English: Great Wall of China near Jinshanling Polski: Wielki Mur Chiński w okolicy Jinshanling (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Dr Alf is right to be worried about UK defence cuts, which mean that our Tri-Forces are effectively like the Papal Guard, with aircraft carriers with no aircraft, no fighting and storming robots, no space based weapons, not enough manpower and not even a coastal protection vessel to guard our coast. The China Daily Mail article should be taken with a pinch of salt because the Chinese are very secretive and often deliberately understate their capabilities and force numbers.

For example, they supposedly have 4 million cyber-warriors compared to America’s 1 million or so, Russia’s 2 million and GCHQ’s 12,000 (based on the size of the car park and transport facilities in Cheltenham, Bude etc and which includes contractors and embedded NSA personnel). All these figures are in the public domain, (so no treasonable Edward Snowden type revelations here!).

In fact when cyber warfare units in the People’s Liberation Army(PLA) are factored in the true figure could be up to 1 million more for a total of 5 million.

On top of that, Chinese students studying overseas are required to keep notebooks and record “soft fact impressions” in their interactions with people in the host country where they are studying and their fellow students who will presumably join the Governing elites of their countries when they are older.

Thus following the principle of “If I know what I know plus what you know I have an advantage over you”, the Chinese are methodically working out how everyone thinks so that they can, as” the Donald ” puts it ,”Eat everyone’s lunch”.

The same goes for nuclear weapons, many of which the PLA stores in underground bunkers underneath the Great Wall of China and with the very secret weather warfare facility the PLA has in a remote part of the Gobi desert.

In the sense that many of the more modern weapons Russia has, China never gets the latest versions but they patiently re-engineer what they do have, so whatever gaps exist are steadily being closed.
America has the most advanced fighting robots, killer satellites, weather warfare capability, Tesla cannon and thermobaric weapons, the most marines and the biggest carrier fleets. It also has the “Death Star ” weapon positioned in deep space just before GW Bush left office.

That said there is no room for complacency, as China holds most American debt and is increasing defence spending in real terms by 11.5% per year even in the face of present economic turbulence.

John Gelmini