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Old 03-16-2019, 08:29 AM
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Cool Forget the Mexico border, the new US military budget is focused on ‘China, China, Chi

Forget the Mexico border, the new US military budget is focused on ‘China, China, China’
By: Associated Press - 3-16-19
RE: https://www.scmp.com/news/world/unit...budget-focused

#1 - Acting Pentagon chief named hypersonic missiles, space operations, technology theft and militarising land in the South China Sea as threats posed by China

#2 - China ‘seeks Indo-Pacific regional hegemony in the near-term and displacement of the United States’, warned Patrick Shanahan

Chinese bombers. Chinese hypersonic missiles. Chinese cyberattacks. Chinese anti-satellite weapons.

To a remarkable degree, the 2020 Pentagon budget proposal is shaped by national security threats that acting defence secretary Patrick Shanahan summarised in three words: “China, China, China.”

The US is still fighting small wars against Islamic extremists, and Russia is considered a serious concern, but Shanahan wants to shift the military’s main focus to what he considers the more pressing security problem of a rapidly growing Chinese military.

This theme, which Shanahan outlined on Thursday in presenting the administration’s proposed 2020 defence budget to the Senate Armed Services Committee, is competing for attention with more immediate problems like President Donald Trump’s effort to use the military to build a border wall.

The hearing, for example, spent more time on the wall and prospects for using military funds to build parts of it than on any aspect of foreign policy, including the conflict in Syria or military competition with China, Russia or North Korea.

Shanahan is hardly the first defence chief to worry about China. Several predecessors pursued what Barack Obama’s administration called the “pivot” to Asia, with China in mind. But Shanahan sees it as an increasingly urgent problem that exceeds traditional measures of military strength and transcends partisan priorities.

“We’ve been ignoring the problem for too long,” Shanahan told a senator.

“China is aggressively modernising its military, systematically stealing science and technology, and seeking military advantage through a strategy of military-civil fusion,” he wrote in prepared testimony to the committee, which is considering a US$718 billion Pentagon budget designed in part to counter China’s momentum.

The US$25 billion the Pentagon is proposing to spend on nuclear weapons in 2020, for example, is meant in part to stay ahead of China’s nuclear arsenal, which is smaller than America’s but growing. Shanahan said China is developing a nuclear-capable long-range bomber that, if successful, would enable China to join the United States and Russia as the only nations with air-, sea- and land-based nuclear weapons.

Shanahan ticked off a list of other Chinese advancements – hypersonic missiles against which the US has limited defences; rocket launches and other efforts that could enable it to fight wars in space; “systematically stealing” of US and allied technology, and militarising land features in the South China Sea.

Bonnie Glaser, director of the China Power Project at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, said the US has lacked effective strategies for competing with China on a broad scale.

“It is overdue,” she said of Shanahan’s concerns. “We have been somewhat slow in catching up” in such areas as denying China its regional ambitions, including efforts to fully control the South China Sea, which is claimed by several countries.

Some defence analysts think Shanahan and the Pentagon have inflated the China threat.

“I do think it’s worth asking what exactly is threatening about China’s behaviour,” said Christopher Preble, vice-president for defence and foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute. He does not discount China as a security issue, but doubts the US military is the institution best suited to deal with such non-military problems as cyber intrusions into American commercial networks.

In Preble’s view, competition with the Chinese is not mainly military.

“I still don’t believe the nature of the threat is quite as grave as we’re led to believe” by the Pentagon, he said. “They tend to exaggerate the nature of the threat.”

In his previous role as deputy defence secretary, Shanahan and Trump’s first defence secretary James Mattis crafted a national defence strategy that put China at the top of the list of problems.

“As China continues its economic and military ascendance, asserting power through an all-of-nation long-term strategy, it will continue to pursue a military modernisation programme that seeks Indo-Pacific regional hegemony in the near-term and displacement of the United States to achieve global pre-eminence in the future,” that strategy document says.

That explains in part why the US is spending billions more on space, including means of defending satellites against potential Chinese attack, and building hypersonic missiles to stay ahead of Chinese and Russian weapon development.

It also explains some of the thinking behind preparing for an early retirement of the USS Harry Truman aircraft carrier, a strategy that views carriers as less relevant in a future armed conflict involving China.

Note: This article appeared in the South China Morning Post print edition as: Pentagon eyes China with US$718b wish list.
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