As China gains strength, militarily and economically, the strategic interests of the United States will lie increasingly in the Pacific. As China commissions aircraft carriers, we redeploy ours with plans to have some 60 percent of the fleet and 6 of our 11 carriers in the Pacific by 2020.
Still, as Guy Taylor and Rowan Scarborough report in the Washington Times:
Admiral Locklear added this:
“We need to think about all scenarios, not just the ones we’ve been dealing with over the last several years where we’ve enjoyed basic air superiority and basic sea superiority. There are places in the world where in this century we won’t have them.”
The Chinese, Taylor and Scarborough write, recently:
A move which the admiral sees as troubling and something that the U.S. should match:
Big questions for the long game.
