Chicom Tripods to Attack U.S.?

[Humberto Torofuerte]

To be filed under "everything connects"...

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-boot20jul20,0,6226256.column
(Sorry - was too lazy to tinyurl this one)

"China's stealth war on the U.S."

Maj. Gen. Zhu Chenghu of the Chinese People's Liberation Army caused
quite a stir last week when he threatened to nuke "hundreds" of
American cities if the U.S. dared to interfere with a Chinese attempt
to conquer Taiwan.

This saber-rattling comes while China is building a lot of sabers.
Although its defense budget, estimated to be as much as $90 billion,
remains a fraction of the United States', it is enough to make China
the world's third-biggest weapons buyer (behind Russia) and the
biggest in Asia. Moreover, China's spending has been increasing
rapidly, and it is investing in the kind of systems — especially
missiles and submarines — needed to challenge U.S. naval power in the
Pacific.

The Pentagon on Tuesday released a study of Chinese military
capabilities. In a preview, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld told a
Singapore audience last month that China's arms buildup was an "area
of concern." It should be. But we shouldn't get overly fixated on such
traditional indices of military power as ships and bombs — not even
atomic bombs. Chinese strategists, in the best tradition of Sun Tzu,
are working on craftier schemes to topple the American hegemon.

In 1998, an official People's Liberation Army publishing house brought
out a treatise called "Unrestricted Warfare," written by two senior
army colonels, Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui. This book, which is
available in English translation, is well known to the U.S. national
security establishment but remains practically unheard of among the
general public.

"Unrestricted Warfare" recognizes that it is practically impossible to
challenge the U.S. on its own terms. No one else can afford to build
mega-expensive weapons systems like the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter,
which will cost more than $200 billion to develop. "The way to
extricate oneself from this predicament," the authors write, "is to
develop a different approach."

Their different approaches include financial warfare (subverting
banking systems and stock markets), drug warfare (attacking the fabric
of society by flooding it with illicit drugs), psychological and media
warfare (manipulating perceptions to break down enemy will),
international law warfare (blocking enemy actions using multinational
organizations), resource warfare (seizing control of vital natural
resources), even ecological warfare (creating man-made earthquakes or
other natural disasters).

Cols. Qiao and Wang write approvingly of Al Qaeda, Colombian drug
lords and computer hackers who operate outside the "bandwidths
understood by the American military." They envision a scenario in
which a "network attack against the enemy" — clearly a red, white and
blue enemy — would be carried out "so that the civilian electricity
network, traffic dispatching network, financial transaction network,
telephone communications network and mass media network are completely
paralyzed," leading to "social panic, street riots and a political
crisis." Only then would conventional military force be deployed
"until the enemy is forced to sign a dishonorable peace treaty."

This isn't just loose talk. There are signs of this strategy being
implemented. The anti-Japanese riots that swept China in April? That
would be psychological warfare against a major Asian rival. The
stage-managed protests in 1999, after the U.S. accidentally bombed the
Chinese Embassy in Belgrade, fall into the same category.

The bid by the state-owned China National Offshore Oil Co., to acquire
Unocal? Resource warfare. Attempts by China's spy apparatus to
infiltrate U.S. high-tech firms and defense contractors? Technological
warfare. China siding against the U.S. in the U.N. Security Council
over the invasion of Iraq? International law warfare. Gen. Zhu's
threat to nuke the U.S.? Media warfare.

And so on. Once you know what to look for, the pieces fall into place
with disturbing ease. Of course, most of these events have
alternative, more benign explanations: Maybe Gen. Zhu is an eccentric
old coot who's seen "Dr. Strangelove" a few too many times.

The deliberate ambiguity makes it hard to craft a response to
"unrestricted warfare." If Beijing sticks to building nuclear weapons,
we know how to deal with that — use the deterrence doctrine that
worked against the Soviets. But how do we respond to what may or may
not be indirect aggression by a major trading partner? Battling
terrorist groups like Al Qaeda seems like a cinch by comparison.

This is not a challenge the Pentagon is set up to address, but it's an
urgent issue for the years ahead.