How we manage our return to relative equality with other, emerging great powers will largely determine whether we continue to prosper and the world continues to integrate. Obviously we cannot determine the process. It is natural that our power will decline relative to other nations as global wealth continues to grow. If you see this as the U.S. becoming weaker, you will draw one set of conclusions. If you see this as a natural and positive development, then you will draw another set of conclusions. One thing is certain: the arrangements that were established in the 1950s are definitively dead.
China was a third world country when it was established as a Great Power at the insistence of President Roosevelt in 1944. Today it is emerging as a global powerhouse. It is governed by a ruthless dictatorship opposed by a very significant minority of its people. We accept this and we should. We do not have to approve its suppression of Tibet and other minorities but it is in our interest to encourage economic development and hopefully political change in China.
But China is not alone. India, Korea and Pakistan have nuclear weapons. Japan could have them in five minutes. Until recently the vast power of the U.S. trumped most of the regional tensions and rivalries. This is not going to continue. The U.S. has very good relations with Japan and is developing ties with India. Korea is volatile and its northern dictatorship is teetering. Taiwan is struggling to figure out how to live with China without being absorbed. We do not want a war with China, but would we aid Taiwan if it is attacked? It could happen. What will happen if there is serious disorder in China? What if there is a real uprising in Tibet and other parts of Western China? Would the ruling cliques bang the drums of nationalism and attempt to seize Taiwan and Hong Kong? What will the United States do? I do not think we know. We have been locked in place for more than sixty years as the Sole Superpower.
In the last few years the U.S, has begun to change its military relationships with Japan and Korea. We are slowly, too slowly, withdrawing forces from South Korea, Okinawa and other parts of Japan and constructing a new base of operations in Guam. This is a development of great significance. At the same time our national defense strategy continues to be based on the technologies which brought us total victory in WW2. We continue to rely on the carrier groups and flights of planes to project power. The nuclear carriers we use to terrorize third world countries have never been challenged or threatened.
Nuclear carriers groups are huge targets. The Russians could never compete with us. Instead they spent a lot of effort in developing weapons to attack ours. These missile systems have been sold on to the Chinese and the Iranians. I am attaching a piece by Martin Sieff, a defense analyst, which raises significant questions about the vulnerability of carriers which were invented almost a century ago! You may recall that Admiral Rickover, the creator of the nuclear navy, aroused the ire of his bosses when he openly called for scrapping carriers as obsolescent technology -- almost four decades ago. Carriers continue to get bigger.
The article below is the fifth and final piece of a series. Those who are interested, Google Martin Sieff and read the others.
There is no question that the U.S. is the predominant military power. We should continue to be a naval power of the first rank as we were in fact even before we were the United States. Whether we have the correct configuration of naval forces to assure that is an open question.
The navy loves carriers, the Pentagon loves the Navy, and the Congress is their pimp. The development of a new national security doctrine is imperative. This doctrine will identify the forces we require and the weapons systems we need to fund and develop. The Soviet Union has been gone for almost two decades. We have not addressed the consequences of this extraordinary development. The way we have engaged in Iraq is one consequence of our failure to adjust.
I am devoted to being provocative and thoughtful. We know that an overhaul is required. Our governance is deplorable. Some of it is due to this Administration -- Iraq obviously, foreign policy generally -- some of it is deeper, structural, involving tax policy and the concentration of power in Washington and legal bureaucracies that proliferate like May flies. Some of it we may fix, some will be with us like the Roman dole to the very end.
Read the attached piece by Martin Sieff, Google him for the first four which are worth twenty minutes of your time.
Please ask your friends and others to read this if you think its worthy. And share your thoughts, friendly, disagreeable, whatever they are.
By MARTIN SIEFF
UPI Senior News Analyst
WASHINGTON, April 1 (UPI) -- Russian and Chinese naval weapons designers know they lack the resources and the technology to match the awesome power of U.S. aircraft carrier battle groups ship for ship and plane for plane. So instead, for decades, they have opted for asymmetrical solutions to the problem of killing U.S. super carriers. And they have come up with some lethal weapons.
Russian military systems designers look to be able to produce large numbers of weapons based on relatively simple designs that are cost-effective and robust on the battlefield. And when confronted with U.S. weapons systems that they cannot match directly like stealth bombers or nuclear-powered super aircraft carriers, they look for asymmetrical solutions that enable them to use their own areas of expertise.
Therefore, although Russia has still to demonstrate it can successfully build and operate a modern, 21st century-era large aircraft carrier, it leads the world in designing and producing relatively cheap missile systems designed to "kill" such carriers at scores, and even hundreds of miles distance. The U.S. arsenal has no weapons to compare with the Russian-built Moskit 3M80 -- NATO designation SS-N-22 Sunburn -- ramjet-powered cruise missile or the new, even more advanced SS-N-27 Sizzler.
These weapons fly two and a half times faster than U.S. ones. American cruise missiles are subsonic, but Russian-made ones can fly at well over Mach 2, or more than twice the speed of sound -- with speeds estimated at 1,500 mph to 1,700 mph at close to ground level.
Russia has sold the technology to build the Moskit to China, which manufactures it as the Hai Ying or Sea Eagle HY2. It can carry an almost 500-pound warhead, and it can deliver a tactical nuclear weapon. The threat of the Hai Ying is so great that it has effectively barred operational access to the Taiwan Strait to U.S. aircraft carriers in time of high tension. China has also supplied the Hai Ying to Iran.
It is striking that four-star Adm. William Fox Fallon, who has just resigned as head of U.S. Central Command, has expressed his caution and reluctance about going to war with Iran. Fallon is the U.S. Navy's leading expert, and therefore probably the top authority in the world, about using aircraft carrier-based air power to strike land-based targets. His previous position was running Pacific Command with great distinction, and that theater includes China and Taiwan.
Fallon's caution is clearly based in part on the fact that U.S. carrier battle groups would have to be operated with great discretion and skill to protect them from the threat of Iran's Sunburns.
The threat that the Moskit SS-N-22 Sunburn -- and now its younger more advanced sister, the SS-N-27 Sizzler -- pose to U.S. aircraft carriers is very similar to the one that German battleships' 15-inch, or 381mm, plunging shell-fire fired from long range posed to British battlecruisers in World War II. The Bismarck, as previously noted in this series, sank the legendary and enormous, but only lightly armored, HMS Hood with a single long-range shell that detonated its powder magazine.
Respected analyst David Crane, writing in Defense Review in November 2006, concluded bleakly, "Bottom line, our aircraft carriers are vulnerable against the latest Russian and Chinese torpedo and missile tech, and with the current U.S. naval defense philosophy, that situation isn't likely to change anytime soon."
It is difficult to disagree with this prognosis.
UPI Senior News Analyst
WASHINGTON, April 1 (UPI) -- Russian and Chinese naval weapons designers know they lack the resources and the technology to match the awesome power of U.S. aircraft carrier battle groups ship for ship and plane for plane. So instead, for decades, they have opted for asymmetrical solutions to the problem of killing U.S. super carriers. And they have come up with some lethal weapons.
Russian military systems designers look to be able to produce large numbers of weapons based on relatively simple designs that are cost-effective and robust on the battlefield. And when confronted with U.S. weapons systems that they cannot match directly like stealth bombers or nuclear-powered super aircraft carriers, they look for asymmetrical solutions that enable them to use their own areas of expertise.
Therefore, although Russia has still to demonstrate it can successfully build and operate a modern, 21st century-era large aircraft carrier, it leads the world in designing and producing relatively cheap missile systems designed to "kill" such carriers at scores, and even hundreds of miles distance. The U.S. arsenal has no weapons to compare with the Russian-built Moskit 3M80 -- NATO designation SS-N-22 Sunburn -- ramjet-powered cruise missile or the new, even more advanced SS-N-27 Sizzler.
These weapons fly two and a half times faster than U.S. ones. American cruise missiles are subsonic, but Russian-made ones can fly at well over Mach 2, or more than twice the speed of sound -- with speeds estimated at 1,500 mph to 1,700 mph at close to ground level.
Russia has sold the technology to build the Moskit to China, which manufactures it as the Hai Ying or Sea Eagle HY2. It can carry an almost 500-pound warhead, and it can deliver a tactical nuclear weapon. The threat of the Hai Ying is so great that it has effectively barred operational access to the Taiwan Strait to U.S. aircraft carriers in time of high tension. China has also supplied the Hai Ying to Iran.
It is striking that four-star Adm. William Fox Fallon, who has just resigned as head of U.S. Central Command, has expressed his caution and reluctance about going to war with Iran. Fallon is the U.S. Navy's leading expert, and therefore probably the top authority in the world, about using aircraft carrier-based air power to strike land-based targets. His previous position was running Pacific Command with great distinction, and that theater includes China and Taiwan.
Fallon's caution is clearly based in part on the fact that U.S. carrier battle groups would have to be operated with great discretion and skill to protect them from the threat of Iran's Sunburns.
The threat that the Moskit SS-N-22 Sunburn -- and now its younger more advanced sister, the SS-N-27 Sizzler -- pose to U.S. aircraft carriers is very similar to the one that German battleships' 15-inch, or 381mm, plunging shell-fire fired from long range posed to British battlecruisers in World War II. The Bismarck, as previously noted in this series, sank the legendary and enormous, but only lightly armored, HMS Hood with a single long-range shell that detonated its powder magazine.
Respected analyst David Crane, writing in Defense Review in November 2006, concluded bleakly, "Bottom line, our aircraft carriers are vulnerable against the latest Russian and Chinese torpedo and missile tech, and with the current U.S. naval defense philosophy, that situation isn't likely to change anytime soon."
It is difficult to disagree with this prognosis.
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