https://www.pogo.org/newsletters/the-bunker/introducing-the-bunker?utm_source=bunker&utm_medium=email&utm_content=logo&emci=053a66ec-9f38-ef11-86d2-6045bdd9e096&emdi=b6cf8167-2b39-ef11-86d2-6045bdd9e096&ceid=201249This week in The Bunker: China-threat hyperbole soars ever higher; the officer in charge of building a new ICBM is fired; Biden slights troops who died on his watch; and more.
DÉJÀ VU VU PLATTER July 3, 2024
We’ve seen this show before
Kids love visiting Chinese American restaurants and starting out with a Pu Pu Platter. It’s an assortment of chicken wings, fried wonton, egg rolls, and other greasy delicacies. Best of all, you can heat them up, skewered on sticks, that you poke into a tabletop flame. The fire comes from a Sternocan centered on the plate, which gives everything a delectable chemical aftertaste.
Over the past week, there’s been a similar collection of Middle Kingdom treats threats rolled out:
Sounding the Alarm On China’s Threat to the U.S.
China ‘actively’ targeting U.S. industrial base, warns CYBERCOM chief
China’s ‘worst-case thinking’ could spark space crisis, study finds
China is seeking ways to disrupt daily American life should a conflict erupt, Pentagon’s IT leader says
Nearly 160,000 Chinese illegal border crossers since January 2021, or 32 U.S. Army brigades
Former Navy captain tells Congress of decades-long U.S. intelligence failures on China
China is a serious threat and must be taken seriously. But it has an increasingly brittle leadership, a corrupt military, and a developing demographic disaster. Any discussion of the threat it poses needs to be tempered with these realities, but rarely is.
This threat roster also has a familiar aftertaste. The last time, the enemy was the Soviet Union. Just like today, the threat was real, but turbocharged by those with a vested interest in magnifying it. That’s how we ended up with McCarthyism, illusory U.S. missile and bomber gaps, the annual glossy Soviet Military Power sales brochure to boost U.S. arms production, and untold billions of dollars in excess defense spending.
That “former Navy captain” cited in the last headline above is James Fanell, who retired from the service in 2015 after warning that China was readying for a “short, sharp war” in the Pacific (heck, even The Bunker quotedhim).
“Over the course of decades the Chinese Communist Party effectively misled our Executive Branch to ignore the People’s Republic of China as a rising existential threat,” Fanell said in his 17-page statement (PDF) to the House Oversight Committee’s June 26 hearing, “Defending America from the Chinese Communist Party’s Political Warfare.”
“In particularly, the Department of Defense and the Intelligence Community were deceived by the CCP’s skillful use of elite capture, deception, disinformation and propaganda programs. As a result, senior U.S. leaders unilaterally disarmed psychologically, intellectually, and militarily, despite clear evidence that PRC had no intent to rise peacefully, and viewed America as its main enemy to be defeated through protracted war,” Fanell said. “Even worse, our leaders help fund and otherwise enable China’s military, economic, and technological advances needed to destroy our military forces in the field and destroy our society and economy.”
“Paging Dr. Strangelove!”
Two points: China is not going to “destroy our military …and destroy our society and economy.” And when it comes to “deception, disinformation and propaganda,” the U.S. national-security state takes a back seat to no one.
“History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes,” Mark Twain supposedly said. He never did. What he did say, however, is even more relevant: “History never repeats itself, but the Kaleidoscopic combinations of the pictured present often seem to be constructed out of the broken fragments of antique legends.”