The United States should never be forced to sacrifice the cutting-edge military capabilities that we need to protect ourselves. America must have a military that has the fortitude to fully protect this country, regardless of where the threat comes from or in what form it comes in – and have everything we need to operate successfully whether the theatre is land, sea, air, cyberspace or outer space. 

 

The United States should also never be in a position where we are forced to pick and choose between the most dangerous regions of the world. We must be able to sustain security simultaneously in Russia, Africa, South and East Asia, the Middle East, and Europe. Given China’s strategic moves toward global economic dominance – including its booming trade relationships and Xi Jinping’s “Project of the Century,” the multibillion-dollar Belt and Road Initiative – plus its aggressive moves in the South China Sea, safeguarding stability in the Asia-Pacific region is increasingly important to our economic and national security.

 

At the same time, we obviously can’t fixate solely on that region of the world when the Middle East and Eastern Europe remain so unstable and unpredictable. We can just point to Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, Hamas’ attack on Israel, Bashar al-Assad being booted out of Syria, and the fact that Afghanistan is once again a refuge for jihadists to see how quickly things can escalate in those regions.

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Because of the sheer scope of these operational and geographical realities, U.S. national security must be forward-thinking, innovative, and dare we say, crafty.

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War is evolving, big time. This means we must evolve as well – and do what five-star Army general and former President of the United States Dwight D. Eisenhower once advised: “Learn how to compose differences not with arms, but with intellect and decent purpose.” This is not to say that diplomacy can solve everything. With jerks like Vladimir Putin around, it clearly cannot. But the “intellect” part of President Eisenhower’s advice is convicting. The harsh truth is that throwing a bunch of money at a million different things to see what sticks – as we have done since the 9/11 terrorist attacks – is not going to cut it anymore.

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… and neither is relying on a ridiculously gigantic arsenal of big, scary bombs to prove nothing more than we have as many bombs as other people. The “my bomb is bigger than your bomb” strategy we have depended on for decades now seems lazy and terribly inadequate.

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We already know this is a zero-sum game… the ultimate prisoner’s dilemma, where two countries assume they have only two choices: to increase military spending for more weapons or to make an agreement with the opposing side whereby everyone reduces their total number of weapons. The dilemma is that neither side can be sure the other side will follow through with the agreement to reduce weapons; therefore, both sides increase their military spending to lead the race. The moral of the story is that, even though both sides are acting rationally, the result is irrational.

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Russia and China figured this out years ago. Sure, they still rely on the bomb thing to a certain degree. Russia has more nuclear warheads than any country in the world (5,580 to America’s 5,044), and in 2019, Russia deployed Avangard, a new hypersonic weapon that flies at lightning-fast speeds, allowing it to evade American missile defense systems. They are also working on stealth submarines and torpedoes.

 

China finally reached the wealth necessary to heavily upgrade its military. The DF-21D anti-ship ballistic missile is a game changer, as is their intermediate-range missile called the DF-26 that threatens our naval forces and bases in the Pacific. In what some referred to as a “sputnik moment,” China tested a hypersonic missile in 2021 that almost orbited the entire earth before returning to hit its intended target. Last December, images of what seemed to be new Chinese military aircraft went viral on social media. Defense experts said these aircraft, though blurry on the video, appear to be highly original advanced stealth designs.

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China and Russia already have weapons that jeopardize our assets in space, through everything from cyberattacks to radio jamming to destroying them altogether. The Annual Threat Assessment from the U.S. Director of National Intelligence from five years ago said China and Russia were “seeking to expand the full spectrum of their space capabilities, as exemplified by China’s launch of its highest-resolution imagery satellite, Gaofen-11, in July 2018.” Both were also “training and equipping their military space forces and fielding new anti-satellite (ASAT) weapons to hold U.S. and allied space services at risk, even as they push for international agreements on the non-weaponization of space. Both countries recognize the world’s growing reliance on space and view the capability to attack space services as a part of their broader efforts to deter an adversary from or defeat one in combat.”

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These advancements are all the more frustrating because we did a lot of the heavy lifting for them by developing superior military tech (like long-range precision-strike, electromagnetic-spectrum warfare, and hypersonic warfare) – then sat by while they just copied us. But beyond all that, the most significant advancements China and Russia have made have little to do with space or military hardware at all. While we were busy fighting wars in the Middle East, China and Russia were busy closely examining our weak spots and developing new tactics to exploit our vulnerabilities.

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By far, the most impressive part of their strategy to challenge the United States falls under the “crafty” category. For example, both countries have developed anti-access/area denial (A2/AD) networks and designed smart asymmetric-warfare strategies (asymmetric-warfare is essentially a conflict between two countries that have significantly uneven military capabilities, like the United States versus either China or Russia).

 

These hybrid warfare tactics are designed to significantly raise the cost and risk of retaliation by potential adversaries, and to keep them guessing. This creates a kind of permanent gray zone between war and peace, where things don’t necessarily escalate into military conflict, but where potential adversaries know the threat exists nonetheless.

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China, for example, has used the disputed waters of the South and East China Seas as its own gray zone battlefield, building militarized artificial islands and occupying disputed reefs and shoals to keep U.S. naval forces out deep in the Pacific. Way back in 2016, Stephen Biddle and Ivan Oelrich, global security experts, explained it this way:

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​For its part, Russia demonstrated hybrid warfare in the annexation of Crimea and in their effort to destabilize Ukraine (before the physical invasion) by using cyber warfare, extortion, and incredibly effective and destabilizing propaganda.

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When Putin started his full-fledged war in Ukraine, his propaganda went into overdrive. To justify the invasion, he told the Russian people that he started the war to “demilitarize and denazify” the Ukrainian government. He perpetuated the lie that Kyiv has been carrying out “genocide” against the Russian-speaking people who live in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions of Ukraine (known as the Donbas). The New York Times reported that, after the war started, “the Kremlin cycled through a torrent of lies to explain why it had to wage a ‘special military operation’ against a sovereign neighbor. Drug-addled neo-Nazis. Genocide. American biological weapons factories. Birds and reptiles trained to carry pathogens into Russia. Ukrainian forces bombing their own cities, including theaters sheltering children.”

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The RAND Corporation – a nonprofit policy think tank partially funded by the U.S. government – “characterizes the contemporary Russian model for propaganda as ‘the firehose of falsehood’ because of two of its distinctive features: high numbers of channels and messages and a shameless willingness to disseminate partial truths or outright fictions.  In the words of one observer, ‘new Russian propaganda entertains, confuses and overwhelms the audience.’”

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Russia’s guerilla-style brand of cyber asymmetric-warfare has been targeting the United States for decades. Moonlight Maze, Russia’s three-year covert operation to hack into U.S. governmental agencies, started in 1996 and penetrated both NASA and the Pentagon. In fact, Moonlight Maze is the reason the U.S. Cyber Command center was created in the first place.

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James Andrew Lewis, the Senior Vice President and Director of the Technology and Public Policy Program at the of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, explains that “Russia is a haven for the most advanced cybercrime groups and no clear line delineates the criminal world from the government. The Kremlin sees Russian cybercriminals as a strategic asset, and one of the most difficult problems for reducing cybercrime is that Russia, along with North Korea, will not cooperate with Western law enforcement,” he continued. “High-end cybercriminal groups in Russia have hacking capabilities that are better than most nations for both criminal and intelligence purposes.”

 

Unfortunately, Russia has just gotten better and better at hacking since Moonlight Maze, so much so that we now are engaged in an ongoing and unrelenting cyberconflict. This battle reached deep inside the good ‘ol USA when the Russians significantly intervened in the 2016 presidential election, then yet again in 2020 when they unleashed the mother of all cyberattacks against us.

 

In early 2020, as Americans were settling into COVID lockdowns and the U.S. cyber-defense agencies were obsessively focused on protecting the upcoming presidential election, Russian hackers known as APT29 and Cozy Bear – the pride of the Foreign Intelligence Service of the Russia Federation (SVR) – launched a massive cyber hack against the United States. Thousands of people, both inside and outside of the U.S. government, downloaded corrupted software, giving the Russians a pathway to create hidden back doors to access each user’s network. 

 

This went way beyond spying, which most every country does to some degree. Instead, this was a global espionage supply chain attack that compromised U.S. intelligence agencies; nuclear laboratories; Fortune 500 companies; companies that monitor and protect critical domestic infrastructure; the National Institutes of Health; and the U.S. departments of State, Treasury, Commerce and Energy. The hack is believed to have reached at least 250 United States federal agencies and American corporations of all sizes, including Microsoft and Amazon.

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The National Nuclear Security Administration, which oversees our nuclear stockpile, was also breached, as was the Los Alamos National Laboratory, where most of our nuclear weapons are designed. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) was compromised, which may not seem like a big deal until you find out that FERC is responsible for Black Start, the United States’ strategy for restoring power if we ever experience a disastrous national blackout (which you can bet is already on Russia’s attack checklist). The Department of Homeland Security and Pentagon were also hit, which is ironic given they are the departments tasked with protecting our networks.

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A large part of the 2020 Russian hack was facilitated by malware embedded in the updates of software called Orion. Orion was made by SolarWinds, a company that makes network monitoring software that at the time was used by at least 425 of the Fortune 500 companies, plus media companies and most of our governmental agencies. In the years leading to the attack, SolarWinds was accused of having insufficient security for its products, but corporations and the U.S. government kept using them anyway.

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< SolarWinds is still in business – with a market capitalization of $2 billion – but was not let off the hook for the hack. In November 2022, the company agreed to settle a securities class action lawsuit with investors for $26 million for misleading them and the public about the effectiveness of its digital security products and failing to adhere to publicly stated internal security procedures. In October 2023, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission charged SolarWinds and Timothy Brown, its former Chief Information Security Officer, with “fraud and internal control failures relating to allegedly known cybersecurity risks and vulnerabilities” – the first ever SEC charges brought in connection with a cybersecurity case. >

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From all angles, it’s clear that China and Russia are testing the international order that America has ruled for decades. These countries are even more dangerous because they view pesky things like human rights and the rule of law as nothing more than nuisances – and that philosophy can easily spread across the globe.

 

​The bottom line is that these crafty tactics work – and we can’t exactly bomb our way out of this – so we better find ways to counteract this sneaky and incredibly dangerous behavior. And fast.