"panda huggers" vs. the new McCarthyism

[Faustine]

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.