Leading U.S. security analyst: “China Is Ready for War,” Seth Jones of the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies argued this week in Foreign Affairs. However, he explained, thanks to America’s “crumbling” defense industrial base, the U.S. appears to be nowhere nearly as prepared for a conflict with China.
The gist: “Despite the country’s current economic challenges, its defense spending is soaring and its defense industry is on a wartime footing,” Jones writes. “China has already caught up to the United States in its ability to produce weapons at mass and scale,” and it has “become the world’s largest shipbuilder by far, with a capacity roughly 230 times as large as that of the United States.”
A few areas the U.S. should improve upon in the months ahead, according to Jones:
- Its “anachronistic contracting and acquisitions system that is much better suited for the leisurely pace of peacetime than for the urgency of wartime”;
- U.S.-based production of certain “solid rocket motors, processor assemblies, castings, forgings, ball bearings, microelectronics, and seekers for munitions”;
- It will also need to shore up its “advanced battery supply chain,” since so many of the components are dominated by China;
- And U.S. shipyards need to somehow increase their supply of “engineers, electricians, pipefitters, shipfitters, and metalworkers.”
Related analysis: “What reports got wrong about China’s ‘sunken nuclear submarine,’” via J. Michael Dahm of Blue Path Labs with Peter W. Singer, writing Wednesday in Defense One. For one thing, there’s little actual evidence that the sub was nuclear. For another, the discussion of the sub in Chinese-language sources reveals interesting things about the state of the Chinese naval industrial base. Read on, here.
Related reading: “Why Can't the U.S. Build Ships?” asked Brian Potter last month on his blog Construction Physics, answering with a 4,000-word run through history.
“In looking at the history of US shipbuilding, two major trends stand out," he writes. "The first is the high cost of inputs, particularly labor and steel. But the other factor is cultural, he argues. While some nations have been driven to build ships for trade or survival, the United States “never appears to have been strongly motivated to make its shipbuilding industry an international success. Historically it has been isolationist, trading much more with itself than it has with other countries.” Read the rest, here.
From the region: The Brits just announced a major change in how it manages a quietly-influential territorial relic from the colonial era. In a joint statement with Mauritius on Thursday, the two nations announced the Chagos Archipelago is Mauritius’s sovereign territory.
This includes the strategic Diego Garcia island, which the U.S. military has used to carry out its post-9/11 global war on terrorism. However, “both our countries are committed to the need, and will agree in the treaty, to ensure the long-term, secure and effective operation of the existing base on Diego Garcia which plays a vital role in regional and global security,” 10 Downing Street said Thursday.
Fine print: “For an initial period of 99 years, the United Kingdom will be authorised to exercise with respect to Diego Garcia the sovereign rights and authorities of Mauritius required to ensure the continued operation of the base well into the next century,” the joint statement reads.
The legal struggles of locals on Diego Garcia were thoroughly documented in a recent book from international law specialist Philippe Joseph Sands entitled, “The Last Colony: A Tale of Exile, Justice, and Courage.” The Brits forcibly removed some 2,000 people from the island in 1973, diverting them to Mauritius and the Seychelles. Sands’ account of that history is short but packed with emotion as he retraced just some of the lives disrupted by the Brits’ determination to stay on Diego Garcia against the will of the UN General Assembly.
“The [new] treaty will address wrongs of the past and demonstrate the commitment of both parties to support the welfare of Chagossians,” the joint statement reads. What’s more, “Mauritius will now be free to implement a programme of resettlement on the islands of the Chagos Archipelago, other than Diego Garcia, and the UK will capitalise a new trust fund, as well as separately provide other support, for the benefit of Chagossians.”
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