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Joel Skousen: Assessing China’s Long-Term Threat

On October 8, 2013

In Bomb Bomb America?, China, Joel Skousen, The End of America?, War

World Affairs Brief, October 4, 2013 Commentary and Insights on a Troubled World. Copyright Joel Skousen. Partial quotations with attribution permitted. Cite source as Joel Skousen’s World Affairs Brief (http://www.worldaffairsbrief.com)

This Week’s Analysis:

Selective Government Shutdown: The Political Agenda

Obamacare Exchanges Open Doors

Armed Services Turn Hostile to Those Opposed to Gays

Assessing China’s Long-Term Threat

Kenyan Mall Massacre—A Blackout of Information

[…]

ASSESSING CHINA’S LONG-TERM THREAT

Every week new information surfaces about China’s massive military building program. This week wired.com wrote about China’s new fleet of small, triple-hull, low-radar-profile attack vessels that are designed to act in swarms against larger naval foes. The US has been working on a small, fast warship much longer but with little to show for it:

In just seven years, the Chinese People’s Liberation Army Navy has built 83 of the 400-ton Type 022s at an estimated cost of $40 million per ship. And production continues at a high rate in several shipyards. The U.S. Navy, by comparison, has finished just two LCS [Littoral Combat Ship] in the same span of time, each at a cost of more than $600 million.

While bigger US ships might outgun even half of the Chinese vessels, an 80 to 2 advantage in quantity can take its toll on American technical superiority. As wired said in another article, the Chinese weapons strategy focuses on numbers:

But Beijing has a brutally simple — if risky — plan to compensate for this relative weakness: buy missiles. And then, buy more of them. All kinds of missiles: short-range and long-range; land-based, air-launched and sea-launched; ballistic and cruise; both guided and “dumb.” [and put them on small fast ships like they are building]

Fortunately, quite a few analysts in the private sector are taking a good hard look at the future Chinese nuclear threat and even starting to watch for World War III. Breakingdefense.com published an article this week that jumped right into the whole topic. Here are excerpts with my comments and corrections:

Because China believes it is much weaker than the United States, they are more likely to launch a massive preemptive strike in a crisis. [It has nothing to do with weakness, which China clearly is intent on overcoming. It has everything to do with the strategy of deception and surprise attack.] Here’s the other bad news: The current US concept for high-tech warfare, known as Air-Sea Battle, might escalate the conflict even further towards a “limited” nuclear war, says one of the top American experts on the Chinese military. [The escalation will happen very fast once it starts. If I’m right about North Korea being preserved by the West from regime change to serve as the trigger for WWIII, in any initial attack on South Korea by the North, the US will be “forced” to use tactical nuclear weapons to stop NK’s overwhelming forces in the peninsula. This will provide China with the excuse to initiate their pre-emptive nuclear strike on America—blaming the USA for “first use.”]

China analyst Larry Wortzel said at the Institute of World Politics: “The People’s Liberation Army still sees themselves as an inferior force to the American military, and that’s who they think their most likely enemy is.” That’s fine as long as it deters China from attacking its neighbors. But if deterrence fails, the Chinese are likely to go big or go home. [Go Home isn’t an option for the Chinese]. “What they do is very heavily built on preemption,” Wortzel said.

Wortzel argued that… “China’s dependent on these ballistic missiles and anti-ship missiles and satellite links,” he said. Since those are almost all land-based, any attack on them “involves striking the Chinese mainland, which is pretty escalatory.” [Wortzel is too hung up on the concept of escalation—thinking that the war will rise gradually in intensity, as have past wars. But, he’s wrong. He fails to understand that both the Russians and Chinese intend to execute a huge nuclear first strike so as to eliminate our retaliatory potential.]

“You don’t know how they’re going to react,” he said. “They do have nuclear missiles. They actually think we’re more allergic to nuclear missiles landing on our soil than they are on their soil. They think they can withstand a limited nuclear attack, or even a big nuclear attack, and retaliate.” [And, they can–because they are preparing huge underground shelters. In the US, only our leaders are preparing huge shelters. They want the public vulnerable so they can come out of our bunkers and talk us into joining a militarized NWO to prosecute the war.]

So how would China’s preemptive attack unfold? First would come weeks of escalating rhetoric and cyberattacks. There’s no evidence the Chinese favor a “bolt out of the blue” without giving the adversary what they believe is a chance to back down. [This is frankly very naive, and based on wishful thinking. The Chinese are ruthless in their strategic thinking and won’t give much warning]

When the blow does fall, the experts believe it would be sudden [but notice what Wortzel says the “sudden” attack applies to:]. Stuxnet-style viruses, electronic jamming, and Israeli-designed Harpy radar-seeking cruise missiles (similar to the American HARM but slower and longer-ranged) would try to blind every land-based and shipborne radar. Long-range anti-aircraft missiles like the Russian-built S-300 would go for every plane currently in the air within 125 miles of China’s coast, a radius that covers all of Taiwan and some of Japan. Salvos of ballistic missiles would strike every airfield within 1,250 miles. That’s enough range to hit the four US airbases in Japan and South Korea – which are, after all, static targets you can look up on Google Maps – to destroy aircraft on the ground, crater the runways, and scatter the airfield with unexploded cluster bomblets to defeat repair attempts. Long-range cruise missiles launched from shore, ships, and submarines then go after naval vessels. And if the Chinese get really good and really lucky, they just might get a solid enough fix on a US Navy aircraft carrier to lob a precision-guided ballistic missile at it.

Wortzel is conjuring up a scenario in which the Chinese attack like we would attack—a multi-faceted strike using all forms of military power—cruise missiles, anti-ship missiles, bombers, fighters, naval power and a mix of electronic jamming warfare and cyber attacks. What he is missing is the advantage the Chinese and Russians intend to gain by using hundreds of ballistic missiles flying that are capable of taking out most of our military in a dramatic first strike!

Why they can’t see this, given the huge investment both Russia and China are making into underground protected and mobile ballistic missile systems, is worrisome. The Russians just announced another new ballistic missile system this week. US military planners have been propagandized for so long in their War College lectures, about the deterrence factor of “Mutually Assured Destruction” that they no longer seem to believe anyone is going to pull the nuclear trigger.

Think like the enemy: Even if you had similar conventional weapons at your disposal, but always slightly behind American military technology, wouldn’t you rather use the nuclear option to reduce the odds and wipe out most of those US and NATO weapons in one nuclear first strike? The reason why the Chinese and Russians are building convention weapons is for mopping up and occupation after a nuclear first strike. For the enemy, nuclear weapons are not a last resort, but the primary offensive choice.

The article spends a lot of time talking about the degree of training and sophistication it takes to run a coordinated war between Army, Naval, Air and Missile forces. They are right and the Russians and Chinese aren’t close to being able to imitate the sophistication of US and NATO coordinated attacks using a wide range of conventional weapons.

The bigger issue is ensuring the Second Artillery [what the Chinese call their ballistic missile forces] can operate relatively seamlessly with the Chinese air force and navy. So far, the three forces rarely train together in peacetime and they have no real-world combat experience fighting together. “Their military was always separated really into a ground force, a navy, and an air force, and since about ’63 a missile force, that never operated together, never,” said Wortzel. “They planned independent campaigns.”

But the Chinese are getting better, in the use of joint command structures in disaster relief operations and, most notably, with their “Vanguard 2009” exercises in the Jinan Military District, Dean Cheng notes. It’s well worth noting that the officer who commanded both those exercises and much of the response to the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, Gen. Fan Changlong, has since been promoted two ranks to become senior vice-chairman of the Central Military Commission, sort of China’s equivalent of the Joint Staff and the National Security Council rolled into one. While not conclusive, Fan’s rapid rise to such an influential position “suggests that joint operations is really important,”

Cheng declined to guess how good the Chinese had gotten at coordinating all their armed services in joint operations. “Is it a shortfall? Probably, but it’s a lot less of a shortfall than in 1999,” he said.

Others ask why the Chinese are building aircraft carriers even while planners in the West are wondering if carriers are sitting ducks in the next world war. I think it’s another sign that the Chinese plan on using the pre-emptive nuclear strike to take down most of the US military. Only then could their inferior carriers be useful for the inevitable occupation of the Far East from Japan down to Australia that they are planning.

Sure, the Chinese are planning on using EMP and cyber attacks to shatter the computer dependency of US military coordination—but only after the West has been softened up and perhaps beaten into submission by a massive pre-emptive nuclear strike. It’s archaic and wishing thinking that the Chinese and Russians will hold back the use of nuclear missiles as a last resort. Every major Russian war game starts with a simulated pre-emptive nuclear strike on America, followed up by conventional weapons, not the other way around.

[ audio ] Henry Gruver’s Three Visions: Russian (and Chinese) Invasion of America — “When Russia opens her gates and lets the masses go, the free world will occupy themselves with transporting, housing and caring for the masses, and will begin to let their weapons down, and will cry ‘peace and safety,’ and that’s when it will happen.”

Dumitru Duduman: Wake Up America

Skousen: U.S. Intentionally Vulnerable to Nuclear Attack from China/Russia

[2-hour audio] Henry Gruver with Steve Quayle: Visions of War – Visions of Heaven

[mp3 audio] Henry Gruver’s Vision of America being invaded by Russia

[47-minute audio] Henry Gruver: Russian Invasion of America

Skousen: U.S. Intentionally Vulnerable to Nuclear Attack from China/Russia

Skousen: Analysis of Strategic Threats in the Current Decade

[Updated May 2010] Joel Skousen: Analysis of Strategic Threats in the Current Decade — The Big Picture!

All 100+ of my Joel Skousen posts (10 posts per page; latest appear first)