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 insure 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 an escalating incident between its near peer adversaries.[3]
In response to the Eastern Bloc, NATO was formed in 1949 who positioned its conventional military forces as close as possible to the USSR border and utilized nuclear deterrence to prevent any attack, or at minimum, deny the Soviets a quick victory. The strategy worked and the USSR was not able to further salami slice into Western Europe.
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
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$2.4million, 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]
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] Throughout the start of the 21st century, China also built multiple airstrips on artificial islands within the internationally recognized territorial waters of other countries. Examples of alleged illegal airstrips in disputed waters include: Fiery Cross Reef, Subi Reef, and Triton Island. These territorial ambitions are in stark violation of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, of which China is a signatory circa 1982, who then further ratified the treaty in 1996, legally binding them to it.
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 2019, months before grappling with the start of Hong Kong extradition protests, Chinese dictator Xi Jinping essentially said he would use violent military force to reunify with Taiwan if he had to.[16] In 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 President Biden effectively stated America would go to war with China should they attempt a Taiwan invasion.[17] In 2024, the Chinese military violated Taiwanese airspace over 3,000 times, an increase from the roughly 1,700 airspace incursions in 2022 and 2023.[18] In 2025, During Trump's second Presidency, the US seemingly walked back claims of war over Taiwan, and appeared to pursue the method of strategic ambiguity on the matter.[19]
Taiwanese defense against Chinese reunification is often framed as a two prong strategy:
Scientists are often evaluated by a number of papers published and similar criteria. In this context, salami slicing refers to "fragmenting single coherent bodies of research into as many publications as possible".[20] If the fragment is too small it may be too hard to publish, so this includes forming minimal publishable items. It can be harder to collect, digest, understand and evaluate the research when scattered in a number of sources. It also leads to repetitive descriptions of context, bibliography lists and so on. Regarding that it is costly to scientific dissemination process, it is often considered a bad practice[21] or even unethical.[22] Some authors managed to divide research to extreme proportions.[23] Salami slicing "can result in a distortion of the literature by leading unsuspecting readers to believe that data presented in each salami slice (i.e., journal article) is derived from a different subject sample".[24]
In the 2016 film Arrival, Agent Halpern mentions a Hungarian word meaning to eliminate your enemies one by one. It is thought that this alludes to szalámitaktika.[28][29]
In a 1972 episode of the TV series M*A*S*H, Radar attempts to ship an entire Jeep home from Korea one piece at a time. Hawkeye commented that his mailman "would have a retroactive hernia" if he found out.[30]
In a 1986 episode of Yes, Prime Minister, "The Grand Design", the government's chief scientific adviser walks Prime Minister Hacker through how salami tactics work and would prevent the prime minister from using nuclear weapons. [31][32]
Music
Johnny Cash's "One Piece at a Time" has a similar plot to the aforementioned M*A*S*H episode, but with a Cadillac made up of parts spanning model years 1949 through 1973.[33]
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