Dangerous Words: Would China Attack Two U.S. Navy Aircraft Carriers?

Michael Peck

Security,

“What the United States fears the most is taking casualties,” said Lou. “We’ll see how frightened America is.”

Now comes Admiral Lou, who represents what seems to be a growing Chinese belief that America is too weak to fight. The Chinese are certainly not the first: the Germans and Japanese thought the same in 1941 (perhaps China should remember that the Japanese thought the Chinese were weaklings in the 1930s).

Admiral Lou Yuan is China’s Curtis LeMay.

(This first appeared back in January of this year.)

LeMay, the U.S. Air Force general who torched Japanese cities and later headed Strategic Air Command, was notorious for his bellicosity. In the 1950s and during the Cuban Missile Crisis, he tried to get the U.S. to launch a nuclear first strike against the Soviet Union: during the Vietnam War, he urged bombing North Vietnam “back to the Stone Age.”

Now comes Lou Yuan, deputy chief of the Chinese Academy of Military Sciences and a prolifically hawkish military commentator who supports a Chinese invasion of Taiwan. Last month, Yuan told an audience at a Chinese military-industrial conference that China could solve tensions over the South East China Sea by sinking two U.S. aircraft carriers.

This would kill 10,000 American sailors. “What the United States fears the most is taking casualties,” said Lou. “We’ll see how frightened America is.”

Lou has previously urged an invasion of Taiwan if the U.S. Navy uses the island, regarded by China as a renegade territory, as a naval base. “If the US naval fleet dares to stop in Taiwan, it is time for the People’s Liberation Army to deploy troops to promote national unity on the island,” he said.

LeMay was no fan of Communism, but he would have understood Lou’s sentiment.