The Chinese Military Is A Paper Dragon -- Kyle Mizokami, Real Clear Defense/War Is Boring
Some think China is a near-peer competitor. Wrong.
China’s rise over the past 30 years has been nothing short of spectacular.
After decades of double-digit growth, today China is the world’s second largest economy—and possesses an increasingly sophisticated military that’s among the planet’s most powerful. Despite China bordering a number of unstable countries, its borders are secure.
That wasn’t always the case. In 2,000 years, China has suffered invasions, revolutions and humiliations from the outside world — plus its own internal rebellions. It has been brutalized, conquered and colonized.
No longer. China’s defense spending has increased tenfold in 25 years. Beijing is building a powerful blue-water navy, developing stealth fighters and carefully experimenting with peacekeeping and expeditionary operations.
Read more ....
My Comment: As regular readers of this blog know .... I always look at trends .... trends in economics, politics, international relations, and the military. In the case of China .... I had the opportunity to see what the Chinese military looked like in mid 1980s .... to put it bluntly .... not impressive. On my last trip to China 2 years ago .... a completely different story. And while the Chinese military is nowhere near what a modern state like the U.S., Japan, etc. can deploy into a war zone .... they are light years ahead from where they were 30 years ago .... and more to the point .... they have the will and determination to have a military that can confront the U.S. and Japan on an equal footing 20 to 30 years from now. Paper tiger today .... maybe .... but I am willing to bet that in the Asian arena this will not be the case in 20 or 30 years. This is a long post by Kyle Mizokami .... but it is a must read if studying the Chinese military is your thing.
1 comment:
The U.S built most of it's military from scratch. We gained some traction when we acquired Nazi era rocket engineers and plenty of other influences I'm sure, but as I understand, we pioneered most of what we have. We started with the raw materials and carefully, and expensivley, built our power from the ground up. Decades later China has the resources and the industry but doesn't need to do as much R&D because they can steal it from the rest of the world. Maybe an analogy is that it took 10000 years after the invention of the bow to progress to Tomahawk missiles because we had to do all the R&D and industry building to get there, but if you have the blueprints to build everything you need to build Tomahawks and you have the blueprints for the Tomahawks themselves...
It seems to me that to expect China to follow the same linear curve as the West is a mistake. If they have the industry, the resources, and the plans, why can't they do in 10 years what it took us 75 to make from scratch? It seems to me that the scale of their industry is miles ahead of ours as is demonstrated by the fact that they make most of the worlds gadgets. If the state wanted to, couldn't they retool their industries and catch up to us in nearly the blink of an eye? Even if they can't match our most sophisticated gear, couldn't they simply overwhelm us with less sophisticated gear that they could produce for pennies on the dollar compared to us? As another example, (not based on facts but generalization) If we can produce 1 M4 rifle every 10 minutes but they can produce 20 AK's in 10 minutes, would it really matter if we had the technological advantage? I know that is a generalization and that sometimes the technological advantage can't be overcome by numbers alone, but sometimes the numbers alone are enough. One last analogy, if we had the best pesticides available but were suddenly attacked by the largest and most numerous swarms of locusts the earth has ever seen...
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