美国议会调查局在年末提交的一份报告中用大篇幅宣扬中国常规潜艇将对美海军形成“巨大威胁”。无独有偶，日本防卫厅近日宣布将在2006年着手开发针对中国潜艇“威胁”的新型鱼雷与声纳系统，该项费用已经被批准列入防卫厅技术研究本部的06年预算中。当世界已经开始逐渐厌倦漫天飞舞的“中国军事威胁论”的时候，日美已经执着了一年的“中国潜艇威胁论”似乎仍将2006年持续“流行”。

　　中国潜艇成了美国“心病”
    
    在美国议会调查局12月24日完成的这份题为《中国海军的现代化和对美国海军的影响》报告中，详细描述了中国海军实力的发展状况。该报告明确指出，美国海军应该将中国海军实力的增强视作威胁，特别是中国大幅增加各种以海军舰艇为假想敌的攻击型导弹，并“极具野心”地提高潜水艇的战斗能力，报告提醒美国议会在防卫政策方面提高对中国的警惕。报告中称，仅中国增强潜艇战斗力这一项就足以让美国提起充分的重视，目前中国同时瞄准了5种潜水艇，正在进行“世界上最具野心的潜水艇扩张”。
    
    报告详细罗列了中国海军威胁美军的11个领域：战术弹道导弹、对地攻击的巡航导弹、反舰巡航导弹、地对空导弹、陆基战机、潜艇、水面战斗平台、水陆两栖舰只、海军水雷、核武器和高能微波武器。
    
    不仅如此，《汉和防务评论》及一些美国媒体也纷纷报道，声称“中国最新的国产‘093’、‘094’型核潜艇2005年年底进入海试阶段”；“在 2005年年终之际，俄罗斯计划向中国海军交付已经完工的两艘‘基洛’级潜艇和一艘‘现代’级驱逐舰。随着各种新型常规和核潜艇加入现役，中国潜艇部队的战斗力将达到新的巅峰”云云。
    
    　　报告为美国海军支招
    
    美国国会研究服务部隶属于美国国会图书馆，有740多名研究人员，每年经费开支达7000多万美元，实际上是个专门为美国国会议员提供政策建议的思想库，每年向国会提供3000多份政策建议报告。其中许多被美国国会议员吸纳成为立法的依据。这次的报告也“很自然地”给美国海军提了不少建议，认为美国海军必须为可能爆发的台海战争做好准备，为确保美国海军在西太平洋地区的军事领导权未雨绸缪。美国海军必须提高快速进入作战区域的能力，提高击败中国海军海上反接近力量的能力，提高在信息战和电磁脉冲战环境下作战的能力，甚至在必要情况下为使用核武器做好准备。
    
    报告建议美国国防部对中国海军的地位和实力重新评估，尤其要提高太平洋舰队在美国海军舰队中的份量，这包括：将美国海军舰只在西太平洋海域的母港前移；增加在太平洋海域的航空母舰、潜艇和反潜作战平台的数量；提高太平洋舰队的导弹防御能力、防空能力、反电磁脉冲攻击能力、反潜作战能力和反水雷作战能力；提高海军计算机系统的安全性能等等。
    
    美国《今日防务》杂志甚至指出，“美国太平洋舰队如果要介入台海冲突，目前这种以非隐身船只和飞机为基础的海空军很容易成为中国潜艇导弹的目标，因此，美军非常需要隐身舰队及飞机。”该杂志也透露，美国已经开始开发新一代DDX型隐型导弹驱逐舰，可有效降低导弹攻击。
    
    　　日本乘机扩张海军力量
    
    在美国极力鼓吹“中国潜艇威胁”的同时，日本乘机搭上了这班车，而日本大肆宣扬所谓来自中国潜艇的威胁却有着更为深层次的动机。据日前《产经新闻》引述日本防卫厅官员称，中国潜艇在东海不及200米深的浅水海域的活动有增加趋势，此次重点声纳研发的重点是把原本安装在艇首的圆形声纳改良为U形声纳，以加强声纳侦察能力，扫除声纳探侦的盲点，新设计的鱼雷是为了更适用于浅水地区，借此对付来犯的潜水艇。
    
    目前，日本海军使用的各型鱼雷皆仿自美军MK鱼雷系列，可有效用于各种水深作战，从技术的角度讲，并不存在急需改良的必要。以日本潜艇使用的89型线导鱼雷为例，该型号为仿美制Mk48重型鱼雷，作战距离38公里，航速达55节，高爆战斗部装药100-150公斤，作战潜深900公尺以内，属于通用型鱼雷，在浅海区同样具有优越的作战性能。可以说，此次日本以中国潜艇威胁为借口发展自己的鱼雷系统，最明显的结果将会是摆脱了对美国鱼雷技术的依赖，而该系统与日本自己建造的16艘先进常规潜艇的结合，将使日本从此拥有了独立技术的水下攻击舰队，其潜艇作战能力将跃上一个新的台阶。 (国际先驱导报)

By Edward Cody
Washington Post
Thursday, April 27, 2006

BEIJING, April 26 -- China, Russia and four Central Asian nations announced Wednesday that they will hold joint anti-terrorism exercises next year, emphasizing a desire to balance U.S. military influence in Asia with stepped-up preparations of their own.

The regional security grouping, known as the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, includes Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. Its activities have centered mainly on guarding against cross-border threats to internal stability, particularly from militant Islamic groups.

Guo Boxiong, vice chairman of the Chinese Communist Party's Central Military Commission, said the plans for joint drills demonstrate the group's growing role in maintaining security in the region, the official New China News Agency said. He vowed that defense ministers from the six nations will work together to combat what China calls the "three forces" -- separatism, terrorism and extremism -- that threaten to provoke unrest in the area.

In a communique, the six nations said next year's exercises will be held in Russia. They did not detail what activities were planned. But the Russian defense minister, Sergei Ivanov, told reporters here that the exercises will be designed by a group of military and anti-terrorism experts to enhance regional security coordination and are not aimed at any third country.

In China's case, the threat has mainly come from Uighur separatists in the heavily Muslim Xinjiang autonomous region of western China. Through common Turkic languages and history, the estimated 8 million Uighur people have maintained ties to their Central Asian neighbors even as the region increasingly is populated by China's Han majority. As a result, Beijing is eager to cultivate influence with the governments of those nations, lest Uighur militants find support and encouragement from across the borders.

China also has a growing stake in maintaining a stable environment in Central Asia, which is a source of oil and gas for the energy-hungry Chinese economy. Although Russia traditionally has played a leading role in the region -- the nations of Central Asia were Soviet satellites -- Chinese diplomacy and trade have established a significant presence in recent years. The Shanghai Cooperation Organization was formally organized in 2001 under Chinese leadership.

The first joint anti-terrorism maneuvers by the group were held in 2003, although Uzbekistan did not participate. They included some exercises in the Xinjiang region.

Separately, China and Russia held bilateral military exercises last August. They were billed as a drill against ethnic unrest but also were interpreted as a demonstration that Beijing and Moscow want the United States to understand it is not the only guarantor of security in the region despite its dominant role since World War II.

China Builds a Smaller, Stronger Military
--Modernization Could Alter Regional Balance of Power, Raising Stakes for U.S. 

Edward Cody

Washington Post, April 12, 2005

BEIJING -- A top-to-bottom modernization is transforming the Chinese military, raising the stakes for U.S. forces long dominant in the Pacific.

Several programs to improve China's armed forces could soon produce a stronger nuclear deterrent against the United States, soldiers better trained to use high-technology weapons, and more effective cruise and anti-ship missiles for use in the waters around Taiwan, according to foreign specialists and U.S. officials.

In the past several weeks, President Bush and his senior aides, including Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Director of Central Intelligence Porter J. Goss, have expressed concern over the recent pace of China's military progress and its effect on the regional balance of power.

Their comments suggested the modernization program might be on the brink of reaching one of its principal goals. For the last decade -- at least since two U.S. aircraft carrier battle groups steamed in to show resolve during a moment of high tension over Taiwan in 1996 -- Chinese leaders have sought to field enough modern weaponry to ensure that any U.S. decision to intervene again would be painful and fraught with risk.

As far as is known, China's military has not come up with a weapon system that suddenly changes the equation in the Taiwan Strait or surrounding waters where Japanese and U.S. forces deploy, the specialists said. China has been trying to update its military for more than two decades, seeking to push the low-tech, manpower-heavy force it calls a people's army into the 21st-century world of computers, satellites and electronic weapons. Although results have been slow in coming, they added, several programs will come to fruition simultaneously in the next few years, promising a new level of firepower in one of the world's most volatile regions.

"This is the harvest time," said Lin Chong-pin, a former Taiwanese deputy defense minister and an expert on the Chinese military at the Foundation on International and Cross-Strait Studies in Taipei.

U.S. and Taiwanese military officials pointed in particular to China's rapid development of cruise and other anti-ship missiles designed to pierce the electronic defenses of U.S. vessels that might be dispatched to the Taiwan Strait in case of conflict.

The Chinese navy has taken delivery of two Russian-built Sovremenny-class guided missile destroyers and has six more on order, equipped with Sunburn missiles able to skim 4 1/2 feet above the water at a speed of Mach 2.5 to evade radar. In addition, it has contracted with Russia to buy eight Kilo-class diesel submarines that carry Club anti-ship missiles with a range of 145 miles.

"These systems will present significant challenges in the event of a U.S. naval force response to a Taiwan crisis," Vice Adm. Lowell E. Jacoby, director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, told the Senate Armed Services Committee in testimony March 17.

The Nuclear Deterrent

Strategically, China's military is also close to achieving an improved nuclear deterrent against the United States, according to foreign officials and specialists.

The Type 094 nuclear missile submarine, launched last July to replace a trouble-prone Xia-class vessel, can carry 16 intercontinental ballistic missiles. Married with the newly developed Julang-2 missile, which has a range of more than 5,000 miles and the ability to carry independently targeted warheads, the 094 will give China a survivable nuclear deterrent against the continental United States, according to "Modernizing China's Military," a study by David Shambaugh of George Washington University.

In addition, the Dongfeng-31 solid-fuel mobile ballistic missile, a three-stage, land-based equivalent of the Julang-2, has been deployed in recent years to augment the approximately 20 Dongfeng-5 liquid-fuel missiles already in service, according to academic specialists citing U.S. intelligence reports.

It will be joined in coming years by an 8,000-mileDongfeng-41, these reports said, putting the entire United States within range of land-based Chinese ICBMs as well. "The main purpose of that is not to attack the United States," Lin said. "The main purpose is to throw a monkey wrench into the decision-making process in Washington, to make the Americans think, and think again, about intervening in Taiwan, and by then the Chinese have moved in."

With a $1.3 trillion economy growing at more than 9 percent a year, China has acquired more than enough wealth to make these investments in a modern military. The announced defense budget has risen by double digits in most recent years. For 2005, it jumped 12.6 percent to hit nearly $30 billion.

The Pentagon estimates that real military expenditures, including weapons acquisitions and research tucked into other budgets, should be calculated at two or three times the announced figure. That would make China's defense expenditures among the world's largest, but still far behind the $400 billion budgeted this year by the United States.

Projecting Force to Taiwan

Taiwan, the self-ruled island that China insists must reunite with the mainland, has long been at the center of this growth in military spending; one of the military's chief missions is to project a threat of force should Taiwan's rulers take steps toward formal independence.

Embodying the threat, the 2nd Artillery Corps has deployed more than 600 short-range ballistic missiles aimed at Taiwan from southeastern China's Fujian and Jiangxi provinces, according to Taiwan's deputy defense minister, Michael M. Tsai. Medium-range missiles have also been developed, he said, and much of China's modernization campaign is directed at acquiring weapons and support systems that would give it air and sea superiority in any conflict over the 100-mile-wide Taiwan Strait.

But the expansion of China's interests abroad, particularly energy needs, has also broadened the military's mission in recent years. Increasingly, according to foreign specialists and Chinese commentators, China's navy and air force have set out to project power in the South China Sea, where several islands are under dispute and vital oil supplies pass through, and in the East China Sea, where China and Japan are at loggerheads over mineral rights and several contested islands.

China has acquired signals-monitoring facilities on Burma's Coco Islands and, according to U.S. reports, at a port it is building in cooperation with Pakistan near the Iranian border at Gwadar, which looks out over tankers exiting the Persian Gulf. According to a report prepared for Rumsfeld's office by Booz Allen Hamilton, the consulting firm, China has developed a "string of pearls" strategy, seeking military-related agreements with Bangladesh, Cambodia and Thailand in addition to those with Burma and Pakistan.

Against this background, unifying Taiwan with the mainland has become more than just a nationalist goal. The 13,500-square-mile territory has also become a platform that China needs to protect southern sea lanes, through which pass 80 percent of its imported oil and tons of other imported raw materials. It could serve as a base for Chinese submarines to have unfettered access to the deep Pacific, according to Tsai, Taiwan's deputy defense minister. "Taiwan for them now is a strategic must and no longer just a sacred mission," Lin said.

Traditionally, China's threat against Taiwan has been envisaged as a Normandy-style assault by troops hitting the beaches. French, German, British and Mexican military attaches were invited to observe such landing exercises by specialized Chinese troops last September.

Also in that vein, specialists noted, the Chinese navy's fast-paced ship construction program includes landing vessels and troop transports. Two giant transports that were seen under construction in Shanghai's shipyards a year ago, for instance, have disappeared, presumably to the next stage of their preparation for deployment.

But U.S. and Taiwanese officials noted that China's amphibious forces had the ability to move across the strait only one armored division -- about 12,000 men with their vehicles. That would be enough to occupy an outlying Taiwanese island as a gesture, they said, but not to seize the main island.

Instead, Taiwanese officials said, if a conflict arose, they would expect a graduated campaign of high-tech pinpoint attacks, including cruise missile strikes on key government offices or computer sabotage, designed to force the leadership in Taipei to negotiate short of all-out war. The 1996 crisis, when China test-fired missiles off the coast, cost the Taiwanese economy $20 billion in lost business and mobilization expenses, a senior security official recalled.

High-Tech Emphasis

A little-discussed but key facet of China's military modernization has been a reduction in personnel and an intensive effort to better train and equip the soldiers who remain, particularly those who operate high-technology weapons. Dennis J. Blasko, a former U.S. military attache in Beijing who is writing a book on the People's Liberation Army, said that forming a core of skilled commissioned and noncommissioned officers and other specialists who can make the military run in a high-tech environment may be just as important in the long run as buying sophisticated weapons.

Premier Wen Jiabao told the National People's Congress last month that his government would soon complete a 200,000-soldier reduction that has been underway since 2003. That would leave about 2.3 million troops in the Chinese military, making it still the world's biggest, according to a report issued recently by the Defense Ministry.

Because of pensions and retraining for dismissed soldiers, the training and personnel reduction program has so far been an expense rather than a cost-cutter, according to foreign specialists. But it has encountered competition for funds from the high-tech and high-expense program to make China's military capable of waging what former president Jiang Zemin called "war under informationalized conditions."

The emphasis on high-tech warfare, as opposed to China's traditional reliance on masses of ground troops, was dramatized by shifts last September in the Communist Party's decision-making Central Military Commission, which had long been dominated by the People's Liberation Army. Air force commander Qiao Qingchen, Navy commander Zhang Dingfa and 2nd Artillery commander Jing Zhiyuan, whose units control China's ballistic missiles, joined the commission for the first time, signaling the importance of their responsibilities under the modernization drive.

Air Superiority

Striving for air superiority over the Taiwan Strait, the air force has acquired from Russia more than 250 Sukhoi Su-27 single-role and Su-30 all-weather, multi-role fighter planes, according to Richard D. Fisher, vice president of the International Assessment and Strategy Center in Washington. The Pentagon has forecast that, as the Sukhoi program continues to add to China's aging inventory, the air force will field about 2,000 warplanes by 2020, of which about 150 will be fourth-generation craft equipped with sophisticated avionics.

But specialists noted that many of China's Su-27s have spent most of the time on the ground for lack of maintenance. In addition, according to U.S. and Taiwanese experts, China has remained at the beginning stages of its effort to acquire the equipment and skills necessary for midair refueling, space-based information systems, and airborne reconnaissance and battle management platforms.

A senior Taiwanese military source said Chinese pilots started training on refueling and airborne battle management several years ago, but so far have neither the equipment nor the technique to integrate such operations into their order of battle. Similarly, he said, China has been testing use of Global Positioning System devices to guide its cruise missiles but remains some time away from deploying such technology.

Buying such electronic equipment would be China's most likely objective if the European Union goes ahead with plans to lift its arms sales embargo despite objections from Washington, a senior European diplomat in Beijing said. A Chinese effort to acquire Israel's Phalcon airborne radar system was stymied in 2000 when the United States prevailed on Israel to back out of the $1 billion deal.

By Benjamin Kang Lim

BEIJING, Dec 22 (Reuters) - A Chinese general has been punished for telling reporters China could use nuclear weapons in the event of a U.S. attack over Taiwan, military sources said on Thursday.
   

Major General Zhu Chenghu received an "administrative demerit" recently from the National Defence University, which bars him from promotion for one year, said the sources, who requested anonymity.

"He misspoke. But the punishment could not be too harsh or we would be seen as too weak towards the United States," one source told Reuters.
   

An administrative demerit is the second lightest punishment on a scale of one to five, but still potentially damaging to his career. The lightest is an administrative warning, while the heaviest is expulsion.
   

"His chances for promotion in the future are extremely slim,"another source said.
   

The Defence Ministry declined to comment.
   

In July, Zhu told a group of visiting Hong Kong-based reporters China would have no choice but to resort to nuclear weapons in the event of a U.S. attack over democratic Taiwan, which Beijing has claimed as its own since their split at the end of the Chinese civil war in 1949.
   

The United States, which switched diplomatic recognition to Beijing from Taipei in 1979 but remains the island's main arms supplier and has pledged to help Taiwan defend itself, criticised Zhu's comments as irresponsible.
   

China has sought to play down the gaffe, saying Zhu's remarks were his personal views. But China says it will never allow self-ruled Taiwan to declare independence formally.
   

Zhu is not the first Chinese general to warn the United States of possible nuclear conflict.
   

Xiong Guangkai warned Chas Freeman, a former U.S. assistant secretary of defence, in 1995 that China could use nuclear weapons in any conflict over Taiwan and that Americans cared more about Los Angeles than Taipei.
   

That warning coincided with menacing Chinese war games and missile tests off Taiwan waters in the run-up to the island's first direct presidential elections in 1996.
   

Xiong, 66, retired this month as deputy chief of general staff of the People's Liberation Army after passing the compulsory retirement age of 65.