CHINA THREAT? NOT!

You see that New York Times’ story, three posts down, on China’s grow­ing threat to Taiwan? Arms Control Wonk Jeffrey Lewis, who’s spent a whole lot of time study­ing the Chinese mil­i­tary, isn’t buy­ing it.

All the unclas­si­fied mod­el­ing of a PRC-​​ROC [China-​​Taiwan] throw­down sug­gests the Chinese need a lot more than a few more amphibi­ous ships and sub­marines to make a run at Taiwan. [The Pentagon’s annual assess­ment] Chinese Military Power in 2003 cap­tured some of the dif­fi­culty in mount­ing an amphibi­ous oper­a­tion when it noted:

However, the PLAs [China’s People’s Liberation Army] abil­ity to project force beyond Chinas land bor­ders, while improv­ing, remains lim­ited due to a short­age of amphibi­ous ships, heavy cargo car­ry­ing air­craft, long-​​range trans­ports, and other logis­ti­cal short­com­ings. Even though the PLA has improved its amphibi­ous attack capa­bil­i­ties in recent years, there are few signs that Beijing is seri­ous about increas­ing the PLAs heavy lift capac­ity or con­duct­ing sus­tained ground oper­a­tions abroad in the near term.

The New York Times’ descrip­tion of the intel­li­gence report isn’t very, well, descrip­tive — I’d like to know what kind of amphibi­ous assault ships and whether they are aug­ment­ing or replac­ing exist­ing assets. Either way, [what’s described in] the report doesn’t seem like enough to fun­da­men­tally changes the bal­ance of power in the Taiwan Strait.
Chinese Military Power in 2004 did allude to amphibi­ous and sub­ma­rine con­struc­tion, but still con­cludes that “Most of the PLAs land­ing craft are small and inca­pable of oper­at­ing on the open ocean; its larger land­ing ships are old and in need of replace­ment. Since the mid-​​1990s, a num­ber of newly designed land­ing ships have been under con­struc­tion; how­ever, the num­bers cur­rently believed to be under con­struc­tion most likely are insuf­fi­cient to sup­port a siz­able amphibi­ous oper­a­tion in the next 5 years.”

THERE’S MORE: Be sure to see Jeffrey tear AEI “scholar” Dan Blumenthal a new one over Beijing’s alleged “mar­ket­ing to the mul­lahs.” Here’s a one-​​sentence sam­ple: “Blumenthals arti­cle starts strong which is to say that it begins with a fal­si­fi­able the­sis state­ment.” Read the rest.

April 10th, 2005 | Strategery | Comments Off Both comments and pings are currently closed.