Really, AEI thinks Obama has an emerging China policy?? Perhaps AEI could let us in on what they think (or hope) it is. The only policy I have been able to detect from the fumbling Obama Administration is perpetual whining about the dollar Yuan exchange rate (meaning the Chinese should upwardly revalue their currency). On second thought perhaps inquiring minds at AEI think that this is an issue worth starting a shooting war over? Sadly for them the only way we could likely finance such a war would be to borrow a couple of hundred billon from the Chinese first which would of course drive the dollar down further and the Yuan higher. No wonder the neocon geniuses at AEI hate all the paradoxes of economics. Having to think about financing a war when your polices have driven us to bankruptcy spoils all the fun of a good rockem sockem war that they can cheer from the safety of the sidelines.

By Andrew F. Krepinevich, Wall Street Journal, September 11, 2010

"China's goal is to stop the U.S. from protecting its longstanding interests in the region—and to draw Washington's democratic allies and partners (such as Japan, South Korea and Taiwan) into its orbit. China's military buildup centers on a set of capabilities, called 'Assassin's Mace' by the Chinese, which is designed to exploit surprise. China's People's Liberation Army (PLA) sees the U.S. military's battle networks—which rely heavily on satellites and the Internet to identify targets, coordinate attacks, guide 'smart bombs' and more—as its Achilles' heel. The message to the U.S. and its allies is clear: China has the means to threaten the forward bases from which most U.S. strike aircraft operate."

China becomes a threat when it starts to pull back from its trade relationship with the US. Until then (and only then), China is a 'threat' only in the sense defined by DOD (and especially the Navy) as 'we better have some kind of threat - how else can we justify these obscene levels of defense spending?'

While the defense establishment attempts to make the Chinese both bad and ten feet tall, American business is engaged with China in some of the most profitable and economically vital relationships anywhere in the world. When Apple can no longer get Chinese firms to make son-of-iPad, then worry. Until then ... not so much.

Anti-ship missiles? A dime a dozen globally. The only defense issue for a nation is make or buy. See: Falklands/Malvinas War; Exocet.

AEI? A band of buffoons, eh.

Well rat spit! Rubber Ducky's comment about son of iPod, blew me out of the water like a Harpoon missile.

I was hoping with the wind-down in Iraq, and our eventual departure from Banastan, I could make a case for America going into withdrawal, and suffering from enemy deprivation, thereby ginning-up support for our defense industry in turning our attention to the yellow menace, and the pending ASM gap in the Pacific pond.

Nixon in his infinite wisdom decided to embrace China’s Communist dragon to counter Russia’s Soviet bear in 1972.

China was a pariah country in the world just like today’s North Korea until 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. 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.

By opening up vast US consumer market and subsequently European market to cheap Chinese products, US and Europe have helped China accumulate huge foreign exchange reserves that China has used to procure all kind of modern military equipment. With its huge diplomatic missions worldwide, China has been able to spy away all the military technologies that US and Europe are unwilling to sell.

Nixon’s 1972 trip to China was supposed to benefit US businesses by opening up a billion-strong Chinese consumer market. Instead China has benefited far more from 300 million US and 250 million European consumers.

China has US by its 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 Chinese goods proves and US government is hooked to huge investments that China makes in US treasuries.

Little could Mao or even Deng have imagined that by wearing a capitalist mask, 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 saying quite prophetic.

Should be interesting to see if weapons technology forces strategic shifts such as preventing nations from easily interfering with each other.

After 8+ years of the Neo-cons screaming that China was going to be the next war, why should we be surprised that China is modernising its military?

Is it the Neo-cons philosophy every place in the world has to look out for the USA's interests and not their own?

If I was to make enough violent threats against someone, that person would eventually go out and buy a gun.

At the rate we are going, the USA will only accomplish the following:

1) We will bankrupt ourselves building up huge military assets we do not really need

2) we will pick a fight with the wrong people. and loose...badly!

3) we will end up being an ex-world power, like the Russians, only getting respect because we have a Nuclear Arsenal.

4) the rest of the world will prosper, we will be poor.

One of these days, the world will not need or want us around. That days is fast approaching

From the Krugman piece cited by Mr. Ricks:

“And in a depressed world economy, any country running an artificial trade surplus is depriving other nations of much-needed sales and jobs.”

Boo hoo.

No longer enamored of the bracing benefits of competition, and the healing tonic of creative destruction? Perhaps it's time to try mutually beneficial economic relations.

A Tale of Carriers

by Fred Reed

I wonder whether Americans realize that they have a Vienna-sausage military at filet-mignon prices. The sorry performance in recent wars is just one example of the ongoing rot, but the whole enterprise has become unbalanced, aimed at fighting the kinds of enemies we don’t have instead of the ones we have recently chosen to make.

The Navy is a fine example. The carrier battle group, the heart of the Navy, is a hugely expensive way to get relatively few combat aircraft to a remote place. It is a relic of World War II, for which it was well suited. Since it was then fighting similar battle groups, the strengths and weaknesses were more or less matched.

But the Navy has not fought a war for sixty years, certainly not one it needed to win, and it shows. Today’s battle groups, CVBGs as we say, are almost indistinguishable from those of 1945, except for the upgrading of weapons. Instead of five-inch-thirty-eights, we have Standard missiles. Instead of F4F Hellcats, the F-18 Hornet. Yet the carrier is still the Mother Ship, protected by screens of cruisers and destroyers, with interceptors flying CAP. The problem is that the enemy has changed.

Bear in mind that a great many countries fear attack by the United States, among them such trivial nations as Russia, China, and Iran. None of these has the money to build carrier groups to oppose those of the Navy.

All of these have thought about cheap ways to overcome the US behemoth. Four solutions soon came to hand:

1. Very fast sea-skimming cruise missiles, such as the Brahmos and Brahmos II (Mach 5+).
2. Supercavitating torpedoes, reaching speeds of over 200 miles an hour.
3. Very quiet submarines, diesel-electrics in the case of poor countries.
4. Anti-ship ballistic missiles, such as the one attributed to the Chinese.

Any military buff knows that the Navy cannot defend itself against these. It says it can. It has to say it can. In fleet exercises against submarines, the subs always win – easily. The Pentagon has been trying to invent defenses against ballistic missiles since the days of Reagan (remember Star Wars?) with miserable results. If you have close friends in the Navy, ask them over a few beers what scares the bejesus out of them. Easy: Swarms of fast, stealthy, sea-skimming cruise missiles with multi-mode terminal guidance.

Add to the brew that today’s ships are fragile, based on the assumption that they will never be hit. Go aboard a WWII battleship like the Iowa, BB-61 (I have) and you will find sixteen-inch belt armor and turrets designed to withstand an asteroid strike. Now go aboard a Tico-class Aegis boat (I have). You will find an electronic marvel with big screens in a darkened CIC and an amazing SPY-1 phased-array radar that one burst of shrapnel would take out of commission for many months.

Now note that cruise missiles have ranges in the hundreds of miles. Think: Persian Gulf. A cruise missile can be boxed and mounted on a truck, a fast launch, or a tramp steamer. The Chinese ballistic missile has a range of 1200 miles, enough to keep carriers out of aircraft range of Taiwan. I wonder whether the Chinese have thought of that?

In short the day of surface navies seems to be coming to a close, at least as strategically decisive forces. So does the day of the manned fighter as Predator-style “drones” improve.

What happens now? Nothing – for the moment.

To understand the problem, assume for the moment that the Navy knew beyond doubt, and openly admitted in internal discussion, that it could not protect its surface ships from modern anti-ship missiles. What would it do? What could it do?

Nothing. Why? Because, apart from the missile submarines, which have no role in combat, the Navy is the surface fleet. Many, many billions of dollars are invested in carriers and careers, in escorts for carriers, in countless men trained to run them. Mothball the carriers, and the Navy becomes a few troop ships useful for unopposed landings. Maintaining a large fleet only to support the Pentagon’s preferred role of massacring half-armed peasants would just be too costly.

So: Does the Navy say to Congress, “We really aren’t of much use any longer. We suggest that you scrap the ships and put the money into something else”? Mankind doesn’t work that way. The appeals of tradition, ego, and just plain fun run high. (Never underestimate the importance of ego and fun in military policy.) A CVBG is a magnificent thing, just not very useful. The glamor of night flight ops, planes trapping ker-whang!, engines howling at full mil, thirty knots of wind over the flight deck, cat shots throwing fighters into the air – this stuff appeals powerfully to something deep in the male head. The Navy isn’t going to give this up.

Thus it can’t admit that its day comes to a close, whether it knows it, suspects it, or refuses to think about it. The carrier is forever. Unless one gets sunk.

Which (I suspect) is unlikely, because the admirals won’t risk the test. I don’t know what Iran has but, if a shoot-out came, and half a dozen ships appeared on international television smoking and listing with large holes in them, that would be the end of the Navy’s credibility. Remember what happened when an Iraqi fighter hit the USS Stark with two French Exocet missiles: The missiles worked perfectly, and the Stark’s multitudinous and sophisticated defenses failed utterly. The Navy produced all manner of face-saving explanations.

Predictably, the military contractors will offer sure-fire extremely expensive defenses, things like directed-energy, that will develop more slowly than missiles and experience massive cost overruns, which is what weapons are for. John Paul Jones, slave-trader turned naval hero, once said that he meant to go in harm’s way. Today’s Navy will stay farther and farther out of harm’s way, which will be wise of it, and become an immensely pricey collection of symbolic iron yachts.

So what is the cavalry doing as it eyes machine guns and barbed wire? Buying a better horse. The Navy wants the Ford class (CVN 78) super-carrier, which I think might better be named the USS Thundertrinket. What will it do that the current Nimitz-class carriers don’t? Cost more (eight billion for the first copy, plus five billion R&D. A bargain.) To the uninitiated, that may seem a lot for a high-tech crossbow, but it will put lots of jobs in Norfolk, Virginia, and send money to military contractors. Good thing the US has a robust economy.

You can put mayonnaise on a Vienna sausage and eat it, but not on an aircraft carrier.

April 24, 2010

Parameters 'used' to be interesting? But I suppose when America is again involved in 'stabilization efforts' that liberal think tanks can sign off on then it will suddenly become interesting again?

"...without a justified reason" - sounds distressingly like the assurances my ex-wife gave concerning an amicable divorce.

UCAVs? yeah, of course - but to be of significant use viz the strategy the PLA is rolling out their flight dynamics will have to be better than an F-22's and the stealth technology will have to stay ahead of the anti-access technology in development - which will only happen with the Pentagon handing out large contracts to the greedy war mongering companies out there - something I take you're not comfortable with - so there seems to be a flaw in your thinking here. Besides, how exactly is it we afford a big government liberal agenda and a complete revamping of the navy? Oh, right - tax the rich - I forgot that was your plan. Very sensible.

Let's be honest - the AEI approves of the emerging Gates/Clinton China policy which was made necessary after Obama's strategy of bowing to all and sundry failed to change the world.

So our Navy has shrunk to 280 ships, only five times bigger that any potential enemy. Yet the good news is we now have 350 Admirals
http://www.navy.mil/navydata/bios/bio_list.asp

not including the Admiral (selectees) on that list