Stealth War: How China Took Over While America's Elite Slept

Robert Spalding — a retired Air Force brigadier general and former senior director for strategy on the National Security Council — argues that China has been waging a comprehensive, multidimensional campaign against the United States and its allies for decades, exploiting Western openness in economics, academia, technology, and media to extract resources, transfer technology, and extend political influence — all without triggering the kind of response that more overt aggression would provoke. The book is polemical and explicitly advocacy-oriented, written to alarm as much as to analyse.

Stealth War should be read with awareness of its rhetorical intent: Spalding is making a policy argument as much as an empirical one, and some of his claims require more evidence than he provides. But the core insight — that China's approach to strategic competition is fundamentally different from Soviet-era models, exploiting the seams of open societies rather than confronting them directly — is important and well-documented. For practitioners advising clients on Chinese influence operations, the book provides a useful operational framework for understanding how economic, academic, and information vectors are integrated in Chinese strategy, even where the specific analysis benefits from additional scrutiny.