A Look at IntelFusion

Through Twitter, I’ve become familiar with Jeffrey Carr’s excellent blog IntelFusion which covers a range of topics of great interest to readers here. Several recent posts that have caught my eye:

Unrestricted Warfare, the Chinese Box, and the game of Go

In 1999, a seminal work on Chinese military strategy was published by two Senior Colonels of the Peoples Liberation Army Air Force (PLAAF), SrCol Qiao Liang and SrCol Wang Xiangsui, entitled Chaoxian zhan (translated as “Warfare that exceeds boundaries”).

….In July, 2002, the Asia Times printed a new article by the two Colonels “Chinese box approach to international conflict“. In it, they discuss China’s uber strategy in dealing with specific international issues:

“It is Chinese practice to attack an issue with a framework larger than the issue itself. When a crisis occurs, Chinese leaders first detach from it temporally and spacially. They spend time thinking about the issue before action, thus allowing more room for maneuver in the future. This is somewhat like playing with a magic box: first you pack the specific problem and related factors into a box and then fit it into larger boxes with related problems in different levels. Finally, you come up with a framework of highest generality to harness the whole situation.”

In this article, the authors later allude to the Chinese game of Weiqi (more commonly called by its Japanese name “Go”) and the strategy of the “idle piece”.

Nuclear black market still operating in the DRC

Ever since WWII, when the Democratic Republic of the Congo provided the raw uranium ore for U.S. production of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, various States interested in acquiring nuclear weapons have been attracted to the Congo’s relatively lax export controls for uranium found in its Cobalt and Copper ore. The most recent incident just occured a few days ago :

Security forces in Democratic Republic of Congo’s Katanga province have intercepted a truck transporting radioactive mineral ore bound for export, local authorities said on Friday. The truck, carrying 30 tonnes of copper and cobalt ore for Chinese-run firm Hua-Shin Mining, was stopped at an inspection checkpoint near Kolwezi, one of Congo’s biggest copper belt mining towns, on Wednesday.

Last November, another attempt to smuggle uranium resulted in the radioactive ore being dumped into a river causing serious health concerns for the surrounding population.

Read these posts in full at IntelFusion.