China has an off-switch for America, and we aren't ready to deal with it.
Imagine waking up tomorrow and your phone has no signal. Your smart home isn't working. Your Ring camera is offline. You get in your car, but your GPS won't route. Worse, every traffic light in town is out. Intersections are a mess of blaring horns and confusion. Sirens echo in the distance. You drive to an ATM, hoping to grab some cash. The screen flickers, then goes black. It's not just your neighborhood. It's not just your state. The entire nation has gone dark.
This scenario is digital darkness, caused by China's 'off-switch' for America. It is the penultimate step in China's strategy to defeat America before gunning for global control.
So-called 'assassin's maces' play a central role in China's plan to become the world's sole superpower by 2049. Of the many known assassin's maces, four demand immediate attention:
1) Tactical Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) Weapons: China develops tactical EMP weapons that can disable entire regions by targeting civilian infrastructure America relies on to function. These compact pulse generators can hover above unprotected data centers, destroying electronics inside with pinpoint electromagnetic blasts. Several dozen well-coordinated EMP strikes could wipe out cloud infrastructure, disrupting America's power, transportation, communications and financial systems nationwide.
2) Deep Sea Fiber Cuts: Over 95 percent of global internet traffic travels through undersea fiber cables. China recently unveiled deep-sea cable cutters capable of severing cables at extreme depths. Recent disruptions near Taiwan and the Baltic Sea suggest these tools are already in use. Cutting a few lines disrupts global communications instantly and fractures U.S. military coordination.
3) Anti-Satellite Weapons: As America stockpiles low earth orbit satellites, China expands its anti-satellite arsenal to include missiles, parasitic satellites and lasers designed to disable or destroy orbital assets. In March 2025, the U.S. Space Force reported that Chinese satellites performed aggressive 'dogfighting' maneuvers in orbit. This capability allows China to carry out precise strikes designed to trigger the dreaded Kessler Cascade, a chain reaction of satellite collisions capable of destroying all low earth orbit satellites within days, crippling internet, communications and surveillance systems.
4) Cyber Attacks: China's cyber weapons are the most deeply embedded assassin's mace. Just this week, U.S. investigators uncovered rogue communication devices hidden in Chinese-made solar inverters and batteries. Such undocumented components can bypass firewalls, allowing China to remotely monitor, destabilize and disable critical infrastructure. Chinese-made chips, routers and switches embedded throughout U.S. networks contain dormant firmware that, upon activation, could place critical U.S. infrastructure under Chinese Communist Party command.
The Chinese army's 'blended domains' philosophy strips traditional boundaries between war and peace. An omnipresent battlefield erases any line between military and civilian enterprise. The doctrine is described in 'Unrestricted Warfare,' the 1999 book in which Chinese military leaders promote the use of psychological, technological and informational attacks to undermine and subsequently overwhelm America.
Under this approach, China targets power grids, satellites, telecom networks and data centers to exploit a critical U.S. vulnerability: when building digital infrastructure, we tend to optimize for return on investment, which inversely correlates to premium cost and time to market. As a result, most of our digital infrastructure — including hyper-scaler data centers where we house 'the cloud,' fiber switches and internet service provider networks — aren't designed to withstand deliberate, coordinated attacks. Chinese strategists studied weaknesses in our civilian infrastructure closely, then carefully designed their maces for maximum leverage.
China is ready to deploy its maces when the 'moment of Shi' arrives — the point at which they will proceed to the next step in their stated goal to become the world's only superpower. Meanwhile, America's digital infrastructure remains dangerously exposed.
Congress must make digital resilience a national security imperative to strengthen America's most vulnerable systems through immediate, coordinated actions:
With strategic action, we can and must ensure America is ready for any road ahead.
Jase Wilson works on utility infrastructure innovation at Ready.net, a company dedicated to strengthening America's digital backbone.
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