SinoDefence Forum

perce4

Greetings!
I just had an article e-published by Air University. I'd appreciate your thoughts and comments.
Thanks much!
- Clayton

Challenge and Response: Developing a USAF Agenda for Cooperative Action with China

Arrows and an Olive Branch for China, an Op-Ed based on the article.

ABSTRACT:

China’s challenge to the United States--its rising economic power, military capability, and diplomatic and cultural influence--is surely one of the most important challenges facing the United States in the early 21st century. This paper recommends a US Air Force (USAF) agenda for cooperative action with the People’s Liberation Army Air Force (PLAAF) as an important part of the overall US response to the challenge of China.

First, it explores the China challenge, examining Chinese grand strategy, political and territorial fault lines, and the PLAAF itself. Then it reviews the US response to the China challenge, covering US strategic options and the “responsible stakeholder” framework--a balanced approach incorporating both containment and engagement efforts. Focusing on the engagement efforts, this paper describes the risks, benefits, and differing US and Chinese perspectives of military-to-military engagement. It then goes on to propose a comprehensive USAF agenda for cooperative action with the PLAAF, recommending program objectives, proposing specific opportunities for engagement, and offering points for planning and execution.

Prudent USAF-PLAAF engagement can play an important role in ensuring China’s role as a responsible stakeholder in the international system. This paper explains how.

Londo Molari

I'm not Chinese and even I find the word containment insulting. Just thought I'd mention that right off the bat. Love the tone of the Op-Ed... gave me a chuckle. Pride goeth before a fall I suppose.

gizhou

I propose the USAF, USN and USMC practice live air to air missions with the PLAAF with appropriate AWACS and jammer support.

crobato

Thank you Colonel for posting the article.

My comments.

"Frenemy" policy to China is not really new, and that's appears to be practically the Pentagon's policy to China. Engagement, engagement and engagement. The details of execution should be left to the pros. But you know as they say, "keep your friends close, and your enemies even closer."

__________________
"Lets do a thermal sweep."

daveman

Again, like virtually all "USA vs. China" papers, this one also incorrectly assumes China is challenging the USA in military/economic/political power.

The truth is, THE USA IS CHALLENGING CHINA.

It's kind of like a really good poker player sitting down at a table with a gangbanger.

The skillful poker player, being the superior player, is separating the gangbanger from his chips.

So the gangbanger takes out his pistol and sets it on the table.


I'll let you decide who is who in the analogy and what will ultimately happen.

adeptitus

The PLAAF is the best thing that ever happened to the USAF post-Cold War. Without the PLAAF, the USAF administration would lose one of their key cards in demanding larger budget and new toys.

sandyj

US AFA: Threats to American Air Supremacy
26-May-2008 17:36 EDT

The US Air Force Association recently released a video entitled “Threats to Air Supremacy,” which offers a very basic look at emerging land and air-based threats to America’s “teen series” fighters in particular. Given the importance of air supremacy to American military doctrine, this is an issue that can be expected to become more prominent in coming years. As such, we present a Flash-based version below, without commentary, as a service to our readers.

The video can also be viewed using Windows Media Player: [High-res | Low-res]

one of these three will get you to the video

high res URL: http://www.afa.org/MPEG/A _Supremacy.wmv

URL: http://www.afa.org/MPEG/Air_Supremacy.asp

URL: http://www.defenseindustrydaily.com/...&type=textlink

daveman

With the F22s, America is virtually guaranteed its air dominance over China.

What more does the US Airforce want? What more can it want?

Pointblank

One thing is that you should never stay still, you always look at what others are doing, even if you have the lead, so you can maintain the lead.

PrOeLiTeZ

US knows that if they stop trade with China....US would hurt way more then China, China rich population is on the rise in record numbers so their own people can cover some of the trade loss, but US cannot as much.

man overbored

I know this isn't a trade forum, but aside from my flying for the USN my degrees are in economics with an emphasis on trade. In brief, the US economy is mostly insular, we buy what we make. Imports and exports, aside from oil, are a minor proportion of the US GDP, under 20%. The US will not suffer greatly from a trade disruption. Aside from this, everyone wants to sell to the US. Loosing one seller, even one like China is nothing, there are dozens of nations waiting for one of their competitors to trip up and hand them a market opening here. Despite the great size of the Chinese population, they do not command the purchasing power of the US economy, particularly if you examine individual purchasing power. At best a Chinese city dweller commands around $7000 per year in actual purchasing power measured in PPP's. Per-capita GDP is far less. This means the Chinese city dweller has command of purchasing power equal someone in the US with $7000 per year to spend. That is still a very low income that will not support a great deal of consumer spending. Actual per capital income is just over one grand. Not much money to buy things with.
Most Asian nations by comparison live and die by their ability to sell their manufactured goods abroad. Most do not have the sort of lavish consumer society seen in the US ( for better or worse and in my opinion mostly the latter ) so the claim that loosing the US market would hurt the US more than the exporter is simply not backed by any econometric study I have seen. In fact quite the opposite is true and it has been carefully modeled. Sorry for the economics digression but this is actually my first love aside from the military.

Cheers

crobato

The problem is that this great consumer society, about 60% is in debt and the rest has a very low savings rate. This is not to mention that for spending its dependent on that one Asian import---recycled US dollars as credit. As for US manufacturing, are you counting food and beer into that? You walk into a store, and just about everything that isn't a food product seems to be made somewhere else.

Lose one seller? It takes a great deal of time and investment to make the factories and plants to produce the certain items in that country, and you cannot transport those overnight. This is not to mention circumstances in many countries, corruption, political stability, cronyism, lack of domestic supplies, inefficient infrastructure, lack of trained population in manufacturing, for examples, conspire to make what they are producing uncompetitive to Producer A. One reason why China is so competitive is that much of the components you need to build something, lets say, a PC, can be obtained from domestic suppliers without the need for overseas freight. Another is that China has a superb infrastructure---communications, internet, road, air, shipping. Business is extremely selective on the environment it chooses to do business with. If you have an inefficient customs and port loading, and imported containers with materials and components are taking several days or even weeks of delays, that's going to impact the cost of doing business that will domino all the way to the final cost of the product.

Another factor is that multinationals already have massive plant and RD investments in China. You think Intel would just choose to build a plant anywhere?

And still another factor is that the Chinese PPP is still growing. A slowdown would be a mere 8 to 9%, which is at least 4x that of other countries growth rate. There is already a broad swath of the population---as big as the entire Japanese population---that is already reaching middle class levels.

__________________
"Lets do a thermal sweep."

PrOeLiTeZ

The truth is China has many wealth individuals, the reason why its PPP is low is cause of its large population dragging the high income down. US has poor-mid-wealthy, China has very poor-poor-extremely wealthy. They're is a massive class difference with small mid class, the wealthy aren't just wealthy theyre extremely wealthy.

Fact is if US closes trade with China, China has lots of production lines within mainland from other countries. US looses its profits big time, and still owes China heaps of money if the trade closes or not. US economics had debated this for ages and China has too...China knows it'll loose some money but it will be able to sustain itself. China is growing double digits everyyear and it isnt neccesarly related to increase of US-Sino trade its from other countries growing interest with trading with China.

Overseas Engineer going to China get payed LOADS, something like US$85,000, what my uncle was payed. Also the China rich list in billionare and millionare grow dramatic everyyear, US has a stable rich list with the same people they're all the time. China had think was one year it had 1 billionare and the next year it had 20, lots not mention the millionares.

Looking at it China has becoming less and less Soviet era communism driven, so if world pushes China to hard they'll go back to Soviet era style, give time for China to grow since it only started decade ago.

man overbored

One more economic digression. The interesting thing is the US produces just over 20% of all the world's manufactured goods. By that I mean things like airliners, oil drilling equipment, oil field support equipment, oil storagea and distribution equipment ( such as the loading equipment for tank trucks or railcars ), stationary gas turbine "peaker" generators ( check out Solar Turbines sometime, the global leader ), heavy machinery, conveyor belt and sortation equipment for distribution warehouses, medical equipment out the kazoo, lazer scanners as used for scanning barcodes in stores but more importantly for inventory purposes in big distribution systems ( Symbol Technologies in Moon Township Pennsylvania ), big transformers and switches used by electrical utilities, portable generators, farm machinery. These are all made in the US and most dominate their respective markets or are at least major competitors. No one builds more railroad locomotives than the US, and the big locos from General Electric are the most powerful ever made ( AC-6000CW at over 6200 hp ). They are used everywhere including China. This is big ticket stuff. You have to build thousands of computers to chalk up the same value on a nation's GDP as is earned by building one big locomotive or one complete peaker unit installed from Solar Turbines. How many cars does China have to make to match the value of a single Boeing 787? How many computers or big screen TV's? How many shirts in a textile factory. The stuff we import are the low value items who's manufacture does not support a high wage. The stuff we build here pays bank, and this is part of why the US GDP is so huge ( fully 30% of the global GDP folks ) and why the US is still the largest producer of manufactured goods by a very large margin. Our stuff doesn't show up in a computer or a TV, but is on the world's runways, oil drilling rigs and in the world power generating plants and bulk petroleum distribution facilties.
By the way, US is the low cost steel producer today ( yes, it is ) because US steel manufactures, after the shake out of the 1970's rebuilt with very efficient electric mills. Land in the US is a quarter the price of China, and electricity is also a fraction of the cost in China. A ton of rolled steel sells for $1000. Maybe $10 of that is labor. It's inisgnificant. Where US steel manufacturers have their advantage is in energy costs and their long standing agreements with their suppliers. Everything necessary to make steel is available in abundance in the Us. There is no shortage of iron ore or coal. US steel makers have long term fixed price contracts for these commodities. The US is not paying the sky high prices Chinese and Brazilian steel makers are for their ore or their coal. Right now, old line industries like mining and steel are outgrowing the US GDP by 2% annually. Are you amazed? The US economy is large and resilient.
Don't look now, but a recent LA Times article from last week reveals Chinese firms relocating to the US due to the lower land and energy costs. This isn't a big trend by any means, but it is a huge surprise to a Chinese businessman to discover how cheap it can be to make things here. Those factories can leave China for Indonesia or Vietnam ( and some companies are hedging their bets on China by moving a proportion of their production to other places ) just as quickly as they shut their US, European or Japanese plants to seek cheap wages and land in China.
The US still has a lot to offer the world economically, but you have to work in certain industries to see our wares.

crobato

A lot of the equipment you say are not 100% built in the US. More often you are seeing what is a global product, where the parts come from everywhere around the world. Boeing for example, now has engineers in Russia while getting parts from China and Japan. Everything from locomotives to cars to planes now require parts from all over the world, especially the electronics.

Big transformers and electrical infrastructure stuff made in the US are used in the US, but guess what not so much around the world where the Japanese, Korean, European and now increasingly Chinese stuff getting hold.

As for locomotives, that's a phase out industry and the Japanese and Europeans are holding the cards for fast monorail and bullet trains. China's Maglev is from Germany. I also don't see that strong a world market presence for US farm and heavy equipment where the Japanese and the Germans are pretty strong here, e.g. Komatsu. Another thing is, a lot of the US branded materials are US brands made in China.

GDP doesn't tell anything. You need to look at trade balances, surpluses, deficits, as well as savings rates. You can still have a high GDP but you're gradually being bled bone dry if you have deficits and debts.

I have not seen steel exported from the US for a while to Asian countries especially during the Asian building boom. The steel is coming from Taiwan, Korea, China and even Russia. Even steel from China is being imported into the US.

In Asia, prices of land are high but that's the consequence of having a high population and less land. That's not a sign of economic resilience or mismanagement but rather the basic situation that was given. Which is less land but got way too much money.

If Chinese firms are relocating to the US, they're buying US land, US factories and hiring US workers. That's good, but its also symbolic of the turnaround where China (and other countries) aer becoming the employers and Americans the employees. In other words, becoming more and more like the Third World.

Here is what you can do. Take a trip abroad. Go visit a massive construction site in Asia, be it in China, Taiwan, Korea, Malaysia, Philippines or Indonesia. Ask where they are getting the materials from. Look where the equipment and tools are coming from. Ask yourself what is the share the US is getting here.

Now we are all getting off track here even myself. We should concentrate nothing more than the original topic at hand.

__________________
"Lets do a thermal sweep."