[Salon] Threat du jour. . . How long does this have to go on before we realize we’re being scammed? (9/13/23.)

https://www.pogo.org/analysis/2020/01/introducing-the-bunker?utm_source=bunker&utm_medium=email&utm_content=logo&emci=e75d4e10-a351-ee11-9937-00224832e811&emdi=012c34ab-2452-ee11-9937-00224832e811&ceid=201249

The U.S. seems to need an enemy. For the two generations following World War II, it was the Soviet Union and its 10-foot tall Red Army soldiers. Until it fell apart. Then it was Japan, who was going to eat our economic lunch. Until it grew so old and frail it couldn’t. Now the bogeyman is China— a country that not only is going to eat our economic lunch, but is going to beat the U.S. military, too.

How long does this have to go on before we realize we’re being scammed?

In recent days, we’ve heard about China’s newest combat game-changer: quick-setting concrete. That supposedly gets Chinese warplanes back in the air shortly after runways have been cratered by (presumably) U.S. bombs. “The runway cutting was completed in 10 minutes, the pneumatic drilling took 30 minutes, mixing the concrete was completed in 8 minutes, filling was completed in 2 minutes, and the surface was completed in 1 minute, after 25 minutes the repair material was initially set,” a report sponsored by the (surprise!) U.S. Air Force said. “After another 2 hours the concrete finally solidified completely to meet the requirements of airfield use.”

Not sitting on the tarmac, the Pentagon is launching its Replicator program to build “multiple thousands” of cheap air, land, and sea drones to counter China’s growing military. The goal is swarms of robot weapons that are “small, smart, cheap, and many,” Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks said August 28. Unfortunately, Pentagon history tells us the Defense Department is lucky to get two of those four (and as for cheap, that’s going to be difficult, given that such systems rely heavily on Chinese parts). The press is complicit in this, hyping stupid Chinese moves like their balloons and gate-crashers that — while of dubious military utility — are peddled as the leading edge of the Next Big Thing Threat.

But the U.S. is fighting a China that doesn’t exist — and likely never will. “China probably will never match America’s power, much less surpass it,” the usually Pentagon-friendly Loren Thompson (no relation) writes. “A combination of smart policies in Washington and deep-seated defects in China precludes the Middle Kingdom from ever being a true superpower.” Bully for Thompson: those are fighting words, and contrary to the conventional U.S. nat-sec wisdom that China’s military is a burgeoning behemoth primed to drive the U.S. out of the western Pacific. China’s per-capita income is $13,000, he notes, compared to $76,000 in the U.S. Next year’s Pentagon budget will eclipse China’s. And despite frequent scare-mongering about the Chinese navy, Thompson says “a handful of U.S. bombers equipped with stealthy antiship missiles would make quick work of the Chinese fleet in a war.”

It’s often said that the U.S. national-security state is perpetually on the hunt for the Next Big Threat. The Bunker reported on the final years of the Cold War, when Caspar (The Unfriendly Ghost) Weinberger launched Soviet Military Power (PDF), a regularly-published glossy jeremiad replete with Defense Intelligence Agency drawings of scary new Soviet weapons designed to make Americans quake in their non-combat boots. It worked (although the weapons didn’t; cf. Ukraine).

Americans are being duped again. The Pentagon plans to issue its latest edition of Military and Security Developments Involving the People’s Republic of China(PDF) — more commonly called China Military Power — in mid-October. Perfect: just in time for Halloween.