Highway to the Danger Zone

 

Uncle Volodya says, “Confusion is a luxury which only the very, very young can possibly afford and you are not that young anymore.”

Better listen now; said it ain’t no joke
Let your conscience fail you – Just do the stroke
Don’t you take no chances, Keep your eye on top
Do your fancy dances – You can’t stop, you just

Stroke me, stroke me: Give me the business all night long…

Billy Squier, from “The Stroke“

 

“Try again. Fail again. Fail better”.

Samuel Beckett

Cue ominous music.

Ha, ha; sorry to jump the rails before we’ve even got properly started, but that reminds me of the short film, “The Gunfighter“. The part where Sally, the whore, says, “That music seems kinda ominous, don’t it?”, and the younger of the murderin’ Henderson boys replies, “Ominous….what’s that mean?” That film was my introduction to the genre, and I think it set the bar pretty high. Check it out, it’s less than ten minutes of your busy day. This has been a grim year; you need to laugh more.

Anyway, as usual, that’s not what we’re here to talk about. So once again, please, cue ominous music.

The United States Air Force – indeed, the US military as a whole, but today’s highlight is on the Air Force – is in a very bad place.

Remember when it used to be both fun and fashionable to mock the Chinese military? Their funny, stilted marching, their ancient, terrifying (for the crew) submarines, their crappy stolen-technology fighter planes? No more, it seems. The USAF is struggling just to remain at parity with modern Chinese air power.

“Hinote said the Air Force is not having success in war games fought with today’s technology.

“What we’re finding is that in key areas of the competition between China and the United States … we’re pairing. In a few important areas, we’re behind — tonight. This is not a tomorrow problem. This is a today.”

That would be Lieutenant-General Clinton Hinote, DCOS Strategy, Integration and Requirements for the USAF. Empowered to speak for the country on policy, and America’s policy is ever-more focused on confronting China. Pivoting away from Russia as now a mere irritant, the United States feels the chill as the long shadow of China falls over it, and in the knowledge that of the two major powers it has settled upon for enemies, only one can threaten its global economic dominance.

China.

Speaking strictly for myself, I enjoyed a little chuckle over General Hinote’s lament that the United States is failing in war simulations it devises and runs itself, attributing tactics and capabilities to the enemy it often knows next to nothing about, with the added burden of factoring in weapons capabilities which are still on the horizon, such as hypersonics. When the USA was building the National Missile Defense (NMD) system, tests were conducted against a known target with a known launch time and location, a known trajectory and other flight characteristics such as speed and altitude. Technicians would argue that that’s simply the way you do tests; your aim is to collect and compile data which can be studied and interpreted, and testing the ability of the system to actually intercept the target is secondary; a bonus. But strategists will note how infrequently the enemy cooperates by ringing you up or sending you a datasheet to let you know when and from where he plans to attack.

And equipment! my, yes, I can certainly understand his complaints there; it’s amazing how little $56.9 Billion buys these days. Technically, Missile Defeat and Defense falls under the air envelope as well, so that’s another $20.3 Billion, less a paltry $619 Million allocated for sea-based interceptors. Nuclear Modernization included $2.8 Billion for the B-21 Long Range Strike Bomber, which definitely belongs under Air Forces. So what’s that all add up to, Daryana? $79.93 Billion? Yeah, that’s what I got, too; thank you.

Forgive my impertinence, General, but I could not forbear from noticing that the lead line item under air assets was 79 more of the F-35 Joint Strike Fighters, AKA ‘the flying anvil’. It’s a supersonic fighter which suffers structural damage when it flies at supersonic speed, and whose pilots sometimes experience loss of control during hard maneuvers, like when you are trying to avoid getting shot out of the sky. That sounds…very serious to me, although it’s true my military experience was all navy.

“But the structural damage that the Navy’s F-35C and the Marine Corps’s F-35B suffer when flying at supersonic speed reportedly is unfixable — and potentially the most serious long-term problem for the stealth fighter…After long periods at speeds faster than Mach one, the F-35B and F-35C suffer damage to their tails. The damage can destroy some of the aircraft’s antennae and also wreck the radar-absorbing coating that helps to keep down the F-35’s signature on enemy sensors.”

Unfixable. That seems…kinda ominous, don’t it? Not ominous enough to dwell any longer upon it, apparently; the F-35 program office closed the matter under the category, “No plan to correct”.

“This issue was closed on Dec. 17, 2019 with no further actions and concurrence from the U.S. services,” the F-35 program office told Defense News. “The [deficiency report] was closed under the category of ‘no plan to correct,’ which is used by the F-35 team when the operator value provided by a complete fix does not justify the estimated cost of that fix…In this case, the solution would require a lengthy development and flight testing of a material coating that can tolerate the flight environment for unlimited time while satisfying the weight and other requirements of a control surface,” the program office continued. “Instead, the issue is being addressed procedurally by imposing a time limit on high-speed flight.”

Sorry; was I laughing out loud? I thought I was using my inside voice. As the article mentions, the J-20 can fly supersonic rings around it. So can the SU-35, but we’re mostly concentrating on Chinese equipment for today. So can the F-16, comes to that, and it has been flying the unfriendly skies since the 1970’s.

The China Problem is moving General Hinote to invest in divestment, you might say – the US military has to get rid of sub-par equipment it can no longer devote money to support. The alternative, spelled out starkly, is to face the reality that defeat is inevitable. Actual airframes and systems that might soon be on the chopping block are not specified, but if the government follows General Hinote’s recommendations, the Air Force will be downsizing from seven fighter fleets to four. We will likely see some padding, so that the four which remain become larger as favourite legacy platforms are shuffled, but it can’t be anything like reducing to four while keeping everything. So the future Air Force will also require fewer pilots.

Is it exclusively a military problem, though, do you think? It’s fun to think so, because then you can get misty-eyed as Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall chokes that “…if the US is going to “win the ‘one fight’ to keep our freedom, it will be because of the success of our Air and Space Forces.”

Come again? China is a direct threat to American freedom? How, exactly? China is not in the slightest interested in menacing America’s freedom to stay on its own side of the world and mind its own business. Threatens the US Navy’s freedom to prance around in the South China Sea, perhaps, which might be why it was not named the American Territorial Waters Sea. No, the way it looks to me is that rather than having to reluctantly respond to a specific Chinese threat, Washington elites and influencers instead decided that China is getting uppity, and does not want to play the role assigned it.

And from that standpoint, China presents a far wider and more complex problem than its military capability. Let’s take a quick look at the economic picture.

The USA is still ahead for GDP, both ranked in US dollars, $20.937 Trillion to $14.723 Trillion (I’m using Trading Economics as a reference). The USA is also slightly ahead in GDP growth rate, using the figures of both governments, at 12.2 percent to 7.9 percent annually. Unemployment rates for the two are near-identical. However, about there the picture begins to diverge.

China’s inflation rate is 0.8% the USA’s is 5.3%; not particularly scary, but a significant difference, especially for a country whose currency is not really backed by anything but imagination.

“If you got a $1,400 check from the federal government earlier this year, or if your company received money to help cover payroll and other expenses, then you received some of the newly minted digital dollars that were created to support our economy. No taxpayers were involved in that process. It was all done using nothing more than a computer keyboard.”

The USA simply credits itself with new money whenever it thinks it needs more. It isn’t backed by gold, obviously, and hasn’t been for some time – but now, it isn’t backed by tax revenues, either. It’s simply magicked out of the air. Considerable economic brainpower has been dedicated to explaining why the United States can keep on doing this as long as it likes, but I’m afraid it was wasted on me; I still don’t get it. If there are no constraints on how much money a government can hump into the system, simply running the presses day and night…why doesn’t everyone do it? Tomorrow – or maybe next week; even fakery takes time to bring about – the GDP of Canada could be $80 Trillion!! It’s just some more zeroes – get with it, government!

China posted a trade surplus of $58.3 Billion last month. The USA posted a $70 Billion deficit. China’s government debt-to-GDP rate is 66.8%. The USA’s is 108%. China continues to dominate global trade, its export component having more than tripled in 20 years.

China surpassed the USA as a recipient of Foreign Direct Investment last year. It even tore the shorts off the USA at the box office. And as General Hitone has candidly informed us, China is at parity with the USA in many military areas, and has passed it in others.

It is important to remember that the current antagonistic relations between the USA and China originate with bellicose American maneuvering and rhetoric. It selected China as an enemy because it became clear to Washington that China could not be contained, and would not do as it was told. The roots of America’s disadvantage lie in the years it indulged in a free-for-all of offshoring, rewarding companies who ‘downsized’, cutting their domestic workforce and moving their operations and sometimes even their headquarters abroad. Manufacturing became hollowed out even as American consumers became accustomed to a wide range of cheap but good-quality manufactured goods from China. Now the US government struggles to reconcile the irreconcilable situation with tariffs and sanctions and fist-shaking. It cannot cut China off from its energy supply, because it lies conveniently next door and is served by pipelines. It cannot browbeat Americans into buying only American-made goods because they are considerably more expensive by comparison, while being of much the same quality. It cannot threaten to pay a visit with its giant military, because the Chinese military is bigger yet. It cannot fiddle global monetary policy against China, because it owes China billions in borrowing. What’s left?

Well…America does have the F-35.