Possible war with China rears it’s head..
A Washington Times special report details, at great length, how China has been building up it’s forces, rapidly, and an invasion of Taiwan seems a done deal.
China is building its military forces faster than U.S. intelligence and military analysts expected, prompting fears that Beijing will attack Taiwan in the next two years, according to Pentagon officials.
U.S. defense and intelligence officials say all the signs point in one troubling direction: Beijing then will be forced to go to war with the United States, which has vowed to defend Taiwan against a Chinese attack.
China’s military buildup includes an array of new high-technology weapons, such as warships, submarines, missiles and a maneuverable warhead designed to defeat U.S. missile defenses. Recent intelligence reports also show that China has stepped up military exercises involving amphibious assaults, viewed as another sign that it is preparing for an attack on Taiwan.
“There’s a growing consensus that at some point in the mid-to-late ’90s, there was a fundamental shift in the sophistication, breadth and re-sorting of Chinese defense planning,” said Richard Lawless, a senior China-policy maker in the Pentagon. “And what we’re seeing now is a manifestation of that change in the number of new systems that are being deployed, the sophistication of those systems and the interoperability of the systems.”
China’s economy has been growing at a rate of at least 10 percent for each of the past 10 years, providing the country’s military with the needed funds for modernization.
The combination of a vibrant centralized economy, growing military and increasingly fervent nationalism has transformed China into what many defense officials view as a fascist state.
“We may be seeing in China the first true fascist society on the model of Nazi Germany, where you have this incredible resource base in a commercial economy with strong nationalism, which the military was able to reach into and ramp up incredible production,” a senior defense official said.
For Pentagon officials, alarm bells have been going off for the past two years as China’s military began rapidly building and buying new troop- and weapon-carrying ships and submarines.
This is just the beginning. It’s pretty alarming. It feels rather like the situation with Japan in 1940.
I’d love to be able to say that I am confident that we could thwart this, but we simply cannot, short of a preemptive strike to wipe out the Chinese Navy and it’s facilities. That of course, is an act of war, and China is no Iraq.
We’re going to have a war forced on us - an old fashioned war - and the only way to avoid it is to give China Taiwan, and anything else she decides she wants. The Spratlys? Brunei?
We’d be seen (rightly so) as weak-kneed in the region. Our national mindset is not ready for this. I PRAY we could repeat the feat of the 1940s.