Chinese begin to worry U.S. militarily

[Manstein]

By Jim Yardley and Thom Shanker The New York Times
Friday, April 8, 2005

Officials say equation has shifted in event of a Taiwan crisis

ZHANJIANG, China When the flagship of the U.S. Navy's 7th Fleet came into view on a recent Monday afternoon, a Chinese naval band onshore quickly began playing as two rows of Chinese sailors snapped into formation and workers hurriedly finished tacking down a red carpet.

The command ship, the Blue Ridge, answered with music from its own band and raised a Chinese flag below Old Glory.

But the most apt symbolism in the stagecraft of the ceremonial visit came when the two navies staged a tug-of-war - evoking their emerging competition in East Asia.

While the American military is consumed with wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, global terrorism, and the threat of nuclear proliferation in North Korea and Iran, China is presenting a new and strategically different security concern to America in the western Pacific, as well as to Japan and Taiwan, Pentagon and military officials say.

China, these officials say, has smartly analyzed the strengths and weaknesses of the American military and focused its growing defense spending on weapons systems that could exploit the perceived weaknesses in case the United States ever needs to respond to fighting in Taiwan.

This rapid military modernization is the major reason President George W. Bush has warned the European Union not to lift its arms embargo against China.

A decade ago, U.S. military planners dismissed the threat of a Chinese attack against Taiwan as a 160-kilometer infantry swim. Now, the Pentagon believes that China has purchased or built enough amphibious assault ships, submarines, fighter jets and short-range missiles to pose an immediate threat to Taiwan and to any American force that might come to Taiwan's aid.

Even the most hawkish officials at the Pentagon do not believe China is preparing for an imminent invasion of Taiwan. Nor do analysts believe China is any match for the United States military.

But as neighboring North Korea is erratically trying to play the nuclear card, China is quietly challenging America's reach in the western Pacific by concentrating strategically on conventional forces.

"They are building their force to deter and delay our ability to intervene in a Taiwan crisis," said Eric McVadon, a former military attaché at the U.S. Embassy in Beijing. "What they have done is cleverly develop some capabilities that have the prospect of attacking our niche vulnerabilities."

Japan, America's closest ally in East Asia, and China's rival for regional dominance, is also watching China's buildup. Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi echoed Bush by warning Europe against removing the arms embargo. A think tank affiliated with Japan's Defense Ministry criticized China's increased military spending and warned it was rushing to prepare for possible conflict with Taiwan - an assertion China sharply denied.

The growing friction between Japan and China, fueled by rising nationalism in both countries, is just one of the political developments exacerbating tensions in East Asia.

In March, China passed a controversial new "anti-secession" law authorizing a military attack if top leaders believe Taiwan moves too far toward independence - a move that brought hundreds of thousands of people in Taiwan out in protest last month.

China's most recent military white paper also alarmed U.S. policymakers because it mentioned the United States by name for the first time since 1998. It stated that the American presence in the region "complicated security factors."

China, meanwhile, blamed the United States and Japan for meddling in a domestic Chinese matter when those two countries recently issued a security statement that listed peace in Taiwan as a "common strategic objective."

"The potential for a miscalculation or an incident here has actually increased, just based on the rhetoric over the past six months to a year," one U.S. intelligence analyst in Washington said.

At the welcoming ceremony for the Blue Ridge here at the hometown of China's South Sea Fleet, the American commanding officer, Captain J. Stephen Maynard, and his Chinese counterpart, Senior Captain Wen Rulang, sidestepped questions about the anti-secession law and military tensions.

Wen, Asked about China's military buildup and how America should view it, praised the U.S. Navy as the most modern in the world.

"As for China," he said, "our desire is to upgrade China's self-defense capabilities."

But in China's view, self-defense involves Taiwan, which it regards as a breakaway province and which the United States has, by treaty, suggested it would help defend. In 1996, when China fired missiles in warning over the Taiwan Strait prior to Taiwanese elections, President Bill Clinton responded by sending a battle group to a position near Taiwan. Then, China could do nothing about it. Now, analysts say, it can.

In fact, U.S. carriers responding to a crisis would now initially have to operate at least 800 kilometers, or 500 miles, from Taiwan, which would reduce the number of jet fighter sorties they could launch and cut their loiter time in international airspace near Taiwan.

This is because China now has a modernizing fleet of submarines, including new Russian-made nuclear subs that can fire antiship missiles from a submerged position. America would first need to subdue these submarines before moving ships close to Taiwan.

China launched 13 attack submarines between 2002 and 2004, a period when it also built 23 ships that can ferry armored vehicles and troops across the 160-kilometer-wide strip of water to Taiwan.

"Their amphibious assault ship building alone equals the entire U.S. navy shipbuilding since 2002," said an intelligence official in Washington. "It definitely represents a significant increase in overall capacity."

In the worse-case scenario for a Taiwan crisis, any delay in U.S. carriers reaching the island would mean that the United States would initially depend on fighter jets and bombers stationed on Guam and Okinawa, while Chinese forces could use their amphibious ships to traverse the narrow Strait. Some U.S. military analysts believe China could now defeat Taiwan before America could arrive at the scene.

http://www.iht.com/bin/print_ipub.ph...ews/china.html

[ccrn]

The NY TImes assumes we dont have subs in the area?

[aricbcool]

"Chinese begin to worry U.S. militarily "

I thought the title was presumptuous to say the least. How do they know what has us worried. I wonder if "worried" is actually a DOD defence term...

In my vastly uneducated opinion on the subject, I think that China is just saber rattling. I think they feel like we've been center-stage on the world stage for too long and they want to tell us that "Hey, we're China and we're a superpower. Remember us?"

As far as Taiwan goes, I think that they wouldn't risk their opulent trade agreements with us to start a war. On the other hand, they might be silly enough to think they can get away with it.

We'll see.

--Aric

[lrd]

My link wouldn't work, so here's the article.

Washington Post
April 12, 2005
Pg. 1

China Builds A Smaller, Stronger Military

Modernization Could Alter Regional Balance of Power, Raising Stakes for U.S.

By Edward Cody, Washington Post Foreign Service

BEIJING -- A top-to-bottom modernization is transforming the Chinese military, raising the stakes for U.S. forces long dominant in the Pacific.

Several programs to improve China's armed forces could soon produce a stronger nuclear deterrent against the United States, soldiers better trained to use high-technology weapons, and more effective cruise and anti-ship missiles for use in the waters around Taiwan, according to foreign specialists and U.S. officials.

In the past several weeks, President Bush and his senior aides, including Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Director of Central Intelligence Porter J. Goss, have expressed concern over the recent pace of China's military progress and its effect on the regional balance of power.

Their comments suggested the modernization program might be on the brink of reaching one of its principal goals. For the last decade -- at least since two U.S. aircraft carrier battle groups steamed in to show resolve during a moment of high tension over Taiwan in 1996 -- Chinese leaders have sought to field enough modern weaponry to ensure that any U.S. decision to intervene again would be painful and fraught with risk.

As far as is known, China's military has not come up with a weapon system that suddenly changes the equation in the Taiwan Strait or surrounding waters where Japanese and U.S. forces deploy, the specialists said. China has been trying to update its military for more than two decades, seeking to push the low-tech, manpower-heavy force it calls a people's army into the 21st-century world of computers, satellites and electronic weapons. Although results have been slow in coming, they added, several programs will come to fruition simultaneously in the next few years, promising a new level of firepower in one of the world's most volatile regions.

"This is the harvest time," said Lin Chong-pin, a former Taiwanese deputy defense minister and an expert on the Chinese military at the Foundation on International and Cross-Strait Studies in Taipei.

U.S. and Taiwanese military officials pointed in particular to China's rapid development of cruise and other anti-ship missiles designed to pierce the electronic defenses of U.S. vessels that might be dispatched to the Taiwan Strait in case of conflict.

The Chinese navy has taken delivery of two Russian-built Sovremenny-class guided missile destroyers and has six more on order, equipped with Sunburn missiles able to skim 4 1/2 feet above the water at a speed of Mach 2.5 to evade radar. In addition, it has contracted with Russia to buy eight Kilo-class diesel submarines that carry Club anti-ship missiles with a range of 145 miles.

"These systems will present significant challenges in the event of a U.S. naval force response to a Taiwan crisis," Vice Adm. Lowell E. Jacoby, director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, told the Senate Armed Services Committee in testimony March 17.

The Nuclear Deterrent

Strategically, China's military is also close to achieving an improved nuclear deterrent against the United States, according to foreign officials and specialists.

The Type 094 nuclear missile submarine, launched last July to replace a trouble-prone Xia-class vessel, can carry 16 intercontinental ballistic missiles. Married with the newly developed Julang-2 missile, which has a range of more than 5,000 miles and the ability to carry independently targeted warheads, the 094 will give China a survivable nuclear deterrent against the continental United States, according to "Modernizing China's Military," a study by David Shambaugh of George Washington University.

In addition, the Dongfeng-31 solid-fuel mobile ballistic missile, a three-stage, land-based equivalent of the Julang-2, has been deployed in recent years to augment the approximately 20 Dongfeng-5 liquid-fuel missiles already in service, according to academic specialists citing U.S. intelligence reports.

It will be joined in coming years by an 8,000-mileDongfeng-41, these reports said, putting the entire United States within range of land-based Chinese ICBMs as well. "The main purpose of that is not to attack the United States," Lin said. "The main purpose is to throw a monkey wrench into the decision-making process in Washington, to make the Americans think, and think again, about intervening in Taiwan, and by then the Chinese have moved in."

With a $1.3 trillion economy growing at more than 9 percent a year, China has acquired more than enough wealth to make these investments in a modern military. The announced defense budget has risen by double digits in most recent years. For 2005, it jumped 12.6 percent to hit nearly $30 billion.

The Pentagon estimates that real military expenditures, including weapons acquisitions and research tucked into other budgets, should be calculated at two or three times the announced figure. That would make China's defense expenditures among the world's largest, but still far behind the $400 billion budgeted this year by the United States.

continued

[lrd]

continued from above

Projecting Force to Taiwan

Taiwan, the self-ruled island that China insists must reunite with the mainland, has long been at the center of this growth in military spending; one of the military's chief missions is to project a threat of force should Taiwan's rulers take steps toward formal independence.

Embodying the threat, the 2nd Artillery Corps has deployed more than 600 short-range ballistic missiles aimed at Taiwan from southeastern China's Fujian and Jiangxi provinces, according to Taiwan's deputy defense minister, Michael M. Tsai. Medium-range missiles have also been developed, he said, and much of China's modernization campaign is directed at acquiring weapons and support systems that would give it air and sea superiority in any conflict over the 100-mile-wide Taiwan Strait.

But the expansion of China's interests abroad, particularly energy needs, has also broadened the military's mission in recent years. Increasingly, according to foreign specialists and Chinese commentators, China's navy and air force have set out to project power in the South China Sea, where several islands are under dispute and vital oil supplies pass through, and in the East China Sea, where China and Japan are at loggerheads over mineral rights and several contested islands.

China has acquired signals-monitoring facilities on Burma's Coco Islands and, according to U.S. reports, at a port it is building in cooperation with Pakistan near the Iranian border at Gwadar, which looks out over tankers exiting the Persian Gulf. According to a report prepared for Rumsfeld's office by Booz Allen Hamilton, the consulting firm, China has developed a "string of pearls" strategy, seeking military-related agreements with Bangladesh, Cambodia and Thailand in addition to those with Burma and Pakistan.

Against this background, unifying Taiwan with the mainland has become more than just a nationalist goal. The 13,500-square-mile territory has also become a platform that China needs to protect southern sea lanes, through which pass 80 percent of its imported oil and tons of other imported raw materials. It could serve as a base for Chinese submarines to have unfettered access to the deep Pacific, according to Tsai, Taiwan's deputy defense minister. "Taiwan for them now is a strategic must and no longer just a sacred mission," Lin said.

Traditionally, China's threat against Taiwan has been envisaged as a Normandy-style assault by troops hitting the beaches. French, German, British and Mexican military attaches were invited to observe such landing exercises by specialized Chinese troops last September.

Also in that vein, specialists noted, the Chinese navy's fast-paced ship construction program includes landing vessels and troop transports. Two giant transports that were seen under construction in Shanghai's shipyards a year ago, for instance, have disappeared, presumably to the next stage of their preparation for deployment.

But U.S. and Taiwanese officials noted that China's amphibious forces had the ability to move across the strait only one armored division -- about 12,000 men with their vehicles. That would be enough to occupy an outlying Taiwanese island as a gesture, they said, but not to seize the main island.

Instead, Taiwanese officials said, if a conflict arose, they would expect a graduated campaign of high-tech pinpoint attacks, including cruise missile strikes on key government offices or computer sabotage, designed to force the leadership in Taipei to negotiate short of all-out war. The 1996 crisis, when China test-fired missiles off the coast, cost the Taiwanese economy $20 billion in lost business and mobilization expenses, a senior security official recalled.

High-Tech Emphasis

A little-discussed but key facet of China's military modernization has been a reduction in personnel and an intensive effort to better train and equip the soldiers who remain, particularly those who operate high-technology weapons. Dennis J. Blasko, a former U.S. military attache in Beijing who is writing a book on the People's Liberation Army, said that forming a core of skilled commissioned and noncommissioned officers and other specialists who can make the military run in a high-tech environment may be just as important in the long run as buying sophisticated weapons.

Premier Wen Jiabao told the National People's Congress last month that his government would soon complete a 200,000-soldier reduction that has been underway since 2003. That would leave about 2.3 million troops in the Chinese military, making it still the world's biggest, according to a report issued recently by the Defense Ministry.

Because of pensions and retraining for dismissed soldiers, the training and personnel reduction program has so far been an expense rather than a cost-cutter, according to foreign specialists. But it has encountered competition for funds from the high-tech and high-expense program to make China's military capable of waging what former president Jiang Zemin called "war under informationalized conditions."

The emphasis on high-tech warfare, as opposed to China's traditional reliance on masses of ground troops, was dramatized by shifts last September in the Communist Party's decision-making Central Military Commission, which had long been dominated by the People's Liberation Army. Air force commander Qiao Qingchen, Navy commander Zhang Dingfa and 2nd Artillery commander Jing Zhiyuan, whose units control China's ballistic missiles, joined the commission for the first time, signaling the importance of their responsibilities under the modernization drive.

Air Superiority

Striving for air superiority over the Taiwan Strait, the air force has acquired from Russia more than 250 Sukhoi Su-27 single-role and Su-30 all-weather, multi-role fighter planes, according to Richard D. Fisher, vice president of the International Assessment and Strategy Center in Washington. The Pentagon has forecast that, as the Sukhoi program continues to add to China's aging inventory, the air force will field about 2,000 warplanes by 2020, of which about 150 will be fourth-generation craft equipped with sophisticated avionics.

But specialists noted that many of China's Su-27s have spent most of the time on the ground for lack of maintenance. In addition, according to U.S. and Taiwanese experts, China has remained at the beginning stages of its effort to acquire the equipment and skills necessary for midair refueling, space-based information systems, and airborne reconnaissance and battle management platforms.

A senior Taiwanese military source said Chinese pilots started training on refueling and airborne battle management several years ago, but so far have neither the equipment nor the technique to integrate such operations into their order of battle. Similarly, he said, China has been testing use of Global Positioning System devices to guide its cruise missiles but remains some time away from deploying such technology.

Buying such electronic equipment would be China's most likely objective if the European Union goes ahead with plans to lift its arms sales embargo despite objections from Washington, a senior European diplomat in Beijing said. A Chinese effort to acquire Israel's Phalcon airborne radar system was stymied in 2000 when the United States prevailed on Israel to back out of the $1 billion deal.

[lrd]

Originally Posted by ccrn

The NY TImes assumes we dont have subs in the area?

Honolulu Advertiser
May 8, 2005

The Rising East

Silent Service Shifts Focus Toward Asia

By Richard Halloran

Lurking somewhere off the coast of China, an American nuclear-powered attack submarine patrols quietly, listening by sonar to the movements of lumbering merchant ships and the telltale churn of cruising warships.

Occasionally, the captain orders "up periscope" to take a picture or an infrared image or pokes an antenna through the surface to monitor radio transmissions ashore. The submarine's powerful computers record all sorts of information, then compress it into a file that takes only a burst of a few seconds to transmit back to the United States.

Gathering intelligence that might escape a satellite's eye or ear in the sky is among the new missions of the U.S. Navy's "silent service." That is especially true in the vast Pacific and Indian oceans where the focus is on China's expanding military might and, to a lesser extent, on belligerent North Korea and its nuclear ambitions.

Officers with access to intelligence operations say the United States needs all the information it can get on China because, as one says, "The Chinese are masters at deception. They might build a submarine a thousand miles up the Yangtze River, and we wouldn't know about it until she went to sea." The submarine can loiter on station while the satellite must stay in orbit as it passes overhead.

Moreover, submarines have given new priority to attacking targets on land with cruise missiles, which are flying torpedoes with stubby wings, small jet engines and a built-in navigational mechanism.

In the combat phase of the war in Iraq, 12 U.S. and two British submarines fired 270 cruise missiles in support of the invading soldiers and Marines.

A third mission is to work with special-operations forces like the Navy's Seals, putting them ashore undetected in new mini-submarines, which sound as if they came out of a James Bond spy movie, waiting for them to blow up a bridge or a communications center, and then returning in the mini-submarine to the mother ship.

Sometimes the second and third missions are combined. The submarine slips the commandos into enemy territory where they find a mobile target such as a medium-range missile, aim a laser beam at it from a thousand yards away and notify the submarine. It fires a cruise missile that rides the laser beam down to the target.

"Deterrence is what this is all about," says a senior submariner. A study by the Lexington Institute, a think tank in Washington, D.C., notes that visible military forces usually serve as deterrents. The study adds, however, "the best movie directors have long known that the greatest suspense is created when an audience cannot see what it fears."

Before the end of the Cold War 15 years ago, the primary duty of U.S. attack submarines was to find and track Soviet submarines, especially those armed with long-range nuclear ballistic missiles. If the Soviet captain opened his hatches to launch a missile, the next sound he would have heard would have been an American torpedo exploding in his engine room.

With most of the successor Russian warships rusting at their piers, all that has changed for American submarines. Where the majority patrolled the Atlantic and its adjacent seas, today the Pacific and Indian oceans have become their main operating areas.

Where before they operated in the deep water of the open ocean, today they patrol in the shallow seas along the Asian littoral, which requires new navigational skills. Warm water and turbulent currents play havoc with the sonar listening devices. Shallow waters are noisy with coastal shipping that makes it hard to discern targets of value.

On the other hand, communications from underwater have improved. Where they were slow and required the submarine to come near the surface where the boat was vulnerable, now high-data antennae enable the submarine to transmit swiftly from depth.

A submarine on the Asian littoral can transmit a picture through a supercomputer on Maui and have it on the president's desk in Washington in 90 minutes, submariners say.

American submariners, always a special breed, have gotten even better. The high school lad who could talk on the phone, watch TV, play a computer game and do his math homework — all at the same time — makes an excellent sonar operator, fire control technician or navigational plotter.

On one recent patrol in Asian waters, a submarine crew handled 5,600 contacts in 30 days. "These guys have to adjust on the fly," says an officer. "They've got to be able to do all the missions at once."

Richard Halloran is a Honolulu-based journalist and former New York Times correspondent in Asia.

[CPTAUSRET]

Anyone who dismisses China as a future threat, has not been there recently, or has not adequately studied the situation.

Terry

[Roguish Lawyer]

Originally Posted by CPTAUSRET

Anyone who dismisses China as a future threat, has not been there recently, or has not adequately studied the situation.

Terry

I agree. But some respected QPs on this Board disagree with us. Perhaps they'll come in to play?

[Huey14]

All the technology in the world won't help anyone when you're being charged by 200 million Chinese with an AK each.

[jatx]

Originally Posted by Huey14

All the technology in the world won't help anyone when you're being charged by 200 million Chinese with an AK each.

Where will this charge take place, and what will the Chinese motivation be? If you say Taiwan, I would be willing to bet that we'd let them have it.

[The Reaper]

Originally Posted by Huey14

All the technology in the world won't help anyone when you're being charged by 200 million Chinese with an AK each.

Not necessarily so.

Some technology is better than others.

TR

[Pete]

China will launch a sneak attack on Taiwan while we are under the leadership of a Democrat President. The US will rattle a few saber's and complain at the UN with them making no reply. This will cause the Democrat to be defeated by a Republican but by that time China will have too firm a grip on Taiwan for us to launch an attack.

Next? North Korea of course. They'll settle that problem real quick.

Japan sees that and understands the threat.

Pete

Japan’s Superpower Potential
by Harold C. Hutchison on the Strategy Page
May 12, 2005

[Trip_Wire (RIP)]

Originally Posted by CPTAUSRET

Anyone who dismisses China as a future threat, has not been there recently, or has not adequately studied the situation.

Terry

Here's one QP who agrees with this assesment!

[NousDefionsDoc]

The search for a near peer competitor for budget justification continues...

Who benefits by the US seeing the Chins as a threat?


Every semi-developed country in the world is a "threat". What possible benefit would the Chinese gain by attacking the US militarily?