Bob Barney discusses China’s big military problem (Transcript)

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 Bob Barney discusses China’s big military problem

Hi, this is Bob Barney with The Plain Truth Today brought to you by theplaintruth.com and today we’re going to continue on a series I started last week. Last week I talked about the American military is just simply not what people think it is and if you want to go back and listen to that, you might want to do that after listening to this about China and I also did one last week about Russia and how the attack on Ukraine was probably the stupidest thing that Vladimir Putin ever did because what he did, he showed the whole world just how weak the Russian military actually was and they were living off a reputation they didn’t deserve and so the other thing that I’m going to talk about today is China. Where is China? Because if you watch especially Fox News and Fox Business News, you think that China is probably the most powerful country in the world.

Well, I said, as I said last week and I’ve said all along, if China was as strong as we think they are or the propagandists in our military was just trying to get more and more money, they’re trying to get a 1.5 trillion dollar budget and it’s mostly going to go for waste and abuse and fraud and that’s really what our military industrial complex is. We have drone builders in America making two million, three million dollar drones and Ukraine making two, three thousand dollar drones and so I wanted to get into the China dilemma because again, just like Russia and America, China’s military might is a lot of propaganda on our part trying to make them bigger than they are and if they were as powerful as we are led to believe, believe me, they would have Taiwan tomorrow. There’s a reason why they don’t take Taiwan tomorrow because they don’t want to be in the situation Russia is in Ukraine or actually the United States is with Iran and sometimes these superpowers have a lot of nuclear bombs but not necessarily a lot of really conventional warfare which they get their butt wiped with lesser countries that just simply have the will to fight more and I think we’re going to play some audios about China’s military might and the lack of it and I think many people they’re really just listening to what they read or what’s on the news probably think China’s the most dominant thing happening and they’re the biggest threat we have and again, if you really know the Bible and you really know who the big players are going to be at the end time anyway, I don’t know when that’s going to be, you got to look at Germany and you got to look at Japan.

You got to look at the people of World War II and those are the same people that are going to be World War III or IV, whatever world war that will be when the Bible end time wars take place but China is going to be a player. We know that they’re the 300 or 200 million man army that marches into the Jerusalem area but are the Chinese people going to be in control of that or will the Japanese be in control of that after they decimate China if they ever go to war and China is trying to provoke Japan because they’re afraid of Japan and they think if they got to do something with them maybe they’re better to do it now. They will be woefully defeated if they go against Japan because they’re going to fight an enemy that knows how to fight.

Chinese people are not war-like people and they do not know how to fight and I’m going to play a couple excerpts from a video, a YouTube video, it’s entitled ten reasons why China’s military is weaker than you may think and let’s listen to a little bit about this and I’ll interject some comments. China has big plans. It aims to become the world’s foremost economic and military power by 2049, the centennial of the People’s Republic.

This is what Xi Jinping calls his China dream. Dreaming is one thing but reality often tells a very different story. True, China has been spending a lot of money on its military and on the surface the results appear to have paid off.

The country has modernized its air force, created an arsenal of missiles and built up its navy. However, these efforts didn’t stop a scandal from breaking out in late 2023 and early 2024 that brought significant embarrassment to China’s military. And by the way, just to break in here, that embarrassment we covered in the Plain Truth message board mainly and I think I had one or two stories maybe in on the Plain Truth front page but we reported what you’re going to hear about here that I did not really, I found this again in an India news site back then and you just don’t hear this over in America because we have an American media that’s trying to promote China as they’re the greatest military strength coming and we’ll continue right now.

And that was only the tip of the iceberg. Beneath the hood of this grandeur, all is not as it seems. Behind the glittering facade, China faces personnel, logistics, command and even equipment problems that would prove troublesome in a real war.

In this video, we’ll look at some of the reasons why China’s military is actually weaker than you think. Number 10. Keeping its soldiers alive is one of the more important things a military organization can do.

The loss of too many soldiers not only risks the political capital needed to keep a war effort going, it also ensures the loss of experienced troops, forcing the need to call up less experienced replacements. These less experienced replacements tend to die faster. And that is exactly what Russia has found out fighting Ukraine.

Right in the beginning of the war, which we did a very good program and you can go back and listen to that as well last week, but during the beginning of the Ukrainian war, Russia had very seasoned troops, very good troops, and most of them were killed or wounded within the first month or two of the combat. And what do you have now? And which we reported last week, you have a Russian military sending children, kids, 15, 16, 17 year old kids to the front line to die. And they have to go because they even admitted if they don’t go, they’ll be shot by their commanding officers.

And so you have troops that just do not want to fight. They don’t know how to fight and they don’t want to be there. And you’re going to find out China has similar problems if they get into a war.

And this may be one of the reasons why Taiwan is still Taiwan. And so a cycle is created. Russia has experienced such a spiral in its war in Ukraine.

The steady influx of poorly trained conscripts has resulted in the Russian military taking more casualties than Ukraine, even in the times it’s been on the defensive, as was the case in the Zaporizhia campaign a year ago. Providing proper body armor goes a long way in keeping soldiers alive on the battlefield. This has proven to be a notorious problem in the Russian ranks, soldiers that were mobilized after the war began.

These troops tend to come from the country’s poorer and minority backgrounds who cannot easily afford the body armor the Russian state has often been unable to supply. Russia turned to China to provide components or completed sets of body armor to mitigate some of these disadvantages. But as it turns out, Chinese equipment hasn’t done dashingly.

Ukrainian soldiers that have captured some sets of Chinese body armor have taken to selling them online. Tests of the same armor in the American military laboratories provide some clues about the reasons why. The ceramic plates in the Chinese body armor succeeded in stopping common small arms rounds like the 7.62 millimeter, meaning that these bullets would not puncture the body of the soldier wearing the vest.

However, the plates also showed significant deformation from the impact, meaning that they would not be as effective in preventing their wearer from suffering blunt force trauma. They failed to stop and disperse the energy. Significant injuries or deaths would be common to the wearer of this particular form of body armor.

Since many Chinese soldiers would be wearing similar body armor in a confrontation, we canexpect similar results on the battlefield. Maybe the soldiers in China’s People’s Liberation Armyunderstand this, which brings us to number nine. Service in the armed forces of some sort ismandatory in China, but the military nevertheless has trouble keeping its ranks intact.

In January 2011, the PLA announced it would be giving its troops a 40% pay increase, particularly for troops stationed on the border and promising officers. This decision was made in an effort to boost recruitment of career soldiers, especially among troops with college degrees, which the Chinese brass wants to make up 70% of the total going forward. Incentives for future employment are part of the strategy too, as China’s state-owned enterprises give preferential treatment to PLAveterans.

This and the pay raise seems to have worked in boosting desired recruitment. However, China is falling far short of retaining its personnel. And one of the things they had to do even last year was raise that 40% increase in pay, I think to about 65% increase in pay, and it still has not had the results that the Chinese really expected they would get.

And that’s because the Chinese people, like I keep saying, I don’t think they’re going to mention it here in this program, but the Chinese people simply are not a war-like people, and they want to be in business. They are capitalists at heart, the people. I’m not talking about the government here.

I’m talking about the people that they need to fight for them, and they tend to not to be the people that want to go to war. And that’s a problem when you’re trying to build a big, bad military.Especially the most talented among them.

Only 35% of troops who completed their service in the PLA chose to re-enlist to active duty. Even fewer of those who had college degrees have chosen to stay. In contrast, 55% of the total troops across the branches of the U.S. military re-enlist.

This ensures the creation of steady career officers and NCOs with experience that pays dividends in an actual confrontation. And that is very important. Americans have been able to keep the military going under the Donald Trump regime.

I will tell you this right now. He has been so pro-military that many people are joining that were not joining in the Biden years, especially. And so, again, China has problems coming.

I’ll be right back. Hi, Bob Barney for the Plain Truth today, the place to go to find out what’s happening, why it is happening, and if God has anything to do with it. And if you’re familiar with the Bible, you understand by the end times that the players in the field are not going to be China, mostly.

They’re not going to be Russia, and it’s not going to be the United States of America. It’s going to be, again, Japan raising its head in the Pacific, and it’s going to be Germany and the Holy Roman Empire revived from the dead under the Pope and a reunion with a person called the Antichrist or the King of the North that are going to be the powers versus the King of the South, a united Islam country, probably from West Africa all the way over into Afghanistan and beyond. And that is what we cover in theplaintruth.com. I believe the only place you’re going to hear that is here and what we find online when we find it.

Let’s go on with what today’s program is about. China’s military is not what is made out to be.China does not have similar resources to call on.

Senior officers in the Chinese military are also lowly paid. For example, a colonel in the PLA made about $37,200 per year in 2021. Brigadier generals made $42,000.

This is less than a private in the U.S. Marine Corps who made $43,800 in the same year. Additionally, China does not have an equivalent to the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. Veteran care and benefits is much less robust than in the United States.

China might have a large defense budget, but it spends its money unevenly. Weapons and equipment are prioritized over compensation for personnel. This is a problem for recruitment, retention, and building capable experienced soldiers.

There’s a reason for that. Communist countries just simply do not value human life. That is the whole idea of socialism, the whole idea of the Soviet Union when they were intact, and the idea of what happens in China.

Life is cheap. You have 14, 15-year-olds working in coal mines in China. You have child labor laws non-existent in China.

The workforce is like a slave workforce. Now, they’re paid well. Workers in China are quite happy when they’re working for, let’s say, commercial businesses in China, manufacturing for the world that they do.

And the Chinese people are very good at doing that. But they’re not too interested in low pay and no benefits of being a soldier. It also has led to corruption.

For example, there have been reports of Chinese officers selling the solid fuel in their units’missiles to use as flammable material for cooking food. Russia’s incompetent handling of its invasion in Ukraine proved how much personnel can matter in conducting a conflict. Corruption within the Russian ranks has ensured that troops are not adequately supplied, ballooning casualties.

China would likely face many of the same problems in a war even with its smaller neighbors, let alone the United States. Problem number eight is that China’s Navy lacks aerial capability. In contrast, the United States Navy is as capable in the skies as it is on the seas.

It has the world’s second largest number of total aircraft for any military force, just behind the US Air Force. The US Navy, in fact, flies about as many aerial missions as the Air Force does. Such missions give it an intelligence and experience advantage that China cannot compete with in the skies above the waves.

China, on the other hand, has a serious shortage of trained naval aviators. It may have built the world’s largest Navy and prioritized maritime warfare in recent years, but this is atypical of China’s historical experience. With the brief exception of the treasure fleets commanded by the Admiral Zhang He in the early 15th century, China has been a land power, concentrating on creating the strong army it needed to defend its long frontiers.

To this day, China is tied with Russia at having the most neighbors, bordering 14 other countries. Not all of these frontiers are naturally defensible, meaning that China must maintain a comparatively larger land force than the US. Nevertheless, because of China’s containment within the first island chain and its vulnerability to a hostile power cutting off its maritime trade routes, the demand for a strong naval force.

Unfortunately for the Communist Party, institutional knowledge and experience doesn’t come as easily as building new equipment. Traditionally, China’s Navy and Air Force trained in the same institution, a tell about its new kid on the block status when it comes to naval aviation. This was contrary to more experienced maritime countries, and China’s Navy finally established an independent school to train its aviators in 2017.

However, the institution has lacked the expert knowledge and equipment needed to train China’snaval aviators up to the standards of their American counterparts. It will be a long time to accrue the experience to reach parity with the US. China’s equipment is also lacking in this area.

Its current plane for training aviators for carrier-based missions is the JL-9G. This plane is too slow and too light to produce all of the maneuvers needed to take off and land on a carrier. And that, by the way, was the problem that North Korea had during the Korean War.

They were using the Russian MiG, and we were using our jets in the Korean War, and we couldoutmaneuver them, we could out-pilot them, and we could use our military aircraft on aircraftcarriers. And China has had a problem with their entire, the brand new aircraft carrier that theymade is not even working properly, and they can’t even properly land on it or even take off from itbecause they don’t have the experienced pilots. This is all the kind of things you’re not being told mainly in the Western press, especially the American press, who wants to make China the booger man, and they’re not.

Which is why pilots need to train on land-based simulated carriers. China also lacks carrier planes. The Shenyang J-15 Flying Shark is its go-to plane for now, but only 60 have been built as of 2023.

The end result? China might have three aircraft carriers with a fourth on the way, but it will struggle to fully staff those carriers. What good is an aircraft carrier without aircraft or pilots? At that point, you’ve only built an expensive parade ship. That’s kind of funny, but that’s what we’re talking about here.

And I just want to bring again to the attention that there is a reason why China is not going around the world trying to invade countries. Because I think they have the brains, maybe we don’t, but they do have the brains not to look bad and try to use propaganda to make them look stronger and more powerful than they really are. Number seven.

More ships does not mean more power. China’s navy has a lot of vessels, but most of these are lighter, less combat-ready ones, like corvettes and frigates. China’s navy has no cruisers and 49 destroyers, compared to America’s 22 cruisers and 70 destroyers.

China therefore remains far behind the U.S. in ship tonnage. As of 2022, the plan had a combinedtotal of about 1.3 million tons between all of its ships. The U.S. Navy had about four and a halfmillion tons.

China has the advantage of being able to concentrate all of its forces in the waters where a confrontation would happen. The U.S. Navy wouldn’t be able to do this because of its globalcommitments. However, leaders in Beijing still understand that they would lose in a directconfrontation with even part of the U.S. Navy.

And another thing that really needs to be brought out here is the United States Navy is at a very low point now. I do believe Donald Trump is trying to rebuild the Navy somewhat, as Ronald Reagan did. But if we can get back to a four, five, or six hundred ship Navy that we had under Ronald Reagan, then we would outperform China in any war like four to one.

And that is another problem that China has. And it’s, again, something just not being reported too much in American press. This is why China relies on an anti-access area denial strategy.

The strategy centers on electronic warfare and an arsenal of missiles. China’s ships may be capable of bullying smaller nations like the Philippines, but against the U.S. Navy, they have a much taller task, despite their outward show. Number six, China is even more severely lacking in underseas warfare.

Although it’s developing two new nuclear submarines, the Type 95 and Type 96, that would make up for some of its disadvantages, these are still years away. In the meantime, China is operating mostly with diesel electric submarines that don’t have the depth, speed, or staying power of America’s nuclear submarines. Now, one thing about diesel electric submarines that is not mentioned in this report, but they are very dangerous because unlike nuclear submarines that can really be traced when they’re near the surface of the water because their nuclear reactors glow to a satellite, diesel electrics, when they’re underwater, and now with the new battery technology, they can stay above water a lot, I’m sorry, below water a lot longer than like in World War II.

But when they’re underwater running off batteries, they make no noise. They don’t have the noise or the radiation glow from a satellite that a nuclear submarine has. And so their diesel electric submarines can be a problem, and they will be a problem, but they still are no match to a really strong American naval submarine, which if you know your history and you know about military history, our submarine force probably stopped the Cold War from ever becoming World War III because Russia never knew where our submarines were when they’re deep water, and they have the firepower, nuclear powered missiles that just our submarine force could annihilate Russia without one intercontinental missile.

That’s something that’s just not reported, but that’s what our submarines could do, and they, like I said, probably stopped World War III from ever happening with the Soviet Union. I’ll be right back. Please visit theplaintruth.com, the place to go to find out what’s happening with today’s news, and also we have a Your Health Today section where you can find out how you should eat, what diseases you should work for, and like the big thing now is antibiotic resistance, and what you can do, and there is technology around the corner that may solve the use of needing antibiotics to kill bacterial infections, and you can find those stories on Your Health Today, and you can only find that by going to theplaintruth.com. Please go there every day.

Meanwhile, its current nuclear submarines, the Type 93 and 94, are few in number and very noisy. They’re too small to cancel noise effectively, making them easy to discover by a competent anti-submarine force. Meanwhile, China is lacking in anti-submarine warfare experience, and this will be even harder for it to get than the new submarines.

China hopes to break the threat that the U.S. submarine fleet poses to it at critical choke points in the first island chain, but this hope is still many years away. Number five, inadequate strategy. As mentioned, China relies on an anti-access area denial strategy to mitigate some of the disadvantages it would face in a direct confrontation with the U.S. military.

However, the United States has methods to mitigate the strategy. Its advantage in submarine warfare is one, but even some surface vessels like the three Zumwalt-class destroyers would be hard for China to detect. America’s stealth aircraft are also present in the region.

All of these assets can be armed with long-range missiles that can destroy critical infrastructure, like China’s artificial islands, even before their platforms enter the A2AD zone. The stockpiling of the stealth and jam-resistant LRASM anti-ship missile also poses a severe threat to China’s navy that the A2AD strategy cannot adequately compensate for. The United States is also focusing its efforts to developing technologies specifically designed to further counter China’s A2AD strategy and equipment in the region.

The arsenal of missiles it’s hiding behind will not be as effective a decade from now as it is today.Four, incomplete or failed military reforms. The PLA used to have an incomprehensible commandstructure.

Xi Jinping began to change this in 2015, streamlining chains of command along American lines and creating new services, such as the Rocket Force, Joint Logistic Support Force, and Strategic Support Force, which manages information and cyber warfare. Since these organizations are new, they haven’t fully established how to effectively operate. And that simply means they don’t communicate or intercommunicate with each other as well as like the United States does, or Israel does, or even for that matter, Western Europe does with their very small navy power that they have and building theirs as well.

This brings us to number three, lack of logistical capability. Russia’s logistical hardship and its geographical background was an embarrassment for the Kremlin. China has a much harder logistical mission.

It seeks to build a strategic military capable of power projection beyond its borders into its region and further afield. However, China lacks the necessary bases to do this. Its only overseas military base is in Djibouti.

More importantly, China still relies on civilian ports of call, tankers, and strategic airlifts. And it’s very important to understand that. Number two, China’s military has not seen combat in half a century.

The last time was the brief Sino-Vietnamese War in 1979. This conflict came after Vietnam invaded Cambodia and overthrew the Khmer Rouge regime of Pol Pot. China’s initial attack across the border achieved modest successes, but the PLA wound up performing poorly against the battle-hardened Vietnamese troops and failed to succeed in its goal of dislodging the Vietnamese from Cambodia.

Number one, by law, the People’s Liberation Army and all of its branches is not even a nationalmilitary. It is the Communist Party’s armed force representing its wishes and doing its bidding, not the nation’s. For all of the progress it’s made on the equipment front, the PLA cannot shake off this ideological mandate.

20 to 30 percent of the training time for a soldier in the PLA is spent on ideological functions, with 40 percent of the time in induction training spent on such tasks. The PLA also has political commissars. These troops have an official rank equivalent to commander and ensure that all soldiers in their units, which they have dossiers on, are behaving correctly.

The commissars must approve any promotion or disciplinary action, which in effect makes them superior to even the commanding officer of a particular unit. The commissars also act as the unit’s spiritual, mental health, and welfare officers. This is not something the PLA can change.

Lessening the ideological training and power of political officers would negate the military’s quality of being the armed forces of the Communist Party. This would be a major problem in a confrontation with the United States. China may have much more sophisticated weapons than it did years ago, but without the right training and doctrine, their use will be less effective than their potential.

We’ve seen the dynamic play out on the battlefields of Ukraine, and China’s military is less experienced and equally or more politically charged than Russia’s is. It’s for this reason, more than any other, why the PLA is weaker than you think. And they are weaker than we think, because the American media, like I said, is a propaganda arm for the United States government that is trying to convince the Americans to spend trillions and trillions of dollars on defense and on boondoggle projects that just simply are not what’s effective for the modern war that we’re going to be fighting.

And so I think America, as I pointed out last week, is also a paper tiger. But those people who’s trying to promote China as going to be the end-time world power are as wrong as those pundits who thought that Russia or the Soviet Union was going to be the biggest power in the world andsurpass the United States, as we were told back in the 1970s. And it took Ronald Reagan’sadministration to prove that was just a facade, that the Soviet Union was not the military powerthat we thought they were, and that is the case.

In the coming weeks, I am going to do more and more programs on what’s happening in Western Europe, especially Germany, and in Japan, because Japan has built a massive aircraft carrier, not since 1944 have they built one, and Japan is becoming a military power in the Pacific, as they were in the 1920s and the early 1930s when they invaded China and they took China over. And that’s something that I personally believe it’s going to happen again before the so-called end of all wars, Armageddon happens, and that 200 million man army that is obviously a Chinese army that will invade the Holy Land during the time right before Jesus Christ comes back to this earth to take it all over, that army, I believe, is going to be controlled by Japanese military leaders and the island of Japan, and that the Communist Party in China is failed to do. Communism does not work.

It hasn’t worked in the Soviet Union, and it hasn’t worked in China, and it hasn’t worked anywhere else that it’s been tried. Now, I know there are many Democrats, especially, and I’m fearful that a lot more Republicans now, especially under Trump 2.0, are being kind of socialist by trying to take over American corporations and nationalizing them, like AMD and some of these other things, even IBM now. That is a prescription for disaster.

FDR knew to leave Ford building his airplanes and to leave private business doing the work of war machinery and not take it over by the government, which basically can do nothing right. That private enterprise can do almost everything right for the profit factor. Well, this is Bob Barney trying to wake you up that China is not the people you should be worried about.

There are other people involved, and we’ll get into that, and if you read The Plain Truth every day, you’ll know where we’re saying is the problem that’s coming, and we are being blindsided by leaders that simply do not know what they’re doing. Until tomorrow, Bob Barney for The Plain Truth today, brought to you by theplaintruth.com saying goodbye.