US News & World Report 7/23/01
CHINA How big a threat?
Inside the bitter fight over assessing China's intentions
By Richard J. Newman and Kevin Whitelaw
It was originally created by the U.S. Air Force and is now entrusted with
some of the U.S. government's most sensitive and secretive national
security studies. So executives at Rand, a think tank based in Santa
Monica, Calif., were stunned when intelligence officials called on June 8
to say they were firing Rand from a classified project ordered by Congress
to assess China's future military capabilities. The National Intelligence
Council (NIC), a group that reports directly to CIA chief George Tenet,
concluded that Rand was failing to do its job adequately and decided it
needed to hire another contractor.
But there is another side to the story. As Rand held conferences with
experts and conducted its analysis, it seemed that the eventual report
would depict China as a growing military powerbut as no match for the
United States in the near future. The NICitself under pressure from
Republican hawks in Congressappeared to be looking for a different, more
alarming conclusion. At one point, for instance, the NIC pressured Rand to
add several specific China hard-liners to its conference roster, U.S. News
has learned. "They want China to be 10 feet tall," complains one analyst
familiar with the project. "They're cooking the books." Faced with
resistance from Rand, according to some sources, the NIC decided to seek a
more compliant contractor. A senior intelligence official denies that the
NIC was shopping for a predetermined result.
Either way, the controversy provides a window into the battle underway in
Washington over how great a threat China poses in the next decade or soa
debate that has intensified since the arrival of the Bush administration
with its agenda to increase military spending and build a missile defense
system. In this instance, the full storylike the initial work performed by
Randis hidden from public view by government secrecy. The outcome of the
larger debate, however, will have huge ramifications for the future
security posture of the United States and billions of dollars in defense
spending.
"Panda huggers." China looms as the biggest factor in U.S. defense policy
since the demise of the Soviet Union. A militarily aggressive China would
give defense planners a useful foil: an identifiable enemy. That's just
what a self-styled "Blue Team" of conservatives foreseesa China intent on
annexing Taiwan, by force if necessary, and dominating Japan and South
Korea. That would put China on a collision course with the United States,
thereby justifying a surge of U.S. spending on weapons ranging from Stealth
bombers to the national missile shield. A docile and more democratic China,
on the other hand, would undercut calls for higher defense spending. With a
Communist government once again in the cross hairs, passions are ramping up
to a Cold War pitch. Blue Teamers label those who disagree with them "panda
huggers." Blue Teamers, in turn, have been derided as "the storm troopers."
At meetings for the Rand study during the spring, project managers had to
establish rules forbidding personal insults. Shouting erupted at several
meetings, according to people who were present. Blue Team participants
complained later of feeling ignored during conference sessions. Says
one: "It was clear that they were just going through the motions."
The raw emotions stem from more than personal disagreements. Over the past
decade, many more members of Congress and their staffers have received
access to the Central Intelligence Agency's classified intelligence. The
GOP-controlled Congress, deeply distrustful of the Clinton administration's
handling of defense and foreign policy, began asking for alternative
assessments. "In recent years, there has been a lot of second-guessing of
the CIA's analyses," says Steven Aftergood of the Federation of American
Scientists.
Congress's 1999 intelligence bill, for example, suggested that the China-
Taiwan Issues Group in the CIA's Directorate of Intelligence was prone
to "group think" and directed the CIA to expose its China analysts
to "contrary thinking" to challenge their suppositions. Republican Sen.
Richard Shelby of Alabama, vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence
Committee, says the intelligence community "was not rigorous in its
analysis" of the future potential China threat. An external commission
established by last year's intelligence bill, and chaired by retired Army
Gen. John Tilelli, accused the CIA of an "institutional predisposition" to
play down the China threat, in a classified report delivered to Congress
last week.
But intelligence analysts view Congress's new activism as an alarming
effort to bully the CIA into producing analyses consistent with
conservative ideology. "If you're on the inside, you feel like you're being
pilloried," says a former intelligence official. "It's very McCarthyesque,"
adds another. A number of analysts involved with the scotched Rand report
believe that this fiasco represents a rare instance when motives to
generate evidence in support of predetermined conclusions were laid
bare. "Coming from this Congress, it did worry me [from the beginning] that
there was an intent on getting a specific answer," says one close observer.
What makes China especially controversial is that Western intelligence
agencies know so little about it. "We knew way more about the Soviet Union
than we do about China," says one Pentagon official who has worked on
several China studies. Influential Pentagon strategist Andrew Marshalla
key adviser to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeldhas long argued that
Pentagon planners need to focus more on Asia.
No common ground. So little hard information leaves wide room for
interpretation among analysts trying to puzzle out the enigmatic Asian
nation. "No one disputes the basic fact of China's military buildup," says
Arthur Waldron of the University of Pennsylvania. "The argument is about
its significance." Hawks see a massive military buildup at a time when
China has no discernible enemywhich can only mean its arsenal is directed
at the United States. Others see a second-rate military power struggling to
modernize a force with outdated tactics and ancient equipment. The rancor
stemming from ideological differences seems to have hardened
positions. "The middle ground is sparsely populated," observes one analyst.
On paper, there seems to be a lot to worry about. The Pentagon estimates
that China could build as many as 1,000 ballistic missiles per year over
the next decade. Most of those would be designed to strike airfields,
aircraft carriers, ports, and other key facilities in the event of a war
over Taiwan. As many as 650 of those may be deployed near the coast
opposite Taiwan and targeted directly at the renegade province. China is
building space reconnaissance satellites that would be able to track U.S.
aircraft carriers and other forces during a conflict. It will soon have a
cruise missile like the U.S. Tomahawk. Participants at the Rand conferences
raised other intriguing concerns. Several suggested that Chinese agents
have penetrated U.S. bases in Okinawa, Japan, and perhaps elsewhere in the
Pacific. That could help China gain key intelligence during a conflict and
even conduct sabotage or terrorism.
But China, with a decrepit industrial base and a risk-averse socialist
bureaucracy, faces even more difficulty than advanced nations in developing
high-tech weaponry. And China's leaders face handicaps other nations don't.
For starters, Beijing's Communist leadership appears far more concerned
about threats from inside China than about extending its military reach.
China's People's Liberation Army includes 10 divisionsthe total number in
the active-duty U.S. Armydedicated solely to maintaining internal order.
China also faces a mounting financial crunch. While its economy is growing
rapidly, the Chinese government still supports numerous Soviet-style, state-
run businesses, which mostly lose money. "Just floating all these state-
owned enterprises is almost driving them bankrupt," says Richard Dunn, a
retired Army colonel and China specialist at defense contractor SAIC.
Meanwhile, Chinese troops appear to be minor leaguers compared with their
American counterparts. Many U.S. experts blamed the April collision between
an EP-3 surveillance plane and a Chinese fighter jet on poor skills by the
Chinese pilot.
Chinese leaders are aware of their military limitations. That's why Chinese
defense planners stress "asymmetrical" warfare rather than attempt to match
the U.S. jet for jet and ship for ship. China's asymmetrical approach is to
develop weapons and strategies that would most effectively counter U.S.
strengths: lasers or jammers to disrupt U.S. satellites and other "eyes and
ears"; submarines that might be able to sink a large U.S. ship and produce
a disconcerting list of casualties; and, of course, hundreds of missiles
that would be hard to shoot down and would force American forces to operate
without access to many of the ports and airfields they typically rely on.
But this capability does not yet exist. "Not only can't we predict which
way they're going to go," says Dunn, "I think they can't predict which way
they're going to go."
Infighting. A much safer forecast is that the China slugfest will continue
to rage among U.S. strategists and probably intensify. Armed with a
critical Tilelli reportand perhaps a second damning report from whomever
the CIA selects to replace RandCapitol Hill Republicans could call for
a "Team B" reassessment of the China threat. That's what happened in the
1970s, when Congress appointed a second team of outsiders to re-examine the
Soviet threat. That assessment portrayed a much more serious military
buildup than previously thought, which triggered Ronald Reagan's huge
boosts in defense spending in the 1980s. And in 1998 a commission headed by
Rumsfeld reported that the ballistic missile threat to the United States
was more serious than the CIA had been reporting. The CIA, in response,
heightened its own estimate of the threat.
Republicans hoping for a similar outcome on China may even find help from
across the political aisle, where liberals decry China's labor and human-
rights practices. Democratic Sen. Robert Byrd of West Virginia last year
helped create the U.S.-China Security Review Commission, whose job is to
gauge whether China's trade relationship is influencing U.S. national
security decisions. The committee has $3 million for its work over the next
several years. By then, perhaps it will be clearer whether China is public
enemy No. 1 or just a public-relations ploy.
