And it is advantageous to face a foe whose elites are blinded by both greed and hubris.*
From Legion Magazine:
The message no one wanted to hear
In 1999, two Chinese colonels, Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui, wrote a groundbreaking book titled “Unrestricted Warfare” that was published by the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) Press. They begin the book with the simple acknowledgement that the Gulf War of 1991 changed warfare forever. Desert Storm was an overwhelming, all-encompassing victory against what had been considered one of the greatest military powers in the world, and it was accomplished in a mere 42 days. The key, of course, was the substantial technological superiority of the Americans. This victory shocked the Chinese to the core. They no longer had delusions that they could win in a direct military confrontation with the United States. They realized that “war by other means” would be necessary.
The book identifies some of these other means, including:
- Financial warfare (manipulation of currencies, banks and the stock market),
- Technological warfare (gaining primary control of various technologies),
- Resources warfare (manipulating the price of, or access to, key resources),
- Network warfare (control of the Internet and real-time communication), and
- Economic aid warfare (controlling other nations by creating economic dependencies).
There should be little doubt that the work of the two colonels has been followed carefully by the PLA in determining means of engagement. In fact, the book has become the de facto manual for economic warfare worldwide.
Risks and Responses. In late 2008, I received a copy of a 1944 letter written by President Franklin D. Roosevelt to Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson. In it, the president asked for a study on how U.S. war-making efforts were impacting the economy, industry and morale in Germany and Japan. This was different from previous studies undertaken by the Economic Defense Board and the Board of Economic Warfare, which had focused on procuring economic support for the U.S. war effort. FDR’s letter to Stimson requested just the opposite: an analysis of how warfare could be used to target economies. Roosevelt understood that to defeat the enemy’s economy was to defeat the enemy.
The recently declassified letter came to me from a leader in the Irregular Warfare Support Group (IWSG) of the Pentagon. Along with the letter came a request that I help IWSG “develop the present-day economic warfare threat doctrine and strategic appreciation.” IWSG is a part of SOLIC (Special Operations, Low-Intensity Conflict).
My connection to IWSG stemmed from concerns I had shared with some Pentagon insiders regarding the cause and effect of the 2008 market crash. In “Unrestricted Warfare,” the two Chinese colonels explained that “a single manmade stock-market crash, a single computer virus invasion, or a single rumor or scandal that results in a fluctuation in the enemy country’s exchange rates, or exposes the leaders of an enemy country on the Internet, all can be included in the ranks of new-concept weapons.”
Having watched the 2008 collapse up close and personal as an investment manager, it was clear to me that something out of the ordinary had happened. At the request of DoD, I submitted a white-paper report that outlined my concern. Basically, it goes like this:
Terrorists brought down the World Trade Center both as a symbol and as a direct attack on the U.S. financial system. They accomplished their feat after careful study and several trial runs.
It’s not hard to imagine that the Bear Stearns attack was an initial attempt to bring down our financial system and influence elections.
Is it possible that enemies of the United States purposefully attacked our financial markets on or about Sept. 11, 2008? There is some evidence that al-Qaida may have short-sold airline stocks in advance of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Could they have seen this to be a successful weapon to be used against our capitalist system?
The initial white-paper report went on to describe mechanisms for how such an economic weapon could be used and identified the key issues needed for further study. It prompted swift response. Based on emails I received, it appeared that the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB), the Department of Defense, and even the CIA had been caught off guard. Despite the fact that the 2008 global market meltdown had erased some $50 trillion of wealth, with about $13 trillion of the losses in the United States alone, there was virtually no consideration that it had been triggered as an act of warfare or terrorism. Everyone saw what was happening as normal economic forces, and the politicians lined up in partisan camps to blame each other.
In that context, I was contracted by IWSG to formally outline the risk. The commitment was made in January, during the waning days of the Bush presidency, and the paper was delivered in June with the title, “Economic Warfare: Risks and Responses – Analysis of Twenty-First Century Risks in Light of the Recent Market Collapse.” The unclassified paper included 110 single-spaced pages with 210 endnotes and nine appendices. Working with experts across various fields and with the strong support of Patrick Maloy, who had left a lucrative Wall Street career to serve a second stint in the Marine Corps, I developed a formal hypothesis of the crash, using a motive-means-and-opportunity analysis of who might have been involved, and why. The deeper we dug, the more interesting things became.
Maloy was introduced to me by IWSG. He had been sending reports to DoD for several years with intelligence gathered in North Africa and the Middle East warning of a coming economic attack. When he saw my paper, he immediately knew that my hypothesis matched his experience. He also knew that there were no credible efforts in place to address a threat he knew to be all too real. He saw my work as an opportunity to provide a wake-up call and education for the defense and intelligence establishment.
The findings were simple. There was credible evidence to believe that a global economic war was under way that followed the ideas outlined by the Chinese colonels in 1999. Such a war had the potential to take the United States from the world’s largest economy and sole superpower to a second-tier nation in a decade or less....
....MUCH MORE
Previously on the colonels:"China updates its ‘Art of (Hybrid) War’"
*And related:
- "Western Greed Fuels China's Domination"
- "The deal that the American elite chose to make with China...."
- "Biden Is Delivering the Middle East to China"
- The Unbelievable Failure Of The CIA And The Intelligence Community Regarding China
