Not, Decidedly, a 20th Century Arms Race
Good analysis from Stratfor today on the growing East Asian focus on navel power. The focus here is on amphibious warfare ships for force projection, not aircraft carriers. Why? Because humanitarian relief and peacekeeping operations are more likely than full-on military conflicts and Japan, South Korea and Australia are working to improve their capabilities for these missions.
In all of this, the analysis wonders aloud if China’s focus on building an indigenous aircraft carrier isn’t missing the boat (pun intended). A carrier by itself is enormously expensive and complicated (witness the repeated Soviet failures to build a functional operational carrier) yet offers precious little in the way of peacekeeping capability. The amphibious warfare ships being built by Australia, South Korea and Japan, on the other hand, offer a flexible force-projection capability for operations ranging from peacekeeping to stability operations to disaster relief to full-on shooting war. The money China devotes to carriers must come at the expense of something, and it could very well be this sort of force projection capability.
While the analysis raises the spectre of America losing its monopoly on large-scale, quick-reaction assistance, this growing SysAdmin capability represents an enormous opportunity. Orchestrated within a cohesive strategic vision, these forces are well on the way to developing an international SysAdmin force capable of sharing the load of responding to “dozens of small flare-ups across the region in the next decade.”
