Sea Change

By Seth Cropsey

Thursday, August 24, 2023

 

The U.S. Navy faces a particularly difficult strategic problem. While the balance of forces in the Indo-Pacific makes Chinese victory in a major conflict unlikely, it is increasingly apparent that Beijing has a path to victory in a war with the United States — and that this path will become more viable with time. Specifically, the U.S. Navy has allowed the tools it needs to punch through the Chinese reconnaissance-strike network to atrophy over the past 30 years but has not developed an alternative theory of victory. The Navy therefore presents the U.S. with two options in case of a conflict with China: a long war of annihilation, or capitulation.

 

Solving this strategic problem demands building the capabilities the U.S. would need to strike the Chinese mainland, degrade Chinese offensive capacity, and ultimately present China with the same choice that the U.S. has — either escalation or capitulation. The difficulty is in the interim. Even if the U.S. were to begin a major capacity-building program today, it would take years to bear fruit, giving the People’s Liberation Army a window of opportunity during which the military balance, while not outright favorable to China, could be manipulated enough to give the PLA a shot at victory. Deterrence requirements vary over time, just as combat requirements do.

 

The U.S. has one overriding strategic interest, that of Western Hemispheric autonomy: the ability of the North and South American powers to set policies independent of pressure from Eurasia’s traditional powers. The historically successful means to secure this interest has been the management of a security architecture on the Eurasian landmass. Eurasia remains home to most of the world’s population and resources. The American economy is incapable of national or regional autarky: An America that hid behind its oceanic walls and dominated its Latin American neighbors would be poorer, less tolerant, and ultimately less free, for the domination of a region for purely extractive purposes is corrosive to national character, as Russia and China have demonstrated. The proven solution to the American strategic problem is therefore forward engagement and active political-military management in Eurasia. It took American statesmen a century to accept this truth.

 

The Indo-Pacific’s population and economic strength make it Eurasia’s weightiest theater. But it is worth noting that Asia is not the sole area of importance for U.S. interests. America is not an Asian power, at least not by virtue of geography. The distance from Hawaii or Alaska to the Chinese coastline is some 4,500–5,000 miles. That from New York City to London is only some 3,400 miles. Geographically, America is marginally more European than Asian.

 

Europe, meanwhile, remains the United States’ cultural focus — Americans share a kinship with Europeans that stems from a shared history of political experimentation, fundamental support of liberal values (even if the American and European regimes differ), and, most critically, robust financial cooperation. Europe is not a strategic backwater but one of the three critical regions in Eurasia, the balance within which helps shape the Indo-Pacific. The United States therefore needs to treat Eurasia as an integrated strategic whole, not as a region artificially divided between European, Asian, and Middle Eastern elements. Indeed, disruption in the Indo-Pacific would have Eurasian reverberations because the Eurasian trade system is increasingly transcontinental. By safeguarding free movement and commerce in Asia, the U.S. helps ensure European and Middle Eastern peace.

 

Because of its economic strength and growing military power, China is the greatest threat the U.S. faces. The PLA has expanded more rapidly in the past 30 years than any armed force in history. In only a decade, it has in many respects transformed itself. Formerly a territorial-defense force with limited standardized training and practices and no real desire to conduct combined-arms warfare or large-scale air-naval exercises, it is now a military with the world’s largest navy by ship numbers, an increasingly competent ground army, and an air force capable of complex offensive operations.

 

China’s objective is the domination of Asia and, by extension, the revision of Eurasian security and economic arrangements to its benefit. China has a unique political-economic model, one that resembles that of its late Soviet cousin. Beijing learned the lesson of the late 1980s: Gorbachev’s mistake was to divest the USSR of its spirit of conquest and accept that the Soviet Union would not eject the U.S. from Europe or Eurasia as a whole. An authoritarian state that is reflexively illiberal and lacks the dynamism that capitalist development provides has two options. It can either dominate its surrounding region or retreat and seek autarky. The latter choice is available only to small regimes such as North Korea’s, and, even then, they require external benefactors to survive. Large authoritarian states must reorder the region around them or risk continuous friction that, combined with the internal inefficiencies of central planning, will ultimately cause them to unravel.

 

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Taiwan is China’s main target because the West’s Pacific security architecture relies on Taiwan’s alignment with an anti-Chinese coalition. Chinese control of Taiwan would offer China dominance over trade routes from the South China Sea to the Philippine Sea. It would also afford the PLA a forward base from which to deploy long-range aircraft and submarines, thereby jeopardizing trade between the Americas and the Western Pacific. Taiwan in hostile hands would be a noose to strangle Japanese, Korean, and Philippine trade. Australia would ultimately be isolated and succumb to Chinese power. And while India might sustain itself with the support of non-regional allies, the U.S. should not count on Indian cooperation to balance against China following a war in the Taiwan Strait.

 

As Taiwan is the focal point of Chinese offensive ambitions and American and allied defensive objectives, it is worth considering the likely shape of a war over Taiwan and the First Island Chain.

 

Assaulting Taiwan is a daunting proposition, even with the PLA positioned across a strait not much wider than the English Channel. Taiwan is densely populated, which would mean urban combat if the island were invaded. Careful stockpiling would allow Taiwan to hold out under blockade for several months, reducing the viability of an attritional strategy. Moreover, there are only a few landing points suitable for a major amphibious assault, meaning the Taiwanese army would have ample opportunity to dig in and hold off a lightning assault.

 

The difficulties that geography poses to a defender of Taiwan, however, are greater than those it poses to an attacker. China can deploy most of its land, air, and naval forces around Taiwan relatively easily — at least compared with the American and allied ability to respond — simply because it is close and its forces are many. The U.S. must cross thousands of miles of open ocean to reinforce Taiwan’s defenders. American allies would also need to transit daunting oceanic stretches. The relative distances involved favor China.

 

Moreover, absent American involvement, it is improbable that other regional powers would be able to defeat China in a First Island Chain contest. This calculus changes only if Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, Vietnam, Australia, and Singapore were to form an alliance with a degree of interoperability comparable to NATO’s. Otherwise, the natural friction of alliance operations would diffuse the combined combat power that could marginally balance China’s. Even in this improbable scenario, China would retain the advantage. A partnership between this hypothetical bloc and India would strengthen deterrence, but India has shown no desire to link its strategic defense to that of other powers.

 

This points to a sobering conclusion: If the U.S. did not fight, China would win. This was not always the case and demonstrates how much the situation has shifted in China’s favor.

 

The reality is that the U.S. must carry the load, providing the heavy capabilities that can deter and defeat China. Beijing understands this. It also drew a valuable lesson from the Gulf War. The U.S. is victorious when it is allowed to build up in-theater forces with functionally unlimited supplies flowing in from bases in other regions and in North America. This allows the U.S. to gain air control and then pick apart the enemy’s force structure at will.

 

The PLA’s force structure is designed to prevent such an event. Its ground forces and marines would be responsible for the assault on Taiwan itself, supported by attack aviation and a ferocious short-range rocket and missile bombardment that saturated every major decision-making center in Taiwan. Meanwhile, the PLA air force and navy, and the longer-range weapons in its rocket force, are crafted to destroy any exposed military infrastructure and combat forces within 1,000 miles of Taiwan and damage infrastructure at least as far as Guam.

 

The U.S. possesses heavy assets to foil an invasion of Taiwan. American long-range bombers and carrier-based fighter aircraft, alongside U.S. air-to-air refueling capabilities operating within 1,200 miles of Taiwan, would have an outsized effect on the fight, hitting Chinese transports, ground formations, ports, and depots on the Chinese mainland. If American tactical aviation could be brought to bear, the air balance over Taiwan would be tipped against China, thereby making a lodgment on the island even more difficult to secure. But if these heavy and light assets can be kept at a distance of 900 to 1,200 miles from Taiwan, then China can maintain a superior preponderance of forces and overwhelm Taiwan’s defenders. Hence China’s host of long-range strike aircraft and anti-ship missiles, and an increasing number of nuclear-powered attack submarines, are designed to threaten the U.S. Navy’s carrier strike groups and limit the penetration of U.S. Air Force strategic bombers.

 

To win a Taiwan war, the U.S. Navy would therefore need to push its forces within a 600- to 900-mile bubble around Taiwan. This would demand the disruption of China’s reconnaissance-strike network. The network includes not only the missiles and launch vehicles that would threaten U.S. heavy assets but also a host of space, air, and sea-based sensors, including likely thousands of high-endurance drones, designed to detect the approach of U.S. forces.

 

Under the best circumstances, Taiwan would hold out despite heavy pressure while U.S. allies disrupted the PLA’s ability to project force into the Philippine Sea. With the reconnaissance-strike network sufficiently eroded, the U.S. could approach Taiwan enough to strike targets on the Chinese mainland, starving PLA formations on Taiwan of valuable supplies, disrupting Chinese combat sustainment and repair by destroying Chinese ports and airfields, and hitting communications and surveillance nodes that enable war coordination.

 

The cumulative effect of this campaign, after weeks more of hard fighting, would be a Chinese withdrawal from Taiwan and a transition to a standoff. China can hit targets within the U.S., but the U.S. holds the advantage in a standoff absent a ground element: With the Chinese reconnaissance-strike network degraded, the U.S. could mass more combat power closer to China. Careful diplomatic management would be critical at this point to guide Washington and Beijing toward the termination of war and the prevention of the use of strategic nuclear weapons, which Xi Jinping and his coterie are likely rational enough to avoid.

 

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This assessment of a Taiwan war outlines a strategy for the U.S. and its allies where none currently exists. But whatever strategy is adopted, it must involve the disruption of China’s reconnaissance-strike network. The military assets the U.S. requires to accomplish this are, however, in increasingly short supply.

 

U.S. submarines are the razor-edged arrowhead of this approach. They are stealthy, well armed, and capable of delivering the missiles, mines, and torpedoes necessary to strike major warships and critical targets on the Chinese mainland. They would also, with a sufficiently robust communications system, be able to spot long-range-missile-carrying warships and aircraft even before China’s reconnaissance-strike network has been wholly eroded. The PLA would struggle to counter some three-dozen-plus U.S. submarines, a handful of guided-missile submarines armed with 154 missiles each, and another dozen allied submarines when it must also conduct an extraordinarily complex campaign on Taiwan and seek out the U.S. fleet.

 

Unfortunately, America’s submarine fleet is in disrepair. At any given time, around 40 percent of attack submarines are not deployable because of repairs, maintenance, refueling, and ageing, which shrinks the fleet to around 30 boats. At least five of these must be reserved to escort carrier groups, while others would likely be scattered in European and Middle Eastern waters, since odds are that another revisionist power, such as Russia or Iran, would take advantage of American focus on Asia and launch, at the least, a probe of U.S. naval power.

 

The Navy retires two submarines per year while adding three every two years, resulting in a net loss of one submarine every other year. Maintenance backlogs will not be resolved absent a comprehensive funding injection and scaling plan for the submarine-industrial base. Once conflict begins, attrition and Chinese attacks on U.S. military infrastructure, whether through intelligence-directed sabotage, cyberattacks, or even kinetic means, would hollow out the submarine-industrial base further. Without enough submarines to break the Chinese reconnaissance-strike network, the U.S. would be forced to expend valuable long-range missiles with imprecise targeting data or expose its carriers to attack.

 

Moreover, the missiles the U.S. would need to abrade the Chinese reconnaissance-strike network at range and sink Chinese warships are in short supply. Fortunately, the U.S. is expanding its lines of long-range anti-ship missiles and joint air-to-surface standoff missiles, but shifting from the limited production of a combined number of missiles in the low hundreds to at least 500 annually will take time. Similarly, the Harpoon anti-ship-missile line, the production of which finally restarted, will not be at full scale until the late 2020s — given additional funding after current contracts have expired.

 

No power can maintain a wartime-scale military-industrial system in peacetime. This makes peacetime production and stockpiling crucial to filling the gap between the outbreak of war and the expansion of the defense-industrial base. The United States’ stockpiles may last for weeks, perhaps months, but the defense-industrial base would take years to expand to the necessary scale. Even if the U.S. were to have enough submarines to fight forward, it might still lack the requisite missiles.

 

Finally, the U.S. has not invested in a sufficiently resilient reconnaissance-strike network of its own. The U.S. military in general, and its air-naval forces in particular, are reliant on satellites for intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance, and targeting. Moreover, U.S. precision weapons often require GPS guidance. China has had a robust anti-satellite-weapons program for around two decades and is almost certainly building other jamming tools to disrupt American space operations. The fleet cannot fight blind. Even as communications systems that do not require satellites are developed, and even as new long-range-strike tools that are more resistant to electronic effects are fielded, the reconnaissance problem will remain. China has built an enormous fleet of drones designed to conduct reconnaissance in a space-degraded environment, along with an industrial system that is more than capable of expanding its fleet during wartime. The U.S. has no counterpart capability, nor is one under development.

 

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It is dismayingly clear that the most effective strategy the U.S. can employ to deter and, by implication, defeat China requires a variety of scarce capabilities. The PLA surely understands this. The greatest short-term risk is that China, perceiving a shortfall in American capabilities for the next five years — a shortfall that sabotage and strategic attack can accelerate — decides on an aggressive first strike on Taiwan, on the assumption that, after a few weeks, U.S. forces would become largely inoperable.

 

More troubling is that the only real alternative strategy to the one above would guarantee a protracted struggle and come with a risk of nuclear war. The irony of what one might call the mainland-targeting approach — the strategy that involves the United States’ hitting targets within China and telegraphing that intent well before a conflict to avoid any escalatory misperceptions — is that it is the least escalatory strategy. Hitting targets on the Chinese mainland with conventional weapons does not necessarily signal that the U.S. seeks to destroy the Chinese Communist Party. The goal of these attacks need not be to decapitate the regime but to disrupt military capabilities and deny the PLA its objectives.

 

By contrast, a strategy that restricts attacks on the Chinese mainland for either political reasons or lack of capabilities must transmogrify into a blockade. A Sino–American war would destroy the international commercial and financial system regardless of its course or outcome, but a blockade on Chinese imports of raw materials, fuel, and food would threaten the CCP directly.

 

China remains overwhelmingly dependent on imports. Again, a war would disrupt these imports regardless, but a strategy predicated on their disruption would put the CCP at direct risk. The natural conclusion of a blockade would be societal collapse and revolution in China, the CCP’s greatest fear. Given that regime survival is the paramount objective of Chinese strategy, this is the scenario in which the CCP might consider the use of nuclear weapons. Meanwhile, a blockade would take at least months, more likely years, before it started to tip the scales, since China would stockpile ahead of a conflict and find work-arounds once war had begun. Hence, a blockade not coupled with an offensive capability would simply fail, as China, after capturing Taiwan, would force the United States’ Indo-Pacific allies to fold.

 

China’s military over the past 30 years has built a complex and advanced system to prevent the U.S. from approaching it by sea and air. Our response has been to fruitlessly persist in seeking ways to penetrate this sturdy redoubt, notwithstanding the growing danger to U.S. forces that doing so entails.

 

I have summarized the fundamental strategic challenges and operational questions at the heart of American military thought today. The trouble is that there is little sign that any of the services, the Navy included, along with the civilian defense bureaucracy, is considering these questions with any degree of sophistication or comprehensiveness. There are undoubtedly individual officers, analysts, and appointed officials who see the shadow of looming conflict. But they have yet to influence Washington. Conventional wisdom today amounts to a desire to bury one’s head in the sand.