Red Star Over the Pacific

A sea-denial navy frankly admits its inferiority to prospective antagonists while refusing to admit defeat. It does not flee vital expanses or resign itself to passive defense. In the late 1990s, two prominent Sinologists declared that China’s innate weakness at sea forced it to shelter passively within the first island chain, waging a strategy of “protracted defensive resistance.” U.S. naval supremacy was too stifling for more forceful measures to succeed.¹ We dissent. A sea-denial force works around its weaknesses and exploits such advantages as it does enjoy. Its objective is to clear rival navies out of designated waters—or to deter them from entering in the first place—for a finite interval, until the nation’s strategic objectives are in hand.² Generally speaking, then, sea denial is a strategically defensive strategy prosecuted by inferior naval powers through offensive means. The People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLA Navy) will face this strategic predicament for the foreseeable future, but it will stay on the operational and tactical offensive.

The hybrid offensive–defensive style of combat conforms philosophically both to Mao Zedong’s concept of “active defense,” which yokes offensive means to defensive ends, and to Alfred Thayer Mahan’s dictum that even lesser navies can impose local command of important waters.³ The Chinese military possesses, is procuring, or plans to acquire systems designed to make the seas and skies adjoining the Asian mainland no-go territory for any opponent. Beijing has lavishly purchased arms from Russia since the early 1990s. It has bolstered its domestic defense industry at the same time, allowing a variety of indigenous weaponry to be fielded. The infusion of new platforms and systems, supplemented by the advent of a more professional, more battleworthy corps of mariners, has produced a leap in offensive PLA combat power.⁴

To name a few weapons systems that have entered service in recent years, modern diesel submarines—difficult to detect, track, and target in shallow offshore waters—have slid down the ways at Chinese shipyards or been purchased from Russian suppliers in significant numbers. Destroyers equipped with sophisticated radar suites (purportedly comparable to the U.S. Aegis combat system), antiship missiles, and air-defense missiles increasingly form the backbone of the Chinese surface fleet. PLA Navy surface groups’ chances of withstanding long-range missile or air bombardment are brightening. This is doubly true so long as the fleet operates within range of shore-based cover, as PLA Navy forces typically do.

The range and accuracy of shore-based assets are growing, extending the PLA Navy’s combat radius commensurate with Chinese views of the importance of the offshore island chains. Indeed, China may be on the brink of rendering a strategic concept condemned by Captain Mahan—the “fortress-fleet” tethered to shore fire support—viable for the first time. Writing of the Russian Navy’s dismal performance against Japan in 1905, Mahan faulted the Russian naval command for this “radically erroneous” way of conducting affairs.⁵ This may no longer hold true. If Chinese land forces can hoist a protective umbrella over the near seas, PLA Navy units will be able to range freely within the waters Beijing deems important without leaving the protective cover of shore defenses.

Under this aegis, defense will increasingly blur into offense, even eastward of the first island chain. Advanced ground-based air-defense systems, capable naval fighter/attack aircraft, long-range cruise missiles, and even a ballistic missile reportedly able to find and attack vessels on the high seas are central to China’s military modernization effort.⁶ (Chapter 5 covers the antiship ballistic missile and its ramifications.) If the Chinese package these assets wisely and develop the requisite tactical proficiency, they will gain confidence in their ability to deter or defeat any foreign power bold enough to attempt hostile entry into nearby waters or airspace .⁷

China’s continent-scale geography is an invaluable asset to the PLA Navy’s sea-denial strategy, furnishing plentiful sites for coastal bases. Indeed, emerging military capabilities are explicitly designed to strike at targets in littoral sea areas from bases on the mainland. And as range improves, shore defenses can be positioned farther inland, employing China’s deep continental interior as a safe haven from which to mete out punishment against intruding forces along the coastline.⁸ This haven serves the purely military purpose of buffering People’s Liberation Army (PLA) assets against attack. A PLA that exploits the mainland’s vast strategic depth can compel enemy forces to enter the combat range of its weaponry, accepting battle on China’s political, geographic, and military terms. Such a strategy would have found favor with Mao Zedong, who famously urged his followers to draw enemies deep into Chinese territory before striking a devastating counterblow.⁹

Just as important, defending from deep inland dares an opponent to act against the mainland. If U.S. forces struck at, say, Chinese antiship missile sites located well inland—especially if these sites adjoined populated areas, where collateral damage would be a risk—political sympathies would favor Beijing not only among key audiences in China but elsewhere in Asia and in the international community. The United States would risk escalating a limited naval conflict to full-blown war against China, its leading trading partner and a fellow permanent member of the UN Security Council. The repercussions of such a fight would vastly outweigh the presumably modest strategic goals at stake for Washington. The chances of Washington’s climbing down from a dispute would improve—increasing the likelihood of China’s winning without an actual exchange of fire. Fusing offense with defense, then, is eminently in keeping with Chinese strategic traditions. This approach constitutes the core of Chinese fleet tactics.

Hughes’ Fleet Tactics (1986) and its successor, Fleet Tactics and Coastal Combat (2000) constitute a baseline for analyzing the challenges posed by Chinese antiship tactics. However useful his treatise, though, it cannot stand alone. This is no indictment. These works aspire to school tacticians in a variety of settings and against a variety of potential antagonists. Indeed, in Fleet Tactics Hughes describes his purpose as “to illustrate the processes—the dynamics—of naval combat” rather than to foresee how particular contingencies might turn out.¹¹ Thus Fleet Tactics is largely silent on operational and strategic matters, and it is entirely devoid of political, cultural, and strategic context. Like any good theory, it can be tailored to varying circumstances.

This is a strength and a weakness. There is a decidedly technical feel to such accounts, which are de rigueur in U.S. Navy training institutions, where warfighters learn their craft. The downside of the abstract approach to naval warfare is that, taken in isolation, Hughes’ works strongly imply that technology decides the outcomes of martial encounters at sea. On the high seas, enemy fleets slug it out with volleys of precision-guided arms. Fighting close to enemy shores is a different matter. Shore defenses may fire surface-to-surface missiles at U.S. task forces, or land-based aircraft may launch antiship missiles from aloft. Quiet diesel-electric submarines may lurk below, awaiting their chance to launch torpedoes. But in both modes of fighting, the combatants hammer away with everything in their magazines, and the side that lands the first blow is the likely victor.

For Hughes, the arbiters of high-tech naval combat are (a) “scouting effectiveness,” meaning the proficient use of shipboard and offboard sensors, combat systems, and computer datalinks to find enemy units; (b) “weapon range,” or the ability to inflict damage at a distance; and (c) tactics, which are determined by scouting effectiveness and the range of a fleet’s weaponry.¹² Hughes’ account is doubtless accurate, but it is limited. Far more than missile ranges, seeker effectiveness, or detect-to-engage algorithms will shape the results of any Sino-American clash at sea. Not for nothing did Colonel John Boyd proclaim that people, ideas, and hardware—“in that order”—were the prime determinants of competitive endeavors such as warfare.¹³ Or, more to the point, Mao Zedong decried “the so-called theory that ‘weapons decide everything,’ which constitutes a mechanical approach to the question of war. . . . It is people, not things, that are decisive.”¹⁴

Outdistancing an opponent’s sensors and weaponry is far from the only challenge any U.S. naval offensive will face. Fleet Tactics shares this deficit of vision with standard net assessments that tally up numbers of platforms and their technical characteristics, often scanting the human element of war and politics. A larger view is in order. Consider one datapoint from Asian maritime history: Imperial Japan, which has emerged as a model for PLA Navy development. Ni Lexiong, a leading Chinese proponent of sea power, faults China’s Qing dynasty for being insufficiently Mahanian in its 1894–1895 naval tilt against Japan. Says Ni, China should bear in mind that Mahan “believed that whoever could control the sea would win the war and change history; that command of the sea is achieved through decisive naval battles on the seas; that the outcome of decisive naval battles is determined by the strength of fire power on each side of the engagement.”¹⁵

That distinguished analysts now pay tribute to Japanese sea power, despite the bitter history of Sino-Japanese relations during the twentieth century, marks a striking turnabout in Chinese strategic thought. Beijing’s willingness to consider the Japanese paradigm bespeaks increasing openness to non-Chinese, noncommunist sources of wisdom on military and naval affairs. Yet looking beyond Chinese traditions is eminently Chinese. Think about Sun Tzu’s Art of War, an ancient text that remains a fixture in Chinese strategic discourses. The Chinese sage counsels generals to “know the enemy and know yourself; in a hundred battles you will never be in peril. When you are ignorant of the enemy but know yourself, your chances of winning or losing are equal. If ignorant both of your enemy and of yourself, you are certain in every battle to be in peril.’”¹⁶ This is a truism, but one worth repeating. It also represents a plea for candor about the strengths and weakness of each belligerent—a candor that rejects analyses blinkered by culture or ideology.

Strategic insight, then, should be sought wherever it can be found. So, too, should American commanders heed Sun Tzu’s wisdom. They need to understand U.S. forces’ material and human strengths, acknowledge their shortcomings, and come to terms with the ends, ways, and means likely to guide Chinese efforts in times of crisis or war. As we showed in foregoing chapters, Mahanian geopolitical logic helps govern Chinese maritime strategy and could help goad Beijing into a trial of arms involving the United States. Our purpose here is to explain what that means in operational and tactical terms. A few propositions:

• If Mahan supplies the grand logic of maritime war, Mao Zedong’s operational-level writings on land warfare will inform Chinese tactics and operational practices in any clash off Taiwan, in the South China Sea, or in hot spots elsewhere along the Asian periphery.

• The South China Sea represents the most likely maritime theater for Beijing to conduct combined-arms attacks designed to saturate and overpower U.S. task groups’ defenses, fulfilling its geopolitical and strategic aims.

• PLA forces will integrate weapons systems, new and old, into joint “orthodox” and “unorthodox” attacks, executing offensive actions to attain strategically defensive goals. They will not depend on any single method or system, or solely on aerial, surface, or subsurface warfare. Multiple axes of attack, multiple weapon types, and preparedness to shift nimbly between the main and secondary efforts (and back again) will be hallmarks of the Chinese way of naval war.

• Among the three tactical scenarios Wayne Hughes posits (described below), PLA Navy planners and commanders will probably incline to dispersed attack, sequential attack, and massed attack, in that order. Unless Beijing grows so confident in its quantitative and qualitative superiority that it can simply hammer away, saturating American defenses at a single blow, it will stay with tried-and-true Chinese methods.

As Sun Tzu’s theories suggest, more acute understanding of oneself and the adversary could provide the margin of victory in a test of arms with China. Now fast-forward from China’s Warring States period, when Sun Tzu purportedly lived, to nineteenth-century Europe.¹⁷ Recall that Carl von Clausewitz depicts war as “only a branch of political activity . . . that is in no sense autonomous.” “Is war not just another expression of their thoughts, another form of speech or writing?” he queries before answering his own question. “Its grammar, indeed, may be its own, but not its logic.”¹⁸ By this, he means three things. First, war is the act of pursuing policy aims with the admixture of military means. The addition of violent means fires passions among the combatants—usually negative ones such as fear, anger, and hatred—while bringing chance and uncertainty to the fore. Second, nonmilitary instruments such as diplomacy and economic coercion still have a part to play after the shooting starts. And third, war—and warlike preparations—is an expression of political and strategic thought. For those schooled on Clausewitz, it is impossible to fully appreciate Chinese hardware and tactics without grasping the larger strategic, political, and cultural considerations that impart the logic to war.

Despite our bleak tone, we are not prophesying naval war in Asia. There is ample room for debate about China’s intentions and its vision of its maritime destiny, and it is entirely possible that Chinese naval power will evolve in a benign direction. Indeed, one of our main recommendations is that the United States should do its best to shape conditions in favor of a maritime entente with China. As U.S. military specialists like to point out, though, hope is not a strategy. Washington cannot afford a strategy of neglect simply because it reckons the probability of a clash with China as low and wants to keep it that way. By investigating the logic and grammar of Chinese sea power, U.S. strategists can estimate how the PLA Navy would handle itself in Asian waters, mounting an integrated, offense-minded defense against U.S. Navy carrier and amphibious strike groups.

As Posen observes, a skillful though weaker adversary enjoys certain advantages when operating on its home turf, including nearby shore-based assets and manpower, short lines of communication, and familiarity with the tactical environment.¹⁹ A savvy power can parley these advantages into distinct strategic and operational advantages over the United States, imposing costs Washington might find politically unacceptable. Even a lesser foe could impel U.S. decision makers to hesitate in times of crisis, or perhaps even to withdraw U.S. forces following a traumatic event—say, the crippling or sinking of an aircraft carrier. This dynamic—and it is worth spotlighting its pronounced psychological, nontechnical component—will characterize any near- to mid-term military encounter off Chinese coasts.

The prospects for variety in the operating environment—especially in littoral combat—should give wise tacticians pause. Bernard Brodie points out that, thankfully, “there are too few naval wars and far too few major naval battles to enable us ever to prove the correctness of a tactical theory”²⁰ (his emphasis). Even epic battles represent individual data points when evaluating a theory, and they take place too seldom to allow for rigorous trend analysis and confident findings. The U.S. Navy fought its last major engagement at Leyte Gulf in 1944; China’s PLA Navy has never fought one. Furthermore, as Brodie notes, even a marginally different configuration of forces or set of tactics by one side or the other can produce a different outcome to a particular engagement—leading analysts to render a different, possibly faulty verdict about the efficacy of the tactics deployed.²¹ Sobriety, it seems, is the most prudent attitude when evaluating past naval actions.

Wayne Hughes posits three representative scenarios for naval engagements on the high seas: attack by massed forces on massed forces; dispersed attack with near-simultaneous time on top of targeted forces; and sequential attack, essentially attacks dispersed in time rather than direction (see figure below) .²² Two caveats are in order. First, we are not predicting specific Chinese tactics. For the sake of simplicity, we use these three possibilities as crude indicators of how Chinese forces might respond to a U.S. naval offensive. The attacking force—“Force B” in Hughes’ nomenclature—could represent a mix of Chinese shore- and sea-based missile shooters supplemented by platforms like minelayers or torpedo-firing submarines. The important question is whether Chinese strategic and operational preferences incline Chinese commanders toward massed, dispersed, or sequential attack, as depicted in figure below. A related question is, would the Chinese prefer to keep the PLA Navy closer to home, in keeping with the fortress-fleet approach favored by many continental powers, or would they feel comfortable dispatching the fleet for independent operations, beyond shore-based cover?²³

Second, in the formulae Hughes develops to gauge the probabilities of U.S. defenses’ being overwhelmed or penetrated by “leakers” (platforms or munitions that get past the battle group’s layered defense), he avoids using the characteristics—ranges, warhead sizes, etc.—of specific weapons systems. For the most part, we follow suit. Capabilities change while tactical principles apply across many contingencies. Those closer to tactical questions must put the analysis and findings presented here into actual practice.In short, some composite of land and sea defenses will constitute China’s contested zone in littoral sea areas. As the Chinese military extends its reach seaward, especially in a post-Taiwan era, the high-seas component will naturally come to predominate. In Clausewitzian terms, as the PLA extends the range of land-based weaponry and continues building its oceangoing fleet, China will push the “culminating point of the attack” outward from Chinese coasts—improving its prospects for denying the U.S. military access to important waters and, should Beijing choose to do so, for vying for sea control. Clausewitz observes that when one state invades another, the combat power of the invading army starts to dwindle while the defending army grows stronger as the lines of communication with its bases shorten and it takes advantage of familiar surroundings. The culminating point represents the crossover point at which the defender’s strength starts to surpass that of the attacker. A fleet that stands into an enemy’s maritime contested zone faces the same dynamic.²⁴

Wars are not—or should not be—fought for their own sake. Politics imparts the logic to warfare, determining the ends for which statesmen, soldiers, and mariners strive. Grammar, on the other hand, refers to the ways and means for realizing a nation’s political aims.²⁵ As noted in chapter 2, Alfred Thayer Mahan proffered both a Clausewitzian logic of sea power premised on commerce, politics, and the military and a grammar of naval strategy, operations, and tactics. One of the conceits behind this volume is that Captain Mahan’s sea-power theories now exert substantial influence on the logic of Chinese maritime strategy. While Mahan has fallen into disuse verging on irrelevance in U.S. naval circles (despite officials’ occasional efforts to conjure him up to support particular initiatives²⁶), his sea-power philosophy continues to beguile in Asia. Chinese naval development attests to it.

Mahan, then, furnishes both the logic and the vocabulary to argue for assertive sea power. Proponents of this school of thought write and speak in avowedly Mahanian terms, and in many cases they explicitly use his works to justify an ambitious maritime strategy. In particular, his portrayal of sea power as “overbearing power” suffuses their discourses on maritime affairs. Should the Mahanians win out among the cacophony of voices clamoring for the attention of senior policymakers, Chinese strategy will take on distinctly offensive overtones. Perhaps the most thoughtful spokesman for China’s Mahanian school is Professor Ni Lexiong of the Shanghai Institute of Political Science and Law. Ni uses sea-power theory to evaluate the competing claims of the advocates of sea power and the advocates of globalization. The latter, he contends, believe that “China should not act by following the traditional sea power theory in pursuing a strong Navy, because today’s world situation is different from the time of Mahan . . . the globalization of the world’s economy has made various countries’ interests interconnected, mutually dependent on each other to a greater degree, and that if a country wants to preserve its life line at sea, the only way to do so is to go through ‘cooperation’ rather than the traditional ‘solo fight.’”²⁷ Globalization theorists, says Ni, urge Beijing not to embark on a naval arms buildup. To do so would alert “today’s naval hegemon,” the United States, “making China’s naval development a self-destructive play with fire,” reminiscent of Imperial Germany’s quixotic bid for sea power at the turn of the nineteenth century.²⁸ For the sake of discussion, the author stipulates that globalization theorists such as Thomas Barnett may have it right. The world may be entering an age of perpetual peace in which economic interdependence renders armed strife almost unthinkable within the advanced world. Barnett opines that the developed nations have in effect abolished war among themselves, achieving “something awfully close to Kant’s perpetual peace,” a realm that has transcended force as an instrument of policy.²⁹

While he does not discount such a revolution in world affairs, Professor Ni rightly points out that even a pacific international system—like any domestic political order—ultimately depends on the latent or actual use of force. In either case, then, China should improve its navy. It will need a muscular PLA Navy to play its part in the “world Navy,” the seagoing arm of an international police force, should such a constabulary ever put to sea. Chinese seafarers can aid the transition to a peaceful international order. Ni nevertheless believes the world remains mired in power politics, demanding that sovereign states maintain powerful military forces as a means of self-help. Thus “it is China’s necessary choice to build up a strong sea power,” warding off “threats to our ‘outward-leaning economy’ by some strong nations.”³⁰

It comes as little shock that Mahan has fallen into disrepute in operational and tactical matters. As he admitted to Theodore Roosevelt, he made an indifferent fleet officer—“I am the man of thought, not the man of action,” he confided—and more than once he came up on the short end of a technical debate.³³ He feuded with W. S. Sims, for example, on the question of whether new U.S. battleships should be fitted with all-big-gun main batteries or with a composite battery of big and lesser-caliber naval rifles.³⁴ Notes Richard Hough, Sims administered an “annihilating” rejoinder to Mahan’s advocacy of mixed armament, upbraiding Mahan for ignoring the combat punch of Japanese 12-inch gunfire at Tsushima.³⁵ If Mahan fared poorly in tactical debates in his own day, it is scarcely surprising that American and foreign tacticians nowadays look elsewhere for insight.

Accordingly, Chinese officials, mariners, and scholars consult other martial traditions as they draft a grammar of marine combat. For help, they look to China’s rich stock of land-warfare traditions, including the writings of Sun Tzu and, in particular, of Mao Zedong. The Chinese Communist Party’s founding chairman, Mao etched his strategic outlook on contemporary China through personal example and through voluminous writings on political and military affairs. He was famously indifferent to maritime pursuits. ³⁶ Yet, as we saw in chapter 2, China’s current maritime strategy, “offshore active defense,” takes both its name and its guiding precepts from the Maoist doctrine of active defense, an approach to warfighting distilled from his experiences in land campaigns against Imperial Japanese occupiers and the Chinese Nationalist Army.³⁷

Mao scorned passive defense. His military writings were wholly offensive in character, even during the wilderness years when his Red Army was vastly inferior to its enemies and had little choice other than to remain on the strategic defensive. Passive defense represented “a spurious kind of defense” whereas active defense meant “defense for the purpose of counter-attacking and taking the offensive.”³⁸ Even strategically defensive aims, then, were best attained through offensive ways and means. Distasteful and transient, passive measures were necessitated by an unfavorable balance of forces. They were not the core of China’s national strategy, let alone its strategic preference.³⁹ This outlook lends China’s quest for sea power much of its grammar.

To Chinese eyes, U.S. mastery of East Asian seas resembles the Nationalist Army’s strategy of “encirclement and suppression,” transposed to the East, Yellow, and South China seas.⁴⁰ The Red Army did not reply to Nationalist Army ground offensives through passive means; it used tactical offensives opportunistically to elongate the war, tire out enemy forces, and shift the balance of forces in the communists’ favor. Patient action represented a precursor to a counteroffensive and, ultimately, to decisive victory. Prompted by Mao and Mahan, similarly, Chinese naval strategists talk routinely of prying control of the waters westward of the first island chain from the U.S. Navy’s grasp. They intend to surround and control these waters by offensive means, even while the United States commands Asian waters. It is increasingly common for Chinese strategists to implore Beijing to take “absolute control” of the seas within the island chain.

Such commentary puts an ominous twist on Western conceptions of a passive Great Wall strategy.⁴¹ True, Mao did warn against risking engagements in which victory was not ensured, but it is a grave mistake to equate such prudence with acquiescence in Chinese military inferiority. Again, the strategic defensive was a distasteful expedient for Chairman Mao, not a desirable or permanent state of affairs. If the PLA heeds his advice, then, its grammar of naval war should give the U.S. Navy pause. American rule of Asian waters does not render all naval battles unwinnable for Beijing. Washington must take seriously the prospect that Beijing will adopt a Mahan- and Mao-inspired naval strategy in its littoral waters, framing strategy and tactics with this prospect in mind. If so, the PLA Navy will be a force to be reckoned with.

In this context, dispersed attacks on exterior lines are becoming increasingly thinkable for the PLA, as they were for the Red Army in its struggles against the Imperial Japanese Army and the Nationalist Army. The dispersed approach confers a variety of benefits. First, Maoist preferences predispose Chinese defenders to let U.S. forces close on Chinese shores (like Mao’s “foolish” boxer who “rushes in furiously and uses up all his resources at the very start”), attenuating their strength before mounting attacks from shore- and sea-based weaponry scattered around the battle zone. Nor will the PLA confine its fleet tactics to any particular warfare domain. It will unleash missile barrages complemented by submarine attack, minefields, and other tactics and systems to which China has paid lavish attention. As American forces approach Chinese coastlines, the PLA will assume the exterior lines, rendering dispersed attack possible along multiple threat axes. After falling back on land-based support, Beijing can bring the full force of its contested zone to bear, creating a 360-degree threat to U.S. expeditionary groups.

Second, PLA commanders will concentrate their efforts on individual vessels or small detachments in an effort to wipe them out. Despite the tenor of Chinese commentary and their own assumptions, U.S. commanders should not automatically assume that aircraft carriers will be the prime target for PLA action. Amphibious ships would make tempting targets in a Taiwan contingency, for example, assuming U.S. Marines attempted to land to succor Taiwanese defense forces. As we show in the following chapter, disabling or sinking one of the U.S. Navy’s gee-whiz Aegis warships would give the United States pause, stirring memories of the 2000 attack on the destroyer USS Cole and magnifying the political impact of such a feat of arms on the American electorate. Or the PLA Navy might even assail U.S. combat logistics vessels in transit to or from the conflict zone. Despite the lower political profile of tankers and stores ships, depriving carrier or amphibious task groups of the “bullets, beans, and black oil”—to use an older generation’s term for the supplies needed to sustain combat operations off enemy shores—would eventually bring the U.S. effort to a halt.

Third, and closely related, the PLA will incorporate orthodox and unorthodox methods and weaponry into its defensive scheme, conforming to Mao’s and Sun Tzu’s warfare precepts. Western naval analysts commonly invoke the concept of saturation attack, implying that cruise missiles will be China’s sole implements, or at any rate its implements of choice. This may be true, but more likely, PLA saturation attack will involve the concerted use of missiles, aerial attack, mines, torpedo attack, and electronic warfare. Such weaponry is ideal for a contested zone, complementing more conventional means. Antiship missiles could represent not the primary, orthodox element of an active-defense campaign but the secondary, unorthodox element. For example, missile attack would compel U.S. tacticians to look skyward while Kilo-class diesel boats loosed salvos of wake-homing torpedoes against U.S. surface combatants. It also bears repeating that Maoist tactics are fluid, with orthodox attack morphing into unorthodox attack and back again. Distinguishing orthodox from unorthodox tactics may be difficult to impossible in the heat of battle.

And fourth, Beijing will merge nonmilitary instruments into its defensive efforts, using diplomacy to augment Maoist active defense. For instance, Beijing could impress upon Washington the lasting diplomatic and economic repercussions of taking on China over Taiwan or some other object. Its need to weigh benefits against costs could induce the United States to hesitate in wartime, improving the PLA’s chances of achieving its wartime goals. Additionally, Chinese diplomats could try to weaken or pick off U.S. allies, discouraging nations such as Japan from granting the use of bases on their soil, or impressing on Australia that it will pay a price for supporting U.S. military action. This would impair America’s strategic position in Asia.

Beijing would turn operational achievements of Chinese arms to propaganda advantage. Small but solid Chinese tactical victories would weary the American populace while giving Washington’s allies second thoughts about supporting the United States against China, Asia’s central political and economic power. Asians understand that, win or lose in a naval war, they have to live with a vengeful China. Disparate strategic views could create tensions that China could exploit—dismantling the alliance system that lets the United States operate on grand-strategic exterior lines far from North American shores.

Chinese interests rivet Beijing’s attention on this expanse, its gateway to South Asia. At least four strategic challenges beckon the attention of Chinese strategists southward. First and foremost, Taiwan, along the northern edge of the sea, continues to obsess the Chinese leadership. A formal declaration of independence, or a Taiwanese breach of a Chinese redline such as constitutional reform, remains the most likely casus belli for Beijing. But the cross-strait dispute is no longer the all-consuming issue it once was. If it has not already, China will soon gain the confidence to start looking past Taiwan, to other pursuits in Southeast and South Asia. Satisfactory settlement of affairs in the Taiwan Strait will free up Chinese resources and energies, advance the cause of national unification, break through Dean Acheson’s island-chain perimeter, and give the PLA its own offshore (and unsinkable, if also immovable) aircraft carrier and submarine tender. By occupying the island, moreover, Beijing can use the logic Admiral Ernest King applied to Formosa. Keeping the bottle of the South China Sea uncorked will let Chinese shipping bearing vital resources from the Middle East and the Horn of Africa reach Chinese seaports unmolested.

Second, and closely related, there is the “Malacca dilemma,” or “Malacca predicament,” that perplexes Chinese scholars and top officials, most prominently President Hu Jintao. Beijing fears an attempt on the part of the United States and its allies to close the Malacca, Lombok, or Sunda straits to Chinese shipping as an indirect riposte during a Taiwan conflict.⁴³ Ensuring free passage through the sea lines of communication linking the Persian Gulf region and Africa with Chinese seaports—in particular through the Strait of Malacca—now constitutes a matter of surpassing importance to China’s communist regime.⁴⁴ The uninterrupted flow of oil, natural gas, and other raw materials across the bodies of water to the mainland’s immediate south and southwest—the South China Sea and the Indian Ocean—will occupy an increasingly prominent place in China’s maritime calculus. This emerging energy security imperative suggests that tracking longer-term Chinese intentions and grand strategy in southern waters constitutes an urgent task for the United States.⁴⁵

Third, China has staked maritime-territorial claims to most of the South China Sea, making Southeast Asia a natural theater of nautical endeavor. Indeed, the National People’s Congress in effect wrote China’s claims into domestic law in 1992. National sentiment helps animate Beijing’s goals in the region; so does the region’s value for maritime communications; and so do the undersea resources supposedly to be found around the numerous islands to which China and powers like the Philippines, Taiwan, and Vietnam have lodged claims. Even cartographers have joined the fray. One laments that the landmass of China resembles a rooster, an image unworthy of China’s majesty. But including the sea areas claimed by China gives the nation an appealing shape on the map—a torch. This conveys not only the region’s importance for Chinese national dignity but also the interdependence between the sea and Chinese economic development. “Chinese map,” proclaims the author, “you are the collected emotion and wisdom of the Chinese people, their coagulated blood and raging fire, symbolic of their power and personality, the embodiment of their worth and spirit.”⁴⁶ Whether Beijing will attempt to enforce domestic law as its naval power grows remains to be seen—but at the very least, this is a prospect fellow seafaring states must take seriously.

Fourth, it has become apparent that undersea warfare imparts momentum to China’s southward maritime turn. In April 2008, Jane’s Intelligence Review disclosed that the PLA had constructed an impressive naval base complete with underground pens for fleet nuclear-powered ballistic-missile submarines, or SSBNs, on Hainan Island, in the northern reaches of the South China Sea.⁴⁷ The news prompted a flurry of speculation among strategic thinkers in the West and Asia. “Must India be anxious?” asked one Indian commentator.⁴⁸ To borrow a metaphor Chinese officials use, the Sanya base gives Beijing the first of China’s “two eyes” at sea—Taiwan being the other.⁴⁹ Whimsical metaphors aside, basing SSBNs in the South China Sea would let the PLA Navy outflank U.S. and Japanese antisubmarine-warfare efforts in Northeast Asia, enabling the Chinese submarine force to operate on exterior lines. Sanya, moreover, gives the navy a forward base not only for SSBNs but also for attack submarines, aircraft, and surface units, extending its combat reach seaward in much the same way Taiwan would in the Pacific Ocean.

The South China Sea, in short, offers an ideal theater for the PLA to fight on tactically exterior lines, even while the United States operates along strategically exterior lines. The Luzon Strait, which separates Taiwan from the Philippines, will take on new prominence once operational Chinese units are stationed at Sanya. This will be doubly true once China regains Taiwan, expediting Chinese military access to the strait. In a day-after-Taiwan scenario, with PLA emplacements on the island, China would extend its reach seaward while gaining a commanding position opposite Luzon. This would render the logic of dispersed attack even more compelling. PLA forces could vector in attacks on U.S. Navy task forces not only from PLA Navy units at sea but also from sites on the mainland and, just as importantly, from Hainan and Taiwan—in General MacArthur’s metaphor, its twin offshore aircraft carriers and submarine tenders. By forcing the United States into perimeter defense, the PLA can open up new tactical vistas for itself. It could feint in the South China Sea, for instance, stretching American defenses and situational awareness to the south while staging a breakout in the north, through narrow seas monitored only lightly by the U.S. and Japanese fleets since the Cold War.

Taken together, this adds up to an effort similar to the one the United States mounted in Mahan’s day, when the U.S. Navy set out to establish its ascendancy over superior European navies in the Caribbean Sea and the Gulf of Mexico—expanses of comparable economic and military importance to a rising United States that had locked its gaze on Asia-Pacific markets and bases. For U.S. naval commanders, consequently, monitoring how China manages its “Caribbean” will provide important clues to Chinese capabilities and intentions.⁵⁰

Preference #1: Dispersed Sea Denial

To return to Wayne Hughes’ analytical template, what are China’s strategic preferences for naval warfare? In more specific terms, how will China apply its panoply of new hardware to achieve the goal of sea denial? Using Hughes’ three determinants of tactical effectiveness, Chinese defenders will attempt to disrupt U.S. scouting, outrange U.S. weaponry, and exploit defects in U.S. fleet tactics, keeping American commanders off-balance. Consonant with Mao’s injunction to cut off one of an enemy’s fingers rather than mash them all, PLA defenders will concentrate on individual U.S. units or small formations that find themselves remote from mutual support. By playing up tactical victories in the world press, Beijing can hope to discourage the American people and peel away ambivalent U.S. allies like Japan or Australia, collapsing the overall U.S. effort. Western analysts, then, must remain alert to inventive PLA uses of China’s tactical and geostrategic advantages. Some representative weapon systems useful for dispersed but integrated attacks would include the following:

Antiship Cruise Missiles. The PLA has plowed major effort and resources into cruise-missile procurement and development. Indeed, a recent RAND report situates SS-N-22 and SS-N-27 antiship missiles at the heart of China’s strategy for a Taiwan contingency, strongly suggesting that the United States would find itself on the losing end of a cross-strait encounter in 2020.⁵¹ Antiship missiles can be fired from ships, aircraft, and surface batteries, forcing U.S. Navy antiair defenders to cope with multiple threat axes. For instance, the fast, agile SS-N-22 Moskit (known in U.S. naval circles as the Sunburn) carried on PLA Navy Sovremennyy-class guided-missile destroyers has excellent prospects even against the U.S. Navy’s Aegis combat system, the latest in American technical wizardry and the system it was designed to penetrate. ⁵² Such weaponry makes an ideal candidate for orthodox antiship attack.

Antiship Ballistic Missiles. Over the past couple of years, reports that the PLA is on the brink of fielding an antiship ballistic missile (ASBM) capable of striking ships under way in the Pacific have become increasingly common. (See chapter 5 for details.) This would represent an impressive feat of weapons engineering. Such a capability is not found in even the U.S. arsenal. Fielding the capacity to strike at advancing U.S. carrier or amphibious task forces at long range (reportedly up to 2,500 km for the PLA’s Dong Feng-21C missiles, which are fired from mobile launchers) would confront the U.S. military with an entirely new set of challenges. A China able to strike effectively within the second island chain with sufficient numbers of birds could hope to replicate Imperial Japanese strategy, which aimed at whittling down the U.S. battle line before a Mahanian engagement in Asian waters. It would certainly extend the range of a PLA fortress-fleet, making this concept workable for the first time. And an ASBM capability would signal China’s ability to function along exterior lines against U.S. naval forces at far greater distances than once thought possible, executing a Maoist strategy on a grand scale.⁵³

Antiradiation Weapons. Again, the PLA will use the raw hitting power of its antiship missiles in concert with other systems. Despite its passive nature, antiradiation weaponry makes an ideal implement for unorthodox attack. Showcased in Afghanistan, two wars against Iraq, and other conflicts of the past two decades, the modern American way of war is premised on winning the contest for information supremacy at the outbreak of war. U.S. forces have prevailed in large part because superior technology gives them a “common operating picture” of conditions in the battle space that no opponent can match. Airborne sensors detect and target multiple enemy aircraft, ships, or ground vehicles across long distances. Jammers and antiradiation missiles incapacitate enemy sensors attempting to gather data on and target U.S. assets. These tactics effectively paralyze U.S. adversaries during the opening phases of a military campaign, paving the way for an even more important battlefield condition, namely air supremacy.

Beijing’s purchase of (and effort to reverse-engineer) the S-300 Russian air-defense system is instructive. An indigenous antiradiation variant of the S-300, the FT-2000, will likely be deployed near the Taiwan Strait to target Taiwanese forces and deter U.S. military intervention in a cross-strait war.⁵⁴ Reportedly nearing production, the FT-2000 is nicknamed “AWACS killer” for its mission of attacking the airborne sensors and electronic-warfare assets on which U.S. air superiority relies in wartime.⁵⁵ It homes in on radio-frequency emissions, much as U.S. aviators use high-speed antiradiation missiles, or HARM, to assault enemy air defenses in theaters like Iraq. This leaves the radiating platform no good options. It can silence its radar emissions and go blind, impairing or negating its coordinating function, or it can perform its mission and risk a missile hit. China’s newest air-defense warships will be outfitted with surface-to-air antiradiation missiles comparable to the FT-2000.

In Hughes’ terms, the FT-2000 could seriously degrade U.S. scouting effectiveness, one of his chief determinants of tactical success. Weapons range means little without the ability to find and target enemy forces at long distances. Since the dawn of carrier warfare, U.S. naval strategy has seen command of the air as a prerequisite for surface fleet operations. An operation near Chinese shores would be no different. If Chinese air defenses completely or partially negated the U.S. edge in information warfare, they would slow down and complicate the efforts of U.S. aircraft to establish dominance over the skies—blunting U.S. offensive action and exposing U.S. warships, including aircraft carriers, to air and missile counterstrikes. Robust Chinese air defenses would oblige U.S. commanders to devote their energy to securing the skies. Skillful use of even an inherently defensive and passive weapon such as the FT-2000, then, would open the way for PLA offensive–defensive operations in Mao Zedong’s sense.

Undersea Warfare. The Chinese submarine fleet has aroused growing concern in U.S. defense circles, judging from scholarly commentary and the Pentagon’s annual reports to Congress, “Military Power of the People’s Republic of China.”⁵⁶ Lethal, stealthy diesel-electric submarines like the Russian-built Kilo can prowl China’s offshore contested zone while nuclear boats range farther afield, cueing PLA commanders as U.S. forces approach or launching nuisance attacks on the high seas. Armed with wake-homing torpedoes—torpedoes that find their way to surface targets by following the water turbulence churned up by the ship’s propellers—even diesel boats can compel American ship drivers to attempt radical evasive maneuvers. In a very real sense, they can distract a ship’s combat team while the PLA bombards the fleet with antiship cruise missiles, presenting a tough if not insoluble tactical problem.⁵⁷

To sum up, if the PLA manages to compel U.S. forces to look toward any single dimension of the maritime threat environment—antisurface, antisubmarine, or antiair—it can then pose additional challenges in the other dimensions. Nuclear and diesel-electric attack submarines, missile-armed fast patrol boats, or “assassin’s mace” systems such as minefields make good adjuncts to more traditional systems such as antiship cruise missiles and shore-based aircraft.

A well-designed Chinese force package would impose a three-dimensional threat environment on U.S. forces, and unorthodox and orthodox attacks would proceed along multiple vectors. The more stresses the Chinese can impose, the less likely U.S. forces would be to venture landward of the island chains or into the South China Sea. If China can even partially cancel out U.S. technologies that manage the fog of war, moreover, it could severely curtail U.S. forces’ freedom of maneuver along Asian coastlines, access the U.S. Navy has long taken for granted. The combined effect of information warfare and kinetic measures could induce U.S. forces to operate farther from Chinese shores, helping China achieve its goal of sea denial in the China seas.

One caveat is worth stating. Despite the tone of our commentary, we do not maintain that these capabilities, alone or combined, would give China a decisive edge in littoral warfare, let alone outright military superiority over the United States. The PLA Navy remains a relative newcomer to naval warfare. The cost constraints familiar to military services worldwide burden it. It has technical hurdles to overcome. Its officers and men must gain tactical acumen by operating at sea, the only place mariners can hone their craft. When the PLA Navy will be the U.S. Navy’s equal in material and human terms, if ever, remains an open question.

To offset these lingering shortcomings, the PLA will press its operational and tactical advantages, abiding by Mao Zedong’s counsel. By driving up the costs of entry, Beijing can hope to deter or hamper U.S. involvement in Asian conflicts, fulfilling its defensive strategic aims. If the PLA can deny U.S. forces the ability to dictate events, it will have attained the most important goal of sea denial, imposing local dominance on the waves and aloft for long enough to realize operational and strategic goals. The approach we have posited here comports with the experiences of the past forty-plus years of naval war. From Egypt’s sinking of the Israeli destroyer Eilat with Styx missiles in 1967, to the Argentine sinking of HMS Sheffield in 1982, to the Iraqi Exocet attack on USS Stark in 1987, to Hezbollah’s crippling of the Israeli corvette Spear with a C-802 surface-to-surface missile in 2006, experience demonstrates that a determined yet inferior navy can hurt a superior one, forcing a change in its behavior even without scoring an outright naval victory.⁵⁸

In each incident, a single missile hit scored a mission kill—that is, put its combat-systems suite out of action, preventing the vessel from accomplishing its mission—disabled the stricken vessel, or, in the cases of the Eilat and Sheffield, sank it altogether. The damage USS Samuel B. Roberts, USS Princeton, and USS Tripoli suffered from crude, cheap Iraqi sea mines during the late 1980s and early 1990s represents an even more striking example. For Chinese naval planners, then, the tactics of dispersed, multifaceted attack promise a handsome return on a modest investment. They make sense according to sound principles of naval warfare, as elaborated by Wayne Hughes, and they fit with Chinese strategic and operational traditions. It only makes sense for the PLA to employ them.

Preference #2: Cut Off the U.S. Navy’s Fingers Sequentially

Chinese naval planners cannot count on defeating the United States by crippling or sinking a small, though politically significant, portion of the U.S. fleet. This might work by raising the costs of fighting China above the value Washington assigns the object at stake. But the United States has defied predictions of moral flabbiness before. One lesson of the Pacific War, the first Gulf War, and even Operation Iraqi Freedom for Chinese strategists must be not to discount the United States’ will to fight. Prudence demands that Beijing think ahead and consider what to do should its sea-denial strategy fail to drive U.S. naval forces from sea areas where the PLA wants local superiority. The most obvious fallback for the PLA would be to keep doing what works. Picking off U.S. warships and formations piecemeal would eventually create a favorable environment for Chinese sea denial so long as U.S. commanders kept playing into Chinese hands, presenting a “cooperative adversary.”

Successive small-scale victories at sea would resemble the numerous exterior–interior-line battles waged by Mao’s Red Army against such foes as the Imperial Japanese Army and the Chinese Nationalist Army. Sequential tactics would let the PLA cut the U.S. Navy down to size over time, perhaps realizing its tactical and operational aims on the logic sketched previously. If not, it would gradually tilt the military balance toward China, enhancing the PLA’s prospects for the decisive engagement that Mao foretold in land combat. To be sure, this presupposes great confidence on Beijing’s part in its ability to manage escalation in an Asian maritime conflict. Keeping tabs on Chinese strategic discourses thus seems an obvious step for U.S. naval planners. Wayne Hughes’ second tactical scenario, sequential attack, would likely rank second in China’s hierarchy of naval tactics, dispersing defensive strikes in time as well as space.

Preference #3: Mao Zedong, Meet Alfred Thayer Mahan

In closing, it is worth pointing out that, as the PLA Navy approaches parity with the U.S. Navy, Maoist grammar will increasingly blur into the Mahanian grammar of concentrated fleet-on-fleet engagements. Hughes’ third scenario, massed attack, thus merits consideration for Beijing. Some Chinese strategists look directly to Mahan for inspiration on naval strategy. One well-known pundit, Zhang Wenmu, cites Mahan’s dictum that economic prosperity hinges on the deployment of naval forces at strategic locations. China, maintains Zhang, must “build up our navy as quickly as possible” in preparation for the “sea battle” that represents the “ultimate way for major powers” to resolve economic disputes.⁵⁹ One way a major fleet action might come about: a sequential PLA strategy could culminate in a Mahanian trial of arms, with the decisive clash developing by increments.

Alternatively, if the PLA felt the balance of forces favored it from the outset, its commanders might offer Mahanian battle right away. Having decided to resort to arms, that is, Beijing might seek a decision with the United States immediately rather than stay with Mao Zedong’s sequential approach. Venturing everything to gain everything would not represent so dramatic a break with Mao as it appears. Mao enjoined weaker powers, not stronger ones, to give ground and concentrate against isolated enemy units. Once Chinese forces attain a position of parity or relative superiority, they will enjoy far more operational and tactical options, including the conventional counteroffensive Mao believed they must eventually prosecute to achieve victory. In a favorable strategic setting, there is no reason for the PLA not to proceed straight to the counteroffensive. Indeed, Mao on occasion reversed his own strategy when strategic circumstances warranted. Despite deep reservations among his comrades, Mao prevailed on them to intervene decisively in the Korean War, convinced that a massive initial blow would push UN forces off the peninsula. While this gamble failed miserably, the same type of logic and wishful thinking could again take hold of Chinese commanders. Some factors that might impel the PLA Navy to risk a fleet action include the following:

Maoist Logic–Not So Different from Mahan’s After All. As noted earlier, a Mahanian engagement would be compatible with Maoist traditions under certain circumstances. Having ensnared U.S. forces deep in China’s contested zone, the PLA can assume the exterior lines, applying Mao’s operational logic far more broadly than he anticipated. As noted in chapter 2, the Great Helmsman himself contemplated globe-spanning exterior lines, albeit in a diplomatic—as opposed to an operational—sense. It might seem reasonable to his contemporary followers to extend his theory in other ways, pursuing a counteroffensive that promises outright naval victory.

Death Ground. In some of the contingencies foreseeable in the Taiwan Strait or the South China Sea, the Chinese Communist regime would find its survival at stake. Self-preservation is top priority for Beijing. A cross-strait war, to name the most obvious contingency, would call Chinese national unity into question, and the legitimacy of the regime with it. U.S. intervention, then, might summon forth an all-out PLA assault. If the communist regime’s longevity hinged on it, self-restraint would recede in importance. Or, should the United States mount a blockade of Chinese resource shipments, a similar calculus might take hold. Clearly, all bets are off should some U.S. action place China’s leadership on death ground.

Now or Never. While China often deprecates the United States’ political staying power, Beijing may fear a repetition of 1941, when an Asian sea power dramatically underrated America’s will and capacity to wage war across the Pacific and paid the price for it. Resigned to an armed encounter with U.S. forces, Chinese commanders might aim a knockout blow at U.S. expeditionary strike groups that venture into the China seas. Chinese strategists might fear merely disabling or sinking a small U.S. Navy contingent. By bloodying the Pacific Fleet, Beijing might provoke the kind of massive U.S. counterstroke Imperial Japan incurred after Pearl Harbor. An all-out, victorious engagement would foreclose that prospect.

Dare All to Gain All. Should the PLA offer decisive battle, the ensuing fleet action—again, assuming the PLA Navy won—would hasten China’s rise to regional and world eminence and reorder the Asian and perhaps global international systems. America would not readily rebuild its navy—or regain its superpower status, which turns on supremacy in the maritime commons—following a catastrophic defeat. We find it doubtful that Beijing would risk war for this reason alone. Chinese thinkers grasp the political, economic, and military costs of great-power war. Still, the allure of a final reckoning might prod Chinese commanders to risk the fleet if they were already leaning that way for the reasons hypothesized earlier.

In light of these figures, Chinese strategists are beginning to look beyond the Taiwan impasse, implying that they feel confident with their ability to deny the United States access to the waters shoreward of the first island chain. Now look at the American side. For close-in encounters such as one off Taiwan, which could involve landing U.S. Marines ashore or interdicting Chinese landing forces, U.S. forces must venture within the cruise-missile envelope and well within range of missile-armed aircraft flying from airfields on the mainland. Layered defenses will be thinner and more permeable in these cramped quarters while response times for U.S. defenders will plummet.

Shipboard defenses will take on new importance under these circumstances. The U.S. Navy’s premier self-defense system, the RIM-162 Evolved Sea Sparrow Missile (ESSM), is a semiactive radar-guided missile fired from vertical launch systems or deck-mounted launchers. However accurate, its range is reported at only 45 km, which compresses reaction times for U.S. task forces against Chinese antiship weaponry such as the Sunburn, with its sea-skimming cruise altitude, maximum velocity of Mach 3, and capacity for radical evasive maneuvers in the terminal phase.⁶¹ One study estimates the probability of a hit for a Mach 2.5 missile at 40 percent against a carrier group screened by Aegis combatants.⁶² The window for multiple ESSM engagements, then, would shut quickly under battle conditions. The Close-In Weapons System (CIWS), U.S. Navy warships’ point defense against aerial attack, is a radar-guided Gatling gun able to disgorge up to 4,500 penetrating rounds per minute. The range of CIWS mounts is so short, though, that their rate of fire is cold comfort for shipboard defenders against airborne threats.⁶³

For the moment, U.S. warships can range Taiwan, Hainan, or coastal targets with air or cruise-missile strikes while remaining beyond the reach of shore-launched antiship missiles such as the ones examined before. Depending on the variant, the U.S. Navy’s Tomahawk land-attack cruise missiles boast ranges officially reported at 1,600–2,500 km. The F/A-18 E/F Super Hornet, the mainstay of today’s carrier air wings, has a combat radius of 723 km with a standard bomb load and external fuel tanks.⁶⁴ (Add another 111-plus km for the Super Hornet’s standoff land-attack, or SLAM, air-to-surface missiles—278-plus km for the extended-range variant, or SLAM-ER.)⁶⁵ At extreme range, then, the F/A-18 can hit targets roughly 1,000 km away. The air-launched variant of the SS-N-22, by contrast, can strike at a reported maximum range of only 250 km. And even that figure is contingent on the PLA’s ability to detect, identify, and track U.S. warships at such distances. U.S. Navy doctrine frowns on very-long-range antiship strikes for fear of hitting noncombatants. There is little reason to think the PLA Navy, which has never been tested in high-seas combat, has leapfrogged this intricate technical and doctrinal challenge. Nor is there reason to think PLA commanders would cut loose indiscriminately, heedless of the danger to civilian shipping, unless Beijing finds itself on death ground.

For now, then, the United States seems to have the advantage, but its advantage is on the wane. U.S. naval commanders should no longer expect to strike with impunity at Chinese military assets, ashore or at sea, while keeping their own high-value platforms—carriers, amphibious landing ships, Aegis cruisers and destroyers—out of harm’s way. How far offshore the PLA Navy operates—a function of how widely Chinese political leaders construe their contested zone, how much risk Chinese commanders and statesmen are willing to assume, how much warfighting prowess Chinese mariners and airmen exhibit, and the technical feasibility of systems such as the ASBM—will determine when U.S. task forces will come under threat when approaching the Asian coast.

Looking ahead, we can safely say that the PLA’s tactical reach already extends beyond the first island chain. It is also safe to say that Beijing will soon be able to dispute U.S. command of the waters and skies between the two island chains, if indeed it cannot already. How far offshore China’s navy conducts exercises and what Chinese officers and pundits say about their doctrine will provide the best indicators available. For planning purposes, the soundest assumption is that U.S. forces will face surface, subsurface, and aerial threats along more than one threat axis, especially as they close on Chinese shores. In China’s contested zone, the PLA will fight on exterior lines, mounting dispersed attacks to overpower U.S. antiair, antiship, and antisubmarine defenses. U.S. commanders, accordingly, should think in terms of mutual support, or “massing for defense,” as Captain Hughes puts it.⁶⁶ Chances are, the balance will continue shifting toward the PLA in the coming years as Chinese forces expand and improve their arsenal and refine their tactics to make best use of the contested zone. In a sense, then, Mahanian grammar warrants at least a partial revival among U.S. naval planners—a point to which we return in chapter 8. Concentration of force is worth revisiting as a guide to future operations.

An additional, closely related point: it is high time for naval officers to discard their shopworn assumption that high-tech warships or carrier aviation can strike down the “archer” before he looses his “arrow” at the fleet. This is a worthy goal, to be sure, but it is not a foregone conclusion. This assumption has dominated thinking about antiair defense at least since the advent of the Aegis combat system in the early 1980s. Surface combatants have been designed around it, with thin to nonexistent armor plating to bolster their ability to stand in a fight. Past generations of naval architects designed combatants with just the opposite assumption in mind—that U.S. warships would suffer battle damage. Staying power was built into their very structure. Rediscovering this bleaker yet more realistic philosophy of naval architecture and taking a humbler attitude toward rising contenders befits a U.S. Navy girding itself for the rigors of sea combat in Asia.

Banishing the archer-not-the-arrow assumption means changing attitudes, a cultural task amenable to determined leadership from the top. Some of Hughes’ commentary on warship design, however, cannot be speedily implemented. Improving the capacity of U.S. warships to withstand punishment would reduce the likelihood of their becoming losses or mission kills after a single enemy missile or aircraft leaked through their defenses. As mentioned earlier, staying power is in large measure a function of rugged ship construction. But, as programs such as the ill-starred DDG-1000 project show, modifying material capabilities takes time, involves steep costs, and incurs numerous uncertainties. The sooner the U.S. Navy starts hardening its fleet and reconsidering its tactical and operational practices, the better.

And finally, naval officers and civilian officials should not let themselves be entranced by net assessment—by the propensity to measure sea power by the size and technical specifications of America’s or China’s seagoing arsenal. U.S. analysts must continue and step up their efforts to understand how prospective adversaries such as China may wage war. Educating commanders’ judgment and improving their cultural literacy is another matter. U.S. mariners must school themselves in foreign history and culture, think through prospective futures for maritime Asia, and prepare accordingly.

MASSED, DISPERSED, OR SEQUENTIAL TACTICS?

TACTICAL SCENARIOS: NEAR SHORE AND ON THE HIGH SEAS

APPLYING MAHANIAN LOGIC TO CHINESE SEA-POWER THOUGHT

APPLYING MAOIST ACTIVE-DEFENSE GRAMMAR TO OFFSHORE OPERATIONS

CASE STUDY: THE SOUTH CHINA SEA ON THE “DAY AFTER TAIWAN”

Preference #1: Dispersed Sea Denial

Preference #2: Cut Off the U.S. Navy’s Fingers Sequentially

Preference #3: Mao Zedong, Meet Alfred Thayer Mahan

CAN THE UNITED STATES PRESERVE ITS NAVAL MASTERY?