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People’s Liberation Army-Navy.
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People’s Liberation Army-Navy.
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China's military can destroy five out of six U.S. bases in Asia with waves of missile strikes as the 
result of its large-scale military buildup that threatens U.S. access and freedom of navigation in East Asia, according to a forthcoming congressional report.
"The main implication of China's improved air and conventional missile capabilities is a dramatic increase in the [People's Liberation Army's] ability to inhibit U.S. military operations in the region," a late draft of the report by the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission concludes.
The U.S. government has growing concerns over what the report says are "China's improving capabilities to challenge the U.S. military's freedom of access in East Asia."
The draft report - the final version is set for release Wednesday - has been disclosed as tensions in Asia intensify over growing assertiveness by the Chinese military in the Yellow Sea, the East China Sea and the South China Sea.
President Obama, during his recent visit to Asia, frequently mentioned growing U.S. concerns about "maritime security" and the need for stronger alliances against regional threats.
In Japan on Saturday, Prime Minister Naoto Kan thanked Mr. Obama for U.S. support during Tokyo's recent dispute with China over Chinese fishing near Japan's Senkaku Islands.
"For the peace and security of the countries in the region, the presence of the United States and the presence of the U.S. military, I believe, is becoming only increasingly important," Mr. Kan said.
Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said last month during theJapan-China dispute that the Senkakus are covered by the U.S.-Japanese defense treaty, a signal to China that the U.S. military is prepared to defend the islands from Chinese encroachment.
The United States also could face a Chinese missile strike on its bases and ships in a future conflict with China over Taiwan, according to the China commission report.
In addition to missiles, the Chinese military buildup includes major deployments and upgrades of Chinese jet fighters that have increased ranges and better weapons, as well as greatly improved air defenses, the report says.
The report says that in the event of a conflict, China missiles alone would be enough to attack and shut down five of the six major U.S. military bases in the region. Guam is the exception because it is 1,800 miles from China.
China's growing long-range bomber arsenal, however, means the "PLA Air Force's bomber fleet soon could allow it to target Guam, where the sixth U.S. Air Force base is located," the report says.
Guam is the site of a major U.S. military buildup in Asia, with the addition of new submarines and bombers and spy aircraft.
U.S. bases vulnerable to Chinese missile attack include two in South Korea, namely Osan and Kunsan air bases, the report says. Each could be destroyed with attacks by 480 short- and medium-range ballistic missiles and 350 ground-launched cruise missiles for each base. The bases are some 240 to 400 miles from China.
In Japan, U.S. bases at Kadena, Misawa and Yokota could be knocked out with 80 medium- and short-range ballistic missiles and 350 ground-launched cruise missiles, the report says. Those bases are between 525 miles and 680 miles from China.
"Not only would U.S. bases be threatened in the event of a conflict with China but so too would U.S. deployed aircraft," the report says.
For the past 20 years, China's missile and naval forces have been transformed from an outdated military to "one with modern aircraft and air defenses and a large, growing arsenal of conventional ballistic and land-attack cruise missiles," the report says.
Since 2000, for example, Chinese short-range missile forces alone increased from a brigade of up to 36 launchers to as many as 252 today, the report states.
Additionally, China now has up to 500 DH-10 land-attack cruise missiles with ranges of up to 932 miles. A second, new cruise missile, the YJ-63 also is deployed and has a range of more than 125 miles.
"In addition to increasing the number of missiles, China is also extending their range, improving their accuracy, and increasing their payload," the report says.
While China prominently proclaims the peaceful intentions behind its growing military buildup, within the military the rhetoric is far more aggressive.
The United States is the main foe among officers, and they continue to churn out books and articles about how America can be defeated. Lesser foes include Taiwan, Japan, Vietnam and South Korea. But it's understood, among Chinese officers, that if the mighty Americans can be brought to heel, all other local powers will become much easier to handle.
Meanwhile, the winds of political change can be detected within China. A group of 23 retired senior government officials and academics openly called for more democracy in China, and authoritarian rule. These old guys can get away with this kind of open talk because they are old, retired, and still have many friends within the government. The real target of the letter was the hard-liners in the government who pay more attention to maintaining the communist police state, than to improving the well-being of the average Chinese. The hard-liners used to include a lot of officials who still believed in communism, but there are few of those left, and not enough of them for anyone to bother with anymore.
The hard-liners tend to ally themselves with corrupt officials (nearly everyone in the ruling elite is at least a little dirty) to maintain the police state. But many senior officials actually back more democracy, and accountability to the people.
The United States sees China as having a natural interest in protecting its access to the sea (for importing raw materials and exporting manufactured goods). This justifies the large amounts of money the Chinese are pouring into building up their fleet. This is very new for China, which has not been a major naval power for over 600 years. What alarms the Americans is how the U.S. is being demonized by the Chinese military leadership.
Chinese politicians speak in more friendly terms, while tolerating the bellicose attitudes of their generals and admirals. The politicians refrain from reining in the aggressive attitudes of their military commanders. China experts counsel that the rants from the military are mainly to build morale within the ranks, and make it easier for the politicians to reduce corruption in the armed forces. This corruption is an old, old problem in China.
It's been reduced in the last two decades, but is still there, in a big way. By whipping up this fervor for dealing with a major war, it becomes unpatriotic (for many, but not all, officers) to steal and connive. But to outsiders, it looks like the Chinese are preparing for something ominous. This is reinforced by the increasingly aggressive Chinese attitudes towards disputes with its neighbors over uninhabited islands (often just rock outcroppings only visible at low tide). Outright possession of these islets gives the owner possession of nearby oil or natural gas deposits. Something worth fighting for, and that's what worries neighbors when it comes to China's growing naval strength.
South Korean and Australian military officials believe China has recently made a major effort to steal secret data from them via the Internet. The hacking attacks try hard to hide their origins, but better forensic tools make it easier to find and follow tracks. The Chinese Internet based espionage efforts have been growing more frequent and aggressive over the last decade. As the evidence piles up, China is having a more difficult time trying to hide behind blanket denials.
China is aggressively offering inexpensive weapons and military training services to African nations. This would give China more influence within African armed forces, and better knowledge of what makes them tick. This can be useful when there are embarrassing incidents. Recently, in Zambia, two Chinese mine officials opened fire with assault rifles, when confronted by workers angry about the way they were mistreated. Two workers were wounded and the rest dispersed. The Zambian government wants to prosecute the two Chinese gunmen, while China wants to avoid any damage to Chinese economic interests in Zambia and Africa. China has also been approaching Western nations for greater military cooperation. The latest targets were Poland and Italy.
Not wanting to incur the wrath of China, Vietnam made it clear that it will not lease Cam Rahn Bay to Russia, or any other foreigners. From 1979-2002, Russia did lease access, but left in a dispute over how much they should pay. Russia recently offered to return, and China was not pleased. Despite centuries of tension, China is currently a major trading partner with neighboring Vietnam. While Vietnam has been deferential to China, most other neighbors of China (including India) are increasingly cooperating in efforts to form a de facto military and political alliance against China. If this ever becomes a formal alliance (an eastern NATO, against the eastern superpower), China will not be pleased.
China now has military alliances that allow it to fly combat aircraft all the way to Europe. A joint air force training exercise in Turkey last month had Chinese jet fighters flying through the air space of two allies, Pakistan and Iran, to new ally Turkey.
The U.S. has approached China about negotiating who would be allowed to do what in North Korea once the current North Korean government collapsed. Everyone in the region agrees that it's not a matter of if, but when, the North Korean dictatorship will collapse. South Korea considers it their responsibility to move in and clean up the mess. China has openly discussed other ideas, not involving South Korea. The proposed U.S. talks would seek to work out an arrangement that would not risk another major war in the area.
The government made a major effort to keep the recent news of imprisoned 1989 demonstration leader Liu Xiaobo winning the Nobel Peace Prize. Censors worked overtime to keep the news off all forms of media (especially cell phones and the Internet). It got through anyway, and the extent of the censorship effort made the government look weak and afraid of what the 1989 pro-democracy demonstrations represented.
In the northwest, China continues to have problems with its Moslem minority. As mainstream (Han) Chinese continue to move into these remote areas, the locals, who are often Moslem, increasingly respond with violence. Last month, for example, over a thousand northwestern Moslems (not Turkic Uighurs, but Hui, a catchall term for dozens of Moslem ethnic groups in the area) rioted and tried to destroy a newly built (by Han, largely for Han) nightclub. The locals objected to the booze and prostitution such places featured.
Two warships of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) People’s Liberation Army-Navy (PLAN) docked at a port in Myanmar on August 29, 2010, in the first publicized PLAN ship visit — but not the first actual PLAN visit — to Myanmar.
It was a move designed to help pre-position the PRC in its relations with Myanmar in the lead up to that country’s upcoming national elections.
The move also ended two decades of discreet PRC approaches to its naval presence in the Indian Ocean. It also follows the open PLAN task force presence in anti-piracy operations off the Horn of Africa, and the now open commitment to use of the Pakistani Baluchistan port of Gwadar, at the entrance to the Persian Gulf.
Significantly, although the PRC maintains itself as both a heartland and maritime power, it is aware that the great challenge to break out from US global strategic dominance is essentially a maritime matter. Given economic and other realities, the US will be forced to rely increasingly on the US Navy — and particularly the Seventh Fleet in the Pacific and Indian Oceans — to project US influence.
But Washington is also working to bolster its strategic relations with the Republic of Korea, the ASEAN states as a whole, and India. The crunch for the US will be in finding the economic resources to boost the US Navy’s power projection advantages, particularly in the Pacific and Indian Oceans.
An Australian analyst, Dr Joel Rathus, of Adelaide University and Japan’s Meiji University, has noted (in the East Asia Forum, August 28, 1010): “A re-alignment is steadily underway in East Asia. Increasingly, ASEAN (and Korea) are moving closer to the geographically distant US, while China is becoming more distant from its neighbors.”
He also said: “China has seen the US and ASEAN draw closer on issues of major interest, such as the territorial disputes in the South China Sea. Clinton’s identification of this issue as a ‘pivot’ of regional security brings the United States back as a player after more than a decade of diplomatic passivity (to China’s notable discomfort).”
Building, or re-building, the US Navy in the Pacific and Indian Ocean to its earlier pre-eminence will not be easy for the US, despite the apparent numerical dominance which the USN has in the regions in terms of air and naval striking power.
To begin with, the PLAN has already deployed assets which severely inhibit the US Seventh Fleet: the Kilo- and Improved Kilo-class submarines, and other modern submarines, which can readily penetrate USN anti-submarine warfare (ASW) pickets around carrier battle groups; and the shipborne SS-N-22 Sunburn (P-270 Moskit or 3M-80/-80E) supersonic anti-ship missiles, against which there is as yet no adequate defense.
Now, Adm. Robert Willard, commander of the US Pacific Command, has confirmed during August 2010 discussions in Tokyo, that the PLA was “close to becoming operational” with its anti-ship ballistic missile (ASBM), based on a variant of the CSS-5 medium-range (1,500 to 2,000 km) ballistic missile (also known as the DF-21).
The DF-21s have maneuverable warheads (MARVs: Maneuverable Re-Entry Vehicles), and the type has undergone testing. The yet-to-be-deployed DF-21D would, most US sources agree, be a game-changer in the Pacific, giving the PRC, not the US, control of the anti-access/area denial (A2/AD) high ground. The PRC is highly conscious of the fact that control of the seas is foreseeably being removed from the US.
All of this potentially makes the US-Republic of China (ROC: Taiwan) strategic relationship of greatly renewed importance, but the US has gone out of its way in recent years to downplay this, even to the point of supporting the ROC Army’s internal political lobbying to retain control of the ROC defense equation.
Right now, some 80 percent of the ROC’s defense spending goes to the Army, which reflects the original “continental army” approach which the ROC had when it left the mainland and was positioning itself to return. That situation no longer prevails: the ROC is now an island, maritime power, which relies on sea transport for some 99 percent of its raw materials.
Despite this, the US — and even the US Naval War College analysts — have gone out of their way to promote a so-called “porcupine strategy” for the ROC, by which it would rely on the Army to repel a PRC invasion. Now, however, the US needs the ROC to develop its maritime and air power resources, which have long been neglected.
Mark Helprin, writing in The Wall Street Journal on August 15, 2010, noted that “If present military trends continue, the correlation of forces will shift much more to Beijing's advantage within the next decade.” He continued:
“Lurking about the presidency in the guise of secretary of state, America's chief diplomat has embarked upon a mistake that someday may rival Dean Acheson's exclusion of Korea from the Pacific defense area, or April Glaspie's muddled words to Saddam Hussein.
At a regional meeting in Hanoi in late July, Hillary Clinton unveiled an initiative the effect of which is an attempt to forge a defensive alliance along the maritime perimeter, with nations such as Vietnam and the Philippines. Like her predecessor Acheson, Mrs. Clinton seems averse or blind to military analysis. Her inevitably stillborn South China Sea initiative is showy diplomacy that may lead either to a military clash with China or, more likely, a ratification of China's aims as the United States lets its implied guarantees die on the vine.
China's assertions in regard to the potentially oil rich and strategically important South China Sea are consistent, clear, and patently absurd. Based upon the questionable ownership of uninhabited rocks and shoals, some which do not rise above water and others roughly the size of a Volkswagen, it claims an area almost as large as the Caribbean Basin and as far as 1,800 miles from its nearest shoreline.
In linking America's national interests to those of the coastal states thus insulted, Mrs. Clinton's recent comments are commendable but insufficiently backed. China above all is sensitive to "paper-tigerism" and ready to challenge it, especially in regard to its essential interests and where the balance of applicable power is swinging in its favor. A naval battle in which China has the upper hand? Do we not have the most powerful military in the world?
We do, but strategic appraisal must not be one-dimensional.
Although decisive to some, that this country spends more on defense than the next 14 countries combined is irrelevant to things such as the scope of its commitments, personnel costs, the willingness or reticence of allies, purchasing power parity, force structure, asymmetrical advantage and disadvantage, domestic politics, strategical genius, its absence, and many other factors including not least geography.
China fought us to a draw in Korea more than half a century ago. In Vietnam we stayed our hand for fear of drawing it into the battle, when its primitive navy was not even a tenth the size of ours, it had no nuclear weapons that could threaten us, and the Western Pacific was an American lake with a necklace of massive military installations now largely abandoned and an alliance structure we are at present trying to rebuild with words.
Whittled down by successive administrations, the big stick now turns on the Obama lathe as it is pressed against the Gates knife. If present trends merely continue, in five or 10 years, when the U.S. will have to decide whether to challenge China's claims or acquiesce, the correlation of forces will have shifted much more to China's advantage. “
The PRC’s anti-fleet capabilities are not the only concern which the US must face in the region. The Indo-Russian BrahMos supersonic cruise missile is already deployed with the Indian fleet and the new BrahMos Block II — which is capable of more complex trajectory and maneuver — has now (as of September 5, 2010) been successfully tested. These various missiles, deployed by the PRC and India, have yet to see successful countermeasures deployed by the US Navy.
At present, the US has pursued an aggressive strategic campaign to provide strategic partnership to India, but in reality India cannot afford to abandon its relationship with Russia, even though New Delhi is aware that it must move its relationship with Russia to a new parity, abandoning the old Cold War paternalism with which Moscow treated India.
Moreover, India, while seeing accord with the US Chinese Military, Chinese Navy, Chinese Power, Peoples Liberaton dealing with the PRC, has its own strategic agenda to follow in the Indian Ocean, and this, too, is not necessarily in total accord with the objectives of Washington.
result of its large-scale military buildup that threatens U.S. access and freedom of navigation in East Asia, according to a forthcoming congressional report.
