US-China Military and Security Developments

Abstract

Implications for CanadaThe rise of China, foretold for more than a century, brings with it multidimensional repercussions for Canada and the world. Significant changes in the areas of energy, the environment, industry, and trade are taking place against the backdrop of a new security landscape as China's strategic outlook and military power evolve in line with its economic growth and, importantly, as the United States responds to these circumstances. This article examines military and security developments between America and China and assesses their implications for Canada. It begins by highlighting objective advancements in China's military capability, and then identifying - as best as possible, given limited information - the likely intentions and interests behind these military steps. It goes on to outline America's resultant strategic concerns and response, particularly with respect to the north Pacific region. The final section centres on Canada's traditional and developing capabuities and roles in this region, and puts forward some likely implications for Canada of US-China muitary and security developments.CHINA'S MILITARY CAPABILITYThe transformation objectiveMore than a decade into the 21st century, a process of transformation is well underway in aU components of the People's Liberation Army (PLA), including the army, navy, and air force. Broadly conceptualized, this is a muitary transformation taking place along the lines of that instituted by the United States and its western aUies in the decade and a half after the faU of the Berlin WaU, up to and including the Iraq War of 2003. Muitary transformation - known as the revolution in military affairs in the United States in the 1990s - sees that are smaUer in size than their Cold War predecessors; professional or voluntary rather than conscript; equipped with advanced technologies; expeditionary in the sense of able to be deployed and sustained far from home shores; and ague and flexible once on the battlefield, making use of battlefield helicopters and lighter, technologicaUy advanced equipment. Such operate jointly, i.e., army, navy and air force work together, with seamless interoperabuity at a premium. They are everything that a massive, Cold War, in-place conscript army, with designated tasks and operating largely independently from other services, was not.Transformed military make use of advanced intelligence, surveulance, and reconnaissance technologies, notably unmanned aerial vehicles and sateUites, and they can use computers to command, control, communicate, and process intelligence information in near-real time, using high-volume datalinks directed, more often than not, through sateUites. When they apply force, it is precision- guided, whether it is an air- or sealaunched missue, an air-launched bomb, or even a smaUer missue launched from an unmanned combat aerial vehicle. An increased focus on special operations also reflects greater precision in the application of force. This is a smart, rapid-reaction, digitized muitary, and its collective vision - now somewhat out of favour in the west because of the competing and often mutuaUy exclusive demands of counterinsurgency - forms the core of China's goal, stated consistently since 2002, of buuding a modern military based on informatization, that is, the application of information technology to muitary operations.Driven by changed circumstances brought on by the end of the Cold War, military transformation as outlined above was largely achieved in the western world by the middle years of the last decade. But in China the shift has been one step removed. Its transformation has been a response to America's transformation, particularly as exhibited by the precision- guided, information-based warfare of the 1991 Gulf War and, later, NATO's 1999 war in and around Kosovo. The PLA's guiding doctrine, calling for the ability to fight local wars under modern high technology conditions, dates to 1993,1 while the official promulgation of its goal of building informationalized armed forces dates to the years shortly after the Kosovo operation. …