Quote of the day: China's "new" carrier

FT story on Chinese navy trotting out used Ukrainian carrier that it is using to train its personnel for the ultimately home-built carrier it should possess near the end of the decade.  China also practiced outfitting a carrier here because it bought the hull from Ukraine in 1998 unfinished (meaning they've been at it 12 years on some level).

Carrier is named Shi Lang, for a 17th century admiral who conquered Taiwan - get it?

The quote from a non-Chinese naval officer:

Owning a carrier is one thing, operating one, or even a carrier strike group, is something completely different.

By the time China can operate a carrier strike group, the US should have left that field and moved onto something far more flexible, fungible and unmanned in execution.

Or we can hang around the 20th century while China plays catch-up.

A grain of salt please on the Assassin's Mace

Nice reporting by Paul Roberts at ThreatPost (Kaspersky Lab Security News Service, HT to Dave Emery) of some analysis of China's own cybersecurity amidst all this talk in Washington that the PLA is readying its killer opening "Assassin's Mace" blow in any fight over Taiwan or thereabouts.  It opens nicely:

The official line in Washington D.C. is that there's a new Cold War brewing, with an ascendant China in the place of the old Soviet Union, and cyberspace as the new theater of war. But work done by an independent security researcher suggests that the Chinese government is woefully unprepared to fend off cyber attacks on its own infrastructure.

The gist that follows:

For the last 18 months, Dillon Beresford, a security researcher with testing firm NSS Labs and divorced father of one, has spent up to seven hours a day of his spare time crawling the networks of China's state and provincial governments, as well as stealthier networks belonging to the PLA and the country's top universities. Armed with free tools like Metasploit and Netcat, as well as Google Translate, he's pulled back the curtains on the state of cyber security in China. What he's discovered may come as a surprise to many U.S. policymakers and Pentagon officials. 

Dillon BeresfordContrary to the image of China as a nearly invincible cyber powerhouse, Beresford says in an interview with Threatpost Editor Paul Roberts, that the fast-growing nation suffers from woeful cyber security practices at home that leave, literally, thousands of networks and databases vulnerable to even trivial, remote attacks. Beresford, whopublicized holes in domestic Chinese SCADA systems in September, 2010, said the country's aggressive cyber offense abroad, he said, is in stark contrast to an almost total lack of basic cyber defense at home that has left both classified and unclassified government networks vulnerable to attack and compromise. 

Great post (really an interview with Beresford) and worth reading in full.

I have had some very smart people in DC warn me ominously about all of China's continuing military advances and I'm buying almost none of it.  I see them putting up a Potemkin village of a defense designed, as Beresford suggests, to hide great weaknesses.  It is a lot of wasted effort because the US has no intention of doing anything other than to scare China (deterrence), which makes China's showy counter-efforts to do the same all the more pointless.

As if there's nothing else to be done in this world that the planet's two biggest and highly interdependent economies insist on pursuing this asinine sideshow!

This is business as usual in the PNT, which hopefully Panetta disciplines better than Gates did.  On the Chinese side, it's poorly supervised generals with too much money on their hands.  The fiscal pain will solve the issue on our side, and the right crisis will inevitably reveal China's misaligned military - as in, not appropriate to their actual emerging global security needs.  They remain in fighting-the-last-war mode - a good indication of their complete lack of recent operations that matter whatsoever (thus no learning).  Let them field their carrier design alongside their new carrier-killer missile and think themselves so clever.  I find most of it pathetically unimaginative and unbefitting their rise.  They desperately need better military leadership on top.

The Gap is full of fake states, aka Yugoslavias

Thomas Friedman piece in NYT yesterday called "Pray.  Hope.  Prepare."

The gist:

That is to say, in Europe, when the iron fist of communism was removed, the big, largely homogenous states, with traditions of civil society, were able to move relatively quickly and stably to more self-government — except Yugoslavia, a multiethnic, multireligious country that exploded into pieces.

In the Arab world, almost all these countries are Yugoslavia-like assemblages of ethnic, religious and tribal groups put together by colonial powers — except Egypt, Tunisia and Morocco, which have big homogeneous majorities. So when you take the lid off these countries, you potentially unleash not civil society but civil war.

So he ends the piece by saying pray for Germany (homogeneous state revolutions), hope for South Africa (where past grievances are more peacefully dealt with), and prepare for Yugoslavias (more "Pentagon's New Map" material).

The Gap is full of Yugoslavias and not so many Germanys.  How many South Africas we can manage is the challenge, but one thing is for sure:  our current system of ad hoc responses only serves us so well.  While too many in the Pentagon still dream of fabulous high-tech stand-off wars with the Chinese, the future is full of Yugoslavias.

Globalization, meanwhile, continues to advance, and when it hits these fake states, it unleashes decades or even centuries of pent-up grievances.  The results will include plenty of civil wars, which in turn will birth more and more states.  These states will need to be bundled up into larger economic unions as part of their integration process--and for their survival. Eventually, there will be a "united states of everywhere."  That is the globalization replication process we unleashed, and it is the most potent marketizing/remapping process yet seen in the age of capitalism, so much so now that it advances with little to no effort on our part, as the impetus for its advance comes--ironically enough--from those ultra-conservative Chinese capitalists.

But China won't step into that fray unless forced to by our withdrawal from the world, now set somewhat in motion by the fiscal crisis long brewed by our decades-long deal with the world (you grow via export growth, we absorb that growth, you plow your winnings into our debt markets and accept a dollar-denominated financial order, and we fund and provide a Leviathan to manage global security).  We are victims of our own success, but we haven't raised our replacements.  We may take delight in France's recent muscular behavior, but it will not last. The burden must shift Eastward and Southward because that is where the money is (East) and that is where the action and thus incentives are (South).  So, from here on out, we manage the world through more small nudges, eschewing the big bets that no one else is game to join in on.

This is the "end of empire" to some, but to me, it's just the next logical evolution, success being harder than failure because it demands more changes from you and denies you obvious enemies.  

So there's no hoping or praying about it.  We know what lies ahead:  the hardest leftover work created by Europe's disastrous colonial orders of the 19th century.  You may imagine that reality, combined with growing multipolarism, creates a rerun of 19th-century balance of power, but you'd be wrong.  No one is really stepping up for any such competition and no one really seeks such control.  In truth, everybody would just as soon go back to the sole-policeman model, because that was easier on them and provided more certainty.  Now, responsibility is more dispersed but willpower is evaporating across the board, despite this glorious spurt from Europe.  

But, of course, there is no future reality to be found there.  So we enjoy it while we can, because the big adjustments and accommodations with the real risers like China, India, Turkey, Brazil, Indonesia - even Iran, those are yet to come.  So the near-term is more Yugoslavias, but few takers.

The pessimist in me says we enter a long period of let-it-burn tragedies, until the A-to-Z rule set for processing politically bankrupt states truly emerges.  But that's how things usually work out in this world:  you ignore the pain--until you can't.

Eurasia Group's Ian Bremmer and David Gordon cite top geo-pol risks for 2011

David Gordon is an old friend, who, as the National Intelligence Officer for economics and globalization in the National Intelligence Council, came to most of my wargames at the Naval War College and World Trade Center in NYC.  He later became Vice Chair of the NIC and then head of policy and planning at State in the final Bush years (when diplomacy made quite the comeback).  One of the smartest guys I know and just a great guy all around.  After Bush ended, he left government and went to direct research at Ian Bremmer's Eurasia Group, which specializes in political risk consulting.

Ian, you know from his books ("J Curve," "Fat Tail," "End of the Free Market"), all of which have made it into my own books or columns.  Ian and I did a back-and-forth on his "The Call" blog at Foreign Policy regarding the last one.  Ian is deservedly recognized as THE political risk guru out there (he often writes with Nouriel Roubini) and he's done an amazing job of building up Eurasia Group from nothing in just over a dozen years.  Having worked with Steve DeAngelis is building up Enterra Solutions over the past 6 years, I truly appreciate what that takes.  

I've been working for Dave and Ian since January as a consultant on a project for the government that's been a lot of fun and there are others in the hopper, so this is turning out to be a nice working relationship in addition to my other affiliations.  I've missed working for the USG these past few years, so it's been great to get back to that sort of analysis.

The top ten risks cited will also sound familiar enough to readers of this blog.  Here's the opening, plus the list as links to the report:

The risks that exercise us most usually center on a country, an issue, an event. We worry over political chaos before or after an election, a coup in a fragile regime, or military conflict with a rogue nation. But for the first time since we've been writing, the political risk environment is much broader this year. It's the change in the world order itself that gives us most cause for concern.

Two years after the financial crisis, there's a strong argument to be made for optimism. The American economy is poised for (at least modest) growth and emerging markets are still churning ahead. By that logic, it's high time for governments, captains of industry, banks, and citizens to get back to business. Time to leave behind record gold prices and put the trillions of dollars sitting on the sidelines back to work.

But that conclusion implies a level of confidence, if not quite comfort, with where the world is headed. Whatever your expected shape of economic recovery—a U-curve, V-curve, L-curve, or something else—we're entering an entirely new world order. That means new ways for states to relate with one another both politically and economically. It means new areas of conflict. 2011 looks to be the year that our understanding of how the world works becomes out of date.

This is scary not because it's incomprehensible but because the scale of change is so great that it becomes difficult to manage. Few of us have experienced a transition of this scope. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union two decades ago, it was fashionable, briefly, to herald a new world order. The pronouncements were premature. Soviet collapse remade the global security balance, but its economic impact was considerably more modest. The advanced industrialized economies had ruled the global economic system; the end of the cold war meant a move from the G7 to the "G7 plus one." Globalization sped up a bit, the West had new countries to invest in (at least for a while), and some of the old ones (Germany) got stronger. "Plus one" didn't imply a new world order.

That's not true today. After the financial crisis, the G7 was replaced by the G20. This change brought no challenge to America's global military supremacy. But the rules of the economic road are a different story and the new geopolitical order is shaped not by a military balance but by an economic one. This new world order marks the end of a decades-long agreement on how the global economy should function. This is world-changing indeed, because the dominant economic trend of the last half century, globalization, now faces a direct challenge from geopolitics.

---

The rise of this new order will have a profound impact on nearly all of the world's big-picture, long-term trends. A lack of coordinated governance on key economic issues will become entrenched and give rise to lasting international conflict. States and corporations will become more closely aligned in both developed and developing states. Most significantly, we'll see a shift in the highest levels of global conflict to the region where globalization and geopolitics collide with greatest force: for the past twenty years, the sharpest geopolitical tensions were to be found in the Middle East; we'll now see a decisive and long-term shift of those tensions to Asia.

All the risks we're looking at in 2011—conflict from the North Korean succession process, the unwillingness of China to budge under international pressure, the lack of political and economic coordination in Europe, currency controls intensifying global economic misalignment, the geopolitics of cybersecurity—are intensified by this transition to a new world order. The red herrings on our list avoid risk in spite of it.

Surprisingly, and despite all the anxiety these changes have created, there's no name for this new era. We propose the G-Zero. This is the lens through which we'll understand global events in the coming years. It's our top risk for 2011.

THE RISKS

1	The G-Zero
2	Europe
3	Cybersecurity and geopolitics
4	China
5	North Korea
6	Capital controls
7	US gridlock
8	Pakistan
9	Mexico
10	Emerging markets
*Red herrings

Being Mr. Counterintuitive, I like the "red herrings" the best. They are Iran, Turkey, Sudan and Nigeria. I like the optimism on each.

China spends more on security inside China than defense outside

Crouching dragon, rolling SegwayPic here

FT story a while back, noting that Chinese internal security spending now bigger - at least officially - than defense.  Of course, both numbers are probably underreported, just equally so.

Source was new budget released by China, saying public security will now cost 624B RMB and defense 602B RMB.

In the US federal budget, I would say defense outweighs "security" by more than 2-1.

You want to know why China can never be a true superpower without being democratic?  Good example, there.

Much better, less hyped NYT piece on same reporting (Chinese stealth fighter captured . . . on film!)

Sorry, but China on the brain.  Spent half-hour taping today at WFYI (local PBS) for NPR's "All Things Considered" weekend show (based on my recent China-focused Esquire article).  I will be interspliced with the eminently sensible Jim Fallows and Gideon (Mr. Zerosum!) Rachman.

Just had to include this piece from the NYT because the same story in the WSJ (see below) just set me off a bit.

Best bits here:

First, from VADM Dorsett, who's the N2/6 (or combo intell and info dominance guy):

Still, a top Navy intelligence officer told reporters in Washington on Wednesday that the United States should not overestimate Beijing’s military prowess and that China had not yet demonstrated an ability to use its different weapons systems together in proficient warfare. The officer, Vice Adm. David J. Dorsett, the deputy chief of naval operations for information dominance, said that although China had developed some weapons faster than the United States expected, he was not alarmed over all.

“Have you seen them deploy large groups of naval forces?” he said. “No. Have we seen large, joint, sophisticated exercises? No. Do they have any combat proficiency? No.”

Admiral Dorsett said that even though the Chinese were planning sea trials on a “used, very old” Russian aircraft carrier this year and were intent on building their own carriers as well, they would still have limited proficiency in landing planes on carriers and operating them as part of larger battle groups at sea.

That guy is sensible.

Then this bit from the Chinese side:

In an interview on Wednesday, a leading Chinese expert on the military, Zhu Feng, said he viewed some claims of rapid progress on advanced weapons as little more than puffery.

“What’s the real story?” he asked in a telephone interview. “I must be very skeptical. I see a lot of vast headlines with regards to weapons procurement. But behind the curtain, I see a lot of wasted money — a lot of ballooning, a lot of exaggeration.”

Mr. Zhu, who directs the international security program at Peking University, suggested that China’s military establishment — not unlike that in the United States — was inclined to inflate threats and exaggerate its progress in a continual bid to win more influence and money for its favored programs.

Ouch!  Very ouch!

Nicely reported and written piece.  Makes me feel sad for the WSJ (see below), and makes me wonder if Murdoch's influence is weakening its objectivity.

I especially agree with the NYT citation from the expert that this sort of military porn is China's preferred deterrence.  I think that's a brilliant conclusion:

It is the J-20, a radar-evading jet fighter that has the same two angled tailfins that are the trademark of the Pentagon’s own stealth fighter, the F-22 Raptor. After years of top-secret development, the jet — China’s first stealth plane — was put through what appear to be preliminary, but also very public, tests this week on the runway of the Aviation Design Institute in Chengdu, a site so open that aircraft enthusiasts often gather there to snap photos.

Some analysts say the timing is no coincidence. “This is their new policy of deterrence,” Andrei Chang, the Hong Kong editor in chief of the Canadian journal Kanwa Defense Weekly, who reported the jet’s tests, said Wednesday. “They want to show the U. S., show Mr. Gates, their muscle.”

Think about it:  they put together a plane that looks just like ours.  Can it get any more obvious?

Now, whether it operates as well as ours . . . that's a VERY different question.

Again, great piece.

Chinese military threat skyrockets just as Gates previews his defense cuts! Eta nye slyuchaina!

Gates announces his force structure cuts today on the Hill, culminating the burst of "sudden revelations" covered in the MSM about Chinese naval developments.

The PLAN submits a plan to build a carrier over the decade, but the WSJ describes it's "imminent deployment" (imminent apparently being in the latter years of this decade).  

The Chinese "carrier killer" missile is deployed and operational, claims PACOM, except it admits that it won't have the capacity to hit any moving ship until after "several years" of testing, so it's "operational" and "deployed" but not "fully operational."  The WSJ dutifully reports that the DF-21D is likewise looking at its "imminent deployment" -- again, correct if "imminent" means . . . oh . . 5 or 6 years from now.

In yesterday's WSJ  we see on page one the first images of China's 5th gen stealth fighter making a "taxi test." I can only assume it will be "operational" and "deployed" any minute now, despite being in testing for the next several years.

All of these announcements are meant to blow us away with the Chinese build-up, and we're getting this feed now because of the Gates' announcement on cuts and the initial presentation of the budget to Congress.  This is very similar to the drumbeat of stories about cyberwarfare that led up to the standing up of USCYBERCOM. You could call it "defense porn" or just plain propaganda and you'd be right.

But when we step back from the hype, you have to ask yourself what exactly do we expect to accomplish here?

Do we expect to somehow scare the Chinese into NOT building up their military as their economy expands so rapidly?  Is there any history that says this build-up is weird or provocative given China's rise?  We have several hundred military facilities around the world and regional commands that cover the world.  Does China have anything like that?  Are they outspending us or spending somewhere in the range of 1/6th of our budget?  Are they intervening around the world with their forces or is the exact opposite true and they're actually free-riding on all of our efforts?

More narrowly: Can we expect to maintain a confident supremacy over the Chinese military WRT to a small island just off its coast? Is that a realistic and practical force-sizing principle? Or is it open-ended in the extreme?

China's military is going to keep building up.  We can continue to encourage its focus on a big-war force by matching it in its neighborhood, but then we rule out enlisting Chinese help to protect China's ever-expanding global resourcing network, meaning we're effectively providing China a global security umbrella and allowing it focus on building a big-war force that we are determined to counter and remain supreme over in the single most stressing scenario imaginable (instantly reversing an invasion of a small island nation off their coast).

Anybody think we're going to be able to pay for such go-it-alone-ism globally while standing down the Chinese build-up in East Asia given our current and growing insolvency?  Sense any "realism" in this path or just full-specturm fear-mongering?

We were told by Team Obama that America would no longer seek to play unilateral global hegemon ("Primacy" as Paul Wolfowitz dubbed it), but the truth is, our national security establishment is crammed full of experts who believe in exactly that, even as few would identify themselves as neocons.  America must, in their opinion, dominate all domains of warfare and all players in all domains of warfare, because ANYTHING less means we've lost our grip on the world--the WORLD I tell you!

This is classic America being unable to handle the success of its multidecade globalization process.  We built a world in which multiple rising great powers could be accommodated peacefully, and yet now, as they display the temerity of actually moving in the direction of having militaries commensurate with their status, we're stunned to contemplate no longer dominating the planet militarily as we have over the past two, truly anomalous decades.

And so our answer is to freak out and demonize China, who just happens to be our huge trade and financial partner in the global economy--the same country which must help us "rebalance" both OUR economy and the world economy.

Spot a disconnect there?

Watch, just watch this sort of hype be used by Congress to fight Gates' reduction plan tooth and nail.  Their true intentions will be about jobs in their home districts, but the effect will be the same.

America is not handling this moment in history very well, and Obama is proving to be anything BUT transformational.  The GOP is no help whatsoever. There is far more business-as-usual here than real change.

So get used to being very afraid about the world, because that is what everybody is selling right now in Washington.

Yes, the real and serious adjustments will eventually be forced upon us by circumstances. I was just hoping we could meet them head-on thanks to real leadership. But we have no real leaders today--just followers and "good soldiers" and party "stalwarts."

The strategic "tells" on China's military build-up

NOTE:  No WPR column today because journal takes off this week.

Great WAPO piece by John Pomfret (by way of David Emery) on the hollowness that is China's military rise.

Great line from Chinese expert (from China) about the inability of China's defense industry to create good engines being the "heart disease" of the PLA. Why?  It's the crux of their inability to create a solid force structure on their own, hence the need to buy so much from Russia (half of the latter's exports in arms).

So how afraid are we supposed to be about a force that buys Russian stuff?  Meanwhile, the much-feared "carrier killer" missile is . . . how many years from being operational?  Who knows.

But here's the larger logic and the real "tell" when it comes to strategic intent:  because China refuses to station troops abroad, it really doesn't have any overseas bases in the traditional sense. That, plus a paltry 3 replenishment ships and almost no training time for their subs (relative to ours) says this is nowhere close to being a blue-water force. It is - at best - a regional area-denial force, which means it's completely and narrowly defensive in scope.

And yeah, until China changes it mind about "non-interference" as represented by stationing of troops abroad, it will NEVER be a blue-water navy - simple as that.

I don't want China's navy to be offensive, but I do want it to become global over time. It can do that and remain largely defensive.  China's resource dependency demands it.

And I want that because America will need some help in the years and decades ahead.  Our fiscal reality demands it.

Strange days

Economist cover story on coming wave of Chinese takeovers.

As the chart shows, China's outward stock of FDI (accumulated overseas foreign direct investment) remains low, by historical standards.  But since it's got the money, it's naturally going to rise.

Fascinating really:  you can see the decline of the British empire, then the US stepping in to fund so much of the world post-WWII, and then our own progressive decline as the rest of the West recovered, then Japan rose (and fell), and now China rises.  Naturally, some will wish to make the comparison of the decline of the US "empire" with that of the Brits', but our system was never set up to maintain dominance.  It was set up to encourage the rise of others peacefully, which it's done (65 years of no great power war and counting, the biggest increase in human wealth/income ever seen, billions avoid poverty).  The world simply couldn't handle the rise of great powers--until we came along and forced a system that could. It is, without doubt, the greatest accomplishment of any great power in human history.

But with our success comes adjustment, especially since, in our most recent decades of encouraging globalization's rise, we got addicted to the cheap money mindset afforded us by having the world's reserve currency.  Again, granted, the rise of so many powers simultaneously in Asia is a huge accomplishment, but now we seem intent on turning that wonderful thing into something dangerous--dangerous enough to torpedo the system.

And we're alone in this quest.  NATO's new strategic concept, as summed up beautifully by The Economist, is to expect "fewer dragons, more snakes."  But we seem to reverse that equation, at least in our AirSea Battle power-projection forces (Navy, Air Force).  I realize we've been Leviathan for a long time, but we're setting ourselves up for hedging/containment/struggle with our bankers--truly an awkward choice.  

And we're sending these tough signals at a time when it's clear, if we're going to tap inbound FDI in coming years, we best figure out how to accept it from China, lest we go into a funk that calls into question all manner of met responsibilities around the world.  

China is most definitely cheating its way to the top, just like we did in the 19th century, and more recently in the obviously mercantilist rise of both Japan and South Korea.  We imagine them cheating their way right past us, but, as history has shown, it's one thing to dig stuff out of the ground, make steel and then build buildings and infrastructure, but it's quite another thing to dominant innovation-based industries.

China has its way of taking over Western companies, and the flavoring smells of all sorts of legacy communist mindset (meaning, state in charge), but what is the great success rate here? Not as high as imagined.  They have no secret capabilities, just secret plans they imagine are unique and unfathomable. They are neither.  

The more China reaches out and tries to own, the more it will become subject to global rules, just like any other firm that operates effectively.  If China chooses politics over efficiency, its "reign" will be historically short, and its vast pool of money mostly wasted.  

We can pull for such an outcome--most definitely.  But it's a cutting-off-our-noses-to-spite-our-face logic.  We can benefit from China's money.  Indeed, it seems hard to imagine our recovery without further integration with those to whom we've sent so much money, thanks to our deficit spending.  It will not be an easy path. We'll be working out this clash of cultures mentally in movies, TV and books for years to come, just like we did with the great Japanese "threat" that preceded. The only real difference here is size--as in China's market and wealth and our responsibilities and debts.  

So no, at this time in history and globalization's evolution, I wouldn't be arguing for the U.S. to be planning and preparing openly for war with China (how else do you describe the AirSea Battle Concept?), no matter how carefully I hedged my language. Everybody knows what we're capable of, and that we have the only great-power military in the world with any sort of hardcore recent combat experience (and lots of it). By doing this, we invite uncertainty at unacceptable levels and risk China's long-term effort to shut us out of Asia defensively, because, yeah, a rising power of that size and strength deserves its place in the world--not merely the small space in its own region that we offer it. Did Britain have military bases surrounding the U.S. during it's rise in the late 19th century?  Did it constantly get up into our grill?  No, it was more sensible than that and we should be too.

China's integration into the global economy enters a whole new phase now. We can accept that and seek to shape it--hopefully to our own short-term economic advantage, or we can play long-term blocker, and watch the money and the relationships go elsewhere.  

Europe isn't preparing for war with China, but we are.

China taking big step into the normal world

As someone who spent his youth studying communist systems, this is a big deal that popped out at me yesterday in the FT.  For all the chatter about the PLA getting more bold, etc., this says they just lost out on a major point of internal control.  The winners?  Western businesses that get in, Chinese businesses and wealthy who can now take advantage, and frankly, the Chinese people in general because this says China is becoming that much more like everybody else on a mundane subject that nonetheless has long been a source of huge anxiety/security for the military.

China is opening up its airspace to small commercial and private aircraft:

China plans to open its airspace below 4,000 metres to civilian aircraft, a decision that is likely to open up one of the world’s largest untapped markets for corporate and other private aviation.

The Central Military Commission – the supreme institution governing the People’s Liberation Army – and the state council, China’s cabinet, said in a policy paper that low altitude airspace would be gradually opened to private aircraft, according to people who have seen the document and reports posted on the websites of the defence ministry and the state council.

Helicopters and light aircraft are virtually absent from Chinese skies because of extremely tight military control over all airspace and restrictive regulations that require all private aircraft flights to be approved in advance by military and civil aviation authorities, which can take weeks or longer.

“Right now it is basically impossible to use general aviation aircraft in China and some aircraft owners are already pushing the envelope by flying without permission,” said Jason Liao, chairman and chief executive of China Business Aviation Group, who has been lobbying for the past decade to get Beijing to open China’s lower altitude airspace.

“This is a huge step for China and almost certainly means the country will eventually become the second-largest market in the world for general aviation aircraft like helicopters and turboprop aircraft [after the US].”

At present the PLA has the final say over the use of China’s airspace and often schedules air drills and weapons tests at short notice, severely disrupting commercial aviation operations and exacerbating the country’s chronic flight delays.

According to the policy paper any aircraft flying at 1,000m or lower will be able to take off and fly without any prior approval or paperwork.

And you thought only billionaire Bruce Wayne could fly his planes over China without prior approval!

Really a big deal, of course, for the industry, but - again - a very positive sign of China opening up and trusting its public and its own secure standing in the world a lot more.

And what will be ever cooler to watch is how the Chinese, with their new found wealth, will go after new ideas, like maybe this flying-street-legal car from Terrafugia:

That's a core concept of mine, the old New Core sets the New Rules.  China is still very frontier in a lot of economic ways.  Biases aren't yet established, so the wild-and-wooly that might not fly in the U.S. for this or that reason, could break through that much faster over there, because China's got that brave new world vibe going on.  So I could easily imagine the right rich Chinese industrialist saying to himself, "I've gotta have that flying car!" and booyah!  All of a sudden there's a market that over times doubles back this way, making the idea that much more believable/acceptable in our market. 

We've been THAT market for the world for so long that we'll really be shocked by somebody else stepping in and playing that role more and more.  Japan's been that country for us a little bit in certain technologies, but China is going to play that role big time, if for no other reason that it's undergoing such explosive urbanization, building something like cities for half a billion people in an historical blink of an eye.  When you're doing that much from scratch, you set the new rules, the new standards, the new tastes, the new technologies, the new breakthroughs, the new everything.  

This isn't just an opportunity for Western firms to make money, this is a chance for America to learn something at a point when we need new ideas, new competition in such thinking, and new spurs to our own inestimable ability to reinvent ourselves.

The France-UK accord on "defence"

FT story on UK-France defence agreement.

The basics:

Nuclear weapons

For the first time ever, both states are collaborating over their independent nuclear deterrents

A facility at Valduc in France will model the performance of both countries’ nuclear warheads to ensure long-term security and safety. This will be supported by a joint Technology Development Centre at Aldermaston, UK

This will cut costs for both the UK and France, and involves an unprecedented sharing of knowledge about nuclear weapons

Future deployment of aircraft carriers

From 2020, Britain and France will probably have one operational carrier each. The timing of refits will be co-ordinated to ensure one carrier is always deployable. When one nation’s carrier is being refitted, the other will not be forced to deploy its vessel in operations against its will

The aim of this is to ensure that Britain and France can always offer up a carrier to the major international missions – Nato, the EU or United Nations - that might need one

Future deployment of ground troops

Britain and France will develop a rapid reaction force, with training beginning next year. This is not aimed at creating a mixed brigade as some eurospectics fear. Instead, a British brigade and French brigade – around 5,000 troops each – will be trained to fight alongside each other on joint missions under a commander from either state. This will enhance France’s ability to operate in Nato. Because France was outside Nato in the four decades after 1966, it does not operate to Nato norms

Industrial co-operation

Both countries will work together on the next generation of Unmanned Air Surveillance Systems – or drones. In the longer term they will jointly assess requirements for the next generation of Unmanned Combat Air Systems from 2030. A joint technological and industrial roadmap will be developed over the next two years. British and French contractors are warmly welcoming this agreement because it gives long-term guidance over how they should work together

This will be called a lot of things, the big criticism being a "surrender of sovereignty," as the piece notes.

But to me it's just a load of common sense.  The UK and France don't face different security environments, even as they do often disagree on how to respond to things that arise.  But as this point in their shared evolution, an action that cannot achieve reasonably good approval ratings from both sides of the Channel probably isn't something either of them would want to pursue on their own.  So rather than a loss of sovereignty, I would say the people in both countries are now unusually empowered to veto overseas operations.

And I don't think that's a bad or unrealistic thing in this day and age.  For NATO countries to be fighting and losing people in Afghanistan while it's clear that other nations, far closer to the scene, have more to lose--and gain, is simply not tenable in a long-term sense.  

I do think this is a harbinger of things to come:  the pooling of national security resources to a degree unthinkable just a few short years ago.  The demographics will simply demand it in terms of money, and the public will learn to both live with it and enjoy--as they age--more say over what actually gets done.

To me, the rising powers of the East and South would be wise not to crow about this or see only in this the decline of once-great powers.  What it really represents is the West moving progressively to reduce dramatically its long-term security efforts on behalf of the collective global community.  Rising powers may instinctively sense more freedom of actions for themselves, but what they should see is more responsibility being dumped on their laps.

The days of free-riding are coming to an end.  Ditto for America's "special relationship" with the Brits, as our ex just got remarried to somebody who doesn't approve of nights out with the boys.

Two I've been waiting on: UAVs poised to explode across civilian sector and China's preference for boys eroding

WSJ story up first.  Dovetails very nicely with the "Six Degrees of Integration" entry we had in the sample Wikistrat "CoreGap Bulletin."

The first prediction was an easy one for anybody who's worked for the military as long as I have:  UAVs will become a part of everyday life, just like the Internet and GPS before them.  When you work with the military, you simply come to accept these fantastic advances as routine, especially when you have years to get used to them mentally before they're unleashed upon the public.  I didn't come along early enough to catch arpanet (DARPA's original Internet; DARPA being the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), but I had years of exposure to GPS prior to its release into the wild, and it wasn't hard to imagine that it would change things--always being able to track exactly where you are. 

So with the UAVs getting smaller and smaller, the difference between them and what model plane enthusiasts have long toyed with gets less and less, meaning the latter enter the game. Already, as the piece points out, there's this gray area of regulation known as "recreational use of drones."  As one former CIA counterterror guy who now works for a drone company puts it, "The only thing you're bounded by is your imagination--and the FAA in the United States."

I used to predict that UAVs would be all over by now, because I could see the trajectory unfolding a decade ago, like with GPS, but then 9/11 kind of chilled that feeling, because all of a sudden, everybody was scanning the skies for dangerous objects. But with the Long War providing such a strong and persistent requirement, things got quickly back up to speed. 

And when you think about it, helicopters are actually pretty hard things to fly and so they come with plenty of crashes, so unless carrying bodies is a requirement, why not switch over to drones everything else.  Think of all the traffic and weather copter work. Then there's the paparazzi stalkings of celebrities or using helos to scout disaster zones.  None of that requires a body in the vehicle--just the video feed.

I know, I know.  Politicians looking for photo ops will suffer, but so will celebrities seeking to avoid them.

Great line from the piece from a divorce attorney:  "If the Israelis can use them to find terrorists, certainly a husband is going to be able to track a wife who goes out at 11 o'clock at night and follow her."

Safety issues galore.  Wait until the first murder happens in a civilian context.  Privacy issues too, of course. Bullying will follow, as will scams.  It'll be a new way to sneak into ball games or to virtually attend exclusive events ("Look, there's the President!"). And, of course, terrorists will use them successfully.

And many journalists will write "Pandora box" pieces, but life will go on, becoming that much more interesting/complex/weird and ultimately routine enough on this score.

Second one I've been waiting on and it's apropos of my Chinese daughter's birthday this week:  FT story on how property bubble is latest bit to erode Chinese preference for sons.  

The one-child policy came faster than urbanization could change age-old norms, so we soon got the dearth-of-females issue that a few demographers have beat to death as a cause for future wars ("Horny guys of the Middle Kingdom--unite and let's conquer . . . oh hell, let's just hop a plane to Vietnam and get a bride this weekend  I'm buying the first round!").  But when we were there adopting Vonne Mei, I remember all these young women seeing me hold her:  they'd bring over their boyfriends, point at me, and then punch them in the shoulder, spewing a few sharp lines.  Guy would look stunned and embarrassed, rub his shoulder while staring at me, shake his head a bit, and then meekly follow the young woman away.  You could just imagine what she said. 

But the vibe was really two fold:  "See!  Americans like girl babies!" and "See, that's how a Western man helps his wife by taking care of the child!"

You could see both norms beginning to take hold in the minds of young women who were getting better educations, were no longer trapped in the village, and were looking at urban careers in their future.  All these things combine to delay pregnancy, but they also shift the preference from boys to girls.  You need boys if working the fields is the big thing, but if you're going to age in urban settings, it's the girl who's far more likely to take care of you in your old age in an interpersonal sense (the Chinese adage of "A daughter is a warm jacket for a mother"), and if she's going to have a career now, then the difference between her and the moneymaking son erodes further, especially since the daughter doesn't cost as much as the son when it comes to marrying them off.  Custom in China has it that parents must buy the son a flat before he can marry.  

The FT piece points out that the tide has already turned in major metros like Beijing, going back almost 15 years.  China went majority urban a few years back and will urbanize at a stunning rate going forward.  Hence, the big sex imbalance fear, like most demographic issues, is already finding solution by the time we discover its outlines.  Doesn't mean there won't be a single generation significantly impacted; just means the problem is a lot more temporally bounded than realized.

And when you talk about that one generation being impacted, remember that a lot of these guys, if unable to find wives at home, will either travel for them or emigrate on that basis.  My favorite historical example of such willful flexibility:  Chinese male "coolies" come to America in the 1800s and end up building big chunks of the frontier West as manual laborers--like the RRs. They can't bring their women along and many are never able to return.  So who are one of their prime targets for inter-racial marriages? Irish Catholic widows, showing that where there's a will, there's a way.

In the end, China's "unique" problem goes away like it does everywhere else, because modernization tends to erase such "unique" values (that weren't really unique in the first place but simply represented a people trapped in time). Now, you could say Chinese couples are "time traveling"--a concept I want to explore in the Wikistrat globalization model: when change comes so quickly that it makes people feel like time is being compressed and thus they're rocketing forward in time in some domain. Think about it here:  thousands of years of custom altered in roughly one generation. That, my friends, is real time travel.  And it's social revolution.  China's rise has this impact at home--and abroad.

The primary question today

FT column by Philip Stephens that asks the question, "To what degree will the big powers locate their foreign policies in a shared understanding of collective security?"

The Old Think says this is impossible, and that national interests demand zero-sum competition--especially over raw materials. The New Think understands international economics in the age of globalization, meaning globally integrated production chains rule out zero-sum competition over resources ("I'm going to fight you tooth and nail for resources, pissing you off incredibly, and THEN expect to conduct relatively free trade with you that monetizes my victory?"  "Aha," says the Cold Warrior.  "They will somehow enslave their regions to accept this long-term unfavorable transaction, scaring them into become economic vassals with their military might!"--I know, it's almost too stupid to even type but there it is.).

Stephens here, unfortunately, feels the need to resurrect a bad historical analogy: the 19th century Congress of Vienna (ah yes, pre-nuclear analogies for an increasingly post-nuclear world). Naturally, Stephens fears a world of uncontrolled nuclear proliferation, because that's such a standard scare tactic ("Look! Over there, two dozen new nuclear powers!"). Stephens knows this is just around the corner because he went to an IISS conference where State's James Steinberg and Henry Kissinger both said so (the "dangerous game changer"!).

Then he moves onto the intelligent stuff, which he likewise credits to both Steinberg and Kissinger (apparently, the usual credo of proliferation cited, both speakers moved onto to reality): the rise of economic interdependency accompanied by environmental and resource interdependencies.

Naturally, everybody laments that rising Asia seems stuck in myopic nationalism--a good critique.  Their rise forces them to grow up very quickly, without the benefits and wisdom afforded by Eurasia's World Wars.

Nonetheless, the IISS, in a new study, feels comfortable enough to lecture rising Asia to pick up the pace and realize that "interdependence should be driving demand for more collective action."

Then Stephens hits the nail on the head:  the pol-mil cooperation venues haven't kept pace with the rising network and economic connectivity--my primary theme of the need for new rules in PNM. Within that observation I locate the crux of the matter: China and America's pol relationship remains stunted because of the mil residual called Taiwan--thus my call in Blueprint to "lock in China at today's prices" (and yes, as I warned back then, that price has gone up since!).

Stephens whines on a bit about the lack of improvement in transatlantic relations as promised by candidate Obama.  I couldn't care less.

Saving the Cold War--for posterity

Interesting FT weekend piece on Cold War relics, asking the question, Should they be dismantled or preserved.

Reminds me of being in Berlin years ago and realizing how the city missed out on a huge tourist attraction in The Wall.  Yes, exciting and fun to pull it all down, but a great big section should have been preserved for history and tourism.

So the simple answer is this:  save enough for a critical mass effect on tourism and save the best ones for history's sake--whenever feasible. But err on the side of tourism, because if no one comes visit, then the money won't be there for preservation.

The challenge of bounding federal cybersecruity

WAPO piece on the search for federal cybersecurity by way of reader David Emery.  

A wonderfully summarizing segment:

Indeed, one sign of the private sector's engagement is an increase in the number of leading technology firms that, spurred by government contracting rules, have adopted a common lexicon to describe computer configurations and vulnerabilities. The increasing adoption of these protocols by firms such as Symantec, McAfee and Microsoft is making more feasible the automated monitoring of networks to detect and patch vulnerabilities more rapidly, officials say.

The Department of Homeland Security - which is responsible for protecting civilian government systems and helping to secure commercial networks - would like to see such "continuous monitoring" applied across the entire federal government and beyond, said Phil Reitinger, deputy undersecretary of the National Protection and Programs Directorate.

"We certainly want to build out a fundamentally more secure ecosystem that can be adopted by the private sector as well," he said.

Despite such advances, experts say that DHS remains beset by bureaucratic challenges, a lack of authority to demand results from civilian agencies, and a plethora of other priorities - including combating domestic terrorism, securing the borders and enforcing immigration laws.

DHS has struggled to implement Einstein 3, a program that is supposed to detect and block malicious software before it enters government networks.

More than a year after the department said it was moving forward, the program remains in pilot mode, in part because DHS has been unsure whether to use technology from private industry or from the ultra-secret National Security Agency. The agency has powerful electronic surveillance capabilities, but its involvement might raise privacy concerns.

You have everything here in microcosm:  the positive role of creating a common pubic/private-sector language, a great role for the government to play; the difficult choice of militarizing (intelligencizing?) the technology to go for more security or keeping it commercial to better manage boundary conditions with the private-sector-dominated critical infrastructure?; the privacy fears; the unclear rules; etc.

Nice piece.

More natural counter-China balancing in Asia: India-South Korea

Great WPR piece that speaks to the "Finlandization" fallacy peddled by Krepinevich:

Indian Defense Minister A.K. Anthony visited South Korea last week at the invitation of his South Korean counterpart to boost defense cooperation between the two states. His visit came just two months after the Indian external affairs minister visited Seoul and at a time of great turbulence in the strategic environment of the Asia-Pacific region. After having long ignored each other, India and South Korea are now beginning to recognize the importance of tighter ties. The resulting courtship was highlighted by South Korean President Lee Myung-Bak's state visit to New Delhi in January, when he was the chief guest at the Republic Day celebrations. During his stay, New Delhi and Seoul decided to elevate their bilateral relationship to a "strategic partnership."

Ah, but what is this compared to the Assassin's Mace!

[cut to the Pink Panther squaring off against his man-servant]

South Korea and India entered into a free trade agreement last year too.

Chart of the Day: Somali piracy = sole rise in global piracy

WSJ story where chart caught my eye:  pull out the Somali bump-up and the rest of global piracy is basically flat from 2005 through 2009.  Because of Somali pirates, the total number of attacks has been increase by about 50%, meaning Somalia alone now accounts for roughly one-third.

The twist:  al Shabaab, the youth militant successor to the Islamic Courts Union (kicked out of Mogadishu by the Ethiopian military three years ago) used to just tax the pirates, but now it fields its own boats and speaks of "sea jihad." This is viewed primarily as a revenue-raising effort, because few American-flagged ships pass by there (Maersk Alabama was a relatively rare passage).  And with average ransoms paid now up to $2m (double the average of last year).

The good news?  The booming market for pirates suffers a talent dearth, as multinational navy response officers are noticing a steep decline in proficiency.

Cybersecurity as a way to revitalize the US-Japan alliance

FT op-ed by John Alkire, managing director of Morgan Stanley Japan.

Basic argument:  we share a common enemy in China's persistent and pervasive cyber snooping and industrial theft.  Recently, US and Japanese officials agreed to stop cyber-snooping on each other and cooperate on cyber-security--basically the cyber equivalent of a traditional military alliance.  Alkire even goes so far as to say we should stand up a joint cyber-security facility on Okinawa to finesse the continuing tension over the US marine base there.

So yeah, little to no chance of us every landing Marines in China, but cyber-security "forces"?  There you have my attention.

Chart of the day: China as the world's biggest navy

Economist story on defense spending in a time of austerity. 

Unsurprisingly, the focus is on how the West keeps reducing its platform numbers because of its addiction to speed, stealth and other forms of high technology (i.e., every platform costs so much more to build over time, that we can afford far fewer of them).  Poster child right now is the F-22, whose production runs for the US ends at 187 units instead of the originally planned 750.

But what do commanders in the field want?  Helicopters and drones--not F-22s.  So why worry about the numbers?

Well, on the naval side, we can now say that China's Peoples Liberation Army Navy is the world's biggest fleet of major combatants, even though nobody would seriously suggest that the PLAN comes anywhere near our overall naval combat capability nor global reach.

So how impressed should we be?

The only question that matters, in my mind, is whether or not China is building a force that counters our capacity to shape the global security environment.  That's not simply a numbers game, but a willingness-to-use mindset, which I don't see China possessing now, or in the future so long as the Party rules. Why? If you use forces, you will lose forces, and China's single-party state can't afford such losses of face.

If you think major naval battles are in the offing, then you're spooked by China's PLAN build-out, but I myself don't see the larger nuclear correlation of forces impacted by this whatsoever, so China's numerical superiority impresses no more than the old Sov version did.  We dare not go to the mattresses over anything important because we know how that will end.  China may still dream of Taiwan in these terms, but America does not.

Hence, the only military developments that impress me are those that involve bolstering China's ability to do counterinsurgency and nation-building, and I see none in the offing or on the horizon.  Instead, China mindlessly apes America's past in its military build-up, as though it's more interested in appearances than global capabilities, and more interested in narrow sea denial than expansive sea control.

I'd be more impressed with a PLAN that eschewed classic major combatants and went in for vast fleets of unmanned vehicles, because I don't see countering traditional naval capabilities to be all that hard--or all that expensive.

What the system really needs right now is more Somali-like pirates the world over to encourage more navy-to-navy collaboration like the Somali version has.

In the end, it's not a matter of who has more ships, but whose ships are most welcomed around the world.

Cybersecurity: the paradigm shifts

Intel wants to be inside of everything, so sayeth Bloomberg Businessweek.  The PC market for chips is only so big and it's slowing, which the market for embedded chips, while smaller for now, will grow dramatically.

So Intel's purchase of MacAfee, the software security firm, is viewed as a shot across the IT's industry's bow, suggesting that cybersecurity concerns are going to move far beyond the world of computers and the internet to something far more pervasive. Thus devices with embedded chips will need embedded software on those chips and embedded security software within that software. 

How you think of cybersecurity in terms of firewalls in such a world is beyond me.  Cisco speaks more and more of "borderless security"--a trend that I think favors the horizontal systems of the world (like the United States) far more than the vertical ones (like China).  I mean, how can a society with low social trust prevail in such a world?