More on the Sino-Russian Wargames

On the eve of this week’s massive joint military exercise by Asian rivals Russia and China, I blogged the following:

Terrorism is not the target of strategic bombers, not yet anyway. Nor is it the target of submarines and amphibious landings. The same goes for extremism. That leaves separatism, read Tiawan.

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The Chinese ambitions on Taiwan are obvious and its build-up is transparent. The values of this exercise toward their ambitions are clear: bombers hoping to threaten the American assets, subs meant to hold off the U.S. Navy, and amphibious and airborne troops training to seize Taiwan.

What dogs do the Russians have in this hunt? Simply a paying customer.

Now, as the games progress, it seems that analysts and sources have reached the same conclusions about the true agendas behind the exercise.

All this, codenamed Peace Mission 2005, is supposed to be an anti-terrorist exercise.

China’s first proposed location, the coast of Fujian province facing Taiwan, would have made its main interest a little clearer. The Russians, anxious not to be dragged into a war over the island republic, wanted the war games on the border of landlocked Xinjiang, in China’s north-west.

Shandong, the compromise, is closer to China’s objective. A Russian military source, quoted by the Japanese news agency Kyodo, said: “This scenario envisages blitzing into Taiwan’s nerve centres while enforcing naval blockades for containing the US military’s intervention.”

Wu Min-chieh, a writer for Hong Kong’s Communist Party-linked newspaper Wen Wei Po, said the exercises had multiple objectives — showing off the level of military co-operation between China and Russia; demonstrating the ability to intervene in Korea, just across the Yellow Sea; and deterring independence forces in Taiwan.

Other analysts see it as continuing pressure by the two powers to force the US out of its military presence in central Asia as part of the Afghanistan invention since 2001, especially following Uzbekistan’s recent order for the US to quit an air base.

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The exercise is also a chance to show some of the weapons [Russia] hopes to sell to the Chinese, including the Tu-22 bomber, aerial tankers, and airborne radar planes.

I also wrote that Russia intended the exercise as a dog-and-pony show for its soft underbelly exposed to Islamist terror. This lengthy critique of the Russian motivations for the exercises agrees with concern about the southern border but concludes that Russia is looking at it wrongly.

Analysts said the maneuvers with China were also meant to send a warning to Washington, blamed by Moscow for backing peaceful pro-Western revolutions in former states once controlled by Moscow. The Kremlin denies the suggestion.

“As far as Russia is concerned, the joint games were intended to demonstrate to the United States that Moscow has a powerful ally,” independent analyst Pavel Felgengauer said.

Peaceful revolutions have already ousted governments in Georgia, Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan. Moscow fears they could spread and further erode its influence in a region where it was once master.

The hardline Uzbek government is under Western pressure after its troops killed over 500 people in the city of Andizhan in May. And Kazakhstan faces possible turbulence with presidential polls in December.

Critics say the military exercises match the instincts of a backward-looking military that does not want to reform or change its traditional, and cheaper, reliance on a conscript army.

“As long as you have a big potential foe, you have good reason to justify delaying reforms,” Golts said.

Post-Soviet history shows that Russia’s main threat now comes from regional conflicts, such as the 10-year rebellion in Chechyna that remains unresolved.

“Nothing answers less the need to meet modern security challenges than a massive draft army,” said Golts.

Both are interesting examinations of an unprecedented and provacative exercise. As the first story points out, the U.S. military is “very interested” in the proceedings.