Brigada de porumbei militari a Armatei Populare Chineze Trupe aeropurtate de la natura: China şi-a făcut armată de porumbei călători LINK
Trupe aeropurtate de la natură: China şi-a făcut armată de porumbei călători
03 mar 2011, 12:51 Steluta Voica | REALITATEA.NET
Brigăzile de porumbei militari călători înfiinţate la sfârşitul anului trecut în China numără 10.000 de soldaţi înaripaţi, care pot zbura, în cazul în care canalele hi tech de comunicare cad, cu 120 de km/h şi pot duce greutăţi de până la 100 de g.
Chiar dacă şi-a anunţat de puţină vreme cu mândrie în media de stat noul super avion, un stealth fighter, armata chineză nu-şi pune toată încrederea în armele supratehnologizate de luptă şi a investit prevăzătoare şi în nişte brigăzi de soldaţi înaripaţi de pe urma cărora au tras foloase şi Alexandru Macedon sau Napoleon. Armata chineză îi pregăteşte mai ales ca rezerve în misiunile desfăşurate în zonele îndepărtate ale ţării sau în cele muntoase greu accesibile, precum cele ale Himalayei. Şi nu doar atât: "Aceşti porumbei militari vor fi folosiţi pentru misiuni între trupele noastre de graniţă pe mare şi pe uscat", a completat la Televiziunea centrală Chineză expertul militar Chen Hong, după ce armata chineză a făcut oficial anunţul.
Trupele de la natură aeropurtate au o lungă istorie de serviciu în China. Sunt folosiţe de armatele chineze de mai bine de o mie de ani, dar baza brigăzilor moderne de porumbei călători militari a fost pusă în anii '30 de un grup de porumbei americani. Veteranul Claire Lee Chennault, locotenent pilot în Aviaţia americană, şeful unui grup de militari americani, numit "Tigrii Zburători", scrie time.com, a fost desemnat în 1937 de SUA să ajute China să respingă invazia japoneză. A adus cu el şi sute de porumbei călători şi acestia aveau să fie nucleul din care se vor dezvolta ulterior trupele de soldaţi înaripaţi, cărora acum China le-a sporit numărul la 10.000 de capete. China mai are în serviciu militar şi 10.000 de câini, înnoinudu-şi aceste efective cu încă 2.000 în fiecare an, şi doar 1.000 de cai, care au rămas o rasă demodata de lupta. În civilie, cel mai mare preţ pentru un porumbel călător în China l-a plătit un licitator anonim care a achiziţionat un exemplar de curse, rasă belgiană, considerată creme de la creme în lumea columbofililor, cu 200.000 de dolari.
Noi,cu sutele noastre de mii de ciori (dacă n-o fi un meleon)îi rupem. Hai România. Hai mă… !
Înca n-am apucat să trăiesc şi eu două-trei luni în China,să văd un pic cum e. Dar am o nelămurire : la chinezi,lucrurile chinezeşti or fi la fel de proaste ca în restul lumii ?
Citat din sursa de mai sus : "China mai are în serviciu militar şi 10.000 de câini, înnoindu-şi aceste efective cu încă 2.000 în fiecare an, şi doar 1.000 de cai, care au rămas o rasă demodata de lupta."
Caii respectivi prin ce sunt « o rasă demodată de luptă » ? Or fi cu şenile,sau pe roţi ? Break sau coupé ? Carburaţie sau injecţie ? Eram convins că …oricum o dau,tot cacofonie iese…că cavaleria / că chinezii cavalerişti sunt bine dotaţi. Iacă că nu . Caii chinezeşti au oare ochii oblici ?
Câte nu ştim despre oamenii ăia şi animalele lor….
Unul din cele mai bune articole legate de rebeliunea din Balochistan din cate am citit pana acum. LINK
The bodies surface quietly, like corks bobbing up in the dark. They come in twos and threes, a few times a week, dumped on desolate mountains or empty city roads, bearing the scars of great cruelty. Arms and legs are snapped; faces are bruised and swollen. Flesh is sliced with knives or punctured with drills; genitals are singed with electric prods. In some cases the bodies are unrecognisable, sprinkled with lime or chewed by wild animals. All have a gunshot wound in the head.
This gruesome parade of corpses has been surfacing in Balochistan, Pakistan's largest province, since last July. Several human rights groups, including Amnesty International, have accounted for more than 100 bodies – lawyers, students, taxi drivers, farm workers. Most have been tortured. The last three were discovered on Sunday.
If you have not heard of this epic killing spree, though, don't worry: neither have most Pakistanis. Newspaper reports from Balochistan are buried quietly on the inside pages, cloaked in euphemisms or, quite often, not published at all.
The forces of law and order also seem to be curiously indifferent to the plight of the dead men. Not a single person has been arrested or prosecuted; in fact, police investigators openly admit they are not even looking for anyone. The stunning lack of interest in Pakistan's greatest murder mystery in decades becomes more understandable, however, when it emerges that the prime suspect is not some shady gang of sadistic serial killers, but the country's powerful military and its unaccountable intelligence men.
This is Pakistan's dirty little war. While foreign attention is focused on the Taliban, a deadly secondary conflict is bubbling in Balochistan, a sprawling, mineral-rich province along the western borders with Afghanistan and Iran. On one side is a scrappy coalition of guerrillas fighting for independence from Pakistan; on the other is a powerful army that seeks to quash their insurgency with maximum prejudice. The revolt, which has been rumbling for more than six years, is spiced by foreign interests and intrigues – US spy bases, Chinese business, vast underground reserves of copper, oil and gold.
And in recent months it has grown dramatically worse. At the airport in Quetta, the provincial capital, a brusque man in a cheap suit marches up to my taxi with a rattle of questions. "Who is this? What's he doing here? Where is he staying?" he asks the driver, jerking a thumb towards me. Scribbling the answers, he waves us on. "Intelligence," says the driver.
The city itself is tense, ringed by jagged, snow-dusted hills and crowded with military checkposts manned by the Frontier Corps (FC), a paramilitary force in charge of security. Schools have recently raised their walls; sand-filled Hesco barricades, like the ones used in Kabul and Baghdad, surround the FC headquarters. In a restaurant the waiter apologises: tandoori meat is off the menu because the nationalists blew up the city's gas pipeline a day earlier. The gas company had plugged the hole that morning, he explains, but then the rebels blew it up again.
The home secretary, Akbar Hussain Durrani, a neatly suited, well-spoken man, sits in a dark and chilly office. Pens, staplers and telephones are neatly laid on the wide desk before him, but his computer is blank. The rebels have blown up a main pylon, he explains, so the power is off. Still, he insists, things are fine. "The government agencies are operating in concert, everyone is acting in the best public interest," he says. "This is just a . . . political problem." As we speak, a smiling young man walks in and starts to take my photo; I later learn he works for the military's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) spy agency.
We cut across the city, twisting through the backstreets, my guide glancing nervously out the rear window. The car halts before a tall gate that snaps shut behind us. Inside, a 55-year-old woman named Lal Bibi is waiting, wrapped in a shawl that betrays only her eyes, trembling as she holds forth a picture of her dead son Najibullah. The 20-year-old, who ran a shop selling motorbike parts, went missing last April after being arrested at an FC checkpost, she says. His body turned up three months later, dumped in a public park on the edge of Quetta, badly tortured. "He had just two teeth in his mouth," she says in a voice crackling with pain. She turns to her father, a turbaned old man sitting beside her, and leans into his shoulder. He grimaces.
Bibi says her family was probably targeted for its nationalist ties – Najibullah's older brother, now dead, had joined the "men in the mountains" years earlier, she says. Now a nephew, 28-year-old Maqbool, is missing. She prays for him, regularly calling the hospitals for any sign of him and, occasionally, the city morgues.
Over a week of interviews in Karachi and Quetta, I meet the relatives of seven dead men and nine "disappeared" – men presumed to have been abducted by the security forces. One man produces a mobile phone picture of the body of his 22-year-old cousin, Mumtaz Ali Kurd, his eyes black with swelling and his shirt drenched in blood. A relative of Zaman Khan, one of three lawyers killed in the past nine months, produces court papers. A third trembles as he describes finding his brother's body in an orchard near Quetta.
Patterns emerge. The victims were generally men between 20 and 40 years old – nationalist politicians, students, shopkeepers, labourers. In many cases they were abducted in broad daylight – dragged off buses, marched out of shops, detained at FC checkposts – by a combination of uniformed soldiers and plain-clothes intelligence men. Others just vanished. They re-emerge, dead, with an eerie tempo – approximately 15 bodies every month, although the average was disturbed last Saturday when eight bodies were found in three locations across Balochistan.
Activists have little doubt who is behind the atrocities. Human Rights Watch says "indisputable" evidence points to the hand of the FC, the ISI and its sister agency, Military Intelligence. A local group, Voice for Missing Persons, says the body count has surpassed 110. "This is becoming a state of terror," says its chairman, Naseerullah Baloch.
The army denies the charges, saying its good name is being blemished by impersonators. "Militants are using FC uniforms to kidnap people and malign our good name," says Major General Obaid Ullah Khan Niazi, commander of the 46,000 FC troops stationed in Balochistan. "Our job is to enforce the law, not to break it."
Despairing relatives feel cornered. Abdul Rahim, a farmer wearing a jewelled skullcap, is from Khuzdar, a hotbed of insurgent violence. He produces court papers detailing the abduction of his son Saadullah in 2009. First he went to the courts but then his lawyer was shot dead. Then he went to the media but the local press club president was killed. Now, Rahim says, "nobody will help in case they are targeted too. We are hopeless."
Balochistan has long been an edgy place. Its vast, empty deserts and long borders are a magnet for provocateurs of every stripe. Taliban fighters slip back and forth along the 800-mile Afghan border; Iranian dissidents hide inside the 570-mile frontier with Iran. Drug criminals cross the border from Helmand, the world's largest source of heroin, on their way to Iran or lonely beaches on the Arabian Sea. Wealthy Arab sheikhs fly into remote airstrips on hunting expeditions for the houbara bustard, a bird they believe improves their lovemaking. At Shamsi, a secretive airbase in a remote valley in the centre of the province, CIA operatives launch drones that attack Islamists in the tribal belt.
The US spies appreciate the lack of neighbours – Balochistan covers 44% of Pakistan yet has half the population of Karachi. The province's other big draw is its natural wealth. At Reko Diq, 70 miles from the Afghan border, a Canadian-Chilean mining consortium has struck gold, big-time. The Tethyan company has discovered 4bn tonnes of mineable ore that will produce an estimated 200,000 tonnes of copper and 250,000 ounces of gold per year, making it one of the largest such mines in the world. The project is currently stalled by a tangled legal dispute, but offers a tantalising taste of Balochistan's vast mineral riches, which also includes oil, gas, platinum and coal. So far it is largely untapped, though, and what mining exists is scrappy and dangerous. On 21 March, 50 coal workers perished in horrific circumstances when methane gas flooded their mine near Quetta, then catastrophically exploded.
Two conflicts are rocking the province. North of Quetta, in a belt of land adjoining the Afghan border, is the ethnic Pashtun belt. Here, Afghan Taliban insurgents shelter in hardline madrasas and lawless refugee camps, taking rest in between bouts of battle with western soldiers in Afghanistan. It is home to the infamous "Quetta shura", the Taliban war council, and western officials say the ISI is assisting them. Some locals agree. "It's an open secret," an elder from Kuchlak tells me. "The ISI gave a fleet of motorbikes to local elders, who distributed them to the fighters crossing the border. Nobody can stop them."
The other conflict is unfolding south of Quetta, in a vast sweep that stretches from the Quetta suburbs to the Arabian Sea, in the ethnic Baloch and Brahui area, whose people have always been reluctant Pakistanis. The first Baloch revolt erupted in 1948, barely six months after Pakistan was born; this is the fifth. The rebels are splintered into several factions, the largest of which is the Balochistan Liberation Army. They use classic guerrilla tactics – ambushing military convoys, bombing gas pipelines, occasionally lobbing rockets into Quetta city. Casualties are relatively low: 152 FC soldiers died between 2007 and 2010, according to official figures, compared with more than 8,000 soldiers and rebels in the 1970s conflagration.
But this insurgency seems to have spread deeper into Baloch society than ever before. Anti-Pakistani fervour has gripped the province. Baloch schoolchildren refuse to sing the national anthem or fly its flag; women, traditionally secluded, have joined the struggle. Universities have become hotbeds of nationalist sentiment. "This is not just the usual suspects," says Rashed Rahman, editor of the Daily Times, one of few papers that regularly covers the conflict.
At a Quetta safehouse I meet Asad Baloch, a wiry, talkative 22-year-old activist with the Baloch Students' Organisation (Azad). "We provide moral and political support to the fighters," he says. "We are making people aware. When they are aware, they act." It is a risky business: about one-third of all "kill and dump" victims were members of the BSO.
Baloch anger is rooted in poverty. Despite its vast natural wealth, Balochistan is desperately poor – barely 25% of the population is literate (the national average is 47%), around 30% are unemployed and just 7% have access to tap water. And while Balochistan provides one-third of Pakistan's natural gas, only a handful of towns are hooked up to the supply grid.
The insurgents are demanding immediate control of the natural resources and, ultimately, independence. "We are not part of Pakistan," says Baloch.
His phone rings. News comes through that another two bodies have been discovered near the coast. One, Abdul Qayuum, was a BSO activist. Days later, videos posted on YouTube show an angry crowd carrying his bloodied corpse into a mortuary. He had been shot in the head.
The FC commander, Maj Gen Niazi, wearing a sharp, dark suit and with neatly combed hair (he has just come from a conference) says he has little time for the rebel demand. "The Baloch are being manipulated by their leaders," he says, noting that the scions of the main nationalist groups live in exile abroad – Hyrbyair Marri in London; Brahamdagh Bugti in Geneva. "They are enjoying the life in Europe while their people suffer in the mountains," he says with a sigh.
Worse again, he adds, they were supported by India. The Punjabi general offers no proof for his claim, but US and British intelligence broadly agree, according to the recent WikiLeaks cables. India sees Balochistan as payback for Pakistani meddling in Kashmir – which explains why Pakistani generals despise the nationalists so much. "Paid killers," says Niazi. He vehemently denies involvement in human rights violations. "To us, each and every citizen of Balochistan is equally dear," he says.
Civilian officials in the province, however, have another story. Last November, the provincial chief minister, Aslam Raisani, told the BBC that the security forces were "definitely" guilty of some killings; earlier this month, the province's top lawyer, Salahuddin Mengal, told the supreme court the FC was "lifting people at will". He resigned a week later.
However, gross human rights abuses are not limited to the army. As the conflict drags on, the insurgents have become increasingly brutal and ruthless. In the past two years, militants have kidnapped aid workers, killed at least four journalists and, most disturbingly, started to target "settlers" – unarmed civilians, mostly from neighbouring Punjab, many of whom have lived in Balochistan for decades. Some 113 settlers were killed in cold blood last year, according to government figures – civil servants, shopkeepers, miners. On 21 March, militants riding motorbikes sprayed gunfire into a camp of construction workers near Gwadar, killing 11; the Baloch Liberation Front claimed responsibility. Most grotesque, perhaps, are the attacks on education: 22 school teachers, university lecturers and education officials have been assassinated since January 2008, causing another 200 to flee their jobs.
As attitudes harden, the middle ground is being swept away in tide of bloodshed. "Our politicians have been silenced," says Habib Tahir, a human rights lawyer in Quetta. "They are afraid of the young." I ask a student in Quetta to defend the killing of teachers. "They are not teachers, they work for the intelligence agencies," one student tells me. "They are like thieves coming into our homes. They must go."
The Islamabad government seems helpless to halt Balochistan's slide into chaos. Two years ago, President Asif Ali Zardari announced a sweeping package of measures intended to assuage Baloch grievances, including thousands of jobs, a ban on new military garrisons and payment of $1.4bn (£800m) in overdue natural gas royalties. But violence has hijacked politics, the plan is largely untouched, and anaemic press coverage means there is little outside pressure for action.
Pakistan's foreign allies, obsessed with hunting Islamists, have ignored the problem. "We are the most secular people in the region, and still we are being ignored," says Noordin Mengal, who represents Balochistan on the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva.
In this information vacuum, the powerful do as they please. Lawyer Kachkol Ali witnessed security forces drag three men from his office in April 2009. Their bodies turned up five days later, dead and decomposed. After telling his story to the press, Ali was harassed by military intelligence, who warned him his life was in danger. He fled the country. "In Pakistan, there is only rule of the jungle," he says by phone from Lørenskog, a small Norwegian town where he won asylum last summer. "Our security agencies pick people up and treat them like war criminals," he says. "They don't even respect the dead."
Balochistan's dirty little war pales beside Pakistan's larger problems – the Taliban, al-Qaida, political upheaval. But it highlights a very fundamental danger – the ability of Pakistanis to live together in a country that, under its Islamic cloak, is a patchwork of ethnicities and cultures. "Balochistan is a warning of the real battle for Pakistan, which is about power and resources," says Haris Gazdar, a Karachi-based researcher. "And if we don't get it right, we're headed for a major conflict."
Before leaving Quetta I meet Faiza Mir, a 36-year-old lecturer in international relations at Quetta's Balochistan University. Militants have murdered four of her colleagues in the past three years, all because they were "Punjabi". Driving on to the campus, she points out the spots where they were killed, knowing she could be next.
"I can't leave," says Mir, a sparky woman with an irrepressible smile. "This is my home too." And so she engages in debate with students, sympathising with their concerns. "I try to make them understand that talk is better than war," she says.
But some compromises are impossible. Earlier on, students had asked Mir to remove a portrait of Muhammad Ali Jinnah, Pakistan's founding father, from her office wall. Mir politely refused, and Jinnah – an austere lawyer in a Savile Row suit - still stares down from her wall.
But how long will he stay there? "That's difficult to say," she answers.
Si inca unul LINK Heroin smuggling routes Balochistan borders Helmand province in Afghanistan, the centre of the Taliban insurgency and the world's single largest source of heroin. Baram Cha, a small town tucked into the Chagai Hills just inside the Afghan border, is a notorious hub of heroin processing labs, and has been raided by helicopter-borne teams of British special forces and Afghan counter-narcotics soldiers. From Helmand, the drugs cross Balochistan via two routes – west to Iran and south to the Makran coast on the Arabian Sea.
Gwadar port Completed in 2008, this Chinese-built project transformed a sleepy Baloch fishing village into a major deep-water port. It's strategically located near the Straits of Hormuz – a major oil shipping lane – and China wants access to the sea for its land-locked western provinces. But the US sees it as a potential military base, and the UAE considers it unwelcome competition. Baloch nationalists view Gwadar as an imposition by the central government whose benefits will bypass the province. It has become a hub of violent upheaval in the past two years, with shootings and bombings by nationalists, and reprisal abductions and killings by the security forces. Gwadar was not traditionally under the sway of tribal leaders, suggesting that Balochistan's fifth insurgency has a broader reach than previous ones.
Nato supply lines After the Khyber Pass, Balochistan is Nato's second largest Pakistani supply route to troops in Afghanistan. More than 3,000 trucks pass through Balochistan every month. Between nine and 12 of them are attacked and burned every month, according to army figures. It is not clear whether the attacks are by Baloch militants or pro-Taliban Islamists.
Taliban bases Taliban fighters rest and recuperate in madrasas and mosques dotted along the ethnic Pashtun belt of Balochistan, between Quetta and the border, where at least 30% of the population lives.
Nationalist insurgency One of the world largest natural gas fields is located at Sui, which provides approximately 30% of Pakistan's gas needs. The insurgency started in earnest from this region from 2005, when Bugti tribesmen attacked Pakistani security forces guarding the gas field. In 2006, the army killed the Bugti leader, Nawab Akbar Khan Bugti, at a cave in the mountains near Kohlu, dramatically fuelling the insurgency. Quetta, the provincial capital, has seen many "disappearances" of Baloch nationalists in recent years. Since July it has also seen a steady stream of bodies dropped on the edge of the city. Electricity, gas supplies and train services to the city are frequently attacked by Baloch rebels. The small town of Khuzdar is home to the Mengal tribe, which has been involved in several of Balochistan's insurgencies over the past six decades. It has seen a string of violent acts in the past year – shootings of journalists, abduction of Baloch activists by security forces, dumping of bodies bearing torture marks. Nationalist rebels, in turn, have lobbed rockets into the local Frontier Corps base and ambushed military convoys.
Never Fight a Land War in Asia March 1, 2011 By George Friedman
U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, speaking at West Point, said last week that “Any future defense secretary who advises the president to again send a big American land army into Asia or into the Middle East or Africa should have his head examined.” In saying this, Gates was repeating a dictum laid down by Douglas MacArthur after the Korean War, who urged the United States to avoid land wars in Asia. Given that the United States has fought four major land wars in Asia since World War II — Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq — none of which had ideal outcomes, it is useful to ask three questions: First, why is fighting a land war in Asia a bad idea? Second, why does the United States seem compelled to fight these wars? And third, what is the alternative that protects U.S. interests in Asia without large-scale military land wars?
The Hindrances of Overseas Wars
Let’s begin with the first question, the answer to which is rooted in demographics and space. The population of Iraq is currently about 32 million. Afghanistan has a population of less than 30 million. The U.S. military, all told, consists of about 1.5 million active-duty personnel (plus 980,000 in the reserves), of whom more than 550,000 belong to the Army and about 200,000 are part of the Marine Corps. Given this, it is important to note that the United States strains to deploy about 200,000 troops at any one time in Iraq and Afghanistan, and that many of these troops are in support rather than combat roles. The same was true in Vietnam, where the United States was challenged to field a maximum of about 550,000 troops (in a country much more populous than Iraq or Afghanistan) despite conscription and a larger standing army. Indeed, the same problem existed in World War II.
When the United States fights in the Eastern Hemisphere, it fights at great distances, and the greater the distance, the greater the logistical cost. More ships are needed to deliver the same amount of material, for example. That absorbs many troops. The logistical cost of fighting at a distance is that it diverts numbers of troops (or requires numbers of civilian personnel) disproportionate to the size of the combat force.
Regardless of the number of troops deployed, the U.S. military is always vastly outnumbered by the populations of the countries to which it is deployed. If parts of these populations resist as light-infantry guerrilla forces or employ terrorist tactics, the enemy rapidly swells to a size that can outnumber U.S. forces, as in Vietnam and Korea. At the same time, the enemy adopts strategies to take advantage of the core weakness of the United States — tactical intelligence. The resistance is fighting at home. It understands the terrain and the culture. The United States is fighting in an alien environment. It is constantly at an intelligence disadvantage. That means that the effectiveness of the native forces is multiplied by excellent intelligence, while the effectiveness of U.S. forces is divided by lack of intelligence.
The United States compensates with technology, from space-based reconnaissance and air power to counter-battery systems and advanced communications. This can make up the deficit but only by massive diversions of manpower from ground-combat operations. Maintaining a helicopter requires dozens of ground-crew personnel. Where the enemy operates with minimal technology multiplied by intelligence, the United States compensates for lack of intelligence with massive technology that further reduces available combat personnel. Between logistics and technological force multipliers, the U.S. “point of the spear” shrinks. If you add the need to train, relieve, rest and recuperate the ground-combat forces, you are left with a small percentage available to fight.
The paradox of this is that American forces will win the engagements but may still lose the war. Having identified the enemy, the United States can overwhelm it with firepower. The problem the United States has is finding the enemy and distinguishing it from the general population. As a result, the United States is well-suited for the initial phases of combat, when the task is to defeat a conventional force. But after the conventional force has been defeated, the resistance can switch to methods difficult for American intelligence to deal with. The enemy can then control the tempo of operations by declining combat where it is at a disadvantage and initiating combat when it chooses.
The example of the capitulation of Germany and Japan in World War II is frequently cited as a model of U.S. forces defeating and pacifying an opposing nation. But the Germans were not defeated primarily by U.S. ground troops. The back of the Wehrmacht was broken by the Soviets on their own soil with the logistical advantages of short supply lines. And, of course, Britain and numerous other countries were involved. It is doubtful that the Germans would have capitulated to the Americans alone. The force the United States deployed was insufficient to defeat Germany. The Germans had no appetite for continuing a resistance against the Russians and saw surrendering to the Americans and British as sanctuary from the Russians. They weren’t going to resist them. As for Japan, it was not ground forces but air power, submarine warfare and atomic bombs that finished them — and the emperor’s willingness to order a surrender. It was not land power that prevented resistance but air and sea power, plus a political compromise by MacArthur in retaining and using the emperor. Had the Japanese emperor been removed, I suspect that the occupation of Japan would have been much more costly. Neither Germany nor Japan are examples in which U.S. land forces compelled capitulation and suppressed resistance.
The problem the United States has in the Eastern Hemisphere is that the size of the force needed to occupy a country initially is much smaller than the force needed to pacify the country. The force available for pacification is much smaller than needed because the force the United States can deploy demographically without committing to total war is simply too small to do the job — and the size needed to do the job is unknown.
U.S. Global Interests
The deeper problem is this: The United States has global interests. While the Soviet Union was the primary focus of the United States during the Cold War, no power threatens to dominate Eurasia now, and therefore no threat justifies the singular focus of the United States. In time of war in Iraq and Afghanistan, the United States must still retain a strategic reserve for other unanticipated contingencies. This further reduces the available force for combat.
Some people argue that the United States is insufficiently ruthless in prosecuting war, as if it would be more successful without political restraints at home. The Soviets and the Nazis, neither noted for gentleness, were unable to destroy the partisans behind German lines or the Yugoslav resistance, in spite of brutal tactics. The guerrilla has built-in advantages in warfare for which brutality cannot compensate.
Given all this, the question is why the United States has gotten involved in wars in Eurasia four times since World War II. In each case it is obvious: for political reasons. In Korea and Vietnam, it was to demonstrate to doubting allies that the United States had the will to resist the Soviets. In Afghanistan, it was to uproot al Qaeda. In Iraq, the reasons are murkier, more complex and less convincing, but the United States ultimately went in, in my opinion, to convince the Islamic world of American will.
The United States has tried to shape events in the Eastern Hemisphere by the direct application of land power. In Korea and Vietnam, it was trying to demonstrate resolve against Soviet and Chinese power. In Afghanistan and Iraq, it was trying to shape the politics of the Muslim world. The goal was understandable but the amount of ground force available was not. In Korea, it resulted in stalemate; in Vietnam, defeat. We await the outcome in Iraq and Afghanistan, but given Gates’ statement, the situation for the United States is not necessarily hopeful.
In each case, the military was given an ambiguous mission. This was because a clear outcome — defeating the enemy — was unattainable. At the same time, there were political interests in each. Having engaged, simply leaving did not seem an option. Therefore, Korea turned into an extended presence in a near-combat posture, Vietnam ended in defeat for the American side, and Iraq and Afghanistan have turned, for the time being, into an uncertain muddle that no reasonable person expects to end with the declared goals of a freed and democratic pair of countries.
Problems of Strategy
There are two problems with American strategy. The first is using the appropriate force for the political mission. This is not a question so much of the force as it is of the mission. The use of military force requires clarity of purpose; otherwise, a coherent strategy cannot emerge. Moreover, it requires an offensive mission. Defensive missions (such as Vietnam and Korea) by definition have no terminal point or any criteria for victory. Given the limited availability of ground combat forces, defensive missions allow the enemy’s level of effort to determine the size of the force inserted, and if the force is insufficient to achieve the mission, the result is indefinite deployment of scarce forces.
Then there are missions with clear goals initially but without an understanding of how to deal with Act II. Iraq suffered from an offensive intention ill suited to the enemy’s response. Having destroyed the conventional forces of Iraq, the United States was unprepared for the Iraqi response, which was guerrilla resistance on a wide scale. The same was true in Afghanistan. Counterinsurgency is occupation warfare. It is the need to render a population — rather than an army — unwilling and incapable of resisting. It requires vast resources and large numbers of troops that outstrip the interest. Low-cost counter-insurgency with insufficient forces will always fail. Since the United States uses limited forces because it has to, counterinsurgency is the most dangerous kind of war for the United States. The idea has always been that the people prefer the U.S. occupation to the threats posed by their fellow countrymen and that the United States can protect those who genuinely do prefer the former. That may be the idea, but there is never enough U.S. force available.
Another model for dealing with the problem of shaping political realities can be seen in the Iran-Iraq war. In that war, the United States allowed the mutual distrust of the two countries to eliminate the threats posed by both. When the Iraqis responded by invading Kuwait, the United States responded with a massive counter with very limited ends — the reconquest of Kuwait and the withdrawal of forces. It was a land war in Asia designed to defeat a known and finite enemy army without any attempt at occupation.
The problem with all four wars is that they were not wars in a conventional sense and did not use the military as militaries are supposed to be used. The purpose of a military is to defeat enemy conventional forces. As an army of occupation against a hostile population, military forces are relatively weak. The problem for the United States is that such an army must occupy a country for a long time, and the U.S. military simply lacks the ground forces needed to occupy countries and still be available to deal with other threats.
By having an unclear mission, you have an uncertain terminal point. When does it end? You then wind up with a political problem internationally — having engaged in the war, you have allies inside and outside of the country that have fought with you and taken risks with you. Withdrawal leaves them exposed, and potential allies will be cautious in joining with you in another war. The political costs spiral and the decision to disengage is postponed. The United States winds up in the worst of all worlds. It terminates not on its own but when its position becomes untenable, as in Vietnam. This pyramids the political costs dramatically.
Wars need to be fought with ends that can be achieved by the forces available. Donald Rumsfeld once said, “You go to war with the Army you have. They’re not the Army you might want or wish to have at a later time.” I think that is a fundamental misunderstanding of war. You do not engage in war if the army you have is insufficient. When you understand the foundations of American military capability and its limits in Eurasia, Gates’ view on war in the Eastern Hemisphere is far more sound than Rumsfeld’s.
The Diplomatic Alternative
The alternative is diplomacy, not understood as an alternative to war but as another tool in statecraft alongside war. Diplomacy can find the common ground between nations. It can also be used to identify the hostility of nations and use that hostility to insulate the United States by diverting the attention of other nations from challenging the United States. That is what happened during the Iran-Iraq war. It wasn’t pretty, but neither was the alternative.
Diplomacy for the United States is about maintaining the balance of power and using and diverting conflict to manage the international system. Force is the last resort, and when it is used, it must be devastating. The argument I have made, and which I think Gates is asserting, is that at a distance, the United States cannot be devastating in wars dependent on land power. That is the weakest aspect of American international power and the one the United States has resorted to all too often since World War II, with unacceptable results. Using U.S. land power as part of a combined arms strategy is occasionally effective in defeating conventional forces, as it was with North Korea (and not China) but is inadequate to the demands of occupation warfare. It makes too few troops available for success, and it does not know how many troops might be needed.
This is not a policy failure of any particular U.S. president. George W. Bush and Barack Obama have encountered precisely the same problem, which is that the forces that have existed in Eurasia, from the Chinese People’s Liberation Army in Korea to the Taliban in Afghanistan, have either been too numerous or too agile (or both) for U.S. ground forces to deal with. In any war, the primary goal is not to be defeated. An elective war in which the criteria for success are unclear and for which the amount of land force is insufficient must be avoided. That is Gates’ message. It is the same one MacArthur delivered, and the one Dwight Eisenhower exercised when he refused to intervene in Vietnam on France’s behalf. As with the Monroe Doctrine, it should be elevated to a principle of U.S. foreign policy, not because it is a moral principle but because it is a very practical one.
Mongolia Prepares for Flood of Money as Copper, Coal ‘Supercharge’ Economy
Hurrying into her cramped office deep within Mongolia’s huge Soviet-era Government House, Parliament member Sanjaasuren Oyun, 46, is flushed with excitement, a smile creasing her usually serious face.
She hands papers to her young female assistant and exchanges some quick words in the low guttural murmur of Mongolian. Dressed in a pinstriped suit, with a pearl necklace, hair cropped to a business-like shoulder length, and an iPad tucked under her arm, she turns to a waiting reporter.
“Sorry to make you wait,” she said, switching smoothly to English, which she picked up as a student at Cambridge. “It’s an important debate we are having today. We are considering a freeze on new exploration licenses.”
Outside, it’s a still-chilly, late-May afternoon in Ulaanbaatar, no sign of green along its potholed dirt roads. But the capital city of about 1 million people is already being transformed by forces greater than the change of seasons, Bloomberg BusinessWeek reports in its July 25 edition.
A freeze on licenses to explore for minerals is no small matter in Mongolia, a country undergoing a resources boom, as miners such as London-based Rio Tinto Group and China’s Shenhua Group compete for the right to extract coal, copper, gold, molybdenum and uranium.
It’s a resource play that’s expected to bring a flood of money into the impoverished country over the next decade, centered around huge mining projects such as the Shivee Ovoo and Tavan Tolgoi coal reserves, valued at about $300 billion and $400 billion, respectively, and the copper and gold mine Oyu Tolgoi, worth some $300 billion, according to Quam Asset Management Ltd. in Hong Kong, which runs a Mongolia-focused investment fund. Wealth, Wise Use
Oyun is at the center of the country’s efforts to pick its way between wealth and wise use. She is a geologist who once worked for the biggest investor in Mongolia’s mining industry, Rio Tinto, yet she has made a career pushing for the rights of ordinary Mongolians and fighting corruption.
She is also part of the nation’s young democratic history. On the wall in her office is a picture of her brother Zorig, a member of Parliament who seemed on his way to becoming prime minister when he was killed in 1998. His murder is still unsolved. Investor Talks
On the Parliament floor, members are demanding that the Mineral Resources and Energy Minister Dashdorj Zorigt step down for his handling of negotiations with foreign investors.
“The situation is a bit different from before,” Oyun says, gesturing at a television broadcasting the debate. “When we made our first mining legislation in 1997, we were desperate to attract investment, but no more. We can be more demanding.”
She acknowledges that the politicians may be grandstanding, aiming to embarrass rivals in the run-up to 2012’s presidential elections. The energy minister didn’t step down, though the freeze on new licenses has been extended through 2011.
The discussion about ensuring Mongolia benefits from its resources is a struggle that pits nomadic herdsmen and environmentalists against well-connected players such as Prime Minister Sukhbaatar Batbold and Baasangombo Enebish, executive director and chief executive officer of coal company Erdenes MGL, as well as global resource giants such as Rio Tinto and Peabody Energy Corp. (BTU) Mining Protest
Oyun realizes it’s time to meet her daughter and rushes outside, where her driver waits with the 5-year-old.
As the car pulls out around Sukhbaatar Square, in front of Parliament, Oyun points out an ongoing protest: Three round felt tents, known as “yurts” or “gers” in Mongolia, have been set up at the far end of the square. Their occupants are demanding the government close the mining industry to foreign companies.
“The gentleman who organized this protest has become something of an extremist --- I’m not sure that’s the right word,” she says, referring to Tsetsgee Munkhbayar, a former herdsman turned environmentalist.
“He fired guns near mining equipment last year and now says he and his followers may have to take up arms against the government,” she continues, frowning. “He is a resource nationalist. But here in Mongolia we need to strike a balance. How to be sensible but also populist -- yes, we face this tension.”
Mongolia is empty and remote, perhaps one reason Genghis Khan -- or Chinggis Khaan as his name is spelled locally in English -- set out to take over most of Eurasia eight centuries ago. Desert, Steppe
On the two-hour-plus flight north from Beijing, the blankness of the Gobi Desert dominates before becoming the sweeping yellow and green of the steppe, then finally long ranges of treeless mountains as the plane approaches Ulaanbaatar. Other than the broad changes in landscape below, little else is seen. There are no buildings, no roads, no people, no trees, nothing much at all, really.
Squeezed between China and Russia, and equal in size to western Europe, Mongolia has just 2.8 million people, making it one of the most sparsely populated countries in the world, notwithstanding the livestock.
Mongolia’s National Statistical Office estimates there are 33 million head of livestock in the country, including goats, sheep, horses, cattle and camels. More than a third of Mongols live in the rundown capital, while about a quarter are still semi-nomadic, living in gers and moving their herds along with the seasons. Mineral Riches
While it may be short on humans, Mongolia is one of the richest nations in terms of natural resources, and that’s just the known deposits. Four-fifths of the country is still unsurveyed. Over the next decade, copper production is expected to double, iron ore to triple, coal to grow by six times, and gold and oil by 10 and 13 times, respectively.
Much of that growth will be driven by demand from China, predicts Eurasia Capital, an Ulaanbaatar-based investment bank that focuses on Central Asia and Mongolia.
The biggest prize is Oyu Tolgoi -- or Turquoise Hill -- named after the color of copper oxide as it seeps from the ground, and one of the largest deposits of copper and gold.
Situated deep in the Gobi Desert, it’s just 80 kilometers (50 miles) from China’s northern border. Canadian company Ivanhoe Mines Ltd. and Rio signed an agreement with Mongolia to develop it in 2009 after the project developer Ivanhoe tried for more than six years to reach a mining accord. Rio last month agreed to increase its stake in Ivanhoe to 46.5 percent. Burnt in Effigy
Securing the deal wasn’t easy; disputes over how much control Mongolia should cede to the foreign miners led to bitter negotiations as well as protests where effigies of Ivanhoe’s founder Robert Friedland and then President Nambaryn Enkhbayar were burnt. It was “readily acknowledged” that participants in the demonstrations were paid to parade, Ivanhoe Capital Corp. spokesman Bob Williamson said.
“It is one of the flagship projects that Rio has,” said Cameron McRae, president and CEO of Oyu Tolgoi LLC, in his expansive office in the Monnis Tower, one of Ulaanbaatar’s new high-rises. With an expected $6 billion in annual revenue from the mine, “it gives the copper group the opportunity to move into one of the top three in the world,” McRae said.
Oyu Tolgoi employs close to 3,000 Mongolians. By early 2013 the company plans to invest $7 billion, including building 100 kilometers of road from the mine to the Chinese border, an 85- kilometer pipeline to bring water to the operation, a 180- kilometer transmission line, and eventually a power station that may cost $1.5 billion. Supercharging Economy
“We are very aware this is transforming Mongolia’s economy,” says David Paterson, vice president for regional development and communications at Oyu Tolgoi, also noting that capital spending on the project’s first stage alone is equal to Mongolia’s annual gross domestic product.
Simply getting ready to mine is supercharging the tiny economy. GDP grew 6.1 percent last year and was up 9.7 percent in the first quarter of 2011 from a year earlier.
“The mining sector could very well carry Mongolia for the next 50 years,” says Parmeshwar Ramlogan, the Ulaanbaatar-based resident representative for Mongolia at the International Monetary Fund.
Ramlogan predicts Mongolia could grow at double-digit rates for at least the next 10 years, raising per capita income -- now at $2,470 -- fourfold within a decade and making it one of the fastest-growing economies in the world. Transforming Economies
“There is a time in these transforming economies when normal economic growth goes out the window,” says Richard Harris, CEO of Quam Asset Management. “It’s like a geological fault that the economy goes through. You are talking about a nomad or shopkeeper in a small town who suddenly becomes a truck driver or a miner. And he goes from earning a few dollars a day to a few dollars an hour. Then you see the economic changes that go with that.”
Policy makers in Mongolia have created a so-called human development fund in large part through prepaid taxes from foreign investors in the Oyu Tolgoi mine, and it doles out 21,000 tugriks ($17) to every Mongolian once a month.
Government negotiators are also demanding that the foreign companies that will develop part of the Tavan Tolgoi mine, which holds an estimated 6.4 billion metric tons of coal, pay their taxes early. Plans call for listing shares in the other half of the project in London or Hong Kong, then granting 10 percent of them to Mongolians, making every citizen a shareholder. Years of Neglect
No place is likely to change as much as Ulaanbaatar. Mongolia was a satellite state of the Soviet Union from 1921 to 1990, and the years of neglect are still evident in the capital, with block after block of battered-looking cement residential buildings lining rutted roads.
A statue of Lenin still stands in front of the Ulaanbaatar Hotel, built in 1961 to house visiting dignitaries from the Soviet bloc. Oyun’s grandfather, a Russian explorer, geographer and ethnologist who spent 26 years in Mongolia, was forcibly returned to the Soviet Union in 1939 and died there in a gulag in 1942. His family never learned the nature of his “crime.”
Already high-rises are springing up around Sukhbaatar Square. Louis Vuitton, Emporio Armani, Burberry and Ermenegildo Zegna boutiques vie for attention in the blue-glass Central Tower on the southeastern edge of the square.
In the Monet Restaurant, on the building’s 17th floor, businessmen in expensive suits dine on Norwegian salmon and Australian prime beef, finishing with a platter of Gouda, Camembert and Roquefort cheeses with wild blueberry crackers.
A bottle of Mouton Cadet Reserve Sauternes can be had for 135,000 tugriks ($108) while diners gaze over the square and beyond to the distant new sports stadium, built with Chinese money. Irish Pub
At night a wilder side emerges in places such as Seoul Street’s Grand Khaan Irish Pub, known for its hamburgers, beer and occasional fistfights, and in the city’s numerous strip clubs.
In the notorious Marco Polo Club, Australians and Americans working for mining-equipment companies mingle with visiting European investment bankers, drink Chinggis Khaan-brand vodka mixed with Red Bull, and watch topless Mongolian women pole dance.
Harris Kupperman, 30, runs his own hedge fund, Praetorian Capital Management, based in Miami Beach. On a trip through North Asia last August, he was struck by the economic potential of Mongolia. He’s bought a house in the high-end neighborhood of Zaisan with views over Ulaanbaatar. In February he started the Mongolia Growth Fund, raising $36.6 million.
New York Vibe
“All it takes is for you to put your feet on the ground here, you can feel the energy everywhere,” he said. “It’s unlike anywhere in the world in terms of sheer energy, apart from New York and maybe Hong Kong.”
Kupperman has started an insurance company and plans to buy, renovate and rent the dilapidated Soviet-era apartments that fill the core of the capital. After looking at other resource economies such as Qatar, Dubai and Kazakhstan, Kupperman and his partners concluded that real estate and finance are two industries that flourish in mineral boom economies, but without the capital costs and political risks of mining.
Sipping on a Heineken in the View Lounge, a stylish bar on the rooftop of the 11-story boutique Corporate Hotel, Kupperman notes that he’s not the only investor in town. Dazed and Confused
“You go out on the street any day at noon and you will see dazed and confused hedge-fund guys walking around, with a Mongolian as a guide, with dust all over their $1,000 shoes. And you know they are thinking, [how can I] invest in this country?”
Mongolia continues to court start-up money. When Prime Minister Batbold went to China in June, Mongolia’s President Tsakhia Elbegdorj was in the U.S., visiting, among other places, the offices of Bloomberg Businessweek.
Elbegdorj, 48, is a former journalist and two-time prime minister. Like many of the parliamentarians making decisions about the country’s future, he studied abroad. He has a master’s degree in public administration from the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard.
On his June 17 visit he noted that Mongolia is planning to issue dollar-denominated bonds “in the near future” to finance expansion of the mining industry and build roads and bridges. It has yet to do so.
Oyun is a technocrat in her own right. In 1992, as a student majoring in geology at Cambridge, she flew with a prospecting team organized by Rio Tinto deep into the Mongolian desert to examine the potential of Tavan Tolgoi, then an undeveloped mine. Oyun graduated from Cambridge in 1996 with a doctorate in earth sciences and joined Rio Tinto in Newbury, England, at the branch then responsible for new projects. Stabbed to Death
In October 1998, one day after returning to England from a one-month trek in the Tianshan Mountains of Kyrgyzstan, Oyun received a call at two in the morning from a Mongolian colleague working in Rio’s Ulaanbaatar office. Her brother Zorig, then infrastructure minister in the government, had been stabbed to death in his small apartment in the capital, just before an election that would have likely made him prime minister.
In an interview just before his death, Oyun recalls, “he said he was very worried that vested interests were taking precedence over the national interests of Mongolia.” Russian Mafia
According to Oyun, many Mongolians are convinced that her brother’s unsolved murder was a politically motivated assassination, possibly involving Russian mafia interested in the country’s then-largest coal mine, Erdenet.
Days after Zorig’s murder, Oyun returned to Mongolia for his funeral.
“There was this outpouring of public grief that, even for me, was overwhelming to see,” she remembers. She moved back to Mongolia to begin a political career, founding Civic Will, an opposition party.
Since 2009 the country has been governed by a “Grand Coalition” of the Mongolian People’s Party and the Democratic Party. Civic Will’s platform in large part centers on fighting corruption, especially the growing influence of money in Mongolian politics.
“I entered politics in 1998 because of my brother’s murder,” Oyun says. “I didn’t join either party because I didn’t find support from either of them for clean politics.”
Oyun is fixated on transparent and clean governance, concerned that the new money will be siphoned off through corruption. Corruption Concern
Transparency International, a corruption watchdog, last year rated Mongolia in the bottom third of 178 countries, putting it on par with Mali and Mozambique.
Of particular concern are the close links between government and large businesses. A “majority of the 76 MPs have significant commercial interests in a range of sectors,” London-based risk consultants Exclusive Analysis said in a 2009 report on Mongolia.
“People are obsessed with money,” said Tsetsgee Munkhbayar, 45, organizer of the protest in Sukhbataar Square. With a face brown from years in the sun, Munkhbayar usually dresses in traditional Mongolian garb: a deel, the long robe generally worn with a sash, and a rounded, pitched helmet-like hat.
“The traditional Mongolian perspective of loving nature and mother earth is being forgotten,” he said. As a people we are at a dead-end. We must get ourselves away from the idea that economics is everything and that economics will save us.” Fire Nation
Munkhbayar heads a coalition of environmental and nationalist groups called Fire Nation, which organizes protests against the rush to develop the mineral economy. Self-trained in environmental legislation, he hands out copies of the national mining law to a visiting reporter. Frustrated by what he says is the mining industry’s tendency to ignore land protections, Munkhbayar and others have taken to violent civil disobedience.
Last September, Munkhbayar was part of the group that fired bullets into mining equipment owned by Canadian and Chinese companies that he says were breaking the law. While he claims no employees were directly threatened, he says without remorse that the incident was intimidating as staff “ran or tried to get out of the way.”
On June 3, Munkhbayar led a group of about 50 horsemen into the center of the city where they shot arrows at Government House. They were protesting the lack of official response to calls for a national referendum to elect a new government. ‘Bribing Officials’
Munkhbayar does much of his work out of a small office in Ulaanbataar’s Sukhbaatar district, where on a May visit two volunteers are tapping on ancient, generic computers. Camping gear, including traditional Mongolian wooden saddles, is piled against one wall. His wife and 8-year-old daughter, youngest of four children, watch a tiny television.
“International corporations are bribing our government officials so they can take over Mongolia,” Munkhbayar said. “People should stop buying stocks from international mining companies that are involved in exploiting Mongolia. Instead of spending money to buy stocks they should use that money to help movements like ours.”
With a national election looming next year, some financiers and politicians fear Parliament could take a few pages from Munkhbayar and vote in policies that might damp economic growth. It has happened before.
Since leaving the Soviet Union, Mongolia has zigzagged between privatization and nationalization. In the mid-1990s, Mongolian politicians, inspired by Newt Gingrich, even wrote a “Contract with Mongolia.” Later, populist calls to nationalize industry coincided with the passage of the highest profits tax on gold and copper in the world. It was repealed two years ago. Swing to Populism
As commodity prices rise, Mongolia may be swinging back toward the populists.
Despite passing a stringent fiscal stability law last year, requiring that the deficit not exceed 2 percent of the budget, the government plans to run up a deficit more than four times that amount this year. That may bring inflation into double digits and drive up the value of the tugrik, making non-mineral parts of the economy, such as Mongolia’s cashmere industry, less competitive.
It could also bring on the so-called Dutch disease, says Rogier van den Brink, lead economist for Mongolia at the World Bank. That’s when the discovery of natural resources leads to the decline of a country’s manufacturing industries.
“It is always very tempting for government and politicians to say we are rich,” says van den Brink. “The only problem is, it’s still in the ground. So let’s spend all this money in advance. That puts fuel on the fire of an already overheating economy.” Policy Extremes
It’s true Mongolia has veered between policy extremes, concedes Oyun, now sitting in the second-floor office of the Zorig Foundation, in an old, high-ceilinged building next door to Mongolia’s Foreign Ministry -- where Oyun served as minister from 2007 to 2008.
A large map of Mongolia covers much of one wall, next to an assortment of five photos of Zorig, including one of him perched on a supporter’s shoulders addressing crowds during a 1990 protest. Student volunteers wander in to ask Oyun about her schedule for the next week.
“If we stick to the golden middle -- if we stick to the main international trends of doing business and having good governance -- not going to either the right or left extremes, then we don’t have to be what economists call the darling of the ultraliberals in the West, but we don’t have to introduce the highest windfall tax in the world either,” she said.
“There is finally, after 20 years, a real opportunity for Mongolia to grow, and to create jobs and income for the population. I can’t expect us politicians to be clever, but if we don’t come up with stupid decisions, then we should be fine for at least the next few years,” she said with a laugh.
“As Genghis Khan apparently said, it’s easy to ride on a horse and conquer a country, but much more difficult to get down from the horse and run it.”
--Dexter Roberts in Beijing. Editors: Bryant Urstadt, Andrew Hobbs
Sursa: Money.ro | Publicat: 12 nov 2011, 15:05 | Actualizat: 12 nov 2011, 15:11
După ce la începutul acestui an a avut loc primul test al avionului "invizibil" construit de chinezi, arma care a pus pe jar americanii, acum a ieșit la iveală un nou set de fotografii cu avioanele J-20 În luna agust a acestui an, Reuters informa că pentru noul prototip al chinezilor s-a folosit tehnologie rusească.
Experţii spuneau acum câteva luni că a cincea generaţie de avioane chineze invizibile J-20, care a avut zborul inaugural în luna ianuarie a acestui an, în timpul unei vizite a secretarului american pentru apărare, ar putea avea originile din avionul rusesc Mikoyan 1.44 care nu a fost niciodată produs.
Ceea ce ar putea fi adevărat. O sursă apropiată industriei de apărare ruseşti, care a dorit să-și păstreze anonimatul, a declarat că similarităţile dintre cele două avioane arată că tehnologia Mikoyan a trecut în mâinile chinezilor.“Se pare că au avut acces...la documente ce fac referire la Mikoyan”. Aceasta a mai adăugat că nu este clar dacă acest transfer de tehnologie este sau nu legal.
Evident că, autoritățile chineze, dar și compania rusească care a supravegheat producția avioanelor Mikoyan au negat trasferul de tehnologie.
Analiştii spun că astfel Moscova ar putea fi cu ochii pe abilităţile de apărare ale vecinului din est. Analistul independent Adil Mukashev spune că la mijloc ar putea fi vorba de o tranzacţie financiară. “China a cumpărat tehnologia pe bucăţi, inclusiv coada avionului”, a declarat acesta.
Uite asta nu pricep eu : de ce nu se fac niste portavioane (vreo 300..) si submarine (cam la vreo 500 bucati) invizibile si românesti. Le combinam cu aviatia (invizibila si ea,vreo 700 de escadrile) si tancurile (cel putin 6000,tot invizibile) si-l punem pe unu' sa le coordoneze dintr-o sala mare plina de ecrane.
Puterea militară a Chinei creşte pe zi ce trece. În replică, SUA încheie un acord de staţionare a trupelor americane în Australia.
Noul scenariu este luat în calcul după ce Washington-ul, ale cărui baze militare au devenit vulnerabile în Pacificul de Vest, a încheiat, săptămâna trecută, un acord istoric cu Australia: 2.500 de militari ai Marinei americane vor staţiona în partea de nord a ţării.
Războiul dintre cele mari puteri s-ar putea duce însă şi într-un alt mod decât cel clasic. Cum chinezii fac deja experimente cyber prin care penetrează corporaţiile americane, dar şi sistemele informatice guvernamentale, este de aşteptat ca în momentul unei confruntări demersul Chinei să fie devastator într-o epocă în care calculatoarele controlează aproape totul.
Pregătiri de război? Forţele Navale chineze, îndemnate să se pregătească de confruntări armate
Preşedintele chinez, Hu Jintao, a îndemnat marţi Forţele Navale să fie pregătite de confruntări armate
Preşedintele Hu a îndemnat Forţele Navale să "accelereze modernizarea" şi să "înceapă pregătiri intensive pentru confruntarea militară", pentru a " garanta securitatea naţională şi pacea mondială", raportează agenţia oficială.
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