ll power flows from the barrel of a gun.

—Mao Zedong

The last time most Westerners took full notice of the Chinese military was on June 4, 1989. That’s the day the Dragon’s tanks rolled over bodies and bicycles around Tiananmen Square and trigger-happy shock troops took target practice on protesters pinned against the walls of the Forbidden City.

Since that bloodshed more than two decades ago, China’s leaders have not softened their attitudes one bit toward political dissent. What has changed considerably is their military arsenal.

In fact, China’s Army, Air Force, and especially its Navy have all taken Great Leaps Forward toward becoming the most formidably equipped in the world. Unfortunately, much of this shiny new weaponry is now aimed squarely at us.

A weapons of mass destruction case in point is the Dongfeng (DF) or “East Wind” 31A. This is a mobile-launched, long range, intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) that is hard to track, harder to spot, and more than ready to deliver a 1-megaton nuclear warhead right to your doorstep in Des Moines or Decatur.

Or how about the Jin class nuclear missile submarine with its Jù Làng-2 ICBMs? These “Giant Wave” missiles can be armed with multiple warheads capable of frying any city in the United States or Europe.

And speaking of submarines, did you know that on the tropical island of Hainan, China’s southernmost province, the Navy has built a James Bond–style underground hideaway? This base’s clear purpose is to shield the comings and goings of China’s growing submarine fleet from Western satellites—a fleet that now regularly intrudes into Japanese territorial waters and just as regularly stalks U.S. ships on the high seas.

As for control over those high seas, there is also the DF-21D ballistic anti-ship missile—a true naval warfare game changer. It’s a mobile-launched, Mach 10, solid fueled demon expressly designed to drive America’s Pacific Fleet from the Taiwan Strait and Sea of Japan right back to the beaches of Hawaii; and this sudden screaming death has just one target—aircraft supercarriers like the USS George Washington, which house crews of over 5,000 American sailors and aviators.

What do these armaments have in common? They are distinctly offensive weapons geared not toward territorial defense but rather toward what Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mike Mullen has described as “expeditionary” campaigns. Indeed, this weaponry is part of a rapidly expanding arsenal that could be used effectively against the likes of India, Japan, or Vietnam in regional conflicts. It could be used equally effectively to take on the United States over control of such strategic chess pieces as world shipping lanes—or to finally take Taiwan in an ultimate mano-a-mano blitzkrieg.

Here’s how Admiral Mullen has framed the growing contradiction between what civilian leaders like Premier Wen Jiabao insist is a “peaceful rise” and what, in reality, has become the most rapid military buildup of a totalitarian regime since the 1930s:

[China’s] heavy investments of late97 in modern, expeditionary maritime and air capabilities seem oddly out of step with [its] stated goal of territorial defense. Every nation has a right to defend itself and to spend as it sees fit for that purpose. But a gap as wide as what seems to be forming between China’s stated intent and its military programs leaves me more than curious about the end result. Indeed, I have moved from being curious to being genuinely concerned.

Just how much should all of us outside the Pentagon be concerned? And what exactly is the truth behind China’s alleged peaceful rise?

The only way to correctly answer these questions is to analyze what China’s military forces are doing—not by swallowing whole what its civilian leaders are saying. That’s why over the course of the next four chapters we are going to drill down into the impressive set of military capabilities a rising China is developing.

We begin in this chapter with a wake-up call overview of China’s traditional brute-force military branches—the Army, Air Force, and Navy. Chapters 9 and 10 then move to an even more alarming analysis of China’s growing capabilities in modern espionage and “asymmetric warfare.” To complete our assessment, we will look closely at the astonishing rise of China as a space power—and come to better understand why the People’s Republic sees control of the heavens as the ultimate strategic high ground.

By the end of these four chapters, it should be clear that we in America do not just need a “Sputnik moment” as President Barack Obama has called for to jump-start our economy. We—along with Europe, Japan, and the rest of the world—also need a “Winston Churchill moment” that wakes us to the growing dangers of a heavily armed, totalitarian regime intent on regional hegemony and bent on global domination.

The “Chosin Few” Meet Chinese “Hordes”

Yes, we all have our memories98 of buddies killed, of the hordes of Chinese assaulting our frozen lines, and the long, dangerous walk out, but I truly believe the uppermost thought in our minds, when we think of that campaign, is the cold! Those long nights in a ditch, or a foxhole, with the thermometer hanging around 40 degrees below zero, will long be remembered.

—Korean War veteran Lee Bergee, USMC

Since the days of Mao Zedong, China has relied on a military strategy grounded in the use of overwhelming force. Today, even as China is moving toward a far more modern view of warfare, it continues to maintain the world’s largest standing army. This army is a “horde” 2.3 million strong; and its boots on the ground far outnumber the combined forces of Canada, Germany, the United States, and the United Kingdom. Moreover, China’s ground troops are exceedingly well supplied with the world’s largest inventory of tanks, artillery, and personnel carriers.

On the tank front alone, China’s 6,700 dwarf Taiwan’s 1,100, South Korea’s 2,300, and Vietnam’s 1,000 or so. Even the U.S., in the middle of fighting two Asian land wars, only runs about 5,000 tanks.

Emblematic of the Red Army’s rapid shift to new technologies is the “Type 99” main battle tank, which is the vanguard weapon today for China’s modernized ground force. Its design is largely stolen from the venerable Soviet T-72. This high-tech killing machine incorporates everything from laser-guided missiles and satellite navigation to explosive reactive armor that can repel armor-piercing projectiles.

All in all—and it’s a whole lot of “all”—the Red Army is a formidable expeditionary force. It remains eminently capable of the same kind of quintessentially old-school human wave attacks that the world already bore stark witness to in conflicts ranging from China’s 1962 surprise attack on India to its 1979 unprovoked assault on Vietnam.

And with the machinations and threats of a lunatic North Korea remaining ever in the news today—and with China North Korea’s biggest ally and protectorate—let none in the United States ever forget the People’s Republic’s role during the Korean War. This 1950s bloodbath should have been a quick mop-up of poorly supplied North Korean troops by United Nation forces. Instead, in the pivotal battle of the war, China’s human waves turned Chosin into a frozen Hell; and thousands of young Americans, Brits, Australians, and Koreans bled out in cold mud under ruthless Chinese fire. Let’s not forget, too, that this was a relentless war that Mao Zedong pitilessly extended for two more years. He even sacrificed his own son to the pointless cause while doing it—only to doom at least three generations of North Koreans to virtual slavery and starvation.

The Best Air Force the Dragon Can Buy, Steal, or Scrounge

Wargaming, including an extensive simulation by Rand,99 has shown that the U.S. would generate a 6-1 kill ratio over Chinese aircraft, but the Americans would lose.

—Aviation Week

While China’s Red Army relies on sheer numbers, its Air Force is becoming one of the best that the Chinese can buy with our “Walmart dollars” or that its spies can steal.

Consider the Shenyang J-11B and the J-15 “flying shark.” The first, a twin-engine jet fighter, is a carbon copy knockoff of the Russian Sukhoi Su-27. The second, an aircraft carrier-capable plane, is the equally counterfeit twin of the Russian Su-33.

Now here’s what so darkly comic about these counterfeit planes. With each, China first signed a purchase and licensing agreement with Russia. However, once China got delivery of a plane or two, it simply reverse-engineered the Russian technology and then backed out of the deal—which just goes to show you there is no honor between a thief and a thug.

In response to getting ripped off not once but twice, an angry Russian Defense Council Member, Colonel Igor Korotchenko, discounted the Chinese knockoffs by claiming in the Russian International News Agency that: “The Chinese J-15 clone is unlikely100 to achieve the same performance characteristics of the Russian Su-33 carrier-based fighter.” Then he added, “I do not rule out the possibility that China could return to negotiations with Russia on the purchase of a substantial batch of Su-33s.” Well, don’t hold your breath, Colonel.

As for other noteworthy aircraft flying in Chinese formations, there is the J-17 “Thunder.” This plane grabs your attention not so much because of its offensive capabilities—it features impressive air-to-air and air-to-ground missiles. Rather, China’s development of the J-17 illustrates yet another of the many covert ways that the People’s Republic is acquiring sensitive military technologies. In this case, China used the backdoor vehicle of a phony “joint venture” with Pakistan—and some opportunistic French intervention—to magically create a path to circumvent the European Union’s weapons ban on China.

And, speaking of magic, the Chinese Air Force recently pulled out of its collective hat a diverse array of technologically advanced, remote-controlled, and self-guided “drones.” These are the same kind of unmanned craft that America has used with great effectiveness in both Afghanistan and Iraq.

To rub its newfound (and newly pirated) capabilities in America’s face, China not only debuted a radical new jet-powered drone at a Chinese air show in Zhuhai. The exhibitors also included a video simulation of the drone targeting a U.S. aircraft carrier so its crew of 5,000 American souls could be more accurately slaughtered by an incoming Chinese missile. Peaceful rise indeed.

30 Minutes over Tokyo, 10 Minutes to Taipei

Of all the airplanes in the hangars of the Chinese Air Force, the most provocative has to be the Chengdu J-20 “Black Eagle” stealth fighter. In a finely tuned insult to the United States—and perhaps as a rare display of the Dragon’s dark military humor—the Chinese Air Force successfully completed the J-20’s first test flight during an official state visit by the U.S. Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates. Of course, Gates was the perfect foil for Beijing’s little diplomatic joke—and poke in America’s eye. For it was Gates, doing his best impression of Neville Chamberlain, who had publicly insisted that China could not possibly produce such a fifth-generation plane before 2020.

What is not so amusing about this radar-evading plane is that it is clearly designed for air-to-ground attacks on China’s regional neighbors. Indeed, this Chinese Black Eagle exceeds its American stealth counterpart, the F-22, in a variety of performance factors that clearly value offensive bombing missions over territorial air defense. These factors include both a high fuel capacity and the runway clearance required for a heavy weapons load. What such factors mean from a strategic point of view is this: While the J-20 probably isn’t agile enough to defend China from top American fighter planes, it is an absolutely perfect weapon if the goal is to sneak up on Kyoto, Taipei, or Seoul with a big payload of bombs and missiles.

As to how China so quickly acquired the kind of sophisticated stealth technology that it took America decades to research and hundreds of billions of dollars to develop, this, too, is a chilling story. According to Croatian Military Chief of Staff, Admiral Davor Domazet-Loso, China acquired its basic stealth technology101 from the carcass of an American stealth fighter shot down over Serbia in 1999. In fact, as soon as the fighter went down, China dispatched a large cadre of spies to crisscross the region and buy up any parts that local farmers and villagers might have scavenged.

As to whether the People’s Republic is preparing to use its air force offensively, incursions by the Chinese Air Force are already forcing Japan to scramble its fighters almost 50 times a year—or roughly once a week and twice the rate of Chinese provocations just a few years ago. Nor is Japan alone in getting this sort of probing. India regularly reports Chinese incursions into its air space, particularly in the disputed regions near Kashmir and Arundachal Pradesh. Can you spell Hegemon?

Red Sky, Morning Sailor, Take Warning

The Chinese military’s future goal102 is to secure naval supremacy in the western Pacific waters inside the second line of defense from the Japanese archipelago to Guam Island and Indonesia. After that, the Chinese military will vie with U.S. naval forces in the Indian Ocean and in the entire Pacific region.

—Asahi Shimbun

While China’s army personifies brute force and its air force has the best flying machines it can buy or steal, China’s naval buildup ultimately is the most unsettling to Pentagon analysts. Indeed, the People’s Republic is moving forward at Manhattan Project speed to develop a blue water Navy capable of challenging the U.S. Navy. Its first goal is to push U.S. aircraft carrier fleets out of the Western Pacific—and perhaps finally take Taiwan—and then to ultimately project hard power across the globe.

At the center of this grand strategic struggle is one of the most iconic weapons in history—the mighty aircraft carrier. The U.S. Navy likes to call these ships “four and a half acres of sovereign and mobile American territory;” and they’ve been the backbone of a Pax Americana on the high seas ever since the end of World War II.

In fact, as the Dragon knows all too well, directly confronting a U.S. carrier and its accompanying armada is an exceedingly difficult task. Besides having its own flight wing of 75 fixed and rotor aircraft, a typical carrier like the George Washington will be closely guarded by an Aegis guided missile cruiser able to repel any surface attacks. The flattop will also be flanked by several destroyers with anti-aircraft missiles and will likely have at least one sub-hunting frigate running point. Meanwhile, beneath the sea, one or more fast attack, nuclear-powered Los Angeles class subs will be silently escorting this formidable surface group; and, at least in the past, any frontal assault by the existing Chinese Navy would not get within 50 miles of such a fleet in open waters.

It is precisely this kind of formidable carrier force that has thus far kept Taiwan free from the mainland’s subjugation. It is also the specter of America’s carrier-led Pacific Fleet that keeps Chinese strategists worrying about this ultimate nightmare: That one day the American Navy might blockade the oceanic transit point for 80% of China’s imported oil—the Strait of Malacca—in retaliation for some form of Chinese aggression.

Slam BAM, Thank You Ma’am

Known among defense analysts as a “carrier killer,”103 the Dongfeng-21D missile would be a game-changer in the Asian security environment, where U.S. Navy aircraft carrier battle groups have ruled the waves since the end of World War II. The DF-21D’s uniqueness is in its ability to hit a powerfully defended moving target with pinpoint precision—a capability U.S. Naval planners are scrambling to deal with.

—Associated Press

Because Chinese military strategists clearly see all the implications of a powerful aircraft carrier force, they are now rapidly developing a two-pronged counter-strategy. One prong involves the building of China’s own countervailing aircraft carrier group; the other relies on perfecting its game-changing “carrier killer” missile—known not so affectionately in Pentagon circles as the “BAMer,” short for ballistic anti-ship missile.

We say perfecting the BAMer because it is no small feat to hit even a large ship bobbing along in the ocean from a thousand miles away. That’s why China is busy taking target practice at a carrier-sized rectangle set up at a testing range in the Gobi desert. (Check it out on Google Earth; the coordinates are on our website!)

In fact, China’s new carrier killer is a “game-changer” in much the same way the advent of airplane-dropped torpedo bombs drove massive battleships from the high seas at the beginning of World War II. That sea change came when a British bi-plane with a single torpedo bomb helped sink the Nazi’s giant new battleship—the Bismarck—on its first cruise. That this truly was a game changer was further ratified by Japanese Admiral Yamamoto, who also used deadly torpedo bombs with devastating effect at Pearl Harbor, sending American battleship after battleship to the bottom.

Yet even as China’s big stick BAMer may foreshadow the extinction of the American aircraft carrier as a force projection power—and threaten to drive back America’s Pacific Fleet to the safe harbor of Hawaii—China is rapidly building its own countervailing fleet of flattops. In fact, China’s first carrier is likely to roll out of Dalian harbor sometime in 2011; and its story would be one riveting hour-long special on the Military Channel.

It’s a story that begins with China using a front company operating out of Hong Kong to buy an aircraft carrier from the Ukraine. This ship was the Varyag—a 67,500-ton flattop that was supposed to be the pride of the Soviet Union’s fleet.

With the breakup of the Soviet Union, however, construction of the Varyag was never fully completed. Instead, as its hull was gathering rust in a Black Sea Shipyard in the Ukraine, China developed a Hong Kong front group run by a bunch of former Chinese military officers to buy the ship at auction for a mere $20 million under the ruse that it would be turned into a giant floating casino in Macau.

Seeing through that ruse, the U.S. Pentagon got its putative ally Turkey to initially block transit of the ship. At that point, however, China’s deputy foreign minister, Yang Wenchang, flew to Ankara with a $360 million “economic aid package”—read: bribe—to trump Pentagon pressure; and the baksheeshed Turks allowed the Varyag to pass through the Bosporus.

Of course, upon the Varyag’s arrival in China, it was towed not to Macau but rather to Dalian Harbor for extensive analysis and refitting. Recent photos indicate she has been dry-docked, repainted in the colors of the Chinese Navy, had her flight decks resurfaced, and now sports a shiny new radar mast installed on her island. And very soon now, she will be launched and rechristened as the Shi Lang.

And here again, we must show our appreciation for the Chinese military’s dark sense of humor—and history! In this case, China has named its first flattop after a famous commander of the Manchu Fleet who originally invaded Taiwan during the 17th century and then worked hard to designate Taiwan as a prefecture of the Fujian province. Yep! The Chinese military sure knows how to send a message.

Over the next few years, China will send a much bigger message. It is expected to send a fleet of at least five flattops roaming around the globe—and no doubt running into the U.S. Navy.

The 007 Dragon Plays “Hide the Submarine”

Photographs emerged last night104 that appeared to confirm fears in Washington that China is building a giant underground nuclear submarine base on a tropical island. Pentagon chiefs are worried that the secret base near Sanya on China’s Hainan Island...could threaten Asian countries and America’s dominance in the region. The pictures obtained by respected military magazine Jane’s Intelligence Review...show vast tunnel entrances that are thought to lead to huge caverns capable of hiding up to 20 nuclear submarines from spy satellites.

—The Daily Mail

No aircraft carrier force and blue water Navy would be complete without a strong “run silent, run deep” submarine force, and China has been quietly building what will soon be the largest fleet in the world. In fact, the newest generation of diesel electric subs are so fast and quiet that they have been able to stalk U.S. Navy ships with little or no detection. Indeed, in one confrontation now as infamous in U.S. Navy lore as it was embarrassing then, a Chinese Type 039 Song-class attack submarine boldly surfaced within torpedo range of the USS Kitty Hawk after stalking the carrier group undetected for miles.

China’s newer Type 041 yuan-class boats are expected to be even quieter and able to operate fully submerged for much longer periods on a new “Air Independent Propulsion” system—read: to better threaten Western shipping in the Western Pacific and critical straits of Malacca, that crucial choke point for oil flowing to Japan, Korea, and Taiwan. Moreover, to secure distant force projection capability, China has built several new Type 094 Jin Class missile subs designed to pull up to the coast of California and lob missiles as far away as Savannah, Missouri or Savannah, Georgia.

In fact, there is at least some evidence to suggest that the People’s Republic may already be practicing for Armageddon off the California coast. Thomas McInerney, a retired United States Air Force Lieutenant General, asserts that the Chinese Navy actually conducted such a test launch off Los Angeles in November of 2010—on the eve of a G-20 Summit, no less. An outraged McInerney had these sharp words for the Pentagon:

We should get a definitive answer105 [from Washington]. This is not an airplane because of the plume and the way you see that plume...That is a missile, launched from a submarine. You can see it go through a correction course, and then it gets a very smooth trajectory meaning that the guidance system has kicked in.

While the Pentagon quickly and vehemently denied Chinese involvement, it still can’t identify the specific plane it says made the contrail. But the real story here is that military experts are even debating a possible missile launch off the City of Angels. Such a debate should leave no doubt that China’s investment in offensive strategic weapons is progressing rapidly.

Which brings us back to the aforementioned James Bond–style sub base on Hainan Island. Photos by the Federation of American Scientists do indeed reveal 60-foot-high tunnel entrances that have been cut into the island’s seaside hills, and anywhere from a half dozen to a full score of nuclear subs will be able to hide in the base’s man-made caverns.

Note that this new 007 base also features a high-tech demagnetization pier used to cloak its subs from electromagnetic detection at sea; and China clearly wants its U-boats left alone and undetected. Indeed, in one well-publicized incident, five Chinese ships—both military and commercial—intentionally and repeatedly crossed the bow of the USNS Impeccable it was cruising in international waters 75 miles from the Chinese coast. The American vessel was pulling a towed sonar array to monitor submarine activity coming in and out of Hainan Island; and at one point, the attacking Chinese flotilla dumped floating debris in the path of the U.S. ship. This forced the Impeccable to come to an emergency “all stop,” after which Chinese sailors attacked the Impeccable’s sonar array with grappling hooks. Remember that little tête-à-tête the next time you buy your next fix of Chinese products from Walmart.

All Military Power Flows From a Nation’s Factory Floor

Quantity has a quality all its own.

—Josef Stalin

While our ever-so-brief review of China’s growing military might leave no doubt about its rapidly improving offensive capabilities, at least some China Apologists will be quick to argue this point: In almost every weapons category, America’s technology still remains vastly superior.

In fact, in many cases, these Apologists would be right. For example, in a dog fight, the American F-22 fighter would likely down its Chinese counterpart in a New York minute. So, too, would the USS Ronald Reagan and its armada almost certainly send any of China’s new aircraft carriers to Davey Jones’ locker in short order.

But this love affair with American technological superiority misses a much more important point—one that underscores the insanity of allowing a mercantilist and protectionist China to destroy the American manufacturing base and vitiate our economy. This point is best made from the perspective of a particularly insightful Nazi artillery commander who was captured at the battle of Salerno. Said he about the futility of his precision German weaponry against a horde of American matériel:

I was on this hill as a battery commander with six 88-millimeter antitank guns, and the Americans kept sending tanks down the road. We kept knocking them out. Every time they sent a tank, we knocked it out. Finally, we ran out of ammunition, and the Americans didn’t run out of tanks.

The real truth to be told here is that America didn’t defeat Hitler and the Nazis so much with its incredibly brave soldiers as it did with its overwhelming industrial might. In fact, in almost every category, the Nazis had technologically superior weaponry in the latter stages of the war. The German Panzer tank, for example, was the finest in the world, the Germans’ famous U-boats were the best subs, the Bismarck was the greatest battleship ever floated, and in some classes, Germany’s weapons literally had no peers as they fielded the world’s only long-range rockets—both the V1 cruise missile and the V2 ballistic missile—and deployed the Me-262, the world’s first jet aircraft.

What America did have, however, was the world’s biggest factory floor. And once this “workshop to the world” was converted to a total war footing after Pearl Harbor, the huge and highly efficient auto factories of Detroit, shipyards of Maine, chemical plants of Ohio, and steel mills of Pennsylvania churned out vastly superior numbers of tanks and planes and guns and bombs. The result was a military juggernaut that promptly trounced the two greatest war machines the world had ever seen.

In fact, no one understood the inevitability of an American victory better than Admiral Yamamoto. He spent the day after his devastatingly successful surprise attack on Pearl Harbor not in jubilation but rather in depression and desperation. For he knew full well that a massive American response would follow; and as mighty as Japanese industry was at the time, it would be no match for the American Heartland.

America’s growing military problem today, however, is that the biggest auto plants are no longer in Detroit but in cities like Chengdu, Jilin, Nanjing, and Wuhu; the busiest shipyards are in Bohai, Dalian, Fujian, and Jiangan; and the mills and smokestacks that churn out almost ten times more tonnage a year than American steelmakers are in Chongqing, Hebei, Shanghai, and Tianjin.

This, then, is what both our Pentagon and our modern-day Neville Chamberlains in the White House and on Capitol Hill need to fully understand: China’s J-20 fighter doesn’t have to be the world’s best if it can field 1,000 of them versus our 187 F-22s.

China’s Shang class attack subs really don’t have to be better than the USS Los Angeles class or the British Astute class boats if they can fill half the Pacific Ocean with them.

And when it comes to all those rockets on China’s launch pads and in China’s ballistic missile subs, just how precise does the aiming of a hundred hydrogen bombs directed at Middle America need to be before we are willing to acknowledge the People’s Republic’s hegemony over Japan, Taiwan, India, and Australia?

This is why we do indeed now need a Winston Churchill moment. As Churchill once said about World War II:

There never was a war in history easier106 to prevent by timely action than the one which has just desolated such great areas of the globe...but no one would listen, and one by one we were all sucked into the awful whirlpool.

In our new Winston Churchill moment, we must clearly see that to win a traditional military war against a United States that has already surrendered much of its industrial capacity to China, all China needs to do is to develop (or pirate) credible weapons systems and then build them in sufficient quantities to overwhelm our technologically superior forces.

In fact, China has already done the former. It’s time to wake up before it does the latter. It’s also time for all of us to understand much more clearly the intimate relationship that exists between a nation’s manufacturing base and its military power.