01.12.11
Made In China: Stealth fighter envy
Last week the LA Times put a picture of China’s stealth fighter on the frontpage. And a day or so ago, the NY Times stuck it up on top of the website.
Even if you wanted to miss it, impossible.
J at Armchair G. gets around to discussing the “China” problem, via a scholarly article.
But if you’ve kept apace of US events the idea of China seriously challenging the US militarily is laughable. The country’s aim is to be able to muss our hair just enough to trouble a theoretical defense of Taiwan.
China has no blue water navy that would last more than a couple days against the USN. It’s military is not battle-hardened. It’s air force would enjoy a short exciting life. And once all of its air defense has been destroyed by showers of cruise missiles, its industrial base in the eastern part of the country could be worked over good by a strategic bombing campaign. (Oh, they’ll use mighty cyberwarriors to strike back! That would be so scary.)
One has a hard time imagining most Chinese would even want to go up against the US military, considering how well things have been going elsewhere.
Why mess up a good thing?
It’s only thought for computer games, fiction, perhaps good for a Tom Clancy or Dale Brown novel.
The news value of it is diversionary, a distraction from real major problems.
From Armchair, quoting an expert:
Beijing can’t match our globe-spanning regional combatant command structure; possesses no foreign military bases, compared to our several hundred; and presents almost no capacity for projecting — and far more importantly, for sustaining — its forces beyond its immediate home waters …
The author notes that for the most part, there is no “plausible” avenue to war with China.
After all the analysis I’d only add that not only does China not have all the things said, militarily, but also that there’s no reason to suspect that what it does have would even work very well.
For reasons which have been abundantly discussed here.
We’re essentially asked to believe that an industrial base that’s good at making really lots of not very good things — just good enough for us beggars to wear and use, even though threadbare — automatically snaps to attention and makes great advanced military hardware.
Recall that the people selling the news about foreign military hardware — well, their paychecks depend upon you actually believing them. And that worked so well with the news about the old Soviet Union.
So — yeah, ha-ha, sure buddy. (DD blows an amusing noise out of his two dollar super stealth ballistic Mojo Deluxe Made-In-China Blues & Rock harmonica.)
Lads, would you buy this on a nice black or white T-shirt?
Deindustrialization and the beggaring of the US middle class is the major security problem. It has led to obvious political instability in the US, among many other things.
China, while not the root cause, is only the enabling instrument. It was not, after all, China that compelled all US toilet seat manufacturers to fire their workforces and end domestic production.
Thought exercise: Consider the value and the morality of having a combined armed force good for crushing the Chinese military, or that of any other nation, in a couple weeks of busy work, if the middle class it’s ostensibly defending no longer has anything.
Absurd.