Page 429

REVISTA IEEE 2

429 Ángel Rodríguez García-Brazales, Jorge Turmo Arnal y Óscar Vara Crespo The effect of global economic imbalances on the military strategy of the United States and China. talking about unmanned bomber aircraft, low visibility air attacks with a longer range than the current ones, unmanned underwater vehicles, new air and underwater intelligence sensors, systems capable of planting underwater minefields from airborne platforms and new types of antisubmarine measures7. The development of such a project, which would ultimately enable the United States to attack targets in inland China, requires large-scale investment in the technological development of new weapons systems. Investments which, given the current macroeconomic climate, cannot be undertaken in the short or – foreseeable – long term unless substantial changes are made to the federal budget, given that the Department of Defense’s budget has been reduced by 21% since 2010. Meanwhile, China’s strategy is based on sophisticated but low cost weapons systems that enable it to maintain control over its territorial waters and act as a counterbalance to the North American bases that surround its main areas of interest to date: the East and South China Seas. The aim of the A2/AD strategy (anti-access/anti-denial capabilities) is to deter the United States from intervening in this area of influence due to the high human and material costs involved for the U.S., although not for China. With these strategic approaches, and given the current and – foreseeable - future situation of both countries’ economies, China can afford to develop and deploy its deterrent capability in the aforementioned areas of territorial tension much faster than the USA. In any event, a detailed analysis of their strategic capability in the Pacific and Indian Oceans is beyond the scope of this paper. What we do wish to assess, however, is the impact of macroeconomic scenarios on the power balance between the two countries, whether they can maintain the status quo, or whether, if it came to it, they would have the budget to implement the strategies we have just discussed. For this purpose, we need to quantify the strategic effort they are making from an economic perspective. Let us begin by looking at trends in military spending as a percentage of GDP, which is a measure of a country’s efforts in this field. According to figures from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, China’s military spending as a percentage of GDP went from 1.8% in 1998 to 2.2% in 2002; was around 2.1% from 2003 to 2007 and approximately 2% between 2008 and 2012. On the other hand, U.S. military spending as a percentage of GDP increased from 3.1% in 1998 to 3.4% in 2002; from 3.7% in 2003 to 4% in 2007 and from 4.4% in 2008 to 4.7% in 2012. According to World Military Strength Comparison8, the U.S. military budget in 2012 was $689 billion dollars, while China’s budget was $129 billion. The armies of both countries have approximately three million soldiers, although in the case of the United States, half of these are active officers, while the other half are reserve officers. China has 2.2 million active soldiers, while the remainder are reserve officers. 7  Van Tol, J., et alia (2010) AirSea Battle: A Point-of-Departure Operational Concept, CSBA, http:// www.csbaonline.org/publications/2010/05/airsea-battle-concept/ page 83. 8  Global Firepower, with data from the CIA, SIPRI and other sources.


REVISTA IEEE 2
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