By Thomas G. Mahnken*
This article was first published in the Australian Naval Review, 2019, Issue 2, in December 2019.
Recent policy documents such as the 2017 National Security Strategy and 2018 National Defense Strategy have been forthright in discussing the multi-dimensional challenge posed by China as well as the need for the United States to compete with China in multiple spheres of statecraft and diverse geographic settings over the long term.
Largely absent from these documents as well as broader policy debates, however, is a discussion of what concerns us about China’s rise and the objectives we hope to achieve in that competition. Such a discussion is the necessary predicate for the development of an effective strategy.
What Concerns Us About China’s Rise?
Four aspects of the rise of China stand out as being of particular concern to the United States and its allies.[1] If these features were to change, all else being equal, the United States would be much less apt to view China as a competitor.
The first has to do with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leadership’s increasing attention to external affairs. It is axiomatic that any country’s political leaders pay greater attention to domestic matters than to international affairs, and that is certainly true regarding the CCP leadership, which is highly attentive to threats to domestic stability. Nevertheless, in recent years China has become increasingly active on the international stage. China has not only exerted its weight in its neighborhood but also has increasingly done so in areas far removed from the Asian continent, to include Africa and the Persian Gulf. This international activism, to include not only economic investment and attempts to increase political influence, but also increasingly military deployments, raises concerns in the United States and among America’s allies.
The second aspect of China’s rise that raises concern has to do with China’s geopolitical orientation. Whereas the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) was long focused on the Asian continent, in recent decades it has increasingly adopted a maritime orientation. It is thus the build-up of the PLA Navy (PLAN) and PLA Air Force (PLAAF), as well as other anti-access/area denial (or, in Chinese parlance, counter-intervention) capabilities, such as Beijing’s missile and anti-satellite weapons, and not Chinese military spending in the abstract, which has stimulated a US and allied response. Similarly, China’s efforts to claim sovereignty over the South China Sea and East China Sea and attempts to coerce or invade Taiwan would bring China into conflict with the United States and its allies.
The third area of concern, related to the previous two, involves China’s attitude toward the international status quo: China’s leadership has increasingly challenged the status quo, whether rhetorically or, increasingly, through action. Nothing illustrates this attitude more tangibly and dramatically than China’s campaign of building and then militarizing new land features in the South China Sea as a means of bolstering Beijing’s claim of ownership.
A final area of concern has to do with China’s domestic political system. However loudly or quietly the United States and its allies seek to promote democracy abroad, China’s authoritarian political system and disregard for human rights and personal freedom are recurring sources of tension with the United States, its allies, and others in the region and beyond. Whatever U.S. leaders say, the leadership of the CCP firmly believes that the United States is out to overthrow it. Moreover, under Xi Jinping the CCP has set about establishing an authoritarian alternative to the liberal international order.
A strong case can be made that if these features were to change – if China was to become more internally focused, emphasize more the Asian continent over its maritime periphery, become more supportive of the status quo, and more pluralistic – then the United States and its allies would be much less concerned about China’s overall rise. Indeed, under these circumstances China would come more to resemble today’s India: a rising power with growing economic strength that is internally focused, continentally oriented, supportive of large parts of the international status quo, and pluralistic (indeed, a robust democracy).
This being the case, we should ask whether it is feasible for the United States and its allies to influence these aspects of China’s behavior, and if so how. As we will argue below, a strategy of maritime pressure could contribute to achieving at least two of these aims; namely, those related to China’s maritime orientation and revisionist attitude toward the status quo.
China’s Counter-Intervention Strategy
China’s leadership has been able to take advantage of a series of favorable asymmetries in pursuit of its aims. First, China’s leadership has been able to exploit a geographic asymmetry: the fact that the territorial objectives of greatest interest to China – Taiwan, the South China Sea, and the East China Sea – are far closer to it than to the United States. By contrast, the United States faces the “tyranny of distance”: the fact that the United States has territory, allies, and interests in the Western Pacific, but is separated from them by the expanse of the Pacific Ocean.
Second, the Chinese leadership has been able to exploit a political asymmetry inherent in U.S. alliance relationships. In particular, it has used the growth of Chinese military power in general, and China’s deployment of A2/AD capabilities in particular, to undermine confidence in U.S. security guarantees among America’s allies and partners in the Asia-Pacific region. China has been able to exploit the fact that the United States relies upon forward-based assets stationed on allied territory to both deter aggression and reassure allies and friends. A significant portion of its defense investments has been targeted at both raising the cost to U.S. allies and friends of hosting U.S. forces while also undermining their confidence in U.S. security guarantees.
Third, in terms of technology, China has been able to exploit the growth and spread of precision strike systems through the development and deployment of a centralized, land-based reconnaissance-strike system composed of long-range sensors, command and control networks, and precision weapons to hold U.S. and allied air bases, ports, facilities, and personnel at risk. In particular, the PLA has fielded advanced capabilities for wide-area surveillance and targeting, large numbers of ballistic and cruise missiles, integrated air defense system, advanced fighter-bombers, a large submarine force, modern surface combatants, and hardened and protected command and control networks.
Finally, China has developed a counter-intervention doctrine aimed at defeating the U.S. style of power projection, which relies upon fixed forward-based assets and large power projection forces centered on carrier strike groups. The PLA has, figuratively and perhaps literally, studied the U.S. armed forces’ playbook by observing U.S. combat performance from the 1991 Gulf War, studying closely U.S. exercises and operational deployments, reading U.S. joint doctrine, and conducting no doubt extensive espionage.
China’s pursuit of a range of counter-intervention capabilities poses a significant challenge to U.S. interests. Those capabilities constrain U.S. options to project power, thereby undermining U.S. credibility among allies and friends. They impose considerable costs on the U.S. armed forces as they seek to respond. And they give China momentum in the Sino-American competition, forcing the United States to develop costly operational and technological countermeasures in response. Any strategy to respond should yield an expanded set of U.S. and allied options while constraining those of China. Those options should impose considerable costs upon China as it responds. And the strategy should give the United State momentum in the Sino-American competition, forcing Beijing to respond to allied moves.
Crafting A Response: A Strategy of Maritime Pressure
A U.S. response to China’s anti-access strategy should seek to gain and exploit advantages in the areas of geography, alliances, technology, and doctrine. Such a strategy should seek to use Asia’s strategic geography – in particular, the barrier formed by Japan, Taiwan, and the Philippines – to constrain China’s access to the Western Pacific in time of crisis or war. As described in depth in the following chapter, this could be accomplished by fielding sensor and engagement networks both unilaterally and in cooperation with allies along China’s maritime flanks.
America’s alliances also represent a major source of strength. As further described in Chapter three the United States should deepen its interoperability with allies to bolster their capabilities and strengthen their will. The United States already shares information with its allies, and the case for increasing that cooperation is strong. The United States should also deepen cooperation in the areas of theater strike with key allies.
In terms of technology, the United States should both develop and deploy countermeasures to China’s precision strike systems as well as deploy anti-access systems of its own. Counters to precision strike include hardening and dispersal of key facilities, countermeasures to precision navigation and timing, and the development of directed energy weapons to destroy precision weapons. At the same time, the United States should deploy a joint and combined anti-access network of its own along the First Island Chain.
In terms of doctrine, the United States should exploit the weaknesses inherent in a centralized approach to warfare, including the need to gather and process large volumes of information. Chinese military doctrine displays a strong belief that strategy is a science rather than an art and maintains great confidence in its ability to predict the outcome of conflicts.[2] In order to bolster deterrence, the United States and its allies should work to reduce the confidence of the Chinese leadership in its ability to control the course and outcome of a future conflict.
Such a strategy, if implemented consistently over time, holds the promise of influencing Chinese actions at the tactical, operational, and strategic level. Tactically, it would erode the effectiveness of Chinese counter-intervention systems. Operationally, it would deny the PLA leadership the type of war it has been planning for decades, forcing it to either double-down on its investment in anti-access capabilities or seek a new approach. But its greatest promise is likely to be strategic: such an approach holds the potential to alter the decision-making calculus of the leadership of the CCP. A strategy of this type could markedly increase the cost to Beijing of pursuing a strategy of maritime expansion and potentially rechannel Chinese attention away from its maritime flanks and toward the Asian continent. It would increase the cost of challenging international norms and hopefully give the Chinese leadership greater incentive to accept significant elements of the existing international order. In these ways, the strategy would address at least two of the concerns about China’s rise articulated above.
* Thomas G. Mahnken is President and Chief Executive Officer of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments and a Senior Research Professor at the Merrill Center for Strategic Studies at Johns Hopkins SAIS. From 2006 to 2009 he served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Policy Planning.
[1] See the discussion in Thomas G. Mahnken, “The Australia-US Alliance in US Strategic Policy” in Peter J. Dean, Stephan Frühling, and Brendan Taylor, eds., Australia’s American Alliance (Melbourne: Melbourne U P, 2016).
[2] Thomas G. Mahnken, Secrecy and Strategem: Understanding Chinese Strategic Culture (Sydney: Lowy Institute, 2011).
