If the United States wants to form a strategic partnership perhaps it might make more sense to build one with the Chinese? China is our fastest growing trade partner while Russia is not even on the radar screen by comparison.

I'm not blasting the SECDEF for questioning the conventional wisdom of the carrier-based USN, but Kaplan's analysis certainly argues for maintaining an overwhelming Navy if te seas will be the primary arena of potential conflict with China.

The US has the luxury of not involving itself in great power politics, in most cases, due to its fortuitous geography. I don't see alliances being necessary or forged.

* My "Subject" header is of course taken from John Mearsheimer.

Rewind to pre-WWI.

Bismarck's juggling the three balls: Britain, France and the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

Britain's pre-WWI attempt to protect its "British Lake" (from the Suez to India), and assure the dominance of its P&O maritime industry against competition from the threatened Berlin to Basrah rail lines being pursued by Germany and the sick man (Ottomans).

We and they lost that lake by measures through, among many other things, mishandling of Iran, the opening of Pakistan's Chinese Gwadar port, and, last week, the Shia contenders for Iraq going to Iran for guidance on post-election Iraq's government.

Once everybody settles, I am sure that the sophisticated and Euro-oriented Turks will be complete their "continental by-pass" by pipelines, rail, road, etc...Heck the US is even carving out and upgrading the overland route from Iraq to Afghanistan so as to reactivate the Silk Road. Want to invest in a caravansarai (I mean truck stop)?

Isn't it all going nicely for the wise and patient Turks? No one else seems to focus on the riches inherent in reopening the continental route (the good ol' Silk Road).

Where do these folks come up with these silly and antiquated ideas about sea lanes and shipping channels? They obviously spend too much time in an office.

PS- Yes, I am a geographer and transportation planner.

The role of the Chinese Navy is to justify a large US Navy!

Note the bizarre juxtaposition of this posting with 'Gates to the ship industry: Shape up' immediately following.

The formula I like for the US Navy was printed in US Naval Institute Proceedings 6 years ago: I would not change one word...

The Nation Needs a Different Navy

By Captain John Byron, U.S. Navy (Retired)
Proceedings, June 2004

We now fight only on land. In this new century, the nation’s combat will be on terra firma, with air-to-air combat and sea battles relegated to history and to a dim, unlikely future. Is the Navy becoming irrelevant? Sadly, the answer is yes—unless it is reshaped for two essential missions ahead.

Mission One: Maintain a sufficient fleet-in-being as hedge against potential threats to freedom of the seas, retaining enough industrial, technological, and training infrastructure to remain superior to any nation that might pose a blue-water threat. The Navy must drastically downsize its capital-ship inventory because its current cost cripples the second mission.

Mission Two: Support land warfare. This is now the Navy’s primary mission, and the current fleet works hard at it. Making best use of a Cold War fleet, however, yields much less support than the Navy could provide with a force built purposely for its new role.

A relevant Navy will require:

• Just enough attack submarines and surface combatants to keep Mission One alive—about half the current number. Protect assets in the near-shore area with them and with the new littoral combat ship, a design tuned to the new mission at a cost per hull one-tenth that of the complex new cruiser-destroyers and submarines on the drawing boards.

• Aircraft carriers as they are now, but hold the CVN(X) until Mission Two is equipped fully.

• Cost-driven replacements of aging combat aircraft that maximize ordnance delivery, even at the expense of air-to-air combat.

• Large numbers of sea-launched cruise missiles rebased to arsenal ships. Smart weapons do not need smart platforms and their huge per-round delivery costs.

• Just enough Trident submarines to maintain an adequate deterrent posture against rogue nations—six would do. Keep the four Trident cruise missile-configured submarines.

• Amphibious readiness groups, but with state-of-art ship designs and the concept expanded to embrace support of special operations forces (SOFs).

• Expanded logistics support of land war from more fast sea-lift and prepositioned ships, also expanded to embrace direct support of SOFs.

• Full commitment to mobile sea bases as a primary contribution to supporting land combat.

At the same time, major changes must be made to the shore establishment to gain efficiency and focus the Navy culture on its new missions:

• State that Mission Two is the Navy’s primary mission. Reorganize around it and move away from the bureaucracies entrenched to sustain Cold War platforms.

• Exercise strong leadership for change, from the top of the Navy to the deckplates. So far, the Navy’s answer to transformation” is pursuit of a technologically refined version of its legacy force structure, not something fundamentally new that is tuned to future need.

• Break the backs of the three dominant warfare communities to stop perpetuating a blue-water navy frozen in the Cold War. As long as they call the tune, the surface, submarine, and aviation communities will starve Mission Two.

• Overhaul the officer personnel system to emphasize Mission Two’s priorities and shift the officer corps from its dysfunctional careerist orientation to one that is more mission based.

• Reduce end-strength through design-manning tradeoffs, innovative crewing, and aggressive use of commercial sources for nonmilitary work.

• Cut Navy bases to just what is needed.

• Make costs visible and justify them with mission metrics; eradicate nonmission spending.

• Rebalance the resource shares of the services: more Marine Corps, Army, and SOFs—and less Navy and Air Force.

These are enormous changes. An incremental approach is doomed, as is a wistful hope that the specialized parts of the Navy will put aside parochialism to serve the new primary mission. Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Vern Clark gets it. He has laid out the right framework and the right goals. But large numbers of his admirals and the rest of the Navy have yet to take up this bold challenge, change course sharply, and help him remake the Navy for the realities of the 21st century.

How scared should we really be of the Chinese considering their huge internal problems (which they largely cover up), very unbalanced workforce, and reliance on the US consumer economy for growth?

This is a subject that I don't think garners anywhere near the attention it should.

To those who say that China's internal issues (which are significant) are a significant barrier to its continuing rise, I would argue that all major superpowers have significant growing pains. A large income gap and a disenfranchised portion of the populace doesn't indicate that a state is incapable of acting as a unified, world power. The Soviet Union had a totally unsustainable economic system, lost a huge amount of their population and infastructure in World War II, and still managed not only to rise, but survie as a world superpower for five decades. I would argue that China today is starting to look eerily similar to the United States at the turn of the 20th Century. If the Chinese ever put a Teddy Roosevelt-like figure in power, I think we should collectively start becoming more concerned about their position in the world.

The argument that goes "Well, they have so far to catch up..." is also dangerous in my opinion. If we stop or significantly slow development (think militarily, though this applies in a number of different areas) while China continues growing at an unimpeded pace over the next two decades, you will see that gap close uncomfortably fast. Think of it this way: the US went from never having sent a man in space in 1961 to landing on the moon in eight short years later. Given today's technology, a rapidly growing economy, and a huge population and labor base, why couldn't China accomplish a similar feat in any number of areas?

I know China isn't totally focused on hard power, and that there are several other elements of China's rise and America's response (diplomatic, economic, etc.) worthy of discussion. I also apololgize for fanning the flames of this blog's raging COIN debate, but "What about China?" is the question I always find myself asking when people start telling me the military needs to focus more on COIN than it is already.

US has literally created this challenge from China on its own when Nixon embraced China‘s Communist dragon to counter Russia‘s Soviet bear in 1972 while Mao‘s cultural revolution was in full swing killing millions of innocent Chinese at the time.

Let us face it - China was a pariah country in the world just like today’s North Korea until anti-Communist Nixon’s 1972 visit. All the West European and East Asian countries stayed away from China following the US lead until 1972 and embraced China after Nixon’s visit. While US would not give MFN status to Soviet Union (remember Jackson-Vanik amendment?) unless Russia shed Communism, it had no problem giving it to China’s Communist dictators with a capitalist mask. Trade with China expanded by leaps and bounds during 12 years of Republican rule beginning in 1981. Bush Senior had no problem sending his national security advisor to Beijing within two months after Tiananmen massacre. After campaigning against butchers of Beijing in 1992 elections, even Bill Clinton became enthusiastic supporter of trade with China once he took lessons in foreign policy from Nixon in early 1993 during a special Whitehouse-arranged meeting. US also promoted China to a super power status by accepting it as a permanent UNSC member.

US businesses were supposed to benefit from huge Chinese consumer market. Instead that theory of American economists and China-apologists has been turned on its head and China has benefited far more from vast American and European markets. China used huge trade surpluses with US and the West to buy all the military equipment in the world. And China with its foothold in US and Western Europe, spied away any technology it could not buy.

Now China has US by the tail - US businesses are hooked to huge profits that cheap Chinese products generate for them as a walk through any Walmart, Sears or Home Depot filled with cheap Chinese goods attests to and US government is hooked to huge investments that Chinese government makes in US treasuries.

Nixon’s China embrace to counter Soviet Union has come back to haunt US with the rise of China to challenge US just as Reagan‘s embrace of Islamic fundamentalists to counter Soviet Union in 1980s Afghanistan came back to haunt US in the form of 9/11 attacks.

Reagan must be squirming in his grave for his Republican predecessor Nixon being responsible for the rise of dictatorial China as a threat to US after Reagan was supposed to have vanquished Soviet Union.

The West will desperately try to reverse the rise of China but will be largely unsuccessful. Little could Mao or even Deng have imagined that their followers will beat capitalists at their own game. Lenin used to say that ’capitalists will sell us the ropes with which we will hang them’. With the West selling such ropes (in the form of technology transfers), China has proved that Lenin quote quite prophetic.

Democratic China sounds like a catch-22 for our ultranationalist American compatriots. The idea of a US-Russian alliance is also interesting. But do we really expect things to get so dire that a US-Russian military/intelligence pact similar to the one forged with China in the 1970's will be reasonable? Things would have to heat up a LOT and I don't see China propagating any ideological model threatening US interests. How are you going to motivate Americans to hate the Chinese for trading goods or being better Capitalists? Especially if they become more democratic? Can't rule it out though--another Taiwan Straits crisis or two would probably do the trick. We can't afford to fight a Cold War with the Chinese while simultaneously spending hundreds of billions on the "terror" war. But I can't doubt the politicians' ability to scare the shit out of enough people to sacrifice Medicare and Social Security on the altar of American militarism. By the way, what the hell does Robert Kaplan know about China. Does he speak Chinese?

Chinese culture is a peaceful culture. Even Communist China, despite the turmoil and the self inflicted devastation in the early half of its rule, is fundamentally peaceful and they have a record to show for it. Here is a podcast showing how China deals with its border problem:

http://asiapacific.anu.edu.au/podcasts/India_China_Border.mp3

Download and listen it. It is not the system of government but the culture of the people that matters.