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Whether that's true or not, large organizations and especially military organizations do the same thing. During times of peace they seriously create plans to do things which are seemingly unthinkable, just so that if the worst happens and they're needed, the plans can be taken out of storage and updated rapidly. I've mentioned before that I have no doubt that somewhere, in a file cabinet in the Pentagon, there is a plan for the invasion of Canada. I think there is no chance it will ever be carried out, but I am quite sure it exists. That's because war, as demonstrated by Clausewitz, is politics by other means. It's the use of coercion to gain from another nation or group that which they would not otherwise give you. Terms like "economic war" are literally true; war doesn't have to involve guns and shells and ships. "Information war" and "Psychological war" are equally true. This is not a new concept; Sun Tzu observed that supreme excellence in war lies in causing your opponent to surrender without a fight. Sean writes to me to ask my opinion of this article which describes how the People's Liberation Army is trying to develop new doctrine to leverage non-traditional forms of warfare against the US, given that they have no chance of matching us in high tech field war. My reaction is that I'm hardly surprised at it. The observation in this article that “The first rule of unrestricted warfare is that there are no rules, with nothing forbidden” is true; in unrestricted warfare only utilitarianism restricts your behavior. You avoid doing things only because they would not be helpful. Note that most warfare is not "unrestricted"; a government has to make a conscious decision to engage in that, but once having decided that the stakes are high enough to do so, it has to go for broke. But this is really rare; in the last hundred years I know of only one example of it, which is the war fought by the US, UK and USSR against Japan and Germany. And just as the US has plans for invading Canada, equally there will be plans for waging unrestricted warfare against other nations -- and they, in turn, will have plans in place for such warfare against us. This brings up the difference between capabilities and intentions. We are capable of a lot of things that we'll never do. We often talk informally about "turning that nation into a parking lot" and the US really does have the ability to saturation-bomb with thermonuclear weapons. If the US wanted to do so, it is fully capable of exterminating every single human in Afghanistan. We have the ability to make the place not only completely uninhabited now, but uninhabitable for the next thousand years (sort of a high-tech version of "sowing the fields with salt", only this would be done with "dirty" nuclear weapons that saturated the place with long-lived radioactive fallout). It would require a decision by us to engage in unrestricted warfare to bring about such a horror and I don't expect it to happen. But plans for that are in a file cabinet, or they better damned well be. That's because the military planners need to be able to present to the politicians a series of options. The military planners are doing that first-stage evaluation of every possible alternative no matter how horrible. It is then the politicians who do the second stage of rejecting nearly every one of the choices. Each option evaluation written by the military planners would describe what would be done, how long it would take, how much it would cost (in bucks and blood) and what the direct and indirect political and military results (and any other results which might be important, such as ecological damage) of it would be. It is not for the military planners to decide that a given choice is too horrible to contemplate; that's the job of the politicians. Part of the reason for evaluating extreme possibilities is so that the side effects can be fully evaluated ahead of time so as to show how terrible a given alternative might be. In other words, you make the plan precisely so as to prove that it is an option you should not take. But you can't really know that for sure without fully evaluating it. But there are lesser forms of warfare, such as economic war or psych-war, which may actually be preferable to normal field combat, and indeed both of those are used constantly. (The US and EU have been waging a low-grade economic war for about 20 years about issues like protectionism and tariffs; eve 
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