Did you know China already has the largest navy in the Pacific? The most active submarines? And that often published images of its old Cold War weaponry are way out of date?
Miscalculating China’s capabilities may well be the West’s greatest mistake.
And strategic analysts are beginning to warn that a whole raft of generally accepted ‘truisms’ are, in fact, dangerously wrong.
China’s military has no experience. It’s technologically inferior. Its troops are poorly trained. Its equipments and tactics are poor-quality ‘knock-offs’ of stolen Western technology.
These statements sound promising to a world increasingly concerned about Beijing’s bellicose assertion of its new-found power.
But are they real?
History holds a warning.
Those exact-same catchcries were being bandied about with confidence in the 1930s and 40s about Japan.
It’s famous ‘Zero’ fighter was just a cheap rip-off of Western designs, they said. Its impressive fleet was built on outmoded British technology. And their training and tactics were inferior. They had no new ideas.
December 7, 1941, brutally proved all of the above wrong.
Have we set ourselves up for such a surprise again?
Former US Air Force intelligence specialist Robert McCoy thinks so.
“Only now are American leaders publicly acknowledging what has probably been spoken about behind the scenes for some time in Washington’s halls of power,” he wrote.
https://www.northernstar.com.au/news/the-west-has-badly-underestimated-china/3746745/