History Seems to be Continuing
Power Line
Driving home from work tonight, I listened to Hugh Hewitt interviewing Frank Gaffney. They were talking about Bill Gertz's article in the Washington Times this morning about a classified intelligence report that concludes that over the last ten years, America's intelligence agencies failed to detect China's aggressive arms buildup. Among the things that our analysts missed:
<<<
China's development of a new long-range cruise missile. The deployment of a new warship equipped with a stolen Chinese version of the U.S. Aegis battle management technology. Deployment of a new attack submarine known as the Yuan class that was missed by U.S. intelligence until photos of the submarine appeared on the Internet. Development of precision-guided munitions, including new air-to-ground missiles and new, more accurate warheads. China's development of surface-to-surface missiles for targeting U.S. aircraft carrier battle groups. The importation of advanced weaponry, including Russian submarines, warships and fighter-bombers.
>>>
This doesn't sound good, when talking about intelligence work:
<<<
According to officials familiar with the intelligence report, the word "surprise" is used more than a dozen times to describe U.S. failures to anticipate or discover Chinese arms development.
>>>
When intelligence reports are leaked, bureaucratic infighting is usually the reason. Here, it appears that a group of "panda-huggers" have dominated intelligence analysis on China for some years. Now we know they were wrong. There is no doubt that China has embarked on an aggressive arms buildup suited to projection of its power throughout the Far East. Which raises the question: Is Japan building warships? If not, why not?
I'm no expert here, but it seems to be a common problem that the government's main "experts" on a country or region are infatuated with the people they are supposed to be evaluating critically. Thus, the "Arabists" in the State Department have long been anti-Israel Arab partisans; the CIA analysts responsible for the Soviet Union thought highly of that grotesque entity, and completely failed to notice that it was collapsing; and now, the panda-huggers apparently glossed over China's aggressive intentions. There is every reason to believe that the next 100 years of history will be as interesting, and perhaps as tragic, as the last 100.
powerlineblog.com
washtimes.com |
