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Salami slicing tactics

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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Divide and conquer process

For the political meaning of the term, see Salami slicing tactics (politics).

The metaphor refers to salami cured meat, which can be very thinly sliced.<br>Salami slicing tactics , also known as salami slicing , salami tactics , the salami-slice strategy , or salami attacks ,[1] is the practice of using a series of many small actions to produce a much larger action or result that would be difficult or unlawful to perform all at once.

Salami tactics are a generally subversive strategy used extensively in geopolitics, such as countries attempting to expand their borders, and war games as a method of achieving goals gradually without provoking significant escalation.[2]

Perhaps the most famous example of the salami tactic was through WWII and into the start of the Cold War, with the formation of the Eastern Bloc in Europe by the USSR. By the time WWII ended, Eastern Europe was under the control of the Soviets. This advantage was used to ensure the election of submissive communist satellite states in several countries. As a result, from 1945 to 1949 through a series of slices, the USSR was able to bring Albania, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Romania, Hungary, and East Germany under its control without escalating incidents between its near peer adversaries.[3]

In finance, the term "salami attack" is used to describe schemes by which large sums are fraudulently accumulated by repeated transfers of imperceptibly small sums of money.[4]

Financial schemes<br>[edit]

Computerized banking systems make it possible to repeatedly divert tiny amounts of money, typically due to rounding off, to a beneficiary's account. This general concept is used in popular automatic-savings apps.[5] It has also been said to be behind fraudulent schemes, whereby bank transactions calculated to the nearest smallest unit of currency leave unaccounted-for fractions of a unit, for fraudsters to divert into other amounts.[6] Snopes in 2001 dismissed a popular account of such an embezzlement scheme as a legend.[7]

In Los Angeles, in October 1998, district attorneys charged four men with fraud for allegedly installing computer chips in gasoline pumps that cheated consumers by slightly overstating the amounts pumped. The fraud was noticed by consumers who found that they had been charged for volumes of gasoline greater than their cars' gas tank capacities.[8]

In 2008, a man was arrested for fraudulently creating 58,000 accounts which he used to collect money through verification deposits from online brokerage firms, a few cents at a time.[9]

In 1996, a fare box serviceman in Edmonton, Canada, was sentenced to four years' imprisonment for stealing coins from the city's transit agency fare boxes. Over 13 years, he stole 37 tonnes of coins, with a face value of nearly CA$2.4 million, using a magnet to lift the coins (made primarily of steel or nickel at the time) out of the fare boxes one at a time.[10]

In Buffalo, New York, a fare box serviceman stole more than US$200,000 in quarters from the local transit agency over an eight-year period stretching from 2003 to 2011 and was sentenced to thirty months in prison.[11]

Geopolitics<br>[edit]

Main article: Salami slicing tactics (politics)

The first use of salami slicing in politics - and the original Hungarian term (Hungarian: szalámitaktika) - is commonly attributed to Hungarian politician Mátyás Rákosi, who described the actions of the Hungarian Communist Party in its acquisition of power in the Second Hungarian Republic.[12][13]

China's salami slice strategy<br>[edit]

Main article: Chinese salami slicing strategy

In 2021, the European Parliamentary Research Service accused China of using the salami slice strategy to gradually increase its presence in The South China Sea.[14] Examples of this strategy are the Spratley Islands dispute, the Scarborough Shoal standoff, and more broadly China's Nine-dash line claims over virtually the whole entire South China Sea. China repeatedly uses its coast guard and merchant fishing vessels as a paramilitary fleet to intimidate its neighbors, often referred to as grey zone tactics.[15]

China's salami slicing actions provoked wide international condemnation, especially in regards to its island neighbor. China claims Taiwan as part of its sovereign territory via the One-China Policy. In January 2019, Chinese leader Xi Jinping essentially said he would use military force to reunify with Taiwan if he had to.[16] In August 2022, then US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi visited Taiwan, which further escalated international tensions following the COVID-19 pandemic. Shortly after her visit in 2022, then US...