ARTICLE: China Offers Glimpse of Rationale Behind Its Military Policies, By Edward Cody, Washington Post, December 30, 2006; Page A17
The Big War crowd wants to keep overfeeding the Leviathan while starving the SysAdmin, no matter how many ground personnel deaths that takes in Afghanistan, Iraq and everywhere else we go in this Long War. They will tell you the "real war" is going to be with China over Taiwan. Why? The Chinese are--by default now--the second biggest military spender in the world. Our worst-case estimates place total Chinese military spending at roughly what we spend on acquisitions alone, or what we spend on R&D alone, and nowhere near what we're cranking just in Iraq on an annual basis. The vast majority of the stuff they've imported has been from the Russians, and last time I checked, we weren't that impressed with their stuff. According to our own Pentagon, in a generation's time China could be spending roughly half of what we're spending right now.
Think China's going to close any gap that way?
Ah, but the advantage of proximity WRT Taiwan. China "gets" Taiwan and the West falls, does it not? Because it would signal that . . . oh something or other.
But China makes it clear each and every time that the trigger will be Taiwan's actions. So what does America do? We sell Taiwan very sophisticated arms. We bolster our alliance with Japan on this score, inviting Japan into our defense guarantee on Taiwan (yes, that Japan that was the colonial master of Taiwan in the first half of the 20th century and still denies its atrocities vis-a-vis China in Manchuria during WWII). In fact, we bolster our military ties with virtually every country that surrounds China--save Russia--during the Bush administration. Moreover, we cite China consistently to justify high-tech capacities that we continuously purchase in dollar amounts that vastly outweigh China's spending. Between now and 2025, we are likely to spend the Chinese military by $10 trillion dollars.
So what is China guilty of in this last explanation of its vaunted defense build-up?
As a rising economic power they're doing to their military the same thing they've been doing to their economy for years now: swapping out cheap labor (here, ground troops) for high-tech capital (mostly air and naval, aping their model, otherwise known as the U.S. military). Why does the PLA ape the Pentagon? Who else should they logically ape?
And here are the provocative rationales offered by Hu Jintao for China's build-up:
1) danger on the Korean peninsula (hmm, that one's hard to critique);
2) rising U.S.-Japanese military cooperation (given the state of Sino-Japanese relations, that seems fairly plausible, does it not?)
3) rising provocations re: independence from Taiwan (that's really BS, but a standby for the Chinese).
China continues to use Taiwan as a national diversion, with the Party leadership making that the great excuse for a build-up that logically arises from China's rising. Yes, the obsession is real, and it's mind-boggling with the PLA. I have sat in conversations with their military strategists and planners and listened to nonsense after nonsense on this issue. You'd think the whole frickin' universe revolved around this all-important scenario, when--truth be told--this scenarios matters only to military acquisition planners in both Beijing and Washington. Why? Frankly, it's all we have left and for the Chinese, it's a nice cover for what I believe to be the long-term rationale truly at work: China's growing fears over its rising energy dependence, which within years will vastly outweigh ours.
But my God! What kind of nation builds a big military to protect its access to energy around the planet?
Well, actually, that would be us by a huge margin.
But imagine if the Chinese were perceived to move in that direction! This would be an affront to us, would it not? Wouldn't it signal China's trying to cut off our access to energy in the Persian Gulf (Where we get all our oil, right? Or is it China's oil in the main?).
Ah, now I'm confusing myself. All this mirror imaging by China's strategic thinkers, whether it's on Taiwan or energy security, that's got to be something just to confuse us. Surely they cannot be so unimaginative simply to ape our moves, building a naval and air force whose primary design is to prevent our ability to threaten their ability to threaten Taiwan's ability to threaten independence? And beyond that simply to guard sea lines of communication? Surely the Chinese strategic vision is not that narrow, that myopic?
Why the hell not? That's basically our Big War rationale. With China, they're aping #1. But what exactly is our excuse when Marines and Army are dying every day in this Long War we've declared? Why is the Pentagon so intent on having a war with the country that inevitably becomes our biggest economic partner?
I'm not overstating. There are many in the military and especially the Air Force and Navy that just gotta have their conflict with China. Otherwise these guys must contemplate evolutions of their forces that they do not care to contemplate.
Too many Pentagon planners want to make the environment match the force, not the other way around. They'll tell you China spies on us and tries to steal our secrets, constantly trying to make their force more like ours. They'll tell you the big future threat we face is the loss of Taiwan. They simply don't want the war we've got, and if left to their own devices, will continue to build a force that's unprepared for that war--getting our people killed in the process.
This Sino-focused strategic argument is nothing more than the primacy strategy in disguise. It's the notion pushed by the neocons near the end of the elder Bush's administration, which said that now that the Sovs were gone, our #1 goal in military spending should be to remain the world's biggest military power by far. Well, an extra $10 trillion vis-a-vis your #2 competitor strikes me like we're already there. But that's not enough for the primacists, and if it takes a botched Long War effort and thousands upon thousands of U.S. ground troops to achieve, well then that's just too damn bad.
Thanks to Keir Lauritzen for sending this article in.