It is now a common assumption among national security thinkers that the area
from Baghdad to Tokyo will be the main location of U.S. military competition for
the next several decades.
''The center of gravity of the world economy
has shifted to Asia, and U.S. interests flow with that,'' said James Bodner, the
principal deputy undersecretary of defense for policy.
When General
Anthony Zinni, one of the most thoughtful senior officers in the military, met
with the Army Science Board earlier this spring, he commented offhandedly that
America's ''long-standing Europe-centric focus'' probably would shift in coming
decades as policymakers ''pay more attention to the Pacific Rim, and especially
to China.'' This is partly because of trade and economics, he indicated, and
partly because of the changing ethnic makeup of the U.S. population.
Just
10 years ago, said Major General Robert Scales Jr., commandant of the Army War
College, roughly 90 percent of U.S. military thinking about future warfare
centered on head-on clashes of armies in Europe. ''Today,'' he said, ''it's
probably 50-50, or even more'' tilted toward warfare using characteristic Asian
tactics, such as deception and indirection.
[Good grief the racism here is nauseating!
Bhuaaah.]
The U.S. military's favorite way of testing its
assumptions and ideas is to run a war game. Increasingly, the major
games played by the Pentagon - except for the army - take place in Asia, on an
arc from Tehran to Tokyo.
The games are used to
ask how the U.S. military might respond to some of the biggest questions it
faces: Will Iran go nuclear, or become more aggressive with an array of
hard-to-stop cruise missiles? Will Pakistan and India engage in nuclear war -
or, perhaps even worse, will Pakistan break up, with its nuclear weapons falling
into the hands of Afghan mujahidin? Will Indonesia fall apart? Will
North Korea collapse peacefully? [Note this for
later] And what may be the biggest question of all: Will the United
States and China avoid military confrontation?
One Pentagon official
estimated that about two-thirds of the forward-looking games staged by the
Pentagon over the last eight years have taken place partly or wholly in
Asia.
Last year, the U.S. Air Force's biggest annual war game looked at
the Middle East and Korea. [Obviously because that's where the
Pentagon and Clinton's team planned to attack!]
The games planned
this summer, ''Global Engagement Five,'' to be played over more than a week at
Maxwell Air Force Base in Alabama, will posit ''a rising large East Asian
nation'' that is attempting to wrest control of Siberia, with all its oil and
other natural resources, from a weak Russia. At one point, the United States
winds up basing warplanes in Siberia to defend Russian interests. [But of course, not US interests]
Because of the
sensitivity of talking about fighting China, ''What everybody's trying to do is
come up with games that are kind of China, but not China by name,'' said an air
force strategist.
''I think that, however reluctantly, we are
beginning to face up to the fact that we are likely over the next few years to
be engaged in an ongoing military competition with China,'' noted Aaron
Friedberg, a Princeton political scientist. ''Indeed, in certain respects, we
already are.''
The new attention to Asia is reflected in two
long-running, military-diplomatic efforts.
The first is a drive
to renegotiate the U.S. military presence in Northeast Asia. This is aimed
mainly at ensuring that U.S. forces still will be welcome in South Korea and
Japan if the North Korean threat disappears.
[Here comes their nightmare:]
To that end, the U.S. military will be instructed to act less like post-World War II occupation forces and more like guests or partners.
Pentagon experts on Japan and Korea say they expect that ''status of forces agreements'' gradually will be diluted, so that local authorities will gain more jurisdiction over U.S. military personnel in criminal cases. In addition, they predict that U.S. bases in Japan and South Korea will be jointly operated by American and local forces, perhaps even with a local officer in command.
[Oh yeah, they'd love to give up jurisdiction of US military personnel, and they'd love even more to give up command control to a "local" officer. If there's one thing that military leaders absolutely cannot stand, it's to have power over and control of people.]