Page 2 of
2 The
China pivot and the US 'siege'
strategy By David
Isenberg
The production cost is roughly
$3.8 billion apiece but if you include research
and development, the cost grows to $7 billion
each. Much of the weaponry the US military plans
to acquire in the future is of a stand-off nature.
Due to concerns over other countries
anti-access/area-denial (A2/AD) capabilities the
US military has expressed concern over Chinese
progress in this area for years. It is a staple of
the report on Chinese military power the Pentagon
annually publishes.
To counter this, the
Pentagon developed a concept called Air-Sea Battle
(ASB) that assumes any war in the region is
dominated by naval and air forces, and the domains
of space and cyberspace.
It is consistent
with the traditional US approach to war, which
seeks to substitute
technology for manpower and avoid protracted
conflicts with a major land power; especially one
with armies, navies, air forces, and nuclear
weapons like China.
But ASB has downsides.
Writing in the April issue of Armed Forces Journal
Colonel Douglas McGregor (UA Army-Retired) writes:
To those convinced of China's
dangerous and aggressive intentions, ASB offers
a military solution that is attractive in two
important ways. First, the majority of
congressmen, four-stars and political appointees
in the Defense Department are preoccupied with
the threat of war with a capable opponent, an
opponent like China with armies, air forces, air
defenses, naval forces and nuclear weapons.
Leaders in a country that for 50 years
has been the world's only true center of
military, political and economic gravity, their
predisposition is to police the globe with
American military power even if most of the
world doesn't want policing and US taxpayers
cannot afford it. The strategic imperative to
contain or counter Chinese military power is, to
them, irresistible.
Second, when it
comes to warfare, high-tech/remote/standoff
solutions encourage the illusion of certainty,
light casualties in action and operational
success in the thoroughly unpredictable
environment of extraordinary brutality and
barbarism that is real war. ASB provides a new
way for many in the armed forces and congress to
look for solutions that avoid this ugly reality.
In short, it is a concept for the
joint employment of precision-guided missiles and
munitions against future target sets on the
assumption that the capability and capacity to
destroy thousands of targets with great precision
will be sufficient to drive future opponents
toward acceptable termination. Ground forces were
not included because it would take too long for
them to deploy and make a meaningful contribution
at the outset of the precision-strike campaign.
This is both an optimistic and potentially
catastrophic illusion, according to Macgregor. He
notes that US war games rarely assume a protracted
military campaign that might last months or years.
The impact of such war games on the thinking and
behavior of American national political and
military leaders should not be underestimated.
He warns that, "the unspoken assumption
implicit in Air-Sea Battle is that a
precision-strike campaign against China would not
drag on without result. This is not the first time
the English-speaking peoples of North America,
Britain and Australia have perceived the world
beyond their borders in ways that flattered their
self-image of unconstrained economic growth and
sea-based global military power."
Anybody
who doubts the truth of that has only to recall
what the US public was told prior to the invasions
of Afghanistan and Iraq.
One might dismiss
Macgregor, on the grounds that as a retired army
officer, he objects to a future war plan that
largely excludes ground forces. Yet, given China's
overall size and demonstrated historical ability
to survive external attack it would be dangerous
to ignore his warning.
He points out that
without integrated US expeditionary and allied
ground forces, ASB risks becoming the 21st-century
equivalent of medieval siege warfare. Put more
bluntly, he views relying primarily on ASB as a
sucker's strategy:
Given China's size and depth, its
authoritarian culture and supporting
institutions of internal security, American air
and naval strike forces are likely to run out of
precision-guided munitions long before they run
out of targets to attack or achieve conditions
favorable for acceptable termination.
Without a realistic plan that integrates
US and allied ground forces from regional states
like Vietnam, South Korea, Japan and even
Russia, and powerful ground forces capable of
holding China's regime survivability and
internal national cohesion at risk from multiple
directions, the probability of achieving
conflict termination on terms that favor US and
allied interests is low to
nonexistent.
Macgregor also believes
that those who believe a conflict between a rising
China and other nations is inevitable, as devotees
of the realist approach to international relations
contend, ignores significant counter-availing
forces:
Lastly, military planning for a
potential conflict with China must also be
viewed in the context of contemporary Chinese
society, whose problems include ones not
terribly different than those of past dynasties
reaching back centuries.
The mobilizing
power of Chinese or "Han" nationalism to support
aggressive external war is less than many
Western analysts think, thanks to ethnic
irredentism, regional secessionist tendencies
and severely uneven economic development,
particularly between the eastern coastal areas
and China's interior.
Today, these
historic problems are compounded by China's
dependence on an export-driven economy,
widespread corruption in the public and private
sectors, dangerous levels of pollution in its
most densely populated areas, and a growing
housing bubble that, like all bubbles, must
eventually burst. A military confrontation with
the US is the last thing on the central
government's mind.
David Isenberg
is an adjunct scholar with the Cato Institute, a
US Navy veteran, and the author of the book,
Shadow Force: Private Security Contractors in
Iraq. The views expressed are his own. His
e-mail is sento@earthlink.net. His blog is
PMSC Observer (iissonline.net)
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