China

Inscrutable Advice from the Middle Kingdom: Wise or Wicked?

The pressure to reduce U.S. defense spending took a hit Monday when China’s top military officer suggested Washington is spending too much on its military in light of its economic problems at home. “I know the U.S. is still recovering from the financial crisis,” Chen Bingde, chief of the General Staff of the People’s Liberation Army, …

The iPhone Foe

The independent U.S. Naval Institute’s Proceedings journal has long been one of the best at asking questions some of its readers might prefer not be asked. In its just-released July issue, Lieutenant Commander Matthew Harper grapples with the Navy’s biggest bogeyman: China. Military relations are fundamentally altered, he argues, …

Cyber-espionage: We’re #2! We’re #2!

Economist story (6/18) about the recent wave of high-profile attacks by hacker collectives references “SQL injections,” or the technique of penetrating databases of companies, agencies, etc. McAfee, the web security firm, says about half of those it tracked over the first quarter of 2011 were made by Chinese “cyberspies” – a rather …

The CIA-After-Next: Who’s Gonna Run This World

Outgoing Defense Secretary Robert Gates has done a lot of good things over his tenure: he carved out a bureaucratic space for the small-wars crowd (Army, Marines, SOF) and he engineered the Navy-Air Force Full Employment Act (otherwise known as the AirSea Battle Concept) to keep the rest of the Building happy; he was tough enough on …

Signs of a Changing World…Or Not

Every once in awhile, a spate of stories makes you sit up and pay attention. A trio just flitted across my screen:

— Vietnam wants U.S. help in defusing its growing tensions with China over Beijing’s encroachment into the resource-rich South China Sea, the Financial Times reports.

— Great Britain no longer has a navy capable of …

Chinese Water Torture…

Spinning off Mark Benjamin’s Chinese posting: a couple of days after celebrating U.S. naval prowess in 1942’s Battle of Midway — widely seen as the turning point in World War II’s Pacific war between the U.S. and Japan — the guided missile destroyer USS Chung-Hoon is continuing further east as tensions rise between China and its …

“The future ain’t what it used to be” — Admiral Yogi Berra

Congress can’t deal with the Pentagon’s annual budget in a timely way, yet it wants the U.S. military to keep churning out regular reports detailing how many ships and airplanes it plans on buying for the next 30 years. The House Armed Services Committee’s investigative subcommittee looked into the topic this week. What was …

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