Planning the next war

[annata]

No one had any idea how the war would start. But the American response, laid out in a concept that one of Marshall’s longtime proteges dubbed “Air-Sea Battle,” was clear.

Stealthy American bombers and submarines would knock out China’s long-range surveillance radar and precision missile systems located deep inside the country. The initial “blinding campaign” would be followed by a larger air and naval assault.

The concept, the details of which are classified, has angered the Chinese military and has been pilloried by some Army and Marine Corps officers as excessively expensive. Some Asia analysts worry that conventional strikes aimed at China could spark a nuclear war.

Air-Sea Battle drew little attention when U.S. troops were fighting and dying in large numbers in Iraq and Afghanistan. Now the military’s decade of battling insurgencies is ending, defense budgets are being cut, and top military officials, ordered to pivot toward Asia, are looking to Marshall’s office for ideas.

In recent months, the Air Force and Navy have come up with more than 200 initiatives they say they need to realize Air-Sea Battle. The list emerged, in part, from war games conducted by Marshall’s office and includes new weaponry and proposals to deepen cooperation between the Navy and the Air Force.

A former nuclear strategist, Marshall has spent the past 40 years running the Pentagon’s Office of Net Assessment, searching for potential threats to American dominance. In the process, he has built a network of allies in Congress, in the defense industry, at think tanks and at the Pentagon that amounts to a permanent Washington bureaucracy.

While Marshall’s backers praise his office as a place where officials take the long view, ignoring passing Pentagon fads, critics see a dangerous tendency toward alarmism that is exaggerating the China threat to drive up defense spending.

“The old joke about the Office of Net Assessment is that it should be called the Office of Threat Inflation,” said Barry Posen, director of the MIT Security Studies Program. “They go well beyond exploring the worst cases. . . . They convince others to act as if the worst cases are inevitable.”

Marshall dismisses criticism that his office focuses too much on China as a future enemy, saying it is the Pentagon’s job to ponder worst-case scenarios.

“We tend to look at not very happy futures,” he said in a recent interview.

China tensions
Even as it has embraced Air-Sea Battle, the Pentagon has struggled to explain it without inflaming already tense relations with China. The result has been an information vacuum that has sown confusion and controversy.

Senior Chinese military officials warn that the Pentagon’s new effort could spark an arms race.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/...tml?tid=pm_pop

[annata]

posted in this section as the conspiracy is the mindset, of "threat assessment" which does lead to acceptence that the "next war " is an inevitability.

Keeping thinking of new wars, new threats, how to respond, Voila' a self fulling receipe,

The result has been an information vacuum that has sown confusion and controversy.

[Liberty]

A friend of mine sent this to me.

September 6, 2012







Russian Submarine
by Kerby Anderson






What was a Russian attack submarine doing in the Gulf of Mexico? That is a question many are asking, especially in light of the fact that its presence was only discovered after it left.

Bill Gertz reports in his article “Silent Running” that a “Russian nuclear-powered attack submarine armed with long-range cruise missiles operated undetected in the Gulf of Mexico for several weeks.” In fact, its presence in strategic U.S. waters was only confirmed after it left the area.

The incident exposed certain deficiencies in our anti-submarine warfare capabilities. And those capabilities will be reduced even more since the current administration is calling for nearly a half a trillion dollars in cuts in defense spending over the next ten years.

Bill Gertz confirmed with one military official that this attack submarine was able to operate undetected for a month. Another official explained that this type of Russian submarine “was built for one reason and one reason only: To kill U.S. Navy ballistic missile submarines and their crews.”

Some have speculated about why Russia sent a submarine off the waters of the United States. One naval analyst concluded: “Sending a nuclear-propelled submarine into the Gulf of Mexico-Caribbean region is another manifestation of President Putin demonstrating that Russia is still a player on the world’s political-military stage.”

Earlier this summer Russian strategic bombers made incursions into restricted U.S. airspace near Alaska and California. In June, Russian strategic nuclear bombers and support aircraft conducted nuclear bomber exercises in the arctic. In July, a Russian strategic bomber flew into airspace near California until it was met by U.S. interceptor jets.

These incidents suggest a growing military assertiveness by the Russian leaders and remind us that Russia still can pose a threat to the United States.