How Close Are We to War With China?
Capabilities versus intentions. That is the conundrum faced by military planners. What will your enemy do? What can your enemy do? Unfortunately, most of the glaring blunders in warfare and diplomacy revolve around decision-makers and planners focusing on what they think their adversary will do and ignoring what he can do.
One of my favorite battles, the Battle of Leuthen, fought on the outskirts of Breslau (Wroclaw), Poland, on 5 December 1757, is a classic case study. The outnumbered Prussian army of Frederick the Great approached the fortified Austrian army under Leopold Joseph von Daun in a column formation and parallel to the Austrian front line. Everyone knew the Prussians were outnumbered. Everyone knew the Austrians held the high ground. Everyone knew that it took hours for an army to shake itself out of column of march and assume an attack formation. Everyone knew that the Prussians were declining to fight a superior force in a superior position. That was comforting right up to the point where the Prussian wheeled into battalions <em>en echelon</em>, walked uphill through all the lead the Austrians could fling at them, and routed the Austrians from their entrenchments cold steel. Everyone knew the Prussians were the masters of drill and that Frederick was rarely if ever, intimidated by superior numbers and so the capabilities of the Prussians were known but discounted because their perceived intentions were so much easier to manage than their actual capabilities.
More recently, the US Navy suffered the same result for the same reason.
On August 9, 1942, the Allied squadron supporting the invasion of Guadalcanal was roundly thumped by the Japanese Imperial Navy in a night action. The official US Navy analysis of the battle identified the cause of the disaster:
“The Allied High Command, on occasions, estimated the course of action that the enemy intended to follow and then based their plans on this estimate of the enemy's intention. They did not give adequate consideration to other enemy capabilities which might adversely affect their plans. As an example, they estimated that the Japanese forces noted off Bougainville were heading for Rekata Bay and therefore overlooked the enemy capability of attacking the Savo Island Area that night. Also two of the Allied cruiser commanders (the QUINCY and ASTORIA) overlooked the enemy capability of being present in the area and estimated that the Japanese forces illuminating them were friendly. A partial result of this oversight was that they were caught by surprise and their ships were so seriously damaged that they sank within a short time.”
Where is this going? Well, I think we are on the verge of being involved in a shooting war with China. Right now everyone is fixated on a possible invasion of Taiwan. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Army General Mark Milley took some valuable time out from rousting extremists out of the force to make this pronouncement.
Milley addresses the capability of China to take Taiwan via a coup de main. In that narrow construct, it may be true (assuming Taiwan is not so rotten with ChiCom influence that it falls of its own accord and that the US and Japan can bestir themselves to react to a credible threat of Chinese military action). But is that a feasible scenario? Would China risk going to war with the US over a narrow objective which it could fail to achieve and leave the dominance of the South China Sea unsettled?
My thesis is that we are undergoing probing attacks to test our reactions and our defensive capabilities. For instance, China is incessantly probing the air defenses of potential US allies:
A Chinese aircraft carrier sortied through the Taiwan straits.
When a US military aircraft landed in Taiwan for a brief time, the Chinese government warned that foreign aircraft entering Chinese air space were subject to being shot down.
If one looks over the past year, a disturbing pattern emerges of potential actions being rehearsed to enable China to do what the Japanese did in 1941. That is, run the table on their strategic objectives, with the difference being that China could land the knockout blow that Japan was unable to administer.
It is now clear to anyone but the most thoroughly bought-and-paid-for Chinese backers in the State Department and the US media that the Wuhan virus was created in a lab run by the Chinese military. We don’t yet know if the release was accidental or “accidental,” but what we do know is that while the Chinese had quarantined Wuhan from all travel to the greater Communist China, they still permitted international flights. So, from this data point alone, the premise that the virus was deliberately released is supportable, and the virus was spread to a) gauge Western reaction to a “pandemic,” and b) economically and politically damage the West.
Over the past year, the United States has been the subject of an unprecedented number of cyber-attacks. The best known is the ransomware attack on the Colonial Pipeline, but that was just one of many. Details are here, but the trend is unsettling. The high number of such attacks in October coincides with about the time that the Wuhan virus was “accidentally” being released.
Credit: blackfog.com
We don’t know there is Chinese involvement in these attacks, then again, we don’t know much about the attacks at all. The media have been quick to blame Russia because Russia’s history as a bad actor is pretty well established and a lot of people have a vested interest in blaming a rather toothless if annoying adversary, which can be ignored, rather than a very real one that might require action. It is entirely possible that China decided after its coup of compromising tens of millions of federal personnel files, including security investigations, in 2014-2015 that they needed to use cutouts for future operations.
While the press attention has focused on companies paying top dollar to get access to their data, we know that a lot of government and quasi-government sites have been attacked. What we don’t know is how many critical resources…like flood control software for the Ohio Valley…have been compromised and the breach has remained undiscovered.
Then we have other random factoids.
In July 2020, the amphibious assault ship USS Bonhomme Richard caught fire while docked at San Diego. The ship has been scrapped. The Navy believes arson was involved. As of yet, no report on that event has been made public.
In March of this year, a Taiwanese owned container ship managed to wedge its way into the Suez Canal blocking it for six days. It snarled commerce worldwide but would have stopped the transit of US surface combatants from the Atlantic to the Pacific has we been attempting to surge forces to the Western Pacific.
We know that our intelligence networks in China have been rolled up (see my RedState post Arrested CIA Officer Possessed Names of Covert Agents), is appears that the CIA is deeply penetrated by Chinese agents, and we have the paramour of a known Chinese intelligence agent sitting on the House Intelligence Committee.
Imagine this scenario.
Instead of a headlong, Pickett’s Charge attack on Taiwan that might be rebuffed and would definitely destroy the Establishment mantra that China is a competitor and trading partner, not an adversary; another “gain of function” virus is released. This one is not something like the common cold but deadly. Covert assets inside the CIA assist Chinese intelligence services in rounding up whatever US HUMINT assets remain. As the virus causes the nations on the Pacific Rim to lockdown, malware and hacking attacks on critical US infrastructure begin to roll across the country. The upper Ohio Valley is inundated by flooding. Oil, gasoline, and electrical infrastructure grinds to a halt. Telecom networks are disrupted. Financial markets go into a tailspin. Under the smoke screen of these events, China makes its move. Imitating Japan in December 1941, China grabs all contested territory in the South China Sea and strikes US, Japanese, and Taiwanese targets. Guam is neutralized. The Philippines are given a demarche to forbid US forces from using its territory or suffer the consequences. As the US attempts to move naval assets into the theater, the Suez Canal is blocked. This time for longer than six days. Covert Chinese assets, knowing and unknowing, inside US naval facilities disable key combatants via sabotage. With no threats remaining in the Western Pacific, China turns to Taiwan. Taiwan sees it is alone and capitulates. While the US is still trying to decide on initiating a thermonuclear exchange…remember, we’re still hamstrung by the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces agreement we signed with the USSR (see my RedState post: Trump Announces the US Is Leaving a Treaty Russia Is Violating and You Can Guess What Happened) which deprives us of tactical nuclear weapons but allows China to have them…there is suddenly nothing left to fight about or with. Our bases on Guam are demolished. Japan is out of action. South Korea doesn’t like what it’s seeing and seeks neutrality. Taiwan is reclaimed by Communist China. The US military has no forward operating bases, and the surviving naval combatants are retreating towards Hawaii to refit.
The stuff of action novels? Sure. But think about it for a moment. Is the likelihood that all of this happening over the past year by accident any greater than the likelihood that we’ve seen a series of probes and rehearsals for a Chinese move to achieve strategic dominance in the Pacific without a full-blown war with the US. If everyone is saying that China will move to regain control of Taiwan sooner rather than later, why wouldn’t they try to run the table?
Keep in mind, we’re looking at capabilities—which we know—not intentions—which are unknowable. Also keep in mind, in the words of Ian Fleming, “Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, three times is enemy action.” I think we have to assume we are well past three instances at this point.
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