The Contest of the Century (19 page)

Amid the military jargon there lies an idea that—if taken to its logical conclusion—is fraught with peril. The first time AirSea Battle was described in public was in a paper by an independent Washington think tank called the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. The paper said that if the U.S. and China ever came to blows, the U.S. should direct a
“blinding campaign” at China’s missiles and sophisticated radars. In early 2012, the Pentagon released a document called “Joint Operational Access Concept” (known in the building as JOAC), a 75-page paper which has a couple of recommendations that stand out. In the event of a conflict, the paper says, the U.S. should “attack the enemy’s cyber and space” capabilities. At the same time, the U.S. should attack the enemy’s anti-access forces “in depth.”

The clear implication of this advice is that, if war ever were to break out, the U.S. should plan to launch extensive bombing raids across mainland China. To neutralize China’s weapons that might prevent the U.S. from “getting to the fight,” the U.S. would need to take out the missile bases and the surveillance equipment that they rely on, including land-based radar. These facilities are spread across the country, including
many highly built-up areas. The basic idea behind AirSea Battle leads to a fairly uncompromising conclusion that, in the early stages of a conflict with Beijing, the U.S. should destroy dozens of military sites across mainland China.

There are several reasons why this would be a dangerous way to think about a conflict with China. For a start, it is a recipe for rapid escalation. Given that two nuclear powers are involved, there should be big incentives to leave room for diplomats to try and find a way to resolve the situation. Yet, in calling for U.S. forces to take out China’s missile batteries as a first step, AirSea Battle is a formula to intensify any conflict quickly. It is not at all clear how China would interpret such a bombing attack. American commanders might rationalize their actions by saying that they were only going after the Chinese missiles that could hit their ships and satellites. But the Chinese might well conclude that the U.S. was also targeting its nuclear weapons. The fact that Washington knows so little about the Chinese decision-making process on nuclear war makes this even more risky.

Using AirSea Battle’s ideas against China is an all-or-nothing battle plan. Military strategists talk about devising a “theory of victory,” a war-fighting plan which will also create the sort of victory that can be translated into a realistic political settlement. But if AirSea Battle means swiftly ordering bombing raids across China, it does not provide any off-ramps that would create space for diplomacy. Short of complete Chinese capitulation, it is difficult to see how such a war would end.

As an approach to fighting, AirSea Battle would likely be very expensive, too. It would require the Pentagon to fast-track a lot of weapons projects, such as a new generation of stealth bomber, at a time when budgets are coming under pressure. It is not only the usual critics of the military-industrial complex who fear this is part of the hidden agenda of AirSea Battle. An analysis by the Marine Corps concluded that the plan would be
“preposterously expensive.” At the same time, Chinese hawks pushing for more aggressive defense spending would use the American investments as powerful evidence to push their own budget demands. The U.S. military objective should be to deter China, not provoke its hard-liners. Toward the end of the Cold War, the arms race ultimately bankrupted the Soviet Union before the pressures of high defense spending began to seriously undermine the U.S. But if a deeper arms
race were to develop between China and the U.S., it is not at all clear that Washington would be starting from a stronger financial footing.

Then there are the allies. The iron rule of Asian geopolitics is to avoid forcing countries to choose, yet it is possible that AirSea Battle would oblige Washington to make some fairly hefty demands of its allies. Asian governments are keen on a U.S. military that can push back against Chinese aggression and are eager to enlist U.S. help in this regard. But some allies might balk at the prospect of a plan to attack deep into mainland China, especially if it involved launching bombing raids from their territory. Ben Schreer, an Australian military strategist, says AirSea Battle is suited to “a future Asian Cold War scenario.” Winning the support of allies is even harder when the U.S. cannot tell them much about the plan. Given the high secrecy around AirSea Battle, I have met Japanese and South Korean officials who insist they have been forced to talk with the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments—a think tank—in order to find out what it really means. Rather than providing assurance to its friends and allies, Washington’s new battle plan could easily rattle some of them.

All these objections combine to create one final problem with AirSea Battle: Is such an approach politically viable? Whatever the level of international support the U.S. might enjoy at the beginning of a conflict would be sorely tested if the Pentagon were to escalate the dispute quickly into bombing runs on mainland China. Washington would likely face enormous international pressure to desist, putting it immediately on the back foot. Given all the risks, especially the chance of nuclear escalation, it is not at all clear that an American president would ever actually endorse a war plan that involves such a rolling bombing campaign. Successful deterrence relies on being able to demonstrate a military threat that is credible and realistic. Pentagon planners hope the Chinese military will be cowed by the mere thought of an American military strategy based on AirSea Battle. But, equally, the Chinese might come to see it as a one great big bluff.

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At the very least, AirSea Battle concentrates the mind. It is prompting a much broader debate in the U.S. about how to construct credible deterrence. If the basic objective is to convince Chinese hard-liners that
there is no path to a quick win in the western Pacific and to defend its allies, then U.S. strategy should be built around finding ways to raise the costs so that China’s leaders would never be tempted even to consider such a proposal—and to do so in ways that are politically and economically realistic and which are not hugely provocative toward China. In its effort to force U.S. carrier groups into the seas around China’s coasts, AirSea Battle fights the very war that Beijing has long been planning for. Instead, the U.S. and its allies will have to think about ways to invert that logic—to draw China’s untested navy out of its comfort zone, using the region’s geography against it and imposing high penalties that would give Chinese military commanders pause for thought.

The American naval historians Toshi Yoshihara and James Holmes suggest that the U.S. partly focus on what they call
“war limited by contingent,” smaller-scale operations which provide support to allies, preventing dramatic escalation but making life extremely difficult for the Chinese navy. They draw the analogy of the duke of Wellington’s campaign in Spain and Portugal in 1807–14, which was in military terms a mere sideshow to the broader conflict with France, but which Napoleon complained gave him “an ulcer.” The geography along different parts of the first island chain provides many strategic locations which can be used to construct a series of small-scale facilities with missile batteries, tunnels, and decoys that could create havoc for another navy in the vicinity. These facilities would be purely defensive and would present no direct threat to the Chinese mainland, but they could be used to make it extremely costly and difficult for China to exert control over the nearby seas. Under such an approach, the U.S. could also enhance the sense of deterrence by increasing the number of submarines it has operating in the region. “The ideas that China is pursuing about denying access can work both ways,” Holmes told me. “There are many ways to give China an ulcer, which could be one of the best ways of deterring aggression before it ever happens.”

In the event of a broader conflict, another option might be to reach back into the Pacific War playbook. During the Second World War, the United States imposed a blockade on Japan that cut it off from the rest of the world for four years, and the same approach could potentially be used again. Rather than seeking to smash China’s mainland missile
defenses quickly, the military objective would be to impose enough strain on the Chinese economy that China’s leaders would be forced to the negotiating table. At first glance, such an approach might sound like an implausible suggestion, given the high degree of dependency between the two economies. But this would be a situation in which the two countries were already involved in a war that had devastated the global economy. The only question is how the U.S. would wish to conduct that war.

The region’s maritime geography would help a blockade. Given that so much of China’s energy comes from the Middle East, a blockade could be enforced by controlling only five strategic chokepoints—the Straits of Malacca, Sunda, and Lombok, which are the gateways from the Indian Ocean to the Pacific, and the routes to the north and south of Australia. A blockade forces the Chinese navy to come out: rather than operating from the protective confines of its coastal waters, the Chinese would have to launch operations far away from base. China’s naval strategy is based on the “asymmetry” of not having to match the U.S. ship for ship, sub for sub. But the farther from China that its forces are required to operate, the greater demands are made on China’s more inexperienced commanders.

There are plenty of strategic difficulties with a blockade. Without Russian support for the plan, China would have an overland route. Such a plan is also likely to enhance China’s feeling of being under siege: this is, of course, the very “Malacca Dilemma” that China has long fretted about. However, a blockade would afford lots of ways that the leaders of both countries could bring the conflict to an end while saving some face. A slow process, it provides opportunities for both sides to back down while claiming some sort of victory. Such an outcome would be politically messy, with both nations claiming to have prevailed and nationalist tensions soaring. But the result could open the way to a return to the status quo of freedom of navigation in peacetime. In the disastrous scenario of a U.S.-China war, it is at least possible to imagine how such a conflict might end.

Even the proponents of these ideas acknowledge that they are at best half-answers, but they are kick-starting a broader discussion about strategies for deterrence. The debate is also raising difficult questions
about how the navy should focus its investment in the coming years. Many of the possible options for a conflict in the western Pacific would require the U.S. to substantially rethink the sort of navy it needs. During one of their presidential debates, Barack Obama mocked Mitt Romney’s defense-spending plans by telling him, “We have these things called aircraft carriers, where planes land on them.” For almost a century, aircraft carriers have been essential platforms during conflict and powerful diplomatic statements during peacetime, as they roam the world from one harbor to another. But in areas like the western Pacific, their effectiveness could be coming to an end. As Henry Hendrix, a U.S. Navy captain and historian, puts it, aircraft carriers are
“big, expensive, vulnerable—and surprisingly irrelevant to the conflicts of the time.”

Some parts of the American navy believe that the U.S. should invest in a larger fleet of smaller and faster warships, which would increase the number of targets an opponent’s missiles needed to take out but dramatically reduce the political and economic costs if one were hit. Other strategists propose much bigger investments in quiet, stealthy submarines, which would be harder for China’s new surveillance technologies to pick up when they operate in the western Pacific. In a more defensive strategy that is designed to prevent another country from exerting sea control over the region, submarines are likely to be one of the main tools. And there are also strong proponents of weaponized drones—unmanned aircraft—which in the future might have the ability to operate at much greater distances from a base or a ship than fighter jets can. All three of these technologies could potentially give American commanders better options than sending in aircraft carriers. Yet downgrading the role of aircraft carriers is a decision fraught with difficulties. The fleet of carriers has become a symbol of American commitment to helping police the oceans. Any significant cut in their numbers would be viewed as a signal of retreat by some U.S. allies in Asia—precisely the people whom the new strategy is designed to reassure. Either way, there are no straightforward answers to the headaches China will cause the Pentagon in the coming years.

LEADING FROM BEHIND

The quest for a military Plan B dovetails with the second leg of American strategy, how to engage with the rest of Asia. As
Chapter 3
indicated, the U.S. has the wind in its sails: China’s behavior has provoked a powerful backlash in the region, mobilizing Asia’s internal balance of power and pushing many of Asia’s other rising powers much closer to the U.S. If constructed in the right way, Washington’s web of friends and allies in the region could provide a parallel layer of deterrence against a Chinese push to dominate the region.

Yet, despite this fertile territory, the business of managing a coalition in Asia will be an extremely complex and delicate task. Even if it wanted to, the U.S. could not construct an Asian version of NATO. The potential partners are too diverse. They include a solid treaty ally, like Japan, but also a country like India, which would never sign up for anything that looked like a formal alliance, no matter how worried it became about Chinese naval power. Unlike Western Europe during the Cold War, these Asian powers have much less sense of a collective threat. Many countries have individual disputes with China, but they are less likely to intervene in one another’s quarrels. Any effort to construct an Asian NATO against China would also break the iron rule: it would come across as the sort of confrontational step that could erode broader support for the U.S. in the region. A rigid alliance would feel a lot like an exercise in containment.