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. 

Soviet Oceanic Reconnaissance-Strike: New Observations from Maksim Tokarev (Part 2 of 2)

There are a few other new details Maksim Tokarev provided that, while unrelated to the topics I discussed yesterday, I find highly enlightening.

For one thing, a Soviet Naval Air Force raid commander possessed a considerable degree of local tactical decision-making authority:

But what is still valid for that is that the strike leader (one of the regiments CO in the air) had - the other side of the coin - very vast authority to create his own tactical changes according to the present situation. For example, [he might order exchanging] the roles of the RUG [Ed. note: Reconnaissance-Attack Group; the pathfinders] and part of UG [Ed. Note: the main attack group].

However, one of a raid’s chief vulnerabilities was its local communications:

This means that the VHF circuits between parts of the strike should have been solid and redundant, and this was in reality the weakest point of the doctrine. It is impossible to [maintain] radio silence if you haven’t [found] the target where it should be, nor [have] the time to seek and destroy.

Communications from surface tattletales (whether they were combatants or auxiliaries) to the Soviet Ocean Surveillance System were somewhat ‘stronger’ in a relative sense as they could ‘take refuge’ in frequencies the U.S. Navy would probably have been loath to jam prior to the outbreak of hostilities:

The USN EW in this case, if it was intended to jam the Soviet naval frequencies (if [known to] them), should have been aware that the tracking messages could be passed [via] 500 kHz or 2182 kHz, [which] are the international maritime distress channels and to jam those is not very good choice from the general safety standpoint.

One could make the same case about preemptively jamming fishing boats’ use of commercial satellite communications to make contact reports to an ocean surveillance system today.

Lastly, the Soviet Navy’s professional career-path stovepipes would likely have affected how its forces attempted to employ tactical deception in combat.

In Soviet Navy each officer [was], from his cadet's years, an avid specialist in one of the naval warfare segment[s], and [usualy stayed] in this professional community for [an entire] career. If the officer [was] educated in EW, it [meant] that he started this pipeline at the age of 18-19 while [a] Naval College cadet, along with the bachelor's degree process, and simultaneously it [meant] that he [would] never achieve command at sea or even XO appointment. On the other side, the future ADMs, COs and XOs, being almost always craftsmen in navigation, or (not "and") artillery/missiles, or mine-torpedo realms (they all [were] different specialties in Soviet-era naval education with very moderate cross-studies in the others), [would] have never had the EW or recco/intel service time during [their] whole career - [regardless of whether they were] in [the] surface or subsurface communities. [It was] easier to change [one’s naval branch specialty from] ships to subs and back, than to change [one’s] professional community and become the gunner or navigator if [one]had been educated as the radio communication means officer.

This presents a good example of why an Unrestricted Line Officer should be well-rounded in terms of tactical and technical expertise, and why basic information warfare principles and concepts need to be understood throughout the entire Unrestricted Line.

The career stovepipes also might have made it more difficult to employ deception effectively:

So the question of deception was subdivided in deceptive approaches of every specialty, and sometimes the surface cruiser's missile people, who can substitute the whole salvo by the one-by-one launches, if the two nearby SSGNs were doing the same (making those three+ axis of attack, coinciding with the courses of incoming Backfires), could have been interferred by the submarine staff's torpedo officers, who could try to hide the fact that the two Victors are tracking the CBG and can try to hit the carrier with long-range torpedoes first, and then allow the missile attack.

In other words, attacks of different types by two different combat arms could conceivably interfere with each other due to the different planning staffs’ relative areas of expertise and different chains of command. This in turn reinforces the importance of a unitary operational chain of command.

Soviet Oceanic Reconnaissance-Strike: New Observations from Maksim Tokarev (Part 1 of 2)

A few weeks ago I published a series of posts analyzing Maksim Tokarev’s outstanding Naval War College Review article that detailed the Soviet Navy’s 1980s-era doctrine for employing combined arms against U.S. Navy battleforces. At the end of my first post, I suggested that:

With a finite number of bombers, missiles, and trained crews, it is reasonable to think Soviet commanders would have been somewhat hesitant to dispatch such irreplaceable forces into battle unless they had some degree of confidence in their situational picture’s accuracy; the operational-strategic penalties that would be incurred if they ‘got it wrong’ simply seem too high for this not to have been the case. Accordingly, it will be extremely interesting to someday learn the criteria that had to be satisfied for SNAF commanders to order a raid. 

In the comments section to my final post in that series, Maksim graciously shared many new observations to address multiple aspects of that very question. As before, I’m going to quote his key points and then add my commentary. I’ve lightly edited his remarks; the wording changes I made are in brackets.

Maksim first notes that the Soviet Naval Air Force’s organizational ethos, much like that of most air forces and service air arms, was rooted in the ‘spirit of attack.’ Detailed mission planning was less important than seizing upon fortuitous opportunities to deal the enemy a severe blow:

Courage, brisk battle, blaze of glory, fair uniform first - and at least moderate careful planning [only] then. The heroes, the warriors, don’t hesitate to fight and die, bird's souls in the human’s bodies. The staff work is always something neglected, too boring to be the good job… sometimes “the good enough decision now is better than the brilliant one tomorrow.”

The consequence was that, as Maksim puts it:

The commanders who share that ethos can send the strikes against [ambiguous or low-confidence] target, hoping to receive definite targeting enroute, or counting on the strike’s inherent recco and targeting abilities.

This is a crucial (and quite obvious in hindsight) point that I’ve previously failed to consider. It is applicable not only within the context of the Cold War naval competition, but also to any attacker’s calculus. Attack opportunities against a highly capable opponent’s maneuvering forces are generally fleeting. A brief intercept of the opponent’s radio or active sensor emissions, or perhaps a scout’s brief (and perhaps sacrificial) direct contact with what seems to be an element of the opponent’s force, might be the only targeting cue the prospective attacker ever receives. The next detection of the opponent’s force might be when it is too late to derail or defeat the opponent’s operational plan. In fact, the next attack opportunity might not arise until after the opponent has already achieved his operation’s main objective(s). Maksim alludes to this dilemma from Soviet Navy commanders’ perspective:

Look, they [examined] the Northern Weddings’ logs hard, every minute of evolutions, every launch and landing, every word on radio and so on. They understood that when the carriers came in the Norway fjords, it [would be] just too late to try to hit them [with] air assets. [i] So the time slot to decide could have been very narrow. It’s better to make a wrong decision than suspend the good one.

Individuals make opportunity cost decisions based upon how they subjectively value their available options. A prospective attacker must choose between withholding scarce strike assets in hopes of a future opportunity to attack with a higher degree of targeting confidence, or otherwise expending those assets in the present with low targeting confidence under the assumption that there may be no future opportunity. When an attack-embracing organizational ethos within belligerent “A’s” forces mixes with a paramount objective of preventing belligerent “B” from attacking first, there will likely be intense psychological pressures on belligerent “A’s” operational commander to order a strike. The implication is that a careless and perhaps overconfident “B” who does not employ effective concealment (with some supporting deception for good measure) risks falling victim to a bold “A” who capitalizes on the most limited of targeting cues. Conversely, an intelligent “B” who understands “A’s” opportunity cost calculus well enough might be able to craft a deception and concealment plan that lures “A” into expending precious ordnance (and perhaps platforms and crews) for naught. There is no way to determine the outcome of either of these two scenario types in advance; circumstances and chance during battle matter greatly.

Maksim makes an additional point, though, in that the destruction of an opposing force may be far less important within a campaign context than its disruption or suppression:

The key success is not the sinking of the carriers. Just stop [their] launch, recovery, any air activity; it’s enough to weaken the NATO ASW along the Norwegian coast and give the SSBNs the possibility to reach launching positions in [the] Atlantic, making nuclear war very costly for both parts, [and therefore] evaporating the political will to start it. At the same time the tank armies will be in Berlin, Paris, Brussels and so on.

In other words, he is referring to one of the Soviets’ chief maritime strategic objectives for the early phases of a conventional European war: degradation of potential offensive ASW efforts by NATO navies against Soviet SSBNs. His assertion is consistent with the intelligence assessments that shaped the U.S. Navy’s development of the 1980s Maritime Strategy. The Soviets viewed the correlation of wartime-fielded nuclear forces as a key factor in deterring NATO’s escalation to the nuclear threshold. NATO would likely only have contemplated crossing that threshold, though, if the Red Army had routed NATO’s forward defenses along the inter-German front. From the Soviet perspective, then, any measures that increased the likelihood that mutual intra-war nuclear deterrence would hold also increased the likelihood that they could achieve their war objectives via conventional means. It was additionally recognized that if the Soviets had been able to effectively protect their SSBN force during a conventional war, they would have possessed a stronger position for war termination negotiations.

Consequently, effective disruption or suppression of U.S. carrier battleforce operations along the Soviet maritime periphery could have prevented NATO navies from attaining the margin of local sea control necessary for combined arms prosecutions of older Soviet SSBNs, such as the Yankee-class, that had to break through the Greenland-Iceland-United Kingdom gap in order to reach their Western Atlantic patrol stations. Similar disruption/suppression efforts against U.S. carriers operating somewhat deeper within the Soviet maritime periphery could have delayed or prevented destruction of the Soviet surface combatants performing defensive ASW in support of the ‘boomer bastions’ used by later generation Soviet SSBNs such as the various Delta-classes and the Typhoon-class. All this would be in addition to—and possibly more important to the Soviets than—preventing U.S. carrier air wings’ conventional strikes against military targets in Soviet coastal areas.

Another key observation by Maksim is that Soviet maritime strike capabilities should be viewed holistically, or rather that the Soviet Naval Air Force was not necessarily the primary combat arm for the anti-carrier mission:

There were also surface and [submarine] components of the Anti-Carrier Doctrine, and it is extremely hard to say which one was main and which one [was] complementary. It depended on who, when, [and] how [the carriers were found] and where the [Soviet maritime] forces [were] deployed at the moment.

Naturally it does mean that [the entire] air component could have been used as the decoy, three whole air divisions of expendable planes and people - if the surface combatant[s] or subs needed [that kind of support in order to be able to attack effectively], [whether they were]in better [attack] positions in the staff’s opinion or by chance.

The idea that an entire combat arm could be used as an expendable decoy is quite incredible from a Western perspective, but in light of the aforementioned Soviet maritime strategic priorities it makes perfect sense. If the Soviets believed it was unlikely that a conventional conflict would be protracted, and that nuclear deterrence/bargaining therefore predominated, the opportunity cost of expending these platforms and crews in such a way could be quite acceptable. Coordination between two or more combat arms for a single near-simultaneous attack would have been incredibly difficult based on the issues Maksim identifies in his article and that I’ve addressed in some of my prior writings. Nevertheless, these issues would not have necessarily precluded Soviet Navy commanders from burning up one combat arm in an attempt to knock a U.S. battleforce off-balance in preparation for a later attack by another combat arm.

When the implications of Maksim’s aforementioned observations are combined, we come to see what he means when he says:

That is why my article is in general about kamikazes. It was one-way navy. No one expected to return, [had] the war been declared.

Continental powers’ concepts regarding the combat employment of naval forces have historically been quite different than those of maritime powers. U.S. naval strategists and operational planners, not to mention those of us in the armchair analysis community, would be wise to bear in mind that courses of action that seem rash or potentially self-defeating from our perspectives could be quite rational from a potential adversary’s perspective.

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[i] Jon’s sidenote: this refers to the U.S. Navy’s 1980s concept for creating carrier operations bastions in Norwegian fjords. For more details, see Commodore Jacob Børresen, Royal Norwegian Navy (Retired). “Alliance Naval Strategies and Norway in the Final Years of the Cold War.” Naval War College Review 64, No. 2 (Spring 2011): 97-115.

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.