February 18, 2020—Urgent Need to Counter China!

“. . . don’t lose sight of the competition from China that is already present in your state. Let’s all rise to the occasion and protect our security, our economy, indeed all that we hold dear.” ~ Secretary of State Mike Pompeo

The news is full of reports on the coronavirus that originated in China, including reports that Chinese authorities have withheld honest reporting on the origin, magnitude and status of this global threat that is claiming deaths outside of China, including of Americans.

Click here for a recent report that the Joint Chiefs of Staff has issued an executive order (EO) calling on the United States Northern Command to start preparing for a full-blown pandemic of the Wuhan coronavirus (CoVid-19) here on American soil. So, this is a very serious matter!

Whatever the truth of this source of this spreading coronavirus danger, China’s leaders have long been dedicated to replacing America as the world’s preeminent power. Click here for a Wikipedia discussion about Michael Pillsbury, who’s authoritative book is presciently entitled, “The Hundred Year Marathon: China’s Secret Strategy to Replace America as the Global Superpower.”

Michael has been studying China for decades and is one of America’s leading authorities on China—and has long warned about China’s threat. He is a regular adviser to President Trump as he engages in current negotiations with Xi Jinping, China’s President and Chairman of its Communist Party. I hope the President is paying attention to Michael’s assessment and recommendations.

Click here for last week’s message that focused on comments by Secretary Pompeo and Attorney General Bill Barr that emphasized the threat is already posed by China—a threat that reaches to every state of the nation. Most of last week’s message reported on Attorney General Barr’s comments.

Click here for a video of Secretary Pompeo’s speech to the National Association of Governors, emphasizing the urgent need for them to pay attention to the threat to their states from China. A most notable Pompeo statement in that speech to remember is

“It’s happening in your state with consequences for our foreign policy, for citizens who reside in your states, and indeed for each of you. . . The Chinese Government has been methodical in the way it’s analyzed our system . . . It’s assessed our vulnerabilities, and it’s decided to exploit our freedoms to gain advantage over us at the federal level, the state level, and the local level.”

This past weekend, Secretary of Defense Mark Esper joined these cabinet level spokesmen who have gone public with this long-standing threat from China. Click here for his important speech to the Munich Security Conference of a high-level international collection political-military leaders. From my perspective, most notable of many of his many important comments, was that he immediately referenced the National Security Strategy and emphasized that:

“[W]e are now in an era of Great Power Competition, with our principal challengers being China, then Russia, and that we must move away from low intensity conflict and prepare once again for high-intensity warfare.”

SecDef Esper then spent the bulk of his speech discussing this, the “Pentagon’s top concern:” The Peoples Republic of China (PRC).

He noted the change in our policies with respect to China 20 years ago, that led to China becoming a member of the World Trade Organization (WTO)—hoping that China’s economic reform movement would lead to a market-oriented trading partner. It didn’t happen. And he noted that, “under President Xi’s rule, the Chinese Communist Party is heading even faster and further in the wrong direction.”

These concerns have been obvious to some of us for some time—and led me to become a charter member of the Committee on the Present Danger China (CPDC), dedicated to raising this concern to all who will listen. Click here for information on this intended revival of the original Committee on the President Danger (CPD) that I also joined, which warned about the danger from the Soviet Union.

Many CPD members of both Political Parties became influential members of the Reagan Administration and became leaders in the Reagan revolution that brought an end to the Soviet Union. We hope to see a repeat performance re. the current and growing threat from the Communist leadership of China. Here is a brief summary of what we are about.

“The Committee on the Present Danger: China” is a wholly-independent and non-partisan effort to educate and inform American citizens and policymakers about the existential threats presented from the Peoples Republic of China under the misrule of the Chinese Communist Party. Its purpose is to explain these threats that range from: the PRC’s accelerating military buildup; its active information and political warfare that targets the American people and our business, political and media elites; cyber warfare; and, economic warfare.

The Committee takes no ideological point of view, rather it relies on the facts as reasonable people can understand them. Armed with these facts, the Committee believes Americans’ abundant common sense will prompt them to demand of their elected officials that all reasonable measures be taken to defend the United States, its vital economic interests, and the security of its citizens.”

Currently, CPDC is conducting special threat briefings in the “Primary States.” Having had successful briefings in Iowa and New Hampshire, they will be in Columbia later today; and I will be joining them at 0900 in Room 110 of the Blatt Building of the SC Capitol, 1105 Pendleton Street, to discuss this important issue.

Click here for the press release for this important event. Among other things, I will emphasize that we are playing “catch-up” to China in building the space systems we need.

As Incredible as it may seem, we abandoned the most important innovations of President Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) in early 1993, when the Clinton Administration “took the stars out of Star Wars,” as Defense Secretary Les Aspin boasted. And no administration (Democrat or Republican) has since reversed that terrible mistake.

But our key technology found its way to China, as is discussed in Appendix B of the 2009 report from the Independent Working Group report on Missile Defense, the Space Relationship and the Twenty First Century. It can be read by clicking here. Meanwhile, we remained asleep at the switch.

Moreover, the Trump administration also seems to be stuck in this same mode, even though President Trump successfully advocated a U.S. Space Force. I dealt with this key issue in my February 13, 2020 Newsmax article that urged Congress to rectify this serious mistake.

Trump Budget Doesn’t Address Space-Based Missile Defense

By Henry F. Cooper, Newsmax, Thursday, 13 February 2020 10:17 AM Current | Bio | Archive https://www.newsmax.com/henryfcooper/donaldtrump-budget-missiledefense/2020/02/13/id/953946/

President Donald Trump applauds as the flag for the new the U.S. Space Command is revealed in the Rose Garden at the White House August 29. (Getty Images)

According to the February 11, 2020 Defense News, President Trump’s Ballistic Missile Defense (BMD) budget request for 2021 includes steps that I very much applaud. But it omits at least one important initiative that, in my opinion, is key to very effective missile defense systems, especially to support the president’s new Space Force.

I trust Congress will carefully scrub this proposal and, while supporting key initiatives, also rectify at least one of its shortcomings. I especially hope Congress: 1. acknowledges the shortcomings of the current Ground Based Midcourse Defense, as indicated by the president’s budget that reinforces previous decisions canceling upgrade efforts for that deficient effort; and 2. enhances programs to provide more cost-effective ways to base our ballistic missile defense systems, as I have argued previously in these pages.

For decades, we have invested most of our missile defense resources in building the least effective, most expensive defenses against ballistic missiles — ground-based interceptor systems, while ignoring or short-changing much more cost-effective alternatives, especially those based at sea and in space.

This bias reflected the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty that made protecting the American people illegal. And the ABM Treaty limited even those ineffective ground-based defenses.

In the mid-1990s, I chaired a Heritage Foundation “Team B” that reviewed the merits of the then extant and anticipated advanced technology for defending Americans at home and abroad, as well as our overseas troops, allies and friends. Our Team B panel included previous directors, program managers and technology leaders of President Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), members of congress, and private sector technical experts.

The Heritage Foundation published three comprehensive 1995-98 reports, all noting the deficiencies and expense of ground-based defenses and recommending building as quickly as possible more effective global defenses, “first from the sea and then from space.”

And we argued the ABM Treaty should be abandoned as quickly as possible.

We strongly supported the sea-based Aegis BMD program, which began on my watch as SDI director. It focused on defending our troops, friends and allies against short- and medium-range ballistic missiles — a limited focus because the ABM Treaty banned space-based, sea-based and mobile land-based defenses to protect Americans in our homeland. That sea-based defenses could defend against intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) was clear.

Thus, once the George W. Bush administration withdrew from the ABM Treaty in 2002, Retired Vice Admiral J.D. Williams (who was a member of the Heritage Team B) and I began advocating widely that the Aegis BMD system be given an ability to protect Americans in our homeland, including as a much less expensive way to defend the Eastern Seaboard than building a Northeastern ground-based BMD system..

Its first-generation Standard Missile-3 Block IA interceptor proved the merits of our case when, in a fast-paced effort from a standing start approved by Bush in 2008, Operation Brunt Frost intercepted a threatening satellite travelling faster than an ICBM. Its inherent capability has improved during the subsequent 12 years — as the Block IA morphed into the Block IB into the Block IIA, which is now operational.

But that inherent capability was not exploited to protect the American people at home — until now. Thankfully, President Trump’s 2021 budget request explicitly seeks to exploit Aegis BMD, at least in a ground-based mode, to protect Americans at home.

This “Aegis Ashore” capability is being deployed to protect Hawaii (since it has been tested there for years) and is operational in Poland and Romania. It’s about time we exploit it to protect the continental United States.

Aegis Ashore sites around the Gulf of Mexico to protect against launches from the vessels in the Gulf would be very important. We should also consider how to exploit the sea-based Aegis BMD system to defend Americans at home — say when our Aegis BMD ships are in American ports or near the American coasts. The cost of this defense should be less than building a dedicated East Coast BMD site like those in Alaska and California.

So — thanks to the president’s 2021 Budget Request, we could be on the verge of getting the first step of our Heritage Team B recommendation for a “Global Defense, First from the Sea and then From Space.”

But there is no sign that the Trump administration is moving toward the second objective — space-based defenses. And such defenses will be essential to the viability of the president’s Space Force, as discussed previously. We emphasized we knew how to build such cost-effective global defenses 30 years ago — in response to Reagan’s insistence that his SDI explore all technological ways to achieve such a capability.

We were on a path to success — until the Democrats in Congress and then in the Clinton administration cancelled those important activities that were producing convincing capabilities. Regrettably, Reagan’s most cost-effective vision for defending against ballistic missile attack has remained dormant ever since — in both Democrat and Republican administrations.

Regrettably, President Trump’s budget request for 2021 is no different in this regard than its predecessors. Will Congress address this failure?

Bottom Lines.

China poses an existential threat to U.S. National Security — in my view a much greater threat than Russia. And it’s long past time that we awoke to that threat, which has critically important economic and military components.

The Trump administration is seeking to change the course it inherited from decades of inadequate recognition of our growing peril—in both Democrat and Republican administrations.

We have been in this position before and Americans have come through when it was needed. And it is needed again—to confront the threat from China.

What can you do?

Join us in praying for our nation, and for a rebirth of the freedom sought, achieved and passed to us by those who came before us.

Help us to spread our message to the grass roots and to encourage all “powers that be” to provide for the common defense as they are sworn to do.

Begin by passing this message to your friends and suggest they visit our webpage www.highfrontier.org, for more information. Also, please encourage your sphere of influence to sign up for our weekly e-newsletter.

Encourage them to review our past email messages, posted on www.highfrontier.org, to learn about many details related to the existential manmade and natural EMP threats and how we can protect America against them. I hope you will help us with our urgently needed efforts, which I will be discussing in future messages.

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