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 Wednesday, April 13, 2005

China Raising Military Stakes to ALTER Regional Balace of Power

  by

Edward Cody

Read here full article " China Builds a Smaller, Stronger Military" in Washington Post

April 12, 2005

Edited article

A top-to-bottom modernization is transforming the Chinese military, raising the stakes for U.S. forces long dominant in the Pacific.

Several programs to improve China's armed forces could soon produce:

  • a stronger nuclear deterrent against the United States,

  • soldiers better trained to use high-technology weapons, and

  • more effective cruise and anti-ship missiles for use in the waters around Taiwan.

    President Bush and his senior aides, including Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Director of Central Intelligence Porter J. Goss, have expressed concern over the recent pace of China's military progress and its effect on the regional balance of power.

    Chinese leaders have sought to field enough modern weaponry to ensure that any U.S. decision to intervene again would be painful and fraught with risk.

    As far as is known, China's military has not come up with a weapon system that suddenly changes the equation in the Taiwan Strait or surrounding waters where Japanese and U.S. forces deploy.

  • China has been trying to update its military for more than two decades, seeking to push the low-tech, manpower-heavy force it calls a people's army into the 21st-century world of computers, satellites and electronic weapons.

    U.S. and Taiwanese military officials pointed in particular to China's rapid development of cruise and other anti-ship missiles designed to pierce the electronic defenses of U.S. vessels that might be dispatched to the Taiwan Strait in case of conflict.

    The Chinese navy has taken delivery of two Russian-built Sovremenny-class guided missile destroyers and has six more on order, equipped with Sunburn missiles able to skim 4 1/2 feet above the water at a speed of Mach 2.5 to evade radar.




    Sovremenny-class Destroyers

    In addition, it has contracted with Russia to buy eight Kilo-class diesel submarines that carry Club anti-ship missiles with a range of 145 miles.



    Kilo-Class Submarine

    "These systems will present significant challenges in the event of a U.S. naval force response to a Taiwan crisis," Vice Adm. Lowell E. Jacoby, director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, told the Senate Armed Services Committee in testimony March 17.

    The Nuclear Deterrent

    Strategically, China's military is also close to achieving an improved nuclear deterrent against the United States, according to foreign officials and specialists.

    1. The Type 094 nuclear missile submarine, launched last July to replace a trouble-prone Xia-class vessel, can carry 16 intercontinental ballistic missiles. Married with the newly developed Julang-2 missile, which has a range of more than 5,000 miles and the ability to carry independently targeted warheads, the 094 will give China a survivable nuclear deterrent against the continental United States, according to "Modernizing China's Military," a study by David Shambaugh of George Washington University.

    2. In addition, the Dongfeng-31 solid-fuel mobile ballistic missile, a three-stage, land-based equivalent of the Julang-2, has been deployed in recent years to augment the approximately 20 Dongfeng-5 liquid-fuel missiles already in service, according to academic specialists citing U.S. intelligence reports.

    It will be joined in coming years by an 8,000-mileDongfeng-41, putting the entire United States within range of land-based Chinese ICBMs as well. "The main purpose of that is not to attack the United States" Lin said. " The main purpose is to throw a monkey wrench into the decision-making process in Washington, to make the Americans think, and think again, about intervening in Taiwan, and by then the Chinese have moved in."

    With a $1.3 trillion economy growing at more than 9 percent a year, China has acquired more than enough wealth to make these investments in a modern military.

    The announced defense budget has risen by double digits in most recent years. For 2005, it jumped 12.6 percent to hit nearly $30 billion.

    The Pentagon estimates that real military expenditures, including weapons acquisitions and research tucked into other budgets, should be calculated at two or three times the announced figure.

    That would make China's defense expenditures among the world's largest, but still far behind the $400 billion budgeted this year by the United States.

    Taiwan has long been at the center of this growth in military spending; one of the military's chief missions is to project a threat of force should Taiwan's rulers take steps toward formal independence.

    The 2nd Artillery Corps has deployed more than 600 short-range ballistic missiles aimed at Taiwan from southeastern China's Fujian and Jiangxi provinces, according to Taiwan's deputy defense minister, Michael M. Tsai. Medium-range missiles have also been developed.

    Much of China's modernization campaign is directed at acquiring weapons and support systems that would give it air and sea superiority in any conflict over the 100-mile-wide Taiwan Strait.

    According to foreign specialists and Chinese commentators, China's navy and air force have set out to project power in the South China Sea, where several islands are under dispute and vital oil supplies pass through, and in the East China Sea, where China and Japan are at loggerheads over mineral rights and several contested islands.

    China has acquired signals-monitoring facilities on Burma's Coco Islands and, according to U.S. reports, at a port it is building in cooperation with Pakistan near the Iranian border at Gwadar, which looks out over tankers exiting the Persian Gulf.

    According to a report prepared for Rumsfeld's office, China has developed a "string of pearls" strategy, seeking military-related agreements with Bangladesh, Cambodia and Thailand in addition to those with Burma and Pakistan.

    Unifying Taiwan with the mainland has become more than just a nationalist goal. The 13,500-square-mile territory has also become a platform that China needs to protect southern sea lanes, through which pass 80 percent of its imported oil and tons of other imported raw materials.

    It could serve as a base for Chinese submarines to have unfettered access to the deep Pacific, according to Tsai, Taiwan's deputy defense minister. "Taiwan for them now is a strategic must and no longer just a sacred mission," Lin said.

    China's amphibious forces had the ability to move across the strait only one armored division -- about 12,000 men with their vehicles. That would be enough to occupy an outlying Taiwanese island as a gesture, they said, but not to seize the main island.

    If a conflict arose, they would expect a graduated campaign of high-tech pinpoint attacks, including cruise missile strikes on key government offices or computer sabotage, designed to force the leadership in Taipei to negotiate short of all-out war.

    The 1996 crisis, when China test-fired missiles off the coast, cost the Taiwanese economy $20 billion in lost business and mobilization expenses, a senior security official recalled.

    High-Tech Emphasis

    A key facet of China's military modernization has been a reduction in personnel and an intensive effort to better train and equip the soldiers.

    Premier Wen Jiabao told the National People's Congress last month that his government would soon complete a 200,000-soldier reduction that has been underway since 2003. That would leave about 2.3 million troops in the Chinese military, making it still the world's biggest, according to a report issued recently by the Defense Ministry.

    Air Superiority

    The air force has acquired from Russia more than 250 Sukhoi Su-27 single-role and Su-30 all-weather, multi-role fighter planes.


    The Pentagon has forecast that the air force will field about 2,000 warplanes by 2020, of which about 150 will be fourth-generation craft equipped with sophisticated avionics.

    Many of China's Su-27s have spent most of the time on the ground for lack of maintenance.

    China has remained at the beginning stages of its effort to acquire the equipment and skills necessary for midair refueling, space-based information systems, and airborne reconnaissance and battle management platforms.

    Chinese pilots (have) started training on refueling and airborne battle management several years ago, but so far have neither the equipment nor the technique to integrate such operations into their order of battle.

    Similarly, China has been testing use of Global Positioning System devices to guide its cruise missiles but remains some time away from deploying such technology.

    Buying such electronic equipment would be China's most likely objective if the European Union goes ahead with plans to lift its arms sales embargo despite objections from Washington.

    A Chinese effort to acquire Israel's Phalcon airborne radar system was stymied in 2000 when the United States prevailed on Israel to back out of the $1 billion deal.


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