GIVEN CURRENT WARS, F-35s ARE BETTER CHOICE THAN MORE F-22As

On Jun 19, 2:24 am, "Michael Shirley" wrote:
On Wed, 18 Jun 2008 02:19:11 -0700, eatfastnoodle
wrote:



Actually, China has huge internal problem to overcome before it can go
out and compete with the US on a global scale. If the US and China
could work something out on Taiwan, I don't think conflict between
China and the US is inevitable. (assuming Korean peninsula doesn't
blow). The thorny issue is always Taiwan, for China, giving up Taiwan
is simply a political impossibility, for the US, allow China to take
over Taiwan would mean the beginning of the end of American dominance
in East Asia. (anybody controls Taiwan would also control Japan's oil
lifeline, if China took over Taiwan, the foundation of American Asian
strategy: US-Japanese alliance would be shaken to its very core).

Very true. I also think that the Chinese are running against a clock that
makes them think that exporting problems on bayonets is easier than
solving them at home. Their water's polluted, their arable land is
shrinking, desertification is growing, they've got a failure of the One
Child Policy and they're overproducing males out of balance with females
as a result. The economic growth curve is outstripping the population
curve and they're starting to see what a paradigm/reality mismatch is all
about as they discover the limitations of a highly centralised government
in a dynamic society where change happens faster than they can get the
reports on what happened yesterday.

If I were on the Standing Committee of the Politburo, that would scare
the living crap out of me. And the number of really big projects like the
Three Gorges Dam that isn't even finished yet but which is starting to
suffer from silting, has got to be causing some panic. Hu Jintao started
out as a civil engineer specializing in water projects and dams and even
with that kind of expert knowledge at the top, the problems are
increasingly insoluable for the guys in Beijing.

So increasingly, external military policies, (something that has always
wound up being ruinous to the Chinese in the end) are looking better and
better, while the local problems become something that they'd just as soon
avoid. So, I think that we're going to see a period of optional
adventurism in Beijing's future and that's bad for us, especially since we
really can't afford a war with those people. Even if our overdependant on
Chinese trade economy would survive it, the fact of the matter is that
neither our industrial base nor our education system will support it.

We need to go tactical defensive/strategic offensive in our actions, and
a lot of that needs to revolve around soft power while being militarily
unprovocative. We don't, in the crude vernacular of our times, need our
politicians to be writing a check with their elephant mouths that our
humming bird asses can't cash.

In short, we need to change the game, because the one we're playing is
gonna get our nose bloodied. All the Chinese need to do in order to win is
simply not lose, and our own best option is not to play.

Lets let Beijing expend their capital, both economic and political for
awhile while we rebuild our industrial base, clean out our universities
and other schools and generally start behaving like we still want to be
around in 2050, by which time the Adventurists in Beijing will have spent
their capital. If they want to have fun trying to police an empire in
Africa, lets let them bleed to death doing it. Things might even improve a
little bit over there.

--
"Implications leading to ramifications leading to shenanigans"-- Admiral
Elmo Zumwalt, USN.

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CoS USAF, Gates differ