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Tuesday, October 19th, 2010 at 9:16pm

China’s Sea-Based Nuclear Deterrent in 2020

Posted by Tom Skypek in American Foreign Policy, China, Future Warfare, U.S. Nuclear Policy

As part of my nuclear fellowship with the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), I authored a piece on the future of China’s sea-based nuclear deterrent.  This article was recently published by in a collection of essays on nuclear issues:  A Collection of Papers from the 2010 Nuclear Scholars Initiative (Washington, DC: Center for Strategic and International Studies, 2010).  The are some outstanding essays in the collection on a range of important nuclear topics.

My article examines the burgeoning nuclear capabilities of the People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN).  The intent of the article is to draw attention to Chinese investment in its nuclear forces.  There is no shortage of literature examining Chinese conventional military modernization efforts; but judging by recent…

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Monday, January 4th, 2010 at 6:45pm

Ilan Berman on U.S. Nuclear Superiority

Posted by Tom Skypek in American Foreign Policy, China, Russia, U.S. Nuclear Policy

Ilan Berman, a noted expert on Iran and Vice President for Policy at the American Foreign Policy Council, has a great piece in today’s Defense News on the Obama administration’s (mis)handling of U.S. nuclear policy.  Berman reminds us that both Russia and China are modernizing their strategic forces while the U.S. weapons complex is eroding:

Indeed, practically every declared nuclear weapon state is engaged in a serious modernization of its strategic arsenal. The United States, by contrast, has allowed its strategic infrastructure to atrophy since the end of the Cold War.

The results of this neglect are striking, as scholars Bradley Thayer and Thomas Skypek have detailed in a pair of studies. America’s ICBM force is aging rapidly,…

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Tuesday, November 17th, 2009 at 7:43pm

Congress Should Launch All-Star Commission to Examine Cyber Threats

Posted by Tom Skypek in American Foreign Policy, China, Cyber Warfare, Future Warfare
A report issued last month by the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission concluded:   ”China is likely using its maturing computer network exploitation capability to support intelligence collection against the U.S. Government and industry by conducting a long term, sophisticated, computer network exploitation campaign.”  For the last decade, China has been conducting ”hacker attacks” and network intrusions against U.S. Government and private sector computer networks.  In June 2008, Congressman Frank Wolf (VA-10th) revealed that computers in his office had been hacked; authorities concluded that the attacks originated in China.  Last May, I argued in The Washington Times that our lack of a declaratory cyber deterrence policy makes us weaker as a nation by…

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Tuesday, October 14th, 2008 at 6:11pm

China’s Growing Influence on the African Continent

Posted by Tom Skypek in American Foreign Policy, China

Here’s an excerpt from a piece I authored recently in The Weekly Standard:

The African continent is quickly becoming a proxy battleground for Washington and Beijing, as the latter’s appetite for emerging markets and raw materials grows. In July 2008, Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Eric Edelman told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that “China’s full court press to establish influence and connections in Africa and Latin America may be seismic in its future implications for the United States.” China’s burgeoning influence in Africa is now squarely on the Pentagon’s radar screen. In October 2007, the United States affirmed its commitment to the continent by announcing the establishment of a new combatant command: Africa Command, known by its acronym in…

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Thursday, August 28th, 2008 at 3:42pm

Russia Seeks Counterbalance to West from SCO

Posted by Matt Schwieger in American Foreign Policy, China, Russia

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev appealed to China and other Central Asian nations to show its support for Russia’s actions in Georgia at a Shangai Cooperation Organization (SCO) summit in Tajikistan today.  International press offered conflicting analysis, which of course, is no surprise. What is striking, however, is that the break was not along traditional media fault lines.  The following is a snapshot of a few of the headlines…

(CNN) — Russia’s hopes of winning international support for its actions in Georgia were dashed Thursday, when China and other Asian nations expressed concern about mounting tensions in the region.

AP: Asian alliance snubs Russian plea for support

AFP: Medvedev hails support from China, Central…

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Thursday, August 21st, 2008 at 2:20pm

Russia as a Strategic Partner?

Posted by Tom Skypek in American Foreign Policy, China, Russia, The American Presidency

The other day Thomas P.M. Barnett asked whether or not Russia could eventually be a strategic partner for United States.  He argued that Washington’s reaction to Russia’s invasion of Georgia has been overly emotional:

Frankly, putting the political and strategic implications aside for a minute, Russia’s intervention in Georgia should strike us as more of a turn-on than turn-off. In the past, I’ve tended to write Russia off as a strategic partner not because the incentives weren’t there but because the military and governmental capabilities had seemingly atrophied to such a profound degree. Georgia can be seen as disproving that perception.

I mean, if you want strategic allies who can go places and do stuff in…

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Sunday, August 17th, 2008 at 5:08am

Robert Kagan and The Return of History

Posted by Tom Skypek in American Foreign Policy, China, Russia

After the Soviet Union collapsed in the early 1990s, some defense analysts and international relations scholars believed that a new, peaceful era would emerge. One scholar, Francis Fukuyama, built his career on this idealistic hypothesis (which he now backed away from). He wrote a an article in 1989 entitled “The End of History?” which concluded that liberal democracy had triumphed over authoritarian forms of government. In an article yesterday, Robert Kagan examined the growing power of the authoritarian regimes of Moscow and Beijing and the “return of history”:

One wonders whether Russia’s invasion of Georgia will finally end the dreamy complacency that took hold of the world’s democracies after the close of the Cold War. The collapse of the Soviet…

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Sunday, August 3rd, 2008 at 12:53pm

“How to Handle China”

Posted by Tom Skypek in China

From Fareed Zakaria’s recent article entitled “How to Handle China”

The greatest failure of Western foreign policy since the cold war ended has been a sin of omission. We have not pursued a foreign policy toward the world’s newly rising powers that aims to create new and enduring relations with them, integrate them into existing structures of power and lay out new rules of the road to secure peace and prosperity. If the emerging countries grow strong outside the old order, they will freelance and be unwilling to help build a new one. The new world might well be the same as the old—the 19th-century world, that is, marked by economic globalization, political nationalism and war.

Zakaria is a…

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Monday, July 21st, 2008 at 7:23am

China Continues to Modernize its Strategic Forces, Builds New SSBNs, ICBMs

Posted by Tom Skypek in American Foreign Policy, China

According to the most recent Nuclear Notebook published in the July/August issue of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Robert S. Norris and Hans M. Kristensen examine China’s nuclear forces in 2008.  They identify three important developments: 

  • China continues to modernize its strategic nuclear forces
  • China has deployed two new long-range ICBMs, the DF-31 and the DF-31A
  • China is producing up to four new SSBNs

Beijing’s maritime investments are especially concerning.  Nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarines (SSBNs) are survivable weapons platforms which provide an array of capabilities beyond what is required for China’s domestic security.  A robust SSBN fleet will enable China to project power both regionally and globally.

Increased transparency on the part of Beijing would help to allay concerns over its rising defense budget and…

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