What Could China do to the USA on D+0?
...they're already taking direct action
As with many things the People’s Republic of China (PRC) has been doing to expand her capability to project power and influence in the USA, this has all been decades in the making.
It isn’t, “Do they have the capability and infrastructure to conduct direct action inside our borders?”, it is more like, “How many assets and cells are ready to conduct direct action inside our borders?”
This is a serious topic that is coming out of the SCIF and into open source by serious people and institutions.
If you find yourself shrugging your shoulders or thinking people are exaggerating the threat, RAND recently republished an editorial by Ian Mitch, a senior policy researcher at RAND focused on homeland security, irregular warfare, and counterterrorism and former senior intelligence officer at the Department of Homeland Security.
First he sets the table with what they are already doing.
In recent years China's U.S. spy network expanded its activities to more aggressively target dissidents within the diaspora. U.S. residents have been stalked, harassed, assaulted, and had their property damaged in retaliation for speaking out against Beijing.
So-called “China repatriation squads” have secretly hunted down dissidents, pressuring them to return to China by, among other tactics, threatening or imprisoning their relatives. A former U.S. correctional officer, acting on Beijing's behalf, burned down a sculpture in the Mojave Desert depicting President Xi Jinping's head as a coronavirus in 2021. When a former pro-democracy leader from China, now a naturalized U.S. citizen, announced a run for the House of Representatives, a Chinese intelligence operative hired someone to derail the campaign by setting the candidate up with prostitutes, assaulting him, or tampering with his car to cause a crash.
China-linked groups have also incited mob violence. During Xi's 2023 visit to San Francisco, groups with ties to the Chinese state orchestrated coordinated assaults on anti-Beijing protesters, coming at them with flagpoles and chemical sprays, and tossing sand in their eyes.
I saw this in college in the mid/late 1980s on a micro scale when it was well known that the then small number of PRC nationals at my large state university (the number then was just a couple dozen, now it is well over 1,000) were harassing the students from Taiwan.
In the decades that followed, we had The Confucius Institutes (thankfully most are now closed as they are at my alma mater after over a decade). However we still have the Chinese Students and Scholars Association performing most of the state-sponsored enforcement and control of PRC nationals. They do this in the open against their own people in the USA.
For years, our FBI turned a blind eye to PRC police stations operating in our major cities. Why our administrators and government officials allowed them is for others to find out.
They built their networks, overt and covert, with little serious opposition. They have the will to act. They have experience and operatives all through our government and industry.
It is a perfect setup.
U.S. authorities have tracked dozens of incidents in which Chinese nationals, sometimes posing as tourists, attempted to access military bases and other sensitive sites. U.S. national security officials are concerned that such incidents may signal early efforts by Beijing to test security and develop plans to physically attack these locations.
The prospect of Chinese sabotage on U.S. soil should not seem far-fetched. Many of the United States' adversaries are already at it. Russia is waging a brazen covert campaign in Europe to undermine support for Ukraine that involves attempted assassinations, arson, bombings, physical assaults, and cutting underwater cables. Similarly, Iran has long pursued murder-for-hire and kidnapping plots on U.S. soil, including a recently revealed plot to assassinate Trump last fall.
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China's strategy involves recruiting large numbers of sources with the expectation that some will not be detected. It uses students, businesspeople, and others whose legitimate covers are less likely to raise suspicion.
It's a numbers game and China has the advantage. In 2020, the FBI reported that about half of its nearly 5,000 active counterintelligence cases were related to China. Recent news reports suggesting the bureau's new leadership may be redirecting investigative resources from traditional priorities to immigration enforcement raises further concerns about whether the United States can keep pace with China's sprawling espionage operations.
One thing is clear: China's spy agencies are watching closely. And any sign that the United States is stepping back could embolden Beijing to become more aggressive with its operations on American soil.
You don’t have to be Joshua Steinman to get a bit paranoid about this.
These numbers below I had Grok grab from CBP are staggering. Remember, these are just from the four years of the Biden Administration, and these are only those we documented. How many came across our borders and were not documented? Of those who have come here, how many of them are agents of the PRC? How many can be used by the PRC?
Based on available data from U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and related sources, here is the number of People’s Republic of China (PRC) nationals apprehended for illegally crossing the U.S. southern border (between ports of entry) from Fiscal Year (FY) 2020 to the end of FY 2024:
FY 2020: Approximately 255 PRC nationals were apprehended. This figure is derived from the low baseline before the significant increase noted in later years, as FY 2020 data aligns with pre-surge trends (fewer than 450 in FY 2021).
FY 2021: 342 PRC nationals were apprehended, as reported by CBP data.
FY 2022: 1,987 PRC nationals were apprehended, showing a marked increase.
FY 2023: 24,125 PRC nationals were apprehended, a significant surge driven by factors like China’s post-COVID economic challenges and social media-driven migration routes.
FY 2024: 36,500 PRC nationals were encountered, with 36,338 specifically apprehended for illegal crossings between ports of entry, as reported by CBP data up to September 2024.
Total from FY 2020 to FY 2024:
Adding these figures: 255 (2020) + 342 (2021) + 1,987 (2022) + 24,125 (2023) + 36,338 (2024) = 63,047 PRC nationals apprehended for illegally crossing the southern border.
63,047 PRC nationals apprehended for illegally crossing the southern border. If only 1% are agents of the PRC, that is 630.
Forget four years, go back 10 or 20 years and include an estimate of those who successfully crossed without being processed. Then throw the 1% to the side, and then figure out the percentage that the PRC government knows is here, and knows who their relatives are still in the PRC. You can figure it out from here.
Right now, the Trump Administration is focused on finding and deporting the violent criminals here illegally. Never forget, just by being in the USA illegally, foreign nationals have broken our laws.
Should war come in the Pacific, we are going to be hit with sabotage—sabotage enabled by bad-faith politicians and corrupt corporate desires for cheap labor and educational bureaucrats greedy for foreign cash.
The question for us today is do we want 10% of our national electrical grid and water supply disrupted, or 60%?
One of my prior lives wrote scenarios for DoD, another life dealt with the details of "new" types of warfare (hybrid, total government approach, etc.) and how we would respond. So, imagine the worst, and how would you deal with the consequences. Bad at best, the worst is...well. Imagine being in Spain the other day, except it's the U.S., 75% of the grid is offline, and won't be restored for...two weeks. (Stavridis coauthored a book about that). Most (but not all) of those military age Chinese nationals came up through the Darien gap in South America, in what looks oddly like a very organized operation where the Chinese nationals were in professionally set up encampments with organized logistics and transportation...with luggage. Things that make you go "hm" indeed. The time window is on us now, I believe. Hope we can get through the next months and years without someone in Asia deciding that the time is "right now". We're going to that fight the way we are today (largely), as you can't overcome several decades of declining preparedness overnight.
I'd imagine Chinese operatives in the US could destroy much of Air Force on the ground with FPV drone attacks in the first hours of a war. Then they could surrender, knowing they would be treated with kid gloves.