U.S. Hawks Mobilize For War on China
by Michael Billington
Feb. 25—Almost four months ago, at the conclusion of the APEC (Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation) summit, Chinese President Xi Jinping publicly invited the United States and others to join China in the Asian International Infrastructure Bank, and its drive for global development. Yet leading elements of the U.S. security establishment not only refuse to admit that China is eschewing geopolitics in favor of cooperation, but are also gunning for a military confrontation.
The latest example comes from Andrew Krepinevich, one of the leading members of the Andy Marshall kindergarten at the Pentagon’s Office of Net Assessment (ONA, which dreamed up Donald Rumsfeld’s misbegotten “Revolution in Military Affairs”). He au-thored a piece in the March/April issue of the Council on Foreign Relations’ Foreign Affairs magazine, titled “How to Deter China—The Case for Archipelagic Defense.” The article is a call for a massive build-up of U.S. and allied land, air, and sea military forces along the “first island chain” around China (the Kuril Islands, Japan, the Ryukyu Islands, Taiwan, the Philippines, and Borneo, running from the Kamchatka Peninsula to the Malay Peninsula). Krepinevich, who now heads an ONA spinoff, the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments (CSBA)—the current Deputy Secretary of Defense Bob Work was previously a senior fellow there—declares China to be preparing to drive the United States out of the western Pacific altogether. “China’s PLA is bolstering its so-called anti-access/area-denial (A2/AD) capabilities,” Krepinevich writes, “with the express goal of making the western Pacific a no-go zone for the U.S. military,” including the destruction of the Pentagon’s satellite-based command-and-control systems. To meet this imagined challenge, he calls for enhancing the Air-Sea Battle doctrine (Andy Marshall’s first-strike plan for war on China, which Obama has officially endorsed) by sending significant numbers of ground forces throughout the region to run “mobile launchers and anti-ship missiles,” and plant naval mines across the access-points.
March 6, 2015 EIR National 39 to the Pacific through the island chain, “to make large stretches of sea off-limits to the Chinese navy.”Proof that ground troops could do the job? Krepinevich points to the great success of U.S. advisors, with air power, in Vietnam! This would indicate that Marshall’s kindergarten is also smoking too much of George Shultz’s marijuana.Since China has become skilled at anti-satellite war fare, he adds, the United States should “establish a communications network of fiber-optic cables buried beneath the ground and the seabed along the chain.”Krepinevich worries about the fact that there is an inadequate “willingness of states along the first island chain to cooperate.” This is explained, he says, by China’s effort to “slowly but inexorably shift the regional military balance in its favor, leaving the rest of the region with little choice but to submit to Chinese coercion.”Are They Insane?
This captures the insanity of this neoconservative network within the institutional leadership of the United States. The fact that China, together with its allies in the BRICS (Russia, India, Brazil, and South Africa, but essentially including nearly all of the nations of Asia, Africa, and South America), has sparked the greatest explosion of infrastructure development and trade agreements in the last 50 years, in contrast to the refusal of the U.S. and Europe to invest in any real physical development anywhere in the world, is of no import to these utopian theorists.In their eyes, everything is geopolitics, and the actual conditions of life of the human beings who populate the nations of the world mean nothing to them. In fact, their view of humanity as no more than animals in a Hobbsian world of “war of each against all,” is extended to the interests of nations as well, in a zero-sum game, with each nation’s advantage coming at the expense of the others. Xi Jinping’s call on the U.S. to join in his New Silk Road vision, in “win-win” cooperation in developing the entire world, is viewed by this Pentagon grouping as simply a cynical ploy aimed at Chinese world domination. Since the U.S. must necessarily confront China, argues Krepinevich, the (mostly unwilling) nations surrounding China must accept U.S. material military support, so that they can “form a col Projection Capability,” which is essentially an updated version of Air-Sea Battle. It argues that twice lective front that deters China from acts of aggression or coercion,” and counter “China’s revisionist ambitions.”Air-Sea Battle and the ‘Third Offset Strategy’ Krepinevich was one of the authors of the “Air-Sea Battle” doctrine in 2010, which has subsequently been adopted by the Obama Administration. It is not actually a military strategy, but simply a first-strike battle plan, based on the assumption that if China, in the eyes of the neo-con war planners, has the intention of securing its territorial waters (through what these imperial schemers dubbed “anti-access/area-denial”), then Washington must launch full-scale bombing assaults on all Chinese mainland military installations, along with an array of military and space-based operations against China’s industrial and military capacities.
In October, one of Krepinevich’s collaborators at the CSBA, Robert Martinage, issued a report titled “Toward a New Offset Strategy: Exploiting U.S. Long-Term Advantages to Restore U.S. Global Power before, the United States found itself confronted by an adversary that threatened to obtain military parity with it—in the 1950s, when President Eisenhower responded by launchig a “New Look,” massively building up nuclear weapon capacities as a deterrent to Soviet nuclear capacity, and in the 1970s, under Secretary of Defense Harold Brown’s “Offset Strategy,” using information technology to create a new generation of “smart weapons” to maintain superiority over the Soviet Union.Now, China and Russia are modernizing their military capacities, such that U.S. superiority is “beginning to slip away,” writes Martinage. The United States must launch a “Third Offset” strategy to meet the threat, he argues, laying out a series of proposals which are spelled out in Krepinevich’s “Deter China” war plan in Foreign Affairs.
Lyndon LaRouche, briefed on this insanity, said that it demonstrates that Obama and his neo-con controllers are a lost cause; that they have no idea how to run a war, or even an interim operation. All they know how to do is kill masses of people.
posted by: Rhea Razon
