http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010/11/pentagon-readies-new-ship-killers-for-pacific-showdown/#more-35385November , 2010 -- Pentagon and its embedded media covering up Chinese show of force off Los Angeles...
China flexed its military muscle Monday evening in the skies west of Los Angeles when a Chinese Navy Jin class ballistic missile nuclear submarine, deployed secretly from its underground home base on the south coast of Hainan island, launched an intercontinental ballistic missile from international waters off the southern California coast. WMR's intelligence sources in Asia, including Japan, say the belief by the military commands in Asia and the intelligence services is that the Chinese decided to demonstrate to the United States its capabilities on the eve of the G-20 Summit in Seoul and the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in Tokyo, where President Obama is scheduled to attend during his ten-day trip to Asia.
The reported Chinese missile test off Los Angeles came as a double blow to Obama. The day after the missile firing, China's leading credit rating agency, Dagong Global Credit Rating, downgraded sovereign debt rating of the United States to A-plus from AA. The missile demonstration coupled with the downgrading of the United States financial grade represents a military and financial show of force by Beijing to Washington....
The Pentagon spin machine, backed by the media reporters who regularly cover the Defense Department, as well as officials of the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), and the U.S. Northern Command, is now spinning various conspiracy theories, including describing the missile plume videotaped by KCBS news helicopter cameraman Gil Leyvas at around 5:00 pm Pacific Standard Time, during the height of evening rush hour, as the condensation trail from a jet aircraft. Other Pentagon-inspired cover stories are that the missile was actually an amateur rocket.
Experts agree that this was a ballistic missile being fired off of Los Angeles. Pentagon insists it was a jet aircraft or model rocket.
There are no records of a plane in the area having taken off from Los Angeles International Airport or from other airports in the region. The Navy and Air Force have said that they were not conducting any missile tests from submarines, ships, or Vandenberg Air Force Base. The Navy has also ruled out an accidental firing from one of its own submarines.
Missile experts, including those from Jane's in London, say the plume was definitely from a missile, possibly launched from a submarine. WMR has learned that the missile was likely a JL-2 ICBM, which has a range of 7,000 miles, and was fired in a northwesterly direction over the Pacific and away from U.S. territory from a Jin class submarine. The Jin class can carry up to twelve such missiles.
Navy sources have revealed that the missile may have impacted on Chinese territory and that the National Security Agency (NSA) likely possesses intercepts of Chinese telemetry signals during the missile firing and subsequent testing operations.
Japanese and other Asian intelligence agencies believe that a Chinese Jin-class SSBN submarine conducted missile "show of force" in skies west of Los Angeles.
Asian intelligence sources believe the submarine transited from its base on Hainan through South Pacific waters, where U.S. anti-submarine warfare detection capabilities are not as effective as they are in the northern and mid-Pacific, and then transited north to waters off of Los Angeles. The Pentagon, which has spent billions on ballistic missile defense systems, a pet project of former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, is clearly embarrassed over the Chinese show of strength.
Likely route of Jin-class submarine from Hainan base.
The White House also wants to downplay the missile story before President Obama meets with his Chinese counterpart in Seoul and Tokyo. According to Japanese intelligence sources, Beijing has been angry over United States and allied naval exercises in the South China and Yellow Seas, in what China considers its sphere of influence, and the missile firing within the view of people in Southern California was a demonstration that China's navy can also play in waters off the American coast....
For the U.S. Navy, the Chinese show of force is a huge embarrassment, especially for the Navy's Pacific Command in Pearl Harbor, where Japan's December 7, 1941 attack on the fleet at Pearl Harbor remains a sore subject....
In 2002, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice reportedly scolded visiting Chinese General Xiong Guankai, the deputy chief of staff for intelligence of the People's Liberation Army, for remarks he allegedly made in 1995 that China would use nuclear weapons on Los Angeles. Xiong denied he made any such comments but the "spin" on the story helped convince Congress to sink billions of additional dollars into ballistic missile defense, sometimes referred to at "Star Wars II."
AIPAC has a "use by" date for Obama....that is very fast approaching, at which time America will no longer have the slightest interest in the Middle East and will have to focus on what really matters: China, India and it's own parlous domestic economy....
That time is right now. America has been warned by China, Germany and God knows who else, not to print another $600 billion in "Quantitative easing". The dollar is depreciating against all major currencies and debtors have just drawn a line in the sand....and with Missiles....
Increasing attention must be paid to the needs and wants of ordinary Americans in the coming year.... An Israeli stimulated attack on Iran at a time of national distress, whose proximate cause is the machinations of (Jewish) Wall Street, is likely to provoke an anti - USA backlash....from the Whole World, especially China carrying hundreds of Billions of US treasury notes....
Criminals like Netanyahu are grabbing what they can from the blazing US store.... Remember, possession is Nine Tenths of the law, or as the Israeli playbook puts it: "In a negotiated solution, nobody should have to leave their home....." Now, CHINA with ICBMs wants the same deal on its "faltering Billions..." of US paper.....
http://www.diplomaticourier.org/kmitan/articleback.php?newsid=592
All the while bankrupted America and Obama's visit was intended to let China know that America knows that India knows that Beijing’s recent “aggressiveness,” as one Indian minister put it to me, has China’s neighbors a bit on edge. None of China’s neighbors dare mention the C-word — containment — in public. Indeed, none of them want to go there at all or intend to promote such a policy. But there’s a new whiff of anxiety in the Asian air.All of China’s neighbors want China to know, as the sign says: “Don’t even think about parking here.” Don’t even think about using your growing economic and military clout to just impose your claims in border disputes and over oil-rich islands in the South China Sea. Because, if you do, all of China’s neighbors will be doomed to become America’s new best friends — including India.
That’s why each one of China’s neighbors is eager to have a picture of their president standing with Secretary Clinton or President Obama — with the unspoken caption that reads: “Honestly, China, we don’t want to throttle you. We don’t want an Asian cold war. We just want to trade and be on good terms. But, please, stay between the white lines. Don’t even think about parking in my space because, if you do, I have this friend from Washington, and he’s really big. ... And he’s got his own tow truck.”
I’d call this “pre-containment” or “containment-lite” — triggered in the last year by a sudden upsurge in China’s assertion of claims to all of the South China Sea. It marks a stark contrast to the mood in the region just two years ago. As Christian Caryl, a contributing editor at Foreign Policy magazine, noted in an Aug. 4 essay: China for years was being praised by Asian experts for being so shrewd, so clever, so deft, in building cultural and economic ties with all its neighbors — and outmaneuvering the stupid, oafish Americans. But in just six months, China has cast itself in the role of bully and prompted its neighbors to roll out the red carpets for Uncle Sam.
“In recent months,” noted Caryl, “Beijing has elevated its claims to territory in the South China Sea to the level of a ‘core national interest’ on par with Tibet or Taiwan, and that has sparked considerable anger among the other countries in the region — including Brunei, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Taiwan, and Vietnam — that claim ownership of pieces of the sea. ... Then, just in case the Americans and the Southeast Asians still didn’t get the message, the Chinese Navy staged large-scale maneuvers in the sea, deploying ships from all three of its fleets. Admirals watched as the ships fired off volleys of missiles at imaginary enemies — all of it shown in loving detail by Chinese television.”
China has also muscled Vietnam into halting its oil exploration in what Beijing claimed were Chinese territorial waters and forced Japan to release a Chinese fishing boat captain, who was arrested after a collision with two Japanese coast guard vessels near disputed islands in the East China Sea. China got its way with Japan by halting China’s exports to Japan of rare earth elements crucial for advanced manufacturing.
“With the Chinese Communist Party increasingly dependent on the military to maintain its monopoly on power and ensure domestic order, senior military officers are overtly influencing foreign policy,” wrote Brahma Chellaney, a defense analyst at Delhi’s Center for Policy Research.
But the Indians, like their fellow Asians, really do not want to go beyond containment-lite with China — for now. Sure India and China are at odds over borders and Pakistan, but China is now India’s largest trading partner.
Also, never forget that Indian foreign policy has a long history of nonalignment. “Until a year ago, the big Indian debate was how do we deal with American hegemony,” said the Indian strategist C. Raja Mohan. Many of India’s older elites still fear U.S. “imperialism” and “neo-Liberalism.”
And, finally, says the Indian defense analyst Kanti Basu: “Deep down, the Indians who pay attention in the strategic community sense that the Chinese are rising and the Americans are fading — and it doesn’t look like the Americans are going to fix their problems any time soon.” So don’t bet the silverware on America.
No, India is not going to jump into America’s arms. But we’re not asking it to. Democracy, geopolitics, geography and economics are all combining to move America and India closer together. And that’s a good thing for both. If China plays it smart, Indian-American relations will never go beyond pre-containment. But if China doesn’t play it smart, Obama to India could one day become the new Nixon to China: my enemy’s enemy is my new best friend....
In 1981, a Soviet Victor-class nuclear submarine successfully evaded the Navy's Sound Surveillance System (SOSUS) network of underwater hydrophones, Towed Array Sensor System (TASS) ships, and P-3 sonobuoy-equipped aircraft and popped up off the Oregon coast alongside a Soviet fishing trawler.
While serving as the Operations Officer at the Navy's SOSUS station at Coos Head, Oregon, this editor received a phone call from the Coast Guard station in Brookings, Oregon reporting that some local fishermen sighted a Soviet submarine alongside a fishing trawler flying the Soviet flag some 30 miles off Brookings.
The incident resulted in the sending of a "Bravo" visual sighting on a Navy-Wide Formatted Message Reporting System (RAINFORM) message to the Commander Oceanographic System Pacific (COMOCEANSYSPAC) in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. Since the clear majority of Soviet submarine contact reports were SOSUS RED messages, meaning the submarine had been detected by the SOSUS acoustic arrays, the sending of a BRAVO visual sighting message to the Navy's top commands in Pearl Harbor created a political storm.
The Navy's higher-ups immediately began to question the veracity of the Oregon fishermen and the Coast Guard in an effort to limit the damage. The reaction by the Navy was similar to the cover story now being issued by the Pentagon that the missile plume witnessed some 35 miles off the California coast was actually from a US Airways flight from Honolulu to Phoenix, a model rocket, or an optical illusion.
In 1981, a Victor-III Soviet nuclear attack submarine, armed with torpedoes and anti-ship missiles, popped up previously undetected some 30 miles off the Oregon coast. The submarine had undergone significant noise-reduction modifications, with its turbine and propeller cavitations being quieted to avoid detection by U.S. Navy acoustic sensors in the Pacific. The Navy, embarrassed, covered up the incident.
The Navy, clearly embarrassed over the undetected presence of a Chinese Jin-class SSBN submarine off the coast of Los Angeles, is, some 40 years after the Victor-III incident, continuing its age-old tradition of covering up when it screws up. Aiding and abetting the Pentagon are a group of recently-minted "experts" from NASA, the Discovery Channel Rupert Murdoch's array of claptrap publications, Pentagon-funded web sites and think tanks, and other "usual suspects" in the conspiracy theory proffering business...
The Pentagon, shown to have wasted billions of dollars on a useless ballistic missile defense system, is working overtime with the media and on the Internet to cover up the latest debacle. However, even some reporters who cover the Pentagon full-time are beginning to question the Pentagon's version of events last Monday night over the skies west of Los Angeles....
The Chinese military’s non-nuclear missiles have “the capability to attack” and close down five of six major U.S. Air Force bases in South Korea and Japan, an unpublished government report says.
China’s improved inventory of short- and medium-range missiles provides a “dramatic increase” in its ability to “inhibit” U.S. military operations in the western Pacific, according to excerpts from the draft of the 2010 annual report by the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission scheduled for release on Nov. 17.
Read more ....
My Comment: When I read reports that China has targeted Taiwan with 1,400 missiles, it becomes easy to see how they can shut down U.S. air power in the region.
On a side note, The Brookings Institute has released another report on the continuing growth of Chinese military power, and their impact on Taiwan. The link to the report is here....
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