Note from MN: US military and diplomatic maneuvering vs. the threat the US state and economic interests perceive from China -- which should be understood as long-term preparations for war on China -- are the necessary backdrop for understanding why the US is currently making war in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Iraq and Libya. Below, some unusually frank information from the bourgeois press about how the Pentagon and US political leadership are looking at China. While these pieces don't draw the connections to the current wars (except the first, which makes the absurd claim that the Pentagon is saving money by "pulling back" from Afghanistan and Iraq -- absurd because of recent reports that the US is pressuring both the Afghans and Iraqis to agree to a long-term strategic US military and "security" presence), it would be foolish not to understand the longer-term arc of US military aggression in Asia and Africa, and which will inevitably increase in "Latin" America as well, as ALBA and other independent development proceeds there, and as the Chinese make increasing inroads into resources and markets there, as they are in Asia and Africa.--MN
Pieces from the NY Times recently: September 4, 2011 Chinas Challenge at Sea By AARON L. FRIEDBERG Princeton, N.J. AMERICAS fiscal woes are placing the country on a path of growing strategic risk in Asia. With Democrats eager to protect social spending and Republicans anxious to avoid tax hikes, and both saying the national debt must be brought under control, we can expect sustained efforts to slash the defense budget. Over the next 10 years, cuts in planned spending could total half a trillion dollars. Even as [?--MN] the Pentagon saves money by pulling back from Afghanistan and Iraq, there will be fewer dollars with which to buy weapons or develop new ones. Unfortunately, those constraints are being imposed just as America faces a growing strategic challenge. Fueled by economic growth of nearly 10 percent a year, China has been engaged for nearly two decades in a rapid and wide-ranging military buildup. China is secretive about its intentions, and American strategists have had to focus on other concerns since 9/11. Still, the dimensions, direction and likely implications of Chinas buildup have become increasingly clear. When the cold war ended, the Pacific Ocean became, in effect, an American lake. With its air and naval forces operating through bases in friendly countries like Japan and South Korea, the United States could defend and reassure its allies, deter potential aggressors and insure safe passage for commercial shipping throughout the Western Pacific and into the Indian Ocean. Its forces could operate everywhere with impunity. But that has begun to change. In the mid-1990s, China started to put into place the pieces of what Pentagon planners refer to as an anti-access capability. In other words, rather than trying to match American power plane for plane and ship for ship, Beijing has sought more cost-effective ways to neutralize it. It has been building large numbers of relatively inexpensive but highly accurate non-nuclear ballistic missiles, as well as sea- and air-launched cruise missiles. Those weapons could destroy or disable the handful of ports and airfields from which American air and naval forces operate in the Western Pacific and sink warships whose weapons could reach the area from hundreds of miles out to sea, including American aircraft carriers. The Chinese military has also been testing techniques for disabling American satellites and cyber-networks, and it is adding to its small arsenal of long-range nuclear missiles that can reach the United States. Although a direct confrontation seems unlikely, China appears to seek the option of dealing a knockout blow to Americas forward forces, leaving Washington with difficult choices about how to respond. Those preparations do not mean that China wants war with the United States. To the contrary, they seem intended mostly to overawe its neighbors while dissuading Washington from coming to their aid if there is ever a clash. Uncertain of whether they can rely on American support, and unable to match Chinas power on their own, other countries may decide they must accommodate Chinas wishes. In the words of the ancient military theorist Sun Tzu, China is acquiring the means to win without fighting to establish itself as Asias dominant power by eroding the credibility of Americas security guarantees, hollowing out its alliances and eventually easing it out of the region. If the United States and its Asian friends look to their own defenses and coordinate their efforts, there is no reason they cannot maintain a favorable balance of power, even as Chinas strength grows. But if they fail to respond to Chinas buildup, there is a danger that Beijing could miscalculate, throw its weight around and increase the risk of confrontation and even armed conflict. Indeed, Chinas recent behavior in disputes over resources and maritime boundaries with Japan and the smaller states that ring the South China Sea suggest that this already may be starting to happen. This is a problem that cannot simply be smoothed away by dialogue. Chinas military policies are not the product of a misunderstanding; they are part of a deliberate strategy that other nations must now find ways to meet. Strength deters aggression; weakness tempts it. Beijing will denounce such moves as provocative, but it is Chinas actions that currently threaten to upset the stability of Asia. Many of Chinas neighbors are more willing than they were in the past to ignore Beijings complaints, increase their own defense spending and work more closely with one another and the United States. They are unlikely, however, to do those things unless they are convinced that America remains committed. Washington does not have to shoulder the entire burden of preserving the Asian power balance, but it must lead. The Pentagon needs to put a top priority on finding ways to counter Chinas burgeoning anti-access capabilities, thereby reducing the likelihood that they will ever be used. This will cost money. To justify the necessary spending in an era of austerity, our leaders will have to be clearer in explaining the nations interests and commitments in Asia and blunter in describing the challenge posed by Chinas relentless military buildup. Aaron L. Friedberg, a professor of politics and international affairs at Princeton, is the author of A Contest for Supremacy: China, America and the Struggle for Mastery in Asia. August 24, 2011 U.S. Official Warns About Chinas Military Buildup By ELISABETH BUMILLER WASHINGTON The pace and scope of Chinas military buildup is potentially destabilizing in the Pacific, a top defense official warned Wednesday as the Pentagon released an annual report cataloging Chinas cruise missiles, fighter jets and growing, modernizing army. The official, Michael Schiffer, the deputy assistant secretary of defense for East Asia, made the remark at a news briefing about the report, titled Military and Security Developments Involving the Peoples Republic of China 2011. Every year the report, which is submitted to Congress, creates grist for China watchers who look for rising tensions between the United States and China. This year was a particularly rocky one between the countries, so interest has intensified. Over all, the report described what is generally known: Chinas Peoples Liberation Army with some 1.25 million ground troops, the largest in the world is on track to achieve its goal of building a modern, regionally focused force by 2020. The Chinese military remains focused on Taiwan, which it claims as part of its sovereign territory, and it has deployed as many as 1,200 short-range missiles aimed in its direction. Moreover, it is developing anti-ship ballistic missiles, potentially capable of attacking American aircraft carriers. It is also developing its own aircraft carriers, and is already in sea trials with a refitted Soviet-era carrier from Ukraine a development the report anticipated, but which occurred after it was printed. Finally, China is developing a new-generation stealth jet fighter, the J-20, which it boldly tested in Beijing in January during a visit by Robert M. Gates, then the defense secretary. Mr. Schiffer said that no single development led him to describe Chinas arms buildup as potentially destabilizing, although Pentagon officials had increasingly said they were concerned about Chinas military intentions in the Pacific. Instead, he said, he used the phrase because of Chinas lack of transparency and its trends in military prowess. Its a combination of the lack of understanding thats been created by the opacity of their system, but it is also because there are very real questions given the overall trends and trajectory in the scope and the scale of Chinas military modernization efforts, Mr. Schiffer said. I wouldnt put it on any one particular platform or any one particular system. Theres nothing particularly magical about any one particular item. The report also said that numerous intrusions into computer systems around the world in 2010 appeared to have originated in China, and that developing capabilities for cyberwarfare is consistent with authoritative Chinese military writing. The report said that two Chinese military doctrinal writings Science of Strategy and Science of Campaigns identified information warfare as integral to achieving information superiority and an effective means for countering a stronger foe. The report estimates that Chinas total military spending for 2010 was more than $160 billion. The Pentagon spends more than $500 billion a year, although the number is closer to $700 billion a year if the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are included. Three months ago a top Chinese general visited the Pentagon as part of what the report cited as positive developments in talks between the American and Chinese militaries. The general, Chen Bingde, said at the time that China had no interest in challenging the American military and that he did not understand why questions were raised about Chinas military buildup when similar concerns were not raised about the United States. August 10, 2011 China Begins Sea Trials of Its First Aircraft Carrier By MICHAEL WINES BEIJING Chinas first aircraft carrier began sea trials on Wednesday, the state-run Xinhua news service reported, a highly symbolic step in what is certain to be an effort of many years to create a carrier presence in the Pacific waters off its coast. The carrier, once known as the Varyag, left Dalian, its northeast China port, for what analysts said would be a test of its rudder, propulsion system and other basics. Xinhuas two-sentence report stated only that the carrier would make a short voyage before returning to Dalian for further tests. The Chinese Defense Ministry said last month that the carrier would be used largely for scientific research and training. Foreign military analysts say it could be a decade or more before the Chinese can deploy and operate a true fleet of carriers, the most costly and complex weapons systems in any nations arsenal. The launching is nonetheless a highly significant moment for Chinas fast-growing military. Its a milestone for them, and not only the navy. Its a national date, too, said Andrei Chang, the Hong Kong-based editor of Kanwa Asian Defense Review. But its the first step in a long march. In publicly acknowledging the carriers existence last month, a Defense Ministry spokesman said that the vessel did not alter Chinas stated policy that its armed forces were wholly defensive in nature, and that the ship had nothing to do with Chinas continuing disputes with neighboring nations over its claim to most of the South China Sea. A fleet of carriers would nevertheless bolster the navys already overwhelming military advantage over Chinas smaller neighbors. China has long been rumored to have more aircraft carriers under construction in a Shanghai shipyard, but most Chinese military matters are tightly held secrets, and that report has yet to be confirmed. Military experts say that a naval force needs a minimum of three carriers to maintain a constant sea presence because at any one time a single vessel is likely to be docked for repairs or modernization. The ship that began sea trials on Wednesday is in fact a retrofitted version of a Soviet vessel, the Riga, that was once supposed to become the most advanced carrier in the Soviet fleet. But construction at a Ukrainian shipyard was halted when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. Ukraine was unable to finish construction and later stripped the ship, which had been renamed the Varyag, of its weapons and engines and put it up for sale. A Chinese company bought the Varyag for $20 million in 1998, ostensibly to turn into a floating casino. But in 2004, workers in Dalian sandblasted the hull and repainted it in Chinese colors, then began an update. As retrofitting wound up this spring, the Chinese unveiled a carrier-based jet, the J-15 Flying Shark, an updated clone of a Soviet-era Sukhoi-33 fighter. Many experts say the carrier is unlikely to deploy a fighter force until after 2015 because landing a jet on an aircraft carrier is a highly dangerous maneuver that requires years of training. In a blog entry posted on Tuesday, an expert on the Chinese military, Andrew S. Erickson, cited Pentagon figures showing that the United States Navy and Marines together lost nearly 12,000 aircraft and 8,500 crew members from 1949 to 1988, including 776 planes and 535 crew members in 1954 alone. Not all those aircraft were based on carriers, but the rate of accidents for carrier-based planes was higher than that of the entire seagoing force. Even a less-aggressive carrier operator than the U.S. is almost certain to suffer substantial unexpected losses of aircraft and crew as it works to build its operational knowledge and human capital, Mr. Erickson wrote. Clearly the first Chinese carrier aviators and ship captains face steep challenges ahead. July 14, 2011 U.S. and China Try to Agree on Military Strategy By MICHAEL WINES BEIJING During three days in China this week, the top American military officer, Adm. Mike Mullen, exchanged warm pledges with his Chinese counterpart to improve the reliably fractious relationship between the two forces. He watched Chinese Su-27 fighters barrel roll over an air base, saw a Chinese counterterrorism exercise in a stifling bunker beneath an army post and squeezed into a Chinese submarine at a naval base. By the time Admiral Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, departed on Thursday morning, one might never have suspected that each side bases its military planning on the prospect that the other might be the enemy. They do, however, and that reality hung like a dark cloud over the visit, the first such meeting in four years here in Beijing. It is making rapprochement between the worlds leading military power and its fastest-rising one a fiendishly difficult task even as the president of each nation says he wants to achieve precisely that. As the United States military contemplates the future and in particular a newly powerful Asia, its ever more crucial relationship with China is being tugged in opposite directions. Chinas own breakneck modernization of its creaky military machine is the principal reason. The Chinese military recently confirmed the impending launch of its first aircraft carrier, with more to come. It has staged the maiden flight of its first stealth jet fighter and lifted the curtain on another carrier-based fighter. Its shipyards are building a new, still-secret class of advanced submarines. And it has acknowledged the development of a seagoing missile that some experts say could strike ships as far as 1,025 miles away. Except for the submarines, each of these developments occurred this year. And they followed a year in which the Chinese military put seven reconnaissance satellites into orbit. On the one hand, analysts say, Chinas military ambitions are understandable. The countrys global trade footprint and its reliance on foreign fuel and raw materials justify building a sophisticated and far-flung military force to secure its interests, just as the United States has done. As China expands into areas now dominated by the American military, they say, broad cooperation is crucial to avoid dangerous rivalries and potentially disastrous miscalculations. Some good might even come of this unlikely alliance. But on the other hand, many American analysts view Chinas military overhaul as the core of an effort to rein in American military power in the western Pacific. In this view, the anti-ship missile, aircraft carrier and much of the other sophisticated hardware China is developing are intended as a counterforce to the United States Navys Seventh Fleet, which has dominated Pacific waters for a half-century or more. Its not that we need another enemy like the Soviet Union, Bonnie S. Glaser, a senior fellow in Chinese security policy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, said in an interview. Were responding to measures that China is taking, and to the unwillingness of China to sit down and tell us what theyre doing and what missions these new platforms and weapons are intended to achieve. From an American standpoint, the Chinese have been ambiguous about their motivations. In January, fresh from a summit meeting with President Obama in Washington, President Hu Jintao made it clear that the Peoples Liberation Army, the overseer of all Chinese forces, needs to build trust with the Pentagon. Yet the Chinese army not to mention large factions in Chinas bureaucracy, its leadership and the all-powerful Communist Party regard the United States as determined to thwart Chinas rightful emergence as a global power. They note that the United States has shifted the bulk of its aircraft carriers from the Atlantic to the Pacific, that it recently strengthened military agreements with Singapore and Australia, that it is courting Chinas rival, India, and that it has sought to intervene diplomatically in the South China Sea, where China and most of its neighbors have experienced bitter territorial disputes. They also note that the United States has rejected demands to scale back aerial and ocean reconnaissance of Chinas eastern border on the Pacific. Nor will it revise a longstanding Congressional mandate to sell weapons to Taiwan, which China claims as a province. China has all but set the resolution of both issues as a precondition for genuine trust between the two militaries. And so the Chinese are building what they call an entirely defensive force, although one that includes weapons that exist primarily to strike American military targets. I can understand people in the Pentagon and the P.L.A. planning for worst-case scenarios all militaries do that, said Dennis J. Blasko, an independent scholar who worked as a China expert in Army intelligence, referring to the Peoples Liberation Army. Thats the function of militaries to make those plans. Admiral Mullen, in his visit to China, said repeatedly that American actions in the Pacific were merely a part of decades of involvement in the region that did not pose a threat to China. In a speech at the National Defense University in Washington in May, Gen. Chen Bingde, the commanding officer of the Chinese forces, said that his countrys military upgrade could not hope to match American technological might, and that China never intends to challenge the U.S. But on both sides of the Pacific, suspicions inevitably rise every time one side unveils a new weapon or cements an old alliance. Some American analysts say the two nations moves and countermoves could doom any chance for a true military and diplomatic accommodation. Others say the United States could be forced into another arms race except that this time, unlike during the cold war, it would be China that has billions to spend on new weapons and the United States that might be forced to choose between guns and butter. Charles W. Freeman Jr., a former diplomat whom Mr. Obama unsuccessfully nominated to lead the National Intelligence Council, made that case forcefully in a recent speech to the China Maritime Studies Institute, which is based in Rhode Island. The United States is now fiscally hollow, Mr. Freeman said, noting that the entire American military budget is essentially financed with borrowed money. Yet we are entering a long-term military rivalry with China on terms that are easily bearable by China but fiscally ruinous for us. This rivalry is all the more disadvantageous because China is competing in notably cost-effective ways, and we are not. Some analysts dispute his assessment. But most would agree that it costs much less to build a missile that can sink an American carrier than it does to build the carrier and a sophisticated anti-missile defense system. China may be able to afford the missile, and the United States may be able to build the ship and the defense system. But whether they are necessary might be another matter. Said one American analyst, Were priming for a fight that Im not sure either of us needs or wants to have. ------------------------------------ --------------------------------------------------------------------------- LAAMN: Los Angeles Alternative Media Network --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Unsubscribe: <mailto:[email protected]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Subscribe: <mailto:[email protected]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Digest: <mailto:[email protected]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Help: <mailto:[email protected]?subject=laamn> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Post: <mailto:[email protected]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Archive1: <http://www.egroups.com/messages/laamn> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Archive2: <http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Yahoo! 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