March 6, 2015 EIR National 39
U.S. Hawks Mobilize
For War on China
by Michael Billington
Feb. 25—Almost four months ago, at the conclusion
of the APEC (Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation)
summit, Chinese President Xi Jinping publicly invited
the United States and others to join China in the
Asian International Infrastructure Bank, and its drive
for global development. Yet leading elements of the
U.S. security establishment not only refuse to admit
that China is eschewing geopolitics in favor of cooperation,
but are also gunning for a military confrontation.
The latest example comes from Andrew Krepinevich,
one of the leading members of the Andy Marshall
kindergarten at the Pentagon’s Office of Net Assessment
(ONA, which dreamed up Donald Rumsfeld’s
misbegotten “Revolution in Military Affairs”). He authored
a piece in the March/April issue of the Council
on Foreign Relations’ Foreign Affairs magazine, titled
“How to Deter China—The Case for Archipelagic Defense.”
The article is a call for a massive build-up of
U.S. and allied land, air, and sea military forces along
the “first island chain” around China (the Kuril Islands,
Japan, the Ryukyu Islands, Taiwan, the Philippines,
and Borneo, running from the Kamchatka Peninsula
to the Malay Peninsula). Krepinevich, who now
heads an ONA spinoff, the Center for Strategic and
Budgetary Assessments (CSBA)—the current Deputy
Secretary of Defense Bob Work was previously a
senior fellow there—declares China to be preparing to
drive the United States out of the western Pacific altogether.
“China’s PLA is bolstering its so-called anti-access/
area-denial (A2/AD) capabilities,” Krepinevich
writes, “with the express goal of making the western
Pacific a no-go zone for the U.S. military,” including
the destruction of the Pentagon’s satellite-based command-
and-control systems. To meet this imagined
challenge, he calls for enhancing the Air-Sea Battle
doctrine (Andy Marshall’s first-strike plan for war on
China, which Obama has officially endorsed) by sending
significant numbers of ground forces throughout
the region to run “mobile launchers and anti-ship missiles,”
and plant naval mines across the access-points
to the Pacific through the island chain, “to make large
stretches of sea off-limits to the Chinese navy.”
Proof that ground troops could do the job? Krepinevich
points to the great success of U.S. advisors, with
air power, in Vietnam! This would indicate that Marshall’s
kindergarten is also smoking too much of George
Shultz’s marijuana.
Since China has become skilled at anti-satellite warfare,
he adds, the United States should “establish a
communications network of fiber-optic cables buried
beneath the ground and the seabed along the chain.”
Krepinevich worries about the fact that there is an
inadequate “willingness of states along the first island
chain to cooperate.” This is explained, he says, by China’s
effort to “slowly but inexorably shift the regional
military balance in its favor, leaving the rest of the
region with little choice but to submit to Chinese coercion.”
Are They Insane?
This captures the insanity of this neoconservative
network within the institutional leadership of the United
States. The fact that China, together with its allies in the
BRICS (Russia, India, Brazil, and South Africa, but essentially
including nearly all of the nations of Asia,
Africa, and South America), has sparked the greatest
explosion of infrastructure development and trade
agreements in the last 50 years, in contrast to the refusal
of the U.S. and Europe to invest in any real physical
development anywhere in the world, is of no import to
these utopian theorists.
In their eyes, everything is geopolitics, and the
actual conditions of life of the human beings who populate
the nations of the world mean nothing to them. In
fact, their view of humanity as no more than animals in
a Hobbsian world of “war of each against all,” is extended
to the interests of nations as well, in a zero-sum
game, with each nation’s advantage coming at the expense
of the others.
Xi Jinping’s call on the U.S. to join in his New
Silk Road vision, in “win-win” cooperation in developing
the entire world, is viewed by this Pentagon
grouping as simply a cynical ploy aimed at Chinese
world domination. Since the U.S. must necessarily
confront China, argues Krepinevich, the (mostly unwilling)
nations surrounding China must accept U.S.
material military support, so that they can “form a col40
National EIR March 6, 2015
lective front that deters China from acts of aggression
or coercion,” and counter “China’s revisionist ambitions.”
Air-Sea Battle and the ‘Third Offset Strategy’
Krepinevich was one of the authors of the “Air-Sea
Battle” doctrine in 2010, which has subsequently
been adopted by the Obama Administration. It is not
actually a military strategy, but simply a first-strike
battle plan, based on the assumption that if China, in
the eyes of the neo-con war planners, has the intention
of securing its territorial waters (through what these
imperial schemers dubbed “anti-access/area-denial”),
then Washington must launch full-scale bombing
assaults
on all Chinese mainland military installations,
along with an array of military and space-based
operations against China’s industrial and military capacities.
In October, one of Krepinevich’s collaborators at
the CSBA, Robert Martinage, issued a report titled
“Toward a New Offset Strategy: Exploiting U.S.
Long-Term Advantages to Restore U.S. Global Power
Projection Capability,” which is essentially an updated
version of Air-Sea Battle. It argues that twice
before, the United States found itself confronted by an
adversary that threatened to obtain military parity
with it—in the 1950s, when President Eisenhower responded
by launchig a “New Look,” massively building
up nuclear weapon capacities as a deterrent to
Soviet nuclear capacity, and in the 1970s, under Secretary
of Defense Harold Brown’s “Offset Strategy,”
using information technology to create a new generation
of “smart weapons” to maintain superiority over
the Soviet Union.
Now, China and Russia are modernizing their military
capacities, such that U.S. superiority is “beginning
to slip away,” writes Martinage. The United States must
launch a “Third Offset” strategy to meet the threat, he
argues, laying out a series of proposals which are
spelled out in Krepinevich’s “Deter China” war plan in
Foreign Affairs.
Lyndon LaRouche, briefed on this insanity, said that
it demonstrates that Obama and his neo-con controllers
are a lost cause; that they have no idea how to run a war,
or even an interim operation. All they know how to do
is kill masses of people.
The British Empire’s Global Showdown,
And How To Overcome It
EIR
Special Report
The British Empire’s
Global Showdown, and
How To Overcome It
June 2012
The Global Showdown report is available in hard copy for $250,
and in pdf form for $150, from the EIR store.
Call 1-800-278-3135 for more information.
EIR Special Report
In the face of a potential thermonuclear World War III, a
confrontation being engineered from London by a desperate
British-centered financial oligarchy operating through the
vast—yet often underestimated—powers of the British monarchy,
EIR has produced a 104-page Special Report, documenting both
the drive for war, and the war-avoidance efforts of patriotic
military/intelligence circles in the U.S., and the Russian and
Chinese leaderships. The British hand behind the warmongers,
and the concrete economic and strategic programs which can
defuse the threat, are elaborated in depth. These include the
Russian proposal for collaboration on the Strategic Defense of
Earth (SDE), based on Lyndon LaRouche’s original Strategic
Defense Initiative (SDI).
U.S. Hawks Mobilize
For War on China
by Michael Billington
Feb. 25—Almost four months ago, at the conclusion
of the APEC (Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation)
summit, Chinese President Xi Jinping publicly invited
the United States and others to join China in the
Asian International Infrastructure Bank, and its drive
for global development. Yet leading elements of the
U.S. security establishment not only refuse to admit
that China is eschewing geopolitics in favor of cooperation,
but are also gunning for a military confrontation.
The latest example comes from Andrew Krepinevich,
one of the leading members of the Andy Marshall
kindergarten at the Pentagon’s Office of Net Assessment
(ONA, which dreamed up Donald Rumsfeld’s
misbegotten “Revolution in Military Affairs”). He authored
a piece in the March/April issue of the Council
on Foreign Relations’ Foreign Affairs magazine, titled
“How to Deter China—The Case for Archipelagic Defense.”
The article is a call for a massive build-up of
U.S. and allied land, air, and sea military forces along
the “first island chain” around China (the Kuril Islands,
Japan, the Ryukyu Islands, Taiwan, the Philippines,
and Borneo, running from the Kamchatka Peninsula
to the Malay Peninsula). Krepinevich, who now
heads an ONA spinoff, the Center for Strategic and
Budgetary Assessments (CSBA)—the current Deputy
Secretary of Defense Bob Work was previously a
senior fellow there—declares China to be preparing to
drive the United States out of the western Pacific altogether.
“China’s PLA is bolstering its so-called anti-access/
area-denial (A2/AD) capabilities,” Krepinevich
writes, “with the express goal of making the western
Pacific a no-go zone for the U.S. military,” including
the destruction of the Pentagon’s satellite-based command-
and-control systems. To meet this imagined
challenge, he calls for enhancing the Air-Sea Battle
doctrine (Andy Marshall’s first-strike plan for war on
China, which Obama has officially endorsed) by sending
significant numbers of ground forces throughout
the region to run “mobile launchers and anti-ship missiles,”
and plant naval mines across the access-points
to the Pacific through the island chain, “to make large
stretches of sea off-limits to the Chinese navy.”
Proof that ground troops could do the job? Krepinevich
points to the great success of U.S. advisors, with
air power, in Vietnam! This would indicate that Marshall’s
kindergarten is also smoking too much of George
Shultz’s marijuana.
Since China has become skilled at anti-satellite warfare,
he adds, the United States should “establish a
communications network of fiber-optic cables buried
beneath the ground and the seabed along the chain.”
Krepinevich worries about the fact that there is an
inadequate “willingness of states along the first island
chain to cooperate.” This is explained, he says, by China’s
effort to “slowly but inexorably shift the regional
military balance in its favor, leaving the rest of the
region with little choice but to submit to Chinese coercion.”
Are They Insane?
This captures the insanity of this neoconservative
network within the institutional leadership of the United
States. The fact that China, together with its allies in the
BRICS (Russia, India, Brazil, and South Africa, but essentially
including nearly all of the nations of Asia,
Africa, and South America), has sparked the greatest
explosion of infrastructure development and trade
agreements in the last 50 years, in contrast to the refusal
of the U.S. and Europe to invest in any real physical
development anywhere in the world, is of no import to
these utopian theorists.
In their eyes, everything is geopolitics, and the
actual conditions of life of the human beings who populate
the nations of the world mean nothing to them. In
fact, their view of humanity as no more than animals in
a Hobbsian world of “war of each against all,” is extended
to the interests of nations as well, in a zero-sum
game, with each nation’s advantage coming at the expense
of the others.
Xi Jinping’s call on the U.S. to join in his New
Silk Road vision, in “win-win” cooperation in developing
the entire world, is viewed by this Pentagon
grouping as simply a cynical ploy aimed at Chinese
world domination. Since the U.S. must necessarily
confront China, argues Krepinevich, the (mostly unwilling)
nations surrounding China must accept U.S.
material military support, so that they can “form a col40
National EIR March 6, 2015
lective front that deters China from acts of aggression
or coercion,” and counter “China’s revisionist ambitions.”
Air-Sea Battle and the ‘Third Offset Strategy’
Krepinevich was one of the authors of the “Air-Sea
Battle” doctrine in 2010, which has subsequently
been adopted by the Obama Administration. It is not
actually a military strategy, but simply a first-strike
battle plan, based on the assumption that if China, in
the eyes of the neo-con war planners, has the intention
of securing its territorial waters (through what these
imperial schemers dubbed “anti-access/area-denial”),
then Washington must launch full-scale bombing
assaults
on all Chinese mainland military installations,
along with an array of military and space-based
operations against China’s industrial and military capacities.
In October, one of Krepinevich’s collaborators at
the CSBA, Robert Martinage, issued a report titled
“Toward a New Offset Strategy: Exploiting U.S.
Long-Term Advantages to Restore U.S. Global Power
Projection Capability,” which is essentially an updated
version of Air-Sea Battle. It argues that twice
before, the United States found itself confronted by an
adversary that threatened to obtain military parity
with it—in the 1950s, when President Eisenhower responded
by launchig a “New Look,” massively building
up nuclear weapon capacities as a deterrent to
Soviet nuclear capacity, and in the 1970s, under Secretary
of Defense Harold Brown’s “Offset Strategy,”
using information technology to create a new generation
of “smart weapons” to maintain superiority over
the Soviet Union.
Now, China and Russia are modernizing their military
capacities, such that U.S. superiority is “beginning
to slip away,” writes Martinage. The United States must
launch a “Third Offset” strategy to meet the threat, he
argues, laying out a series of proposals which are
spelled out in Krepinevich’s “Deter China” war plan in
Foreign Affairs.
Lyndon LaRouche, briefed on this insanity, said that
it demonstrates that Obama and his neo-con controllers
are a lost cause; that they have no idea how to run a war,
or even an interim operation. All they know how to do
is kill masses of people.
The British Empire’s Global Showdown,
And How To Overcome It
EIR
Special Report
The British Empire’s
Global Showdown, and
How To Overcome It
June 2012
The Global Showdown report is available in hard copy for $250,
and in pdf form for $150, from the EIR store.
Call 1-800-278-3135 for more information.
EIR Special Report
In the face of a potential thermonuclear World War III, a
confrontation being engineered from London by a desperate
British-centered financial oligarchy operating through the
vast—yet often underestimated—powers of the British monarchy,
EIR has produced a 104-page Special Report, documenting both
the drive for war, and the war-avoidance efforts of patriotic
military/intelligence circles in the U.S., and the Russian and
Chinese leaderships. The British hand behind the warmongers,
and the concrete economic and strategic programs which can
defuse the threat, are elaborated in depth. These include the
Russian proposal for collaboration on the Strategic Defense of
Earth (SDE), based on Lyndon LaRouche’s original Strategic
Defense Initiative (SDI).
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