Does China Hold the Strategic Advantage by Operating Inside the U.S. and Allies’ OODA Loop?
Guest post by Evan Dudik
What is the biggest roadblock to a successful U.S. China strategy? Maybe it lies hidden in plain sight. Here’s a sketch of what really is certainly in plain sight:
- China has increasingly flown provocative flights over Taiwan, testing the island’s readiness, wearing out its pilots and consuming its air force’s supplies.
- China continues to build and fortify artificial islands in the South China Sea.
- China has harassed and chased out of its self-proclaimed but internationally unrecognized sovereign waters—those within the so-called nine-dash line– fishing and mineral prospecting vessels that aren’t Chinese. The nine-dash line encompasses the Spratly and Senkaku Islands, extending within spitting distance of the Philippines.
- China has massively increased the size of its “maritime militia,” a mild term for the thoroughly militarized, 20,000-vessel, fully armed adjunct force to the People’s Liberation Army (Navy). [1]
- As of the end of March 2021, Chinese vessels have provided a constant presence around Senkaku, with ships hovering in the contiguous zone and, at times, making incursions into Japan’s territorial sea. Only on three stormy days—February 17 and 18 and March 5—have Chinese vessels been absent. [2]
- China has reincorporated Hong Kong into the Chinese Reich and employs every military, diplomatic and economic wile to do the same to Taiwan.
- China has launched the huge Belt and Road initiative whose threat to the world’s maritime chokepoints cannot be overstated. Each initiative focuses on a single country, a single chokepoint at a place, time, and level of effort of China’s choosing.
- In the infamous city of Wuhan, China has recently built a giant 15 square mile campus cybersecurity training university aiming to churn out 2,500 graduates per year, fueling future hacking sprees as deadly or more than the Microsoft Exchange hacking ‘spree’ launched the week before this was written (July 25, 2021). [3]
- China announced it will invest $400 billion in Iran in return for a favorably priced supply of oil.
- China is investing in quantum computing, artificial intelligence, hypersonic weapons, numerous diesel electric submarines, anti-satellite missiles, and satellites. And on and on and on, all of which have the potential to neutralize and/or defeat U.S. military forces in the Pacific.
- China is cornering the world’s supply of cobalt, vital for our electric cars, iPhones, weapons systems, communications equipment and more, by buying mining companies’ operations in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (and at least a half dozen other African countries).
- And sending hundreds or thousands of managers and overseers employing practically slave adult and child labor under appalling conditions. [4]
We all know that information about our adversaries and partner countries is and always has been critical to National Security. Before our interconnected world of the internet, information operations were more about human spying, one person to another. As technology has progressed this information criticality has only become more intense, and today has become the most critical component of modern warfare.