Asia Times
By Peter J Brown

Just a few days after United States Navy Admiral Robert Willard, commander of the US Pacific Command, departed from Beijing in late May after a face-to-face meeting with Lieutenant General Ma Xiaotian, deputy chief of the People’s Liberation Army’s (PLA) general staff, China waved off a visit by US Secretary of Defense Robert Gates.

China announced that this was not a “convenient time” for Gates to visit. Willard’s talks with Ma in Beijing were part of the second round of the ongoing China-US Strategic and Economic Dialogue. Willard was there as part of the huge US delegation that was headed by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

Immediately prior to the dialogue, China had been contemplating two very different expressions of the current state of US-China

relations under the Barack Obama administration. The president’s 52-page US National Security Strategy (NSS) issued in early May, for example, was an engagement-centric, restrained and diplomatic overview. The NSS spoke of US relations with China using carefully crafted words such as “we will encourage China to make choices that contribute to peace, stability and prosperity as its influence rises”. The NSS did not rock the boat and was really not a formal strategy, unless repeating the word “engagement’ more than three dozen times is acceptable as such.

A few days after the NSS was unveiled, however, “AirSea Battle: A Point-of-Departure Operational Concept” (ASB) was presented by four analysts from the Washington DC-based Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments (CSBA). It was almost a polar opposite of the NSS in its treatment of China.

The ASB, which was 123 pages long and fell just short of being an actual blueprint for an armed confrontation between the countries, made a case for “offsetting actions” on the basis that “the strategic balance in the Western Pacific will become unfavorable and unstable”. Missions involving US Navy ships, submarines and the US Air Force (USAF) “in the early days of a war”, were examined.

ASB has taken years to evolve, and among other things, ASB is an indicator of the CSBA’s growing influence in Gates’ inner circle. US Navy Under Secretary Robert Work, a former US Marine Corps artillery colonel, is a former CSBA analyst. A participant on Obama’s Pentagon transition team in 2008, Work became the navy’s second-highest-ranking civilian in May 2009. He was recently described by Defense News as “a deeply experienced military strategist and wargamer”.    more …