[Disarmo] Pentagon For Confrontation With China

[glry <glry at ngi.it>]

Perilous Pivot: Pentagon Positions Itself For Confrontation With China
    Posted by: "Rick Rozoff" rwrozoff at yahoo.com rwrozoff
    Date: Thu Jan 16, 2014 9:17 am ((PST))

http://www.space4peace.org/newsletter/Space%20Alert%2029.pdf

Space Alert!
Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space
Winter-Spring 2014
Newsletter #29


Perilous Pivot: Pentagon Positions Itself For Confrontation With China
Rick Rozoff


The U.S. deploys long-range B-52 strategic bombers to the East China Sea
only days after China declares an air defense identification zone in the
region.

Less than three weeks later the American guided missile cruiser USS
Cowpens almost collides with a Chinese vessel attached to China's newly
acquired first aircraft carrier in the South China Sea.

Incidents from the Taiwan Strait Crisis of sixty years ago? From the
period of U.S.-Chinese armed hostilities during the war on the Korean
Peninsula that had ended a year earlier?

No, the above confrontations, the above provocations occurred in the
last five weeks of 2013 and herald more incidents of the sort as
Washington has declared the strategic shift of military assets from
Europe and the Middle East to the Asia-Pacific region.

Indeed, with the emergence of China as the world's second-largest
economy and its concomitant renewal of (comparatively minor) territorial
claims in the East China Sea and South China Sea, the stage is set for a
U.S.-Chinese confrontation of a nature and on a scale not seen since
before the Sino-Soviet split of 1960.

The so-called Asia-Pacific pivot entails the deployment of 60 percent of
total American naval assets - quantitatively the largest and
qualitatively the most technologically advanced and lethal in the world
- to the region. Washington, unparalleled in world history, divides the
entire planet between six regional military commands (unified combatant
commands) and six naval fleets. The largest in both categories are those
that encompass the Asia-Pacific: U.S. Pacific Command's area of
responsibility, East Asia and the Western Pacific Ocean, includes over
50 percent of the world's surface, more than 100 million square miles,
with U.S. Central Command's ranging from Egypt in the west to China and
India in the east. The U.S. Seventh Fleet, tasked to patrol the waters
of the Asia-Pacific, is the largest overseas naval force in the world
and will be further enhanced by the U.S. Navy's intensified deployment
to the region. The U.S. has eleven of the world's
 twelve nuclear aircraft carriers and all eleven super carriers. It
already had 60 percent of its submarines - attack, cruise missile and
ballistic missile submarines, all nuclear-powered - assigned to the
Asia-Pacific.

Following the expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization
throughout Europe over the past fifteen years - every European nation
except one (Cyprus, which is under intensified pressure to join NATO's
Partnership for Peace program) is now a full member of or involved in
one or more partnership arrangements with the U.S.-led military bloc,
which has enforced a cordon sanitaire on Russia's western and much of
its southern frontier, it was inevitable that the U.S. and its allies
would next move to encircle, quarantine and ultimately confront China.

In the past decade the Pentagon has begun conducting annual
multinational military exercises in nations bordering China (Khaan Quest
in Mongolia, Steppe Eagle in Kazakhstan) and near it (Angkor Sentinel in
Cambodia). With its NATO allies the U.S. has waged war and moved into
bases in nations bordering China - Afghanistan, Kyrgyzstan, Pakistan and
Tajikistan - as well as nearby Uzbekistan, and, even before the official
announcement of the strategic shift to the Asia-Pacific region, acquired
the use of new military facilities in Afghanistan, Kyrgyzstan, Pakistan,
Australia, Singapore and the Philippines. After securing rights to base
naval and air force personnel and assets in Sembawang during the early
1990s, the Pentagon has now reached an agreement to rotate - in fact to
permanently station - its new Littoral Combat Ships in Singapore.

USS Cowpens, mentioned above, is a Ticonderoga class guided missile
cruiser equipped to or capable of being upgraded to carry Standard
Missile-3 interceptors that are an integral component of plans for a
global so-called missile defense shield being developed by the U.S. and
its military allies in Europe, the Asia-Pacific area and the Middle East
(especially the Persian Gulf).

Washington is incorporating several Asia-Pacific nations into its global
interceptor missile grid, in its initial manifestation launched in
conjunction with NATO as the so-called European Phased Adaptive Approach
which will station increasingly longer-range land-based missiles in
Romania and Poland and Aegis class cruisers and destroyers equipped with
Standard Missile-3 interceptors in the Mediterranean and likely later in
the Baltic, Norwegian, Black and even Barents Seas.

The Pentagon's partners in the Asia-Pacific wing of the international
missile system, which targets China as the European version does Russia,
include to date Japan, South Korea, Australia and Taiwan, with the
Philippines reported to be the future location of a third Forward-Based
X-Band Radar interceptor site, with one already in Japan and a third
slated for deployment there, of the sort deployed to Turkey in 2012 and
to Israel in 2008. The X-band radar, also know by its manufacturer,
Raytheon, as Army Navy/Transportable Radar Surveillance (AN/TPY-2), is
being used in conjunction with the ship-based interceptor missile system
known as the Aegis Combat System produced by Lockheed Martin.

The U.S. alone possesses 86 warships, 64 Arleigh Burke class guided
missile destroyers and 22 Ticonderoga class guided missile cruisers,
already or capable of being integrated into the above, ultimately
global, sea-based interceptor missile system. Its partners in the Aegis
system include NATO and "Asian NATO" military allies Spain, Norway,
Australia, Japan and South Korea, with other nations, east and west,
being recruited to supply frigates equipped with missile radar systems.

In addition, the current National Defense Authorization Act envisions
expanding the amount of the U.S. Missile Defense Agency's longer-range
Ground-based Midcourse Defense missiles based in Fort Greely, Alaska
from 26 to 40. Those missiles are aimed to the east, of course, a fact
that will not be missed in either Beijing or Moscow.

As with the international missile interception program, so with other
matters the North Atlantic Treaty Organization has obediently followed
Washington's lead far outside the North Atlantic region, engaging in
wars in Southeast Europe, South Asia and North Africa. It is now
integrally committed to the intensified push into the Asia-Pacific and
the military encirclement of China.

In 2012 NATO announced the launching of its latest, and first
non-geographically specific, partnership program, Partners Across the
Globe, which began with the incorporation of eight Asia-Pacific nations:
Afghanistan, Australia, Iraq, Japan, Mongolia, New Zealand, Pakistan and
South Korea, three of which share borders with China, as do Kazakhstan,
Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, the latter three members of NATO's
Partnership for Peace program employed to bring twelve Eastern European
nations into the military bloc as full members in the decade of 1999-2009.

Since the summer of 2010 the U.S. has been courting the ten members of
the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia,
Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and
Vietnam), several of whom are embroiled in island disputes with China,
for inclusion into a rapidly evolving Asian analogue of NATO which
includes the eight above-mentioned new NATO partners and is intended to
be a super-Cold War era-like bloc subsuming the former members of the
Central Treaty Organization (CENTO), Southeast Asia Treaty Organization
(SEATO) and Australia, New Zealand, United States Security Treaty
(ANZUS) into a systematic initiative aimed against China.

China is a critically important component of the two groups representing
the greatest potential for a multipolar world, BRICS (Brazil, Russia,
India, China, South Africa) and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization.
As such it is the inevitable target of American brinkmanship, gunboat
diplomacy and, perhaps most dangerously of all, the Pentagon's worldwide
interceptor missile system.


====================================================================
Stop NATO e-mail list home page with archives and search engine:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/stopnato/messages

Stop NATO website and articles:
http://rickrozoff.wordpress.com

To subscribe for individual e-mails or the daily digest, unsubscribe,
and otherwise change subscription status:
stopnato-subscribe at yahoogroups.com
======================================================================


-- 
G. Jure Ellero glry at ngi.it
-- web adviser --
www.sibialiria.org    -Geopolitica
www.diecifebbraio.info  -Resistenza
http://boinc.berkeley.edu/ -Scienza
--