As it moves away from communism, China’s strategy is to use such forces as advanced missile batteries, diesel submarines, and Russian-built destroyers to dominate the Asian region. The United States must manage this potential threat by maintaining a military presence and creating stronger regional alliances.
In 1900, Alfred Thayer Mahan wrote: "If the advantage to us is great of a China open to commerce, the danger to us and to her is infinitely greater of a China enriched and strengthened by the material advantages we have to offer, but uncontrolled in the use of them."
Now Mahan's worst fears are coming true. A resource rich, yet politically insular, China is the central problem of Asia. Those who dismiss China's military as "hollow" because it lacks superpower characteristics are missing the point. Beijing is channeling its defense resources to employ capabilities in ways that will allow China to dominate the region by intimidating its neighbors while undermining U.S. presence, access, and influence. China's intent is to resolve the conflict with the United States over whose values will influence the course of Pacific history.
The value differences between China and the United States are not just a product of cultural misunderstandings. Like the radical Islamic leaders of al Qaeda and the Taliban, Western values and democracy are what many Chinese leaders fear most. China's rulers envision Asia's future as characterized by Chinese dominance, with every Asia-Pacific neighbor serving as a de facto tributary state.
China's strategy to diminish U.S. influence and presence in the Pacific is threefold: undermine U.S. alliances through unfettered maritime intimidation; push a further withdrawal of U.S. forces from Asia; and take advantage of stretched U.S. resources that have resulted from our troubles in the Middle East.
Avoiding disaster requires us to better manage the problem of Asia by abandoning strategic ambiguity, declaring clear policy intentions, maintaining a strong U.S. Pacific presence, and cultivating an Asian maritime alliance to collectively oppose China's strategic ambition.
The Problem of Asia
Four decades of steady movement toward free-market economies and democratic governments is now being threatened by an awakened dragon. China is at an economic and political crossroads. It is plain that Chinese communism soon will follow its Soviet brother to the ash heap of history. Whether this change in Chinese politics will be driven by global economic integration or by its bent for aggressive nationalism, however, remains unanswered. Unfortunately, Chinese leaders have yet to real-ize that the two are irreconcilable. The Communist Party's "New China" policies are bearing economic fruit and bolstering China's economic-military prowess while eroding the ideological foundation of the regime. Because China's current economic gains are not sustainable without an institutional overhaul, all signs point toward an eventual political transformation. The question is whether the world will be fortunate enough for China's transition from communism to be as peaceful as the Soviet collapse. The odds are short.
Chinese leaders are attempting to bolster their legitimacy through an explosive combination of economic reforms, xenophobic nationalism, and political repression. Adding fuel to the fire, the Tiananmen repression has left Chinese politicians more beholden to the People's Liberation Army (PLA) which still holds substantial influence over government policies. PLA leaders are the most ardent spokesmen against Western values, historical mistreatment, and for China's aggressive pursuit of maritime claims. The problem of Asia, then, has a pronounced maritime dimension.
Chinese Maritime History
Maritime power always has been a measure of national strength in the Pacific Rim, where the sea lines of communication form even stronger lifelines. From 1100-1400, innovation and trade flourished in China. Strong economic growth manifested itself in formidable naval strength. In 1281, for instance, the Emperor sent a fleet of 4,400 ships to invade Japan. In the early 14th century, China began to suffer from a stronger central government where narrow bureaucratic interest prevailed over the interests of a fledgling mercantilist class. Political insularity stymied technological innovation, stunted economic growth, forced the dismantling of the fleet, and fostered laws against shipbuilding. The destruction of the Chinese maritime economy and naval power set the stage for centuries of Western domination.
Today, China's burgeoning economy increasingly is dependent on sea lines of communication for its escalating exports as well as its demand for imported gas and oil. It is not lost on the Chinese that almost half of all global maritime trade passes through the narrow straits and archipelagic waters adjacent the South China Sea. These areas frequently are patrolled by the U.S. Navy. China therefore is turning toward domination of its maritime frontiers as its first strategic imperative.
China cannot hope to become a peer competitor of the U.S. Navy and has no intention of doing so. Instead, the Chinese are tapping into their distant naval heritage to build some modern forces with the aim of mastering "the art of the inferior defeating the superior under high-tech conditions." Their objective is to dominate Asia with the power to coerce, punish, and dissuade. Their method is an innovative mix of modern and legacy forces multiplied through unconventional tactics and weapons.
Pockets of Excellence
China's new maritime focus has produced healthy pockets of naval expansion within the People's Liberation Army Navy (PLAN), seeking to enhance asymmetric advantages. Thus, submarines and cruise-missile destroyers have become the platforms of choice.
The first priority is the creation of a formidable attack submarine fleet capable of controlling the sea lines of communication throughout the South and East China Seas. The PLAN'S 52 boats include 5 Han-class nuclear-attack submarines. China also is busy constructing—with Russian assistance—a much more capable Type 93 class. These submarines eventually will allow for engagement of China's enemies out to the second island chain. In the meantime, China plans to rely heavily on newly constructed submarines of older design, as well as a number of more modern diesels such as the indigenously produced Mings. Many analysts underestimate the capability of these Chinese submarines and submariners. While not of modern design, these Mings are newly constructed, have adequate sensors and weapons, and are difficult to find in the acoustically complex Chinese coastal waters.
China has seven frontline diesel submarines including four Russian Kilos and four indigenously produced Songs. The Song should serve as a warning to those who discount China's indigenous naval program. Stunning our intelligence community when she arrived unexpectedly in the mid-1990s, the Song's French hull and reengineered German diesels—coupled with her ability to launch advanced torpedoes and antiship cruise missiles—make her a formidable foe, approaching the capabilities of the very best diesels in the Pacific.
As the PLAN improves its undersea capabilities, the U.S. Pacific attack submarine force has dwindled to 24. We would be lucky to get a dozen boats to the Pacific theater in the first weeks of a crisis. China could easily deploy more than 40. During the Cold War, airborne antisubmarine warfare (ASW) assets could weigh in, but that capability has all but atrophied. The United States might eventually bring enough ASW forces to theater to thwart any Chinese submarine campaign, but probably not in time to prevent substantial damage to the economies of East Asia, or significant setbacks in Taiwan.
China also is steadily modernizing its surface fleet. The PLAN has 18 destroyers and 35 frigates, including increasingly capable home-built Luhu destroyers as well as the Jiangwei II frigates. Their most capable ships, however, are their two Russian-built Sovremennyy-class guided-missile destroyers which were designed to attack U.S. carriers with supersonic SS-N-22 Sunburn missiles. The PLAN recently ordered two more.
Selected modernized forces have received less public attention than PLA rocket forces that are immediately threatening China's neighbors. China is sharpening its nuclear sword so that it might up the stakes of U.S. intervention in any Asian crisis. The PLA now has 20 nu-clear-tipped land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles capable of reaching across all of Asia and to the western United States. It also has one operational Xia-class nuclear-powered submarine armed with 12 CSS-N-3 (JL-1) ballistic missiles, and is building the Type 94 ballistic missile submarine that will carry 16 recently proven JL-2 missiles with a range of more than 5,000 miles.
Equally imposing are the large missile batteries composed mostly of CSS-6s and CSS-7s deployed near Taiwan. This force has increased from less than 50 in 1997 to more than 350 today and likely will approach 650 lethal and accurate missiles by 2005. During the four CSS-6 firings over Taipei in 1996, the PLA apparently exploited the global positioning system to demonstrate "a degree of accuracy not previously associated with Chinese missiles."
Toward Unrestricted Warfare
Recognizing that it cannot close the capabilities gap with modern militaries in the near-term, China is seeking success through "limited war under high-tech conditions." This involves acting early to disrupt alliances and stretch adversary resources, employing new concepts with old weapons, using selected new weapons as force multipliers, and striking hard, early, and by surprise to achieve limited objectives. Much of this strategy is eerily reminiscent of Japanese military thinking before Pearl Harbor.
Before the attacks of 11 September 2001, China was pursuing a strategic axis with the Middle East to bracket India and stretch U.S. resources. It is not surprising that a Chinese delegation was in Kabul on 10 September 2001 to negotiate a political-military agreement with the Taliban. By supplying weapons of mass destruction and missile technology to Iran, Pakistan, and other countries, China keeps the United States preoccupied with the Middle East, diminishing our military presence and power in the Western Pacific.
Thinly spread U.S. forces become more vulnerable to the new concept weapons envisioned in the recently published strategic doctrine "Unrestricted Warfare". These ideas are typical of the brilliant, yet critically flawed, strategic thinking among PLA leaders such as PLA Colonels Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui. Their exhaustive analysis points to a certain strategic backwardness of America's technology obsession and our aversion to casualties that both prevents our pursuit of "new concept" weapons and makes us uniquely vulnerable to them. Unrestricted warfare, they claim, starts with the knowledge that "everything that can benefit mankind can also harm him" and ends with the principle that "there are no rules, with nothing forbidden. There is nothing in the world today that cannot become a weapon."
They applaud terrorism as one successful aspect of unrestricted warfare. In fact, Qiao and Wang went on the record to explain that "the attacks [of 9-11] demonstrated the United States' fragility and weakness" to unrestricted attacks and "from a long-term viewpoint, could be favorable to China." Chinese military writings suggest that maritime forces will be the object of unrestricted attacks that combine everything from nuclear threats to information attacks and swarm tactics.
Unrestricted warfare does not naively rely on singular attacks. China's "real hand of cards," the authors contend, rests with addition: combining "the battlefield and non-battlefield, warfare and non-warfare, military and non-military which is more specifically combining stealth aircraft and cruise missiles with network killers, combining nuclear deterrence, financial wars and terrorist attacks, or simply combining Schwarzkopf plus Soros plus Xiaomolisi plus bin Laden. Only when blood or cruelty are added in is the situation able to become severe and begin to be shocking."
The critical flaw of this unrestricted approach is its moral ambivalence coupled with an innate underestimation of U.S. power, resolve, and historical willingness to accept casualties when stirred to wrath. Like Japanese thinking before Pearl Harbor, unrestricted warfare fosters a false hope that the United States can be deterred or defeated through the shock induced by "clever operations."
Toward a Stronger Asian Alliance
Sun Tzu correctly instructed that "what is of supreme importance in war is to attack the enemy's strategy." The United States must combat the addition of unrestricted warfare with the superior math of maritime alliance formation. Clear policy intentions plus a strong U.S. presence in Asia plus united allies plus joint capabilities trumps "Schwarzkopf plus Soros plus Xiaomolisi plus bin Laden" every time.
First, it must remain clear to the Chinese that the United States will defend democracy and the free markets in Asia while checking any Taiwanese provocation.
Second, the United States must strengthen its presence in Asia. From an Asian perspective, the United States continues its steady withdrawal from the Pacific. It started with Saigon, then bases in the Philippines, and is bolstered by strained U.S.-Japan relations, talk of reducing U.S. forces in Korea, and by the recent 40% reduction in the Pacific Fleet. The United States must act to soon assure friends that the Chinese are wrong when they claim that "the Americans are unreliable and may leave, but China is here forever." A good start would be to move more submarines to the Pacific to match the threat and double our carrier battle group presence in order to achieve near-continuous coverage of the South China Sea. Continued uncontested Chinese naval operations in this waterway only strengthens China's coercive hand.
Third, monolithic U.S. power in Asia is not desirable. Strategies such as unrestricted warfare become untenable when countered by the United States and its Asian friends, unified in political resolve and military capabilities. China likely will not pursue aggressive policies if opposition becomes a widespread Asian matter with the United States playing only a strong supporting role. The current bilateral agreements with Asian nations will not suffice. Too many Asian partners stood silent, for instance, during past Chinese intimidations of Taiwan. The United States must convince its friends that the best course is to face Asia's problem together. Navigating the differences in cultures, history, and religions to build a stronger Asian security community is a tough challenge that must be overcome.
Finally, the U.S.-Asian alliance must extend beyond diplomacy toward an ability to conduct effective joint operations. Recent wars have been focused on strikes against adversaries with little ability to deny U.S. access. Access, however, cannot be assumed. Continued failure to revitalize access-enabling capabilities such as antisubmarine and mine warfare could be a costly mistake. In addition, allied participation in these conflicts has been more of a political luxury than military necessity. In Asia, the United States will need more help. For instance, bringing the Australians, Koreans, Japanese, and others to confront the Chinese ASW problem could greatly improve this nation's chances. Extensive joint training is required.
Recapitalizing the U.S. force structure is the first step toward sustaining the strong U.S. presence in Asia necessary to build an alliance truly capable of operating jointly in both military and political realms. Such an alliance offers the best hope of constraining China as it faces political transition. As this nation seeks to transform its military, the United States cannot ignore the problem at hand. Ignoring terrorism in the 1990s led to terrible consequences. Failing to focus on Asia's problem now could prove even more disastrous.
Lieutenant Commander Adams, a submariner, is a prize-winning Naval Institute author and a U.S. Navy League Alfred Thayer Mahan Award recipient. He is attending the U.K. Submarine Commander Course.