Be prepared for combat: Chinese general (China-Japan islands dispute)

Beijing: A senior Chinese general has urged the army not to be slack and be prepared for any possible military combat. The remark comes amid rising tensions between China and Japan over some disputed islands.

Efforts should be made to ensure that the military is capable of resolutely performing its duty to safeguard the country's national sovereignty, security and territorial integrity whenever it is needed by the Party and the people, said Gen. Xu Caihou, vice chairman of China's Central Military Commission.

Xu made the remarks on Thursday during an inspection of military units in north China's Shanxi Province, reported Xinhua. The military should improve its competence in the deterrent and operational missions, Xu said.

The army should always keep its political resolution, ideological stability and unity, Xu said. Moreover, Xu told the military to improve efforts to keep the soldiers well-informed of important current events and policies.

The international community isn’t stopping Japan from rearming. In fact I think certain of their allies ahhrmmm... (us) would love them to take a more assertive military role. They are one of the worlds most respectable nations with one of the worlds largest economies.

It is not countries that run amok and rape their neighbors. It is cabals that manage to seize countries. Admiral Raymond Spruance is credited with saying something like “there are enough brutes in any country, and enough of the brute in each of us” for what happened to happen anywhere.

“Japan put up a fine fight during this war, he began. . . The brutal treatment accorded our prisoners of war by the Japanese military caused many of our people to hate the Japanese. From my observations in Japan last year I never had the feeling that the mass of the Japanese people were in any way cruel or brutal. Their treatment of animals and children was quite the contrary. My only explanation was that cruelty and brutality were deliberately fostered in the Army and to some extent the Navy as a matter of high policy with the idea of producing tougher fighting men.

“There are always enough brutes in any population and enough of the brute in each individual to make this easy. The difficult thing in war is for the high command to restrain the brutal instincts which fighting tends to arouse in many individuals, while at the same time conducting relentlessly the operations which the war requires. For my own part I never found that I had to develop in myself a hatred of the Japanese as a race, in order to make what I hoped would be a good war against them.” (Bue, Thomas B., The Quiet Warrior: A Biography of Admiral Raymond A. Spruance, 1974)

If you want to get the Japs attention you have to drop the big one. Twice. In my opinion, those nukes saved more Japanese lives than it took. It is often noted that taking the islands would have cost up to a million Allied casualties. Given the Japanese stubbornness, I think it may have cost as many as four million Japanese lives with the refusals to surrender and the commission of suicide by the propagandized populace. And it was accomplished with the loss of a lousy hundred thousand lives or so. It was a terrible, terrible thing, but it was the right call.

I think we all have a sense that someday someone is going to set off a nuke again. It’s just the way of the world - if something can happen, it will, sooner or later.

Umm...they're already re-armed. They have the second-best Navy in the world, one that is clearly superior to the Chinese Navy.

Just because they call it a Self-Defense Force instead of a Navy means nothing.

Yup, call it what you want, but Japan is Japan and I would never dream of screwing around with anything that belongs to Japan. Japan needing N weapons is horsecrap.

They already have, to a large degree. The Japanese Navy is one of the most powerful in the world. Heck, they even have two light carriers, with another two under construction. They just got around the treaties banning them from having carriers by calling them helicopter-destroyers.

Yes - a destroyer comparable in size to an Essex and capable of carrying the F-35s that Japan is planning to buy. Their air and ground forces aren't anything to scoff at either.

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