Military Veterans and Patriots

Tag: China

  • World News Roundup

    World News Roundup

    It’s week 142 (two years, eight months and three weeks) of Putin’s 3 days to Kiev invasion of Ukraine. For all of the 700,000 casualties*, 3558 tanks, 1744 Infantry Fighting Vehicles, 4986 Armored Fighting Vehicles, ~1000 APCs/Engineering Vehicles/Command Post Vehicles, 1282 Artillery pieces, 477 MLRS, and sundry Hundreds of other vehicles and equipment, the Russians only control about 5% of Ukraine. Hell, they don’t even control all of the Oblasts they ‘annexed’ last year, in fact they control less of Kherson Oblast than they did when the sham referendum was held.

    It’s gotten so bad for Putin the Russian army is using North Korean troops as cannon fodder in Kursk Oblast to try to stem a Ukrainian incursion into that part of Russia. Around two brigades of North Korean troops were sent to far eastern Russia for training and equipping about 6 weeks ago. The first Nork casualties were reported last week, and several have reportedly defected to Ukraine.

    I feel I should mention that if, and as of right now it’s a big IF, any of these NK troops get back to NK, they are headed directly to a camp for the rest of their miserable lives. Why? because they’ve seen how the rest of the world lives. The information control in North Korea is complete. If the State does not want you to know something, you do not know it. The 10,000 or so Norks in Russia however. . . What’s the saying about genies and bottles?

    The Norks have also sent around 100 self-propelled artillery pieces for the Russians to use. The issue with the Nork arty is that it’s a different caliber, 170mm, than anything the Russian tubes use. It also takes forever and ten minutes to emplace, aim, fire, and unemplace. In other words, it is highly susceptible to counter-battery fire and drone strikes. In other, simpler words, nearly useless in the current Ukraine battlefield.

    Speaking of Kursk Oblast, the UAF have taken several thousand square kilometers of territory, including the Gazprom natural gas pumping facilities at Sudzha. The Russians and their NK allies have tried very hard to take that territory back in the past few days/week. While they have managed to regain some land, the majority of the attacks have been defeated. A total of 500 vehicles and several thousand men were lost on 3 consecutive days in meat wave attacks.

    Frankly, I’m still of my old Cold War mindset that the only good Russian is a dead Russian, and wish the Ukrainians all the luck in the world. I am also of the mindset that as long as there are no US boots on the ground there, we should be helping them as much as possible. This is an existential threat to a country we are treaty-bound to aid in the case of an invasion. I realize that some of you hold differing ideas about the war in Ukraine, and that’s your prerogative. We can disagree and still be friends.

    *The 700,000 casualty number is on the low side of the estimated range. I have seen numbers as high as 1.2 mm and as low as 650,000. It includes what the Russians call gruz 200 (cargo 200 or deceased soldiers), severely wounded and sick troops who are unable to return to the front. Since WWII, the accepted ratio of KIA to WIA is about 1-4. The appalling lack of battlefield triage and care on the Russian side puts that number closer to 2-3. The US had a ratio of about 1-10.7 during the GWOT for reference. This casualty rate has, of late, exceeded the replacement rate, that is there are more Russian casualties occuring in Ukraine than births across Russia. That is a demographic disaster in the making.

    Israel is still absolutely curbstomping both Hamas and Hezbollah. Every time either appoints new leadership, Israel plays a game of Whack- Fuck with them. Of late, the IDF has been taking out Hezb figure who were involved in the Beirut Barracks bombing. Good on them. . .

    Since my last piece about that particular shit sandwich, we’ve found out that one of the targets Israel hit in Iran was a clandestine nuclear weapons facility. It seems the facility in question was some sort of assembly area and it is now all but completely destroyed.

    We also found out that the Israelis managed to take out all of Iran’s relatively modern air defense systems. I say relatively, because the bulk of the Iranian ADA was Russian built S-300 system. Prior to the Israeli/Hamas conflict, Iran has four of those systems, now, well, they have exactly zero.

    The CCP has been flexing a bit in the Pacific. In the weeks leading up to the US elections, they repeatedly violated the Taiwanese ADIZ and circled the island with their navy and coast guard. Meanwhile, the US just approved $567m in new military aid for the Taiwanese.

    They also attacked a Philippine naval vessel trying to resupply the Philippine ship/base at Second Thomas shoal. Second Thomas is part of the Spratly chain and inside of the Philippines exclusive economic zone. The Chinese claim it as theirs based on the name of the body of water, the South China Sea, and not much more. I’m sure most of you have seen the 9 dash map.

    The entire claim is ridiculous. Under international law, coastal countries have sovereign control out to 12 miles and an exclusive economic zone of up to 200 miles. Under Maritime law, and World Court rulings, none of China’s territorial claims are valid. Sooner or later it’s going to wind up in a shooting match. I just hope we’re ready.

    On the lighter side, the famous deer in Nara park in Japan are in the news. The deer, much accustomed to people, are starting to get aggressive with tourists. The park, a 502-hectare sanctuary designated as a national treasure, is home to around 1,400 free-roaming deer, and some of the city’s most famous landmarks, including Todaiji Temple. Last year there were 5 documented injuries caused by the deer, this year there have already been 35.

    “We do not think the deer are becoming more aggressive towards people, but there has been an increase in incidents,” said Yumiko O’Donnell, of the Nara Prefectural Government’s Tourism Bureau. “More tourists are coming back to Nara Park after the pandemic. So it is possible that after a relatively quiet time, the deer have been surprised to see many more people”. Nature, red in tooth and claw. Even in the Land of the Rising Sun.

    This next, and last, item is a bit um, gross. While trying to get to the bottom of a completely unrelated topic your editor ran into an odd set of facts. One I really wish I hadn’t, but one that explains a lot. Consanguinity, that is inbreeding or cousin marriage is far more common across the Ummah, or Muslim world than it is in any other region. By a lot.

    Pakistan leads the way with 61% of marriages being between first cousins. Qatar, Kuwait, UAE, the Sudans and Afghanistan are all at 50%. Mauritania, Iraq, Iran and Yemen are all in the 40% range, with most of the remainder in the 25-39% range. The numbers fall in the far eastern Muslim states like Indonesia where they have a consanguinity rate of less than 15% and Malaysia with less than 5%.

    For reference, America’s hat, Canada, has a 1.5% consanguinity rate, while the US has a less than 0.1% rate.

    But what does it mean? Consanguinity is linked to a whole host of issues. Children of consanguineous marriages are twice as likely to have genetic disorders than children of non-related couples. These disorders include thalassaemias (a blood disorder), cystic fibrosis, Down’s syndrome, and infantile cerebral palsy. Consanguineous births are also at a higher rate of congenital malformations, such as congenital heart diseases, renal diseases, and rare blood disorders.

    Plus the eeeewwwww factor.

  • Under Weak Democrat Leadership, U.S. Unprepared For Looming WarWith China

    Under Weak Democrat Leadership, U.S. Unprepared For Looming WarWith China

    Under Weak Democrat Leadership, U.S. Unprepared For Looming War With China

    BY: HELEN RALEIGH for The Federalist 

    The Biden-Harris administration has hamstrung the U.S. military even as China’s army, navy, and air force are on the rise.

    The Commission on the National Defense Strategy recently released a report warning that the United States faces the most severe and pressing defense challenges since 1945. The report not only emphasizes the potential for a near-term major war but also underscores the urgent need for action, making the gravity of the situation clear.

    The commission, having meticulously reviewed both public and classified information, has identified China and Russia as major adversaries seeking to undermine the United States’ global influence. However, the commission’s greatest concern lies with China. Its report reveals that “in many ways, China is outpacing the United States and has largely negated the U.S. military advantage in the Western Pacific through two decades of focused military investment,” which is a cause for grave concern.

    The commission estimates that China spends about $711 billion annually on defense, although some experts estimate it to be around $474 billion. The wide range of estimates for China’s defense spending is due to the Communist regime’s notorious practice of hiding the actual scope of its defense spending from its published government annual budget. Some speculate that Beijing might have underreported its past defense spending by as much as 40 percent.

    One thing is sure: China’s yearly defense spending is climbing steadily upward, which poses a serious threat to the United States and its allies, as it allows China to further develop its military capabilities and potentially challenge the current global order.

    The commission noted that China already has “the largest aviation force in its region” and the largest army and navy globally (with 370 ships and submarines). In its recent report, the Center for Strategic & International Studies (CSIS), a think tank based in Washington, D.C., points out that the Chinese military is on a war footing, as the regime “is heavily investing in munitions and acquiring high-end weapons systems and equipment five to six times faster than the United States … China is now the world’s largest shipbuilder and has a shipbuilding capacity roughly 230 times larger than the United States.”

    Besides preparing for the war itself, China has been deepening its economic and military ties with other U.S. adversaries, including Russia, Iran, and North Korea, helping enhance their military and economic power to cause a menace to the U.S. influence worldwide. For example, China and Russia established a “no-limits” partnership in February 2022, right before Russia invaded Ukraine. Since then, through purchasing Russian oil and gas and agriculture products, China has been propping up Russia’s economy and minimizing the effect of economic sanctions the West has imposed on Russia.

    On the military front, Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines testified at a congressional hearing that “China’s provision of dual use components and material to Russia’s defense industry is one of several factors that tilted the momentum on the battlefield in Ukraine in Moscow’s favor, while also accelerating a reconstitution of Russia’s military strength after their extraordinarily costly invasion.”

    The commission is deeply troubled by the United States’ unpreparedness as the global security landscape grows increasingly perilous. The U.S. military, lacking the necessary capabilities and capacity, may be unable to confidently deter hostile nations or prevail in combat. This urgent and pressing situation, exacerbated by the Department of Defense’s convoluted “research and development (R&D) and procurement systems, reliance on decades-old military hardware, and a culture of risk avoidance,” demands immediate attention and action.

    However, the major constraint of the U.S. military’s capacity and capability has been the Biden-Harris administration’s defense budget cut (after inflation) four years in a row. Take the administration’s 2025 budget, for example. The U.S. Army is asking for 442,300 troops, a decline from 485,000 in 2022. The U.S. Navy will have 287 ships in 2025, down from 296 today. Navy experts estimated that to defeat the Chinese navy in a battle at sea, the U.S. Navy “needs about 350 ships and another 150 unmanned or lightly manned vessels, for a total of 500.” The United States military has been on a trajectory of managed decline under the Biden-Harris administration. It is crucial that we advocate for increased defense budget allocation to address these issues.

    The Biden-Harris administration’s decision to accumulate significant national debt on domestic initiatives like the Green New Deal while reducing U.S. defense spending is also a matter of urgent concern. The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (CRFB) has reported that the interest payment on our national debt has already exceeded government spending on national defense, a situation that demands immediate attention, especially as the potential for near-term major war has increased.

    Another alarming sign of the United States’ unpreparedness for war is the negative effect its military support of Ukraine has had on U.S. military stockpiles. The support has led to a depletion of America’s inventory of certain weapons and ammunitions, underscoring that “the U.S. defense industrial base (DIB) is unable to meet the equipment, technology, and munitions needs of the United States and its allies and partners.” The DIB’s limited capacity to “produce, maintain, and replenish weapons and munitions” will severely hamper the U.S. military’s fighting capability.

    Furthermore, the commission warns that a military conflict with a near-peer such as China will result in staggering military and economic costs. Even without a full-out war, “the global economic damage from a Chinese blockade of Taiwan has been estimated to cost $5 trillion, or 5 percent of global gross domestic product (GDP),” which will certainly affect American businesses and consumers.

    The commission is concerned that “the U.S. public are largely unaware of the dangers the United States faces or the costs (financial and otherwise) required to adequately prepare. They do not appreciate the strength of China and its partnerships or the ramifications to daily life if a conflict were to erupt. They are not anticipating disruptions to their power, water, or access to all the goods on which they rely. They have not internalized the costs of the United States losing its position as a world superpower.” This concern is a serious one because the United States will not win an all-out war against adversaries such as China without the support and resolve of the American public.

    The commission closes its gloomy report with a list of recommendations, two of which are notable. First, “Congress should pass a supplemental appropriation immediately to begin a multiyear investment in the national security innovation and industrial base.” Among other things, this supplemental appropriation would help “expand industrial capacity,” “harden facilities in Asia,” and “secure access to critical minerals.” Second, “for fiscal year 2025, real growth in defense and nondefense national security spending is needed and, at a bare minimum, should fall within the range recommended by the 2018 NDS Commission.”

    Ultimately, the American public must be made aware of the potential grave threats we face and factor this into their decisions this November. Do Americans want to elect someone who will continue to impose policies that accelerate America’s economic and military decline and relinquish America’s global leadership role or someone who will stop America’s self-imposed decline, introduce policies that will strengthen this nation economically and militarily, and make America great again?

    Make no mistake: An economically and militarily powerful America is the best deterrent of World War III.

    The Democrats are to entrenched in their Russia, Russia, Russia mantra to worry about little ole China. My contention is they worry about Russia because Putin has a frowns face. Xi has a nice smile; therefore, we not worry about China.

  • China and Artificial Intelligence: The Cold War…

    China and Artificial Intelligence: The Cold War…

    China and Artificial Intelligence:

    The Cold War We’re Not Fighting

    Arthur HermanJuly/August 2024 for Commentary Magazine

    The public and the media are right to worry about a future dominated by artificial intelligence. But the threat is not coming from Silicon Valley, Big Tech, or the Deep State. It’s coming from Beijing, and much more than the runaway development both of artificial intelligence and machine learning (ML) is at stake. The fate of societies and economies founded on Western liberal principles hangs in the balance—a future that Beijing and the Chinese Communist Party want to replace with their own totalitarian template. And that even includes a new definition of what it is to be human.

    While Americans worry about whether AI and ChatGPT will enable students to cheat on their term papers or generate deep-fake videos of President Biden or Donald Trump, China has been steadily moving ahead with its own plan for this advanced digital technology. While the AI industry in this country remains focused on commercial advantage and market share and is diffused and dispersed throughout more than 67,000 companies large and small, China’s efforts in AI are centralized and regimented and entirely focused on a larger agenda.

    Americans have had some exposure to China’s ruthless use of new technologies from human-rights advocates who detail how they are being used to oppress China’s Muslim Uighur minority. One of the reasons for alarm at the effectiveness of the Chinese-owned TikTok is that its algorithm owes its speed and effectiveness to AI, while TikTok’s data-gathering can provide valuable grist for the Chinese government’s AI mills.

    China’s recent announcement about mass-producing humanoid robots by 2025 also raised alarms, since these are devices that will be largely driven by AI.

    Thus, even as anti-AI activists in the U.S.—among them some of the technology’s original innovators—were calling for a moratorium on research a year ago, China was paving the way toward an AI-dominated future none of us wants. For the past seven years, China has been moving ahead with its plans to become the world’s AI superpower. This includes building the next high-tech industrial revolution for victory on the battlefield and creating a total surveillance multiverse.

    China is ramping up AI investment, research, and entrepreneurship on a historic scale. Its generative AI spending is set to reach 33 percent of the world’s AI investment by 2027, up from 4.6 percent in 2022. Those investments will probably reach $13 billion by then, according to a new report from research firm IDC.

    Money for AI start-ups is pouring in from Chinese venture capitalists, tech juggernauts, and the Chinese government. Chinese students have become adept at AI, enrolling in advanced-degree programs and streaming lectures from international researchers on their smartphones. Start-up founders are furiously pivoting, reengineering, or simply rebranding their companies to catch the AI wave.

    We’ve never faced an opponent like this, with the will and the means to transform the world into what it wants. The Soviets tried it during certain phases of the Cold War, but they never had the scientific, technological, or economic means to carry it out.

    China does. Indeed, what is happening to the Uighurs is just the first bitter sip from the cup that Beijing and President Xi have in store for the rest of us.

    Yet without understanding the larger context, and the origins of China’s obsession with AI as a means of social and political control and of remaking the world in China’s image, the true extent of the threat remains opaque—and our ability to respond constrained.

    On May 25, 2017, the world changed. That was the day a boardgame-playing AI Google product called AlphaGo AI defeated Chinese champion Ke Jie in the national game of go. AlphaGo had scored its first high-profile victory in March 2016 during a five-game series against the legendary Korean player Lee Sedol, winning four to one. While barely noticed by most Americans, the five games drew more than 280 million Chinese viewers. Overnight, China was seized by AI fever. The buzz didn’t quite rival America’s reaction to Sputnik, but it lit a fire under the Chinese technology community that has been burning ever since.

    The government in Beijing took no chances when AlphaGo came to play Ke Jei. Media coverage was banned—China did not want to risk the national humiliation of having its champion lose to Google’s DeepMind division in real time. So most Chinese viewers were not allowed to watch the match live. Beijing even went as far as issuing a censorship notice to broadcasters and online publishers, warning them against livestreaming the match, according to China Digital Times. The notice said, “Regarding the go match between Ke Jie and AlphaGo, no website, without exception, may carry a livestream.”

    But on May 25, AlphaGo didn’t just beat Ke Jie—it systematically humiliated him. During three matches lasting more than three hours each, Ke tried every approach he could think of: conservative, aggressive, defensive, even wildly unpredictable. Nothing worked. AlphaGo seemed to anticipate his every move, as it slowly squeezed him out of the picture.

    For Chinese observers, the moment was galvanizing, and the government mobilized the nation to dominate this new technology. Instead of being intimidated, China’s Communist Party leadership saw the future not as something to fear but something to seize. And not even two months after Ke Jie resigned his last game to AlphaGo, the Chinese central government released its New Generation Artificial Intelligence Development Plan.

    It called for greater funding, policy support, and national coordination for AI development. It also set clear benchmarks for progress by 2020 and 2025 and projected that by 2030 China would become the center of global innovation in artificial intelligence—leading in theory, technology, and application.

    Already in 2017, investors had responded to that call, pouring record sums into artificial-intelligence start-ups and making up 48 percent of all AI venture funding globally, surpassing the United States for the first time.

    President Xi has set aside $150 billion in government funding to make China the first AI-driven nation, which includes building a massive police-surveillance apparatus powered by Big Data and artificial intelligence. At the same time, the Chinese military has been seeing its future in an AI battlefield.

    Jin Zhuanglong, head of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, said in a January 2024 interview that the government has four major targets this year: 1) Accelerate the transformation and upgrading of traditional industries; 2) consolidate and improve the leading position of advantageous industries; 3) actively foster emerging industries and industries of the future, and 4) promote new industrialization enabled by artificial intelligence.

    These all have military applications. The Chinese are working toward fully automated shipyards, both for shipbuilding and unloading cargo. And AI is already being helpful in warship design. Military marine architects used an artificial-intelligence app to design the electrical layout of a warship, and they did it with unprecedented speed and accuracy. It took the AI designer roughly a day to complete work that would normally take a human team a year, according to the South China Morning Post.

    Hudson Institute scholar Koichiro Takagi sees the Chinese military’s interest in AI research and applications centering on four main areas (bearing in mind that under Chinese law, anything that private companies develop in AI automatically belongs to the People’s Liberation Army).

    One area is the autonomy of unmanned weapons, including the development of drone swarms, about which more later. 

    The second is processing large amounts of information through machine learning. For example, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) is building a network of unmanned weapons and undersea sensors in the waters surrounding China to gather data it can analyze with AI/ML.

    The third is using AI to speed up military decision-making, including what’s called “strategic reasoning.” AI can sift through multiple options for actions on multiple fronts and domains to arrive at an optimal solution—something that would take a human-led council of war hours, even days, to achieve.

    Fourth is the military’s interest in cognitive warfare, or actively influencing the brain and neurological systems of their human opponents, to shape the enemy’s will to fight or subdue an opponent without a fight. (The most science-fictional of the four, it is the one about which we have reason to be skeptical, at least for the present.) 

    But probably the most striking and notorious developments within the Chinese AI monolith today are AI’s applications for the total surveillance state.

    China is building a burgeoning panopticon with more than 500 million surveillance cameras deployed nationwide as of 2021—which accounts for more than half of the world’s surveillance cameras.

    As analyst Paul Scharre has noted in the Los Angeles Times, Beijing is pouring billions of dollars into projects such as the Skynet and Sharp Eyes surveillance networks and its “social credit system”—scoring ordinary people and rewarding them for their fidelity to the rules. This gives the central government a much larger role in China’s AI industry than the role Washington plays in the industry here.

    China now requires that train passengers show national IDs to buy tickets, which allows the government to block human-rights activists or anti-corruption journalists from traveling. In Xinjiang Province, home of China’s oppressed Uighurs, the government uses AI-sifted Big Data and facial recognition to scrutinize anyone entering a mosque or even a shopping mall, thanks to the thousands of checkpoints requiring a national ID check-in.

    China’s use of AI in human-rights abuses has been glaring in the case of ethnic Uighurs in Xinjiang, who are subjected to tools such as face, voice, and even gait recognition. Under the Strike Hard Campaign, the Chinese Communist Party has built thousands of police checkpoints across Xinjiang and deployed 160,000 cameras in the capital, Urumqi. Facial-recognition scanners are set up at hotels, banks, shopping malls, and gas stations. Movement throughout the province is tightly controlled through ID checkpoints that include face, iris, and body scanners. Police match the obtained data against a massive biometric database consisting of fingerprints, blood samples, voice prints, iris scans, facial images, and DNA.

    Even more significant than the use of this technology to control and repress the Uighur minority is the data collected, which AI companies can use to further train and refine their algorithms.

    Some groups—PBS, Electronic Frontier Foundation, and the Center for Strategic and International Studies—have suggested that China is using Xinjiang as a testing ground for its advanced facial-recognition software and alert systems. This software, which can be covertly positioned in traffic lights and elsewhere, collects biometric data in real time as people walk through the streets and go about their day. It tracks people and deposits information into a comprehensive database to identify a person by name, address, and other state records. This surveillance has been used to restrict the free movement of people, particularly Muslims, by quartering them to their homes or specific parts of an area, like a neighborhood.

    As the Center for International Human Rights reported in October 2022: “The use of AI has not been limited to external forms of surveillance like security cameras. The Uighurs and other groups have also been forced to download apps to their phone that help law enforcement to monitor online behaviors. For example, the apps search through text messages and internet searches for mentions of Quran verses or donations to a mosque, and even staying off social media can raise suspicions. Such acts can result in an indefinite holding at a detention center.”

    Human Rights Watch (HRW) was able to discover and reverse engineer one of the apps that police in Xinjiang use for surveillance. Called IJOP or Integrated Joint Operations Platform, it includes among its functions geo-location and mapping, information searches using personal data, facial-recognition features, and Wi-Fi detecting. HRW’s findings indicate that the wide collection of data, ranging from DNA samples to the color of a vehicle, has been used to set up alerts for foreign nationals and people found to exhibit such behaviors as spending time abroad, having certain types of content on their phone, or simply using large amounts of electricity.

    Once the app’s algorithm identifies such behavior, it then triggers an alert to law enforcement that prompts an investigation. This feeds directly into an AI-driven system called the Supreme Court Information Center that oversees application of Chinese law in specific cases across the country.

    About six years ago, the project was little more than a database. No longer. Now it has become a rule of the Supreme Court that judges follow the advice of the AI system and, if they do not follow it, provide a written justification that is included in the case documents.

    According to the Supreme Court, the system learns from 100,000 cases every day and monitors them for possible wrong decisions or corruption. In addition to court records, the system is said to have access to the databases of police, prosecutors, and government agencies.

    For example, the AI is expected to help enforce sentences “by finding and seizing the property of a convict almost instantly and putting it up for online auction.” Combined with China’s social-credit system, it can deny debtors access to transportation, hotels, or other social services, and enforce the ban.

    “The smart court SoS (system of systems) now connects to the desk of every working judge across the country,” said Xu Jianfeng, director of the Supreme Court Information Center. For the central government, this ensures that all law cases in China conform to its ideological direction. For those unfortunate enough to be caught in its grip, it means no judge or law-enforcement official dares exercise his or her independent judgment in adjudicating a case.

    As noted above, the Chinese military sees much bigger game in its uses of AI. The Ministry of National Defense has established two major institutions, the Artificial Intelligence Research Centre and the Unmanned Systems Research Centre, that are focused on AI and unmanned-systems research and development.

    The PLA’s most important military think tank, the Academy of Military Science, has also updated its doctrine to cope with AI technological development. Its job is driving defense innovation and ensuring that the war-fighting theory and doctrine of the PLA take full advantage of disruptive technologies such as AI as well as autonomous systems.

    As already noted, papers that have been published so far by PLA senior officials and strategists show that the PLA is seeking to use artificial intelligence in four main areas. One is the autonomy of unmanned weapons, including the development of swarms of numerous drones. China aims to conduct highly autonomous integrated operations with a variety of unmanned systems and unmanned weapons. In addition, the PLA is rapidly expanding its use of unmanned weapons, first entering the airspace south of Taiwan’s Air Defense Identification Zone in September 2022, with the number of intrusions increasing to a total of 70 by December of that year.

    Among all the AI technologies, China places the top priority on unmanned combat systems and equipment, along with other advanced military innovations. As the war in Ukraine has demonstrated, unmanned technology has been rapidly changing the face of warfare: Some have even dubbed it the most recent revolution in military affairs, akin to the advent of gunpowder. Unmanned equipment is also one of the first options that military leaders are looking to for future combat equipment.

    Since President Xi took office, he has emphasized the importance of unmanned systems for China’s future dominance. In 2020, when he met students at the Chinese People’s Liberation Army Air Force Aviation University, Xi declared, “Drones are profoundly changing war scenarios. It is necessary to strengthen drone-combat research, education and training, and accelerate the training of drone pilots and commanders.”

    The revolution brought by unmanned systems expands exponentially with AI and machine-learning applications, especially when military operations and strategy depend more and more on the gathering and interpretation of information, at which AI and unmanned systems excel.

    Moreover, under civilian-military fusion rules, communication and coordination regarding AI innovation resources are the norm among scientific-research institutes, universities, enterprises, and military-industry units. New joint laboratories are also being stood up to enhance collaboration between civilian institutes and the military establishment.

    For example, North China University of Technology and the equipment departments of the PLA’s army, navy, and rocket force founded the Military-Civil Fusion Intelligent Equipment Research Institute. Tsinghua University has its Military-Civil Fusion National Defense Peak Technologies Laboratory. Meanwhile, the Chinese military is helping itself to a smorgasbord of the latest AI-enabled products from private companies. To take just one example, the PLA’s surveillance and image-processing systems are reinforced by intelligent security monitors produced by Hikvision.

    The second area of PLA interest in AI is in pro-cessing large amounts of information through machine learning. As of this date, the PLA is building a network of unmanned weapons and undersea sensors in the waters surrounding China, using AI to process the information obtained from this network. As Hudson’s Takagi notes, “The PLA is considering a new form of electronic warfare that uses artificial intelligence to analyze received radio waves and to optimize jamming.”

    The third area is accelerating the decision-mak-ing process on and off the battlefield by employing AI. There is considerable debate, even in China, regarding the perils of handing over key aspects of decision-making to “smart” machines. For example, those in Chinese military circles worry about using artificial intelligence for decision-making in nuclear strategy, which might precipitate a nuclear confrontation faster than human reflection and judgement can process, or stop.

    For now, however, experts agree that the PLA will likely stick to AI for processing masses of information and data, and guiding drones and other autonomous weapons, not complex decision-making. As China’s confidence in the capabilities of AI grows, however, it is likely that more and more decision-making will be passed along to AI support systems, including within its Rocket Force, which oversees China’s nuclear arsenal.

    “In 2005, the U.S. State Department publicly stated the U.S. assessment that China also operates an offensive biological weapons program, specifically identifying two Chinese entities as likely involved, one of which is the Fifth Institute,” a U.S. intelligence report released by the House Intelligence Committee stated, as quoted by the Indo-Pacific Centre for Strategic Communications. “In a 2006 declaration of compliance with the Biological and Toxic Weapons Convention, China acknowledged that the Fifth Institute specifically researches SARS coronaviruses.”

    The report also mentioned the book The Unnatural Origin of SARS and New Species of Artificial Humanized Viruses as Genetic Weapons, which was published by Chinese military experts in 2015, and which describes how to create weaponized viruses for use by the military.

    The revelations about the PLA’s keen interest in weaponizing viruses sheds an ugly and sinister light on the current debate about the origins of the Covid virus. And not only that. The government’s and military’s fascination with biotech and their interest in AI/ML are converging.

    For example, also in 2015, then-president of the Academy of Military Medical Sciences He Fuchu insisted that biotechnology will become the new “strategic commanding heights” of national defense. Since then, Fuchu has become vice president of the Academy of Military Sciences, which leads China’s military science enterprise.

    Zhang Shibo, a retired general and former president of the National Defense University, has named biology as one of seven “new domains of warfare.” In the wake of Covid and the possibility that the virus in the Wuhan lab was being developed for biowarfare purposes, these matters need to be taken very seriously.

    In all these cases, AI applications can be useful for not only identifying but manipulating and attacking an entire category of persons or groups through targeted viruses and diseases. This is because, at the most basic biological level, DNA itself is nothing more than data—data that can be exploited using AI and machine learning.

    In that sense, the combination of China’s earlier interest in biotech and its obsession with advancing artificial intelligence may allow China’s military and intelligence services to develop comprehensive digital profiles of specific individuals, nations, and races—a form of high-tech racial profiling that a Himmler or a Mengele might have only dreamed about. By targeting specific weaknesses within a population’s genomic makeup, it might be possible to develop weapons that could harm a specific subpopulation or race.

    Even more frightening, scientists at the Suzhou Institute of Biomedical Engineering and Technology are using mouse embryos to develop ways to provide key growth information to an AI caretaker, which can then rank the embryos in terms of overall health and genetic potential—enabling researchers to manipulate the growth of embryos to achieve optimal results. In short, the Chinese vision of AI includes a new paradigm for genetic engineering, conducting eugenics on a massive high-tech scale.

    The key question is: What can the United States do to confront this nightmarish threat?

    Advocates for international standards for the technical and ethical development of AI had hoped that international, multilateral, scientific, and standard-setting bodies could somehow restrain China’s voracious AI appetite. In their 2022 book The Age of AI, the late Henry Kissinger and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt argued for similar international constraints on the growth of AI for not only China but also the United States—comparing the race for AI supremacy to the race for nuclear weapons in the Cold War.

    China’s surge in AI research and deployment since then has made those hopes seem even more illusory than they were in 2022. Indeed, China has been increasingly active in those same international standard-setting bodies. In 2019, leaked documents from the UN telecommunication union’s standards process—which directly affects 193 member states—revealed how China was setting the norms for rules governing facial-recognition applications that would only facilitate Chinese-style norms of surveillance, e.g., ones that could be used for malicious profiling by the PLA or other Chinese agencies.

    Meanwhile, Stanford University’s AI Index, which assesses AI advancements worldwide across various metrics in research, development, and the economy, ranks China among the top three countries for global AI activity. On AI research, for example, China produced about one-third of AI journal papers and AI citations worldwide in 2021. In economic investment, China accounted for nearly one-fifth of global private-investment funding in 2021, attracting $17 billion for AI start-ups. Tencent, Huawei, and Alibaba are already among the top 10 global companies in AI, as a recent Nikkei study showed.

    Some in the U.S., including the authors of the most recent McKinsey report on AI investment, have concluded that “there is tremendous opportunity for AI growth in new sectors in China, including some where innovation and R&D spending have traditionally lagged global counterparts: automotive, transportation, and logistics; manufacturing; enterprise software; and healthcare and life sciences” (my emphasis). Overall, McKinsey has seen “clusters of use cases” in which AI can create upwards of $600 billion annually in economic value for China—that’s roughly equal to the city of Shanghai’s entire contribution to China’s GDP.

    While some, including U.S. allies, may see these clusters as investment opportunities, more alert observers should recognize that all of China’s AI research and development is aimed at one goal: advancing China’s global hegemony. This includes enabling other, similar regimes to survey and control their own citizens. As David Yang, a professor of economics at Harvard, notes, “Autocratic governments would like to be able to predict the whereabouts, thoughts, and behaviors of citizens. And AI is fundamentally a technology for prediction.”

    Yang’s research shows China exporting huge amounts of AI technology, amounting to much more than its contributions to other frontier-technology sectors such as quantum or even unmanned systems. “To the extent that [Chinese] technology is exported,” Yang concluded, “it could generate a spreading of similar autocratic regimes to the rest of the world.”

    And so an intentional pause on American AI development would “absolutely” give China an advantage, as Sultan Meghji, a professor at Duke University’s Pratt Engineering School, said in a recent interview with Newsweek. China is “investing massive amounts of money in AI, we are already to a degree struggling to keep up,” Meghji said. “This is one of the biggest competitions in technology right now and we should be accelerating our investments in AI.”

    Still, the U.S. is currently the global leader in AI technology, especially in innovation and cross-cutting applications. Yet while commercial AI expands exponentially, the U.S. government has to deal with the technology through the prism of government funding and directed research. Our government operates in an environment that is the opposite of civilian-military fusion. Tech companies proficient in AI/ML have to be coaxed, not coerced, into supporting government or Pentagon uses of AI. In fact, private companies can still exercise veto power over participating in specific government programs, as happened when Google employees refused to participate in a defense project to develop facial-recognition software to identify terrorists. Google had to back out of the project.

    This is all the more reason why the United States needs to develop an overall AI strategy that aims not just at countering China’s moves in AI but advancing American AI supremacy.

    Which nation wins this struggle will ultimately depend on which one has the clearest idea of what it’s doing, and where it’s going. The Chinese clearly do, and theirs is a vision that is more frightening, and potentially more catastrophic for human freedom, than anything dreamed up by science fiction.

    Of course, there are unknown risks with AI, as with any disruptive technology. It’s also clear that, unlike the Chinese, Americans still don’t know where we are going with AI, or specifically how to get there—at least not yet. But the time to figure out the answers, and to set a course for achieving them, is growing short.

    Being snarky, they are not addressing it because they are to busy howling RUSSIA, RUSSIA, RUSSIA!

  • The PRC’s Bid For…

    The PRC’s Bid For…

    The PRC’s Bid for Strategic Superiority

    China’s rapid military expansion indicates that the PRC is intent on global military domination and is targeting the U.S. because it is the last barrier to its dominance.

    By: James E. Fanell and Bradley A. ThayerMarch 10, 2024


    The unrelenting pace of the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) nuclear and conventional modernization continues without abatement. The PRC continues its bid for global strategic military superiority in order to coerce the U.S. and its allies and threaten U.S. national security interests as no other power has in history.

    This fact was again brought to light this past week at the PRC’s “Two Sessions,” the early March annual meeting of the National People’s Congress and the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, where a 7.2 percent increase to the annual budget of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) was announced. This is the second year in a row where the PLA’s budget grew by 7.2 percent and continues the three-decade trend by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to prioritize spending on the PLA, which is always above the PRC’s annual gross domestic product (GDP) growth.

    Any announced increase in spending on the PLA is almost certainly higher since the PRC’s statement does not consider key areas of defense-related spending such as research and development, civil-military fusion programs, or the reality of purchasing power parity that comes from lower wage costs for the PRC. As such, the U.S. intelligence community (IC) assesses that the PRC spends about as much as the U.S. does on defense.

    While many Western defense analysts compare the total amount of money spent by the PRC on the PLA versus the U.S., what matters most is not the number of dollars that are spent but what a nation gets for that money. In that regard, the PRC is getting a lot more bang for the buck.

    For example, the PRC’s nuclear expansion has evinced a flood of new evidence that is now coming to the fore. The seeds of this deadly fruit were planted many years ago. ICBMs do not spring, like Athena, from the head of Zeus. They take many years of design, development, and testing before they are deployed. The fact that this nuclear modernization was identified by the U.S. but was dismissed, discounted, or ignored is a profound indictment of the IC, as we argue in our new book, Embracing Communist China: America’s Greatest Strategic Failure. We argue that the politicization of the IC is profound, as they have consistently downplayed the existential danger posed by the PRC.

    In a recent development, the PRC has developed a new generation of mobile Inter-Continental Ballistic Missiles (ICBM), as U.S. Air Force General Anthony Cotton, the Commander of U.S. Strategic Command, revealed in Congressional testimony and as reported by Washington Times journalist Bill Gertz. Gen. Cotton’s testimony now confirms that the PRC has more ICBM launchers than the U.S. He echoed his predecessor, U.S. Navy Admiral Charles Richard, in describing the PRC’s nuclear advances and buildup as “breathtaking.”

    In contrast, “breathtaking” is not a word that would be used to describe the state of the U.S. nuclear arsenal or infrastructure, unless employed in a rather different context, such as “breathtakingly moribund.” The 400 silo-based Minuteman III ICBMs are aging and nearing the end of their life cycle. They will be retired as the Sentinel ICBM is deployed, but the Sentinel is plagued by delays and cost overruns. It will also be silo-based, not mobile, and will not be cold-launched, so the silo might be reloaded.

    Moreover, in addition to the new mobile ICBM, the PRC has many mobile ballistic missile systems. The PRC possesses two-road mobile ICBMs as well as mobile intermediate-, medium-, and short-range ballistic missiles. The PRC has also expanded its ICBM fields, including adding 300+ new silos for the solid-fueled DF-31 and DF-41 and perhaps a silo-based version of the new ICBM. The new ICBM may also be rail-based at some point in the future.

    The military expansion is important for Americans to grasp because this rapid and “breathtaking” military growth indicates that the PRC is intent on global military domination and is targeting the United States because it is the last barrier to its dominance. This buildup reveals the intent of the PRC and should cause American national security leaders to recognize that it was not the U.S. expansion of its nuclear capabilities that caused the PRC’s rapid expansion. What we are witnessing today is all part of the CCP’s grand strategy of dominance.

    The military superiority that the PRC seeks will permit it to coerce the U.S. and its allies through its escalation dominance, the possession of military superiority at each level of conflict, from the conventional to tactical nuclear weapons to theater and finally at the strategic level. This superiority will allow Beijing to force the U.S. to yield in crisis situations or in the event of conflict. It is also noticed by key allies like Japan and partners like India. The PRC’s potent nuclear capabilities will test the extended deterrent of the U.S. like it has not been tested for forty years. The alliance and force posture of the U.S. in the Indo-Pacific depends upon U.S. nuclear and conventional superiority, which has deterred aggression and maintained stability in this region for decades. Now that both capabilities are being tested by the PRC, there is a considerable risk that this peace and stability will unravel.

    The Cold War with the Soviet Union stayed cold because the U.S. and its allies could match Soviet strength and did not permit the Soviets to develop capabilities for which the U.S. did not counter. In contrast, the present period of international politics is defined by U.S. inaction, lethargy, and strategic insouciance toward the growing conventional and nuclear capabilities of its enemy. At this pace, the present Cold War with the PRC will not stay cold but will most certainly turn into a hot war if the U.S. does not respond to defeat the PRC’s bid for nuclear and conventional superiority.

    James E. Fanell and Bradley A. Thayer are authors of Embracing Communist China: America’s Greatest Strategic Failure.

    But, how is this possible? According to Joe, and his multiple press minons Russia is the greatest threat in the whole wide world! Their reasoning (and oxymoron for sure) is Russia wants to take over Europe. Obviously, a geopolitical power wanting to take over the world ranks somewhere below Europe.

  • The State Of Play

    The State Of Play

    I was having a conversation with AuntiE today about the possibility of a hot war between NATO and Russia earlier today. She shared an article from Zero Hedge about statements from the current NATO naval chief, Nederlander Rob Bauer. Bauer seems to think there will be a shooting war within the next 20 years.

    I tend to disagree.

    The ‘three day Special Military Operation’ has put to rest the myth of Russian strength. We are now going on 100 weeks of that particular adventurism. In that 100 weeks, Russia has had somewhere between 250,000 and 500,000 casualties, lost nearly 75% of its pre-invasion tank force, had a near-successful mutiny and is now forced to buy arms and ammunition from Iran and North Korea.

    Am I saying Putin, and be crystal clear that he’s the one and only one calling the shots, wouldn’t start something with a NATO country? No, there’s always a possibility, however slight, that he’d make that miscalculation. What I am saying is that even if he did, he’d lose. Badly. And relatively quickly. Hell, the Texas of Europe, Poland, could be in Moscow in a month.

    A poorly armed and equipped Ukraine has forced Russian forces back to a relatively narrow strip along the Black and Azov sea coasts. Right now, during the bezdorizhzhia, or mud season, the lines are mostly static. I expect that to change some once everything freezes hard enough for maneuver warfare to begin again in earnest.

    What does have me concerned is the CCP. Chairman Xi has made it as clear as he can that annexing Formosa is his top priority. The recent election there, the anti-CCP party won handily, won’t help. It is widely considered that Xi took the results personally. I feel the need to remind everyone that the US is bound by legislation to aid Taiwan in the event of a CCP attack.

    The PLARF (People’s Liberation Army Rocket Forces) have missiles that can hit any of the US bases in the Pacific ocean. That renders Guam, Kwajalein, Diego Garcia and the bases in Korea and Japan all but useless for logistical purposes.

    The distances in the Pacific are immense. Los Angeles and Hawaii are 2,231 nautical miles apart. Hawaii to Japan is 3,800 nautical miles. The distance between Los Angeles and Tokyo by cargo ship is 5,081 Nautical Miles. For reference, the distance between Halifax and Southampton England, the most common WWII convoy route, is 2,624 nautical miles. This creates a logistical nightmare.

    I think the only thing holding Xi back at the moment is a major corruption scandal in the PLA. I wrote a little about that scandal in the View a couple of weeks back. It certainly isn’t anything POTATUS has done or is doing. Sooner or later, he’ll get his ducks in a row and go for Formosa.

    Iran and its proxies across the Sahel are flexing. While I’m sure that Israel can take care of both Hamas and Hezbollah by itself, I am concerned about a wider regional war. Iran launched attacks in Syria, Iraqi Kurdistan and Pakistan last week. Pakistan retaliated with a limited strike a few days later, but the tensions are still very high between the two.

    The Houthi are continuing their attacks on shipping in the Red Sea and Bab el Mandab strait and now in the Gulf of Aden. One of the latest strikes was against the US owned and flagged MV Ocean Jazz. The 10662 DWT heavy lift vessel was previously chartered by the US Navy’s Military Sealift Command.

    The only bright spot about the current issue with the Houthi is the AEGIS system is getting its first real-world testing. The eggheads are using the data collected from each intercept to improve the system. All those improvements are uploaded across the fleet and to the AEGIS ashore batteries. That little fact may come to be useful if the CCP decides it’s gonna get froggy with the Taiwanese.

    Of the three major hot-spots, and yes there are others, I think Iran and the Middle East are the most likely to expand. Let’s be honest, the Ayatollahs version of Islam is little better than a death cult. They aren’t what I’d call rational actors and cannot be expected to do the things that a traditional geopolitical actor would do.

    That said, the one that keeps me up nights is China. Between the distances involved, the near-peer abilities of China and what Vizzini said, it will quickly become a bloody and expensive war.

  • The View From Here

    The View From Here

    Featured Image: The Thousand Islands region of the St Lawrence river taken from Grenadier Island.

    We’re kicking off today’s View with some news out of Ecuador. From Reuters:

    Ecuador is reeling from a fresh wave of violence that has shaken the South American nation, with President Daniel Noboa launching a military crackdown on gangs after criminal groups took more than 100 prison staff hostage and armed men dramatically interrupted a live television broadcast.. . .

    Police said on Sunday that Adolfo Macias, the leader of the Los Choneros criminal gang, had disappeared from the prison where he was serving a 34-year sentence. Authorities are trying to track him down.

    Meanwhile, there were incidents of violence in at least six prisons beginning on Monday. As of Wednesday, more than 100 guards and other staff were still being held hostage by prisoners. In Riobamba, a provincial capital in central Ecuador, 39 inmates escaped from a prison, though some have been recaptured.

    Seven police officers were also kidnapped around the country, though three have been freed.

    Much of this is being blamed on the Coof and the Ecuadorian response by the ‘experts’. While that may have some effect, it’s really the soft on crime policies and the look-the-other-way attitude towards drug cartels that caused this explosion in violence. And let’s be honest, that part of Central and South America has a unique violence problem and has for a very long time. El Salvador has tried to crack down on criminal gangs this year with some success. That success has not been without detractors, there has been widespread condemnation of potential civil rights abuses. This editor thinks El Salvador hasn’t gone far enough with the punishment for Mara Salvatrucha.

    Hunter Biden made a short appearance at a hearing being held in the House. The committee was marking up the charges against him. Nancy Mace, R-SC, laid into the first son:

    “My first question is who bribed Hunter Biden to be here today?” Mace said.

    “You are the epitome of white privilege coming into the Oversight Committee spitting in our face ignoring a congressional subpoena to be depose.? What are you afraid of? You have no balls.”

    Mace added: “I think Hunter Biden should be arrested right here, right now, and go straight to jail.” [….]

    “Hunter Biden wasn’t afraid to sell access to Joe Biden to the highest bidder when he was an elected office. He wasn’t afraid to trade on the Biden brand, peddle influence and share those ill gotten gains with members of his family, including Joe Biden,” Mace said.

    “He wasn’t afraid to compromise the integrity of the presidency and vice presidency by involving Joe Biden shady business deals with our foreign adversaries. But Hunter Biden, you were too afraid to show up for a deposition and you still can’t today.” Mace added “My last message to you, Hunter Biden, you play stupid games, you win stupid prizes.”

    He fled the hearing shortly after that exchange.

    https://twitter.com/RNCResearch/status/1745106360834924959?s=20

    I have a couple of questions about his appearance at the hearing. First, why didn’t the Chair order the Sergeant at Arms to arrest him on the spot? Before anyone asks, yes, they have that authority. I’ll freely admit it would have been pure political theater, but still.

    Second, who on his team thought this was a good idea? Never mind the legal exposure, as if there would ever be consequences. The press lit into Hunter as he left the hearing, and his advisors had to know it would happen. This is the best of the press questions AFAIC:

    https://twitter.com/TPostMillennial/status/1745107221992632623?s=20

    Anthony Fauci testified to the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic Chaired by Ohio Republican Brad Wenstrup. Here are the highlights of his testimony:

    https://twitter.com/COVIDSelect/status/1745048323852005634?s=20
    https://twitter.com/COVIDSelect/status/1745048326448247246?s=20
    https://twitter.com/COVIDSelect/status/1745048329128427718?s=20
    https://twitter.com/COVIDSelect/status/1745048331414307111?s=20

    I really hope that odious little gnome gets what he deserves. That said, I’m a realist and know, deep down, nothing is going to happen. And I mean nothing at all. This country, and the entire world for that matter, is no better prepared for a major pandemic now than they were 5 years ago. Hell, they’re probably worse off now. You know, scratch ‘probably’. The way the shot was forced on everyone created more issues than it could have ever solved. Worst among those issues is the heightened hesitancy to get new and novel shots.

    A recent intelligence report seems to show the People’s Liberation Army of the CCP has major corruption and readiness issues. The report indicated that instead of rocket fuel, many of the CCP’s ICBMs contained water in their fuel tanks. It also indicated the silo doors on some of the fixed missile installations did not open far enough to launch a missile. There are indications that Xi is undergoing a major purge in the PLA leadership over these and other concerns.

    https://twitter.com/nexta_tv/status/1743709041145065975?s=20
    …to risk staging large-scale military operations in the near future, according to the publication.

    While I have no reason to disbelieve this story, I still remember that the US intel agencies were saying the Soviets were still a major threat right up until the USSR collapsed in 1991. It’s not that I think the PLA is immune from that level of corruption, they aren’t, it’s the fact that Obama’s NSC leaked the identities of most US assets in China and they either got rolled up or got disappeared.

    All that said, my opinion of the PLA/CCP hasn’t changed much over the past few years. They’re good at bullying smaller neighbors but that’s about it. Their record of force projection is abysmal. Hell, the Vietnamese kicked the shit out of them in the late 70s/early 80s. Look up the Sino-Vietnamese war if you don’t believe me. Then there’s the shit that’s going on with India in the Aksai Chin region.

    Got a story to share? A comment on anything here? Let us know in the comments below.

  • BRI – Belt & Road Initiative

    BRI – Belt & Road Initiative

    Since 2013, when it was launched by President Xi Jinping in Kazakhstan and Jakarta, the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) has developed very fast. Initiated by China, it was meant to assist developing countries in need of building infrastructure, which needs much funding and investment. But since its inception, the BRI has undergone changes to become a common endeavor of many countries and international organizations for joint cooperation in infrastructure projects.

    Immediately after its inception, it was recognized that the BRI should be broadened beyond infrastructure development, and include cooperation on trade, finance and people-to-people relations to get off the ground effectively. As the program has become very big and all-encompassing, it has become a global effort.

    At the Second BRI Forum held on April 24 to 26 in Beijing, 126 countries and 29 international organizations signed BRI cooperation agreements. This, indeed, marked an important development

    This article was published in thejakartapost.com with the title “Insight: Seeking global cooperation through Belt and Road Initiative”. Click to read: https://www.thejakartapost.com/academia/2019/05/13/insight-seeking-global-cooperation-through-belt-and-road-initiative.html.

    ***********************************************************************************************************

    Trade in goods between China and countries and regions along the Belt and Road registered a volume of more than 6 trillion U.S. dollars from 2013 to 2018, during which more than 244,000 jobs were created for the locals. China’s direct foreign investment under the framework has exceeded 90 billion dollars.

    According to Bernadette Deka-Zulu, executive director of the Policy Monitoring and Research Center in Zambia, China has already shown commitment and earnest in the BRI process and it was up to individual partner countries to tap into the initiative and come up with programs that will yield their desired benefits.

    In the past six years, China has signed 173 cooperation documents with its BRI partners, which include currency swap agreements with 20 countries along the Belt and Road and RMB clearing arrangements with seven countries.

    The China-Europe freight trains, connecting China with 50 cities in 15 European countries, had completed more than 14,000 trips by the end of March 2019.

    Moreover, the BRI is actively seeking alignment with other national or regional development plans, including African Union’s Agenda 2063, Russia’s Eurasian Economic Union, Italy’s InvestItalia program, Saudi Arabia’s Saudi Vision 2030, Kyrgyzstan’s 2040 National Sustainable Development Strategy, and Mongolia’s Development Road program, among others.

    At home, the BRI also seeks to facilitate the development plans of the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region, the Yangtze Economic Belt and the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area, securing tangible benefits for the Chinese people.

    The BRI, with the principle of extensive consultation, joint contribution, and shared benefits, helps bring mutually beneficial cooperation to a much greater level.
    Source: http://www.xinhuanet.com/english/2019-09/14/c_138391095.htm

    ****************************************************************************

    List of Countries that have signed a MOU (Memorandum of Understanding) in principle with China relevant to the BRI (Belt & Road Initiative)

    The countries of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) are spread across all continents:

    • 44 countries are in Sub-Saharan Africa
    • 35 BRI countries are in Europe & Central Asia
    • 25 BRI countries are in East Asia & Pacific (including China)
    • 21 BRI countries are in Latin America & Caribbean
    • 18 BRI countries in Middle East & North Africa
    • 6 countries are in South East Asia

    The BRI also works with 18 countries of the European Union (EU) and 9 countries of the G20. Cont’d

    Source: https://greenfdc.org/countries-of-the-belt-and-road-initiative-bri/

    Comment: I’ve watched with interest and been wary, since China continued to build airports and infrastructure since 2014 in countries like the Philippines or Sub-Sahara in Africain 2017 . They control much of the pricing of minerals world wide, due to demand. Most of their mining development in other countries is done by Chinese nationals and limited involvement with the regional populace. They also retain ownership of that infrastructure – roads, airports, facilities, and commercial assets.

  • Nine Line’s Tyler Merritt Calls Foul Over CCP Slave Labor Fabric in the Apparel Business

    Nine Line’s Tyler Merritt Calls Foul Over CCP Slave Labor Fabric in the Apparel Business

    (AP Photo/Rajanish Kakade)

    SALENA ZITO | HotAir

    SAVANNAH, Georgia — Tyler Merritt has questions.

    Ten years ago, the 39-year-old West Point graduate launched his apparel company, Nine Line, out of his garage. Named after the military code word for getting wounded soldiers off the battlefield, the company now runs the booming business out of a 60,000-square-foot facility here in Georgia.

    They produce a complete range of punchy patriotic apparel while employing more than 200 people, mostly veterans and their spouses, in suburban Savannah.

    On this day, Merritt is standing outside of the Nine Line storefront, which is adjacent to a Black Rifle Coffee shop, along the cobblestoned River Street in historic downtown Savannah. He has his rescue dog, Red, on his leash and doing the right thing on his mind.

    Merritt says he has never shied away from service, patriotism and doing the right thing: “These things are at the heart of why we do our business and how I do business with others.”

    But he wonders: From where does the cotton for his shirts come? His company uses the fabric on his clothing line, whose shirts bear slogans such as “Land of the Free Because of the Brave” and “Faith, Family, Friends, Flag and Firearms.”

    For him, it had to be ethically sourced — in short, not from any supplier who was part of the slave labor trade in the Xinjiang region of China. This is nonnegotiable for Merritt and his brand. To ensure he maintains these standards, he goes above and beyond what most retailers do, and he conducts isotopic testing — basically a DNA test on fabric to detect the unique fingerprint of the country of origin.

    That’s when things went south. Merritt discovered one of his suppliers had been using cotton from Xinjiang, so he made a phone call.

    “I said, ‘Hey, I’m a customer of yours. Can we talk about this?’” Merritt, who was a helicopter platoon leader for the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment known as the Night Stalkers, said.

    Soon after that first phone call, Merritt said he started to get legal notices from “very, very powerful law firms,” which he said initially gave him pause, then ultimately motivated him to continue to press for information.

    “I’ve never been one to back down. So it was, I believe, a very poor strategic move on the count of Next Level Apparel, which is the entity that was tested through the boxes that we received into our facility from our distributor S&S Activewear. The carton label stated the importer of record was YS Garments, and after a simple Google search, I discovered YS Garments is doing business as Next Level Apparel. When I received test results back from these samples tested, it stated the Next Level DBA YS Garments products were consistent with Xinjiang cotton,” he said.

    Merritt said he even spoke to the CEO of Next Level privately about the issue. “Eventually, I ended up speaking to lawyers over the next several months,” he said. “In the end, I asked one very specific question that would never be answered directly: ‘If you have suspected product that is either coming to this country illegally or at the very least unethically, do you plan on quarantining it and testing it? And if it comes back as consistent with Xinjiang cotton, will you inform your customers and return it to whoever you purchased it from?’”

    The Uyghur Autonomous Region in northwest China is where a lot of the cotton used worldwide originates. The Chinese Communist Party has populated this region with forced labor and “reeducation” camps meant to nullify this historic minority.

    “If you are a company buying cotton for your fabrics in this region, it gives you an unfair, illegal advantage because you are paying less than your competitors,” explained Merritt.

    Next Level Apparel posted a statement on its retail page regarding concerns about reports of forced labor in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region that read in part:

    “Next Level Apparel takes very seriously any reports about forced labor and we have been engaging with multi-stakeholder working groups to assess collective solutions that will help preserve the integrity of our global supply chains. We will continue to collaborate with industry associations … to understand, evaluate and address this critical global issue.”

    Merritt remains skeptical: “After months of discussions, I’ve been able to return all of my products that I purchased from them. They have assured me it was quarantined and will not be put back into circulation, but there are lingering questions that need to be answered.”

    “Their ‘Zero Tolerance Policy’ states they would terminate any relationships with vendors who utilize unethical sourcing such as slave cotton from Xinjiang. I want to know if they have done that yet. It is incumbent on them to identify who is in their supply chain that is causing this to occur,” he said.

    A call to Next Level Apparel was not returned by deadline.

    For the average consumer — or even church groups, youth sports organizations or local event planners — fraud in the textile industry is easy to mask. “If you’re selling at a convention center, if you’re selling to a church group, if you’re selling to a school group and people are looking for those bottom dollar prices, they may be unknowingly participating in the slave trade if they’re purchasing from some of these companies that are utilizing forced slavery, that are utilizing cotton that derived from Xinjiang cotton,” Merritt said.

    Merritt’s decision to take this on has come with great personal cost. Since this journey began for him late last year, he’s been slammed with lawyer fees, and his company has faced numerous cyberattacks.

    “I won’t say it hasn’t been hard, but I have to be able to look at myself in the mirror every morning, and that means doing the right thing. That’s how I’ve approached my military career, my personal life, and my business. Everything comes with risk, but clearly, it is a risk I am willing to take. So bring it on.”

    Original Here

  • LEAKED: Emails Show Biden State Department Sought to Protect China During Spy-Balloon Fiasco

    LEAKED: Emails Show Biden State Department Sought to Protect China During Spy-Balloon Fiasco

    AP Photo/Andrew Harnik, Pool

     Bonchie | RedState

    With so much domestic rancor going on as the next election season heats up, it’s worth remembering that there are serious foreign policy issues to deal with. It’s also worth remembering that the Biden administration is doing its level best to screw every single one of them up.

    A new report backed by leaked emails and inside sources is shedding light on a shocking policy Joe Biden is pursuing in regard to China. According to Reuters, during the Chinese spy balloon fiasco that captivated the nation in early 2023, embattled Secretary of State Antony Blinken was actually seeking to protect the communists.

    hen an alleged Chinese spy balloon traversed the United States in February, some U.S. officials were confident the incursion would galvanize the U.S. bureaucracy to push forward a slate of actions to counter China.

    Instead, the U.S. State Department held back human rights-related sanctions, export controls and other sensitive actions to try to limit damage to the U.S.-China relationship, according to four sources with direct knowledge of U.S. policy, as well as internal emails seen by Reuters.

    (…)

    Rick Waters, deputy assistant secretary of State for China and Taiwan who leads the China House policy division, said in a Feb. 6 email to staff that has not been previously reported: “Guidance from S (Secretary of State) is to push non-balloon actions to the right so we can focus on symmetric and calibrated response. We can revisit other actions in a few weeks.”

    The sources said many measures have yet to be revived. The decision to postpone export licensing rules for telecom equipment maker Huawei and sanctions against Chinese officials for abuses of Uyghurs, has damaged morale at China House, they said.

    In other words, instead of punishing China for its insanely provocative violation of US airspace and sovereignty, Blinken had his lackeys pause major human rights and trade measures. That included already planned actions to sanction Chinese tech companies like Huawei and to combat China’s genocide of the Uyghurs.

    It gets worse, though. Though the buck stops with Blinken, he apparently farmed out US policy toward China to Wendy Sherman, his second-in-command.

    Speaking to Reuters on condition of anonymity for fear of repercussions, they said Blinken had largely delegated China policy duties to Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman, the United States’ second ranked diplomat.

    Who is Wendy Sherman? She’s the China-loving official who led the lobbying effort against the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act of 2021. So not only is Blinken derelict in his duties by passing off the biggest US foreign policy issue in existence to an underling, but he gave those duties to someone with a long history of being suspiciously soft on the Chinese.

    Sherman was also at the forefront of the disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan, infamously proclaiming that the “Taliban seek legitimacy.” If there’s a diplomat with worse instincts, I’m not sure who it would be. Sherman is just terrible and has managed to be on the wrong side of just about every major foreign policy issue she’s been involved with.

    But as I’ve speculated in the past, it’d be a mistake to chalk all this up to sheer incompetence. The Biden administration continually operates as if it is bought and paid for by the Chicoms. From COVID to economics, the Chinese are allowed to dominate. It’s long past time for people to start asking why.

    Original Here

  • The Real Purpose of …

    The Real Purpose of …

    The Real Purpose of the Chinese Spy Balloon

    And it comes accompanied with mocking derision.

    February 8, 2023 by Bob Newton for Frontpage Magazine 

    Once upon a time, America’s greatest military strength was the creativity of its people. Our adversaries didn’t know what to expect from us on the battlefield or in the planning rooms, and it instilled the strongest of emotions in our adversaries – fear.

    But there is no fear coming from the leaders of Communist China following its latest provocation of sending a spy balloon over the United States. Rather, China’s claims of “help” from flying a stratospheric “research” balloon over the heart of America sounds more like mocking derision.

    Perhaps we should be thankful for their incursion as a lesson in what we must do better. For one, China is helping to test our air defenses and specifically our ability to deal with what defense experts call an asymmetric threat. This test provides insights as to what we can do and what we’re willing to do, both now and in any future response to this overflight.

    Those of us who’ve dedicated our lives to defending this nation deeply understand traditional air defense and appreciate the new service dedicated to controlling the domain above the air, the Space Force. But between these two layers is the stratosphere, specifically the upper portion where the air is very thin. This is where the Chinese balloon was flying.

    The stratosphere is a high-ground for observation and communications that, unlike the lower atmosphere and space’s low earth orbits, allows for long endurance sensing and is not crowded. Consider it an untapped growth area. Historically, the stratosphere is considered part of a country’s territorial airspace which some of America’s capability developers have explored how to exploit and dominate against any threat.

    Undoubtedly, China’s real test is whether or not the American people awaken to this issue. Those who understand the strategic importance of the stratosphere have proposed concepts for using and defending it to the Pentagon, and debated the potential of balloons meandering over the adversary’s airspace.

    There are many tactical considerations involved: Could an adversary do anything about a unique, slow speed stratospheric system; how might they react; is it a good exchange (using a million-dollar missile to kill a cheap floater); what could be lost with the payload; and what is the capability value?

    But instead of taking some nickels and dimes from earlier $700+ billion defense budgets to explore the risks and rewards of establishing stratospheric capabilities, our keenly focused institutional processes and mega-suppliers yielded the same old stuff – traditional air defense, jets, rockets and satellites for space, and nothing in between; the space now occupied by China.

    While Washington dithered, the Chinese were either thinking the same thing or took our concept and invested their yuan into actually building, and now using, a stratospheric balloon against us. Perhaps we should thank the Chinese for allowing us to see how our own stratospheric concepts might work.

    The real purpose of this Chinese research experiment was to reveal both our military capabilities and our political resolve. They’ve likely concluded we lack the political will and, likely, the capability to effectively deal with this asymmetric threat, which lingered for days over the heartland of America.

    In time China and other potential adversaries, as well as our allies, will witness how we react to this spy balloon stimulus. If we sluggishly respond by dumping hundreds of millions of dollars into the lumbering, traditional defense suppliers we’d be lucky to see anything in years, they’ll learn one lesson. But if we reopen the doors to America’s agile small business development community, they’ll learn another lesson: fear of the unbounded unknown and respect.

    Will this past week’s events be a wake-up call to the nation? Perhaps, maybe a small one. But will it be enough to change the Defense Department and dislodge a calcified establishment into meeting new threats with new ideas? We cannot say. Either way, the world is watching.

    As Japanese Admiral Yamamoto is rumored to have said after the attack on Pearl Harbor, “I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve.” The world knows how that story ended but we’ve rested on those laurels too long.

    Whether the spy balloon incursion has awakened a 21st century sleeping giant depends on the American people. If it has, perhaps the best thing we can say is, ‘Thanks, China.’


    Having limited knowledge of what options were available to down this thing, I read more then a few suggestions that our jets have ‘guns’ which could have been used to create holes causing slow leaks i the balloon. The theory being it would not ‘crash’ but come down slowly. The question still arises as to why this was not stopped upon entering our air space in the Aleutians.