Robert Spalding - Stealth War: How China Took Over While America’s Elite Slept

I know something about stealth. In 1998, I began training to pilot B-2 Spirits, known far and wide as Stealth Bombers. The B-2 was at that time the high-profile new weapon in the US Air Force arsenal, a dazzling, billion-dollar, high-tech machine that looked like it had flown in from a future century. Its continuous curvature allowed it to avoid detection by the electromagnetic waves used by radar systems to track objects. In other words, I learned to fly a plane that achieved something every military strategist has dreamed of: being invisible.

Twenty years laterhaving served as chief China strategist for the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and as senior US Defense official and Defense attach to the Peoples Republic of ChinaI left my position as senior director for strategic planning at the White House, deeply concerned about a different stealth weapon being turned against my country. For the past forty years, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has been playing a beautiful game. It is sophisticated yet simple. It is a competition to gain control and influence across the planetand to achieve that outcome without resorting to military engagement.

Flying quietly below the radar, the CCP has been acquiring technology without paying a cent toward developing it, carefully taking control of the worlds shipping businesses, infiltrating our corporations and science laboratories, and using American investor dollars to float the cost of its own factories and companiesand then, adding insult to injury, insisting that that money stay in China.

War between nation-states in the twenty-first century looks much different than war in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Instead of bombs and bullets, its about ones and zeros and dollars and cents: economics, finance, data information, manufacturing, infrastructure, and communications. Control those fronts today, and you can win a war without firing a shot. Its a simple, logical strategy. And it is one leaders in the West have been very slow to grasp.

Our political, military, corporate, and fiscal leaders have failed to recognize the subtle game the CCP has been playing. They have been operating, understandably, under the now outdated idea that war is fought only with bombs and bullets. The CCP strategy, however, is to fight in other ways, utilizing a variety of tactics. It advocates and sponsors a constant focus on theft, coercion, economic sabotage, and monopolization of infrastructure on a global levelall to increase Chinas sphere of influence. Everywhere.

Like the B-2 bombers I flew, the CCPs stealth war isnt truly covert. It has been hiding in plain sight. How did we miss it? Im not interested in pointing fingers at one particular party. Both Republican and Democratic elites have missed the signsor are complicitand as a patriot who cares about my fellow citizens, my main interest is to defend the people of this country and the ideas that have driven it since it was founded.

Perhaps nothing threatens the CCP more than the Constitution of the United States. Chinas president, Xi Jinping, has stated as much, and CCP documents that I will share make clear that fundamental American conceptsthe rights of free speech and freedom of religionare threats to the authoritarian power of the CCP, which believes that these liberties must never be allowed to take root in China and must never be the rights of Chinese citizens.

The CCPs fundamental loathing of our Bill of Rights and other legal protections should be chilling to anyone who values freedom. It is the primary reason I am writing this book. I want to alert the world to Chinas stealth war and its strategy to dominate the planet by focusing on six spheres of influence: the economy, the military, global diplomacy, technology, education, and infrastructure.

China is closing in on achieving its goal of influencing the politicians and corporations of the United States. If this happens, fundamental freedoms we take for grantedthe ability to criticize a politician or a policy, to publish political statements, to report on governmental abuse or inefficiency, to sing the lyrics you want, to study literally any subject under the sun, to visit any website, no matter what ideology is espousedwill come under assault.

As for our economy, it will continue to erode, as the CCP arranges to use our own capital against our own best interests. Trade terms will be less favorable. Chinese-owned and -manufactured products will flood our markets, creating a further trade imbalance that will favor the CCPs interests. The job market and average wages will continue to stagnate. Our best and brightest will be recruited by Chinese-owned companieswhich are, as well see, ultimately property of the CCP.