Air-Sea Battle and Offshore-Control are not Mutually-Exclusive: The Conclusion

For previous installments, see Parts I, II, and III

Political Objectives and Contingency Circumstances Must Dominate Strategic Concept Design

The main takeaway from this week's discussion should be that the form of a notional Sino-American war in East Asia would be dictated by its specific circumstances and the respective sides’ political objectives. Accordingly, as it is the revisionist power, China would likely establish most of the initial precedents for the conflict’s violence. If Chinese leaders’ valued their political objectives highly enough, any method for attempting to force them to restore the status quo ante would inherently carry horizontal and vertical escalation risks. This would be true for a U.S. embargo against Chinese trade that was complete enough to impose a high dose of pain, a highly successful U.S. limited war effort isolated to the contested zone, or a broader conventional conflict that included direct U.S. attacks against PLA targets on Chinese soil. The only differences between these methods would be the amount of time it might take for Chinese leaders to face a major escalation decision, and the sources and types of pressure pushing them to escalate.

This also means there is no guarantee Chinese leaders would follow their historical pattern of backing down or settling for symbolic gains once the PLA had inflicted ‘enough damage and pain’ for them to claim ‘China had taught its adversaries a lesson.’ Indeed, their willingness to do so in a given contingency would be relative to their political objectives, the circumstances that drove them to war in the first place, and their personal wisdom. Today’s China is not Mao’s China or Deng’s China—its current leaders enjoy a far more powerful country than did their predecessors, and neither they nor we know how they would actually act within the circumstance-unique fog, friction, and political pressures of a contemporary East Asian conflict. A strategic concept that is not structured to take these considerations into account is simply not practicable for either warfighting or deterrence.

U.S. political leaders must be sober in defining the nation’s interests in East Asia, deliberate in characterizing and valuing their political objectives, and resolute in developing, resourcing, and implementing their grand strategy for averting such a conflict. It follows that this strategy’s military component must address the entire spectrum of potential combat, as well as provide U.S. political leaders with a wide set of response options, if it is to stand a chance at preventing Chinese leaders from achieving their political objectives. Without doubt, this would be best accomplished by deterring a war altogether. The integration and evolution of relevant aspects of Air-Sea Battle and Offshore Control within a single strategic concept will be a first step towards accomplishing this crucial task.

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.

 

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.