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NewsTranscript
00:00The gentleman yields back.
00:05Chair now recognizes myself for questions.
00:09Mr. Bannas, you mentioned in your testimony that there was a shortage of expertise in
00:14the federal government with respect to China.
00:17Would you say that our government is ill-prepared for what China currently has with respect
00:25to their schemes against our government and our way of life?
00:30Does the government have a plan?
00:33I would put it this way, that we don't have enough China expertise to execute our own
00:40policy.
00:41So we're using, for example, we are asking a department to enforce a major piece of trade
00:47legislation and yet for a couple of years they were relying on Google Translate for
00:53their language resources.
00:54And explain why that's important that we do have a plan.
00:57And that's the purpose of this hearing and I apologize that there are, you know, clowns
01:01like the last questioner that get off topic.
01:05But explain why that's important to have a plan.
01:10In some form or another, nearly every federal department has some role to play, whether
01:15it's because they fund research and therefore they have a responsibility to maintain the
01:19integrity of that research.
01:21They are, they have a responsibility in some form to protecting constitutional rights and
01:27the exercise of those, which the CCP is attempting to restrict inside the United States.
01:32So you can kind of go down each one and see that.
01:37Exactly.
01:38Colonel Newsom, what is unrestricted warfare, China's master plan to destroy America?
01:43What unrestricted warfare refers to is the Chinese approach to going after its enemy
01:49and the United States is the one they call their main enemy.
01:54That publication states that the battlefield will be everywhere, right?
01:57That's right.
01:58What does that mean for America?
01:59It means anything goes, you know, we tend to expect a war to start on the day the shooting
02:03starts and we say we're at war to the Chinese, we're already at war.
02:07You said that U.S. needs its own political warfare strategy against the Chinese Communist
02:12Party.
02:14What should that look like?
02:15Well, it needs to be a, first of all, a comprehensive plan that you use your, every tool you've
02:21got, economic, financial, media, propaganda, but more than anything, you've got to have
02:29an awareness you're actually at war and then you've got to have somebody who's responsible
02:33for running it.
02:34I can't see who in United, the USG, is the person who does political warfare.
02:40I saw a State Department official testifying recently and you could tell he had no idea
02:48about political warfare, but someone's got to be in charge and responsible for it.
02:54So General Spaulding, how does the Chinese Communist Party differ from the Soviet Union
02:59in its approach to political warfare against America?
03:02I don't think it differs in its approach.
03:05It differs in the tools it has available to itself.
03:08So the Soviet Union was cut off from the global economy.
03:11So globalization wasn't a thing and it wasn't a part of it.
03:14And then furthermore, Silicon Valley hadn't developed all the tools of influence and technological
03:19reach into our own homes, into each individual citizen.
03:24So those tools far surpassed anything that were available to the Soviet Union in terms
03:28of active measures.
03:30So how could our methods of combating the Soviet Union work against the Chinese Communist
03:35Party?
03:36Well, as I mentioned previously, bringing back COCOM, bringing back the US Information
03:41Agency, making public diplomacy an independent effort within the executive branch, and then
03:46focusing all the agencies and departments of the executive branch on this political
03:50warfare.
03:51For example, right now you have, within the White House, you have the National Security
03:56Council focused on national security, you have the National Economic Council focused
03:59on trade, and they fight over what challenges are coming in because of the Chinese Communist
04:06Party.
04:07They need to be united.
04:08Who would you, is there any existing agency or any existing person within the government,
04:16our present government structure that you would put in charge of trying to educate this
04:24administration and the cabinets and the divisions within each cabinet about the potential perils
04:30of the CCP?
04:31Well, that's the job of the intelligence agencies, but they're not really focused on political
04:36warfare.
04:37So unless you get them to basically lead off that effort in terms of explaining to the
04:42executive branch what political warfare is, and until you unite all the agencies and departments
04:47against this threat, you're not going to do anything against it.
04:50Mr. Mattis, is there, I'll ask each of you, is there a single person or agency in the
04:57government that should be in charge of that?
04:59Do you agree with the intelligence community or you have?
05:03I think this is fairly clearly the job of the President, the Secretary of State, the
05:09National Security Council, and the supporting staff.
05:13And when we have done this well in the past, we had an integrated system that was looking
05:20at what was going on, and we were also looking at the other tools that we had at our disposal.
05:26We understood the Marshall Plan as part of political warfare, and we understood some
05:31of our education, cultural exchange, the idea of putting Americans abroad so that other
05:36countries could have a true experience of Americans rather than the Soviet propaganda.
05:41Right.
05:42Colonel, do you have a response?
05:45Well, it's a tough challenge.
05:46I would say if you run it out of the National Security Council, it could work, but you have
05:51to have the right people, some people who understand it, have that personality that
05:55can make it work.
05:56So it looks like you have to have the will.
06:00You have to, first of all, understand the threat that China poses.
06:03You have to have the will to combat China before we could task agencies and specific
06:12people with a business model to combat China's growing influence in the United States.
06:22And it's kind of like you have to have a will to secure the border before you can secure
06:25the border.
06:26So I hope that we can do that.
06:28I hope that, you know, we've seen from Representative Khanna and Representative Cristoborte, who
06:34asked serious, credible questions today, and I appreciate that, that this is a huge problem
06:41in America.
06:43And it doesn't sound like our government right now is taking it very seriously, and we need
06:49to change that.
06:50And I hope that the work of this committee moving forward, and hopefully we can continue
06:54to find a couple of reasonable members of the committee on the other side of the aisle
06:59to work in a bipartisan manner to see that that happens.
07:03That concludes our questioning.