马斯克将获得美国可能与中国开战的绝密计划
【中美创新时报2025 年 3 月 20 日编译讯】（记者温友平编译）两名美国官员周四表示，五角大楼定于周五向埃隆·马斯克简要介绍美国军方可能与中国爆发战争的计划。让埃隆·马斯克接触美国最严密的军事机密是他作为特朗普总统顾问角色的重大扩展，并凸显了他的利益冲突。《纽约时报》记者Eric SchmittEric LiptonJulian E. BarnesRyan Mac 和 Maggie Haberman对此作了下述报道。
两名美国官员周四表示，五角大楼定于周五向埃隆·马斯克简要介绍美国军方可能与中国爆发战争的计划。
另一名官员表示，简报会将重点关注中国，但没有提供更多细节。第四名官员证实，马斯克将于周五前往五角大楼，但没有提供细节。
让马斯克接触到美国最严密保护的一些军事机密，将大大扩大他作为特朗普总统顾问和削减开支、清除政府反对者和政策的领导人的广泛角色。
这也将凸显有关马斯克利益冲突的问题，因为他在联邦官僚机构中涉猎广泛，同时继续经营着作为政府主要承包商的企业。在这种情况下，马斯克是 SpaceX 和特斯拉的亿万富翁首席执行官，是五角大楼的主要供应商，在中国拥有广泛的经济利益。
五角大楼的作战计划，在军事术语中称为 O 计划或作战计划，是军方最严密保护的机密之一。如果一个外国知道美国计划如何与他们作战，它可能会加强防御并解决其弱点，从而使计划成功的可能性大大降低。
这份绝密的中国战争计划简报有大约 20 到 30 张幻灯片，阐述了美国将如何应对这种冲突。据了解该计划的官员称，简报涵盖了该计划，首先是来自中国的威胁迹象和警告，然后是各种选项，包括打击中国的目标和时间，这些选项将提交给特朗普先生做出决定。
白宫发言人没有回复一封寻求评论的电子邮件，询问此次访问的目的、原因、特朗普先生是否知道此事以及此次访问是否引发了利益冲突的问题。白宫尚未透露特朗普先生是否为马斯克先生签署了利益冲突豁免。
《纽约时报》刊登此文后，美国国防部首席发言人肖恩·帕内尔在一份声明中表示：“国防部很高兴欢迎埃隆·马斯克周五到访五角大楼。他受到国防部长赫格塞斯的邀请，只是来参观。”
此次会晤体现了马斯克扮演的非凡双重角色，他既是世界上最富有的人，又被特朗普赋予了广泛的权力。
马斯克拥有安全许可，国防部长皮特·赫格塞斯可以决定谁有必要了解该计划。然而，选择与马斯克分享大量技术细节则是另一回事。
官员们表示，赫格塞斯、美国参谋长联席会议代理主席克里斯托弗·W·格雷迪海军上将和印度太平洋司令部司令塞缪尔·J·帕帕罗海军上将将向马斯克详细介绍美国在两国发生军事冲突时对抗中国的计划。
对于没有丰富军事规划经验的人来说，对与中国开战等重大突发事件的作战计划是极其难以理解的。由于计划的技术性，总统通常只看到计划的大致轮廓，而不是文件的实际细节。目前尚不清楚马斯克想要或需要听到多少细节。
据熟悉该计划的官员称，赫格塞斯上周收到了部分中国作战计划简报，周三又收到了另一部分。
目前尚不清楚向马斯克提供如此敏感简报的动机是什么。他不在军事指挥系统中，也不是特朗普在涉及中国的军事事务上的官方顾问。
但马斯克可能需要了解战争计划的某些方面，这是有原因的。如果马斯克和他的政府效率部（DOGE）成本削减团队想要以负责任的方式削减五角大楼的预算，他们可能需要知道五角大楼计划在与中国的战斗中使用哪些武器系统。
以航空母舰为例。削减未来的航空母舰将节省数十亿美元，这些钱可以用来购买无人机或其他武器。但如果美国的战争战略依赖于以创新的方式使用航空母舰来让中国感到意外，那么封存现有舰船或停止未来舰船的生产可能会削弱这一计划。
几十年来，与中国开战的计划一直主导着五角大楼的思维，早在与北京可能发生的冲突成为国会山的常规观点之前。美国已经建立了空军、海军和太空部队——甚至最近还建立了海军陆战队和陆军部队——以应对可能与中国的战斗。
批评人士表示，军方在战斗机或航空母舰等大型昂贵系统上投入过多，而在中程无人机和海岸防御上投入过少。但马斯克在评估如何调整五角大楼的支出时，需要知道军方打算使用什么以及用于什么目的。
马斯克已经呼吁五角大楼停止购买某些高价物品，例如由其航天发射竞争对手之一洛克希德马丁公司制造的 F-35 战斗机，该项目每年花费五角大楼超过 120 亿美元。
然而，在道德专家看来，马斯克广泛的商业利益使他能够获得有关中国的战略机密是一个严重的问题。官员们表示，对中国作战计划的修改重点是升级防御太空战的计划。中国已经开发了一套可以攻击美国卫星的武器。
马斯克的低轨道星链卫星群从太空提供数据和通信服务，被认为比传统卫星更具弹性。但他可能有兴趣了解美国能否在与中国的战争中保护他的卫星。
与五角大楼和美国军方的一些高级官员一起参加有关中国威胁的机密简报会，对于任何寻求向军方出售服务的国防承包商来说，都是一个极其宝贵的机会。
马斯克可以深入了解五角大楼可能需要的新工具，以及他仍担任首席执行官的 SpaceX 可以出售的新工具。
美国企业研究所高级研究员托德·哈里森 (Todd Harrison) 表示，从事五角大楼相关项目的承包商通常可以访问某些有限的战争规划文件，但只有在战争计划获得批准后才能访问，哈里森专注于国防战略。哈里森说，个别高管很少甚至从来没有机会独家获得五角大楼高层官员的简报会。
“马斯克参加战争规划简报会？”他说。“给予一家国防公司的首席执行官独特的访问权似乎可能成为合同抗议的理由，并且存在真正的利益冲突。”
马斯克的 SpaceX 已经从五角大楼和联邦间谍机构获得了数十亿美元的报酬，以帮助美国建立新的军事卫星网络，以试图对抗来自中国日益增长的军事威胁。 SpaceX 使用其猎鹰 9 号火箭为五角大楼发射了大部分军用卫星，这些火箭从 SpaceX 在佛罗里达州和加利福尼亚州的军事基地设置的发射台上发射。
该公司还从五角大楼获得了数亿美元报酬，五角大楼目前严重依赖 SpaceX 的 Starlink 卫星通信网络供军事人员在全球范围内传输数据。
2024 年，SpaceX 获得了约 16 亿美元的空军合同。这还不包括国家侦察局对 SpaceX 的机密支出，国家侦察局已聘请该公司为其建造一个新的低地球轨道卫星星座，以监视中国、俄罗斯和其他威胁。
特朗普先生已经提议美国建立一个新的系统，军方称之为“金色穹顶”，这是一个太空导弹防御系统，让人想起罗纳德·里根总统试图实现的目标。（里根先生心目中的星球大战系统从未得到充分开发。）
认为中国存在导弹威胁——无论是核武器、高超音速导弹还是巡航导弹——是特朗普最近签署行政命令指示五角大楼开始建造金色穹顶的主要因素。
位于德克萨斯州博卡奇卡的 SpaceX 星际基地所在地。五角大楼的简报可能有助于埃隆·马斯克了解五角大楼可能需要的新工具，以及他目前担任首席执行官的 SpaceX 可以出售的新工具。图片来源：Callaghan O’Hare 为《纽约时报》提供
五角大楼官员表示，即使开始规划和建造该系统的第一批组件也将耗资数百亿美元，而且很可能为 SpaceX 创造巨大的商机，SpaceX 已经提供火箭发射、卫星结构和天基数据通信系统，所有这些都是金色穹顶所必需的。
另外，马斯克先生一直是五角大楼监察长调查的焦点，调查对象质疑他是否遵守了最高机密的安全许可。
去年，一些 SpaceX 员工向政府机构投诉称，马斯克和 SpaceX 的其他员工没有正确报告与外国领导人的接触或对话，随后调查开始。
在拜登政府任期结束前，在参议院民主党人对马斯克提出质询并声称他没有遵守安全许可要求后，空军官员开始了他们自己的审查。
事实上，空军拒绝了马斯克提出的更高级别安全许可的请求，即所谓的“特殊准入计划”，该计划仅用于极其敏感的机密计划，理由是这位亿万富翁可能存在安全风险。
事实上，SpaceX 对五角大楼如此有价值，以至于中国政府表示认为该公司是美国军方的延伸。
根据战略与国际研究中心编写的论文翻译，《星链军事化及其对全球战略稳定的影响》是中国国防科技大学去年发布的一篇出版物的标题。
马斯克和他控制的电动汽车公司特斯拉严重依赖中国，这家汽车制造商的旗舰工厂之一位于上海。这座最先进的工厂于 2019 年揭幕，是在中国政府的特别许可下建造的，目前占特斯拉全球交付量的一半以上。去年，该公司在财务文件中表示，它与中国贷方达成了 28 亿美元的贷款协议，用于生产支出。
在公开场合，马斯克避免批评北京，并表示愿意与中国共产党合作。2022 年，他为中国网络空间管理局（该国的审查机构）的杂志撰写了一篇专栏文章，吹捧他的公司及其改善人类的使命。
同年，这位亿万富翁告诉《金融时报》，中国应该通过建立一个“可以接受的台湾特别行政区”来获得对台湾的一些控制权，这一说法激怒了独立岛屿的政客。在同一次采访中，他还指出，北京寻求保证，他不会在中国出售星链。
次年，在一次科技会议上，马斯克称这个民主岛屿是“中国不可分割的一部分，但又武断地不属于中国”，并将台湾与中国的关系与夏威夷和美国进行了比较。
在他拥有的社交平台 X 上，马斯克长期以来一直用他的账号赞美中国。他说，中国在电动汽车和太阳能领域“遥遥领先”，并称赞中国的太空计划“比人们意识到的要先进得多”。他鼓励更多人访问中国，并公开提出俄中结盟“不可避免”。
题图：本月，特朗普总统与埃隆·马斯克和马斯克的儿子 X 在白宫。目前尚不清楚向马斯克提供如此敏感的简报的理由是什么。来源：Doug Mills/纽约时报
附原英文报道：
Musk Set to Get Access to Top-Secret U.S. Plan for Potential War With China
Giving Elon Musk access to some of the nation’s most closely guarded military secrets is a major expansion of his role as an adviser to President Trump and highlights his conflicts of interest.
President Trump with Elon Musk and Mr. Musk’s son X, at the White House this month. It is unclear what the reasoning is for providing Mr. Musk such a sensitive briefing.Credit…Doug Mills/The New York Times
Eric SchmittEric LiptonJulian E. BarnesRyan MacMaggie Haberman
By Eric SchmittEric LiptonJulian E. BarnesRyan Mac and Maggie Haberman
March 20, 2025
Updated 9:03 p.m. ET
The Pentagon is scheduled on Friday to brief Elon Musk on the U.S. military’s plan for any war that might break out with China, two U.S. officials said on Thursday.
Another official said the briefing will be China focused, without providing additional details. A fourth official confirmed Mr. Musk was to be at the Pentagon on Friday, but offered no details.
Providing Mr. Musk access to some of the nation’s most closely guarded military secrets would be a dramatic expansion of his already extensive role as an adviser to President Trump and leader of his effort to slash spending and purge the government of people and policies they oppose.
It would also bring into sharp relief the questions about Mr. Musk’s conflicts of interest as he ranges widely across the federal bureaucracy while continuing to run businesses that are major government contractors. In this case, Mr. Musk, the billionaire chief executive of both SpaceX and Tesla, is a leading supplier to the Pentagon and has extensive financial interests in China.
Pentagon war plans, known in military jargon as O-plans or operational plans, are among the military’s most closely guarded secrets. If a foreign country was to learn how the United States planned to fight a war against them, it could reinforce its defenses and address its weaknesses, making the plans far less likely to succeed.
The top-secret briefing for the China war plan has about 20 to 30 slides that lay out how the United States would fight such a conflict. It covers the plan beginning with the indications and warning of a threat from China to various options on what Chinese targets to hit, over what time period, that would be presented to Mr. Trump for decisions, according to officials with knowledge of the plan.
A White House spokesman did not respond to an email seeking comment about the purpose of the visit, how it came about, whether Mr. Trump was aware of it, and whether the visit raises questions of conflicts of interest. The White House has not said whether Mr. Trump signed a conflicts of interest waiver for Mr. Musk.
After The Times published this article, Sean Parnell, the chief Defense Department spokesman, said in a statement: “The Defense Department is excited to welcome Elon Musk to the Pentagon on Friday. He was invited by Secretary Hegseth and is just visiting.”
The meeting reflects the extraordinary dual role played by Mr. Musk, who is both the world’s wealthiest man and has been given broad authority by Mr. Trump.
Mr. Musk has a security clearance, and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth can determine who has a need to know about the plan. A choice of sharing lots of technical details with Mr. Musk, however, is another matter.
Mr. Hegseth; Adm. Christopher W. Grady, the acting chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; and Adm. Samuel J. Paparo, the head of the military’s Indo-Pacific Command, are set to present Mr. Musk with details on the U.S. plan to counter China in the event of military conflict between the two countries, the officials said.
Operational plans for major contingencies, like a war with China, are extremely difficult for people without extensive military planning experience to understand. The technical nature is why presidents are typically presented with the broad contours of a plan, rather than the actual details of documents. How many details Mr. Musk will want or need to hear is unclear.
Mr. Hegseth received part of the China war plan briefing last week and another part on Wednesday, according to officials familiar with the plan.
It was unclear what the impetus was for providing Mr. Musk such a sensitive briefing. He is not in the military chain of command, nor is he an official adviser to Mr. Trump on military matters involving China.
But there is a possible reason Mr. Musk might need to know aspects of the war plan. If Mr. Musk and his team of cost cutters from the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, want to trim the Pentagon budget in a responsible way, they may need to know what weapons systems the Pentagon plans to use in a fight with China.
Take, for example, aircraft carriers. Cutting back on future aircraft carriers would save billions of dollars, money that could be spent on drones or other weaponry. But if the U.S. war strategy relies on using aircraft carriers in innovative ways that would surprise China, mothballing existing ships or stopping production on future ships could cripple that plan.
Planning for a war with China has dominated Pentagon thinking for decades, well before a possible confrontation with Beijing became more conventional wisdom on Capitol Hill. The United States has built its Air Forces, Navy and Space Forces — and even more recently its Marines and Army forces — with a possible fight against China in mind.
Critics have said the military has invested too much in big expensive systems like fighter jets or aircraft carriers and too little in midrange drones and coastal defenses. But for Mr. Musk to evaluate how to reorient Pentagon spending, he would want to know what the military intends to use and for what purpose.
Mr. Musk has already called for the Pentagon to stop buying certain high-priced items like F-35 fighter jets, manufactured by one of his space-launch competitors, Lockheed Martin, in a program that costs the Pentagon more than $12 billion a year.
Yet Mr. Musk’s extensive business interests make his access to strategic secrets about China a serious problem in the view of ethics experts. Officials have said revisions to the war plans against China have focused on upgrading the plans for defending against space warfare. China has developed a suite of weapons that can attack U.S. satellites.
Mr. Musk’s constellations of low-earth orbit Starlink satellites, which provide data and communications services from space, are considered more resilient than traditional satellites. But he could have an interest in learning about whether or not the United States could defend his satellites in a war with China.
Participating in a classified briefing on the China threat with some of the most senior Pentagon and U.S. military officials would be a tremendously valuable opportunity for any defense contractor seeking to sell services to the military.
Mr. Musk could gain insight into new tools that the Pentagon might need and that SpaceX, where he remains the chief executive, could sell.
Contractors working on relevant Pentagon projects generally do have access to certain limited war planning documents, but only once war plans are approved, said Todd Harrison, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, where he focuses on defense strategy. Individual executives rarely if ever get exclusive access to top Pentagon officials for a briefing like this, Mr. Harrison said.
“Musk at a war-planning briefing?” he said. “Giving the CEO of one defense company unique access seems like this could be grounds for a contract protest and is a real conflict of interest.”
Mr. Musk’s SpaceX is already being paid billions of dollars by the Pentagon and federal spy agencies to help the United States build new military satellite networks to try to confront rising military threats from China. SpaceX launches most of these military satellites for the Pentagon on its Falcon 9 rockets, which take off from launchpads SpaceX has set up at military bases in Florida and California.
The company separately has been paid hundreds of millions of dollars by the Pentagon that now relies heavily on SpaceX’s Starlink satellite communications network for military personnel to transmit data worldwide.
In 2024, SpaceX was granted about $1.6 billion in Air Force contracts. That does not include classified spending with SpaceX by the National Reconnaissance Office, which has hired the company to build it a new constellation of low-earth orbit satellites to spy on China, Russia and other threats.
Mr. Trump has already proposed that the United States build a new system the military is calling Golden Dome, a space-based missile defense system that recalls what President Ronald Reagan tried to deliver. (The so-called Star Wars system Mr. Reagan had in mind was never fully developed.)
Perceived missile threats from China — be it nuclear weapons or hypersonic missiles or cruise missiles — are a major factor that led Mr. Trump to sign an executive order recently instructing the Pentagon to start work on Golden Dome.
The site of SpaceX Starbase in Boca Chica, Texas. The Pentagon briefing could help Elon Musk gain insight into new tools that the Pentagon might need and that SpaceX, where he remains the chief executive, could sell.Credit…Callaghan O’Hare for The New York Times
Even starting to plan and build the first components of the system will cost tens of billions of dollars, according to Pentagon officials, and most likely create large business opportunities for SpaceX, which already provides rocket launches, satellite structures, and space-based data communications systems, all of which will be required for Golden Dome.
Separately, Mr. Musk has been the focus of an investigation by the Pentagon’s inspector general over questions about his compliance with his top-secret security clearance.
The investigations started last year after some SpaceX employees complained to government agencies that Mr. Musk and others at SpaceX were not properly reporting contacts or conversations with foreign leaders.
Air Force officials, before the end of the Biden administration, started their own review, after Senate Democrats asked questions about Mr. Musk and asserted that he was not complying with security clearance requirements.
The Air Force, in fact, had denied a request by Mr. Musk for an even higher level of security clearance, known as Special Access Program, which is reserved for extremely sensitive classified programs, citing potential security risks associated with the billionaire.
In fact, SpaceX has become so valuable to the Pentagon that the Chinese government has said it considers the company to be an extension of the U.S. military.
“Starlink Militarization and Its Impact on Global Strategic Stability” was the headline of one publication released last year from China’s National University of Defense Technology, according to a translation of the paper prepared by the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
Mr. Musk and Tesla, an electric vehicle company he controls, are heavily reliant on China, which houses one of the auto maker’s flagship factories in Shanghai. Unveiled in 2019, the state-of-the-art facility was built with special permission from the Chinese government, and now accounts for more than half of Tesla’s global deliveries. Last year, the company said in financial filings that it had a $2.8 billion loan agreement with lenders in China for production expenditures.
In public, Mr. Musk has avoided criticizing Beijing and signaled his willingness to work with the Chinese Communist Party. In 2022, he wrote a column for the magazine of the Cyberspace Administration of China, the country’s censorship agency, trumpeting his companies and their missions of improving humanity.
That same year, the billionaire told The Financial Times that China should be given some control over Taiwan by making a “special administrative zone for Taiwan that is reasonably palatable,” an assertion that angered politicians of the independent island. In that same interview, he also noted that Beijing sought assurances that he would not sell Starlink in China.
The following year at a tech conference, Mr. Musk called the democratic island “an integral part of China that is arbitrarily not part of China,” and compared the Taiwan-China situation to Hawaii and the United States.
On X, the social platform he owns, Mr. Musk has long used his account to praise China. He has said the country is “by far” the world leader in electric vehicles and solar power, and has commended its space program for being “far more advanced than people realize.” He has encouraged more people to visit the country, and posited openly about an “inevitable” Russia-China alliance.
