With the shift of the US strategic focus toward China as America’s main competitor, both the Department of Defense and academic experts have been examining what a war with China would look like. Unfortunately, but not surprisingly, all these analyses overlook one of the most important aspects of such a war: how it would affect the homeland and the US population. The 9/11 attacks demonstrated that the notion that the homeland, protected as it is by two vast oceans, is untouchable is no longer true. If nineteen hijackers with about $500,000 could cause such unimaginable physical and psychological damage, consider what China could do with its vast resources, years of preparation, and deep reach into US society.
To be sure, a kinetic conflict between US and Chinese military forces would mostly happen in the Indo-Pacific region. However, the US homeland would face protracted Chinese efforts to interrupt and slow down political and military decision-making, overwhelm domestic emergency services, erode public trust in local and federal governments, impose direct physical and psychological costs on the US population, and deepen the division between different interest groups across American society. While it is close to impossible to model all potential Chinese actions on US soil in case of war, we can find useful clues in analyses of Chinese theories of war, observations of current Chinese activities, and comparisons with other similar actors across the world whose irregular warfare campaigns China is closely monitoring.
Irregular Warfare on the Homeland and Escalation Dynamics
A conflict with China in the Indo-pacific would meaningfully increase the risks of large-scale nuclear escalation, which would consequently increase the potential for irregular warfare employed in the US homeland. Why? US policy envisions the potential use of nuclear weapons only “in extreme circumstances to defend the vital interests of the United States or its Allies and partners.” China would likely perceive that a direct conventional attack on the US homeland would cross this red line, provoking potential US nuclear use. Despite the high risk of a conventional strike on the US homeland, China would have a strategic interest in disrupting the US defense industrial base and undermining US political will. Irregular warfare, which seeks plausible deniable and employs indirect methods, would arguably be the prime method for Chinese action to achieve these objectives.
Additionally, irregular warfare in the US homeland could also occur to set conditions ahead of an expected conflict. Irregular warfare aimed at degrading US political resolve could also be used to hedge against a US response to actions short of war, such as blockades aimed at winning without fighting. In short, China could use the irregular warfare tactics explored in this article to weaken the capacity or resolve of the United States to fight while avoiding the risk that would accompany conventional attacks on the US homeland.
Physical Sabotage
American society is highly dependent on several types of critical infrastructure. Ports, airports, healthcare facilities, oil pipelines, power plants, communication cables, and data centers are foundational and necessary elements of the American way of life. Arguably, beyond the data centers and some power plants, none of these pieces of critical infrastructures are secured to the level of their importance to the US population. Damaging or even destroying some of them would not require much expertise, preparation, or resources, while repairing or replacing them would take a long time with protracted effects on the US population. Examples of infrastructure’s vulnerability are plentiful—from fishing boats cutting underwater communication cables by simply dragging their anchors and oil spills causing environmental disasters to contaminated water affecting the lives of millions and individual vandalism on a power grid cutting electricity to thirty-five thousand customers. Even simple acts of arson causing billion dollars in damage.
Proxies and Mass Protests
Recent history demonstrates the significant physical and psychological impacts of well-organized mass protests on the American public. Given US society’s unique composition and several deeply rooted racial, social, religious, and political challenges, malign actors can manipulate segments of the population and instigate violence on the streets or on school campuses.
A RAND researcher has argued that the Chinese state already has a sizeable operative capability within the United States in the form of spies, paid collaborators, illegal Chinese immigrants, and large number of students. While the FBI is actively investigating thousands of counterintelligence cases related to China, these cases almost exclusively focus on government officials, military and law enforcement members, and businessmen.
Iranian and Russian irregular warfare campaigns in Europe provide a proven model for how to induce disaffected individuals, including those with few clear political ties, to commit sabotage. Additionally, Iran has co-opted European criminal organizations to carry out attacks on dissidents or targets connected to Israel. The sad reality is that these techniques could be easily replicated in the United States, incentivizing individuals to execute malign actions against the American population in the homeland. Where there are grievances that lead individuals to drive a truck into a festival, conduct a public mass shooting, or stab people on the street, those grievances can be manipulated. These individuals and groups probably would never realize that their actions serve a different purpose than their individual political, social, religious, or racial agendas.
Unmanned Systems
Conflicts across the world, including in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Israel, Nagorno-Karabakh, Sudan, Ukraine, and Yemen, have demonstrated how belligerents can use small, commercially available unmanned systems—drones—to disrupt civil aviation, damage or destroy critical infrastructure, and carry out deadly attacks.
To cause disruption, a drone doesn’t have to even do any damage. Drones flying near airports can shut down civil aviation for hours. Notably, a Chinese quadcopter manufacturer that dominates the commercial market recently replaced geofencing around restricted sites that made its drones inoperable around airports with a warning about nearby restricted airspace. The company claims the geofencing feature was unnecessary after a US Federal Aviation Administration rule change and that the company sought to place “control back in the hands of the drone operators, in line with regulatory principles of the operator bearing final responsibility.” In addition to empowering operators, however, the changes will make it easier for users to fly commercially purchased drones over restricted airspace without modification.
Drones can additionally be used to create broader social panic. A few well-placed drone attacks or instances of high-profile surveillance can provoke broad panic. A series of mysterious sightings of unknown objects over sensitive sites in Washington, DC and the Hampton Roads region of Virginia proved that this tactic works. At least some of the drones were likely affiliated with China; a Chinese student was convicted of violating the Espionage Act after being caught piloting a drone to take pictures of classified naval vessels at a Newport News shipyard. While these incidents were a legitimate national security threat, in the following months, a wave of drone sightings were reported across the northeast United States. The FBI received at least five thousand reports. Most of these so-called sightings were not worthy of the resulting social media panic and were, according to the Department of Homeland Security, actually “a combination of lawful commercial drones, hobbyist drones, and law enforcement drones, as well as manned fixed-wing aircraft, helicopters, and stars mistakenly reported as drones.” In times of war, when the general population will already be on edge, a few well-placed surveillance or one-way attack drones would likely provoke a similar response where civilians would begin seeing drones everywhere (even if they were actually seeing stars, satellites, or helicopters), overwhelming federal authorities’ ability to respond to tips.
Cyberattacks
Fundamental characteristics of modern Western societies are their belief in the freedom of information flow and their reliance on technology and access to digital services. The United States is one of the most digitally advanced countries in the world, which makes it extremely vulnerable to cyberattacks. One of the major differences between cyberattacks and all the other tools discussed earlier is that they do not require any actual physical presence in the targeted country. Malign actors can conduct their attacks from anywhere in the world. While some experts still question how damaging cyberattacks can be, several cases, such as the Colonial Pipeline attack or the 2023 cyberattacks on the US healthcare system, have already demonstrated both the vulnerabilities of civilian cyber infrastructure and the potential devastating effects of sustained denial of services. Attacks would not need to directly cause damage to cause social disorder. The Colonial Pipeline attack disrupted fuel deliveries from the pipeline for only a matter of days before the company paid a $5 million ransom. Despite the short timeline and nonviolent nature of the attack, it provoked panic buying and sporadic reports of violent disputes at gas stations across the East Coast. In an irregular warfare campaign, Chinese hackers would almost certainly seek to both cause physical damage and deny access to necessary daily services for large portions of US population, creating fear and chaos in the homeland.
Weaponized Immigration
Areas of polarization create opportunities for foreign actors like the China to exploit in times of conflict and migration is one of the most polarized topics in the United States. While economic disparities, violence of transnational criminal organization, and political repression drive most migration in the western hemisphere, migration can be systematically influenced through operations in the information environment or the manipulation of regional conflict. The migration crisis along the Belarusian-Polish border in 2021 provides one model of how a state can use weaponized migration as a key tenet of an irregular warfare campaign. During the incident, Belarus sought to put pressure on Poland and the European Union, at least partially in retaliation for restrictions following the disputed 2020 Belarus election. In the lead-up to the crisis, a network of Belarusian-sponsored travel agents sold would-be migrants in Iraq and other Middle Eastern countries on one-way trips to Belarus as tourists. Once in Belarus, they were moved to the border with Poland (as well as those with Lithuania and Latvia), in an effort to produce a crisis at the external borders of the European Union. While China does not share a land border with the United States, in times of conflict it could adopt the tactics of weaponizing migration to exert pressure, including through exploiting existing migration flows and operations in the information environment aimed at boosting migration to the United States. China could use migration in three interconnected ways to destabilize or distract the United States: increasing pressure on the southern border to force the diversion of federal resources, using migration issues to change the perception of the United States in the western hemisphere, and using perceptions of uncontrolled migration to provoke domestic instability.
In recent months, the US secretary of defense has established securing the southern border as a central DoD priority, deploying thousands of troops and repurposing military bases for immigration enforcement. In times of conflict in Asia, DoD and interagency resources would be uniquely focused on the Indo-Pacific region. A surge in migration would be a political distraction and potentially even divert needed resources.
Chinese operations in the information environment often elevate migration and human rights. Articles published by Chinese state media outlet Xinhua describe immigration detention facilities as “concentration camps” and deride human rights abuses in the immigration system. During conflict, China would likely increase these messaging campaigns as they sought to portray the United States as maintaining a double standard on human rights. Additionally, any conflict in the Indo-Pacific would likely involve accusations of Chinese violations of international law, including the law of the sea and the UN Charter’s prohibition on nondefensive use of force that violates the “political independence of a state.” Expect China to counter this messaging with allegations of US noncompliance with international legal norms around migration.
Polarization during migration influxes has recently been connected to domestic violence in the United States, creating an additional irregular warfare avenue to sow chaos in the homeland. In 2018, conspiracy theories blaming migrant caravans on a Jewish plot influenced the Pittsburgh synagogue shooter to target worshipers at Tree of Life Synagogue, killing eleven. A year later, a Texas man targeted Hispanic shoppers at an El Paso Walmart, killing twenty-three after being radicalized online. While these acts of domestic terrorism are not linked to a foreign power, they exhibit the latent capacity for online radicalization to inspire acts of mass violence. During times of conflict, many would be predisposed to be suspicious of outsiders and fear invasion. This would make it easier for an irregular warfare actor to intentionally inflame xenophobia through a real or perceived influx of migrants, especially among communities predisposed to conspiracy theories. Such operations would aim to turn the United States inward, creating an impression of security threats from within the country.
Mass Manipulation through Social Media
In recent years, there has been increasing attention to the Chinese government’s influence on Chinese-owned apps, especially TikTok. The narrow focus on one app obscures the fact that a byproduct of widespread commercial social media use is that foreign powers can use any platform as a vector of influence. The potential of a foreign adversary controlling the algorithm may have been the largest proximate threat but a legal or security solution to the structure of TikTok parent company ByteDance does not eliminate the threat. Examples in Europe reveal how state actors can use deepfakes and false posts pretending to be official accounts to imply support of issues, causing real-world effects during periods of heightened tension. Additionally, Chinese state-sponsored English- and Spanish–language media frequently use wedge issues like immigration scandals and alleged human rights abuses against minorities to portray the United States negatively in the western hemisphere.
A majority of US adults surveyed in 2024 “often” or “sometimes” get their news from social media platforms, creating an opening for foreign information operations to influence Americans. While influence operations can and do work through traditional media sources, social media creates a powerful way to spread false narratives or heighten underlying political tensions. In times of conflict, such campaigns targeting the United States would seek to degrade the government’s ability to communicate effectively with the US population while seeking to cultivate broader antiwar sentiments.
The idea that a war with China would be contained to a region far away and the US homeland and population would not be directly affected by it is a dangerous example of wishful thinking. Unfortunately, the ways available for China to inflict serious physical and psychological damage on the US homeland and population in case of war are only limited by Beijing’s imagination. While the scenarios and tools described above might seem far-fetched, if they are combined, coordinated, dispersed, and executed on a protracted manner across the United States they would present a significant challenge for the US government and American society as a whole.
As homeland defense is becoming one of the cornerstones of the current administration’s national defense strategy it is crucial to determine what that really means—what capabilities, capacities, and authorities are needed to effectively address irregular warfare challenges posed by a peer adversary in the homeland. It is time for US decision-makers to start investing more into irregular warfare and the capabilities to counter it. Moreover, it is time to begin developing a total defense approach to preparing American society, not just the military, for the realities of a future war. What an American version of total defense should look like is the million-dollar question for practitioners and policymakers.
Dr. Sandor Fabian is a former Hungarian Special Forces lieutenant colonel with twenty years of military experience. He was previously an MWI and IWI nonresident fellow and is the author of the book Irregular Warfare: The Future Military Strategy for Small States.