China Military News & Updates

[rocky]

Pakistan expanding its nuclear capability - Pakistan - msnbc.com

Alarming article

 

[Known_Unknown]

Ajai Shukla: Flashing steel at China

Nice article on China-India relations. A year old, but still a good read.

http://www.business-standard.com/india/storypage.php?autono=317895

Ajai Shukla: Flashing steel at China
BROADSWORD

Ajai Shukla / New Delhi March 25, 2008

As a young captain in the Indian Army, I experienced first hand the dynamics of a Chinese power play. One autumn day in 1987, near Tawang in Arunachal Pradesh, almost exactly where the 1962 war sparked off, a group of Chinese soldiers crossed the rugged Line of Actual Control (LAC) and sat themselves down in a grazing ground called Wangdung. For days, while India launched diplomatic protests, more Chinese soldiers trickled across; before long, a 100-man company from the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) had established itself in Wangdung.

The Chinese expected little more; but the Indian Army had long buried the ghost of 1962. With diplomacy scorned, New Delhi ordered Operation Chequerboard, a massive mobilisation that quickly concentrated 100,000 soldiers around Tawang. As the Indian stance grew harder, the Chinese positioned softened. In a similar face-off in 1967 that Beijing would have remembered, Indian jawans had killed over 200 PLA soldiers in Nathu La, in six days of pitched fighting. While China still holds Wangdung, India’s robust reaction forestalled further Chinese encroachments.

Should New Delhi also flash steel in its reactions over the ethnic uprising in Tibet? Chinese statements make it clear that Tibet is seen as no more than a potential embarrassment during China’s “coming out party” at the Olympic Games. Beijing believes that New Delhi’s foreign policy conservatism will ensure that it continues to toe the line on Tibet. But would Indian interests be better served by reminding China that it has painful pressure points at Dharamshala that can be activated?

Contrary to public perception, India has not been entirely pliant when it comes to dealing with the Middle Kingdom. Next year it will be half a century since the Dalai Lama was given refuge in India. Tibetan volunteers, committed to freeing their homeland from the Chinese yoke, form several battalions of India’s Special Frontier Force (SFF), which frequently operates on the northern border. China believes they often cross the LAC for special missions deep inside Tibet. The Indian Army, as its chief General Deepak Kapoor said, crosses the LAC into “China” as often as the PLA crosses into “India”. The reason, as he clarified, was that neither India, nor China agrees where the LAC lies.

Neither have India’s responses to events in Tibet been free of ambiguity. Foreign Secretary Shiv Shankar Menon met the Dalai Lama recently; New Delhi has a formal consultative arrangement with His Holiness. The speaker of the US House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, met the Dalai Lama and issued a strong statement. It was just the kind of adverse pre-Olympics publicity that Beijing does not want. The police halted the “March to Lhasa”, mounted by the Dalai Lama’s followers, but it garnered headlines nevertheless. And could Tibetan demonstrators have stormed the Chinese Embassy in New Delhi without the tacit complicity of the Government of India?

The big question, of course, is: has New Delhi embarked on a rash course of confrontation? Or is a habitually timid India underplaying its hand?

The backdrop to India’s dilemma is the paradox in its relationship with China. On the one hand, as members of the international state system, both countries share an interest in maintaining the status quo. China’s vulnerabilities in Tibet and Xinjiang are mirrored by India’s concerns in J&K and the northeastern states. But China has never let that shared interest with India hold it back from developing and using the levers of influence. Beijing has skilfully played the insurgency card in Nagaland and Manipur; Naga leader Thuingaleng Muivah admits to training and equipping his forces in China. In helping Pakistan obtain a nuclear arsenal, China has violated the Non-Proliferation Treaty and the Missile Technology Control Regime. And, in the last couple of years — as the US began viewing Beijing as a possible ally against a resurgent Russia — China has hardened its rhetoric on the border dispute with India.

India must decide whether its long-term leverage with China lies in multilateral relationships like the US-India relationship. In the recent past, that has been the case; in 2005, when New Delhi and Washington seemed ready to sign both a defence agreement and the nuclear deal, China agreed to a set of “Political Principles” that would form the framework of an eventual border agreement. This agreement noticeably favoured India; China has recently distanced itself from it.

But if multilateral levers are fickle and subject to change, then are there levers that India could create? India’s policy on Tibetan independence cannot radically change. India cannot support the redrawing of borders, and the Dalai Lama himself asks for no more than real autonomy for Tibet. New Delhi, however, does have options even without going back on its recognition of Tibet as an “autonomous region of the People’s Republic of China”. Without repudiating that long-held stand, India can fuel the debate on Tibet’s autonomy. The Tibetan government-in-exile, located in Dharamshala, will respond enthusiastically to the slightest signal from New Delhi.

For that, India would need to break a Pavlovian behaviour pattern that China has induced. Senior Indian diplomats increasingly realise that Beijing’s rhetoric on the warmth of its relations with New Delhi have imposed on Indian diplomats a certain decorum of behaviour that obscures the underlying adversarial relationship between the two countries. That artificial decorum also makes New Delhi reluctant to play the role of a countervailing power to China. This could be the moment when New Delhi recognises Sino-Indian relations for what they really are as opposed to what Beijing says they are.

 

[LETHALFORCE]

China is a threat to global good

Global Politician - China is a threat to global good

China is a threat to global good

Susenjit Guha - 5/13/2009

As the world watches without being able to bring about a ceasefire, a humanitarian crisis is underway in Sri Lanka with nearly 170,000 civilians displaced and 50,000 trapped in the war zone.

It has become common for rampaging armed forces and also those in cahoots with terrorists the world is battling with, despots and dictators to cock a snook at the UN. Much of the cockiness lies in the covert moral and logistic support lent by China, hungry for resources for widening its reach to get a major slice of business in the troubled regions and make its presence felt.

The Sri Lankan offensive against the LTTE is not faulted as the terrorist organization has used all possible means of violence over the years to foment terror in this beautiful island resembling a tear drop in the Indian Ocean. Lots of blood sweat and tears have flowed for the fight for a separate Tamil homeland in protest for the marginalization of the Sri Lankan Tamils. But the process of terror was always condemnable and has encouraged later day terror groups like the al Qaeda to emulate their suicide attack techniques.

But what happened so suddenly that the Sri Lankan armed forces finally managed to decimate the formidable LTTE?

It was China once again. Having supported despots with blood on their hands in Africa and Myanmar for the sake of resources to feed a surging Chinese economy, Sri Lanka was a natural choice to complete the string of pearls in the Indian Ocean.

Having set about building and ramping up ports in Burma, Bangladesh and Pakistan, which would in be used for docking and refueling of its navy, China is now building a $1 billion port in the fishing village of Hambantota in Sri Lanka’s north east, very close to the fighting zone. It would also double up as the Chinese Navy’s stop-over point during patrols to guard against piracy of oil imports from the Middle East and establish a base in the Indian Ocean all along the arc.

No wonder the Sri Lankan armed forces are fighting perhaps their last battle to crush the LTTE for ever with an urgency never seen before. Shunned by governments the world over including India when Sri Lanka sought arms for the civil war, China chipped in during the last two decades with arms supplies. Chinese arms supplies increased further when the US suspended all military aid to Sri Lanka citing gross human rights violations. Chinese aid to Sri Lanka jumped to $1billion last year leaving other nations far behind.

Like wise, China beefed up the Myanmar armed forces and stood with them when they were accused of human rights violations last year when monks and civilians rose in protest against rampant corruption, price rise and food shortage. Pakistan can act in self denial of not harboring terrorists and fuel terror acts in neighboring countries on the strength of Chinese military aid and support while the US and western powers resign themselves to the reality and cannot do much about it.

According to Jane’s Defense Weekly, Sri Lanka shopped for $37.6 million worth of arms and supplies for its army and navy. China gave 6 F7 fighter jets for free in 2007 as per reports of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. According to media reports, the bulk of arm shipments fro China was handled by Lanka Logistics and Technologies where the Defense Secretary who is the Sri Lankan president’s brother, has a major stake.

And the arms went into killing 75 civilians in a makeshift hospital by the Sri Lankan armed forces which lay very close to the battle zone. It was the only one available for the trapped civilians.

UN reports peg civilian casualties at 6500 since January this year as the Sri Lankan government vehemently denies and keeps the war zone out of bounds for journalists and aid workers.

Sri Lanka is acting with the same nonchalance to global criticism and pressure as Myanmar’s armed forces did last year on the strength of a counter weight like China. Calls for evacuating the civilians have fallen on deaf years.

China’s desperate need for Hambantota had been cautioned by Pentagon’s Air Staff personnel Lieutenant-Colonel Christopher J. Pehrson in a 2006 paper and by the U.S. Joint Forces Command last November.

With a trail of blood from volatile Africa, Myanmar to Sri Lanka, China is a threat to global good and reticent about gross human rights violations and human catastrophes to preserve its own commercial interests.

US have also been accused of partying with despots and affecting civilian casualties, but democracy allows a groundswell of dissent as was evident in the last presidential elections. China has stifled a moral counterweight which makes it more dangerous.

 

[Pintu]

There was a gross Human Right violation by Sri Lankan Army as well as the Sri Lankan State in Northern Sri Lanka backed by the vested interest by China, I am not supporting LTTE's act, but it simply inhuman that no Aid agency was allowed to battled Nothern Zone, even common unarmed Tamils were killed but suppressed by the Sri Lanka.

Regards

 

[SATISH]

China now bigger threat than Pakistan

Taking China’s dramatic military expansion seriously, the Indian Air Force chief has said China poses a more real and potent threat to India than Pakistan, which remains caught in a vortex of conflict and instability.

Talking to HT, Air Chief Marshal Fali Homi Major said India was rapidly upgrading its fighter bases in the country’s northeast to boost its military deterrence against China.

“China is a totally different ballgame compared to Pakistan,” the air chief said. “We know very little about the actual capabilities of China, their combat edge or how professional their military is…they are certainly a greater threat.”

The comments are bound to lend urgency to the new government’s China agenda and the need to understand the security implications of the rapidly modernising Chinese military.

The Chinese air force is ridding itself of obsolete platforms from the 1960s such as the J-6 and J-7 (equivalent to MiG-19s and MiG-21s). The People’s Liberation Army Air Force is pushing full steam ahead with the induction of first-rate fighter jets such as Sukhoi-30s, JF-17 Thunder light combat aircraft, J-10 strike fighters, airborne early warning aircraft and midair refuellers to expand the operating radius of its fighter jets.

“The way he (China) is growing, he definitely has the capability. But we should neither put China on a pedestal and say it will chew us up nor lose sight of the fact that they have (acquired) huge capabilities,” Major said.

China now bigger threat than Pak: IAF chief- Hindustan Times

 

[Officer of Engineers]

“China is a totally different ballgame compared to Pakistan,” the air chief said. “We know very little about the actual capabilities of China, their combat edge or how professional their military is…they are certainly a greater threat.”

Then, isn't it your job to find out?

 

[SATISH]

OoE sir,
I see it as a game played by most of the defence guys on top to get funding for their programmes. Even we can see Australian and American forces do this. C'mon you can see the hidden agenda. And you being a moderator of WAB you can understand this more clearly.

 

[Officer of Engineers]

The job is to identify the threat, no matter how false it is.

 

[SATISH]

Sir we consider most of our neighbourhood as our threat. China tops them all because they are bigger and more powerful than us. The intelligence agencies here are mostly underfunded organisations and have a lot of failures in comparison to their sucess. We dont have adequate infrastructure against the Chinese. The air chief wants more funding to build more ALG, FOB and air bases against China. The terrain is not suitable for a large scale armoured battle against the Chinese forces so air power will play a very important part incase of war against China or Chinese aggression.

 

[Officer of Engineers]

Just out of curiosity, have you ever read the REFORGER exercises?

 

[SATISH]

No sir. Can you please explain us or post us about the exercises.

 

[Yusuf]

REturn of FOrces to GERmany.
Sir please explain context of that excercize to the Indo China scene.

 

[Officer of Engineers]

REturn-of-FORces-to-GERmay,

It is NATO's exercies to return sufficent forces to repel a Soviet thrust across Europe. The reason I stated this is that these were our assumptions (and boy, were they wrong) about Soviet intentions and therefore, our justification for buying the forces we have in theatre.

In the case of the 4th Canadian Mechanized Brigade Group, we were to be re-enforced by a battle group from Canada. On paper, this was to be a full mechanized infantry battle group supported by a tank squadron. In reality, we're going to get 2 airborne companies from Canada, mainly because that would be all that was availble.

Do you see where I'm coming from?

 

[SATISH]

Sir will the terrain in the border of India and China support movement of large divisions of mechanized forces between us? And OoE sir I know how good you are but it takes time for me to understand what you are trying to tell me. Sir we made a huge blunder in 1962 and were beaten up badly. This time the Indian forces want to be prepared to thwart any aggression by any of our neighbours or on both fronts.

 

[Officer of Engineers]

Sir will the terrain in the border of India and China support movement of large divisions of mechanized forces between us?

That really depends on where the action takes place. During the 80s fiascal, the InA moved 6 bdes and the PLA air lifed 2 regts. So, if we are talking about the Indian Cold Start or the Chinese War Zone Campaign, then these are the likely sized engagement forces.

And OoE sir I know how good you are but it takes time for me to understand what you are trying to tell me. Sir we made a huge blunder in 1962 and were beaten up badly.

Do you know what the difference between 1962 India and 1979 Vietnam? The Vietnamese didn't believe they lost even though the PLA took 3 provincial capitals.

In 1962, the Chinese were bingo ammo, food, and water when they got out of Dodge.

This time the Indian forces want to be prepared to thwart any aggression by any of our neighbours or on both fronts.

Screaming the PLA are Martians ain't the way to go.

 

[nitesh]

The People’s Liberation Army Air Force is pushing full steam ahead with the induction of first-rate fighter jets such as Sukhoi-30s, JF-17 Thunder light combat aircraft, J-10 strike fighters, airborne early warning aircraft and midair refuellers to expand the operating radius of its fighter jets.

Typical DDM. When is the Chinese started inducting the JF-17? Wasn't they were unsatisifed with it.

 

[SATISH]

Typical DDM. When is the Chinese started inducting the JF-17? Wasn't they were unsatisifed with it.

With their huge modernization I wont be surprised to see JF flying in Chinese colors.

 

[nitesh]

With their huge modernization I wont be surprised to see JF flying in Chinese colors.

What does it means? They were not satisfied with that even Pakistanis are not satisfied with it (read the Chinese missiles, Russian engine and the radar and avionics is anything I missed ) that is why they are looking for replacements which I don't think they have found it. So the chances are bleak or some token orders as the export customers would not like to use the plane which is not used by the country which designed it.

 

[SATISH]

That really depends on where the action takes place. During the 80s fiascal, the InA moved 6 bdes and the PLA air lifed 2 regts. So, if we are talking about the Indian Cold Start or the Chinese War Zone Campaign, then these are the likely sized engagement forces.

Do you know what the difference between 1962 India and 1979 Vietnam? The Vietnamese didn't believe they lost even though the PLA took 3 provincial capitals.

In 1962, the Chinese were bingo ammo, food, and water when they got out of Dodge.

Screaming the PLA are Martians ain't the way to go.

Sir, we also have to watch out for the Pakistani adventures during the time of war with China. So we will be facing aggression on both sides most probably. So right now air power is a very important factor. The Chief is more likely to ask for more funding for the porous air defense network in the Indian borders and better infrastructure. The doctrine of both the Indian and Chinese forces have changed in the turn of the century. We still have to see which one will out perform the other.

 

[Su-47]

This might be a call for more funds, but all the same, we should increase our defence budget, and speed up defence procurement, especially MRCA.

If we can induct high quality MRCA aircraft like Rafale or Ef, it will give us the deterrence needed against China. On the other hand, if we go with MiG-35s, the chinese maybe be able to counter with Su-30s.

Our defence procurement should be such that it should deter them from trying anything mischievious. They should realise that we are willing to fight to the end, and that any hostilities will be costly.