don't think that's the case anymore. That's only going to be one input into a wide range of factors that shapes his thinking, not least of which I suspect will be the summit that he has scheduled with President Trump in May.
So where we are and how likely war is to happen or how likely Chinese leaders think war is to happen, I think that is going to come down to how heavily they weigh PLA analyses.
We know that the PLA analysis shares some relatively alarming assessments to China's leaders. Who knows what will come of that?
I think the most important thing that the Department of War can do to address some of these threats is to keep its eye on the ball and continue prioritizing ongoing initiatives like Piper for enhancing allied capacity, which will be really relevant in a protracted war, as well as developing some redundancies to hedge against compromised communications.
And it won't just be physical redundancies. The Department also needs procedures for identifying and handling that compromised messaging. When an adversary injects false information into decision making processes, there is going to be gum in the systems. Figuring out how to quarantine it and ensure that it minimizes the disruption of the overall US Decision making cycle, I think is going to be key in a future cognitive domain operations conflict.
[00:33:14] Speaker B: Howard, this has been great.
Those are kind of the tough questions
[00:33:17] Speaker A: we have for you.
[00:33:18] Speaker B: We're going to have a little bit of fun now as Kunal is going to transition us to our rapid fire questions.
These are always the same. They let us know a little bit more about our guest and we can, we can pull you away from, from the scary PLA stuff and we can get into knowing a little bit more about Dr. Howard winning. So, Kunal, why don't you throw the rapid fire questions his way?
[00:33:38] Speaker C: Yeah, I got it. You know, this one, this first one's still a little grim, more fun. But what technology or trend keeps you up at night?
[00:33:47] Speaker A: You know, you said that you wanted to pull back from the scary stuff,
[00:33:50] Speaker B: but we can be scary on this one. I take it back.
[00:33:53] Speaker A: This is. It's not exactly a technology. Right. But when I think about the trends, I worry about what succession looks like in the Chinese Communist Party. Right. Xi Jinping is 72 years old today, and he's deliberately prevented anyone from even being seen as an heir apparent. Now, a consolidated China is a much more challenging adversary, but a fractured adversary, a politically fractured adversary, I think is a much Much more dangerous. One, it's not clear who we should be delivering messages of deterrence and assurance to. It's not clear that that message will be received and influential within the system. It's not clear who can make the decision to initiate or pull back escalatory behavior.
So I worry what that transition, whenever it happens, would look like, especially just because it's not something that the United States can really prepare for.
[00:34:45] Speaker C: I mean, hey, back, I think last May on a hot mic, President Xi and President Putin were talking about living forever. That's right. Maybe they might not have to worry
[00:34:54] Speaker A: about the technology that keeps me up, that they'll live forever.
[00:34:58] Speaker C: Number two, what is something about yourself that most people might not know?
[00:35:02] Speaker A: Yeah. I don't mean to brag, but for one year, I was. This is extremely cool.
I was ranked in the top 150 in the world in Pokemon random battles online in college.
[00:35:17] Speaker B: That is incredible.
[00:35:18] Speaker A: Yeah. I also want to be clear, like, top 150 is not good, but it is also not bad.
[00:35:26] Speaker B: Well, it sounds good. It sounds great. I mean, out of how many millions, I would assume, right?
[00:35:31] Speaker A: Like 8,000.
[00:35:32] Speaker C: Okay, that's still great.
[00:35:34] Speaker B: I'll edit my millions comment out.
[00:35:37] Speaker A: No, we can say it's millions.
[00:35:39] Speaker B: That's fine. There we go. Yeah. Yeah, that's pretty amazing.
[00:35:41] Speaker C: And then number three, what's your favorite movie?
[00:35:44] Speaker A: I watch Christopher Nolan's the Prestige every year. I think this is. This is probably a relatively common one, but, you know, I think it's a beautiful character portrait of. Of obsession. But the real talent that you see from. From Nolan, the incredible skill is in making magicians look cool.
So I'm very. It's. I am always in awe of the movie whenever he manages that.
[00:36:09] Speaker B: The Prestige, I think, is his most underrated because I think when you start to peel away the layers and look a little bit under the surface, there's so much there in that movie that I don't think on, on first viewing you can get. So I. I absolutely love that movie.
[00:36:24] Speaker C: I've actually never watched it or heard of it before today. So I'll be added to my list.
[00:36:28] Speaker B: This will be Kunal's last podcast.
[00:36:33] Speaker C: And then number four, you know, going back a little bit to China now, have you watched the Wolf Warrior movies and Slash or Born to Fly? And if so, what are your thoughts?
[00:36:44] Speaker A: I have not, but I have a recommendation that I have watched.
I have a recommendation for you to include on this question.
It came out over Chinese New Year. I watched Jinzu Wusheng.
I think The English name is Scare Out. It had a limited release in the United States and it's about a team of MSS agents hunting a potential double agent agent in their ranks.
So it was actually produced in conjunction with the mss. It's hilarious. The, the, the first couple of minutes when they're showing like, you know, produced by, you know, whatever companies and then all. They're listing all the names, it's in Chinese and in English. And then you see the MSS seal and Ministry of State Security in Chinese. That's the only moment that's not translated in the movie.
Reportedly, some of the tactics, techniques and information was informed by actual, actual cases of the mss, like prosecuted of spies in China. I don't know if that's true, but that's, that's the reporting about it.
[00:37:46] Speaker B: All right, so Scare Out, Is that what you said it's called?
[00:37:48] Speaker A: Yeah, Scare Out.
It is not a good movie. The cinematography is very, very bad. But I think it's a, it's a really good window into how the state portrays heroism and threats.
And I'll note the threats speak in flawless American accents.
[00:38:07] Speaker B: All right, cool. Now you've got your next assignment. So.
[00:38:10] Speaker C: Yeah, watch, watch Scare. Watch the prestige. Yeah, I would, I would highly recommend watching Born to Fly. It's their version of Top Gun.
[00:38:19] Speaker A: Is Born to Fly. Good, because in Top Gun, you. You shoot people. Right? Isn't Born to fly just like you fly?
[00:38:24] Speaker C: Well, do they have. So it's there. The plot is they're getting threatened by the F35, I believe. And this is like, oh, we're developing the J20 in response their own stealth jet and apparently it's not very good. The Wolf Warrior movies are supposed to be better. In fact, Hollywood B lister, I believe. Frank Grillo was the villain.
[00:38:46] Speaker A: I feel like if you're not, if Bornafly is not, you know, you can't say this is China's Top Gun and then not have dog fighting. Like really what you're looking at. If it's just you're building the J20, then it's China's version of the scene in Iron Man 2 where he like makes the new like power core or whatever that's no longer toxic to his blood. That, that like 15 minute montage or something. It's just, it's an engineering movie. I. It's.
[00:39:12] Speaker C: I think there's some, there's some dog fighting. I think at the end. It's probably design. It's. I think it's designed like Top Gun. It's been a while. I've only watched clips of it and I read the Wikipedia summary, but supposedly a pretty pretty okay knockoff but not great.
[00:39:28] Speaker A: I'll give it a shot. Yeah.
[00:39:29] Speaker B: Now I'm too curious not to not to watch it and find out. So we'll see.
Well Howard, you did excellent on the rapid fire questions. 10 out of 10. We want to thank you for coming on and talking to us today and following up from your appearance on our virtual event. So encourage everyone who's listening to this that hasn't seen the virtual event. Please do go back and run through all those panels. On behalf of the Convergence of the Army Mad Scientists Initiative, Kunal and myself, we'd like to thank you again for coming on and talking to us.
[00:39:55] Speaker A: Matt Kunal, thank you so much for having me. This has been a pleasure.
[00:39:58] Speaker C: Oh, thank you so much.
[00:40:01] Speaker B: Thanks for listening to the Convergence. I'd like to thank our guest, Dr. Howard Wang. You can follow us on social media @Army Madsci. And don't forget to subscribe to the blog the Mad Scientist Laboratory.
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