Report: China’s Military Space Power Growing

China’s escalating expertise in space is also enhancing its competence as a global military force. Along with lofting future radar, ocean surveillance, and high-resolution photoreconnaissance satellites, China’s rise as a space power also includes pursuit of an offensive anti-satellite system.

Those observations are included in a new report—Military Power of the People’s Republic of China: A Report to Congress—issued by the U.S. Office of the Secretary of Defense.

The annual Pentagon report issued late last month addresses the current and future military strategy of the People’s Republic of China. It takes a look at the current and probable future course of military-technological development on the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) and the tenets and probable development of Chinese grand strategy, security strategy, and military strategy, and of the military organizations and operational concepts, through the next 20 years.

This charachter Jeffrey Lewis pops up at the end of the article, and spouts the usual liberal nonsense...and then note what he says at the very end:

A critic of the U.S. Secretary of Defense-issued report is space policy and arms control analyst, Jeffrey Lewis. He thinks poorly of the assessment and judges it far from a work of scholarship.
Lewis is Executive Director of the Project on Managing the Atom at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
“This report, as in previous years, suffers from the usual defects associated with a report drafted by committee and rushed into print with poor or compromise editing,” Lewis told SPACE.com.
He added that the report’s space section is little more than a laundry list of Chinese space activities.
“A member of Congress or defense analyst looking to argue that China is developing anti-satellite weapons might find such a list useful,” Lewis said. “But an analyst attempting to make a serious, evidence-based assessment should regard the report as a useless compendium of previously established facts lacking the necessary qualifications about what the intelligence community does not know.”
For example, Lewis said that the Pentagon view of China’s laser weaponry proficiency falls short. Previous reports, he added, described limits to what the intelligence community knew about Chinese laser research, noting that “whether this claim extends to actual facilities” or “whether Beijing has tested such a capability is unclear.”
Lewis said that the U.S. Congress ought to create a requirement that the Director of National Intelligence—not the Secretary of Defense—report on Chinese military power.

The practical upshot of this in the immediate future would be that the report would be in the hands of a known Panda-Hugger...John Negroponte, and removed from Rumsfeld's staff, those with noticeably fewer illusions.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.