Agenda: China's Military Readiness STRATFOR June 24, 2011 | 1417 GMT Director of Military Analysis Nathan Hughes discusses the strengths and limitations of China's military capabilities. Editor's Note: Transcripts are generated using speech-recognition technology. Therefore, STRATFOR cannot guarantee their complete accuracy. Colin: Tensions have been rising again in the South China Sea, this time between Vietnam and the Philippines and China over disputed potentially oil-rich territory. This weekend China's vice minister for foreign affairs and the United States assistant secretary of Asia-Pacific meet in Hawaii with the Chinese side advising Americans to urge restraint. The vice foreign minister was quoted by the Wall Street Journal as saying, "some countries are playing with fire and I hope the U.S. won't would be burned by this," well we will see. Welcome to agenda and joining me this week for his latest assessment of the Chinese Military is Nathan Hughes, Stratfor's director of military analysis. Nate, it's a good time to be discussing this. China's first aircraft carrier goes for trials next week. It will be another year until, of course, it is in service but what difference will it make? Nate: Well, the Chinese fixed-wing carrier aviation program is still very preliminary, they have had the Varyag in their possession for over a decade now. It was originally bought from the Ukraine as surplus to be a casino, at least extensively in 1998. But it takes a long time to really develop all the capabilities necessary to really run an effective flight deck, and that's something that the United States has been doing for 100 years now and China is sort of just getting started with it. While the aircraft carrier goes to sea, it's not even clear with the first time when they will actually start landing aircraft on at it. At the moment we've got some imagery that suggests there is still considerable amount of construction equipment and detritus on the deck itself, and it may go to sea with some of that because this first sea trial is really about putting the engines through their paces and making sure the basic shipboard systems are functioning properly. Colin: So these are just sea trials not weapons testing? Nate: Right, the initial sea trials of a vessel is really about making sure that the engines work the way they are supposed to and this sort of thing, and especially when you start talking about the purpose of an aircraft carrier, to feel and be able to launch and recover fixed wing aircraft, that is really quite a ways down the road for the Chinese even after, probably well after, the commissioning of this ship next year. Colin: Of course even with this addition, the Chinese Navy only forms a relatively small part of China's military. Most of it is in the army, which has also has a bigger budget. How much of the PLA's effort is taken up with dealing with China's internal problems? Nate: Well, this is really an important thing to remember about China is that the vast majority of its military and security apparatus is devoted to land combat and internal security missions. While the navy and air force have gotten a lot of press lately, this is only a small fraction of, in fact combined the Navy and Air Force number fewer than nearly the internal security forces under the Ministry of Defense. It is important to remember the size of China. While it's the size of the United States, it has one billion extra people. Almost all of whom exist in a fairly low state of subsistence or less, many are disillusioned with the amount of financial rebalancing that has taken place. Many are in buffer areas and some are ethnic minorities, so there is a lot for China to manage internally even as it appears to be expending a lot of effort externally. Colin: Can you put any kind of percentage on it? Nate: The Chinese People's liberation Army Navy and People's Liberation Army Air Force together, number less than 600,000, while the People's armed police and a number of other internal security entities: everything from border police to railroad police, number over 700,000. And this isn't even counting the 1.6 million-man People's Liberation Army. Colin: What are the chances of these forces actually having to be deployed in the short-term? Nate: Well China spent almost its entire modern existence working with a very low- tech conscripted People's Army. The idea was simply to be able to maintain internal security and defend China's borders in a fairly traditional, attritional warfare sort of sense. So the challenges before China in the modernization that has taken place since the 1980's are very profound in terms of taking these new techniques, these new systems and these new weapons that they have been working on, integrating them into an effective war fighting system, and being able to deploy them further afield. China's been spending a lot of focus lately on China's deployment of only two warships and a replenishment vessel at a time to the counter piracy mission off the coast of Somalia. And while this is somewhat of a prestige thing, it's also about learning the basics of sustaining naval vessels far afield; the basics of maintenance, replenishment, the metrics of logistics, these are things China is still very unfamiliar with and those working to learn the tricks of the trade the idea, the idea that they will be able to deploy large numbers of forces anywhere beyond China's borders, I think is very, is still a very real question. Colin: What is your assessment of the quality of the hardware that China has invested in? Nate: Which I have been doing since the 1980's, has been investing a considerable amount in the latest Russian hardware, in the 1990's when things were pretty bad for Russia, China was the single biggest buyer of high-end late Soviet technology. They've combined that with an aggressive espionage effort, including cyber espionage efforts, to glean the latest technology from the United States and its allies. China's domestic efforts to put this all together, to be able to build it itself and use it itself, are very extensive, but the challenge is that because China is still new at this, and it's been growing so rapidly, it's in a very uncertain place while some of the technology it's fielding is certainly very impressive, its ability to integrate that into a war fighting concept, it's lack of real practical or operational experience with it, leaves very real questions about its performance in a shooting war. Colin: Nate, thank you very much. STRATFOR's Director of Military Analysis Nathan Hughes ending agenda for this week. I'm Colin Chapman, goodbye for now. . <http://media.stratfor.com/images/clear.gif?n=197937&h=0&u=128209&t=13089314 65&j=199670> [Non-text portions of this message have been removed] ------------------------------------ -------------------------- Want to discuss this topic? Head on over to our discussion list, discuss-os...@yahoogroups.com. -------------------------- Brooks Isoldi, editor biso...@intellnet.org http://www.intellnet.org Post message: osint@yahoogroups.com Subscribe: osint-subscr...@yahoogroups.com Unsubscribe: osint-unsubscr...@yahoogroups.com *** FAIR USE NOTICE. This message contains copyrighted material whose use has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. OSINT, as a part of The Intelligence Network, is making it available without profit to OSINT YahooGroups members who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information in their efforts to advance the understanding of intelligence and law enforcement organizations, their activities, methods, techniques, human rights, civil liberties, social justice and other intelligence related issues, for non-profit research and educational purposes only. We believe that this constitutes a 'fair use' of the copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the U.S. Copyright Law. If you wish to use this copyrighted material for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use,' you must obtain permission from the copyright owner. For more information go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtmlYahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/osint/ <*> Your email settings: Individual Email | Traditional <*> To change settings online go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/osint/join (Yahoo! ID required) <*> To change settings via email: osint-dig...@yahoogroups.com osint-fullfeatu...@yahoogroups.com <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: osint-unsubscr...@yahoogroups.com <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
