In October 2011, I had the opportunity to go down the road to the U.S. Air Force Academy (USAFA) in Colorado Springs and participate in their annual foreign affairs conference, called the Academy Assembly. 2011 marked the 53rd running of the event, and in the past it has featured speakers and participants from the likes of Paul H. Nitze (1959) to Donald Rumsfeld (representing the Office of Economic Opportunity in 1970) to John Nagl (2009).  It was a great experience, not only professionally, in what really was my first opportunity to interact with some really bright cadets and also undergraduate students from various public and private universities across the U.S. who were delegates of their schools to the Assembly, but also personally, in that I had never really been any of our nation’s military academies before. While I was there I had a chance to tour the famous chapel (see a few of the photos I took at the chapel below (along with some other photos from the week) – really beautiful!), take a meal with the cadets (all 3,000 of them!), and stroll the grounds of what really is a fantastic location, situated hard against the front range of the Rocky Mountains overlooking Colorado Springs. I came away from the experience really impressed by the caliber of cadets at the Air Force Academy and hoping that I have a chance to visit again soon!

My official duties at the Academy Assembly were threefold: first, moderate the discussions of  the several cadets and civilian delegates assigned to my roundtable. I believe there were about ten of us, in total, including me and the cadet who was assigned to guide me around the campus during the week I was there, Cadet Second Class Andrew Gallion. After each major event/speaker during that week, we convened a roundtable to discuss what we had just heard attempt to tie it in with the overall Assembly theme, “Power and Influence: Global Dynamics in the 21st Century.” Speakers at this year’s assembly (bios here) included Mrs. Gillian Sorensen, United Nations Foundation Senior Advisor and National Advocate; several Olmsted Scholars (include myself; more on this aspect below); Undersecretary of the Air Force Erin Conaton; Mr. Peter Brookes, Senior Fellow for National Security Affairs at the Heritage Foundation; USAFA’s own Dr. Schuyler Foerster, Brent Scowcroft Professor of National Security Affairs at the U.S. Air Force Academy (I liked his presentation the best of all the week’s presentations – it was candid and realistic), and finally, Ambassador Christopher Hill, currently Dean of the Josef Korbel School of International Studies at the University of Denver (and previously U.S. Ambassador to Macedonia, Poland, South Korea, and Iraq, as well as Assistant Secretary of State for East Asia and Pacific Affairs from 2005 – 2009). All the roundtable discussions augured towards a final deliverable: a set of “findings” that distilled each small group’s several hours of discussion and debate on the issues presented into a short document complete with conclusions and recommendations.

The second thing was to participate in a special panel featuring all the Olmsted Scholars who came to the Assembly, which in 2011 totaled six (there were originally supposed to be seven of us, but one scholar had to cancel at the last minute). This was an inordinately high number of scholars, according to the scuttlebutt floating around the Assembly, so the organizers decided to devote an entire panel to our insights. We each had a chance to speak for a few minutes about some of the major issues facing our nation/region of study, and after everyone had a chance to speak, the floor was opened to the cadets and delegates for questions. By the miracles of modern technology, I have obtained for you a chance to watch the Olmsted panel in full, which runs about 1 hour and 6 minutes. There are some pretty interesting perspectives shared by the various Scholars on Turkey, China (x2), France, Russia, and, of course, Taiwan.

The final role of Olmsted Scholars at the Academy Assembly is just to interact with the cadets and delegates, and for the cadets in particular, be a resource for them regarding the Olmsted Scholar Program and service as a military officer in general. (Full disclosure: the Olmsted Foundation is one of the primary donors which fund the Academy Assembly each year.) This was perhaps the easiest role to fill – after all, it’s pretty simple to convey the sheer awesomeness of the opportunity available to young military officers to spend 3 years studying the language and culture of their country of choice, spending at least 2 of those years overseas and essentially “own your own program” to pursue a master’s degree and advanced language and cultural studies. The Olmsted Scholar Program is pretty well-known amongst the U.S. Air Force Officer corps, and, from what I saw at the Academy, also amongst cadets. Obviously, part of the reason past Olmsted Scholars such as myself are invited to these conferences (similar events are held annually at both the U.S. Military Academy and the U.S. Naval Academy) is to help spread the word about scholarship to cadets who in a few short years will be in the eligibility window for the program.

Finally, the 28 October 2011 edition of Academy Spirit, the official newspaper of the U.S. Air Force Academy, carried a two-page spread about the 53rd Academy Assembly. You can see it here (html), or, if you prefer to read a “broadsheet” format, check out pages 8-9 here (PDF).

Bonus: on the final day of the Assembly, I had the opportunity to see the entire USAFA Cadet Wing put on a parade in honor of General Peter Pace, USMC (Ret.), who was being honored with the 2010 Thomas D. White National Defense Award, the highest honor the Academy can bestow. You can see some of the photos from that event here.

Here’s an excerpt:

A New York City subway train holds 1,200 people. This blog was viewed about 7,100 times in 2011. If it were a NYC subway train, it would take about 6 trips to carry that many people.

Click here to see the complete report.

Ben Packham, “2500 US marines on Australian soil to increase defense ties,” The Australian, November 17, 2011

UP to 2500 US Marines will be stationed in Australia for six months of every year under a new bilateral defence deal sealed today by Julia Gillard and Barack Obama today.

The agreement will also allow more US ships and military aircraft – including B52 bombers – to operate from Australian bases.

President Obama said the agreement, coming at the 60th anniversary of the ANZUS alliance, reflected the United States’ determination to safeguard security in the Asia-Pacific.

”Because of these initiatives that are the result of our countries working very closely together as partners, we are going to be in a position to more effectively strengthen the security of both our nations and this region,” Mr Obama said after private talks with Ms Gillard today.

”This deepening of our alliance sends a clear message of our commitment to this region – a commitment that is enduring and un-wavering.”

The agreement is set against the background of growing Chinese military spending and the dramatic expansion of the Chinese navy.

Mr Obama said President Obama said the US welcomed the rise of China but “it’s important for them to play by the rules of the road”.

“We will send a clear message to them that we think they may need to be on track, in terms of accepting the rules and responsibilities of being a world power.”

Putting 2,500 U.S. Marines in the Darwin area is significant. It’s farther afield from China than is Guam, but still close enough to be “in the neighborhood.” Think of this as a “diversification” of the American defense portfolio in the region. While 2,500 Marines might not sound like a whole heck of a lot, numbers-wise, it is roughly equivalent to the number of Marines found in a Marine Expeditionary Unit (MEU), which are employed to such great effect off of U.S. Navy amphibious shipping assets around the globe. I would imagine that if these Marines based in Australia were to be employed operationally in the region, it would be in a MEU-like capacity, meaning that the modular expansion to a Marine Expeditionary Brigade (MEB) or Marine Expeditionary Force (MEF) would also be possible based on the size of the contingency.

Smart move.

Related articles

• Darwin visit for Obama after speech to MPs (news.theage.com.au)
• More US troops to train in Australia (news.theage.com.au)
• Australia Trip Concludes With Military Ties in Focus (blogs.wsj.com)
• Barack Obama to deploy 2,500 Marines in Australia as he says ‘we do not fear China’ (telegraph.co.uk)
• Aust, US agree on joint military training (news.theage.com.au)
• Obama to Send Marines to Australia (weeklyworldnews.com)
• Expanded Military Ties in Australia (whitehouse.gov)

One of the two big annual U.S. government reports on China was released this week. (The other is the annual DoD China military power report.) I haven’t had a chance to read it at all yet…but don’t let that stop you! Here you go:

U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission 2011 Report to Congress (pdf)

From the press release announcing the report:

“…This year also marked several milestones for China’s decades-long military modernization efforts, fueled in part by a defense budget that has averaged 12 percent growth over the past decade. China has recently achieved several military “firsts”: it flight tested its first stealth fighter, conducted a sea trial of its first aircraft carrier, and made progress towards deploying the world’s first anti-ship ballistic missile.

While all nations have the right to develop the means to defend themselves, the Commission continues to be concerned with the opacity of China’s military development and intentions, which invites misunderstanding. And, in particular, our report notes China’s development of its cyber capabilities, focusing on the growing evidence that Beijing sponsors or condones computer network intrusions against foreign commercial and government targets. When combined with the military’s excessive focus on other disruptive military capabilities, such as counterspace operations, it presents an image of Chinese intentions that diverges significantly from Beijing’s official policy of peaceful development.

As a result of China’s growing economic and military strength, Beijing increasingly acts with greater assertiveness on the international stage. In the South China Sea, for example, Beijing insists on treating a multilateral maritime dispute as a series of individual bilateral issues, much to the consternation of the other claimants. Furthermore, newly acquired maritime security capabilities provide China with a means for backing up its excessive territorial claims in the region. Over the past year, China repeatedly asserted its interests by harassing Indian, Philippine and Vietnamese fishing and oil exploration vessels in the South China Sea. The willingness to place Chinese national interests ahead of regional and global stability is also demonstrated in Beijing’s relations with both North Korea and Iran.

China’s rapidly growing economic and military strength entitles it to play a significantly larger role in the international system. Former U.S. Trade Representative Robert Zoellick anticipated that when he called on China to be a “responsible stakeholder” nearly ten years ago. Since he said that, however, we have learned it is unrealistic to assume China will simply fit neatly and cleanly into a Western economic and political system that alternately exploited and rejected it for the past hundred and fifty years, and which the Chinese Communist Party has spent most of its life repudiating…”

Abstract:

This thesis project tests the hypothesis that U.S. Navy active missile defenses’ utility against China’s Anti-Ship Ballistic Missile (ASBM) reconnaissance-strike system can be significantly increased when paired with emerging Electronic Warfare (EW) technologies and novel tactical deception concepts. Qualitative open source-based technical, tactical, and doctrinal analyses of China’s ocean surveillance, reconnaissance, and ASBM strike systems are conducted to outline their likely capabilities and limitations. Qualitative process-tracing is next used within a historical case study of how the U.S. Navy employed EW and tactical deception during the Cold War to defend aircraft carrier battle groups against Soviet ocean surveillance, reconnaissance, and strike systems. The case study’s data and conclusions are then used to qualitatively infer the ASBM concept’s inherent technical, tactical, and doctrinal vulnerabilities. Following this, emerging EW technologies are identified that have the theoretical potential to exploit Chinese radars, electro-optical and infrared sensors, radiofrequency direction-finding/Electronic Intelligence (ELINT) systems, satellite communication networks, and decision-making systems. EW’s theoretical influence on a naval surface force’s active missile defenses’ effectiveness against ASBMs is also qualitatively assessed. The case study’s conclusions and the analysis of emerging EW technologies are additionally used to derive potential U.S. Navy tactical deception concepts as well as recognize the prerequisites for their effective use. Lastly, EW and tactical deception’s implications for U.S. maritime strategy and conventional deterrence against Chinese aggression in East Asia are assessed.

Image via Wikipedia

Hard to believe, but today is the 10th anniversary of the 2001 incident in which a U.S. Navy EP-3 reconnaissance aircraft operating above the waters of the South China Sea was struck by a People’s Liberation Army Air Force (PLAAF) interceptor jet. The U.S. pilot, Shane Osborn (who has gone on to be a successful politician in Nebraska), managed to keep the crippled plane in the air while the crew members hastily tried to destroy as much of the payload as possible – classified equipment and materials related to the aircraft’s surveillance mission. Unfortunately, due to the in extremis situation, the crew was only able to partially complete this task before an emergency landing was made at an airfield on Hainan Island. The crew was taken into custody and the aircraft seized.

The PRC lost the jet pilot who ran into the EP-3, but in the long run they gained a lot more. Writing in the November 1, 2010 issue of The New Yorker, Seymour Hersh detailed the take:

The plane carried twenty-four officers and enlisted men and women attached to the Naval Security Group Command, a field component of the National Security Agency. They were repatriated after eleven days; the plane stayed behind. The Pentagon told the press that the crew had followed its protocol, which called for the use of a fire axe, and even hot coffee, to disable the plane’s equipment and software. These included an operating system created and controlled by the N.S.A., and the drivers needed to monitor encrypted Chinese radar, voice, and electronic communications. It was more than two years before the Navy acknowledged that things had not gone so well. “Compromise by the People’s Republic of China of undestroyed classified material . . . is highly probable and cannot be ruled out,” a Navy report issued in September, 2003, said.

The Navy’s experts didn’t believe that China was capable of reverse-engineering the plane’s N.S.A.-supplied operating system, estimated at between thirty and fifty million lines of computer code, according to a former senior intelligence official. Mastering it would give China a road map for decrypting the Navy’s classified intelligence and operational data. “If the operating system was controlling what you’d expect on an intelligence aircraft, it would have a bunch of drivers to capture radar and telemetry,” Whitfield Diffie, a pioneer in the field of encryption, said. “The plane was configured for what it wants to snoop, and the Chinese would want to know what we wanted to know about them—what we could intercept and they could not.” And over the next few years the U.S. intelligence community began to “read the tells” that China had access to sensitive traffic.

The U.S. realized the extent of its exposure only in late 2008. A few weeks after Barack Obama’s election, the Chinese began flooding a group of communications links known to be monitored by the N.S.A. with a barrage of intercepts, two Bush Administration national-security officials and the former senior intelligence official told me. The intercepts included details of planned American naval movements. The Chinese were apparently showing the U.S. their hand. (“The N.S.A. would ask, ‘Can the Chinese be that good?’ ” the former official told me. “My response was that they only invented gunpowder in the tenth century and built the bomb in 1965. I’d say, ‘Can you read Chinese?’ We don’t even know the Chinese pictograph for ‘Happy hour.’ ”)

This incident can be considered as the opening event in a series of clashes that have marked increased tensions between the U.S. and the PRC in the South China Sea. In the next instance of conflict between the two nations, in 2009 an unarmed U.S. ocean surveillance vessel manned by civilians ran into trouble in about the same area of the South China Sea. Chinese vessels harassed the ship and nearly rammed it, while at the same time attempting to snag its towed sonar array. Since then, direct U.S.-China confrontation has been supplanted by amplified pressure between China and other countries surrounding the South China Sea, many of whom have competing claims to land features and territories in the sea such as the Spratly Islands. These tensions came to a head at the 2010 ASEAN Regional Forum, where U.S. Secretary of State Clinton declared, as a counter to resurgent PRC claims of the South China Sea as a “core interest”, that the U.S. had “a national interest in freedom of navigation, open access to Asia’s maritime commons, and respect for international law in the South China Sea.”

The final chapter in this dispute has yet to be written.

H/T Cheng-yi Lin

To read more about the Hainan Island Incident, see Shirley A. Kan, et al., China-U.S. Aircraft Collision Incident of April 2001: Assessments and Policy Implications, CRS Report to Congress, October 10, 2001.

Related Articles

• South China Sea Tensions Rise (online.wsj.com)

China’s National Defense in 2010, Information Office of the State Council, People’s Republic of China, March 2011

U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings Magazine – April 2011, Focus on China. A few of the main features are subscriber-only material, but there are also several articles that look very interesting available for free, such as:

• When Land Powers Look Seaward by Andrew Erickson, Lyle Goldstein, and Carnes Lord
• Mao’s ‘Active Defense’ Is Turning Offensive by James R. Holmes and Toshi Yoshihara
• Two Vectors, One Navy by Michael McDevitt and Frederic Vellucci
• China’s Naval Challenge by Milan Vego
• The Real Game-Changers of the Pacific Basin by Craig Hooper and Commander David M. Slayton, U.S. Navy

A Step Too Far: Why CPGS Is The Wrong Answer to China’s Anti-Access Challenge (PDF), East-West Center Asia-Pacific Bulletin No. 102, March 24, 2011, by Iskander Rehman

Rising Power… To Do What? Evaluating China’s Power in Southeast Asia (PDF), RSIS Working Paper No. 226, March 30, 2011, by Evelyn Goh

I hope that once I’ve had a chance to read through some of this I will have some comments to add. In the meantime, here’s what a few other learned observers have to say:

China Releases National Defense 2010 White Paper – Information Dissemination

Beijing Issues Latest Defense White Paper “China’s National Defense in 2010″: Full Text and Key Excerpts – Andrew Erickson

Image via Wikipedia

The last of the “big two” Jemaah Islamiyah (JI) leaders formerly in the Southern Philippines has reportedly been nabbed a bit outside of Southeast Asia:

The officials did not say where or when Umar Patek, a deputy commander of al-Qaida’s Southeast Asian affiliate Jemaah Islamiyah, was detained. But the Philippine army, which has also been hunting him, said he was picked up in Pakistan Jan. 25 alongside a Pakistani associate assumed to have been harboring him.

The arrest of Patek, who has a $1 million American price tag on his head, ends a 10-year international manhunt and is a major achievement in the global fight against al-Qaida and its offshoots. If he cooperates, the 40-year-old militant could give valuable intelligence on the current state of the extremist organization and its hardy affiliates in Southeast Asia.

As I wrote some time ago, Umar Patek and Dulmatin were the main guys we were looking for during my time with the Joint Special Operations Task Force – Philippines (JSOTF-P). Looks like this is further confirmation of the marginalization of JI and their Abu Sayyaf Group (ASG) allies in the Southern Philippines.

On Patek, see also:

Indonesian Terror Suspect, Wanted for 2002 Bali Bombings, Arrested in Pakistan http://j.mp/ieXCn0 Umar Patek finally turns up.—
Gary Sampson (@gjsamps) March 30, 2011

H/T: cmjack3

For more on JSOTF-P, USA Today recently ran a nice piece on the mission there. I recommend watching the approximately 5-minute video you can find with the story for a good overview of what JSOTF-P is all about.

And finally, Small Wars Journal with a bunch of good linkage on JSOTF-P. (You can also find the video I mentioned above there.)

Related Articles

• Senior Jemaah Islamiyah leader thought to have been captured in Pakistan (longwarjournal.org)
• Umar Patek, Terror Suspect In Bali Bombings, Caught In Pakistan (huffingtonpost.com)
• Indonesia police work to confirm Bali bomb suspect arrest (cnn.com)
• Bali bombing mastermind finally captured (telegraph.co.uk)
• Officials: Indonesian suspect captured in Pakistan (sfgate.com)
• Suspect in 2002 Bali bombings captured in Pakistan (theglobeandmail.com)
• Pakistan: Bali bombing suspect to be returned (seattletimes.nwsource.com)
• Officials: Indonesian suspect captured in Pakistan (seattletimes.nwsource.com)

Image via Wikipedia

• The ‘blue national soil’ of China’s navy – The Washington Post

  tags: China naval_power military_modernization FC

  • China is deploying new submarines at an impressive rate — three a year. They are suited to pushing back U.S. power projection in the Western Pacific. China’s much-discussed ballistic and cruise missiles also seem designed to keep U.S. surface forces far from China’s soil. And China seems increasingly inclined to define the oceans off its shores as extensions of the shores — territory to be owned and controlled like “blue national soil.” This concept is incompatible with the idea of the oceans as a “common.”

• The Jamestown Foundation: Defense and Deterrence in China’s Military Space Strategy

  tags: FC China space militarization jamestown

  • In all, according to Chinese analysts, as a result of the actions of the world’s major space powers, space war is no longer the stuff of science fiction. Indeed, they argue that it is already more a reality than a myth. Consequently, they conclude that China must be prepared not only to degrade an adversary’s ability to use space, but also to protect its own space capabilities. Chinese writings suggest that Beijing would consider doing so through a combination of defensive measures and deterrence.

• Observations, Comments, and Whatnot: On Glaser and US Abandonment of Taiwan: Part II: Strategy

  tags: FC China Taiwan US

  • What all of this indicates is that it is just as easy to envision a Chinese takeover of Taiwan making security concerns worse as it is to imagine such a takeover making the security environment better. Indeed, PRC control of Taiwan could very easily further serve to escalate any future conflict elsewhere. The psychological effects on US allies and security partners of a US retreat or abandonment has already been explored at length elsewhere and will not be repeated here. What I propose instead is that analysts miss the fact that a PRC takeover of Taiwan would give the Chinese the “central position” in the Asia-Pacific.

• New Book on the Peril of Nuclear Weapons Highlights the Archive’s Nuclear Vault

  Looks like a very interesting book.

  tags: nuclear FC

  • Rosenbaum, a columnist for Slate Magazine and the author of several well-received books, including Explaining Hitler and The Shakespeare Wars, has explored the danger of nuclear weapons since the late 1970s, when he published a major piece in Harper’s on nuclear command and control and weapons and the problem of “moral choice” raised by the existence of nuclear war plans like the SIOP (Single Integrated Operational Plan). In this new and highly original book, Rosenbaum revisits these issues in an extended meditation on the risks of nuclear catastrophe in the 21st century world. By looking at the careers of key individuals such as Bruce Blair, Colonel Valery Yarnich, and Harold Hering, the challenges posed by Iran’s nuclear ambitions and Israel’s nuclear arsenal, and why the post-war system of deterrence could break down, Rosenbaum shows why nuclear peril did not go away when the Cold War ended.

• How US can avoid war with China – Taipei Times

  tags: FC China US Taiwan

  • George Washington University professor Charles Glaser wrote in the recent issue of Foreign Affairs that, because a crisis over Taiwan can easily escalate to a war, the US should consider making concessions to China, backing away from its commitment to Taiwan. His views may be questioned on several bases:

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Image via Wikipedia

• The Jamestown Foundation: A Chinese Assessment of China’s External Security Environment

  tags: FC China thesis

  • The CASS Asia-Pacific Blue Paper underscored the challenges facing China’s peripheral environment in terms of four types of external trends and threats.  According to the report: First, the “return” of the United States to Asia has made China less appealing to some of its neighbors, through tapping some long existing disputes and incidental security accidents.  Second, instability in Northeast Asia (i.e. North Korea) has become the most serious security challenge to China’s peripheral defense, particularly because of the Cheonon incident and Yeonpyeong artillery shelling.  Third, maritime disputes have become an important source of security tension along China’s periphery.  Fourth, some non-traditional security issues—water security in particular—have affected China’s stability and its regime security, and China’s relations with some neighbors (World Journal, January 13).
  • China’s security environment is increasingly challenged by the United States in that the latter has taken the opportunity presented by regional tensions to shore up its alliance with both South Korea and Japan, as well as through trilateral defense coordination.  If the United States’ “return” to East Asia has not been enough, Washington is also apparently revamping its relations with some Southeast Asian countries and urging these nations to hedge against China’s rise.  In July 2010, Secretary of State Clinton openly challenged China’s position on the South China Sea in her address to the 17th ARF Ministerial Meeting in Hanoi, which was bluntly rebuffed by her Chinese counterpart.

• The Jamestown Foundation: Taiwan’s Intelligence Chief Warns about the PLA’s Growing Strategic Weapon Systems

  tags: FC China missiles Taiwan US thesis jamestown

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.