My working assumption about international affairs is that
people in mortal peril are careful and clever.
On the other hand, people with plenty of money, power, and impunity are
often arrogant and sloppy.
This outlook colors my perspective on various US dustups
with adversarial nations, most recently Syria.
That’s why I’m unwilling to rule out the possibility of a
false flag chemical weapons attack.
Assad might be stupid enough to order an attack with the UN inspectors
in Damascus; but as more details emerge concerning Saudi Arabia’s determination
to bring down the Syrian regime pronto, the circumstantial case for Prince
Bandar organizing the atrocity is strengthened.
I must say I have not been particularly impressed with the
public dossier, which leans on the “panicky” exchanges and the interception of
a conversation between the last Hezbollah higher-up clueless enough in this
post-Snowden era to use an unsecured landline to dish dirt on Assad with his
Iranian compadre.
When I look at Syria, I think about the PRC, with the caveat
that if and when the United States tries to take down China, China will also
have plenty of money, power, and impunity and the US will have to be more
careful and clever than it has been.
The issue of red lines and casus belli was very much on my
mind when I wrote my recent piece for Asia Times Online on Air Sea Battle, the
think tank recipe for massive conventional war with the PRC.
What interested me was the fact that China has
counterprogrammed asymmetrically against the United States in Asia in order to
deny the US the justification and opportunity to enter the lists on behalf of
Japan and The Philippines as a military power.
The PRC advances the maritime conflicts as strictly civilian affairs,
using maritime survey vessels and so on, keeping the disputes as much as
possible on a bilateral, law-based basis.
The PRC has been careful and clever, in other words.
However, over recent decades the United States has not stood
idly by as the PRC, Russia, and other antagonists/competitors of the United
States have tried to shield themselves from the full-spectrum exercise of
American power.
Through a combination of doctrine and dirty tricks, the
United States has done its best to be able to go to war when it wants to.
In my Air Sea Battle post, I highlight an exchange between two U.S.
Senators in 1968:
Senator CASE: Mr Chairman, I think one of the suggestions, I
do not know that it has quite been put into these words, is that the Defense
Department, for purposes which it considered most patriotic and necessary,
decided that the time had come to stop shillyshallying with the commies and
resist, and this was the time, and it had to be contrived so that the President
could come along, and that the Congress would follow. That is one of the
things.
Senator HICKENLOOPER: I think historically whenever a country wants to go to
war it finds a pretext. We have had 5,000 pretexts historically to go to war.
Or, in other words:
Senator Case and Senator Hickenlooper’s thoughts were
recorded in an executive session of the Foreign Relations Committee convened to
discuss a staff report concerning the Gulf of Tonkin incident. The transcript was declassified in 2010
through the efforts of John Kerry.
The takeaway from the staff report was that the Johnson
administration was very, very keen to escalate US involvement in the Vietnam
War. Therefore, it brushed aside worrisome
details of the August 4, 1964 incident in order to rush through a retaliatory
attack (the first bombing attack against North Vietnam by the US, signaling that
the entire country was in play and the US would no longer limit its involvement
to propping up the strongman du jour in Saigon against the assault of the Viet
Cong) and pass the Gulf of Tonkin resolution.
The immediate context for Senator Hickenlooper’s ruminations
is that the staff report made a very strong case that no attack had actually
occurred on August 4, 1964 (the Maddox and
the Turner Joy were chasing their own
tails, not North Vietnamese PT boats); nevertheless questions about the true
character of the incident were hurriedly brushed aside in order to launch the
retaliatory attack and push through the resolution.
By contrast, the committee was wrestling with the current issue
of the sigint vessel USS Pueblo’s capture
by North Korea and also remembering the attack on another US signals intelligence vessel, the Liberty by Israel in 1967 (quick note: Wikipedia needs to take a look
at its article on the Liberty incident, which was apparently
written by the public relations office of the IDF; interested readers may refer
to the NSA’s declassified report on the incident, in which an NSA deputy director
is quoted as dismissing the Israeli investigation as “a nice whitewash” .)
Since the United States was not interested in going to war
with North Korea or Israel, those genuine attacks on US sigint vessels were not casi
belli; but a spurious attack attributed to North Vietnam provoked a retaliatory
attack, a congressional resolution, and a great big war.
Hence Senator Hickenlooper’s musing.
The U.S. has worked to sweep aside barriers to armed
intervention with remarkably vague and non-legalistic invocations of red lines,
universal values, human rights, global norms, the delicate sensibilities of the
international community, etc. Of course
the Bush administration attempted to broaden the legal basis for military
action with the doctrine of pre-emption of potential threats (basically
anything and everything) instead of imminent threats (the maniac cutting
through your door with a chain saw).
Remarkably, the Obama administration, through Susan Rice, has signaled
its determination to expand this doctrine beyond threats to the United States or
its allies with the doctrine R2P—responsibility to protect the citizens of an
adversary. R2P would give a green light
for the United States to intervene when some local slice of humanity, not just
US citizens, was exposed to threat from an unsavory government.
In fact, that’s pretty much what we did in
Libya, albeit through a UN resolution and with a lot of cajoling by France.
The queasy character of the US intervention doctrine is on
full display in Syria, where the Obama administration has reserved for itself
the role of judge, jury, and executioner (and for that matter, legislator, by
unilaterally promulgating the chemical weapons red line) in the matter of
Bashar al Assad’s alleged transgressions in the matter of weapons of mass
destruction. Since the US anticipates
that the UN Security Council will be unwilling to authorize action against
Syria, President Obama reserved the right to act independently. Even as he submitted the question of a
resolution to the US congress, his spokespeople reserved the right for the
president to order an attack even if the resolution didn’t pass.
A fine kettle of fish.
This got me to thinking that a lot of American wars start
with a lie. Not because the United
States is especially mendacious or wicked, but because when it comes time to
start a war, its designated enemies have probably done a pretty good job of
establishing plausible factual and legal rebuttals to the popularly accepted
legal justifications for war.
Like Saddam. He dealt
with the demand to get rid of his WMDs by getting rid of his WMDs. But President Bush figured out a way to deal
with Saddam!
Like Gaddafi. He declared a ceasefire to comply with UN Resolution 1973. Didn't help him!
The PRC government has deployed all of the stratagems that
America’s adversaries have deployed in order to keep from getting bombs dropped
on them: non-military management of disputes that might impinge on the US,
legalistic adherence to international law, a reliance on the restraining factor
of a useful veto in the UN Security Council, and advocacy of the principle of
sovereignty and non-interference in internal affairs.
If China is throwing its weight around in a manner that the
United States deems unacceptable, how does the United States bring into play
its most important great power asset—the ability to threaten and carry out
military attacks on a recalcitrant state?
It occurs to me that a prime directive of US military
planners and diplomats must be the issue of how and when to start a war with
the PRC if we want and need one.
I think about that in the conclusion of the Asia Times
Online article, where I dig through the history of the Gulf of Tonkin incident
made available by government declassification over the last decade or so, and how
the Johnson administration was able to conjure up a war out of a clusterf*ck in
the Tonkin Gulf.
I also think about it when the western press credulously
amplifies spurious claims that “China is flying fighter jets through Japanese
airspace” and “China is preparing to erect structures on the Scarborough Shoal.”
Starting a war with China, if the US wants one, is really
not going to be terribly hard.
Which brings me back, by a long and circuitous route, back
to my even longer and more circuitous article about Air Sea Battle at Asia
Times Online.
Air Sea Battle (or ASB) makes the case for a massive upgrade
of US military capabilities in the West Pacific in order to successfully handle
one rather improbable scenario—a simultaneous attack against all US military
and security interests in the region within reach of the People’s Republic of
China.
This is not a likely scenario for a variety of reasons.
But not impossible, I suppose, if China’s
Brezhnev fights his way to the top of the political pile in the CCP with a divine mandate to resurrect the COMECON bloc and
convinces the PLA that the key to China’s future is obliterating its economic
relationships with the United States, Japan, and Western Europe and cutting
itself off from Middle Eastern energy so the PRC can monopolize the economic
opportunities of The Philippines, Taiwan, and Vietnam and lap up all that
sweet, sweet crude that apparently lurks under the South China and East China
Seas.
Could happen, I guess.
I’m not holding my breath.
The closest thing to a real-world justification for ASB is
that it will prevent or at least delay the Finlandization of China’s smaller
neighbors--even though the PRC seems to have enough economic and enforcement
levers and legal and diplomatic cover to create a lot of problems for the
Philippines and Vietnam (and to a lesser extent, Japan) without running afoul
of the US military.
But, as I point out in the article, the United States needs
to be at war with the PRC if it wishes to bring full US power to bear. And the chances that the PRC will initiate a
full-spectrum attack against the US military and give the United States a
justification to destroy all of the PRC’s military assets and much of its
economy in a prolonged campaign are pretty small.
So I think if and when war comes, it will come courtesy of
one of Senator Hickenlooper’s 5000 pretexts, in response to a US policy
decision, perhaps a decision by that the US policy makers decide that China is
getting stronger and more assertive and less cooperative, US military dominance
is a wasting asset, and it better be wielded to cut China down to size before
the PRC becomes a genuine peer competitor.
War with China is, to me, a remote contingency. But ASB makes it more likely, by holding out
the promise that the war is winnable and increasing the temptation to figure
out the best way to start one.
The ATOl piece is below the jump. It can be reposted if Asia Times Online is acknowedged and a link provided.
Suppose we offered battle ...
By Peter Lee
Suppose we gave a war ... and only a People's Republic of China maritime surveillance vessel showed up?
That is the first of many conundrums facing the US military as it considers the megaboondoggle known as ''Air-Sea Battle''.
With the Barack Obama administration aspiring to pivot out of the [Image]Middle East (albeit with a stopover in Syria and,
just maybe, Iran), and into Asia, it was felt that a new US military
doctrine was required to drive planning, preparation, and budgets.
Air Sea Battle - its name consciously mimicking Air
Land Battle, the doctrine that guided US vigilance against another big
red boogeyman, the Soviet Union, in Europe in the 1970s - originated
with a study by the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessment
published in 2010. It is unapologetically constructed around the
challenge - the ''unprovoked challenge'', as the authors characterized
it - that the People's Liberation Army (PLA) might pose to the United
States.
Actually, the threat is not to the United States. It is
the threat to the ability of the US military to operate in the
Western Pacific. And, for that matter, it isn't an actual threat:
With
the spread of advanced military technologies and their exploitation
by other militaries, especially China's PLA, the US military's ability
to operate in an area of vital interest, the Western Pacific, is being
increasingly challenged. While Beijing professes benign intentions, it
is an old military maxim that since intentions can change overnight -
especially in authoritarian regimes - one must focus on the military
capabilities of other states. [1]
Well, it could be a threat.
And
if it were a threat, it could be called anti-access/area denial. And
it could get its own cool acronym: A2/AD. Which is what they did.
Too
bad the threat wasn't defined as ''regional reaction/domain denial''.
Then we could call the threat R2D2 and people would associate the
People's Republic of China with the Star Wars robot that
looked so cute and harmless in the first movies but then became a
flying, high-tech killing machine in the prequels.
It
is perhaps unkind to mock Air Sea Battle and the effort, expense, and
gravitas that went into its preparation. Unfortunately, it is
eminently mockable. Its apparently disabling paradox is illustrated on
pages 9 and 10 of the CSBA study:
It must be emphasized that an AirSea Battle concept is not about war with China.
Nor is it about ''rolling back'' Chinese influence, or even about
''containing'' China. Rather, it should be seen as part of a larger
''offsetting strategy'' that acknowledges that China's tremendous
economic achievement simultaneously enables it to acquire formidable
military capabilities. ... One of the key elements of such an
offsetting strategy is demonstrating a continuing US ability to
reassure allies and partners in the region that they will not be the
victims of coercion or a form of ''Finlandization'' on the part of
China. To accomplish this, the United States must have a demonstrable
ability to intervene effectively in the event of a military
confrontation or even conventional conflict with China.
The
key question: if we are not fighting a war with China; if indeed China
is doing bad things like coercion and Finlandization but does not
engage in military hostilities with the United States, how do we get
from of Air Sea Just Sitting There to Air Sea Battle?
That
is a problem the authors can't answer - unless China obliges by
launching a first-strike attack on US military forces, in other words
turns the threat of A2/AD into reality. This is openly identified as
the first assumption underlying the Air Sea Battle concept:
This
paper assumes that China would have the strategic and operational
initiative at the outset of war and that, even with warning, US
military forces would not be authorized to preempt imminent Chinese
military action kinetically. Thus the United States must be able to
recover from the initial blow by aggressor forces and sustain
operations for the concept to be viable.
As
to the scenarios in which the People's Republic of China might choose
to attack the military forces of the United States - under which
circumstances the authors assume full participation by treaty partners
Japan and Australia on the US side - the study is, unfortunately,
silent.
So
the Air Sea Battle slides past the awkward issue of why or when China
would launch a first strike against US forces, and fast forwards to an
interesting discussion of how it would be done.
In
the opening minutes of a conflict, seek to render US and allied
forces ''deaf, dumb and blind'' by destroying or degrading US and allied
Low Earth Orbit (LEO) ISR [information, surveillance and
reconnaissance], Space-Based Infrared System (SBIRS), third-generation
Infrared System (3GIRS) sensors and communications satellites. This
would be accomplished by employing directed-energy weapons,
direct-ascent and co-orbital anti-satellite weapons, or terrestrial
jamming, in concert with coordinated cyber and electronic warfare
attacks;
>> Conduct ballistic missile salvo attacks, complemented by
LACMs [land attack Cruise missiles] launched from various platform
types, against US and Japanese air and naval bases. Attacks on
Japanese targets could be supplemented by air strikes. Key targets
would include forward air bases including those at Andersen, Kadena
and Misawa; major logistics nodes such as Guam (airfields and port
facilities); and key logistics assets such as fuel storage tanks. The
PLA's objective would be to deny US forces the ability to generate
substantial combat power from its air bases in the Western Pacific;
>> Conduct major strikes using land-based anti-ship ballistic
missiles (ASBM) and anti-ship cruise missiles (ASCM) launched from
various platforms and submarines against all major US Navy and allied
warships at sea within 1,500 nm of the Chinese coast, with particular
emphasis on the maritime areas around the PRC's littorals. The PLA's
objective would be to raise the cost of the US and allied fleet
operations within this ''keep-out'' zone to prohibitive levels (see
Figure 4); and
>> Interdict US and allied sea lines of communication (SLOCs)
throughout Southeast Asia and the Western Pacific. Nuclear submarines
could patrol forward near Hawaii in the Pacific and Diego Garcia in
the Indian Ocean to interdict the flow of supplies and reinforcements
moving to forward bases; attack Navy assets transiting to and from
operating areas in the Western Pacific; and force the Navy to divert
substantial resources to convoy escort and anti-submarine warfare (ASW)
in non-forward areas.
With
the United States securely in the category of innocent victim of
unprovoked aggression, the planners and the US military are off to the
races: space war, cyber war, ''blinding attacks'', ''thinning out''
the PLA's missile inventory, three months of warfare against Chinese
surface and submarine war vessels, and so on.
And,
by the way, bye-bye Beijing, per the study's assumptions:
Neither US nor Chinese Territory Will Be Accorded Sanctuary Status
Neither belligerent will be off-limits to strikes by the other. At a
minimum, selected US conventional counterforce strikes - both kinetic
and nonkinetic (eg, cyber) - inside China will be authorized from the
conflict's onset. A limited number of very high-leverage targets,
principally those related to China's air defenses, command and
control, ISR, and counter-space/space control, as well as fixed-site
and mobile ballistic missiles (including production sites), lie at the
heart of the PLA's A2/AD operational approach. According these
targets sanctuary status would severely undermine US attempts to
maintain a stable military balance in the Western Pacific and, as
such, decrease the effectiveness of deterrence.
The
report makes another necessary assumption to keep the party going:
Mutual Nuclear Deterrence Holds
Tacit agreement not to use or threaten the use of nuclear weapons
would appear to be in both parties' interests. There have been several
wars where weapons of mass destruction were possessed by one side or
the other, and yet were not employed, even by the defeated power. In
World War II, Germany accepted a total defeat at the hands of the
allies without employing its formidable arsenal of chemical weaponry.
In the First Gulf War, Iraq suffered a severe defeat but did not
resort to the use of its chemical weapons. If this assumption does not
hold and nuclear warfare ensues, then the character of the conflict
would change so dramatically as to render discussion of major
conventional warfare irrelevant. Of course, an Air Sea Battle
operational concept and its associated capabilities are intended to
deter conventional acts of coercion or aggression, thereby reducing
the prospects of a nuclear confrontation.
The
People's Republic of China recently affirmed its ''no first use''
nuclear weapons doctrine. In other words, the PRC's relatively modest
nuclear arsenal is designed to survive and thereby deter a first
nuclear strike by somebody else.
There appears to be an across-the-board consensus that ASB's assumption
that the exchange will not go nuclear is reasonable.
The
current Chinese nuclear arsenal does not include any announced
tactical component, making it unlikely that it would be used in its
current form in an ASB exchange.
RAND's David Shlapak told Asia Times:
Attacking
the homeland of any nuclear-armed country is always a fraught
undertaking. That said, I'm not aware of any evidence that China is
considering developing tactical nuclear weapons as a response to ASB,
and I wouldn't expect their nuclear doctrine to change to counter what
is after all a tactical concept.
If
China did change so as to threaten a nuclear response to conventional
attack, they'd face a pretty high credibility hurdle. The United
States, after all, has enormous quantitative and qualitative
advantages in the nuclear realm. The US and NATO [North Atlantic Treaty
Organization] had a very difficult time making believable escalatory
threats in the context of a European war against the Warsaw Pact, even
though its nuclear capability was at worst on par with the Soviets';
China would encounter the same dilemma.
However, I think this assumption may be too optimistic.
The
premise of ASB is ''no sanctuaries'', which strongly implies that the
area of Beijing - which is clustered with SAM missile sites in addition
to its command-and-control significance - would not be declared
off-limits to US and Japanese strikes.
ASB,
despite its efforts to paint the encounter as symmetric (they attack
our military targets with conventional weapons, we attack their
military targets with conventional weapons, gentlemen come out of your
corners at the bell, I want a nice, clean fight) and therefore
controllable, really isn't.
The
war is supposed to be fought all over Chinese territory. Of course,
the PLA Navy is welcome to try to sail into the Atlantic Ocean and
attack Washington DC in retaliation but this is simply not going to
happen.
Beijing getting ''shock and awed'' by precision strikes is probably
not part of the Chinese leadership's plan for regime survival, so we
should not automatically assume that the PRC's only riposte to ASB will
be to keep the fight on a mano-a-mano straight-up conventional basis.
Where stands Japan?
A
further complicating factor is ASB's assumption that Japan will be
pitching in on the US side (according to the ASB Gotterdammerung
scenario, China would simultaneously attack US military bases in
Japan, thereby bringing Japan into the war). Japan and the PRC are
locked in vicious antagonism that is, up to now, still thankfully
verbal. But the flip side to Japanese feistiness with China is its
increasing independence from the United States, and the current
government's desire to shed the restraints of the pacifist constitution
and control its own security destiny.
Add
to this the nascent, well maybe not so nascent, dream of some in Japan
to celebrate its return to full great power status by fielding a
nuclear arsenal (Japan's Epsilon rocket, which has virtually no
civilian potential and walks talks and quacks like an ICBM, is in the
midst of launch tests) [2] and we have the possibility of an independent,
aggressive, and nuclear Japan in the mix against China.
It
is increasingly difficult to imagine that PLA planners are not talking
about an alternate future in which tactical nuclear weapons are
deployed and a new doctrine announced in order to mix it up with the
Japanese as well as deter the massive conventional attack on the
Chinese mainland as envisaged by ASB.
If
Air Sea Battle were put into effect and the Chinese regime decides its
security is best served by the threat of air-bursting a nuclear weapon
over the USS George Washington instead of pouring more money
and development effort into its conventional the carrier-killer
missile ... well, hopefully CSBA has another study in its safe dealing
with this contingency.
In
passing, for those of you who have ever looked at a map of the South
China Sea and said to yourselves, hmmm, it looks like the nation with
the most vital interest in free navigation down there is actually
China, so what exactly is the point of the United States' national
interest in protecting freedom of navigation in the South China Sea
from the Chinese threat, there's this:
[T]he
US forces could exploit the Western Pacific's geography, which
effectively channelizes Chinese merchant traffic. Since direct Chinese
commerce with the United States and Japan would cease at the outbreak
of conflict, there would be little if any trans-Pacific traffic left
to intercept. Most interdiction efforts would focus on ships trying to
transit the South China Sea. Traffic bound for China would be
intercepted as it tried to enter the southern portions of the South
China Sea, ie, beyond range of most PLA A2/AD systems, from the
Malacca, Singapore, or major Indonesia straits.
And
let's not overlook the economic and environmental benefits of legal
piracy:
Rather
than the mass sinkings of merchant ships by German U-boats and their
US counterparts during World War II, US and allied forces might
conduct maritime interception operations (MIO) against ships bound for
China. Economically (and environmentally) it would be far more
beneficial to seize (and perhaps confiscate) prize cargos than sink
them. The option to use force against noncompliant ships would be
retained.
In
November 2011, the Pentagon set up an ''Air Sea Battle Office'', whose
debut was greeted with a flurry of interest and a storm of criticism.
As
to how this concept got off the drawing board and into the public
discourse, it did respond to a genuine and immediate threat - the
threat that termination of the Iraq and Afghan wars and the pivot out
of the Middle East would bring some major adjustments to US defense
spending. The real enemies confronting each other over the contested
terrain of the Pacific: US Army vs US Air Force and Navy.
A
2012 article in the bureaucrat-friendly Government Executive magazine
with the optimistic title ''The Next War'' rather awkwardly framed the
matter as one of turning away from essential unpleasantness of
Army-type war, with its IEDs, brutalized local populations, and devastating post-traumatic stress
disorder issues, to the more sleek and satisfying alternative of men and
women in crisp uniforms firing extremely expensive ordinance from
fancy ships and airplanes:
In
this war over the next war, the Air Force and Navy have stolen an
intellectual march over the Army with their joint AirSea Battle concept.
It is a vision of future conflict well-matched to America's
exhaustion with ground wars, its preference for high-tech, long-range
engagements and its growing anxiety over the rise of China. ...
AirSea Battle and the anti-access/area denial threat have come to
dominate the debate, with the Army still struggling to respond. The
ground force has no grand concept yet to carry its banner in the
inter-service battle over missions, roles and funding. The Obama
administration's strategic guidance, issued in January, explicitly
swears off the kind of ''large-scale, prolonged stability operations''
that the Army and Marines spent the last decade learning, slowly and
bloodily, how to do. [3]
As
an American taxpayer, I was interested to learn that the centerpiece
of the Air Force and Marine's order of battle - and the Pentagon's
biggest procurement program, amounting to almost half a trillion dollars
- might be the wrong kit for the job by the standards of Air Sea
Battle:
As
powerful as the idea has proved, AirSea Battle poses one big problem
for its Air Force and Navy sponsors: The two services' largest program,
the Joint Strike Fighter, doesn't actually fit the concept very well.
The Air Force, Navy and Marines are committed to buying 2,457 F-35
Joint Strike Fighters, also known as Lightning IIs, for an estimated
$395.7 billion. ...
The F-35 has a combat mission radius - the maximum distance at which
it can strike a target and return without refueling - of about 600
nautical miles (not quite 700 statute miles, or 1,100 kilometers).
While the aircraft itself is a small, stealthy, agile target, the
platforms from which it must refuels are not: Air Force tankers,
aircraft carriers and air bases. As adversaries acquire ever
longer-range and more accurate missiles, they can make it increasingly
dangerous to refuel short-range fighters within 700 miles of their
final target.
There are always alternatives, of course:
[G]iven
AirSea Battle's emphasis on long-range strikes, especially over the
vast distances of the Pacific, the military is arguably over-investing
in relatively short-range fighters and shortchanging long-range
bombers.
A
budget item of $5 billion is reportedly the downpayment on a new long
range bomber - enough to pay for designing the landing gear, one
analyst joked.
The Navy has its own equipment issues, though at $37 billion they are
of a lower order of magnitude than those confronting the Air Force:
[I]n the seas, the Navy faces a similar square-peg,
round-hole problem with the vessel it plans to buy more of than any
other - the Littoral Combat Ship. ''These are not large surface
combatants that are going to sail into the South China Sea and
challenge the Chinese military; that's not what they're made for,''
Adm Jonathan Greenert, chief of naval operations, said at a Government
Executive event in April. ''You won't send it into an anti-access
area'' by itself.
Greenert's candor triggered a cascade of other Navy leaders
insisting that LCS was, indeed, a warship. The service has committed
to buying 55 Littoral Combat Ships at an estimated cost of $37
billion, and the program already was under fire for cost overruns,
schedule slips and construction defects on the first two vessels.
LCS will play a vital role in the future fleet, but a supporting
one. Smaller, cheaper and significantly less damage-resistant than the
standard Arleigh Burke-class destroyer ...
The first LCS, the USS Freedom is forward-deployed at Changi in Singapore (to be followed by three more ships by 2017), one of the first fruits of the US ''pivot to Asia'' and,
potentially, a building block for ASB. The LCS also has a certain
camel's nose in the tent significance, because it turns out it needs
destroyer escort in order to complete its mission in less than
friendly environments:
[T]here
are no plans to kit out LCS for the long-range strikes at the core of
AirSea Battle, a role reserved for the more robust destroyers and the
giant aircraft carriers. Indeed, the most survivable strike platform in
the face of long-range anti-ship missiles is not a surface ship at
all, but a submarine, which the Navy buys at a steady rate of two a
year, more than any class of vessel except the LCS itself. But
submarines can't shoot down incoming missiles. So if Littoral Combat
Ships go in to hunt subs and clear mines close to the coast of a
well-armed enemy, they will need destroyers to escort them. [4]
So, in addition to its other problematic elements, we can add to the
dubious virtues of Air Sea Battle that it will require a U-turn on
existing armaments and several decades and hundreds of billions of
dollars for the military to bring its capabilities in line with the
demands of the doctrine.
By 2013, Air Sea Battle seemed to be in retreat.
The Air Sea Battle Office issued a concept summary in May 2013 that
did not mention the C word - China - and downplayed ASB as ''not a
strategy'' and ''a limited but critical component in a spectrum of
initiatives'':
ASB is a limited objective concept that describes what is
necessary for the joint force to sufficiently shape A2/AD environments
to enable concurrent or follow-on power projection operations. The
ASB Concept seeks to ensure freedom of action in the global commons
and is intended to assure allies and deter potential adversaries. [5]
Recently, Defense News reported rather disbelievingly on assertions
that ASB was ''not about China'' despite the existence of dozens of
pages in the 2010 CSBA report describing details of protracted war
with the PRC - complete with maps showing Chinese missile facilities,
including factories, that would be recipients of the US military's
special attention.
Admiral Roughead (now retired), one of the progenitors of ASB,
deployed his iPhone to rebut charges that it targeted - well, sought
to ''contain'' - China:
''There is a sense [among the Chinese] that it is aimed at
China. My answer is, it's not,'' he said. ''Their perception is that
it is aimed exclusively at them, that it's there to contain them.
''My point is: We're not containing China. If we were containing
China, why do I have an iPhone'' assembled in China ''on my desk?''
To divine the concept's true intent, Roughead pointed to its origin.
''I set up a director of warfare integration,'' he said. ''Then
[General Norton Schwartz] came in'' with the Air Force piece, and
Air-Sea Battle was born. [6]
Equally embarrassing was the allegation, difficult to prove or rebut
but at the same time rather plausible, that the announced US interest
in ASB had actually accelerated China's A2AD efforts:
Some critics have charged that the Air-Sea Battle concept is
driving China to increase its A2AD capabilities, often pointing to
recently fielded weapons that could threaten US aircraft carriers.
[Jan] Van Tol [one of the authors of the CSBA report] scoffs at the
notion that such developments are driven by Air-Sea Battle.
''China has been trying to field those capabilities well before
ASB,'' he observed. ''Interest in ASB did not trigger Chinese interest
in fielding these systems.''
One of those critics, Georgetown University's Amitai Etzioni, begged to differ:
The Pentagon, when explaining Air-Sea Battle, increasingly
speaks about interservice cooperation and coordination rather than
offensive capabilities. Etzioni has noticed the trend.
''It's true that they're now walking it back, because it's really
very escalating,'' he said. ''The Chinese keep pointing to it as a
reason to escalate.''
Currently, ASB appears to be out of vogue, judging by the key Pentagon
metrics - budget, staffing, an exciting mission, and institutional
heat - as reported by Defense News:
Within the Air-Sea Battle office itself, the discussion - at
least to outsiders - today centers on the interservice cooperation
and integration the concept is attempting to foster. ...
Only 17 officers are assigned to the Air-Sea Battle office, which
has no specific budget. The officers are counted as part of the Plans,
Policy and Operations offices from their respective services.
The database of military assets is not a completed work, [Navy Captain Philip] Dupree said, nor will it be finished soon.
''You're right, we are creating a database. But the database is not
like we worked it all out,'' he said. ''This is a process that is
going to take years. It is a lot of capabilities that we are tying
together.''
The real work of the office, Dupree said, ''is to facilitate the conversation ... ''
However, there are serious issues pertaining to the military positions
of the People's Republic of China that ASB attempted to address,
sometimes haltingly and sometimes indirectly, by evoking new norms under
the guise of establishing a new doctrine - or concept.
The first is to reaffirm absolute US military dominance (and not just
military parity or maintenance of a credible deterrent) as an
existential necessity, even as the technological and financial costs
threaten to become prohibitive.
The US Navy and Air Force are accustomed to sailing and flying
wherever they want without fear of suffering a devastating attack. In a
decade or two, China might have the capability to A2/AD the United
States, maybe just in the near-shore areas, maybe out to the first and
second island chains.
It's understandable that the United States wants to be No 1 militarily
everywhere. Nobody likes to be Number 2, even though the 150+ other
nations that make up the rest of the world have dealt with being
Number 2 with varying degrees of success for the last 70 years.
For the United States to maintain its hegemon status in the Western
Pacific as China ''rises'' will require a truly massive investment.
Since the PRC is not an overtly hostile power, it's difficult for a
democratic government which already has some serious budgetary problems
to find the money and political will to fund that contingency.
ASB tries to justify that investment - and preclude an alternate
future in which pursuit of a balance-of-power parity between the
United States and China in the West Pacific keeps war off the table -
by imagining a future in which the PRC would initiate an attack. If
ASB is in place, the can US fight back and wins. Without ASB, our
forces get chased out of the West Pacific Theater of Operations or WPTO
per the jargon.
Enter Taiwan
The second issue involves the accepted scope of military operations
protecting Taiwan. The inconvenient truth about defending Taiwan is
that the PRC's aggressive deployment of surface-to-surface missiles
means that a PRC attack can only be thwarted by strikes against Chinese
missile bases deep on the mainland - a dangerous, escalating tactic.
In 2011, Raoul Heinrichs wrote in The Diplomat about the Taiwan element of ASB:
The officer, a senior leader in US Pacific Command, looked
down, fumbled with his papers and shifted uncomfortably in his seat.
It was 2009, and he was answering a question about whether, in a
Taiwan Straits crisis similar to that which occurred in the mid-1990s,
the United States could confidently respond by again deploying
aircraft carrier groups around Taiwan. 'No,' he conceded after a long
pause, 'and it's the thing that really keeps me up at night.' It was a
telling response.
... new doubts are emerging about the credibility of certain US
strategic assurances, particularly in relation to Taiwan, which other
US allies use as a barometer of Washington's regional commitment. [7]
ASB implicitly puts conventional warfare against the PRC mainland
(with a crossed-fingers hope that the exchange doesn't go nuclear) on
the Taiwan agenda and, for that matter, on the Senkaku agenda, and
asserts a new norm meant to blunt the advantage that the PRC enjoyed if
hostilities were restricted to the vicinity of Taiwan and the Taiwan
Strait: no sanctuaries, meaning that the arena of controlled
aggression and mutually managed escalation, at least as defined by the
United States, includes the entire Chinese mainland.
Taiwan independence offers the most plausible occasion for direct
conflict between the United States and the PRC, since the Chinese
leadership maintains its absolute claims to sovereignty over the island
and has trumpeted its resolve to deny independence by any and all
means. However, for obvious reasons the United States does not wish to
go on record that it will barrage the entire Chinese mainland on
behalf of Taiwan in order to regain military parity on behalf of
Taiwan independence advocates.
The third norm relates to defining the People's Republic of China as a
first-strike military threat against US forces. Up until now, the
PRC, like other nations that found themselves the object of US
hostility, has been extremely canny about asymmetric
counter-programming against US military superiority.
To date and for the foreseeable future, in its maritime arguments with
its neighbors, the People's Republic of China has eschewed direct
military confrontation for deployment of civilian elements such as
maritime surveillance vessels, coast guard vessels, and whatnot. A
major purpose of this strategy is to deny the US military the
opportunity to place its currently sole-hegemon thumb on the scale.
However, as America's adversaries have learned to their terminal
chagrin, carefully modulated defiance and careful appeals to
international law and the authority of the United Nations butter no
parsnips once the United States has decided it wants to drop the
hammer on a nettlesome adversary.
... and enter Vietnam
For an illustration of how a US naval force engaged in routine patrol
exercising its rights to freedom of navigation near an adversary's
waters was disrupted by an unprovoked surprise anti-access/aerial
denial attack, which the US countered with a rapid, coordinated
deployment of a broad spectrum of military assets (in ASB speak)
... or parlayed a confrontational stance into the dreaded Land War in Asia (in history speak)...
... we can look beyond this September of Syria and consider the Gulf of Tonkin incident of 1964.
In 1964, the Lyndon Johnson administration was acutely aware of the
shaky status of the South Vietnamese regime under its current bossman,
General Nguyen Khanh, and was eager to secure a congressional
resolution that would enable the provision of more direct US aid.
There was considerable interest in achieving a casus belli - a
direct outrage against US military forces that would justify
escalation of US military action. The goal was obtained with the
August 4, 1964, Gulf of Tonkin incident, in which two destroyers with
an NSA Sigint mission - which involved trespassing into North
Vietnamese territorial waters in order to provoke and record radar and
radio responses - were supposedly attacked in international waters by a
swarm of torpedo boats.
As a trickle of declassified documents has made clear, there was no
attack on the night of August 4. There was, instead, a considerable
amount of confusion and, perhaps, its inglorious doppelganger, panic,
aboard the two destroyers, the Maddox and the Turner Joy
as they sailed in circles evading non-existent torpedoes and then
interpreted the sonar signal of their own propellers bouncing off
their own wakes as more torpedoes. Over an hour and a half, hundreds
of rounds were fired and fighter planes were summoned to bombard the
empty ocean.
The heightened nervous tension aboard the two vessels was a product of
the fact that, two days earlier, there had been a real attack, in
which North Vietnamese torpedo boats chased down the Maddox in broad daylight and exchanged fire before fighters from a nearby US aircraft carrier plastered the boats.
And the reason that the North Vietnamese were so aggressive was
because they had conflated the two destroyers with an apparently
unrelated slice of US provocation: attacks on North Vietnamese targets
by South Vietnamese special forces in Norwegian vessels (known as
''Nastys'') arranged by the United States, whose missions were subject
to White House approval and under the direction of the US Military
Advisory Command Vietnam to escalate pressure on North Vietnam with
unprecedented direct attacks on North Vietnamese territory in order to
get the Vietcong to ease off their campaign against General Khanh.
In fact, the August 2 attack had been triggered by a Nasty attack
against Hon Me, a strategic Vietnamese island that was also a North
Vietnamese PT boat base near the patrol area of the Maddox. On
August 4, the US Navy was even more on edge because that night the
Nastys had, for the first time, shelled the North Vietnamese mainland.
The NSA (whose voluminous sigint concerning the incident underwent
considerable suppression and distortion in the weeks after the incident)
then made its own modest but signal (pun intended) contribution to
the emerging cock-up by misinterpreting intercepted North Vietnamese
radio traffic as evidence of PT boats massing for an attack. The Maddox and the Turner Joy received a message warning of the danger of an attack. They demanded US jet fighters from the Ticonderoga and Constellation overhead at all times, and not just 15 minutes away. [8]
The two vessels bravely continued with their near-shore missions
because of the importance of upholding the principle of freedom of
navigation (the official reason):
1. Termination of DESOTO patrol [the cage-rattling Sigint mission] after two days of patrol ops (operations) subsequent to Maddox
incident as planned in Ref A (this was basic instruction for patrol),
does not in my view adequately demonstrate United States resolve to
assert our legitimate rights in these international waters. ...
The above patrol will: (a) clearly demonstrate our determination to continue these operations.
Or, according to the jaundiced view of a secret report prepared by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1968:
It says clearly that CINCPACFLT was disappointed with the
results of the mission thus far - that is, the United States had not
yet ''demonstrated'' its resolve to assert its legitimate rights in
international waters. This seems to mean that we had not as yet had
the opportunity to demonstrate this forcibly.
... Although the administration described the patrol of the Maddox and Turner Joy
as routine but prepared for attack, there is considerable evidence
that the objective of the patrol was to provoke the North Vietnamese
and then to bloody them if they responded to the provocation. [9]
Later on August 4, US personnel at the scene quickly backed away from
apocalyptic narrative they had been feeding their superiors during the
supposed encounter. However, it was too late to stop the roll toward
launching a retaliatory raid - for whatever reason; it was followed by
an address to the nation and passage of the Tonkin Gulf resolution,
which LBJ approvingly characterized as ''like Granny's nightgown; it
covered everything''.
The question has been asked why the White House ignored the dubious
nature of the August 4 action, and the reasonably prompt caveats
issued by officers on the scene, and did not wait for daylight and a
survey of the surrounding ocean to see if the US fusillade had
actually hit anything before ordering the retaliatory raids against
North Vietnamese boats and ports which - since the North Vietnamese PT
boats had not been engaged in any actions on August 4 and were
unaware that a ''red line'' had supposedly been crossed - caught them
completely napping.
In 2009, Gareth Porter made a compelling case that secretary of
defense Robert McNamara knew the case was weak, but decided to issue
the executive order for the attack and get the Vietnam War ball rolling
instead of sharing his doubts with LBJ. [10]
In the secret 1968 staff investigation (only declassified through the
efforts of John Kerry in 2010), the Senate Foreign Relations Committee
determined that secretary McNamara had misled the committee by
stating that the North Vietnamese had fired first on August 2 (the Maddox
had fired first as the boats approached at high speed and clearly
unfriendly intent), by characterizing the August 4 attack as unprovoked
and in international waters (given the provocation of the Nasty
attacks and the fact that the Maddox's mission involved
sailing inside North Vietnamese territorial waters and the fact,
unearthed with some difficulty by the staff, that the US Navy knew
about the Nasty missions.
On the even more sensitive question of what personnel of the US
Military Assistance Command, Vietnam, were doing aboard the destroyers
the night of the incident - and the coastal raids - the committee
apparently chose not to go there).
This exercise in near-shore assertiveness gives an idea of how quickly
an incident can turn into a war, especially when the desire to start a
war is barely disguised.
The commander of the Navy task force in charge of the Maddox and Turner Joy
sent out the message (page 71 of the report) that reads like the
distant but direct ancestor 21st century Air Sea Battle
fear-mongering:
It is apparent that DRV [Democratic Republic of Vietnam] has
thrown down the gauntlet now considers itself at war with the United
States. It is felt that they will attack US forces on sight with no
regard for cost. US ships in Gulf of Tonkin can no longer assume that
they will be considered neutrals exercising the right of free transit.
They will be treated as belligerents from first detection and must
consider themselves as such. DRV PTS [patrol craft] have advantage,
especially at night, of being able to hide in junk concentrations all
across the Gulf of Tonkin. This would allow attack from short range
with little or no early warning.
Tonkin 1964 looks a lot like ASB 2030: hostility and hair-trigger
reactions in an adversary's near-shore waters under the flag of
''freedom of navigation''.
Of course, ASB can deter war, if the destabilizing escalation it
engenders is managed by men and women of infinite wisdom and with the
best of motives; but extrapolating from the 1964 precedent, in other
hands, it can simply make provoking a war easier.
Considering that ASB needs the plausibility of the PRC launching an
initial attack to justify itself, that should be enough to make people
nervous.
In 1968, digesting the staff report in executive session, the members of
the Senate Foreign Relations Committee ruminated on the implications
of the Gulf of Tonkin Incident and the war resolution it enabled:
Senator CASE: Mr Chairman, I think one of the suggestions, I
do not know that it has quite been put into these words, is that the
Defense Department, for purposes which it considered most patriotic
and necessary, decided that the time had come to stop shillyshallying
with the commies and resist, and this was the time, and it had to be
contrived so that the President could come along, and that the
Congress would follow. That is one of the things.
Senator HICKENLOOPER: I think historically whenever a country wants to
go to war it finds a pretext. We have had 5,000 pretexts historically
to go to war. [page 97]
5,000 pretexts for war. Make ASB the five thousand and first.
"5000 Pretexts for War"
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