WHILE the United States could field over 300,000 aircraft, Germany and Japan combined have less than 200,000. On the naval front, the US had about 350 destroyers compared to Japan’s 63, while on the land-war front, the US had over 70,000 tanks compared to less than 45,000 for Germany.
While it’s true that the brave American soldiers, sailors and flyers at the frontlines brought World War II victory, they were backed by heartland factories that could churn out tanks and planes and ships at rates far greater than the enemy could destroy them—definitive proof of the winning ways of what the great Prussian strategist Carl von Clausewitz once aptly referred to as “war by algebra.”
Today, however, many of those factories that won World War II for America have been shuttered and moved to cities with names like Chengdu, Chongqing and Shenzhen. As for the Soviet Union, its fate as a fallen empire may be particularly apropos to the current trajectory of US-China military relations.
Just consider: Back in the Cold War days of the 1980s, President Ronald Reagan adopted a highly aggressive “star wars” strategy to vanquish the Soviet Union based on his Strategic Defense Initiative.
“What ‘the Gipper’ had in mind, however,” said Peter Navarro, in his best-selling book, Crouching Tiger, “was not decisively defeating the Soviet Union on the battlefield. Rather, Reagan wanted to lure the Soviets into an expensive arms race in the hopes of breaking the ‘evil empire’s’ economic bank in the process.”
Navarro said: “As US defense expenditures [and budget deficits!] dramatically rose during the 1980s, Reagan was repeatedly criticized for his hawkish gambit. However, the Gipper’s strategy wound up succeeding beyond even the Reaganites’ wildest dreams; looking back at the statistics on GDP growth and military expenditures during the period, we now know why.”
“To wit, in order to play such military spending poker with
Reagan, the Soviets had to devote a far larger share of their GDP to
defense—some analysts cite a figure as high as 40 percent! It was this crushing
defense burden along with the
collateral neglect of the other sectors of its economy that ultimately bankrupted
the Soviet Union and led to its economic surrender and breakup,” Navarro
explained.
In comparing this Soviet fall to China’s rise, Princeton professor Aaron Friedberg notes: China is a very different kind of military competitor than the Soviet Union was. The Soviet Union for ideological reasons cut itself off from the international trading system, cut itself off to a considerable degree from the global technological system and tried to do everything on its own.
The Chinese are pursuing the inverse strategy. They are plugging themselves into the world economy and into the world technological and scientific systems as deeply as they possibly can. And that’s a far smarter strategy and it’s enabling them to move forward much more rapidly.
Echoing this “China is not the Soviet Union” theme, Brookings scholar Michael O’Hanlon adds: “While China’s growth may slow down to a 7- or 6-percent rate, it’s still the fastest-growing economy in the world and the No. 1 world manufacturing economy. And that trend is not slowing in the slightest. So the idea that we could somehow just ramp up our efforts and beat the Chinese at producing war ships and fighter jets, I think, is at best a short-term partial fix.”
“This sobering assessment brings to mind the advice of hockey great Wayne Gretzky to always skate to where the puck is going to be, not to where it is. To mix metaphors here, China appears to be moving on the global supremacy chessboard to a place where, if left unchecked, the US may eventually be forced to turn over its king, at least in the Asian theater,” Navarro said.
Our next question therefore must be: Just what might China’s strategy look like over the next several decades to achieve its goals?
In thinking historically about the strategic implications of China’s rise and growing size, consider this: At the start of World War II, the combined economies of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan were only half the size of the United States.
“If for no other reason than the sheer weight of its factories and work force, America thereby held the strategic high ground. In fact, the statistical correspondence between economic power and military might in World War II is startling,” Navarro said.
To reach the writer, e-mail cecilio.arillo@gmail.com.