This is the Kato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, August 9th, 2023.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Perhaps it's time to take a deep breath with respect to China at its widely expected attempted takeover of Taiwan,

especially in light of the promises the U.S. kind of sorta made to the government of Taiwan.

He does Eric Gomez discuss recent developments that call into question China's willingness

and ability to take control in the near term.

Amid a lot of news items that came about last week. This one sort of slipped under the radar. If you don't mind,

explain what happened.

Sure, so basically the number one and number two military commanders of

China's rocket force, the PLA rocket force,

are known by some of us as the Plarf, which is a hilarious way to say it.

The top two guys in the Plarf were replaced by a

someone from the Navy is now running China's missile force and someone from the Air Force is now the second in

command. And that's a surprising turn of events because the rocket force is China's newest sort of branch of the armed services.

Think of it sort of like our space force, but they do conventional and nuclear ballistic

missiles.

And yeah, all of a sudden, their number one and two guys got replaced

and not by people who were also in the tomorrow suddenly got you know kicked out and they said okay we're going to put an

army guy and a navy guy in charge of the Marines in the US and that would be that would be

pretty weird that you wouldn't just promote from within.

So that that's the situation we're looking at.

And no clear reason as to why?

...