CHAPTER 1

Mahan’s Two Tridents

In December 2006, Chinese president Hu Jintao told a group of naval officers, “We should endeavor to build a powerful people’s navy that can adapt to its historical mission during a new century and a new period.” The fleet should stand ready to uphold Chinese interests “at any time.” “It is a glorious task,” concluded Hu.¹ As the president’s words attest, this is a time of flux for navies. Consider the material dimension of maritime strategy, the most easily observable, most easily quantifiable expression of strategic thought about the sea. Yale University professor Paul Kennedy observes that European and Asian navies are on opposite trajectories from a material standpoint. European governments seem resigned to letting their fleets shrink, in effect surrendering their claim to sea power. This downward drift is taking place despite the European Union’s aspirations to leadership in the Gulf of Aden and the Red Sea, where piracy endangers merchant shipping critical to global prosperity.² For Europeans, broadly speaking, sea power is now more a matter of constabulary action than it is of armed encounters to determine who will rule the waves.³

Counterpiracy off Somalia is a better metaphor than the clash between enemy main fleets for contemporary European sea power. High-end naval platforms and capabilities command ebbing popular and elite support in European capitals—witness the recent decision by Britain’s Royal Navy to decommission surface combatants with useful service life remaining. The Royal Navy in effect mortgaged its future to fund two midsized aircraft carriers only to see the British government consider canceling the carriers as well.⁴ In November 2009, The Guardian of London reported that the U.K. Ministry of Defense was mulling selling one of the carriers to India.⁵ What a metaphor for the eastward shift of sea power now taking place! Financial pressures and interservice rivalry have driven the British force structure inexorably downward. Indeed, the Royal Navy is now smaller than the French Navy for the first time since the 1805 Battle of Trafalgar, when Lord Horatio Nelson’s fleet outdueled an allied Franco-Spanish fleet in the Mediterranean Sea.

The decline of European seafaring inverts half a millennium of maritime history. Western apathy toward traditional sea power is manifesting itself even as Asians bolt together fleets with gusto. Europe inherited its mastery of Asian waters almost by default, when Portuguese seafarers made their entry into the Indian Ocean following Hindu and Chinese rulers’ abandonment of sea power. Kennedy likens the discontinuity in maritime history evident today to a similar discontinuity following the decision by China’s Ming dynasty to dismantle the world’s most formidable navy, Admiral Zheng He’s “treasure fleet.”⁶ China evacuated the seas scant decades before Vasco da Gama dropped anchor along the Indian subcontinent, ushering in an age of external dominion over Asian national life.⁷

Control of maritime communications in Asia enabled European conquerors to deprive India of its independence for the only time in the subcontinent’s long history, to have their way with a China in decline, and to establish bases and colonies throughout coastal Asia. Only in the 1950s, following two world wars and long decades of imperial decline, did Great Britain withdraw from east of Suez, tacitly ceding naval supremacy to the U.S. Navy. By quitting Asian waters, the Royal Navy signaled the beginning of the end of the “Vasco da Gama epoch” of Asian history.⁸

As Europeans turn their backs on conventional combat at sea, Asians have hurled themselves into the naval enterprise with aplomb, and to great fanfare. After decades of studied silence, China has at last confessed, more or less, to its aircraft-carrier ambitions. Over the past ten years, the People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLA Navy) has introduced five new classes of modern conventional and nuclear submarines. High-tech PLA Navy guided-missile destroyers made their debut in the Indian Ocean, discharging counterpiracy duties. Beijing is reportedly attempting to manufacture an antiship ballistic missile that might well change the rules of the contest for maritime mastery in the Far East. President Hu’s words about a powerful people’s navy manifest themselves in such platforms and systems. Hu’s words are more than mere rhetoric. They betoken a sharp, determined turn to the sea. His phrase has become a fixture in Chinese commentary and strategic debates about maritime matters.

China is not alone in laboring to construct a great navy. Japan, which already boasts a world-class fleet, recently put to sea what it euphemistically calls a “helicopter destroyer,” or DDH. By all appearances, the DDH is a prototype for a future light carrier. Next-generation Japanese submarines equipped with air-independent propulsion—a cutting-edge technology that permits diesel boats to remain underwater indefinitely, eluding detection—have started to enter service. South Korea finds itself in the midst of an across-the-board naval modernization program. Over the next decade, Seoul will take delivery of frigates, diesel submarines, and amphibious assault ships, not to mention state-of-the-art Aegis guided-missile destroyers. Well to the south, Australia too plans to acquire Aegis destroyers. Canberra will also procure twelve diesel-electric submarines worth nearly $17 billion. The submarine project represents the most ambitious, most expensive military project in Australian history. And to Australia’s northwest, India forthrightly avows its desire for a dominant navy. While Indian naval development has made fitful progress, New Delhi has inked a contract for a retired Russian aircraft carrier and cut steel on two Indian-built flattops—creating the core of a blue water fleet.

As one civilization vacates the oceans, then, another is crowding the seas and skies with ships and warplanes that bristle with offensively oriented weaponry. What the rise of Asian naval power portends for the region remains to be seen, but past maritime realignments should prompt practitioners and scholars of sea power to take notice. The interwar period, for example, saw the future belligerents fit out the navies that would pummel one another in World War II. There is little reason to believe that a similar great-power cataclysm is imminent today, or even thinkable. Even so, the material ingredients for competition and rivalry are certainly present in the tight confines of the East Asian littoral. Two Chinese analysts warn of Sino-Japanese frictions, given the close geographic proximity between two venturesome sea powers. Observe Zhang Ming and Chen Xiangjun, “Due to geo-strategic considerations, it is very difficult to contain two world-class powers along the cramped western Pacific coastline and to keep two ocean-going navies confined within the first island chain.”⁹

Zhang and Chen prophesy that the potential for accidents, miscalculations, and even deliberate provocations will mount as great navies encounter one another in Asian waters. They are onto something important, and something that defies normal methods for appraising sea power. Tallying up ships, aircraft, and weaponry is only one benchmark for sea power, worthy and indeed critical though it is. The realm of ideas is admittedly more nebulous than that of net assessment, but understanding how an aspiring or established sea power thinks about strategy is indispensable to forecasting how it will fare on the high seas. If a navy’s political masters and commanders incline toward offensively minded strategy, it will employ the assets at its disposal far differently from a navy predisposed to defense. Some scholarship, for instance, condemns the “cult of offense” that permeated strategic thought and military planning in Europe for helping bring on the slaughter of World War I.

Unsurprisingly, then, the material discontinuity Paul Kennedy discerns between Asia’s maritime rise and the freefall of European sea power finds an intellectual parallel. Professor Geoffrey Till of King’s College London expands on this point, maintaining that Europeans are entering into a “postmodern,” “post-Mahanian” perspective on sea power. The postmodern approach is predicated more on noncombat missions aimed at upholding “good order at sea” in the face of nontraditional challenges than on pounding away at enemy fleets. Asians, says Till, are on precisely the opposite intellectual track. Asia is entering a “modern,” “neo-Mahanian” world rather like the one inhabited by Western sea powers and Japan in the days of Mahan. If he is right, Asians will display a bloody-minded outlook toward the chances of armed conflict at sea.¹⁰

And indeed, Mahan is making a comeback, judging by the martial overtones of Asian commentary on marine affairs. The Asia columnist for the Economist magazine attended the May 2009 meeting of the Shangri-La Dialogue, which convened in Singapore under the auspices of the International Institute of Strategic Studies. As “Banyan” tells it, whenever he “prodded a military man from India or China, out leapt a Mahanite.”¹¹ These days the name of Mahan is shorthand for fatalistic acceptance of zero-sum international competition and war on the high seas. Atlantic Monthly columnist Robert Kaplan stops short of such bleak predictions, but he observes that “whereas the U.S. Navy pays homage to Mahan by naming buildings after him, the Chinese avidly read him; the Chinese are the Mahanians now” ¹² (our emphasis). Echoing Banyan, Kaplan opines that it is not just the Chinese; “his books are now all the rage” among Indians as well.¹³ If the PLA Navy and the Indian Navy indeed attempt to transcribe Mahanian theory directly into naval strategy and forces, the chances of an epic fleet battle like the one America’s sea-power “evangelist” or “Copernicus” seemed to preach will increase.¹⁴

For its part, the United States appears to be trying to straddle the neo- and post-Mahanian worlds, meeting proliferating demands with flat or declining resources. An old navy joke holds that if the sea services keep doing more and more with less and less, they will end up doing everything with nothing. Such is the lot of a nation like the United States that regards itself both as the chief custodian of free navigation in the world’s sea-lanes, a function that involves upholding good order at sea, and as the protector of its own national interests and prerogatives against aspiring “peer competitors,” rivals more or less equivalent to the United States by the yardsticks of diplomatic, informational and ideological, military, and economic power.

 

U.S. Navy operations in the Indian Ocean are a microcosm of this larger strategic phenomenon. Navy fighter/attack aircraft render close air support to troops in Afghanistan, the highest form of power projection ashore, even as billion-dollar ships track innumerable, often primitive small vessels to suppress piracy and interdict proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. At the same time, the Navy is almost certainly prepared to strike against the Iranian nuclear complex should statesmen in Washington give the order. How well the sea services handle the dual character of sea power, in which police and warfighting functions appear coequal, represents the central test of American staying power in the maritime domain. This challenge is particularly acute in Asia, where the expansion of indigenous naval power is accelerating while the U.S. presence remains stagnant.

If prognoses by Kennedy, Till, Kaplan, and the like are correct, the Asian seas are primed for a reconfiguration of maritime power. Helping the United States manage a disturbance to the regional order—to the extent possible—is our chief purpose in this book. It is no secret that China’s rise is the primary challenge and, we hope, a major opportunity for the United States and its Asian allies. In a sense, the book is a “red team” exercise in which we try to anticipate future trends, helping the United States, the “blue team,” start adapting its strategy and forces—keeping abreast if not ahead of change. We believe empathy with the red team is a virtue in this kind of endeavor, so we pay special attention to the human dimension of maritime strategy. Americans must avoid projecting their own assumption onto societies with vastly different traditions, experiences, and habits of mind. By knowing how competitors think, the United States will improve its prospects of responding wisely to Sino-American interactions.

CHINESE SEA POWER AND THE ANTIACCESS/ AREA-DENIAL DEBATE

Military and operational trends are the focal point for most analyses of challenges to U.S. nautical supremacy. The notion that an Asian antagonist might employ antiaccess and area-denial strategies has gained substantial currency inside the Beltway. (For simplicity’s sake, we group these strategic variants together as “access denial.”) Such a strategy involves taking concerted military and nonmilitary steps to (1) delay the arrival of U.S. and allied forces in-theater; (2) prevent U.S. forces from using bases in the region to sustain military operations (or, failing that, disrupt the use of these bases); and (3) keep U.S. power-projection assets as far away as possible.¹⁵ However useful in the military sphere, we believe this one-dimensional outlook impoverishes the study of access. Another purpose of this book, consequently, is to widen our conception of access beyond the use of force.

 

American analysts have been hard at work attempting to project how access denial would affect a clash over Taiwan. As Thomas Ehrhard and Robert Work explain:

PRC “anti-access operations” are defined as actions taken to deny U.S. forces from deploying to a position in theater from which they can conduct effective operations against Chinese forces. They include PRC political action to coerce regional countries into denying U.S. forces access to operational bases, and operational attacks against existing U.S. regional bases or forward deployed naval forces. PRC “area-denial operations” are actions taken within the Pacific theater of operations to deny successfully deployed U.S. forces an ability to conduct effective operations in the vicinity of Taiwan and the Chinese mainland. ¹⁶

The authors sound a gloomy note, concluding that, “For the first time since the late 1980s, and for only the second time since the end of World War II, U.S. carrier strike forces will soon face a major land-based threat that outranges them”¹⁷ (their emphasis). In other words, they rate the Chinese threat to U.S. forces in Asia on par with that posed by the Soviet and Imperial Japanese fleets, the last to challenge the United States for command of Far Eastern waters.

Unsurprisingly, considering the bleak tone assumed by influential commentators, access denial has become the prism through which policymakers in Washington survey the rise of Chinese sea power. They see the threat as real, growing, and worrisome. Their obsession with access denial is understandable, and even necessary given the ramifications for Taiwan. Conceiving of China’s maritime ascent too narrowly, though, poses certain analytical dangers. We contend that China’s access-denial strategy is only one facet of a broader, more sustained Chinese nautical challenge to the United States. To casually conflate access denial with China’s ambitious naval project is to misread Chinese sea power entirely. This sort of myopia severely limits forecasts of China’s longer-term maritime prospects, misinforming U.S. efforts to make and implement strategy in Asia.

Assume that China’s buildup of access-denial capacity, manifest in its naval modernization program, is designed solely to return Taiwan to mainland rule. If so, it is also safe to assume that Beijing will curtail its challenge to U.S. naval supremacy, or end it altogether, once it regains the island. By this logic, a satiated China will likely turn inward on the “day after Taiwan.” The Communist Party regime will have retrieved the last piece of Chinese territory lost to foreign aggression, restoring national unity and dignity in the process. China will have accomplished its aims at sea while the United States will have little choice but to acquiesce in the new normal across the Taiwan Strait. Asia will return to an uneasy equilibrium between the ascendant land power, China, and the ascendant sea power, the United States. In this alternative future, neither can overcome the other’s comparative geostrategic advantages; neither has much reason to try. Relatively stable coexistence resumes.

What if this optimistic chain of reasoning is wrong? Present trends in China’s naval buildup, and in rhetoric issuing from Beijing, suggest that such a benign outcome is neither inevitable nor probable. That China is already building up power-projection capabilities for the post-Taiwan future is no longer a controversial statement.¹⁸ If so, systems under development for access denial are the precursor to a more capable, lasting Chinese presence in Asian waters. Few China-watchers have begun exploring the ramifications of such a presence. Of the few who have, even fewer have sought to estimate China’s prospects of gaining more control of its maritime environs. How Beijing might establish an offshore preserve is a question that remains unanswered.

Without a firm grasp of specific factors, processes, and scenarios impelling China’s seaward turn, Washington and its allies have little basis to plot long-term maritime strategy in Asia. We intend to plug this analytical gap.

A MAHANIAN LOGIC AND GRAMMAR OF ACCESS

As noted earlier, Western strategists tend to restrict the question of access to its military dimension, impairing their ability to envisage the future of Chinese maritime strategy. We nonetheless believe the term “access” possesses enormous analytical value. An expansive outlook toward access makes a useful starting point from which to chart the course of Chinese sea power, and to assess its potential effects on U.S. maritime strategy in Asia. For help recalibrating our field of view, we turn to Alfred Thayer Mahan, whose writings supply the building blocks for a holistic approach to this topic.

The sea, proclaimed the American sea captain, was a “wide common, over which men may pass in all directions.”¹⁹ “Communications,” meaning secure passage through this watery medium, was “the most important single element in strategy, political or military.”²⁰ The “eminence of sea power” lay in its ability to control the sea-lanes, along with critical geographical nodes that facilitated or impeded the flow of commercial and naval shipping. Digging a Central American canal and obtaining Caribbean bases from which to safeguard the approaches to the Isthmus obsessed him .²¹ The ability to ensure communications “to one’s self, and to interrupt them for an adversary, affects the very root of a nation’s vigor,” concluded Mahan.²²

Military-centric definitions of access conform to these fairly familiar observations about sea power. But there is more to Mahan than that, as a thorough survey of his massive body of work shows. Mahan’s works can and should be read on two levels. Prussian strategic theorist Carl von Clausewitz sheds light on the twin nature of Mahanian sea-power theory, postulating that “war is only a branch of political activity; that is in no sense autonomous.” Clausewitz refutes the common idea that war suspends political interchange between the belligerents “and replaces it by a wholly different condition, ruled by no law but its own.” He poses a rhetorical question: “Do political relations between peoples and between their governments stop when diplomatic notes are no longer exchanged? Is war not just another expression of their thoughts, another form of speech or writing? Its grammar, indeed, may be its own, but not its logic.”²³ By this he means two things that bear on our understanding of access. War, first of all, is the pursuit of national policy with the admixture of military means. It differs from other international interactions by virtue of chance and uncertainty, the dark passions it fires, and countless other factors. Second, political interchange between belligerents does not cease when gunfire starts. Nonmilitary instruments like diplomacy, economic pressure or incentives, and alliance politics play their part during wartime.

Now apply this dual structure to Mahanian theory. Many commentators pay excessive heed to Mahan’s grammar of operations and tactics, to the neglect of his larger logic—or, as historians Harold and Margaret Sprout termed it, his “philosophy”—of sea power.²⁴ Slighting the logic, which infuses meaning into his grammar of marine combat, limits and distorts our understanding of Mahanian sea power.²⁵ The naval historian vehemently denied lusting for battle on the high seas, and indeed, in The Problem of Asia, he insisted that “military or political force” represented an “alien element” in international relations.²⁶ Mahan urged navies to take the offensive should war be thrust upon them, but he never advocated naval rivalry for its own sake. In contemporary parlance, he urged sea powers to “hedge” against the likelihood of military conflict, keeping their options open.

But he also went Clausewitz one better, carrying his logic/grammar construct beyond the battlefield and into the domain of peacetime diplomacy. Naval strategy differed from military strategy, wrote Mahan, because it had “for its end to found, support, and increase, as well in peace as in war, the sea power of a country.”²⁷ Finding and securing strategic geographic nodes was one way to bolster sea power in peacetime, as were efforts to hold open access to markets and bases. A nation intent on sea power was perpetually on the offensive, in wartime and peacetime alike. Not for nothing did German admiral Wolfgang Wegener affirm that Great Britain had prosecuted a centuries-long strategic offensive, assembling the largest maritime empire the world had known.

Naval preparedness was the sharp edge of maritime strategy, then, but it was only a means to an end. Although Mahan believed fleet actions were necessary at times, he was adamant that peacetime commerce was the true path to national prosperity and greatness. “War has ceased to be the natural, or even normal, condition of nations,” he declared, “and military considerations are simply accessory and subordinate to the other greater interests” they serve.²⁸ Economics and commerce predominate. The “starting point and foundation” for comprehending sea power was “the necessity to secure commerce, by political measures conducive to military, or naval strength. This order is that of actual relative importance to the nation of the three elements—commercial, political, military.”²⁹

Scarcely could there be a clearer statement of why nations covet access to far-flung regions such as Asia. In essence, commerce is about privileged access to the means needed to generate wealth and national power. Such access is impossible without the politico-military means to protect it, and to keep others from denying commercial access. Seagoing nations shoul d lock their gaze on this overriding priority. Mahan thus advances a tripartite concept, which, given the nautical bent of his writings, we call his first “trident” of sea power. Access to sources of economic well-being—namely foreign trade, commerce, and resources—ranks first among equals within the Mahanian trident; military access, third. This cuts against the usual interpretation of Mahan’s works.

The second plane on which sea-power theory functions, Mahan’s grammar, is more martial and operational in nature. We call this his second trident. But even here, he assigns commerce pride of place. Indeed, trade and commerce form the interface between the grammar and logic of sea power. In his most influential work, The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1660–1783, the historian portrayed sea power as founded on the three “pillars” of production, merchant and naval shipping, and overseas markets and bases. Mysteriously, he conflated markets, essential to commercial interchange, with the forward outposts needed to refuel and repair steam-propelled vessels.³⁰ Whatever the case, all three pillars relate directly to commerce, namely industrial production at home, the merchant marine, and foreign markets. Mahan designated the “tendency to trade, involving of necessity the production of something to trade with . . . the national characteristic most important to the development of sea power.”³¹

Two pillars relate directly to naval power, namely forward naval stations and the battle fleet. If the logic of sea power dictates gaining access for commercial reasons, then the grammar means securing access through force of naval arms. “Command of the sea,” maintained Mahan, meant “that overbearing power on the sea which drives the enemy’s flag from it, or allows it to appear only as a fugitive; and which, by controlling the great common, closes the highways by which commerce moves to and fro from the enemy’s shores.”³² Overbearing power, in the form of warships, naval weaponry, and battle efficiency, embodies the martial grammar of sea power. Both tridents must remain sharp for either to do its work.

The two-tiered nature of sea power, embodying as it does both peacetime and wartime activities, reaffirms Mahan’s nuanced approach to maritime affairs. Importantly, both the grammar and the logic of sea power have access to locations (such as seaports and bases) and to physical goods (such as trade commodities and natural resources) as their end. The logic and grammar advance the same goals, but the logic governs the geopolitical and strategic aspects of sea power while the grammar supplies the rules for naval preparedness and warfare.

Defined in Mahanian terms, incorporating both economic logic and military grammar, access is a broad concept indeed. Nor is it confined to the United States, meaning simply the liberty of the U.S. military to project power into waters adjoining China. In fact, our study is about access from the Chinese perspective. Beijing too worries about access denial. Chinese leaders and commanders fret that the United States will deploy naval might to deny China access to the commons, retaliating against some Chinese transgression or even, conceivably, on the whim of an American president. Ensuring the physical freedom of movement across the maritime commons is central to economic and military endeavors that the Chinese regime considers crucial to the nation’s economic vitality and prestige.

Access, accordingly, advances strategic aims far broader than a Taiwan contingency or other short-term military objectives. Redefining access in Mahanian terms opens a window into the future direction of Chinese sea power. Peering through this window suggests that China’s march to the seas will not end with Taiwan. Far larger forces are at work.

STRUCTURE OF THE ARGUMENT

While trade and commerce hold pride of place on Mahan’s two tridents, we focus on the military “tine” for the purposes of this book. In grammatical terms, the martial tine is Mahan’s vision of overbearing power at sea, to which so many Chinese Mahanians pay homage. We expand his vision of overbearing power to mean China’s ability to harness such power against others or to nullify the overbearing power adversaries hold in important sea areas. The narrower, military-centric concept of access denial belongs in the latter category. When he espoused a powerful people’s navy, Hu Jintao was clearly speaking in grammatical terms. But imposing and nullifying overbearing power are not mutually exclusive endeavors. That is, the ability to deny sea control opens the way for the sea-denial fleet to exercise command in its own right. This understanding of access captures the dynamism typical of encounters between two maritime contestants with important interests at stake in the same waters and skies. Sino-American relations are nothing if not interactive.

One organizing principle for this volume is that geography helps delineate where access and antiaccess efforts will take place. We postulate that China will strive to achieve and ensure access for itself—and amass the capacity to deny access to others—in concentric geographic rings rippling out from the Chinese coastline. Beijing will first attempt to guarantee access to its immediate maritime periphery, which the Chinese term the “near seas.” Again, we mean access as the commercial, political, and military maneuver space enjoyed by China within a particular geographic zone. Once China is confident about its freedom of action in the near seas, it will work to expand its access beyond the periphery, to what the Chinese term the “far seas.” Broadly conceived, then, this quest for access gives Western observers an instrument for tracking China’s maritime ascent. How closely China approaches the Mahanian ideal of sea power (as we have interpreted it here), with commerce taking precedence over military considerations, will say much about the kind of maritime strategy Beijing will pursue.

The book surveys the access problem from a variety of standpoints. Chapters 2 and 3 set the strategic context. In Chapter 2, we examine the theoretical foundations of access in more detail. We explore how China is consulting strategic theorists and other sources of strategic thought, fairing this guidance into its maritime strategy. Mahan will figure prominently in this analysis, but China’s long, rich history also offers abundant lessons on how to make and execute strategy. Specifically, we argue that Mahan furnishes the logic of Chinese sea power while Mao’s “active defense” concept helps Beijing tailor the warlike grammar of sea power to China’s local circumstances. Chapter 3 adopts a retrospective approach, comparing the access dilemma facing the Kaiser’s Germany to China’s current predicament. We examine geography, capability, and national will—the three main ingredients for attaining and expanding access in the face of a superior adversary—for both aspiring naval powers. We find that China is better positioned than Germany to turn difficult geography to its advantage.

Chapters 4 through 7 unfold loosely along geographical lines, in keeping with the near- and far-seas concepts. We probe various facets of Chinese maritime strategy, focusing first on commercial and trade imperatives close to Chinese coasts, then on China’s efforts to radiate influence into more distant theaters. Chapters 4 and 5 analyze how China may leverage tactical concepts and capabilities to attain or deny access in the near seas. As China’s leadership sees it, wresting some control of the nation’s maritime periphery from the U.S. Navy is critical to economic vitality, and thus to the long-term welfare of the communist regime. We begin, therefore, by examining how Beijing will attempt to manage the Yellow, East China, and South China seas, the waters that wash against Chinese shores. Access-denial operations and tactics are impelling this push into the China seas. We also investigate Chinese views of and responses to sea-based missile defense in an effort to determine how the PLA will adjust its antiaccess strategy to offset this emerging U.S.-Japanese capability.

Chapters 6 and 7 examine how the political and psychological effects of China’s nuclear-powered ballistic-missile submarine (SSBN) fleet and naval “soft power” could deepen and extend Chinese access, both along the nautical periphery and well into the far seas. In Chapter 6 we explore the prospects for the PLA Navy undersea deterrent, manifest in nuclear-powered submarines and sea-launched ballistic missiles. We find that undersea deterrence interacts synergistically with Chinese access and antiaccess strategy. An invulnerable second-strike capability keeps the United States at bay at the strategic level, opening up antiaccess options for the PLA in the near seas at the theater level of war. At the same time, a robust antiaccess posture raises a protective shield under which PLA Navy SSBNs can expand their deterrent patrols eastward, bringing more of North America within range.

In Chapter 7, we maintain that Beijing will apply its energies to guarding its interests in the Indian Ocean, the wellspring of much of China’s economic lifeblood. Chinese leaders have laid the groundwork to exert influence in the region by integrating a sophisticated historical narrative into their regional diplomacy, casting China as an inherently trustworthy sea power. If successful, Beijing will create permissive surroundings for the PLA Navy, should Beijing decide forward deployments of hard naval power are necessary to ensure free passage through South Asian waters for Chinese merchantmen.

After this exhaustive survey of Sino-U.S. interactions at sea, we turn to U.S. maritime strategy in Asia. Chapter 8 dissects and compares the 1986 and 2007 U.S. maritime strategies, identifying relationships and tensions between the logic and grammar of sea power. Whereas the former excelled at grammar for the contest against the Soviet Navy, the latter articulates a compelling logic of sea power while saying little about grammatical matters. We examine both strategies, their merits, and their Asian and Western detractors. The comparison will help policymakers determine whether and how to adjust the current “Cooperative Strategy for 21st Century Seapower” to better its prospects for success, both in post-Mahanian enterprises such as counterproliferation and sea-lane security and in neo-Mahanian missions such as naval preparedness, deterrence, and—should Sino-U.S. relations sour—sea combat.

We close out the book by revisiting the logic and grammar of sea power, in an attempt to determine how the United States and China measure up by Mahanian standards. This is an apt note to end on, as it indicates whether each nation is on an upward, downward, or flat trajectory as a sea power. Trend analysis, we believe, will help makers and executors of maritime strategy establish whose grip on the Mahanian tridents is surer—and who is poised to reign over Asia’s wine-dark seas.