The U.S. military sent a giant C-17 cargo plane to an air show in China this week as a way to strengthen its relationship with the People’s Liberation Army there, despite fears among security and policy experts that doing so puts American technology secrets in jeopardy and also risks angering an important Asia ally.
The decision to send a Boeing C-17 Globemaster III to the China International Aviation and Aerospace Exhibition at the Zhuhai Jinwan airport starting Tuesday is fraught for a number of reasons, defense and security officials told Defense One, noting that President Barack Obama’s arrival in the region this week to help bolster ties with Beijing points up how political factors may have outweighed security, optical and even legal concerns.
The reasons against sending the plane seemed to policy and security officials to have been enumerable. The American military jet will be participating in the air show with just two other foreign militaries in addition to China: the United Arab Emirates and Russia - with which the U.S. military severed ties after Russia’s annexation of Crimea this spring .
In the meantime, to some, the U.S. military’s participation in the air show is a mark of hypocrisy: Last week, the U.S. denied ally South Korea the ability to demonstrate a Korean jet at the same air show because it possesses U.S. technology and U.S. security officials said demonstrating that plane would be in violation of international agreements.
And at a cost of at least $350,000 to attend the air show, some officials inside the U.S. government raised questions about why the C-17 jet, along with about 15 U.S. Air Force personnel, should participate at all.
“It was just bad idea after bad idea,” said one government official.
But despite the myriad concerns, Pentagon officials recognized they were in a tight spot and signed off on the plan late Friday to avoid risking political fallout just as the president’s plane was about to touch down in Beijing.
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