China is Stirring: Why Now?

[vector7]

Monday, January 21, 2013
China? Now??

John Xenakis reports on Breitbart that China's general staff has issued orders to the PLA to prepare for war. They point out that the document uses the specific word for war that means "real, shooting war", not struggle, or "war on poverty" type of "moral equivalent of war".

Although past directives have directed soldiers to be prepared in case of war, this year's directive, for the first time, uses the Chinese word "dazhang," which means "fighting war," and uses it 10 times in the 1000 word directive.

To be plain spoken about it, they don't believe the US would do anything:

Dai Xu, a Chinese Air Force Colonel, is arguing for a short, decisive war with one of China's neighbors--Vietnam, the Philippines, or Japan--in order to establish sovereignty over the Pacific region without risking war with the United States. This is the "kill a chicken to scare the monkeys" philosophy.

The colonel continues

Since we have decided that the U.S. is bluffing in the East China Sea, we should take this opportunity to respond to these empty provocations with something real.

This includes Vietnam, the Philippines and Japan, who are the three running dogs of the United States in Asia. We only need to kill one, and it will immediately bring the others to heel.

International diplomacy ebbs and flows with time. The author is from GenerationalDynamics.com, an organization that specializes in studies of these sorta-cyclical ebbs and flows, like Kondratiev cycles or Elliott waves. He gives this little piece of generational philosophy:

China's 1962 border clash with India did not lead to a wider war because the countries were in a generational Awakening era; with both countries being run by survivors of World War II and, respectively, Mao's Communist Revolution civil war and the bloody Hindu/Muslim war that followed Partition. Each of these wars were extremely brutal, creating tens or hundreds of thousands of casualties and refugees, and no one who survived either of those wars would ever allow it to happen again.

Today, China, India, and America are in generational Crisis eras. The survivors of World War II are all gone. Today's leaders have had an easy life, where their worst crisis was a sex scandal. They have no personal memory of the horrors of WW II, and the Gen-Xers think that any older generation who even talks about it is completely full of crap.

In summary, they have no idea how ugly war can be. They think hardship is when cellphone service is down, or they have to wait 30 minutes for Domino's to deliver. What's wrong with a little war to stir things up and get the Chinese century going for real?

I've had conversations with Gen-Xers along those lines. They do, indeed, think any comparisons to the past are stupid. If I try to tell my own son that the US is more divided than at any time since about 1859, and civil war seems to be a real possibility, I can tell he thinks I'm the "right wing extremist" the feds have been warning him about. Well, he got that part right...




You should go read Xenakis' whole piece, and how he predicts things could go.

[vector7]

Some are starting to wake up...a little too late.

January 21, 2013, 5:41 pm18 Comments
China’s Focus on Aerospace Raises Security Questions

By KEITH BRADSHER

Sim Chi Yin for The New York TimesA worker in an Airbus facility in Tianjin, China, that completes four planes a month, mostly for state-run carriers.

TIANJIN, China — When Airbus executives arrived here seven years ago scouting for a location to assemble passenger jets, the broad, flat expanse next to Tianjin Binhai International Airport was a grassy field.

Now, Airbus, the European aerospace giant, has 20 large buildings and is churning out four A320 jetliners a month for mostly Chinese state-controlled carriers. The company also has two new neighbors — a sprawling rocket factory and a helicopter manufacturing complex — both producing for the Chinese military.

The rapid expansion of civilian and military aerospace manufacturing in Tianjin reflects China’s broader ambitions.

As Beijing’s leaders try to find new ways to invest $3 trillion of foreign reserves, the country has been aggressively expanding in industries with strong economic potential. The Chinese government and state-owned companies have already made a major push into financial services and natural resources, acquiring stakes in Morgan Stanley and Blackstone and buying oil and gas fields around the world.

Aerospace represents the latest frontier for China, which is eyeing parts manufacturers, materials producers, leasing businesses, cargo airlines and airport operators. The country now rivals the United States as a market for civilian airliners, which China hopes to start supplying from domestic production. And the new leadership named at the Party Congress in November has publicly emphasized long-range missiles and other aerospace programs in its push for military modernization.

If Boeing’s difficulties with its recently grounded aircraft, the Dreamliner, weigh on the industry, it could create opportunity. Chinese companies, which have plenty of capital, have been welcomed by some American companies as a way to create jobs. Wall Street has been eager, too, at a time when other merger activity has been weak.

Washington is trying to figure out what to do about China’s deal-making broadly. “Many of these transactions raise important security issues for our country,” said Michael R. Wessel, a member of the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, which was created by Congress to monitor the bilateral relationship. “China’s interest in promoting these investments isn’t necessarily consistent with our own interests, and it’s appropriate to thoroughly examine the transactions.”

In aerospace, the Chinese deal-makers have deep ties to the military, raising additional issues for American regulators. The main contractor for the country’s air force, the state-owned China Aviation Industry Corporation, known as Avic, has set up a private equity fund to purchase companies with so-called dual-use technology that has civilian and military applications, with the goal of investing as much as $3 billion. In 2010, Avic acquired the overseas licensing rights for small aircraft made by Epic Aircraft of Bend, Ore., using lightweight yet strong carbon-fiber composites — the same material used for high-performance fighter jets.

Provincial and local government agencies in Shaanxi Province, a hub of Chinese military aircraft testing and production, have set up another fund of similar size for acquisitions. Last month, a consortium of Chinese investors, including the Shaanxi fund, struck a $4.23 billion deal with the American International Group to buy 80 percent of the International Lease Finance Corporation, which owns the world’s second-largest passenger jet fleet.

“There has always been an obvious cross-fertilization of ideas, expertise and money between the civilian and military,” said Martin Craigs, a longtime aerospace executive in Asia who is now the chairman of the Aerospace Forum Asia, a nonprofit group in Hong Kong. He added that Chinese companies had been actively hiring senior American and European aerospace engineers, so national security concerns could be quelled some by hiring the right people.

The push into aerospace coincides with growing worries in the West and across Asia about China’s increasingly assertive territorial claims, including the dispatch of Chinese warships to waters long patrolled by Japan, the Philippines and Vietnam.

Coincidentally, hours after the A.I.G. deal was announced, two Chinese navy destroyers and two frigates showed up in disputed waters patrolled by Japan. China and Japan have stepped up public criticisms of each other since. And the Obama administration has begun a strategic “pivot,” shifting military forces from the Mideast back to the western Pacific, a move that Chinese officials have criticized as an attempt to contain their country.
Such confrontations in the region are drawing attention to China’s deal-making ambitions.

In October, a $1.79 billion bid by a business linked to Beijing’s municipal government to acquire the corporate jet and propeller plane operations of bankrupt Hawker Beechcraft in Wichita, Kan., fell apart over national security concerns in Washington. Executives found it hard to disentangle the civilian operations from the company’s military contracting business.

But many aerospace experts predict that Chinese investors and companies will find ways to appease American regulators. “There will be concerns undoubtedly and generally quite valid, but the commercial imperatives are such that people will find a way around them,” said Peter Harbison, the chairman of CAPA-Center for Aviation, a global aerospace consulting firm.

The sale of A.I.G.’s leasing business is expected to face scrutiny by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, the government panel that reviews the national security implications of deals involving foreign buyers.

The group’s customers include many of the largest carriers in the United States, and the federal government has long counted on being able to use civilian passenger jets to transport troops overseas during a national emergency. When Saddam Hussein sent the Iraqi army into Kuwait in 1990, the Defense Department relied on the emergency mobilization of civilian jetliners to ferry 60 percent of the soldiers sent to and from the Mideast during the first Persian Gulf war and a quarter of the cargo, according to a RAND study.

Henri Courpron, the chief executive of A.I.G.’s International Lease Finance Corporation, said that he did not believe the United States should be concerned that the acquisition would prevent civilian aircraft from being available in a future crisis. Only 8 percent of the company’s aircraft are currently leased to American air carriers, and most of these are narrow-body aircraft that lack the range to ferry troops across oceans.

“It’s really a nonissue — we have 900-plus aircraft in our fleet, and there are only 11 wide bodies” currently being leased to American carriers, he said in a telephone interview. He added that the carriers have control over the aircraft during the leases. Executives from the consortium buying the stake in the leasing company declined repeated requests for interviews.

Chinese suitors in the aerospace industry understand the concerns. In part, they watched the experience in the natural resources industry. The China National Offshore Oil Corporation failed in its 2005 bid to acquire Unocal after intense political opposition. After that, Chinese energy giants have been more cautious, pursuing minority stakes in the United States and limiting their outright acquisitions.

Chinese companies are taking a similar tack in aerospace, pursuing joint ventures and technical cooperation agreements alongside acquisitions. For example, Avic is working with General Electric and other American aerospace companies on the production of a civilian jetliner, the C919. Beijing envisions the narrow-body C919 as the next step toward building a domestic aerospace business that can compete with Boeing and Airbus.

Western companies and their advisers say that they are acutely aware that technology transfers could help China strengthen its military and develop more competitive civil airplanes, and are taking precautions to protect trade secrets and national security. “You transfer the part that is most easily reverse engineered, or easily dissected,” said a lawyer with detailed knowledge of these transactions.

But many in the aerospace sector are more skeptical that the West can avoid losing control of technology. “The mentality is, they’re going to find a way to get there anyway, and we may as well get there with them,” Mr. Harbison of the CAPA-Center for Aviation said.

Airbus executives say that they are being prudent. They add that there are few trade secrets about the A320 manufactured here, an aircraft that was designed in 1986. “The A320 is well known all over the world,” said Jean-Luc Charles, the general manager of Airbus’s operations here.

A tour of the main assembly area, a hangar with gray steel walls and large red cranes overhead, suggests that it may be possible to protect the technology. The seats are installed here and the aircraft painted, but the factory is largely assembling planes from kits imported from Europe. Entire fuselages, with green protective coatings, are brought by ship from Hamburg, Germany. Even the stepladders and freight elevators give weight limits in German, and the tool boxes are labeled in English, not Chinese.

Mr. Charles said that 95 percent of the parts are still imported, and that it would take many years for that amount to shrink. “One by one, we start to give them the parts,” he said. “But each subassembly is a complex project — it takes five years.”



Sim Chi Yin for The New York TimesAn Airbus A320 nears completion in Tianjin. China now rivals the United States as a market for civilian aircraft and is pushing to increase its domestic production.

A version of this article appeared in print on 01/22/2013, on page B1 of the NewYork edition with the headline: China Looks to the Sky.

[vector7]

Did China Test its “Carrier-Killer?”

By Harry Kazianis

January 24, 2013



Want China Times is reporting that China may have tested its new anti-ship ballistic missile (ASBM), the DF-21D.

The DF-21D, sometimes referred to as a "carrier-killer," is fired from a mobile truck-mounted launcher into the atmosphere, with assistance from over-the-horizon radar, satellite tracking and possibly unmanned aerial vehicles where a warhead is delivered to its target at a speed greater than sound.

Want China Times explains:

"The People's Liberation Army has successfully sunk a U.S. aircraft carrier, according to a satellite photo provided by Google Earth, reports our sister paper Want Daily — though the strike was a war game, the carrier a mock-up platform and the "sinking" occurred on dry land in a remote part of western China.

Satellite images revealed two large craters on a 200-meter-long white platform in the Gobi desert used to simulate the flight deck of an aircraft carrier. The photo was first posted on SAORBATS, an internet forum based in Argentina. Military analysts believed the craters would have been created by China's DF-21D anti-ship missile, dubbed the "carrier killer."

If such reports are accurate, this would be another step towards developing a weapons system that could tip the balance of power in the Asia-Pacific in China’s favor.

A logical next step would be for China to test the weapon against a moving vessel at sea as opposed to a stationary target on land.

China's new missile would also need to be tested against an uncooperative target. Such a weapon would face various challenges to hitting a vessel in the open ocean. As defense analyst Roger Cliff explained in an interview with The Diplomat:

"The thing to keep in mind is that, in order for China to successfully attack a U.S. navy ship with a ballistic missile, it must first detect the ship, identify it as a U.S. warship of a type that it wishes to attack (e.g., an aircraft carrier), acquire a precise enough measurement of its location that a missile can be launched at it (i.e., a one-hour old satellite photograph is probably useless, as the ship could be 25 miles away from where it was when the picture was taken), and then provide mid-course updates to the missile. Finally, the warhead must lock onto and home in on the ship."

In terms of countermeasures and ways to defeat the missile, Cliff also explained the U.S. had a number of options, although some measures may be difficult to employ:

"…over-the-horizon radars used to detect ships can be jammed, spoofed, or destroyed; smoke and other obscurants can be deployed when an imagery satellite, which follows a predictable orbit, is passing over a formation of ships; the mid-course updates can be jammed; and when the missile locks on to the target its seeker can be jammed or spoofed. Actually intercepting the missile is probably the most difficult thing to do. The SM-3 has an exoatmospheric kill vehicle, meaning that it can only intercept the missile during mid-course, when it’s traveling through space, so an Aegis ship escorting the target would have to fire its SM-3 almost immediately in order to intercept the missile before it reentered the atmosphere, or else there would have to be an Aegis ship positioned right under the flight path of the missile. The DF-21D may be equipped with decoys that are deployed in mid-course, making the SM-3’s job harder. U.S. Aegis ships are also equipped with the SM-2 Block 4 missile, which is capable of intercepting missiles within the atmosphere, but the DF-21D warhead will be performing some high-G maneuvers, which may make it impossible for the SM-2 Block 4 to successfully intercept it."

China's ASBM was also in the news this week for other reasons.

Inside Defense reports that the Pentagon's testing directorate has stopped publicly raising concerns about the lack of a surrogate missile needed to test defenses against the DF-21D.

Last year the Pentagon’s operational testing chief, J. Michael Gilmore complained that the Department of Defense (DOD) had not been given funding to develop a threat-representative anti-ship ballistic missile (ASBM) target for open-air trials, which Gilmore characterized as an "immediate test-resource need."

Pentagon spokeswoman Jennifer Elzea has confirmed that DOD will no longer be discussing the ASBM target shortfall in public because of security concerns.

"Additional discussion of Anti-Ship Ballistic Missile Target at the unclassified level is not possible at this time," Elzea said, Inside Defense reported.

[vector7]

China Already Has A Plan To Sink The US Fleet In Any Upcoming Battles

January 23, 2013

Robert Johnson
Businessinsider

As the U.S. makes clear it will defend Japan should China try and lay claim to the Senkaku Islands in the East China Sea, this Chinese announcement from mid-2012 offers additional perspective. Once the U.S. announced it’s turning attention from the Middle East and directing military assets to the Pacific, it didn’t take long for China to make clear how it would handle what it saw as a new regional threat.



The Economic Times reported China promptly increased its conventional missile capability to carry out multiple launches, from multiple sites —a tactic that could overwhelm a Navy ship’s defenses and cripple its abilities. Tan Weihong, Commander of China’s Second Artillery Force said, “Conventional missiles are a trump card in modern warfare. So we must be ready at any time.

We must be able to deliver a quick response to attacks, hit the targets with high accuracy, and destroy them totally. Of the 114 missiles [our brigade] has launched so far, all have accurately hit the target.“ For each incoming missile a U.S. Navy ship will have to perform some variation of the following actions: First it will launch a long-range air defense missile, like a SM-2ER.

If that fails, then a shorter range missile like the ESSM (Evolved Sea Sparrow Missile) will go out — then the ship’s main deck guns will fire anti-air rounds with fused airburst shells.

Surviving missiles will be engaged by close-in weapons systems like the Mk-15 Phalanx or the RAM (Rolling Airframe Missile).

Any incoming missiles struck by these systems will be so close, and moving so fast, that incoming shrapnel and debris would likely be unavoidable.

While all these “Hard Kill” options are going on, the ship’s electronic warfare systems will have been trying to jam the incoming missile, offering the missile a false target, while firing off chaff (for radar guided weapons) and flares (for infrared guided weapons). All that for every single missile, so if China can send off several at once directed at the same ship, the chances of success on their part may increase exponentially.

China would launch its ordnance both from shore and its new Aegis type 052 Luhu-class destroyers. This battle plan is especially relevant given the developments in the area over the past few days, which I’ll address in a following post.

[American Patriot]

yep, its too late and truthfully, why would the Fleet stand up to them if ordered to stand down?


Another General was forced to step down today.

[MinutemanCO]

Why would China attack Vietnam? They are communist sympathizers. What exactly would they gain tactically or strategically from this form of military aggression? If they wish to test the determination of the US then an easy call would be a major offensive against Taiwan. Then again, if any single entity, China would epitomize unpredictability.

[MinutemanCO]

From the hip... I would find it hard to believe that Obama would provide security in any way but superficially for Japan. Our aging alliances mean absolutely nothing to him. I am more and more of the belief that the current presidential administration and all those pulling the strings are seriously aligned with the larger, global communist infrastructure. It's the only possible way they could have projected such incredible momentum at home. With this paradigm in sight, everything changes.

[vector7]

Inside China: War hysteria blamed on U.S.

By Miles Yu

Wednesday, January 23, 2013

Xi Jinping

War hysteria in China has not been this screechy since the 1970s.

The newly appointed supreme leader President Xi Jinping has completely revamped the command structure of the People’s Liberation Army and given the world’s largest military force a central mission: get ready for a war, quickly.

Much of China’s call to arms is related to Beijing’s increasingly unyielding stance on many of its territorial disputes with neighbors, and China has disputes with almost all of them.

Some of the more-tense discord is with China’s maritime neighbors, including Japan, the Philippines, South Korea, Taiwan and Vietnam.

As the clouds of war appear to be gathering ominously over China’s various territorial disputes, China has one arch enemy in mind: the United States.

The official communist newspaper, The Global Times, accused Washington of an “insidious strategic plot to make trouble for the Chinese-Japanese relations” in the conflict over the Diaoyudao islands, which Japan also claims and calls the Senkaku islands.

“Under the direct control by the United States, right-wing forces in Japan are using the dispute to challenge China’s sovereignty, and other countries such as the Philippines in the South China Sea region, are provoking us and acting ridiculously,” the newspaper said last week in an unusually harsh commentary stated.

“We must be clear that the United States never wants China to be strong. The U.S. is changing China from a peaceful competitor to a Soviet Union-like Cold War-era enemy.”

The article stopped short of calling for a direct war with the United States, but it warned that “China must be prepared for war; speed up economic and military preparations required of a military struggle; speed up our nuclear second-strike capabilities; and actively develop overseas strategic and military support bases.”

Last Friday, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton met with Japan’s Foreign Minister Fumio Kishida in Washington and reiterated the U.S. policy of neutrality in China’s territorial dispute with Japan.

“Although the United States does not take a position on the ultimate sovereignty of the islands, we acknowledge they are under the administration of Japan,” she said.

“We oppose any unilateral actions that would seek to undermine Japanese administration, and we urge all parties to take steps to prevent incidents and manage disagreements through peaceful means. … Our alliance with Japan remains the cornerstone of American engagement with the region.”

In response to Mrs. Clinton’s remarks, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Qin Gang registered his government’s “strong dissatisfaction and resolute objection.”

“The United States bears a historical responsibility that it cannot deny over the Diaoyudao problem,” said the government spokesman, without elaborating.

“These statements [by Mrs. Clinton] are without factual support and without regard to the right and the wrong.”

Propaganda on the Internet

More than 540 million people currently use the Internet in China, but there are also millions of Internet-based “opinion-guiding” agents employed by the Chinese government to control and censor every single Internet forum and portal.

Secretly in the employment of the Chinese government, these censors officially are called “Internet commentators” but popularly known as the “50-Cents Party.” The nickname can be traced to October 2004 when the Hunan provincial Community Party Propaganda Department pioneered the system of paying 50 cents in Chinese yuan per posting to Internet agents hired specifically to write postings that seek to counter every piece the government dislikes.

Based on the Hunan model in 2007, then-Communist Party General Secretary Hu Jintao issued a directive in creating a massive “Internet commentator army” made up of “comrades who are ideologically resolute, skilled in Internet technology and familiar with the approach and language of the common Internet users.” The job of the agents is to “guide public opinions expressed on the Internet.”

Since then, these diligent 50-Cents Party members have proliferated by the millions at every Internet portal in China’s vast cyberspace, scanning and searching, incognito, for any “negative opinions” to counter. The postings are designs to appear as spontaneous, individual responses.

In reality, these 50-Cents Party members are under the control of Communist Party propaganda apparatus at all levels of government.

In Beijing alone, 1 in 10 residents in the capital city of 20 million are “propaganda workers,” according to the city’s vice mayor and municipal party propaganda chief Lu Wei, who spoke at a Propaganda Workers’ Conference on Jan. 17.

He disclosed that 60,000 professional “propaganda workers” are directly in the employed by the city government and more than 2 million informal collaborators work as the city’s propaganda team, most of them on university campuses and youth-oriented organizations that are most likely Internet-based.

At the conference, the Beijing propaganda chief ordered his propaganda army troops to master the Internet posting skills “in order to create positive energy” by posting Twitter-like messages exalting the Communist Party’s image and achievement, providing “opinion-guidance” on “hot topics” such as corruption, housing, and inequality.

[vector7]

PLA; plan, fight, and win wars is an ominous sign ★China’s New Militancy

Posted on 02. Şub, 2013 by qrw_@ in ARCHIVE, FORCES, GEOPOLITICS, STRATEGY, STRUCTURE

EAST ASIAREGION SECURITYTOPIC

January 31, 2013

By Gordon G. Chang

Chinese leaders’ repeated calls for the PLA to be ready to plan, fight, and win wars is an ominous sign.



“We will show the courage to try and resolve our differences with other nations peacefully—not because we are naïve about the dangers we face, but because engagement can more durably lift suspicion and fear,”President Obama said in his second inaugural address.

How exactly does the international community “engage” hostile states? Take China, for instance.

Xi Jinping, named Communist Party general secretary in November, reflects a new militancy.

On Tuesday, he delivered a hard-edged speech to the Politburo in which he effectively ruled out compromise on territorial and security issues. His tough words were in keeping with the ever-more strident tones of his messages to the People’s Liberation Army about being ready to plan, fight, and win wars. Chinese leaders have traditionally addressed the army and urged improvement in general readiness, but, as veteran China watcher Willy Lam notes, Xi has put a special emphasis on it. Moreover, his calls on preparing for conflict go well beyond those of his two predecessors, Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao.

In the past, the military’s war talk contrasted with soothing words from senior civilian leaders. Now, with Xi, the aggressive comments from flag officers are consistent with what he, as top leader, is saying. Worse, as the Financial Times notes, Xi’s words of war are now “being bundled” with his rhetoric, which seems calculated to “fan nationalism.”

In this environment, Chinese military officers can get away with advocating “short, sharp wars” and talking about the need to “strike first.” Their boldness suggests, as some privately say, that General Secretary Xi is associating with generals and admirals who think war with the U.S. might be a good idea.

China looks like it is taking one of its periodic wrong turns. Is it because Xi Jinping is a nationalist who wants to lead the country down a path of high profile force projection? Or is he succumbing to pressures from elements inside a regime increasingly in disarray?

Most analysts think the People’s Army remains firmly under the control of Beijing’s civilian leaders. Sources, for instance, are increasingly reporting that General Secretary Xi is personally directing Beijing’s provocative intrusions into Japanese water and airspace.

Moreover, Rand’s Scott Harold perceptively notes that Beijing’s civilian leaders can turn off the tough talk from military hawks when it is important for the Party to present a peaceful front, such as when Hu Jintao visited the U.S. in 2011. “All of a sudden, bam, these guys got turned off,” Harold told Reuters, referring to the more talkative officers.

Nonetheless, there are increasing signs of a military breaking free of civilian control. Last year, there were two sets of coup rumors that circulated around China, one in January and the other in March. The stories may not be true, but that’s almost beside the point. These rumors went viral in China not only because they were sensational but also because, for many Chinese citizens, they were credible. They were credible because top leaders had conditioned the Chinese people over the last several years to believe the top brass had assumed a central role in Beijing politics.

Hu Jintao, for instance, inadvertently gave credence to the rumors of the attempted military takeovers by repeatedly issuing public warnings, in the form of pointed reminders, that the People’s Liberation Army is subject to the absolute will of the Party. Xi Jinping has also issued the same warnings during his short tenure as general secretary and as chairman of the Party’s Central Military Commission. By now, there have been too many of these statements to think that the Party at this moment truly “controls the gun.”

In fact, the generals and admirals have squabbling civilian leaders to thank for their growing influence. Beginning about a decade ago, flag officers were drawn into the power struggle between the outgoing Jiang Zemin, who was then trying to linger in the limelight, and Hu Jintao, his successor. Last year, we also witnessed top civilian leaders running to the military as they sought support in their various fights with each other.

For instance, when Bo Xilai, then-Chongqing Party secretary, sent his armed security officers to surround the American consulate in Chengdu last February, he went to Kunming to visit the headquarters of the 14^thGroup Army. His father, Bo Yibo, had established that unit, and analysts naturally speculated that the younger Bo was appealing to its current officers to support his now-failed bid for promotion from the Party’s Politburo to the Politburo’s Standing Committee.

Moreover, in early April, former leader Jiang is rumored to have sat down with military officers beforemeeting with Hu Jintao and other members of the Standing Committee before stripping Bo of his Party positions. When he later met with Hu and the Standing Committee, Jiang did so at the headquarters of the Central Military Commission in Beijing, a powerfully symbolic venue.

And in an even more disturbing sign of the growing role of the military and the erosion of the standing of civilian leaders, “leftists” last year publicly called on the army to intervene in the nation’s politics.

From all outward appearances, the military is already playing an expanded role in policy as well as politics. Senior officers look like they are acting independently of civilian officials, but in any event, they are openly criticizing them and are making pronouncements on areas that were once the exclusive province of diplomats.

The process of remilitarization of politics and policy has gone so far that the People’s Liberation Army could soon become the most powerful faction in the Communist Party, if it is not already. The military has, from all accounts, retained its cohesiveness better than other Party factions, especially Xi’s amorphous Princeling group.

Xi Jinping appears to have no power base to speak of. Jiang Zemin has apparently packed the Standing Committee, the apex of political power in China, and Hu Jintao has picked the Party’s Central Military Commission. So where does that leave Xi? Normally, the general secretary’s faction ends up the most powerful, but his faction—if he has one—is clearly not. Therefore, it makes sense for him to rely on the military to consolidate a shaky position.

There is always constant bargaining when a new Chinese leader takes over, and this is especially true now because the ongoing transition did not start well. In this troubled time, we should not be surprised that the most hardline elements in Beijing look like they are free to say and do what they want.

And perhaps that’s why Chinese leaders talk war and employ bellicose tactics while they try to push China’s borders outward, taking on Japan, India, and all the nations bordering the South China Sea. At the same time, the Chinese navy is seeking to close off that critical body of water, which Beijing political leaders claim as an internal Chinese lake. State media has been hinting since the middle of 2011 that it is China’s “territorial waters.”

Beijing’s expansive territorial claims are perhaps the inevitable result of the Communist Party’s trajectory. As Pentagon consultant Edward Luttwak notes, “Militant nationalism is the only possible substitute for ex-communists who seek to retain power.” So it is natural that Xi Jinping is talking tough and that the military is assuming a frontal role in expanding territory and waters under China’s control.

In these circumstances, the international community is struggling to maintain good relations with Beijing. There is always a renewal of hope when a new Chinese leader shows up on the scene, but do not expect the optimism to last long. If Xi is as good as his word and there will be no compromise on important issues, as he indicated on Tuesday, then he leaves threatened nations little choice but to oppose his country’s expansive claims.

President Obama may think he will be able to craft a nuanced policy of engagement with China, but he will instead end up desperately reacting to a regime on the march.

[vector7]

Chinese MSM Source reports Troop Mobilization – Prepping for Japan War – Troops Active For Several Days In Fujian And Zhejiang – Hostilities Between China And Japan May Be About To Take A Major Turn For The Worse!!

February 11th, 2013
11 7 0 1 63

GOOGLE TRANSLATE:

[NTDTV February 8, 2013 News] the continental network transmission, Fujian and Zhejiang troops for several days active.

Plus before the news that Chinese warships radar has repeatedly aimed at the Japanese ships and planes, therefore, the media have speculated that China may “prepare for war” Diaoyu Islands .

According to friends broke the news: February 3, Nan’an, Fujian Highway 308, artillery units practical exercise for several days.

February 3 to 6, Fujian, Xiamen, Zhangzhou, Huzhou, a large troop movements, and nearly 100 vehicles of various types of military vehicles, armored vehicles, artillery filled the entire road, endless, Xiamen even the scene of a traffic jam 10 kilometers.
In addition, on February 3 in Shiyan, Hubei, a large number of tanks, wheeled military base from Shiyan room counties is delivered to the coastal areas.

Many local residents of the tense situation of some concern.

Prior to this allegation, January 15 and 30, the Chinese navy guided missile frigate, twice the fire control radar lock frigates and ship-borne helicopters of the Japanese Maritime Self-Defense Force, is also considered to enter a combat state.

According to mainland media quoted the “People’s Daily” front-page article claiming that China will not change in point of view on the issue of the Diaoyu Islands , and have to prepare to win the war.

The international media alleged that China has purchased from Russia 239 engine, used in the manufacture of the H-6K.

Combat covering the Diaoyu Islands, in this model, the engine can also be used to manufacture transported -20 transport aircraft purchased.

If the engine assembled, will greatly enhance China’s military power.

Integrated these signs and reports, people have come to a startling conclusion: Day might want to go to war.

According to military experts, the Sino-Japanese war in the Diaoyu Islands, Fujian and Zhejiang provinces, is the most important logistical base.

If the war to expand, at any time, will spread to the provinces of Fujian, Zhejiang. The NTDTV reporter Zhang Tianyu, Li Zhi Far roundup

http://www.ntdtv.com/xtr/gb/2013/02/08/atext845253.html

We don’t know if it merely a coincidence that a story has emerged discussing a Chinese mobilization in response to the ongoing territorial feud with Japan over the Diaoyu/Senkaku islands (and the proximal massive gas field) the very week that China celebrates its new year (and days after news that a Chinese warship was very close to firing on a Japanese destroyer).

We don’t know how much of the story is based in reality, and how much may be propaganda or furthering someone’s agenda.

What we do know is that the source of the story: offshore-based, Falun Gong-affiliated NTDTV has historically been a credible source of information that the China communist party desperately tries to censor, such as breaking the news of the SARS epidemic in 2003 some three weeks before China publicly admitted it.

Its motto is “to bring truthful and uncensored information into and out of China.”


If that is indeed the case, and its story of major troop movements and mobilization of various types of military vehicles and artillery into the Fujian and Zhejian provinces, bordering the East China Sea and closest to the Diaoyu islands, is accurate, then hostilities between China and Japan may be about to take a major turn for the worse.

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-0...zing-war-japan
Fujian and Zhejian provinces highlighted below:
http://www.zerohedge.com/sites/defau...lization_0.jpg
China conducting ‘training drills’ in Pacific – Navy flotilla to demonstrate ‘readiness for mobilization’
http://www.scmp.com/news/china/artic...lunar-new-year
Japan to give patrol boats to Manila amid China tensions
http://www.scmp.com/news/china/artic...tensions-china
Japan May Release Radar Data To Prove China’s Lying About Radar Incident
http://www.brianbrown.net/2013/02/09...adar-incident/

[vector7]

PLA trains to fight Asian enemy allied with English-speaking 'third force'

Scenarios involve fighting Asian enemy allied with America over disputed islands

Minnie Chan minnie.chan@scmp.com


An English-speaking 'third party' surprise scenario was added to a recent military drill to strengthen the air force's real combat response capability. Photo: Xinhua

It could have been just another routine military drill with the pseudo enemy's jets retreating. But then the pilots of the People's Liberation Army were caught off guard by chatter over the radio - in English.

By the time they had figured out that they had to confront a third party, their field command - an early-warning plane - had already been shot down, the PLA Daily reported.

Analysts said the inclusion of an English-speaking third party in PLA drills was aimed at sending a message that the Chinese military is preparing for possible intervention by the United States if China clashes militarily with neighbouring countries over territorial disputes.

The "third party" was a surprise scenario added to the drill to strengthen the air force's real combat response capability, the army newspaper said.

The drill took place early last month. As a battle between the PLA air force and its pseudo opponent, the "blue army", reached its climax, the PLA pilots suddenly heard in English over the radio: "Target on a radial 180.60." Followed by "Roger," the PLA Daily reported.

"Who is that? Why is there a foreign language?" some PLA pilots asked, according to the newspaper.

The shooting down of the "red army" airborne command centre forced its air force land commander to withdraw all fighter jets and change strategy to deal with the crisis, it reported.

"The 'third party force' was another surprise scenario we provisionally added to the drill with the aim of making our training more like real combat," the daily quoted drill director Jing Jianfeng as saying.

Ni Lexiong , the director of the sea power and defence policy research institute at the Shanghai University of Political Science and Law, said: "The 'third party' scenario simulated how the PLA would have to react if it was attacked by both the Japanese army and the US air force.

"The PLA report was also aimed at letting Japan and other Asian countries know that the PLA is prepared for all possible military clashes over territory in the East and South China seas."

Beijing-based naval expert Li Jie said the appearance of a "third party force" would become common in PLA training.

The drill was a good example of the PLA's ability to meet the goal of "being prepared for real combat and for victory" which party chief Xi Jinping had demanded," Li said.

Xi reiterated his call for the army to enhance its fighting capabilities through real combat training after he became chairman of the Central Military Commission in November.

[vector7]

China's escort fleet to join exercise in Pakistan


2013-02-17 08:31:55 GMT
2013-02-17 16:31:55(Beijing Time) Xinhua English


The 14th Chinese naval squad heading for Somali waters will take part in a multi-national exercise in Pakistan in March, military sources said Sunday.
The "Exercise Aman-13" is scheduled to start in the North Arabian Sea on March 4. Aman is an Urdu word meaning "peace".


The fleet, sent by the Chinese People's Liberation Army (PLA) Navy,
departed Saturday from a port in Qingdao of east China's Shandong Province to the Gulf of Aden and Somali waters for escort missions.


The 14th convoy fleet comprises three ships -- the missile destroyer Harbin, the frigate Mianyang and the supply ship Weishanhu -- carrying two helicopters and a 730-strong troop, all from the North China Sea Fleet under the PLA Navy.


Since December 2008, authorized by the United Nations, the Chinese navy has organized 14 fleets to the waters of the Gulf of Aden and Somali waters to escort 5,046 Chinese and foreign ships. More than 50 Chinese and foreign ships have been rescued or assisted during the missions.


http://english.sina.com/china/2013/0217/561903.html

[vector7]

Guess who's coming for Dinner?
The Chinese General who threatened a nuclear strike on U.S. visits Washington this week

Maj. Gen. Zhu Chenghu / du.edu

BY: Bill Gertz
March 4, 2013 7:00 pm

A Chinese general who once threatened to use nuclear weapons against hundreds of U.S. cities will visit the Pentagon this week as part of a U.S.-China military exchange program.

Maj. Gen. Zhu Chenghu, who is head of China’s National Defense University, will take part in a “familiarization exchange,” Maj. Catherine Wilkinson, a Pentagon spokeswoman, told the Free Beacon.

“The delegation will visit Hawaii and D.C.,” she said. “A military delegation from the U.S. Pacific Command will visit China later this year for a reciprocal exchange.”

Zhu will lead a group of 10 senior colonels from all branches of the Chinese military, Wilkinson said. She declined to provide the names of the officers.

Zhu is best known for inflammatory comments made to two foreign news reporters in 2005 when he said China would use nuclear weapons against the United States in any conflict over Taiwan.

A State Department spokesman at the time called the comments “highly irresponsible.”

“If the Americans draw their missiles and position [sic]-guided ammunition onto the target zone on China’s territory, I think we will have to respond with nuclear weapons,” Zhu told reporters for the Financial Times and the Asian edition of the Wall Street Journal, according to their July 14, 2005, editions.

The comments raised questions within the Pentagon about the sincerity of China’s policy of not being the first to use nuclear weapons in a conflict.

Zhu’s comments also were the most explicit statement of Chinese strategic intent since 1995 when another general, Xiong Guangkai, implicitly threatened to use nuclear arms against Los Angeles if the United States defended Taiwan in a conflict.

“If the Americans are determined to interfere … we will be determined to respond,” Zhu said.

“We Chinese will prepare ourselves for the destruction of all of the cities east of Xian [in central China]. Of course the Americans will have to be prepared that hundreds … of cities will be destroyed by the Chinese,” he said.

Then-State Department spokesman Sean McCormack criticized Zhu’s comments as “highly irresponsible.”

“We hope that these are not the views of the Chinese government,” he said. “The United States is not a threat to China. We have a broad and deep relationship in which we try to work closely with the Chinese government on a variety of issues, and I think that the remarks from that one individual are unfortunate.”

Wilkinson said Zhu was speaking personally and that “we agree with Sean McCormack’s response [to reporters] in 2005 that while the remarks are highly irresponsible, we do not believe they reflect the official view of the Chinese government. General Zhu said that they were his personal remarks, not official policy.”

Chinese spokesman later claimed the comments did not reflect official policy. However, the Pentagon’s latest annual report on China’s military stated that China has not clarified its policy.

Sen. James Inhofe (R., Okla.), the ranking member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said Zhu’s visit is an opportunity to learn more about China’s nuclear weapons intentions that “have long been inscrutable to experts in the United States.”

“We do know, as the congressionally mandated U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission reported last year, that ‘China has assumed a more muscular nuclear posture, which ongoing improvements will continue to enhance,’” Inhofe said in a statement to the Free Beacon.

“Before the President reaches out to Russia for yet another round of U.S. nuclear reductions, we should know more about how such reductions will affect the nuclear balance with China,” he said.

Zhu’s comments called into question the stated Chinese policy of not being the first nation to use nuclear weapons in a conflict. Zhu said the no-first-use policy did not apply to nuclear-armed states. He said the policy was limited to nonnuclear states and could be changed.

The Pentagon’s 2012 report to Congress on China’s military stated, “There has been no clarification of the ambiguity regarding the conditions under which China’s [no-first-use] policy might not apply or where conditional nuclear threats might be permissible.”

The 2011 annual report said it is possible that China’s military considers “demonstration [nuclear] strikes, or high altitude [nuclear] bursts” as permissible under its doctrine. It also said it is unclear whether Chinese doctrine allows the use of nuclear weapons in response to a conventional strike that threatened its nuclear forces or the communist regime, as Zhu stated in 2005.

Zhu also is a signatory to the Global Zero anti-nuclear manifesto that became a central issue during the Senate nomination battle over Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel. Hagel helped author a major study for the international anti-nuclear weapons group that called for radical denuclearization, including possibly unilateral U.S. nuclear cuts.

Hagel came under fire from several Republicans who said his nuclear views were outside the mainstream of U.S. national security policy. He sought to distance himself from the Global Zero report but remained one of the group’s signatories, along with Zhu.

Chinese government spokesmen later sought to clarify Zhu’s 2005 remarks as his personal comments.

However, China specialists say no Chinese general would make such personal comments for fear of being fired.

Zhu was neither reprimanded nor fired after the comments, an indication his remarks reflected official military policy.

Wilkinson, the Pentagon spokeswoman, did not respond when asked if officials had reservations about inviting a Chinese general who threatened nuclear strikes against the United States.

However, former State Department official John Tkacik, a China affairs specialist, said Zhu’s comments in 2005 undermined Beijing’s public nuclear policy and was authorized the Central Military Commission, the ultimate power organ in communist-ruled China.

Zhu also was never penalized for the comments and in fact was later promoted, Tkacik said.

“Gen. Zhu’s propensity to threaten nuclear war against adversaries without regard for China’s supposed commitment to ‘no first use,’ his subsequent military promotions and his continued prolixity in China’s official communist party media should be a clear signal to American policy-makers that Chinese state policy is to use nuclear weapons as an instrument of intimidation,” Tkacik said in an email.

Zhu’s visit is part of the Pentagon’s unrestricted military exchange program that critics say has benefited China’s military buildup in the past by providing key warfighting advice, despite congressional restrictions that prohibit the exchange of any information with Chinese military visitors that could undermine U.S. security.

Legislation was passed as part of the 2000 Defense Authorization Act that limited Chinese exchanges to sites and information that did not boost Chinese power projection capabilities or nuclear forces.

However, the Pentagon has largely ignored the law and frequently provided access to sensitive U.S. military facilities, including war game experimentation centers.

The legislation was passed after China learned a key vulnerability of U.S. aircraft carriers during one visit in the late 1990s.

According to defense officials, a Chinese military visitor asked a U.S. Navy officer where the most vulnerable point of a carrier is located. He was told that it underneath the ship near its ammunition magazine.

Months after the disclosure, China was detected by U.S. intelligence agencies purchasing high-technology wake-homing torpedoes from Russia that can dive beneath a ship and strike underneath.

[vector7]

Maybe Obama is looking to outsource.

"We cannot continue to rely only on our military in order to achieve the national security objectives that we've set."
Barack Obama July 2, 2008

[Phil Fiord]

Funny but this is kind of like the movie coming out March 22. Olympus Has Fallen

[American Patriot]

What is quite interesting about this.... no, I won't say it. It's too much conspiracy.

Yes, yes I will. No, maybe not.

Ok.... Obama NEEDS a way to take out certain cities and he needs a partner to do it.

[vector7]

Companion Thread:

• China preparing for armed conflict 'in every direction'
  

China pulls back curtain on expanding massive military might, revealing in defence report it was 1.4 million members



Tom Phillips, The Telegraph | 13/04/17 1:12 PM ET


Feng Li / Getty Images files Delegates from Chinese People's Liberation Army march from Tiananmen Square to the Great Hall of the People to attend a plenary session of the National People's Congress last month.

China has laid bare the scale of its rapidly expanding military might for the first time in a paper that argued that the American “pivot to Asia” was destabilising the region.

China’s People’s Liberation Army, or PLA, has some 850,000 service members spread across seven regional commands, according to the defence report issued Tuesday. The navy and air force have 235,000 and 398,000 service members respectively.

The paper also alludes to China’s powerful Second Artillery Force. Described as “the country’s core force for strategic deterrence,” it oversees China’s nuclear arsenal and is tasked with “deterring other countries from using nuclear weapons against China.”

The total number of service members listed was 1.48 million. In 2006, China said the military had a total of 2.3 million members. It was not clear if the new count represented a real reduction in numbers, or if the shortfall was made up by other ground force units that appeared to have been omitted from the count, including the Second Artillery Force.


Andy Wong / AP files Chinese Army Z-9WZ attack helicopter, designed and manufactured by China, during a demonstration for press at a base of Chinese People's Liberation Army (PLA) Army Aviation 4th Helicopter Regiment, ahead of Army Day on Aug. 1, 2014 on the outskirts of Beijing, China.

Xinhua, the state-run news agency, said the paper represented the first time China had made public “the actual number of army, navy and air force servicemen.” China’s “main missile line-up” was also being divulged for the first time, Xinhua added.

Related

• Chinese military linked to massive hacking operation against high-level U.S. targets, security firm says
• China’s military denies report that details secret cyberspy unit devoted to hacking attacks on U.S.
• North Korea prepares for ‘all-out war’ as China urges calm after nuclear threats

Last year, China said its annual defence budget — now the world’s second largest — would grow to about 65 billion pounds. The report, which contained few specific details of China’s military structure, was emphatic in describing what it said was the country’s commitment to a doctrine of peaceful development. “China will never seek hegemony or behave in a hegemonic manner, nor will it engage in military expansion,” it argued.

The report also attacked President Barack Obama’s so-called “pivot” towards the Asia-Pacific region, suggesting that his policy of boosting the American military footprint there was causing frictions.

“The U.S. is adjusting its Asia-Pacific security strategy and the regional landscape is undergoing profound changes,” it said. “Frequently [this policy] makes the situation there more tense.”

Beijing views the “pivot” — under which 60 per cent of the U.S. navy forces are to be deployed to the region by 2020 — as an attempt to contain China’s rise and block the country’s development. Speaking at the report’s launch in Beijing, Yang Yujun, a defence ministry spokesman, hinted that America’s increasing focus on the region was “not conducive to the upholding of peace and stability.”

“We hope that the relevant parties would do more to enhance the mutual trust between countries in the region and contribute to peace and stability,” Colonel Yang said.


STR / AFP / Getty Images files This photo taken on September 15, 2011 shows a group of Chinese People's Liberation Army (PLA) soldiers learning how to keep their guns steady during training at their base in Luzhou, in southwest China's Sichuan province.

China’s state-run media also carried opinion pieces critical of America’s growing role in Asia. An editorial in the China Daily newspaper argued: “There remain doubts about whether the U.S. will play a constructive role in the region.

“The U.S. needs to ensure that its involvement in Asian affairs contributes to lasting peace and stability in the region. China does not oppose a bigger U.S. role in the Asia-Pacific as long as it acts in a more constructive and responsible way and strives to respect the interests of all countries in the region.”

Xinhua praised the report as a sign of military transparency, although Colonel Yang admitted that there was no such thing as “absolute military transparency.”

[vector7]

Why The Next War With China Could Go Very Badly For The United States

By Michael, on May 28th, 2013



Most Americans assume that the U.S. military is so vastly superior to everyone else that no other nation would ever dream of fighting a full-scale war against us. Unfortunately, that assumption is dead wrong. In recent years, the once mammoth technological gap between the U.S. military and the Chinese military has been closing at a frightening pace. China has been accomplishing this by brazenly stealing our technology and hacking into our computer systems. The Pentagon and the Obama administration know all about this, but they don’t do anything about it. Perhaps the fact that China owns about a trillion dollars of our national debt has something to do with that. In any event, today China has the largest military in the world and the second largest military budget in the world. They have stolen plans for our most advanced jets, helicopters, ships and missile systems. It is estimated that stealing our technology has saved China about 25 years of research and development. In addition, China is rapidly developing a new generation of strategic weapons that could potentially enable it to actually win a future war against the United States. At one time such a notion would have been unthinkable, but as you will see below, the next war with China could go very badly for the United States.

The Washington Post is reporting on a confidential report that was prepared for the Pentagon, and what this report says about the extent of Chinese cyber espionage is absolutely startling. Will China know ALL of our secrets at some point? The following is a brief excerpt from the Washington Post article about the theft of our military technology by China. It turns out that Chinese hackers have gotten their hands on plans for almost all of the new cutting edge weapons systems that we have been developing…

Some of the weapons form the backbone of the Pentagon’s regional missile defense for Asia, Europe and the Persian Gulf. The designs included those for the advanced Patriot missile system, known as PAC-3; an Army system for shooting down ballistic missiles, known as the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense, or THAAD; and the Navy’s Aegis ballistic-missile defense system.

Also identified in the report are vital combat aircraft and ships, including the F/A-18 fighter jet, the V-22 Osprey, the Black Hawk helicopter and the Navy’s new Littoral Combat Ship, which is designed to patrol waters close to shore.

Also on the list is the most expensive weapons system ever built — the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, which is on track to cost about $1.4 trillion.

One military expert that the Washington Post showed the report to was absolutely stunned…

“That’s staggering,” said Mark Stokes, executive director of the Project 2049 Institute, a think tank that focuses on Asia security issues. “These are all very critical weapons systems, critical to our national security. When I hear this in totality, it’s breathtaking.”

The experts said the cybertheft creates three major problems. First, access to advanced U.S. designs gives China an immediate operational edge that could be exploited in a conflict. Second, it accelerates China’s acquisition of advanced military technology and saves billions in development costs. And third, the U.S. designs can be used to benefit China’s own defense industry. There are long-standing suspicions that China’s theft of designs for the F-35 fighter allowed Beijing to develop its version much faster.

But it isn’t just hackers that the U.S. military needs to be concerned about.

The truth is that the Chinese are stealing secrets from us any way that they can.

For example, the Chinese use attractive young women to seduce our defense contractors. In fact, as the Washington Times recently reported, one 59-year-old American man was recently charged with passing very sensitive secrets to a 27-year-old Chinese “honeypot” that he was seeing…

A U.S. defense contractor who works in intelligence at the military’s Pacific Command in Hawaii has been charged with passing classified national security information to a 27-year-old Chinese woman he was dating.

Benjamin Pierce Bishop, 59, is accused of sending the woman an email in May with information on Pacom’s war plans, nuclear weapons and U.S. relations with international partners, according to the complaint filed in U.S. District Court in Honolulu and unsealed Monday.

The complaint goes on to allege that Mr. Bishop told the woman over the telephone in September about the deployment of U.S. nuclear weapons and about the ability of the U.S. to detect other nations’ short- and medium-range ballistic missiles.

Another way that China is gaining a strategic advantage over the U.S. is by getting the U.S. military to become increasingly dependent upon them. According to Forbes, now the U.S. military is even leasing a Chinese satellite for communications purposes…

American dependence on China grows by the day. The latest news is that the United States has been reduced to leasing a Chinese satellite to handle communications with U.S. military bases in Africa. Surprising, isn’t it? The nation that launched the world’s first communications satellite (I remember it well – it was called Telstar) has so lost its manufacturing mojo that it has to rely on its most formidable military adversary to provide the hardware for some of its most sensitive communications. This at a time when underlying unemployment rates among U.S. manufacturing workers remain at near-depression levels.

Isn’t that crazy?

And a recent Senate report discovered that many of our most advanced weapons systems are absolutely riddled with counterfeit Chinese parts…

A recent Senate report, titled Inquiry Into Counterfeit Electronic Parts In The Department Of Defense Supply Chain, “uncovered overwhelming evidence of large numbers of counterfeit parts making their way into critical defense systems.”

The investigation found 1,800 cases of counterfeit electronic parts involving over one million suspect parts in 2009-10 alone, thereby exposing “a defense supply chain that relies on hundreds of unveiled independent distributors to supply electronic parts for some of our most sensitive systems.”

The report concluded, among other things, that China is the “dominant source” of counterfeit products that enter the DoD supply chain, that the Chinese government does little to stop it and that the DoD doesn’t know the “scope and impact” of these parts on critical defense systems.

Who in the world would be stupid enough to allow one of their greatest strategic enemies to supply large numbers of parts for key weapons systems?

Apparently we are that stupid.

Things are particularly bad when it comes to semiconductors…

Senator John McCain commented: “We can’t tolerate the risk of a ballistic missile interceptor failing to hit its target, a helicopter pilot unable to fire his missiles, or any other mission failure because of a counterfeit part.” Calling the issue “a ticking time bomb,” Brian Toohey, president of the Semiconductor Industry Association, commented: “The catastrophic failure risk inherently found in counterfeit semiconductors places our citizens and military personnel in unreasonable peril.”

It would be bad enough if we just had to worry about counterfeit parts failing. But what if China has a way to shut some of those parts down in the event of a conflict? What if some of those parts contain “Trojan Horse” computer chips or malware?

That may sound crazy, but unfortunately Trojan Horse chips can be extremely difficult to detect. The following is from a recent Forbes article…

As the Defense Science Board pointed out, Trojan Horse circuitry is almost impossible to detect even with the most rigorous analysis. This is particularly so if a saboteur can accomplish matching subversions in both software and relevant hardware.

And as I mentioned above, China is rapidly developing a vast array of new strategic weapons which may enable it to actually win the next war with the United States.

For example, China has been developing a new generation of inter-continental and submarine-launched nuclear missiles.

The submarine-launched missiles are of particular concern…

The Ju Lang-2 intercontinental missile is the second generation of Chinese submarine-launched ballistic missiles.

It’s a closely held secret, and details are sketchy. If it lives up to what public military intelligence says it is, it’s a huge get for China, especially with their new sub fleet.

The missile is believed to have a range of 8,000 km, and can carry conventional or nuclear warheads.

Do you remember a few years ago when a Chinese sub fired a missile from just off the west coast of the United States?

We didn’t know that the sub was there. If that missile had been fired at Los Angeles it would have been destroyed long before we could have ever responded.

And don’t think that a first strike by either China or Russia is inconceivable. As I have written about previously, the U.S. strategic nuclear arsenal has already been reduced by about 95 percent, and Obama seems absolutely determined to whittle it down even more. In fact, there has been talk that the Obama administration ultimately wants to reduce our arsenal down to just 300 warheads. If Russia or China knows exactly where those warheads are, it would be very easy to take them out in less than 10 minutes with a submarine-based first strike.

And China has also reportedly been developing very sophisticated EMP weapons. The following is from a WND report…

In 2011, it was first revealed that China was developing EMP weapons to be used against U.S. aircraft carriers in any future conflict, especially over Taiwan, according to a 2005 National Ground Intelligence Center study.

That center study said the Chinese were developing a family, or “assassin’s mace” of EMP and high-powered microwave, or HPM, weapons to be used by a technologically inferior force such as China’s, against U.S. military forces.

The once secret but now declassified study pointed out that the Chinese could detonate an EMP weapon some 30 to 40 kilometers over Taiwan or – by inference – a U.S. carrier strike group – and destroy the electronics capability on which U.S. network-centric strategy depends.

But an EMP weapon does not have to be a high-altitude weapon that affects a large area. Smaller scale EMP weapons could take out a wave of fighter jets or a carrier fleet.

In a future conflict with China, we could see U.S. planes falling out of the sky or great naval vessels sitting dead in the water after being hit with EMP blasts.

But isn’t China our friend?

That is what most Americans and most American politicians seem to believe. They seem to think that China is our “buddy” and “trading partner” and that we will never have a military conflict with China.

But that is NOT how the Chinese see things.

The Chinese regard the United States as their greatest strategic threat and as an enemy that needs to be vanquished.

That is why they are constantly spying on us, hacking into our computers and stealing our technology.

That is why they are feverishly building up their military and preparing for a future war with America.

So what do you think?

Do you believe that war with China is in our future?

If so, do you think that we will win?

[American Patriot]

We on this site have been talking about this, and predicting it for probably over 10 years (Ryan? How far back do we go now? Anomalies about 99? 98?) and this is JUST coming out on sites like that one?

LOL

I think the guys here are well on the cutting edge of predicting Chinese movements.

[Ryan Ruck]

I believe I had just started researching about Russia and China back around '98-'99 but didn't really get involved online about it until around '01 when our EP-3 was forced down on the old C2C boards since Art's show was really the only one touching on it (I suspect because of his closeness to the Philippines). It wasn't long after that the C2C boards closed and then I/we migrated to AN. The rest is history...