Modern Wisdom - #463 - General Robert Spalding - China's Secret Playbook For War

Episode Date: April 21, 2022

General Robert Spalding is a retired United States Air Force brigadier general after more than 25 years of service, a senior fellow at Hudson Institute and an author. China has injected itself into pretty much every area of life we care about. From media to technology, energy, food, transportation and even culture. But this strategy wasn't random, it turns out that their entire plan was detailed in a book from 1999 which General Spalding is very familiar with. Expect to learn what's actually happening with the Shanghai lockdowns, how facial recognition and drones are able to automatically fine citizens who break laws, why American companies can't stand up to Chinese demands, why China's recent increase in military spending should worry everyone and much more... Sponsors: Join the Modern Wisdom Community to connect with me & other listeners - https://modernwisdom.locals.com/ Get 20% discount & free shipping on your Lawnmower 4.0 at https://www.manscaped.com/ (use code MODERNWISDOM) Get 20% discount on everything from Lucy at https://uk.lucy.co/ (UK) or https://lucy.co/ (US) (use code: MW20) Extra Stuff: Buy War Without Rules - https://amzn.to/3vksc5i Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch. Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What's happening people? Welcome back to the show. My guest today is General Robert Spolding. He's a retired United States Air Force Brigadier General after more than 25 years of service, a senior fellow at Hudson Institute and an author. China has injected itself into pretty much every area of life we care to care about, from media to technology, energy, food, transportation, and even culture. But this strategy wasn't random. It turns out that their entire plan was detailed in a book from 1999, which General Spolting is very familiar with. Expect to learn what's actually happening with the Shanghai lockdowns, how facial recognition and drones are able to automatically find citizens who break laws.

Why American companies can't stand up to Chinese demands, why China's recent increase in military spending should worry everyone, and much more. It really does blow my mind that China and their plan for future global domination is just this big, looming elephant in the world that no one appears to care about actually pointing a finger at. Whilst everybody's accusing everyone else of misogyny or closet homophobia, no one's actually bothered about the fact that there is a huge superpower on the other side of the world slowly gearing up to take over everything.

And the fact that there is a playbook that was written nearly 25 years ago doesn't surprise me in the slightest. They are significantly better coordinated than the west. But now, please welcome General Roberts Spalding. What do you know about what's happening inside of Shanghai right now? Well, I mean, I think I'm as informed as everybody else's, which is I'm looking at all the Twitter videos and they all the articles. So, you know, the specifics, it sounds like, you know, it's fairly similar to the Wuhan lockdown where they were keeping people, you know, in their apartments.

I think the thing that they've moved on to is if you're quarantined, like, they just take your pet right away and, you know, there's no like, I think they've moved on to is if you're quarantined like they just take your pet right away and and you know there's no like. I think they've gotten more efficient at defining how they implement a lockdown. And you know a lot of these decisions that were probably painful in the very beginning like in Wuhan like what do we do it about these pets they've made the decision this is what we're gonna do. What do we do about these paths? They've made the decision. This is what we're going to do. It's basically, they've got a checklist. One of the things that you find out about living in China is there's checklists for everything.

You go through the checklist and you make sure that you're hitting all the things and the checklist now is pretty involved. I think they've perfected what they think a lockdown should be, and that's what you're seeing in Shanghai. Yeah, I've seen videos of bags of cats alive in the streets. I've seen videos of dogs seemingly being sort of killed, slashing, mobilized, slashed, disposed of, which is... I think those cats are going to be disposed of i think that's you know they are alive but i think they're they're going to be disposed of is is that my

the impression that i've gotten from everything i've seen what do you think is the reason for doing that are they worried that they're a vector of transmission or they worried that if you have a pet you're more likely to go outside and break quarantine i would i would imagine that it's their vector because i mean pets can get coronavirus so i would imagine that they believe it's their vector because I mean pets can get coronavirus. I would imagine that they believe it's a vector of transmission. If they're going to quarantine the people, they're going to quarantine the pets.

They can't really kill the people, although when you look at the Wheefgars or the Falun Gong, they don't really have a lot of problem with those types of things. What they are, at least at this point, it's just the animals that they're after. I saw a tweet that said 25 million people in lockdown in Shanghai, policed by drones that have facial recognition and give orders. People who go out on their balconies without masks, affine directly from their CBDC accounts. Yeah, I mean, it's awesome. Isn't it?

If you think about it, what, you know, the technology that we created in Silicon Valley, and basically, what the Chinese have done is they've taken a systems engineering approach to society, right? So they want to, they want to basically automate how society performs. And, you know, if you think of it from a manufacturing perspective, for example, you know, we talk about six sigma. And the idea is that you eliminate all, you know, anomalies, and you make sure that your, you know, whatever errors that are causing systemic anomalies, you get rid of them. And so in a sense, they've taken those principles of manufacturing and using the tools of Silicon Valley,

which are really this ability to harvest data and mine it and then use it to basically cancel those that are outside, that are anomalies. cancels those that are outside, that are anomalies, they have taken systems engineering in this IT system that we built in the West and combined it to create a way to automate their society and and its performance base. You do good, you're rewarded, you get better prices, you get better treatment, you do bad, you're canceled, that's it, period. And so you get your performance built in because everything that you do has immediate consequence on your life. Just like you said with the drones, like somebody's going to come there and they're going to charge your account if you mess up. Now, you know, that's something that's never existed. It's essentially like the concept of the penopticon,

which is a prison that was designed so that at any point, a prisoner would think somebody is watching them. So what you find with these kind of situations when you're always being watched, is that people modify their behavior to ensure that they're not going to be punished. And so what they're trying to get is this digital panopticon where you're always being watched, you know what the rules are, you know if you break the rule, you're going to be punished, and so you get the behaviors. And that's really what they're trying to get. I want these behaviors, I don't want those behaviors, and I'm going to design a system

that automatically eliminates those behaviors. Yeah, well, I mean, with the Panopticon, it's kind of like a wheel and spoke design, right? So in the middle of it, you have potentially one guard, sat on a swively chair, and going out away from him all the way around in 360 degrees, or all of the different cells. The difference here is that it's not because of how scalable technology is, you don't

just need to have one guard that might be looking, you could scale technology to the point where you are always being watched all the time. Right. Because the AI can do it, right? Precisely. You don't need, and the AI never takes a, you know, a P-break and never, you know, never goes on month break. AI is like running, man. It's running in real time.

And so, I mean, when you think about it from, you know, logically, if you were gonna take an engineer, an engineer's approach to political science, it's the perfect way that an engineer would design a system because everybody, and there's so many of these dystopian movies that take this approach where you basically just engineer society so that everybody does what they're supposed to. I mean, it's terrifying, but it is strange. The lack of limits that a bureaucratic dictatorial regime opens up in technology

that there are certain areas of technology, how they can be implemented, how they can be integrated with other elements of society, that when you don't have a democracy and you have fewer human rights, there's a whole new world of technocratic overreach that can be garnered. Right, well, and the other thing is that, and what this is traditionally been and what China has benefited from,

its connection to the West, and that is anomalies aren't always bad. Like you have people that commit crimes, but other anomalies are you invent stuff. You're innovative. You create new things that have never existed before. People go to the moon. You create an iPhone. These are also anomalies just like doing bad things are anomalies. So the problem is when you start to create this systematic approach to society, you're

getting rid of all anomalies. You're not just getting rid of the bad ones. You're also getting rid of a lot of the good ones too. And the reason China's been able to get away with this is because they could just go to the West who has the good and the bad and take the good leave the bad and what you see happening as a consequence of coronavirus were a lot of the policies that you're seeing in Shanghai were implemented also in the west. Countries in the west that are democracies were basically taking the same policies that

China was in terms of lockdowns and and and all of these other restrictions and so what happens is over time and and this to china's seeks to be the dominant system in the world and then have all systems look like it which is kind of the same thing that the u.s.n.uk decided to do after the end of war war two we think all society should be democracies becauseacies because not only we think that's the right way to go it also protects you know our vision of the system and that our democracy isn't coming under threat or pressure from those nations that think differently. Well the China

thinks the same way and so what it's been able to do in the two years of the coronavirus is really slowly begin to move democracies into its form of thinking about the relationship between the state and the individual. You know, the state has power over the individual and therefore the individual should do whatever the state says without question. This has been how the West has basically adapted to coronavirus and with things like contact tracing in the West, you're beginning to see the technology be brought in to enable that vaccine, you know,

passports, digital vaccine backports. Passports is another thing. So, I mean, you're seeing the homogenization of the international order in a way that's completely opposite of how it was envisioned after the end of World War II between the US and the UK. What's happening with famine? I've been seeing tweets and news stories and stuff about famine in Shanghai.

Is that true? Got any idea? Well, I don't know if there's famine so much as, at least yet, so much as if you're locked up and you can't get the food, you're going to be hungry. I mean, I lived in, I might not, you know, flying V52s and we had a snowstorm one time and I was in my house for a week. You know, finally had to break out and go get milk and some other things. I mean, I think that's what they're running into is, you know, you're after your, there's only so much stuff that you're prepared to do in quarantine.

And then if you can't leave to go get food, that's a problem. But surely the Chinese government must know that this is going to happen, right? You lock people down, you don't allow them to leave to go and get food. There are certain things that you need to do. And I guess maybe as well, this is one of the reasons that perhaps the killing of pets. I'm pretty sure that yeah, a vector of transmission will be one of them, but just if you have a pet, it got to go outside to go to the bathroom. Good point. Yeah, good point. So have a walk. So I just think there's more and more

situations there. Have you got any idea about why it is that there's some videos floating around of the Chinese government or their enforcement agency breaking into people's apartments and taising them and taking them to sort of COVID isolation facilities. I've seen some awful videos and you never know on the internet right you see a video and you go this could be from 2009 during the whatever whatever crisis. But these videos that look like kind of individual portaportis and everybody's got the head stuck out. Yeah. I don't know what is, but there's definitely videos floating around of the Chinese

government breaking into people's apartments and, and sort of tasing them and taking them away. Do you have any idea what's happening there? Well, um, I think it's, I think it's all related to, hey, you may have had a positive test and now you're going to go, um, spend time in the Pokey. Um, I, it doesn't surprise me for Shanghai. What surprises me is you see the same thing in Australia. They got the same, basically, camps where they send people to. Like, I can see it in China. I can see it in Shanghai. It makes sense to me. But when I see it happening in a country that's supposed to have something related to

the Bill of Rights and the rule of law, and you're saying, hey, this is what they're instituting, that's what really bothers me because Shanghai, I totally expect this kind of behavior. I remember, I remember just a concern for the well-being of people is different there. I've seen people in the most horrid situations in China. I remember one time, one of my neighbors was moving and the moving truck shows up with the crates and there's no people, like where are all the people? They take the lid off the one of the crates and all the people come out of the crate. They were basically sealed up in the crate and that's how they had transported them to the work site. So when you think about, hey, you're concerned

for the well-being of people, that's not what you get in China. It's just not the system. So I'm not surprised to see it. It is their system. What I'm surprised is that it's been able to be replicated in the West. Does it put into slightly harsher contrast accusations of fascists, totalitarian regime, overreach, and slavery, and monday racism, and stuff like that, when we do have kind of this very, I mean, look at India, which has an explicit caste system, right, which is still unbelievably terrifying. I've only just started learning about this. And then you have China where, I mean, the detention camps actually look like they're getting worse, not better now. And it just seems to be this sort of blinkers on view. I noticed that the current Hollywood push,

especially from Disney, but the whole Hollywood push around the Don't Say Gable from Florida didn't seem to extend to the most recent Harry Potter film which got released in China and had the only six seconds of LGBT content in there, which suggested that Dumbledore had previously been in a relationship with this other guy, they removed that, especially for the Chinese edition.

So you do have what seems like double standards, either willful ignorance and or outright double standards coming from the West when they're looking at their own world versus just complete disregard for what's happening over in China. Well, I mean, if you think about it, and you look at kind of, in particular, not just the end of World War II, the Cold War, but after the end of the Cold War and say the 30 years after the end of the Cold War, and you look at who's progative nations around the world listened to. It was America, right? They were listening to, I mean, America was the most powerful, had the most powerful

economy, the most productive economy. And that economic heft and the willingness to use that economic heft to build up other countries like the Marshall Plan or rebuilding Japan or Korea after all these countries after World War II. And then you realize that over the course of those 30 years, that power, that economic productivity, the supply chain of the world, if you will, has shifted from America to China. Now has allowed China to take the mantle of America. And so this idea that, you know, it's...

And when I lived in Shanghai from 2002 to 2004, or all of my neighbors were building factories in the Shanghai Special Economic Zone, big companies, big US corporations. And what those business executives would tell me is like, we're going to change China to be more like America. The more that we're integrated economically with this society, the more China is going to change

to be more liberal. They're going to be, you know, the beginning to change to be more liberal. They're going to be, you know, the beginning to accept our principles and values. And of course, the Chinese Communist Party determined after Tiananmen Square that that was absolutely not going to happen. And so while it was a little bit of hubris on our part, what's actually happened is the reverse has happened. Is that now, rather than US corporations spreading the values of liberty, democracy,

rule of law, free trade, it's that US corporations are now responding to where the economic power lies in the world and they're spreading the same authoritarian or totalitarian principles that China wants to espouse. So it should not be surprising that we're seeing this shift in our corporate sector and our financial sector away from, hey, we're gonna promote the principles of America

to promote the principles of the Chinese Communist Party because that's where our bread is buttered. So there's a strong tie between, hey, you're economically powerful, to, hey, you get to draft the narrative, that's what the Chinese figured out. Like the Soviets were, hey, we're gonna go out of you with weapons, the Chinese are, we're gonna go out with you with money, and economics, and finance, and we're gonna use that,

and not just the power of our productivity, and productive economy, but we're going to invest in the emerging market economies to the extent that they look towards us, not the US, right? So it's no longer going to be the US dictating how what are the principles and rules of the international order? It's China. And so that's what we're seeing play out on a daily basis.

What I would agree with is yes, in terms of the power economically that China has and also supply chain too, so whether that be downstream or upstream from whatever we need, what I don't think they've managed to do just yet is take on the mantle culturally that America had, right? That sort of cultural leader, people following that way, the American dream. I'm not seeing yet people in the West look to the culture of China outside of the corporate world and say, oh, I want Chinese fashion and Chinese, I mean, like K-pop is the closest thing that I've seen to that. Even Japan, I was thinking about this year that I'm aware that this is not just one like homogenous zone over there, but just generally I've seen eastern cultural

influence seem to wane a little bit. Anime, the sort of the push that we had maybe about sort of 10 to 15 years ago with stuff like Pokemon. I don't know, that's been an interesting thing for me to observe. That being said, in developing nations, you know, Belt and Road initiative stuff, I don't know whether that's the same case. I don't know whether there's some countries in Africa that have received tons and tons of money from China and not only look to them as saviors and collaborate as financially, but then also perhaps might be sort of a praising Chinese cuisine or Chinese fashion or music or whatever.

Well, I mean, I think you're looking at the wrong way. The Chinese don't need us to adopt their culture. They don't need us to fall in love with their brands. All they need to do is get the brands that they already know to start spreading the messages that the Chinese want them to spread. So in other words, when you say, you know, the Chinese aren't, you know, controlling culture, it's because you're looking for a Chinese company to do it. No, that's not the way of unrestricted warfare. That's not the way of war without rules. It's you get the companies

that you like to do to say the things that the Chinese Communist Party wants them to say. So the message, so you're getting the same messenger, it's just the message that's coming out of them is different. And so, you know, and you're already conditioned to say, okay, this is coming from America, so it must be okay. Well, no, it's coming from America, but the message is Chinese. And so, you know, this is why we, you know, and I see this in DC all the time, like, oh, the Chinese will never, like, take over. They're not trying to take over in the way that you think. They're not trying to make the face Chinese. They're trying to make the face Chinese, they're trying to make the message Chinese.

So if you are sufficiently reliant on China for your trade, for your money, for your distribution, they can then have leverage over the things that you do and say back home. You then become a conduit for the message from the CCP. Okay, cool. I understand. I guess an example of that might be that Warner Brothers that produced this new Harry Potter film that had these seconds of dialogue taken out of them, they had to do that in China. Over time, let's say that they were more reliant, increasingly more reliant on China.

China would perhaps say, well, actually, we don't just want you to take it out of the Chinese version, but we don't want it in any version perhaps. Right. Okay, cool. Fine. And that's what Hollywood's been doing, right? And you've seen that the other thing that you notice and I see this all the time in movies that come out, how many times you know in the last 10 years of you watched a movie and the the hero coming to rescue, particularly science science fiction films, it's you it, because it's set in the future, and it's a Chinese, you know, astronaut.

Oh, they had a spare. They were saving the world, right? Wasn't that, um, wasn't that the one when, the Mars, the Martian, wasn't it that China had the exact rocket that we needed, but it was the second one, and then we were going to finally collaborate, and they were going to come out.

That one might have blown up as well. But yeah, I do know, I know exactly the sort of narrative that you're talking about. It's also been a while since we've seen a big blockbuster action movie where China has been the primary enemy. You never see that, never.

It doesn't happen. In fact, the one time that it was going to happen, which was the remake of Red Dawn, they changed it to the North Koreans. Which, I mean, the North Koreans attacking the United States, are you kidding me? I mean, as a plot point, it's like the stupidest thing, that I mean, it's hilarious. You mentioned earlier on unrestricted warfare, which is this book from 1999 that I'd never heard of and seems absolutely terrifying. Can you explain what unrestricted warfare is, how it came about, everything else?

Yeah, so it was written by these two PLA Air Force Lieutenant colonels. And it was basically their attempt to create a doctrine for how you compete with a more militarily powerful foe. And it really had to do with the fact that they saw United States, the United States as their number one enemy, but they didn't have the wherewithal to go up against them directly militarily. How would you deal with that problem?

So there's two trends that they noticed. One was the internet and it was very early beginning there, but it was growing rapidly and the other was globalization. So essentially, they built a military doctrine around how do you exploit the internet and globalization to overpower a militarily superior foe? So, in the military, there's doctrine. And the doctrine is basically based on lessons learned of all the conflicts you've had prior. What are those principles that you distill from those lessons learned

that allow you to plan for future conflicts, you know, things like mass or surprise or deception, you know, how do you bring those principles into the way that you think about war? What they did is they took that and they built a doctrine around how do you use the internet and globalization to basically, almost like the Germans went around the French-Masino line? How do you bypass the military, which is there to defend the sovereignty and political independence of a society

and go right at the society itself and begin to attack the society in a way that number one doesn't highlight you as an enemy and number two enables you to gain specific advantages that your adversary doesn't see happening, right? So it's basically happening in the day to day and you're basically losing your political independence and sovereignty day by day by day as this conflict unfolds. How impressive of a document is this? It seems pretty prescient. It seems like it's been able to predict what was going to happen. What does it feel like reading it? Well, I mean, so I read it in 99 and I read it again in 2013 and in 99 I'm like,

this is crazy. In 2013, I read it and I'm like, oh my God, these guys. So when you go back to, you know, I flew B2s, right? So I'm an airman. When you go back into the history of air power and how that became used as a weapon system, very early on, they're like, you know, the army, we didn't have an air force in the United States. We had an army, the army's like, the things useless for military. There were theorists back then saying,

okay, this is what you can do with an airplane. Guys like in the US General Billy Mitchell in Italy, Giulio, Duhé, General Billy Mitchell in Italy, Giulio, Duhay. They theorize that a airplane could be a very powerful weapon. What these guys are saying in 1999 is, holy smokes, this is the next evolution or warfare. Here is a weapon even more powerful than the airplane, and here is how you use it.

So in a lot of ways, I got the opportunity, like Billy Mitchell was dead, I think when I was born, I'm now getting to see the birth of a whole different kind of warfare that, you know, everything else in the, in, in, in, in kind of air power sense is all history to me, you know, things that I read about. This I'm actually getting, I'm, I'm able to see. And when you go back as an airman and you read the history and you think like, how could anybody have ever disagreed with Billy Mitchell? And then you experience it yourself, because I'm like, these guys are crazy, they're nuts.

There's no way you're gonna ever be able to do this. And then I see over the course of 20 years that that's exactly what's happened. I'm like, this is, you know, as a military guy, I'm like, wow, this is really interesting because I never saw this coming. I read the document, I thought it was nuts, and it actually came to pass.

That is, that's, you know, it's terrifying because obviously it's successful, but then you gotta say as a strategist or a military thinker, you're like, that's pretty cool. I got to see this unfold in real time and be duped in the thinking that these guys are nuts. They don't know what they're talking about.

Why is it that they were able to see something or have faith in a trajectory that you thought at the time was ridiculous? I think it has to do with the circumstances of what the Chinese Communist Party is. It's primarily a political organization, and so the People's Liberation Army is the Party's army. It is the armed component of the Chinese Communist Party. And so when you're a, and you know, Klaus Whit says war is politics by other means. In other words, I used military force

to achieve a political outcome. I couldn't have got any other way. Well, but the Chinese don't think that way. And Mound didn't think that way. And through their 5,000 years of history, there's a lot of examples that they think a little bit differently about warfare. And that is, it's much better to achieve your objectives

without going to war because war carries with it the risk of losing everything. And so, I think they were already programmed. So Mao's concept of people's war is embedded into the way the Chinese Communist Party and the people's liberation army already think. And what that is is that politics is war. In other words, it's not war is politics by the other means. Politics is war and that's the way you have to approach it. And if you approach it from the standpoint

that politics is war, and then you see these tools beginning to materialize that allows you to take your political warfare and export it globally to somebody else that's not even in your borders and do that because the internet and the globalization gives you the power to do that. Boom. The same way that the airplane, when paired with the logistics might of the United States, meant the were the most powerful military on the earth. These two colonels, Lieutenant Colonel said, okay, if I can take these tools, I can export the way that we think about warfare, which is basically

political in nature. How do we undermine the faith and confidence of a society in the governing structure of that society? And then how do we slowly turn those elites of that governing structure to think of the world where they have the right to be in the leadership position they have, and that by that right that the individuals below them should just basically do what they say, that becomes the way that they create safety. Because ultimately the Chinese Communist Party, they just want to exist. And if the rest of the world looks like they do and the people that they're interacting with are the elites of the rest of the countries and the elites all agree, right?

They all agree that they are in charge and everybody should do what they say. They don't care, you know, how you describe that and you can call it American democracy, you can call it the EU democracy they don't care as long as you have a separation between the individual rights and what the elites are allowed to do how do you think that china sees the enemies um well they see everybody anybody that's outside their borders is an enemy. And, you know, the whole attitude and enemy of my enemy is my friend. So, they don't have strong alliances. What they do have is interests, and then they use those interests to play off their enemies. Because, again, if politics is your way of doing things, then the more that you can get your,

what you view as your enemies to go after each other, the less the more secure you're going to be. And so, you know, Russia, Iran, North Korea, you know, people think, well, they're allies of the Chinese. Well, in a sense, they are, but in a sense, the Chinese love it when the Russians and the Iranians and the North Koreans are basically creating problems for America because the Chinese also see the Russians, the Iranians and the North Koreans as adversaries, right?

They're on their border and they want them to be distracted. And so getting all of these nations to fight amongst themselves is a perfect, is a perfect, and you think about not just, you know, Russia, Iran, North Korea, but if you go to talk to any American ally in Asia, Singapore, the Philippines, right? North or South Korea, what are they constantly tell American diplomats and uh... and leaders oh don't get us to choose we want we want to do business with china and we want to have you as a security partner so ultimately you're creating this thing where

you know the united states is not able to grit a coalition to go against china and china can't see that uh... an alliance materialize that can challenge it, right? Because everybody is really unwilling to come together as a group to challenge China. That's essentially what they're trying to work out. So it's fine that China doesn't have allies. What they want to ensure is that nobody else does either. And the way that you do that is you constantly keep this friction between and amongst not just Russia, Iran and North Korea, but also the

democracies, particularly where China is concerned. So one of the things that's happened because a Russian invaded Ukraine is the EU is now looking even more forcefully at, hey, how do we deal with China? One of the things that Chinese have been very, very successful in doing is taking the US and EU and splitting them when it comes to China. So they have been very effective at splitting apart alliances, particularly when it comes to them. And so they don't need allies if nobody else has allies. Yeah, these loose coalitions with whoever China has their friendships of convenience rather

than genuine alliances that stand there. And I mean, it is kind of like having the playbook open wide and you can almost see the horizon coming a little bit when you think, look, just consider everything that China does as purely in its own interests. All that they care about is them. And if you can help them get on their way, then absolutely fine. They're going to be fine for that to happen. However, the second that you can't anymore, they're not going to be bothered, and also they don't mind being ruthless and culling you if needs be. so they don't mind being ruthless and calling you if needs be.

It's the more that I learn about it, the more sort of scary it seems, and it is such an effective way to legislate or to run a country. I'm not saying that it's the best thing to do, or even an optimal thing to do for the people that live in it, but you can get a lot done if you're a dictatorship. Well, that's why Trudeau, you know, said, I wish I could be, you know, have a system like China does. And essentially, that's what politicians in the West want.

They want a system like China because they think they can get a lot done. And I think what, you know, at least the framers of the US Constitution, particularly guys like Alexander Hamilton that looked at all prior governing structures and said how do we fashion something where nobody can gain ultimate power because ultimate power is corrupting you know This idea is losing favor in the world and it's losing favor because the most powerful Country in the world is no longer

the United States. It's now China and its ability to move the narrative in its favor means that this lust for liberty that came out of the American revolution and really found a home in so many nations afterwards. We've been in existence over 240 years, but all of that is now lost its luster. And even within the United States, you have the citizens of the United States saying, and not without, you know, the Chinese being very involved in how they accelerate that, you know, social unraveling that we are losing that, you know, what I would call, you know, lust

for freedom, that really motivated our ancestors to create this system. And so, you know, when I say, you know, China is the most existential threat that um... not just america but democracies ever faced i really believe that because it's not about tanks moving through the fold of gap it's not about the armed might of the soviet union it's really about us losing our lust for the constitutional protections that our ancestors devise because they were concerned about a government having power over the people

you know we have people like Arnold Schwarzenegger who came from former you know communist country comes the United States finds enormous wealth saying you know y'all to do exactly what the country says you know because of and then freedom who who wants this freedom? You know, everybody should give up their freedom for coronavirus. And won't know that the Constitution was not designed so that you just give up your freedoms for convenience. It's designed that if you give up your freedoms,

then what happens is tyranny. And essentially, you know, once you give, once you give a politician an inch, they're going to take it a mile. I see from a politician's perspective, why a dictatorship would be so seductive, right? Because it democracies, it's there's so much friction. I'm going to get people to agree all this voting, all the campaigning, all of the problems with actually getting to hear what people want and then having to be accountable

for making sure that you deliver the thing that you said that you're going to give them. Like it does look from the outside looking in. If you forget about human welfare and decency and freedom and liberty and all that stuff, it actually does look like a pretty effortful way to run a country. However, yeah, I am. It's so interesting the way that these policies have sort of looped back around. But you talk about the magic shoes of technology. What are you referring to there?

Well, I mean, I think what they are saying is these, when you look at the US in terms of warfare, we had kind of what's called the first offset, which was nuclear weapons. And ICBM technology, the second offset was this use of GPS, stealth with aircraft, networking, computers. And we were talking about in 2013, 2014 at the Pentagon about the third offset. What was the third offset going to be? And I think what it's related to where the internet, where they thought the internet was going.

And in particular, this ability to target the individual. So John Warden talks about what you should go after in terms of attacking a society in order to have a successful military campaign. One of the things that you should not go after is the population, right? Because rather than so bombing the population really turns them against the people bombing them, not the leaders of the country. If you're trying to create a political outcome, then you need to go after the leaders of the country because there's the ones that are going to make the political decision based on

the pressure you put on them. If you put it on the population, it's going to reinforce the rule of the political elite because it's going to garner the people's support against whoever is bombing them. So military force is not a good tool for getting the population behind you. And what these two PLA kernels, Tena kernels saw was, you know, the internet is a way to go after the population on an individual basis. So if I can get you to change your perceptions, your intentions, your behaviors, using the internet. Now I've got a tool to really change the game of warfare, which is warfare being a political endeavor. And if you can use populism as a way to go after the ruling elite, and you can take these tools that were created in Silicon

Valley and go after the population in a way that their perceptions, their intentions, their behaviors are modified in such a way that, you know, now, like, and here's an example of the way that we used force in the Coast of the War. So we basically, in a nutshell, went after the assets of the elite supporting Milosevic. And we started just taking away. Night after night, we were sending B2s to Belgrade and other parts of Serbia to take away their assets. And pretty quickly, they realized,

hey, I'm not gonna have anything if we don't stop this and Milosevic ended up being tried for war crimes. Well, you can also go after the population using the internet and begin to get these same kind of outcomes. And that's what the Chinese, so when you talk about the magic shoes of technology, you know, we're moving from, you know, how do you take a airplane and make it the ultimate weapon on Earth for, you know, using you take a airplane and make it the ultimate weapon on earth for you know using force to get a political outcome to how do i take this you know information technology and use that as a weapon to get my outcome and at far less risk and at far less cost and accept targeting the elites which i'm doing doing with the military force. I'm targeting the population.

And all I want to do is get them number one to not be aligned, as one cohesive whole. And number two, the narratives that they believe are less and less supporting of the governing structure of that system they're in. So it's a perfect technology. If you think about it, it's a perfect, if you think about it, you know, it's a perfect, it's a perfect technology and that's what, you know, that's what they were talking about. You've just described the last five years

of media communications. Bingo. That's what it's felt like, you know, a lack of trust in the officials that are supposed to run the country, a lack of faith in the organizations that are supposed to dispense country, a lack of faith in the organizations that are supposed to dispense the news and the media to us, a lack of understanding or even agreement

around what true means, a lack of faith that the other people that are in the country agree with you or want the same things that are good for the country, a lack of agreement about what is good for the country, mutual fractioning and distaste and yeah, I mean, so I learned about the Internet Research Agency, Russia's sort of cyber disinformation unit, and that seemed pretty sophisticated, just how aggressive and mature is China's disinformation process. information process? Well, I mean, the Russians are like, I mean, it's like trying to compare, you know,

you know, J. Paul Getty and you know, some guy that runs a local convenience store. You know, so the guy that runs a local convenience store He may have a little bit of throwaway, but it's not like a Getty. And you know, so that's the different So they have the same kind of, you know, maybe intent in terms of what they're trying to do, but getty can do it on a much bigger scale. And that's the thing with China. The other thing, you know, where the media is involved,

go look at who the top five media companies are in the United States, and then go look at who their shareholders are, and then go look at those shareholders and look at their relationships with China. And you begin to see the problem, right? So that's the goal of your realization part. Have you ever seen the map of Disney and how much stuff it owns? You can go and look online and there's a super high quality image.

The reason it needs to be super high quality is that when you look at it normal sized, everything's in type 0.1 font, and you zoom in and you realize that you thought you were getting a varied meal. No, you're not getting a varied meal. It's all coming from the same tree at the very, very top. Right, and that's essentially what's happening with the media.

And it's a tragedy too. It is, we look at the media as a fourth of state in the United States, and it's supposed to be the honest broker. It's supposed to step in and say, okay, this is what the government's telling you. This is what's actually going on. Because anybody that's done policy in Washington DC can tell you that policy comes from corporate

and comes from financial institutions it doesn't come from you know the uh... good intentions uh... citizen servants that come citizen servants that come to washington dc i mean they may come with this idea of they're going to change things. If they don't lose that lust for serving the people, what they end up doing, I've seen

a lot of people do this, they just end up leaving. They're like, I'm so frustrated, I can't get anything done. People don't care. And the ones that end up staying, they stay because they become enriched by it. And so, in many ways, and there's a good book, Catherine Gale, who was a businesswoman in Wisconsin, had a food company, had an epiphany one day when she was working on a strategy for her company. So she wrote this book called The Politics Industry. And so if you look at China as kind of a one party authoritarian system, you know, Catherine Gail makes a very compelling argument that America has become a dual party authoritarian

system, where the parties actually fight not amongst each other, they fight amongst others, right? So they're basically the idea that the democrats and the republicans don't uh... agree on the issues is more or less the theater that's put on that allows them to have the control over the policy that actually gets made and so um... and it when you think about it from a just a foreign policy sense uh... having been in this for a long time and national security policy. You see that whether you're on the Democratic side or Republican side, the policies tend to be pretty similar.

And then when you get right down the brass tax, like how are we going to do telecom policy in the United States? How are we going to do energy policy in the United States? There's a lot of There's a lot of industry influence on how those things get done. So, the left and right is performative disagreement. It's performative disagreement in order to prevent any kind of real change that benefits, those that aren't in the ruling elite is the best way to and and I You know having seen this on the policy side and seeing how effective That corporations were in financial institutions were and getting what they want and how ineffective You know the average citizen was in getting what they want it just really, you know, the average citizen was in getting what they want.

It just really brought home to me the power of, you know, how we've, we've basically used the rules to create a duopoly in the United States. So there's some appearance of, you know, that you have a choice but in reality a lot of these people are Have in some respects they're incentivized to maintain the system as is because they profit from it Well, the illusion of choice is a great way to make people feel like there's nothing to rise up against the problem Isn't the system writ large the problem is those Democrats or those Republicans or whatever talking about the military spending early on China had a strategy of limited military spending for a while didn't it?

Well, I mean, I don't know what you mean by limited, you know, there's, I guess in the sense that it did study the Soviet Union and it did realize that the mistake the Soviets made were to spend 40% of GDP on the military. So limited yes, I guess what they were trying to do is make sure that the social contract in China is this. If you agree to give up your liberties to have anything to say with how the countries run, we endeavor as a Chinese Communist Party to provide for you, to provide a job. as a Chinese Communist Party to provide for you, you know, to provide a job. And as long as you give up those liberties, that's the social contract. And so in order to do that, you know, they kept military spending at a modest level. That being said, you know, they don't spend on R&D because they still everything. And the, the, um,

rent and B is such that, you know, the purchasing power parity with regard to the US and China means that every dollar, you know, you know, every yuan spent is like, you know, six dollars, six American dollars. And so I think, you know, while yes, they have, you know, in, in aggregate, they've spent less year over year than the United States.

Considerably less. I think what they get out of it is a lot more. And really, their goal was not so much to be a military power until the time was right. Right? So they until they had grown the productivity of their society sufficiently. Now, what they saw after World War II is the US had the supply chain. On the supply chain, you dictate to the world. They wanted on the supply chain. Now they do.

Now they can start to build their military, which are seen that start to accelerate. They've just started to expand, right? So it looks like they're really aggressively. Are they looking for getting ready for a conventional conflict, do you think? Oh, yeah, they're going to invade Taiwan. That's coming. It's without a doubt. And the power that in might that they have accrued over the last 20 years is staggering.

It is, I mean, I'm not kidding when you could basically cover every square inch of Taiwan with the weaponry that they've developed. It's going to make it. It's just invasion of Ukraine. Oh my gosh. It's, and they don't care about the people, right? So if you don't care about the people, all you want is the land because it, because it fits your narrative, what you promise to the Chinese people, you keep us in power, we're going to restore us to greatness. One of them is basically getting back Taiwan. They have the built, and any base that we have in the region will be leveled to dust if we get in the way.

I just don't think people realize how much they've built over the last 20, 30 years. It's amazing. It's just it's amazing It's incredible. What's happening in the South China Sea at the moment? Well, I mean part of the South China Sea is controlling the resources of the South China Sea, but also being able to have So back in the 80s The Chinese Communist Party gave an order to the PLA. Hey We want sorry. What's the PLA? The people's liberation army, the military. So the given order to the military to control the South China Sea. And what the PLA came back and said is like, we don't

have the resources. Like, you know, in order for us to maintain control of the South China Sea, you know, we would need to have aircraft carriers. We don't have aircraft carriers. We don't have a Navy We just don't have the resources and so the South China Sea islands were really fulfilling an order that the PLA had received you know decades earlier and That China that China just had finally had the resources to actually go out and build. So they just built them for aircraft carriers that don't move. And now they have the planes, they have the ships, they have the fuel, they have the logistics, they have everything they need

to be sustained down there and control it. The other thing that the other challenge in terms of that China has with regard to Taiwan is they know that they can be cut off from resources energy resources raw material so they built the belt and wrote initiative which is essentially away and and they describe it as we're going to look west and what what that means is you know bringing oil through the straight and melaka is really how they get energy

well that can easily be blockaded by submarines right so now how do I get my energy well I want to have this belt and road initiative that allows me to go into Pakistan going to Iran go into North Africa and Middle East and get my resources another way so that you can't block me out in the straight of my lockets. It also has to do with Russia, Eastern, Central Asia. It's really getting all the resources from there and allowing the Chinese to really have an alternative source for raw materials and energy and food when they invade Taiwan. So when you look at what happened when Russia invaded Ukraine, part of the benefit that the Chinese get to see in watching the Russians invade Ukraine is to see the response of the West, right?

What are the things that the West does? Because what China wanted to do is, if I can see that response then I know what to plan for. Oh, you think that that was a dry run for Taiwan. I think it's a dry run for Taiwan. And that's why you think about it from the Chinese perspective. That's why because Putin went to Xi and basically she said, hey, wait until after the Olympics, but he got the green light light from she what she wanted out that was to see you know how the not just how the russian military performed

uh... because i would say that the chinese military much more professional much more uh... much better equipped much better trained then the russians but it's also like how the how's the west going to react and in some, you know, I mean, sitting back as a strategist, right, I'm watching this play out, I'm like, and you know, you're like, okay, this really, this bad thing's going to happen over here,

and I have this, you know, bad thing happening right here, and you're like, should I go in guns blazing here, and let that guy know that's gonna be even a bigger problem, know what my guns are, you know, you're looking at this, and you're like watching it happen in real time, like why are we showing them this? Right, we should not be, it should not be guns blazes, because Russia's not the power.

They've got an economy less in the size of Texas. China is the power. They are basically getting all and we've taken out the playbook and thrown the whole thing in at Russia and now we have nothing left. And not only that, but now China is beginning to take its kind of the way it looks at its sphere of the world and beginning to create the mechanisms. So when they move into Taiwan, we're going to be like, I can't do that one, I can't do that one, I can't do that one, and we're just going to be sitting there and people are going to be upset.

They're going to be frustrated. Like why can we not do something? Well the reason we can't do anything is because we showed all our cards vis-a-vis Russia and i'm that i'm not saying this is hey we shouldn't support you crane i'm just telling you what we've done is we've gave in we've given the chinese the keys to victory uh... over time one without ever having to really break a sweat i mean that's the thing that scares me.

This is one of those videos that resurfaces online three years later in the middle of a crisis and everybody goes, the signs were there. The signs were there. This everybody knew it and go, okay. It really is, it's a combination of all and dread that I kind of look at what China is able to do. It is unbelievably sophisticated and very, very impressive.

The only problem is that it's being used to facilitate a regime that a lot of us don't want to have happen. It is pretty, pretty scary. One of the other things that I thought about, and I've seen stories on, was their role in the fentanyl crisis that was happening in America. How sophisticated or purposeful was that? Well, the beauty of China, again, the systems engineering to society, right?

Getting people to do things that are in no interest and making sure that the things that they don't do, they don't do because they know there will be consequences. So it doesn't matter where you're going in the world today. If you're getting fentanyl, it comes from the same place. It comes from China. And it comes from not from, like in the US Midwest, where you got a guy in a

trailer house out in the middle of nowhere, you know, blowing himself up. It's coming in factories, right? They're making it in factories. And so, and so you're like, well, how is it that China doesn't have a fentanyl problem? If that's the source, how is it there's no fentanyl problem in China? Well, they're easy. The Chinese know that they're making fentanyl problem in China? Well, very easy. The Chinese know that they're making fentanyl, they can make all they want, and they can profit off it all they want. Just don't sell it in China or they end up dead. So, and so really,

what the Chinese, they have a really, when it comes to how you make your money, they don't care as long as it doesn't impact the party, right? If you don't, if you make your money they don't care as long as it doesn't impact the party. If you don't impact the party, then you'll have at it. If it actually helps the party, even better. So if you can get rich and it helps the party, even better. One of the most sick examples of this is organ harvesting in Chinese prisons. Who are having their organs harvested?

Healthy people. Who are the healthy people? Their religious dissidents, the fallen gong, the weggers. So you get in there, you live a healthy lifestyle, you're a good candidate for organ transplant, boom, you're dead, what's take your organs and sell them. Guess what? The people that run the prisons and the hospitals get to make the tens of thousands of dollars from selling your organs, okay?

So they get rich, but the party gets rid of their enemy, which is these religious, what they call religious, fanatics, sick, terrible, but, you know, and it works in the system. Fentanyl is the same way. You have the Chinese pharmaceutical companies making the, making the drugs, selling it through the triads and the cartels. So that's the distribution mechanism. Because I was wondering how it is that China gets it out of their country and into America. Yeah, so the triads are a big part of it. Sam Cooper who's a Investigative journalist in Canada wrote a good book willful blindness talks about, you know You know how it works at least in Canada. I wish he'd come in the United States and and and do the same thing and I wish he'd come in the United States and do the same thing.

And then because in the United States it's killing people, you know, great. And the way, so this is why this warfare, this type of warfare is so effective. The DOJ, the FBI, they look at drugs as a born behavior. It's criminal behavior outside the norm. Remember, we said, we're going to try and systemize things and we're going to get rid of a born behavior. Our system basically expects citizens to act in the best, they expect citizens to be lawful. They expect citizens to act in their own best interests, which also happen to be in the best interests of the society.

And therefore, the only ones that are gonna be doing these bad things are people that are bad. And so let's create a system that where everybody's trusted and then the bad people we just go after and we catch them or criminals and we lock them up. Well, when you look at that and you say, hey, this is just criminal behavior, but it's supported by a system that's systemic, then you don't have either the perception or the tools to deal with it.

The analogy that I like to use is, I tell people, they say, what if your dad came home and he said, hey, we got a big ant hill in the backyard. I don't want you to go to Ant Hill. And you go out there and you set up an ambush point where the ants are walking by and you start killing ants. And your dad comes home later in the afternoon and he says, well, how did you get rid of the ant hill? And like, how successful have you been?

And you say, well, you say, I had set up this ambush point, and I was killed, I'm 100% effect. Every ant has come by this in the last several hours. I've killed every, I'm 100% effect that I'm really doing a good job, dad. And he's like, but the ant hill is still there, right? So it's the same thing for FBI. If they lock up a criminal, boom, win.

And my statistics are i keep locking up more and more criminals but are you slowing the flow of fentanyl to the united states no they're not it's actually increasing so what's going on there well it's a systemic thing and i so in order to get you know the chinese comies party runs everything in china in order to to get the chinese Communist Party to stop shipping fentanyl to the United States, it has to be painful on the elites.

And what the Chinese have done is when you inflict pain on the Chinese elites, you're also inflicting pain on your own elites, right? We move the supply chain over there. So the way that you get the Chinese to stop shipping you fentanyl, as you say, you're not gonna ship anything to this country until the fentanyl stops, right? What happens? Your own elites come to you and say,

we can't have that because I'm gonna lose money, right? So right away you've cut off any ability that you have to solve this problem because it's a systemic problem. People in China are getting rich. People in America are dying. That means that you're doing well individually. The party's doing well because it sees the U.S. as an enemy. And we've created a system that really prevents us from doing anything about it. Other than just like we were talking about between Republicans and Democrats in a performative

basis, right? The FBI can try to, hey, we arrested these three people or we got the Chinese to arrest three people, which by the way are out in two weeks. So it's warfare on a different label and you have to basically take a step back and say, and when I, so when I went to China, I did not think this way. I completely believed that our relationship with China was in that good. I wanted to go back to China and work there. And it wasn't until I really started to understand

the Chinese Communist Party when I was working in the Pentagon later on that I really began to see. You have to look at the problem differently. If you don't look at the problem differently, then slowly, you know, what those business in Shanghai were telling me that we're going to make China and us, no, they're going to make us into them. And that's the problem. You've got this quote from Sun Su on how to deploy a stealth war in your book.

It says, all warfare is based on deception. Let your plans be dark and impenetrable as night, and when you move, fall like a thunderbolt. He advocates using spies and agents to study and demoralize the enemy to the point when an attack comes, the outcome is decided. Attack a defeated enemy, he cancels. The army is the coop de grass. Hearing that makes me pretty scared and it also makes me think that I'm guessing if we got to the stage where China actually declared a war, it would already be too late. Yeah, I would be, we would basically capitulate. I mean, that's their goal is to basically

say, you know, things are over. But, you know, that being said, they're pretty good at just, you know, so if war is the way we think of war, it's a political out, it's politics by the means, if slowly you're getting the political outcomes that you want. And so by the point where you would need to go to war, you already find that your adversary agrees with you, there is no point for war. And so, you know, things that blow my mind, like just blow my mind, that I found out in the last two years is Imperial College of London, you know, which puts out, put out the epidemiology model that said, you know, all these people are going to die from coronavirus.

Now, I looked at that model and I compared it to the data coming out of Italy. Italy was very hard hit very early on with the coronavirus, but the model was so out of whack from what the data you were actually seeing in Italy. I'm like, this is crazy. This is not, this, this, this num, the model is not correct. Well, the model is what was used to basically get us to accept that lockdowns and all these other measures are required. What blew my mind and what I didn't know until Michael Singer had done research and presented it to me is that in 2015,

Xi Jinping had gone to the Imperial College of London. That the Chinese Communist Party was giving them tens of million dollars at Neo Ferguson, the epidemiologist that was putting out the models was basically on the payroll of the Chinese Communist Party. You want to talk about deception? I mean, that's beautiful. It's beautiful. You get your, the fear that you want to create comes right out of your enemy's own mouth. I mean, that's, that is sophistication. Dude, it's terrifying. It's terrifying.

You've blown my mind today. I really, really enjoyed the book. If people want to keep up to date with what you do and find out more, why should they go? I'm on Twitter at Robert underscore, Spalding, no you in Spalding. And I'm on LinkedIn and Instagram, general Sp... linkedin and uh... and instagram general spawning uh... general spawning dot com's my website and uh... and you'll see the book

there general spawning i appreciate you thank you thank you you