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05/31/2004 Archived Entry: "Pentagon: China Re-Strategizes After Iraq"

Posted by steve @ 12:40 AM EST [Link]

THE REPERCUSSIONS OVER IRAQ CONTINUE: The rapid victory the coalition enjoyed in Iraq is forcing a lot of countries to reevaluate how they would fight a war, particularly against an American military force. One of those countries is China.

The report said China is rethinking the concept that U.S. airpower alone is sufficient to prevail in a conflict -- a concept it inferred from the 1999 air war over Kosovo, which involved no U.S. ground forces.

"The speed of coalition ground force advances and the role of special forces in [Iraq] have caused the People's Liberation Army theorists to rethink their assumptions about the value of long-range precision strikes, independent of ground forces, in any Taiwan conflict scenario," the report said.

Other aspects of the Iraq war have reinforced the Chinese belief that the United States' long-range strategy is to dominate Asia by containing the growth of Chinese power, the report said. These include recent Pentagon decisions to base long-range bombers, cruise missiles and nuclear attack submarines to the Pacific island of Guam -- moves related in part to the Iraq conflict.

"China's leaders appear to have concluded that the net effect of the U.S.-led campaign [against terrorism] has been further encirclement of China," specifically by placing U.S. military forces in Uzbekistan and other Central Asian nations, and strengthening relations with Pakistan and India, concluded the Pentagon analysis.

Read on.