Besides the regular pace of news stories about China harassing ships from Japan and the Philippines, we have a new saga in the coming vision of a shooting war with China. It is an image that China wants to make, not an vision of the future. This is how they play the political manipulation game they are so good at.
The latest installment is the "combat patrols" they say they are starting up in the area around the Sprately Islands. They have been doing these for over a year and they weren't called combat patrols then. They weren't even mentioned, expect to justify the removal of some sick soldiers on a military aircraft. The US gave them grief over that because there weren't supposed to be soldiers on that island. The State Department said that would be militarization of the islands. You can see how much they cared about that.
This is language used for political purposes to give us a visual image that changes the game. Military aircraft flew out of their island airports for over a year, pretending to be innocent practice runs. Now they are "combat patrols". We react and dance around wondering if those combat patrols will be used for combat. They want us to wonder. They want us to conjure up an image of combat far from home with a Chinese force that is based in that area.
There isn't going to be any combat. Neither side wants to start a war over these little scraps of land in the middle of nowhere. They started with the use of the term "bloody nose" to describe what was going to happen there, they upped the ante by putting combat into the mix. They are great with language, and even better with information war. It is all part of the same game. They may have stolen every secret we have and applied that to their own aircraft, but it is still a dangerous game to play and the Chinese know it. In spite of considerable budget abuse to the military by an unfriendly administration, the words of Teddy Rosevelt still ring true - Speak softly and carry a big stick.
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