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2 US puzzles over China's military
might By Benjamin A Shobert
are diligently at work seeking to
understand not only the extent of China's military
capabilities, but the intentions that guide the
PLA. The questions of intent and transparency
were very much present at last week's USCC meeting
and this week's Carnegie Endowment debate in
Washington, "The Implications of China's Military
Modernization." USCC commissioner and participant
at the Carnegie debate, Larry Wortzel, asked
whether or not the
PLA
understanding of established international
military protocols is matched by its technological
aptitude.
The ASAT test is a good example
of this concern. Since several Chinese defense
analysts have posited that no country should be
able to use surveillance satellites to look into
China, the recent demonstration of ASAT
capabilities has the appearance of flexing this
particular doctrinal muscle. To shoot down another
country's spy satellites can be considered an act
of war, much like sinking a neutral ship at sea.
Should China do more than demonstrate its
capabilities on its own defunct orbiter, the
stakes of US-China military engagement would be
fundamentally heightened.
As China's
development continues, its technological
capabilities will need to be weighed against how
far it has internalized and how much it
understands the accepted standards of
international statecraft. As long as any disparity
between these two areas exists, it will be very
important for China to make an extra effort to
offer transparency in its actions and clarity in
its intent. Similarly, efforts on the part of the
US to understand China's policy must look beyond
quantitative pieces of analysis like the QDR and
delve more deeply into questions of the cultural,
historical and political context within which
China operates.
Fellow Carnegie debate
participant, David Finkelstein, suggested that a
proper understanding of how China views threats to
its littoral is essential to properly framing the
context of China's military modernization. As
Finkelstein argued, the concentration of China's
wealth, its technological infrastructure and much
of its national pride, is located along the
country's eastern seaboard. Having an appreciation
of the conflicts that China has faced along this
region over the past 100 years is essential if we
are to understand what China views as necessary
for its own national security.
This
realization does help contextualize the debate,
but it still leaves several questions unanswered,
primarily what happens when the Chinese navy and
air force develop the capability to effectively
neutralize their forward deployed US equivalents?
Obviously, such neutralization does not make
necessary an ejection of US forces from the
Asia-Pacific region; however, it does play a
critical role in how strident a position the US
can take on the Taiwan question.
The
ever-present factor in US-China military policy is
whether the question of Taiwan's future can be
resolved without sparking a conflict between the
US and the PLA. Because the PLA's modernization is
considered inevitable, the US has a series of
choices it must make: should it continue to
maintain the operational delta (difference in
capabilities) between the US and PLA militaries,
hoping that the gap will always deter China from a
force-based engagement with the US? Given the
amount of investment going into anti-terrorism
capabilities, is maintaining the necessary delta
even possible? At the moment, the US government's
position is to maintain all of its existing
commitments, which by necessity requires that its
position on Taiwan also not change.
The
dueling realities of the PLA's modernization and
the US commitment to Taiwan make the potential for
miscalculation of paramount concern. As both
Finkelstein and Wortzel agreed, this remains the
primary challenge going forward. Because the US
will continue to project itself in the Pacific
Ocean, and the South China Sea, it is likely that
ongoing skirmishes between the two naval and
aviation forces, such as occurred in 2001, are
likely to continue. If these skirmishes get out of
hand, they could lead to an escalation on a par
with the feared scenario of a PLA strike against
Taiwan. As a result, ongoing dialogue between the
two military forces and establishing lines of
communication between the two at the appropriate
level in the chain of command remain critical.
Globalization complicates, and perhaps
constructively so, the whole question of how to
respond to China's military modernization. Whether
through sales of national defense capabilities to
China by Russian and EU nations, or the inevitable
migration of US dual-use technologies into the
Chinese military-industrial complex, China would
not have been able to so rapidly modernize were it
not for the "flat" world we currently inhabit. But
China also provides circuit boards to the only US
manufacturer of sonobuoy technology, Sparton
Corporation, for anti-submarine detection by the
US Navy, further demonstrating the extent to which
China has genuinely become the world's factory
floor regardless of end-product.
This type
of intersection and the overlap between competing
military and economic agendas is an important
distinction between Cold War thinking and today's
US-China reality; however, it remains to be seen
whether differences between the two results in a
more interwoven world, or simply a world which
manages to evolve new paradigms for confrontation,
escalation and misunderstanding.
Benjamin A Shobert is the
managing director of Teleos Inc
(www.teleos-inc.com), a consulting firm
dedicated to helping Asian businesses bring
innovative technologies into the North American
market.
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