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In article <t1f5qi$30g3k$42@news.freedyn.de>
<governor.swill@gmail.com> wrote:

...Send Kamala Harris to suck them all off until Trump is elected again.

The last time tensions soared between Beijing and Washington
over Taiwan, the U.S. Navy sent warships through the Taiwan
Strait and there was nothing China could do about it.

Those days are gone.

China’s military has undergone a transformation since the mid-
1990s when a crisis erupted over Taiwan’s president visiting the
U.S., prompting an angry reaction from Beijing.

“It’s a very different situation now,” said Michele Flournoy, a
former undersecretary of defense for policy in the Obama
administration. “It’s a much more contested and much more lethal
environment for our forces.”

Chinese President Xi Jinping, unlike his predecessors, now has
serious military power at his disposal, including ship-killing
missiles, a massive navy and an increasingly capable air force.
That new military might is changing the strategic calculus for
the U.S. and Taiwan, raising the potential risks of a conflict
or miscalculation, former officials and experts say.

During the 1995-96 crisis, in an echo of current tensions, China
staged live-fire military drills, issued stern warnings to
Taipei and launched missiles into waters near Taiwan.

But the U.S. military responded with the largest show of force
since the Vietnam War, sending an array of warships to the area,
including two aircraft carrier groups. The carrier Nimitz and
other battleships sailed through the narrow waterway that
separates China and Taiwan, driving home the idea of America’s
military dominance.

“Beijing should know the strongest military power in the western
Pacific is the United States,” said the then-defense secretary,
William Perry.

The Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) back then was a low-
tech, slow-moving force that was no match for the U.S. military,
with a lackluster navy and air force that could not venture too
far from China's coastline, former and current U.S. officials
said.

“They realized they were vulnerable, that the Americans could
sail aircraft carriers right up in their face, and there was
nothing they could do about it,” said Matthew Kroenig, who
served as an intelligence and defense official in the Bush,
Obama and Trump administrations.

The Chinese, taken aback by the U.S. military’s high-tech
display in the first Gulf War, “went to school on the American
way of war” and launched a concerted effort to invest in their
military and — above all — to bolster their position in the
Taiwan Strait, Kroenig said.

Beijing drew a number of lessons from the 1995-96 crisis,
concluding it needed satellite surveillance and other
intelligence to spot adversaries over the horizon, and a “blue
water” navy and air force able to sail and fly across the
western Pacific, according to David Finkelstein, director of
China and Indo-Pacific security affairs at CNA, an independent
research institute.

“The PLA Navy has made remarkable progress since 1995 and 1996.
It’s actually mind-staggering how quickly the PLA Navy has built
itself up. And of course in ‘95-96, the PLA Air Force almost
never flew over water,” said Finkelstein, a retired U.S. Army
officer.

Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has
described China’s dramatic rise as a military power as a
strategic earthquake.

“We’re witnessing, in my view, we’re witnessing one of the
largest shifts in global geostrategic power that the world has
witnessed,” Milley said last year.

The Chinese military now is “very formidable especially in and
around home waters, particularly in the vicinity of Taiwan,”
said James Stavridis, a retired four-star admiral and former
commander of NATO.

China’s navy now has more ships than the U.S., he said. Although
U.S. naval ships are larger and more advanced, with more
experienced crews and commanders, “quantity has a quality all
its own,” said Stavridis, an NBC News analyst.

China is currently building amphibious vessels and helicopters
to be able to stage a possible full-scale invasion of Taiwan,
experts say, though whether the PLA is capable of such a feat
remains a matter of debate.

During the 1995-96 crisis, China lost communication with one of
its missiles, and came away determined to wean itself off global
positioning systems linked to the U.S., said Matthew Funaiole, a
China expert at the Center for Strategic and International
Studies think tank. “It got them thinking that ‘we can’t rely on
technology from other countries,’” he said.

Officials in the U.S. and Taiwan now have to take into account a
much more lethal and agile Chinese military that can deny
America the ability to deploy warships or aircraft with
impunity, and even to operate safely from bases in the region,
Funaiole and other experts said.

“The game has changed in terms of how stacked the deck is for
the U.S. It’s much more of an even game. Whatever the U.S. does,
China has options,” Funaiole said.

Outraged by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan this
week, China has launched large-scale, live-fire military
exercises, including ballistic missile launches, that have
surpassed the drills carried out in the 1995-96 standoff. The
exercises are located in waters surrounding Taiwan to the north,
east and south, with some of the drills within about 10 miles of
Taiwan’s coast. China once lacked the capability to conduct a
major exercise in waters east of Taiwan, experts said.

China on Thursday fired at least 11 ballistic missiles near
Taiwan, with one flying over the island, according to officials
in Taipei. Japan said five missiles landed in its economic
exclusion zone, near an island south of Okinawa.

This time, the U.S. government has made no announcements about
warships moving through the Taiwan Strait. “Biden could try to
do that, but China could put them on the bottom of the strait.
That’s something they couldn’t do in 1995,” Kroenig said.

The White House said Thursday that the USS Ronald Reagan
aircraft carrier would remain in the region as China carries out
its exercises around Taiwan to “monitor the situation.” But
National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby said that a
previously scheduled ICBM test had been postponed to avoid any misunderstanding.

Despite the tough rhetoric between the two powers and the
mounting tensions, China is not looking to start a war over
Pelosi’s visit and is seeking to stage a show of force, not an
invasion of Taiwan, former U.S. officials and experts said.

For the moment, Chinese President Xi is focused on shoring up
his country’s sluggish economy and securing an unprecedented
third term at the next Communist Party congress later this year.
But China’s newfound military might prompt overconfidence in
Beijing’s decision-making or lead to a cycle of escalation in
which each side feels compelled to respond to show resolve,
former officials said.

There is a risk that Xi could underestimate U.S.'s resolve, and
that he believes there is a window of opportunity to seize or
blockade Taiwan in the next few years before American
investments in new weapons alter the military balance, said
Flournoy, now chair of the Center for a New American Security
think tank.

“I worry about China miscalculating because the narrative in
Beijing continues to be one of U.S. decline, that the U.S. is
turning inward,” Flournoy said. “That’s very dangerous, if you
underestimate your potential adversary.”

To prevent such an outcome, Flournoy argues both Taiwan and the
U.S. need to bolster their military forces to deter Beijing and
raise the potential cost of any possible invasion or
intervention against Taiwan.

Finkelstein said he worries about an “action-reaction” chain of
events that could lead to a conflict no one wants, and that the
risk of miscalculation in Beijing, Taipei and Washington is
“going sky-high.”

To keep a lid on the tensions, the U.S. and China need to pursue
an intense dialogue to lower the temperature, he said. “We need
to be talking to each other constantly.”

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/national-security/last-time-was- taiwan-crisis-chinas-military-was-outmatched-us-forces-n-
rcna41560

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