http://www.fpri.org/enotes/200804.kuehner.kaplannewbalanceofpower.htm
(((As if we didn't already have enough trouble... Robert "Coming Anarchy"
Kaplan is describing a different planet here.)))
Link: E-Notes: Robert Kaplan on the New Balance of Power - FPRI.
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"Kaplan observed that this is the world that is being created while the U.S. is focused on messy counterinsurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan, even if new powers are quietly rising up. The total result of the Iraq War, to him, is that it has fast-forwarded the arrival of the Asian century.
India now has the world’s fourth largest navy; it is about to have the third largest. It will soon take delivery of its first nuclear-powered fast-attack submarine. Meanwhile, China’s navy is growing to be in asymmetric terms a peer competitor of the U.S., the Japanese Navy is now three times, soon to be four times, the size of Britain’s Royal Navy. All this is happening not just while the U.S. is deeply involved in two countries in the greater Middle East, but also as European defense budgets are starved at 2 percent or less of their GDPs.
What interests Kaplan is that, as an indicator of where the future is going, Europe has not been able to take advantage strategically or in many other ways of the U.S. quagmire in Iraq and the growing one in Afghanistan, but the Asian countries have. Asian militaries are becoming real civilian-military postindustrial complexes. The fact that the Chinese or Indian armies are so large was for decades meaningless, because they were poorly trained and badly equipped, more useful for defending long land borders and bringing in crops than for actual deployment, maneuverability, and fighting. That is changing rapidly. The Indians are using the Israelis to develop a new space satellite technology tied in with their own military. India and China’s software prowess is increasingly having military dimensions.
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Naval Threats (((huh? whoa)))
"If Afghanistan has taught that it might not be wise to go it alone, notwithstanding the quick initial results one can achieve that way, Kaplan said; and if Iraq has shown the U.S. the crude, low-tech end of asymmetry with IEDs and other devices, then the Chinese competition is going to show the U.S. the very sophisticated, subtle, high-tech end of asymmetry in the naval and other realms.
"The Chinese are not competing with the U.S. across the board; they are concentrating on three things: (1) submarines, (2) missiles that can hit moving targets at sea, and (3) the ability to knock out satellites in space, all of which put together constitute an asymmetric threat against the U.S. navy.
"That asymmetric threat is not designed to get into a war with the U.S., but to deny the U.S. access whenever and wherever it wants, from the Asian mainland to the Chinese coast, to make it think twice before entering a zone where its carriers could be hit by a missile. This will dissuade U.S. movements and affect U.S. strategy. And ultimately, Kaplan noted, power is the ability to affect your competitors’ mode of operations...."
