By Jens Kastner.

Broad hints have been coming out of China that the country might start small-scale military strikes over disputed waters that are believed to hold rich energy reserves. The consequences of such endeavors would be tolerable to Beijing, international experts say.

Bitter territorial disputes China has with neighbors in the East and South China Seas have long grabbed media headlines. Virtually all countries in the region are involved in spats with China, from South Korea and Japan to the Philippines and Vietnam. In March alone, Beijing had verbal clashes with Seoul over a submerged rock; with Manila over the Philippines’ plan to build a ferry pier; and with Hanoi over China’s biggest offshore oil explorer’s moves to develop oil and gas fields.

But it wasn’t only words: Vietnamese fishing boats were also seized by China and their crews detained. What all the disputed zones, islands and rocks have in common is that they actually are much nearer to the shores of the rival claimants than to China’s.

When strategists speak of the “Malacca Dilemma”, they mean that Beijing’s sea lines of communications are highly vulnerable. In times of conflict between the US and China, the supply of crude and iron ore needed to keep the Chinese economy alive and kicking could be relatively easily cut off in the straits that connect the Indian Ocean with the Pacific.

As such, a move would force the Chinese leadership rather quickly to the negotiation tables on the enemy’s terms – and as it becomes clearer that the western Pacific holds vast untapped reserves of oil and natural gas – Beijing naturally sees control over the areas as a way out of its precarious situation. (According to Chinese estimates, oil and gas reserves in the western Pacific could meet Chinese demand for more than 60 years.)

With official defense spending to top US$100 billion in 2012, and the actual amount estimated to be much higher, China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) seems on course towards building the strength needed to ensure all goes smoothly in China’s quest for energy security.

New ballistic anti-ship missiles will make Washington think twice about ordering US forces into the region to come to their allies’ rescue, as will a growing arsenal of land-based tactical aircraft and anti-ship cruise missiles, not to mention a fleet heavy on missile-firing warships and submarines. Making access to this part of the world even dicier for US forces, China’s ongoing military modernization has also seen an easing of past detection, tracking and targeting problems for Chinese gunners.

If Beijing is confident that Washington would not want to intervene, rival armed forces in the region could be taken on with J-15 fighters to be stationed on China’s first aircraft carrier likely to be commissioned in August, a rapidly increasing number of naval destroyers, as well as brand-new amphibious landing ships and helicopter-carriers that can carry thousands of marines quickly to disputed islands.

That the political will exists for such operations has been signaled more than once. In commentaries run in China’s state media, most notably in the Global Times, the concept of “small-scale wars” has increasingly been propagated since 2011. In early March, Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao emphasized that the PLA needed to be better prepared to fight “local wars”.

Experts interviewed by Asia Times Online agreed that China would likely meet future objectives with limited military strikes.

According to Steve Tsang, director of the University of Nottingham’s China Policy Institute, much will depend on what the small war is about, how it is conducted and against which country. Tsang believes the South Koreans won’t be the target despite a recent war of words that erupted after the chief of China’s State Oceanic Administration claimed that Leodo Reef, a submerged rock off South Korea’s resort island of Jeju, is almost certainly part of China’s “jurisdictional waters”. Beijing refers to the rock as Suyan Reef.

“China starting even a limited military operation against South Korea would be too serious to be tolerated by anyone,” Tsang said. “The US would have to take a strong position and immediate action at the United Nations Security Council to impose a ceasefire,” he added.

However, a minor military confrontation against Vietnam or the Philippines over the disputed atolls in the South China Sea was a very different matter, Tsang argued. “Although China couldn’t take an easy victory against Vietnam for granted, and such wars will be gravely disturbing in Southeast Asia and the rest of East Asia, they will be manageable. If the confrontation would be short and limited, the immediate impact wouldn’t be very significant.”

Tsang warned, however, that a Chinese attack on Vietnam or the Philippines would strengthen the willingness of countries in Southeast Asia cooperate with the United States.

“But fundamentally there is not much those countries can do to counter an assertive China.”

Tsang then took on the notion that the existing mutual defense treaty between the Philippines and the US leaves the Southeast Asian country “immune” to a brief Chinese attack.

“You need to check the terms of the treaty. The US government needs to consider [a military attack against the Philippines] as a serious security matter for which it needs to respond, for which time is required to deliberate an appropriate response,” Tsang said. “Nothing will happen if the incident is over before the matter reaches congress for a serious debate.”

James Holmes, an associate professor of strategy at the US Naval War College, says Beijing would likely get away with it if the PLA were to attack the Philippines or Vietnam.

“Beijing would keep any small war as small and out-of-sight as possible. The superiority of its fleet vis-a-vis Southeast Asian militaries, and the advent of new shore-based weaponry like the anti-ship ballistic missile, give China a strong ‘recessed deterrent’ in times of conflict,” Holmes said.

He explained that China could hold its major combat platforms in reserve while seeking its goals with relatively innocuous, lightly armed vessels from its maritime security services, which are its equivalents to a coast guard.

“Southeast Asian navies might challenge these ships, but they would do so in full knowledge that People’s Liberation Army could deploy vastly superior sea power should they try it,” Holmes said.
Economists also don’t see too many obstacles for a small energy war against one China’s Southeast Asian neighbors.

“Stock markets would overreact around the world in the short term – say a few days,” said Ronald A Edwards, an expert on China’s political economy at Tamkang University in Taiwan.

“But there would be little if any effect in terms of affecting this year’s inflation, employment or output of any country other than the one attacked by China.”

Edwards concluded on a disturbing note. He argued that the outcome of the nine-day-long Russian-Georgian war in 2008, in which Russia used overwhelming force to push Georgia out of South Ossetia, earning Western condemnation, could be taken as an indicator on whether China’s economy would pay dearly for the PLA’s military adventures.

“The brief Russian war with Georgia comes to mind as a very good example for comparison,” Edwards said. “While the news coverage of this was headlines everywhere for a couple weeks, there were no major economic effects in countries other than Georgia in August of 2008 or thereafter.”

Source

By Marine Olivesi.

Two Syrian-American brothers sneaked back into Syria to fight the Assad government. They ran into their father in the besieged city of Idlib, and he was not happy to see them.

Last week, a 20-year-old man called Abdul knocked on the door of a house outside Philadelphia.

He knew the apartment was packed with relatives waiting for him, and he was nervous.

When the door opened, two brothers, several cousins and uncles crowded around him and slapped him on the back. Abdul – a blue-eyed, muscular young man – fell into his mother’s arms.

“It’s enough, mum,” he whispered to her in Arabic. “Stop crying. I’m here now.”

It was a homecoming with a difference.

Missing

Abdul’s mother and the rest of the family had not heard from him since mid-February.

He had told his parents he was going to Turkey, where his older brother Mo was helping Syrian refugees who had crossed the border from the fighting in northern Syria.

The two brothers, Abdul and Mo, disappeared soon afterwards. Abdul says the two sneaked into Syria itself and joined the rebel Free Syrian Army.

“I made my decision to fight,” Abdul said in an interview at a travel agency office in downtown Antakya, Turkey, before he returned to the US.

The brothers were born in the US but moved to Syria as young children. In 2009, Abdul returned to the US to attend university in New Jersey.

When the Syrian uprising kicked off a year ago, Abdul became consumed by news of the struggle.

“I was on Facebook for one year – I didn’t go out,” he said. “I was like, with them [the opposition fighters] – but in a different country.”

In early February, Abdul had had enough sitting on the sidelines.

He dropped out of university, paid off his credit card debts, and flew to Turkey, intent on joining the fight. (Some Syrian-American friends were supposed to join him, but backed out at the last minute.)

He landed in Istanbul, then caught a bus 18 hours to the Syrian border. There he and Mo spent five days looking for weapons – without success, he said.

The brothers sneaked over the border on 18 February and joined a small band of rebels.

After several days of training in a mountainous region inside Syria, they and a unit of about 35 fighters made their way on foot and by car to the brothers’ hometown of Idlib, then an opposition stronghold in the north-west of Syria.

Hiding from dad

Meanwhile, Abdul’s mother and two younger brothers made the reverse trip, fleeing the violence in Idlib to take refuge in New Jersey.

The boys’ father Michael remained behind in Idlib to tend to his drugstore.

By the time Abdul got to Idlib, he had not seen his father for more than two years. But he was keen not to let him know he had returned.

“We were in the same protest,” he said, “but I was hiding behind people so he wouldn’t see me.”

Abdul feared his father would order him out of the country if he discovered him.

“He’d kick me out!”

Michael and his two sons were finally reunited the next day, as fighting broke out in the city.

“The tanks started at 05:00 exactly in the morning,” Michael recalled in an interview in Turkey. “You could hear the bombing and shelling. The sound of bullets was like listening to rain.”

The Syrian army stormed Idlib on 10 March. Michael says he was holed up in his apartment. Then his phone rang. His sister, also in Idlib, delivered a confusing message: “Come get your boys.”

“I said: ‘What boys?’” Michael said. He told his sister: “Thank God my boys are not here. They are outside the country!”

“No, no,” she answered back. “Your boys are surrounded with tanks and they are at their uncle’s house and they don’t know what to do.”

“My boys?”

“Yes.”

Flight from Idlib

Abdul said he and his brother Mo fought with a rebel unit that day. The squad leader was injured, and realising their rusty Kalashnikovs could do nothing against the army’s tanks and shells, the brothers retreated to their uncle’s house nearby.

Michael jumped in his car and drove through the shelling to find his sons.

He did not give them a warm welcome.

“Of course I didn’t say hello. I was cursing very, very strong words,” he says. “I’m sorry to say that but I was very angry. I had been worried about myself. Now I was worrying about three people.”

With the help of friends, Michael arranged for several opposition fighters to smuggle them out of Idlib.

Abdul said their flight was scary. A tank positioned about 70ft (21m) away turned its cannon toward them as they ran across the road surrounding Idlib. They managed to escape through an olive grove.

Their father Michael sneaked out of Idlib the same night, and the three were reunited the next day in southern Turkey.

No promises

Michael said he finally kissed his sons then, but he still had harsh words.

“It was stupid what they did. Very stupid,” he said. “People were paying a lot of money to get out, and they couldn’t get out. They [my sons] came by themselves. They went into a death trap.”

But Abdul defended his and Mo’s acts.

“When you see dead bodies and your friends getting killed,” he said, “you’re not going to be afraid of anything.”

He says the government’s crackdown has only hardened his resolve.

“Don’t do this again,” were his father Michael’s last words to him when the two kissed goodbye in Turkey. Mo and Michael remained in Turkey.

But Abdul said he could not promise his father anything.

Source

By Alastair Leithead.

Unmanned aircraft are the new cornerstone of modern military operations, and both American and British crews are learning to fly them at a New Mexico Air Force base. There, they must tackle the practical questions of what it means to wage war from afar.

America and its allies are fighting wars around the world from computer screens in the deserts of Nevada and New Mexico.

Drones – officially known as remotely piloted aircraft – have become a major part of modern warfare.

These unmanned aircraft have the ability to fly above contentious areas, taking and relaying surveillance photos. The most controversial drones have the ability to launch an attack via onboard weapons.

America operates thousands of drones, with the bigger, more sophisticated versions controlled from bases in the US.

More pilots are being trained to fly American unmanned aircraft than fighter planes, and most of them are put through their paces at Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico.

It’s the biggest drone pilot training centre in the world, with American and British crews learning to fly them, spy with them and fire missiles from them.

‘Not robot warfare’

The two common armed drones are the Predator and the Reaper, and Colonel Ken Johnson, 49th Operations Group commander at Holloman, showed me around them both.

They have high-tech cameras and weapons mounted under the wings. They’re smaller than you might imagine with a grey hump where the glass cockpit would normally be.

“There’s always going to be a human crew controlling the aeroplane,” he said, explaining why he preferred the term ‘remotely piloted aircraft’ to ‘drone’.

“So they’re not robots. This is not robot warfare.”

Some took off from the runway, controlled from inside the small, innocuous khaki-coloured shipping containers packed with all the necessary computer power.

In other darkened rooms on the base, pilots ran through training exercises on simulators.

“You can use the shadow patterns and the colours in the picture to identify if the man is carrying a weapon,” a female US trainer explained to one of the British Royal Air Force students.

We were allowed to watch but not give the surname of any pilots or navigators as they learned and practiced.

The bank of screens displayed maps and an aerial view of buildings, roads and computer-generated men walking – some carrying guns.

“It’s a basic intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance trip – a two and a half hour mission,” explained Squadron Leader “Dex”, an instructor, but also commander for UK forces at the base.

One person flies the drone, the other operates the cameras and sensors.

They clearly give a huge advantage to troops on the ground, but there’s controversy surrounding the American use of drones.

CIA’s black hole

In Pakistan, covert missile strikes are launched on suspected insurgents in a country not at war with the US.

Who is targeted, why and who’s next on the strike list is a secretive process, and there have been reports of civilian casualties in unmanned air attacks.

“For the covert US drone programme there needs to be a lot more transparency and accountability,” said Sarah Holewinski, executive director of the Campaign for Innocent Victims in Conflict (CIVIC).

“With the military’s drones we know how they are operated – some is confidential, but we know what happens there. When it comes to the CIA’s use of drones it’s a complete black hole.

“For civilians living on the ground they don’t know whether they are going to be targeted the next day, or at the market if they are standing next to somebody who is a target.”

The military dismisses descriptions such as “targeted assassinations” for strikes on suspected fighters in Pakistan or on men not convicted of any crime.

“I think it’s only controversial in terms of the media – they will make it controversial,” said Sqdr Ldr Dex.

“We train to operate a weapon system in exactly the same way we would train in a manned aircraft – and we do the same job.

“So to us there’s nothing controversial about it. Through our training and our smart decisions we avoid collateral damage as best we can. All of our engagements, all of our missions are legitimate and legal.”

And what of the psychological impact on troops fighting a war in Afghanistan during the day and then picking up the children from school on the way home to dinner?

Sqdr Ldr Dex says it’s part of the training – and the long drive home through the desert from the base helps leave his working day behind him.

But fighting and killing from thousands of miles away as if it were a computer game is a very different way of fighting a war.

These are moral, and legal debates, which will intensify the more we depend on unmanned aircraft to fight our wars.

It appears to be the future, as nations around the world invest in the technology, but it’s already very much in the present.

Source

Norway and Russia have agreed to improve cross-border military relations and expand cooperation in multibranch exercises and common strategic and environment-based programs in their Arctic territories.

The desire on the part of both countries to strengthen political and military cooperation was reinforced during high-level talks here on March 30 between Russian Deputy Defense Minister Anatoly Antonov and Norwegian Defense Minister Espen Barth Eide and Roger Ingebrigtsen, state secretary for defense.

Defense News

Finland’s Committee on Foreign And Security Policy (CFSP) has declared that Defense Minister Stefan Wallin was within his rights to “provide ministerial guidance” in support of the retention of the Uusimaa Brigade, whose future came under close scrutiny as part of the National Defense Reorganization Plan (NDRP).

The CFSP’s declaration validates Wallin’s role in recommending the retention of the brigade, which serves as the primary military training installation and garrison for Finland’s minority Swedish-speaking community.

Defense News

At A meeting of South-East Asian nations in 2010, China’s foreign minister Yang Jiechi, facing a barrage of complaints about his country’s behaviour in the region, blurted out the sort of thing polite leaders usually prefer to leave unsaid.

“China is a big country,” he pointed out, “and other countries are small countries and that is just a fact.” Indeed it is, and China is big not merely in terms of territory and population, but also military might. Its Communist Party is presiding over the world’s largest military build-up. And that is just a fact, too—one which the rest of the world is having to come to terms with.

That China is rapidly modernising its armed forces is not in doubt, though there is disagreement about what the true spending figure is. China’s defence budget has almost certainly experienced double digit growth for two decades. According to SIPRI, a research institute, annual defence spending rose from over $30 billion in 2000 to almost $120 billion in 2010. SIPRI usually adds about 50% to the official figure that China gives for its defence spending, because even basic military items such as research and development are kept off budget. Including those items would imply total military spending in 2012, based on the latest announcement from Beijing, will be around $160 billion. America still spends four-and-a-half times as much on defence, but on present trends China’s defence spending could overtake America’s after 2035.

In the western Pacific, that would mean targeting or putting in jeopardy America’s aircraft-carrier groups and its air-force bases in Okinawa, South Korea and even Guam. The aim would be to render American power projection in Asia riskier and more costly, so that America’s allies would no longer be able to rely on it to deter aggression or to combat subtler forms of coercion. It would also enable China to carry out its repeated threat to take over Taiwan if the island were ever to declare formal independence.

China’s military build-up is ringing alarm bells in Asia and has already caused a pivot in America’s defence policy. The new “strategic guidance” issued in January by Barack Obama and his defence secretary, Leon Panetta, confirmed what everyone in Washington already knew: that a switch in priorities towards Asia was overdue and under way. The document says that “While the US military will continue to contribute to security globally, we will of necessity rebalance towards the Asia-Pacific region.” America is planning roughly $500 billion of cuts in planned defence spending over the next ten years. But, says the document, “to credibly deter potential adversaries and to prevent them from achieving their objectives, the United States must maintain its ability to project power in areas in which our access and freedom to operate are challenged.”

It is pretty obvious what that means. Distracted by campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan, America has neglected the most economically dynamic region of the world. In particular, it has responded inadequately to China’s growing military power and political assertiveness. According to senior American diplomats, China has the ambition—and increasingly the power—to become a regional hegemon; it is engaged in a determined effort to lock America out of a region that has been declared a vital security interest by every administration since Teddy Roosevelt’s; and it is pulling countries in South-East Asia into its orbit of influence “by default”. America has to respond. As an early sign of that response, Mr Obama announced in November 2011 that 2,500 US Marines would soon be stationed in Australia. Talks about an increased American military presence in the Philippines began in February this year.

The uncertainty principle

China worries the rest of the world not only because of the scale of its military build-up, but also because of the lack of information about how it might use its new forces and even who is really in charge of them. The American strategic-guidance document spells out the concern. “The growth of China’s military power”, it says, “must be accompanied by greater clarity of its strategic intentions in order to avoid causing friction in the region.”

Officially, China is committed to what it called, in the words of an old slogan, a “peaceful rise”. Its foreign-policy experts stress their commitment to a rules-based multipolar world. They shake their heads in disbelief at suggestions that China sees itself as a “near peer” military competitor with America.

In the South and East China Seas, though, things look different. In the past 18 months, there have been clashes between Chinese vessels and ships from Japan, Vietnam, South Korea and the Philippines over territorial rights in the resource-rich waters. A pugnacious editorial in the state-run Global Times last October gave warning: “If these countries don’t want to change their ways with China, they will need to prepare for the sounds of cannons. We need to be ready for that, as it may be the only way for the disputes in the sea to be resolved.” This was not a government pronouncement, but it seems the censors permit plenty of press freedom when it comes to blowing off nationalistic steam.

Smooth-talking foreign-ministry officials may cringe with embarrassment at Global Times—China’s equivalent of Fox News—but its views are not so far removed from the gung-ho leadership of the rapidly expanding navy. Moreover, in a statement of doctrine published in 2005, the PLA’s Science of Military Strategy did not mince its words. Although “active defence is the essential feature of China’s military strategy,” it said, if “an enemy offends our national interests it means that the enemy has already fired the first shot,” in which case the PLA’s mission is “to do all we can to dominate the enemy by striking first”.

Making things more alarming is a lack of transparency over who really controls the guns and ships. China is unique among great powers in that the PLA is not formally part of the state. It is responsible to the Communist Party, and is run by the party’s Central Military Commission, not the ministry of defence. Although party and government are obviously very close in China, the party is even more opaque, which complicates outsiders’ understanding of where the PLA’s loyalties and priorities lie. A better military-to-military relationship between America and China would cast some light into this dark corner. But the PLA often suspends “mil-mil” relations as a “punishment” whenever tension rises with America over Taiwan. The PLA is also paranoid about what America might gain if the relationship between the two countries’ armed forces went deeper.

The upshot of these various uncertainties is that even if outsiders believe that China’s intentions are largely benign—and it is clear that some of them do not—they can hardly make plans based on that assumption alone. As the influential American think-tank, the Centre for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments (CSBA) points out, the intentions of an authoritarian regime can change very quickly. The nature and size of the capabilities that China has built up also count.

History boys

The build-up has gone in fits and starts. It began in the early 1950s when the Soviet Union was China’s most important ally and arms supplier, but abruptly ceased when Mao Zedong launched his decade-long Cultural Revolution in the mid-1960s. The two countries came close to war over their disputed border and China carried out its first nuclear test. The second phase of modernisation began in the 1980s, under Deng Xiaoping. Deng was seeking to reform the whole country and the army was no exception. But he told the PLA that his priority was the economy; the generals must be patient and live within a budget of less than 1.5% of GDP.

A third phase began in the early 1990s. Shaken by the destructive impact of the West’s high-tech weaponry on the Iraqi army, the PLA realised that its huge ground forces were militarily obsolete. PLA scholars at the Academy of Military Science in Beijing began learning all they could from American think-tanks about the so-called “revolution in military affairs” (RMA), a change in strategy and weaponry made possible by exponentially greater computer-processing power. In a meeting with The Economist at the Academy, General Chen Zhou, the main author of the four most recent defence white papers, said: “We studied RMA exhaustively. Our great hero was Andy Marshall in the Pentagon [the powerful head of the Office of Net Assessment who was known as the Pentagon’s futurist-in-chief]. We translated every word he wrote.”

In 1993 the general-secretary of the Communist Party, Jiang Zemin, put RMA at the heart of China’s military strategy. Now, the PLA had to turn itself into a force capable of winning what the strategy called “local wars under high-tech conditions”. Campaigns would be short, decisive and limited in geographic scope and political goals. The big investments would henceforth go to the air force, the navy and the Second Artillery Force, which operates China’s nuclear and conventionally armed missiles.

Further shifts came in 2002 and 2004. High-tech weapons on their own were not enough; what mattered was the ability to knit everything together on the battlefield through what the Chinese called “informatisation” and what is known in the West as “unified C4ISR”. (The four Cs are command, control, communications, and computers; ISR stands for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance; the Pentagon loves its abbreviations).

General Chen describes the period up to 2010 as “laying the foundations of modernised forces”. The next decade should see the roll-out of what is called mechanisation (the deployment of advanced military platforms) and informatisation (bringing them together as a network). The two processes should be completed in terms of equipment, integration and training by 2020. But General Chen reckons China will not achieve full informatisation until well after that. “A major difficulty”, he says, “is that we are still only partially mechanised. We do not always know how to make our investments when technology is both overlapping and leapfrogging.” Whereas the West was able to accomplish its military transformation by taking the two processes in sequence, China is trying to do both together. Still, that has not slowed down big investments which are designed to defeat even technologically advanced foes by making “the best use of our strong points to attack the enemy’s weak points”. In 2010 the CSBA identified the essential military components that China, on current trends, will be able to deploy within ten years. Among them: satellites and reconnaissance drones; thousands of surface-to-surface and anti-ship missiles; more than 60 stealthy conventional submarines and at least six nuclear attack submarines; stealthy manned and unmanned combat aircraft; and space and cyber warfare capabilities. In addition, the navy has to decide whether to make the (extremely expensive) transition to a force dominated by aircraft-carriers, like America. Aircraft-carriers would be an unmistakable declaration of an ambition eventually to project power far from home. Deploying them would also match the expected actions of Japan and India in the near future. China may well have three small carriers within five to ten years, though military analysts think it would take much longer for the Chinese to learn how to use them well.

A new gunboat diplomacy

This promises to be a formidable array of assets. They are, for the most part, “asymmetric”, that is, designed not to match American military power in the western Pacific directly but rather to exploit its vulnerabilities. So, how might they be used?

Taiwan is the main spur for China’s military modernisation. In 1996 America reacted to Chinese ballistic-missile tests carried out near Taiwanese ports by sending two aircraft-carrier groups into the Taiwan Strait. Since 2002 China’s strategy has been largely built around the possibility of a cross-Strait armed conflict in which China’s forces would not only have to overcome opposition from Taiwan but also to deter, delay or defeat an American attempt to intervene. According to recent reports by CSBA and RAND, another American think-tank, China is well on its way to having the means, by 2020, to deter American aircraft-carriers and aircraft from operating within what is known as the “first island chain”—a perimeter running from the Aleutians in the north to Taiwan, the Philippines and Borneo (see map).

In 2005 China passed the Taiwan Anti-Secession Law, which commits it to a military response should Taiwan ever declare independence or even if the government in Beijing thinks all possibility of peaceful unification has been lost. Jia Xiudong of the China Institute of International Studies (the foreign ministry’s main think-tank) says: “The first priority is Taiwan. The mainland is patient, but independence is not the future for Taiwan. China’s military forces should be ready to repel any force of intervention. The US likes to maintain what it calls ‘strategic ambiguity’ over what it would do in the event of a conflict arising from secession. We don’t have any ambiguity. We will use whatever means we have to prevent it happening.”

If Taiwan policy has been the immediate focus of China’s military planning, the sheer breadth of capabilities the country is acquiring gives it other options—and temptations. In 2004 Hu Jintao, China’s president, said the PLA should be able to undertake “new historic missions”. Some of these involve UN peacekeeping. In recent years China has been the biggest contributor of peacekeeping troops among the permanent five members of the Security Council. But the responsibility for most of these new missions has fallen on the navy. In addition to its primary job of denying China’s enemies access to sea lanes, it is increasingly being asked to project power in the neighbourhood and farther afield.

The navy appears to see itself as the guardian of China’s ever-expanding economic interests. These range from supporting the country’s sovereignty claims (for example, its insistence on seeing most of the South China Sea as an exclusive economic zone) to protecting the huge weight of Chinese shipping, preserving the country’s access to energy and raw materials supplies, and safeguarding the soaring numbers of Chinese citizens who work abroad (about 5m today, but expected to rise to 100m by 2020). The navy’s growing fleet of powerful destroyers, stealthy frigates and guided-missile-carrying catamarans enables it to carry out extended “green water” operations (ie, regional, not just coastal tasks). It is also developing longer-range “blue water” capabilities. In early 2009 the navy began anti-piracy patrols off the Gulf of Aden with three ships. Last year, one of those vessels was sent to the Mediterranean to assist in evacuating 35,000 Chinese workers from Libya—an impressive logistical exercise carried out with the Chinese air force.

Power grows out of the barrel of a gun

It is hardly surprising that China’s neighbours and the West in general should worry about these developments. The range of forces marshalled against Taiwan plus China’s “A2/AD” potential to push the forces of other countries over the horizon have already eroded the confidence of America’s Asian allies that the guarantor of their security will always be there for them. Mr Obama’s rebalancing towards Asia may go some way towards easing those doubts. America’s allies are also going to have to do more for themselves, including developing their own A2/AD capabilities. But the longer-term trends in defence spending are in China’s favour. China can focus entirely on Asia, whereas America will continue to have global responsibilities. Asian concerns about the dragon will not disappear.

That said, the threat from China should not be exaggerated. There are three limiting factors. First, unlike the former Soviet Union, China has a vital national interest in the stability of the global economic system. Its military leaders constantly stress that the development of what is still only a middle-income country with a lot of very poor people takes precedence over military ambition. The increase in military spending reflects the growth of the economy, rather than an expanding share of national income. For many years China has spent the same proportion of GDP on defence (a bit over 2%, whereas America spends about 4.7%). The real test of China’s willingness to keep military spending constant will come when China’s headlong economic growth starts to slow further. But on past form, China’s leaders will continue to worry more about internal threats to their control than external ones. Last year spending on internal security outstripped military spending for the first time. With a rapidly ageing population, it is also a good bet that meeting the demand for better health care will become a higher priority than maintaining military spending. Like all the other great powers, China faces a choice of guns or walking sticks.

Second, as some pragmatic American policymakers concede, it is not a matter for surprise or shock that a country of China’s importance and history should have a sense of its place in the world and want armed forces which reflect that. Indeed, the West is occasionally contradictory about Chinese power, both fretting about it and asking China to accept greater responsibility for global order. As General Yao Yunzhu of the Academy of Military Science says: “We are criticised if we do more and criticised if we do less. The West should decide what it wants. The international military order is US-led—NATO and Asian bilateral alliances—there is nothing like the WTO for China to get into.”

Third, the PLA may not be quite as formidable as it seems on paper. China’s military technology has suffered from the Western arms embargo imposed after the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989. It struggles to produce high-performance jet engines, for example. Western defence firms believe that is why they are often on the receiving end of cyber-attacks that appear to come from China. China’s defence industry may be improving but it remains scattered, inefficient and over-dependent on high-tech imports from Russia, which is happy to sell the same stuff to China’s local rivals, India and Vietnam. The PLA also has little recent combat experience. The last time it fought a real enemy was in the war against Vietnam in 1979, when it got a bloody nose. In contrast, a decade of conflict has honed American forces to a new pitch of professionalism. There must be some doubt that the PLA could put into practice the complex joint operations it is being increasingly called upon to perform.

General Yao says the gap between American and Chinese forces is “at least 30, maybe 50, years”. “China”, she says, “has no need to be a military peer of the US. But perhaps by the time we do become a peer competitor the leadership of both countries will have the wisdom to deal with the problem.” The global security of the next few decades will depend on her hope being realised.

Source

Syrian forces pressed a crackdown on rebel bastions Wednesday despite a truce pledge, with the United States voicing doubts that President Bashar al-Assad will comply with a peace plan deadline.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said troops stormed and shelled several towns or villages, with 52 people killed around the country, including 28 civilians, with most of the casualties in the city and province of Homs.

While the US State Department criticised the “intensification” of violence against opponents of the regime, Russia said the opposition would never defeat Assad’s army even if “armed to the teeth.”

Rami Abdel Rahman, head of the Britain-based Observatory, told that “from the Turkish border in the northeast to Daraa in the south, military operations are ongoing.”

“Tanks are still shelling or storming towns and villages before going back to their bases,” he added. “That does not mean they are withdrawing.”

The assaults were taking place despite Assad’s pledge to implement by April 10 a six-point peace plan brokered by UN-Arab League envoy Kofi Annan.

Former UN chief Annan said Monday that Assad had agreed to start “immediately” pulling out troops under a six-point peace plan.

However US State Department spokesman Mark Toner told reporters in Washington Wednesday that “we’ve yet to be convinced that they have any intention of complying with the April 10 deadline”.

The Observatory has charged that the army was torching and looting rebel houses across the country in a campaign that could amount to crimes against humanity.

The Syrian National Council, the main opposition bloc, accused the regime of carrying out “a policy of genocide against the Syrian people” and called for immediate pressure from the international community for a pullback of tanks.

Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, meanwhile, predicted that under-equipped rebel forces would never be able to defeat Syria’s powerful military.

“It is clear as day that even if the Syrian opposition is armed to the teeth, it will not be able to defeat the government’s army,” the Interfax news agency quoted Lavrov as saying while on a visit to the ex-Soviet nation of Azerbaijan.

“Instead, there will be carnage that lasts many, many years – mutual destruction.”

Lavrov said two groups of Syrian opposition representatives would visit Moscow in the coming days and that Russia would try to convince them that it wanted to help resolve the year-long crisis.

Source

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has said that no country would have adopted a hostile attitude toward Iran if the United States had not exerted pressure on it to change its policy on Iran.

Ahmadinejad made the remarks during a recent interview with ZDF, which is a public-service German television broadcaster based in Mainz.

“If the political pressure by the United States had not been there, no other country would have had problems with Iran because Iran is not a threat to the interests of any European country,” Ahmadinejad stated.

Elsewhere in the interview, the Iranian president commented on the approach that the International Atomic Energy Agency has adopted toward Tehran’s nuclear program, saying that the UN nuclear watchdog has not acted “independently” and is influenced by the major powers.

Tehran Times

China’s military modernisation and its continued support to Pakistan, including infrastructure development in Northern Areas, were listed by the Army as the major threats faced by the country.

In a detailed presentation on demands for grants before the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Defence, Army Vice Chief Lt Gen SK Singh also mentioned the continued instability in Pakistan and the terrorist infrastructure there as a major security challenge facing the country, sources told PTI here.

Terming China as one of the major threats, the Army in its presentation mentioned Beijing’s unresolved boundary issue with India, its infrastructure development in Tibet and inroads into immediate neighbourhood as the reasons behind its thinking.

China’s politico-military assertiveness and support to Pakistan including infrastructure development in Northern Areas were also cited in the 22-page presentation.

Terming Pakistan as the “epicentre of terror”, the presentation said it was continuing its support to the proxy war against India and was keeping the terrorist infrastructure on its soil intact.

The Army told the MPs that it desired to prevent wars through deterrence and it should have the capability to calibrate a proactive response to a war.

The Army also came up with a tentative modernisation plan for the next fiscal in which it briefed about the allocation to its different arms.

Source

Russia’s Severnaya Verf shipyard in St. Petersburg has signed a contract on the overhaul of two warships for the Algerian navy, the company’s press service said on Thursday.

The Russian shipbuilder will modernize a Nanuchka II class corvette and a Koni II class frigate, which have been in service with the Algerian navy since the 1980s.

“The contract has been signed in the framework of an agreement between [Russian state-run arms exporter] Rosoboronexport and the Algerian Defense Ministry,” the company said in a statement.

The agreement, inked in 2007, envisioned the overhaul of three warships of each class. Russia delivered the first pair, consisting of a Nanushka II class corvette and a Koni II class frigate, to Algeria in February, 2011.

About 80% of onboard systems were replaced in the course of repairs, and the ships’ service life was extended for 10 years.

The second pair of warships is being modernized at Severnaya Verf under a 2008 contract.

“The vessels will sail for sea trials in June, and will be delivered to the customer in July,” the company said.

Algeria is a key buyer of Russian weaponry. According to the Russian Federal Service for Military-Technical Cooperation, sales of military equipment to Algeria currently constitute 15% of Russia’s arms exports.

RIA