Feb. 8, 2011, 12:01 a.m. EST
Commentary: Today an economic battle; later, combat
Source: Market Watch
SAN LUIS OBISPO, Ca;if. (MarketWatch) — Yes, Americans love war. Yes, wars cost money. And pile on debt, new taxes. Still, we love war. Why else let the military budget burn 48% of your tax dollars? But why is it “off the table” when the GOP talks “deficit cuts?”
Why? We love war. We’d rather attack with a macho battle cry like “damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead!” than listen to a warning from historian Kevin Phillips: “Most great nations, at the peak of their economic power, become arrogant, wage great world wars at great cost, wasting vast resources, taking on huge debt, ultimately burning themselves out.”Which dominates our Congressional deficit hawks? Which is China’s military strategy?
Admit it, we love war. Marine Corps posters grabbed me as a kid. Trained me as an aviation weapons system tech. So I couldn’t resist Erik Sofge’s edgy thriller, “China’s Secret War Plan,” about a China-U.S. war. Like a fast-paced Tom Clancy thriller. In Popular Mechanics: One of my favorites as a kid working in a small-town magazine store.
Yes, war’s popular. Locked in our DNA long ago. Sofge’s thriller was based on war games played by Pentagon generals and Rand Corporation strategists.
Americans love war. Can’t resist video games, war movies: “Hunt for Red October,” “Platoon,” “Dirty Dozen,” “Star Wars,” “Terminator.” War turns us on, a testosterone virus in our brains. Our love blinds us to costs, collateral damage, unintended consequences, new debt for our kids. Besides, they’ll grow up loving war. DNA is passed on. Can’t resist.
That hot button was pushed recently with “secret” photos of China’s new stealth bomber exposed during the state visit of China’s President Hu Jintao. Sofge’s thriller begins:
August 9, 2015, 0400. China’s war for “Taiwan starts in the early morning. There are no naval bombardments or waves of bombers … 1,200 cruise and ballistic missiles rise from heavy vehicles on the Chinese mainland ... Taiwan’s modest missile defense network. a scattered deployment of I-Hawk and Patriot interceptors, slams into dozens of incoming warheads … a futile gesture. The mass raid overwhelms the defenses as hundreds of Chinese warheads blast the island’s military bases and airports.”
Do taxpayers have a choice? Plan for big wars, get bigger deficits?
The GOP wants to cut America’s massive debt. But “off-the-charts” military spending is “off the table.” Back in the ‘40s WWII consumed 57% of our GDP. Today, war eats up about half America’s budget.We’re sinking under Iraq war debt. Nobel economist Joseph Stiglitz estimates Iraq at $3 trillion, with $2 trillion for future costs, like VA medical. The Afghan war maybe another $3 trillion. Plus endless terrorist threats. Future wars are “planned” years, even decades in advance, strategies based on Pentagon-Rand war games.
America talks peace. But deep inside our collective brain is a dark monster: We’re little kids who love playing war. Age 10 I had a collection of model fighter planes, played air wars. Age 15, owned three guns for hunting. Then the Corps. Like a moth to the flames, we cannot resist our destiny in war. Sofge brings alive the action in our brains: “Taiwan’s air force is grounded … Taiwanese troops mobilize in downtown Taipei and take up positions on the beaches facing China, just 100 miles to the west. But they know what the world knows: This is no longer Taiwan’s fight. This is a battle between an old superpower and a new one.” Games or reality, it’s all in our heads.
Or is this how WWIII starts? Between an aging America that loves war, won’t surrender without a fight, and the world’s rapidly emerging superpower, predicted to have a population one billion larger than America’s by 2050. Plus an economy 40% of the world’s GDP, dwarfing America’s GDP predicted to fall to just 14%. Yes, China’s the emerging new superpower, a crafty enemy laughing as we waste our economic resources.
Listen as Sofge quotes retired Rear Adm. Eric McVadon, former naval attaché in Beijing: “They are obsessed with Taiwan. On some given day, it’s entirely possible for people to be standing around a table in the Politburo in Beijing, and someone gets the ball rolling. And when it stops, we’re at war.”
Warning: That toxic thinking may well happen again when new neocons, a future Rumsfeld/Cheney team, gets the same paranoid itchings at the same time as China’s generals, all driven by inflated egos, irrational obsessions and a propensity to make the same kind of misjudgments that launched the Iraq War.
Warrior mindset sabotages our economy and superpower status
”Right now the Chinese seem to have taken the lead in this new arms race,” warns Sofge: “When Rand released a report in 2000 describing the potential outcome of a Sino-American conflict over Taiwan, the United States won the war handily. Nine years later, the nonpartisan think tank revised its analysis, accounting for Beijing’s updated air force, its focus on cyber warfare and its ability to use ballistic missiles to take out American satellites. Rand’s new conclusion: The United States would ultimately lose an air war, and an overall conflict would be more difficult and costly than many had imagined.”
Warning, just nine years from 2000 to 2009: The Iraq-Afghan Wars were supposed to make America stronger. Wrong. Those nine years are a perfect example of how war distorted America’s collective brain. Our neocon mindset about the Iraq war resulted in what’s now the “biggest foreign policy blunder” in history. Sofge captures this insanity:
”Ever since 1949, when Nationalist forces retreated to Taiwan following the Communist victory in the Chinese Civil War, Beijing has regarded the island as a renegade province of the People’s Republic. Now, in 2015, only the United States can offer Taiwan protection.” But “the nearest aircraft carrier is the U.S.S. Nimitz, which had just left the Japanese port of Yokosuka on Tokyo Bay … at least two days for the carrier to reach the strait … The closest other carrier group, near Pearl Harbor, is six days out.”
Yes, too late: The war’s over in less than 24 hours. Ironically, the Iraq/Afghan wars have not only weakened our economy and weakened our ability to fight future wars, they weakened America’s superpower status by indirectly handing the war-game victory to China. Worse, our irrational, neocon war brain is now demanding Americans “double down,” insisting defense cuts are “off the table.” Yes folks, America loves war,;in that mindset we will take on trillions new debt, even go down in flames.
Powerful new war strategy: China’s army of “cyber-attack” hackers
Suddenly, Sofge’s thriller exposes China’s fabulous new high-tech strategy: “Until the Nimitz arrives, it’s up to Kadena Air Base in Okinawa, 400 miles northeast of Taiwan, to defend the island. By 0515 hours, Air Force pilots are taking off in 40 F-15E fighters … airborne when Kadena comes under attack.Error messages begin popping up on computer screens. Modern air defense systems share sensor information but this connection is going to become a liability. An army of hackers operating throughout China swarms the base’s networks, tying up communications with gibberish and cluttering the digital screens of radar operators with phony and conflicting data.”
Future wars: New “army” of hackers, tech geeks, game players, search-engine geniuses. Today Chinese compete with Google, X-Box, Facebook. Later they’re China’s cyber warriors, trained by China’s war-loving generals. The Pentagon knows: They’ll add trillions to our budgets, taxes and deficits, preparing for future wars. Forget cuts.
Hackers score many victories disabling Taiwan: “Early-warning satellites detect the infrared bloom of 25 ballistic missiles launched from the Chinese mainland. Five detonate in orbit, shredding American communication and imaging satellites … partially blinds U.S. forces.” So much for all that money wasted on a satellite defense system.
The pace of Sofge’s thriller accelerates like the final swift dogfight in “Top Gun:” China’s “20 remaining missiles re-enter the atmosphere over Okinawa … Kadena’s Patriot batteries fire missiles … but they are off-network … in disarray. Ten missiles are struck by multiple interceptors … equal number slip through … hit Kadena. … GPS-guided warheads contain bomblets … crater the base’s two runways … air-bursts devastating barracks, radar arrays and hangars … F-15s on the way … F-22 stealth fighters now cannot land on the bases shattered runways … Kadena’s satellites gone, the Nimitz and its flotilla of eight escorts … Aegis-guided missile destroyers … submarines … steaming toward an enemy possessing one of the world’s largest submarine fleets … an arsenal of land-, air- and sea-launched anti-ship missiles.”
Want more? Read Sofge’s “China’s Secret War Plan” thriller in the December 2010 Popular Mechanics. See how America could lose WWIII to China … in less than a day.
But Sofge hedges: “Chances are that a war between China and the United States will not happen in 2015, or at any other time. Under normal circumstances, a war for Taiwan would simply be too costly for either side to wage, especially given the chance of nuclear escalation. But circumstances are not always normal.”
In fact, history tells us wars are never “normal,” always unpredictable. Imagine this new cyber war, with an “army of Chinese hackers” beating America’s high-tech and very high-cost military.
China vs USA, WWIII. Too costly? That never stops nations. Especially when leaders on both sides have macho egos, love war, act irrational. Add up China’s new stealth bomber, the deterioration of America ego losing those Pentagon war games and a resurgence of neocon war-loving politicians and you have to conclude that taxpayers will keep spending trillions preparing for the next global war, years in advance.
If not with China in 2015, then with some other boogeyman lurking the dark shadows of our collective brains, bad guys that will dominate the thinking of military generals for decades to come, for as the Bush Pentagon put it: “By 2020, warfare will define human life.”
So to be ever-vigilant, we’ll spend trillions, prepare for anything, anyone, anytime. Why? We love war!
