US told to make China its No 1 enemy

[sipila]

From: "Dick Withecombe" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>

US told to make China its No 1 enemy
http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,3604,462294,00.html
US told to target China

Martin Kettle in Washington
Saturday March 24, 2001
The Guardian 

A historic shift of emphasis in United States military deployment from
Europe to Asia, with China supplanting Russia as America's principal foe, is
at the heart of the Bush administration's long awaited defence strategy
review, according to reports in Washington.
Outlines of the potentially epochal rethink of the US's global strategic
priorities were given to President George Bush by his defence secretary
Donald Rumsfeld at a private meeting at the White House on Wednesday, the
Washington Post reported yesterday.
"The president was complimentary, he appreciated the policy discussion, and
gave the indication that the topics were indeed what he had in mind," a
Pentagon official told the paper.
More than 50 years after the struggle to deter the Soviet Union in Europe
became the centrepiece of US military strategy in the aftermath of the
second world war, the Rumsfeld review has concluded that the Pacific Ocean
should now become the most important focus of US military deployments, with
China now perceived as the principal threat to American global dominance.
The review says, in effect, that Washington should abandon the long-standing
doctrine that the US military must always be prepared to fight two major
world conflicts simultaneously, the reports quote officials as saying.
By elevating China to the status of global enemy number one, the review
clearly foreshadows an American turn away from Europe, or at least from the
levels of US engagement and attention which have existed for the lifetime of
most Europeans. 
Mr Bush ordered the strategy review immediately on taking office. It is the
most important of three complementary reviews intended to shape US military
priorities in the 21st century. The other two are on nuclear weapons and
missile defence options, and on service pay and conditions.
The huge distances involved in the Pacific mean that the Pentagon must give
additional priority to "long-range power projection", the report says.
This means putting fresh resources into airlift capacity to enable the US to
move troops, vehicles and weapons many thousands of miles from bases in
America to the frontline in Asia at short notice.
The report says the threat from hostile missiles is likely to become so
serious that the US can no longer afford to risk its largest and most
expensive ships, the Nimitz class aircraft carriers, in forward positions.
As a result, the navy will be told to stop building big ships and to
concentrate on speed and manoeuvrability, including a new generation of
smaller carriers, to avoid them becoming targets.
The threat from weapons of mass destruction, such as nuclear, chemical and
biological weapons, against American military targets means that US allies
may begin to question the advisability of allowing Washington to have bases
in their countries, the Pentagon suggests. The report says this is another
reason why long-range supply capacity needs to be increased.
The review does not make recommendations about particular weapons systems,
but there is no doubt in Washington that missile defence shields will form a
central part of the new strategy.
Other key elements of what would be, in effect, a rearming of the US
military are likely to include a greater role for long-range bombers and for
unmanned aircraft. The F-22 fighter programme is likely to face cutbacks,
though there is speculation that it will not be scrapped.
The sweep of the review is so comprehensive and its conclusions so radical
that the publication of the final report later this year is likely to set
off a whole series of turf wars within the US military, as the armed
services scrabble for influence and funding in the new era.
Washington's decision to turn more of its guns and missiles towards China
came as it was confirmed that a senior colonel in the Chinese people's
liberation army has defected to the US while visiting as part of a military
delegation. The defection, which apparently took place at the end of last
year or in January, involved an unnamed officer in the foreign affairs
department of the army general staff.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,3604,462219,00.html
US realigns sights towards China

Biggest US warships 'out of date'

Radical defence review alters military priorities and signals new hostility
to China 

Martin Kettle in Washington
Saturday March 24, 2001
The Guardian 

The most radical strategic review in a generation of the United States'
military priorities is about to conclude that the world's largest warships
are dinosaurs of 20th-century warfare, and will inaugurate an era of direct
confrontation with China.
Establishing the Pentagon study, President George Bush ordered his defence
secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, and his team of advisers to "challenge the
status quo" and to "skip a generation of technology". All the early signs
are that this is exactly what the planners have done.

The key person in the review process is a career Pentagon official, Andrew
Marshall, 79, a man routinely described in profiles as "legendary" and "the
most influential person in the world you've never heard of".

Mr Marshall has been an adviser to every US defence secretary since the
Nixon administration and is a long-term advocate of US missile defence and
of a more confrontational stance towards China, both of which are central
tenets of the Pentagon rethink.

Mr Rumsfeld has entrusted Mr Marshall with the decisive role in a review
which is intended to impose lasting changes in the way that the Pentagon
budget, set this year at $310.5bn - or a third of the total amount spent on
the military in all parts of the globe - is divided up. Mr Bush has
indicated that US defence spending will get an even bigger increase than
this year's $14.2bn - or 4.8 % -rise.

By putting Mr Marshall in charge of the review, Mr Rumsfeld has signalled
that he does not want the armed services to set their own agenda. Reports in
Washington say that the three service chiefs have been largely excluded from
decisive stages of the review process. Mr Rumsfeld briefed the service
chiefs this week about the preliminary findings of the review in a manner
that was said to be "brusque".

It will mark a sharp shift in emphasis. Less than three weeks ago President
George Bush presided at the Virginia launching ceremony for the USS Ronald
Reagan, the ninth and latest of the US Navy's massive Nimitz-class aircraft
carriers that have been the centrepieces of American battle planning since
the end of the Vietnam war more than 25 years ago.

But the ship that Mr Bush hymned on March 4 as "one hundred thousand tons of
American power" and which the Pentagon boasted would "serve the fleet for 50
years" now looks certain to be the last of its kind, and may even be held
back from the frontline role for which it was originally conceived.

Gargantuan $5bn aircraft carriers like the Reagan, each carrying 80 aircraft
and with a crew of 6,000, have been identified by the Pentagon as too big
and too expensive a target in the missile-dominated warfare that US military
chiefs now believe will characterise the 21st century.

Initial leaks from the wide-ranging US defence review set in motion by the
Bush admin istration suggested yesterday that Mr Rumsfeld is about to order
the Navy to stop building Nimitz class carriers immediately. Instead the
Navy will be instructed to rethink its carrier capacity in favour of
smaller, faster and more manoeuvrable vessels that are less vulnerable to
missiles. 

"The big loser is the carrier," a source told the Washington Post yesterday,
which broke the story. The big winner in the review, by contrast, is likely
to be the US Air Force (USAF).

Pentagon planners have decided that the key to the future of warfare is
likely to lie with long distance bombers and unmanned aircraft and that
"long range power projection" - including the requirement to airlift large
numbers of troops and matériel halfway around the world from bases in the US
- is the challenge of the future.

However, the USAF will be disappointed by the review's emphasis on less
spending on jet fighter planes. The central question here is the future of
the F-22 stealth fighter, which is scheduled to replace the existing F-15 as
the principal US combat plane during the next decade in a $350bn programme.

Reports yesterday suggested that the air force will be told to cut the
number of F-22s on its order books, largely on the grounds that its range
may not be sufficient to fit the new thinking.

The US currently has 1,384,000 military personnel of all types on active
duty, divided between the army with 482,000, the navy with 373,000, the air
force with 356,000 and the US Marine Corps with 173,000. The overwhelming
majority of these - around 1.13m - are based in the continental US and in
American territories overseas, such as Guam and Puerto Rico.

The US has 117,000 service men and women stationed in Europe, including
69,000 in Germany and 11,000 in each of Britain and Italy. There are just
over 5,000 US troops in Bosnia and the same number in Kosovo.

In East Asia and the Pacific, the US has 101,000 service personnel, of whom
40,000 are in Japan and 37,000 in South Korea. The other major
concentrations of US forces are in Saudi Arabia 7,000 and Kuwait 5,000.

In retrospect, Mr Bush seemed to be hinting only a few weeks ago that a
turning point had been reached in military planning on the use of aircraft
carriers. 

"For the last 60 years, every president has had to ask, 'Where are the
carriers?' None has ever been disappointed by the navy's response," Mr Bush
said at the launch of the USS Ronald Reagan. "But he cannot live forever on
that legacy. Our challenge is to build a military that will deter and win
the wars of the future."

The nuclear-powered Nimitz-class aircraft carriers have been in service
since the first of them, the USS Nimitz, was commissioned in 1975. At
present, five of the eight commissioned Nimitz carriers are with the US
fifth fleet in the Arabian gulf and with the sixth fleet in the
Mediterranean. The other three are with the much larger seventh fleet in the
Pacific ocean, and are mostly based in Japan.





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