China’s state media has said its new missile, called the DF-21D, was built to strike a moving ship up to about 1,700 miles away. U.S. defense analysts say the missile is designed to come in at an angle too high for U.S. defenses against sea-skimming cruise missiles and too low for defenses against other ballistic missiles.

Even if U.S. systems were able to shoot down one or two, some experts say, China could overwhelm the defenses by targeting a carrier with several missiles at the same time.

As such, the new missile—China says it isn’t currently deployed—could push U.S. carriers farther from Chinese shores, making it more difficult for American fighter jets to penetrate its airspace or to establish air superiority in a conflict near China’s borders.

In response, the Navy is developing pilotless, long-range drone aircraft that could take off from aircraft carriers far out at sea and remain aloft longer than a human pilot could do safely. In addition, the Air Force wants a fleet of pilotless bombers capable of cruising over vast stretches of the Pacific.

Rhetorical brinksmanship on both sides has heightened over the past year as China has sought to enhance its military capabilities amid American intentions to play a larger role in Asia. China acquired its first aircraft carrier and a Japanese patrol plane reported the first confirmed sighting of a Chinese secret drone last year, and in December President Hu Jintao instructed the Chinese navy to speed up its development and prepare for warfare. Bloomberg also reports that a Pentagon defense strategy review, scheduled to be released tomorrow, will urge the branches of the U.S. Armed Forces to combine resources to ensure that China cannot block America’s access to the South China Sea:

The military services must work more cooperatively to pool their intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance capabilities and cyber-security tools, as well as operational concepts, the review is expected to say, according to an administration official familiar with the review who asked not to be identified.

The U.S. should be able to deter any emerging anti-access capabilities such as the diesel attack submarines being developed by China and the anti-ship ballistic missiles deployed by China and Iran, and if necessary, defeat them, said the administration official.

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“The names of the military pilots selected in 2010 to form China’s second group of taikonauts — which have been a closely guarded secret for the last 18 months — appear to have been released [as the result of] a possible philatelic blunder,” said Tony Quine, an Isle of Man-based space memorabilia collector and contributing writer for the British Interplanetary Society’s “Spaceflight” magazine.

Quine worked with Russian space industry expert Igor Lissov to confirm the envelope’s autographs since finding it listed for sale on a German space dealer’s website two days ago. The two elicited the assistance of Chinese space enthusiasts to help verify the translation of the seven signatures.

See more on China’s space programme, via CDT.

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The study is yet to be released, but already it has sparked a congressional hearing and been circulated among top officials in the Pentagon, including the Air Force vice chief of staff ….

“It’s not quite a bombshell, but those thoughts and estimates are being checked against what people think they know based on classified information,” said a Defense Department strategist who would discuss the study only on the condition of anonymity.

The study’s critics, however, have questioned the unorthodox Internet-based research of the students, who drew from sources as disparate as Google Earth, blogs, military journals and, perhaps most startlingly, a fictionalized TV docudrama about Chinese artillery soldiers — the rough equivalent of watching Fox’s TV show “24” for insights into U.S. counterterrorism efforts.

The backlash has likely been sharpened by fears that an unexpectedly large Chinese arsenal could derail delicate arms reduction negotiations between the US and Russia. World Security Institute researcher Matt Durnin expressed some of the more moderate criticism in a China Real Time Report post, ‘More Tunnels, Yes. More Nukes? Not Necessarily‘:

The most obvious fault – and one that has been widely noted – is Karber’s repetition of a fantastical estimate for the number of nuclear weapons in the PLA arsenal, which turns out to come from blogosphere speculation based on earlier misestimates that were long ago debunked.

A more basic, though less sensational, flaw concerns the connection Karber and his team draw between length of tunnels and numbers of nuclear warheads. There is little question that the PLA have been busy diggers—China’s media reported in 2009 that the military had finished over 3,000 miles of tunnels—but there are reasons for tunneling other than hiding nukes ….

In spite of these doubts, it’s premature to toss out the baby with the bathwater. Karber’s suggestion that more tunnels equal more nukes may be a stretch, but there’s no question that China is increasing the quality and survivability of its nuclear forces—the keys to a convincing deterrent. In this sense, the data gathered by Karber and team could be helpful to understanding how China’s attitude toward its nuclear forces is evolving. The outcome will be building blocks to a better understanding of China’s nuclear program and the prospects for disarmament — provided that readers take Karber’s conclusions with a generous dose of skepticism.

China nuclear analyst Gregory Kulacki went further, according to the Washington Post, calling the work’s conclusions “ridiculous” and its methodology—described in some detail in the Post’s article—”incompetent and lazy”.

Kulacki has blamed Washington’s unyielding insistence on greater transparency from China for the general ill health of nuclear relations between the two powers. The US refuses to declare an absolute no-first-use policy like China’s, while China remains unwilling to adopt Cold War-style crisis prevention protocols to prevent inadvertent nuclear escalation. Some progress, however, has been made on the issue of container port screening for nuclear materials. From China Real Time Report:

In a joint U.S.-China non-proliferation initiative, officials [this] week are scheduled to commission and demonstrate a radiation detection system at Shanghai’s flagship Yangshan port, according to a brief statement distributed Friday by the U.S. Consulate in Shanghai.

“This U.S.-Chinese effort is the first project of its kind in China,” the statement said ….

Installation of the port equipment is part of a global U.S. program called the Megaports Initiative, run by a Department of Energy division that aims to equip 100 of the world’s biggest ports with radiation detection scanning systems. A number are already in operation.

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Among the adjustments, according to a representative of the Beijing Military Recruitment Office, are a relaxation of rules governing weight and tattoos. New recruits will now be allowed to be 25% heavier or 15% skinnier than what the military considers an ideal weight, and people with tattoos on the neck or face — grounds for automatic rejection in the past — will now be considered, so long as the ink in question doesn’t exceed two centimeters in diameter.

The amendment also offers enticements specifically targeted at college students who decide to join the military before graduation, including post-service yearly tuition contributions as high as 6,000 yuan ($944) ….

“We understand that one big reason some college students are not positive enough about joining the army is that some aspects of post-discharge arrangement policy are generally not strong in terms of implementation,” Mr. Zhou Yongshan said (in Chinese). To solve the problem, he said, required new policies that would allow college students “to see the spaciousness of the entrance gate and, at the same time, see how the exit road has been widened.”

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301 Hospital refers to the General Hospital of Chinese People’s Liberation Army, the most prestigious hospital in Beijing, which specializes in treating high officials of the Communist Party.

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Anyone who needs convincing that China’s military trajectory is cause for alarm should take a look at “Asian Alliances in the 21st Century,” a new report co-authored by several well-known Asia security experts, including Dan Blumenthal, Randall Schriver, Mark Stokes, L.C. Russell Hsiao and Michael Mazza. The report details the rapid modernization of China’s military capabilities and claims that Beijing is interested neither in benign hegemonic rule nor in helping Washington address global challenges. Rather, China’s leaders are ultimately concerned only with maintaining their power and expanding their maritime reach.

The thrust of the report has merit. China’s assertiveness in the East and South China Seas, as well as its increasingly unattractive foreign policy rhetoric, gives significant reason for concern and little reason for optimism about China’s real interest in strengthening regional security cooperation in the near term.

There are no shades of gray in the report, however, and the lack of nuance can be disconcerting. Oddly enough, it may even lead the authors to be a bit too optimistic. In the “what do we do about it” section, for example, the report calls for a far more deeply integrated U.S.-led alliance system in Asia. This proposal, however, raises a few additional issues that the report does not fully address.

James Traub has also written about the report at Foreign Policy (via CDT), warning that its recommendations could make war with China a self-fulfilling prophecy.

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AOL Defense: Cultural bias can result in serious misunderstandings between nations and armies. How does this play into Americans’ perception of China’s military rise, and China’s own perception of its place in world security? In other words, are the U.S. and China “talking past each other” in a military sense?

Erickson: Yes. Never before has the world witnessed the simultaneous presence of a powerful United States and a powerful China, let alone their interaction. Nearly as exceptional is the phenomenon of two great powers in the international system with two very different cultures, political systems, geographic regions and sets of national interests poised to avoid a great power war ….

The fears and aspirations of the United States and China draw on powerful currents of national identity and experience. Consequently, they are easy to reinforce and difficult to moderate. In coming years, driving factors, such as their constant development of new high-end military capabilities, are likely to become more significant.

Lack of strategic transparency and understanding remains a major problem between the U.S. and China. Beijing has traditionally disclosed far less information about the most critical aspects of its military capabilities than has the U.S.; its strategists believe that as the weaker party it must use ambiguity to compensate for technological inferiority.

A section of the interview which gained wider attention focused on practical problems with space-based military assets:

Space … is expensive to enter, hard to sustain assets in, contains no defensive ground, and – barring energy-intensive maneuvering – forces assets into predictable orbits. Moreover, some of the most debilitating asymmetric tactics could be employed against space and cyberspace targets.

David Axe—Erickson’s interviewer at AOL Defense—interpreted this as a recommendation that the US cede space to China altogether, rather than allowing itself to be drawn into competition there. From Wired’s Danger Room national security blog:

No one disputes that China is gaining “ground” in space. “The [People's Liberation Army] is acquiring a range of technologies to improve China’s space and counter-space capabilities,” warned the 2011 edition of Congress’ annual report on the Chinese military (.pdf). But the Pentagon’s official response is to dig in deeper in orbit, with newer and better spacecraft costing at least $10 billion a year, in total. Erickson is virtually alone in fundamentally questioning the Pentagon’s space presence — and recommending an orbital retreat ….

In Erickson’s perfect world, U.S. forces probably wouldn’t rely on space at all. With no one to beat, China wouldn’t lose the new space race. But it wouldn’t win, either.

Erickson, however, rejected this interpretation on his blog:

Space-based platforms should not constitute a disproportionately-increased share of newly-developed assets. For the foreseeable future, however, space will remain indispensable for a variety of reasons. There are many military functions that are best performed from space, particularly to support C4ISR and long-distance power projection. Moreover, space assets can be made more reliable by deployment in smaller packages and dispersed networks as small- and micro-satellites, an effort that the U.S. is already working on and China is pursuing intensively. These types of satellites have lower unit costs, and hence the loss of a given platform could be far less devastating than that of a “Greyhound bus-sized” large satellite. This, coupled with rapid replenishment, could greatly enhance survivability and reduce incentives for attack. The United States, and particularly the U.S. military, should thus NOT remove assets from space or otherwise decrease its presence there—it should rather seek both improved space approaches and supplementary approaches in other domains, and not try to increase space-basing uncritically at the expense of other alternatives ….

China’s military capabilities are improving across the board, with space being a particular “pocket of excellence.” But the United States maintains formidable capabilities here and elsewhere. Despite its current difficulties, it has bright days ahead. There is no need to adopt an “alarmist attitude” that all-out conflict with China is inevitable, or to adopt a “defeatist” attitude that the U.S. has no choice but to abandon its core interests, values, allies, or friends. The U.S. can “win without fighting” in space, by continuing to use it to support military operations, and not accepting limitations on its non-weaponized uses of space to do so. Space is not a sanctuary—U.S. assets there can be attacked by a capable military such as China’s—but China increasingly faces its own vulnerabilities and thus is developing incentives not to attack first in space. Space is thus not a desirable arena of conflict for either great power, and its preservation as a safe environment is in fact in their mutual interest.

Other observers are more interested in cooperation than competition. Asian-American astronaut Leroy Chiao suggests that, with the Shuttle retired, and Russian rockets grounded following a failed launch late last month, China should be invited aboard the International Space Station. From CNN:

What can we do? Are there any other options? Yes: Bring China into the International Space Station program. China is the only other entity besides the U.S. and Russia with a human spaceflight capability. In fact China is, at the moment, the only entity that can launch astronauts into low earth orbit.

Here’s how it might work. NASA would follow the model used to begin work with the Russians in the early 1990s. Technical exchanges of specialists and astronauts would pave the way for developing plans, processes and procedures to allow modification of the Shenzhou spacecraft to rendezvous and dock with the ISS, with joint Chinese, U.S. and Russian crews. The United States would lead these efforts.

There are those who argue against any space cooperation with China, on grounds that the Chinese would obtain technological secrets and capabilities from the U.S. The fact is, nothing of military value would be transferred in either direction, just as such knowledge has not been transferred to or from Russia as a result of the positive and successful collaboration in our civil space programs. China would only learn from us about how to operate with a civil space station.

For now, however, a sense of competitiveness remains as America’s space program stalls and China’s continues to gather momentum. This shone through in one recent report on two Tsinghua physicists’ proposal to capture and mine a near-Earth asteroid:

The Chinese … seem fairly optimistic that they could tweak the orbit of a near-Earth asteroid by just enough (a change in velocity of only about 1,300 feet-per-second or so) to get it to temporarily enter Earth orbit at about twice the distance as the Moon. The orbit would be unstable, and eventually (after a few years) the asteroid would head back out into space from whence it came, but it would stick there long enough for us to poke around on it.

Then what? Well, there’s science to be done of course, but they estimate that a two-kilometer-wide metallic asteroid (about 1.2 miles across) could be worth something like 25 trillion dollars, which would handily pay down the entire U.S. national debt with barely enough left over to restart the space shuttle program. Sweet! Except, sweet for China. Not us. Oh well.

Sources:

China’s ‘Ripples of Capability’ – AOL Defense
China Analyst: U.S. Can’t Win in Space, So Why Bother Racing? – Danger Room – Wired.com
The U.S. Must Continue to Use Space and Can “Win without Fighting” There—It’s Just Not a Panacea, a Sanctuary, or a Desirable Battlefield – Andrew S. Erickson
Make China our new partner in space – CNN.com
Chinese want to capture an asteroid into Earth’s orbit – DVICE

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In a clip found on YouTube and smaller video-sharing sites, Jin — with the help of slides — presented eight major espionage cases. While some cases had been publicized, others had never been revealed or discussed in detail before, especially those involving senior officers of the normally secretive People’s Liberation Army (PLA).

Jin talked about Senior Col. Xu Junping, who once directed the American and Oceanic department of the defense ministry’s foreign affairs office but defected to the United States in 2000. Jin said Xu was extremely close to China’s top military brass.
Looking around the world, where else could you find a country’s ambassador spying for another country?

“What he gave the Americans was not the number of missiles we had or some other technical details, he told them about the personalities of our leaders and their decision-making habits and processes,” Jin said. “These were key intelligence.”

Jin said another senior colonel, Wang Qingqian, was caught spying for Japan while serving as a military liaison officer at the Chinese embassy in Tokyo. Wang installed bugs in the offices of the ambassador and the military attaché, Jin said, and opened embassy windows periodically to allow Japanese remote-surveillance equipment to peek inside.

The video can be viewed in this report from New Tang Dynasty Television:

See also a report from the New York Times.

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China is still far behind the U.S. in space technology and experience, but what it doesn’t lack is a plan or financial resources. While U.S. programs can fall victim to budgetary worries or a change of government, rapidly growing China appears to have no such constraints.

“One of the biggest advantages of their system is that they have five-year plans so they can develop well ahead,” said Peter Bond, consultant editor for Jane’s Space Systems and Industry. “They are taking a step-by-step approach, taking their time and gradually improving their capabilities. They are putting all the pieces together for a very capable, advanced space industry.” […]

China’s space station is slated to open around 2020, the same year the International Space Station is scheduled to close. If the U.S. and its partners don’t come up with a replacement, China could have the only permanent human presence in the sky ….

Some elements of China’s program, notably the firing of a ground-based missile into one of its dead satellites four years ago, have alarmed American officials and others who say such moves could set off a race to militarize space. That the program is run by the military has made the U.S. reluctant to cooperate with China in space, even though the latter insists its program is purely for peaceful ends.

The Financial Times notes that, according to a new report from the World Security Institute, the PLA’s satellite surveillance capabilities are rapidly catching up with those of the US:

“Starting from almost no live surveillance capability 10 years ago, today the PLA has likely equalled the US’s ability to observe targets from space for some real-time operations,” two of the institute’s China researchers, Eric Hagt and Matthew Durnin, write in the Journal of Strategic Studies.

China warned the US last month not to become involved in its dispute with Vietnam over the South China Sea. “[China’s] strategic priority is to keep the US out of its backyard,” Mr Durnin told the Financial Times, adding that the satellite technology needed for achieving that goal is now in place.

When China tested missiles near Taiwan in 1996, the US deployed two aircraft carriers to nearby waters. The PLA’s inability to locate the ships was a source of great embarrassment that helped spur China’s satellite programme.

“The United States has always felt that if there was a crisis in Taiwan, we could get our naval forces there before China could act and before they would know we were there. This basically takes that off the table,” said Joan Johnson-Freese, a professor at the US Naval War College in Rhode Island.

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The drone (pictured above) appears to be small, possibly no more than a dozen feet in length. Since it was spotted far from land in the company of Chinese warships, it’s likely that the flying robot is launched from the helicopter flight deck of a frigate or destroyer — though the exact methods of launch and recovery remain unclear. (U.S. naval drones use catapults or take off vertically.) The UAV’s apparent small size implies a limited range and basic sensors, particularly given China’s problems building robots and advanced military electronics.

The circumstances of the pilotless plane’s revelation could offer hints about its role. Early this month, the Chinese navy sailed 11 warships through international waters between two Japanese islands. The two-week deployment — a new, semi-annual tradition for the rapidly-expanding Chinese navy — was probably meant as a display of strength, and included target practice for the ships’ crews.

It just so happens, a drone is an excellent way to spot targets for long-range gunfire and missiles — especially for a navy that lacks the ultra-high-tech satellites the U.S. Navy takes for granted. And what could be more impressive for foreign audiences than “accidentally” letting the Japanese photograph the new UAV in action?

A recent New York Times article described the current state-of-the-art in American drones, from 200-foot spy balloons to 4-inch “hummingbirds”.

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