Considering present economic and financial circumstances central bankers have only one option: War

Editor's note: The 2024 US presidential elections are going to be a chaotic circus and everyone knows it but they continue playing along with it. The US economy is in recession starting last year and when government spending ("defense" spending) is removed "the real economic growth is being reported at minus one percent." Wall Street doesn't reflect reality. Not when the "magnificent seven" stocks are practically running the show on Wall Street. Massive layoffs are coming with the US deficit now running at around $2 trillion a year. This is beyond anyone's ability to comprehend and is obviously no longer sustainable. When Americans wake up to the reality of what is going on now being covered up intentionally by the oligarch-controlled media including what was perpetrated on the American people with the Covid injections, the only way out for the central bankers is war. This could be a very good reason why US policy "experts" are starting to shift their attention to China. One way or another it seems we are going to get dragged into a war or get slammed with another faked pandemic maybe even Disease X.

US Prepping To Abandon Bases In Eastern Syria and Turn To China
________

Source: FP

Washington Is Exaggerating China's Military Budgets

Pentagon and congressional hawks are overestimating their rival.

January 17, 2024 | By William D. Hartung, a senior research fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft.

A People's Liberation Army delegate sleeps during a congressional session in the

Great Hall of the People in Beijing on March 9, 2006. 

PHOTO BY PETER PARKS/AFP

The U.S. Congress has just reached a tentative agreement to appropriate $886 billion for the Defense Department and related work on nuclear weapons at the Energy Department, and if all goes as planned, the Biden administration will release its new budget request in early February. The central justification for this spending—which is at one of the highest levels since World War II—is China, which the Pentagon routinely refers to as the "pacing threat" driving U.S. strategy.

Assessing the potential military threat from China is an art, not a science. Information regarding the details—how much the Chinese are spending, how the funds are being spent, whether the technologies they are investing in will work as advertised, how long it will take to get from the research stage to workable systems, and how the military spending will trend over the next 10 to 15 years—is hard to come by due to both a lack of transparency and the inherent difficulties involved in predicting the pace of technological development.

But there is ample evidence to suggest that China hawks in the Pentagon and Congress are overstating China's military capabilities while underplaying the value of dialogue and diplomacy in addressing the challenges that Beijing poses to the United States and its allies.

One key front in the debate on Pentagon spending is the controversy over how much China actually spends on its own military. There's no debate that Chinese spending has substantially increased over the past two decades as its economy has skyrocketed. Yet the most recent analysis by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute—the standard source for global comparisons of military outlays—suggests that the United States still outspends China by a healthy margin of 3-to-1.

But the Heritage Foundation and other critics argue that the standard approach understates China’s military investments by a substantial margin, for two reasons. Firstly, official Chinese reporting omits key military-related activities, including a full accounting of research and development on new weapons systems and the cost of defense capabilities in space. Secondly, Chinese currency goes further than that of the United States due to cheaper costs for key inputs, including but not limited to personnel in the armed forces and the weapons industry.

Taking these factors into account, officials such as Republican Sen. Dan Sullivan have suggested that Chinese spending is roughly comparable to the United States and rising at a higher rate.

But proponents of the view that China spends much more on its military than is commonly understood are overstating the case. Even analyses that dramatically boost Chinese figures to account for a larger range of items and the differential purchasing power put Beijing's spending at a little more than half of Washington's—around 59 percent, according to a study conducted by Peter Robertson, a professor of economics. Robertson has attempted to adjust purchasing power as relates to specific military items, a concept he calls military-purchasing power parity (PPP) but he acknowledges that doing so can provide only a rough estimate at best: "[c]aution is . . . required since the military-PPP values discussed here are based on very aggregate data and involve approximations." Based on what we do know, Chinese spending figures alone are thus not a reason to increase the Pentagon budget.

But that's not the end of the story. Spending alone is not a good measure of relative military capabilities, intentions, or likely outcomes in specific scenarios. The United States substantially outpaces China in the numbers and sophistication of traditional military platforms such as major aircraft carriers (11 in the U.S. fleet compared to 3 in China), nuclear weapons (by a ratio of 10-to-1), and advanced combat aircraft (nearly 3-to-1). Concerns about China's larger number of ships are counterbalanced by the fact that the U.S. Navy has more than twice as much tonnage, which reflects the possession of larger ships with greater range and more firepower.

But uncertainty about the U.S. Navy's shipbuilding plans, the vulnerability of large carriers to modern missiles, and the funds wasted on vessels such as the dysfunctional Littoral Combat Ship could combine to erode U.S. advantages in naval firepower over time. In addition, Chinese progress in anti-access/area-denial systems could complicate the U.S. ability to effectively employ offensive systems in a conflict.

Please go to FP to continue reading.

________

Related:

US denies that it's planning to pull out of Syria – media

Many object to the US military being in Syria but they are there mostly guarding Conoco oil assets. Those oil assets were set up under contract years ago and are probably still in force despite Syria being ravaged over the past 12 years.

Syria: SDF says it took Conoco gas field from ISIL