By ANDREW KREPINEVICH
Why is newly confirmed Defense Secretary Jim Mattis making his first overseas trip to the Western Pacific to confer with two of America’s key allies, Japan and South Korea?
After all, both Mattis and Gen. Joe Dunford, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, have declared Russia poses the greatest danger to the United States. But actions, they say, speak louder than words, and for good reason. From a military perspective, the need to make the Western Pacific our top priority is clear. It follows from examining key planning factors that the military uses to help it set priorities. In every case the analysis finds that China, not Russia, poses the principal threat.
The first focuses on “military potential,” or a country’s ability to generate military power. Over the past dozen years China’s defense budget has experienced double-digit growth, increasing by nearly 200 percent. It now stands at over three times that of Russia’s and second only to our own. Given China’s continued economic growth and Russia’s stagnation, the spending gap between these two revisionist powers is destined to widen over time.
There is also the matter of geostrategic risk. This refers to the ability of allies and partners to defend themselves. Again, we find the situation far more precarious in the Western Pacific than in Europe. The populations of France, Germany and Great Britain together exceed that of Russia. Each alone has a GDP twice the size of Russia’s, and a more advanced industrial base. Our NATO allies clearly have the ability to offset the Russian threat, should they choose to do so.
This is not the case in the Western Pacific, where China’s GDP is over twice that of Japan’s, and its population over ten times greater. Thanks to technology that it has developed, bought or stolen, Beijing’s industrial base is rapidly closing the gap with Japan, America’s only great power ally in the region. And unlike in Europe, where our allies are bound together within NATO, no such regional alliance exists in Asia. Again, here is where U.S. military capability is needed most.
Read the full story at Breaking Defense