Bill Tallen

Many Americans relaxed into complacency and normalcy bias after the end of the Cold War, when America seemed ascendant and untouchable: the world’s sole “hyperpower.” The wake-up call came 10 years later, in 2001, when we got touched, hard. After 20-plus years of constant warfare against an enemy we would not even allow ourselves to name, we should have lost all remaining illusions of invulnerability.  

I’ve written here about the war in Ukraine, the impending China-Taiwan conflict, and a soon-to-be-nuclear Iran. America is a major player in all of these crises, and elsewhere as well, and has deep vulnerabilities and no assurance of security or success. This is about those vulnerabilities and the threats that target them — from within, on the home front, and I’m not talking about political polarization, protests and budget fights. The next war may be fought at home as much as overseas.  

In 1999, two Chinese colonels wrote a book titled “Unrestricted Warfare.” Influenced by the apparent U.S. mastery of conventional warfare in the first Iraq war of 1991, the authors noted, in the words of one reviewer, “It is possible to be very good at warfare [the business of military action] … without being good at war [the application of force to achieve political objectives],” citing as examples Napoleonic France, Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. Now unfortunately, we could add the United States to that list. We win battles, but not wars.

Those Chinese officers recommended a wider approach to war: targeting trade, finance, ecology (wildfires?), morale and psychology, the media, networks, power grids, technology, industrial production and critical resources; through means that would include terrorism, sabotage, smuggling, drugs, diplomacy and even international law. Scholars still debate the extent to which that book has influenced Chinese strategy, but from a common sense perspective, it looks like they have been waging war on us for at least two decades. 

“China will do everything in its power to ensure it never gives a superpower adversary its preferred mode of warfare,” the reviewer says. Instead, if they choose to fight us, it will be where we are most vulnerable. Cyber warfare can be conducted from anywhere, though a judicious application of high-explosives at, for instance, data centers could contribute. While the power grid could be attacked by a nuclear EMP detonation in low orbit, there are simpler ways, harder to trace positively to their source, that would not run the risk of using a nuclear weapon with a return address. A still-unsolved series of attacks on power substations in California in recent years may have been a trial run: destroying transformers with rifle shots from outside the fence. Technology now also allows the “surgical” use of short-range directional EMP weapons mounted on motor vehicles.

The potential scope of such an asymmetric, unrestricted Chinese threat became clear in 2023 and 2024 from warnings about the number of unaccompanied Chinese males of military age and bearing, who were crossing the open U.S. southern border. Estimates of their number top 10,000, and they are most likely soldiers of their Strategic Support Force (SSF), special operations troops capable of a wide spectrum of direct actions against American military targets and civilian infrastructure, that could include roads, rail, bridges, ports, dams, water and wastewater systems, energy production and distribution, and more. All this could be calibrated to disrupt or discourage U.S. intervention in a Chinese war on Taiwan, without causing enough deep, lasting damage to provoke a general, possibly nuclear war.

The other current threat on U.S. soil originates in the Middle East and Southwest Asia: an alliance of Islamist terrorist organizations that has grown and solidified since the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan. Their operators, like the Chinese, have infiltrated across our border by the thousands. Reputable sources tell of indications that their attack plans and deployments are essentially complete, awaiting only the order to begin (for light breakfast reading, see ‘The Gathering Storm’ available from Amazon). With ample funding and technical support from allies like Iran, Pakistan, and Taliban-governed Afghanistan, this network is capable of targeting critical infrastructure; but they have long favored simple and brutal mass casualty attacks like the Oct. 7, 2023 attack on Israel or the New Year’s Day, 2025 vehicular attack in New Orleans. Imagine hundreds or thousands of such attacks, nationwide; Wyoming would not be spared.

Counterterrorism as a priority seems to have taken a back seat to the immigration crisis, and to our ongoing, internal civil and political differences. Time to raise awareness and refocus may be short. As an ancient classic once put it, “Readiness is everything. Resolution is indissolubly bound up with caution. If an individual is watchful at all times, even before danger is present, he is armed when danger approaches and need not be afraid.”