Author Biography

Robert Spalding retired from the U.S. Air Force as a brigadier general after more than 25 years of service. The author of Stealth War, he is a former China strategist for the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Joint Staff at the Pentagon, as well as a senior defence official and defence attache to China. He earned his doctorate in economics and mathematics from the University of Missouri and is fluent in Mandarin.

Excerpt from Book

Chapter 1 Know Your Enemy "To know your enemy, you must become your enemy." That is from Sun Tzu, the font of much Chinese strategic wisdom. He means: See the situation through your enemy''s eyes. How would he react if the circumstances were reversed? What steps would he take to gain advantage? Where are his weak points? When it came to the outbreak of SARS-CoV-2, not only did we not see the problem through the eyes of China''s Communist leaders, we didn''t even realize they were the enemy. In January 2020, Americans believed what the Chinese told them-that the virus was under control. Why would they lie about something as serious as a deadly disease? But even as we believed them, the Chinese Communist Party was locking down its own country while allowing international flights out of Wuhan, knowing that Wuhan residents would carry the virus to the rest of the world, perhaps escalating it into a global pandemic. It made the cold-blooded calculation that COVID-19 could actually help China if it weakened the United States and Europe. The CCP also began a global disinformation campaign, led by their hordes of "50 Cent Army" members. This wasn''t a conventional army-it was a group of social media agents who got paid 50 cents in Chinese renminbi for every post they''d make on Western social media platforms. The disinformation campaign shared positive stories about the CCP''s response to COVID-19, making it seem far more effective than it actually was, while downplaying the severity and contagiousness of the virus. At the same time, Chinese officials refused to tell the World Health Organization about the outbreak for many weeks, in violation of their agreement. Meanwhile, all those international travelers who flew out of Wuhan and other Chinese cities were carrying the virus across Asia, into Europe, and soon after to the United States. And how is it conceivable that China muzzled its doctors and refused to share the genetic sequence and virus samples or allow outside scientists into China to study the origins and formulate treatment-to this day? Thanks to COVID-19, by late 2020, the world''s major economies would lose an estimated $4 trillion in economic output-and eventually more than five million people would die. In addition to reopening their economy faster than the West, the Chinese owned the means to mass produce many of the goods the West urgently needed, like ventilators and personal protective equipment. They would also gain a propaganda victory as they found yet another reason to point to U.S. failings while falsely praising their own conduct by rewriting and burying history. For the Chinese leadership, COVID was not a problem, it was an opportunity. It was a weapon to be used to advance the interests of China. Whether or not it was a deliberate or accidental release from the Wuhan lab-we may never know-everything that followed was an orchestrated response that caused havoc for the rest of the world. If these consequences of the CCP''s actions had been the result of a conventional military attack, America would have surely retaliated. But instead, this kind of stealth war-combining ruthless economic policies, indifference to the public good, and a weaponization of the internet-attracted minimal attention. While conspiracy theorists speculated that the Chinese had designed COVID-19 in a lab as a bioweapon, few Americans discussed the less extreme but proven case: that the CCP took advantage of a surprise crisis to advance its own interests and hurt its adversaries. They had started lying to the public from the moment of Dr. Li Wenliang''s warning, and they''re still lying about Chinese COVID statistics as I write this in late 2021. Looking back, we can see that the United States ignored that hoary military maxim of know your enemy. How different would the early days of the COVID epidemic have been if we had taken a much harsher view of the Chinese Communist Party and had not been distracted by the false and foolish notion that any criticism of the Chinese government was racist. But we did not understand what our enemy wanted and we did not understand their game. What China Wants Knowing the goals and motives of any country is at the foundation of diplomacy and national security-most keenly when you''re talking about a budding superpower with a giant army and nuclear weapons. Fundamentally, you want to know if your adversaries are a threat, and if so, what kind of threat? Are they willing and able to go to war with their neighbors? Do they want territory? Resources? Control over global trade? Is there a scenario in which they would invade the United States? National security analysts, as I once was, look for clues in speeches by party bosses, bread crumbs in academic papers, phrases of military doctrine. Always, we''re standing outside a murky window peering in. Or trying to find a clear window. I think Unrestricted Warfare is that window. Once we establish what the Chinese are up to, UW will help us understand the how and why. Winston Churchill famously said of Soviet Russia, "It is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma." He was trying to see into the mind of Joseph Stalin and his Communist party henchmen in the Kremlin. American leaders at the height of the Cold War asked a thousand times, "What is Russia up to? What do they want? How dangerous are they?" We eventually figured them out. Thanks to some keen analysis and the fortitude of President Ronald Reagan, we divined that Russia was a hollow country with a fragile economy and a bloated military-a jackbooted clown show plagued by an endless series of economic disasters that ultimately proved communism, and the Communist party, a failure. Reagan''s arms race drove them over the cliff. It would be a mistake, however, to put China in the same box. Beijing''s motives are much more obscure than Moscow''s, and the biggest error our leaders can make today is thinking they have a simple understanding of what the CCP wants and how it is getting it. It''s easy to think we have some understanding of our rival. We have, after all, fought bloody battles against the Chinese army during the Korean War. The Chinese have fought shooting wars with India and Vietnam over disputed territory. More recently, because there wasn''t much fear of military action, there has been a general assumption in our diplomatic and military community that China is not a direct threat to the United States. Or, if they are, that we can control them by putting pressure on them in all of the normal ways. But we can''t rerun the Soviet movie and expect the same outcome. China is a bigger problem. Yes, they made the same colossal economic blunders under Mao-resulting in millions of deaths from starvation. Their ghastly political purges drained its society of its talent before the 1980s. But they survived. Thrived, even. And since then have arguably made few mistakes. Remember that their economy dwarfs Russia''s, as does their population of 1.4 billion people. Their version of communism is much more complex than the Soviet''s, allowing free enterprise with a leash. And the Chinese culture has taken to entrepreneurship in a way that Russia''s has not. China''s military is now formidable. Whether from research and development or theft, they are a technologically advanced nation. Their money has given them far more global entrZe than the Soviet''s blunt force ever could. They have their problems, which I''ll discuss later. But the big lesson is: China is not Russia 2.0. So what is China up to? What do they want? And how are they working to get it? According to too many of our politicians and business leaders, China doesn''t want much, and it isn''t acting against us at all. Conversations on this subject that take place in the Pentagon are usually steered by the view from the top. In some fashion, the views of the president and his most senior advisers and cabinet members set the tone for how the meetings would go. In my tours in both the White House national security staff and the Pentagon, the required view was that if you said China was an enemy, you could be out of a job. Outside the formality of those rooms, my colleagues and I had screaming arguments about exactly that subject. When I arrived at the Pentagon as the China adviser to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in 2014, the instructions from the Obama administration were clear: We were not going to do anything in public to antagonize China as their relationship is too significant financially. The narrative was that the two most powerful countries in the world had to cooperate to solve greater challenges like a nuclear-armed North Korea and climate change. That stance was built on the absurd idea that China wants to fix either of these issues. (It doesn''t.) Over those years I came to two key realizations. First, the number one goal of the Chinese Communist Party is the survival of the Chinese Communist Party. And second, the number one threat to achieving that goal is American democracy. We may not see them as our enemy, but they surely see us as their enemy. An existential one. The basis of globalization that was agreed to in the wake of World War II was the principles of the Atlantic Charter, which underlies the United Nations, the World Trade Organization, and other bodies. There are four keys: free markets, democratic principles, rule of law, and self-determination. This is what the global elites who convene in places like Davos believed the Chinese were moving toward. In fact, the exact opposite was true. As we later learn

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