Red Dragon Ships and Missiles

(fm the BC thread "The Five Minutes")

blert,
Does the Chinese leadership realize that they are making themselves hostage to PLAN impulses?

My belief is that the the CCP is very aware of the risk of military leadership becoming its own faction. Not only is maintaining effective control over the armed forces a basic tenet of Leninist government, relying on methods that were originally devised by Trotsky during the Russian Civil War, but they have the additional historical example of Japan in the last century to consider. Finally they have the chinese case of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, who rose from head of the Whampoa Military Academy to leader of the KMT. Both the KMT and the CCP viewed each other as renegade military factions. So a concern with the phenomenon of self serving military factions is a formative part of CCP ideology. Control of the military in a Leninist system is maintained through three methods;
1) A system of political officers modeled on the russian zampolits with
     dual controls
2) Rotating commanders to prevent their getting to close to their officers
     and rotating the units to prevent their getting local, as opposed to
     national, loyalty
3) Encouraging rivalries and factions with multiple chains of command
     and redundant organizations.

You note that an attack by the Chinese on the US 7th Fleet using terminal homing warheads launched by IRBM would expose them to the risk of retaliation from the US Navy's SLBM force. That makes it imperative for the Chinese to politically neutralize the ability of the US to respond to an attack to make such a threat credible. With the installation of BHO the strategic capacity of the United States has dramatically declined in credibility. That vastly increases the probability of Chinese pressure to isolate Taiwan and India and assert dominance over resources, such as in the South China Sea. This is an example of how Obama's conduct in the National Command Authority (NCA) has increased the risk of war.