Forces: U.S. & Coalition/Casualties & War Plans

23.07.2004

There have been 1,025 coalition deaths, 904 Americans, 61 Britons, six Bulgarians, one Dane, one Dutch, one Estonian, one Hungarian, 19 Italians, one Latvian, six Poles, one Salvadoran, three Slovaks, 11 Spaniards, two Thai and seven Ukrainians, in the war in Iraq as of July 22, 2004

Military might and political messages
By Mac William Bishop
Asia Times
July 24, 2004

TAIPEI - Military exercises often have as much political use as tactical utility, and this week, China, Taiwan and the US all have conducted major exercises in or around the Taiwan Strait. These maneuvers send messages about the various countries' intentions in the Taiwan Strait.

China's exercises began on July 16 and were scheduled to end Friday, July 23. Meanwhile, the United States' global Summer Pulse 2004 exercises, which began in mid-July and will last until mid-August, have moved to the Western Pacific region this week. Taiwan also is holding its annual Han Kuang (Han glory) exercises, which began on Wednesday, July 21, and will last until July 28.

The fact that the exercises are being conducted virtually simultaneously is neither an accident nor coincidental. It is also no accident that former Chinese president Jiang Zemin, now the chairman of the Communist Party's Central Military Commission, was quoted in a Hong Kong daily Wen Wei Po last week as in essence promising to attack Taiwan (seen as a wayward province) before or around the year 2020. The comments were made as China kicked off a major military exercise on Dongshan Island near China's southeast coast, only 280 kilometers from Taiwanese territory.

Yet even as China was showing off its military might near the Taiwan Strait, the US was conducting its own show of force in the Western Pacific, with an exercise called Summer Pulse 2004. This exercise is one of the largest naval drills the US has conducted in years, involving seven carrier strike groups - more than 120 warships, all over the world. The Pacific aspect of the exercise was widely interpreted by Taiwanese, as well as some Chinese and US pundits, as constituting a direct challenge to China.

The commander of US Pacific Forces, Admiral Thomas B Fargo, was in Beijing on a routine regional tour, and he was warned on Friday by Chinese Foreign Minister Li Zhaoxing to stop military exchanges and arms sales to Taiwan. This is precisely what Li told US National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice last week. Li said nothing about Summer Pulse 2004.

US military officials confirmed that the exercise was serving a purpose in this regard, but said it was an exaggeration to say that Summer Pulse was being held exclusively for the benefit of Taiwan and China. "It's a lie to say that the exercise is directed at China, but then again, it's a lie to say that it is not," a senior US defense source told the Asia Times Online.

The scheduling of these exercises is no accident, the source said, speaking on condition he not be identified further. There were very clear reasons that the US would choose to conduct parts of Summer Pulse in the Western Pacific at the same time that China and Taiwan were conducting their own exercises: to demonstrate the United States' ability to project power and to show China that the US can still play a deterrent role in the region, despite its other operational commitments worldwide, as in the Middle East.

In short, the exercises are being held by the US to remind China that it is still serious about its commitment to defend Taiwan.

China has consistently vowed that it would unify with the democratic island of Taiwan at any cost. High-ranking party officials and senior People's Liberation Army (PLA) officers in the past have said that Beijing is willing to go to war to prevent Taiwan from becoming an independent country, and Taipei and Beijing have yet to agree to formal negotiations about Taiwan's status.

Political tensions between the two rivals have increased with the controversial re-election of Taiwanese President Chen Shui-bian, and his administration's plan to formulate a new constitution is particularly worrying to Beijing. Chen promised in his inauguration speech on May 20 to confine the constitutional revisions to matters of administration and governance, and to avoid sensitive topics related to sovereignty.

"I am fully aware that consensus has yet to be reached on issues related to national sovereignty, territory and the subject of unification versus independence," Chen said. "Therefore, let me explicitly propose that these particular issues be excluded from the present project of constitutional re-engineering."

This pledge, however, did not assuage Beijing's fears that Chen had, in effect, established a timeline for independence.

China has, therefore, sought to employ various forms of pressure on Taiwan to remind the island's leaders that it was and remains deadly serious about preventing any slide toward independence. Jiang Zemin's comments and the publicity surrounding the PLA's military exercises can be interpreted in this light.

The exercises, in which 18,000 troops reportedly took part, have been conducted only 280km from the Taiwanese-controlled Penghu islands, also called the Pescadores. China's exercises are designed to demonstrate that country's ability to carry out joint operations, or missions involving naval, air and ground forces. These would be vital in carrying out a successful attack on Taiwan.

According to Hong Kong's Ta Kung Pao newspaper, one of the primary goals of the exercises was to demonstrate China's ability to gain air superiority over Taiwan. Proving that it could control the air over the Taiwan Strait is of paramount importance to China, as the PLA Air Force (PLAAF) has long been outclassed by its Taiwanese counterpart, both in terms of the quality of its aircraft and the training of its pilots, according to some defense analysts.

However, the combination of increased defense spending by China and structural problems with Taiwan's military is beginning to erode the qualitative superiority of Taiwan's Air Force, according to the US Department of Defense's most recent report to the US Congress on China's military capabilities.

"The [Taiwanese] Air Force's recently completed transition from 1960s fighter aircraft to modern 'fourth generation' [advanced aircraft such as the US-made F-16 or the French-made Mirage 2000-5] units retains many of the qualitative advantages over the PLAAF. However, fighter pilot shortages are stressing personnel, and training is conservative and overemphasizes defensive counter-air missions," according to the report, Fiscal Year 2004 Report to Congress on PRC Military Power.

Correcting China's relative lack of "fourth generation" fighter aircraft is one of Beijing's top priorities. And as China's 2004 arms budget is about US$26 billion (many analysts believe China's arms budget is much higher than the official figures indicate), the PLAAF will probably not have to go begging to acquire advanced weapons systems.

"The PLAAF and the PLANAF [PLA Naval Air Forces] are undergoing significant upgrades, which include acquiring fourth-generation aircraft, air defense systems, advanced munitions, and C4ISR [command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance] equipment," the US Defense Department's report noted.

One of the reasons Beijing wants more capable air forces is due to the Chinese strategy of preventing intervention by "third parties" (ie the United States) in the event of a Taiwan Strait conflict.

The US, which is by law committed to providing for Taiwan's defense by selling weapons to the island, has in the past shown its willingness to intervene in crises in the Taiwan Strait. Notably, in 1996, former US president Bill Clinton dispatched two aircraft-carrier battle groups to the region after China began firing missiles into the waters of the Taiwan Strait. The missile tests were apparently designed to prevent the people of Taiwan from voting for Lee Teng-hui, an avowed pro-independence presidential candidate. The threats were unsuccessful - in fact, some analysts believe they had an effect opposite to that intended by China - and Lee won the election.

However, the cross-Strait strategic balance has been rapidly shifting in China's favor over the past 10 years, and many analysts - including experts at the Pentagon - are starting to believe that the US would have a difficult time intervening on Taiwan's behalf should China decide to attack. Therefore, some elements of the US military want to show China that the US could respond - in a very substantial way.

Official statements from the US Navy confirm that the primary purpose of the drills was to demonstrate the US's ability to get ships where they were needed as quickly as possible.

"We've moved from our standard deployment pattern to the Fleet Response Plan, where we promised the president of the United States that we can put six carriers anywhere in the world within 30 days, and [two more carriers] shortly after that," Vice Admiral Michael McCabe, the commander of the US Navy 3rd Fleet, said in a statement on the US Pacific Command's website. "We've changed the way we maintain, the way we train, the way we equip and the way we deploy. As an example of that, this summer, in what's called Summer Pulse, we will have seven different aircraft carriers with their supporting ships operating in five different theaters."

However, a number of strategic assessments of possible "Taiwan scenarios" indicate that many US defense officials believe China is gaining the ability to defeat Taiwanese forces before foreign militaries could intervene. The US, then, is not relying on a purely military containment strategy.

"Washington does not in any way ignore China's military buildup and the possibility that it might in the long term pose a strategic challenge to the United States," said Richard Bush, the director of the Center for Northeast Asian Policy Studies at the Brookings Institution in Washington, DC. Bush is also a former director and chairman of the American Institute in Taiwan, the US de facto embassy in Taipei.

"But successive administrations, Democratic and Republican alike, believe that US interests will be best served by a PRC [People's Republic of China] that is deeply integrated into the international community," Bush said. "If, on the other hand, the United States starts out by treating China as our enemy, it will surely become our enemy."

Another US defense expert concurred with this assessment.

"The United States policy toward China is still an engagement policy. The long-term intentions of China toward Taiwan and the rest of Asia are not clear, but the US does not actively seek to contain China," said Larry Wortzel, the director of the conservative Heritage Foundation's Davis Institute for International Studies in Washington. Nor is the US "surrounding' China", he said.

Taiwan, meanwhile, appears to be trying to adapt to the changing military balance in the Taiwan Strait, despite its relatively limited resources. Taiwan's Legislative Yuan has approved a nearly US$10 billion defense budget for this year, not including a "special budget" of approximately $16 billion earmarked for the procurement of a number of high-profile advanced weapons systems from the US. The special defense budget is at present the source of bitter debate within the Legislative Yuan, as many in Taiwan feel the money could better be spent elsewhere.

Despite the lack of a consensus on priorities, the military establishment in Taiwan is attempting to carry on as usual. The country began conducting its annual Han Kuang series of military exercises on Wednesday. The exercises, criticized by some observers as unimaginative and pointless, include a mock counter-landing operation, a rehearsal of an airborne assault, and several live-fire exercises.

But one of the most highly anticipated events in this year's exercise took place on Wednesday, when Taiwan's air force landed two Mirage fighter aircraft on the Sun Yat-sen Freeway in central Taiwan. When the freeway was built in the 1970s, several portions were designed to be used as temporary or emergency runways in the event of a war with China. Taiwan has five such freeways, several portions of which could theoretically be used as emergency airfields.

But the hype surrounding the landings was dismissed by some observers. "Landing on the freeway is no different from landing on a regular runway," said retired Taiwanese army general Shui Hua-ming. "The only difference is, well, it is the freeway, not an airport."

One foreign defense analyst held a different view. "The freeway landings are good, because it shows that Taiwan's military is trying something different," the analyst said, on condition of anonymity. "Usually, every year it was the same thing. They hold the same anti-amphibious landing exercise, blow up the same beach, and then turn around and everyone claps," he said.

Taiwan still hasn't fortified its airfields and hangars to increase their survivability in the event of a "saturation attack" by the PLA's Second Artillery Corps (China's missile forces), so the country was still vulnerable to the more than 500 short- and medium-range missiles that are deployed across the Strait, targeting Taiwan.

"This is a good sign," the analyst said. "It shows that Taiwan's military is willing to take a few risks and look for new alternatives to defend Taiwan."

Mac William Bishop is a journalist based in Taipei. Comments or queries may be sent to mwbtaiwan@hotmail.com .