Instead, it makes more sense to start not with China, but with Asia as a whole. If the U.S. is going with the grain of what most of a rising Asia wants, it will become much easier to fend off any Chinese efforts to alter the status quo. The good news for Washington is that ideas that it says it wants to promote in Asia—free trade, open navigation, legal protections for investment, economic integration across the Pacific, and an emphasis on human rights—are all things that most Asian governments also support. As its military dominance starts to wane, Washington’s objective is to help build an Asian regional order based on these principles, which China could not overturn even if it wanted to. All this will require a delicate balancing act. As the iron rule dictates, the U.S. will need to avoid turning China into an implacable enemy. But it also needs to demonstrate to both China and its allies that it has staying power, and that, despite Chinese predictions, it is not about to retreat back across the Pacific for evening cocktails in Hawaii. China and the U.S. will eventually have to learn to live with each other, to find a way to respect each other’s interests in the western Pacific, if they are to avoid a rivalry that feels like the Cold War. But that accommodation will be more favorable to the U.S. and more stable for the region if China believes any bid for regional dominance would come at enormous costs and regional isolation.
Elements of this approach are already being developed in what is now called the Obama administration’s “pivot” to Asia. The president has left no doubt that he sees the Asia-Pacific as a central long-term priority for U.S. national security. But many of the details are not clear. As things stand, the U.S. economic agenda in the region is shaky, and the hints Washington has given of its new military strategy are downright alarming. This chapter will look at the four pillars of the U.S.’s approach to Asia—military, diplomatic, economic, and political.
HOW NOT TO FIGHT CHINA
In 1992, a young deputy air-force attaché at the U.S. Embassy in Beijing called Mark Stokes started to tour quietly around various parts of the country, looking for clues about what the Chinese military were up to. In those days, there were not nearly as many foreigners living in China as there are today, and in most cities a Western face soon attracted a lot of attention. But by hanging around cities with large military bases, such as Leping in the southern province of Jiangxi, and comparing impressions with what was being written in Chinese military literature, Stokes was able to gain some insights into what the PLA was actually planning. He started to accumulate evidence about what appeared to be the start of a major strategic bet by the Chinese military on medium-range and long-range missiles. It was the first sign that China was building a military that one day might seek to exert greater control over the western Pacific. “In many ways, we are still in the same position we were in then of underestimating China’s ability for important breakthroughs in areas that directly challenge the U.S.,” says Stokes, who now helps run a consultancy that monitors the Chinese military.
For much of the last two decades, the Pentagon has held an anguished internal debate about the nature of China’s military modernization. Back in 1992, plenty of people in the Pentagon dismissed the analysis of people such as Stokes, rejecting the idea that a country as poor as China would have such clear-cut military ambitions. Others argued that China’s ability to contest Asia’s seas with the U.S. was heavily constrained by its dependency on the global economy. China could not afford to upset the apple cart, they said. In the 1990s, the debate was largely academic, because the U.S. still had a dramatic superiority, which it had coolly demonstrated in the 1995–96 standoff over Taiwan’s election. After China launched several missiles into Taiwanese waters in order to intimidate voters, the U.S. sent two aircraft-carrier groups into the region as a demonstration of force. Beijing was furious, but it could not do anything, and Taiwan held its election without further threats. Yet, over the years, the Pentagon has consistently been surprised at the pace of China’s military buildup, from its ability to take out satellites to the stealth fighter jet it tested while Bob Gates was in the country. Today, if you ask the question about how the U.S. would respond to a similar crisis, the answer from U.S. military officials often involves a lot of nervous fidgeting.
One of the jobs of a military is to plan for worst-case scenarios. The U.S. military conducts regular war games to test how conflicts with potential adversaries such as China might play out, and in recent years these have delivered some disturbing conclusions. In several of the simulations, the U.S. participants found that Chinese missiles quickly overwhelmed many American bases in the region, as well as sinking some of the aircraft carriers that the U.S. sent into the western Pacific. It is a measure of the rapid advance in China’s air force and navy in the last two decades that, if a conflict did break out over Taiwan, it is now not at all clear that the U.S. would be able to intervene decisively in the Taiwan Strait.
The U.S. has not lost an aircraft carrier since the Japanese sank the Hornet in 1942. In both practical and symbolic ways, the aircraft carrier has been the symbol of American power projection over the six decades during which it has dominated the Pacific. The credibility of U.S. defense guarantees for the region has been carried on the backs of America’s eleven carriers, with their decks each the size of three football fields filled with dozens of fighter aircraft. But it is those same vessels that are now potentially under threat by China’s vast new array of missiles. The loss of a carrier would be a massive psychological blow to American prestige and credibility, a naval 9/11. The mere prospect that carriers might be vulnerable could be enough to restrict their use. Even if the U.S. Navy commanders thought their carriers would probably survive in a conflict, they might be reluctant to take the risk. As a result, the U.S. needs a Plan B.
Deep in the bowels of the Pentagon, that new plan is taking shape. It is not actually described as a plan—instead, Pentagon officials call it a new “concept” for fighting wars. But it does have a name, AirSea Battle, which echoes the war-fighting doctrine from the later stages of the Cold War called AirLand Battle, when the massive buildup in Soviet troops appeared to give the U.S.S.R. the capacity to overrun Western Europe. Many of the details about AirSea Battle remain vague. But the few indications that have been made public suggest an approach that, if pushed too far, could be a manifesto for a new Cold War.
——
In 2005, the American writer Robert Kaplan did a cover story for The Atlantic entitled “How We Would Fight China.” I can remember receiving a copy in my office in Shanghai and tossing it angrily onto a pile of papers, the plastic wrapper still on the magazine. This was the high point of the debacle in Iraq, and the idea of talking up a war with China at that very moment seemed the height of neoconservative conceit. It made me uncomfortable for all sorts of other reasons. When you have recently moved to a country, are learning its language, making friends, and exploring its mysteries, it is unsettling to be asked to start thinking about how it might be defeated militarily. When I did eventually read Kaplan’s article a few years later, it was not as hawkish as the title suggested and contained sensible recommendations about getting on better with the rest of Asia and dispersing U.S. military assets across the region. But I also began to realize that the question he raised was a crucial one. China does not have a grand imperial plan to invade its neighbors, in the way the Soviets did. But in any country with a rapidly growing military—one that is feeling its national oats and is involved in a score of unresolved territorial disputes—there is always the risk that its leaders might be tempted by some sort of military solution, the lure of a quick win that would reorder the regional balance. If China and its neighbors all believe that the U.S. has a credible plan for a conflict, this both acts as deterrence against any eventual Chinese adventurism and reduces the risk that anxious Asians will start their own arms races with Beijing. Or, as T. X. Hammes, the American military historian, puts it: “We need to make sure no one in the Chinese military is whispering in their leaders’ ears: If you listen to me, we
can be in Paris in just two weeks.”
Alarming as it may sound, the question of how to fight China also forces Washington to reflect on its deeper objectives in Asia. Bob Gates, the former defense secretary, used to remark that the Pacific had “for all practical purposes been an American lake for our navy since the end of World War II.” But relative decline means finding different ways to achieve U.S. goals. With its superiority now under challenge, Washington faces a choice: it can try to retain its primacy, or it can shift to a more defensive approach that is geared toward preventing another power from ever turning the region into a sphere of influence. Deterrence is not always the same as domination. Washington’s answer to this question remains muddled. When asked to define their military objectives, American officials will say that deterrence is their principal goal, but they also give plenty of indications that they still aspire to a more maximalist role, to try and hang on to their unquestioned superiority. Shortly after he became head of the U.S. Navy in 2011, Admiral Jonathan Greenert issued a set of “Sailing Directions,” which set out the navy’s mission and made the claim that “we own the sea.” When I asked another senior U.S. official about the objectives of AirSea Battle, he said, a little awkwardly, “It is part of a conversation we are having about the different forms we expect our pre-eminence to take.”
AirSea Battle is a direct response to the war-game simulations that showed Chinese missiles taking out American carriers. Its target is the buildup by other nations of what in Pentagon-speak is known as “anti-access/area-denial,” or A2AD for short, the weapons and ships that are designed to prevent an opponent from getting into the seas around its coasts in the event of a conflict. “We need to make sure that we can actually get to the fight,” an air-force official explained. In public, Pentagon officials claim AirSea Battle is not aimed at China. One senior Pentagon official insisted to me, “This is not an anti-China battle plan.” But when the Pentagon starts to describe the new threats it is facing—long-range, precision-strike missiles that can restrict the movements of its ships, advanced submarines, and skills in cyberwar—it becomes clear that AirSea Battle is primarily about China. The hypothetical threat that the Pentagon planners outline describes accurately the precise strategy that China has been developing to restrict U.S. access to the western Pacific. No wonder U.S. military officers sometimes refer to China as “Voldemort”—in the Pentagon’s new battle plan, China is the enemy whose name they dare not speak.
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.
——
At the very least, AirSea Battle conc
entrates 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.”
The Contest of the Century Page 14