ALLFARE: CHINA’S WHOLE-OF-NATION STRATEGY
ALLFARE: CHINA’S WHOLE-OF-NATION STRATEGY By:
Michael Margolius of the War College’s War Room lays the case for how prevailing frameworks such as DIME and the CCP’s “Three Warfares” fail to capture the integrated nature of Beijing’s strategy in his piece Allfare: China’s Whole-of-Nation Strategy. He proposes “Allfare” to describe a whole-of-nation approach that synchronizes state power, commercial access, proxy actors, illicit networks, and information operations into a unified campaign designed to shape outcomes without triggering open war.
Maritime coercion, cyber activity, influence operations, narcotics precursor flows, and strategic investment patterns should not be assessed in isolation, he says. They all form part of a coordinated design.
Implications for U.S. Defense Planning
The article situates “Allfare” within China’s long-term objectives and emphasizes preparation through non-kinetic measures. The fear, Margolius describes, is that open societies like ours present exploitable seams across economic, informational, and civic sectors. An effective response begins with recognizing that what appear to be separate pressures are often components of a single strategic design, and it requires integrating efforts across domains to address them coherently.
Check out David Maxwell’s The Missing War: Why the 2025 NSS Needs a Political Warfare Strategy to Defeat the CRInK in the Gray Zone for a perspective on how the 2025 NSS would be stronger with the kind of response that Margolius lays out. In Maxwell’s words: “we must compete where the enemy competes.”
To analyze how states exert their influence, scholars often compartmentalize actions into rigid analytical frameworks, which obscures the holistic scope of the challenge.
“Current paradigms of understanding the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) actions against the West typically use the DIME framework or even the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP)’s own “Three Warfares.” However, these frameworks that bin actions into discrete categories fail to encapsulate the totality of the PRCs activities targeting the west. While the United States hesitates to admit its “competition” with the PRC is conflict, the PRC appears to leverage all forms of warfare short of kinetic operations in daily affairs. To analyze how states exert their influence, scholars often compartmentalize actions into rigid analytical frameworks, which obscures the holistic scope of the challenge. By decomposing actions and analyzing them through the common frameworks, analysts fail to appreciate the interconnectedness across all elements of national power, particularly clandestine and sub-state illicit activities. These disadvantages call for a new model of analysis.
Adopting the concept of “allfare,” which captures every potential vector of malign action, provides a better appreciation for the strategic scope of PRC activities. Allfare encourages perceptions of linkages and cross-organizational intentions across the entire network, including official party and state instruments, proxies, and even seemingly disparate criminal actors. This last element, the illicit actors that ultimately advance CCP interests are entirely absent from traditional analytical frameworks. These activities are, at minimum, accepted by the party, and are very probably intentionally exploited. Since 2015, U.S. national security strategies have identified a rising Communist China as a threat to the liberal international order and continued American influence, yet policymakers still fail to grasp the broader whole-of-society grey-zone warfare the CCP conducts against the United States. Though they call for countering Chinese actions, the PRC continues their malign actions with no symmetrical or discernable asymmetrical response.. Allfare provides that aperture to see and then effectively defend against these multifaceted threat vectors. Through both planned and opportunistic actions, the CCP is waging Allfare against the West. Some examples include saber-rattling and confronting ships in the international waters of the South China Sea, inciting anti-Western sentiment through pervasive presence in citizen’s social and digital lives, confounding Western initiatives through vetoes and legal maneuvering in international organizations, cyber-attacks, tolerance of narcotics production for distribution to the West, and positioning for irregular warfare.”
