Divvying up the Pacific?

ARTICLE: Inside the Ring, By Bill Gertz, Washington Times, August 17, 2007

I would agree with the Air Force general: such a proposal, while quite promising, feels like going all the way on the first date. It's just unrealistic for us to opt out of the Western Pacific (why lose the connectivity?), especially since the Chinese are nowhere near capable of filling our shoes in strategic terms. Simply put, their navy just couldn't pull it off and won't be able to for a significant historical learning curve. We just didn't step into this job one afternoon. It was decades in the learning/making.

Then there's just the trust factor: China's rebranding of its military is extremely embryonic at this point (arguably, non-existent). It's just nowhere near being trusted enough by locals to aspire to such a role, especially absent some East Asia NATO-like overlay.

So very nice to see as a proposal (to the extent it's not just a cynical ploy of overreaching Chinese military types), but we'd need years of coalition operations before that discussion-leading-to-a-proposal-such-as-this would make any sense. Our response should be to push such coalition ops.

So joint patrols, yes. But divvying up the Pacific? No way.

Thanks to Greg Lowe for sending this.

Comments

[Ted O'Connor]

Good thing Jimmy Carter is out of office. His specialty was giving stuff up. Just like their army, the Chinese navy has no combat experience. They are a long way from pushing us out of the pacific. The Japanese will be the first to react to any Chinese advances.

[GJA]

Another reason why Tom's ideas of restructuring the military for the new realities won't really matter regarding a possible conflict with China is because most of Tom's ideas relate to Land power.

If we had any sort of conflict with China, our land forces would play a limited role, as this conflict would mostly feature naval and air power.

So, if our forces are geared towards nation building, this really will not give China any sort of an advantage. Geographically, I can't find any place our land forces would meet? Am I missing something?

In fact, nation building as close to China as possible will give us the advantage, as we would have close proximity to launch air strikes from.

So it would seem that transforming our land forces into the nation building variety will in indeed serve our short and long term interests.

[Bill C.]

GJA: Think proxy wars -- our Third World against their Third World.