Huge fires have been devastating Los Angeles for days. The damage is enormous. What do we know? What don’t we know? What to think?
WHAT WE KNOW (SALT report)
Size. NIL.
Activity. Manned and/or natural-fostered wildfire heavily affecting a densely populated L.A. residential area.
Location. Los Angeles County, Pacific Palisades (red zone).
Time. Started on 07JAN25 at 10:30am – still ongoing.
Battle Damage Assessment (BDA). 25 fatalities; over 90,000 residents displaced; more than 60 square miles burnt; at least 7,000 homes destroyed; damages potentially exceeding $250 billion.
WHAT WE DO NOT KNOW
At this stage, local and federal authorities are still scrutinizing the official causes of the critical incident. Allegedly, a team from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) took the lead on the investigations. Additionally, there are inquires aimed at determining the fallacies around the limited crisis response mechanism and containment measures.
WHAT WE THINK
In connection with the critical incident – whose management, regardless of the current inquiries, has been widely criticized by the public opinion due to the limited implementation of preventive and contingency measures by local and governmental agencies – possible assumptions grounded upon the “what-if” scenario structured analytic approach might be devised. The goal is to be prepared for a holistic risk assessment effort taking in to account the current geostrategic/geopolitical global competition framework.
These hypotheses a) refer to the clandestine agenda, which is being potentially implemented in the U.S. by sleeper cells under the operational branches of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), and b) are to be pictured within the logic of the global scale competition. The strategic framework is the realm of the “other than war” operations. Be they arson-originated sabotage, subversive, psychological, cyber-related, informational, normative or intelligence in nature, these activities are typical of the so-called “Gray Zone” or “5th Generation Warfare” operational environment, where the distinction between war and peace is blurred and not recognizable. The use of proxy agents is also conceived with the aim of plausibly denying China’s direct involvement (and then responsibility) by granting covert action. As emphasized hereafter, the scenario implies the use, on the part of a malign nation-state actor, of its instruments of national power aimed at interfering/influencing/coercing/degrading/defeating the adversary in light of the political goals to be achieved.
Significant Activities (SIGACTs). Over the last years, the U.S. Government has tracked an increment in the operational activities that have a) violated its sovereignty that have been carried out by individuals/network related to the PRC and b) been executed within the “hybrid engagement” approach. Indicators and Warnings (I&W) of the alleged damaging activity that have been spotted in the operational environment are the following:
The spy balloon: A Chinese surveillance balloon that flew across the U.S. and was able to gather intelligence from several sensitive American military sites entered the airspace over Alaska on 28JAN23. Within the next four days, the balloon was flying over Montana — specifically Malmstrom Air Force Base, where the U.S. stores some of its nuclear assets. The balloon was shot down on 4FEB23 off the coast of South Carolina.
Southern border. The House Committee on Homeland Security, in the “Startling Stats” factsheet detailing the U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) border encounter numbers for March of Fiscal Year (FY) 2024, reported that “24,376 Chinese nationals have been encountered at the Southwest border, 24,214 of them apprehended illegally crossing the border. Encounters of Chinese nationals in March 2024 increased over 8,000 percent compared to March 2021, and have surpassed all of last fiscal year––just six months into FY24”. As specified, the overwhelming majority of these Chinese migrants are military-age males, which poses a great concern in terms of the PRC ability to deploy operatives in the U.S. soil as advance force considering future activations. Of note, Chinese entities are also exploiting the porous southern border by working with Mexican cartels to transport and sell fentanyl in the U.S. As widely known, China is the principal fentanyl manufacturer on the planet. Its chemical and pharmaceutical companies provide precursor chemicals necessary for fentanyl creation. These chemicals are sold and shipped to Mexican cartels, which then create large batches of the drug in the country.
Computer network operations. As reported in the 2024 Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), “China remains the most active and persistent cyber threat to U.S. Government, private-sector, and critical infrastructure networks. Beijing’s cyber espionage pursuits and its industry’s export of surveillance, information, and communications technologies increase the threats of aggressive cyber operations against the United States and the suppression of the free flow of information in cyberspace”. Along the same lines, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) stated that “CISA, National Security Agency (NSA), the FBI assess that People’s Republic of China (PRC) state-sponsored cyber actors are seeking to pre-position themselves on IT networks for disruptive or destructive cyberattacks against U.S. critical infrastructure in the event of a major crisis or conflict with the United States”. To be stressed, the Department of Justice informed of “a multi-month law enforcement operation that, alongside international partners, deleted “PlugX” malware from thousands of infected computers worldwide. As described in court documents unsealed in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, a group of hackers sponsored by the People’s Republic of China (PRC), known to the private sector as “Mustang Panda” and “Twill Typhoon,” used a version of PlugX malware to infect, control, and steal information from victim computers”.
Espionage activities. A survey dated 2023 showed that there have been 224 Chinese military, political, and commercial espionage cases directed at the United States since 2000. The focus was on the illicit acquisition of information by Chinese intelligence officers or their agents and on the increasing number of Chinese covert influence operations. As an effect of the efforts estimates run into the billions of dollars for commercial and technological espionage. In addition to the illegals, Chinese nationals who go to the U.S. to work or study – then on legal bases – are a fertile ground for recruitment. Often, they intend to return to China or have close family members resident in China, making them more susceptible to coercion. In terms of tactics and techniques, hacking is the preferred mode of espionage, even though the PRC uses traditional methods of agent recruitment (usually sex or money) as well as unconventional approaches, such as buying property next to a military or research facility.
Influence operations. Connected to espionage activities, a pattern of persistent influence enterprise has emerged. The Justice Department reported that China has spent more over the past six years—$280 million—to influence U.S. politics than any other foreign country. A study found out that “China appears to be increasingly interfering in U.S. elections through intensive lobbying, control of foreign media outlets, and sophisticated disinformation campaigns”. Moreover, the Chinese Government or its proxies, such like pro-China businesspeople, “control nearly all of the Chinese-language media in the U.S. and is posed to gain control of U.S. university associations for students of Chinese heritage by using those to try to shape campus and political discourse”.
SIGINT. Thru the use of satellite imagery and other open-source tools, it has been assessed that nearly a dozen facilities across Cuba were rumored to be connected to Chinese espionage. Of these, four had observable SIGINT instrumentation (Signal Intelligence, collection activity aimed at intercepting signals transmitted by both civilian and military actors), clear physical security infrastructure (guard posts, perimeter fencing, military insignia, etc.), and other characteristics that suggested intelligence collection targeting the U.S.
It is reasonable to infer that the density of the reported SIGACTs presumably conducted by the Chinese enterprise seems to be representing I&W that pose a serious growing concern for the U.S., especially if coordinated with the threat of force application in the South China Sea and other worldwide areas of interest/influence for the PRC.
With this regard, another authoritative evidence of the alarm raised by suspicious Chinese undertakings within the U.S. borders is the interview with 60 Minutes Overtime released on 12JAN25 by the FBI Director Christopher Wray Over on the reasons for his resignation and the threats facing America. With this respect, the Director clearly stated that the “Chinese government’s pre-positioning on American civilian critical infrastructure – like water treatment plants, transportation systems, and telecommunications – has not gotten the attention it deserves”.
Direct effects. According to the suggested thesis, the L.A. wildfires might be seen as an indicator of an operational act of sabotage aimed at disrupting and degrading U.S. critical infrastructures and activities of a city that is a point of departure of maritime forces and equipment in a scenario relating to kinetic engagements of the PRC in the South China Sea maritime region.
Second order effects. Within the same logic and along the projections of the proposed scenario-based speculation, the critical incident as potentially orchestrated by the PRC might be producing other disrupting and degrading consequences like a) a relevant number of residents becoming homeless; b) a significant contractions on jobs; c) the likely emergence of internecine frictions leading to rampant criminal activities; d) a likely uptick in drug addiction due to the miserable conditions that the populace will be enduring.
The strategic goal. If the hypothesis holds, the Chinese enterprise would seem to be poised to heavily affect the American society thru the lens of global confrontation paradigm by exhausting the U.S. systems-of-systems from within, a legacy of the Sun-Tzu doctrine that requires “subduing the enemy without fighting”.