China’s Race to Dominate the Military and Emerging Technologies

by Lawrence A. Franklin

Dr. Lawrence A. Franklin was the Iran Desk Officer for Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld. He also served on active duty with the U.S. Army and as a Colonel in the Air Force Reserve.
April 6, 2023

• The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) openly says it wants to establish dominance in emerging critical technologies as part of its strategy to supplant the United States as the world’s dominant power, establish a new world order and replace the US-led international system established after WWII.
• The US has only a little time left in this race. Reports indicate that deep cuts to the military made by several administrations have severely impaired its ability to catch up. Remaining talent and resources will possibly be reallocated in a new administration, if it is not too late by then. China has been supercharging its military for years while the U.S. has sat back, watched, and argued about unrelated social issues.
• Communist China is currently preparing its people for war. America is not. The American people, who take their magical lives — when compared to so many people in the world — for granted, may be in for a tormenting shock.

China has been supercharging its military for years and is preparing its people for war. America is not. The American people, who take their magical lives for granted, may be in for a tormenting shock. Pictured: DF-17 hypersonic missiles at a military parade in Beijing, China, on October 1, 2019. (Photo by Kevin Frayer/Getty Images)

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) openly says it wants to establish dominance in emerging critical technologies as part of its strategy to supplant the United States as the world’s dominant power, establish a new world order and replace the US-led international system established after WWII.

The US has only a little time left in this race. Reports indicate that deep cuts to the military made by several administrations have severely impaired its ability to catch up. Remaining talent and resources will possibly be reallocated in a new administration, if it is not too late by then. China has been supercharging its military for years while the U.S. has sat back, watched, and argued about unrelated social issues.

China also hopes to exploit the military potential of new technologies. Some, such as hypersonic advances, have the potential for developing sophisticated new weapons systems. Others, such as the science of “Big Data,” can enhance military targeting while rapidly collecting, analyzing and storing immense amounts of information.

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Musk, experts urge pause on AI systems, citing ‘risks to society’

1. Manufacturing victory

On a warm August day last year, while House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) was drawing the ire of Beijing with her high-profile visit to Taiwan , a small group of national security experts was huddled around two big game boards in a small window-lit conference room in Washington, D.C.

The professionals from MIT and the Center for Strategic and International Studies were playing another iteration of a tabletop exercise designed to game out what might really happen if China were to launch an invasion of Taiwan and the United States went to war to thwart them.

With two competing teams matching wits and moving tiny game pieces around on the two maps — one showing China, the other the U.S., Japan, and Taiwan — the results from 24 different scenarios, stretching over several months, varied, always with both sides suffering big losses but usually with the U.S. prevailing, albeit at enormous cost.

“The good guys win in the sense that we are able to maintain an autonomous Taiwan and the Chinese are not able to conquer the island, but the bad news is that we take a lot of casualties,” said Mark Cancian, senior adviser at CSIS, one of the participants in the real-world version of Risk.

“For example, often we lose 500 aircraft, two aircraft carriers, and Taiwanese economy is devastated, so there’s a very high price,” Cancian told the Washington Examiner. “The Chinese also lose a lot of ships and aircraft, so it’s costly all around.”

There was, however, one glaring deficiency on the U.S. side, which months later would be echoed in a display of Russia’s embarrassingly flawed plan to invade and subjugate Ukraine — namely a critical shortage of certain kinds of precision munitions.

Ukraine is primarily a ground war with stationary targets that can be attacked by cruise missiles and drones, which, as the war dragged on much longer that Russian President Vladimir Putin planned, began to be in short supply.

In a war with China over Taiwan, which is an island, the weapons of choice would be air-to-air and anti-ship missiles, especially the LRASM (Lockheed Martin’s Long Range Anti-Ship Missile ).

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Thanks To Leftist Corruption, U.S. Military Recruiting Is In Total Freefall

“Here I am as a lieutenant general in the United States Air Force,” then Lt. Gen Anthony Cotton whined to Air Force Magazine. “When I see what happened to Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, Rayshard Brooks—and the list goes on and on.”

“That could be me,” he claimed.

Since Cotton was, unlike Breonna Taylor, probably not harboring an armed drug dealer who opened fire on police or, unlike George Floyd, overdosing on fentanyl during a struggle with police as the climax to a long criminal career, that was a disingenuous smear from a top officer.

The spectacle of successful black men like Obama, Merck CEO Kenneth Frazier, or Gen. Anthony Cotton falsely claiming that America is so racist that any of them could suffer the fate of career criminals simply because of an accident of skin color is pathetic and disgusting. The Merck CEO or the Air Force general are as likely to suffer the fate of George Floyd as their white counterparts are to end up like a dead white meth addict shot in a raid in Georgia.

But Cotton knew what he was doing. What he was doing was dishonorable and self-serving.

And it worked.

Two years after complaining about police lights flashing in his rearview mirror and someone challenging his parking spot, Cotton has been nominated by Biden to head U.S. Strategic Command.

Beware: 100% green energy could destroy the planet

The untold story about “green energy” is that it can’t possibly be scaled up to provide anywhere near the energy to replace fossil fuels. (Unless we are headed back to the stone ages, which is what some of the “de-growth” advocates favor).

Right now, the United States gets 70% of its energy from fossil fuels. To go to zero over the next 20 years would be economically catastrophic and cost tens of millions of jobs. With gas prices at nearly double their price back from when Trump left office and inflation up from 1.5% to 8% in just 15 months, we are already experiencing the economic damage from the green energy crusaders.

But we also have to ask whether green energy is even good for the environment. Some environmentalists are pointing to a little-noticed study by the World Bank showing that moving toward 100% solar, wind, and electric battery energy would be “just as destructive to the planet as fossil fuels.” This was precisely the conclusion of a story in Foreign Policy magazine, hardly a right-wing publication.

According to the Foreign Policy analysis, moving to a “carbon-free” energy future “requires massive amounts of energy, not to mention the extraction of minerals and metals at great environmental and social costs.”

Here are some of the numbers. Going all-in on batteries, solar, and wind would require

• Thirty-four million metric tons of copper,
• Forty million tons of lead,
• Fifty million tons of zinc,
• One hundred and sixty-two million tons of aluminum,
• Four-point-eight billion tons of iron.
• Those tens of millions of windmills, solar panels, and electric batteries for cars and trucks aren’t exactly biodegradable. So, we will have the most prominent energy graveyard with toxic pollutants that will be 100 times larger than any nuclear waste storage. And yet, the Left is worried about plastic straws!
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If you missed part one of this interview, you can find it here. 

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