Casey Fleming: The Chinese Regime Uses All Sectors to Wage War on the US, and the US Must Respond

How has the Chinese Communist Party used unconventional tactics to wage war on the US for the past several decades? And why did almost nobody notice?

What is asymmetric hybrid warfare, and how is it central to the Chinese Communist Party’s strategy of attack on the West?

And, how can companies, universities, and governments effectively protect their innovation against this assault?

This is American Thought Leaders ??, and I’m Jan Jekielek.

In this episode, we’ll sit down with Casey Fleming, Chairman and CEO of the intelligence consulting firm, BlackOps Partners. He is an expert on security strategy, asymmetric hybrid warfare, cybersecurity, and economic espionage, and he regularly advises the private sector as well as Congress, the Department of Justice, and the White House.

Jan Jekielek: Casey Fleming, great to have you on American Thought Leaders.

Casey Fleming: It’s a pleasure.

Mr. Jekielek: You have been interviewed numerous times by the Epoch Times regarding your expertise around China and asymmetrical hybrid warfare. When we talked about China three or four years ago, it was a very different picture. Tell us how things have changed.

Mr. Fleming: I think our government has finally realized how serious the threat is from China. Before, we were looking at it like a one-off instance. It was amusing at the time, and nobody really connected the dots. What we have seen now is a ground swell. The government is all in on the China threat, and has come all in on it. They realize now that it must be a “whole-of-nation” approach, just as the Chinese Communist Party has a “whole-of-nation” approach against the United States and all of our Western allies. There has been a shift to a “whole-of-nation” approach, which now includes not just the government, but the private sector including business and academia.

Mr. Jekielek: You almost make it sound like we are at war here, but we are not, right?

Mr. Fleming: It depends on who you ask. If you ask the Chinese Communist Party, they are absolutely in war with us. They have consistently said that they are at war with the United States and it is a life and death war. To [the CCP], it is a life and death war, but people in the United States are not used to this type of war. To the United States and our western allies, you are either in a bloody battle with uniforms, tanks, planes and generals, or you are not.

Our adversaries have waged what they call an “asymmetric hybrid war” against us. That is everything short of conventional war that we are aware of. The first thing everybody needs to understand is the war that has been waged on the United States has incidentally been around since the start of the Communist Party in China, which was 1949. In 1986, they came out with a nation-state directive called Program 863 (the naming comes from the date—namely the year 1986 and March, the third month)… I’ll give you my layman’s terms: “we’ll basically lie, cheat and steal to global dominance.” That is the war. We all have to understand that they have waged war on us. We have not waged a conventional war. But the war that is being fought is something that we are not used to. We are not used to asymmetric hybrid warfare, which is attacking from all angles and sides to weaken and take over the United States. That is what the overall end game strategy is. They want to defeat capitalism, democracy, and turn the world into their own order. We have to understand what the war is and what the fight is. That is what the whole asymmetric, different direction, hybrid warfare is about.

What is hybrid warfare? Hybrid warfare is achieving military gains through non-military methods. We do not like the word “war” in the United States, because that means very nasty things. The bigger name is called “Great-Power Competition.” If you look at history, about every 70 years, a nation or a couple of nations decide to challenge the world order. That is called the “Great-Power Competition”. Currently, it is China and Russia. They have friends by the name of Iran and North Korea that are all allied together and are all communist. Some people regard China as a democracy, but that is not the case. China is clear, serious, oppressive, authoritarian, dictated, and communist. There are not two Chinas, there is one China and it is a communist driven command and control country with a straight line through the country. We, and our western allies, have to understand that if we put a plant, laboratory, development center, sell into China, or buy products from China, we are partnering with the Chinese Communist Party. This is absolutely the truth.

[This] government is refreshing. I met with senior leaders of our government yesterday, and they underscore the seriousness of this. It is an existential threat to the United States, because the Chinese Communist Party wants to weaken us through our strength, which is the economy. Our strength is through our economy, and they want to weaken that by stealing the technology.

Our adversary is all about live versus die. In other words, their philosophy is that they must live, but we must die. So when they compete, they have to win, so we can never compete again. Americans are completely foreign to that. We believe in winning and losing. For example, if my team does not win the Super Bowl, World Series, or Little League this year, the clock resets in January, and I get another shot.

Mr. Jekielek: Come back, and fight another day.

Mr. Fleming: Come back and fight another day. With the Chinese Communist Party, you will never come back and fight another day. What many people do not understand about the Communist Party is that they have no intention ever of coexisting with anyone. They want to absolutely dominate and control the global universe as we know it today. Teachings inside China, through the Chinese Communist Party, are that they have owned the world for 2000 years, and are going to rightfully own the world back again. The date [of their goal] is the hundred year anniversary of the Chinese Communist Party in 1949, which is 2049.

We have to understand our adversary. So are we at war? Not necessarily, but our adversary is certainly at war with us. If you are at war with an adversary, you have to know your adversary intimately. That is where we focus, communicate, and raise the awareness accordingly.

Mr. Jekielek: Would you say that this is primarily an economic war? With what has happened recently with the tariffs, it has been described as a trade war. Has it primarily been a trade war or an economic war?

Mr. Fleming: Your operative word was primary, and the answer is yes. The primary focus [for China] is defeating the US economy. They do that through financing, banking, and stealing intellectual property from every company. Whether you are doing business in China or not, if you have intellectual property, and of course you do because that is what you sell to make a profit, you are targeted by the Chinese Communist Party’s military, all the operatives, all the citizens that they control, and so on. So yes, it is primarily economic, but there are over 100 different methods of asymmetric warfare. For example, drug warfare. They are behind fentanyl to weaken America. You, your family, and your cousins can order fentanyl and have it in your mailbox in three weeks directly coming from China.

There is drug warfare, propaganda warfare, religious warfare, and all these types of things. We do reports on that quite a bit. We have a chart that is about forty of the main [types of warfare]. For example, cyber warfare is a key vector, but it is not the be-all and end-all. Our companies are all focused on cyber warfare, thinking that is where the focus needs to be, and there does need to be focused on that. Don’t take your foot off the pedal on that, but you need to look at all the other methods that they are using to extract information. Their goal is to put your company out of business.

Assistant US Attorney by the name of John Demers came out with a fantastic and accurate quote: “rob, replicate and replace.” So where is your company or university, in this whole “rob, replicate and replace piece of it? You are absolutely in one of those stages. “Rob” is where they are stealing your intellectual property. “Replicate” is when they are selling your intellectual property/product to your customers at 30 cents on the dollar. So how long can you compete? Lastly, “replace” is to put you out of business. “Rob, replicate and replace.” So where is your company on that spectrum? Your company is absolutely on that spectrum, because you have intellectual property.

Mr. Jekielek: This actually reminds me of the Segway. The iconic brand where the IP was stolen, and the competing product was reverse engineered and created. And then with its success being sold, perhaps 30 cents on the dollar, that company actually ended up buying Segway. I think this illustrates your point.

Mr. Fleming: There are literally hundreds of these examples, and nobody really connects the dots. We do because we caught this a long time ago, but nobody, with the 24 hour news cycle ever connects the dots and says, “this is the strategy, this is what is working, this is the execution of the Chinese Communist Party in this industry and industry sector” and so on. We all hear about Huawei and the 5G technology, but we forget where Huawei came from. Huawei was born out of theft from Northern Telecom (Nortel). In 2000, Nortel was the largest company in Canada, with a worth of 30 billion dollars. It was the largest employer in Canada, the oldest company in Canada, and the big AT&T of Canada. In 2000, the Chinese Communist Party got into the network through the Chinese military, and the company executives did not take it seriously. The IT director was running up and down the hallways with his hair on fire, and they said “calm down”.

You had a 30 billion dollar company in Canada and a zero revenue company in China that nobody had ever heard of. After 2008, there are no more employees, complete bankruptcy with Nortel and now a 30 billion dollar company in China called Huawei. Today, Huawei is a 110 billion dollar company that has plenty of money to offer. You want to get into 5G? We will pay for all of your equipment with no startup cost. We will just lease the equipment to you moving on, because they have the cash derived from selling products to Americans and western allies.

Another example is American Superconductor. It was a windmill energy company that had best of breed, fantastic windmills. The technology came down to the source code inside computer chips running these windmills. China ordered a billion dollars worth of windmills in their pipeline of backlog of products to be manufactured and shipped to China. They took the first hundred million and realized that they had reverse engineered the hardware on [the windmills], but needed the software. They figured out one of seven people in the world that had the software, and spent 20,500 euros on women, alcohol, and bars in order to get the source code and chip away from a 29 year-old system engineering manager in Austria. Once they had the source code to run those windmills, they canceled 900 million dollars from this moderately sized company. Their stock went from 45 dollars a share to 4.5 dollars over a 90 day period. The US attorney at the time quoted it as “corporate homicide”.

This is what is happening in every industry. It is “rob, replicate and replace”. There are literally hundreds of these examples. Another one is a very large microchip or micro processing company, where [China] stole 50% of the IP. They extracted 50% of the heart, soul and future of the company. The Department of Justice and the FBI got involved, but those secrets are gone. It is not a good day when the FBI knocks on your door. Typically your secrets are in the wind and they are not going to come back.

Mr. Jekielek: We have reported a lot on how the Chinese military works with hackers, universities, and industry in this kind of circle. You mentioned that America is committed to a “whole-of-nation” approach. That is very new. What we know is that China very much has a “whole-of-nation” approach through the command and control system of the Chinese Communist Party. To me, it is difficult to imagine a “whole-of-nation” approach in America right now. How is this working?

Mr. Fleming: It is difficult because our government is typically fragmented and separate. The private sector keeps the government at arm’s length, and government keeps private sector at arm’s length and academia and the military is on its own. We are all kinds of fragmented. What is extremely new and refreshing is that our government has realized that the Chinese Communist Party has a “whole-of-nation” approach to destroy the United States’ economy, democracy and capitalism. The only answer back is the same “whole-of-nation” approach. The only time I can actually remember a period like that in the United States was World War II. We are at a World War II juncture, where the government absolutely desires and wants to work with the private sector, including industry, business, and academia. We are all working singly in the same mission to combat and defend against these threats. Again, it is not just economic espionage and stealing IP, it is drug warfare, religious warfare, etc. You can find this information from my company called BlackOps, and we have a slide on this. I call it the “money slide”. It is basically the Chinese Communist Party’s asymmetric strategy against the United States in the west. Russia plays in about six or seven of those information warfare, also known as cognitive warfare.

We are all dealing with the fake news and people trying to sway public opinion now. If you control the mind, you control the country, so we all have to be aware of this cognitive warfare that is going on. It is a serious time.

We as Americans, the West, and the rest of the world have enjoyed a pretty good economy. We have serious adversaries that want to take that away and make it their own to a world of oppression, misdeeds and something that we find very distasteful with the runnings and the history of the Chinese Communist Party. In my opinion, it is good versus evil, which is happening now today.

Again, it is refreshing that our government, at the very high levels, says enough is enough. We are not going to allow you to steal our innovation, industry and economy. We are going to defend that very significantly. It is a unique time. I know we have been trying to get together for several months and do this interview, but now is appropriate because very recently, this sea change has happened with our country, where we are all on the same team. That to me is very exciting.

Mr. Jekielek: It is absolutely. At the same time, there are untold billions of dollars of investment that are caught up in the grasp of the Chinese Communist Party. We have had experts like Robert Spalding explaining how money is very tough to get out if not impossible. Right? So that is some serious leverage against the private sector, government, academia and the US all working in conjunction. How do you see this playing out?

Mr. Fleming: At some point, you have to understand where you turn the faucet off or turn the faucet down. You know that your money is at risk doing business in China, so do you continue to put good money after good money into a very risky scenario? And now, even these existential things like this coronavirus is completely unplanned for, but you can see how risky your investments are in China. Just by something that was not even planned, which is this coronavirus, that is basically freezing the Chinese economy, and the supply chain of materials and products to the United States for us to make products or sell to our customers.

The question really begs to companies and to universities. We need to start looking strategically at the money that we put into the Chinese Communist country. People now understand that it does not come without attachments. It does not come without strings attached. It comes with risk, and we are seeing now with the coronavirus, the risk that comes with putting plants, laboratories, cooperation with university campuses, and sister campuses in China. It comes with extreme risk.

I think that since we are a capitalist society in the United States and in the West, we are too enamored with the cash flow and the money. We don’t ever want to look at the risk on the other side of it that what it may come with and I think now our government certainly is swinging to the side of being protective. It is going to force the private sector, which includes business and academia, to understand that the money in a communist regime is money that is at very high risk. This coronavirus and the trade wars are a very good window on the future of where it is coming. Each company and each university needs to realize how much risk we are willing to tolerate by these investments that we’re making in China.

Mr. Jekielek: Let’s look at the coronavirus scenario. We have had people on the show talk about the initial cover up of coronavirus and the punishment of the people who were raising the alarm. This sort of stuff is actually structural to the Communist Party and the communist system. I think this is very important for understanding how the system functions. Could you speak to that a bit?

Mr. Fleming: Anything that comes out of China, as far as information, is all state-run propaganda. It is typical of every communist regime. Nothing is allowed to get out of China, and if it does, [violators] will be severely punished by the regime. You have to understand that everything that comes out of China, as far as any type of information, has to be the party line. And if it gets out through other methods such as through the people, those people will be severely punished. I think the truth is going to come out maybe a year from now. What truly happened, what the origins of the [coronavirus] are, and what the coverups have been. Even recently, the Chinese Communist Party has admitted that they did not react quickly enough and so they are actually falling on their sword a little bit, because this has become pretty serious on a countrywide basis.

Mr. Jekielek: Now based on what you have seen on the information warfare side of things, do you expect them to blame America?

Mr. Fleming: They already are through social media channels. They are blaming the United States for planting the coronavirus. All I can say is to let lead calmer heads prevail and see what happens a year from now what really plays out. I think the truth will eventually come out in about a year once we are all past this. I hope it does not grow any more than it has [in China], but we are hearing that the numbers are grossly under-reported both on infections and deaths. Because we are dealing with a Chinese Communist Party regime, we have learned to never take anything at face value and let it all play out. Time will always tell you what is going on. My time parameter is about a year.

Mr. Jekielek: You mentioned religious warfare a couple of times as something that the Chinese Communist Party uses against the US. What is that?

Mr. Fleming: That is another vector and method of asymmetric warfare to weaken the United States. They do information warfare campaigns, which is cognitive warfare to get into the minds [of people.] They do not believe in religion, and they think Americans are weak because we believe in religion. They use that against us, and fight our beliefs around religion. Expect our values to be attacked, and that social media and regular mainstream media might not be factual, and can be levied by some of our adversaries. They use anything to fight our beliefs that we were raised with as children. Whatever religions that are special to us, or that we were raised with. They know that most of us are very religious people, and so they do anything that attacks it and renders it obsolete or inaccurate to weaken our resolve. They want to weaken our resolve by challenging those religions. That is the same with any one of those attack vectors of asymmetric warfare.

Mr. Jekielek: It is very interesting to think about all of this from a warfare perspective, but I am also thinking about the Thousand Talents Program. The top Harvard professor of nanotechnology was recently indicted by creating an institute and getting paid huge amounts of money for knowledge. This strikes me as something that would fit into an attack vector. How do you see this situation?

Mr. Fleming: It is absolutely an attack vector. It is education warfare and propaganda warfare. The Thousand Talents Program is supported by the Confucius Institute program and the Confucius Classroom Program.

Mr. Jekielek: Please briefly explain how that works, and how the Thousand Talents Program fits in.

Mr. Fleming: There is a Chinese company throughout Hollywood called the Wanda Group, and it is run by the Chinese Communist Party. Every company in China is a facade, and is commanded and controlled by the Chinese Communist Party. They have employees and executives that have to swear oaths to the Chinese Communist Party. If it is a large company, there are Chinese Communist Party command and control groups placed in the company headquarters. The Wanda Group influences and uses propaganda through our films. Americans love movies, and they want to make America look worse than it really is, and make China the all powerful victor in movies. In fact, for the new Top Gun movie coming out, the Chinese Communist Party had [the Wanda Group] change the trailer. I’ll leave that to your viewers to figure out how they changed the trailer from the previous Top Gun trailer to the new Top Gun trailer. It might have to do something on the back of Tom Cruise’s jacket. That is the propaganda side.

To the education piece that you asked on Harvard University, it is an influence as well as a pipeline. Starting an institute is a pipeline to send intellectual property directly to China in a firehose conduit to make that happen. The Thousand Talent Program is to pay some professors to get information directly [to China]. How else are they going to be able to destroy our economy and sell our products to our customers at 30 cents on the dollar? There is no cost for research, development, and innovation for them when they do this. For example, when you make a cancer drug, computer chip, or a super soybean, or anything, the first one costs 10 billion dollars for research and development. The second one costs a nickel. The Chinese Communist Party is trying to get rid of the cost of the first one and just go straight to the second one. It is not just money, it is also the time. For example, they say it takes ten years to develop the hybrid seed, or the DRAM (dynamic random-access memory) and then just to steal it. It takes ten years and say 10 billion dollars, but they don’t care about that. They are the Chinese Communist Party. They just want to know how to mass produce the product and cut us out of the program.

Mr. Jekielek: I remember that you did an estimate of what the cost of the IP theft was through your operation.

Mr. Fleming: The number that the government runs on is about 600 billion per year. That is the raw innovation and research and development that is stolen out of the economy. You have to put the MBA number on that. The government just gives you the raw number, but for the business executives, CEOs, board of directors, that computer chip, hybrid seed, cancer drug, car engine, fuel system in a car, or battery was meant to power their companies for seven to ten years. For example, if they make a 3 billion dollar investment in a cancer drug, that is meant to power their company for anywhere from seven to ten years in revenue, profit and jobs. You have to take in account that number into the 600 billion dollar [raw calculation] each year. I say that the number is certainly 600 billion, but you have to factor that into the actual value of that technology in our economy and to each and every company that is losing intellectual property. For just rough math sake, 10 years worth of value on 600 billion dollars is 6 trillion dollars. This is taken each and every year out of the US economy. Maybe it is not 6 trillion dollars, and maybe it is somewhere between 600 billion and 6 trillion.

Pick the number you want that fits, but it is catastrophic, if it goes on cumulatively over time in the US economy. It affects every company. I don’t care if you’re, you are a distributor or whatever, if you have competing products coming from China for 30 cents on the dollar, it’s very difficult to stay in business that way, especially when you have to pay for new products and new innovation to power your company for the next five years, and have the rug pulled out from underneath you from a very aggressive and insidious adversary who is in this for the long haul. It is a life and death fight by our adversary, and no different than World War II.

I think everybody is waking up to that fact now. Some people think that it might be at DEFCON 1 level. How do you measure this? I get asked a lot, “where is it on a scale of one to ten?” People are expecting the answer to be at one or two. It is not. We have an intelligence group that works with expatriates coming back from China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Russia. We also have a very robust intelligence network. When you add all this up, it is not a one or two on a scale of 10. It is about an 8.5 or a nine. We have to understand that as senior leaders of companies and of academia, because that is where all of our innovation is developed and transferred.

Our adversaries have technology transfer institutes, so when they steal the innovation, it goes into a technology transfer Institute. They extract out how much of it can be commercial to kill the US economy and grow our Chinese economy, as well as find out what the military applications could be. It is stripped, how it can be used both commercially as well as military. It is a professional network. It is a very sophisticated network that they have to extract information and innovation from the west. Also, this is not just the United States. It is just as bad for Germany, France, Italy, UK, Australia, and Canada.

Mr. Jekielek: Aside from doing advisory work with the Department of Justice and the White House, you also do advisory work in the private sector. How often are people coming to you with questions about this now? What I understand is in the past, people were not ready to admit that they had been cyber compromised because of, for example, stocks. How has the climate in the private sector changed through wanting to know how to deal with this?

Mr. Fleming: It is a sea change. Three or five years ago, it was like an annoyance and almost entertaining to have our people speak at conferences. People treated it as information that was interesting and nice to know. Nowadays, however, the phone rings off the hook. People now know that there is a problem and that it is serious. They want the truth. “My people in my company are not telling me the truth. They are telling me what I want to hear but not what I need to hear. Will you come here and tell me what I need to hear?” And we say “yes we will certainly do that for you.”

It has been a relief to us because all of us in our company are patriots for America and our heritage. To finally get sunlight on this now, and to have the phone ringing off the wall is exciting and refreshing to know that we are not alone in this fight anymore. It is all for one and one for all.

Mr. Jekielek: Let’s talk about Huawei. Huawei is a great example of a whole-of-country approach that the Chinese Communist Party hugely subsidizes. All different aspects of the Chinese economy are pushing Huawei to be the telecom giant. They are operating in 70 countries around the world currently and new contracts are being signed all the time. The US is supposed to come up with its own version, but so far has been lackluster with the development in this area. Where do you see this going? Is there going to be an American Huawei?

Mr. Fleming: We will absolutely see it. I think it is lackluster now, but when the chips are down Americans perform under pressure and will impress. Huawei is run by the Chinese Communist Party. Everybody watching needs to understand that it is a communist regime. Understand that there is oppression built into it, and supporting and growing the Communist Party built into it.

5G is like a central nervous system in the technology world. The difference between 4G and 5G is a huge quantum leap. It is basically computing everywhere, so everything is going to be on the network or that nervous system. Everything you do for your company or for your family is going to be on that 5G network. If you have evil, nefarious equipment that is meant to siphon off all your IP and information, then use the information to power your artificial intelligence. The more information and data you have to feed your artificial intelligence, the better your artificial intelligence is going to be. 5G is not just a technology race about bringing revenue to the economies that are participating, but fundamentally about command and control. By having 5G in a country, if you say something or act in a way that the Chinese Communist Party does not like, they can shut down your company, and countries off the 5G network. Viewers need to understand that 5G is a weaponized technology. That’s why we and our American government are vehemently opposed to the intentions by these nefarious companies having a foothold in the 5G network.

Mr. Jekielek: Right now, there have been preliminary decisions made with the UK that some aspects of the network will be run with 5G. The Chinese Communist Party has made assurances that Huawei will not be beholden to the Communist Party, and that they will follow the rules in the UK. They say that there will not be any sort of systems like the surveillance that we utilize in China, because we will follow your rules. Presumably people believe that. Why else would they choose to put this network in? Tell me about this.

Mr. Fleming: If you have ever studied and know anything about the Chinese Communist Party or any communist regime, you need to understand it is plausible deniability and stealth. It is fake left and go right. They cannot be trusted. The other thing is that there might be financial gains with it as well.

Mr. Jekielek: It is very cheap as it is basically just massively subsidized.

Mr. Fleming: The money comes with risk. So what is your risk tolerance for the money that you are receiving from Huawei to put in a 5G network in the UK? I do not speak for the US government, but it would be very difficult for me if I were in the government, or the government intelligence community to share any information with our staunch ally, which is the British government if they are going to be installing a 5G network that goes straight to the Chinese Communist Party.

Mr. Jekielek: When we were speaking offline, we talked about speaking with a certain high level official about how important it is to get the private sector involved with the whole-of-nation approach. Can you speak to that a little bit?

Mr. Fleming: The government understands that the private sector is in charge of their own destiny, and that the private sector is the economy. The private sector and the economy fund our national security. The government cannot tell the private sector what to do, so the private sector has to fix themselves on this. Individual companies and universities need to understand that their business and academic environments have shifted. Their adversary has shifted the environment for them. What that means is that asymmetric warfare or hybrid warfare is the new operating environment that they are now in. They have to move to this environment to survive as a company. Think about it, a nation state and all of their resources, and their command and control is completely after your intellectual property. I think you might act a little bit differently. So you need to have a security culture in your company. We used to have sexual harassment training in the 80s, diversity training in the 90s, and now we need to have security training. Not just cyber security. Cyber security is just one vector, an important and critical vector, but only one. We have insider threats, spy issues, the Thousand Talents Program, etc. All of these are different ways to extract the corporate jewels of our economy and country and ship them straight back to an aggressive, evil nation state.

Companies and universities need to understand that they are operating in a new environment under rules they are not familiar with. It is all based on Asian martial arts theory in a hybrid warfare type of thing. Corporate strategies at the strategic layer must be remolded and recast keeping in mind the hybrid warfare platform that has been thrust upon them by the Chinese Communist Party. The same thing goes for universities. The universities need to recast their one year plan, five year plan, and 20 year plan in this new environment. It’s not a new environment to the Chinese Communist Party, as it has been around for them since 1986. But to [American] companies, private sector, academia, it is new. So their strategies must be recast on top of this hybrid warfare platform. There are going to be winners and losers. When you lose your technology, you lose your IP, so you are done. You’ll go by the way of Nortel, American Superconductor, or you will be a shadow of what you used to be.

There are hundreds of other companies that we track that nobody else tracks. That is the number one message. Where do we go from here? Companies need to understand that they need to protect their IP at all costs. This war that the Chinese Communist Party has declared on us is looked upon as a challenge.

But what is refreshing is that it is a whole-of-nation approach from the United States standpoint. That gets me tremendously excited. The last time that this happened was World War II, so I am excited that we are actually moving forward so we can win this war against us. We can win it by out-innovating them because they are not innovators. We also have to protect that innovation. The way to win this is to focus on the grand innovation and out-innovate [China]. We have to have a security culture that protects the IP, corporate jewels, university jewels and research. A lot of these universities take government grants to develop powerful innovation that gets shared with companies and military applications. We absolutely have to protect it at all costs. We need to vet people who have access to it, and lock down access to it. We have to expect to be attacked, through both insider threats as well as the cyber community. Even conventional people that look like you and I, are turned spies because they were being blackmailed. So we need to lift our heads out of the cyber world and understand that this problem is a bigger problem. It is not just cyber.

Another point I would like to make is one of the fallacies that we are in right now in the United States regarding the way we view cybersecurity. Information Technology, back in the day was basically thrown over the fence at the geeks. I liken it to the plumbing of a company that keeps a company running. The C levels, CEO and the board flip IT over to the geeks, and they keep everything running. We don’t understand it, but they do. So that’s cool. Cybersecurity came along and sounded kind of like IT, so they said “okay, let’s throw that over the fence to the geeks.” So cybersecurity was just a box on top of the IT. That has been at the tactical layer in the organization. There are three levels of strategy in every organization. Starting from the bottom is the tactical layer, then the operational, and lastly, the strategic layer.

Our adversaries, by the fact that they attack us and have issued asymmetric hybrid warfare against us, operate at the strategic layer. We are mismatched in our response back to our adversary. Their war is waged at the strategic layer against every company, university and government. We need to migrate. There are several things that universities, as well as every company needs to do. They need to move cybersecurity and their whole security strategy up to the strategic layer in the organization.

Next, they have to create a security culture. We have a culture of sexual harassment training never took off in the past until we assigned it to the CEO. Same thing with diversity training, as it never took off until we assigned it to the CEO. Inside security is hybrid warfare, insider threat, and cybersecurity. Cybersecurity is not all security, it is just a single vector. There has to be an overall security culture in your organization, university or company.

A key point here also, is that it is not just your company, but also your supply chain. Your supply chain is also a huge vulnerability for your company and a very big weak link. About 60% of the breaches happen through the supply chain. You have to buddy up your suppliers and give them some tough love and say “if you are going to handle our IP, or company, this is what we expect you to abide by and you will be held accountable”. The whole global business and academic environment is now on a hybrid warfare platform. It has been thrust upon us, and we don’t have a choice. If you don’t adapt immediately, put your corporate or university on a strategy, and recast on top of an asymmetric hybrid warfare platform, you will fail and you will lose. This is something that’s fairly urgent.

I remember when I first started in this business intelligence piece against the Chinese Communist Party and the Russian FSB. I could not believe that this was happening. But over time, it kept happening. My learning curve was flat on this. All of a sudden it hockey-sticked all the way up. Now, after a couple of years, it is more expected what they are going to do next. It’s not surprising. Every person is going to go through a learning curve on this. So, everybody is going to say this is baloney. There is denial at first, and then people are going to realize everything that is happening.

I think having the US government behind this now saying that there has to be a whole-of-nation approach and stressing the importance of private sector involvement will help people with the early part of acceptance and the denial piece of it. It is an existential threat. The FBI director says that it is the largest and the most significant threat to the future of the United States. You would never hear that coming out of the FBI five years ago, or in the history of the FBI. But now, there are sounding the alarm bells for people to rally together arm-in-arm, brother to brother, sister to sister, and do a whole-of-nation approach on this.

Mr. Jekielek: Casey Fleming, such a pleasure to speak with you.

Mr. Fleming: Thank you for having me.