Category Archives: China

Escalating Military Conflict in Iraq and S. China Sea?

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US sending nuclear-capable B-52 bombers to ISIS fight

FNC: The United States is sending nuclear-capable B-52 aircraft to drop bombs on the Islamic State terror group, defense officials confirmed to Fox News Friday.

The B-52 Stratofortress will start its first bombing campaign against ISIS in April, the Air Force Times reports. It’s not clear how many B-52s or airmen will be involved.

Officials say the aircraft will replace nuclear-capable B-1 Lancers hitting ISIS targets in Iraq and Syria.

The Lancers returned to home bases in the U.S. in January. They flew only 3% of all strike missions against ISIS, but had dropped 40% of the bombs and other munitions. B-1s could loiter over the battlefield for 10 hours, much longer than jet fighters, and also could fly supersonic, reaching targets across Iraq and Syria within minutes.

“The B-1s are rotated out, so they’re not here right now, they’ve gone back to do some upgrades,” Lieutenant General Charles Q. Brown Jr., commander at U.S. Air Forces Central Command, told reporters.  More here.

The U.S. just sent a carrier strike group to confront China

The U.S. Navy has dispatched a small armada to the South China Sea.

NavyTimes: The carrier John C. Stennis, two destroyers, two cruisers and the 7th Fleet flagship have sailed into the disputed waters in recent days, according to military officials. The carrier strike group is the latest show of force in the tense region, with the U.S. asserting that China is militarizing the region to guard its excessive territorial claims.

Stennis is joined in the region by the cruisers Antietam and Mobile Bay, and the destroyers Chung-Hoon and Stockdale. The command ship Blue Ridge, the floating headquarters of the Japan-based 7th Fleet, is also in the area, en route to a port visit in the Philippines. Stennis deployed from Washington state on Jan. 15.

The Japan-based Antietam, officials said, was conducting a “routine patrol” separate from the Stennis, following up patrols conducted by the destroyer McCambell and the dock landing ship Ashland in late February.

The stand-off has been heating up on both sides. After news in February that the Chinese deployed an advanced surface-to-air missile battery to the Paracel Islands, U.S. Pacific Command head Adm. Harry Harris told lawmakers that China was militarizing the South China Sea.

“In my opinion China is clearly militarizing the South China Sea,” Harris testified on Feb. 24. “You’d have to believe in a flat Earth to believe otherwise.”

Overnight, Chinese officials dismissed claims that China was militarizing the region, pointing to the Stennis’s patrol as evidence that the U.S. was to blame for the increased military tensions.

“The accusation [that China is militarizing the region] can lead to a miscalculation of the situation,” said Fu Ying, a spokeswoman for China’s National People’s Congress. “If you take a look at the matter closely, it’s the US sending the most advanced aircraft and military vessels to the South China Sea.”

A Pacific Fleet spokesman downplayed the heavy U.S. presence in the region.

“Our ships and aircraft operate routinely throughout the Western Pacific — including the South China Sea — and have for decades,” Cmdr. Clay Doss said in a statement. “In 2015 alone, Pacific Fleet ships sailed about 700 combined days in the South China Sea.”

However, experts say sending Stennis and its air wing to the South China Sea is a clear signal to China and the region.

“Clearly the Navy and DoD is demonstrating its full commitment to presence and freedom of navigation in the region,” said Jerry Hendrix, a retired Navy captain and analyst with the Center for a New American Security in Washington, D.C. “With the full carrier strike group and the command ship, the Navy is showing the scope of its interests and ability to project presence and power around world.”

The destroyer Lassen’s vaunted October patrol within the 12-mile limit of China’s man-made South China Sea islands was the first challenge of China’s sovereignty over the Spratly Islands since Chinese land-reclamation projects began there.

On Jan. 30, the destroyer Curtis Wilbur patrolled near Triton Island, part of the Paracel Islands chain China also claims. More here.

Hey Pentagon, Hiring Hackers, a Good Idea?

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Personally I do see some positives, but I see more downsides….what say you?

The Department of Defense announced today that it will invite vetted hackers to test the department’s cybersecurity under a unique pilot program.  The “Hack the Pentagon” initiative is the first cyber bug bounty program in the history of the federal government.

 

Under the pilot program, the department will use commercial sector crowdsourcing to allow qualified participants to conduct vulnerability identification and analysis on the department’s public webpages.  The bug bounty program is modeled after similar competitions conducted by some of the nation’s biggest companies to improve the security and delivery of networks, products, and digital services. The pilot marks the first in a series of programs designed to test and find vulnerabilities in the department’s applications, websites, and networks.

 

Participants in the bug bounty will be required to register and submit to a background check prior to any involvement with the pilot program.  Once vetted, these hackers will participate in a controlled, limited duration program that will allow them to identify vulnerabilities on a predetermined department system.  Other networks, including the department’s critical, mission-facing systems will not be part of the bug bounty pilot program.  Participants in the competition could be eligible for monetary awards and other recognition.

This innovative project is a demonstration of Secretary Carter’s continued commitment to drive the Pentagon to identify new ways to improve the department’s security measures as our interests in cyberspace evolve.

Pentagon to Establish Defense Innovation Advisory Board

WASHINGTON, March 2, 2016 — In an effort to enhance the Defense Department’s culture, organization and processes by tapping innovators from the private sector in Silicon Valley and beyond, Defense Secretary Ash Carter announced plans today to establish a Defense Innovation Advisory Board, Pentagon Press Secretary Peter Cook said.

 Google, CEO

The initiative represents the secretary’s enduring commitment to building lasting partnerships between the public and private sectors, Cook said in a statement.

“Just as the Defense Business Board provides advice to the department on best business practices from the private sector, the Defense Innovation Advisory Board will provide advice on the best and latest practices in innovation that the department can emulate,” Cook added.

The board’s mandate is to provide department leaders independent advice on innovative and adaptive means to address future organizational and cultural challenges, the press secretary said, including the use of technology alternatives, streamlined project management processes and approaches — all with the goal of identifying quick solutions to DoD problems.

Areas Deeply Familiar in Silicon Valley

The board will seek to advise the department on areas that are deeply familiar to Silicon Valley companies, such as rapid prototyping, iterative product development, complex data analysis in business decision making, the use of mobile and cloud applications, and organizational information sharing, Cook said, and will not engage in discussion of military operations or strategy.

Alphabet Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt will chair the board, which will be composed of up to 12 people who have successfully led large private and public organizations and excelled at identifying and adopting new technology concepts, Cook said.

Carter and Schmidt will jointly select the board, Cook said. “Members will represent a cross-section of America’s most innovative industries, drawing on technical and management expertise from Silicon Valley and beyond,” he added.

As chairman of Alphabet and as the author of “How Google Works,” Schmidt has a unique perspective on the latest practices in harnessing and encouraging innovation and in the importance of technology in driving organizational behavior and business operations, Cook said.

**** Background

US spy chief James Clapper highlights cyber threats

BBC: US intelligence agencies have placed cyber attacks from foreign governments and criminals at the top of their list of threats to the country.

Online assaults would increasingly undermine US economic competitiveness and national security, said Director of National Intelligence James Clapper.

A report issued by his office said Russia’s military was setting up a cyber command to carry out attacks.

The report also describes China, Iran and North Korea as leading threats.

In testimony to a congressional committee on Thursday, Mr Clapper said he no longer believed the US faced “cyber Armageddon”.

The idea that major infrastructure such as financial networks or power grids could be disabled by hackers now looked less probable, he said.

However he warned: “We foresee an ongoing series of low-to-moderate level cyber attacks from a variety of sources over time, which will impose cumulative costs on US economic competitiveness and national security.”

Mr Clapper highlighted the case of Russia, which he said posed the greatest a cyber risk to US interests. He said that threat from the Russian government was “more severe” than previously realised.

He also said profit-minded criminals and ideologically driven hackers were also increasingly active.

Over the past year there have been a series of high-profile cyber attacks against US targets.

North Korea was accused of being behind the theft of a huge data cache from Sony Pictures in November.

Mr Clapper also mentioned the example of an alleged Iranian attack on the Las Vegas Sands Casino Corporation last year.

Meanwhile in January the Twitter and YouTube accounts of the US military command were hacked by a group claiming to back Islamic State (IS).

During the hearing, Mr Clapper acknowledged that the US had its own “offensive capabilities”.

In 2010 Iran experienced a cyber attack on its nuclear program. Tehran accused Israel and the US of planting malware.

China to lay off five to six million workers

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Hank Paulson: China needs to let ‘failing companies fail’

Former U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, who oversaw bank bailouts during the global financial crisis, has different advice for China: Let companies fail.

“They can show right now they’re very serious about dealing with inefficient state-owned enterprises as they take capacity out of the steel industry, coal industry and others by letting some failing companies fail,” Paulson, who was Treasury secretary from 2006-2009, told CNBC’s Squawk Box on the sidelines of an Institute of International Finance event organized in conjunction with the G20 meeting in Shanghai.

As Treasury secretary, Paulson oversaw a $700 billion government-funded bailout of U.S. financial institutions that were seen as “too big to fail” in the global financial crisis.

Paulson, who is also a former chairman and CEO of Goldman Sachs, added that China needed to move faster to promote competition.

“Competition is about opening up to the private sector, which is the future, and it’s about putting the state-owned enterprises on a level playing field,” said Paulson,, who earlier this decade founded the independent think tank Paulson Institute promoting sustainable and environmental projects. “There’s clearly room to move faster.”

Last year, China issued guidance on reforming often-inefficient state enterprises, such as introducing mixed public-private ownership as well as pushing for mergers and share sales, but the market isn’t always certain of progress on this front.

Exclusive: China to lay off five to six million workers, earmarks at least $23 billion

Reuters: China aims to lay off 5-6 million state workers over the next two to three years as part of efforts to curb industrial overcapacity and pollution, two reliable sources said, Beijing’s boldest retrenchment program in almost two decades.

China’s leadership, obsessed with maintaining stability and making sure redundancies do not lead to unrest, will spend nearly 150 billion yuan ($23 billion) to cover layoffs in just the coal and steel sectors in the next 2-3 years.

The overall figure is likely to rise as closures spread to other industries and even more funding will be required to handle the debt left behind by “zombie” state firms.

The term refers to companies that have shut down some of their operations but keep staff on their rolls since local governments are worried about the social and economic impact of bankruptcies and unemployment.

Shutting down “zombie firms” has been identified as one of the government’s priorities this year, with China’s Premier Li Keqiang promising in December that they would soon “go under the knife”..

The government plans to lay off five million workers in industries suffering from a supply glut, one source with ties to the leadership said.

A second source with leadership ties put the number of layoffs at six million. Both sources requested anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to media about the politically sensitive subject for fear of sparking social unrest.

The ministry of industry did not immediately respond when asked for comment on the reports.

The hugely inefficient state sector employed around 37 million people in 2013 and accounts for about 40 percent of the country’s industrial output and nearly half of its bank lending.

It is China’s most significant nationwide retrenchment since the restructuring of state-owned enterprises from 1998 to 2003 led to around 28 million redundancies and cost the central government about 73.1 billion yuan ($11.2 billion) in resettlement funds.

On Monday, Yin Weimin, the minister for human resources and social security, said China expects to lay off 1.8 million workers in the coal and steel industries, but he did not give a timeframe.

China aims to cut capacity gluts in as many as seven sectors, including cement, glassmaking and shipbuilding, but the oversupplied solar power industry is likely to be spared any large-scale restructuring because it still has growth potential, the first source said.

DEBT OVERHANG

The government has already drawn up plans to cut as much as 150 million tonnes of crude steel capacity and 500 million tonnes of surplus coal production in the next three to five years.

It has earmarked 100 billion yuan in central government funds to deal directly with the layoffs from steel and coal over the next two years, vice-industry minister Feng Fei said last week.

The Ministry of Finance said in January it would also collect 46 billion yuan from surcharges on coal-fired power over the coming three years in order to resettle workers. In addition, an assortment of local government matching funds will also be made available.

However, the funds currently being offered will do little to resolve the problems of debts held by zombie firms, which could overwhelm local banks if they are not handled correctly.

“They have proposed this dedicated fund only to pay the workers, but there is no money for the bad debts, and if the bad debts are too big the banks will have problems and there will be panic,” said Xu Zhongbo, head of Beijing Metal Consulting, who advises Chinese steel mills.

Factories shut down would have to repay bank loans to avoid saddling state banks with a mountain of non-performing loans, the sources said. “Triangular debt”, or money owed by firms to other enterprises, would also have to be resolved, they added.

Although China has promised to help local banks transfer the bad debts of zombie steel mills to asset management firms, local governments are not expected to gain access to the worker lay-off funds until the zombie firms have actually been shut down and debt issues settled.

($1 = 6.5476 Chinese yuan)

China’s Exploding Military Footprint

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This Map Visualizes China’s Growing Military Capabilities In The South China Sea

This Map Visualizes China's Growing Military Capabilities In The South China Sea

This awesome interactive map shows China’s emerging area denial and anti-access military capabilities in the South China Sea. It is useful in visually tracking China’s progress towards creating an overlapping field of control over a vast majority of the area.

The map, which you can access here, is built by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS).

Great work Tyler:One of China’s highly developed islands in the northern part of the South China Sea, Woody Island, has been equipped with surface-to-air missiles and fighter aircraft. These moves have come just as many defense analysts have predicted for years and are likely an indication of things to come for China’s other island outposts throughout the South China Sea.

There is also evidence that China is installing a high-frequency long-range radar array on Cuarteron Reef, one of their handful of manmade islands in the south-central part of the South China Sea. This radar type is known to be used for detecting aircraft and ships at extreme ranges far over-the-horizon and can theoretically detect some stealthy aircraft under certain circumstances. It is just one of many other sensors popping up on this island and others, although the existence of such a capability provides even more evidence that China is actively seeking an aggressive anti-access, area denial strategy over the South China Sea.

China might be installing HF radar that can detect stealth aircraft in S. China Sea

This all comes as China’s largest island building project out of their manmade island initiative, Fiery Cross Reef, officially activated its 9,000-foot runway early last month. The runway is capable of supporting even China’s heaviest bomber and transport aircraft.

With any luck CSIS will keep updating this fabulous visual resource as China expands its military capabilities to its other islands that remain under construction in the South China Sea. Undoubtedly, the threat rings you see today will blossom and multiply, creating a massive overlapping area of control backed up by anti-ship and anti-air missiles, as well as fighter and maritime surveillance and attack aircraft.

Going back to 2015: (So much for that Obama Asia Pivot)

WSJ:

Analysts say the imminent end to China’s island-building work could signal a willingness to seek compromise with Washington and rival claimants in the South China Sea, even as it demonstrates Beijing’s ability to unilaterally dictate terms in the long-standing dispute.

“This is a step toward halting land reclamation, which the U.S. has demanded, and at the same time, China can tell its people that it has accomplished what it wanted to do,” said Huang Jing, an expert on Chinese foreign policy at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy in Singapore.

“China unilaterally started the land reclamation and now China is unilaterally stopping it,” Mr. Huang said. “China is showing that—as a major power—it can control escalation, that it has the initiative, and that it can do what it sees fit for its interests.”

Beijing lays claim to almost the entire South China Sea, a stretch of resource-rich waters that carries more than half the world’s trade. Its claims overlap with those of Malaysia, Vietnam, Brunei, Taiwan and the Philippines—several of whom have criticized China’s rapid and extensive construction program in the Spratlys as the latest in a series of aggressive Chinese efforts to assert territorial rights.

 

A Plane Titled Arsenal

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Here’s what we know about the Pentagon’s new, secret warplane

BusinessInsider: There’s increasing chatter about a secret, potentially costly, Defense Department weapons program with an interesting moniker: the “Arsenal Plane.”

Defense Secretary Ash Carter mentioned the project earlier this month while describing the work of the Strategic Capabilities Office (SCO), a clandestine workshop established within the Pentagon in 2012 to develop the next generation of bleeding-edge weapons, ostensibly to counter China and Russia.

The new warplane effort “takes one of our oldest aircraft platform and turns it into a flying launch pad for all sorts of different conventional payloads,” Carter said during a Feb. 2 speech previewing the department’s then-pending fiscal 2017 budget request.

“In practice, the arsenal plane will function as a very large airborne magazine, networked to fifth generation aircraft that act as forward sensor and targeting nodes, essentially combining different systems already in our inventory to create holy new capabilities,” he said, referring to the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter.

The Pentagon chief mentioned the project again on Thursday when he testified before the House Appropriations Defense subpanel and ticked off a handful of technologies SCO is working on, including the Air Force’s budget-busting Long Range Strike Bomber (LRSB) program and “swarming 3-D printed micro-drones.”

But what’s known about the Arsenal Plane beyond that? Defense leaders aren’t giving up any specifics.

The concept is being developed “in partnership with DARPA. We will be supporting, and the idea is to look for additional ways to arm a particular aircraft so that it might be able to do different types of missions. More munitions and different types of munitions,” Air Force Secretary Deborah Lee James said during a Feb. 12 Air Force Association event.

But when asked what kind of legacy aircraft might be retrofitted to essentially turn it into an airborne aircraft carrier, James punted: “I think all of this is still being discussed. It’s still a program in development. Those decisions haven’t been reached yet.”

Air Force

The concept was originally introduced in the 1980s, when the military considered turning one of its existing bombers, or a commercial plane like the Boeing 747, into a launcher capable of carrying anywhere from 50 to 70 missiles. The idea was scrapped due to the envisioned platform’s lack of connectivity and precision weapons and the large platform’s inherent vulnerability to enemy attack aircraft.

However, the idea is getting a second-look in the wake of China’s aggressive behavior in the Asia-Pacific region, especially in the South China Sea where Beijing is reclaiming land in the disputed Spratly Islands and turning them into manmade outposts for some of it most advanced military hardware.

The Arsenal Plane is also “a response to the limits of the F-35,” according to Richard Aboulafia, Vice President of Analysis at the Teal Group. For all its traits, the plane “doesn’t hold a whole lot of ordnance.”

Indeed, an F-35 maxes out at around 18,000 pounds of ordnance, and that when munitions are loaded on the plane’s wings – a move that would compromise its stealth technology (and therefore the whole point of the aircraft itself).

That limited amount of weaponry could prove deadly in a dogfight.

“Obviously, in Asia, you’ve got the problem with Chinese numbers,” Aboulafia said, referring to China’s years-long push to modernize and expand all aspects of its military.

Ideally, the new aircraft would be loaded for bear with precision guided missiles so that a squadron of F-35s that might encounter a number of hostile jets could rely on the larger plane for assistance, or cue in targeting information to help it fight or bug out

Aboulafia said the concept is “worth investigating” because one of China’s highest military priorities has been to develop long range, heavy combat fighters — along the lines of its J-20 jet — that are stealthy and capable of taking out tankers or AWACS, an airborne early warning aircraft, which packs little to no firepower.

He said modern technology has largely solved the connectivity and precision issue from the ‘80s, but the size and vulnerability problem remains.

“These things … become missile magnets in a time of war,” he said.

The Pentagon may be moving forward, regardless. Inside Defense, a trade publication, speculates that the department’s 2017 budget request for $198 million in funding for advanced component development for an “Alternative Strike” program is actually for the Arsenal Plane.

The spending request is under the SCO umbrella and states the “project will demonstrate the feasibility and utility of launching existing/modified weapons from existing launch platforms,” the publication notes.

Provided the Air Force’s LRSB effort — expected to start replacing the service’s aging B-52 and B-1 bomber fleets in the 2020s – comes online according to plan, the Pentagon would have no shortage of platforms it could retrofit into a flying fortress instead of shipping off to the boneyard.

The new effort will no doubt be swarmed with questions about affordability, especially after a think-tank report released earlier this month warned of a coming “bow wave” in bills to the Air Force budget in the 2020s as the service looks to modernize.

But Aboulafia noted those costs are driven mostly by the F-35, the LRSB and the service’s new tanker programs.

“What might make this more affordable is an off-the-shelf platform … its cash footprint might be smaller,” he predicted.

This story was originally published by  The Fiscal Times.