The South China Sea (37 page)

In simple terms, the assassin's mace is the ability to prevent American air bases and aircraft carriers in the Western Pacific and South China Sea launching their planes and missiles against Chinese targets. The primary reason for it, Western analysts assume, would be to halt or delay a future United States intervention in support of Taiwan. If a future Taiwanese government made any moves towards independence, the Chinese Navy would be expected to lead some kind of blockade or invasion and fend off the US Navy. The assassin's mace wouldn't necessarily have to be used; it would just have to create sufficient uncertainty in the minds of American admirals to stop them deploying their most powerful assets. The US military has a more prosaic name for the tactic: ‘Anti-Access’ or ‘A2’. When a similar method is used closer to the target area it's called ‘Area Denial’ and the two in combination have become known as ‘A2/AD’. China's A2/AD tactics might use mines or submarines armed with torpedoes and cruise missiles or cyber attacks but most attention has been focused on a new weapon – the Dong-Feng-21D anti-ship ballistic missile. With a range of over 1,500 kilometres and the ability to manoeuvre as it descends, the Dong-Feng-21D could, theoretically at least, hit large ships from bases on the mainland.

In mid-2007 information about the development of the new missile began to reach the public and by October 2008 the US Pacific Air Forces were already war-gaming their response: an ‘operational concept with long-range conventional threats to surface ships and land bases’ is how the US Pacific Air Forces spokesman, Lieutenant Colonel Edward Thomas, described it.
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Two desktop simulation exercises, entitled ‘Pacific Vision’ 1 and 2, tested how the US would respond to a challenge from an unnamed ‘near-peer competitor’ in the Asia-Pacific region in 2028. By the end of the exercise, the response had a name: Air-Sea Battle.

Pacific Vision was part-funded by the Pentagon's internal research group, the Office of Net Assessments. Since its creation in 1973, the office's job has been to imagine worst-case scenarios for the United States and then imagine ways to avoid them. The office has only ever had one boss: Andrew Marshall, 92 years old at the time of writing. Marshall lives in a highly secret world of potential dangers to American security: some clear and present, others distant and hypothetical. Unlike most horror writers he has a budget of more than $13 million a year to amplify his fears among the Washington security community.
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Marshall is routinely
described as ‘highly influential’ by policy-makers and pundits alike. His sage-like pronouncements have led others to call him the Jedi Master.

One of the staff working on the exercises was Jan van Tol, a former US Navy captain who had spent several years working in the Office of Net Assessments before transferring to its favourite think-tank, the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. He says the exercises dramatically illustrated how new Chinese technologies could radically alter the balance of power in East Asia: ‘The big thing about Pacific Vision was that it pointed out that if the Chinese move to longer and longer range ballistic missiles, then fixed bases in the Western Pacific would become highly vulnerable. And that basing underpins all our strategies for how we would fight a war. That was the real shocker that caught attention at quite a senior level.’
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In the weeks after Pacific Vision, the results were passed up the military chain of command to the Air Force Chief of Staff, General Norton Schwartz, and the Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral Gary Roughead. During the same period the think-tank delivered its recommendations to Washington policy-makers. And it was at almost exactly this time that the Chinese maritime authorities chose to blockade the USNS
Impeccable
and deliver – as if on cue – a textbook example of the threat to freedom of navigation in the South China Sea. With all of Washington's defence thinkers now alert to the issue, the Office of Net Assessments and the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments were pushing at an open door. By the time the Air-Sea Battle concept arrived at the Pentagon, there was a tsunami of support behind it. In July 2009, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates directed the navy and air force to address the challenge and in September General Schwarz and Admiral Roughead signed a still-secret memorandum to develop Air-Sea Battle into an operational concept.

The discussions went on until December 2010 when Bryan Clark, a retired nuclear submariner turned Special Assistant to the Chief of Naval Operations, was ordered to collate the ideas into a coherent document. ‘The concept was intended to guide service force development activities,’ he says. ‘What we buy, what we train to do, the doctrine that we use, all of the things that the services do to prepare forces to hand over at some future date to the combatant commanders.’ According to Clark, the concept that he authored was directly informed by the work of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments (CSBA): ‘The work that Jan and everybody at
CSBA did was very useful and I incorporated a good portion of that into the classified DoD [Department of Defense] concept.’ Clark's 44-page document was completed in February 2011 and approved by service chiefs that April. By the autumn of that year the Department of Defense had begun, in Clark's words, ‘deliberately applying the concept to our investments … using it to guide their budget development, exercise development, the training they do and their doctrine’.

Outside the Pentagon, however, the concept of Air-Sea Battle had become highly controversial. The only public explanation of it had been released by CSBA in May 2010. Despite early caveats asserting that the United States did not seek to confront or contain China, the entire document was a blunt warning of the threat posed by the Chinese ‘assassin's mace’. ‘The United States will find itself effectively locked out of a region that has been declared a vital security interest by every administration in the last sixty years’, it intoned. Chapter 3 of the document described how the US might fight back. It called for ‘kinetic and non-kinetic’ (in other words both explosive and electronic) strikes against inland command centres, radar systems and intelligence gathering facilities, raids against missile production and storage facilities and ‘blinding’ operations against Chinese satellites. It also said that China's ‘seaborne trade flows would be cut off, with an eye toward exerting major stress on the Chinese economy and, eventually, internal stress’. The paper was intended to stimulate discussion. It succeeded far beyond its authors’ expectations, causing outrage all the way to Beijing.

It took until May 2013 for the US government to release an unclassified summary of Air-Sea Battle and only 16 of Clark's original 44 pages survived the censor. The essence of Air-Sea Battle was given an ungainly acronym: NIA/D3 – ‘networked, integrated forces capable of attack-in-depth to disrupt, destroy and defeat adversary forces’. It's the ‘in-depth’ part that has given most cause for concern. The word ‘China’ doesn't appear but other key aspects of van Tol's paper were there: in order to overcome the A2/AD threat – the ‘Anti-Access’ and ‘Area Denial’ tactics of China's ‘assassin's mace’ or its anti-ship ballistic missile – the US would have to attack command and control systems located far from the battlefield. As Clark explains, ‘you've got to go in and do surgical operations to take out specific elements of the A2/AD network’. But he's keen to assert
that ‘attack’ doesn't have to mean death and destruction: ‘it might also be a non-kinetic attack where I turn some piece of equipment off or deny it the ability to see me or make its communications not work, that's all a fairly deep attack’.

He also insists that it's not aimed at China. During his last weeks working in the Pentagon, Clark discussed Air-Sea Battle with Admiral Wu Shengli, the head of the Chinese Navy, who was visiting Washington DC. ‘We explained that it's much more about an Iran-type situation … or Syria. It's not just about China; we've already seen how these capabilities are getting out there. Other countries want to stop the world intervening in the bad things they do.’ But the message is falling on deaf ears. Everything China's top brass have heard about Air-Sea Battle has confirmed their worst fears and hardest prejudices about US intentions.

The problem for the region is that both powers are basing major decisions upon fear and prejudice. Neither trusts the other. The crystal ball-gazers at the Office of Net Assessments and its favoured think-tank have done what they're paid to do and imagined future threats to the United States’ global supremacy. It doesn't really matter to them whether the threat is likely; the point is that it is possible. ‘To those who would argue that a Sino-US conflict is “unthinkable”,’ wrote Jan van Tol in his May 2010 paper, ‘it should be emphasized again that the purpose of “thinking about the unthinkable” is that by doing so, ways can be found to sustain and enhance a stable military balance in the Western Pacific, thus keeping conflict in the domain of the “unthinkable”.’ In other words, the United States’ military dominance in the South China Sea and its environs must remain so overwhelming that no other country would dare to challenge it. And put like that, once a possible threat to US primacy has been articulated, the only politically acceptable response is to commission new strategies and weapons systems to defeat it.

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How real is the ‘China Threat’ to American access in the South China Sea and beyond? The bare numbers appear dramatic. China now has the world's second-largest naval fleet and its second-largest military budget. (The US is, of course, first in both leagues.) The Stockholm International
Peace and Research Institute estimated China's 2012 defence spending at $166 billion – a 12 per cent rise on the year before.
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The naval modernisation programme begun by Admiral Liu Huaqing (see Chapter 3), which began with the import of Russian-made submarines and destroyers in the early 1990s, is now at a stage where China can design and build its own warships and weapons systems. By 2014, according to the report on the Chinese military that the Pentagon must deliver to Congress each year, the Chinese Navy possessed ‘77 principal surface combatants, more than 60 submarines, 55 medium and large amphibious ships, and roughly 85 missile-equipped small combatants’ and, since September 2012, its first aircraft carrier, the
Liaoning
.
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The ship numbers appear even more dramatic when compared to the US Navy, which has around 96 large combatants, 72 submarines, 30 large amphibious ships, 26 small combatants and 10 aircraft carriers.
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And unlike the Chinese Navy, whose ships are concentrated in one area, US Navy ships are spread around the globe. But the bald numbers tell us almost nothing about the relative strength of each force. Gary Li is one of the best-informed independent observers of the Chinese Navy. As a former analyst for the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London, now working for the shipping intelligence service IHS Maritime in Beijing, he closely observes the capabilities of the ships now serving with the navy of the People's Liberation Army and he isn't impressed. ‘The Chinese are about two or three generations behind compared to the Americans. The American Arleigh Burke class of destroyer can take care of a small navy by itself. Yes, the Chinese are building ships like crazy, but they are barely reaching the level of America in the 1990s. The naval force is probably 20 years off reaching the state of America and the Americans are still edging forwards – even with all the budget cuts.’
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Even the much-discussed aircraft carrier, the
Liaoning
, has no catapults to launch its planes and uses a ‘ski jump’ instead. This means the J-15 jets that it hosts can only carry lighter, shorter-range missiles and no electronic counter-measures pod when taking off fully fuelled.
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A rare critical article in the Chinese media in 2013 warned that the ship and its planes would be vulnerable to attack even by Vietnamese forces. As Gary Li puts it, ‘Every single new bit of kit that the navy adds makes it look a little closer to a modern navy. But that doesn't mean it is a modern navy.’ Basic problems
continue to hamper the fleet. A December 2013 article in Chinese in the
People's Liberation Army Daily
observed that, during one recent naval exercise, sailors on the four participating ships had been able to hear one another but could not transmit combat data because their information systems weren't compatible.
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The fleet also lacks the unglamorous but vital logistics ships that keep navies afloat, and this prevents the carrier and other ships from operating far away from port.

There are further problems when it comes to actually using the equipment. Most military personnel arrive poorly educated: junior ranks are mainly from peasant families and few are educated beyond the age of 14; fewer than a third of officers have a university degree.
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Recruitment is still by conscription and conscripts only serve for two years, giving them little chance to learn advanced skills. In May 2013 the Chief of the PLA General Staff Fang Fenghui told an audience at the Nanjing Army Command College that it is essential for military academies ‘to cultivate talents in line with actual combats, battlefields and combat requirements’, suggesting that up until that point they had been failing to do so.
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The PLA Navy lacks experience in all areas of modern warfare. ‘The last major sea battle they had was in the Paracels in 1974,’ notes Li. ‘The British and the Americans have had almost a century of experience with aircraft carriers. The Chinese have had about a year. They have no experience with anti-submarine warfare or long-range missile attacks, they don't even have enough mine countermeasures vessels. The Americans could bottle up the whole PLAN North Sea Fleet just by mining the Bohai Bay.’ Furthermore, in any direct confrontation between the two, it's likely that US forces would be supported by highly capable navies from Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and possibly elsewhere.