Last fall, the U.S. Air Force simulated a conflict set more than a decade in the future that began with a Chinese biological-weapon attack that swept through U.S. bases and warships in the Indo-Pacific region. Then a major Chinese military exercise was used as cover for the deployment of a massive invasion force. The simulation culminated with Chinese missile strikes raining down on U.S. bases and warships in the region, and a lightning air and amphibious assault on the island of Taiwan.
The highly classified war game, which has not been previously made public, took place less than a year after the coronavirus, reportedly originating in a Chinese market, spread to the crew of the USS Theodore Roosevelt aircraft carrier, taking one of the U.S. Navy’s most significant assets out of commission.
The USS Theodore Roosevelt in San Diego in 2020. (Seaman Dylan Lavin via Getty Images)
Then in September in the midst of the war game, actual Chinese combat aircraft intentionally flew over the rarely crossed median line in the Taiwan Strait in the direction of Taipei an unprecedented 40 times and conducted simulated attacks on the island that Taiwan’s premier called “disturbing.” Amid those provocations, China’s air force released a video showing a bomber capable of carrying nuclear weapons carrying out a simulated attack on Andersen Air Force Base on the U.S. Pacific island of Guam. The title of the Hollywood-like propaganda video was “The god of war H-6K [bomber] goes on the attack!”
In case the new U.S. administration failed to get the intended message behind all that provocative military activity, four days after President Biden took office, a large force of Chinese bombers and fighters flew past Taiwan and launched simulated missile attacks on the USS Roosevelt carrier strike group as it was sailing in international waters in the South China Sea.
Little wonder that many foreign affairs and national security experts believe the global pandemic has accelerated trends that were already pushing the United States and China toward a potential confrontation as the world’s leading status quo and rising power, respectively. This month the Council on Foreign Relations released a special report, “The United States, China, and Taiwan: A Strategy to Prevent War,” which concluded that Taiwan “is becoming the most dangerous flash point in the world for a possible war” between the United States and China. In Senate testimony on Tuesday, the head of U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, Adm. Phil Davidson, warned that he believes China might try and annex Taiwan “in this decade, in fact within the next six years.”
Meanwhile, a leading Chinese think tank recently described tensions in U.S.-China relations as the worst since the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989, and it advised Communist Party leaders to prepare for war with the United States.
What many Americans don’t realize is that years of classified Pentagon war games strongly suggest that the U.S. military would lose that war.
“More than a decade ago, our war games indicated that the Chinese were doing a good job of investing in military capabilities that would make our preferred model of expeditionary warfare, where we push forces forward and operate out of relatively safe bases and sanctuaries, increasingly difficult,” Air Force Lt. Gen. S. Clinton Hinote, deputy chief of staff for strategy, integration and requirements, told Yahoo News in an exclusive interview. By 2018, the People’s Liberation Army had fielded many of those forces in large numbers, to include massive arsenals of precision-guided surface-to-air and surface-to-surface missiles, a space-based constellation of navigation and targeting satellites and the largest navy in the world.
“At that point the trend in our war games was not just that we were losing, but we were losing faster,” Hinote said. “After the 2018 war game I distinctly remember one of our gurus of war gaming standing in front of the Air Force secretary and chief of staff, and telling them that we should never play this war game scenario [of a Chinese attack on Taiwan] again, because we know what is going to happen. The definitive answer if the U.S. military doesn’t change course is that we’re going to lose fast. In that case, an American president would likely be presented with almost a fait accompli.”
People’s Liberation Army soldiers at a military parade at Tiananmen Square in Beijing. (Greg Baker/AFP via Getty Images)
With Beijing continuing to tighten an iron grip on Hong Kong, engaging in deadly skirmishes with India along their shared border and routinely bullying its smaller neighbors in the South China Sea, the Biden administration recently announced a new Pentagon task force to review U.S. defense policy toward China, to be headed by Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin.
Inevitably, the deteriorating security of Taiwan will be a major focus of the new task force. “By the way, three of China’s standing war plans are built around a Taiwan scenario,” Hinote said. “They’re planning for this. Taiwan is what they think about all the time.”
In the early 2000s, China experts and military analysts at the RAND Corporation were given a trove of classified U.S. intelligence on Beijing’s military plans and weapons programs, and were asked to war-game a confrontation 10 years into the future. China was in the midst of an unprecedented economic growth spurt that saw its GDP increase annually by double digits, with commensurate steep increases in its defense spending. Equally worrisome, the PLA had clearly studied U.S. military operations over the course of two wars against Iraq. Both operations relied on a methodical, months-long buildup of forces to uncontested bases in the region, followed by U.S. aircraft dominating the skies and then carrying out devastating attacks on the enemy’s command-and-control systems.
China’s answer was a well-funded strategy that the Pentagon refers to as “anti-access, area denial” (A2/AD), meaning it would prevent an adversary like the U.S. from being able to carry out the sort of significant military buildup it carried during the two Iraq wars. The PLA’s military plans rely on space-based and airborne surveillance and reconnaissance platforms; massive precision-guided missile arsenals; submarines; militarized man-made islands in the South China Sea; and a host of conventional air and naval forces to hold U.S. and allied bases, ports and warships in the region at risk. Because it lies only 90 miles from Taiwan, China needs only to hold U.S. forces at bay for a matter of weeks to achieve its strategic objective of capturing Taiwan.
“Whenever we war-gamed a Taiwan scenario over the years, our Blue Team routinely got its ass handed to it, because in that scenario time is a precious commodity and it plays to China’s strength in terms of proximity and capabilities,” said David Ochmanek, a senior RAND Corporation analyst and former deputy assistant secretary of defense for force development. “That kind of lopsided defeat is a visceral experience for U.S. officers on the Blue Team, and as such the war games have been a great consciousness-raising device. But the U.S. military is still not keeping pace with Chinese advances. For that reason, I don’t think we’re much better off than a decade ago when we started taking this challenge more seriously.”
The island of Kinmen, seen with the Chinese city of Xiamen in the background, lies inside Taiwan’s territory and is the closest point between Taiwan and China. (An Rong Xu/Getty Images)
Part of the problem is that China advanced its A2/AD strategy while the Pentagon was largely distracted fighting counterterrorism and counterinsurgency wars in Iraq and Afghanistan for two decades. Beijing is also laser-focused on Taiwan and regional hegemony, while the U.S. military must project power and prepare for potential conflict scenarios all around the globe, giving the Pentagon what Ochmanek calls an “attention deficit disorder.” Finally, there is the complacency of the perennial winner that makes it hard for senior U.S. military officers to believe that another nation would dare to take them on.
“My response is that China’s growing military confidence is manifesting itself in an increasingly belligerent approach to its neighbors, the growing frequency of the PLA’s violation of the airspace of Taiwan and Japan, and the bullying of other neighbors in the South China Sea,” said Ochmanek. “Under Xi Jinping there has been a dramatic increase in such provocations compared to a decade ago, and I think it’s grounded in his belief that militarily, China is strong enough now to credibly challenge us.”
By 2017 the Pentagon, led by then-Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis, started to take notice.
“When we were developing the National Defense Strategy in 2017, the trend lines looked very bad vis-à-vis China, and got a lot worse as you projected into the future,” said Elbridge Colby, the former deputy assistant secretary of defense for strategy and force development. “Yet despite that fact there were, and I think still are, a lot of people who resisted the idea that war with China is even possible, let alone losable. That’s why both strategic level and more operational war games were so important. They help show how these things are possible — but also how we can redress the problem.”
In 2018 the Defense Department issued a seminal National Defense Strategy identifying great-power competition with China and Russia, and not terrorism, as the primary challenge to the U.S. After the lopsided Blue Team defeat in the Air Force’s annual war game in 2018, senior officers and defense officials began giving a classified “Overmatch Brief” to select members of Congress.
Former Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis. (Steven Ferdman/Getty Images)
In the most recent war game, the Pentagon tested the impact of potential capabilities and military concepts that are still on the drawing board in many cases. The Blue Team, which represented U.S. forces, adopted a more defensive and dispersed posture less reliant on large, vulnerable bases, ports and aircraft carriers in a conflict with the Red Team, which represented China.
The strategy strongly favored large numbers of long-range, mobile strike systems, to include anti-ship cruise missile batteries, mobile rocket artillery systems, unmanned mini-submarines, mines and robust surface-to-air missile batteries for air defense. A premium was put on surveillance and reconnaissance capabilities for both early warning and accurate intelligence to enable quicker decisions by U.S. policymakers, and a more capable command-and-control system to coordinate the actions of more dispersed forces.
“We created a force that had resiliency at its core, and the Red Team looked at that force and knew that it would take a tremendous amount of firepower to knock it out,” said Hinote. The biggest insight of the war game, he said, was revealed when he talked afterward with the Red Team leader, who played the role of the PLA’s top general.
“The Red Team leader is the most experienced and aggressive officer in these war games across the Defense Department, and when he initially looked at the resiliency of our defensive posture both in Taiwan and the region, he said, ‘No, I’m not going to attack,’” recalled Hinote. “If we can design a force that creates that level of uncertainty and causes Chinese leaders to question whether they can accomplish their goals militarily, I think that’s what deterrence looks like in the future.”
Members of Taiwan’s armed forces participate in a military exercise in January. (I-Hwa Cheng/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
Despite loud alarms raised by the war games, the Pentagon has been slow to adjust its long-term spending plans or to invest in the kinds of military capabilities necessary to defend Taiwan or contested island chains in the South China Sea. Instead, older weapons systems like massive warships, short-range tactical fighter aircraft and heavy tank battalions continue to enjoy support from loyal constituencies both inside the Pentagon and in Congress. What’s needed, experts say, are bolder actions like the Marine Corps’ recent decision to completely divest itself of tanks and heavy armor by 2030 in order to invest in anti-ship missiles and mobile strike teams optimized for a conflict with China.
On a sober note, Hinote pointed out that the Blue Team force posture tested in the recent war game is still not the one reflected in current Defense Department spending plans. “We’re beginning to understand what kind of U.S. military force it’s going to take to achieve the National Defense Strategy’s goals,” he said. “But that’s not the force we’re planning and building today.”
Especially in such polarized times, there's cause to be wary of threats to our liberties from a national security regime with expanded domestic powers.
The Biden administration is planning to use the full force of the federal government in pursuit of a new war. Its target? American citizens.
This countering “domestic violent extremism” effort, declared in the wake of the latest Capitol riot, represents the real-world counterpart to the corporate media rhetoric about the need to “deprogram,” “de-ba’athify,” and drone the Deplorables.
If this is a dangerous political witch hunt masquerading as a national security imperative, it should disturb every American. Half of the country could potentially be ensnared as would-be if not actualterrorists.
In a little-discussed Jan. 22 press briefing, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki asserted “[the] assault on the Capitol … underscored what we have long known: The rise of domestic violent extremism is a serious and growing national security threat.” Consequently, the administration plans a three-part response:
Developing a comprehensive threat assessment, coordinated with the FBI and Department of Homeland Security on domestic violent extremism.
Building “National Security Council capability to focus on countering domestic violent extremism,” including conducting “a policy review effort to determine how the government can share information better about this threat, support efforts to prevent radicalization, disrupt violent extremist networks, and more.”
Coordinating “relevant parts of the federal government to enhance and accelerate efforts to address DVE … an NSC-convened process will focus on addressing evolving threats, radicalization, the role of social media, opportunities to improve information sharing, operational responses, and more.”
In short, the Biden administration plans to turn the institutions and tools used to pursue foreign adversaries on “wrong-thinking” Americans. There are several reasons this is so troubling.
First, it is not clear why such an operation is needed. Contrary to Psaki’s statement, the studies, often conducted by left-leaning organizations, cited by those who claim the threat of non-jihadist “violent extremism” is growingandmassive are highly dubious.
If domestic terrorist groups are proliferating in sufficient, size, strength, and number to merit a robust new government response, on the scale of the Global War on Terror — as somearetelegraphing — the authorities have not demonstrated it. The administration’s hyping of such threats, and the conversion of Capitol Hill to a warzone, without specific evidence of danger, should only increase our skepticism. It appears politics is trumping the truth.
One can argue that the rush to declare a war on “domestic violent extremism” is one of several logical conclusions of an effort that goes back to the beginning of the Obama presidency, to fear-monger over the threat of “right-wing extremism” and marginalize non-leftists. The resistance fever dream of Trump-as-Führer with his tens of millions of supporters as Brownshirts was seamlessly incorporated into this information operation.
With Trump toppled, the riot among non-leftists provided the catalyst for completing the total war on the true objects of the ruling class’s ire: dissenting Americans. It has concocted a narrative: There is a growing “insurgency” among “domestic violent extremists.” The riot was their 9/11. Consequently, the threat, highlighted by that despicable act, demands not only its own 9/11 Commission, but a war on domestic extremism, particularly “white supremacist extremists.”
The wall-to-wall coverage of a neophyte congresswoman, the portrayal of capitols across the country as under threat, and the Defense secretary’s call for a 60-day stand-down to root out “extremism” in the military following the disturbing political vetting of National Guard troops summoned to Washington for the inauguration all feed this narrative.
One can be forgiven for thinking that a war on “domestic violent extremism” represents an extreme jump from a single event that, while inexcusable, pathetic, and disgraceful, thankfully resulted in less bloodshed and infinitely less destruction than what transpired across the country during the summer of 2020 — and preceded a dramatic spike in violence.
That there is nary a word from the Biden administration about pursuing violent members of Antifa and Black Lives Matter in connection with its countering DVE effort is part of a second major disturbing issue: Just as the Biden administration has not clearly defined the need for such a war, it has not clearly defined its targets. While it is not clear who the Biden administration is targeting, the implication again is non-leftists, potentially writ large.
“Violent extremism” is vague and leftists manipulate language. Hence, one man’s terrorist is another man’s “austere religious scholar”; “hate speech” is violence while physical violence is “mostly peaceful”; and concepts like “colorblindness,” “merit,” and even the classics themselves are considered instruments of white supremacy. Given the zeitgeist, readers of this article may well be a suspected violent supremacist by the left’s standards.
The Biden administration is also adhering to such standards. Based on its rhetoric and earliest executive actions — which emphasized “equity” over “equality” — anti-racism, critical race theory, and the associated panoply of woke progressive pillars are de rigueur within the White House. Under the “progressive-or-bigot” paradigm that flows from this worldview, non-progressives of all colors may well be branded “white supremacists,” “right-wing extremists,” and “domestic violent extremists.”
The third disturbing aspect of the coming domestic war on terror is how it’s poised to threaten our most basic civil rights, beginning with free speech.
Under the new infinitely liberal reading of “incitement to violence,” our political class is calling for Big Tech to further police speech — which is to say, to squelch the First Amendment by proxy. The Biden administration is seemingly on board. Psaki noted the “domestic violent extremism” investigation process would include a National Security Council review of the “role of social media” and promote government “efforts to prevent radicalization.”
It’s also worth noting who is leading this effort, and his political and policy predilections. As Psaki revealed, Joshua Geltzer will be responsible for the “scoping effort.”
During a September 2019 hearing before the House Oversight Committee’s Subcommittees on National Security and Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, the former Obama administration National Security Council official and prolific Trump critic called for adopting a “transnational” approach to countering “violent white supremacy.” This included increased terror organization designations, use of the intelligence capabilities of the “international terrorism”-focused National Counterterrorism Center, and tech companies “policing their platforms to remove not just incitement to violence, but also, the ideological foundations that spawn such violence.”
Geltzer was careful to caveat that creating a “domestic analog to the foreign terrorist organization designation regime” might be unconstitutional and that efforts to counter violent white supremacy “must not be used as an excuse for interfering with the lawful expression of political advocacy.” But it is hard to square these seemingly conflicting statements.
In this charged and hysterical political environment, we should be all the more so concerned about the threats to our liberties, particularly of a national security regime with vastly expanded domestic powers. The first role of government is to protect our lives and liberties. The heavy burden is on our leaders to justify infringements on the latter in service of the former.
You’d think I’d be over it by now, after seeing people who are charged with violently attacking the U.S. government in the name of Trump and white supremacy get permissionto vacation in Mexicoand the privilege of beingserved organic food in jail on the basis of their appropriation of indigenous religious practices.
The
arrogance of white people never ceases to amaze me.
You’d think I’d be over it by now, after seeing people who are charged with violently attacking the U.S. government in the name of Trump and white supremacy get permission to vacation in Mexico and the privilege of being served organic food in jail on the basis of their appropriation of indigenous religious practices.
But I confess to still being taken aback by CNBC’s report that one of the suspected Capitol insurrectionists, 32-year-old Isaac Sturgeon, flew all the way to Kenya after allegedly participating in the Jan. 6 white supremacist mob attack right here in the USA.
Yes, Kenya.
Sturgeon is accused of picking up a metal barricade at the U.S. Capitol and using it to shove back police officers who were guarding the building. He then tried to crawl under barriers to get into the Capitol , according to a federal investigators.
After that fun flirtation with domestic terrorism, Sturgeon hopped on a plane to Kenya on Jan. 24, with plans to stay there until April.
Unfortunately for him, Kenyan authorities kicked him out of their country. Sturgeon was deported from the nation over the weekend and promptly arrested by the FBI, who greeted him at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York City on Saturday.
Sturgeon, who is a business owner from Montana, is now facing charges of obstruction of justice, civil disorder, engaging in physical violence in a restricted building or grounds and assaulting or resisting officers.
Prosecutors are expected to ask a federal judge to detain him without bond pending trial.
Meanwhile, a former Trump State Department appointee jailed in connection with the insurrection has raised concerns about his sleeping conditions in jail, according to a Washington Post report.
Frederico Klein, who allegedly assaulted police officers with a riot shield during the Capitol attack, at a hearing on Friday told a judge, “It would be nice if I could sleep in a place where there were not cockroaches everywhere.”
The judge assured him that his concerns would be addressed if the jail he was sent had dirty or unsafe conditions.
Soaring mountains on one side of the road and the Pacific Ocean on the other: It was 1956, and Gary Griggs was experiencing California State Route 1 for the first time.
He was a child, but in the following decades he would drive this scenic stretch of road, called the Pacific Coast Highway, dozens of times. He also would learn how fragile it is.
In 2017, Griggs consulted on a major repair to the highway as an erosion expert. Now, he says, the iconic road's days may be numbered – at least in its current form.
Future generations may say “it was great while it lasted,” the University of California, Santa Cruz professor predicted.
Frequent damage has long plagued the PCH. In January, yet another chunk fell into the ocean after intense rainstorms, which created a debris flow that overwhelmed water drains more than 100 miles south of San Francisco.
This time, a 150-foot piece of road broke off, the state Department of Transportation said.
Repairs are scheduled to be complete in early summer. For now, travelers must turn around when they reach the gaping hole – there's no bypass in that remote stretch of road.
As global temperatures warm because of human-caused climate change, Griggs said, the conditions that lead to this kind of damage will only increase. Griggs said it's "inevitable” that one day the fixes and repairs won't be enough, or will be too costly to save the highway
California's fragile wonder is 'one of the most scenic drives in the nation'
The journey is the destination on California's Highway 1.
The two-lane road hugs the California coast for hundreds of miles. In its most famous stretch between San Francisco and Los Angeles, the roadway is carved into steep, mountainous terrain around the rugged Big Sur coast.
Griggs calls the region a “geological nightmare” – a mix of hard and soft rock that makes development a challenge at best. It's also at the edge of two tectonic plates.
That's part of the reason it has remained a relatively rural stretch of road with few of the tourist attractions you might expect from a world-renowned destination.
“There are easier ways to go north or south, but there aren’t any more beautiful ways to do it,” said Lesley Ewing, a coastal engineer with the California Coastal Commission.
There are no strip malls and few gas stations, said Paula Twidale, senior vice president of Travel for AAA.
“That’s what makes it iconic," she said. It's “one of the most scenic drives in the nation."
The highway climbs from sea level to hundreds of feet above the ocean, wrapping around the terrain to give drivers glorious views – and pull-offs to safely enjoy them.
Given the road's location, it is no surprise that Highway 1 is frequently damaged.
For decades, the highway has struggled to make it through a calendar year without an incident that closes a portion, Ewing said.
That's to be expected from a "highway at the edge of the continent,” said Kevin Drabinski, a Caltrans spokesperson in California's Central Coast.
Usually, damage occurs because of a combination of weather and geological activity, Drabinski said.
But what is changing: the frequency and severity of that damage.
Effects of climate change endanger future of Pacific Coast Highway
Although the highway is celebrated for its ocean views, it is not rising seas that worry Griggs the most. It's fires and rain.
Experts hesitate to attribute an individual incident of road damage directly to climate change. But the effects of climate change are creating conditions that worsen Highway 1's existing problems.
Wildfires are increasingly dotting California with massive burn scars: scorched earth with little vegetation to help hold the soil together.
Overall, in 2020, nearly 10,000 fires burned more than 4.2 million acres in California, more than 4% of the state's roughly 100 million acres of land. That made 2020 the largest wildfire season recorded in California's modern history, according to CalFire.
A burn scar in steep terrain, like that found in Big Sur, creates perfect conditions for mudslides and debris flows.
All that's needed is a deluge of rain – which, in coastal California, is also happening increasingly frequently.
The types of big storms that can batter California with heavy rain and snow are projected to increase in intensity in coming years because of climate change, said UCLA climate scientist Daniel Swain.
"There's a lot of evidence that atmospheric rivers will become more intense as the climate warms," Swain said. While we may not see more atmospheric rivers overall, the ones that cause problems will become stronger, and there will be more major storms, he said.
Made visible by clouds, the ribbons of water vapor known as atmospheric rivers extend thousands of miles from the tropics to the western U.S. They provide the fuel for the massive rain, snowstorms and subsequent floods along the West Coast.
These "rivers in the sky" are responsible for up to 65% of the western USA's extreme rain and snow events, a 2017 study said. Though beneficial for water supplies, these events can wreak havoc on travel, trigger deadly mudslides and cause catastrophic damage to life and property, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said.
One well-known nickname for an atmospheric river is the "Pineapple Express," which occurs when the source of the moisture is near Hawaii.
Swain said the powerful atmospheric river storms have historically caused problems with the Pacific Coast Highway, which "is not in a very geologically stable position even in the best of times."
Most of the land slippages along the highway are caused by land on the upper, mountainous side of the highway – such as during landslides, mudslides and debris flows – which are often worsened by California's ferocious wildfires, he said.
Swain said climate change is expected to worsen both the frequency and potency of wildfires in California, adding yet another layer of concern for vulnerable Highway 1.
What's around the bend? California Coastal Commission expects adaptations
California has been planning for Highway 1's future for years, and the state's Coastal Commission has been charged with protecting the highway, Ewing said.
Californians should expect a two-lane road will continue to span most of the state's coastline. Studies and plans have been made to ensure the highway continues to function.
Breathtaking views are still available in a milelong section for pedestrians and nonmotorized vehicles.
Ewing expects more solutions like that one will be needed in coming years and decades.
“You can keep putting these Band-Aids on it,” Griggs said, noting that adaptations are especially challenging in the unforgiving terrain of Big Sur. Simply retreating the highway inland slightly isn't an easy proposition.
Some repairs made to the Highway 1 are now made to last for decades in anticipation that damage will continue, Caltrans' Drabinski said.
It will take "innovative designs" to protect the road, he said. For now, travelers can expect that "the general experience of that road will still be there."
