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State-Sponsored Biological Terrorism and Multi-Dimensional Warfare
A recent essay in the Washington Post offers a stark reminder that the threat of state-sponsored biological terrorism remains an urgent and seriously underappreciated threat concern. This represents both a challenge and an opportunity for the incoming Trump national security team. It comes as part of a larger and growing hybrid warfare challenge. A challenge emanating from China, Russia, and Iran and exercised through various client states, including North Korea, Venezuela, and the remnants, thankfully, of Iran’s Hamas, Houthi, and Hezbollah proxies. The new administration’s national security leadership has an opportunity to reverse decades of neglect and disinterest, going all the way back to the Clinton administration.
I worked in national security for the better part of four decades. Although in large part my work involved protecting nuclear weapons and countering nuclear terrorism, I was also involved from time to time in matters relating to biological terrorism. For all the talk about Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD), our track record since the early 1990s reveals a disturbing indifference to the WMD threat in all its forms. When the Clinton administration arrived in 1992, it focused on claiming the supposed “peace dividend” that resulted from the collapse of the Soviet Union, while showing an almost aggressive indifference to emerging threats.
This changed, albeit briefly, after 9/11, peaking with the George W. Bush administration’s agitation concerning a potential nuclear weapons threat from Saddam Hussein. This nuclear threat proved ephemeral, but the nuclear threat from North Korea — and the potential threat from Iran — proved all too real. Successive administrations failed to prevent North Korea from becoming a nuclear power capable of threatening the U.S. homeland and often appeared flummoxed by the task. Despite Democrat claims to the contrary, Obama’s appeasement of Iran, as reflected in the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) nuclear deal, had less of an impact than the first Trump administration’s intensive pressure campaign — and meant far less to the mullahs than the prospect of massive Israeli retaliation.
Nuclear War
Even with this record of failure, the nuclear menace received far greater attention than the threat of biological terrorism. I left the government in 2018, but I suspect that this has remained the case during the Biden years. There are several reasons for this. First, much of the nuclear threat is viewed through a conventional military lens, and thus more readily assimilated by our national security institutions. We draw a distinction between conventional and nuclear warfare — and the destructive scale is important — but conceptually nuclear warfare resembles more of a Masters of the Air bombardment than New Age stratagems.
Moreover, while the science of making a nuclear device has been widely understood for decades, creating significant numbers of usable nuclear weapons is surpassingly difficult. Manufacturing weapons-grade nuclear material requires a massive and complex industrial effort, and miniaturizing a nuclear device sufficiently to create a deliverable bomb or missile warhead demands tremendous scientific and engineering expertise. Even creating a crude improvised nuclear device (IND) flounders due to the difficulty of gaining access to a sufficient quantity of the right nuclear material.
Nuclear weapons exist within the framework of a recognizable strategic and tactical calculus. Even the Russian Pres. Vladimir Putin’s insistent nuclear saber rattling, however irrational it may seem, can be placed within a rational framework. Moreover, the nuclear threat always and everywhere fails the test of “plausible deniability.” As such, it’s useful as a weapon of war, but functionally useless as an instrument of state-sponsored terrorism.
Biological Terrorism
But very nearly the opposite is true of biological terrorism. Biological weapons present an awkward tactical fit as an adjunct to open warfare between armies. Even more than chemical weapons, they don’t fit neatly on the battlefield, and run the very real risk of hurting friendly forces as well as the targeted enemy. However, they’re almost perfectly suited for a “deniable” campaign against “soft” civilian targets — perfect, then, for state-sponsored terrorism. After all, the whole point of state-sponsored terrorism is to attack an enemy without inviting a counterattack. It is the perfect tool for undermining an adversary while avoiding the consequences of one’s actions.
Before memories fade, we should recall how our experience with COVID mimicked just such an act of state-sponsored biological terrorism. The Chinese, of course, took great pains to deny that COVID was anything other than the naturally occurring consequence of bat viruses migrating to human beings. And Western governments, including our own, tied themselves in knots to accept this transparent fiction. To even acknowledge the lab leak theory might have forced a confrontation with China that none were willing to sanction. And if it had been an actual biological weapon assault on the West, how would governments such as our own have responded? Even then, it might have been easier to accept the pretense of innocent origin rather than accept the need to punish the perpetrators.
I explored the idea of a state-sponsored bioterrorism scenario in my 2022 thriller novel, Letter of Reprisal. Without revealing too much of the plot — it’s a thriller, after all — I posited a Chinese-sponsored effort to unleash a biological weapon, using a laboratory hidden in the Ebola-riddled region of the Congo, as a basis for orchestrating a devastating event while obviating any blowback against Beijing. It’s an easy enough scenario to envision, especially given the documented Chinese interest in biological weapons and their significant political and economic penetration of central Africa.
Such scenarios, real-world or fiction, partake of an approach to warfare as old as Sun Tzu and as modern as Putin’s “little green men.” Arguably, the three-year slugging match in Ukraine is an atavism — missiles and drones overlaid on the tactics of the two World Wars. Instead, “multi-dimensional warfare” represents the most innovative and challenging developments of the 21st Century. Moreover, it’s not just the Chinese we need to be concerned about. The Russians have even more highly developed biological warfare capabilities, and the science of biological warfare is, as the abovementioned Washington Post article discusses, well within reach of many nations.
Hybrid Warfare
Every day we see more evidence that our enemies have already declared war in what’s now called the “grey zone,” waging unacknowledged but highly effective “hybrid warfare” against us and our allies. In just the past week, we’ve seen stories of critical communications cables being cut in the Baltic Sea. While Russia is the obvious suspect, a Chinese vessel has also been identified as a possible culprit, a reminder that Beijing’s covert operations reach war beyond its Pacific Ocean backyard.
International communications cables represent just one among many strategic vulnerabilities. We know that dangerous actors have taken advantage of Biden’s open borders to infiltrate the U.S. They may simply be engaged in drug smuggling or human trafficking (not that these should be minimized). The fentanyl epidemic, promoted by China via Mexican and Venezuelan drug gangs, caused more U.S. deaths in 2023 than the total number of Americans killed in the Vietnam War. The U.S. homeland remains a target-rich environment. To offer but one among dozens of critical infrastructure examples, note the concentration of data centers in northern Virginia, something like 70 percent of the total U.S. capacity.
Call it “grey zone” or “hybrid” warfare, but recall Sun Tzu’s admonitions about winning the war before the first battle is fought — the People’s Liberation Army generals certainly understand this very well. Don’t assume, then, that the first blows in a war over Taiwan will involve a missile strike on a U.S. aircraft carrier. Instead, consider all that could be done, with deniability, to cripple our physical and moral capabilities before a single shot is fired.
But among all the tools of hybrid warfare, nothing lends itself to such a purpose as biological terrorism. We saw this played out at the height of the COVID pandemic when the disease took an aircraft carrier out of service, roiled the military, and paralyzed decision-making in Washington. A fearful nation, that is anxious, locked down, and bitterly divided regarding the right course of action, is a nation incapable of defending itself, much less its overseas interests.
President Xi Jinping remains adamant that the “Taiwan problem” be solved no later than 2027. In an earlier The American Spectator article, I outlined how the first blows might not be confined to the Taiwan Strait but could take the form of a Pearl Harbor-like effort to preemptively cripple any U.S. military response. Chinese-sponsored biological terrorism, supplemented by attacks on critical infrastructure, could mark the first and most critical stages of such a strike.
The time to start preparing is now.
James H. McGee retired in 2018 after nearly four decades as a national security and counter-terrorism professional, working primarily in the nuclear security field. Since retiring, he’s begun a second career as a thriller writer. His recent novel, Letter of Reprisal, tells the tale of a desperate mission to destroy a Chinese bioweapon facility hidden in the heart of the central African conflict region. A forthcoming sequel will be out soon.
READ MORE from James H. McGee:
Pete Hegseth v. ‘Sam Hanna’ and the Left’s War Against the Jews
Trump’s Election Sends the Swamp a Message
Peanut the Squirrel and the Coercive State
The post State-Sponsored Biological Terrorism and Multi-Dimensional Warfare appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.
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