By Ben Ho*
Last month, Taiwan’s Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) published a report that has a section outlining how China would likely use its aircraft carriers as part of Beijing’s much-touted anti-access/area-denial (A2/AD) strategy. Citing declassified sources from Taiwan’s Ministry of National Defense (MND), the report added that Chinese carrier operations are “geared towards ‘denying’ the United States military access to the Taiwan Strait area of operations.” (Breaking Defense).
While many naval observers — including this author, who previously covered this issue on these pages — believe that carrier strike groups (CSGs) of the People’s Liberation Army-Navy (PLAN) would only have a limited role to play in a Taiwan contingency, the MAC seems to suggest that this would not be the case — and perhaps with some credibility, given that the council drew its conclusion from MND sources.
How then would such a scenario — let’s say in the late 2020s, which brings China’s carrier total to three — possibly play out and what to make of it?
First and foremost, aircraft carriers are likely a part of the Chinese A2/AD edifice only as far as these vessels draw attention away from other, perhaps more important missions. That said, Beijing would do well to deploy its carriers as a “fleet-in-being” as opposed to capital ships to jostle with the adversary for sea control.
Simply put, a fleet-in-being is a force that does not actively seek battle with the (stronger) adversary, but whose mere existence would be a factor in the calculus of opposing strategists. As Trevor Phillips-Levine and Andrew Tenbusch rightly pointed out in a piece for the Centre for International Maritime Security, enemy fleets-in-being “require considerable diversions of resources and capabilities kept in reserve, whether those fleets are a direct participant in an operation or not.”
This concept of operations would see the Fujian, Shandong, and Liaoning — whether concentrated in a single or two or more task forces — roaming the Philippine Sea, but not actively seeking battle with the US Navy in order to complicate Washington’s calculus and tie up American forces that could be better utilized elsewhere. (If this author were the PLAN commander, he would have two of such entities — one cantered on the much more capable “large-deck” Fujian and the other consisting of the two “light” carriers. Such a disposition of forces should be a meaningful balance between achieving concentration/massing of forces, a key principle of war, and dispersion, which is crucial to signature management in the contemporary battlespace.)
It makes sense for the PLAN to adopt this CONOPS. After all, the Fujian, Shandong, and Liaoning are the crown jewels of the Chinese navy and despite the aegis accorded to them by Beijing’s vaulted, though untested, “fortress fleet,” it would arguably still be suicidal for PLAN flattops to seek battle with the US Navy (USN). Indeed, the latter should deploy at least two carrier groups — possibly more — for a Taiwan operation given the extremely high stakes involved.
Should the Chinese try to fight a 21st-century version of the 1944 Battle of the Philippine Sea, PLAN chieftains know the Americans have the edge in experience. By the late 2020s, the US would have almost 110 years of experience in carrier operations; the Chinese on the other hand, only less than 20. And the USN mainstay carrier-based fighter, the F/A-18E/F Super Hornet, is combat proven, while its PLAN counterpart, the J-15 Flying Shark, is not.
On the other hand, who holds the cards in the numbers game is less clear. While 140-odd aircraft on the two notional US carriers would square off against 110 on all three Chinese flattops, the latter could count to a larger extent on support from land-based airpower. (Admittedly, while a bean-counting exercise of this sort is imperfect in assessing combat capabilities, it nevertheless offers a decent starting point for the discussion.) Tellingly, retired Taiwanese admiral and former vice defense minister Lee Hsi-ming maintained last year that PLAN carriers “would not be able to withstand attacks by the US military.”
How US naval planners react to such a Chinese fleet-in-being depends on what they make of this force. American commanders steeped in the concept of sea control should bear in mind what transpired in the Cape Engano engagement of the 1944 Battle of Leyte Gulf. There, the entire US carrier force involved in the battle was deployed against its Japanese counterpart, and it turned out that the latter was just a decoy to divert attention from the Leyte beachhead — with almost disastrous consequences for the Americans.
Think also of the disproportionate effects a single US carrier force or two had in the early months of the Pacific War on the Japanese war effort. To illustrate, Imperial Japan was so taken aback by the 1942 Doolittle Raid (which had minimal tactical effects, but which was strategically profound) that it devoted an entire operation — the Midway campaign — to seek a decisive battle with US flattops.
In that regard, every single USN platform seeking out Chinese CSGs would be one less American asset away from what should be the main effort, which is to relieve the by-then beleaguered Taiwanese forces. And every single day the USN devotes to finding its adversary on the high seas buys more time for the People’s Republic in its military operation against Taiwan.
To accentuate the fleet-in-being concept while exploiting the mobility of warships in general at the same time, China would also do well to not tether its carriers to an area 300 to 800 kilometers off eastern Taiwan, as the Mainland Affairs Council report believes these vessels would do. The figures raised suggest that Chinese CSGs would station themselves such that eastern Taiwan is within range of carrier airpower. As per the MAC, such a disposition of forces would bring about an “east-west pincer attack” on, “an all-round island siege” of Taiwan.
To be sure, this modus operandi could divert Taiwan’s attention to its east coast and complicate its defense planning. However, this CONOPS violates to some extent the tenet “do not tie a mobile fleet to a piece of ground.” Indeed, this author wrote last year that such a set-up could see the Chinese navy “boxed in from four directions between unfriendly forces,” not just two as the MAC report contended.
PLAN strategists well versed in history would also note that this set-up is reminiscent of what the Japanese did during the initial phases of the Battle of Midway. What happened was that Imperial forces were split between two competing objectives — to fight the US fleet and to subjugate Midway island. This decision, which violated the principle of war regarding the selection and maintenance of the aim, contributed to the Japanese debacle in the battle.
All in all, it should not come as a surprise that China might use its carriers in a somewhat unconventional manner during a Taiwan conflict. In recent years, naval commentators have written about deploying the aircraft carrier in non-traditional ways, with the article by Phillips-Levine and Tenbusch mentioned above going as far as recommending that the flattop be used as “bait.”
Given the Chinese proclivity to worship at the altar of Sun Tzu and use deception as a stratagem of warfare, one would probably not want to bet against the People’s Republic using its flattops ingeniously.
However, even if utilized in a secondary role, given the exalted, even phallic, status of aircraft carriers for China — or for that matter, any country which owns them — one who expects them to be relatively weakly defended come wartime a la Imperial Japan’s Northern Force during the Battle off Cape Engano is going to be badly disappointed.
*Ben Ho writes on airpower and naval issues.
