Air-Sea Battle and Offshore Control are not Mutually-Exclusive: Part 3

For previous installments, see Parts I and II

Scenario #3: Major War

Now, let’s continue up the spectrum of conflict to explore what might happen if Chinese leaders placed a high value on less limited political objectives. Domestic political pressures; perceptions of the regional geostrategic order’s trendlines; or misinterpretations of U.S. and allied interests, intentions, capabilities, or resolve could dramatically affect Chinese leaders’ calculations by encouraging opportunism, exacerbating desperation, or a mix of both. Consider how Chinese leaders’ political objectives might be affected in the coming years if the Taiwanese people continue to refuse taking formal steps towards political unification with the mainland, or if the Taiwanese government took bolder steps towards political independence. Consider Chinese leaders’ objectives in a Korean peninsula scenario if they concluded the Pyongyang regime’s survival was endangered by U.S. and South Korean retaliation against some major provocation. Likewise, consider what might occur if the Pyongyang regime collapsed completely under its own weight and Beijing was unwilling to tolerate U.S. and South Korean forces moving northward to fill the security vacuum, secure weapons of mass destruction sites, and render humanitarian aid. Consider the stakes if factional competitions within the Chinese Communist Party’s senior leadership, bureaucratic politics, surging Chinese popular nationalism, or domestic economic policy failures and their sociopolitical fallout incentivized seeking a tangible strategic ‘win’ at the expense of the Japanese Self-Defense Forces or the Philippine military. Consider the possibility that Chinese leaders might seek to improve their geostrategic position by taking opportunistic advantage of some lesser issue, for example using a clash over the Senkaku Islands as a casus belli for a “short, sharp war” to force Japan to demilitarize and politically Finlandize the Ryukyu Islands. In short, no matter the economic and diplomatic incentives China enjoys courtesy of the existing international order, there is a quite-conceivable range of circumstances that could drive Chinese leaders to seek political objectives obtainable only via major deliberate escalations or general conventional war.

Achievement of this class of political objectives would almost certainly demand PLA bombardment, invasion, or violent blockade of a U.S. ally’s homeland ‘core.’ While escalation to such a level hardly seems conceivable at present, one must accept that political and strategic circumstances are highly dynamic and that the underlying factor driving the risk of a major East Asian conflict is the fundamental disagreement between China and its neighbors regarding the nature of the regional security order. Miscalculation, misperception, or accidental confrontation can definitely ignite a conflagration, but this can only occur when an underlying clash of interests and at least one side’s unwillingness to establish or adhere to substantive confidence-building and reassurance measures have already primed the environment.

It follows that if Chinese leaders were to characterize and value their political objectives along the above lines, then it is difficult to imagine how the PLA would be able to accomplish the major tasks that flow from those objectives with a high degree of confidence and at an ‘acceptable’ cost in blood and treasure in the face of a highly-probable major U.S. intervention. The PLA would have to preemptively neutralize U.S. forces in the Pacific to provide Chinese leaders that level of confidence at such a cost, plain and simple. Chinese leaders would no doubt be gambling against the historical record that such an attack would induce the U.S. to quickly concede (though perhaps with some token resistance and retaliation) rather than result in mobilization for major war.

A Chinese first strike would be the culmination of a regional crisis that either incrementally escalated over time or surged quickly depending upon the circumstances; it would never be a ‘bolt from blue’ occurring outside this context. It does not practically matter whether a first strike would occur as part of a pre-planned war-opening PLA offensive campaign, a major PLA intra-conflict escalation once Chinese leaders concluded they would not be able to achieve their objectives otherwise, or the culmination of an inadvertent crisis in which Chinese leaders did not recognize the diplomatic ‘offramps’ provided them by the U.S. and its allies (or chose to disregard them).

Might a PLA first strike be limited to a cyber-electromagnetic offensive against U.S. forces? This might be attractive to Chinese leaders in terms of relative escalatory risks. Also, U.S. C³ and scouting effectiveness in any maritime operation, U.S. forces’ operational security, and U.S. and allied air and missile defenses’ viability would depend heavily upon U.S. military networks’ security and availability. Differing operating concepts might use these networks in dissimilar ways, and technological as well as doctrinal measures exist for reducing a concept’s network dependency as well as increasing its resiliency. Nevertheless, it is important to appreciate that neither Offshore Control nor any other strategic concept addressing maritime warfare could succeed without using some form of modern networking.

Given the exceptionally high degree of uncertainty in cyber-electromagnetic warfare, though, Chinese leaders would have minimal assurances that any such attacks would decisively prevent an effective U.S. intervention. This means the PLA would also likely have to execute some form of conventional first strike against relevant U.S. forces and their supporting infrastructure in East Asia (and perhaps elsewhere in the Pacific), as well as engage in trans-oceanic and intra-theater maritime lines of communication interdiction, in order for Chinese leaders to gain confidence in their chances of achieving their political objectives. Accordingly, it should not be surprising that preemptive strike concepts figure so prominently in publicly-available PLA doctrinal works, or that the PLA 2^nd Artillery Corps’ conventionally-armed medium range ballistic missile inventories appear sufficiently sized to execute a crippling war-opening offensive but not to attack targets of opportunity during a protracted conflict.

It is therefore curious why so many critiques of Air-Sea Battle implicitly assume China would either not engage in a conventional first strike, or if it did, that it would only do so if its leaders were threatened by certain ‘excessively provocative’ U.S. force doctrine, capabilities, forward positions and quantities, postures, or actions. Yes, in some situations U.S. forces’ configurations and employment might risk inducing Chinese leaders to attack first when they would have otherwise preferred not to escalate, and such extremes must be identified through war gaming and then avoided. It is equally true, however, that the U.S presence in East Asia and the Western Pacific would be geostrategically provocative to Beijing regardless of its specific characteristics if Chinese leaders’ political objectives were lofty enough. In other words, U.S. or allied military ‘behavior’ is not the solitary potential trigger of major Chinese escalation.

Any strategic concept for deterring Chinese aggression, and failing that for preventing a major Chinese offensive from achieving its main political objectives, must consequently explain how it can succeed if U.S. forces in the Pacific are subjected to a PLA multi-domain first strike that segues into a maritime lines of communication interdiction campaign. As the critiques of Offshore Control discussed in Monday's post pointed out, if U.S. and allied bases—particularly those in Japan—as well as U.S. intra-theater lines of communication are being effectively suppressed or neutralized by PLA forces operating from the mainland, it becomes difficult to envision how the U.S. could sustainably defend an embattled ally’s airspace, waters, or territory without returning the favor against those PLA forces’ support infrastructure and bases. The PLA’s advantages in operational tempo, intensity, and initiative by virtue of its quantities, positions, and effective striking reach would be too great otherwise. The obvious implication is that defensive forces’ sustainability in ‘frontline’ territories such as Taiwan or the central and southern Ryukyus, not to mention the flow of basic sustenance to these populations, might not be possible under such circumstances. In the case of the southern Ryukyus in particular, one must not overlook the intense political impact of Japanese citizens being held ‘hostage’ by a PLA maritime denial campaign even if Chinese troops never actually invaded those islands. These kinds of problems might even manifest in a Korean peninsula contingency.

If China drew first blood by unleashing a war-opening or war-escalating strike against targets on allied or U.S. sovereign territory, its leaders would have no legitimate standing to protest if the U.S. responded in kind against equivalent mainland Chinese targets. While striking first conveys significant operational-tactical advantages, it hands the victim an invaluable grand strategic trump card by establishing a precedent for conduct within the conflict as well as a legal and moral basis for retaliation. Notwithstanding the operational-strategic necessity of the U.S. responding tit-for-tat under these conditions, the popular passions aroused within the victimized allied nation(s) as well as within the U.S. following a PLA first strike would all but compel U.S. political leaders to hit back. Any U.S. counterstrikes against PLA targets on the mainland would therefore be primarily shaped by the PLA first strike’s precedent-setting characteristics.

Just as is the case with offshore operations against maritime surveillance/reconnaissance networks, there is a tremendous difference between physically striking air and naval bases being used by PLA maritime forces, 2nd Artillery Corps cruise and short range ballistic missile forces’ support infrastructure (as opposed to their launchers in the field, which would be very difficult to achieve), or theater-wide maritime surveillance sensors on one hand and physically striking 2^nd Artillery Corps nuclear forces and their supporting infrastructure or similarly-sensitive targets on the other. Certain PLA tactical and operational-level command posts might even be valid targets depending upon the circumstances, especially if the PLA struck U.S. or allied command posts first.

It must be reemphasized that offensive cyber-electromagnetic operations could play disproportionate roles in U.S. attacks against mainland PLA targets, as they might be more effective than conventional strikes against very specific target types while carrying fewer or more tolerable escalation risks. Cyber and electronic attack objectives would rarely be to destroy or disable targets, if that were even possible using such means, but rather to disrupt PLA operations or provide deception and concealment support to friendly forces.

Beyond these aspects, the U.S. war effort would look very much like what was outlined in the limited war scenario. U.S. and allied forces would strive to blunt the PLA offensive within the contested zone, and ultimately roll the PLA back from any occupied friendly territories through a combination of maneuver and attrition. In support of this main effort, U.S. leaders might opt to escalate horizontally by conducting economic warfare (distant blockade, special/irregular operations against Chinese economic interests elsewhere, use of the U.S. financial system against Chinese trading partners, etc.) as balanced against the provocation-of-neutrals issue and other escalation considerations. Chinese cessation of its offensive and (if applicable) restoration of the territorial status quo ante in exchange for nothing more than relatively symbolic gestures would be the central U.S. political objective.

This scenario is comparatively the ‘least likely’ of the three, but nonetheless is the ‘most dangerous’ case. While it is to be hoped that Chinese leaders never establish political objectives that drive them towards pursuing this or any other kind of war, hope is not a strategy. Deterrence of a Sino-American war consequently rests on convincing Chinese leaders that the U.S. would be clearly able and willing to protractedly reciprocate if a PLA onslaught “went big,” with all the costs, risks, and uncertainties that would entail. 

Tomorrow, some concluding thoughts on how the range of contingency circumstances and both sides' potential associated political objectives must inform strategic concept design.