China Missiles Could Overwhelm U.S. Military in Asia in ‘Hours’, Says Think Tank

By Jason Scott

A decade of “delayed and unpredictable funding” for the U.S. military’s budget has seen America lose its primacy in the Western Pacific, giving the edge to an increasingly sophisticated China, a Sydney-based think tank warned.
China’s “growing arsenal of accurate long-range missiles poses a major threat to almost all American, allied and partner bases, airstrips, ports and military installations in the Western Pacific,” the University of Sydney’s United States Studies Centre said in a report released Monday.
“As these facilities could be rendered useless by precision strikes in the opening hours of a conflict, the PLA missile threat challenges America’s ability to freely operate its forces from forward locations throughout the region,” it said, referencing China’s People’s Liberation Army.
The report recommended that Australia, a major ally of the U.S., should “increase stockpiles and create sovereign capabilities in the storage and production of precision munitions, fuel and other material necessary for sustained high-end conflict.”
While China is Australia’s largest trading partner, the nations have been at odds over series of issues, including the Australian government’s ban on Huawei Technologies Co. from bidding for 5G contracts and its accusation that Beijing has been “meddling” in national affairs.

China will build string of military bases around world

Locations include Middle East, Pakistan, and western Pacific to protect Belt and Road Initiative
The Guardian

Beijing currently has just one overseas military base, in Djibouti. 

The US Defense Department expects China to add military bases around the world to protect its investments in it ambitious One Belt One Road global infrastructure program, according to an official report released on Thursday.
Beijing currently has just one overseas military base, in Djibouti, but is believed planning others, including possibly Pakistan, as it seeks to project itself as a global superpower.
“China’s advancement of projects such as the ‘One Belt, One Road’ Initiative (OBOR) will drive military overseas basing through a perceived need to provide security for OBOR projects,” the Pentagon said in its annual report to Congress on Chinese military and security developments.
“China will seek to establish additional military bases in countries with which it has a longstanding friendly relationship and similar strategic interests, such as Pakistan, and in which there is a precedent for hosting foreign militaries,” the report said.
That effort could be constrained by other countries’ wariness of hosting a full-time presence of the People’s Liberation Army, the report noted.
But target locations for military basing could include the Middle East, Southeast Asia, and the western Pacific.
The report came as the Pentagon also warned that deepening Chinese activities in the Arctic region could also pave the way for a strengthened military presence, including the deployment of submarines to act as deterrents against nuclear attack.
The assessment is included in the US military’s annual report to Congress on China’s armed forces.
The Pentagon report noted that Denmark has expressed concern about China’s interest in Greenland, which has included proposals to establish a research station, establish a satellite ground station, renovate airports and expand mining.
“Civilian research could support a strengthened Chinese military presence in the Arctic Ocean, which could include deploying submarines to the region as a deterrent against nuclear attacks,” the report said.

US commits to aiding Philippines in South China Sea.

China has already established well-armed outposts on contested atolls it build up in the South China Sea.
Last year, there were reportedly discussions on a base in the Wakhan corridor of northwest Afghanistan.
In addition, The Washington Post recently identified an outpost hosting many Chinese troops in eastern Tajikistan, near the strategic junction of the Wakhan Corridor, China, and Pakistan.
Chinese dictator Xi Jinping has sought to project the country’s power beyond its immediate “back yard” in east and southeast Asia.
This includes strengthening the country’s presence in international institutions, acquiring top-flight technology and establishing a strong economic presence worldwide.
It also includes projecting the country’s military force on land, sea and in space, the report notes.
“China’s leaders are leveraging China’s growing economic, diplomatic, and military clout to establish regional preeminence and expand the country’s international influence,” the report said.
Beijing in particular increasingly see the United States as becoming more confrontational in an effort to contain China’s expanding power, it said.

Sina Delenda Est

China's Push Into Western Pacific Alarms U.S. Allies in Asia 
By Ting Shi and Isabel Reynolds

With the Trump administration warning of a possible war with North Korea, U.S. allies in Asia are sounding the alarm on another risk: a clash with China in the western Pacific.
China has recently accelerated air and naval excursions in sensitive areas near Japan and Taiwan, part of a longstanding quest to expand its military presence further from its shores into the Pacific Ocean. Leaders in Tokyo and Taipei have called on Beijing to back off while strengthening their defenses.
Earlier this month, Japan observed for the first time a Chinese submarine entering the contiguous zone (12 nautical miles to 24 nautical miles from shore) around Japanese islets in the East China Sea. That came shortly after Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen warned that China’s increased military patrols around the island threatened to destabilize the region.

Donald Trump’s “America First” foreign policy has raised concern in Asia about the reliability of the U.S. in helping to stave off Chinese pressure as it gains greater military and economic strength. 

China has a long-term goal of reuniting with Taiwan, and territorial disputes with countries ranging from Japan to Vietnam to India.
“The unpredictability of the Trump administration encourages Tokyo and Taipei to do more for their own defense,” said Ja Ian Chong, an associate professor with the National University of Singapore who specializes in Asia-Pacific relations. 

While Trump’s interactions with Xi Jinping mostly focused on North Korea and trade during his first year in office, China’s territorial claims may become more prominent going forward. 

In a strategy document released last week, the U.S. Defense Department cited China’s military modernization and expansion in the South China Sea as key threats to U.S. power.
China has pushed back against that narrative, with its defense ministry over the weekend calling on the U.S. to abandon a “Cold War” mindset. 

It blamed “other countries” for citing freedom of navigation concerns to undertake military activities in the South China Sea, where China has undertaken massive land reclamation to strengthen its claim to more than 80 percent of the area.
On Saturday, China’s foreign ministry said the country will take “necessary measures” to safeguard its sovereignty in the South China Sea after a U.S. warship entered waters near the disputed Scarborough Shoal.

‘New Normal’
The Communist Party’s official People’s Daily on Monday accused the U.S. of destroying stability in the South China Sea, and threatened to “enhance and speed up” its military capacity in the waters in response.
China has also dismissed allegations that it is encroaching on Taiwan and Japan. 

Patrols around Taiwan by Chinese fighter jets, bombers and surveillance aircraft are the “new normal,” Chinese Air Force spokesman Shen Jinke said last month. 

The Chinese submarine spotted near disputed islands in the East China Sea was monitoring the movements of two Japanese vessels, the foreign ministry said.
China’s navy began sailing through the “First Island Chain” -- including Japan, Taiwan and the Philippines -- in 2009. 

The Air Force followed suit with regular patrols in 2015, and the frequency of flights has increased from “four times per year” then to “several times per month” in 2017, according to the official Xinhua News Agency.

‘Cabbage Strategy’
Last year, Tsai said she would increase Taiwan’s defense spending by at least 2 percent each year. Priorities include new missiles, fighter aircraft and ballistic missile defenses. 

The U.S. continues to sell weapons to Taiwan and is obligated to defend the island under a 1979 law.
Japan’s cabinet last month approved a record defense budget of about 5.19 trillion yen ($47 billion), the sixth straight annual rise in defense spending under Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. 

While its missile defense purchases are primarily to deter North Korea, Defense Minister Itsunori Onodera said this month they could be used to stop other weapons.
Abe hosted Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull last week at a military base, part of efforts to strengthen a burgeoning four-way security arrangement that also includes the U.S. and India. 

In an interview with the Australian Financial Review published on Saturday, Abe said the “Quad” grouping wasn’t aimed at containing China even as he warned of instability in the region’s waterways.

‘Not Working’
“There is an attempt to alter the present status in the East China Sea and the South China Sea,” Abe told the publication. 

“So I think the security situation is becoming tougher these days.”
China is employing a “cabbage strategy” in which it gradually surrounds a disputed area with multiple layers of security, according to June Teufel Dreyer, a University of Miami political science professor and author of “Middle Kingdom and Empire of the Rising Sun” -- a 2016 book on China-Japan ties.
“To the extent Taiwan and Japan can be said to have a strategy, it is to raise their deterrence capabilities to a level that keeps the situation stable,” Dreyer said. 

“It’s not working.”

Chinese Peril

China Is Competing With The U.S. For Military Control Over The Western Pacific
By Ralph Jennings

J-15 fighter jets are seen on the flight deck of China's sole aircraft carrier, the Liaoning, as it arrives in Hong Kong waters on July 7, 2017, less than a week after a high-profile visit by Xi Jinping. 

If you follow military rivalries in East Asia, start by learning the term “first island chain.” 

That term refers to the Kuril Islands of Russia, the Japanese archipelago, Taiwan, the northern Philippines and Borneo. 

If strung together on a map from north to south they form a chain past which China was informally blocked from push its military influence eastward into the open U.S.-dominated Pacific Ocean.
Now China is out to change that. 

An intelligence aircraft that it flew Saturday near southern outlying islands of Japan came as a recent example. 

The mission hackles in nearby Taiwan, which had watched a Chinese aircraft carrier encircle it nearly a year ago. 

In August, Taiwan sighted Chinese planes three times.

China's "First Island Chain"

China wants its world third-ranked armed forces to vie with No. 1, the United States, for influence in the western Pacific instead of being held in check behind the island chain.
“(The Saturday flight) fits a growing Chinese pattern of operating naval vessels and military aircraft beyond the ‘first island chain,’” says Joshua Pollack, editor of The Nonproliferation Review in Washington. 

“They want to project power there and ultimately push the U.S. further back, or be seen as able to do so.”

Historic U.S. control
The United States and Japan normally police much of the island chain to keep China, their old Cold War foe and rival in modern diplomacy, from passing through. 

Washington has held annual joint exercises with Manila, as well, and it sells advanced weapons to Taiwan.
“Sealed off by the occupants of the islands, the chain would present a formidable barrier to exit from or entry into the (east and south) China Seas,” the American research institution RAND Corp. says in a 2014 commentary. 

“This is an ideal opportunity for mischief-making at the PLA Navy’s expense. Contingents scattered on and around the islands and straits comprising the first island chain could give Beijing a bad day” in the case of “geopolitical controversy.”

China's aircraft carrier Liaoning (top L) sails past residential tower blocks in Hong Kong on July 7, 2017. 

The U.S. military has dominated the Pacific east of the island chain since the end of World War II. Over that time Japan has become a U.S. ally and China has focused more on big domestic issues than military expansion. 

Today the Hawaii-based U.S. Pacific Fleet patrols the western Pacific with some 200 ships and submarines, nearly 1,200 aircraft and more than 130,000 personnel.
Tokyo has backed that fleet through a U.S.-Japan security alliance. 

Their teamwork has grown from a 1951 deal on U.S. bases in Japan to training and exercises that bind U.S. troops with Japan’s military, which ranks as the world’s seventh strongest.

Enter China
China announced through official news media in 2013 it had “fulfilled its long-held dream of breaking through” the island chain after ships passed between Japan and Russia. 

The same year Beijing began regular air and naval missions to Japanese-controlled East China Sea waters where it disputes Tokyo’s claim to eight uninhabited islets. 

Xi Jinping is trying to tighten command over the military now so it gets better at farther-flung overseas missions, which in turn complement an across-the-board rise in China's international clout.
China’s intelligence aircraft as seen over the weekend “sends a message” around Asia that it “has its own sphere of influence and there’s a new normal,” says Alexander Huang, strategic studies professor at Tamkang University in Taiwan. 

Beijing's military probably hopes other countries drop any protests as it does reconnaissance of facilities operated by its Asian neighbors and the United States, he says. 

Checking Manila’s Pivot to China

Duterte is attacking a pillar of America’s military posture in the Western Pacific.
By DAVID FEITH

Another week, another foreign trip, another Rodrigo Duterte crisis: Fresh from visiting Beijing and announcing an ominous but vague “separation” from the United States, the Philippine president this week visited Tokyo and got specific: U.S. troops should be out of the Philippines within two years. 

A U.S. ally is now attacking a pillar of America’s military posture in the Western Pacific.
Before almost any Americans had heard of Mr. Duterte, in 2014, his predecessor signed a deal to cement cooperation with the U.S. against China’s drive to dominate the South China Sea, Asia’s central waterway. 

The agreement invited the U.S. to rotate troops and materiel through Philippine bases while boosting train-and-equip programs for Philippine troops.
“Well, forget it,” Mr. Duterte says of the deal now. 

“I don’t want to see any military man of any other nation except the Filipino,” he declared Tuesday, characteristically overlooking the Chinese forces illegally occupying Philippine territory at Scarborough Shoal and the Spratly Islands.
Here’s an Asian pivot worthy of the name: Rarely has any country reoriented its foreign policy so dramatically and so quickly. 

Manila’s friends in the U.S. are confused and questioning: Is the alliance lost? 

Is Mr. Duterte’s gambit an indictment of Washington’s own underwhelming pivot to Asia? 

The answers carry lessons for the next U.S. president.
It’s true that the celebrated U.S. pivot, intended to deter China and reassure friends like the Philippines, has mostly amounted to better U.S. attendance at confabs like the East Asia Summit; important but limited openings to new partners Vietnam and India; and modest new U.S. military deployments to Singapore, Australia and (yes) the Philippines. 

The U.S. has undercut these gains by slashing defense budgets, embracing strategic retrenchment, letting Iraq and Syria burn, and so far failing to complete the trans-Pacific trade deal marketed as the pivot’s key element.
It’s also true that the U.S. failed to stop Beijing’s seizure of Scarborough Shoal from the Philippines in 2012, its most aggressive maritime move. 

When Chinese fishermen and armed coast-guard ships evicted Philippine boats from the area, U.S. diplomats brokered a deal for both sides to withdraw—then stood by as Manila honored the deal and Beijing didn’t. 

This hurt trust in the U.S. and whetted Beijing’s appetite. 

As Ely Ratner, now a White House official, wrote in 2013: “Chinese officials and pundits began speaking of a ‘Scarborough Model’ for exerting regional influence.”
China soon built militarized artificial islands off the Philippine coast, with no effective pushback from Washington. 

“America would never die for us,” Duterte charged last year, two months before announcing his presidential bid. 

“If America cared, it would have sent its aircraft carriers and missile frigates the moment China started reclaiming land in contested territory, but no such thing happened.”
Yet would a stronger U.S. pivot have kept Duterte onside? 

Unlikely.
The 71-year-old was fiercely anti-American long before the fall of Scarborough Shoal. 

Until this year he was mayor of Davao, in the restive southern province of Mindanao, where he opposed U.S. forces invited by national leaders to fight al Qaeda-linked Abu Sayyaf terrorists. 

He barred U.S. drones from Davao, boasted of his “hatred” for the U.S. after a local hotel bombing he blames on the FBI, and refused the job of Philippine defense secretary in 2006 rather than work with Uncle Sam.
A former student and admirer of Jose Maria Sison, exiled founder of the Communist Party of the Philippines, Duterte considers the U.S. a former colonial overlord trying to keep his country under foot. 

He resents U.S. criticism of the extrajudicial killings involved in his signature crackdown on drugs—it’s why he called Barack Obama a “son of a whore”—and at their first meeting he reportedly confronted Obama with a photograph of Filipinos slain by U.S. forces a century ago.
So the U.S. is dealing with a proud ideological foe. 

Whether he’ll cause irreparable harm to a 65-year-old alliance, though, remains uncertain.
Voters elected Duterte mostly to fight crime and raise incomes, not to spurn the U.S. for China. 

The Philippines is the world’s most pro-American country, according to Pew: 92% of Filipinos last year viewed the U.S. favorably; only 82% of Americans view their own country favorably.
This is thanks to cultural and linguistic ties dating to the colonial era, the large and successful Filipino community in the U.S., and America’s standing as the Philippines’ second-largest trade partner behind Japan—all in addition to its liberation of the islands in World War II and its more recent contributions of military and humanitarian aid. 

China by contrast is viewed with suspicion, identified as it is with unpopular business elites and bullying in the South China Sea.
Hence the mounting pushback against Duterte—not only from political rivals but from the likes of former President Fidel Ramos, a respected elder statesman and former Duterte ally with close ties to the military, and Antonio Carpio, a Supreme Court justice who warned that undermining Philippine sovereignty at Scarborough Shoal would be an impeachable offense.
The U.S. can help as its Philippine friends try to check Duterte. 

For one, it can show that China isn’t the only country with strategic dollars to spend. 

As much as the Philippine military values U.S. training and equipment, U.S. aid fell from 2010 to 2015. 

The U.S. started to fix that last year with its Maritime Security Initiative, but Congress can do far more.
Mr. Obama and his successor meanwhile must show that the presidential transition won’t distract from U.S. commitments in Asia. 

The impression of U.S. strategic drift might not have created Duterte, but it gives him room to run. 

He’ll have less if the next U.S. president enters office pledging significant increases in defense spending. 

Adversaries in Beijing and Moscow know to read U.S. budget tables, and so do leaders in Manila weighing how hard to fight for a U.S. alliance on the ropes.