But what does China want, and what is it planning? Thus far, efforts to come up with coherent answers to either of these two basic questions have met with only limited success.
Two names, however, keep surfacing. On the Chinese side, there is the late Admiral Liu Huaqing, the revered architect of the country’s long-term naval strategy, the Chinese equivalent of Alfred Mahan or of Teddy Roosevelt.9 The plan China appears to be undertaking today was essentially laid down and promoted by the admiral and his political superior Deng Xiaoping, in 1985. At the time, both men were well on in years: the admiral was seventy, the Chinese leader eighty-one. They were old friends, die-hard Communist revolutionaries, Long March veterans, and as it happens, true visionaries, men whose thinking has had a major impact on the warp-speed development of China in recent decades.
Admiral Liu Huaqing is the principal architect of the rapid expansion of the Chinese navy’s presence in the western Pacific. He believed that by 2040 the nation should have an active blue-water force in the region, with several aircraft carriers at its disposal.* [Xinhua News Agency.]
Liu Huaqing’s view of his navy’s future role came about in the early 1980s, after the sudden realization that the Soviet Union, an entity soon to disintegrate, no longer posed a consequential threat to China’s future. The Chinese armed forces (all formally known under the rubric of the People’s Liberation Army, but with the “Navy” and “Air Force” elements appended to the title) could afford to change their focus, and quickly.
Hitherto the Chinese navy’s policy had been based on coastal defense: on harrying and intercepting any enemy forces that might appear in the coastal cities, and helping the army to dislodge them and drive them back to their lairs. Since this was now not likely to happen, the naval effort could well be spent in the future on offshore defense: on broadening China’s ability to defend itself in the three great seas that surround it, the South China Sea, the Yellow Sea, and the East China Sea.
So a new concept was born. China’s navy, if it were provided with enough ships and with a sufficient budget commitment for the long term, could now project the boundaries of the nation’s influence outward and ever outward into the Pacific Ocean as the years went on. The concept of the First Island Chain was born during these strategy sessions: the need for China to secure the “green waters” within the Kamchatka-to-Borneo line, and to do her best to deny access to any foreign military that might wish to be there.
There were discussions of the allurements of the Second Island Chain and even of the Third Island Chain. The possibility, never before imagined, never even imaginable, that China could one day extend her blue-water power as far as Guam, maybe even as far as Hawaii, seemed suddenly within the realm of the possible.
Admiral Liu had almost overnight given China a new dream. And as the powerhouse of China’s new industrial might cranked itself under way in the late 1980s—as the factories began to hum, and the exports to thunder eastward, and the dollars and the gold began to flow at an unstoppable rate into the bank vaults of Beijing and of Shanghai and, after 1997, of the handed-back territory of Hong Kong—the revenues increased and the public funds became more generously available, and serious new defense spending became a possibility, then a necessity, then an absolute essential. In the People’s Liberation Army Navy’s shipyards, scores of new keels were laid down, scores of new vessels launched, and all the most-up-to-date war-fighting accessories and ammunitions were added in the fitting-out basins, and the coastal waters became white-waked with sea trials and gunfire tests and missile launches, and the new Chinese naval policy was formally implemented in acres of gray steel and black smoke and the flying of battle pennants. And all this has been accelerating across the western Pacific ever since.
There is a timetable, too. By 2000, Liu and Deng had seemingly agreed, phase one of the PLA Navy’s plan would see China in control of the green waters within the First Island Chain. This has not yet been achieved, but China’s influence inside the chain, from the Senkaku Islands in the north to the Spratly Islands in the south, and with the building of all the bunkers and airstrips and radar sites on atolls and skerries all across the region, is considerable, is intimidating, and is growing.
The presence of a Chinese attack submarine in the Philippine Sea in 2006 shows that phase two is now under way: China is making its presence felt within the Second Chain, in the waters between Luzon and the Marianas, between Cebu and Palau, between Borneo and Vanuatu. There is even serious talk these days in Beijing and Shanghai of a Third Island Chain, which includes the Hawaiian Islands, and of China seeking rights and freedoms there as well.
No red-blooded American admiral is going to look too kindly on an aspirant power from Asia bringing its vessels regularly into the seas around Hawaii. Yet Hawaiian waters are temptingly highlighted on Chinese naval planning maps these days—most beguilingly, on a map in the 2005 Chinese translation of the biblically regarded Influence of Sea Power upon History, by Alfred Mahan. Admiral Liu was still in service at the time (he died only in 2011), and his stamp would have been on the decision to draw the map this way, together with his advocacy of phase three of the master plan: that the Chinese exercise some good measure of control of the seas to the west of the Third Island Chain, and become a truly global navy, to boot, by the year 2049.
By the centenary, in other words, of the founding the People’s Republic, and of the founding, in August 1949, of the People’s Liberation Army. That is the key culminating moment for all current Chinese regional ambitions. By then, all that China believes to be China’s is expected to be back in China’s hands. The recent past has been rather kind to China’s ambitions for the slow and steady recouping of its territory. Manchuria is back. Port Arthur and Port Edward have come back. The British colonial outposts of Weihaiwei and Hong Kong are back; Hainan is back from the French, Macau from the Portuguese. Now all that remains is Formosa, the once Portuguese “beautiful island” lying between China and Japan, the recovery of which all know will provoke, unless great diplomatic skill is wielded by all parties, an almighty fight.
The rapid rise in Chinese defense spending ($166 billion in 2012, up 12 percent from the year before, and heading skyward) is part of the plan to help achieve all this, and to secure the seas beyond. The hardware is being amassed: the seventy-seven principal surface combatant ships China had in its 2014 navy (the U.S. Pacific Fleet had ninety-six), the sixty-seven submarines (the United States has seventy-one), the fifty-five amphibious ships (there are thirty in the U.S. Navy), and its eighty-five small fighting vessels (the United States has twenty-six) are all part of the plan. Only in one area, the possession of aircraft carriers, is Beijing well behind Washington, with the Liaoning and her strike group ranged against the ten enormous carriers fielded by the Pentagon. Yet even here the Chinese are catching up: three new carriers bought from Australia and Russia are being fitted out, and two more are being built in Shanghai. And while the Liaoning has a relatively antique “ski-slope” launching system, the new ships will have catapults, and a new carrier-suitable fighter is soon to be ready to join the fleet.
All this gives muscle to the Chinese plan, a design that has firm goals, set dates, political will, and a commitment of the money and machinery to undertake and achieve it. The American counterscheme, its current “offset strategy,” its so-called revolution in military affairs,10 certainly starts from a superior position: the U.S. Navy has an overall total of 284 ships, 3,700 aircraft, and 325,00 active-duty personnel, while the Chinese have 495 ships, 650 aircraft, and 255,000 crew members. Yet it appears to be based very much on a series of back-foot assumptions about China’s intentions, and about how to respond to them, rather than on any kind of forceful taking of the initiative, the kind of bull-by-the-horns approach of a figure such as Teddy Roosevelt. The four-year cycle of the American presidential election system hardly helps: whatever the Pentagon comes up with manages all too often to enjoy little long-term validity. Thanks to the realities of modern American pol
itics, the playing of the long game is not the most prominent feature of many of Washington’s policies.
Yet a counterplan exists, for now, and though like all complicated military strategies, it is a child of many fathers, it was designed in essence by one man, the second of the two much-revered graybeards of transpacific planning: the man who was generally regarded as Admiral Liu’s intellectual opposite number in Washington, Andrew Marshall.
This most remarkable figure retired in 2015 after forty-two years as director of the Pentagon’s Office of Net Assessment, to which he had been appointed by Richard Nixon back in 1973. When he stepped down he was ninety-four years old, and for decades was known familiarly in the American press as Yoda, after the Jedi Grand Master in the Star Wars movies, the Pentagon’s preeminent keeper of peace and justice. His job was to plan for future wars, “to look at not very happy futures,” as he once put it. Among the world’s war makers, most especially those in Russia and China, his fame is legendary. He was “our hero” to the PLA’s General Chen Zhou, one of modern China’s most powerful strategists. America’s RMA theory, said General Chen, was something he and his staff had studied “exhaustively.” The Chinese “translated every word that Marshall wrote.”
Andrew Marshall ran the little-known Pentagon Office of Net Assessment for forty-two years, following his appointment as a defense strategist by Richard Nixon in 1973. His Air-Sea Battle concept, a plan for preparing the United States for any coming confrontation with China, is a key element of today’s strategy.* [U.S. Army.]
And what he wrote most recently (in 2009, when he was eighty-eight years old) formed the basis for the new military policy for the Pacific, what was first called by the Pentagon the Air-Sea Battle concept.
This concept assumes that China is now fully bent on keeping the Americans at bay, keeping them out of their immediate maritime hinterland, and stopping them from getting where they need to go in order to fight. Admiral Liu’s now time-honored navy strategy of sanitizing the green waters inside the First Island Chain is part of it, part of what is known as A2/AD, the cumbersome military acronym for China’s new anti-access/area denial capabilities. China’s naval vessels already have the ability to frustrate and harass American attempts to patrol in the South China Sea: soon they may be able to forbid it altogether. In time this may spread to the East China Sea and then into the Yellow Sea as well.
Naval hardware and policy are just one aspect of China’s plan. Deeper inside Chinese territory is now a growing number of missile bases and radar tracking stations and heavy artillery positions specifically designed to keep enemies away from the country’s coastlines, and further deny them access to the areas in which they might need to wage war. The combination (with newly built islands in the sea and coastal missile batteries on land) seeks to hobble American power projection, to make it both riskier and costlier than before. In other words: to make any military expedition well-nigh unacceptable.
No Chinese planner has any doubt about the might of America’s military, and China’s strategy is not to try to match it, not for now. It seeks instead to practice an asymmetrical version of war planning, to aim to exploit America’s military vulnerabilities rather than attempt to fight them head-on—to keep America apprehensive and at bay, unwilling or unable to make a first move.
One Chinese weapon in particular is currently generating much worry in Washington. It is a large new rocket, the East Wind DF-21D antiship ballistic missile. Batteries of what is believed to be a formidable piece of musketry have been deployed along the coasts since 2010. The missile has been dubbed the “carrier killer”: with its range of some nine hundred miles, it would be able to stop in its tracks, if accurate enough, any American aircraft carrier that dared to push its bow through the seas anywhere west of Okinawa. It has already been tested on a carrier mock-up, albeit in the relatively benign conditions of the Gobi Desert, and it works like a charm.
Once weapons like this are fully operational, once all the radar systems are in place, once patrolling submarines (which China is building at a rate four times that of America) are on station and the newly made cyberweapons (already highly effectively tested on American assets) and antisatellite missiles are locked on, and once the U.S. bases in Japan, on Guam, in South Korea (but, courtesy of Pinatubo, not in the Philippines since 1992) have been placed squarely in the Chinese gun sights, one thing becomes certain: no American expeditionary force would ever be allowed, or would ever wish, to land in China. There could be nothing like the airborne invasion of Iraq or Afghanistan. There could be no seaborne softening-up of any Chinese beaches. Nor could any Tomahawk missile strikes rain down on Chinese cities from flotillas of American Aegis-type destroyers positioned close by in offshore waters—because such waters would already have been closed off, proactively.
The American doctrine of shock and awe would be in trouble. Before the massive battlements of the new Great Wall being constructed by China, any such tactic would simply wither and die. Such is the gloomy realization that convinced Andrew Marshall and his teams to construct what they felt were the necessary countermeasures.
The resulting concept of Air-Sea Battle, which reduces any army component in the coming contest and concentrates instead on the abilities of the navy and air forces, would have at its core two aims: first, to weather and survive operationally undiminished any initial Chinese attack; and second, and more important, to launch from submarines and stealth aircraft a series of devastating pinpoint strikes against the very radar and missiles that would keep Americans away from the Chinese coast. The huge American bases that dominate the western Pacific today (Kadena, Yokosuka, Sasebo, Kunsan, Osan) would be supplemented by nimbler, better-protected forces on distant islands such as Tinian and Palau, from where the counterattacks would come.
All U.S. policy would thus be predicated on the absolute need for the surviving American forces to secure access to Chinese waters, to defeat China’s A2/AD abilities, to get in, to get stuck in, and to stay. Once having secured the vitally necessary access, American forces would bring to their knees any Chinese who dared oppose them. More than two hundred specific components, most of them secret, pepper the pages of the Air-Sea Battle manuals. And the People’s Liberation Army is mentioned in the document almost four hundred times—lest anyone doubt the document’s central aim. It clearly states the need for more ships, more submarines, a second aircraft carrier strike group for the Seventh Fleet (which manages the region), better and stealthier aircraft, better missiles, revitalized small bases, and smarter bombs.
Small wonder that Andrew Marshall’s critics have proclaimed that he didn’t run the Office of Net Assessment, but instead the Office of Threat Inflation. The U.S. Marine Corps, notably left out of the plans, said the concept would be “preposterously expensive to build” and would result in “incalculable human and economic destruction” if employed in a major confrontation. The Brookings Institution insists the scenarios presented by Marshall’s office are fraudulent, the notion that China might ever attack American assets just unimaginable.
Even with the Pentagon’s assurances that no specific regime was targeted in its various assessments, the Chinese, not unexpectedly, were incensed by this proposed policy. “If the US military develops Air-Sea Battle to deal with the People’s Liberation Army,” a Chinese colonel was quoted as telling the Washington Post, “then the PLA will be forced to develop anti Air-Sea Battle.” In other words, an arms race could well develop, with all the risk and cost recalled from the last time, half a century ago, when the Soviet Union was the putative enemy.
Nonetheless the pivot, the rebalance, the Air-Sea Battle or its rebranded, kinder and gentler-sounding Joint Concept for Access and Maneuver in the Global Commons, has now become a firm component of American foreign policy, a doctrine for the new Pacific fully accepted by President Barack Obama. The language mandating its accomplishment was inserted into the National Defense Authorization Bills for the first time in 2012. Money is a perpetual problem: bitter
ideological fights within the U.S. Congress delay or frustrate some aspects of the plan. Worsening troubles in and around the Middle East also delay matters. But in recent months, the first manifestations of the pivot are becoming visible, if only vaguely, in the outer reaches of the ocean.
In northern Australia, for example, there is now a semipermanent garrison of U.S. Marines operating out of an Australian army barracks near Darwin. The first group of 250 arrived in 2013. The eventual plan is for a quarter-century arrangement, with fully 2,500 battle-ready marines and a number of heavy-lift helicopters on station for six months each year. It is a fair-weather deployment, however: all but a skeleton group will go back to Hawaii during the midsummer wet season, when the tropical Australian weather makes training nearly impossible.
In Western Australia, there are now talks about allowing the U.S. Navy to use its Stirling navy base outside Perth and, if agreements are reached, of extending the base runways on Garden Island to allow the deployment of American bombers, and of enlarging the docks to allow the supply and repair of American aircraft carriers.
Singapore has agreed to allow the temporary stationing at its port of four of the U.S. Navy’s newest close-in fighting craft, the so-called littoral combat ships. These vessels (small, stealthy, fast, lightly armed), with helicopters and room for small detachments of marines, are specifically designed to deal with the kind of area-denial abilities that the Chinese are developing nearby. They are believed to be the best answer to the new realities of the South China Sea, and the agreement to station them in Singapore is ideal, now that Subic Bay has been denied to America since 1991.
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