OPINION:
Every day, we hear in the news that we must prepare to fight China in a kinetic war. It is a foregone conclusion, as our national security officials forgo the use of cognitive skills to seek other options. This is exactly what China, Iran, Russia and our domestic adversaries seek.
It is worse than you think. Our adversaries have four armies inside the United States: the terrorist drug cartels, the radical left fascists such as Black Lives Matter, antifa and far-left Democrats, a Chinese national army nearly 500,000 strong — 300,000 students, 40,000 to more than 60,000 people on work visas, and 100,000 illegals/military-age men — and 30 million other illegal aliens. The enemy is within our borders, and the war has already begun as our adversaries seek to destroy, subvert and sabotage America without firing one shot.
We are losing badly and must wake up. After World War II, we kept the same structure and policies for defense, foreign policy, etc. The Korean War, a stalemate, altered little. Since then, America has lost every war it has fought — Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan — except one: the Cold War. In every other engagement, we may have had kinetic successes but lost the war because we never won in the cognitive domain, altering thought, will or intent.
We won the Cold War because we understood the primary battleground was, is and will remain predominantly a battle in the cognitive domain, that of the human mind and spirit. During the Cold War, we leveraged a whole-of-government approach to strategically communicate. We had a military to deter our enemies and the economy to financially outmaneuver them. Unfortunately, the day we declared victory and started dismantling those capabilities and capacities with the so-called peace dividend, we also lost the Cold War. The oligarchs, despots and dictators assumed power and advanced multiple threats and dilemmas against us, including nuclear capabilities, terrorism, drugs, globalism and bioweapons.
Today, our leaders remain unaware, unprepared and unarmed in fighting this cognitive war, and we are losing badly. Our go-to solution? Apply the kinetic hammer, the only tool in our toolbox. President Trump is trying the economic hammer, but we need more alternatives. We bankrupted the Soviet Union financially and cognitively into submission. Our adversaries are doing the same to us as we fund a trillion-dollar defense budget for a World War II force structure and a weak industrial base and forgo any capabilities, capacity and expertise to fight in the cognitive domain. The existential threat to America is the ongoing cognitive war, which I detail in my book “The Cognitive War: Why We Are Losing and How We Can Win.”
For the naysayers who do not think we are already at war, let me provide a few short reminders.
Millions of Americans have been killed by the China flu (COVID-19) and fentanyl.
China, Russia and Iran embed cyberthreats into our critical infrastructure, such as water, electricity and gas.
Our secretary of defense said China is capable of sinking our aircraft carriers in less than 30 minutes.
China is subverting the U.S. unhindered, having built an illegal bioweapons lab in California, multiple illegal police stations and hundreds of Confucius institutes, and having infiltrated numerous states and local governments.
China uses DeepSeek, WeChat and TikTok to conduct reconnaissance and target our social, political, military and economic infrastructure.
The terrorist cartels leverage a network with China, built over five decades, to funnel illicit arms, drugs, terrorists and more.
The radical left censored, canceled and attacked innocent Americans using our national security system and then leveraged the same to enable an invasion of millions of illegals. This contingent is accelerating and fortifying its resistance to removal of illegals via occupation of cities and colleges, riotous demonstrations, antisemitic attacks, indoctrination of our youths and protection of felons, rapists and murderers.
The reality is that Americans live in a make-believe sanctuary, a blissful bubble, that no longer exists. Our enemies understand and have exploited that blissful ignorance to advance their subversion from within. They have studied our government, military, laws and governance and know how and where to unstitch the seams to exploit our vulnerabilities. It matters not whether it is the radical left in America that is now fully exposed to their lies, as they care only about obtaining absolute power. As such, we see their leaders in Congress and elsewhere abusing our foreign aid and our laws and attacking officers upholding those laws. Concurrently, we see China running circles around Congress, our military and our national security apparatus as it keeps us moving toward a kinetic war that will never happen because it will have already won.
China, Russia, Iran and the radical left have compromised America in so many ways. Our adversaries have a strategy, and they are executing it systematically and methodically. We fail to see the forest for the trees.
The problem is that we are at war but do not realize it. We need the right capacity, capabilities and expertise to fight it. Unless that changes, we will surely lose.
• Edward Haugland is a U.S. Air Force veteran and retired senior executive with four decades of service in the intelligence community and the Defense Department.
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