It is the very steepness of Asia’s economic rise (and particularly of China’s until recently) from the 1970s through the first decade of the twenty-first century that causes its leaders to pound their chests militarily. Whereas it took Great Britain nearly six decades to double its per capita income during its industrial revolution following the late eighteenth century, and America five decades to do the same following the Civil War, China doubled its per capita income in the first decade after its late-twentieth-century takeoff. As a whole, Asia’s per capita income rose sevenfold in less than six decades following 1950, reports Asia expert Bill Emmott, a former editor in chief of The Economist.1
Asia’s military rise has followed in tandem with its economic rise. Desmond Ball, professor at the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre of the Australian National University, reports that from the late 1980s to the late 1990s defense outlays rose so dramatically that Asia’s share of global military expenditure nearly doubled, from 11 to 20 percent. Asia’s share of arms imports increased from 15 to 41 percent of the world total. Because China’s economy was not upended by the 1997–1998 economic crisis, its defense budget has increased by double digits nearly every year since 1988, leading to an eightfold swelling in the size of its defense budget over the past two decades.2 In 2011, China’s defense budget rose another 12.7 percent to nearly $100 billion. Though the U.S. defense budget is $708 billion, “the two are headed in opposite directions.”3 Moreover, China’s total military-related spending was estimated by the Pentagon to be $150 billion in 2009, and has surely moved higher since.4 China is now the world’s second largest military spender, with China and Japan far ahead of Germany and Russia in military expenditures.5
Ball observes that Asian defense expenditures have moved from the stage of “non-threatening” general buildups and modernizations to an “action-reaction” phase, in which the various littoral countries are engaged in a heated arms race, particularly in regards to surface and subsurface warships, ballistic and cruise missiles, and missile defense systems, and all facets of electronic and cyber-warfare. Thus does postmodern nationalism define itself.
Worse, this new Asian arms race and the regional security dynamics associated with it will be “much more complex” than that which obtained during the bipolar Cold War era, notes Ball, with more points of interaction and therefore greater likelihood of miscalculations and attendant instability.6
Of particular note is the feverish acquisition of submarines, as surface warships become more vulnerable to offensive missiles. “Submarines are the new bling, everybody wants them,” Bernard Loo Fook Weng of the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies in Singapore told me. Note that submarines are moving, undersea intelligence-gathering factories. Unlike aircraft carriers for example, which in and of themselves constitute statements of national prestige and are useful for a variety of missions, including humanitarian relief, submarines are about sheer aggression, even as the gathering of information in which they engage may serve a stabilizing purpose by providing one state with knowledge about the intentions and capabilities of another. On the other hand, submarine acquisitions introduce a dangerous uncertainty into the military equation, because as soon as they submerge nobody knows exactly where they are. Submarines can patrol in very intrusive ways without announcing their presence.
China has over sixty submarines and will have around seventy-five or so in the next few years, slightly more than the United States. China “is outbuilding the U.S. in new submarines by four to one” since 2000, and by “eight to one” since 2005, even as the U.S. Navy’s ASW (antisubmarine warfare) forces have diminished, write James C. Bussert of the U.S. Naval Surface Warfare Center and Bruce A. Elleman of the U.S. Naval War College.7 Whereas many of China’s submarines are diesel-electric and all of America’s are nuclear, the latest Yuan-class diesel-electric models are quieter than the nuclear ones, and because the Western Pacific constitutes China’s home waters, China’s submarines do not have to travel from half a world away to get to the Asian military theater as America’s must. The unstoppable buildup of military force by China means paradoxically that China can wait and adopt a benign foreign policy for the moment because time is on its side. By the late 2020s, at the current rate of acquisitions and decommissionings, China will have more warships in the Western Pacific than the U.S. Pacific Fleet.
India, South Korea, and Vietnam are expected to acquire six more subs apiece by the end of the current decade, while Australia will acquire twelve new subs within twenty years, though recent budgetary restrictions may affect this statistic downward. Singapore, Malaysia, and Indonesia will shortly acquire two more subs apiece. Malaysia’s defense spending has more than doubled since 2000, with conventional weapons deliveries increasing 722 percent in 2005–2009 compared to the first half of the decade. (Malaysia originally thought of acquiring subs in the 1980s to counter Vietnam, which had just annexed Amboyna Cay in the Spratly Islands, but with Chinese power now looming, it finds another use for them.) Singapore, a tiny city-state at the southern extremity of the South China Sea, is now among the world’s top ten arms importers. Meanwhile, Australia was expected to spend a whopping $279 billion in the next two decades on new submarines, destroyers, and fighter planes, again, continued funds permitting. In all, given military modernization programs under way in South Korea and Japan, Asian nations are expected to purchase as many as 111 subs by 2030, according to AMI International, which provides market research to governments and ship-builders.8
South Korea may be the best example of this defense (and particularly naval) craze in the Asia-Pacific region. In 2006, South Korea decided to more than double defense expenditures by 2015, to $1.24 trillion. It is investing in—among other things like submarines and frigates for antisubmarine warfare—six new Sejong-class destroyers, each carrying 128 missiles guided by an advanced Aegis system. Then there are the purchases of F-15K Slam Eagle air-superiority fighters, four Boeing 737 AWACS aircraft, and probably F-35 Joint Strike Fighters. Japan at the end of 2009 green-lighted construction of an entire new generation of large helicopter carriers, the 22DDH, vital for antisubmarine warfare.9 Asia’s arms race may be one of the most underreported stories in the elite media in decades.
All of these Asian navies are dwarfed by that of the United States, but whereas each of them is increasing in size, the number of U.S. warships over the decades will decrease in number. Military multipolarity, as I indicated in the last chapter, will thus eventually follow economic and diplomatic multipolarity. This military multipolarity is a sign of a more liberalized and just world, in which indigenous states, rather than Western empires, have control over their own resources. To wit, China has recently put to sea its first aircraft carrier, in some sense a refitted Russian-Ukrainian “piece of junk” that is more of an amphibious assault ship than an American-sized carrier.10 American naval officers are not worried about it and they shouldn’t be. It will take Chinese crews years and perhaps decades of training to properly utilize carrier strike groups. But were China able to keep up its naval modernization and expansion—a big “if”—by 2050 it would have nine carriers concentrated in the Western Pacific and Indian oceans, by which time the United States would have about the same number for policing the entire globe.
Future projections are obviously dangerous because of the flaw of linear thinking: current trends rarely continue as they have in the past. But given how China has constituted a great world civilization and seen great empires for the overwhelming majority of its history going back thousands of years, it is reasonable to see the last 150 years of weakness as an aberration that is now being rectified. This is likely despite China’s decreasing economic growth rates, and despite heightened domestic tension. Moreover, the very launching of an aircraft carrier indicates that China has the ambition to transform its navy from the “sea denial” type—in order to protect its coastline—to the more formidable “sea control” type, which portends a blue-water oceanic force.11 In fact, in 2012, China la
unched the fourth of its projected eight new 071 amphibious landing ships that can each carry up to eight hundred troops, hovercraft, armored vehicles, and medium-lift helicopters. “Having a significant fleet of large amphibious assault vehicles clearly suggests a desire for power projection,” says Christian Le Mière, a researcher for the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London. (China has also launched a line of 056 stealthy littoral combat frigates.) Moreover, China overtook South Korea in 2010 to become the world’s largest shipbuilder, even as its best submarines and surface warships are now armed with advanced air defense weapons and long-range antiship missiles.12
China has not yet sufficiently developed and practiced the so-called system of systems necessary for fleet operations, even as it is accelerating training and sustained deployments to gain such experience, says Rodger Baker, vice president and East Asia analyst for Stratfor, a private global intelligence firm. But in the near seas (South China and East China seas), he goes on, China does not necessarily need to engage in coordinated fleet activities to provide deterrence and defense—it can, for example, rely on swarm tactics backed by land-based air and missile assets. China can also use what it calls “combination punches.” In late 2012, challenging Japan’s de facto administration of the Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands in the East China Sea, China “launched joint combat controls by its navy, air force, and strategic missile corps,” in coordination with the threat of economic retaliation, a refusal to attend a major financial conference in Tokyo, and encouraging anti-Japanese protests at home.13 A fleet need not fight well if it can be used in conjunction with diplomatic and other organs of state to exert pressure on adversaries. (Witness China’s emphasis on multiple civilian maritime forces such as coast guards, which can bully neighboring states in the South China and East China seas without eliciting a proportional U.S. response, because the U.S. Coast Guard is absent in the region.)
Keep in mind that China spends only around 2 percent of its GDP, gross domestic product, on defense, whereas the United States spends 4.7 percent.14 So China is in better shape to keep increasing its military budgets. (Likewise, the dramatic growth of national economies throughout East Asia in recent decades has allowed for these military buildups without much affecting defense budgets as percentages of GDPs.)
Because naval power and air power cannot in terms of strategy be disaggregated, it is particularly symbolic that on January 11, 2011, just hours before then-U.S. secretary of defense Robert Gates met in Beijing with President Hu Jintao, China tested a prototype of its J-20 stealth fighter, designed to rival America’s F-22 Raptor, the world’s only operational stealth fighter. “Larger than the F-22, with bigger fuel tanks, it will fly higher, faster and with less chance of detection.”15 China has increased the number of its modern, fourth-generation aircraft from fifty to five hundred since 2000, even as it has reduced the size of its overall air force from three thousand fighters to two thousand.16 This is a perfect illustration of the lesson that military modernization is actually about smaller but more up-to-date force structures. Yes, Asian nations are acquiring a lot of ships and planes: more important, however, is that they are acquiring top-of-the-line items that will mesh with their future space satellite reconnaissance systems, existent missile systems, and electronic and cyber-warfare capabilities.
In particular, China, according to the U.S. Department of Defense, “has the most active land-based ballistic and cruise missile program in the world.”17 China’s new land-based antiship ballistic missiles—using information from space-based tracking systems—may threaten U.S. surface warships, particularly aircraft carriers. Though the United States retains the power of massive retaliation, the very idea that its carriers, cruisers, destroyers, and frigates are not as inviolate as they used to be could affect the deployment patterns of America’s carrier strike groups. And affecting the behavior of your competitor is the essence of power.
According to Yale professor of management and political science Paul Bracken, China isn’t so much building a conventional navy as an “anti-navy” navy, designed to push U.S. sea and air forces away from the East Asian coastline. Chinese drones putting lasers on U.S. warships, sonar pings from Chinese submarines, the noisy activation of Chinese smart mines, and so on are all designed to signal to American warships that Beijing knows about their movements and the United States risks a crisis if such warships get closer to Chinese waters. Because “relations with China are too important to jeopardize with a military confrontation,” this anti-access strategy has a significant political effect on Washington. “The strategic impact of China’s agility is not so much to tilt the military balance in its direction and away from the United States. Rather,” Bracken goes on, “it introduces new risks into the American decision-making calculus.”18
None of these developments is lost on U.S. military planners. For despite the headlines in North Africa and the Middle East, the United States maintains the preponderant amount of its naval forces in the Pacific, Indian, and Arctic oceans—all in Asia or close to it. Of the eleven U.S. aircraft carrier strike groups currently in existence, six are usually focused on the Pacific and Indian oceans. The U.S. Fleet Marine Force, Pacific, is the largest of the Marine Corps’ field commands. The Pacific Air Forces is the largest U.S. Air Force Command. While technically speaking all these American air and sea forces range over 50 percent of the globe, in fact they are primarily focused on balancing against China. For in addition to China’s subs and fighter jets, included in its arsenal are seventy-five major surface warships and its new-old aircraft carrier, with plans to acquire four to six additional carriers in the near and mid-term future.19
The Pentagon’s deployment strategy against China (even as it would publicly deny such a characterization) is a fact of life in the Pacific, not really because China has this or that number of submarines, surface warships, and fighter jets, but because China’s “sheer size [in terms of geography, demography, and economics] and presence at the very heart of Asia make it a potential threat to virtually all of its neighbors,” writes Princeton professor Aaron L. Friedberg. At the same time, Friedberg goes on, “unlike the United States, China has no option to withdraw from the region. This fact alone cannot help but give pause to any smaller nation that might contemplate defying Beijing’s will.”20 To be sure, China, despite “its steadily expanding global involvement,” is enveloping Asia.21 In the words of U.S. Naval War College professor Andrew S. Erickson, while the American Navy and Air Force are spread thin around the planet, “China inherently enjoys theater concentration.”22 This is true not only militarily but economically as well. Even as China’s defense budget has soared, its bilateral trade with the members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations jumped by 640 percent during the first decade of the twenty-first century.23 In other words, to avoid Finlandization, the countries of the South China Sea must rely on the constancy of U.S. naval and air power in an age of declining American defense budgets; or on the possibility that China’s own economic and domestic security will itself at some point suddenly deteriorate to the level where it adversely affects the growth of Beijing’s defense budget. To clarify: it is not China’s burgeoning air and naval forces per se, nor its burgeoning Asian trade patterns per se, but the combination of the two that threatens the de facto independence of other Asian states, particularly those in the South China Sea region.
Whereas Northeast Asia enjoys a rough balance of power between China, Japan, and South Korea (the latter two supported by the presence of the U.S. military) in the South China Sea, China is a much greater threat because in this rapidly militarizing age of ours the U.S. military and body politic simply do not have quite the same attachment to countries like Vietnam, Malaysia, and the Philippines as they do to Japan and South Korea. While the United States has fought wars in the past in Vietnam and the Philippines, it presently has tens of thousands of troops stationed in Japan and South Korea. Japan and South Korea have formidable military-industrial complexes of their own, far sup
erior to the budding arsenals of the weaker nations to the south. That is why the South China Sea will be among the most salient political and moral registers of any future U.S. defense retrenchment. Here is where everyone is arming to the teeth, even as China’s military is pulling further and further ahead of every other in the region.
The South China Sea, to use an alternative geographical definition from the one used in the last chapter, connects the Strait of Malacca in the southwest to the Bashi and Balintang channels and the Taiwan Strait to the north and northeast: that is, it connects the maritime world of the Middle East and Indian Subcontinent to that of Northeast Asia. It is as central to Asia as the Mediterranean is to Europe. If one assumes that the Persian Gulf and Northeast Asia are the two critical areas of the non-Western world that the United States should never let another great power dominate, consider the energy-rich South China Sea, which lies between them, the third. In fact, in geopolitical terms it might arguably be the most critical geographical juncture of the non-Western world; the reason will become apparent shortly.
First, consider how the South China Sea is uniquely crucial to China. As the analyst Mingjiang Li writes, it is a “natural shield” for China’s security in the south, China’s most densely populated and developed region. A “strong foothold” in the South China Sea gives China a strategic “hinterland” of over a thousand miles stretching to Indonesia, and would thus act as a “restraining factor” for the U.S. Navy’s Seventh Fleet transiting the Pacific and Indian oceans. A strong foothold in the South China Sea also helps China’s navy break through the straitjacket of the American-dominated First Island Chain in the Western Pacific. Moreover, Chinese observers complain that other competing states have dug over a thousand oil wells in the South China Sea, which exceeds China’s own offshore production by several times.24 Control over the South China Sea’s oil and natural gas reserves would make China a little less dependent on Middle East energy.25
Asia's Cauldron Page 5
