Maritime Denial and Land-Based Missiles, Revisited

Last month I wrote a bit about the idea that U.S. ground forces should field ‘area denial’ missile systems of their own to defend allies’ frontline maritime territories as well as constrain potential adversaries’ wartime abilities to use adjacent waterspace and airspace. I believe land-based anti-ship and anti-air missile systems can do much to support strategic concepts for broad-spectrum conventional deterrence within maritime theaters. Even so, I noted in my post that these systems’ hypothetical combat utility—and thus their value as part of a deterrent—depends greatly upon when and how they would be deployed to wartime positions, how those positioned on territories within a hotly-contested maritime zone would be logistically sustained throughout a protracted conflict, and how anti-ship over-the-horizon targeting would be performed.

The comments I received on that post pointed out an additional consideration that I had overlooked: the underlying business cases. Given finite budgetary resources, the U.S. Army would have to trade the opportunity costs of developing and then fielding these kinds of systems against the opportunity costs of developing or fielding other types of ground units.

For example, a strong business case can be made for the Army to field relocatable wide-area air defense systems, as they are quite useful for protecting bases, other types of U.S. and allied ground forces in the field, and critical civil/economic infrastructure sites from aerial attacks. The original Patriot system was, after all, developed specifically for these purposes. It is not much of a leap, then, for the Army to use these systems to protect maritime bases, forces, and infrastructure. Nor is it a stretch to use these systems in ways that would lessen the demand on naval surface combatants to provide air defense coverage over islands or mainland coastal areas, thereby granting the warships more maneuvering room or otherwise freeing them for other tasks. Lastly, it is perfectly reasonable to use these systems where geographically possible to create barriers the adversary’s air forces must ‘break through’ in order to achieve their operational objectives. The preceding logic applies to Army BMD systems, as well. It follows that the Army’s existing Patriot (and THAAD) missile forces provide organizational, tactical, technical, and logistical foundations for any expanded (or new) air and missile defense capabilities the Army might choose to field in the coming years. This greatly lessens the associated opportunity costs the Army would face in doing so.

It seems somewhat more difficult, though, to make a business case for the Army to field advanced ASCMs. Since the Army does not presently possess ASCM forces, there would be some opportunity costs in establishing the requisite organizational, tactical, technical, and logistical foundations. Developing an ASCM capability from scratch would also likely trade from a budgetary standpoint against expanding (or maintaining) existing ground force structure. Prior to this year, one might have rationalized this kind of trade based on a strategic assumption that global demands for ‘heavy’ U.S. ground forces would be low over the next ten to fifteen years. That assumption has been called into question by the Russo-Ukrainian War, not to mention Moscow’s increasingly aggressive military posturing against NATO’s eastern and the EU’s Scandinavian members. It is therefore harder to justify development of any new type of Army capability without a better understanding of how it might affect the service’s capacity for major ground combat in Europe.     

I have little doubt land-based ASCMs (with satisfactory over-the-horizon targeting support, of course) could be quite useful in defending America’s allies and constraining potential adversaries’ wartime operations along the First Island Chain in East Asia, the coasts of the Black and Baltic Seas, and perhaps the northern Norwegian coastline. However, I think there needs to be a critical examination of the trades that likely exist between developing new Army ASCM forces and maintaining/expanding the service’s existing combat arms. It also seems to me that an Army ASCM business case analysis should examine whether it makes more sense for America’s allies to field land-based ASCM capabilities themselves. Many of the allies the U.S. is committed to defend in the aforementioned regions already deploy such missiles, whether through indigenous production or through sales by other countries. Rather than duplicating what these allies are already doing, perhaps it would be better for the U.S. to provide the needier ones with financial assistance for establishing, improving, or expanding land-based ASCM arsenals. Or perhaps the U.S. might sell certain allies maritime surveillance/reconnaissance systems or C³ systems that would enhance their existing ASCM capabilities as well as allow them to better coordinate tactical actions with U.S. or other allied forces during wartime. It is even possible the U.S. might find mutually-beneficial opportunities to cooperate with key ASCM-producing allies on researching and developing selected advanced ASCM component technologies. 

Ultimately, I am not opposed in principle to the Army (or Marine Corps for that matter) developing land-based ASCM capabilities. I do believe, though, that their doing so requires a broader analytical basis that addresses the operational issues I previously noted as well as establishes a sound business case.

Air-Sea Battle and Offshore Control are not Mutually-Exclusive: Part 2

Yesterday we summarized the main arguments surrounding Air-Sea Battle and Offshore Control. We also noted several variables that thus far have been largely overlooked in the debate: the belligerents’ characterization and valuation of their political objectives, and a confrontation’s unique political and strategic circumstances. Over the next two days, we will use plausible interactions between these variables to outline how relevant elements of Air-Sea Battle and Offshore Control can be integrated within a single strategic concept that covers the full spectrum of potential conventional Sino-American conflicts.

Scenario #1: High-End Salami Tactics

Let’s suppose that Chinese leaders sought to extract some political concession(s) by forcibly blockading one of a U.S. East Asian ally’s populated maritime territories or seizing one of its remote, unpopulated/sparsely-populated maritime territories. Let’s stipulate, though, that the initial Chinese actions did not result in direct hostilities with the U.S. ally’s military forces, and that any clashes were limited to exchanges between the belligerents’ constabulary forces such as coast guards or national law enforcement agencies.

The U.S. response in such a contingency would likely involve positioning and posturing its in-theater conventional forces in order to latently support allied constabularies’ or military forces’ efforts to counter or delegitimize the Chinese actions, not to mention deter Chinese escalation. Some lower-campaign value American forces might overtly line up alongside the ally’s frontline defenders to show solidarity and create a latent tripwire threat; this kind of response would be very desirable for accompanying vessels running through a Chinese blockade. Heavier U.S. forces latently backing this frontline from ‘over the horizon’ would likely take measures to conceal themselves from Chinese maritime surveillance and reconnaissance; their aim would be to severely limit Chinese opportunities for an effective preemptive first strike and thus enhance crisis stability as well as U.S. deterrence credibility. As U.S. political leaders would likely strive to avoid placing U.S. military units in situations where they would risk setting use-of-force precedents themselves, it seems unlikely the U.S. would impose any kind of distant blockade against China at this stage. Instead, information operations and diplomatic maneuvers to build regional and global opposition (or at least disengaged neutrality) to China’s actions would likely dominate the U.S. grand strategic response.

It is important to note, however, that the absence of direct military action in the physical domains almost certainly would not extend into the cyber and electromagnetic domains. It is quite likely that there would be extensive cyber and Electronic Warfare (EW) skirmishing as both sides jockeyed for situational awareness advantages, harassed each other’s forces, or attempted to manipulate third parties’ perceptions. Both would accordingly face the challenge of waging this cyber-electromagnetic warfare without precipitating accidental or inadvertent escalation.

Scenario #2: Limited War in the Contested Zone

Now, let’s examine a scenario in which initial Chinese actions did lead to direct hostilities between the PLA and the U.S. ally’s forces at sea or on the territory in question. Let’s also assume that the PLA did not escalate by striking civil, economic, or military infrastructure located within the ally’s homeland ‘core.’ Let’s additionally stipulate that in its ‘first move’ the PLA neither struck U.S. forward bases and forces in the region, nor deployed to interdict America’s maritime lines of communication with the ally. We could therefore conclude Chinese leaders valued their political objectives highly enough to resort to direct military force, but that the limited scope of those objectives encouraged them to adopt strategically-significant degrees of restraint—at least during the conflict’s opening phase.

The American military response under such conditions would likely lean closer towards Offshore Control’s concept of a limited war within the contested zone, as U.S. political objectives would center upon arresting the Chinese aggression and eventually restoring the status quo ante without escalating the conflict unnecessarily. This means the U.S. war effort would likely be structured to conform to China’s precedent-setting actions in the conflict. Of course, nothing would preclude U.S. political leaders from determining that their own objectives and the conflict’s circumstances necessitated the setting of selected precedents by U.S. forces as well.The bias against doing so would nonetheless be high.

U.S. war strategy would be based around the use of sequential (and sometimes parallel) Joint conventional combined arms campaigns that gradually attrited the PLA’s offensive capabilities within the bounds of the contested zone while dislodging Chinese forces from any territorial spoils. Unlike Offshore Control, though, the U.S. strategy would not strive for persistent denial of a sizable majority of the East and South China Seas to the PLA. Nor would the U.S. strategy strive for permanent absolute control of the oceanic approaches to East Asia. Sea control and denial of these magnitudes and durations are neither necessary nor practicable, as Julian Corbett observed a century ago in his masterwork Some Principles of Maritime Strategy.

Consistent with Corbett’s logic, U.S. forces would instead strive to deny the PLA’s ability to transit or occupy selected maritime areas for discrete periods. Short-duration denial efforts might entail concentrating U.S. air and naval power in time and space against PLA forces once the latter were detected at, over, or under the sea. Longer-duration denial efforts could take the form of leveraging pre-deployed land-based anti-ship/anti-air missile batteries as well as offshore minefields to protect friendly territories and chokepoints. Offensive minelaying in the approaches to Chinese naval bases would also be an option for longer-duration sea denial.

Similarly, U.S. forces would strive to control only those maritime areas that it and allied forces (as well as protected commerce) would need to traverse in order to achieve U.S. political objectives, and only for the periods of time necessary to do so. One could picture this type of control as a purpose-defined ‘moving bubble’ of superiority in time and space centered on the military force or commercial convoy in transit. Longer-duration (but not permanent) control over fixed areas would only be necessary in the maritime approaches to U.S. and allied territories, or otherwise in the areas surrounding PLA-occupied allied territories if U.S. and allied forces were engaged in forcible entry operations.

The U.S. and its embattled ally could also conceivably allow the PLA to seize and occupy one or more contested territories of relatively low military-strategic value, as that might induce China to excessively allocate scarce materiel and vulnerable forces in order to hold onto its spoils. Chinese assets exposed in this way could be subjected to withering and incessant attacks that would help gradually reduce the PLA’s quantitative advantages in theater. This might have the secondary effect of drawing Chinese attention and resources away from more important U.S. or allied operations elsewhere in the theater.

It is additionally possible U.S. political leaders might order some form of cumulative campaign to provide indirect support to the conventional campaigns and perhaps pressure the Chinese economy at the margins. This might include a distant blockade (as feasible given available forces and supporting infrastructure), plausibly-deniable special or irregular operations against Chinese economic interests in other countries, severing countries or foreign companies that attempt to engage in proscribed trade with China from access to the U.S. financial system, or other measures. U.S. political leaders would obviously have to weigh how these kinds of coercive actions might detrimentally provoke China as well as third parties to the conflict.

Above all, it must be appreciated that the U.S. would be not able to successfully defend a frontline ally in a limited conflict—never mind restore the status quo ante—in the absence of several key factors associated with Air-Sea Battle. For example, doctrine and capabilities that enhance U.S. forces’ resiliency against a conventional first strike are critical to intra-conflict deterrence credibility. The same is true with respect to capabilities that promote latent and highly survivable U.S. conventional escalation dominance such as submarines, long-range strike aircraft, and an intelligently-crafted balance between long-range and short-range guided munitions. Most importantly, U.S. air, ground, and naval surface operations within a contested zone would not be practicable and U.S. and allied intra-theater lines of communication would not be defensible without extensive operations against PLA maritime surveillance/reconnaissance networks. While some Air-Sea Battle critics have asserted such operations would carry the escalatory risk of attacking PLA nuclear forces’ C³ architectures, the former’s maritime sensors and their supporting data pathways outside China’s borders are most definitely not part of the latter. Even so, and depending on the operational and tactical circumstances, deception and concealment in the face of those sensors might be far more effective and impactful than destroying them.

If Chinese restraint held following a U.S. intervention along the lines I’ve suggested, both sides would be able to take advantage of deep operational-strategic sanctuaries for basing and maneuver within the combat theater. The practical result of this might be a protracted conflict that could remain limited unless one of the belligerents’ political objectives and perceptions of the conflict’s circumstances eventually came to demand escalation. Conversely, conflict protraction along these lines and unambiguously strong U.S. and allied resolve might drive Chinese leaders to seek out a mutually-tolerable negotiated settlement if their political objectives encouraged as much. In the second-best outcome, U.S. and allied forces would be able to induce China to break off its aggression and (if applicable) restore the territorial status quo ante in exchange for nothing more than relatively symbolic gestures. The ideal outcome would obviously be convincing Chinese leaders that a limited war within the contested zone would not be quick, cheap, or low-risk, thereby deterring them altogether from seeking one.

Tomorrow, addressing scenarios for major war.

Air-Sea Battle and Offshore Control are not Mutually Exclusive: The Case for a Full-Spectrum U.S. Conventional Deterrent in East Asia

Over the past two years, the debate over U.S. military options for defending East Asian allies from potential Chinese aggression has primarily been between proponents of the Air-Sea Battle operational concept and proponents of the Offshore Control strategic concept. The conventional wisdom appears to be that the two concepts are mutually exclusive. Such a view makes no sense. Simply put, there is no reason why key elements from both cannot be integrated within a single holistic strategic concept that provides circumstance-based flexibility in covering the entire spectrum of potential Sino-American conventional conflict.

In order to see why this is so, let’s first examine how the two concepts are defined in their authoritative source materials and then summarize both sides’ main arguments (with a few linked representative examples).

Air-Sea Battle

Air-Sea Battle is a U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) operational concept that outlines the Joint combined arms capabilities, doctrinal tenets, and Command, Control, and Communications (C³) approaches necessary for maintaining U.S. forces’ access to and freedom of maneuver within opposed theaters. Air-Sea Battle’s present contents flow from the unclassified, clearly-articulated, and widely-overlooked January 2012 Joint Operational Access Concept (JOAC). DoD leadership, senior service leaders, and Air-Sea Battle Office personnel have been consistently explicit in stating Air-Sea Battle is not a strategy in its own right (or even a campaign plan), and that it is not specifically targeted against any particular country.

Nevertheless, many Air-Sea Battle proponents outside DoD assert that the concept is highly applicable to deterring—and if that fails, then waging—a Sino-American war. This school largely believes it would be impossible to prevent a major Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) fait accompli against a U.S. ally in East Asia, let alone have a chance at eventually inducing China to restore the geostrategic status quo ante should a major conflict erupt, if U.S. and allied militaries were incapable of (at minimum) quickly bogging down a PLA offensive and then rallying to restore key defensive ‘facts on the ground.’ Given the region’s geography, the most important of these ‘facts’ would arguably be the security of the trans-oceanic and intra-theater maritime lines of communication America’s allies depend upon for military reinforcement and economic sustenance. Air-Sea Battle proponents therefore argue that U.S. forces must be capable of performing conventional, cyber, and electronic attacks against PLA infrastructure and forces in order to protect friendly maritime lines of communication as well as arrest PLA offensive operations. While most such attacks would likely occur within the contested maritime zone, the proponents assert U.S. forces would also need to be capable of striking PLA infrastructure and non-nuclear forces on the Chinese mainland if strategically necessary. Lastly, while this school generally believes Air-Sea Battle would be incapable of winning a war on its own, they also believe the success of any grand strategy for deterring aggression against allies on China’s doorstep (and defending them if need be) would depend in large part upon the latent availability (and selective use) of the concept’s tools and methods.

Many critics of Air-Sea Battle argue strikes against mainland China would carry unacceptable risks of triggering inadvertent or accidental escalation to the nuclear threshold. Some of the concept’s critics believe these strikes would be automatically executed regardless of the conflict scenario, or that they could only be practicably executed in the form of an escalation precedent-setting preemptive strike by the U.S. Other critics assert Air-Sea Battle’s allowance for land-attack strikes implies the concept embraces a strategy of coercively bombarding an opponent into submission. Additional critics declare that such strikes reflect a deterministic and techno-centric way of war in which the means employed are disconnected from the ends sought. Lastly, a number of critics point out that Air-Sea Battle is not directly applicable to countering China’s ongoing ‘salami tactics’ campaigns in the East and South China Seas.

Offshore Control

Unlike the official Air-Sea Battle concept’s adversary-agnostic focus on the operational level of war, Offshore Control is an unofficial strategic concept conceived by defense academia specifically to address the Sino-American military competition. Offshore Control consists of two main thrusts, both of which are intended to deter war through the latent threat of their credible implementation. The first would be a distant blockade of China’s sea lines of communication that would be primarily achieved by U.S. or allied militaries’ control over Indo-Pacific maritime chokepoints lying beyond the PLA’s effective reach. This blockade would be aimed at compelling conciliation through economic punishment, namely by reducing China’s access to oil and other vital raw materials (and possibly forcing it to pay higher prices on the margins for what it imports overland), as well as by reducing China’s ability to sell its wares in major overseas markets. Offshore Control’s other element would consist of traditional campaigns by the U.S. to prevent effective PLA control of the East and South China Seas, directly defend threatened allies’ territories, and secure control of the maritime lines of communication connecting these allies with the world—all without engaging in any kind of strikes into China.

Offshore Control’s advocates assert that their concept would be more scalable in terms of intensity and controllable in terms of escalation than Air-Sea Battle to match up to the nature of the Chinese acts of aggression that precipitated a given conflict. They also assert that Offshore Control is built around a coherent theory of victory: the raising of Chinese leaders’ costs to an intolerable level by preventing them from militarily attaining their political objectives, as well as by coercively—yet reversibly—economically punishing the Chinese people.

While critics of Offshore Control typically agree that maritime blockades can play strategically useful supporting roles in a conflict, they caution that any embargo is inherently dependent upon the cooperation (or coercion) of neutrals including other great and regional powers, might be too permeable or insufficiently painful to effectively coerce the targeted nation’s leaders and citizens, and is not devoid of horizontal or vertical escalation risks. Other critics argue that the global economic repercussions of a blockade of China would risk catastrophic international political blowback against the U.S. Just about all critics of Offshore Control’s blockading element argue against the belief that the leaders of a great power as large and resourceful as China could be compelled to concede primarily through blockade or any other strategy of political-economic coercion. A few go further to caution that allocation of forces and their supporting infrastructure (e.g. surveillance, reconnaissance, logistics) to blockade enforcement would in many cases trade off against allocation of forces and infrastructure to the primary effort: direct defense of allied territories and lines of communication. Indeed, these critics note  that the aforementioned defensive tasks would be made incredibly difficult by virtue of allied countries’ close proximities to mainland China; PLA forces’ ever-increasing reach in the form of theater ballistic missiles and standoff-range missile-armed aircraft; and the PLA’s unquestionable in-theater quantitative superiority. These critics conclude that allowing PLA forces to strike from mainland China with impunity against allied territories and lines of communication—and thus cause U.S. and allied defensive forces deployed on or operating from those territories (not to mention any allied populations) to wither on the vine—would be strategically ruinous. The same would be absolutely true in a conflict of any scale with respect to allowing the PLA’s mainland-located surveillance resources to observe the contested zone unhindered.

It should be noted that a variation on Offshore Control exists that discards the concept’s coercive blockading element while retaining its maritime denial element and its foreswearing of strikes into China. However, the above critiques regarding the concept’s ability to handle scenarios in which the PLA employed mainland-based aerospace strike forces or mainland-located maritime surveillance resources still apply, and thus I do not assess it separately.

Synthesis

Several truisms can be derived from the preceding arguments. Regarding Air-Sea Battle, it would be illogical and ahistorical to assert that any kind of U.S. coercive strike campaign against Chinese economic or civil infrastructure could successfully defend embattled allies at an acceptable level of risk. It would also be illogical and ahistorical to assert that U.S. forces’ abilities to conduct wartime operations in the East Asian maritime would inherently depend upon them executing preemptive conventional strikes against PLA infrastructure and forces located in mainland China, or that ‘high-end’ operations in general would be appropriate for all conceivable scenarios. That said, it ought to be observed that no authoritative DoD source or credible Air-Sea Battle advocate has ever publicly made such assertions.

Turning to Offshore Control, it would be unsound to assert that a notional U.S. campaign to defend an ally (or restore freedom of maneuver within East Asian waters) could succeed under all conceivable scenarios without ever having the need to conduct any form of strikes against the PLA inside China’s borders. It would also be quite deterministic to assert that an economic blockade would assuredly induce China to restore the status quo ante within a politically acceptable amount of time without hazarding Chinese escalation.

Once we discard these problematic assertions, it becomes quite obvious that much of Air-Sea Battle and Offshore Control actually overlap to a remarkable degree. It is therefore impossible to escape the impression that there is no reason why specific elements from both concepts cannot be unified within a single coherent strategic concept. In fact, their integration where logical and appropriate creates a range of incrementally-intensifying options for responding to notional Chinese acts of aggression. This merger’s logic becomes readily apparent when we consider several variables that thus far have been largely overlooked in the debate: the belligerents’ characterization and valuation of their political objectives, and a confrontation’s unique political and strategic circumstances. As Clausewitz tells us, these variables combine to directly influence the means the belligerents choose to employ and the scale of their clash. This becomes evident when we examine plausible scenarios along the spectrum of Sino-American conflict. 

Tomorrow, addressing high-end salami tactics and limited war scenarios. 

Sea Denial, U.S. Maritime Strategy, and Conventional Deterrence of China

In the February 2014 issue of Naval Institute Proceedings, retired U.S. Navy Commander Victor Vescovo suggested that a maritime strategy relying primarily on sea denial capabilities could be sufficient to deter Chinese aggression against America’s East Asian allies. Vescovo outlined how wartime offensive minelaying in the vicinity of major Chinese ports by U.S. submarines and long-range aircraft could severely damage the export-driven Chinese economy. Vescovo appears to endorse strategies emphasizing conventional deterrence by punishment and compellence by economic coercion, both of which can be highly problematic for reasons I’ve previously addressed.

However, the latent ability to use offensive mining to bottle People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) forces up in their home ports—and also cut crisis-surged units off from returning for rearmament and repair—could greatly buttress conventional deterrence by denial. This notion dovetails with a November 2013 RAND Corporation study that highlights how modern, highly mobile coastal anti-ship cruise missile batteries deployed in the Ryukyus, South Korea, Taiwan, the Philippines, Malaysia, and Indonesia could pose a severe challenge to Chinese wartime passage through the key straits that would provide them access to the Indian and Western Pacific Oceans. Both the mining and coastal missile concepts are captured within the December 2013 testimony of prominent Naval War College Chinese maritime strategy expert Andrew Erickson  to the House Armed Service Committee’s Seapower and Projection Forces subcommittee as well as his related article in The National Interest. Erickson additionally (and rightly) argues that conventional deterrence by denial can be further reinforced via latent U.S. threats of using submarines and long-range aircraft for traditional Anti-Surface Warfare (ASuW) operations within contested zones in the event of a war, or if need be to pummel Chinese expeditionary lodgings upon allied territories with land-attack missiles.

These commentators are absolutely correct that sea denial is an essential element of any U.S. strategy for deterring China—and failing that, for defending America’s East Asian allies under fire. Blunting PLAN operations in the East and South China Seas, not to mention preventing effective PLAN breakouts from the First Island Chain, would go a long way towards preventing China from attaining certain types of political objectives in an East Asian war. U.S. and allied sea denial operations would indeed make it enormously difficult for China to undertake a large-scale invasion of a sizable allied territory, persist in holding any small and isolated allied territories it seized in a hostilities-igniting gambit, use surface forces (including future aircraft carriers) to blockade or conduct land-attack strikes against allied territories, sortie submarines into the Western Pacific for ASuW or land-attack tasks, suppress opponents’ submarine operations inside the First Island Chain, or protect its flow of logistical support to its expeditionary forces.

Chinese wartime political objectives might not necessarily require that the PLAN obtain or maintain sea control in these bodies of water, though. If Chinese leaders sought to coerce a U.S. ally through a maritime blockade, and their valuation of their political objectives drove them to use lethal and not necessarily discriminate force to enforce this embargo, minelaying and traditional ASuW operations by Chinese submarines and land-based aircraft might be entirely adequate. While Chinese sea denial operations might not present a major concern for the U.S. with respect to unpopulated allied territories, they would pose a critical problem with respect to populated ones. Could the southern and central Ryukyus (especially urban Okinawa) hold out indefinitely if their flow of basic foodstuffs, petroleum products, or other staple goods were heavily disrupted? How drastically might the developing Philippine economy be affected if its major ports in western Luzon were pressured? The question’s applicability to Taiwan should be obvious.

Furthermore, any U.S. or allied forces stationed in or operating from blockaded, geographically-isolated friendly territories (the Ryukyus again come to mind) would find their logistical lifelines endangered. If the sea blockade could not be breached via airlift due to insufficient cargo aircraft capacity or perhaps Chinese offensive counterair operations, then these critical lines of communications might be severed altogether. U.S. and allied forces in ‘frontline’ territories could certainly make use of ordnance, food, and other supplies stockpiled (and concealed) near their positions during peacetime—if such foresighted steps had been taken. If not, or if the conflict became protracted, how long would they be able to sustain operational effectiveness with their maritime lines of communication under such pressure? What if the U.S. and allied plan was to surge assets such as anti-ship or anti-air missile batteries to these forward territories only upon detecting Indications and Warning of possible Chinese aggression? If warning signs were missed, or if crisis-psychological factors delayed the U.S. and allied reactions to those signs until too late, could campaign-critical defensive assets warehoused in rear areas be transported to the ‘frontline’ and then emplaced while under fire? If the answers to these questions are highly doubtful or clearly in the negative, then conventional deterrence theory makes clear that it would be unlikely such a force or its associated strategic concept would be an effective deterrent. ‘Mutually-assured’ sea denial cuts both ways.

All this also says nothing about scenarios in which the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) might employ conventionally-armed ballistic and cruise missiles to bombard allied military, economic, and civil targets as a means of coercion. U.S. and allied sea denial operations could do nothing to directly counter such a thrust. PLA suppression of U.S. forward airbases via periodic cruise missile (and perhaps short-range ballistic missile) bombardments would additionally reduce the screening air cover available to protect sea (and air) lines of communication to the embattled ally as well as support friendly forces’ own sea denial operations.

Should the Chinese combine missile bombardment with a submarine and aircraft-enforced blockade, there would be a real risk of rendering U.S. and allied forces in ‘frontline’ territories hors de combat. The PLA might not be able to physically seize or hold those territories, but if the U.S. and its allies could not break the Chinese blockade and roll back China’s ability to continue at-will bombardment, then it is entirely conceivable Chinese leaders might be satisfied by forcibly compelling the U.S. and its allies to militarily withdraw from the territories as the price of a settlement. For instance, the prime Chinese objective in a limited war with Japan and the U.S. might very well be demilitarization and eventual political Finlandization of the Ryukyus. A U.S. conventional deterrent resting purely on sea denial would not be sufficient to prevent this kind of war, and it follows that allowing the maritime approaches to U.S. allies’ populated territories to become a de facto ‘no-man’s land’ would be self-defeating.

U.S. conventional deterrence credibility therefore not only depends upon U.S. forces’ abilities to assert maritime denial against PLA operations in the combat theater, but also their abilities to obtain and exercise localized maritime control within the approaches to allied territories. Protection of these sea and air lines of communication, not to mention the associated sea and air ports of debarkation, may be possible using Joint combined arms including sea-based and theater-range land-based aircraft, naval surface and subsurface forces, land-based air and missile defenses, and defensive naval minefields.

In a major war, though, these measures alone might not be adequate for obtaining maritime control when and where needed. The PLA’s quantitative advantages in theater combined with China’s physical proximity to the probable contested zones suggest PLA forces would be able to attain higher operational tempos than their U.S. and allied counterparts. This differential would be further aggravated if China engaged in a conventional counterforce first strike. Maritime lines of communication protection might consequently depend upon taking actions that suppress PLA operational tempo and offensively attrite the PLA forces engaged in sea denial operations.

Such actions might include cyber or electronic attacks that disrupt, deceive, or exploit PLA maritime surveillance/reconnaissance systems and networks, command and control networks at the operational and tactical levels, or logistical support networks. They might also include offensive maritime operations designed to lure PLA maritime forces into battle on terms that strongly favored the U.S.; an example might be an attempt to draw PLA maritime strike aircraft into an aerial ambush with a convoy or a U.S. Navy task group approaching the First Island Chain serving as bait. In the event China did set the escalatory precedents of unleashing a conventional first strike against U.S. and allied forces and bases, the U.S. could conceivably (and with legal, moral, and operational justification) respond with conventional strikes against equivalent PLA targets on Chinese soil.

It is clear, then, that just as U.S. and allied sea denial capabilities would curtail the PLA’s ability to invade and occupy allied territories, U.S. and allied maritime control capabilities—plus the latent threats posed by U.S. long-range strike capabilities—would be necessary to prevent ‘frontline’ East Asian territories and the friendly forces defending them from withering on the vine. The region’s geography, the PLA’s ever-expanding maritime and land-attack capabilities, and the plausible spectrum of Chinese political objectives and conflict scenarios make it so. Indeed, a conventional deterrent must be designed such that it can cover this full spectrum if it is to enduringly prevent war; one that covers only a narrow range of contingencies risks catastrophic failure if it cannot match up to the unique circumstances of a crisis or the political objectives of an intelligent and determined opponent. U.S. conventional deterrence of China (and U.S. maritime strategy) accordingly must embrace sea denial, but cannot solely rely upon it.