XPost: talk.politics.misc, alt.politics.trump, talk.politics.guns
XPost: alt.california
From: benedict.milley@yahoo.com
In article
wrote:
>
> ...Send Kamala Harris to suck them all off until Trump is elected again.
>
The last time tensions soared between Beijing and Washington
over Taiwan, the U.S. Navy sent warships through the Taiwan
Strait and there was nothing China could do about it.
Those days are gone.
China’s military has undergone a transformation since the mid-
1990s when a crisis erupted over Taiwan’s president visiting the
U.S., prompting an angry reaction from Beijing.
“It’s a very different situation now,” said Michele Flournoy, a
former undersecretary of defense for policy in the Obama
administration. “It’s a much more contested and much more lethal
environment for our forces.”
Chinese President Xi Jinping, unlike his predecessors, now has
serious military power at his disposal, including ship-killing
missiles, a massive navy and an increasingly capable air force.
That new military might is changing the strategic calculus for
the U.S. and Taiwan, raising the potential risks of a conflict
or miscalculation, former officials and experts say.
During the 1995-96 crisis, in an echo of current tensions, China
staged live-fire military drills, issued stern warnings to
Taipei and launched missiles into waters near Taiwan.
But the U.S. military responded with the largest show of force
since the Vietnam War, sending an array of warships to the area,
including two aircraft carrier groups. The carrier Nimitz and
other battleships sailed through the narrow waterway that
separates China and Taiwan, driving home the idea of America’s
military dominance.
“Beijing should know the strongest military power in the western
Pacific is the United States,” said the then-defense secretary,
William Perry.
The Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) back then was a low-
tech, slow-moving force that was no match for the U.S. military,
with a lackluster navy and air force that could not venture too
far from China's coastline, former and current U.S. officials
said.
“They realized they were vulnerable, that the Americans could
sail aircraft carriers right up in their face, and there was
nothing they could do about it,” said Matthew Kroenig, who
served as an intelligence and defense official in the Bush,
Obama and Trump administrations.
The Chinese, taken aback by the U.S. military’s high-tech
display in the first Gulf War, “went to school on the American
way of war” and launched a concerted effort to invest in their
military and — above all — to bolster their position in the
Taiwan Strait, Kroenig said.
Beijing drew a number of lessons from the 1995-96 crisis,
concluding it needed satellite surveillance and other
intelligence to spot adversaries over the horizon, and a “blue
water” navy and air force able to sail and fly across the
western Pacific, according to David Finkelstein, director of
China and Indo-Pacific security affairs at CNA, an independent
research institute.
“The PLA Navy has made remarkable progress since 1995 and 1996.
It’s actually mind-staggering how quickly the PLA Navy has built
itself up. And of course in ‘95-96, the PLA Air Force almost
never flew over water,” said Finkelstein, a retired U.S. Army
officer.
Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has
described China’s dramatic rise as a military power as a
strategic earthquake.
“We’re witnessing, in my view, we’re witnessing one of the
largest shifts in global geostrategic power that the world has
witnessed,” Milley said last year.
The Chinese military now is “very formidable especially in and
around home waters, particularly in the vicinity of Taiwan,”
said James Stavridis, a retired four-star admiral and former
commander of NATO.
China’s navy now has more ships than the U.S., he said. Although
U.S. naval ships are larger and more advanced, with more
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