Special Plans: Whole New Realities at Warp Speed

Here we go again, with the reality-based responding to new Rovian-Rumsfeldian initiatives while their record black budget Special Plans Office burps whole new bubbles into the foam of the multiverse...

...The Bush administration has built a new full fledged war plan for China, the first new conventional war plan since the end of the Cold War.

Yesterday, the Pentagon released its annual report to Congress on China's military power, a report that sees an increased buildup.

The People's Liberation Army "is engaged in a sustained effort to interdict, at long ranges, aircraft carrier and expeditionary strike groups that might deploy to the western Pacific," the report said. Long-term trends in China's development of nuclear and conventional weapons "have the potential to pose credible threats to modern militaries operating in the region."

China's military buildup and power projection capabilities, the report says, are still focused primarily on Taiwan, and the country has positioned as many as 790 ballistic missiles opposite the island.

"The balance between Beijing and Taiwan is heading in the wrong direction," Assistant Secretary of Defense Peter Rodman says, adding that "maybe our job is to be the equalizer if a contingency arises."

The equalizer is Operations Plan (OPLAN) 5077, one of only three completed and full-fledged war plans of the U.S. military (I had previously speculated that CONPLAN 5077 was Korea related, but military sources have corrected me and provided additional details.)

The 5077 plan to defend Taiwan from a Chinese attack dates back from the Reagan administration, and has been successively updated and expanded over the years. Until 2001, the plan was what was called a "CONPLAN," which is an operations plan in concept only. This means that the general American courses of action were identified but the plan itself was only kept in abbreviated form, lacking either the assignment of forces or much of the details of logistics and transport needed for implementation.

In August 2001, "Change 1" to the previous CONPLAN 5077 upgraded the contingency to a full OPLAN, with assigned forces and more detailed annexes and appendices. The Pacific Command developed a new "strategic concept" for the Taiwan contingency in December 2002, and an updated plan was produced in July 2003. Last year based upon new 2004 guidance from Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and after two conferences worked out the assignment of U.S. forces in detail, a final Taiwan defense plan was published.

Pacific Command OPLAN 5077-04, as it is currently known, includes air, naval, ground/amphibious, and missile defense forces and "excursions" to defend Taiwan. Options include maritime intercept operations in the Taiwan straits, attacks on Chinese targets on the mainland, information warfare and "non-kinetic" options, even the potential use of American nuclear weapons...

Darth Rumsfeld the Equalizer. Chancellor Peacemaker they call him no doubt.

Somebody ought to explain the math of the consequences of unleashing war on most of the human race to this idiot, on a nation whose nationals have been intimately involved with the development of the technological base of his dearest defense efforts.

Unleashing a war against China would not turn into another Middle Eastern battle-pork fest for the private contractors of the Carlyle Group.

Sure, with robotic warfighters they might keep up against the sheer numbers- if they had a whole defense industry geared to churn out millions of them.

But these aren't the same Chinese the Chancellor saw in his world tours under Nixon or even Reagan.

The new China could build- and churn out- their own warbots faster than we could.

Once those roll over the scorched earth, we've left the neighborhood of John Titor's timeline completely. Entering, of course, the neighborhood of John Connor's.

Hopefully somebody on the Board of the Company will keep this in mind and retire the idiots before they start to go down this road. But I doubt it. Whether or not something works the way they want it to is a secondary consideration when you're thinking chaos magic.