Gee Why would the Communist Chinese Want to Own Land Next to US Military Bases - and Why would the US Government Let them??
by Mary K Jacobs, The New York Post, June 23, 2024
China has been buying up strategically placed farmland next to military installations across the US, raising national security fears over potential espionage or even sabotage.
The Post has identified 19 bases across the US from Florida to Hawaii which are in close proximity to land bought up by Chinese entities and could be exploited by spies working for the communist nation.
They include some of the military’s most strategically important bases: Fort Liberty (formerly Fort Bragg) in Fayetteville, North Carolina; Fort Cavazos (formerly Fort Hood) in Killeen, Texas; Marine Corps Base Camp Pendleton in San Diego, California, and MacDill air force base in Tampa, Florida.
Robert S. Spalding III, a retired United States Air Force brigadier general whose work focuses US-China relations told The Post: “It is concerning due to the proximity to strategic locations.
“These locations can be used to set up intelligence collection sites and the owners can be influential in local politics as we have seen in the past,” he added.
Click Here to Watch the Newest We the People Convention News & Opinion Podcast!
“It is alarming we do not have laws on the books that would prevent the Chinese from buying property in the US.”
Under the guise of farming, the Chinese landowners could set up reconnaissance sights, install tracking technology, use radar and infra-red scanning to view bases or attempt to fly drones over them as ways to surveil military sites, sources told The Post.
A report in the Wall Street Journal from September 2023 found Chinese intruders attempted to breach military facilities over 100 times in recent years, including sneaking onto a missile range in New Mexico and scuba divers spotted near a government rocket-launch site in Florida.
The threat the Chinese government poses to America is huge, with the FBI labelling it a “grave threat” and director Christopher Wray saying in April hackers have made their way into US critical infrastructure and are waiting “for just the right moment to deal a devastating blow” and “physically wreak havoc.”
The Department of Homeland Security has also warned of the threat of Chinese spies slipping over the US Southern border, disguised as among the more than 30,000 who have already been admitted this since October last year. Those spies will likely “employ economic espionage” and “seek to illicitly acquire our technologies and intellectual property” according to DHS’s Homeland Threat Assessment 2024.
Morgan Lerette, a former contractor for private military contractor Blackwater is sounding the alarm.
“The Chinese are, or will, use this farmland to learn more about US military capabilities, movements, and technology,” Lerette told The Post.
“This will allow them to better understand how to transition their military from a defensive strategy to an expeditionary one,” he said, adding they’ll figure out “how to move forces quickly for conflicts such as taking Taiwan and how and when US forces would respond to their incursions based on troop movement at these bases,” he explained.
He added China will be watching troop movements into and out of bases in an attempt to form an idea of the patterns of behavior and movements.
Click Here to Read More News at the New York Post.com
