China to increase military spending
Reuters reports that President Xi Jinping of China announced that the People’s Republic will be spending more on their military in coming years, the biggest jump in three years;
The government said it would increase the defense budget by 12.2 percent this year to 808.23 billion yuan ($131.57 billion), as China seeks to develop more high-tech weapons and to beef up coastal and air defenses.
The increase follows a nearly unbroken run of double-digit hikes in the Chinese defense budget, second only to the United States in size, for the past two decades.
[…]
China’s military is not made up of “boy scouts with spears”, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Qin Gang told a briefing in response to Japan’s criticism.
“Some foreigners always expect China to be a baby scout,” Qin said. “In that way, how can we safeguard national security and world peace?”
The announcement comes while China is asserting it’s power in the South China Sea and prompting reactions from the US Pentagon, who, by the way was in Congress yesterday justifying their own cuts to the military.
Category: Military issues
don’t worry! the fairy dust and unicorn sparkles will make us all friends with no need for a military. yaaaaaaaaayyyyyyyy!!!!!!!
China is reaping the benefit of a large manufacturing base supported by Western dollars….perhaps it might have been wise to listen to the folks who said making a free trade agreement with a country like China will weaken the US and create an actual superpower out of China…but our weak minded politicians could not be bothered to vote in the interests of the nation they decided to vote in the interests of the people who would move manufacturing jobs out of the US and into China to make more money…fucking traitors the lot of them.
Don’t worry, John Kerry has assembled Obamas dream team in Fantasy Land to work out their new foreign policy in light of increased military expansionism in Russia, China, North Korea, Iran, and other world issues… They are calling it Operation Ostrich.
China doesn’t have much longer to exist unless they do something drastic. I mean even more drastic than they currently are.
When you throw away all the girl babies for a generation and a half, it causes a small problem. They don’t have enough female breeding population to sustain themselves.
It still doesn’t help the fact that they are building ghost cities and they are set to have the largest surface naval fleet in the world, but not enough technically proficient conscripts to actually man it.
That’s the clincher when it comes to China. They have a huge military, but they don’t have the equipment to make them whole and don’t have the technical proficiency to train them into the jobs they need them to be in.
Pretty soon, there won’t be enough males to sustain their military forces (thanks to their Draconian birth controls) as well as sustain their infrastructure. Also, what happens when all those males want a bride, but there are none to be found? We can see that right now in some Muslim countries.
Not to worry. When the lack of women becomes a real problem, they’ll just stroll in and take ours. And those “ghost cities”? Why do you think no one can find Obama’s FEMA camps. Hidden in plain view no less.
Remember quantity is a quality in and of itself… think of a military that could afford to toss a million conscripts out the door of a cargo plane with little training and a couple of grenades, and still have millions more lining up to do the same thing…
Projection becomes an issue if you adhere to a structural realist theory.
Their conscription posters could read, “join the PLA, see the world, meet exotic women, and bring them home as trophies.” The human wave attack is still a terrifying prospect when you talk about the numbers these guys have to throw into it.
Not to mention that quantity begets quantity… let’s say only 1% of a population qualifies as genius level – given their population of $1.4 BILLION that gives them something on the order of 14 MILLION people of very high levels of intelligence… that is, what, over 20 times the size of our entire military? I know that leadership does not come strictly from intelligence…. bt think of it ike this: 1.4 billion is a hell of a talent pool to draw from.
Think of it this way; China is upping its military spending by 12% while the US is reducing its military spending by ~23%. What’s that tell you? Where did I come up with that number? Well, going by past years defense budget of ~$770 billion and the new budget request, just this past week, of $600 billion gives us ~23% less in defense spending. It, also, brings defense spending down to 15% of the total budget (Obama wants a $4 trillion budget with defense being $600 billion) from ~18%. He wants to increase overall spending, but reduce the defense budget by 23% all while others are increasing their military spending. That tells me we are in for a fun filled few years ahead of us.
I would say it’s time to start building up the military’s Cold War-esque capabilities again, or at least create the infrastructure required to do so in a hurry. No matter how you look at it, having only one shipyard in the country capable of producing aircraft carriers and amphibious assault ships and one factory capable of producing tanks is ludicrous. And, of course, DO NOT retire the A-10s. However, at the same time, China is light years away from being able to catch up to the US military. The problem is in their organizational structure and the quality of their troops. China, like many other countries, still uses the Soviet method of organization in how top-heavy the command structure is and how NCO’s have very little actual power. Chinese troops are trained to obey orders without question and are trusted with little to no authority on their own. There’s nobody to push responsibility downwards and provide experienced small unit leadership, the critical functions of a well-developed NCO Corps. Initiative is generally discouraged at all levels to prevent putting ideas about rebellion into soldiers’ heads; instead rigid adherence to a predetermined plan is emphasized (we exploited this in Korea; we would allow Chinese armies to actually achieve their predetermined objectives, then we would counterattack with everything we had. The Chinese elements would often be caught off guard, confused with how to proceed when the battle veered off the master plan). This does exactly what it’s supposed to do in peacetime-it creates a military that won’t overthrow the government and the party, which all dictatorships fear (hence the reason most use the Soviet military organization or something very close to it). However, in combat, everything falls apart. Without good NCO’s, unit cohesion falls apart, and when the upward-oriented command structure is attacked (as all western armies are trained to do and in the US’s case are very good at) units are easily left as headless chickens when the leadership is killed. Basically, a replay of the Persian Gulf War, every war the Arabs have fought with the Israelis, and basically every time… Read more »