US in
'denial' over China's Pacific
strategy By Craig Guthrie
HUA HIN, Thailand - Reports that China is
close to achieving the same spy satellite
capabilities as the United States and making
advances in its drone and missile technologies are
feeding into US theories that Beijing is pursuing
a multi-faceted strategy to reshape the dynamics
of military power in Asia.
However, the
Pentagon seems too enamored with the doctrine of
"access denial", the belief that China is intent
on blocking US access to the region to gain the
upper hand in an asymmetrical conflict, that it is
failing to take the evolution in Chinese military
thinking into account.
In July, reports
surfaced that advances in China's spy orbiter
program in the past 18 months enable it to spy on
the same
moving target - such as a US
aircraft carrier - for up to six hours a day. In
the same month, China launched an advanced new
communications drone and there were revelations
over its anti-ship ballistic missile (ASBM)
program.
"China is clearly pursuing a
policy of 'access denial' toward pushing the US
away from the western Pacific," Joan
Johnson-Freese, chair of the National Security
Decision Making Department at the US Naval War
College, told Asia Times Online. "As part of that,
they need to be able to 'see' what's going on, and
the improvements in their eye-in-the-sky
capabilities will allow them to better do that."
The focus on China's satellite-based
reconnaissance and real-time operations resulted
from partial publication of an analysis by the
Journal of Strategic Studies, due out in full in
October. The article concluded that
the ability of the People's Liberation Army (PLA)
to monitor moving targets from space has been
revolutionized in the past decade.
"Starting from almost no live surveillance
capability 10 years ago, today the PLA has likely
equaled the US's ability to observe targets from
space for some real-time operations," two of the
institute's China researchers, Eric Hagt and
Matthew Durnin, wrote in the analysis, as seen and
reported by Reuters.
"The most immediate
and strategically disquieting application is a
targeting and tracking capability in support of
the anti-ship ballistic missile, which could hit
US carrier groups ... With space as the backbone,
China will be able to expand the range of its
ability to apply force while preserving its policy
of not establishing foreign military bases,"
Reuters reported.
The impetus for the
advances in monitoring systems likely derived from
major embarrassments for the PLA, such as the US
deployments of two carriers, the USS Nimitz
and USS Kitty Hawk, to Taiwan in 1996. That
affront to Chinese sovereignty is seen as a
turning point in post-Cold War US-China relations
and in the formation of the East Asian regional
order.
The access denial theory envisions
the PLA acting quickly in similar scenario to
neutralize US infrastructure in the region in the
event of a conflict, to prevent deployment of
vastly superior US follow-on forces. By striking
hard, Beijing could convince the US and its allies
that the cost of entry in blood and treasure would
be prohibitive, despite the gaping disparities in
firepower and strength between the US and Chinese
militaries.
Admiral Mike Mullen, the
chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, also
referred to access denial in July, ahead of a
meeting with General Chen Bingde, chief of the
PLA's General Staff.
"There are some
significant advancements that China has made
technologically over the course of the last decade
... And those do focus on anti-access or
area-denial - they are focused and have that
capability," Mullen said in Beijing.
Surveillance of moving targets such as
carriers is an aspect of the access denial
strategy as identified in a 2007 report "Entering
the Dragon's Lair", which was prepared by the Rand
Corporation for the US Air Force. It said the PLA
would increasingly focus on restricting or
disrupting the US military's ability to operate
within a theater far from US territory.
"Attacks on aircraft carriers ... could
prevent naval aviation from operating within the
theater or force the carriers to withdraw to
more-distant locations from which their aircraft
would be less effective," according to the report.
It also pointed to a "political anti-access"
strategy, whereby Beijing would apply diplomatic
pressure to foster disputes between host-nations
of Pacific bases and the US.
While media
reports have focused on China's eyes in the sky,
its new stealth fighter, aircraft carrier and
reconnaissance drones are key links in the
anti-access strategy for relaying on-the-ground
communications, while anti-ship ballistic missile
systems are critical for strike options.
In July, the PLA deployed the Silver
Eagle, a twin-tailed drone. According to an
account of its test flight found on a
PLA-sponsored website, as reported by Flight
International, the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)
made a three-hour flight, with a ground operator
controlling the drone with a mouse and keyboard.
When the UAV reached the combat zone, it
maintained a cruising speed of 72kt (134 km/h) and
an altitude of 9,840 ft (3,000 meters). [1]
"During its mission it disrupted
communications, while also acting as a node for a
Chinese military communications network, relaying
'large numbers of information packets' among
Chinese forces. When an 'enemy' aircraft
approached, the ground control station initiated a
'counter-surveillance deployment plan', and by
reducing its altitude and initiating radio silence
the Silver Eagle evaded detection," Flight
International reported.
In a rare example
of Chinese military transparency, General Chen
confirmed this month that the Dong Feng 21D
anti-ship missile, known as a "carrier killer" was
in development. His comments came as the
English-language China Daily reported that the
DF-21D had a range of 2,700 km, far beyond US
assessments by the Office of Naval Intelligence
last year, which put the range at around 1,500 km.
"The missile is still undergoing
experimental testing and it will be used as a
defensive weapon when it is successfully
developed, not an offensive one," Chen told
reporters.
Taken together, the recent
satellite, drone and missile advances are critical
in China's Pacific access denial strategy, says
Gabe Collins, co-founder of China SignPost.com.
China's work on overhead ISR
[intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance]
assets is very important, as they will help the
PLA with over-the-horizon targeting and weapons
guidance. Our work to date has focused most
specifically on the DF-21D that recently reached
initial operational capability. In our December
2010 report on ASBM development, we note China's
rapid buildup of a reconnaissance satellite
constellation, with at least 12 Yaogan advanced
electro-optical and synthetic aperture radar
(SAR) remote sensing satellites launched in the
last 4 years.
Though the network China
is constructing fits well with the strategies
identified in "Entering the Dragon's Lair", Hagt
of the World Security Institute told Asia Times
Online that there were several problems with the
US focus on access denial, particularly in how a
theory devised by Western policymakers is "parsed"
onto Chinese military thinking.
"Remember
that A2/AD [anti-access/area denial] is not a
Chinese term, nor was it first borrowed by the
Chinese to describe their own strategy in the
western Pacific. If one looks at the specifics of
what the strategy really means in the Western
context, there are a number of problems," said
Hagt.
"The Chinese formulation for their
naval modernization is 'active defense',
admittedly an even more amorphous term. I think
where the Chinese foremost resistance to the
[A2/AD] term would be in the concept's inherent
purpose to possess the means and intent to keep
the US (or other power) out of a pre-defined area
using some form of forward deployed surface,
submarine vessels, missiles or even bases. Rather,
they would describe an A2/AD like strategy as one
in reaction to specific threats and triggers, for
instance interference over Taiwan.
"What
exactly would trigger the A2/AD strategy is
unclear. Only interference in Taiwan? Or would
some dispute in the South China Sea be sufficient?
If it is just over Taiwan, what exactly would the
response be? Who would the deterrent be aimed at
exactly? If the US sailed in with carriers aided
by Japanese Aegis destroyers, or let's say just
satellite comlink support, would the deterrent be
exercised over Japan and any others that may
operate alongside US forces? This is the
difficulty over A2/AD and to which nuclear weapons
(a simple deterrent) are not subject to," he said.
Moreover, Hagt said reporting on his
article for the World Security Institute missed
several significant caveats that he and his
colleagues mentioned in terms of a comparison
between US and Chinese capabilities in
reconnaissance satellites:
We point out that while China's
potential to view a stationary target in the
Western Pacific are nearing US capabilities,
they still lack in cueing assets (for example
ELINT, Electronic signals intelligence or
intelligence-gathering by use of electronic
sensors ) ... this is say nothing of the gap
when talking about greater battlefield awareness
on a global scale.
Our point was not
that China is catching up in overall battlefield
awareness, much less on a global scale, but
given that China is mainly interested in a
well-defined and somewhat limited space (western
Pacific), its potential ability to view objects
has greatly increased over the past few
years.
While the Western media may be
exaggerating China's technological advances, a
second look at how Chinese military strategy is
evolving offers further counterpoints to the
access denial theory. Rather than preparing for a
counterstrike, it is more likely that the PLA is
sticking to its "active defense" strategy and
building on "space deterrence".
The PLA
can achieve this by building up a formidable
reconnaissance and strike capability while
adopting a new tack of using political victories
and psychological warfare to chip away at the US's
standing in Asia. Active Defense is said to
feature "defensive operations, self-defense and
striking and getting the better of the enemy only
after the enemy has started an attack".
In
a February report delivered to the US-China
Economic and Security Review Commission, Dean
Cheng, a research fellow at the Asian Studies
Center, said PLA strategy had evolved based on
careful observation of Western war approaches to
identify "three warfares": psychological warfare,
public opinion warfare, and legal warfare, with
the first proving the most important for space
operations.
"Psychological warfare at that
level is aimed not only at an opponent's political
and military leaders, but also at their broader
population ... PLA descriptions of how space
deterrence can be effected are consistent with
this definition of psychological warfare. For
example, Chinese analysts note that space systems
are very expensive. It is possible, then, to hold
an opponent's space infrastructure hostage by
posing a question of cost-benefit analysis: is the
focus of deterrence (eg, Taiwan) worth the likely
cost of repairing or replacing a badly damaged or
even destroyed space infrastructure?"
While Cheng says "three warfares" fits
with the Pentagon's "access denial" doctrine,
"space deterrence" and the political techniques
available to undermine US prestige in space are
likely to play an increasingly important role as
Beijing projects itself as the ascendant power in
the Pacific.
As Chinese military expert
Bao Shixiu wrote in "Deterrence Revisited, Outer
Space", a report published in 2007, "The basic
necessity to preserve stability through the
development of deterrent forces as propounded by
Mao [Zedong] and Deng [Xiaoping] remains valid in
the context of space."
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