U.S. House Members, Experts Air China Concerns
By WILLIAM MATTHEWS, Defense News, July 28, 2005
The Pentagon’s report on rising military power in China is arming members of the U.S. Congress with new arguments for saving favored military projects at home.
For Rep. Rob Simmons, R-Conn., news that China’s submarine force is growing in size and sophistication is ammunition for the fight to save a submarine base in his congressional district.
“China already has more attack submarines than the United States,” Simmons said, citing Pentagon statistics. By 2025, China could have a three-to-one advantage.
“There is an alarming disconnect between the ambitious steps of the Chinese Navy and the Pentagon's shipbuilding plan used to justify closing sub base New London,” Simmons said after a July 27 House Armed Services Committee hearing on Chinese military power.
Del. Madeleine Bordallo, D-Guam, said a Chinese submarine has already been detected snooping around the military stronghold she represents. “Fortunately, it’s noisy,” thus easy for the U.S. military to track, she said.
At about 1,500 miles from China, Guam would be on the front line of any Sino-U.S. power struggle, Bordallo said. She would like to see Guam armed with F/A-22 stealth fighters, minesweepers and an aircraft carrier, she said.
Rep. Duncan Hunter, a longtime advocate of robust U.S. spending on defense hardware, warned that China is buying Russian arms — including “Sovremenny-class guided missile destroyers, sometimes referred to as carrier-killers” — and advanced fighter aircraft. They’re developing new space capabilities and expanding short- and intermediate-range ballistic missiles.
“The United States cut defense spending for a decade while China’s increased,” Hunter complained. “This year, the president’s budget proposed cutting back on the F/A-22 Raptor while China is expanding its fleet of Sukhoi-30 Flankers.”
At the same time, a senior Chinese general “threatened to attack our cities with nuclear weapons if we intervened to stop aggression against Taiwan,” Hunter said. “Clearly, there’s something wrong with this picture.”
Committee members sounded far more alarmed about China’s improving military capability than the U.S. Defense Department does.
A report released July 19 by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld describes China as “modernizing its forces, emphasizing preparations to fight and win short-duration, high-intensity conflicts along China’s periphery.”
But the report does not depict China as entirely hostile. “We see a China facing a strategic crossroads,” it says. “The United States welcomes the rise of a peaceful and prosperous China.”
Two China experts called before the committee emphasized China’s combativeness.
Richard Fisher of the International Assessment and Strategy Center warned that “the government of China is in the midst of perhaps the largest military buildup the world has witnessed since the end of the Cold War.”
In addition to modern fighters, submarines and surface ships, Fisher said the Chinese military has “ground-based laser and new direct-ascent anti-satellite weapons intended to take out key U.S. space assets.”
Submarine-launched non-nuclear missiles and army special forces “could be used against U.S. bases as distant as Hawaii, Alaska and the U.S. West Coast,” he said.
Fisher warned of a new “maneuverable ballistic missile” that could be used against U.S. ships in waters around China. And he said missiles armed with “non-nuclear radio frequency warheads” could be used to destroy the electronic systems on U.S. ships, leaving them helpless in the water.
Heritage Foundation scholar John Tkacik said China’s expanding submarine fleet is highly worrisome.
“By my count, China will have a net gain of 35 submarines over the next 15 years,” he said. Chinese shipyards will probably out-produce U.S. shipyards, so that by 2020, China could have a fleet of 50 modern attack submarines compared with a U.S. fleet of fewer than 40, he said.
China “will likely have a home-field advantage” in any East Asian conflict as early as 2010, Tkacik said.
Franklin Kramer, who was the Pentagon’s chief of international security affairs during the Clinton administration, struck a more measured note.
“There is no question that the Chinese military is a potential adversary of the United States in the Taiwan Strait,” he said. But “the full context in which to understand China’s military power is multidimensional.”
China has been helpful to the United States in the war against terrorism, cooperating in intelligence matters and helping to interdict terrorist financial organizations, he said. And economically, the United States and China have very close ties.
As for military conflict with China, “I don’t think it is at all inevitable,” Kramer said. “An important goal of the United States is to help shave the decisions made by China.”
My understanding is that currently, within the Pentagon and within the planning apparatus, that there is a significant struggle coing on between the people who recognize the growing military threat and rhetoric of the Red Chinese and those who want to continue on with the notion that we can economically bring the PRC around to a "peaceful" emergence in Asia.
The Red Chinese words and actions speak for themselves...much more loudly that the measured statements of those intent on appeasement. That's one reason I put together the Rising Sea Dragon Web Site.
Look at the PLAN GROWTH page at that site and let those pictures of current, massivce construction of modern war ships in the Red Chinese shipyards tell its own tale.