[Mr.Clark]

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.

[ReveBM]

I remind myself that some of our best weapons systems have sometimes been developed during periods when threats may have been seen as "hype".

I will be glad for every advanced weapons system we have and every trained soldier or sailor if we ever have to fight China.

The Chinese are upgrading their military hand over fist; the only small comfort I have is that they have never fought a complex war in a combined fashion (such as the type of byzantine maneuvers they would need to execute to attack Taiwan) and I'm hopeful that they will make many critical mistakes. Shucks, I hope they will be just plain stupid in every way, aside from the whole stupidity of starting a war with us.