US more cautious than wary as China's reach grows

"To predict anything with certainty about the PLA or its intent is really irresponsible," says a senior US expert on China's military. "I don't think the PLA knows which way it is headed. I think there are just too many question marks."

"I view China as a challenge, I would like to put it that way," says Guam's air commander, Col. Michael Boera. "I don't yet know if they are a problem."

In interviews in Hawaii, Guam, Taiwan, and Tokyo, generals and pilots, analysts and experts offered two fundamental points about China and the US in Asia. First, while China has turned its 1970s-era military technology into late 1980s-era technology, it is still 1980s-early-90s technology, and remains untested in combat conditions. China's high-tech training of officers and enlisted personnel is still considered very modest.

Moreover, while China is creating the kind of high-tech battle force that will allow its ships, planes, missiles, and operations centers to coordinate with precision and speed, it does not yet have this hard-earned capability. Nor does it have advanced satellites and AWACS-enhanced battlefield vision (though China is purchasing up to four AWACS-type Russian A-50 planes.)

In the short term, China faces two real problems. One, in the most serious and potentially catastrophic scenario - a PLA attack on Taiwan - it is far from clear that China can sustain an attack, once it meets advanced resistance.

Second, US Pacific forces are not sitting dormant. China, for example, may be reforming, but it has not undergone the kind of "revolution in military affairs" that US forces have in the past decade. Moreover, should it come to a serious dustup in the Pacific, China might be required to face both US and Japanese forces. Japan has state-of-the-art systems that are mostly compatible with US systems.

From atop the slender control tower here at Anderson, with its "Prepared to Prevail" inscription, officers are busy managing a live example of how US forces are adapting. Aircraft from three military branches work together: Ke-135 bomber refuelers, B-52s, Navy P-3s, and Navy H860 helicopters. A set of stealthy B2 bombers was here last week, and Marine F-18 jets arrive next week. Lumbering C-17s buzz around like oversize bumblebees.

This is a composite picture of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's idea of "interoperability" - where military branches act in concert. The concept will be further enhanced this month when a new "Kenney War Fighting Center" starts up in Honolulu. The center will oversee a rapid-response Air Force team throughout the Pacific. Here in Guam, the Kenney center will deploy three sophisticated "Global Hawk" unmanned reconnaissance planes. Global Hawk replaces the U-2 spy plane, and will fly reconnaissance missions of 24 hours or more at 54,000 feet above the 100 million square miles and along the 43 countries that make up the Pacific command region.

"Flexibility, speed, quick response ... is what we seek," says Lt. Col. Jason Salata of Pacific Command.

Last summer, US and Japanese planes conducted joint bombing runs off Guam - the first time Japanese planes dropped munitions here since WW II.

Guam's downside is vulnerability to what is called a "single point failure." That is, many assets could be wiped out in a single event, like an earthquake or a hostile submarine with tactical nuclear weapons. Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, was nearly a "single point failure."

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