The U.S. needs to prepare for a potential war with China, according to a group of defense analysts at a U.S. House armed services subcommittee hearing this week.
At the hearing, the defense analysts told the U.S. House Armed Services’ Seapower and Projection Forces Subcommittee that the Pentagon should begin a massive arms build-up, including additional nuclear submarines, for a possible war with China.
“Chinese leaders are ambitious and they are moving toward great power status,” Seth Cropsey, a senior fellow at the D.C.-based Hudson Institute, said according to DoD Buzz. “The U.S. is not taking this possibility as seriously as it should.”
To respond to this threat, he added, the U.S. needs to develop a detailed war plan involving U.S. military assets.
Jim Thomas, the vice president and director of studies at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, pointed out that China’s military spending has increased nearly threefold in the past ten years, from a conservative $45 billion in 2003 to at least $115 billion currently.
“A decade ago China was reliant upon Russian assistance in its armaments, but is now increasingly shifted toward indigenous design and production,” he stated. “It is rapidly building up a modernized submarine force and its advanced guided missile destroyers represent a major improvement in fleet air defenses.”
Rep. Randy Forbes (R-VA), the chairman of the subcommittee, said that this modernization is “emboldening the Chinese government to exert their interests by bullying their neighbors and pushing back the United States in the Asia Pacific region.”
Although this week’s hearing included demands to enlarge the already massive military-industrial complex, the rapid increase of war tensions in Asia cannot be denied.
On Dec. 9, a former Chinese Ambassador to the United Nations, Sha Zukang, said that a current territorial dispute between China and Japan, of which the U.S. and South Korea are also involved, could lead to World War III.
“If China started a war with Japan, it would be much larger than both the Sino-Japanese War and World War II,” he said to the China Times.
Earlier, on Nov. 23, the Chinese government announced it would enforce new air traffic restrictions inside a self-declared Air Defense Identification Zone which includes most of the East China Sea.
This controversial Chinese ADIZ not only overlaps the ADIZs of Japan and South Korea but also includes the Senkaku Islands, the aforementioned territory in dispute between China and Japan.
The U.S. military did not change its flight operations to comply with China’s new ADIZ but the White House did ask U.S. civilian airliners to notify China when they fly through the zone.
In response, Chinese warships tried to stop the USS Cowpens, a guided missile cruiser, as it sailed through international waters inside the ADIZ on Dec. 5.
A Navy spokesman said that the Cowpens had to maneuver in order to avoid a collision.
Given these unprecedented confrontations, it is definitely possible that the military tensions in Asia could erupt into an all-out war between the U.S. and China, perhaps even a nuclear World War III.
