It is common for us to vent or joke about China’s “stealing.” While this has limited use against China’s public relations campaigns, the mental impression formed from the repeated theft conversation is a sense of moral triumph, disgust, and anger. Yet these emotions can shroud our minds from understanding our adversary. For the Chinese state, stealing is warfare.
We should ask how, if at all, each stolen technology or secret fits into the P.L.A.’s combined warfare capability, plans, and readiness for kinetic warfare or military leverage against our Armed Forces and against our civilian population.
What range of damage could the P.L.A. inflict U.S. and allied forces should the stolen technology be replicated and used against us? How might it help China dominate less powerful nations whose resources the P.L.A. wants? And how might the P.L.A. use won resources to multiply forces against us?
We must hear from or read writings of combat veterans who have been on the using or receiving end of the technology in question, and or who have experienced the Chinese way of warfare. How does the stolen tech work or not work in practice? How might those combat veterans have wanted to adapt the technology to make it work better in combat conditions?
From there, we can begin to deal with the problem of each theft, and, raise the level of seriousness in preventing future theft. The thief is a warrior planning the isolation, inertia, enslavement, or death of free nations and their people, as the Chinese state deems necessary. In the past, overextending themselves has not been their practice, however, they have been rapidly building an expeditionary military, some of it deceptively appearing to be civilian in nature.
If you factor in the Russian state’s information warfare programming the fringes of free nations with “civil war” narratives and see it as a combined effort with China’s weaponization of the opioid and meth drug trades in the U.S. and elsewhere, it is an effort to destroy our will to be independent, free, and to fight external aggressors. By inducing preoccupation with petty, self-defeating methods of dealing with our relationships and problems at home, China and the Russian state would destroy our will and capability to defend against and defeat external enemies directing combined attacks on us. If they are successful, free nations will fall.
