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"DOD is working on the new quadrennial defense review, so the Air Force/Navy have to justify their massive budget outlays. Think about it, what else does the Navy have if China isn't around? The Navy needs China, so that's why you are seeing all these scare stories. "

Sounds a little conspiratorial to me. We are being vigilant enought to reposition B2 Stealth Bombers and other naval and air power to the Pacific during a war in Southwest Asia...so maybe it's not such a conspiracy.

Vigilance is peace throught strength.

Not suggesting its a conspiracy, just service loyalty. If you're a Navy admiral, you want your service to grow and gain better funding. After all, as the admirals would remind you, what is good for the Navy is good for America. Getting this kind of support is growing increasingly difficult considering A) GWOT is mostly an Army/Marine show and B) Iraq is sucking up defense money like a Hoover. So how do you overcome these problems? Simply leak your "concerns" over the growing Chinese naval threat. People like Bill Gertz dutifully listen and push out hilariously alarmist stories, and there's a call for increased funding for the Navy.

That's not always a bad thing, I wouldn't mind seeing more money go the Navy. It's the way the world works, happened all the time in the Cold War. Whenever one of the services was facing cuts, they would instantly cling to some new "developing" Soviet capability that only they could counter. Those B-2's are much more likely to bomb targets in North Korea than in China.

You think that China was marching across the global like Germany at the beginning of WWII. So far, the only thing China has done is continue the modernization of their military. Their military budget still is dwarfed by US.

You an I as well as the rest of the world should take a breath. Fifty years of hostility during the cold war, where there was an clear in present threat greater than the Chinese could hoped to present,and we never went to war with the Soviet Union directly. Maybe in a world with the bomb, wargamers on both sides realized that victory was impossible, and so will the Chinese. We hope.

Why is it conspiratorial to think that without a threat out there whether real or imagined, weapons procurement could become problematic? Just think if you built say submarines and the rest of the world had no submarines for which to threaten us with. How would you justify it? The greatest threat in the back of some in the Pentagon would be universal peace.

Sadly they have nothing to worry about. Man is violent in his heart and war is within his nature. Someday war with China might come, but I would rather see another Cold War because even with all the rhetoric we never listen to devils of our darker side of our nature.

I don't know what motivates the media except fear of how to fill up all that space; television and Radio time, inches on newspaper, vast blank panes on web sites. They need to create drama,to magnify the absurd and make us afraid of what is out there. The current bogeyman is China as if the Terrorist weren't enough to be concerned with.