Why amusing and depressing? Because the Chinese gain knowledge to defeat us in war (tip to The View from Taiwan via Mad Minerva). Yet we think China does us a great favor by agreeing to them:
The events of the last several weeks are the latest installment in a long-running effort by the Pentagon to mollify the Communist Party-ruled military through a series of exchanges, meetings and ship visits involving senior and mid level military officers.
The problem, according to officials close to the program, is that the United States sees the exchanges as a way to develop friendly relations, while China's military has used the exchanges for intelligence-gathering and technology identification for its major military buildup.
"The Pentagon is totally naive about this relationship," said a defense official involved in the program.
An annual Pentagon report to Congress on military exchanges with China's People's Liberation Army reveals that the Chinese military has been granted access to U.S. military expertise despite a legal prohibition on exchanges that could bolster Beijing's power projection capabilities.
The exchanges also provided Chinese military visitors with a look at key strategic communications, logistics and supply capabilities, management methods and tactical combat operations, as well as nuclear policy and strategy, according to a review of the programs.
Here's one lovely tidbit from an American officer too eager to please from a past visit that led to theoretical limits to what the Chinese can visit:
Support for the legislation in Congress was bolstered by a damaging incident in the late 1990s. At that time, a visiting Chinese military officer asked a Navy officer to identify the most vulnerable point on an aircraft carrier. The officer told the Chinese visitor that carriers were most vulnerable underneath their hulls, close to ammunition storage areas.
Would it have really been that hard for the officer to have pointed to an area of the hull where the dining facility is located?
As I've long argued, I'm most happy when these little visits are on hold. We hope to teach the Chinese that we're too powerful to fight. They learn how to defeat us despite our strength.
Or if they don't learn how to do that, they think they learn how to do that.
