Few would deny that China's red star is rising in the world. In recent years, China has completed the Yellow River Dam, became the largest foreign debt holder of the US Government, and taken over shelf space in American Stores. Relations between the US and China during the Cold War were a chilly alliance of convenience aimed at developing fear that China would capitalize on any US-Soviet confrontation, by taking over the undefended scraps of the Soviet's soft undefended underbelly.
In decades past, the Chinese had one primary military asset, that could not be ignored: A Billion People they could throw at a regional threat. And they demonstrated how effective that could be in the Korean War. When Americans pushed the North Korean Army to the Northern reaches of the Korean Peninsula, the Chinese sent their hordes over the frozen Yalu River to force a standstill that protected Communism's southern flank in Asia.
The parallels to Task Force Smith can not be ignored today. Following WWII, President Truman had so slashed the military that North Korea (along with the Soviets and Chinese Communists) felt emboldened to take the rest of Korea by force. The most that could be mustered to stop the invasion was a small task force, ill-equipped with outdated arms. The United States alone lost 38,516 Troops alone in a war often forgotten, while more than 778,000 Allied Troops, 2.5 Million civilians, and more than 1.1 Million North Korean, Chinese, and Soviet Troops died in the war that has not been ended officially, and ended in a stalemate of lines in the same place it started.
But with the fall of the Soviet Empire, as Eastern Europe made the difficult transition from Government owned everything to a free market economy, the Chinese looked for a different model. The Chinese model allowed for partial privatization, a means of harnessing the power of a rising middle class and limited free market, without significantly giving away the economic and totalitarian political power at the top. Economically, the growth was a success, while Freedoms continued to be repressively oppressed, most notably in the Tianamen Square incident, which so paralyzed George Bush, Sr., that the American People lost confidence in his leadership.
China has 4,585,000 already in its military forces. "In a crunch," it could put 749,610,775 more into that force, and sustain that by adding 19,637,534 to it, every year. Its self-reported annual military budget of $100 Billion is leveraged by the fact that it costs far less to produce arms with the cheap labor at government owned factories, without the interference of politicians clamoring for factories in their own districts, with technology stolen from other countries. That $100 Billion budget is under reported, as it does not include true military expenditures attributed instead to the domestic sector, as China does not wish to show its true capabilities and expenditures. Its military budget is rapidly expanding, 12.7% in 2011 alone and at an average of 10%/year for the last 15 years.
China has 9 Armored Divisions, compared to only 1 Armored Division in the US Military, and a total of 10 US Army Combat Divisions. China has 41 Infantry Combat Divisions (including mechanized, light, and amphibious assault). And that is after it cut the number of troops in favor of increasing its technology. And those numbers do not reflect its entire Military force, only its active ground combat divisions.
The increasing threat from China is not the number of bodies it can still throw at an opposing force. The increasing threat is that China is gaining capacity to project force. It has recently acquired an Aircraft Carrier, Stealth Fighter Planes, nuclear armed submarines, and is continuing to develop a real Navy, not just the kind of coastal patrol that has limited its ability to attack Taiwan or Japan. It's flexing its muscles, infringing on the maritime borders of the Philippines and leveraging its power as a lender to the US to prevent sales of outdated F-16's to Taiwan.
China has quietly increased from 6 ICBM's capable of hitting the US in the 1990's to 100 to 200 nuclear armed missiles capable of hitting the United States that we know of.
Aside from China's most obvious asset: the ability to mobilize more than twice as many Troops as the United States has residents, the true strengths of China are cultural. They think and strategize in terms of centuries, while Americans consider 5 years "long term." Because China has so many people, an individual is simply a cog in the machine. They're industrious and selfless in the scope of the "greater good."
As Chinese products take over the shelf space of American Stores, as American companies move their factories to China, as Chinese continue to erase the technological edge of the American military, as Chinese Government owned debt of the US Government continues to mount, what has been the US response? The body politic in Washington has extended Most Favored Nation Trade Status to China. This Administration has ended programs such as the F-22 and F-35 which maintain equal footing with the newest stealth fighters China is producing. The current Administration in Washington has continued to cut the military and simultaneously shifting Defense dollars from military technology to overpriced "green energy" technology.
Whereas, in times past, the US maintained a technological edge to confront numerically superior hordes of Chinese Communists, as well as a nuclear deterrent, the future deterrent appears to be nuclear alone. Where China at one time couldn't put a rifle in every soldier's hands and America feared it wouldn't have enough bullets to hold off a Chinese attack in the region, we should be concerned with their growing abilities to project those bodies around the world.
At a time that America should be increasing its ability to monitor Chinese military operations, it is ignoring it. The current political climate prefers to demonstrate that it is ensuring a diminished capacity to fight a war with China, than to demonstrate that it is ready for any threat. It seems to think that if America pretends there is no dragon growing in size and ability next door to our old allies in Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, and the Philippines, then that dragon will never swallow up our allies, nor set its sights on America.
And as weapons and intelligence technology develops at an ever more rapid pace, more and more of that technology is being off-shored to Asia. Yet, the faster that new technologies become obsolete, the easier it is to fall behind in our abilities to recover from those shortfalls. It takes years to build ships, to develop a new aircraft, or to train someone to speak a foreign language. Having those assets on hand deters the potential for a war, while not having them ensures a great gap between the onset of hostilities and the time it could be turned back.
The classic example of pretending a rising power was not a threat is World War II, where the allies ignored the military build up by Japan and Germany, where the government maintained blindness to the Japanese threat and Europe appeased Hitler by giving away Czechoslovakia. From 1939 to 1942, the Allies fought for mere survival, while Hitler marched across Europe, impeded only by his belief that he was smarter than his Generals. Eventually, Britain was able to rebuild its forces, sufficiently with the help of American factories, to prevent an Invasion of the Island Nation. But it was the mobilization of American factories to sell technology in mass, but inferior to German technologies that allowed America the later ability to mobilize factory workers and Troops to enter the war.
While Czechoslovakia was given to Hitler on a silver platter by Russia, England, & France, it looks like Taiwan is being served up by the current US Administration. Even if the next Administration demonstrates greater loyalty to the allied island nation, than does this one, there would be a steep catch-up curve for Taiwan to catch up on the arms denied by this Administration. And if China does invade Taiwan, it would be very difficult and cost many American lives to liberate our ally.
Ignoring the Japanese threat allowed them to attack Pearl Harbor, in our own blindness. It wasn't as if we didn't know they were expanding their empire across the Pacific, but we tried to pretend they'd never take on us.
And this head in the sand approach of appeasement is not the only parallel. World War II followed the Great Depression, where Germany's military expansion fueled its economic recovery before America's military expansion in response to World War II finally brought America out of the Depression.
While many politicians have stated that budgetary concerns and economic concerns are the greatest threat to American Security, they've failed to notice that in the US in the 1980's, the 1950's and the 1940's as well as 1930's Japanese and German economies that it was building and rebuilding the military that pulled economies out of recessions and depressions. They've failed to admit that cutbacks to the military in the 1920's, 1930's, 1940's, 1970's and 1990's were followed by not only economic setbacks, but wars by Nations that did build their militaries and recovered first.
The Chinese economic boom has also been mirrored by its 15 years of military growth, just as Germany's economic recovery and Japan's economic expansion in the 1930's ran parallel to their military buildup.
The cuts to the military in 1970's mirrored the economic decline of the United States while "cashing in the peace dividend" in the 1920's and 1990's brought a short boom, before economic crashes of 1929 and 2008, and the attacks on Pearl Harbor in 1941 and the World Trade Center in 2001. But whereas the United States mobilized its factories in the 1940's, in the first decade of the 21st Century, the small increase in military spending was far below the percentage GDP expenditures of the 1980's that brought us out of the 1970's depression. It stabilized the economy, but did not produce rapid growth.
Since 2009, the current Administration has cut the modest mobilizations of US industry in defense technologies. Cutting the F-22 program alone cost 100,000 civilian jobs. It has since cut the F-35 program, which it previously claimed meant we didn't need the F-22 program. It has scrapped ships still being built costing more jobs. And it is currently implementing its plan to cut 49,000 Troops. It should be no surprise that unemployment continues to be above 9%, and we can expect that Veteran unemployment will rise, as more Troops are put on the streets, while the Administration attempts to produce incentives to employ them.
And unlike the 1930's, when America was a rising industrial power, today, America is overwhelmingly a service economy, while China is the rising industrial power. While the United States could tap into its 10% of unemployed workers to develop an industrial base, 90% of America's economy is in the service industry. We no longer have factories ready to be converted to military production. Those factories have been moved to China. Americans no longer produce light bulbs or jeans and the recovery of the car industry is more of a factor of Japan's factories suffering an earthquake than the majority of the US Auto Industry being bought by the US Government and then given to the Union or sold to the Italians.
When politicians outlawed the American filament light bulb, General Electric cashed in by shutting down its US factories and building the new factories closer to the mines, in China, that produced the hazardous materials that end up in American landfills as a result of the new Chinese monopoly the legislation created. As a result, Americans pay several dollars for what used to cost pennies, while the Chinese government collects ever more US dollars to loan the politicians to buy more Chinese goods.
These parallels do not categorically prove that military spending is the "secret" to economic recovery, but if a Nation cannot defend its beans, it becomes a lucrative target for those that have the bullets to take those beans away. And those parallels of rising military and economic powers of the 1930's attempting to overwhelm their neighbors should not be ignored in the 2010's.
Those who fail to learn from History are doomed to repeat it.
If Americans don't wake up to these parallels of History, we will suffer. We cannot afford to ignore the threat of China as a growing economic, military, and debt holder power. We cannot afford to appease China's lust for Taiwan. It doesn't mean we should start a war with China, but it does mean that we must be able to defend ourselves if they decide to attack us.
If you want peace, prepare for war.
The wars, so far, of the 21st Century have been counter-insurgency, because there was no force that could fight us force on force. Neither the US nor Soviets could have won a Nuclear War and no Army thought it could defeat the US Military. When tyrants and dictators come to a different conclusion, they will become more prone to invading their neighbors, believing the US will stay out of the conflict, or that they could defeat us if we didn't, but the biggest threat will be China, should they choose to be.
Stumble It!
