New Battlefields for a New World
Pastor Dale Morgan
New Battlefields for a New World*
Apr 23nd, 2007 8:56 AM
April 22, 2007
Sue Bradley
In 1999, Colonels Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui, of China’s People’s
Liberation Army (PLA), published an obscure volume detailing the many
methods China and other countries hostile to the US may use in
combination or independently to wage total war against the US or the
North American continent entirely, many which involve non military methods.
"Unrestricted Warfare," initially received little attention by western
nations despite author Qiao Liang’s premise that, "the first rule of
unrestricted warfare is that there are no rules, [with] nothing [is]
forbidden."
The book carefully catalogues a multitude of means, both military and
particularly non-military, to strike at the United States to incite
conflict or use during times of preoccupation or unrest. Hacking into
websites, targeting financial institutions, terrorism, using the media,
and conducting urban warfare are among the methods proposed.
New-concept weapons primarily include kinetic-energy weapons,
directed-energy weapons, subsonic weapons, geophysical weapons,
meteorological weapons, solar energy weapons, and gene weapons.
Microbots, computer viruses and currency collapse can inflict paralyzing
devastation with minimal expense and effort.
Factor in the warnings from US Senator John Kyl, Chairman of the Senate
Subcommittee on Terrorism, Technology and Homeland Security who wrote,
"An electromagnetic pulse (EMP) attack on the American homeland, said
one of the distinguished scientists who testified at the hearing, is one
of only a few ways that the United States could be defeated by its
enemies -- terrorist or otherwise. And it is probably the easiest. A
single Scud missile, carrying a single nuclear weapon, detonated at the
appropriate altitude, would interact with the Earth's atmosphere,
producing an electromagnetic pulse radiating down to the surface at the
speed of light."
Joining Sen. Kyl is Rep. Roscoe Bartlett, Chairman of the House
Projection Forces Subcommittee, who says an EMP attack - even by an
underfunded comparatively unsophisticated terrorist group and would have
the potential to cripple the US infrastructure and kill millions.
Bartlett continued, "Today we are very much concerned ... about
asymmetric weapons. We are a big, powerful country. Nobody can contend
with us shoulder-to-shoulder, face-to-face. So all of our potential
adversaries are looking for what we refer to as asymmetric weapons. That
is a weapon that overcomes our superior capabilities. There is no
asymmetric weapon that has anywhere near the potential of EMP."
FEMA notes, "An EMP acts like of stroke of lightning but is stronger,
faster and shorter." Known as a "blackout bomb," an EMP would affect
communication systems, economic networks, electrical appliances,
automobile and aircraft ignition systems and have a catastrophic
cascading effect, simultaneously disabling interdependent infrastructure
sectors. It would functionally collapse the US, as well as her northern
and southern neighbor, rendering them ripe for the resultant chaos and
'recovery' which would hopefully ensue.
Dr. Lowell L. Wood, acting Chairman of the Commission to Assess the
Threat to the United States from Electromagnetic Pulse Attack described
the nature of an EMP attack, "...electromagnetic pulses propagate from
the burst point of the nuclear weapon to the line of sight on the
Earth's horizon, potentially covering a vast geographic
region...simultaneously, at the speed of light. For example, a nuclear
weapon detonated at an altitude of 400 kilometers over the central
United States would cover, with its primary electromagnetic pulse, the
entire continent of the United States and parts of Canada and Mexico."
Even a decade ago, China was considered a threat of minimal consequence
as their military consisted primarily of WWII technology. Just as people
only grow older, militaries only modernize, but China has maintained the
older technology that the west has essentially abandoned in favor of
more technologically oriented weaponry, while China skillfully developed
equally advanced methods, and is now capable of responding to or
initiating with dual options.
The decade of the 90’s which saw brushfire conflicts such as Desert
Storm, Somalia and Bosnia-Herzegovina, abruptly ended on September 11,
2001. Indeed, the very goals of warfare have become blurred: no longer
are wars strictly territorial involving power and authority. There are
now disputes over ideologies, trade sanctions and financial and ethnic
unrest. "Battlefields" have become "battlespace," nonmilitary and remote
operations can now decimate more thoroughly than conventional weapons
producing effects and devastation exceeding even the most futuristic of
strategists.
The events that changed the world ultimately changed war itself. In an
astute summary of the new paradigm, General Fu Quanyou, chief of staff
for the PLA quietly asserted, "The inferior can defeat the superior."
And it is terrifyingly simple.