Out of Touch: The Empire Has Lost Its Mind
Jim Kavanagh
I've been trying to figure out something to say that
captures the insanity of the present conjuncture, and a friend steered me to an
article in the Washington Post about American strategy towards China that
epitomizes the delusional and dangerous thinking that underlies American policy
around the world.
In the piece, titled “Preparing
for a China war, the Marines are retooling how they’ll fight,” WaPo
National Security Reporter, Ellen Nakashima explains the U.S. “military’s
latest concept for fighting adversaries like China from remote, strategic
islands in the western Pacific…striving to adapt to a maritime fight that could
play out across thousands of miles of islands and coastline in Asia.”
The strategy, dubbed “Force Design” involves the “forward
deployment” of “smaller, lighter, more mobile” Marine units called Littoral
Combat Teams throughout the First Island Chain, “a crucial stretch
of territory sweeping from Japan to Indonesia.” These smaller, lighter Teams
will be “as invisible as possible to radar and other electronic detection,” and
will “gather intelligence and target data… as well as occasionally sink ships
with medium-range missiles”— thus “enabl[ing] the larger joint force to deploy
its collective might.”
Of course, there is no other “adversary like” China, and this is the “latest concept” for nothing else but winning a war against the People’s Republic of China (PRC), blocking any attempt by the PRC to forcibly reunify its Taiwan province with the mainland. What’s remarkable is that, in carefully describing how this innovative war-fighting strategy might work (“The reality of the mission is daunting”), Nakashima makes painfully clear how utterly ridiculous it actually is.