Keep an eye on Donald Rumsfeld’s trip to Beijing this week. It’s about more than America’s relations with the Chinese. It also could prove to be a turning point in a battle within the Defense Department over the future of the U.S. military.
Thomas P.M. Barnett, in a dynamite story for this month’s Esquire, explains…
The greatest threat to America’s success in its war on terrorism sits inside the Pentagon. The proponents of Big War (that cold-war gift that keeps on giving), found overwhelmingly in the Air Force and Navy, will go to any length to demonize China in their quest to justify high-tech weaponry (space wars for the flyboys) and super– expensive platforms (submarines and ships for the admirals, and bomber jets for both) in the budget struggles triggered by our costly wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
With China cast as America’s inevitable enemy in war, the Air Force and Navy will hold off the surging demands of the Army and Marines for their labor-intensive efforts in Southwest Asia, keeping a slew of established defense contractors ecstatic in the process. How much money are we talking about? Adding up various reports of the Government Accountability Office, we’re talking about $1.3 trillion that the Pentagon is locked into spending on close to a hundred major programs. So if China can’t be sold to Congress and the American people as the next Red menace, then we’re looking at a lot of expensive military systems being cut in favor of giving our troops on the ground the simple and relatively cheap gear they so desperately need not only to stay alive but also to win these ongoing conflicts.
You’d think the great search for the replacement for the Soviet threat would have finally ended after 9/11, but sadly that’s not the case. Too many profits on the line. Army generals are fed up with being told that the global war on terrorism is the Pentagon’s number-one priority, because if it were, they and their Marine Corps brethren would be getting a bigger slice of the pie instead of so much being set aside for some distant, abstract threat. It’s bodies versus bucks, folks, and that’s a presidential call if ever there was one. So it’s time for George W. Bush to make up his mind whether or not he’s committed to transforming the Middle East and spreading liberty to those Third World hellholes where terrorists now breed in abundance. If he is, the president will put an end to this rising tide of Pentagon propaganda on the Chinese “threat” and tell Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld in no uncertain terms that our trigger pullers on the ground today deserve everything they need to conduct the counterinsurgency operations and nation building that will secure America’s lasting victory in his self-declared global war on terrorism. If not, then Bush should just admit that the defense-industrial complexor maybe just Dick Cheneyis in charge of determining who America’s “real enemies” are.
Obviously, Barnett is simplifying a bit, for the sake of magazine brevity — there are plenty of “Big War” types with major jobs in the Army, for example. (How else do you explain all that cash for hulking projects like Future Combat Systems?) And I have hard time believing China’s leaders are as benevolent as Barnett makes them out to be. But the story is mostly dead-on. Unfortunately, it’s also subscription-only, so it may be a bit hard to get online. But it’s worth the few bucks for the read.
(Big ups: Victor)
Yeah I don’t like the discounting of China. There dangerous and there patient. We have to watch out. Now compare what China and say Al-Qida can do to us. Who is the bigger threat. China now has missles targeted at us and they are devloping missle subs. That can destroy the country, Qida can destroy a building, who is the bigger threat. Maybe I am being simple but China is to fear more then terroists in my book.
Joseph — depends on how you look at it.
China doesn’t want a war with the US because of the strong economic ties, and if they launch nukes at us, we will do the same, which is Mutually Assured Destruction for the US & China.
Now Terrorist on the other hand, no ties, live in different countries spread out through-out the world, and if they get a nuke and blow up a city…we cant launch a nuke back at them because there everywhere, and we cant nuke a certian area of Pakistan because there is a training camp there, cuase then Pakistan would go ape shit.
The theory here, I guess, is that there is just not enough money to fight the GWOT, transform to future forces, and still be able to fight “The Big War.” So we dismiss “The Big War” as an ‘older generation’ of warfare that will never happen again. But I will address that fallacy here, rather than tell you what I think is wrong with the concept of “generational warfare” in the first place.
I totally disagree with anyone who suggests that Russia and China do not represent a serious threat to the United States, and that we do not have to worry about fighting “The Big War” anymore.
Transformation and future forces are all well and good, and it needs to be done, but we must also maintain the ability to fight a large scale war as well. The idea that all future conflicts will be asymmetrical warfare, the ‘4–5 block war,’ is, I believe, a dangerous idea to embrace if it means restructuring ALL your forces for that one type of warfare. You NEVER,in warfare, put ALL your eggs into one basket!
Somehow we must find the money to do both, even if it means cutting back elsewhere. I believe defense planners are basing our architecture not based on what we need, but what we “can afford.” When it comes to national defense, that is a fatal mistake.
China is not building up its military for nothing, and Russia is increasingly reverting to its Cold War ways in Central Asia and the Middle East. A growing military and economic alliance between Russia and China is highly likely, and represents a potential adversary that could be a formidable threat to Europe and the U.S. in the future.
When it comes to defense and military planning, you ALWAYS seek to maintain a capability to deal with a “worse case scenario” rather than hoping and praying that it never happens.
What Rumsfeld accomplishes in China is beside the point. Agreements and treaties can be broken in a heartbeat. To assume that the Chinese will always “play nice” is a bad mistake.
Our Navy and Air Force are at dangerously low levels of men and machines, and it takes YEARS to develop and deploy new planes and ships. If we miscalculate, it will most likely be all over before we can bring our forces up to a level to meet the threat.
To dismiss all the Generals and Admirals who agree with what I am saying as “relics” of the Cold War era is only a way of evading the issues.
Focusing EXCLUSIVELY on the GWOT is plain old downright STUPIDITY. And that’s my two cents worth!
Considering that the US spends some $400 billion plus per annum on its military, that it has a bigger navy and airforce than the rest of the world combined, that it has the world’s largest stockpiles of WMD’s and the world’s most aggressive WMD research programme, the statement that “our navy and airforce are at dangerously low levels of men and machines” is, frankly, ludicrous.
That is thinking like a paranoid Chinese defence strategist.
Neither Russia nor China are interested in fighting the “big war” anymore — the operating principal is still MAD, and that is a fundamentally unattractive proposition. However, the Bush administration seems to believe that nuclear war can be fought, and that at the tactical level, nuclear weapons are a legitimate first-strike/Pearl-Harbour option; this gives a lot of people the collywobbles, because the impression that everyone outside the US gets is that the Bush administration is utterly committed to fighting the “big war” if it can find an excuse to do so.
Now this impression may be mistaken — but the US sure does make a lot of threats to a lot of people a lot of the time. And, to be blunt, the US is pretty nasty towards its allies when they don’t toe the line too.
And there is a very big difference between AQ and China — the capacity is one thing, but it’s the intent that is key.