Why? Essentially because China’s strategic priorities on the Korean Peninsula and in East Asia are simply very different from those of the United States, Japan and South Korea. This was evident at a meeting of the leaders of China, Japan and South Korea in Beijing this month. The three countries agreed during talks that they couldn’t accept North Korean provocations. However, reportedly at China’s request, the joint declaration on “Enhancement of Trilateral Comprehensive Cooperative Partnership” omitted any explicit reference to Pyongyang’s actions.

This omission came despite the clear calls of the Japanese and South Korean leaders on North Korea to rein in its behavior. Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda, for example, reportedly argued that “the international community must unite to show North Korea its firm commitment” to preventing Pyongyang’s further provocations. Similarly, South Korean President Lee Myung-bak insisted the joint declaration should urge Pyongyang to exercise self-restraint and not to carry out a nuclear test or other provocative actions. The Chinese leadership, though, nixed such language from the declaration.
 
The summit made clear that although China pays lip service to stability on the Korean Peninsula, repeating as it did its commitment to “realizing a peaceful, stable and prosperous East Asia” and “enhancing  mutual political trust,” the reality is that China’s words are sounding increasingly hollow.

But it’s not just the Japanese and South Korean leaderships that have been destined to be disappointed by Beijing’s stance. Back in March, U.S. President Barack Obama met with Hu in Seoul when world leaders gathered for the nuclear summit. During a 90-minute talk, Obama is said to have pressed Hu to use all instruments of power to rein in Pyongyang and encourage it to scrap its plan to launch a satellite the following month.

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This is an enormous problem. And it raises doubts about our commitment in the Asia-Pacific region. While it’s wrong to speak of a “pivot” to Asia, the idea that we must rebalance U.S. foreign policy with an increasing emphasis on the Asia-Pacific region is undoubtedly correct. The core challenge we face is how to make this rebalancing effort meaningful, because at the moment, amid all of our political and fiscal problems, we run the risk of over-promising and under-delivering on our renewed commitment across the Pacific.

It’s difficult to overstate the gravity of the choices before us right now. We face immediate decisions that will determine the vector of American power in the Asia-Pacific region – diplomatically, economically, and militarily – for decades to come. We have to get our bearings right. If we fail, we’ll drift off course and fall behind. However, if we get these big decisions right, we can create the enduring conditions to expand the supply of American power, to strengthen American leadership, and to secure America’s national interests across the Pacific.

After all, while the context in Asia is changing, U.S. interests in Asia have not. We still seek the same objectives we always have: the ability to prevent, deter, and if necessary, prevail in a conflict; the defense of U.S. allies; the extension of free trade, free markets, free navigation, and free commons in air, sea, space, and now cyber. And above all, the maintenance of a balance of power that fosters the peaceful expansion of human rights, democracy, rule of law, and the many other values that we share with increasing numbers of Asian citizens.

None of these interests is directed against any other country, including China. The continued peaceful development of China is in our interest. We reject the notion that the United States wants to contain China or that we seek a new Cold War in Asia, where countries are forced to choose between the United States and China.

In short, the question we must answer is: Can we in the United States make the big strategic decisions right now that will position us for long-term success in Asia?

One of those big decisions pertains to trade. It’s often said that the business of Asia is business, but when it comes to trade, the United States has been sitting on the sidelines, and Asia is sprinting forward without us. After four years, this administration still hasn’t concluded or ratified a single free trade agreement of its own making. It took them until last year just to pass the FTAs with Korea, Colombia, and Panama that the Bush administration had concluded. Meanwhile, since 2003, China has secured nine FTAs in Asia and Latin America alone. It’s negotiating five more, and it has four others under consideration.

And it isn’t just China. The Japanese prime minister announced this month that he wants Japan to begin negotiations on a free trade area with China and South Korea. India is now negotiating an FTA with the European Union. And yet, we won’t even conclude a narrower Bilateral Investment Treaty with India, let alone a full FTA, as we should. As of last year, one report found that Asian countries had concluded or were negotiating nearly 300 trade agreements – none of which included the United States of America. The launch of the Trans-Pacific Partnership has brightened this picture a bit, but a deal may be years off – if it happens at all.

Instead, we should be moving forward with a bilateral trade agenda, starting with India and Taiwan. We should also move more aggressively on a multilateral track. The Trans-Pacific Partnership splits the ASEAN countries. We either need to bring all of the ASEAN countries into the Trans-Pacific Partnership or push for a formal U.S.-ASEAN free trade agreement. The bottom line is that U.S. long-term strategic and economic success requires an ambitious trade strategy in Asia.

A second decision with enormous implications is our regional force posture. We all share the same goals – strengthening the U.S.-Japan alliance, while maintaining our strategic commitments in the Asia-Pacific region through a robust presence of forward-deployed military forces. Like many of you, however, some of us on the Senate Armed Services Committee were critical of the previous plan to realign U.S. forces on Okinawa and Guam, which had become totally unaffordable. The costs of the Guam move alone had doubled in seven years to more than $20 billion.

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Since fiscal reality dictates that the United States must downsize its military and focus on a more limited set of priorities, is it appropriate for the United States Air Force to create and sustain an institutional irregular warfare capability?

If the key strategic pre-occupation of the United States in the forthcoming decades is maintaining a force posture credible to defeating aggression on the high-end of the spectrum in Asia, what is the place of irregular warfare? 

And what are the changes required to make the fundamental components of Air Force irregular warfare – air advising, air diplomacy and aviation enterprise development – more aligned with larger U.S. strategies?

An institutional Air Force irregular warfare capability directly supports U.S. foreign policy objectives in the Asia-Pacific and represents an asymmetric strength the envy of our competitors.  Institutionalization of USAF irregular warfare capability is important, because it supplies exactly the sort of “low-cost, innovative” strategies called for in the defense strategic guidance and provides a tool to address the larger deeper problem: shaping the conditions for continued advantage.

America’s problem in Asia is more than just maintaining a favorable balance of military power.  Such a balance is certainly critical to regional stability and global security. Asia is, after all, the heart of the global economic engine of growth, and it is U.S. military strength that ensures customary freedom of navigation in the global commons and deters newly powerful states from using force to settle conflicting claims. Asian states appreciate the positive historic role the United States has played over the past 50 years, but some hand wring about the ability of the U.S. to continue to play that role. While the importance of maintaining military balance is undeniable, the larger challenge is a competition for leadership, legitimacy and influence.  Legitimacy is dependent on the actions available to the U.S. to continue to be perceived as present, committed and the security partner of choice. 

The great military theorist Carl von Clausewitz enjoined that “war is politics by other means.”  But the strategic competition in Asia, if well managed, is likely to be one of posture and deterrence rather than war. Rather, the United States might instead consider the rejoinder of China’s first premier, Zhou Enlai, that “All diplomacy is a continuation of war by other means,” and realize that the strategic competition between great powers takes place against a backdrop where competing interests struggle for influence and legitimacy within their own states; the realm of irregular warfare.

According to Joint Publication 1, Doctrine of the Armed Forces of the United States, irregular warfare is a “struggle among state and non-state actors for legitimacy and influence over the relevant population(s). IW favors indirect and asymmetric approaches, though it may employ the full range of military and other capacities in order to erode an adversary’s power, influence, and will.”

And Asia – Southeast Asia, South Asia, North Asia, and Central Asia – all feature non-state actors who seek to erode the legitimacy of various states. Each of those should be considered dangers and opportunities to U.S. and global security. Any such conflict could flare into a crisis, triggering instability that undermines the global economic system or presenting the threat of a failed state with all its attendant costs to blood and treasure. Such internal conflicts can be used by one power against another to distract, entangle and undermine the stability of their partners.  Each internal conflict creates an opportunity for a “preferred security partner” to fill a vacuum, and provide critical opportunities that build sympathy and lay the groundwork for access.  

All the great powers seem to understand that the game in Asia is about more than just deterrence, but influence. Take for example the recent piece by Yan Xuetong titled “How China Can Defeat America” where he the author states:

“To shape a friendly international environment for its rise, Beijing needs to develop more high-quality diplomatic and military relationships than Washington. No leading power is able to have friendly relations with every country in the world, thus the core of competition between China and the United States will be to see who has more high-quality friends. And in order to achieve that goal, China has to provide higher-quality moral leadership than the United States. China must also recognize that it is a rising power and assume the responsibilities that come with that status. For example, when it comes to providing protection for weaker powers, as the United States has done in Europe and the Persian Gulf, China needs to create additional regional security arrangements.” 

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The unanticipated victory of the ruling Saenuri Party has put Park Geun-hye back in the driver’s seat as the front runner candidate in the latest opinion polls, but the presidential election is still seven months away, an eternity in South Korean politics.

The Asan Institute’s Woo Jung-yeop has analyzed the parliamentary vote in a Council on Foreign Relations Other Report, in which he concludes that the opposition Democratic Unification Party (DUP) was hurt by its decision to form a grand coalition, which pulled its campaign strategy to the left.  The DUP’s decision to run an anti-President Lee Myung-bak campaign failed as a result of internal discipline problems, especially the decision by anti-Lee podcaster and comedian Kim Young-min not to step down days before the election, despite widespread public criticism for past foul-mouthed and politically inappropriate remarks.  Moreover, the DUP’s effort to ride a wave of anti-American sentiment by campaigning against the KORUS FTA and construction of a naval base at Jeju Island foundered, in part, on the flip-flopping of DUP leaders who had initiated both projects when they were in power during the Roh Moo-hyun administration.

Although Park Geun-hye was hailed as an “election queen” following her party’s surprise win, the results provide considerable cautionary information regarding whether her campaign for president this December can be successful. The Saenuri Party lost in Seoul and Kyonggi Province, which comprise almost half of South Korea’s population, and the total number of votes for Saenuri Party candidates was less than for candidates from a combined opposition party.  Despite her apparent advantage, Park has drawn a surprising number of competitors in the ruling party primary, including five-time incumbent lawmaker and Hyundai heir Chong Mong-joon, Gyeonggi Provincial Gov. Kim Moon-soo, and Lee Myung-bak confidant and political strategist Lee Jae-Oh, and several other candidates.

The opposition side had been riding high following the strong performance of Park Won-soon in the by-elections for Seoul mayor, but was badly shaken by the National Assembly loss. The election results appear to have weakened former Roh Moo-hyun chief-of-staff Moon Jae-in, opening the way for others including former opposition leader Sohn Hak-kyu or relative newcomer Gyongsang Provincial Gov. Kim Doo-gwan to climb back into the race. It appears that the winner of any DUP primary contest would still face a run-off with popular SNU professor and IT entrepreneur Ahn Chul-soo, if he finally decides to run for the presidency. A divided opposition candidacy would provide the easiest path to the presidency for Park Geun-hye, who appears to have a solid plurality of support from her longstanding base of support in Kyeongsang Province.

The day after the parliamentary elections last month, the Korea Economic Institute sponsored a discussion of the election result with Victor Cha, Bruce Klingner, and myself, at which we identified two factors likely to shape the presidential election: an issues agenda primarily focused on social welfare policies and efforts to capture the middle ground versus simply mobilizing evenly-divided political bases. It was also argued that the United States is likely to be eager to work with South Korea’s next president regardless of who wins the December election.

Although South Korea’s presidential campaign process is mercifully compressed compared to the U.S. process, past election seasons have proven to be highly volatile, depending on the issues and mood, or “wind” that may arise as dominant influences on Korean voters in any particular election season. 

The parliamentary outcome underscores that conservatives and progressives in South Korea’s political landscape are relatively evenly-divided; for this reason, the traditional rule of thumb in analyzing Korean presidential electoral maneuvering is to expect the unexpected.

Scott A. Snyder is senior fellow for Korea studies and director of the program on U.S.-Korea policy at the Council on Foreign Relations. He was previously a senior associate in the international relations program of The Asia Foundation and Pacific Forum CSIS. He blogs at Asia Unbound, where this piece originally appeared.

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Despite the 1972 transfer, U.S. military bases still occupy almost a fifth of the main Okinawa island, while 75 percent of all U.S. bases in Japan are concentrated in Okinawa.

For the central government and the U.S. at least, progress seemed to have been made last month on the question of the future of U.S. forces in Japan. Under a new agreement, the U.S. and Japanese governments decided to stick to an existing plan to relocate the controversial U.S. Marine Corps Air Station in Futenma to Henoko, Nago, in northern Okinawa by constructing a new sea-based replacement facility off Camp Schwab.

But the deal, which includes the transfer of about 9,000 troops and their dependents to U.S. Pacific territory of Guam, has left many Okinawans cold.For a start the United States is reportedly planning to deploy the MV-22 Osprey vertical take-off and landing transport aircraft to Futenma, in what is an already built-up area, in July. In addition to longstanding concerns over crime, locals also point to concerns over safety and noise pollution from aircraft. Such concerns have only been compounded by a series of accidents involving the Osprey during its development. Indeed, only last month, a Marine Corps MV-22 Osprey crashed in Morocco, sparking further safety concerns.

Today’s problems are rooted in a deal reached during the U.S. occupation following Japan’s defeat in World War II, when Emperor Hirohito suggested to U.S. Gen. Douglas MacArthur, then the post-surrender potentate in Tokyo and protector of the Japanese monarchy, that the U.S. continue occupying Okinawa and other islands in the Ryukyu chain in exchange for keeping the imperial system intact.

MacArthur saw limited Japanese opposition to the U.S. retaining Okinawa because “the Okinawans are not Japanese.” Hirohito's Okinawa message, and MacArthur's willingness to retain Okinawa, underscored the reality that the islands were being sacrificed for the purpose of defending the traditional national polity.

But since Hirohito’s death in 1989, his thinking on Okinawa has remained deeply embedded in the minds of mainstream conservative political elites, bureaucrats and politicians in Tokyo, including in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which is often criticized as being subservient to U.S. diplomacy.

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Putin is a leading advocate among Russian leaders of deepening Russia’s Asian connections, and the Pentagon and the White House need to orient their Asian pivot properly to address Moscow’s new Asian orientation. With this in mind, trying to influence Russia’s relationship with China, particularly in the nuclear realm, is especially important, since Putin and other Russians see China as both an opportunity and a challenge. Some clever trilateral diplomacy on the part of the United States could exploit these differences to induce both countries to pursue more benign security policies in Asia and elsewhere.

Russia and China have the world’s two most powerful militaries after that of the United States. China is undertaking perhaps the most comprehensive military modernization program in the world today, while Russia still has approximately the nuclear weapons capacity as the United States. Although trilateral security cooperation has been strong in some cases (such as securing renewal of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty), it has been inadequate in other instances, such as regarding Iran and North Korea, even when none of the three countries want to see the further spread of nuclear weapons.

In confrontation with Washington, Moscow and Beijing could impede realization of important U.S. goals in Asia. Both countries can, for example, veto actions of the U.N. Security Council, a point underscored when they recently collaborated to prevent the Council from adopting more stringent sanctions against Iran and North Korea for its illegal nuclear activities.

In contrast, when they cooperate, the Chinese, Russian and U.S. governments can reinforce global nonproliferation regimes under strain. They also better constrain the nuclear programs of Iran and North Korea as well as discourage other national nuclear weapons programs. At the recent P-5 meeting in Vienna, as during earlier P-5 sessions, the three countries joined with Britain and France to call on Iran and North Korea to respect nonproliferation norms. China, Russia, and the United States also have the greatest ability to secure dangerous nuclear material, prevent the transit of nuclear-related items, and influence the deliberations of international and regional institutions that address nuclear arms control and nonproliferation.

This is all occurring against the backdrop of the relationship between the Russian and Chinese governments being perhaps the best it has ever been. They’ve largely resolved their longstanding border disputes, as well as contained their rivalries in Central Asia, the Korean Peninsula, and other regions. The 2001 Sino-Russian Treaty of Friendship establishes a basis for extensive bilateral security and defense collaboration. Their leaders engage in numerous high-level exchanges, make many mutually supportive security statements, and cooperate in other ways in support of what both governments refer to as their developing strategic partnership. Their growing two-way commerce and investment has made China the number one foreign trade partner of Russia, and they recently completed an unprecedented joint naval exercise in the Yellow Sea.

Yet, China and Russia continue to differ on certain key issues. For a start, they’ve proven unable to resolve their differences over the price China should pay for natural gas imported from Russia. They also differ in their assessment of Pakistan. Whereas Russian government officials and analysts express concern that Islamist extremists might gain control of dangerous nuclear material from Pakistan or even seize political power themselves, China has strongly backed Pakistan diplomatically and provided its nuclear programs with assistance, helping to augment Pakistan’s potential to balance India, a country that has friendly relations with Russia but not China.  

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Mao was speaking, of course, about an economic dynamic transferring from one class to another, for capitalism was then, as it is now, nothing new to China. It has been part and parcel of Chinese culture for centuries, carrying the Celestial Empire through the cycles of production and consumption over several dynasties. It continued into the Communist era with only a relatively short, but very turbulent, interruption.

After Mao’s attempts to curtail private, for-profit ownership turned disastrous, his successor, Deng Xiaoping, set about to revive it under the equivocal epithet “Socialism with Chinese characteristics.” Deng allegedly proclaimed that “to get rich was glorious.” He felt that a socialist state could safely harness the benefits of capitalism, and that communism might work if everyone first got wealthy together. But what he failed to realize – and what Mao understood – was that unchecked capitalism produces social division.

After decades of headlong growth inaugurated by Deng’s reforms, a question once thought consigned to the pages of history after the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution has come back to haunt China’s communist leadership. Are capitalism and socialism really compatible, especially in a country with a colossal population and comparatively few resources? The answer seems to be emerging with alarming clarity as the gulf between China’s “classes” grows wider and more pronounced.

The most recent global financial crisis hasn’t helped. Throughout it, China has played a stabilizing role in the global economic system, thanks to the concerted effort of a centralized government willing to stay a pragmatic course. While some economists boldly predict that China’s growth engine will pick up and continue as before, there are signs that it may be running out of steam. If it does, the Chinese “economic miracle,” and those carried by it, including millions of poor migrant workers from China’s countryside who rely on factory jobs for income, are about to drift into uncharted waters.

For decades, China has built its economic strategy based on four pillars: exports, foreign direct investment (FDI), fixed-asset investment and domestic consumption. Of these, exports are central. They draw in FDI and support investment in fixed assets and domestic consumption. But exports have slowed dramatically and there’s mounting evidence that a fundamental change is under way.

China has long been inclined to regard itself as self-sufficient. This attitude frustrated British merchants when, in the 18th century, they made early attempts to establish trade and diplomatic relations with Beijing on an equal footing. The Qing court liked to believe that Western nations had little, if anything, to offer that China needed; it held the view that it granted trading rights only as a mark of favor to tributaries. China today has comparatively limited natural resources to support a population of its size. Foreign trade on a large scale, once regarded with distain by Qing mandarins, has become vital to China’s well-being, if only to sustain its massive importation of food, energy and raw materials.

To keep exports moving to its biggest customers – North America and Western Europe – China knows that two basic conditions have to be in place. First, Chinese goods must be cheap. Second, Western consumers must have disposable wealth to buy them.

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The latest test was the bizarre and heroic episode last week of the “barefoot” blind lawyer and human rights protestor Chen Guangcheng finding his way out of extra-legal confinement and being spirited into the U.S. embassy in Beijing. Despite what must have been serious differences between China’s security forces and foreign policy officials over how to treat him and the Americans, Chen has so far been able to continue planning to take his family to the United States to study law in the next few weeks.

When the former police chief of Chongqing visited the U.S. consulate in Chengdu in February, he revealed innermost secrets of crimes and corruption by family and associates of a potential top leader, Bo Xilai, the party secretary of Chongqing. Reports are rife but unconfirmed that the chief of the security forces in China, Zhou Yongkang, has since suffered lost influence due to his relationship with Bo. Yet there’s an absence of signs that the security forces are seeking to retaliate by making a case that the United States needs to be taught a lesson about its diplomatic interference in China’s internal affairs.

Two weeks ago, in a letter to Congress intended to unblock the nomination of new Assistant Secretary of Defense for Asian and Pacific Security Affairs Mark Lippert, the White House promised to consider, but not necessarily sell, new military aircraft to Taiwan. This is a perennially neuralgic issue for Beijing, yet it seems so far to have brushed the letter off more as internal maneuvering over personnel than a real sign of an impending arms sale, which is an accurate assessment.

Quite impressively, China swallowed all these events and proceeded to host a comparatively productive and smooth Strategic and Economic Dialogue (S&ED) last week. Though most observers wouldn’t have noticed the conclave, given the excited reporting about Chen Guangcheng that dominated the news, it produced modest breakthroughs on financial services investment, the currency regime, and expanded high technology exports. The companion Strategic Security Dialogue between the two militaries also met smoothly and at greater length than previously. These outcomes are respectable in what is a sensitive political year in both countries.

Further, Chinese Defense Minister Liang Guanglie traveled to the United States in the immediate aftermath of the media turmoil last week for the first visit at his level in nine years, a gap produced by successive spats that made the People’s Liberation Army reluctant to meet. At neither of these two recent military meetings did China raise the Taiwan arms letter, when its officers could easily have done so in the context of other discussion about continued U.S. sales to Taiwan.

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The apparent agreement between Beijing and Washington to allow Chen to go to the United States as a visiting scholar in the very near future may have put an end to this heart-wrenching episode for now, but the fallout from this event, both for Chinese diplomacy and the ruling Communist Party’s ability to maintain control in an increasingly volatile political environment, will be significant and lasting.

On the diplomatic front, the relative flexibility demonstrated by Beijing in handling this crisis has definitely prevented an even more damaging outcome.  The all-important U.S.-China relationship was spared another body blow.

Yet, Beijing should find no cause for cheer. The damage done to the Chinese government’s image abroad is incalculable. For almost a week, the world was riveted by the unfolding drama of Chen’s escape. People all over the world cared about Chen’s wellbeing because he was a powerful symbol for courage and social justice. This couldn’t be good news for Chinese leaders, now seen as complicit in Chen’s mistreatment by thugs hired by local government officials. China may have invested tens of billions of dollars, including extravaganzas like the Beijing Olympics and the Shanghai Expo, to boost its international standing. All it takes to undo such “soft power” offensives is one lonely blind man who dared to show to the rest of the world the cruelty and repressiveness of the current Chinese political system.

For the party, the domestic political fallout is perhaps even more worrying. Chen’s escape revealed the incompetence of its repressive apparatus. If more than a hundred thugs couldn’t guard a blind man, one wonders whether this costly apparatus could do much else. Another disquieting development for the Chinese government during this episode was the failure of its censorship system in blocking out the news of Chen’s escape. Of course, the censors tried hard, but China’s Twitter equivalent, the micro blogs, made their job impossible, as during the Bo Xilai scandal.  There isn’t enough evidence to suggest whether such demonstration of incompetence has hurt the hardliners inside the party.  While it’s conceivable that they could use these two incidents to urge tougher repressive measures in the future, it’s hard to imagine that their political standing has increased as a result of the Chen story.

If anything, the Chen drama suggests that fear of repression is dissipating within China.  Chen escaped with the help of a network of friends and human rights activists, who risked their lives and liberty to spirit him away from danger and into the U.S. Embassy.  More remarkably, after the Chen story broke, many of the same activists fearlessly served as the conduit between Chen and the outside world, even though several of them were detained and beaten up by the police. For the Chinese Communist Party, this is perhaps the most worrisome development – long-repressed dissidents are less afraid to challenge the regime directly. To the extent that authoritarian regimes maintain power largely through fear, the loss of fear on the part of the opposition initially and the ordinary people afterwards is almost certain to portend a profound crisis.

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The rise of China as a regional power compelled the Air Force, in 2006, to begin design work on a radar-evading “stealth” bomber capable of striking heavily-defended targets within the Chinese heartland from secure American bases in the Pacific. But the basic design of the so-called “Next-Generation Bomber” grew increasingly complex and potentially expensive – reportedly billions of dollars per copy. In 2009, then-U.S. Secretary Robert Gates cancelled the Next-Generation Bomber.

But the Air Force revived its bomber effort under new Defense Secretary Leon Panetta. The new “Long-Range Strike Bomber” would be slightly less sophisticated and therefore cheaper than the Next-Generation Bomber: just $550 million per copy for up to 100 copies, with production beginning in the early 2020s. The U.S. Congress approved the first $300 million in development funding late last year. The Pentagon has vowed to cancel the Long-Range Strike Bomber if the total projected program cost exceeds $55 billion. Lockheed Martin, Boeing and Northrop Grumman will compete for the contract, details of which are a closely guarded secret.

One man has played a central role in building the case for the new bomber. David Deptula retired from the Air Force as a lieutenant general in 2010. In 36 years of service, he flew F-15 fighters, helped plan the air war over Afghanistan in 2001 – including long-range strikes by B-2 bombers – and later oversaw Pacific bomber operations. In a landmark 2004 exercise organized in part by Deptula, B-52s flying from the U.S. struck and sank a decommissioned U.S. Navy ship using “smart” guided weapons. In retirement, Deptula has continued advocating for bombers.

The Diplomat asked Deptula about the need for the bomber, the risks to the program and the technologies that could be included.

Why now? Why, during a period of defense cutbacks, is the Pentagon so determined to build a new bomber? What changed to make the bomber such a high priority?

Broadly speaking, nothing has changed; the need for a new bomber is not “new.” The 2001 [Quadrennial Defense Review] noted the challenges to American power projection that included: the potential for a surprise attack that would prevent U.S. forces from deploying to trouble spots in a timely manner; the dearth of viable U.S. bases within range of likely trouble spots in Asia; and the emergence of “anti-access” capabilities that could deny the U.S. access to overseas bases, airfields and ports.

Furthermore, some potential opponents have great strategic depth within which to hide mobile anti-access systems. To counter this, the 2001 QDR said we should develop and acquire “robust capabilities to conduct persistent surveillance, precision strike and maneuver at varying depths within denied areas” – what is this but a new stealth bomber?

The 2006 QDR restated these challenges to power projection and specifically called for the U.S. to “develop a new land-based, penetrating long-range strike capability to be fielded by 2018 while modernizing the current bomber force.” The 2010 QDR called for an expansion of the nation’s long-range strike capabilities, to include options for “fielding survivable, long-range surveillance and strike aircraft as part of a comprehensive, phased plan to modernize the bomber force.”

The January 2012 Defense Strategic Guidance was consistent with [Department of Defense] logic going back 12 years, during which two presidents and three [secretaries of defense] have deemed a new bomber necessary. The guidance again noted the challenges that time, distance and anti-access threats represent to American power projection – certainly, the strategic environment has not become more benign since 2001. The guidance renewed the call for the development of a stealth bomber in order to overcome these challenges.

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