How It All Began: The Belgrade Embassy Bombing

When I was in Beijing during the protests in 1989, a middle-aged man came up to me and asked, “Couldn’t America send some B-52s here and…” and he made a swooping motion with his hand.

Ten years later, on May 7, 1999, the American bombers did show up.  

Instead of showering freedom ordnance on China’s dictators, however, they dropped five bombs on the Chinese embassy in Belgrade.

As to why this happened, the United States has always declared it was an accident.

A lot of people in China believe otherwise and there is a good amount of evidence to support their view.  

The bombing of the embassy was a wake-up call for the PRC leadership, which decided it urgently needed a doctrine and capabilities beyond its strategic nuclear deterrent to handle disagreements with the United States that might acquire a military dimension.

It was also a propaganda godsend for the regime.

Chinese demonstrators were back on the streets, but protesting against the United States instead of against the PRC regime’s deficiencies in Western democratic values.

Americans and the U.S. media had a hard time getting used to this unfavorable turn in some popular Chinese attitudes away from 1989 democracy-love, blaming the ill-feeling on the suppression of news of President Clinton’s apology.

In the July 2001 China Journal, Peter Hays Gries of Ohio State University analyzed letters and submissions to China’s Guangming Daily and characterized the protests as “genuine and understandable” and largely unrelated to unawareness of the presidential apology.

On the ten-year anniversary of the bombing, China Digital Times linked to an interview with a student who identified the bombing as the trigger for a sea-change in the worldview of at least some Chinese:

What do you believe has changed now in the attitude of young Chinese (like those who protested 10 years ago against the USA) towards America?

Over the past decade, I think the young Chinese have gradually dropped their illusion of the U.S. and begun to view it more objectively.

After reform and opening-up, to be more specific in the 1980s and 1990s, the Chinese people began to know more about the outside world. The prosperity of the west attracted the young people so much that all of a sudden everybody wanted to go abroad. At that time, we had a popular saying, “Moon of the west is even more beautiful than that of China.” Experiencing the sharp contrast between China and the west, many Chinese people became critical of China, perhaps in a cynical way.

However, when the Chinese embassy was bombed, many people began to think: is this the kind of democracy and human rights that we want to pursue?

Post Iraq-war, it is difficult to remember the years when the United States effortlessly claimed the moral high ground.  But in 1999, I remember that I also discounted Chinese whinging about the Belgrade embassy accident.

Writing in 2001, Gries provides a reminder:

The demonstrations shocked the US media, which quickly pointed blame at the Chinese government for inflaming the protests.  A brief review of major US newspaper editorials of 11 May reveals a consensus view: the Chinese people were not genuinely angry with (innocent) America; they were, rather, manipulated by Communist propaganda that the bombing was intentional…The Washington Post declared: “The Big Lie is alive and well in Beijing”…Such “state-supervised anger”, the Boston Globe declared, was neither genuine nor popular.  The “brutes in Beijing” were responsible for the Chinese people’s  mistaken belief that the bombing was intentional.

A contentious interview conducted by Jim Lehrer with the Chinese ambassador to the US, Li Zhaoxing, immediately subsequent to the attack, is enlightening for the cognitive dissonance provoked by Li’s refusal to share Lehrer's confidence that the US would publicly and honestly sort out what was obviously just a regrettable goof.  Looking back at the interview through the perspective provided by the shameless mendacity of the Bush administration over the Iraq War, it is Lehrer and not Li who looks delusional and out of touch.

LI ZHAOXING: I'm saying that the Chinese people and the Chinese government are requesting a thorough investigation of the NATO missile attack on our embassy in Yugoslavia.

JIM LEHRER: Yes, sir. But my question is: why would you think that it would not be an accident or a mistake? In other words, why would you think-- to repeat my question, why would you think that the United States would intentionally kill Chinese citizens in downtown Belgrade?

LI ZHAOXING: Ask your own people. Ask your own officials. Ask your own experts. If they ask themselves, seriously, honestly, do they really believe that this is simply a kind of mistake?

…

JIM LEHRER: Are you suggesting that that is not the intention of the United States, to do exactly what you-- in other words, to conduct a full investigation and hold the people responsible for this?

LI ZHAOXING: We attach more to facts, rather than words. No matter how eloquent one could be.

In addition to his encounter with  Jim Lehrer, Li Zhaoxing received further instruction on American attitudes from another, less courtly source.

 Gries passes on a report in the Washington Post in which Tom DeLay, the Republican whip in the House of Representatives, revealed to Li his own formula for managing US-PRC relations, one that did not depend on apologies:

I was on Meet the Press…right after the bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Kosovo [he meant Belgrade], and the [Chinese] ambassador was on before me.  And if you remember, he’s kind of an obnoxious fellow and he’s screaming and yelling about how bad the Americans were, and I had had it up to about here.  So he’s coming off the stage and I’m going onto the stage and I intentionally walked up to him and blocked his way…I grabbed [his] hand and squeezed it as hard as I could and pulled him a kind of little jerk like this and I said: “Don’t take the weakness of this president as the weakness of the American people”.  And he looked at me kind of funny, so I pulled him real close, nose to nose, and I repeated it very slowly, and said, “Do-not-take-the-weakness-of  this president as the weakness of the American people”.

I expect Li Zhaoxing recalled Mr. DeLay’s solicitude as well as Jim Lehrer’s amazed disbelief when he returned to Beijing to become China’s Minister of Foreign Affairs.

A tentative answer to Jim Lehrer’s query as to why the United States might take the dastardly step of bombing the Chinese embassy can be found in my articles from early 2007 on the Belgrade incident: the persistent rumor that attack was conducted to destroy wreckage of a US stealth fighter shot down over Serbia, which the Milosevic government had delivered to the PRC in gratitude for services rendered (or perhaps traded to the PRC in return for presumably safe and secure radio retransmission facilities from inside the Belgrade embassy for the Serbian military, whose communications network was a focus of NATO strikes).

The story that China might have acquired key Stealth technology from the crash in Yugoslavia acquired a lot of legs after China test-flew its first stealth fighter, the J20, in January 2011, as I wrote in Asia Times. 

During the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) campaign against Serbia in 1999, an American F-117A stealth fighter was shot down. Some wreckage undoubtedly made it into Chinese hands. Slobodan Lekic and Dusan Stojanovic of the Associated Press (AP) reported on January 23:

"At the time, our intelligence reports told of Chinese agents crisscrossing the region where the F-117 disintegrated, buying up parts of the plane from local farmers," says Admiral Davor Domazet-Loso, Croatia's military chief of staff during the Kosovo war.

"We believe the Chinese used those materials to gain an insight into secret stealth technologies ... and to reverse-engineer them," Domazet-Loso said in a telephone interview.

A senior Serbian military official confirmed that pieces of the wreckage were removed by souvenir collectors, and that some ended up "in the hands of foreign military attaches". [2]

The idea that the United States had not taken adequate steps to secure the F-117A wreckage and useful technology may have thereby found its way into enemy hands is apparently rather irksome to the Pentagon.

Elizabeth Bumiller transmitted the US official pushback in the January 26 New York Times article titled "US Doubts '99 Jet Debris Gave China Stealth Edge":

[I]t's hard to imagine that a great deal of applicable and useful information could have been culled from the site," said an Air Force official, who asked for anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly about military intelligence. [3]

Interestingly and perhaps not surprisingly, even as this narrative of PRC military espionage cum trashpicking was advanced, I didn’t see anybody pursue the logical corollary: that acknowledgment that China had possessed Stealth wreckage buttressed the allegation that the US government might have bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade in order to destroy the sensitive technology.

In reading my dissection of the Belgrade bombing, its myths and legends, the reader can draw his own conclusions about the context it provides for subsequent US-PRC confrontations and strategies and the attendant media hoopla.  

A final prefatory note:

One element that contemporary readers might find hard to swallow is my assertion that the mission that destroyed the Chinese embassy was the only target selected by the CIA.

Well, that’s what George Tenet, Director of the CIA, said.  It is a mystery to me why he considered this revelation in any way exculpatory.

From the July 23, 1999 New York Times:

"It was the only target we nominated," the director, George Tenet, said at a rare public hearing of the House Intelligence Committee. 

After the strike on May 7, which killed three Chinese and wounded at least 20 others, the CIA decided it better go back to its usual business of spying, a U.S. official said Thursday. Reeling from its error, the agency almost immediately suspended other preparations it was making to forward additional targets to help NATO. 

Will Japan Get Its F-22 Raptors? Will It Need Them?

Recently, the Japanese cabinet, in announcing plans to purchase 28 additional U.S. F-35 fighters (in addition to 42 already contracted), affirmed a policy of maintaining Japanese air superiority over the PRC. 

The F-35 may indeed contribute to Japanese air superiority in unexpected and, to the United States, undesirable ways.

I found it interesting that the Abe administration has gone all-in on the F-35, a U.S. “jack of all trades and master of none” fifth generation (stealth) multi-purpose warplane that gets no love from the zoom-and-boom crowd, and has apparently reconciled itself to not buying any F-22 Raptors.

The F-35’s development history (and cost and schedule overrun statistics) makes for sobering reading.  The US fleet of 2400 planes will cost $400 billion to develop and build—and another $1.1 trillion to operate over its projected 50 year life.  It remains to be seen if the plane is remembered as a monument of sustained US pre-eminence--or a Great Wall of China-style tombstone for an empire-ending megaboondoggle.

The Raptor, despite its own mind-boggling cost (given the vagaries of military accounting and the small number of planes produced to amortize the program’s fixed costs, all one can say is “north of $300 million per copy"), its horrendous flight availability stats, and some nagging and deadly issues relating to its oxygen system, is still the only genuine, flying 5^th generation stealth air superiority fighter, albeit untested in combat.  As such, it figures prominently in the manhood-measuring contests contemplated by various governments that face potentially hostile and relatively well-equipped air antagonists at their borders.

Israel has lusted after the F-22 Raptor; so has Japan.  And the U.S. Department of Defense brass  has yearned to sell the Raptor, in order to further defray its costs and make the plane more affordable for the U.S. military.  

However, the Obey Amendment, named after a Wisconsin congressman, which forbids export of the Raptor in order to keep its superior technology out of hostile hands, has become a perennial in the Defense Appropriations bill.  The civilian defense leadership under DoD Secretary Gates discouraged talk of repealing the Obey Amendment to provide an export tailwind to the program, and consigned the Raptor to niche status in 2009 by capping its build at 187 units. 

One of the reasons that Gates asked for the resignation of Air Force Secretary Mike Wynne in 2008 was that Wynne didn’t back off on his insistence that 381 Raptors were needed.  And apparently somebody was egging on the Japanese with assurances that the manufacturing procedures for the plane had been exhaustively documented and the tooling and technology carefully preserved, so that the production line could be restarted for a qualified buyer like Japan for the bargain price of somewhere between $500 million and $1 billion dollars.

But with the Raptor option foreclosed, Japan opted for 42 F-35s in 2011.

The U.S. Raptor policy, as far as I can tell, has never been authoritatively explained.

The most likely reason is that Secretary Gates wanted the US services and foreign buyers to put their oars in the water on behalf of the F-35 and not cling to hope that they would finally get Raptors instead.

The official reason for the export ban is that the US is loath to engage in coproduction with sophisticated potential buyers and thereby risk the leakage of the precious technology to “competitors” like China.

This might be a genuine concern with respect to Israel, which has shown a dismaying tendency to pass on US technology to PRC in the course of its arms sales, but it would seem that Japan would be an unlikely practitioner of such monkey business.  In fact, Japan might be better at protecting sensitive military technology from the PRC than the United States.

Perhaps the reason for the export ban is the United States wants to maintain a monopoly on the ultimate air superiority fighter.  The Raptor gives the U.S. a trump card in East Asia; 12 Raptors rotate in and out of Kadena on Okinawa, giving the US a persuasive security role while denying the need for Japan to operate its own squadron.

However, the Fifth Generation Fighter monopoly shows signs of eroding, as China fields two stealth aircraft, including the J-20 stealth fighter, and India proceeds with its pricy joint development agreement with Russia for the Sukhoi T-50.

Japan, as one might expect, has its doubts about matching these sexy air-to-air fighters with the F-35, by comparison the Canyonero of 5^th generation warbirds.  And, as one might also expect, it has not taken the Raptor export ban laying down.

Japan has its own 5^th generation fighter program en ovo, the ATD-X, which has been prototyped by Mitsubishi Heavy Industries.  If the Japanese government pulls the trigger for development and serial production, the plane will be called the F-3.

One possible reason to deny the Raptor to Japan is that technology leakage would indeed occur, but toward Mitsubishi Heavy Industries and Ishikawa Heavy Industries and Mitsubishi Electronics instead of China.    

But Japan can probably get the advanced technology it wants through the F-35 program anyway.   

       

An interesting discussion by an JSDF reservist studying in Australia made the case in 2012:

For Japan, the F-35 delivers more than a fighter capable of facing off head-to-head with the latest Chinese and Russian-made adversaries. It also provides access to stealth and other next-generation (NGEN) capabilities that Japan’s defense contractors need to advance development of their own NGEN fighter.

…

There is little doubt that buying the F-35 will help close the gap between Japan’s R&D program and established NGEN fighter programs abroad. With time, Japan’s skilled workforce and manufacturing capabilities probably are sufficient to overcome the rest.

Actually, make that “no doubt”.  Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, which has airframe responsibilities for the ATD-X, IHI, and Mitsubishi Electric have been tasked by the Japanese government to locally source 10% of the components in Japan’s F-35 :

The very likely inclusion of MHI in the project raises the possibility that the F-35s that Japan will purchase may cost 2 times more than an off-the-shelf unit will. Clearly, considerations relating to the development of Japan’s own military industrial base are driving the policy decisions in this particular case, more than perhaps any appreciated need for a large number of F-35As themselves.

Technological insights gained  from the manufacture of components related to low-observability will go into Mitsubishi Heavy Industry’s ongoing ATD-X  ”F-3″ development (the technology demonstrator scheduled to be tested in 2014), which raises the possibility for an indigenous Japanese fighter to be deployed in the late 2020s to replace the Mitsubishi F-2s and F-15Js. Not only is MHI also in the process of constructing its own technology demonstrator, but IHI reportedly has its own plans to develop a technology-demonstrator engine capable of generating 15 metric tons of thrust – two of which could easily power an airframe worthy of replacing the F-15Js. The linkage between these plans, and the F-35 manufacture, is quite clear. It would also seem to fit broadly within the plans of the MOD, and Japanese defense industry, identified by Bradley Perret at Aviation Week, to lay the groundwork for the acquisition of technologies from domestic and international sources that would be necessary for an indigenous Japanese fighter to be assembled, if necessary.

Perhaps as likely (if not more likely), these technologies, plus the industrial “threat” of Japan developing its own indigenous fighter, could be used as leverage/justification for gaining a greater participating share in any future cross-national development/manufacturing project. Japan’s F-XX fighter procurement will in a few years start to garner greater attention…

I like the quotes around “threat”. 

It's interesting to consider if current US strategy considers the "informal" Japanese acquisition of US stealth technology a desirable state of affairs.

 So, if the F-35 Japan program goes ahead—and there is apparently no serious question that it will—and the US does not rethink its Raptor export ban, expect Japan to be ready to enter the 5^th generation fighter game with the F-3.

The other interesting consequence of the stealth fighter game calls into question the reassuring idea that Japan will use its mastery of 5th generation technology simply as a bargaining chip in future negotiations with the US.

In the high end segment of the defense game, economics apparently dictate exports, so that the gigantic costs can be spread over a reasonable number of units, as the United States is trying to do with the F-35 by laying off a few billion dollars in development costs to allies who will presumably have no choice but to double down and purchase a few hundred of the planes.

Japan will face the similar conditions.  In order to be a credible player, exports will be central to any indigenous fighter program, as the Japanese analyst remarked:

The reality is that producing competitive NGEN fighters probably requires far more funding than Japanese policymakers forecast.

As a result, Japan will need to mirror the approaches used by other NGEN producers, including offsetting development costs with foreign exports. This is the only realistic business model which proves politically and economically viable for building a true NGEN fighter. Since Japan’s current laws prohibit the export of such a fighter, Tokyo therefore needs to relax or rewrite its export control restrictions. Japan’s recent moves in this direction increase the likelihood that the domestic legal barriers to exports will eventually disappear.

And that in turn means that restrictions limiting co-development will probably be honored “in the breach” more and more; indeed, the economic demands of Japanese defense “reconstruction” will probably dictate that the limits on plain-vanilla arms sales be jettisoned as well.

As Jon Day wrote for Xinhua on Dec. 11, 2013:

At the defense and security meeting, the government also traversed the thorny issue of lifting its long-standing weapons export ban, with Shinichi Kitaoka, head of the government panel launched by Abe, stating that the ban should be lifted.

Kitaoka is a former Japanese ambassador to the United Nations and has, of late, served as a key adviser to Abe and is a proponent of reinterpreting Japan's war-renouncing, pacifist Constitution to lift the self-imposed ban on the right to exercise collective self-defense, and as the deputy chairman of Abe's Advisory Panel on Reconstruction of the Legal Basis for Security, also wishes to see the embargo on weapons exports lifted.

Believe it or not, the export limitations are already dead as a doornail for F-35 components; Prime Minister Abe is already pitching Japanese sourcing for F-35 parts to NATO.

As Asahi reported in March, here is the requisite loophole:

The Abe administration never doubted that the parts for the F-35 would be excluded from the weapons export ban. In compiling the new statement explaining the exception, the administration came up with a new basic concept of "complying with the United Nations Charter."

The export of Japanese-made parts will be allowed only to those nations that abide by the objectives and principles of the U.N. Charter.

If the international environment is favorable--i.e. places like Indonesia and Malaysia are interested in a Japanese fighter with no strings attached (and amazingly, Taiwan is also bruited about as a market for an indigenous Japanese fighter), the Japanese government might decide to go whole hog on the program. 

So US military planners are presented with an interesting dilemma.

The United States has no defensible reason to deny Japan co-production on the F-35.  

Which means that in a few years the US will probably be faced with a situation in which Japan 1) has developed a viable alternative to the Raptor and 2) has established itself as an unrestricted exporter of military goods and 3) has a vested economic and strategic interest in exporting the plane in competition with the United States, and at the expense of reduced US military and strategic predominance…

…unless the US reverses policy and decides to sell Japan the Raptor…

…and Japan still wants it.