In 1999, two Chinese military colonels published a strategic doctrine that should have been required reading in every Western defense ministry, economics department, and corporate boardroom. It wasn’t. The book was called Unrestricted Warfare, and its central argument was elegant and terrifying: in the 21st century, any domain can be a battlefield.
Not just kinetic warfare. Not just territory and weapons. Financial markets. Material supply chains. Technology standards. Information flows. Regulatory frameworks. Any system that a rival depends on can be weaponized — and weaponized in ways that don’t trigger the conventional definitions of conflict.
We were conditioned to think of warfare as soldiers and aircraft and naval vessels. The doctrine laid out in that 1999 text described warfare as copper pricing, rare earth licensing, smelter capacity, and short-selling campaigns against strategically critical companies. We weren’t looking for that kind of attack, and so we didn’t see it arriving.
Craig Tindale has spent years mapping the material dimension of this doctrine. His work traces how Chinese state capitalism systematically captured the midstream of critical mineral supply chains — not through military force, but through patient investment, below-cost pricing designed to eliminate Western competition, and strategic licensing of outputs to dependent nations.
The Japanese experience is instructive. When diplomatic tensions arose with China, Japan found itself cut off from rare earth supplies essential to its defense manufacturing. No missiles fired. No troops mobilized. Just a licensing decision. The effect was a more direct economic coercion than most kinetic engagements would have produced.
Gallium is the current example. China controls roughly 98% of world gallium supply. Gallium is essential to a new generation of directed-energy and drone-defense weapons. If China decides those weapons won’t be built, it doesn’t need to attack the factories. It simply doesn’t issue the export licenses.
Hamilton understood this logic two centuries before the Chinese colonels codified it: the nation that controls the means of production controls the terms of engagement. We chose efficient markets instead. The 1999 playbook is now in its execution phase, and we’re still debating whether it’s really happening.
The Hedge 