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NATIONAL SECURITY AND DEFENSE

China’s Intent Is to Master AI and Fusion Power: It’s Not What They Say, It’s What They Are Doing by Lawrence Kadish

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21581/china-ai-fusion-power

There is an old adage many of us heard from our parents, “It’s not what you say, it’s what you do.”

So when China creates military equipment that demonstrates a growing skill at an amphibious invasion, it would be best to ignore their rhetoric and concentrate on what they are doing to create the skills, tactics and ability to invade that democratic bastion across the Taiwan Strait.

As students of history, the Communist giant’s rulers knows full well the difficulty of any invasion that comes from the sea. The British Commonwealth is still traumatized over their World War I amphibious assault on the Turkish Dardanelles Straits, which history records as Gallipoli Campaign. Bogged down on the beach, with Ottoman troops and artillery firing down on them, after months of stalemate, and over a half million casualties combined suffered by both sides, the Allies withdrew. Many New Zealand and Australian soldiers suffered, and memorials abound to their sacrifice.

The harsh lessons of Gallipoli were well understood during World War II, when the Allies faced the Nazi forces across the English Channel. It would be more than a year of planning, the creation of specialized equipment, the training of troops, and months of air strikes before any GI stepped ashore at Normandy on D-Day. Even then, on Omaha Beach, the sands ran red with the blood of Americans killed as they came ashore.

It is apparent the Chinese know full well the challenge of making good on their threat to take Taiwan by military force. The latest reports reveal their creation of sea-going barges with enormous crane-like bridges that can be lowered across mine strewn beaches. Satellite imagery suggests those barges could put ashore tanks as well as soldiers.

While President Donald Trump confronts China’s intent to master the 21st Century through their economic weapons and theft of intellectual property, it is important to recognize Beijing’s ongoing investment in their military capability. Combine this example of amphibious innovation with their construction of aircraft carriers, next-generation fighter jets, Pacific island military bases, and their intent to master artificial intelligence (AI) and nuclear fusion power, and it becomes obvious to all that it matters not what China says. It is what they are doing.

America needs to take notice and appreciate the challenge that faces all of us.

Lawrence Kadish serves on the Board of Governors of Gatestone Institute.

DNI Gabbard Must Reverse “Stupid” US Intelligence on Iran’s Nuclear Weapons Program U.S. intelligence still claims Iran has no active nuclear weapons program—despite stockpiles of near-weapons-grade uranium and evidence of covert weaponization efforts. By Fred Fleitz

https://amgreatness.com/2025/04/18/dni-gabbard-must-reverse-stupid-us-intelligence-on-irans-nuclear-weapons-program/

Iran’s nuclear weapons program made tremendous advances over the past four years and can now enrich enough weapons-grade uranium to fuel a nuclear bomb in less than a week. Despite this fact, America’s intelligence agencies are sticking to their longtime position that Iran does not have an active nuclear weapons program.

This line of reasoning is so ridiculous that a former CIA director once called it “stupid intelligence.”

Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard should do away with this “stupid intelligence” immediately because the evidence for an active Iranian nuclear weapons program is overwhelming and undeniable.

Iran claims it is enriching uranium only for peaceful purposes to produce fuel for its one operational nuclear power reactor at Bushehr, two or three small research reactors, and to make radiopharmaceuticals. This claim is farcical. Iran imports fuel rods for its Bushehr nuclear power reactor because it cannot produce them domestically. Iran could also obtain radiopharmaceuticals and fuel for its research reactors at a much lower cost on the international market.

More importantly, the huge amount of near-weapons-grade uranium Iran is enriching is clearly part of a nuclear weapons program because enrichment at this level can be used for only one purpose: nuclear bomb fuel. Iran can now enrich enough uranium to fuel one nuclear weapon in less than a week and 14 in about four months, according to a February 2025 report by the Institute for Science and International Security.

This is a significant increase from late 2020, when Iran could only enrich enough weapons-grade uranium for two bombs in about 5.5 months.

In addition, Iran has spent billions of dollars to develop a covert nuclear weapons infrastructure and to conduct research on producing nuclear warheads. The Iran Nuclear Archive—secret documents on Iran’s nuclear weapons program stolen from Iran by Israel in 2018—also revealed that Iran has acquired several nuclear bomb plans.

The Iran Nuclear Archive also confirmed that although Iranian officials scaled back their nuclear weapons effort following the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, the program quietly continued as a classified operation with a sophisticated deception effort to conceal its existence from International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspectors and the world.

Tulsi Gabbard DIGs the Deep State Partisan intel agencies are the most immediate threat to representative government. by Lloyd Billingsley

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm-plus/tulsi-gabbard-digs-the-deep-state/

Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Tulsi Gabbard has established the Director’s Initiative’s Group (DIG), a task force to investigate weaponization and politicization of the intelligence community, including the CIA and National Security Agency. Gabbard’s best ally for that task passed away in 2021 but left behind strategic guidance for the nation moving forward.

The Italian-born Angelo Codevilla, a Rutgers and Notre Dame alum, served in the US Navy as an intelligence officer both at sea and in the Fleet Intelligence Center, with continued service in the Naval Reserve. Codevilla also served as intelligence analyst at the Bureau for Intelligence and Research in the U.S. Foreign Service, and joined the staff of Sen. Malcolm Wallop on the Senate Intelligence Committee. In 1992 Codevilla authored Informing Statecraft: Intelligence for a New Century. Two decades into that new century, the author showed his grasp of the problem America now faces:

America’s Intelligence agencies are the deep state’s deepest part, and the most immediate threat to representative government. They are also not very good at what they are supposed to be doing. Protecting the Republic from them requires refocusing them on their proper jobs.

Intelligence officials abuse their positions to discredit opposition to the Democratic Party, of which they are part. Complicit with the media, they leverage the public’s mistaken faith in their superior knowledge, competence, and patriotism to vilify their domestic enemies from behind secrecy’s shield. (emphases added)

China’s Cybersecurity ‘Pearl Harbor’ Against America: ‘Everything, Everywhere, All at Once’ by Lawrence A. Franklin

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21550/china-cyber-war-against-america

For decades, Communist China’s spies, hackers and businessmen have feasted on the forced transfer of technology from vulnerable US corporate enterprises drawn to the vast Chinese market. Little has been accomplished to reduce this massive theft of intellectual property. US businesses seem to have resigned themselves to such unfair practices as the price of doing business in China.

In the last two years, however, the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) cyber-attacks against America have undergone a deadly shift that seriously threatens the US’s capability to prevail in any open conflict with China.

The second revolutionary advance in China’s offensive cyber-warfare capabilities that target US interests is more deadly. It threatens a Pearl Harbor-magnitude attack on America. “Volt Typhoon,” aka “Vanguard Panda,” involves the stealthy insertion of potentially debilitating malware into the computer systems that control critical nodes of US infrastructure.

“[W]e have been, over the years, trying to play better and better defense when it comes to cyber. We need to start going on offense and start imposing, I think, higher costs and consequences to private actors and nation state actors that continue to steal our data, that continue to spy on us, and that even worse, with the Volt Typhoon penetration, that are literally putting cyber time bombs on our infrastructure, our water systems, our grids, even our ports.” — Mike Waltz, shortly before he was appointed National Security Adviser, CBS News, December 15, 2024.

Trump might also convene a cabinet meeting to assure that all aspects of American public and private capabilities should be mobilized to build resiliency in critical national infrastructure, while simultaneously examining US cyberspace vulnerabilities.

The US also might also go on the offense and target China’s critical national infrastructure, perhaps starting with the Cyberspace Administration of China?

China’s multidimensional war against US interests is already underway and well-documented. One underappreciated dimension of its attack on American primacy, however, is the arena of cybersecurity.

China Would Lose a ‘Trade War’ With the US—’Gradually, then Suddenly’ China’s trade war bluff may backfire as the U.S. pushes allies to choose between a rogue economic actor and a flawed but fairer partner with unmatched global power. By Victor Davis Hanson

https://amgreatness.com/2025/04/14/china-would-lose-a-trade-war-with-the-us-gradually-then-suddenly/

No one wants a “trade war” with China, or for that matter with any nation. Nonetheless, China has been waging one for years and is now locked in a tariff recalibration with the Trump administration.

In this American effort to find trade parity and equity, China can do some short-term damage to the U.S., especially in terms of ceasing exports of some pharmaceuticals, phones, and computers. But ultimately, it cannot win—and will eventually lose catastrophically. It will likely accept that reality sooner rather than later.

We are only in the first week of the escalating rhetoric and tariffs. But already China is appealing to its Asian rivals, Australia, and the EU to join in fighting the supposed American bully.

But so far, there are understandably few takers.

An exasperated China is now also running vintage Korean War-era propaganda videos of Mao Zedong bragging about how he was standing up to then-President Dwight Eisenhower.

Does Beijing really believe that airing ossified threats from decades ago—issued by the greatest mass killer in human history to the one U.S. president who warned of the military-industrial complex—is going to win over neutral nations?

Or maybe China thinks calls to Western nations to stop American trade “bullying” will resonate—this, from the greatest trade bully, cheat, and rogue commercial nation in history.

China is running a nearly $1-trillion trade surplus with the world. Its mercantilism is the result of market manipulations, product dumping, asymmetrical tariffs, patent, copyright and technology theft, a corrupt Chinese judicial system, and Western laxity—or what might be mildly called “bullying.” The U.S. accounts for about a third of China’s trade surplus, with most of the EU and Asian nations accounting for the other two-thirds.

Trump Delivers Deadly ‘Either/Or’ to Houthi Terrorists Catherine Salgado

https://pjmedia.com/catherinesalgado/2025/03/31/trump-delivers-deadly-eitheror-to-houthi-terrorists-n4938466

President Donald Trump, after a series of successful strikes against Houthi jihadis, is offering the Houthis a choice between ceasing their terror operations or being destroyed.

The Houthi jihadis have been attacking shipping in the key Red Sea passage, damaging trade for America, Israel, and other nations, since before Trump took office. But now Trump, unlike Joe Biden, is tired of Islamic terrorists pushing America around. So the president just warned the Houthis and their Iranian sponsors: “the real pain is yet to come.”

On his Truth Social platform Monday, Donald Trump posted in his usual confident style, “The Iran-backed Houthi Terrorists have been decimated by the relentless strikes over the past two weeks. Many of their Fighters and Leaders are no longer with us. We hit them every day and night — Harder and harder. Their capabilities that threaten Shipping and the Region are rapidly being destroyed.”

Nor will the strikes cease until the Houthis stop attacking U.S. shipping in the area, Trump added. “Our attacks will continue until they are no longer a threat to Freedom of Navigation. The choice for the Houthis is clear: Stop shooting at U.S. ships, and we will stop shooting at you. Otherwise, we have only just begun, and the real pain is yet to come, for both the Houthis and their sponsors in Iran,” the president ended threateningly.

No Time Left: China and Russia Making Sure Iran Goes Nuclear Before End of Trump’s Ultimatum by Majid Rafizadeh

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21507/nuclear-iran-no-time-left

Now, with Trump’s ultimatum delivered on March 7 to Iran— giving the regime a two-month deadline either to give up its nuclear and missile programs or face severe consequences — Beijing and Moscow have simply been accelerating Tehran’s efforts to join the nuclear club and to possesses at least six nuclear bombs before Trump’s deadline expires.

A meeting between Iranian and Chinese officials in Beijing, followed by Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei’s outright rejection of Trump’s warnings, could signal a dangerous development: Iran has likely received guarantees from China and Russia that they will protect the regime, support its nuclear program, and ensure that it acquires nuclear weapons before the possibly-too-generous deadline Trump has set, no matter the consequences.

Iran’s bold rejection of Trump’s threats may not be based on internal strength but on external guarantees. Beijing and Moscow have likely calculated that if Iran regime joins the nuclear club and possesses nuclear bombs before Trump’s deadline expires and he takes direct action, then the West will be forced to accept a nuclear-armed Iran, just as it has had to accept a nuclear North Korea.

With Trump’s ultimatum in place, these adversaries are racing against the clock to ensure that Iran becomes a nuclear-armed state. If the US and its allies fail to act immediately, the balance of power could shift permanently, and the West could lose the war before realizing it had even begun.

Talk surrounding Iran’s nuclear ambitions has long focused on the ruling ayatollahs and their determined pursuit of nuclear weapons. The West’s primary focus has been mainly on Iran’s domestic leadership: the Supreme Leader, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, and Iran’s nuclear scientists. What remains overlooked is the significant role that China, North Korea and Russia have been playing to make sure that Iran achieves nuclear weapons breakout before US President Donald J. Trump’s “two-month ultimatum” runs out.

China Is Taking War to Earth Orbits: A ‘Space Pearl Harbor’ Is on the Way by Gordon G. Chang

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21510/china-space-pearl-harbor

“Communist China has now taken war to the heavens, to low earth orbit, and very likely, will take war to the moon, Mars, and beyond. The heavens are no longer safe for the democracies.” — Richard Fisher, International Assessment and Strategy Center, to Gatestone, March 2025.

“Rising powers, notably China and Russia, saw how reliant we were on space—and how poorly defended our systems were. Our access to the strategic high ground is now more threatened than ever before.” — Brandon Weichert, author of Winning Space: How America Remains a Superpower, to Gatestone, March 2025

China is making fast progress in building space weapons. “The Chinese ISR”—intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance—”capabilities are become very capable,” said Gen. Guetlein. “They have gone from what we used to call a ‘Kill Chain’ to a ‘Kill Mesh.'” A Kill Mesh combines ISR satellites with an array of weapons systems.

“The recent demonstration of Chinese ‘dogfighting’ capabilities in space is an indicator that Beijing means to use force on earth. By targeting sensitive U.S. military satellites, the People’s Liberation Army can render us deaf, dumb, and blind, long before it strikes.” — Brandon Weichert, to Gatestone, March 2025.

The Chinese are evidently planning to blind not only America’s military but also America’s civilian society, which is heavily dependent on space assets. Almost nothing modern in America will work when the Chinese are finished attacking in the heavens.

“With our commercial assets, we have observed five different objects in space maneuvering in and out and around each other in synchronicity and in control,” the U.S. Space Force’s Vice Chief of Space Operations Gen. Michael Guetlein told the 16th annual McAleese Defense Programs conference in Arlington, Virginia on March 18. “That’s what we call dogfighting in space. They are practicing tactics, techniques and procedures to do on-orbit space operations from one satellite to another.”

Guetlein’s stark comment about China signals a break with the past. “This marks the end of the Western-American-liberal dream of nations leaving wars on Earth so they can cooperate in space to advance humanity,” Richard Fisher of the International Assessment and Strategy Center told Gatestone after the general’s widely publicized remarks. “Communist China has now taken war to the heavens, to low earth orbit, and very likely, will take war to the moon, Mars, and beyond. The heavens are no longer safe for the democracies.”

The Passing Signal Psychodrama How does this blunder rank with prior diplomatic and military screw-ups? by Victor Davis Hanson

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-passing-signal-psychodrama/

When we finally learn the full melodrama of the so-called Signal 1-2 day “scandal” of inviting a leftwing, Trump-despising, Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg onto a supposedly secure conference list, involving most of the top Trump security officials, lots of questions need asking and answering.

Most importantly, who exactly had Goldberg’s private number, and ostensibly (in error [?]) could have possibly inserted it into the cleared list of participants in the discussions? Why Goldberg, rather than some random person of some 345 million Americans?

So why in the world would any top Trump officials or their staffers ever even have Goldberg’s private contact information—given his quite public record of a) fabricating stories with unnamed sources, and b) suffering from a decade of chronic Trump derangement syndrome?

Did Goldberg know the mechanisms that had prompted and continued his stealthy presence on the secure discussions?

Why did citizen Goldberg not simply come clean on day one that he realized he was mistakenly included in key national security conference communications, to which he did not belong, and thus should be obviously excluded immediately? Why stealthily listen in for eleven some days? Was the idea of informing his hosts of his own improper presence too old-fashioned morality?

Did Goldberg’s publicizing these discreet discussions really affect in any way at all the otherwise completely successful mission to neutralize years of appeased Houthis aggression and begin to end their veritable destruction of Red Sea international maritime commerce?

Trump Should (Again) Cancel Open Intelligence Hearings on Worldwide Threats Trump should cancel open worldwide threat hearings, which have become security risks and political spectacles used by Democrats to undermine his administration. By Fred Fleitz

https://amgreatness.com/2025/03/28/trump-should-again-cancel-open-intelligence-hearings-on-worldwide-threats/

Like previous years, Democrats used the recent “Signal-gate” affair to turn this week’s unclassified hearings on worldwide threats by the Senate and House intelligence committees into political circuses that did nothing to conduct critical oversight of America’s intelligence agencies.

This is why, as he did in 2019, President Trump should cancel all future open worldwide threat hearings by refusing to allow his intelligence officials to participate in them.

Worldwide threat hearings are held annually and feature top U.S. intelligence officials presenting testimony on the analysis of their agencies on a wide range of security threats facing our nation. Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Tulsi Gabbard, CIA Director John Ratcliffe, FBI Director Kash Patel, NSA Director Timothy Haugh, and DIA Director Jeffrey Kruse testified to this year’s worldwide threat hearings.

These hearings are conducted in open, unclassified hearings followed by closed, classified sessions. There has long been concern that the open hearings pose significant and unnecessary security risks because America’s top intelligence officials discuss the current work of their agencies in front of the press. Despite assurances that this testimony is unclassified, it still provides extremely useful information to America’s adversaries on the focus, scope, and emphasis of U.S. intelligence. There is no question that videos of these hearings are closely watched and studied by hostile governments and their intelligence services.

The worldwide threats hearings have also become political spectacles that members of Congress often use to undermine presidential policy and gain face time on TV to promote themselves. Instead of using these hearings to understand dire security threats, committee members sometimes give self-serving speeches, bully witnesses, and press them to contradict presidential policies.