It is the end of the winter in the capital of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and on most days the city is shrouded in a cold, bone-chilling fog that makes it sometimes impossible to see even the building on the other side of the street clearly. However, at the beginning of this month, there was more than one kind of fog enveloping the city.
On the eve of the Chinese National People’s Congress, it was announced that under planning guidelines to be ratified at the congress, PRC defense spending would increase another 11.2 percent this year. The largely rubber-stamp parliament will approve defense outlays this year of 670 billion yuan (US$106 billion). This is more than a US$10 billion increase from last year’s budget and the first time the official defense spending has topped that magic, round number of US$100 billion.
However, finding intelligence officers, defense analysts and others — both inside and outside the capital of the PRC — who would call even this number greatly understated is not at all difficult. Almost all of them blame the questions about how far from the truth the “official” defense spending is on the traditional problems with the People’s Liberation Army’s (PLA) near-pathological secrecy — and a general complete lack of openness with regard to Beijing’s military policy.
The first problem with believing this US$106 billion figure is that it is such a miniscule percentage of Beijing’s economy.
“If you believe these official defense spending numbers,” more than one diplomat stated here in the capital, “then you accept that the PRC are spending only about 1.4 percent of their GNP on defense, which is just not at all realistic.”
The PLA does officially admit that there has been an upsurge in spending that has seen double-digit budget increases from one year to the next. The PRC’s official defense budget for last year was US$91.5 billion, which was a 12.7 percent increase over 2010.
However, these numbers do not begin to account for the money it would really take to fund all of Beijing’s high-profile weapons programs: the Chengdu J-20 stealth attack aircraft, refitting the aircraft carrier formerly known as Varyag that was acquired from Ukraine in the late 1990s, producing large numbers of reverse-engineered copies of Russian fighter aircraft, a constant stream of new air-launched weapons, new ballistic missiles — many of which are targeted at Taiwan. These and so many other programs, plus an overall initiative to modernize the PLA and bring it into the digital era, are well beyond what the “official” funding levels would support.
PRC defense watchers state that there is a willing self-delusion by Western nations at work in granting a greater level of integrity to the mechanisms of the Chinese state apparatus and the true power of the Chinese Ministry of National Defense (MND) than either one merit.
“What is the [MND] in Beijing — what is it really?” one US-based analyst said. “It is nothing more than a building where the PRC Minister of [National] Defense can hold meetings with his ‘counterparts’ from other nations. But this is not the Pentagon, this is not Whitehall in London — decisions about defense policy are not being made here because the PRC [MND] is nothing more than a liaison office. The decisions about defense policy are made at the Central Military Commission and no one knows for sure how many different military and political organizations are represented there or how the process of formulating those decisions even takes place.”
As far as integrity and transparency in government spending is concerned, the manner in which PRC defense monies are hidden from plain sight traces its roots back to the days when former Chinese leader Mao Zedong (毛澤東) and company were being tutored by their then-Soviet mentors on how to be good little murdering totalitarians. Just as the Russians had been doing for decades and have continued to do, much of Beijing’s defense spending is parceled out into the budgets of other non-defense ministries or contained with special scientific activities. One of the latter is the PRC’s space program, which is entirely controlled by the military.
The bad news for Taiwan is the ever-expanding chasm between not really knowing the true extent of Beijing’s military outlays and the uncertainty surrounding the future of Taipei’s own defense planning. In the past, that chasm was always occupied and compensated for by the presence of the US military, a long-time ally. However, the ability of the US to deter Beijing’s aggressive designs on the island nation are no longer a given.
Late last month, US Representative Randy Forbes of the US House of Representatives Armed Services Committee questioned US Air Force (USAF) Chief of Staff General Norton Schwartz about the implications of the impending shortage of US strike fighter assets. Schwartz told the committee “we have sufficient aircraft to deal with the threats that are outlined in the force-sizing construct at moderate risk,” which is the kind of answer generals give to congressional oversight committees when they want to sound like they are saying something, but are really saying nothing.
Specifically, Forbes tried to elicit Schwartz’s reaction to a 2009 RAND Corp report titled A Question of Balance: Political Context and Military Aspects of the China-Taiwan Dispute. The study reverses a decades-long USAF position and concludes that the force could no longer be assured of prevailing in a conflict with the PLA Air Force (PLAAF) in the Taiwan Strait.
Moreover, no additional assets seemed to make any impact on the final outcome in the RAND study. According to their mathematical modeling and subsequent analysis, the PLAAF would emerge victorious regardless of whether the USAF were able to commit its force of F-22 aircraft — and regardless of whether or not strikes could be launched from Kadena Air Base in Okinawa, Japan. Even plugging two US Navy carrier battle groups into the equation would not roll back the Chinese force.
Overall, the study “suggests that a credible case can be made that the air war for Taiwan could essentially be over before much of the Blue air force has even fired a shot. Threats to Blue air bases and a more evenly matched qualitative balance combine to paint a very troubling picture.”
Alarmingly, Schwartz seemed to not be aware of the study or its implications. For the uninitiated, RAND is a captive USAF think tank that is sometimes referred to as the “US Secretary of the Air Force driving school,” given the trend that presidents of RAND will sometimes move on to the service secretary’s job. A RAND study that draws these kind of conclusions only gets published because the USAF in 2009 wanted to telegraph its official position without taking the political heat for saying it themselves, but today’s USAF leadership is playing the game of “don’t know because don’t want to know.”
One would think that these realities present an overwhelming justification for the badly outgunned Taiwanese air force to be given the right to purchase the 66 new F-16C/D aircraft it has been requesting since 2006. However, no such change from the position of US President Barack Obama’s administration that continues to block this sale seems to be in the offing. Advocates of the sale who had hoped for a new administration next year after the US presidential election in November would be justified in having dim hopes that the president will be replaced and that there will be reversal of this position.
The late North Korean dictator and best friend of the PRC Kim Jong-il was once reported to have said that “we must envelop our environment in a dense fog, to prevent our enemies learning anything about us.” China’s military continues to do a first-rate job of just such an obfuscation of its true strength, spending levels and strategic intentions.
Unfortunately, for Taiwan, as well as for the US soldiers, sailors and airmen who would be pressed into service to help defend Taiwan against the PLA, no one in authority seems to want to peer beyond the fog and face these unpleasant realities — much less take any action to address them before it is too late.
Reuben Johnson is a correspondent for Jane’s Information Group in London and the Weekly Standard in Washington.
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