China worries the Pentagon

Anti-ship missile firings at a US supercarrier mock-up in the desert, a hypersonic weapon flight around the Earth, military preparations to invade Taiwan – all apparent signs of an increasingly belligerent China rehearsing for war. One of America’s most senior military officers added to concerns this week by warning that China could one day launch a surprise nuclear attack on the United States. This conclusion by General John Hyten, outgoing vice chairman of the US joint chiefs of staff, is just the latest warning about China’s possible intentions as it builds a conventional and nuclear force to match America’s superpower military capabilities. Hyten spent three years as commander of US Strategic Command, in charge of America’s nuclear weapons. He is steeped in Armageddon scenarios. His voice of doom about China’s rapidly-growing military advances which he has previously described as “stunning” reflect the general view among the Pentagon’s top hierarchy that Beijing is on a course that could lead inevitably and unavoidably to conflict with the US. Despite the modestly encouraging agreement between President Biden and President Xi of China to start discussions about strategic stability and nuclear arms control, satellite images demonstrate a persistent picture of a nation preparing for war and developing exotic weapons that put the US homeland at grave risk. Recent satellite images of a Chinese firing range in the desert in the northwest revealed a full-scale model of a US Navy Gerald R Ford-class aircraft carrier sitting on a rail line as a massive moving target for the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) to test the latest anti-ship missiles. Further images of the same desert site spotted two full-size mock-ups of US Air Force E-3 Sentry airborne early warning aircraft (Awacs) for target practice. Referring to a flight test in August in which China took the Pentagon by surprise by launching a hypersonic missile that orbited the Earth, Hyten told CBS News in an interview this week: “They launched a long-range missile, it went around the world, dropped off a hypersonic glide vehicle that glided all the way back to China that impacted a target in China.” Asked if the hypersonic glide vehicle, travelling at more than five times the speed of sound , hit the target, he replied: “Close enough”. Were the glide vehicle to be armed with a nuclear warhead, it wouldn’t need to be that accurate. “Why are they building all of this capability?” Hyten questioned. “They look like a first-use weapon. That’s what those weapons look like to me.” As the Pentagon revealed in its annual report on China’s military published this month, the concerns about Beijing’s intentions cover the whole gamut of weapons being developed. American military commanders can only look on in amazement at the speed with which the Chinese navy is being converted into a global maritime force, with aircraft carriers, nuclear-powered submarines, cruisers, destroyers and amphibious assault ships under construction at a rate that makes the US industrial production line seem grindingly slow by comparison. The US Navy’s new-generation aircraft carrier, USS Gerald R Ford, will be immensely capable when it deploys on operations for the first time next year. But it has cost more than $13 billion and is three years late. China is already working on a carrier that in many ways copies what the US has designed for the new Ford-class. For example, the PLA Navy (Plan) is switching from steam-driven aircraft-launch catapults to an electromagnetic system, similar to that on the USS Gerald R Ford. China currently has only two carriers, compared with America’s 11. But the second domestically-built carrier is expected to be operational by 2024, joining the Liaoning, rebuilt from an old Soviet Kuznetsov-class aircraft cruiser, and the first Chinese-designed carrier called Shandong. The Plan is also working on a number of future carrier-based aircraft. This includes the development of China’s J-15 fourth-generation strike fighter into a catapult-capable version. It has already been tested from land-based steam and electromagnetic catapults. There have been reports , too, of China’s aim to convert its fifth-generation J-20 stealth fighter into a carrier-based aircraft, although it would seem to be too large for this role. The J-20 was designed to try and match the US Air Force F-22 Raptor stealth fighter. The Pentagon says China is on the way to building a multi-carrier force, and since it is already the top ship-producing nation in the world by tonnage and has the largest navy on the planet, it is small wonder every US commander of Indo-Pacific Command has been warning for years of the threat posed by Beijing’s burgeoning maritime power. Admiral Philip Davidson who retired as Indo-Pacific commander in April famously warned that China could take control of Taiwan “in the next six years”. He pointed to China’s advances in ballistic and hypersonic missile technology which he said was rapidly changing the “security paradigm” in the region. This week the US-China economic and security review commission, a Congress-appointed agency, warned that the Chinese military had the ability to land 25,000 troops on the island to establish a beachhead. Is China practicing for war before it reaches the goal set by President Xi to have a world-class military by 2049? “Of course the PLA is practicing, or training, for war. All serious militaries do,” Andrew Krepinevich, a former senior Pentagon official, said. “Whether the CCP [Chinese communist party] will wait until 2049 will depend on its calculations of cost, benefit and risk,” he said. “These are dynamic factors that are constantly in flux, as well as the person or group of people who are making the go/no go decision, that is to say their view of the prospective costs and benefits and their risk tolerance,” he said.