“We have no idea how they did this.” It’s not comforting that the preceding was uttered by a U.S. source in reference to an alleged new Chinese weapon: a hypersonic missile. But Beijing now claims it didn’t develop anything unusual, stating that what we detected circling the Earth this summer was a spacecraft.
In other words, our powers-that-be were caught flat-footed, mistook a spacecraft for a missile, or were for some reason lying.
Business Insider reported on the alleged new weapon Sunday:
China demonstrated advanced space capability by testing a nuclear-capable hypersonic missile in August, the Financial Times reported, citing five sources familiar with the test.
The hypersonic glide vehicle launched by the Chinese military circled the globe in low-orbit space before speeding towards its target, sources told the paper.
Although the missile missed its target by about two-dozen miles, the test demonstrated China’s advanced space capability and took US intelligence by surprise, sources told the Financial Times.
The test showed that China had made “astounding progress” on hypersonic weapons and was far more advanced than US officials realized, two sources said, according to the paper.
“We have no idea how they did this,” another source told the paper.
Several countries, including the US, Russia, and China, are competing to develop hypersonic weapons. The missiles fly at low-altitude trajectories at more than five times the speed of sound.
Glide vehicles are a type of hypersonic weapon launched into space on a rocket but orbit the earth under their momentum.
Unlike ballistic missiles, they are maneuverable and do not follow a fixed trajectory, making them harder to track and defend against.
Yet “China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesman Zhao Lijian rejected the reports on Monday, saying that the test … was ‘a spacecraft, not a missile,’ according to CNN,” the Washington Examiner informs.
“‘This test was a routine spacecraft experiment to verify the reusable technology of spacecraft, which is of great significance for reducing the cost of spacecraft use,’ the spokes[man] said,” the site continued. “It can provide a convenient and cheap way for humans to use space peacefully. Many companies in the world have carried out similar experiments.”
“He also noted that ‘what separated from the spacecraft before returning was the supporting equipment of the spacecraft, which was burned and disintegrated in the process of falling into the atmosphere and landed on the high seas,’” the Examiner further related.
It’s hard knowing what the truth is here. If U.S. intel really didn’t anticipate the development of a Chinese hypersonic weapon or really did mistake a routine spacecraft for one, it’s yet another misstep calling into question our “woke” government’s competence. On the other hand, it wouldn’t be surprising if the Chinese test did involve a spacecraft, and the Pentagon knew it, but lied to create the appearance of a looming threat and an impetus for greater military funding. (This presupposes, however, that the pseudo-elites would willingly make themselves look incompetent.)
As for the Chinese, it’s possible they did test a hypersonic missile but lied about it. This wouldn’t fool U.S. intel at this point, but could be PR designed to present a more non-threatening face to the world.
Regardless, the big picture remains the same: As I wrote in the 2014 essay “Is China the Next Evil Empire?” Beijing is by far our main geopolitical threat and appears poised to outstrip us in a host of ways. In fact, the Pentagon’s former software chief, Nicolas Chaillan, just resigned in protest over our military’s stunted artificial intelligence development; he said that cyber defenses in parts of our government are at “kindergarten level” and that he could not stand to watch China overtake America,” wrote the Financial Times.
Beijing has help, too. To wit: A video emerged last year of a Chinese professor talking about how Beijing has people working for them “at the top of America’s core inner circle of power and influence.”
Equally worrisome, though, is that you can’t focus on what makes sense when consumed with nonsense. And our top generals’ (e.g., Mark Milley’s) and other pseudo-elites’ focus on pushing “woke” ideology and “vaccine” mandates on the troops and on rooting out mythical “white privilege” must detract from battlefield readiness.
As to this, ex-Ivy League professor Thomas Lifson, who once taught East Asian Studies at Harvard University, relates an interesting and apropos historical parallel, writing:
Our military’s ideological corruption and focus on investing in at-best-irrelevant and at-worst-harmful initiatives surely must remind many Chinese leaders of their own history that proved disastrous in the late nineteenth century. At the time, Japan was aggressively modernizing and building up its military capacity, including a very capable navy. In response, a visionary senior official Li Hongzhang, created a Northern Fleet, purchasing 2 German battleships with 12 inch Krupp guns and 14 inch armor. But further work was starved of funds because the Empress Dowager Cixi wished to restore the Summer Palace northwest of Beijing for her retirement, and redirected the money to work there, notoriously including the 1893 reconstruction of a marble boat in a lake on the palace grounds.
In order to conceal the misappropriation of funds, the Imperial Household Department, with the necessary (and probably coerced) cooperation of Li Hongzhang, reported the expenditures as “naval funds.” Just like “gender reassignment surgery” is a “defense expenditure.”
The rest, as the saying goes, is history. A year-and-a-half later, on July 25, 1894, the Japanese Navy attacked China’s fleet and sank 2 ships, launching the First Sino-Japanese War. After 6 months of naval and land warfare, China sued for peace and, among other things, handed over Taiwan and Korea to Japan.
Now, China wants Taiwan back, and don’t for a second think that they have forgotten how they lost it in the first place, by squandering funds that should have been used for advanced weapons on useless baubles, of interest mostly to corrupt, decadent, and cowardly rulers.
Beijing also has our number, grasping a reason why we’ve become a woke joke. As a Chinese academic observed earlier this year, America’s “two political parties would sometimes do everything they can to advance their own interests” — even “incite division and violence among the people.”
Put simply, China is focused on dominating the world. We’re busy trying to dominate each other.
