Posted on 01/03/2014 10:25:27 AM PST by SeekAndFind
China's armed forces makes a lot of headlines these days, with 2.3 million active military personnel and the world's second largest defense budget. Some people, like the bloggers at Global Firepower, take this to mean that China has the world's third most powerful military, behind the U.S. and Russia and followed by India and Britain. But this thankfully abstract debate is far from settled, and one top authority says that China's military is still inferior to little Britain with its 224,500 active military personnel.
Professor Malcolm Chalmers, director of UK Defence Policy Studies at the renowned Royal United Services Institute, says Britain would have a clear advantage in a straight fight at an equidistant location.
Chalmers described the modern paradigm in a widely reported 2011 article:
The UK will never again be a member of the select club of global superpowers. Indeed it has not been one for decades. But currently planned levels of defence spending should be enough for it to maintain its position as one of the world’s five second-rank military powers (with only the US in the first rank), as well as being (with France) one of NATO-Europe’s two leading military powers. Its edge – not least its qualitative edge – in relation to rising Asian powers seems set to erode, but will remain significant well into the 2020’s, and possibly beyond.
We recently contacted Chalmers to ask if this paradigm still held and to elaborate on how Britain could beat China.
He wrote back:
I think my 2011 comment remains valid. If you take individual elements of front line military capability – air, sea, land — the UK armed forces continue to outmatch those of China in qualitative terms by some margin. The UK also has greater capabilities for getting the most out of these forces,
(Excerpt) Read more at businessinsider.com ...
The key word there is "equidistant". Equidistant from what two points? China and Australia? China and England?
And for what it is worth, if China decides to slowly expand, that equidistant point will move closer to London.
Britain’s military is run by western leftists. They ain’t goona beat a damn thing.
The UK’s armed forces are superior so long as an adversary (China) is far away? What about when an army of millions is at the gates?
To summ up succinctly what this profesor said. It’s all fine and well that you have a huge land army, but if you don’t have the capability to send them anywhere, what good are they? For protecting your own country and that’s about it.
Yes, they are working on their Navy, but that will take a long time. It’s all about force projection...
In other words that are talking logistics. .sealift, airlift, ect
RE: Britain’s military is run by western leftists. They ain’t goona beat a damn thing.
So, if Argentina invades the Falklands again today, what do you think will happen?
Well handing back Hong Kong sure wasn’t a good start.
I’m not sure whether to classify this as wishful thinking or pure fantasy. In either case, its just an exercise in justifying ever diminishing military capability.
Nuc arms don't count.
There are of course factors outside of quantity. Iraq had a decent sized army of battle tested guys but we didn’t have a lot of trouble with them. However I should hate to be the tip of the spear going into a fight against 224,500 WWII era Japs. How motivated the troops are is a biggie.
Then the Union Jack goes down and the Chinese flag goes up. Just like with Hong Kong.
Professor Chalmers made a reasoned assessment based on a flawed premise; that Red China will fight on Britain’s terms. This simply isn’t true.
Red China craves regional supremacy and global power projection. It plans to have the ability to achieve both by 2025 through conventional and asymmetric warfare. When Red China feel prepared, it will not fight on Britain’s terms but on its own terms. And it is building, testing, and already using its forces, conventional and unconventional, to enforce its battle terms in the upcoming war against the West.
This is exactly what Japan did in the years leading up to WWII. And Britain is falling into the same complacency it had prior to WWII. And so is the United States.
If Britain and the U.S. don’t get our heads out of the sand now, we will soon find ourselves fighting for our existence. And make no mistake, the war has already started with the Red Chinese directed enemy within winning the battles!
Don’t know, but western leftists as I used refers generally to English speaking progressives.
In other words- absolute dishonest, evil morons.
China will take a page out of Hitler’s book: slowly annex neighbouring territory and, if the west pushes back, sign some meaningless piece of paper promising not to do it again. China already has de facto control over Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos and North Korea. Taiwan is the natural next target. I could see China also take a run at Thailand and possibly Indonesia given the level of discrimination exercised by those muslim countries against the sizeable Chinese minority in each country (not to mention the vast oil and gas reserves in the coastal waters). I don’t think China has any ambition to occupy Japan, but they would certainly like to isolate it and cut if off from it’s American military cooperation. China is still about 10 years and 4 aircraft carrier squadrons away from being able to flex its muscles but barring a collapse of the communist regime, that day will eventually cone.
Indeed. 2025 is when Red China is planning on being able to take on the U.S. Look for Free China, Taiwan, to be attacked then and the U.S. to do nothing.
This will be the “Poland moment” of WWIII.
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