US bureaucrats are clueless about Chinese ‘unrestricted warfare’

The House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party held a hearing in late February on the Chinese cybersecurity threat against the United States, and the takeaway was alarming.

Not because of the obvious Chinese capabilities and long-running hacking operations against the United States, which are bad enough. Rather, it was the spectacle of five top-level U.S. government officials, stove-piped by their respective organizations, demonstrating their hopelessly myopic understanding of the Chinese threat. They haven’t a clue about the reality of 21st-century warfare with a peer competitor bent on achieving victory through strategic paralysis.

The strategic paralysis that would result from coordinated attacks on America’s centers of gravity would leave us unable to retaliate in any meaningful way.

Apparently, none of the five officials ever bothered to read “Unrestricted Warfare,” the seminal work on China’s long-term strategic goals and methods. Written in 1999 by two Peoples Liberation Army Air Force colonels, Qiao Liang and Wang Xiang Sui, the book laid out a decades-long plan of creeping, slow-motion warfare against U.S. diplomatic, informational, military, and economic strengths until China would be strong enough to take on the United States in a peer-to-peer conflict.

In retrospect, “Unrestricted Warfare” is exactly what China has been waging over the last quarter century.

Thus, the gist of the House committee hearing was a kind of monotone of bureaucratic bloviation: cyber, cyber, cyber, cyber. Funding, funding, funding, funding.

In reality, a war with China would be much more complex and lethal. And the only person who is laying out the vast range of Chinese capabilities against the United States is one lone Air Force colonel, long retired.

He is no ordinary retiree, however.

If the U.S. Air Force had a pantheon of airpower saints, Col. John A. Warden III would stand alongside Billy Mitchell, John Boyd, Robin Olds, and Curtis LeMay.

Warden was the brain behind “Instant Thunder,” the war plan of Operation Desert Storm in 1990 that would defeat Iraq by simultaneously attacking its centers of gravity.

Warden now has reworked his Instant Thunder theories of strategic paralysis in mirror image: What if the Chinese were to use an Instant Thunder-style campaign against the United States? He expounds upon the idea at the Winning Peer Wars website.

Warden’s video of a notional Chinese attack details in nine minutes what FBI Director Christopher Wray, NSA General Paul Nakasone, and the three Biden cyber-bureaucrats’ two-and-a-half-hours of maundering completely missed: a simultaneous, multi-domain Chinese attack upon America’s centers of gravity, without the use of nuclear weapons.

The strategic paralysis that would result from coordinated attacks on America’s centers of gravity would leave us unable to retaliate in any meaningful way. The video describes an assault upon the U.S. homeland, which has not been seen since the War of 1812, when the British ravaged targets on the East Coast and burned down the White House and the Capitol building.

Warden describes a Chinese attack that would take advantage of America’s complete lack of preparation — a total inability to defend against a biological strike upon the general population (COVID comes to mind), as well as the lack of U.S. air defense against a saturation assault by stealthy radar-evading, precision-guided cruise missiles.

At the same time, remote cyber-strikes would dump the U.S. power grid, while electromagnetic pulse detonations mixed with cyberattacks against the internet and telecommunications networks would render U.S. emergency response systems useless.

In quick order, attacks by Chinese fifth-column units long-since infiltrated across the southern border would demolish continental U.S. military command centers such as U.S. Strategic Command headquarters in Omaha, Nebraska, and U.S. Northern Command headquarters in Colorado Springs, Colorado.

All at once.

In a follow-up video, Warden re-emphasizes the threat posed in the first video and presents an outline of the arduous work the United States must undertake to deter and defeat any future Chinese attack.

Perhaps someone in the executive branch might take a few minutes to watch the videos and get a clue as to the enormity of the threat that China now poses. They can’t say they weren’t warned.