Is China Probing to See U.S. Responses?

By John E. Carey
For The Washington Times
May 7, 2007

In the last seven months there have been five or more significant revelations about China that could cause some people concern, worry and even alarm.

On November 13, 2006, The Washington Times’ military and security policy reporter Bill Gertz wrote, “A Chinese submarine stalked a U.S. aircraft carrier battle group in the Pacific last month and surfaced within firing range of its torpedoes and missiles before being detected.”

China had never before demonstrated any ability to closely approach a U.S. aircraft carrier.

“This is a harbinger of a stronger Chinese reaction to America’s military presence in East Asia,” said Richard Fisher, a Chinese military specialist with the International Assessment and Strategy Center, who called the submarine incident alarming.

“Given the long range of new Chinese sub-launched anti-ship missiles and those purchased from Russia, this incident is very serious,” he said. “It will likely happen again, only because Chinese submarine captains of 40 to 50 new modern submarines entering their navy will want to test their mettle against the 7th Fleet.”

When asked about a Chinese submarine “stalking” the American aircraft carrier at a Brookings seminar, Admiral Mike Mullen, the Chief of Naval Operations and ever the diplomat said he wanted to avoid the word “stalking.”

But he also said that he wanted a phone connected between the U.S. Navy and the Chinese Naval Headquarters so that future incidents could be discussed, understood and rapidly resolved without conflict.

As Mr. Fisher said, the submarine incident needs to be evaluated in the context of what other new military hardware and capabilities China is procuring or developing.

On January 11, 2007 China used a space-launch vehicle derived from its DF-21 medium-range missile to strike and destroy one of its own aging weather satellites.

This was another first: only the United States and the Soviet Union had ever demonstrated an anti-satellite (ASAT) capability.

Yet it was China that apparently wanted the world to know at this time that ASAT was no mystery to them anymore.

China’s military doctrine stresses the need for asymmetrical ways to fight the United States. Holding at risk America’s fleet of satellites that provide communications, intelligence, navigation and other invaluable assets, China could achieve a “game changer” with ASAT.

On March 23, 2007, Bloomberg reporter Tony Capaccio wrote about China’s purchase of Kilo class submarines from Russia along with a very high speed anti ship missile referred to as the “Sizzler.” He also stated that the U.S. Navy may only have a limited defense against this missile.

Like Bill Gertz and others, Mr. Capaccio always works to answer the question, “What does this mean?”

One possible explanation came from Orville Hanson who evaluated U.S. Navy weapons systems for 38 years. “This is a carrier-destroying weapon. That’s its purpose. Take out the carriers” [and China] “can walk into Taiwan,” he said.

Retired Rear Admiral Eric McVadon, a former U.S. naval attache in Beijing, assessed the Sizzler missile this way: “This is a very low-flying, fast missile,” said. “It won’t be visible until it’s quite close. By the time you detect it to the time it hits you is very short. You’d want to know your capabilities to handle this sort of missile.”

The China submarine incident and the ASAT test seemed to be intentional demonstrations meant to display new Chinese military capabilities. Revelation of the “Sizzler” missile, though not a demonstration, clearly could have been hidden from the U.S. China is showing off new capabilities and potential capabilities.

Shift gears in your mind a little to the China that has been violating copyrights, trademarks and other intellectual property rights for decades. China has a culture of corruption, getting more for less, and playing tricky business games. We should be shocked to learn that cheaper, inferior ingredients have been slipped into pet food while we pay full price for the good stuff?

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration found that melamine had been added to wheat gluten inside China to replace more costly materials, thus boosting profits. The product was used in pet food and pets across America suffered and died. Melamine is poisonous.

Last week, the FDA ordered U.S. farmers to hold off the market 20 million chickens. FDA is working to ensure products containing substances such as melamine added to feed manufactured in China do not reach the U.S. human food supply.And finally this.

In a similar effort to decrease manufacturing costs and increase profit, an antifreeze and solvent called diethylene glycol that can kill humans, was discovered in pharmaceutical supplies manufactured in Panama. The diethylene glycol was found to have come from China labeled as sweetener. Over 100 people who have used the products have died.

The Newspaper known as “The Old Grey Lady” reported that, “Over the years, the poison has been loaded into all varieties of medicine — cough syrup, fever medication, injectable drugs — a result of counterfeiters who profit by substituting the sweet-tasting solvent for a safe, more expensive syrup, usually glycerin, commonly used in drugs, food, toothpaste and other products.”

Reporters Walt Bogdanich and Jake Hooker found that, “Toxic syrup has figured in at least eight mass poisonings around the world in the past two decades…. records and interviews show that in three of the last four cases it was made in China, a major source of counterfeit drugs.”

These military demonstrations and acquisitions along with revelations about China’s industrial/pharmaceutical games could all be unrelated, independent or coincidental activities.

But another explanation could also be that China is testing, probing and evaluating the response of the United States to some asymmetric activities, especially as we are distracted by Iraq, Iran and North Korea.

A U.S. intelligence expert we spoke to said, “China wants the U. S. to know that they are not powerless or weak anymore. And asymmetric engagement is real.”

Mr. Carey is a retired U.S. Naval Officer and former president of International Defense Consultants, Inc. He is a frequent contributor to The Washington Times who has lived in China.

PC Culture Creep

By James Lyons
The Washington Times
May 4, 2007

In the long campaign against fundamentalist Islam, it has become abundantly clear that proactive, pre-emptive counterinsurgency and counterterrorist strategies are the only reliable way to prevail.
    
The problem is that a majority of America’s political and military leadership has become so risk-averse, so politically correct and so imbued with a go-along-to-get-along operational philosophy that the warriors who want to pursue aggressive, proactive policies find themselves second-guessed, micromanaged, back-stabbed and marginalized. This epidemic of political weakness and lack of moral courage has left our armed forces — the boots-on-the-ground men and women who face death on a daily basis — trapped in a very dangerous situation.
    
Certainly, a goodly share of the problem rests with former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his top advisers, few of whom grasped that fighting asymmetric insurgencies and terrorists demanded different sorts of military dynamics than the armed forces had been training to fight against.
    
Because Mr. Rumsfeld’s book-smart but real-world naive staffers had spent their time reading a lot more Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz than they had Mao Tse-tung or Sayyid Qutb, they believed technology would allow the U.S. to prevail in future wars and they ran roughshod over anyone who disagreed with them. This intellectual arrogance, coupled with their military incompetence, allowed the nation to be dragged unprepared into a battle against a determined, aggressive and agile enemy.
    
Congress must also share the blame. For years now, congressional oversight of the military has been lackadaisical, unimaginative and pro-forma.
    
Liberals tried to use the military as a social laboratory, while conservatives bought into big-ticket items that ran billions over budget while providing dubious advantage on the battlefield. Bread-and-butter items such as bullets, body armor, improved helmet liners, up-armored Humvees, top-grade boots were overlooked. Training for asymmetric warfare was almost nonexistent. Indeed, the Army’s post-September 11, 2001, counterinsurgency manual had been written during the Reagan administration.
    
But the lion’s share of responsibility for the incredible military mess we are in now lies on the second floor E-Ring of the Pentagon, in the suites occupied by the Joint Chiefs of Staff. For years now, the Joint Chiefs have abrogated their duties. They have been missing in action. They have been the epitome of the politically correct, go-along-to-get-along culture that has become a cancer on our military.
    
Let me be clear. I see the Joint Chiefs as the nation’s final guardian on the proper use of military force. They are subject to civilian control. They do not make policy, but they are charged with carrying it out.
And so, it is their sworn duty to provide to the civilian leadership — the president, the defense secretary and the Congress — accurate, no-nonsense, straightforward, honest assessments about the capabilities of the U.S. Armed Forces in relation to the administration’s policy goals and objectives. If the Joint Chiefs fail to provide that sort of sound military judgment and advice to the civilian leadership, they have not fulfilled their sworn responsibilities.
    
The Joint Chiefs should not ever be intimidated, either. Yet, when tough decisions had to be made prior to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, decisions that would cost the lives of U.S. service personnel, there was only silence from that series of suites on E-Ring. When Army Chief of Staff Gen. Eric Shinseki suggested Mr. Rumsfeld’s estimates were low about how many soldiers it would take to pacify Iraq, the other service chiefs remained silent. Even Gen. Shinseki decided to go along to get along: He retired and slunk into the shadows instead of going public and resigning.
    
I contend that the cultures of political correctness and go-along-to-get-along have so infected the military that they have stifled the natural aggressiveness that must be part of the military character. This applies not only to our forces but to our allies as well. When 15 British sailors and marines gave up without any attempt to defend themselves or escape, I am sure Winston Churchill and Lord Nelson were turning in their graves.
    
In the U.S. Navy we have a motto we live by “Don’t give up the ship.” We developed rules of engagement that allowed my junior officers to be proactive and pre-emptive. If they were threatened, they were to do all in their power to protect their ships and their men and women. And I put those instructions in writing so I could protect my junior officers from my more risk-averse, politically correct colleagues in Washington.
    
Our Joint Chiefs of Staff must do no less when sending our forces to war. They must stand up and be counted. They must provide their best possible military advice, even when they know it will be received unfavorably. I will say it again: The Joint Chiefs must not be intimidated — even by the commander in chief. This clearly never happened with regard to Iraq.
    
    James Lyons, U.S. Navy retired admiral, was commander in chief of the U.S. Pacific Fleet, senior U.S. military representative to the United Nations, and deputy chief of naval operations, where he was principal adviser on all Joint Chiefs of Staff matters.
    

The new war on terror

By Daniel Gallington
April 30, 2007

Just when we need creative solutions and new strategies to fight global terrorism, we’re getting political posturing for the 2008 presidential election.
    
Both sides are a little bit guilty of this: The Congress passed a war funding Bill any president would have vetoed because it interfered with presidential prerogatives as commander in chief. The administration says it is looking for a “war czar” to coordinate the war-related efforts of the State and Defense Departments, an odd idea that critics say looks like part of an exit plan — a political “hand-off” of an increasingly unpopular war.
    
Neither effort is likely to address the fundamental policy issues raised by the war in Iraq or the larger “war on terrorism.” What’s wrong with our efforts isn’t a matter of exit dates or more coordination — though better coordination is almost always a good thing. The problem is our basic strategy for the war on terror is flawed — this is an extremely dangerous situation and can only encourage further terrorist attacks on us, attacks al Qaeda described recently as “on a par with Hiroshima and Nagasaki.”
    
In fact, here is the very scary proposition: We could fail in Iraq — and in the larger “war on terror” — unless we change our basic strategy to target the various strategic components (financial, political and logistic) that terrorism needs for its continued operational success. However, so far we have mostly fought terrorism using traditional counterinsurgency strategies, with only mixed success. Not surprisingly, Americans have tired of this.
    
Some history is instructive: World War II was a massive logistic endeavor for us and cost thousands of lives, but it was mostly over in four-plus years — in Europe, just 18 months after D-Day — and we clearly won it. The war in Iraq has already gone that long with no possibility for a “military victory” (according to Henry Kissinger, who learned it firsthand in the 1970s) even though “victory” is still the word of choice used by the administration to describe our goal there.
    
The war in Korea ended in a stalemate that continues to this day. By many objective measures, we lost the war in Vietnam and at the same time showed anyone interested exactly how to beat us. And the Vietnam War answered this question: Do we have the stomach and patience to fight an insurgency to a successful conclusion? Regardless of whether we should have, the warring factions in Iraq have determined we don’t.
    
Lesson? Americans are impatient: We only give our political leaderships so much time to win a war — any war — and we had better win this one soon.
    
The new strategy: The September 11, 2001, attack was an asymmetric attack on us. Should we have responded with say, a withering — perhaps asymmetric — strike on the leadership or infrastructure of the countries we know sponsor terror, despite lack of a direct cause-and-effect relationship with the September 11 attack?
    
This strategy would assume we may never have a direct cause-and-effect relationship when terrorists strike us. In fact, it is often the trademark of terrorist attack against us that the responsibility for it is “stateless” — so we will not be sure whom to blame.

This new strategy would blame the most likely state sponsors of the terror and take action against them.
    ”Impossible” you might say: The United States has never engaged in asymmetric warfare and never will — this because it’s impossible for a democracy like ours to conduct war other than “by the rules.” By the way, the obvious implication of this idiom explains why asymmetric warfare is so often used against us: Because it has proven so effective and because opposing us conventionally would result in certain defeat — witness the two “conventional” wars in Iraq.
    
But we have used asymmetric warfare — we used it to end World War II in the Pacific against an increasingly radical, irrational and desperate enemy who refused to capitulate, employing human wave and suicide attacks against us. So, “can we do it” is probably the wrong question, especially against an enemy who has chosen asymmetric warfare as its primary means of military operations against us, and against enemies who have sworn to kill us all, young and old, Democrat or Republican, and who are willing to die trying.
    
In short, if we truly have had enough of this craziness and want to protect our children and grandchildren against even grander-scale terrorist attacks than those of September 11, we should stop talking about “end games” and “war czars” and dust off some strategic concepts that incorporate these new strategies.
    
We need make it clear we are tired of counterinsurgency (we clearly are) and intend to hold the leaderships and infrastructures of Iran, Syria, et al., at strategic risk for their support of terrorism — and that this could include asymmetric responses.
    
Sure we can do it, and in the final analysis we may have no real choice — unless we have become comfortable in the role of the primary target for fanatical terror approved and financed by the various radical, hatemonger, nation-states in the Middle East.

And, if you still have reservations about the new strategy, how do you feel about a new attack on the U.S. “on a par with Hiroshima and Nagasaki”?
    
    Daniel Gallington is a senior fellow at the Potomac Institute for Policy Studies in Arlington, Va.