Posted BY: Peter Knickerbocker
In 1999 Colonels Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui of the People’s Liberation Army Air Force (Communist China) wrote the landmark book Unrestricted Warfare. The essence of the colonels’ thinking was their adoption of Machiavelli’s thought as applied to war and expanding the concept of war beyond the clash of armed forces:
Achieve objectives by means fair or foul, that is the most important spiritual legacy of this Italian political thinker of the Renaissance. In the Middle Ages, this represented a breakthrough against romantic chivalry and the declining tradition of knighthood. It meant using means, some possibly comprehensive, without restraint to achieve an objective; this holds for warfare also. Even though Machiavelli was not the earliest source of “an ideology of going beyond limits” (China’s Han Feizi preceded him) he was its clearest exponent. (p. 154)
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