Red Dragon Rising

Fire of Liberty

As if we didn't have enough problems dealing with Al Qaeda in Afghanistan, Iraq and countless other regions, Syria, North Korea, Iran and Venezuela, it seems that the Chinese Dragon is beginning to rise in Asia. As I've noted in several posts, the Chinese have been pouring countless amounts of money and time developing tactics and upgrading their military hardware and forces to ensure that they're ready for a future run-in with the US over Taiwan or some other unannounced future problem. Just look here and here to see what the Chinese are up to. I'd have to say that Max Boot seems to sum up what the Chinese government and the People's Liberation Army (PLA) are thinking in his most recent column in The Los Angeles Times. Here's a sample:

In 1998, an official People's Liberation Army publishing house brought out a treatise called "Unrestricted Warfare," written by two senior army colonels, Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui. This book, which is available in English translation, is well known to the U.S. national security establishment but remains practically unheard of among the general public.

"Unrestricted Warfare" recognizes that it is practically impossible to challenge the U.S. on its own terms. No one else can afford to build mega-expensive weapons systems like the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, which will cost more than $200 billion to develop. "The way to extricate oneself from this predicament," the authors write, "is to develop a different approach."

Their different approaches include financial warfare (subverting banking systems and stock markets), drug warfare (attacking the fabric of society by flooding it with illicit drugs), psychological and media warfare (manipulating perceptions to break down enemy will), international law warfare (blocking enemy actions using multinational organizations), resource warfare (seizing control of vital natural resources), even ecological warfare (creating man-made earthquakes or other natural disasters).

Now my generation might not see a fight between China and the US but they might be gearing up for one fifty years from now. (Their strategic thinking is based on decades and half-centuries not days or months like the West.) But If I know Andrew Marshall and the other folks in the strategic thinktank within the bellows of the Pentagon they're mulling over it non-stop. So far the US has staved off China in the "resource warfare" category when Unocal accepted a takeover bid from US owned Chevron rather than the Chinese owned CNOOC. I just hope that we pay attention to the other observations made in Boot's commentary. We'll see.