BEIJING -- A top-to-bottom modernization is transforming the Chinese
military, raising the stakes for U.S. forces long dominant in the
Pacific.
Several programs to improve China's armed forces could soon produce a
stronger nuclear deterrent against the United States, soldiers better trained to
use high-technology weapons, and more effective cruise and anti-ship missiles
for use in the waters around Taiwan, according to foreign specialists and U.S.
officials.
In the past several weeks, President Bush and his senior aides,
including Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Condoleezza
Rice and Director of Central Intelligence Porter J. Goss, have expressed concern
over the recent pace of China's military progress and its effect on the regional
balance of power.
Their comments suggested the modernization program might be on the
brink of reaching one of its principal goals. For the last decade -- at least
since two U.S. aircraft carrier battle groups steamed in to show resolve during
a moment of high tension over Taiwan in 1996 -- Chinese leaders have sought to
field enough modern weaponry to ensure that any U.S. decision to intervene again
would be painful and fraught with risk.
As far as is known, China's military has not come up with a weapon
system that suddenly changes the equation in the Taiwan Strait or surrounding
waters where Japanese and U.S. forces deploy, the specialists said. China has
been trying to update its military for more than two decades, seeking to push
the low-tech, manpower-heavy force it calls a people's army into the
21st-century world of computers, satellites and electronic weapons. Although
results have been slow in coming, they added, several programs will come to
fruition simultaneously in the next few years, promising a new level of
firepower in one of the world's most volatile regions.
"This is the harvest time," said Lin Chong-pin, a former Taiwanese
deputy defense minister and an expert on the Chinese military at the Foundation
on International and Cross-Strait Studies in Taipei.
U.S. and Taiwanese military officials pointed in particular to China's
rapid development of cruise and other anti-ship missiles designed to pierce the
electronic defenses of U.S. vessels that might be dispatched to the Taiwan
Strait in case of conflict.
The Chinese navy has taken delivery of two Russian-built
Sovremenny-class guided missile destroyers and has six more on order, equipped
with Sunburn missiles able to skim 4 1/2 feet above the water at a speed of Mach
2.5 to evade radar. In addition, it has contracted with Russia to buy eight
Kilo-class diesel submarines that carry Club anti-ship missiles with a range of
145 miles.
"These systems will present significant challenges in the event of a
U.S. naval force response to a Taiwan crisis," Vice Adm. Lowell E. Jacoby,
director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, told the Senate Armed Services
Committee in testimony March 17.
The Nuclear
Deterrent
Strategically, China's military is also close to
achieving an improved nuclear deterrent against the United States, according to
foreign officials and specialists.
The Type 094 nuclear missile submarine, launched last July to replace a
trouble-prone Xia-class vessel, can carry 16 intercontinental ballistic
missiles. Married with the newly developed Julang-2 missile, which has a range
of more than 5,000 miles and the ability to carry independently targeted
warheads, the 094 will give China a survivable nuclear deterrent against the
continental United States, according to "Modernizing China's Military," a study
by David Shambaugh of George Washington University.
In addition, the Dongfeng-31 solid-fuel mobile ballistic missile, a
three-stage, land-based equivalent of the Julang-2, has been deployed in recent
years to augment the approximately 20 Dongfeng-5 liquid-fuel missiles already in
service, according to academic specialists citing U.S. intelligence
reports.
It will be joined in coming years by an 8,000-mileDongfeng-41, these
reports said, putting the entire United States within range of land-based
Chinese ICBMs as well. "The main purpose of that is not to attack the United
States," Lin said. "The main purpose is to throw a monkey wrench into the
decision-making process in Washington, to make the Americans think, and think
again, about intervening in Taiwan, and by then the Chinese have moved
in."
With a $1.3 trillion economy growing at more than 9
percent a year, China has acquired more than enough wealth to make these
investments in a modern military. The announced defense budget has risen by
double digits in most recent years. For 2005, it jumped 12.6 percent to hit
nearly $30 billion.
The Pentagon estimates that real military expenditures,
including weapons acquisitions and research tucked into other budgets, should be
calculated at two or three times the announced figure. That would make China's
defense expenditures among the world's largest, but still far behind the $400
billion budgeted this year by the United States.
Projecting Force to
Taiwan
Taiwan, the self-ruled island that China insists must
reunite with the mainland, has long been at the center of this growth in
military spending; one of the military's chief missions is to project a threat
of force should Taiwan's rulers take steps toward formal independence.
Embodying the threat, the 2nd Artillery Corps has deployed more than
600 short-range ballistic missiles aimed at Taiwan from southeastern China's
Fujian and Jiangxi provinces, according to Taiwan's deputy defense minister,
Michael M. Tsai. Medium-range missiles have also been developed, he said, and
much of China's modernization campaign is directed at acquiring weapons and
support systems that would give it air and sea superiority in any conflict over
the 100-mile-wide Taiwan Strait.
But the expansion of China's interests abroad, particularly energy
needs, has also broadened the military's mission in recent years. Increasingly,
according to foreign specialists and Chinese commentators, China's navy and air
force have set out to project power in the South China Sea, where several
islands are under dispute and vital oil supplies pass through, and in the East
China Sea, where China and Japan are at loggerheads over mineral rights and
several contested islands.
China has acquired signals-monitoring facilities on Burma's Coco
Islands and, according to U.S. reports, at a port it is building in cooperation
with Pakistan near the Iranian border at Gwadar, which looks out over tankers
exiting the Persian Gulf. According to a report prepared for Rumsfeld's office
by Booz Allen Hamilton, the consulting firm, China has developed a "string of
pearls" strategy, seeking military-related agreements with Bangladesh, Cambodia
and Thailand in addition to those with Burma and Pakistan.
Against this background, unifying Taiwan with the mainland has become
more than just a nationalist goal. The 13,500-square-mile territory has also
become a platform that China needs to protect southern sea lanes, through which
pass 80 percent of its imported oil and tons of other imported raw materials. It
could serve as a base for Chinese submarines to have unfettered access to the
deep Pacific, according to Tsai, Taiwan's deputy defense minister. "Taiwan for
them now is a strategic must and no longer just a sacred mission," Lin
said.
Traditionally, China's threat against Taiwan has been envisaged as a
Normandy-style assault by troops hitting the beaches. French, German, British
and Mexican military attaches were invited to observe such landing exercises by
specialized Chinese troops last September.
Also in that vein, specialists noted, the Chinese navy's fast-paced
ship construction program includes landing vessels and troop transports. Two
giant transports that were seen under construction in Shanghai's shipyards a
year ago, for instance, have disappeared, presumably to the next stage of their
preparation for deployment.
But U.S. and Taiwanese officials noted that China's amphibious forces
had the ability to move across the strait only one armored division -- about
12,000 men with their vehicles. That would be enough to occupy an outlying
Taiwanese island as a gesture, they said, but not to seize the main
island.
Instead, Taiwanese officials said, if a conflict arose, they would
expect a graduated campaign of high-tech pinpoint attacks, including cruise
missile strikes on key government offices or computer sabotage, designed to
force the leadership in Taipei to negotiate short of all-out war. The 1996
crisis, when China test-fired missiles off the coast, cost the Taiwanese economy
$20 billion in lost business and mobilization expenses, a senior security
official recalled.
High-Tech Emphasis
A little-discussed but key facet of China's military
modernization has been a reduction in personnel and an intensive effort to
better train and equip the soldiers who remain, particularly those who operate
high-technology weapons. Dennis J. Blasko, a former U.S. military attache in
Beijing who is writing a book on the People's Liberation Army, said that forming
a core of skilled commissioned and noncommissioned officers and other
specialists who can make the military run in a high-tech environment may be just
as important in the long run as buying sophisticated weapons.
Premier Wen Jiabao told the National People's Congress last month that
his government would soon complete a 200,000-soldier reduction that has been
underway since 2003. That would leave about 2.3 million troops in the Chinese
military, making it still the world's biggest, according to a report issued
recently by the Defense Ministry.
Because of pensions and retraining for dismissed soldiers, the training
and personnel reduction program has so far been an expense rather than a
cost-cutter, according to foreign specialists. But it has encountered
competition for funds from the high-tech and high-expense program to make
China's military capable of waging what former president Jiang Zemin called "war
under informationalized conditions."
The emphasis on high-tech warfare, as opposed to China's traditional
reliance on masses of ground troops, was dramatized by shifts last September in
the Communist Party's decision-making Central Military Commission, which had
long been dominated by the People's Liberation Army. Air force commander Qiao
Qingchen, Navy commander Zhang Dingfa and 2nd Artillery commander Jing Zhiyuan,
whose units control China's ballistic missiles, joined the commission for the
first time, signaling the importance of their responsibilities under the
modernization drive.
Air Superiority
Striving for air superiority over the Taiwan Strait, the air
force has acquired from Russia more than 250 Sukhoi Su-27 single-role and Su-30
all-weather, multi-role fighter planes, according to Richard D. Fisher, vice
president of the International Assessment and Strategy Center in Washington. The
Pentagon has forecast that, as the Sukhoi program continues to add to China's
aging inventory, the air force will field about 2,000 warplanes by 2020, of
which about 150 will be fourth-generation craft equipped with sophisticated
avionics.
But specialists noted that many of China's Su-27s have spent most of
the time on the ground for lack of maintenance. In addition, according to U.S.
and Taiwanese experts, China has remained at the beginning stages of its effort
to acquire the equipment and skills necessary for midair refueling, space-based
information systems, and airborne reconnaissance and battle management
platforms.
A senior Taiwanese military source said Chinese pilots started training
on refueling and airborne battle management several years ago, but so far have
neither the equipment nor the technique to integrate such operations into their
order of battle. Similarly, he said, China has been testing use of Global
Positioning System devices to guide its cruise missiles but remains some time
away from deploying such technology.
Buying such electronic equipment would be China's most
likely objective if the European Union goes ahead with plans to lift its arms
sales embargo despite objections from Washington, a senior European diplomat in
Beijing said. A Chinese effort to acquire Israel's Phalcon airborne radar system
was stymied in 2000 when the United States prevailed on Israel to back out of
the $1 billion deal.