THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Wednesday, August 31, 1994 TAG: 9408310479
SECTION: MILITARY NEWS PAGE: A12 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY WILLIAM HAWKINS
LENGTH: Medium: 62 lines
President Clinton's approval rating continues to drop due to weak leadership in the domestic areas on which he had pledged to focus his attention. Yet, greater dangers loom overseas.
In Russia, conditions are moving from bad to worse. The regime of Boris Yeltsin is on the verge of collapse. Yeltsin is absent from Moscow much of the time, leaving behind him an administration whose only talent for organization is devoted to corruption and the looting of the nation's physical assets - assets like weapons-grade plutonium.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the world, an Asian arms race is in progress. As anyone familiar with history could have foreseen, rapid economic growth has led to the expansion of military strength. The combined GDPs of Japan, China and the ``little tigers'' (Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Taiwan, South Korea and Thailand) jumped from $1.5 trillion in 1979 to $4.5 trillion in 1991 - a sum equal to 80 percent of the U.S. economy. And while the U.S. defense budget has been reduced by a third in real terms since 1989, Asian defense spending has continued to increase.
Weapons have been imported in quantity. Indonesia bought 16 missile corvettes and 23 smaller warships from the old East German fleet. China is buying aircraft in bulk from Russia. Every nation in the region is adding advanced jets, modernizing armies with new heavy weapons and building ``pocket'' fleets of fast, hard-hitting warships.
Such buildups have taken place elsewhere, but the Asian situation is different because of the technological capabilities of the players. Asian states want to produce the weapons they acquire and demand that U.S. and European suppliers share production with them. Thus Taiwan will assemble many components of the F-16 fighters it is buying from the United States, as Japan has done with the F-15.
Singapore has licensed construction of the German Type-62 missile corvette. China wants to build Russian MiG-31 fighters. Japan is building its own version of the state-of-the-art AEGIS destroyer and is designing its own FSX advanced fighter. South Korea builds its own version of the American M1 tank. China, Japan, Taiwan and South Korea have their own space programs, with obvious military applications.
And then there is North Korea, whose nuclear weapons and missile programs pose a threat that could call forth equivalent programs throughout the region.
So what is Clinton's response? To cut the U.S. Navy to its smallest size since the 1930s. In 1988, the Navy built under President Ronald Reagan numbered 566 ships. Under the Clinton plan, the Navy will have only 346 ships by 1999. And more cuts may be coming as the General Accounting Office has reported that the funds budgeted by Clinton are inadequate to maintain even the small force levels planned. The decline in U.S. military power only encourages others to fill the vacuum. MEMO: William R. Hawkins is president of the Hamilton Center for National
Strategy in Knoxville, Tenn. He wrote the series ``World War II, 50
Years Ago,'' which appeared on the Military News page earlier this
year.
by CNB