Ominous signs are growing about the potential for direct military conflict between the United States and China. It’s not every day when a top military commander predicts in a memo that military confrontation could happen by 2025 with Beijing. But that’s exactly what Gen. Michael A. Minihan warned a few days ago. Minihan heads the U.S. Air Mobility Command headquartered at Scott Air Force Base, which helps remind folks in this region that, even though China is way over there, any talk of war can have major reverberations right here in the Midwest.
Some of the nation’s most crucial war-fighting forces are based near St. Louis. Scott is the command base for air logistics and refueling aircraft that would rapidly deploy in the advent of war. The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency’s western headquarters is in the heart of St. Louis. And Whiteman Air Force Base is headquarters of the 509th Bomb Wing, home to the nation’s B-2 stealth bomber fleet and the same bomb wing responsible for the U.S. atomic attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki that ended the war with Japan in World War II.
War with China has been and probably remains an extremely remote possibility. But the threat looms ever larger, particularly after a Chinese intelligence balloon was discovered maneuvering in the skies above the northern United States. Secretary of State Antony Blinken postponed a visit to Beijing because of it.
