Well This is Just Stupid

This author wonders if China is a paper tiger. This is just silly. It takes the question of whether China is a super power (they aren't) and uses it to imply they are a paper tiger (they aren't).

Exhibit A: The Chinese can't build a modern jet engine and it may take years or decades for them to master the technology.

That failure means they are not a military threat? Before the Russo-Japanese War, Japan imported their ships from abroad. Was Japan not a threat to Russia, which could build their own ships? And consider that China is making progress in building their own advanced jet engines. They aren't as good as ours--or even the Russian models they are copied from--but they are getting better and the Chinese will master the technology.

Exhibit B: The Chinese DF-21 may not work. Our carrier could move before a missile could reach the area it was aimed at, it is explained.

The DF-21 system may not work yet, it is true. But the pieces are in place. Now the Chinese need to get the pieces to work together. The missile would likely have its own radar to guide the missile as it approached the initial target area identified by satellites. We'd have to move a targeted carrier a lot to avoid that kind of area radar that scans the region around the initial target point. If China can get the parts to work, China could easily fire a volley of such missiles to cover the radius of our carrier's potential evasive movement. Would they waste a number of ballistic missiles doing that? Sure. Would they care if one of twenty slammed into the carrier, sinking or crippling it? No, they would not care. Would even getting our carriers to spend more time worrying about survival and less time stopping a Chinese invasion fleet off of Taiwan be good enough? You bet. Even if the missile system doesn't work as well as the Chinese hope and we fear, would we act more cautiously in moving within range of such a system? Darned straight, we would.

The real problem with the DF-21, as far as I'm concerned, is that it compels us to strike deep into China to knock out the missiles before they launch and attack in space to knock down the Chinese satellites to prevent the Chinese from getting the initial target point. Our carriers are too much of a prestige target to risk losing them. China immediately forces us to expand a local war over Taiwan, for example, into a fight that includes a lot of Chinese territory--which could compel escalation into a general war.

The basic failure of those who minimize Chinese power is their search for evidence that China is emerging as a peer competitor; and when finding evidence that rightly shows they are not a peer competitor, concluding that China really isn't a threat.

China is a threat to us even if they have a short punch in the medium term. Just being able to project power 500 miles in Asia, given the rising importance of Asia, is significant. Recall that the Soviet Union just had to advance a couple hundred miles in Western Europe to defeat the West during the Cold War, given the importance of Europe in that struggle. Recall further that Germany was not a peer competitor of us at any time during 1941 to 1945. Neither was Japan. Being powerful overseas in an area important to us is threat enough, eh?

China is a rising power that casts an increasingly lengthy shadow over their own neighborhood. We remain supreme outside of that looming shadow because of our global power; but inside that shadow, China can increasingly compete with the amount of power we can project there in support of our allies who live under that shadow of Chinese power.

China is not a paper tiger. They can't leap very far, but you wouldn't want to get close to their claws.

UPDATE: The commander of our Pacifice forces, Admiral Robert Willard, gives a good inverview covering this topic in a far more rational manner than the musings of whether China is a paper tiger.