http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-johnson15jul15,1,6131989.story
Quietly and with minimal coverage in the U.S. press, the Navy announced that from mid-July through August it would hold exercises dubbed Operation Summer Pulse '04 in waters off the China coast near Taiwan.
This will be the first time in U.S. naval history that seven of our 12 carrier strike groups deploy in one place at the same time. It will look like the peacetime equivalent of the Normandy landings and may well end in a disaster.
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Needless to say, the Chinese are not amused. They say that their naval and air forces, plus their land-based rockets, are capable of taking on one or two carrier strike groups but that combat with seven would overwhelm them. So even before a carrier reaches the Taiwan Strait, Beijing has announced it will embark on a crash project that will enable it to meet and defeat seven U.S. carrier strike groups within a decade. There's every chance the Chinese will succeed if they are not overtaken by war first.
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Are we slouching toward WWIII here? Or is this a (mistaken) ploy to lure the Chinese into a Soviet-style arms race in the hopes it will bankrupt them? Or--most frighteningly of all--are they trying to provoke a shooting war with a nuclear power?