US Air Force Lieutenant General Bruce Wright, the commander of US forces in Japan, dropped a bombshell of sorts last week when, during an interview, he painted a disconcertingly grim portrait of US capabilities vis-a-vis China's growing military strength.
Comments to the effect that China's air defenses are now "difficult if not impossible" to penetrate by the US' aging F-15s and F-16s, in addition to complaints that operations in Iraq and Afghanistan have cannibalized US military resources in East Asia, could be seen as ringing alarm bells for Taiwan.
But we've heard all that before. Wright, like any other official in his position, is a bean counter who vies with other branches of the US Defense Department for resources. If he sends the right signals, his share of the defense pie could grow in the next annual budget. After all, no commander in his right mind would come out and say he has enough -- or perhaps even too many -- resources to meet his requirements. What they want is what writer James Carroll, in his excellent history of the Pentagon, House of War, calls the "upwards spiral of weapons accumulation" -- more, more, more. And they are encouraged to do this by defense contractors who can only benefit from such pleas.
So they decry the poor state of one's order of battle, bemoan its age, while at the same time overestimating the capabilities and resources of the opponent -- a tradition perfected by defense analysts during the Cold War, who gravely warned of a growing "missile gap" with the Soviets, a wild overestimate (in fact a lie) that indeed led to a substantial missile gap -- in the US' favor.
While acknowledging the great strides China's military has made in recent years, it is important to recognize that the capabilities alone -- the number of aircraft, destroyers, personnel and so on -- an army possesses is insufficient to determine the likely outcome of a military engagement.
While it is true that the US' F-15s and F-16s are older than China's Su-27s, Su-30s and the quasi-mythical J-10 (a reference that emphatically screams for a bigger and permanent deployment of brand new, albeit costly, F-22s to Okinawa), Wright's assessment leaves out other, equally important factors such as training, combat experience, command-and-control and spatial mapping.
In all these aspects, the US military is light years ahead of China. US pilots receive far better training and get many more flight hours than their Chinese counterparts. And given engagements like the Gulf War in 1991, Somalia in 1993, the Balkans in the mid-1990s, Kosovo in 1999, Afghanistan in 2001 and the ongoing war in Iraq, US military personnel have a tremendous advantage in combat experience over the Chinese, whose last conventional military ventures were the Sino-Indian war of 1962 and the invasion of Vietnam in 1979.
That China's modernization of its military warrants careful scrutiny by the international community is indisputable. That regional powers like Japan, Taiwan, South Korea and the US must position themselves so that they can meet China's growing capabilities is beyond question.
But, simultaneously, we must shield ourselves against depictions, such as Wright's, that overestimate the nature of the Chinese "threat" and in the end constitute little more than an attempt to grab as much as possible from a growing, though nonetheless finite, US military budget.
On May 7, 1971, Henry Kissinger planned his first, ultra-secret mission to China and pondered whether it would be better to meet his Chinese interlocutors “in Pakistan where the Pakistanis would tape the meeting — or in China where the Chinese would do the taping.” After a flicker of thought, he decided to have the Chinese do all the tape recording, translating and transcribing. Fortuitously, historians have several thousand pages of verbatim texts of Dr. Kissinger’s negotiations with his Chinese counterparts. Paradoxically, behind the scenes, Chinese stenographers prepared verbatim English language typescripts faster than they could translate and type them
More than 30 years ago when I immigrated to the US, applied for citizenship and took the 100-question civics test, the one part of the naturalization process that left the deepest impression on me was one question on the N-400 form, which asked: “Have you ever been a member of, involved in or in any way associated with any communist or totalitarian party anywhere in the world?” Answering “yes” could lead to the rejection of your application. Some people might try their luck and lie, but if exposed, the consequences could be much worse — a person could be fined,
Xiaomi Corp founder Lei Jun (雷軍) on May 22 made a high-profile announcement, giving online viewers a sneak peek at the company’s first 3-nanometer mobile processor — the Xring O1 chip — and saying it is a breakthrough in China’s chip design history. Although Xiaomi might be capable of designing chips, it lacks the ability to manufacture them. No matter how beautifully planned the blueprints are, if they cannot be mass-produced, they are nothing more than drawings on paper. The truth is that China’s chipmaking efforts are still heavily reliant on the free world — particularly on Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing
Keelung Mayor George Hsieh (謝國樑) of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) on Tuesday last week apologized over allegations that the former director of the city’s Civil Affairs Department had illegally accessed citizens’ data to assist the KMT in its campaign to recall Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) councilors. Given the public discontent with opposition lawmakers’ disruptive behavior in the legislature, passage of unconstitutional legislation and slashing of the central government’s budget, civic groups have launched a massive campaign to recall KMT lawmakers. The KMT has tried to fight back by initiating campaigns to recall DPP lawmakers, but the petition documents they
RSS