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I have no issues with the article's main thesis but it's a really impossible task to do comparisons. The purpose of the Chinese and Russian militaries, leaving aside nuclear WMD, is to defend their homelands and a *limited* regional influence/domination. It is not to protect/police Imperialist interests internationally. The number of troops each side has is wholly irrelevant to this question because they are only so good as each countries ability to project those troops to foreign shores. The Russians have done in a very narrowly focused area where they can concentrate their very limited navy and air force power. That is in Syria and, if one wants, the Crimea. The Chinese have exactly one foreign shores military base, and that's Djibouti near the outlet of the Suez Canal (around 700 yards from the US base there it seems). That the Chinese and Russian have fighters as or more advanced than the US is also irrelevant as they can't really support an overseas defensive or preemptive attack on US forces. They simply don't have enough and by enough I don't mean jets, I mean the logistics to support such an effort. Conversely in a war with China the US simply has no logistics, to "invade" mainland Asia. It can really done because the Chinese defensive capability based on their own land, would be near impossible to overcome. So we'd have to look at real world scenarios instead of comparing the military gonads of each state. The only real world conflict I can see arising is over the Chinese claim to the entire South Chinese Sea (SCS). The U.S. is legally/technically correct that the Chinese claim...a claim first elucidated by the Chinese Imperial Court in the 18th or 19th Centuries I think...is an artificial claim that violates the sovereignty of every country bordering the sea. The Chinese have no tried to enforce this notion to my knowledge except rhetorically. No country in the world has asked the Chinese regime to sale through it with their merchant vessels (and by this I mean all the bordering countries AND S. Korea and Japan who use it). Secondly, the SCS countries are all taking the *opposite* position the belligerent US is taking. Instead of trying to force the issue, these nations are *negotiating* with the Chinese over economic and military limits, etc. But the US does have the strongest navy in the world and outnumbers the Chinese in both tonnage and capability by a factor of 10 to 1 or more (the 'number' of ships is about even but that's only true when you compare small ships of the Chinese to the larger ones the US has). At any rate, no country in the region, even Japan, really wants the US to force this issue. David _________________________________________________________ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: https://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
