Will the Next War Be in Asia? | Michael Klare
In the United States, senior officials are debating implementation of the “Pacific pivot” announced by President Obama in a speech before the Australian Parliament a little over a year ago. In it, he promised that additional U.S. forces would be deployed in the region, even if that meant cutbacks elsewhere. “My guidance is clear,” he declared. “As we plan and budget for the future, we will allocate the resources necessary to maintain our strong military presence in this region.” While Obama never quite said that his approach was intended to constrain the rise of China, few observers doubt that a policy of “containment” has returned to the Pacific.
Indeed, the U.S. military has taken the first steps in this direction, announcing, for example, that by 2017 all three U.S. stealth planes, the F-22, F-35, and B-2, would be deployed to bases relatively near China and that by 2020 60% of U.S. naval forces will be stationed in the Pacific (compared to 50% today). However, the nation’s budget woes have led many analysts to question whether the Pentagon is actually capable of fully implementing the military part of any Asian pivot strategy in a meaningful way. A study conducted by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) at the behest of Congress, released last summer, concluded that the Department of Defense “has not adequately articulated the strategy behind its force posture planning [in the Asia-Pacific] nor aligned the strategy with resources in a way that reflects current budget realities.”
This, in turn, has fueled a drive by military hawks to press the administration to spend more on Pacific-oriented forces and to play a more vigorous role in countering China’s “bullying” behavior in the East and South China Seas. “[America’s Asian allies] are waiting to see whether America will live up to its uncomfortable but necessary role as the true guarantor of stability in East Asia, or whether the region will again be dominated by belligerence and intimidation,” former Secretary of the Navy and former Senator James Webb wrote in the Wall Street Journal. Although the administration has responded to such taunts by reaffirming its pledge to bolster its forces in the Pacific, this has failed to halt the calls for an even tougher posture by Washington. Obama has already been chided for failing to provide sufficient backing to Israel in its struggle with Iran over nuclear weapons, and it is safe to assume that he will face even greater pressure to assist America’s allies in Asia were they to be threatened by Chinese forces.
Add these three developments together, and you have the makings of a powder keg — potentially at least as explosive and dangerous to the global economy as any confrontation with Iran. Right now, given the rising tensions, the first close encounter of the worst kind, in which, say, shots were unexpectedly fired and lives lost, or a ship or plane went down, might be the equivalent of lighting a fuse in a crowded, over-armed room. Such an incident could occur almost any time. The Japanese press has reported that government officials there are ready to authorize fighter pilots to fire warning shots ig Chinese aircraft penetrate the airspace over the Diaoyu/Senkaku islands. A Chinese general has said that such an act would count as the start of “actual combat.” That the irrationality of such an event will be apparent to anyone who considers the deeply tangled economic relations among all these powers may prove no impediment to the situation — as at the beginning of World War I — simply spinning out of everyone’s control. >continue<
The tensions here, and the analogue to a WWI scene where little things combine to ratchet matters out of control (especially adding our legal attachment to the defense of Taiwan), are not being over-hyped. We already face an insane trajectory toward a fight with Iran based on irrational groupthink where “everyone agrees” that Iran cannot be allowed to possess nuclear weapons. So it is paramount that we do what we can to counter any dubious postures and such mental constipations which could send ourselves and the world slipping into an building avalanche toward disaster. If we are a super-power, if we are exceptional, then interrogation and action here is our highest duty.
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(via Anything That Moves by Nick Turse - Guernica / A Magazine of Art & Politics)
In Vietnam, the statistically minded war managers focused, above all, on the notion of achieving a “crossover point”: the moment when American soldiers would be killing more enemies than their Vietnamese opponents could replace. After that, the Pentagon expected, the communist-led forces would naturally give up the fight—that would be the only rational thing to do …
The crossover point, however, proved elusive; as years went by, the conflict only escalated. … [And at the Pentagon] everything came down to the “body count”—the preeminent statistic that served in those years as both the military’s scorecard and its raison d’etre. How else could you tell if the crossover point was within reach unless you tallied the enemy dead?
The war managers, of course, gave little thought to what this strategy—basing the entire American military effort on such an indicator as Vietnamese corpses—might mean for Vietnamese civilians.
Read more Guernica features](http://24.media.tumblr.com/d026814e5c0dc45ddd956f0922353443/tumblr_mgq882W6Ha1r7mk3fo1_500.jpg)
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World Wide Aircraft Carriers
An aircraft carrier is a ship that is capable of operating fixed wing aircraft, including jump-jets such as the Harrier. America has nearly twice as many aircraft carriers - 20 - as the rest of humanity combined - 12 - and America’s aircraft carriers are substantially larger than almost all the other’s aircraft carriers. The Navy likes to call the big Nimitz class carriers “4.5 acres of sovereign and mobile American territory” — and all twenty American carriers of all classes add up to nearly 70 acres of deck space. Deckspace is probably a good measure of combat power. The rest of the world’s carriers have about 25 acres of deck space, approximately one third that of America’s [until 2011, this number was only 15 acres, but new Chinese and Italian vessels upped the total appreciably].](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_mcct52YDZl1qhn3smo1_500.gif)
