How China is positioning to neuter America’s military status as top dog

By Jamie McIntyre Jamie McIntyre is the Washington Examiner’s senior writer on defense and national security. His morning newsletter, “Jamie McIntyre’s Daily on Defense,” is free and available by email subscription at dailyondefense.com.     May 28, 2020

A recently published book begins with the sobering premise that if the United States were to go to war with China today, the biggest, best-trained, best-equipped military force in the history of the world, one fielded by a country that spends more on defense than the next 10 countries combined, would lose.

And most national security experts agree.

The book, which sparked debate inside and outside the Pentagon, is The Kill Chain: Defending America in the Future of High-Tech Warfare, by Christian Brose, a former staff director of the Senate Armed Services Committee and senior policy adviser to the late Sen. John McCain.

In his introductory chapter, Brose lays out how China follows a strategy aimed at denying the U.S. the ability to project power in the way it traditionally has, essentially checkmating America’s greatest strength.

And he describes in chilling detail how the U.S. military as currently configured is uniquely unsuited to go toe-to-toe with China in a conventional force-on-force war.

“Many of the US ships, submarines, fighter jets, bomber aircraft, additional munitions, and other systems that are needed to fight would not be near the war when it started but would be thousands of miles away in the United States. They would come under immediate attack once they began their multiweek mobilization across the planet,” he writes.

“Cyberattacks would grind down the logistical movement of US forces into combat. The defenseless cargo ships and aircraft that would ferry much of that force across the Pacific would be attacked every step of the way. Satellites on which U.S. forces depend for intelligence, communications, and global positioning would be blinded by lasers, shut down by high-energy jammers, or shot out of orbit altogether by antisatellite missiles,” leaving many U.S. forces “deaf, dumb, and blind.”

 

China’s massive arsenals of advanced precision strike weapons, such as cruise missiles and hypersonic weapons, would hit U.S. planes in the region before they could take off, and U.S. aircraft carriers would have to steam away from China to stay out of range of China’s carrier-killer missiles.

In short, all signs point to an ignominious defeat.

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Congress echoes Trump EMP concerns, Iran weapon feared

President Trump has made preparing for an electromagnetic pulse attack cool.

Long met with eye-rolling, the growing threat of an EMP attack on the nation’s electric grid and military bases by Iran or other foes has suddenly gone mainstream following Trump’s March executive order to assess the risks of a man-made or natural EMP hit.

The latest evidence was in the just-passed 2020 National Defense Authorization Act, which adopted Trump’s action and ordered the National Guard to draw up a plan to thwart disaster from an EMP.

And several states are moving even faster. Wyoming just produced its blueprint to respond to an EMP assault that could knock out electricity, water services, hospitals, ATMs, cellular phones, and even vehicles for months.

“These are big and very important results,” said Peter Pry, a longtime champion of EMP preparation and adviser to the White House and military. “Things are taking off. This is a significant change, in a positive way,” he told us.

For proponents of developing protections from EMP, the fight has been a decadeslong slog. Trump has taken the threat seriously, though it’s unclear if his national security team shares his concerns, especially after EMP preparation proponent John Bolton was ousted as the national security adviser.

Also, some insiders fear that a strong lobbying campaign from the electric utility industry, which does not want to spend money to upgrade its infrastructure, is working to dull the president’s executive order.

Artificial Intelligence and the Adversary

What will Beijing do with the data it stole about American military service members and others?

Embracing AI: How thinking weapons will simplify — and vastly complicate — future warfare

For the Pentagon, it was an ominous glimpse into the future.

The date was July 11, 2014, and Ukrainian forces assembled about five miles from the Russian border in southeastern Ukraine were preparing for a final push to the border.

As Defense Secretary Mark Esper recounted to a forum sponsored by the National Security Commission on artificial intelligence this month, the Ukrainian troops, flushed with recent battlefield success against Russian-backed separatists, were feeling confident.

Suddenly, they heard the hum of Russian drones overhead, followed quickly by cyberattacks that jammed their communications, blinding their command and control systems.

Then a devastating fusillade of Russian artillery fire rained down on them, and in a matter of minutes, dozens of Ukrainian soldiers were killed, hundreds more wounded, and most of their armored vehicles destroyed.

The Ukrainian offensive was stopped dead in its tracks.

“The world was quickly awakened to a new era of warfare advanced by the Russians,” Esper said. “It’s clear the threats of tomorrow are no longer the ones we have faced and defeated in the past.”

Fast forward five years to today when rapid advances in artificial intelligence technology, or AI, foreshadow a grave new world of thinking machines and killer robots that will change the nature of modern warfare as profoundly as smart bombs and GPS did during the 1991 Persian Gulf War nearly three decades ago.

“Whichever nation harnesses AI first will have a decisive advantage on the battlefield for many, many years,” said Esper, who has made accelerating AI research and development a top Pentagon priority. “We have to get there first.”

Simply defined, artificial intelligence is the ability of computer systems to solve problems and perform tasks that would otherwise require human intelligence.

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THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

U.S. Launched Cyberattacks on Iran

The cyberstrikes on Thursday targeted computer systems used to control missile and rocket launches