**LEAD STORY**
Military analysts have given the Emergency Response and Research Institute in Chicago a detailed assessment of the capabilities of the Chinese military. A first look, on paper, would show that China has a very large military advantage over the island of Taiwan.
China considers Taiwan a renegade provinceand thus a territory to be subjagated to domination by Bejing. For the most part, Taiwan, even though it is economically very powerful in Asia, is not officially recognized as a completely independent country in the world. And, China is VERY interested in keeping it that way.
China has nearly ten times the armed forces of Taiwan. Ten times the number of fighter aircraft. Twice the number of warships and even has an arsenal of missiles and nuclear warheads. But even though China has greater numbers -- military analysts say that the Chinese military has very serious shortcomings. Analysts do not believe that China has the capability to launch a D-Day type invasion of Taiwan. China is also not considered to pose any kind of a major direct threat to the United States, now or anytime in the near future.
As the military exercises continue in the Taiwan Straits, people are nervous and U.S. military and intelligence is keeping a very watchful eye on what the Chinese are doing. However, most U.S. Department of Defense officials and other military analysts believe that if China were to start a shooting war -- it would face serious military limitations.
In a recent study conducted by the United States Department of Defense, China's military was assessed this way: "The People's Liberation Army is the world's largest fighting force. Its weaponry, however, consists mostly of outdated equipment, and its troops are not well-trained in the tactics of modern warfare."
Even though China has a three-million-member force, it does not have the ability to rapidly deploy its troops either by air or by sea. All military analysts contacted by ERRI said that they are VERY skeptical of the actual fighting abilities of Chinese forces and would probably rank them no higher than the ability of Iraqi forces prior to the Gulf War.
Since the Gulf War concluded, most high-ranking U.S. military commanders, such as General Colin Powell and General H. Norman Schwarzkopf, had said that they were quite shocked at how poorly trained the Iraqi forces were compared to U.S. forces.
U.S. intelligence estimates indicate that China's warplanes and weapons are, for the most part, ten to twenty years behind current technology.
While China does seem to have some very serious shortcomings militarily -- it is still capable of causing some serious harm to Taiwan. China could resort to missile terrorism as Iraq did during the Gulf War or it could attempt to blockade or mine Taiwan's seaports and grind the island's economy to a halt.
On the technological side, Taiwan is ahead of China in several areas. Taiwan is expecting to soon receive a large order of 150 U.S. F-16 and French Mirage 2000 jet fighters. New naval frigates are on the way and a new, improved air defense system. Taiwan is also making improvements to its ground-force capabilites. So, in many areas, Taiwan does have an advantage over China. However, one expert at the Institute for National Strategic Studies said, "If China were to launch a war of attrition against Taiwan, China could eventually prevail, at a very high cost."
U.S. government officials, however, do not believe that the situation will come to that assessment. Last week, U.S. officials reportedly were very blunt to a senior Chinese official and warned that there would be very serious consequences if China decided to use force against Taiwan.
Currently, the United States intelligence apparatus is in high-gear while monitoring the situation that is occurring in the Taiwan Straits. The U.S. is using such things as spy satellites and spy ships to watch the Chinese and provide an early warning should the Beijing government decides it wants to risk a move against Taiwan or the islands of Quemoy and Matsu, which are located just off the coast of the mainland. Both islands have heavily armed troops stationed on them.
China for the past ten years or so has been trying to increase its military spending. But most of the increased spending has gone to improve the pay and living standards of its troops and to keep pace with inflation. The People's Liberation Army (PLA) has also been attempting to shift itself from a very large defensive army to an army that is capable of fighting limited scale regional wars under modern conditions. Many people think that China is an emerging superpower -- but military experts say that it still has a very long way to go before it can be considered as one.
Some very interesting points were recently made by David Shambaugh of the University of London. Mr. Shambaugh is currently writing a book about the Chinese military. Shambaugh said that it will be at least twenty years or more before China will have the necessary airlift and sealift capability to rapidly deploy its troops.
More interesting was the Chinese military reactions to the high-tech war that was waged by the United States on Iraq in the Gulf War. The Chinese military leaders were said to be "stunned" and "every element of the allied strategy left the PLA aghast and hammered home as never before the backwardness of the PLA."
As an example, Chinese fighter pilots might expect to go up against U.S. fighter pilots in air battles. Chinese pilots fly only about half the the training hours logged monthly by U.S. pilots. The Chinese Air Force relies almost entirely on Soviet-designed aircraft from the 1950's that were re-engineered, modified and reproduced by the Chinese themselves in the 1960's and 1970's. Putting it mildly, any air battles would probably be called "turkey shoots" by U.S. fighter pilots. Another problem for the Chinese is their ability to maintain high- technological aircraft such as the 24 Russian Su-27s that they purchased in 1992.
The Rand Corporation did a recent study for the United States Air Force on the capabilites of the Chinese Air Force. The study concluded, "The Chinese Air Force does not constitute a credible offensive threat against the United States or its Asian allies today, and this situation will not change dramatically over the coming decade."
To summarize our assessment of the capabilites of the Chinese military, ERRI agrees with U.S. Secretary of Defense William Perry when he told President Clinton that China simply does not have the capability to launch a massive amphibious attack across the Taiwan Strait. The Taiwan Strait is more than four times the width of the English Channel, which proved itself a very difficult military obstacle for Allied forces on D-Day in World War II.
Military experts assess that the 150,000 troops that the Chinese have currently deployed in the on-going military exercises is much too small of a force to use against Taiwan and its 400,000- member forces. And even if China were able to deploy more manpower into the area -- it simply lacks the amphibious capabilty to even move them across the strait.
(c) EmergencyNet News Service, 1996, All Rights Reserved.