A congressional report released days ago acknowledges that China can now destroy five of the six large American military bases in the Western Pacific region. The first two links [1, 2] discuss this report (thanks to a reader for sending the second link). The five bases which China can destroy are located in South Korea and Japan. The sixth one, which the report regards as safe, is the US military base on Guam. China has built so many cruise missiles that the report indicates that waves of them can destroy the five American bases in South Korea and Japan. The final report indicates that there is at least some awareness building in Congress that “something needs to be done” to defend US bases from Chinese attack.
These links deserve some commentary. To begin with, it has been known for years that China is building huge numbers of cruise missiles which have made the US bases in South Korea and Japan very vulnerable to attack. If the current and last few presidential administrations (GOP and Democrat alike) have not already implemented a crash program to deploy large-scale missile defenses to these bases, then one can only conclude that the last few administrations and congresses must be “brain dead.” This Chinese threat is hardly a revelation. It has been obvious for many years! Is Congress so out of touch with reality that they have not seen this danger? Are Pentagon leaders so absorbed with political correctness issues (like ending “don’t ask, don’t tell” policies for homosexuals in the military and putting women on US subs) that they have neglected critical national security issues like protecting US military bases from Chinese (and Russian) missiles? Given that this Chinese threat has been obvious for years, it is a derelict bunch of leaders our nation has had if there is not already a fully-operational anti-missile defense network at each of these bases. The US Navy has Aegis missile-defense systems on US warships and it would not have been difficult to build and deploy land-based Aegis systems that could have been installed at these US bases years ago!
The first link below asserts the congressional report states that it would take 830 cruise missiles to take out each of the USA’s South Korean bases and 430 missiles each to take out the US bases in Japan. I have a one-word reply to this assessment. Baloney!! What dullards did they find to come up with that assessment? I don’t know how many runways each of these bases have, but it should take no more than a dozen Chinese cruise missiles to render each of these bases nonfunctional for an indefinite period of time. Chinese missiles which “cratered” each airbase’s runways (especially where they intersect) would make it impossible for US aircraft to take off, effectively shutting down the base. The huge numbers of missiles supposedly needed in the congressional report’s assessment may be what is needed to destroy every blade of grass on the military bases, but that would be a waste of Chinese resources (which China is far too smart to do). If Chinese cruise missiles cratered the runways at these US bases, there are “filler” materials to repair runways which have been attacked. China knows this. To counter repair efforts, China could send a few dozen runway-cratering missiles every other day for weeks or months to keep the bases nonfunctional. China could also send waves of dozens of cruise missiles to hit the US warplanes parked on the tarmac or in hangars to make sure they were destroyed while the runways were down. Chinese spies have, no doubt, sent to China the GPS coordinates of each location where US warplanes are parked on these bases so it wouldn’t take many missiles to take out the parked US warplanes.
Also, the report assumes that China would only attack those bases with conventional warheads. In an all-out war, you can be sure those US bases could be hit with nukes. Then China only needs one missile for each base. Did the dummies who wrote the congressional report consider that obvious reality?
The idea that Guam is safe from Chinese missile attack is so laughable that one wonders how anyone could take such an assertion seriously. It is just as vulnerable as the other bases, for several reasons! Let’s list a few of the reasons why this is so. The first link assumes that Guam is out of range of land-based Chinese cruise missiles. The first link includes this statement: “China is thought to have 1,150 short-range missiles with ranges between 180 and 375 miles, and 115 medium-range missiles with ranges between 1,000 and 1,900 miles (emphasis added).” Did you notice the italicized words which reveal that the congressional report’s writers are merely guessing about the numbers and ranges of Chinese missiles? They really don’t know for sure. I’ll bet the Chinese leaders who read that congressional report will laugh with derision at these numbers. Given that China has military production facilities underground and buried into mountains (even as Iran has nuclear facilities hidden deep under Iranian mountains), who knows how many cruise missiles are being manufactured rapidly in hidden Chinese production facilities.
There are other glaring weaknesses in the congressional report which asserts Guam is safe from Chinese cruise missiles. I have a newsflash for the writers of that report. China has warplanes capable of carrying cruise missiles. These warplanes can carry large numbers of cruise missiles to within 200-300 miles of Guam and they can launch these cruise missiles at Guam without ever getting near the Guam military base. China also has modern submarines and warships which can launch many cruise missiles. These Chinese warships can fire their cruise missiles at Guam while they are a long distance away from Guam. This would be especially easy for Chinese subs to do. Also, China can place hidden cruise-missile launching gantries on civilian ships and fire cruise missiles at Guam from close range because US military planners are likely to ignore civilian ships as not being threats. How hard would it be to build a missile-launching gantry inside a merchant ship and raise it above the cargo-hold doors of a civilian merchant ship to fire cruise missiles at Guam (or any other target…including aircraft carriers)? China could get some of their allied Iranian jihadis to do suicide missions with such civilian merchant ships which would actually be warships traveling incognito. China is committed to winning an asymmetric war against the USA, so US war planners need to assume any Chinese ship (military or civilian) could be a threat to American military assets. I haven’t even mentioned the long-range Chinese ICBMs which are being built to hit US aircraft carriers. These Chinese ICBMs can surely target Guam just as easily.
It is evident that Guam is no safer from Chinese attack than Pearl Harbor was safe from Japanese attack on December 7th, 1941. Also, it is obvious that it would only take a small number of Chinese cruise missiles to put the US military bases in South Korea and Japan out of action. They only need to crater the runways and then hit the warplane parking areas with cruise missiles while the runways are cratered. Then the bases are effectively useless. This shows why we urgently needed to have anti-missile defense systems deployed to all US military bases years ago (all US bases everywhere in the world are vulnerable to attack by cruise missiles fired by Russian or Chinese submarines). If Congress hasn’t foreseen this need and met it already, it is my opinion they should be impeached for sheer negligence about critical US national defense issues.
Sheesh! I’ve never served in the military, but I truly believe I could have written a far more realistic report to Congress about the threats posed by Chinese cruise missiles than the bureaucratic drones who wrote that myopic congressional report. The congressional report is so shortsighted and sophomoric that I must assume it was written by the “kowtow to China” faction in the US government which is apparently seeking to hide and downgrade the real dangers posed to the USA by China’s military build-up (this faction was discussed in a recent post).
China is on a rapid course to fulfill its role as one of the attackers in the prophesied Ezekiel 38-39 Gog-Magog attack against the USA, NATO nations and all their allies around the world. Meanwhile, it looks like US war planners, congressional report writers and elected leaders have their heads firmly stuck in the sand re: this Chinese threat. I’d like to use more graphic language about where their heads are stuck into but this is a Christian website so I won’t do so to avoid giving offense to those with delicate sensitivities. Our nation is in major trouble. The greatest danger is that our leaders seem to be truly clueless to the obvious threats now posed to our nation.
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2010/nov/14/chinese-missiles-can-ravage-us-bases/
http://nation.foxnews.com/chinese-missiles/2010/11/15/chinese-missiles-can-ravage-us-bases
