Truism: Generals always prepare for the last war. This can't always be true, or World War One would have repeated itself over and over again. Instead, the French built the Maginot Line and the Germans built tanks.
But there is a large kernel of truth here. The 1991 Gulf War essentially employed NATO's AirLand Battle doctrine from the Cold War, augmented by cruise missiles, very few of which were actually true precision-guided munitions. (We showed great pictures, but we significantly over-emphasized our capabilities as military disinformation; fuel-air explosives had more to do with burying the Iraqi Army in Kuwait than cruise missiles.)
The 2003 invasion of Iraq--which followed the much-heralded Revolution in Military Affairs--actually delivered more of what people thought they'd been getting in 1991. The "Shock and Awe" aerial campaign eclipsed anything from the First Gulf War in explosive intensity (compared on similar time-scales) and allowed the famous "drive to Baghdad" to be accomplished with literally a handful of troops compared to the massive army mobilized twelve years earlier.
All of which is an overly long prologue to a disquieting conclusion: in some key areas of technical military research the US appears to be losing the edge to China. I am specifically referring to two major technologies: anti-stealth radar and nanotechnology.
These are critical areas that, when combined with China's increased medium-range nuclear ballistic missiles, a "boomer"-type nuclear submarine due to be launched in the next two years, and a 2.2-million strong traditional "brown boot" army, suggest that the Peoples' Republic takes quite seriously its long-held goal to become the power on the Pacific Rim, and a military superpower capable of deterring US military action anywhere in Asia--especially in the Taiwan straits.
Open sources have revealed since as early as 1999-2002 that China was working on the development of passive, bistatic high frequency and long-range radars, designed to defeat not only US cruise missiles, but also US radar-evading stealth aircraft such as the F-22 Raptor, F-35 Lightning, F-117 Nighthawk and B-2 Spirit.
Here's the coloring book version of how it works: our air doctrine is based on the idea that we start battering enemy defenses with cruise missiles and stealth aircraft. The idea is to get the enemy to turn on his radar stations, and once we spot them we kill them. Once the radar stations go down, our cruise missiles and non-stealth aircraft move in and destroy things at will. We can destroy their radar because (a) stealth aircraft scatter traditional radar and are hard to "paint", and (b) because radar is "active"--if they bounce a signal off us, we know where it came from.
The new passive systems the Chinese are developing concentrate on detecting the minute disruptions that even stealth aircraft create against the broadcast background of the electromagnetic spectrum. OK, forget that and just remember that these radars don't send out any signal to bounce off our planes, they just monitor the ripples in the spectrum created as our planes pass by. If perfected, these systems (a) defeat current stealth technology and (b) frustrate our strategy because the installations don't actually broadcast anything for us to detect and destroy. If their power sources and communications are concealed, the stations are virtually invisible.
[The good news: this sort of system is incredibly sensitive--read almost quirky--and also requires very, very high-speed processing to evaluate subtle signal changes in real-time. On the other hand, we don't know how close the Chinese are to developing this capacity and producing it in large enough numbers to deploy an effective surveillance network even in an area as constricted as the "Taiwan theater."
But for those who have come to accept stealth technology as an unchallengeable military advantage, this is a tough one to accept: eventually every military technology causes an effective counter to be developed--sort of a free market in arms races.
Meanwhile, China is also intent upon becoming the world leader in nanotechnology, and is investing big time in the infrastructure and human capital necessary to do so (it's one of those advantages you have when you don't give a damn if millions of people starve to death this winter). While there are loads of industrial applications that would obviously be of value to China--or any nation--what we can't lose sight of is the fact that military and not industrial applications seem to be the leading edge of their research.
OK, so you've got a bunch of microscopic little machines. So what?
Here's what: the Center for Responsible Nanotechnology has developed seven nanotech future scenarios to challenge our policy makers to think about the future. In one, CRN points out that a cheap meso-scale "3D printer" fabrication technology (potentially available in less than 10 years) would make possible the rapid automatic construction of micro-UAVs [Unmanned Aerial Vehicles] capable of carrying either small explosive [HE] loads or even radiological, chemical or biological agents. Swarms of these mosquito to bird-sized, incredibly cheap UAVs could be deployed against, say, a US Carrier Group in the South China Sea, overwhelming its defenses through sheer numbers.
This is sort of the "cheap is the antidote to expensive high tech" strategy. If each micro-UAV only has a 1 in 1,000 chance of hitting either a plane or naval vessel and doing some damage, they sound impotent. That is, until you realize that for the cost of a single B-2 stealth plane the Chinese could conceivably field 40-50,000 of the micro-UAVs. Think of a panther being stung to death by a gigantic swarm of hornets. [For the less politically correct this is also known as the "Fuzzy Wuzzy" phenomenon for a lot of imperialist reasons the Brits would just as soon forget about in today's PC world.]
Put passive radar together with well-developed nano-tech, and you've got a whole new kind of war.
The good news is that we do have people doing this kind of thing (and others), and it's difficult to know how well we're doing because our security is pretty good (although some guesses can be made, I'm not going to do it here).
The bad news is that, as in the period 1945-1955 when we saw our nuclear monopoly give way to the deadliest arms race in human history, we aren't the only nation on the planet with the brains, the resources, and the will to invest in practical, high-tech weaponry.
Oh, and don't give me the old "we can just all be friends" line. Here's what the Christian Science Monitor reported of a high Chinese defense official (even if he was later officially repudiated):
Comforting, eh?
[With apologies to Duffy, who will know all the places that I have over-simplified too much or just made errors of fact. Be gentle with me.]
But there is a large kernel of truth here. The 1991 Gulf War essentially employed NATO's AirLand Battle doctrine from the Cold War, augmented by cruise missiles, very few of which were actually true precision-guided munitions. (We showed great pictures, but we significantly over-emphasized our capabilities as military disinformation; fuel-air explosives had more to do with burying the Iraqi Army in Kuwait than cruise missiles.)
The 2003 invasion of Iraq--which followed the much-heralded Revolution in Military Affairs--actually delivered more of what people thought they'd been getting in 1991. The "Shock and Awe" aerial campaign eclipsed anything from the First Gulf War in explosive intensity (compared on similar time-scales) and allowed the famous "drive to Baghdad" to be accomplished with literally a handful of troops compared to the massive army mobilized twelve years earlier.
All of which is an overly long prologue to a disquieting conclusion: in some key areas of technical military research the US appears to be losing the edge to China. I am specifically referring to two major technologies: anti-stealth radar and nanotechnology.
These are critical areas that, when combined with China's increased medium-range nuclear ballistic missiles, a "boomer"-type nuclear submarine due to be launched in the next two years, and a 2.2-million strong traditional "brown boot" army, suggest that the Peoples' Republic takes quite seriously its long-held goal to become the power on the Pacific Rim, and a military superpower capable of deterring US military action anywhere in Asia--especially in the Taiwan straits.
Open sources have revealed since as early as 1999-2002 that China was working on the development of passive, bistatic high frequency and long-range radars, designed to defeat not only US cruise missiles, but also US radar-evading stealth aircraft such as the F-22 Raptor, F-35 Lightning, F-117 Nighthawk and B-2 Spirit.
Here's the coloring book version of how it works: our air doctrine is based on the idea that we start battering enemy defenses with cruise missiles and stealth aircraft. The idea is to get the enemy to turn on his radar stations, and once we spot them we kill them. Once the radar stations go down, our cruise missiles and non-stealth aircraft move in and destroy things at will. We can destroy their radar because (a) stealth aircraft scatter traditional radar and are hard to "paint", and (b) because radar is "active"--if they bounce a signal off us, we know where it came from.
The new passive systems the Chinese are developing concentrate on detecting the minute disruptions that even stealth aircraft create against the broadcast background of the electromagnetic spectrum. OK, forget that and just remember that these radars don't send out any signal to bounce off our planes, they just monitor the ripples in the spectrum created as our planes pass by. If perfected, these systems (a) defeat current stealth technology and (b) frustrate our strategy because the installations don't actually broadcast anything for us to detect and destroy. If their power sources and communications are concealed, the stations are virtually invisible.
[The good news: this sort of system is incredibly sensitive--read almost quirky--and also requires very, very high-speed processing to evaluate subtle signal changes in real-time. On the other hand, we don't know how close the Chinese are to developing this capacity and producing it in large enough numbers to deploy an effective surveillance network even in an area as constricted as the "Taiwan theater."
But for those who have come to accept stealth technology as an unchallengeable military advantage, this is a tough one to accept: eventually every military technology causes an effective counter to be developed--sort of a free market in arms races.
Meanwhile, China is also intent upon becoming the world leader in nanotechnology, and is investing big time in the infrastructure and human capital necessary to do so (it's one of those advantages you have when you don't give a damn if millions of people starve to death this winter). While there are loads of industrial applications that would obviously be of value to China--or any nation--what we can't lose sight of is the fact that military and not industrial applications seem to be the leading edge of their research.
OK, so you've got a bunch of microscopic little machines. So what?
Here's what: the Center for Responsible Nanotechnology has developed seven nanotech future scenarios to challenge our policy makers to think about the future. In one, CRN points out that a cheap meso-scale "3D printer" fabrication technology (potentially available in less than 10 years) would make possible the rapid automatic construction of micro-UAVs [Unmanned Aerial Vehicles] capable of carrying either small explosive [HE] loads or even radiological, chemical or biological agents. Swarms of these mosquito to bird-sized, incredibly cheap UAVs could be deployed against, say, a US Carrier Group in the South China Sea, overwhelming its defenses through sheer numbers.
This is sort of the "cheap is the antidote to expensive high tech" strategy. If each micro-UAV only has a 1 in 1,000 chance of hitting either a plane or naval vessel and doing some damage, they sound impotent. That is, until you realize that for the cost of a single B-2 stealth plane the Chinese could conceivably field 40-50,000 of the micro-UAVs. Think of a panther being stung to death by a gigantic swarm of hornets. [For the less politically correct this is also known as the "Fuzzy Wuzzy" phenomenon for a lot of imperialist reasons the Brits would just as soon forget about in today's PC world.]
Put passive radar together with well-developed nano-tech, and you've got a whole new kind of war.
The good news is that we do have people doing this kind of thing (and others), and it's difficult to know how well we're doing because our security is pretty good (although some guesses can be made, I'm not going to do it here).
The bad news is that, as in the period 1945-1955 when we saw our nuclear monopoly give way to the deadliest arms race in human history, we aren't the only nation on the planet with the brains, the resources, and the will to invest in practical, high-tech weaponry.
Oh, and don't give me the old "we can just all be friends" line. Here's what the Christian Science Monitor reported of a high Chinese defense official (even if he was later officially repudiated):
This summer, Gen. Zhu Chenghu, dean of China's National Defense University, raised the subject of weapons of mass destruction, which China rarely mentions, in connection with Taiwan. Should US forces aid Taiwan in a war, he told bewildered US visitors, "Americans will have to be prepared that hundreds ... of cities will be destroyed by Chinese" nuclear weapons.
Comforting, eh?
[With apologies to Duffy, who will know all the places that I have over-simplified too much or just made errors of fact. Be gentle with me.]
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