The Save America’s Military Coalition Senate Video Telethon 2.0:
Supporting Pete Hegseth, Opposing Cultural Marxism in the ServicesThursday, Jan 2, 2025
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Captain James Fanell
USN (Ret.); Former Director of Intelligence and Information Operations, U.S. Pacific Fleet; co-author, “Embracing Communist China: America’s Greatest Strategic Failure”
TRANSCRIPT:
[01:28:20] James Fanell: Happy New Year, Frank, and good to be with you all and looking forward to the events that will transpire in just a little bit over two weeks, where we can finally [01:28:30] get back into office and into our government. People that are serious and honest about the world around us and how dangerous it is. The DoD report was mandated in 2000 by Congress, the National Defense Authorization Act of 2000, purposely to warn Congress about the rising threat of China. And here we are essentially, 25 years later, a quarter of a century, and we’re finally getting from a Democrat administration the acknowledgment [01:29:00] of that in the last 30 days of their administration, where for four years they downplayed it, ignored it, didn’t say much about it. This report is for me. It’s not stunning or shocking for those of us who watch this and have been watching the PRC, but some tidbits, like the fact that the report acknowledges that by 2030, in just five years, China will have over 1000 nuclear warheads. That’s in context of the fact that just two years ago, they said they only had 200, [01:29:30] and that, you know, you have to put these things in a strategic trend line in the context of where we’ve been and how we’ve undersold. Or as Doctor Brad Thayer and I talk in our book, Embracing Communist China America’s Greatest Strategic Failure. In that book we bring up and give a name to this. It’s called threat deflation. And so for too long, the Department of Defense and our academic and think tanks have undersold and threat deflated the Chinese Communist Party’s [01:30:00] ideological intentions.
[01:30:02] James Fanell: And from my perspective and where I watch a lot is the PLA, the People’s Liberation Army. And so we’ve been downplaying the threat from China for much too long. And just this week, China unveiled this type 076 amphibious assault, basically light aircraft carrier. It’s 40,000 tons, probably closer to 50,000 tons when it’s fitted out. And it has dual islands and [01:30:30] so it can control flight operations and amphibious operations to send, you know, craft ashore. And so this now is a joins three other type 075 amphibious assault ships that have been built in less than five years, and three aircraft carriers that have been built also in the last decade. So in terms of big deck aircraft carriers, both conventional and amphibious type. China [01:31:00] has put eight or so at sea along with the typo seven ones. And they’re there. They’ve done it in the space of a decade where America has only been able to produce one aircraft carrier, and we had one amphibious assault helicopter carrier produced and another one burned up at the pier in San Diego. So we’re standing still, literally, while China is racing ahead, building the force that’s necessary to dominate, not just taking Taiwan, [01:31:30] not just to dominate the first island chain in the South China Sea and the East China Sea, East China Sea, which are all linked together. But they’re on their quest for a global military and maritime and air forces that are going to dominate the world and tell the world how they will buy and sell and trade.
[01:31:49] James Fanell: And they’ve laid the foundation over the last decade with this Belt and Road initiative. So they’re going to marry up their economic laydown, which has got over 100 countries signed up [01:32:00] for it, along with the military capability that will be able to enforce their dictums and in the in the range and the scope of the PLA’s military modernization isn’t just, you know, I focus on the naval arena, which I think is the most important given the power projection that they want to have. But they’ve built up their air forces. They’re building a stealth bomber. They have re modernized bombers. They have new transport aircraft, the [01:32:30] Y-20, which they’re now sending foreign. They’ve gone to Europe many, many times and run exercises with European nations into the Southeast Asia, South Asia, Pakistan, India. Well, not India, India, but around India threatening India. Their naval forces are operating in the Gulf of Guinea and the Atlantic. We know they’re having oceanographic research vessels in the Atlantic, which are precursor to submarine operations. They’re laying cables. They’re disrupting other people’s cables. [01:33:00] The Chinese military reaches around the world, in the terrestrial domain and in the extraterrestrial domain. They’re putting up more satellites than anybody in the last five years, even in US, in terms of military related satellites. They’re also invested heavily in cyber. And we hear about that. We just heard this week that the Treasury Department was hacked.
[01:33:24] James Fanell: Another federal agency hacked. And putting at risk our entire monetary system, the ability [01:33:30] for people to make sure that they can have assured savings and investments and industry and all that goes on to our economy, which is America is really one of our greatest strengths. So they’re attacking in there. They’ve also built a series of missile forces. They have a strategic missile force, unlike the United States. They have a strategic missile force that is focused on short range missiles to take Taiwan medium range missiles to obstruct and obliterate Guam [01:34:00] to take out Hawaii. And they have intercontinental ballistic missiles that are focused and built towards the United States. And they added 350 silos here in the Biden administration in the last 2 or 3 years. Additionally, they built hypersonic missiles that travel at five times the speed of sound, which we have trouble defending against because it’s new technology. So we are being faced by an adversary that’s across all domains, focused on destruction of the United States of America. And [01:34:30] we’re sitting still. And this report is now a little bit a dollar late and a dollar short a day late and a dollar short. But it’s still better than no acknowledgment in the context of the DoD report. Our military is in a situation of crisis because the Chinese are focused on the weakness that has been building up since the Obama administration through things like Dei and CRT and others. The DoD report talks about the PRC’s focus [01:35:00] on cognitive warfare and focus on cognitive warfare is their efforts to infiltrate America’s military and their mindset, and to erode the war fighting spirit that has been the hallmark of the US military going back to 1776.
[01:35:19] James Fanell: As Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley said in their first testimony to the Senate back [01:35:30] in 2021, they said the number one threat facing America was white violent extremism. And yet here we are facing, as they say in their own DoD report three, four years later, that the Chinese Communist Party and their military is an existential. Well, they don’t say it’s existential, but it is an existential threat. And they lay out some of the key elements of that military threat, not only their economic threat. So China has been able to recognize that we’ve had a series of leaders like [01:36:00] General Milley, like Secretary of Defense Austin, led by President Biden, and the rest who have adopted what is non-warfighting focus. And they’re doing that because the Chinese know that we’re doing that. And that’s empowering or emboldening them. I would say to be much more aggressive in their posture towards what’s happening in the South China Sea, towards what they’re doing towards Taiwan, the surrounding of Taiwan, the shooting of ballistic missiles a couple of years ago, and this constant [01:36:30] threat that’s being made militarily by China against the United States, interest in Asia and our homeland. And so China recognizes that this die woke ideology is really debilitating to us.
[01:36:44] James Fanell: And the examples of it are just this last month, in December, we saw at the Navy War College, the Secretary of the Navy show up for a two day symposium that was mandatory attendance for all faculty, all staff, all students, and included the Secretary [01:37:00] of the Navy to talk about women, peace and security, where they actually recommended their number one. One of their recommendations was is that combatant commanders, US Pacific Indo-Pacific command, US European Command, US Central Command, they’re one of the recommendations was is they needed to have gender advisors. So that’s what we’re recommending to our warfighting combatant commanders is that they need to have gender advisors. And this is being revealed in commercials in our fleet, where we’re seeing ads from the US Navy telling [01:37:30] sailors, it’s okay to bring your makeup to see this is the focus. And people say, well, that’s, you know, it’s a new world. And we have to appease the, the new, younger generations. But I’m here to tell you that when you focus on things like that, you’re not focusing on the number one thing, which is to find and fix and kill your enemy, whether it’s at sea or in the air or in space or under the sea or in land combats in in archipelagic waters of the Philippines, or the first or second island chain. And I can tell you [01:38:00] it was coming in during Obama in 2014, 2015 when I left. And that mentality took away our focus from our main mission, which is to fight and win the nation’s wars.
[01:38:12] James Fanell: And we have for the last decade, not been focused as we could and should be on fighting and winning a war against China that no one wants. But we know that if we’re not prepared and we’re not capable, we cannot deter or let alone win in a conflict with a China that’s aggressive and knows [01:38:30] they can defeat us. They calculate a variety of factors when it comes to the use of kinetic force and non-kinetic force. They use what they call scientific development to calculate decisions that they make. Across the Communist Party, 100 million people, those 100 million people are calculating on how they can achieve their goal of the great restoration and rejuvenation of China to become the number one superpower on the planet that rules over the rest. And part of that is to the destruction of the United States of America. [01:39:00] And while they would like not to have to use military force, they have ordered their military going back decades to Hu Jintao to be able to do that. We talk about 2027. They actually originally ordered them to be ready in 2020, and the Chinese government and their military has been preparing themselves for combat. Now, at the end of the day, somebody may jerk the chain and say, no, you don’t have to go. But that doesn’t belie the facts that they have prepared themselves and are preparing themselves for combat. And we have not.