A group studying developments in the Chinese Navy has been set up at the U.S. Navy’s Naval War College, said one of the group’s leaders.
The China Maritime Studies Institute is composed of a number of Chinese-speaking experts, said Lyle Goldstein, an associate professor at the Newport, R.I. college. Group members will comb open literature, looking for the “amazing amount” of information Goldstein said is published by the Chinese.
A primary aim of the group, he told an audience here at a Naval Institute Joint Warfare Conference, will be to better understand the sweeping changes taking place in the People’s Liberation Army Navy.
Goldstein said he was concerned that the current situation “causes the U.S. and China to actually plan for war against each other,” something, he added that can “happen at any time.”
China’s naval modernization, Goldstein said, includes the “quite extraordinary” simultaneous construction of four different types of submarine classes, an “extremely dynamic mine warfare program,” and the county’s fielding of an array of cruise missile types.
China has put “tremendous energy into mine warfare,” Goldstein said, noting Chinese interest in German submarine mining efforts of the U.S. east coast during the world wars.
“We have to get used to a fundamentally new kind of challenge” from China, he said.
A “tremendous amount of uncertainty” surrounds discussion about the aim of the Chinese naval modernization, said David Helvey, head of the China desk at the Pentagon.
Helvey reiterated the U.S. government position that the United States wants China “to act as a responsible international partner,” and noted that the U.S.-China relationship “has improved considerably since it hit a low point during the EP-3 Aries II incident in April and May 2003, when China held the crew of a U.S. Navy intelligence aircraft after it was involved in a collision with a Chinese Navy fighter near Hainan. The recent visit of two Chinese Navy ships to Hawaii and San Diego, which included exercises with the U.S. Navy, helped each country to “demystify” the other, he said.
But Helvey, who leads the group that produces the Pentagon’s annual assessment of Chinese military power, also noted several areas of concern about China’s military modernization:
• China is strengthening its nuclear deterrent, shifting to more accurate systems.
• The Chinese military is improving its precision-strike capabilities and has arrayed more than 800 missiles against Taiwan.
• Better air defense systems are being installed on shore and on ships that expand the air defense perimeter, and the country is developing “significant capabilities in cyberspace.”
China’s military transformation has been “very comprehensive,” Helvey noted, and extends to personnel system improvements and better military education along with a modernized logistics system.
The near-term aim of the Chinese naval modernization, Helvey said, probably is fixed on influencing Taiwan and territorial disputes near Chinese waters. But the buildup also gives the Navy a power projection capability, he said, and “at least one” nuclear submarine has been detected on an area patrol outside Chinese waters.
Goldstein agreed that the Taiwan situation “serves as a basis for their naval modernization.” But China’s leaders, he said, also are subject to “guns-or-butter” debates in their annual budget process. If relations with Taiwan improve or the situation is resolved, he said, “it becomes much harder for the militarists [in China] to win the argument.”
Fourtunately the journalist was a clever man and perceived that he was fooled, obviously by a man who cannot differentiate between reality and fiction.