I don’t like, or trust the Washington Post. It is nothing but a Leftwing Political Rag, a Propaganda Machine, nothing more. It is also responsible for the state that the news business is in today. Woodward and Bernstein under the tutelage of Ben Bradlee destroyed reporting and mainstreamed “Journalists” instead of “Reporters”. They changed the industry from reporting the facts with about 20% of opinion, to reporting opinion with only about 20% of the facts.
You can trace today’s lack of trust in the media directly to those 3 as the poison seed from which the industry has grown into. That still does not mean that on occasion solid reporting can still be found in The Washington Post. It’s just very little and wedged in between crap and propaganda.
Here is an article worth reading. Listed as “Opinion” on WaPo but the only thing of substance it has reported in some time.
Opinion The most shocking intel leak reveals new Chinese military advances, By Josh Rogin
China has tested and deployed a new longer-range hypersonic missile that is probably able to evade U.S. defenses, according to an overlooked top-secret document among those recently leaked. Now, the public can see what the American intelligence community already knew: China is quickly improving its capacity to strike thousands of miles from its shores and prevent the United States from intervening.
The US Government has known this information. What they have not done is inform let alone explain this to the American people. The federal government is also well aware of the following.
The Justice and Defense departments are investigating the leak of hundreds of U.S. intelligence documents, which include chilling revelations about the Ukrainian equipment shortfalls, backdoor Egyptian-Russian arms deals, Israeli spy agencies allegedly working against the country’s elected leaders, and internal South Korean security deliberations. (The Egyptian, Israeli and South Korean governments say this information is false.) Buried in the documents is also a key piece of intelligence regarding China’s progress in military technology.
Has anyone heard anyone from the federal government discuss any of this in public? Now we hear “means & methods” rolled out all the time. We the people can’t know because it will expose “means & methods”. Bull****, the way the information was obtained we don’t need to know, but the information itself is vital for the American people to know.
Our supposed ally Egypt whom we give $Billions in aid to from the American taxpayers pocket is selling arms to a nation that our government has declared an enemy. Why hasn’t this been discussed publicly? Why has not all aid of every kind been shutoff from Egypt? What has been done to keep Seoul in the fold and not align with the Russian and Chinese? The Israeli information affects us, but it is internal Israeli strife. I love Bibi, but it’s his internal problem not ours. We are facing the same problem internally in the U.S., our own intelligence networks are being used internally against internal political parties.
Josh Rogin does an excellent job in laying out the threats to American interests in his piece. The question is how many of you have read it? How many of you understand what Rogan has laid out here actually means to our security? Not just our physical security but the security of entire way of life? Very few have read it, and even fewer have had it explained what exactly it means and why. Here is the rest of what he wrote.
According to a Feb. 28 top-secret report by the Joint Chiefs of Staff intelligence directorate, China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) had three days earlier successfully tested a new hypersonic intermediate-range ballistic missile called the DF-27. (The Defense Department has not confirmed the document’s authenticity.)
“The DF-27 is designed to enhance [China’s] ability to hold targets at risk beyond the Second Island Chain and possesses a high probability of penetrating U.S.” ballistic missile defense, the daily intelligence update stated. It also revealed that last year the PLA deployed versions of the new missile that can attack land targets and ships.
The intermediate-range ballistic missile flew for 12 minutes and traveled 2,100 kilometers (1,300 miles), the leaked document revealed. But according to a 2021 Defense Department report, the DF-27 has a range of 5,000 to 8,000 kilometers, meaning that it can strike any target in East or Southeast Asia and large parts of the Pacific, including Guam. In addition to its added range, the new missile has a “hypersonic glide” capability, which means it can be maneuvered to evade American and allied missile defenses and is a greater potential “carrier killer” than its predecessors were.
What Mr. Rogin neglects in his description of the weapon system is that the missile is a First Strike Weapon. This weapons sole purpose is to devastate it’s targets before they know they are coming with the speed and maneuverability to defeat any counter measures even upon detection.
The most obvious, though not the only, scenario in which Beijing might find this capability useful would be in attempting to invade Taiwan. If American ships can be held at bay and U.S. forces in Asia can be targeted at will, any allied intervention in Taiwan’s defense would be more difficult and costly. Another potentially Taiwan-related revelation in the leaked documents is that China has for the first time recently used its new helicopter-carrying assault ship in an extended deployment.
What is also not pointed out by Rogin is the threat this missile is to Japan. Taiwan is China’s property, Japan is it’s enemy and one of our strongest allies. This weapon can level Japan in minutes.
The new missile is only one piece in a rapidly expanding arsenal that Beijing is deploying as it militarizes more of the South China Sea, builds out its blue-water fleet, expands its footprint in the Pacific Islands, and engages in the largest nuclear buildup since the Cold War.
China is building approximately 350 new nuclear-missile silos, hundreds of new nuclear warheads, and several new bases for mobile rocket launchers that can handle intermediate- and long-range missiles, according to a March report by the Federation of American Scientists (FAS).
“China is continuing the nuclear weapons modernization program that it initiated in the 1990s and 2000s, but is expanding it significantly by fielding more types and greater numbers of nuclear weapons than ever before,” the report stated.
In layman’s terms for the past 40 years while we thought China’s Nuke program was primarily concentrating on ICBMs, China had gone to a completely different strategy. They developed their fleet of ICBMs and as described above are deploying that system of 1000s of warheads in one location. More than enough firepower to place China into the MAD Club of Nuclear war. What their actual priority has been though was to develop battlefield tactical nukes. Nuclear warheads designed to fit the same size warhead as any standard explosive package. They have married this nuclear warhead to a hypersonic delivery system that no one has a defense against.
Where Russia and the U.S. designed defensive systems as the last move in a world conflict, the Chinese have designed their nuclear threat to be an offensive system with the MAD system still as a final defense. Now I know both the U.S. and Russia also have both midrange and shortrange tactical nukes. However these have always only been deployed as last resort tools. The Chinese have not only mounted theirs on a First Strike Weapon, they have already deployed them to forward positions that can be used ahead of conventional forces.
Hans Kristensen, director of the FAS Nuclear Information Project, told me the DF-27 can probably hold either nuclear or conventional warheads, and therefore can be seen as both a strategic and a tactical weapon.
“The Chinese have left their previous philosophy of a minimum nuclear deterrent, and they have determined both in terms of numbers and in terms of types of systems, they need more stuff,” Kristensen said. “This adds to that picture.”
The reason they need more “stuff” is they are preparing for war.
In Washington, military planners are realizing that China (and, to a lesser degree, Russia) has surpassed the United States in hypersonic military technology. But there’s no agreement on what to do about it. The United States is developing hypersonic weapons of its own, but it lacks sufficient means to defend against the ones China is already fielding.
The reason we don’t know what to do is because they aren’t informing the people about what is going on in the world. The threats that we are facing and why. Our intelligence apparatus and our politicians are more focused on politics and what the American people are doing than they are about protecting us.
In the Cold War, the United States developed asymmetric capabilities to nullify the Soviet Union’s advantage in having a larger missile arsenal. Now China is using that strategy against America. Rather than meet China’s missile developments tit for tat, the United States and its allies must shift resources to nullify the new threat and shore up their ability to protect their assets.
Thanks to the leaks, at least the public now knows the extent of China’s advances. But peace in Asia depends on maintaining the credibility of the U.S.-led deterrent.
Opinion by Josh Rogin Josh Rogin is a columnist for the Global Opinions section of The Washington Post. He writes about foreign policy and national security. Rogin is also a political analyst for CNN. He is the author of the book Chaos Under Heaven: Trump, Xi, and the Battle for the 21st Century.
Josh Rogin is one of the few Reporters at the Washington Post worth your time to read, there really aren’t that many that are.
WaPo placed this article in the “Opinion” section. It is not “News” to the Post’s editors. After all there is nothing salacious about Trump or any other Republican so it holds no “News” value to them. It does hold a tremendous amount of news for the American public. It lays out another piece of the puzzle that highlights the steps the Chinese are going to for one reason and one reason only, to defeat the United States.
Combine this first strike weapon with the other moves that China is undertaking. It has gained control of OPEC. It strongly influences Russian fuel production. The recent cuts in Oil Production world wide have been orchestrated by China to cause the West, primarily the U.S., severe economic strife.
China is renegotiating all it’s Treaties around the world to base all it’s trade on the value of the Yuan, not the Dollar. It is also negotiating with OPEC, Russia, and all fuel exporting countries to switch from selling or buying energy products with Dollars with the Yuan. This would flip the worlds reserve currency from the dollar to the yuan causing a selloff and complete collapse of the American Dollar. The Dollar is worth 6 Yuan when the world reserve currency flips so will those numbers. One Yuan will be worth six Dollars. America will collapse.
The Chinese are not just actively preparing for War they have almost got all their pieces in place. If they collapse the Dollar in this manner the U.S. it will happen almost overnight. Chaos will erupt internally in the U.S. we will be so busy tearing ourselves apart that they could take Taiwan an anywhere else they wanted without ever firing a shot. If they have to fire those shots the missiles are already in place.
When the pin is pulled on that scenario is completely in Chinese hands. The United States government has failed at it’s only purpose. To keep it’s people safe. Instead our politicians and civil servants have only concentrated on how to fatten their own wallets. Screw the People, Screw Duty….. what’s in it for me and mine.
The reason it has been allowed to get to this point is because there is no press, no reporters keeping tabs on real “News”. All they care about is playing politics themselves, not what the news is, but what they can shape the “News” into. They are “Journalists” not reporters.
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