Wednesday, August 24, 2016

Sputnik International — New Arms Race: China, US Prepare for Missile Warfare

As these tensions simmer, an op-ed for Asia Times by Bill Gertz points out that China has been stockpiling its missile arsenal for years, over concerns of US aggression.
"Beijing’s arsenal of ballistic and cruise missiles has been growing steadily for decades as new systems were fielded in an array of ranges – short, medium and intercontinental," Gertz writes. "Several long-range cruise missiles, capable of carrying nuclear or conventional payloads also are deployed."
In addition, Beijing has secretly developed a hypersonic missile, the DF-ZF glide vehicle, which ascends to the Earth’s upper atmosphere in order to bypass anti-missile defense systems.
As the United States plans to deploy a Terminal High-Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) missile defense system on the Korean peninsula, ostensibly aimed at deterring North Korean aggression, Beijing has been forced to beef up its own missile defenses.
"To develop suitable capabilities of missile defense is necessary for China to maintain national security and improve defense capabilities. It is not targeting any other country or target, nor is it jeopardizing the international strategic equilibrium," Chinese Defense Ministry spokesman Sr. Col. Yang Yujun told reporters last month.…
According to a report in China Military Online, escalations between the two superpowers will lead to the inevitable.
"The problem is not whether the war will break out, but when," the report said. "Our task is to develop the 'trump card' weapon for China before the war."
How's that pivot to Asia working' for ya?

Sputnik International
New Arms Race: China, US Prepare for Missile Warfare

9 comments:

Kaivey said...

It's all great for the war profiteers, your fires to show that the US is run by organised crime. The defence industry should be nationalised, so the One Percent can't make profit out of the war machine anymore. A rule should be made, that the One Percent who profit out of war should go on the frontline.

Anonymous said...

Absolutely true! If the one percent were on the front line there wouldn’t be a front line.

Then the defence force could be used to defend the country; against tsunamis, floods, earthquakes, cyclones, famine, pestilence etc. A fraction of the defence $budget would be all it would take to maintain peace, because peace is the easiest way to avoid war.

What’s so hard to understand? Oh, we are out of money? Oh we have to clone the American way around the world. Oh – we are exceptional and our burden is to rule the boondocks. Give us a break!

I don’t know who in their right mind would want to invade America?

Kaivey said...

As Putin says, Russia has all the oil and resources it needs, so it doesn't need to go elsewhere for this. This is one of the things that scares the US, that Russia is self sufficient and the US isn't. If the US hadn't given away its industry it would have nothing to fear.

The US elite have gutted the US economy, wrecking it's industry. They have the armaments industry left only, and some software companies. Microsoft is really monopoly, and Apple makes its stuff in China.

The US elite have given away their technology. They didn't care because they were greedy and they thought that China would not catch up in their lifetimes. But they caught up very quickly.

The only thing keeping the US going is its war machine, and cheap resources stolen from the rest of the world.

Postkey said...

"It's all great for the war profiteers, . . . "

It was forever thus?

“Taken together, these four volumes constitute an extraordinary commentary on a basic weakness in the Soviet system
The Soviets are heavily dependent on Western technology and innovation not only in their civilian industries, but also in their military programs.
An inevitable conclusion from the evidence in this book is that we have totally ignored a policy that would enable us to neutralize Soviet global ambitions while simultaneously reducing the defense budget and the tax load on American citizens.”
http://www.crowhealingnetwork.net/pdf/Antony%20Sutton%20-%20The%20Best%20Enemy%20Money%20Can%20Buy.pdf

“In a few words: there is no such thing as Soviet technology. Almost all — perhaps 90-95 percent — came directly or indirectly from the United States and its allies. In effect the United States and the NATO countries have built the Soviet Union. Its industrial and its military capabilities. This massive construction job has taken 50 years. Since the Revolution in 1917. It has been carried out through trade and the sale of plants, equipment and technical assistance.
. . . Because 50 years of dealings with the Soviets has been an economic success for the USSR and a political failure for the United States. It has not stopped war, it has not given us peace.
The United States is spending $80 billion a year on defense against an enemy built by the United States and West Europe.
Even stranger, the U.S. apparently wants to make sure this enemy remains in the business of being an enemy.“
http://www.reformed-theology.org/html/books/best_enemy/appendix_b.htm

Ryan Harris said...

Military budgets have been getting cut for years now. They need to do something to stop the slide and if the politicians won't listen, they will create a war?

MRW said...

Kaivey, part 1

Russia is self sufficient and the US isn't.

Yes, it is. The US actually has the largest oil reserves in the world. Russia is eighth, although Russia is #2 in coal, and generally presumed to be #1 in natural gas.

BACKGROUND
After the oil embargo caught the meddling Kissinger by surprise in 1973, and Saudi Arabia & OPEC reacted to the embargo by cutting production (whereupon the price of oil rose 10X, from $3 to $30 over seven years), Kissinger did a Memorandum Of Understanding (MOU) with Saudi Arabia in 1975 in which the US promised to keep buying its oil from SA and keep the price soaring **as long as SA agreed to denominate all oil sales in USD**. The State Dept did this as a private deal thru Treasury and circumvented Congress. It's generally described in the literature as "as long as Saudi Arabia buys our debt." Which means SA buys treasury securities. In other words, parking its dough—its oil profits—in their Federal Reserve savings account. And as you know, no USD can leave the US banking system by law, so all SA oil profits were parked in in Saudi Arabia's Federal Reserve savings account in Manhattan.

Kissinger must have caught on what the August 15, 1971 change off the gold standard internationally meant. The US no longer needed gold to pay for international payments. As long as the USD was cemented as the reserve currency, it could afford a $100 case of French wine for its embassies and government functions technically for the price of printing a buck: $0.07. So it could now afford all the oil it needed around the world for its military operations and bases, and its domestic federal government use, for keystrokes. The deal was making goddam good and sure that the USD was the reserve currency (The British Pound can still considered the reserve currency until the end of the 60s.)

The MOU assured that. SA and all the gulf countries got stinking rich. They weren't before the 1970s.

Then Carter deregulated natural gas in 1978, which undercut the price of oil and Saudi control. US power plants retooled for natural gas and not oil, and the price came down under Reagan. Reagan got the credit.

MRW said...

Kaivey, part 2
OIL GOES FROM COMMODITY TO A NATIONAL SECURITY CRITICAL ISSUE. STILL IS
Concurrent with Kissinger doing the SA deal: The DoD had gone into apoplexy when the embargo happened. Its troops and bases around the world were left with two-day fuel reserves, in some cases. Sometimes a week. Couldn’t fuel planes, ships, tanks, and trucks. Couldn’t feed the troops. The military was caught completely off-guard.

Oil then became National Security Issue #1. (And I know this directly from a private conversation with the former Sec DoD, James Schlesinger ("Schlessy"), SecDef under Nixon and Ford.) Oil companies became all-powerful. The CIA protected their operations, both domestically and internationally. Fuck domestic use, or the massive cost-pull inflation it caused.

And get this: All refinery building was stopped, still is. Ditto most domestic oil production, except Prudhoe Bay on Alaska’s North Shore, which was strategically and militarily chosen as a drill site in 1973 to take advantage of the new slant drilling tech, and make sure Russia, who also had the technology, didn’t siphon off the oil in the arctic fields north of Alaska, which is the major source of our massive fields.

ALONG COMES OBAMA . . .
Nobody told the putz about the 1975 MOU, and his neocon girls didn’t know. So the federal government permitted shale drilling domestically which was so productive that it could export its oversupply. And the hoi polloi in this country ignorantly crowed about the US being oil-independent. But it’s pissed off the Saudis—we violated the terms of the MOU—who punished us by flooding the market in the last 2-3 years hoping that China would become their brand-new customer. HOWEVER, putz Obama and his girls slapped sanctions on Russia hoping to cripple it, and mocked Putin publicly. Putin turned to China, who knows that the 30-year-old video-game lover Saudi Arabian Prince running the joint is shooting himself in the foot, and decided not to buy from Saudi Arabia. It’s partnering with Russia, multi-billion agreements, and is building massive pipelines between their two countries.

Putin’s PhD thesis was ‘How to take a totalitarian nation into the 21st C using natural resources’.

MRW said...

Kaivey, part 3
THE US RESERVE CURRENCY STATUS MAY BE GONE BY 2030
China is now actively developing bond markets in Chinese Yuan. Britain took them up on it a couple of years ago. People theorize replicating the $750 billion daily market in Yuan can’t be done; but they don’t understand the Chinese mind. If the desire to net save in Yuan globally ever exceeds USD, and the agreement between Russia and China to denominate Russian oil in Yuan predominates globally, then the US reserve currency goes bye-bye, and the cost of foreign wars for us will soar. Won’t do diddly to us domestically. But we won’t be no stinkin’ hegemon, believe me.

OUR CRITICAL LACK IS RARE EARTHS
We need rare earths for every single advanced technology we produce, including advanced military and medical tech. We were #1 in the 1980s. The industry was in the doldrums in 1994 and asked for federal help. Clinton naively said fuck you. While the tea partiers were scouring Walmarts in Feb 2009 for lawn chairs and straw hats to dangle their tea bags from, China was snapping up the remaining rights to rare earth ore sources worldwide. It now dominates the market, has a virtual monopoly on them (96-99% now I think), and since 2013 has restricted the majority of its production to domestic use, taking the world by surprise. It takes 40 tons of ore to produce 2.5 kgs of rare earth for ONE MAGNETfor ONE windmill turbine, and requires four levels of vertical distillation processes to even create the magnets. At the fourth level its more art than science. Sadly, we have lost the scientists who know how to produce them to other industries.

The toxic radioactive waste from producing rare earths is now filling former LAKES in lower Mongolia. It is seriously catastrophic, and so is the dust from this production which infects the eastern Chinese cities, and occasionally North America. The Greenies don’t know this shit--they even thin Beijing pollution is caused by cars--and they are too selfish to find out. As long as they have windmills killing birds and think they are reducing CO2, instead of advancing pipeline design like the Europeans have done successfully for sustainable oil use (which it is…the reserves keep growing) it’s all NIMBY.

MRW said...

In effect the United States and the NATO countries have built the Soviet Union. Its industrial and its military capabilities. This massive construction job has taken 50 years.

Historically wrong, off-the-wall.