US Defense Budget, Fear and Interest
It turned out during the Cold War our best analytical efforts grossly overestimated the true size of the GDP of the USSR while vastly underestimating the astronomical percentage of GDP the Soviets devoted to national security and defense. What makes anyone think we are any more accurate today with China when so few of our analysts are expert Sinologists compared to the large number of Soviet specialists during the Cold War?
If you want to understand Chinese power projection capabilities, you have to count the verifiable assets and boots that give them the ability to project power and estimate the degree to which their known logistical capability can support “x” forces at “y” distance for “z” period of time. That will be about as accurate a guess as can be made, along with qualitative assessments of Chinese personnel and equipment and the most probable areas of operation for them. I don’t expect a Chinese Armada off the coast of Uruguay any time soon.
Chinese military power is growing, just ask India or Vietnam, but we need to be realistic about where the PLA is in terms of military power vis-a-vis the United States. We can put an enormously powerful military force on their front porch at will. If it was a contest today of the entire nation of China vs. just PACOM, my money is on PACOM.
That will change in time but how fast and to what degree of adversariality between our two countries depends on far more than just military spending.
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srv:
March 26th, 2011 at 4:22 am
We not only overestimated the expenditures, we vastly overestimated the capabilities. Same as today. China has a lot of nuclear subs. They also never go anywhere.
zen:
March 26th, 2011 at 4:51 am
True enough.
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In defense of overestimating, we faced a adversary who who built 100 megaton weapons and was only narrowly talked out of using atomic bombs to reverse the course of Siberian rivers from the Arctic ocean to Kazakhstan.