DOD REPORTS ON CHINA'S MILITARY MODERNIZATION

FROM: U.S. DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE

DOD Report on China Details Military Modernization
By Karen Parrish
American Forces Press Service

WASHINGTON, May 6, 2013 - A Defense Department report released today describes China's military modernization and the Chinese army's interaction with other forces, including those of the United States, a senior Pentagon official said today.

The annual report -- titled "2013 Military and Security Developments Involving the People's Republic of China" -- went to Congress today and covers China's security and military strategies; developments in China's military doctrine, force structure and advanced technologies; the security situation in the Taiwan strait; U.S.–China military-to-military contacts and the U.S. strategy for such engagement; and the nature of China's cyber activities directed against the Defense Department.

David F. Helvey, deputy assistant secretary of defense for East Asia, briefed Pentagon reporters on the report. He noted that the report, which DOD coordinates with other agencies, "reflects broadly the views held across the United States government." The report is factual and not speculative, he noted.

Helvey said the trends in this year's report show the rising power increasing its rapid military modernization program. "We see a good deal of continuity in terms of the modernization priorities," Helvey noted, despite the 2012 and 2013 turnover to new leadership, which happens roughly every decade in China.

The report notes China launched its first aircraft carrier in 2012 and is sustaining investments in advanced short- and medium-range conventional ballistic missiles, land-attack and anti-ship cruise missiles, counter-space weapons and military cyberspace systems.

Helvey noted these technologies all bolster China's anti-access and area-denial capabilities.

"The issue here is not one particular weapons system," he said. "It's the integration and overlapping nature of these weapons systems into a regime that can potentially impede or restrict free military operations in the Western Pacific. So that's something that we monitor and are concerned about."

Helvey said the report provides a lot of information, but also raises some questions. "What concerns me is the extent to which China's military modernization occurs in the absence of the kind of openness and transparency that others are certainly asking of China," he added.

That lack of transparency, he noted, has effects on the security calculations of others in the region. "And so it's that uncertainty, I think, that's of greater concern," he said.

Helvey added the report noted China has "increased assertiveness with respect to its maritime territorial claims" over the past year. China disputes sovereignty with Japan over islands in the East China Sea, and has other territorial disputes with regional neighbors in the South China Sea.

"With respect to these claims, we encourage all parties to the different disputes or interactions to address their issues peacefully, through diplomatic channels in a manner consistent with international law," he said.

Helvey noted China's relations with Taiwan have been consistent. "Over the past year, cross-strait relations have improved," he said. "However, China's military buildup shows no signs of slowing."

China also is building its space and cyberspace capabilities, Helvey said. He noted that in 2012, China conducted 18 space launches and expanded its space-based intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance, navigation, meteorological and communication satellite constellations.

"At the same time, China continues to invest in a multidimensional program to deny others access to and use of space," Helvey said.

Addressing China's cyber capabilities, Helvey said the Chinese army continues to develop doctrine, training and exercises that emphasize information technology and operations.

"In addition, in 2012, numerous computer systems around the world, including those owned by the United States government, continued to be targeted for intrusions, some of which appear to be attributable directly to [Chinese] government and military organizations," he added.

Helvey noted a positive trend in U.S.-China engagements over the year, including several senior-leader visits culminating in then-Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta's visit to Beijing in September.

The two sides also explored practical areas of cooperation, he said, including the first counterpiracy exercise conducted in September by Chinese and U.S. forces, followed by the U.S. invitation to China to participate in the Rim of the Pacific exercise in 2014.

"We'll continue to use military engagement with China as one of several means to expand areas where we can cooperate, discuss, frankly, our differences, and demonstrate the United States' commitment to the security of the Asia-Pacific region," Helvey said.

THE MISSILE AND SPACE INTELLIGENCE CENTER

GTR-18 surface-to-air missile simulators are fired at incoming aircraft during nighttime warfare training at the Yodaville close air support range near Marine Corps Air Station Yuma, Ariz., April 11, 2011. The Defense Intelligence Agency's Missile and Space Intelligence Center helps to protect U.S. forces from similar real weapons. U.S. Marine Corps photo by Cpl. Benjamin R. Reynolds

FROM: U.S. DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE
Missile, Space Intelligence Center Saves Warfighter Lives
By Cheryl Pellerin
American Forces Press Service

WASHINGTON, March 8, 2013 - Engineers, scientists and analysts of the Defense Intelligence Agency's Missile and Space Intelligence Center provide high-confidence assessments of foreign missile and space systems and other critical intelligence products that help to keep warfighters from harm

Spread out over some of the 38,000 acres of the Army's Redstone Arsenal in the Appalachian highlands of northern Alabama are the laboratories, high-performance computing operations, test areas and hardware storage spaces that make up MSIC's vast engineering complex.

"The work itself is pretty detailed and geeky," MSIC Director Pamela McCue explained during an interview with American Forces Press Service. "We're a bunch of engineers and scientists, and by nature we love to figure out how things work."

McCue, an electrical engineer, said the work involves looking at all sources of intelligence and figuring out the characteristics, performance and operations of threat weapons, including surface-to-air missiles, anti-tank guided missiles, ground-based anti-satellite systems and short-range ballistic missiles.

Service members who conduct operations anywhere in the world are likely to encounter a variety of weapons, McCue said.

"Our job is to understand the threat weapons and push intelligence to the military so they will be prepared," she added. "Hopefully, we can do it so our service [members] won't even encounter the threat weapons, but if they do, we want them always to come out on top."

MSIC engineers and scientists focus on how a weapon works, how well it works, and how it's vulnerable or how it can be defeated, she said. Air and missile defense is a key mission.

"These are surface-to-air missiles primarily that fire at our aircraft, ... so anywhere that we have an air operation going, we are likely to face these kinds of systems," McCue noted.

The missiles range from air defense systems that a person can carry and fire from the shoulder to long-range air defense systems that can engage targets over hundreds of miles. The director said millions of "man-portable" systems are in use around the world.

With the knowledge its scientists and engineers gain, MSIC works with those in the services who design air survivability equipment, the director said, "so if you're carrying that on an aircraft, it will detect that a missile has been launched against it, and it will take action so the missile, hopefully, will not hit the aircraft.

"It can do that either with some kind of countermeasure," she continued, "usually a laser-based countermeasure, or perhaps even [by] dropping flares, which are electro-optical infrared devices [designed to] distract the missile and pull it off course. These are techniques that we can equip our military aircraft with -- and especially our helicopters, which have to operate in harm's way -- so even if they are engaged, they won't be hit."

Another important area for MSIC includes ground-based weapons that fire missiles or directed energy at platforms in space. These include anti-satellite missiles and directed-energy weapons.

"We in the United States haven't had a lot of [directed-energy weapons] programs for a while, [but] others around the world are still developing directed-energy weapons -- Russia and China are the two big ones," she said.

Very-high-energy weapons include laser systems, she added, and such weapons either would damage sensors on airplanes or satellites, or as technology evolves, physically destroy a platform in air or space.

The other important mission area for MSIC involves short-range ballistic missiles -- those that can engage targets from tens of miles out to 600 miles out.

"These systems are important because they're the weapon of choice for a lot of [nations] to reach beyond their borders, ... and they can be fitted to carry weapons of mass destruction, so they're a big concern for us and our allies," McCue said. "They're certainly a big player in the Middle East and North Korea."

Today, MSIC helps to defend against ballistic missiles on the same ground where, in 1950, German rocket developer Wernher von Braun and his team of top rocket scientists began working with the Army to develop the Jupiter ballistic missile and others.

The work was done as part of the Army Ballistic Missile Agency, which von Braun headed, and McCue said the organization had a small intelligence cell that was "taking a look at what was going on around the world in similar developments."

MISC began then as an Army research and development center, the director added, and in the 1990s, it became part of the Defense Intelligence Agency.

"We've had some of our missions since the very first days, like looking at those threat missile developments to compare them to what we were doing on this side," McCue said. "We picked up additional missions as weapons evolved and new things came online, like the ground-based anti-satellite mission."

In the beginning, the weapons were pretty basic, she said. "For instance, a surface-to-air missile would be capable of tracking a single aircraft at a time," she explained. "It would have a very tightly controlled process for controlling the missile to the target, and it would be very straightforward."

Now, the director said, there's a lot more flexibility.

"On the surface-to-air missile side, you have systems that can track many targets at one time and send many missiles to different targets at the same time," she added, and on the ballistic-missile side, a simple ballistic trajectory may be replaced by extreme maneuvers and countermeasures.

"A lot more complexity in the weapons has come from having more capability, more technology and more computers," the director observed.

Computers have boosted capability on the analysis side, McCue said. "It makes the weapon systems harder to figure out," she said, "but it makes our analysis a little easier and more capable."

The center also has put more emphasis on command and control, as the processes and communications surrounding the launch of a rocket or missile become more computer-driven, she said.

MSIC now has fewer people than it did during the Cold War. But amid the geopolitical instability of much of the world today, MSIC's scientists, engineers and analysts have many more kinds of weapons to deal with. Computer power helps keep the pace, along with a good priority system, McCue said.

"We don't have more people, but we do what I like to call 'risk management,'" the director said. "Every weapon system out there in the world doesn't have an equally high probability of being in an engagement at any given time, so we're constantly assessing priorities and putting the resources we have on the most important weapons, knowing that we can't cover everything."

Over time, major developments in technology could drive changes in MSIC's work, but McCue said she believes being an engineering organization gives MSIC an advantage.

"We tend to keep up with technology, because we use it in our analysis techniques. The folks in the ... labs we work with and the national labs across the country also keep up with technologies, and we're well-linked there," she said. "So ... we have the right mindset, and we are following the technology as a matter of course. The trick is anticipating how that might play into threat weapons."

Technologically, she added, one game-changer could involve people who do unexpected things with weapons, driven by conflicts such as the unrest in Syria or North Korea's use of missiles.

Along with keeping up with evolving technology, working with partners is an important aspect of the work at MSIC these days.

"We are very integrated into the whole intelligence system," the director said, adding that MSIC also works closely with the services and with U.S. allies and partners.

Each service has aircraft they have to fly, she added, "so they have to worry about surface-to-air missiles, [and] they're all what we call customers of ours. We make sure we understand what they need [and] we understand what kind of intelligence they need to put the right things on their military systems, ... and we push intelligence to them in the right form."

Where international partners are concerned, McCue said, "with virtually every partner that the United States has, we work with our counterparts in those countries."

The budget problems plaguing the nation and the Defense Department present a challenge that McCue said the center's scientists and engineers will have to tackle.

"In my observation over the years," she said, "there's a lot of innovation that can come from tight times -- when you're really focused on getting the job done and you've got to figure out some way to do it. We're adaptive and we're flexible, and we're going to keep putting those priorities up there and making sure we get the important things done."