2016-06-23

China Marks the Belgrade Embassy Bombing

ATimes: Chinese embassy bombing: Xi sends message by honoring martyrs in Belgrade
Seventeen years after a US B-2 stealth bomber hit the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, PLA is now capable of neutralizing their stealth fighters. But even as President Xi Jinping was placing a wreath to commemorate the martyrdom of the 3 Chinese journalists at a Belgrade ceremony on June 17, US Electronic Warfare planes, Growler 18As, were heading for Clark Air Force Base in the Philippines amid South Sea tensions. “Stealth” might be dead, but the battle is just beginning.

The wreath laying ceremony attracted a certain uneasy interest on Twitter, with one pivoteer asking, “First time a Chinese leader has joined an event to honor those killed in 1999 Belgrade bombing? Sending message?”

Yup. And what message could that possibly be, pray tell?

The message, as pivoteers know well (or should, though historical amnesia is a pivoteer’s most powerful weapon), is that for the PRC the history of US-China contention does not begin with the US responding innocently and reactively to PRC aggression in the South China Sea in 2010; it starts with the US bombing the PRC embassy in Belgrade in 1999 and revealing to the CCP leadership the existential threat posed by US military and technological strength and its sense of impunity in the face of PLA weakness.
The U.S. stealth advantage was eliminated as a result:
I expect that current Russian and PRC technologies have been able to approach the skill level of anxious Serbian technicians staring at a CRT for twenty seconds in an underground bunker and, with the barrage of wavelengths, band hopping, and signal processing computational systems available to defense radars, pretty much any stealth scenario is crackable.
Defense stocks can do well in a depression.

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