A Chinese Diplomatic Insult

I don't know of another way to take it:

China’s military conducted [the first] test flight of a new stealth fighter jet on Tuesday, overshadowing an important visit to Beijing by Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates aimed at improving defense ties — and apparently catching China’s civilian leadership off guard.

I don't buy the line that China's political leadership didn't know of the test.

It's a pretty calculated slap in the face. I sure hope the war planners have a god handle on how to conduct a war with China out over the western Pacific, or I am not at all optimistic that one can be avoided. I suspect that the Chinese military is spoiling for a fight within the next two decades.

Which is why this article on Avleak was pretty interesting. In a fight where the U.S. inflicts a 6-1 loss ration on the Chinese, the Chinese still win. The Chinese have the capability to launch enough fighters, including old Mig-21s, to soak up every missile that would be fired by the projected force of F-22s and F-35s.

Don't expect much help from the Navy's missile ships in that regard. One of the unspoken drawbacks of the vertical-launch system over the old "one-arm" or "two-arm" bandit launchers is that the VLS ships have to be pierside in order to reload their missiles and, if I remember correctly, the pier had better have a good-sized crane. The older missile ships could, if necessary, be at least partially reloaded at sea, though it probably wouldn't have been very pretty to watch.

It's an oft-repeated maxim that "quantity has a quality of its own." It works something like this:



It doesn't matter how good you are or how sophisticated your weapons are; if you run out of rounds and the enemy is still coming at you, you're screwed.

I do think that China will manufacture a cause for war sometime down the road. Whether over its claims to oil deposits far off its coast or an invasion of Taiwan, China wants this fight to push the Americans out of the western Pacific. I do not think that we can pretend otherwise. So the question becomes are we willing to see it through or are we going to slowly backwater and leave eastern Asia to become under the de facto control of China.

This isn't about just us. Besides claiming Taiwan, China also claims territory now controlled by India, Russia, Vietnam, Japan and the Philippines. If China thinks that they can push the Americans away, there will be nothing really to stop them from asserting their ancient claims. They haven't forgotten that the Vietnamese pretty much kicked their asses in `79.

The Chinese forget no sleight, no mater how trivial it may seem to us. That may be one of the reasons why they seem to be so interesting in eventually picking a fight.

One would hope that rationality would prevail. China has not fought a major war at sea in hundreds of years and by the timeframe that I have in mind, it will have been eighty years since our last naval war. Nothing is certain in war and, in a war between two nuclear-armed nations, things can spiral out of control pretty quickly (that fear kept a war with the Soviet Union from ever breaking out).

But rationality rarely seems to prevail. History is replete with wars that began when one side thought they could gain an advantage by resorting to force of arms. History also shows that much of the time, the gain is not worth the cost. History also shows that while it takes two parties to maintain a peace, only one side need decide to start a war.

For our part, we had better keep in mind that we have potential adversaries on the horizon who fighters are not functionally illiterate sandal-wearing guerrillas. We might have to take on an adversary who has far more sophisticated weaponry than Kalashnikovs. That is not a fight that we can afford to learn on the fly.

(H/T)