Category Archives: China

Army’s Wish List Against China/Russia

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It appears some real strategic thinking and application is happening here and that is a good thing. These lists for more reconnaissance aircraft is a good thing for sure.

Russia's Hybrid Warfare Strategy • Full Version

U.S. Army leaders revealed Tuesday that they are briefing top military commanders about new weapons being built specifically for “high-intensity conflict” against China and Russia, in a new effort to assure that they could provide vital firepower for those potential battlefields of the future.

Reconnaissance aircraft, team reach milestone > U.S. Air ...

Army Secretary Mark Esper said he wants to shift some money away from vehicles and aircraft more suited for conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq and into “what I need to penetrate Russian or Chinese air defenses.”

Among the new weapons and technologies he said are critical: long-range artillery, attack and reconnaissance aircraft, air and missile defenses, and command-and-control networks. Esper said the artillery — known as Long-Range Precision Fires — could be used “to hold at bay Chinese ships.”

Army officials recently briefed Adm. Philip Davidson, commander of U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, who oversees all U.S. military personnel in the Asia-Pacific region. This comes as the Army plans to rotate thousands of soldiers on expeditionary deployments throughout the Pacific — an expansive region often associated with Navy and Air Force military operations.

“We want to talk to [U.S. European Command] as well,” Esper said. “What we’re trying to do is go out and tell them what we’re doing.”

Last year, the Army held a series of reviews that recommended cutting or reducing nearly 200 weapons projects, freeing up $25 billion for investment in higher-priority programs. Among the projects cut are upgrades to Boeing-made CH-47 Chinook helicopters and buys of Oshkosh-made Joint Light Tactical Vehicles, the Army’s replacement for Humvees. Esper said he needs to shift money into “Future Vertical Lift,” an effort to build faster helicopters and tilt-rotor aircraft — similar to the V-22 Osprey —  instead of upgrades to older, larger, and slower helicopters.

“What I don’t have right now is an attack/reconnaissance aircraft,” Esper said, Tuesday during a briefing at the Pentagon. “That’s what I need to penetrate Russian or Chinese air defenses. I’m not going to do that with a CH-47.”

The Army is evaluating prototypes built by Bell and a Lockheed Martin-Boeing team, as it determines the makeup of a new generation of military helicopters.

Army leaders plan to cut the number of Joint Light Tactical Vehicles they will buy from Oshkosh but the size of the reduction has not been finalized, Esper said. Army Undersecretary Ryan McCarthy has previously said the service plans to cut 1,900 vehicles.

“We are certainly cutting the total number. I know that much,” Esper said. “But whether it … finals out; right here today, I can’t tell you. In five years, I could maybe have a different number for you.”

The secretary said that they decision to buy Chinooks and JLTVs was made before the Trump administration’s January 2018 National Defense Strategy put the Pentagon on a path to preparing for great power competition with Russia and China. That strategy reduced the Defense Department’s priority on counterterrorism and counterinsurgency fights in Afghanistan, Iraq, and other spots like Syria, which had dominated much of the past two decades. In its wake, the Army is building new doctrine that will be evaluated over the next 12 to 18 months. The results of those wargames will determine how many soldiers and weapons are needed in the future.

“They were in many ways designed for a different conflict,” he said, of Chinooks and JLTVs. “It doesn’t mean we won’t use them in future conflicts, but now my emphasis has to be on rebuilding my armor, rebuilding my fighting vehicles, having aircraft that can penetrate Russia and Chinese air defenses, that can shoot down Russian and Chinese drones and missiles and helicopters and fixed-wing aircraft. We’re in this transition period and so some folks are caught in that transition.”

Meanwhile, where is the strategic thinking when it comes to hybrid warfare?

The Pentagon wants to develop a way to detect those signs by analyzing the myriad actions in what it calls the “gray zone”–behaviors in a variety of areas that, considered separately, may or may not mean anything but when examined together could indicate malicious intent–and is putting artificial intelligence (AI) to work on the problem.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has launched a new program intended to better understand and interpret an adversary’s gray zone engagement as potential signals of pending aggression. The Collection and Monitoring via Planning for Active Situational Scenarios (COMPASS) program will incorporate AI, game theory, modeling, and estimation technologies to decipher the often subtle signs that precede a full-scale attack.

“The ultimate goal of the program is to provide theater-level operations and planning staffs with robust analytics and decision-support tools that reduce ambiguity of adversarial actors and their objectives,” said Fotis Barlos, DARPA program manager. “As we see increasingly more sophistication in gray zone activity around the world, we need to leverage advanced AI and other technologies to help commanders make more effective decisions to thwart an enemy’s complex, multi-layered disruptive activity.”

The attention to gray zone activity reflects the multi-pronged tactics used in hybrid warfare, of the type employed by Russia in Georgia in 2008 and in Ukraine since 2014. Cyber attacks to shut down the power grid, conduct digital espionage, and sow economic disruption, along with social media campaigns aimed at manipulating public opinion, coincided with the covert movement of troops and equipment into Ukraine. Not only have these tactics proved to be effective, their subtle, sometimes untraceable methods can lend a level of plausible deniability to the attacks. And NATO has said that clandestine hybrid attacks can achieve their aims before being noticed, too late for an effective response.smilelaugh

Is China an Adversary of the United States?

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Yes, and frankly, we should completely reconsider an trade agreements in total with China. The whole launch of a harmonious relationship between the United States and China established by President Nixon in 1972 is not today’s condition. China is hostile to not only the United States but to any country frankly for the sake of money, China needs it by any and all means possible.

Exclusive: Secret NSA Map Shows China Cyber Attacks on U.S ...

China is using ‘debt traps’ effectively to financially punk foreign governments to gain power, influence and assets.

  • China is working to influence media outlets beyond its borders in an effort to impose its ideology and deter criticism of its actions, a press freedom group said.

    In a report released Monday, Reporters Without Borders detailed what it said was China’s impact on a global decline in press freedom and analyzed President Xi Jinping’s strategy to control information outside his own country. The group found that Beijing was using advertising buys, paid-trips for journalists and an expanding global propaganda network to impose its “ideologically correct” terminology and to obscure darker chapters of the country’s history.

  • Huawei has been a theft and spy operation for decades. A major concern and consequence is a renewed U.S. campaign to pressure and persuade America’s allies to keep Huawei technology and equipment out of the next generation of wireless networks, known as 5G. The stakes in this campaign are much bigger than U.S. market share or the effectiveness of Iran sanctions. If Huawei’s chips and routers find their way into this new network, everything from digital privacy to intellectual property could be at risk.
  • Chinese employees stole corporate secrets from Dutch semiconductor equipment maker ASML, resulting in hundreds of millions of dollars in losses, Dutch financial newspaper Financieele Dagblad (FD) reported on Thursday.

    The paper said, citing its own investigation, technology had been stolen by high-level Chinese employees in the research and development department of ASML’s U.S. subsidiary and ultimately leaked to a company linked to the Chinese government.

  • That Chinese worker employed by that farm in Iowa is likely a spy, performing agricultural/intellectual property theft.
  • China has and continues to infect the American education system. It is called the Confucius Institute. It ranges from Kindergarten to graduate school. China has already spent $200 million USD on this effort. So, the Senate held a hearing. Legislation? Still waiting.
  • U.S. government contractors hired by China to be a hacker/ perform espionage or to steal technology. Examples are here, here and here.

Just this past December, the Assistant Director of the FBI for the Counterintelligence Division gave an extended statement and testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee that spoke to the non-traditional espionage methods employed by China against the United States. Simply put, he described it as a Cold War and honestly it is.

In part:

The Chinese government is attempting to acquire or steal, not only the plans and intentions of the United States government, but also the ideas and innovations of the very people that make our economy so incredibly successful. The Chinese government understands a core lesson of the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union: economic strength is the foundation of national power. The competition between the United States and China will be greatly influenced, if not ultimately decided, on the strength of our economies.

The Chinese government means to compete with us in every way possible, playing by the rules at times, bending them at others, and breaking them when necessary to ensure their success. They also aim to rewrite the rules to shape the world in their image, and they have already made progress on this front. The rules they write seek to guarantee the dominance of their businesses and root Chinese national power in the very fabric of an international system.

From my vantage point, it appears we are at the early stages of a hyper-competitive world. This is not simply a competition between businesses and industries but also between governments and the ways in which they govern their societies. Make no mistake: the Chinese government is proposing itself as an alternative model for the world, one without a democratic system of government, and it is seeking to undermine the free and open rules-based order we helped establish following World War II. Our businesses and our government must adapt in order to compete and thrive in this world.

Perhaps AOC, Omar, Nadler, Pelosi, Tlaib and Schiff should be concentrating on the real work to protect American….eh? Better still, perhaps CNN should report on the real stuff….uh huh

When an F-35 Goes Missing

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Some panic has set in for the United States, the need to find the most expensive fighter jet ever built before enemies of the United States find it first.

Japan’s Air Self-Defense Force says the F-35A stealth jet went missing Tuesday while flying off the eastern coast of Aomori. It says the plane disappeared from radar about half an hour after taking off from the Misawa air base with three other F-35As for a flight exercise.

Defense Minister Takeshi Iwaya told reporters that a search and rescue operation was underway for the missing jet and its pilot. The cause of the mishap was not immediately known.

This could be  matter of several countries in the region doing the search.

A US Navy P-8A Poseidon maritime patrol aircraft and the Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer Stethem with the Navy’s 7th Fleet are assisting the Japanese air and maritime assets dispatched to find the missing aircraft and its pilot, the Navy said in a statement Wednesday.

Japan has sent out U-125A search-and-rescue aircraft, UH-60 Black Hawk helicopters, and P-3C maritime surveillance aircraft, as well as three coast-guard vessels to search for the downed F-35, according to The Diplomat.

“We continue to hope for the safe recovery of the pilot, and our thoughts are with his family and all of our Japanese partners as they conduct this search,” United States Forces Japan said in a statement.

The F-35A was being flown by an experienced pilot with more than 3,200 flight hours, including 60 hours in the new stealth fighters. Radar contact with the aircraft was lost while it was about 85 miles east of Misawa Air Base in northern Japan. The Japan Air Self Defense Force has grounded its entire fleet of F-35s in response.

So far, only parts of the missing aircraft have been recovered. The discovery indicates that the plane crashed, most likely marking the first F-35A crash. (A US Marine Corps F-35B crashed in South Carolina in September; the pilot was able to eject.)

While both the US and Japan are committed to finding the pilot, another aspect of the search is securing the technology aboard the advanced aircraft before someone else finds it.

 

“There is no price too high in this world for China and Russia to pay to get Japan’s missing F-35, if they can,” Tom Moore, a former senior professional staff member with the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee, tweeted Tuesday. “Big deal.”

“If one of Japan’s F-35s is sitting at the bottom of the Pacific, we are probably about to see one of the biggest underwater espionage and counter-espionage ops since the Cold War,” Tyler Rogoway, the editor of the respected defense publication The War Zone, tweeted.

The stealth fighter was specifically built to give the US advantages in high-end conflict against great-power rivals. Neither Russia nor China has been able to field a comparable fifth-generation aircraft. More here.

*** Update: Iwaya said that the pilot sent a signal to abort the mission, according to the broadcaster. Shortly after the signal, all communications with the fighter jet were lost. Parts of the jet have been located.

The Japanese defense ministry said the male pilot, who’s in his 40s, remains missing.

The fighter jet went off the radar while flying off the eastern coast of Aomori, just about half an hour after taking off the Misawa air base with three other F-35As.

All F-35’s based in Japan have been grounded.

The Chinese Spy at Mar-a-Lago

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It was not so much about the lies she told to get on the grounds and through the first layer of security at Mar-a-Lago, or about the spy stuff she had on her at the time she was arrested at Trump’s club but there was some interesting things in her hotel room. How about $8000 in cash, an unknown amount of Chinese currency, a signal detector, additional cell phones, a dozen or so credit cards, 9 USB cards, 5 SIM cards and 9 thumb drives that immediately began corrupting files in a test (cold)computer.

The 10 page criminal complaint is found here.

MiamiHerald: Yujing Zhang — the Chinese woman arrested Saturday after allegedly trying to bring an unusual number of electronic devices into President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club — identified herself at a court hearing earlier this week as an investor and a consultant for a Shanghai private-equity firm who appears to have amassed considerable wealth.

Image result for Yujing Zhang in court

Speaking through a Mandarin interpreter, Zhang told a magistrate judge that she owns a $1.3 million house in China and drives a BMW, according to an audio recording of her first appearance at the federal courthouse in West Palm Beach.

A federal prosecutor at the hearing said Zhang poses an “extreme risk of flight” from the United States if she is released from custody.

“She has no ties to the United States in general or to the Southern District of Florida in particular,” said the prosecutor, John McMillan.

McMillan also claimed there were “security implications” that should prevent Zhang from making phone calls while detained.

The FBI is investigating whether Zhang — who told U.S. Secret Service agents she had traveled to Mar-a-Lago from Shanghai to attend a social event — was working as a Chinese intelligence operative, sources familiar with the inquiry told the Miami Herald. Her arrest at the president’s private club revitalized a wider ongoing federal investigation, first reported by the Herald, that had for several months examined potential Chinese espionage activities in South Florida. An affidavit attached to a criminal complaint said she was carrying four cellphones, a laptop, an external hard drive and a thumb drive containing “malicious malware.” Details of the hearing were first reported by CNN.

Zhang is charged with lying to a federal officer and entering restricted property. She has not been charged with any counts related to espionage. Chinese diplomatic officials in the United States say they are aware of Zhang’s arrest and offering assistance.

During the April 1 hearing, Zhang asked sophisticated questions about how her case would proceed in terms of securing bond and hiring an attorney, which were relayed to the judge by her interpreter.

“You’re obviously very intelligent because your questions are excellent for a defendant in this situation,” remarked the judge, William Matthewman, who added that the hour-and-15-minute initial appearance was probably the longest that had ever taken place before him.

While Zhang requested an interpreter at the hearing, the Secret Service noted that she had exhibited a “detailed knowledge of, and ability to converse in and understand even subtle nuances of … the English language” during her interactions with agents at Mar-a-Lago.

The affidavit submitted by a Secret Service agent stated that Zhang read a document out loud in English and would “question agents about the context of certain words throughout the form.”

At the court hearing, Zhang named her employer as Shanghai Zhirong Asset Management, a private-equity firm, but said she was paid on a “per project” basis and had made no money in 2019. She said she travels to the United States for business frequently enough to maintain a U.S. bank account but believed the account did not hold more than $5,000 and said she often brings cash on her trips. She said she had arrived in the country a short time before her arrest.

“My savings are mainly in China,” Zhang told the court.

Zhang will remain in custody pending a detention hearing Monday, but Matthewman ruled she should be allowed to make domestic telephone calls to seek a private attorney. She ultimately chose to be represented by a federal public defender.

She told the court that her family lives in China and said she would like to make international calls and use the Internet to contact relatives and friends, something the magistrate judge denied. She said that she opened the Wells Fargo bank account because she was looking for a “business partner” in the United States but nothing had panned out.

Zhang showed up at Trump’s Palm Beach club around noon on Saturday asking to use the pool and was allowed through an initial Secret Service checkpoint, according to the criminal complaint.

In the affidavit, a Secret Service agent wrote that “due to a potential language barrier issue,” Mar-a-Lago security believed Zhang was related to a club member with the same surname. But a receptionist soon realized she was not an approved guest. At that point, Zhang said she had been invited to attend a “United Nations Friendship Event” between China and the United States. While there was no function by that name on the social calendar, a Chinese-based group called the United Nations Chinese Friendship Association had promoted an event on that same day.

The function was one of two events originally scheduled to take place Saturday and promoted online by Cindy Yang, a South Florida massage parlor owner who also ran a business that promised Chinese business executives face time and photographs with Donald Trump. Both events had been canceled after the Herald published a selfie Yang took with Trump. Zhang apparently never got the message that the events were off.

The arrest at Mar-a-Lago is causing consternation in Congress. U.S. House Oversight Committee Chairman Elijah Cummings, D-Md., said Thursday that he plans to have the Secret Service brief him and Rep. Jim Jordan, the committee’s ranking Republican, over security protocols at the president’s club.

“The two main questions are how secure is it with regard to safety of the president and his family, and then we want to know about security with regard to communications. It seems like anybody can kind of mosey up and bring communications equipment,” Cummings said.

“You cannot play around with the safety of the president and the first family,” he said. “You just can’t do it.”

Russian Military Stuff in Venezuela, Concerns for U.S.

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For context:

  • In 2007, Chavez and President Hu Jintao of China signed a deal for operating credit. The deal was loans for oil .
  • In 2014, the China Development Bank provided Venezuela another $30 billion in more oil back loans including mining, refining, pipelines and power stations. Maduro failed on parts of the deal and China is working diligently to protect the loans, investments and the deals.
  • Russia in 2015, stepped in a provided $6.5 billion in new funds through Rosneft while in previous years, Venezuela bought $4 billion in Russian arms and military equipment. Now both China and Russia are facing defaults by Venezuela.
  • Russia flew in 2 bombers containing more military equipment last month and an estimate 100-200 Russian troops. Russia has explained the troops were there for maintenance. However, as a cover, Russia immediately opened a helicopter training center via Rostec. The helicopters included are Mi-35M gunships and troop transports.  At least 2 factories are under construction in Venezuela building Kalashnikov rifles and ammunition. Furthermore, Russia provides military tactic advice and training to Venezuela.
  • Russia has supplied Venezuela with fighter jets, tanks and an air defense system(s).
  • The worst part of the relationship between Russia and Venezuela consists of at least 5000 MANPADS. The stockpile in Venezuela is the largest in Latin America are of a shoulder fired variation. Known to be SA-24 or Igla-S, having a range of 500-6,000m and an altitude up to 3,500m. More details here.

Venezuela is home to a vibrant illegal weapons trade and smuggling operation(s). Weapons include long guns, machine guns, grenades and other military grade items.

Image result for igla 2 manpads venezuela

While U.S. operatives are working to locate and understand all military equipment in Venezuela, theft of the MANPADS is most concerning including investigations into trade on the Black market.

Image result for igla 2 manpads

Venezuela maintains an inventory of MSTA self-propelled howitzers, TOR0M1 mobile SAMS and T-72 tanks.

It is thought that stockpile is located near the coast in fears of a U.S. attack which Russia is accusing the U.S. of planning. With those stockpiles are 1,500 launchers and grip stocks fundamental to MANPAD operations. These MANPADS were purchased by Chavez in 2010 as part of a $4 billion weapons purchase with Russia. In 2009, Sweden had confirmed that at least 3 MANPADS were found in a FARC guerrilla camp in Columbia. Sweden had actually sold them to Venezuela in the late 1980’s.

Both Obama and John Kerry negotiated a deal with Columbia to disband FARC. The deal happened in early 2016 in Cuba. FARC is a Marxist guerrilla group and was on the U.S. State Department terror list for years. The talks took place in Cuba, yet FARC remains a major concern as to where members are today, likely joined up with other militant organizations in the region.

All of the items above play into the equation of decisions made by the United States, The LIMA Group and the Organization of American States. Not to be left out is the China trade negotiations and matters with Russia.