Word: war
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...well-prepared for a long, costly war. Iran learned how to fight an asymmetrical guerilla war in the 1982-2000 conflict in Lebanon, learning that lightly armed, small, mobile units can beat a larger enemy. Secondly, Iran knows it needs to eliminate any potential fifth column. Saddam's failure to destroy the Iraqi opposition, in particular the Kurdish groups in the north, called into doubt the Iraqi regime's legitimacy. It facilitated the notion that the Iraqi people had asked for a foreign invasion to deliver them from Saddam. Iran's crackdown on student dissidents, foreign journalists and dissident political...
...white paper outlining a twenty year, $74 billion plan to revitalize its navy so it could be ready, if need be, to counter a "major power adversary" - a thinly veiled reference to how some defense officials there imagine China's military project. "The front line of the Cold War may have been in Western Europe," says Andrew Davies, an expert on Asian military modernization at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, a Canberra-based think tank. "But a future one could well be drawn through the western Pacific...
...decline in American influence is at the core of the region's changing geo-political landscape. For decades after World War II, the U.S. authored the status quo in Asia's waters, with a series of naval bases from Guam to Japan, and a high-powered presence of marine corps and air-craft carriers to back up its interests with muscle. In 1996, when tensions between China and Taiwan bubbled over into threats of war, Washington was able to check Beijing's aggression by deploying two carrier battle groups off Taiwan's shores. That kind of move is unthinkable...
...countries in NATO, excluding the U.S. Apart from China, the top Asian spenders include Japan and South Korea, nations that over the past 40 years relied on American military support to deter the communist states to their west. Now, Japan is due to launch its largest ship since World War II, a "Hyuga" class helicopter carrier - Japan's pacifist constitution forbids the use of carriers with more offensive aircraft - that is designed chiefly for anti-submarine warfare. Seoul paraded a similar 14,000 ton vessel at Qingdao...
...cloud of uncertainty looms over the shape of things to come. Experts talk of China's maritime rise in the same continuum as that of the British Royal Navy in the days of Victorian empire, and the U.S. fleet during the Cold War. At present, China's naval capabilities are still that of a regional power - its own state planners aim for the PLA to finally have "risen" only in half a century's time. By then, the world could be very a different place. The Chinese navy could act as a stabilizing force - or a source of conflict that...