U.S. Shields B-21 Bomber Bases From China Or Other Foreign Encroachments

In a move to better track potential surveillance activity near sensitive U.S. bases, the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) has named eight military sites as candidates for enhanced vetting, adding to about 200 sites already covered under older legislation from 2018. For each of the 8 new sites, CFIUS would evaluate reported foreign property acquisitions within 100 miles of each base.

The sites targeted for additional oversight include a mix of Air Force manufacturing, training, or other long-range strike, command-and-control, or reconnaissance facilities. In broad strokes, the new measures appear largely targeted at securing the manufacturing, training and basing foundations for the future B-21 Raider strategic bomber and tightening up surveillance of foreign property investments around F-35 training sites and other Air Force training facilities.

The proposed sites include Air Force Plant 42 in Palmdale, California, a well-known production site for the B-21 as well as other advanced—and often classified—aircraft.

In Texas and Arizona, the Air Force training centers at Lackland Air Force Base (Part of Joint Base San Antonio), Laughlin Air Force Base, and Luke Air Force Base are new entrants on the list of monitored facilities, suggesting that the Air Force is concerned that training activities at those three bases could reveal mission-compromising materials and methods. Luke Air Force Base—a center of F-35 Lightning II training—also includes the large Barry M. Goldwater Range, a Southern Arizona training area that provides fliers with almost 57,000 cubic miles of airspace.

But the primary focus of the new CFIUS-covered sites appears to be on protecting key B-21 infrastructure. The B-1B Lancer strategic bomber bases at Dyess Air Force Base in Abilene, Texas and Ellsworth Air Force Base in Box Elder South Dakota were reserved for additional scrutiny. Both bases are already set to house the future B-21 bomber, and, with Ellsworth long identified as the primary home for the new bomber, expanded surveillance measures are somewhat overdue.

Ellsworth Air Force Base also includes the enormous Powder River Training Complex, offering pilots access to airspace over North and South Dakota, Montana, and Wyoming—an area almost the size of Indiana—for practice. The Complex has methodically expanded to accommodate America’s new aircraft and advanced new tactics, increasing the range size and upping the maximum altitude limits to 52,000 feet. If CFIUS monitoring extends to the associated Belle Fourche Electronic Scoring Site for the training complex and other ground-based emitter sites scattered throughout the training range, property sales will be monitored through much of South Dakota, Wyoming, and Montana.

Another designated monitoring site, Grand Forks Air Force Base, in Grand Forks, North Dakota, operates RQ-4 Global Hawk surveillance drones and helps maintain the High Frequency Global Communications System necessary for critical U.S. command-and-control activities.

Over the past few years, Grand Forks has become something of a poster child for America’s unwieldy risk-assessment and counter-surveillance practices. A motley crew of national security stakeholders have waged a lonely struggle to keep the Chinese Communist Party-linked Fufeng Group from building a 370-acre wet corn milling plant some 12 miles from the base. As Grand Forks was not already included in the CFIUS-covered list of sensitive military sites, it was a real challenge for America to cancel the project, even though the U.S. Air force declared the investment a “significant threat to national security with both near- and long-term risks of significant impacts to our operations in the area”.

Of all the new sites, Camp Dodge, the Iowa National Guard Joint Force Headquarters in Des Moines, Iowa is an apparent outlier. The deceptively sleepy base, an Army training center since the early days of World War I, sits near the Des Moines recreation center of Saylorville Lake, and seems more likely to be overrun with weekend motor-boaters than sophisticated weekend warriors.

Camp Dodge also appears to be the only National Guard facility included in the extended range list. However, given Camp Dodge’s location in the center of Iowa, CFIUS now able to examine virtually all property transfers between Iowa City and Council Bluffs. It gives Iowa’s rules limiting foreign ownership of farmland a particular boost, offering a means for locals to transfer the burden of evaluating suspect foreign land transactions to an already overtasked and understaffed agency.

CFIUS: A Powerful Surveillance Tool Or Paper Tiger?

CFIUS is a young bureaucratic entity, and the office’s ultimate contribution to national security is unknown. It is far too weak to make real changes. On paper, CFIUS looks good, but, in practice, CFIUS is only as good as the personnel used to staff the organization’s assessment work. CFIUS itself, as an organization, appears to be limited to assessing voluntary reports of impending property transfers rather than actively tracking, assessing, and acting upon suspicious foreign property developments—base encroachments or suspect investments near critical infrastructure—in general.

Since 2020, CFIUS has been authorized to review transactions involving the purchase, lease, or concession of property to a “foreign person” near several types of national security sites. These particularly sensitive sites range from active Air Force ballistic missile fields, bases and major annexes containing units from the Air Force Air Combat Command, Air Force Research Laboratories, NORAD facilities, and/or Air Force communications/command assets. Controlled sites include Army and Navy bases, ammunition plants, centers for excellence, research laboratories, and Army Combat Training Centers, long range radar sites, and major range and test facilities.

While a number military facilities are sensitive enough to merit CFIUS review of reported property transactions within a mile from the base fence line, only a handful are sensitive enough to require “extended range” review of up to 100 miles. Right now, thirty-two bases and ranges along with three ballistic missile bases demand the extended range review. The additional eight will bring that total up to forty.

But adding new facilities poses a real challenge for CFIUS. CFIUS regulations give CFIUS personnel a very limited amount of time to investigate property transactions—much of the investigative work is contracted, and, given the price per hour, the CFIUS investigations will be, at best, cursory products worked up by very junior personnel.

On top of the challenges of adequately investigating “voluntary” reports of a foreign property transaction, penalties for non-compliance seem very weak. An omission can result in a fine of up to $250,000. Mitigation violations—in the seemingly rare event they are detected and investigated—are also limited to either $250,000 or the value of the transaction, whichever is greater.

In the world of espionage, a $250,000 fine is chickenfeed. The Russians paid some $1.4 million to high-level FBI double agent Richard Hanssen. Getting a fence-line perch to observe, collect, and potentially interfere with critical U.S. national security activities is worth far, far more.

It’s not all bad. It is, of course, a good step forward to monitor property transactions near critical national security sites. But if transaction reports are voluntary, and the organization charged to monitor these transactions are not provided sufficient tools, time, and talent to investigate transactions, CFIUS risks becoming a paper tiger.

Put bluntly, CFIUS needs to be empowered to become a far more fast-moving and agile entity. It needs to look beyond a few bases, too. All foreign property transactions in the U.S. should be tracked, and CFIUS investigators empowered to dig into data to see where any anomalous foreign—or just merely foreign-linked—transactions might lead.