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“Winning A Peer War”

The Air Campaign

OPINION & ANALYSIS

With Biden in disarray, who’s keeping an eye on Xi Jinping?

JOHN WARDEN CHUCK DE CARO

JULY 24, 2024

In the last few weeks, China’s coast guard has clashed with the Philippines, detained a Taiwanese fishing boat and crew, prowled a Japanese island chain, and violated Taiwan’s air and sea space.

While the U.S. political establishment focuses on Joe Biden’s post-debate resignation imbroglio, and disgraced Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle stonewalls questions about the Trump assassination attempt, the critical question isn’t which faceless White House official is in charge but who is watching Xi Jinping.

The current situation with China mirrors the Korea crisis in the fall of 1950. Before a vast human wave invasion in October and early November, the Chinese conducted a stealthy infiltration followed by a series of probes called the “First Phase Offensive.”

With luck, these actions might hold Xi in check until the Biden crisis is over and slow any possible Chinese march to war.

Washington wrung its hands and rebuffed General Douglas MacArthur’s pleas to bomb the Chinese buildup on the Yalu River. The Chinese assessed the U.S. response and set a trap.

As winter set in, nearly a half-million Chinese swarmed across the mountains. With U.S. air power forbidden to enter China to destroy rear areas and key Yalu bridges, the vast Chinese human wave assaults drove U.S. and U.N. forces past the 38th parallel and overran Seoul. It took another two and a half years to regain the 38th parallel and conclude an armistice. And we are still there.

Those “probing attacks” foreshadowed Communist China’s decision to launch a war with the United States, using all the military power then at its disposal and doing it in the only place in which China could then operate — the Korean Peninsula.

Today, the United States may be in a similar situation, but the stakes are much greater: The relative power and strategic reach of China are of a magnitude beyond that available to them almost 75 years ago and now can reach across the Pacific to our very shores.

We believe Joe Biden’s domestic political problems and the resulting national security chaos have not been lost on Chinese dictator Xi Jinping.

In the last few weeks, China’s coast guard has clashed with the Philippines’ coast guard, blockaded a Philippine shoal outpost, detained a Taiwanese fishing boat and its crew, aggressively prowled an uninhabited Japanese island chain, and flagrantly violated Taiwan’s air and sea space.

In the face of those incidents, Monday’s Pentagon briefing was about China … in the Arctic!

Standing on a wooden box to see above the podium, Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks delivered the briefing with the urgency of a bored schoolmarm assigning math homework.

China gets more aggressive

Meanwhile, in the South China Sea, widespread Chinese actions across the region are being ignored, much like Washington ignored China’s probes on the Korean border in 1950. This neglect is especially concerning given the current American political upheaval generated by Biden’s “difficulties.”

Remember that in 2013, Xi Jinping announced that “western constitutional government, universal values, civil societies, and journalism are false ideological trends.” Xi also asserted that China will be number one in the world militarily and economically by 2049, the 100th anniversary of the People’s Republic of China. In short, China aims to become the world’s new hegemon.

As Xi continues to strengthen his authoritarian rule, he uses Chinese military power to make his ideas stick. Hong Kong is a perfect example.

In 2023, Xi detailed the need for China to meet world-class military standards by 2027, the 100th anniversary of the pre-World War II founding of the People’s Liberation Army. Xi also spoke of “informatization” (i.e., artificial intelligence) to accelerate the construction of “a strong system of strong strategic forces, raise the presence of combat forces in new domains and of new qualities, and promote combat-oriented military training.”

We believe Xi’s posture could lead eventually to a war with the United States, as detailed on our website Winning Peer Wars.

Xi’s long-term objectives are clear, but he may also make opportunistic short-term moves between now and Inauguration Day in January. These moves, just short of war with the United States, could include taking and holding parts of contested shoals and islands, vigorously provisioning Russia with war supplies, and using Chinese personnel for noncombat duties to free Russian soldiers for combat.

Xi could also engage the more than 50,000 Chinese males of military age illegally in the United States in low-level nuisance attacks, such as tampering with railway switches, disturbing pipelines, and sabotaging electric transformers. To map U.S. weaknesses while maintaining deniability, Xi could also conduct nuisance cyberattacks, especially amid the chaos created by the Biden administration’s problems.

Toward strategic paralysis

In late February, the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party held a hearing that exposed the depth of the current Chinese cybersecurity threat against the United States. The overall outcome was alarming, not because of obvious Chinese capabilities and long-running hacking operations, but because the five top-level U.S. government officials were stovepiped by their respective organizations. This made it difficult for them to appreciate the broad systemic impact of their findings. They are myopic in their understanding of the larger Chinese threat and thus unprepared for the reality of 21st-century warfare with a peer competitor bent on war by “strategic paralysis.”

This concept of strategic paralysis was detailed in “Unrestricted Warfare,” the seminal work on Chinese strategic goals and methods written in 1999 by then-Colonels Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui. 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 doing for a quarter-century, aiming to finish by 2049 or perhaps even sooner. While we have laid out proposals to counter Xi’s plans in the long term at Winning Peer Wars, here are some recommendations for the next few months:

Immediately increase reconnaissance by the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command to maximum effort.

Declassify sensitive intelligence of Chinese military operations and release it to open sources.

Open U.S. ships, aircraft, and bases to world media to ensure extensive coverage in the Indo-Pacific theater.

Conduct significant U.S. Air Force and Navy visits to the Philippines, Malaysia, Taiwan, Japan, Vietnam, and other friendly countries.

With luck, these actions might hold Xi in check until the Biden crisis is over and slow any possible Chinese march to war.

Comments

JOHN WARDEN

John Warden is a retired colonel in the United States Air Force. He is a former special assistant for policy studies and national security affairs to the vice president of the United States and was commandant of the Air Command and Staff College.

CHUCK DE CARO

Chuck de Caro was CNN’s very first special assignments correspondent. Educated at Marion Military Institute and the U.S. Air Force Academy, he later served with the 20th Special Forces Group (Airborne). He has taught information warfare at the National Defense University and the National Intelligence University. He was an outside consultant for the Pentagon’s Office of Net Assessment for 25 years.

Retired Col. John Warden lays out the China threat better in nine minutes than the FBI’s Christopher Wray, NSA’s Paul Nakasone, and three Biden functionaries could manage in hours of House testimony.

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.

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CHUCK DE CARO