Wednesday, April 15, 2009
NEW WORLD ORDER
Here's a good overview of Chinese pursuit and implementation of precision-guided weapons from the strategic to the tactical level. It's been well more than twenty years that US military planners could count on significant advantages in this kind of thing. It seems that the genie is well and truly out of the bottle. And with China, the genie has found a home prosperous enough to support it.
For some reason, this feels like a prelude to a return to an earlier era in strategic relations -- the era of more-nearly equivalent Great Powers; the age of the Dreadnoughts. I feel pretty sure the US won't have the stomach to fill the role that the British did in those days -- the primer inter pares willing to shoulder the burden of staying on top in a world where multiple Great Powers are pushing into the first rank. At a first order of analysis, this seems to lead to the necessity of either defining relatively clear spheres of influence for new Great Powers, or ceding global primacy to another Power that is willing to muscle its way to the top and expend the blood and treasure necessary to stay there. A politically stable China seems to fit that description.
Better get to work on figuring out how to define spheres of influence ...
GB, THHotA
posted by Greg 6:21 AM
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