The current situation with China, in our view, mirrors the situation in Korea in October 1950. The Chinese, prior to a vast human-wave invasion in October and early November that year, conducted a stealthy infiltration, followed by series of probes they called the “First Phase Offensive.”
While Washington dithered and denied MacArthur’s pleas to be allowed to bomb the Chinese buildup on the Yalu River, the Chinese measured the U.S. response and set a trap.
As winter conditions set in, nearly a half-million Chinese soldiers swarmed across the mountains as U.S. air power was politically restricted from crossing the Chinese border to destroy rear area logistics or even bomb the essential Yalu River bridges.
With vast human-wave assaults, the Chinese drove U.S. and U.N. forces all the way past the 38th parallel and overran the South Korean capital of 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 U.S. using all the military power at its disposal and doing it in the only place in which it could operate at the time — the Korean Peninsula.
Today, the U.S. may be in a similar situation, but the stakes are much greater: The relative power and strategic reach of China are orders of magnitude beyond what was available to them 75 years ago, allowing the country to now reach across the Pacific to our very shores.
While President Donald Trump is making a high-intensity push to bolster U.S. national security — with everything from the F-47 and the B-21 Raider to the promise of a “Golden Dome” aerospace defense system — these systems are not yet operational. The fact remains that China has steadily been increasing its offensive power under President Xi Jinping.
Just last week, the Chinese military released a propaganda video of its growing naval might. This followed last month’s large-scale jaunt into the Tasman Sea by the People’s Liberation Army Navy, much to the discomfort of our allies Australia and New Zealand.
Last week, China’s Coast Guard continued to challenge the Philippine Coast Guard, while last summer it 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.
Much like the Chinese of 1950 massing in the hills above the Yalu with China’s probes ignored by Washington, so, too, are the contemporaneous, widespread actions of the Chinese across the breadth of the western Pacific being left partially unaddressed in the midst of the Trump administration’s nascent DOGE reformation of the entirety of the U.S. government.
Remember in 2013, Xi announced, “Western constitutional government, universal values, civil societies and journalism are false ideological trends.” Xi also asserted that China will be No. 1 in the world militarily and economically by 2049, the 100th anniversary of the establishment of the People’s Republic of China. In other words, China will be the world’s new hegemon. Xi continues to strengthen his authoritarian rule and use Chinese military power to make his ideas stick.
In 2023, Xi detailed the need for China to meet world-class military standards by 2027, the 100th anniversary of the pre-war founding of the People’s Liberation Army. Xi also spoke of “informatization” (i.e., artificial intelligence) to accelerate building the world’s most powerful, ultra-modern military force.
In light of the posture assumed by Xi, we believe that it could lead in the longer term to war directly against the homeland of the United States, as we have delineated in our website Winning Peer Wars.
Xi’s longer-term objectives are clear, but that does not preclude a variety of opportunistic short-term moves.
Such moves, just short of a war with the U.S., could include taking and holding parts of Pacific shoals and islands now under contention and vigorously supplying Russia with military hardware. Or, China could provide troops for non-combat duties to free Russian soldiers for the Ukrainian War.
There is also the distant possibility of encouraging the estimated 50,000-plus Chinese males of military age illegally in the U.S. to participate in low-level attacks, such as throwing railway switches, disturbing pipelines and affecting electric transformers across the country.
In an effort to map U.S. weakness in the near term, while maintaining deniability, Xi could engage in nuisance cyber attacks at will.
The House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party held a hearing earlier this month that exposed the depth of the current Chinese cybersecurity threat against the U.S. The overall outcome was alarming, not because of the obvious Chinese capabilities and long-running hacking operations, but because of the lackluster U.S. cyber defense worsened by government departments which are stovepiped, thus making it difficult for the U.S. to appreciate the broad systemic impact of the Chinese threat.
The U.S. myopia in the understanding of the larger Chinese threat is complicated by the ongoing DOGE reformation, leaving the U.S. unprepared for the reality of 21st century warfare with a peer competitor bent on war by strategic paralysis — the same strategic paralysis as put forth in the seminal work on Chinese strategic goals and methods, “Unrestricted Warfare.”
The book was written in 1999 by Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui, then colonels in the People’s Liberation Army Air Force. It 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 country in a peer-to-peer conflict.
In retrospect, “Unrestricted Warfare” is exactly what China has been doing during the last quarter century, and what Xi intends to finish by 2049 — or perhaps years or decades before that date.
And while we have laid out plans at Winning Peer Wars to effectively counter Xi’s plans in the long term, here’s what we recommend for the next few months:
- Increase reconnaissance efforts by the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command to maximum effort immediately.
- Immediately declassify sensitive intelligence of Chinese military operations and pass to open sources.
- Open U.S. ships, aircraft and bases to the world media to ensure massive coverage in the Indo-Pacific theater, whose vast distances preclude such coverage.
- Make significant U.S. Air Force and Navy visits to the Philippines, Malaysia, Taiwan, Japan, Vietnam and other friendly countries.
With luck, such actions might hold Xi in check and would tend to slow any Chinese march toward war.
Chuck de Caro was an IW researcher for the late Andrew W. Marshall, director OSD/Net Assessment; de Caro is the progenitor of the world’s first virtual military organization, the 1st Joint SOFTWAR Unit (Virtual).
John Warden is a retired Air Force colonel who served from 1965 to 1995, with tours to Vietnam, Germany, Spain, Italy and Korea, among other CONUS-based assignments. Warden served a number of roles at the Pentagon, was special assistant for policy studies and national security affairs to the vice president and was commandant of the Air Command and Staff College.
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