Gates’ China Choice

Topic A at today’s Senate con­fir­ma­tion hear­ings for Defense Secretary Bob Gates was Iraq. Topic B was Afghanistan. Topic C? That was the fate of Texas A&M’s foot­ball team, nat­u­rally. (You know how politi­cos love their sports-​​talk.)
Somewhere down around the bot­tom of the alpha­bet was China. Which is really too bad. Because one of the biggest choices Gates will have to make in his term at the Pentagon will be how to han­dle Beijing.
As guys like Tom Barnett have end­lessly pointed out, there are, roughly speak­ing, two com­pet­ing camps in the Defense Department. One group — mostly Army guys and Marines — wants to retool our mil­i­tary, to go after ter­ror­ists and tackle insur­gents. The other — largely made up of Air Force and Navy-​​types — thinks that Iraq and Al-​​Qaeda are dis­trac­tions from the one mor­tal enemy that can really threaten America long-​​term: the Chinese.
Donald Rumsfeld’s words favored the first camp. “[P]repar[ing] for wider asym­met­ric chal­lenges” is a “fun­da­men­tal imper­a­tive” for the mil­i­tary, the Pentagon noted in the Quadrennial Defense Review, its every-​​four-​​years look at grand strat­egy. We’re in the mid­dle of a “Long War.” Iraq and Afghanistan are just the open­ing bat­tles.
But fol­low the money, and a very dif­fer­ent set of pri­or­i­ties emerges. The Pentagon is spend­ing its $70 bil­lion bud­get on new weapons like it’s the Cold War all over again with China step­ping in for the Soviets. Nearly $10 bil­lion a year goes to bal­lis­tic mis­sile inter­cep­tors orig­i­nally designed to stop Russian mis­siles; $9 bil­lion to new-​​jack fighter jets meant to take on MiGs; $3.3 bil­lion to next-​​gen tanks and fight­ing vehi­cles; $1 bil­lion for the Trident II nuclear mis­sile upgrade; and $2 bil­lion for a new strate­gic bomber.
Gates can con­tinue the trend. Or more than five years after 9/​11, he can com­mit to focus­ing the Defense Department firmly, absolutely on the two-​​front war which he admits the U.S. is “not win­ning.” That’s the fun­da­men­tal choice to be made. You can change tac­tics in Iraq — or not. But as long as China remains front-​​and-​​center for so much of the mil­i­tary, it’s hard to see how the U.S. winds up win­ning this “Long War.“
UPDATE 6:10 PM: So what will Gates do? Here’s the only inter­change on China from today’s hearings:

SEN. INHOFE: The — in 2000, we formed the U.S.-China Security Economic Review Commission, and it’s usu­ally referred to the U.S.- China Commission. They have had — come out with five reports. This is the fifth report that just came out. I’ve been dis­turbed that no one seems to care about these. They don’t seem to read these and under­stand what’s in them. I have a cou­ple of ques­tions about that I want to ask you. But I am con­cerned about China, and I’d like to hear what your thoughts are.
And just in the last month the Chinese hack­ers, as you, I’m sure, have read, have shut down the e-​​mail and offi­cial com­puter work at the Naval War College. The — this is referred to by this com­mis­sion as the “tight­ened rein” “Titan Rain.“
In September the Department of Commerce expe­ri­enced a mas­sive shut­down of its com­puter sys­tem. This goes on and on.
In July the State Department acknowl­edged that Chinese attacks had bro­ken into sys­tems over­seas and in Washington.
Recently China’s been — used lasers to blind our satel­lites.
On October 26th a Song-​​class Chinese sub­ma­rine sur­faced near the USS Kitty Hawk. They’d been fol­low­ing them unde­tected for a long period of time.
I’ve had occa­sion to spend quite a bit of time in Africa, and I noticed that China’s pres­ence in Africa, par­tic­u­larly in those states around the Sea of Guinea and where they have great oil reserves, is there. And they are way ahead of us. It hap­pens that China and United States are the two coun­tries that depend on for­eign sources of oil more than any of the other coun­tries.
The — as this con­tin­ues, I’d like to ask you what your feel­ing is about this as a top pri­or­ity, about how you view China, about whether or not you have read these reports, and if not, if you would or if you plan to do that, and if you agree with some of that which you have heard com­ing out in these reports.
MR. GATES: Yes, sir. I have not read the reports.
SEN. INHOFE: And I would also say that we watched this — as we were draw­ing down in the 1990s, they increased their mil­i­tary pro­cure­ment by over 1,000 per­cent. So this is a great con­cern.
Go ahead.
MR. GATES: Yes, sir. I have not read the reports. I would be more than will­ing to do so.
I’ve been aware, just from read­ing in the news­pa­pers — it’s been a num­ber of years since I received any clas­si­fied intel­li­gence on what the Chinese were up to. But it’s been my impres­sion that they’ve had a very aggres­sive intelligence-​​gathering effort against the United States. Some of these other things that you’ve men­tioned — this is the first time I’ve heard about that. And clearly, if con­firmed, this would be some­thing that I would want to get well informed on quickly

(Bigs ups: Inside Defense for the tran­script.)
UPDATE 7:15 PM: “I’ve been watch­ing defense sec­re­taries in con­fir­ma­tion hear­ings for 30 years, off and on, but I don’t think I’ve seen any per­form more forth­rightly than Gates did this morn­ing,” coos Fred Kaplan.

The most eyebrow-​​raising momentof many such momentsin Robert Gates’ con­fir­ma­tion hear­ings today came when Sen. Robert Byrd, the sten­to­rian Democrat of West Virginia, asked if he favored attack­ing Iran.
Most wit­nesses in Gates’ posi­tion would duck the ques­tion, cit­ing the time-​​honored prac­tice of avoid­ing “hypo­thet­i­cals.” No sen­a­tor would have con­demned him for fol­low­ing prece­dent. But Gates plunged right in and said, basi­cally, no.
“We have seen in Iraq,” Gates replied, “that once war is unleashed, it becomes unpre­dictable.” The Iranians couldn’t retal­i­ate with a direct attack on the United States, he said, but they could close off the Persian Gulf to oil exports, send much more aid to anti-​​American insur­gents in Iraq, and step up ter­ror­ist attacks world­wide…
When Michigan Sen. Carl Levin, the panel’s senior Democrat, asked if the United States was win­ning the war in Iraq, he said, “No, sir.” Later, when James Inhofe, R-​​Okla., asked if he agreed that we weren’t los­ing the war either, Gates replied, “Yes,” but added, “at this point…“
It is impos­si­ble to imag­ine any of George W. Bush’s pre­vi­ous Cabinet appointees, or any of his sit­ting Cabinet offi­cers, mak­ing such starkand, at least implic­itly, crit­i­cal­state­ments in an open Senate hear­ing.
In short, Gates may well be that entity that Washington has not seen for many years: a truly inde­pen­dent sec­re­tary of defense.

December 5th, 2006 | Eye on China | 2326100 Comments »http://defensetech.org/2006/12/05/gates-china-choice/Gates%27+China+Choice2006-12-05+22%3A33%3A27jason You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.