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a fragile planet...

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"Five years ago, I would’ve said that the possibility of a “kinetic war” in the Indo-Pacific was very unlikely, now it is more likely than it was then. This is something that you and I may well have to confront in the next 5 to 10 years"

 

Christopher Pyne.

 

 

Does Mr Pyne know that, seventy years ago, a Chinese volunteer force, lacking air cover and communicating with bugles, humiliated the US Army? That China enjoys the same advantages–shorter supply lines, higher morale, greater maneuverability, stronger popular support–now as then? That China’s neighbour and ally, Russia, can simultaneously threaten any combination of forces in Europe and Japan?

Has he forgotten that, while fleets win battles, economies win wars? That China’s economy is thirty per cent bigger than America’s, grows three times faster, has twice the manufacturing capacity, and launches a new warship every month? That, adjusted for purchasing power, China’s discretionary defence budget equals America’s?

Is Mr Pyne aware that China’s President is the son of a famous general and was himself Assistant to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff for three years?

Who can blame the Chinese for being eager for a rematch with America? In 1944 the US Air Force firebombed Wuhan, killed 44,000 civilians and left the city burning for a week. In 1992, the US Navy held the Yinhe, a Chinese freighter, at gunpoint in international waters for three weeks, falsely claiming she was carrying contraband. Two years later the US sent the most powerful fleet ever assembled through the Taiwan Strait and, in 1998, the USAF dropped five precision bombs on China’s Belgrade embassy, killing three diplomats and seriously wounding twenty. CIA director George Tenet told Congress, “It was the only target we nominated”.

In 2018 the US Navy practised blocking the Malacca Strait to cut off China’s oil but, says analyst Michael Thim, the gesture was meaningless, “Even in 1996, China’s Navy had sufficient capabilities such that sending Carrier Strike Groups into the Taiwan Strait would be suicidal. The situation has only become more challenging for the Navy in recent years, not because the PLAN has acquired aircraft carriers of its own, but because China has greatly enhanced and modernized its existing anti-access/area-denial capabilities”.

China’s Maritime Militia, its first line of defence, counts 180,000 ocean-going fishing boats and 4,000 merchant freighters–some towing sonar detectors–crewed by a million experienced sailors transmitting detailed information around the clock on every warship afloat. Shore bases fuse their reports with automated Beidou transmissions and forward the data to ‘vessel management platforms’ that collate, format, and send actionable information up the PLAN command chain. Ashore, eight million coastal reservists train constantly in seamanship, emergency ship repairs, anti-air missile defence, light weapons, and naval sabotage.

The PLAN’s fleet composition is fascinating.

Commander Yang Yi, the youngest (and first female) Chief Designer in naval history, designed its eighty Type 022 missile patrol boats on Australian-designed hulls. 400 feet long, with a range of 300 miles, they carry eight C-802 anti-ship missiles tipped with 500lb. warheads that travel fifteen feet above the surface at 650 mph to targets a hundred miles away (an early version disabled an Israeli warship off Lebanon’s coast in 2006). Four of her little boats, she says, can cover the entire Taiwan Strait while sheltering behind China’s coastal islands.

Supporting them are thirty Type 056 frigates with a range of 2,500 miles, each armed with YJ-83 anti-ship missiles and six torpedo tubes, and protected by eight SAM launchers. One frigate can sink Taiwan’s entire navy without coming within range of its American-supplied weapons. Behind the frigates are 20 Type 052D Arleigh Burke–class destroyers. Their 64 missile tubes fire–among others–unique Yu-8 anti-submarine missiles that fly 20 miles then release torpedoes into the water near unsuspecting targets.

Type 055 cruisers, the most powerful surface combatants afloat, carry 128 missile tubes armed with surface-to-air, anti-ship, land-attack and anti-submarine missiles.

Below them, 70 nuclear and conventional submarines carry YJ-12 anti-ship cruise missiles and wake-homing torpedoes that deliver 500-pound warheads at 60 mph from fifteen miles away. Their CM-401 high-supersonic ballistic missiles make precision strikes against medium-size ships, naval task forces, and offshore facilities within two hundred miles. Their CJ-10 subsonic missiles carry a half-ton payload – with a forty-foot radius of accuracy – 2,000 miles. Without leaving Chinese waters, the PLAN’s nuclear subs carry JL-3 missiles that can strike targets in the United States.

But the greatest threat to hostile fleets was born when the US Navy invited a Chinese admiral to visit the carrier Nimitz. Upon his return, he told colleagues, “I’ve just seen the world’s biggest target. If we can’t hit an aircraft carrier we can’t hit anything”.

Thrifty engineers designed novel guidance systems for existing, million-dollar rockets and created the first anti-ship, ballistic ‘carrier killer,’ the DF-21D. It lofts a half-ton warhead one thousand miles into the stratosphere, then it falls, vertically, at 7,500 mph, onto $12 billion aircraft carriers. US Navy analysts say it can destroy a carrier in one strike and that there is currently no defence against it. Its new sibling, the DF-26D, carries twice the payload twice as far.

The last US carrier to pass through the Taiwan Strait was the USS Kitty Hawk in 2007. “We are at a disadvantage with regard to China today in the sense that China’s ground-based ballistic missiles threaten our basing and our ships in the Western Pacific,” Admiral Harry Harris told the US Senate in 2018. The following year Robert Haddick warned, “China’s anti-ship missile capability exceeds America’s in terms of range, speed, and sensor performance,” and Captain James Fanell added, “We know that China has the most advanced ballistic missile force in the world. They have the capacity to overwhelm the defensive systems we are pursuing”. US Navy officers say they risk defeat in a serious conflict off China’s coast and avoid provoking the PLAN in the ‘Three Seas,’; South China, East China, and Yellow Seas.

The Rand Corporation says that, for conflicts close to the mainland or Taiwan, the PLAAF can deploy more fifth-generation J-20 fighters than the US. The J-20 costs half as much, flies twice as far and carries twice the payload of America’s F-35C or F-22 Raptor. Its YJ-12 anti-ship cruise missiles travel 200 miles and deliver thousand-pound warheads at supersonic speed in a corkscrew trajectory. The US Navy says one strike will render any vessel inoperable and warned that, even against alerted warships, one-third of missiles score hits.

The J-20 also carries the specialized PLA-15 air-to-air missile. Propelled by novel dual pulse rocket motors on a semi-ballistic trajectory, it homes on AWACS and airborne tankers loitering behind battle lines. General Herbert Carlisle, warning Congress that his two hundred F-22 Raptors carry six missiles each while the PLAAF’s J-20s carry twelve, added, “Look at the PLA-15, at the range of that weapon. How do we counter that?” The PLA-15’s smaller sibling, the PLA-10, is no less deadly, says airpower specialist Douglas Barrie, “For the notional Western combat aircraft pilot, there is no obvious respite to be found in keeping beyond visual range of the PLA-10. The PLAAF can mount increasingly credible challenges at engagement ranges against some targets that would previously have been considered safe. As one former USAF tanker pilot drily noted, ‘That’s aimed right at me.’”

As if to prove the point, the US Air Force cancelled its E-8C AWACS recapitalization program because it would be easy prey for the PLA-15, and the Pentagon withdrew its entire strategic bomber fleet from Guam in 2020.

Chinese hyperspectral detection satellites oversee the Western Pacific battlespace and airborne lasers detect wave and temperature variations generated by moving targets. The West Pacific Surveillance and Targeting satellite, along with fifteen Yaogan-30 satellites in low-earth orbit–operating as triplets positioned in close proximity–geo-locate military platforms by measuring the angular or time difference of arrival of their intercepted electromagnetic signals. Below them, the Caihong-T4, a massive, solar-powered drone, loiters for months at a cloudless altitude of 65,000 feet, while below, the fifteen-ton, 150-foot wingspan Divine Eagle High Altitude Stealth-Hunting Drone reads electronic signals from aircraft long before they approach their targets. Below the drones AWACS, whose solid-state detectors have twice the range of the US AWACS rotating domes, relay targeting information to Russian-built S-400 anti-aircraft/anti-missile batteries. Jin Canrong, the PRC’s senior defence policy advisor, says China’s shore-based weapons can see all stealth bombers and submarines, destroy every military base in its region within minutes, and take out every aircraft carrier within two thousand miles.

China’s three-stage, solid-fuel DF-41 ICBM, with a 12,000-mile range and a top speed of 20,000 mph, far outranges its American counterpart. Road-mobile, it launches on four minutes’ warning, is faster than any American weapon, and delivers ten independently targetable nuclear warheads.

The DF-ZF Hypersonic Glide Vehicle–whose significance Russian Defence Minister Rogozin compared to the first atom bomb–is operational. Launched six miles above the earth from a missile travelling at 16,000 mph, the DF-ZF rides its own shockwave to the target. Says RAND, “With the ability to fly at unpredictable trajectories, these missiles will hold extremely large areas at risk throughout much of their flight”. A Congressional report concludes, “The very high speeds of these weapons combined with their maneuverability and ability to travel at lower, radar-evading altitudes would make them far less vulnerable to current defences than existing missiles”.

What is Mr Pyne thinking?

 

Read more:

https://johnmenadue.com/war-with-china-despite-their-immense-military-capabilities/

una nuova catastrofe...

 

By Manlio Dinucci (the poster, 27 April 2021)

 

General Scott Miller, commander of US and allied forces in Afghanistan, announced the 25 April the beginning of the withdrawal of foreign troops that, as decided by President Biden, should be completed by 11 September. Thus the US ends the war waged for almost twenty years? To understand it, first of all we need to take stock of the results of the war.  

 The toll in human lives is largely unquantifiable: the "direct deaths" among the US military would amount to about 2.500, and the seriously injured beyond 20.000. I contractor (the mercenaries of the USA) killed would be approx 4.000, plus an unknown number of injured. Losses among the Afghan military would amount to approximately 60.000. Civilian deaths are virtually incalculable: according to the United Nations, they would have been about 100.000 in just ten years. Impossible to determine the "indirect deaths" from poverty and disease, caused by the social and economic consequences of the war.

 The economic balance is relatively quantifiable. For the war - documents the New York Timesaccording to data processed by Brown University - the US has spent more 2.000 billions of dollars, to which more are added 500 for medical assistance to veterans. The war operations have cost 1.500 billions of dollars, but the exact amount remains "opaque". The training and arming of the Afghan government forces (beyond 300 thousand men), they cost 87 billions.

 They have been spent on "economic aid and reconstruction" 54 billions of dollars, largely wasted due to corruption and inefficiency, to «build hospitals that have treated no patients and schools that have not educated any students, and that sometimes they didn't even exist ". They have been spent on the fight against drugs 10 billions of dollars, with the following result: the acreage planted with opium has quadrupled, so much so that it has become Afghanistan's main economic activity, which today supplies 80% of the opium produced illegally in the world.

 To finance the war in Afghanistan, the United States got heavily in debt: they have therefore had to pay so far, always with public money, 500 billions of dollars, than in 2023 they will rise further 600. Furthermore, for the US military who sustained serious injuries and disabilities in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, have been spent so far 350 billions, which will rise in the next decades a 1.000 billions, more than half of which for the consequences of the war in Afghanistan.

 The politico-military balance sheet of this war, that shed rivers of blood and burned enormous resources, it is catastrophic for the US, except for the military-industrial complex which has made enormous profits with it. «And talebani, become stronger and stronger, control or contend a large part of the country ", writes the New York Times.

 At this point, Secretary of State Blinken and others propose that the United States officially recognize and finance the Taliban, since thus “after taking power, partially or fully, they could govern less harshly to gain recognition and financial support from world powers ".

 At the same time, reports the New York Times, «The Pentagon, the American spy agencies, and the Western Allies are devising plans to deploy a less visible but still powerful force in the region, including drones, long-range bombers and spy networks ". According to Biden's order, always reports the New York Times, the US is withdrawing theirs 2.500 soldiers, «But the Pentagon currently has about Afghanistan 1.000 military more than those publicly recognized, belonging to special forces under the orders of both the Pentagon and the CIA ", to which are added further 16.000 US contractors that could be used to train Afghan government forces.

 The official purpose of the new strategic plan is "to prevent Afghanistan from re-emerging as a terrorist base to threaten the United States". The real purpose remains that of twenty years ago: have a strong military presence in this area at the crossroads of the Middle East, Central Asia, southern and eastern, of primary strategic importance especially towards Russia and China.

 

(the poster, 27 April 2021)

 

Read more:

https://www.natoexit.it/en/2021/04/27/afghanistan-il-piano-usa-di-una-nuova-catastrofe/

 

 

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warmongers' "morality"...

 

Why is Australia’s elite apparently so keen on a ‘kinetic’ war with China, when it would be catastrophic for their country?

 

by Bradley Blankenship

 

Many high-placed politicians, generals and journalists are ratcheting up tensions with insane talk of a military conflict with Beijing being ‘highly likely’. For the sake of world peace, they need to grow up and shut up.

There’s a “high likelihood” that a “kinetic” war between Australia and China could take place. That’s at least what Major-General Adam Findlay told his special forces troops last year in a confidential briefing now made public in the Australian media this week.

Though the general’s words were never intended to be public, they are now. As the old saying goes, you can’t take back words. Now everyone is aware of the Australian military establishment’s calculations, which are clearly a driving factor in the aggressive rhetoric that’s been coming from the country’s political establishment.  

For example, Department of Home Affairs Secretary Michael Pezzullo recently stated what is an obvious fact on the country’s annual military commemoration day when he said that the “drums of war” are beating louder across Asia. 

In an op-ed for The Australian, Pezzullo had presented an argument in favor of a war to defend “democracy” and “liberty,” insinuating, without mentioning names, that China is a moral equivalent to Nazi Germany.

He wrote, “War may well be folly, but the greater folly is to wish away the curse by refusing to give it thought and attention, as if in so doing war may leave us be, forgetting us perhaps.”

Echoing a speech by former US Army general Douglas MacArthur, Pezzullo insisted such a war should not make one be considered a warmonger since such a war could be morally justified. But MacArthur, who was fired from his position as commander during the genocidal Korean War after recommending using some 34 nuclear weapons on Chinese and Korean territory, may not have been the best historical figure to echo here in making such an appeal to morality. 

 

Defense Minister Peter Dutton has also recently said that a war over Taiwan might be inevitable and toughened his stance on China. According to him, Australia is “already under attack” from China in cyberspace and the government needs to have a “more frank discussion with the public” about it. Though, he said, the government’s priority is “continued peace in our region.”

All of the rhetoric coming from the current Australian government is a textbook example of what the famed American writer Walter Lippmann called “the manufacture of consent,” which morphed into the title of a famous book by renowned philosopher Noam Chomsky and scholar Edward Herman that was, ironically, dedicated to an Australian social psychologist named Alex Carey. 

In a nutshell, the country’s political establishment is pushing propaganda through various institutions, namely the mass media, to drum up public support for a war with China – a war that they want, not one that is inevitable. So blatant is this attempt that some former officials have spoken out. 

Australia needs a 1 week moratorium on talking about Taiwan, just so everyone can do a little basic reading. https://t.co/tLkTIPgDHU

— Euan Graham (@graham_euan) May 6, 2021

 

Former prime minister Kevin Rudd said that all of the escalations against China “serves zero national security purpose” and Bob Carr, a former foreign minister, pointed out in an op-ed for The Sydney Morning Herald that “Australian diplomacy ought to be identifying the off-ramps that will avoid this nightmare.” 

Their position likely stems from the fact that a war between Australia and China would not serve anyone’s interests, certainly not anyone in either of those countries. 

Such a war would obviously take place under a broader context – and it suggests that what they really believe is likely is a larger war between the United States and China, two nuclear-armed states, which Australia would, they assume, have no choice but to join. Such a war would obviously be catastrophic.

Australia is already paying a high price economically for its bellicose stance. In the latest blow, China today announced it had "indefinitely" suspended key economic dialogue with Australia.

The question is, now that the proverbial cat is out of the bag in terms of how Australia judges China as a threat, where do we go from here? The answer, despite what some in the military, political and media establishment might actually want, is that there probably won’t be a war — because a war like this would endanger literally everyone. If you thought Covid-19 is bad, a war like this would be far worse. The Australian elite needs to wise up.

A question one might ask on this topic is why the Australian military, political and media establishment feels so strongly that Australia would have no choice in whether to participate in an American-led war against China. Is this really the kind of “rules-based order” Australians support? 

 

Read more:

https://www.rt.com/op-ed/523086-australia-china-kinetic-war/

 

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media drums...

 

By Brian Toohey

 

There has, quite rightly, been criticism in the mainstream media of authoritarian states and their use of disinformation campaigns and cyber attacks. However, the US and its democratic allies decades ago pioneered the use of disinformation in their huge propaganda campaigns. China is just a beginner.

 

With few exceptions, Australia’s mainstream media has joined government ministers, senior public servants, generals and prominent US-funded think-tanks in implicitly drumming up support for a war with China. In the process, it has often abandoned accuracy and balance.

Take the May 4 article in the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, which stated that “democracies are just learning” how to compete with authoritarian states such as China, Russia, Iran and North Korea in “grey zone” tactics involving “cyber attacks and disinformation campaigns” somewhere between war and peace.

The claim is false. The US and its democratic allies long ago learnt to spread disinformation as part of a huge propaganda campaign. The New York Times, for example, published two major articles on the topic in December 1977, “Worldwide Propaganda Network built by the CIA” and “CIA: Secret Shaper of Public Opinion”.

CIA developed media network

The series explained how the US had developed an extensive network of more than 800 newspapers, news services, magazines, publishing houses and broadcasting stations, most overseas, to covertly promote American influence. The CIA even funded the Australian magazine Quadrant. Lincoln White, the US Consul General in Melbourne in the mid-1960s, later told me that the CIA station chief Bill Caldwell had a journalist on the The Age who “put our side” of the Vietnam war.

Within the CIA, the massive disinformation operation was dubbed “Wisner’s Wurlitzer” after the first head of covert action. The New York Times said Wurlitzer was supposedly capable of “orchestrating in almost any language anywhere in the world, whatever tune the CIA was in a mood to hear”.

The establishment of Radio Free Europe to broadcast into the Soviet countries and Radio Free Asia to broadcast into China are some of the better-known examples. The agency belatedly realised that hardly anyone owned a radio in China and tried to launch radios in balloons over China, but they blew back towards the launch site in Taiwan.

More conventional techniques often succeeded, particularly when the CIA surreptitiously gained control of existing media organisations or otherwise co-opted local journalists and broadcasters.

Iraq war based on disinformation

More recently, some Anglo-Saxon democracies have relied on disinformation to build a case for starting wars. Before the 2003 invasion of Iraq, George W Bush, Tony Blair and John Howard justified their calamitous act of aggression using nonsensical claims, masquerading as intelligence, about Iraq’s (non-existent) weapons of mass destruction.

This belligerence, in clear violation of the “global rules-based order”, led to an ongoing violence and a terrible refugee crisis, exacerbated by the war in Afghanistan and other parts of the Middle East. Although China engages in harsh internal repression, Australian journalists routinely refer to Chinese “aggression” offshore without acknowledging that it is minuscule, unlike that unleashed by American and Australian democracies in Iraq, Afghanistan and Vietnam.

Nor are the democracies novices in other grey zone activities. The US has a long history of interfering in other countries. Among multiple examples, the US and the UK in 1953 covertly overthrew a democratically elected, secular Iranian prime minister, who wanted to nationalise the foreign companies exploiting country’s oil. The coup masters installed the dictator Pahlavi Reza whose corruption and brutality led to the Iranian Islamic revolution in 1979.

In 1956, the US intervened covertly to stop an internationally agreed election to unify Vietnam going ahead. President Eisenhower said in his memoirs that he intervened because he believed (correctly) that the North’s leader Ho Chi Minh would easily win the presidency.

Without foreign interference by a democracy, there would have been no subsequent war in which as many as 3 million died. Even today, Vietnamese children are born with deformities caused by American planes spraying dioxin, a persistent toxin, during the war. There are no comparable examples of China engaging in grey zone warfare where it has overthrown an important government or stopped a key election.

Pine Gap’s key role

The cyber warfare capabilities of China and Russia are dwarfed by those of the US and its allies. The combination of the vast cyber capabilities of the US National Security Agency and those of the American military can destroy hospitals, power stations, railway lines and other infrastructure in cyber attacks that go well beyond the grey zone.

Australia’s mainstream media regularly highlight grey zone activities involving Chinese intelligence gathering activities without a balancing mention of the much more valuable intelligence gathered by satellites linked to US bases in Australia such as Pine Gap. The ABC has highlighted how Chinese “spy” ships can eavesdrop on military exercises off the Australian coast. The US and Australian military don’t care – encryption ensures that nothing of consequence is intercepted.

Pine Gap, however, collects almost all telecommunications and radar signals within China, plus detecting the infrared heat radiated from missiles and planes. This enables the US to pinpoint targets in real time during a war with China. These benefits far outweigh the value of Australia contributing a couple of frigates and a squadron of F- 35 fighter planes to a future war with China.

If China were foolish enough to attack its sovereign province of Taiwan, that would deserve strong condemnation, but not necessarily military intervention. Almost every country has officially recognised China’s sovereignty over Taiwan. In the 1950s and 60s, countries such as Australia and the US not only recognised that Taiwan was part of China, they promoted the fiction that China was ruled from the Taiwanese capital of Taipei.

Against this backdrop, outside intervention in Chinese military action against Taiwan would need to meet a higher standard than an attack by one sovereign country on another. If China were sensible, it would guarantee Taiwan autonomy, subject to an agreement that it would not host foreign military bases. The Australian and US policy of encouraging Taiwan to take bolder steps towards total independence only risks a terrible war — China will never willingly allow Taiwan to host foreign military bases, just like America would never allow military bases of hostile foreign forces so close to its mainland.

No criticism of our draconian laws

The head of Home Affairs Michael Pezzullo told a parliamentary committee last year that he regularly briefs more than two dozen journalists. Most seemingly repeat what he has to say on a non-attributable basis. In a recent speech, Pezzullo said the “drums of war” were beating and Australia must be prepared “to send off, yet again, our warriors to fight”.

He said Australia must strive to reduce the likelihood of war, “but not at the cost of our precious liberty”. Few senior public servants have done more than Pezzullo to bring about draconian legislation curtailing Australian liberties.

In one example, long jail terms can now apply to anyone who “harms” relations with another country, whatever that is supposed to mean. Yet many of the journalists who rightly condemn Chinese authoritarianism fail to criticise the harsh provisions in this legislation.

Some Australian journalists prefer to use national security sources to foster fear of China. These sources helped generate excitable media reports about an important Chinese spy defecting to Australia. The “spy” was a fake and perhaps the journalist an unwitting recipient of disinformation.

 

Read more:

https://johnmenadue.com/australian-media-helps-government-peddle-disinformation/

 

On this site we have expose the link between misinformation and the CIA...

 

Read also: 

 

https://www.yourdemocracy.net.au/drupal/node/33845

 

https://www.yourdemocracy.net.au/drupal/node/39399

 

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