China is ramping up its intelligence collection efforts against the United States, according to James Fanell, former director of intelligence and information operations for the U.S. Pacific Fleet.
Initially, the astronomers suggested that the lights came from a NASA satellite—they were thought to be American lasers. But just a week after their initial statement, the scientists issued a correction saying that the green beams more than likely originated from a Chinese satellite.
Fanell, a retired U.S. Navy captain and intelligence officer specializing in Indo-Pacific security affairs, said the beams could be measuring quite a number of things, including pollution and “the height, the altitude, the size, the shape, the distances of particular installations in the Hawaiian Islands, which happen to have a lot of U.S. military facilities.”
He says it would be a mistake to disregard China’s actions or just assume that they’re related to the environment.
“I think there’s definitely a military aspect to this, given the presence that we have there in the islands, from the Pacific Missile Range test facility (PMRF) in Kauai, where we’re testing our own nuclear ballistic missiles ... to Oahu and Pearl Harbor and Camp Smith, Pacific fleet, our submarine forces specifically, and even to the Big Island, where the U.S. Army and Marine Corps does a lot of training as well,” Fanell said in an interview.
“Mapping and using green lasers is another way of measuring our capabilities and our resources.
“So part of their activity toward us, I think we will see much more as they increase the overt nature of their intelligence collection against the United States.”
“Given the intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance efforts that the PRC has been conducting more and more focused on the United States that we need to be aware of what these are,” Fanell said, using the official name of the People’s Republic of China.
Regime Seeks Access to Artic
Fanell singled out a report about Chinese surveillance buoys discovered in Arctic waters last fall that were intercepted by the Canadian Armed Forces.These objects would help the communist regime collect data on the Arctic environment, the sea environment, the sea temperature, the salinity, the currents, and things of that nature, he said.
Fanell said the move serves the regime’s effort to “access ... the Arctic, to be able to transit ships up there to carry supplies and goods to Europe, from China instead of having to go all the way through the South China Sea, the Indian Ocean, Suez Canal, and into the Mediterranean where things take much longer and are more at risk.”
He noted that no move by the regime is “benign.”
Displace US
The regime’s ultimate goal is to “displace the United States and be the world’s superpower,” he said.According to Fanell, China’s 14th rubber-stamped National People’s Congress shows the totalitarian nature of the regime.
“That’s kind of the regime in their nature, and their ideology is to become the greatest power on the earth and to rule the rest of the world the same way they rule their own people, which is to have total control,” he said.
“And we’ve been watching it for the last three years over the dynamic zero COVID policy where no one could move around in their country without permission of the government. And that’s what they want. And we need to be resisting that because that’s slavery. And we don’t want to live in that.”