China’s communist regime is pursuing a doctrine of unrestricted warfare against the United States in an effort to undermine and eventually displace it, according to an upcoming documentary featuring retired U.S. Air Force Brig. Gen. Robert Spalding.
Key to this effort, Spalding said, is the CCP’s doctrine of unrestricted warfare, through which the regime weaponizes academia, economics, diplomacy, media, and technology to achieve military ends without more conventional military means.
“Unrestricted warfare is a doctrine for how the Chinese Communist Party wages war which is in many ways fundamentally different from the ways that Western societies wage war,” Spalding, also an Epoch Times contributor, said.
Whereas Western nations typically consider military force to be a means of achieving political goals, Spalding said, the CCP was using political and other means to achieve military victory over the United States without firing a shot.
“Our infrastructure, particularly our digital infrastructure is highly insecure and not resilient which makes it a very dangerous vulnerability vis-à-vis China,” Spalding said.
“They’ve been able to leverage the connectedness [between nations] … to then achieve their ends without having to resort to violence.”
This presents a unique challenge to the United States and like-minded democratic states, Spalding said. The open nature of such societies renders their economic, political, and media systems innately vulnerable to CCP propaganda, IP theft, and coercion.
In such a scenario, Spalding said, the only path the United States could follow toward victory was to decouple and cut off the regime’s access to U.S. markets, media, and even academia.
“There’s no way to counter unrestricted warfare or win unrestricted warfare when you have a Chinese Communist Party that has access to any part of U.S. society, whether that be political, academic, corporate, trade, [or] financial,” Spalding said.
“If they have any access to American society, then they'll use that access to undermine American society. The only way to be successful … is to eliminate their access to American society.”
Spalding, who formerly served as senior director for the White House National Security Council, said that the CCP could not peaceably coexist with the United States because the latter’s values of liberty, free speech, and multi-party governance were necessarily antithetical to communist domination.
Final War received its first screening on Oct. 13 at an event sponsored by The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank. An official release date has not yet been announced.
Spalding said that he hoped the Chinese people would one day have access to such films, and that after decoupling from the CCP the United States might be able to get such information into the mainland.
“Once we’ve established some safe boundaries with China then I do think it is incumbent on the United States and its allies to begin to look at ways to get an alternative narrative into the Chinese people as a way of helping them understand that the truth they are given is not necessarily the whole truth or even truth at all,” Spalding said.
