After the 2018 war game I distinctly remember one of our gurus of war gaming standing in front of the Air Force secretary and chief of staff, and telling them that we should never play this war game scenario [of a Chinese attack on Taiwan] again, because we know
what is going to happen. The definitive answer if the U.S. military doesn’t change course is that we’re going to lose fast. In that case, an American president would likely be presented with almost a fait accompli.”
Air Force Lt. Gen. S. Clinton Hinote, deputy chief of staff for strategy, integration and requirements.
Lightning fast speed with powerful weapons of war deployed in total surprise have achieved effective advantage in combat over the years. First strike, from German General Heintz Guderian’s Blitzkrieg (lightening war) tank assault that effectively took Poland and France in the early days of WWII to the tactics of Genghis Khan in the 13th century, has often been an effect technique to establish immediate dominance over an enemy. That the attacker also has massive resources to defend and hold what is taken makes the first strike particularly opportunist to any would-be aggressor willing to gamble for strategic advantage.
The United States has the most advanced military and the most modern and effective Navy on earth. Our fleets roam the planet. We have military bases all over the world. While China’s navy lags in quality behind ours, they have two very clear strategic advantages: their navy is huge (the largest in the world in sheer numbers of vessels), and with its new base of operations now extended into a man-made base in the South China Sea (the Spratly Islands – pictured above), they are securely planted as the largest regional military force in Asia. We may have better weapon systems and vastly more sophisticated naval vessels… but most of those assets are far, far, far away from Southeast Asia. And China knows this.
President Xi tested his oats on a very inept American President, who kept making threats and escalating economic sanctions. Tariffs and trade sanctions notwithstanding, China now has the largest economic growth of any major nation on earth since pandemic began. They even have a trade agreement with the EU that is focused on reducing American economic power. Despite global opprobrium against massive human rights abuses, they have crushed indigenous Uyghurs in Western China and dramatically decimated Hong Kong’s once fertile democracy with repression. They steal our technology, hack our cyber networks looking for vulnerabilities and accord Americans doing business in the People’s Republic decidedly third-class protections and rights to protect intellectual property and trade secrets.
President Xi Jinping, having eliminated terms limits that would have ended his tenure in November of 2022, has established himself as cult figure autocrat who can have his way within his nation… and maybe in the entire region. No longer following the Obama administration effort of accommodation, President Joseph Biden has made it clear that China can no longer assume that it can simply beat down American interests in the region. Hardline will be met with hardline, not a material departure from the policies of the Trump administration. Welcome to the hood, Mr. Biden, as Xi sent a rather clear message. Our war games were already pointing out that a thoroughly upgraded and reconfigured Chinese military would bring the United States to heel very quickly in a regional conflict.
“Last fall, the U.S. Air Force simulated a conflict set more than a decade in the future that began with a Chinese biological-weapon attack that swept through U.S. bases and warships in the Indo-Pacific region. Then a major Chinese military exercise was used as cover for the deployment of a massive invasion force. The simulation culminated with Chinese missile strikes raining down on U.S. bases and warships in the region, and a lightning air and amphibious assault on the island of Taiwan.
‘The highly classified war game, which has not been previously made public, took place less than a year after the coronavirus, reportedly originating in a Chinese market, spread to the crew of the USS Theodore Roosevelt aircraft carrier, taking one of the U.S. Navy’s most significant assets out of commission.
“Then in September in the midst of the war game, actual Chinese combat aircraft intentionally flew over the rarely crossed median line in the Taiwan Strait in the direction of Taipei an unprecedented 40 times and conducted simulated attacks on the island that Taiwan’s premier called ‘disturbing.’ Amid those provocations, China’s air force released a video showing a bomber capable of carrying nuclear weapons carrying out a simulated attack on Andersen Air Force Base on the U.S. Pacific island of Guam. The title of the Hollywood-like propaganda video was ‘The god of war H-6K [bomber] goes on the attack!’
“In case the new U.S. administration failed to get the intended message behind all that provocative military activity, four days after President Biden took office, a large force of Chinese bombers and fighters flew past Taiwan and launched simulated missile attacks on the USS Roosevelt carrier strike group as it was sailing in international waters in the South China Sea.
“Little wonder that many foreign affairs and national security experts believe the global pandemic has accelerated trends that were already pushing the United States and China toward a potential confrontation as the world’s leading status quo and rising power, respectively. This month the Council on Foreign Relations released a special report, ‘The United States, China, and Taiwan: A Strategy to Prevent War,’ which concluded that Taiwan ‘is becoming the most dangerous flash point in the world for a possible war’ between the United States and China. In Senate testimony on Tuesday, the head of U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, Adm. Phil Davidson, warned that he believes China might try and annex Taiwan ‘in this decade, in fact within the next six years.’
“Meanwhile, a leading Chinese think tank recently described tensions in U.S.-China relations as the worst since the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989, and it advised Communist Party leaders to prepare for war with the United States… What many Americans don’t realize is that years of classified Pentagon war games strongly suggest that the U.S. military would lose that war.
“‘More than a decade ago, our war games indicated that the Chinese were doing a good job of investing in military capabilities that would make our preferred model of expeditionary warfare, where we push forces forward and operate out of relatively safe bases and sanctuaries, increasingly difficult,’ Air Force Lt. Gen. S. Clinton Hinote, deputy chief of staff for strategy, integration and requirements, told Yahoo News in an exclusive interview. By 2018, the People’s Liberation Army had fielded many of those forces in large numbers, to include massive arsenals of precision-guided surface-to-air and surface-to-surface missiles, a space-based constellation of navigation and targeting satellites and the largest navy in the world.” James Kitfield writing for the March 10th Yahoo News.
For all the Trumpian braggadocio, the chest-puffing of “patriotic” Republicans touting how they have built our US forces into a “can do anything anywhere” military, they didn’t. We couldn’t sustain in Afghanistan or Iraq. Little Rocket Man, Kim Jong-un, continues to build ICBMs capable of carrying nuclear warheads to the US mainland… and is even building a nuclear-missile-capable submarine fleet that can get even get closer to our shores. China continues to flaunt our admonitions with an arrogant sneer in Asia, where they know, despite the risks and likely casualties, that the United States is no match for them in the region.
We are in China’s crosshairs in oh-so-many ways. On March 11th, China’s legislature (following the dictates of President Xi), made their goals clear: “In smugly celebratory tones, [China’s National People’s Congress] wrapped up political meetings Thursday [3/11] at which officials praised the country’s repressive political system, hailed its ongoing recovery from the pandemic, flexed Beijing’s power over Hong Kong and laid out plans to compete with the U.S. abroad, saying that ‘the best is still ahead of us.’…
“A draft of the next five-year plan announced at this week’s meetings included a boost in spending of more than 7% each year on research and development. China should focus on several strategic areas over the next five years, the draft said, including artificial intelligence, quantum computing, integrated circuits and aerospace…
“Wang [Yi], the foreign minister, warned the U.S. on Sunday [3/7] that Taiwan remains a ‘red line’ for China. He said that Washington’s support for Taiwan was ‘dangerous,’ suggesting possible conflict over the democratically governed island, which China claims as its territory.” Alice Su writing for the March 12th LA Times. We have to deal with them. They have to deal with us. It’s complicated.
I’m Peter Dekom, and with budgetary pressures caused by having to deal with recovering from the pandemic, President Biden has a difficult road ahead… between fiscal reality and a reconfigured enemy the likes of which we have never encountered before.
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