To deal with China and Russia, the U.S. admiral came up with a “drug scheme”
Admiral Timothy Ray, the commander of the “Global Strike Command” of the United States Air Force, said that if you try to defeat the United States of China and Russia on the battlefield of great powers, there will be an “infinite game”.
According to the report, Ray said in a pre-recorded speech at the 20th Nuclear Trinity seminar: “They [China and Russia] are different from our views on the world outlook on how to act.”
Ray said that the U.S. Air Force Global Strike Command is studying the concept of “infinite game” proposed by best-selling author and inspirational speaker Simon Sinek to revolutionize the way it deals with big power competition.
Ray’s analysis says that limited games, such as baseball, exist within predetermined ranges (e.g. innings), have rules (e.g. outs) and number of participants (i.e., each game, a baseball field and its player’s seat can only hold two teams), and end in a decisive way. Ray explained: “Unlike finite games, infinite games have known and unknown players. They participate in or withdraw from this special competition, with different fairness and different rules. There is no clear final state.
In these infinite games, winning depends on surviving long enough to play for another day. Ray said that the participants in the limited game face of such challenges are similar to playing checkers, aiming to defeat opponents by depriving them of their “resources, time or will”, while participants in infinite games are similar to playing chess.
“I think it’s profound, I think it does,” Ray said of Sineke’s theory.
He said that if the United States, which tries to defeat China and Russia on the battlefield of great powers, is really going to play an “infinite game”, he must think like a chess player, admit the chessboard that is in front of it — not the chessboard it wants to see – and formulate strategies accordingly.
