The Dragons and the Snakes

In 1993, newly-appointed CIA director James Woolsey pointed out that although western powers had “slain a large dragon” by defeating the Soviet Union in the Cold War, they now faced a “bewildering variety of poisonous snakes”. This book examines what happened to the snakes (terrorists and guerrillas) and the dragons (state-based peer enemies such as Russia and China), and how they evolved and adapted in the 25 years since Woolsey’s testimony. It explains how both state and non-state enemies learned by watching us struggle in Iraq and Afghanistan, and mastered new techniques—hybrid warfare, political manipulation, urban asymmetric attacks, high- and low-tech terror—as a way of rendering the West’s much-vaunted military superiority irrelevant. It concludes that, today, we face both dragons and snakes, at the same time and in many of the same places, and that each has learned from the other. Governments copy guerrilla techniques, and non-state groups can access levels of lethality that were once restricted to nation-states. The book argues that we are currently failing to deal with this new, vastly more complex and dangerous environment than at any time since the end of the Cold War.This is a book about how—over the last 25 years—Russia, China, Iran and North Korea developed new ways of war by copying terrorists and guerrillas, and how guerrilla groups were able to access levels of technology that made them able to take on governments in intense fights (mostly in cities) of the kind that used to be restricted to nation-states. It looks at how evolution happens in combat, how states and non-state groups copy each other, how our enemies have sought to exploit our tunnel-vision on terrorism since 9/11, and how we can respond.

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