The fancy guns are trained on China

On February 4, President George W Bush announced a baseline military budget of US$515.4 billion for the next fiscal year, not including funds for operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. This is the largest one-year Pentagon request in real, uninflated dollars since World War II.

A close examination of the FY 2009 request indicates that the principal sources of future budget growth are not the "war on terror" or other such low-intensity contingencies but rather preparation for all-out combat with a future superpower. Probe a little deeper into Pentagon thinking, and only one potential superpower emerges to justify all this vast spending: the People's Republic of China.