Strategic nightmare: The China threat

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Written By Geoff Metcalf

“I have always thought the actions of men the best interpreter of their thoughts.”    –John Locke

Communist China, has been, is, and will remain an enemy of the United States.

This is not right wing knuckle dragging sophistry…it is so because China says it is so.

I have been writing and grousing about the China Threat for over a decade. I have interviewed dozens of experts and collected significant documentation and empirical facts which clearly indicate, China means us harm. All the diplomatic spin about Chicoms as strategic trading partners offering a vast potential consumer market for us to exploit is bullfeathers. State Department erotic dreams of regime change through inertia is criminally myopic.

Murphy’s Law dictates, “Whatever can go wrong, will go wrong, and at the worst possible time.” Add to that Hanlon’s razor, a corollary of Finagle’s Law, “Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.”

A recent British ‘Telegraph’ article read, ‘America prepares for cyber war with China’. It is about time.

Cyberspace is the significant area of operation for preparation of any future conventional or nuclear battlefield.  China isn’t even being covert about their intentions anymore. China is an enemy because THEY SAY SO.

Everything China has done, and is doing, is in preparation for what they are planning…and they are planning (according to Chinese President Jiang Zemin, “for war with the United States”).

I have previously observed that a nightmare strategic scenario would be this:

  • The United States is up it’s hips in alligators in the Mideast. That has happened.
  • We are militarily engaged in Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Syria, Israel et al. We are on the way to that sad reality.
  • North Korea rolls south to ‘unify’ the Koran peninsular.
  • And/Or China executes their established plans for retaking Taiwan. We know their plans because they gave them to us (correctly presuming our CIA would muck up any intelligence gathering effort).

What do we do? Except for issuing a sternly worded snotty memo, and empty threats of nebulous economic sanctions, there isn’t a lot we CAN do.

Sun Tzu declared in The Art of War, “Attack when they are unprepared, make your move when they do not expect it… So a military force is established by deception, mobilized by gain, and adapted by division and combination.”

Hell-o!?!?

The recent focus on cyber war isn’t all that surprising. In fact, cyber warfare and attacks on satellite are inevitable.

Preparation of the battlefield is a military axiom. Roman legions used flaming oil thrown from catapults. English archers attrited French forces at Agincourt on St. Crispin’s Day. Mustard gas was used in WWI. Artillery was used in WWII and still is an accepted standard. ‘Smart’ bombs with GPS and laser guidance have improved battlefield efficiencies.

Given the ubiquitousness of computers and their increased role in everything from intelligence gathering to fire direction control and navigation, it is a given that in future armed conflicts generals are going to focus on defending and destroying computers and satellites.

The 2007 Chinese budget marked an increase of $6.84 billion over last year. China’s 2.3 million-strong military is the world’s largest. The Pentagon believes China is sandbagging and its military spending may be much greater since the announced budget didn’t include weapons purchases and other key items.

Six years ago it was noted that China was developing cyber warfare capabilities that could put at risk the computer networks that the US military increasingly relies on for its operations.

Air Force General Ralph Eberhart, who was head of the US Space Command, said (six years ago) the US military was concerned about China’s focus on developing the means to carry out computer network attacks. “We see this in terms of capabilities we know they have, we see this written in their doctrine, we see this espoused by their leadership,” he told defense reporters six years ago.

We know what China’s intentions are. There is a compendium of books crystallizing the growing, inevitable, significant ‘China Threat’.

A ‘metsubishi’ is a martial arts technique of using blinding powders or even just distracting an opponent to anticipate an attack ‘here’ when you really hit them ‘there’.

Unless or until the U.S. acknowledges the Chicoms are not our friends and DO intend to harm us, we remain vulnerable to a catastrophic ‘metsubishi’ from the China Threat.

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