Air Force Commander Prepares California Desert Community for Pearl Harbor-Like Strike by China

Last month, the commander of Edwards Air Force Base, California, talked openly about the need for local leaders to prepare for a Pearl Harbor-like strike on his base and others inside the United States.

Brig. Gen. Doug Wickert delivered “a sobering assessment of China’s growing military capabilities” in a briefing to community leaders, according to an Air Force press release. Wickert, the 412th Test Wing commander, spoke at Antelope Valley College on May 7.

Edwards Air Force Base is located in the Mojave desert about 100 miles northeast of Los Angeles.

Wickert referenced the 1941 Pearl Harbor attack in his briefing, the press release said, drawing parallels to warnings about Pearl Harbor’s vulnerability prior to the attack.

Such frank talk about the possible impact on a community around an American military base, in the event of a war with China over Taiwan, is rare.

Notably, Wickert’s comments appear to be fully endorsed and approved by the Department of Defense, signaling a changing attitude.

Wickert compared Edwards, a massive facility focused on testing, research, and development, to its counterpart in the Chinese Air Force.

He presented intelligence data on the rapid modernization and “staggering” growth of the Chinese army, the press release said. Using Google Earth imagery, he pointed to Dingxin Test and Training Base in the Gobi Desert, China’s equivalent of Edwards AFB. “The base sits next to a full-scale two-dimensional replica of Taiwan’s Taichung International Airport,” according to the release.

“It’s kind of clear what their intention is,” Wickert said.

A third facility close by is the General Atomics-owned Grey Butte Field Airport, used for drone production, training, and research.

“If I was Chairman Xi and it’s time to go [to war], guess what I’m gonna target first?” Wickert asked. “So like it or not, we’re all in this together.”

Department of Defense military facilities are largely dependent upon local communities for power, water, sewage, information technology network connectivity, counter-drone efforts beyond the fence line, and many other basic services. U.S. military bases, for the most part, are not capable of extended continuity of operations without these local community partners, a key reason Wickert asked that community leaders be in attendance.

Coinciding with the identification of “Volt Typhoon”—a China-linked cyber espionage campaign—the United States passed its 2023 National Defense Authorization Act, including Section 1088, which directed a national tabletop exercise to assess “the resilience of domestic critical infrastructure and logistical choke points necessary for the United States Armed Forces to respond to a contingency involving Taiwan.”

Wickert may have been describing the role of his staff in the Section 1088 series of exercises when he described a recent week-long combat readiness exercise at Edwards Air Force Base.

However, thinking holistically and leveraging the complete spectrum of America’s instruments of national power—economic, financial, diplomatic, and military tools used to influence other countries— is critical, the general said. “The only way to win the next war is to prevent it from happening in the first place.”

The great power struggle between China and the United States is, first and foremost, a battle for economic dominance. It’s a battle to determine which country encumbers the world reserve currency chair.

That was revealed in the unprecedented high level cyber meetings in Geneva last December between members of the Biden team and their Chinese counterparts.

The Trump team has an opportunity to use the economic, financial, and diplomatic instruments of national power to degrade Chinese unrestricted warfare. It it takes advantage of that opportunity, it will minimize the likelihood of having to use the military instrument of national power to engage and defeat China in a war.