Note recent Chinese military exercises:
The "Vanguard 2010" exercises would involve coordinating more than 100 aircraft from the army, air force and navy, with live firing of missiles, to simulate defending Beijing from air attack, the China News Service added.
And note this context:
The increased activity comes as China and the United States have argued over joint U.S.-South Korean drills in the seas off South Korea, and coincides with Beijing's anger at U.S. comments about a sensitive territorial dispute in the South China Sea.
China is rising in power. Their increased economic power is being used for greater military power.
But China's military exercises were designed to protect their capital from air attack. Then note that our naval exercises were carried out within range of China's capital.
Are the implications of that clear? China may be rising, but the power balance is still so lopsided in our favor that we plan military operations close to China and so does China.
If you wonder what we get for our defense dollars, this is just one aspect--we will fight "over there" rather than defending our own shores from approaching enemies. That's pretty significant, but most people don't seem to appreciate that advantage when they complain about how our defense expenditures are such a high percentage of world defense spending. Given the small burden our defense spending is as a percentage of our GDP, I call that a wise investment.
China will have to rise a lot more and we will have to decline quite a bit before that imbalance shifts significantly in China's favor. China is surely gaining the ability to fight us in their own neighborhood. And they could conceivably beat us in their neighborhood. But the battlefield will be in their neighborhood.
And as long as China faces neighbors who'd rather side with us, China faces an even steeper climb to dominance that pushes the battlefield further east and closer to our territory.
