The comparison is to the massive AT&T outage of February 22, 2024, which A&T later said had to do with an internal screwup, a bungled expansion of its network, not, as some initially feared, a cyberattack.
That day, on Twitter, U.S. Senator Marco Rubio suggested that although he didn’t know the cause of the outage, “I do know it will be 100 times worse when China launches a cyber attack on the eve of a Taiwan invasion. And it won’t be just cell service they hit, it will be your power, your water and your bank.”
If you think Rubio has at least a 30 percent chance of being right, maybe you should be prepping for the possibility a little more diligently than you already are, if you are. One advantage of preparing for the worst is that you are also in better shape if the second-worst or third-worst thing happens, like losing power for a couple of weeks after a bad storm.
The Chinese Communist Party may indeed invade Taiwan and may try to discombobulate major allies of Taiwan however it can. Even as China sees how far it can get by gall, propaganda, micro-incursions that turn into macro-incursions, and what James Roth calls “occasional violence,” it is also obviously planning for war and threatening war. The continuous implicit threat of war is one of the things the CCP has going for it in its sundry pseudo-negotiations with neighboring countries about China’s grabs of territory.
The question is whether and, if so, when the Chinese government will decide that it has gone as far as it can go by obnoxiously inching along on five hundred different fronts and that now it is time to invade somebody. Because of China’s rhetoric and military displays in the Taiwan Strait over the decades, apparently escalating over the last several years, Taiwan seems to be the most obvious target if we mean an invasion consisting of a standard military assault using planes and ships and bombs and bullets.
The US believes that Chinese Dictator Xi Jinping has ordered his military to be ready to conquer Taiwan by 2027, although “many analysts see that as an attempt to galvanize his military rather than a timeline for invasion,” Reuters reports.
Unfortunately, Keeping Our Fingers Crossed is right next to the Schlieffen Plan in the graveyard of failed military strategies.
If China does attack Taiwan, and the United States is inclined to fight alongside Taiwan, and there’s anything the US government could do to support the effort from a distance as well as at the battle site, it would make sense for China to try to throw the United States into a state of coast-to-coast confusion.
So it seems that we should prepare for this doomsday.
On the other hand, China, according to China, “firmly opposes and combats all forms of cyberattacks.”
