China’s Leader Xi Dangerously ‘Unaware’ Of Some PLA Gray Zone Ops

ANALYSIS – There is nothing worse than stumbling into a major war with a nuclear-armed superpower because your enemy’s totalitarian dictator isn’t fully ‘aware’ of all the reckless and provocative ‘gray zone’ operations being executed by the regime’s minions.

Gray zone warfare often employs military, paramilitary and quasi-civilian forces, like militias, in confrontation and harassment tactics below the threshold of direct military conflict or war.

And both Russia and China are masters of the art.

Witness the Russian jets that recently played chicken with one of our Reaper drones over the Black Sea.

But China takes the practice to a strategic level.

I recently wrote about how Communist China is ramping up its ‘gray zone’ warfare against Taiwan, amid heightened tensions with House Speaker Kevin McCarthy hosting Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen in California.

In this case, China’s Fujian maritime safety administration announced a provocative special operation. As part of that effort, China launched a three-day patrol and inspection operation in the central and northern parts of the Taiwan Strait.

The exercise reportedly was to include boarding civilian ships.

In another example, I wrote about how Communist China‘s militarized Coast Guard recently spent over 80 hours, more than three and a half days, circling the Japanese Senkaku Islands in the East China Sea on Sunday after refusing orders to leave.

That incursion is part of China’s ever-increasing low-intensity quest to steadily dominate the East and South China Seas.

But the Chinese communists (CHICOM) may be taking their operations too far with the U.S. and its allies. And Xi Jinping, the regime’s leader, may have lost control of them.

This, according to Rear Adm. Mike Studeman, commander of the Office of Naval Intelligence, as quoted by Breaking Defense.

Sometimes even the leaders of democratic countries are not fully informed of everything their military and intelligence services are up to. But with the secrecy inherent in tightly controlled police states, the danger is far more acute.

Speaking at the Sea Air Space exposition, the admiral warned:

We have strong indications that Xi Jinping — and I’m an intelligence guy — Xi Jinping is not aware of everything his security forces are doing. We think it’s a function of the unwieldiness of China’s governance model. There are dangers of dictatorships.

Studeman noted some of China’s other gray zone harassment tactics.

These range from bullying fishermen from Vietnam and the Philippines by ramming their boats or spraying them with high-power water cannons. The Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) also often harasses US Navy warships as they transit the South China Sea.

This aggressive harassment isn’t limited to the high seas. Studeman also noted incidents where Chinese pilots flew dangerously close to U.S. and Australian military aircraft flying in international airspace, as the Russians do much too frequently.

According to Breaking Defense, Studeman assesses that the severity and frequency of incidents like these may not always be making their way to Xi Jinping or other CHICOM Party elites. He added:

There are dangers in how totalitarian states operate. The truth doesn’t always flow very quickly in dictatorships, and if it’s bad news, sometimes that gets adulterated on the way up to [the top]. We see some of that happening.

As these CHICOM gray zone operations increase in aggressiveness and provocation, they could spark a war at any time.

This is especially true if we keep doing nothing more than issuing stern public memos and Xi doesn’t even know what is really going on.

The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the positions of American Liberty News.

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