Monday, April 20, 2009
RETURN TO THE PAST
My last post was about how the growing power of the Chinese military sets the stage for a tectonic shift in what might be called 'the state system" or the global balance of power. This detailed Rand presentation on a study of how US and Chinese air power might compare in actual combat in a few years is instructive in that regard.
The more I think about this, the more I see a retrun to the kind of dynamics in the world that pertained from about 1880 or so through the Second World War. From the end of the Napoleonic Wars through about 1880, Britain was the undisputed master of the seas, and therefore of the world. But with the coming of coal-fired, steam-powered battleships, "rising powers" such as Germany and Japan (and the US) began to at least have the potential to challenge that straegic pre-eminence.
In our time, air superiority is the equivalent of the kind of sea power that marked Britain's supremacy and the challenges to it a hundred years ago or so. The ability of China (and others) to field "smart" weapons that can undermine the strategic dominance of US military power will retrun the world to the kind of Great Power pushing and shoving that marked the period from 1880 to 1945 or so.
One key difference, though, between our time and that of the great Dreadnoughts is that the US will certainly not have the kind of political will required to maintain an imperial milieu. So -- how does the new age of Dreadnoughts work itself out when there is no analog of Britannia willing to rule the seas of the air?
GB, THHotA
posted by Greg 7:51 AM
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