U.S. hits Chinese defense spending

A bit more good sense among the day’s idiocies. The Chief concurs with this evaluation of the relative threat levels of the ChiComs as opposed to the Russians.

The Bush administration said yesterday it is more concerned with China’s cloaked spending on arms and troops than it is about a warning Wednesday from Russian President Vladimir Putin to the United States that “it is premature to speak of the end of the arms race.”

Highlighting the differences, it was noted that:

“Russia is going to make its own decisions about what military capabilities it thinks it needs,” said State Department spokesman Sean McCormack. He then began comparing the Russian military-spending system, whereby Mr. Putin must submit his arms budget in public to a democratically elected parliament, with communist China, where defense spending is kept secret. China, using huge revenues from a fast-growing economy, has commenced on a military expansion of troops, nuclear weapons, aircraft and ballistic missiles positioned near Taiwan.

Not bad for a State Department weenie!

“We believe the Chinese military buildup is outsized to its needs, and specifically, we have mentioned the buildup just opposite on Taiwan on the Taiwan Straits,” Mr. McCormack told reporters. “We believe that in the past the Chinese government has not been transparent as to the amount that it has been spending, and that was the point I was trying to make about the Russian government’s expenditures, is that there is an open political process that their budget goes through.”

It all reminds the Chief of Tom Clancy’s book, The Bear and the Dragon.