Posted on January 17, 2025
Secretary of State nominee Marco Rubio said Chinese port facilities at either end of the Panama Canal pose a military threat and could be used by Beijing in a crisis to shut down military shipping.
Mr. Rubio, appearing before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said President-elect Donald Trump’s comments about the need to restore U.S. control over the canal are serious, asserting that the Chinese presence means the canal is no longer in the Panamanian government’s control.
Mr. Trump has voiced concerns about the need to reacquire the waterway and earlier this month would not rule out using military or economic action to take it over.
Mr. Rubio said a central issue he discussed during a visit to the canal in 2017 is that “Chinese companies control port facilities at both ends of the canal, east and west.” Both military and security officials have expressed concerns that the canal could become a choke point to impede ships, he said.
Mr. Rubio said the former commander of the U.S. Southern Command, Army Gen. Laura J. Richardson, told him she has taken a flight over the canal and identified the Chinese civilian ports as “dual-use facilities that in a moment of conflict could be weaponized.”
“This is a legitimate issue that needs to be confronted,” Mr. Rubio testified.
Mr. Rubio said the matter needs to be studied, but that an argument could be made that China already has effective control of the canal.
“Because if they order a Chinese company that controls the ports to shut down or impede our transit, they will have to do it,” he said, noting that Chinese companies are under state control. “This is not a joke. The Panama Canal is a very serious issue.”
Panama’s government, which insists it will never relinquish control of the canal, recently began talks in 2021 on renewing the leases for the Chinese port.
The ports are owned by Hutchison Ports PPC, a subsidiary of Hong Kong-based C.K. Hutchison Holdings, which runs the ports of Balboa and Cristobal, major shipping hubs at the Canal’s Pacific and Atlantic outlets, respectively.
Report reveals PLA information warfare posture
China’s People’s Liberation Army is waging information warfare that is regarded as a key element of military power and crucial for battlefield combat, according to a report by an Air Force think tank.
“The PLA sees the ‘information domain’ as a domain of war unto itself, equal to the physical domains of air, land, sea, and space,” states the report by the China Aerospace Studies Institute made public this week.
Chinese hard power military operations are used to support information warfare operations.
“For the PLA, superiority in the information domain is necessary to seize and maintain battlefield initiative, and information dominance has become a prerequisite to being able to achieve decisive effects in any of the physical domains,” the report said.
By contrast, the U.S. military and those of other democratic states consider information “as the connective tissue that links and binds all of the other domains,” the report said.
The U.S. and other militaries regard information as serving roles similar to military logistics and supply chains.
Information systems help military forces synchronize and unify efforts in the physical war fighting areas, including cyberspace.
It is a supporting function not a stand-alone power, the report said.
The report said U.S. military planners and theorists must appreciate the role of information in PLA war fighting to understand how China wages war in the information arena. The PLA is described as “the armed wing of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)” and aggressively uses information and propaganda to pursue its goals.
“For Communist parties, the ultimate goal is to transform, or control, the minds of the people,” the report said. “While this can be accomplished for limited times by force, ultimately it is through controlling the narrative, shaping perceptions, and crafting information.”
Communist regimes control and use information to gain and maintain control over society and also shape conditions for the future. This is needed by China to achieve its goals.
Under President Xi Jinping, China has declared its strategic goal is “national rejuvenation.” The Pentagon widely views this goal as China seeking to usurp the U.S. role as the global superpower setting international rules and norms.
A key CCP tool is the Propaganda Department, often mistranslated as the Publicity Department, the report said. The agency is dedicated to controlling the narrative, framing history, and shaping people’s minds.
“In essence, the CCP employs the Propaganda Department to wage war in the battlefield of the mind, i.e. the information domain,” the report said.
The propaganda organ works closely with the PLA’s Political Work Department, a unit of the CCP Central Military Commission that controls the military.
As a party army, the PLA draws on all external political organizations to shape, manage, control, and ultimately fight in, the information domain. That type of warfare is not employed by the U.S. and its allies.
The PLA also operates together with the party’s United Front Work Department, a critical global influence and intelligence organization that analysts say is funded with the equivalent of several billion dollars. For PLA psychological warfare, China’s military is studying cognitive warfare — how to shape how information is received and processed in the human brain.
“The PLA recognizes that warfare in the modern age is not limited to the physical battlefield, and that it must be postured and actively engaged across the information domain, both before and during conflict,” the report said.
Chinese military outposts in the South China Sea are part of preparations to take control of the waterway. Military activities around Taiwan also are part of information warfare called “gray zone operations.”
“Suffice it to say that the PLA is right now, as you read this, actively engaged in operations in the Information Domain, attempting to shape the cognitive battlefield, even before the first kinetic shots of whatever the next conflict may be, are fired,” the report concludes.
The study was authored by Brendan S. Mulvaney, director of the Air Force’s China Aerospace Studies Institute.
Ratcliffe to review CIA analysis on Havana Syndrome
John Ratcliffe, CIA director-nominee, told the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence on Wednesday that he will aggressively review CIA analysis on the mysterious conditions suffered by overseas intelligence personnel and whether they were by enemy directed energy weapons.
“Should I be confirmed as CIA director, I will review all existing information and analysis and pursue all leads that provide insight into the cause and origin of [anomalous health incidents] and all medical incidents with a [counterintelligence] nexus,” Mr. Ratcliffe said in written answers to questions from the committee. “I will ensure that, under my leadership, CIA will pursue this issue aggressively, objectively, and with total analytic integrity.”
The CIA has come under fire from victims of the mysterious malady called “Havana Syndrome,” first detected in 2016 by U.S. Embassy personnel in Cuba. The CIA is leading other intelligence agencies in concluding that it is unlikely that the affliction is caused by foreign adversaries.
Last week, however, the Office of Director of National Intelligence published an updated analysis that revealed two unspecified U.S. intelligence agencies changed their views on the origin of the syndrome.
The two agencies now believe it is possible that directed energy weapons, including radio frequency arms, could be behind at least some of the incidents that have affected an estimated 1,500 American diplomats, intelligence personnel and some military attaches.
A subcommittee of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence recently issued an interim report that stated that new evidence points to foreign adversary attacks for incidents known as AHIs.
The report also accused the CIA of using faulty analysis and for obstructed the panel’s investigation into the origin of AHIs. The CIA denied both charges.
The written answers were made public during Mr. Ratcliffe’s nomination hearing before the Senate committee.
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