A few weeks ago I had the opportunity to read Toshi Yoshihara and James Holmes' Red Star Over the Pacific. A couple of minor quibbles aside, the book is an excellent overview of emerging Chinese naval capabilities and doctrine, set against the background of China's strategic maritime thought. The volume discusses Chinese naval thought in terms of two major strategic thinkers, Mao Zedong and Alfred Thayer Mahan. It also draws out the implications of technological change, and of shifts in US doctrine and force structure. The book is valuable for its insights into the interplay of USN and PLAN doctrine, but also for its use of Chinese language source material.
The authors begin by contrasting Maoist and Mahanian theory, which is an understandable but ultimately unfortunate choice. The section on the military thought of Mao Zedong is not particularly helpful. The authors note that Mao didn't think very long or very deeply about naval warfare, or indeed about maritime affairs at all. Nevertheless, they attempt to draw some lessons from Maoist military theory for how the PLAN might fight, and how it will go about procurement. This attempt is not particularly successful. What we learn is that the Chinese may fight using a combination of orthodox and unorthodox methods, that they may attack small concentrations of US warships in preference of capital ship battlegroups, that they may attack "in depth," instead of concentrating on forward deployed US forces, and they may combine political and military methods to achieve victory. With due respect, I didn't need to read an analysis of Mao Zedong military thought to learn any of these things, nor do I think that any of them represent singular implications of a Maoist approach to maritime conflict. Frankly, the section on seems leftover from the ruins of a larger argument that never quite came together. Indeed, in a later chapter the authors suggest that the beliefs and pronouncements of Mao Zedong on nuclear theory are wholly irrelevant to analysis of China's SLBM deterrent. While the authors claim that "Maoist theory, then, informs the logic of Chinese statecraft and grand strategy as well as its operational and tactical grammar," they fail to marshal sufficient evidence for that claim, or for the argument that Maoist theory has any specific, direct implications for China's maritime development.
The analysis of Chinese views of Mahan is much more useful. The reading of Mahan doesn't necessitate any direct policy consequences, but it is nevertheless interesting that the Chinese are taking Mahan seriously, and are talking about Mahan in terms of their own future naval development. Yoshihara and Holmes draw extensively from Chinese language analysis of Mahan, discussing the intra-Chinese debates over the utility of Mahanian theory and also of its direct implications for PLAN modernization. The authors are a bit cagey on the quality of Chinese analysis of Mahan, and hold out the possibility that Chinese naval advocates are invoking Mahan primarily to justify large scale naval acquisition. It bears noting that this would hardly be the first time that Mahan has been used in such a fashion.
The chapter on the strategic implications of tactical developments is quite good, although its insights won't be news to many who read ID and similar naval blogs. The authors focus on the effect that the development of ASBMs could have on the strategic balance in the Pacific, and give a good overview of the effect that such a development might have. In particular, Yoshihara and Holmes give several examples of Chinese thought on the strategic interaction of ASBMs and BMD systems, as well as on potential tactics to defeat Japanese BMD capabilities.
The authors also do excellent work distilling Chinese efforts to create a "usable history" of Chinese maritime endeavour. Nicely framing the idea of "usable history" as narrative that emphasizes certain facts and produces a template for thinking about the future, they focus on how Chinese historians and propagandists have focused on the career of Zheng He, the fifteenth century Chinese mariner who led expeditions as far as the coast of Africa. The elevation of Zheng He serves two major ideational purposes. First, his story places China as a major maritime power, one capable of carrying out large scale maritime operations at long distances. Second, the expeditions of Zheng He can be put in terms of peaceful expansion of trade and social contact, rather than in terms of conquest. This provides a nice contrast to post-colonial understandings of European maritime expansion. That this picture excludes much of what we know about China's maritime efforts, its later turn from the sea, and European maritime expansion isn't particularly relevant to the usefulness of the history.
A late chapter provides a good summary of the development of US naval doctrine since the 1970s, ending with the Cooperative Maritime Strategy. Again, the account will be familiar to those who have read John Hattendorf's Newport papers, but the summary is economical and draws out implications for the US response to the rise of Chinese naval power. As for CS-21, Yoshihara and Holmes worry that prospective American allies in the region (particularly China and Japan) will see the cooperative emphasis as insufficiently assertive.
There is more to this book than this review indicates; for example, the authors have a chapter on the development of Chinese nuclear deterrence doctrine. The minor quibbles aside, the volume is extremely valuable, and most who have an interest in Chinese naval doctrine (most of the audience of this blog, I would expect) will find it useful.
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