CHAPTER FIVE

FLEET BUILDING WITH CHINESE CHARACTERISTICS

The United States prides itself on fielding a “national fleet” made up of the U.S. Navy and Coast Guard surface fleets.1 America has nothing on China in this department. China’s national fleet is a composite of navy, coast guard, and maritime law enforcement shipping. These official components of the fleet operate in conjunction with unofficial components such as merchantmen that double as minelayers or intelligence-gathering assets and a maritime militia situated within the fishing fleet. If it floats and flies a Chinese flag, it is probably part of Chinese sea power.

The composition of China’s fleet betokens a holistic understanding of what constitutes sea power. Any implement that can shape events at sea could be part of the fleet, whether it be military or nonmilitary, governmental or nongovernmental in nature. Such a fleet furnishes Beijing with options throughout the spectrum of peacetime and wartime competition. It also introduces asymmetries into U.S.-China encounters in the marine common. U.S. naval commanders must accustom themselves to the reality that they confront an assortment of platforms that Chinese commanders can combine and recombine, depending on the mission.

China’s approach poses problems from a cultural standpoint as well. In the sense that “Mahanian” connotes girding for fleet battles and “post-Mahanian” means policing the sea or projecting power ashore, China is comfortable using post-Mahanian means for Mahanian ends. A fishing trawler or coast guard cutter represents an implement of power politics as surely as a warplane or a hulking destroyer. For their part, U.S. naval officers find it hard to deal with white-hulled China Coast Guard cutters or maritime enforcement vessels trying to cement command of Chinese-claimed waters. Countermeasures for maritime militia embedded within the fishing fleet and working in conjunction with law enforcement ships are still harder to come by. We return to the problem of foiling China’s “gray-zone” strategies in chapter 6.

Continental States Can Build Fleets

When the first edition of this book appeared in 2010, it remained commonplace for China specialists to proclaim that it would take the PLA Navy decades to construct a serious blue-water fleet or even a regional fleet with serious clout. And to be sure, many a continental state’s quest for sea power has ended in disaster. Imperial Germany, our standard for comparison in this volume, was a land power dominant by many indices of national power, including population, natural resources, and industrial potential. When Germany squared off against the preeminent sea power of its day, Great Britain, its bid for naval mastery came to grief. Maritime geography combined with a preponderant enemy navy were too much to overcome.

But we take issue with the common wisdom that holds that continental powers cannot go to sea with any real hope of success. That is determinism. Germany is not the only land power to bid for sea power. Past continental powers have gone to sea; therefore they can.² There is no reason to think China will perform more poorly than the likes of a rising United States, Imperial Japan, or Soviet Union. Shipyards laid the keels for the first serious U.S. Navy battle fleet in 1883. Fifteen years later, that navy vanquished the navy of a European imperial power, Spain, and wrested away the Philippine Islands and other Spanish holdings. By World War I, the United States had embarked on building a “navy second to none.” Postwar naval arms accords affirmed the U.S. Navy’s shipbuilding success, codifying its equal standing with Britain’s Royal Navy—the world’s nautical suzerain. America’s project succeeded.

Imperial Japan opted to construct a modern navy following the Meiji Restoration of 1868, which terminated military rule and seclusion in the island state. The IJN made quick work of China’s Beiyang (Northern) Fleet off the Korean west coast in 1894, then demolished two Russian fleets in 1904 and 1905. Those victories granted Japan mastery of Asian waters for decades to come. After suffering humiliation at American hands during the Cuban Missile Crisis (1962), the Soviet leadership set out to construct an oceangoing fleet for the USSR. By the 1970s the Soviet Navy boasted numbers and capability sufficient to surge task forces into multiple oceans and seas at the same time. Its Mediterranean fleet outnumbered the U.S. Sixth Fleet during the 1973 Arab-Israeli War. Indeed, the Soviets bested America, Japan, and Germany in the pace and scope of their ascent to nautical eminence.3

Clearly, then, a continental power can make itself a great sea power given adequate resolve and resources. It can construct a regional navy of consequence within about fifteen years after making the decision to do so, and it can make itself a global force of consequence another fifteen years after that. But success is not foreordained. The continental power may not overcome the dominant sea power of the age. The Soviets’ seaward quest faltered, Japan’s preeminence in Asia proved ephemeral, and the Germans ended up scuttling their High Seas Fleet in disgrace. Even a newcomer that falls short, however, can spoil things for the hegemon. It behooves dominant sea powers to take prospective spoilers seriously.

We maintain that China could defy the fate of continental powers that did fall short by turning its apparent geographic liabilities to advantage, managing its resources wisely, and keeping its ambitions in check. Like America and the Soviet Union, it could become a composite land and sea power if its leadership and people display enough skill at shipbuilding and seafaring and have enough willpower to take to the sea. The early results portend success. Communist China will fare far better than the Kaiser’s Germany.

Fleet Building, German Style

Fleet building is as interactive an enterprise as exploiting strategic geography or rallying strategic will to the sea. Germany faced a Great Britain that was not only blessed by geography—First Sea Lord Jacky Fisher christened Britons “God’s chosen people” for this reason—but also deployed what High Seas Fleet admiral Wolfgang Wegener termed a “brutally superior” Royal Navy astride German maritime communications.4 Threats consist of capabilities and intentions, but military strategists generally plan against rivals’ capabilities and leave the task of judging intentions to politicians. This division of labor makes sense from the standpoint of combat leaders. After all, intentions can change quickly, while designing and building weaponry take years in an industrial age.

In this spirit, Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz, the German state secretary for the navy, deemed it intolerable that Britain’s navy should stand athwart German sea routes—even though there was negligible evidence that Britain would turn that navy against Germany.⁵ Shortly after assuming duties as navy secretary in 1898, Tirpitz informed Kaiser Wilhelm that the military situation against Britain demanded “battleships in as great a number as possible.”⁶ For Tirpitz, winning Germany’s rightful “place in the sun” of empire meant stationing a fleet of sixty-one capital ships at German seaports by the 1920s.⁷

It also meant exempting naval procurement from parliamentary oversight while constantly upgrading the fleet. Tirpitz wanted German capital ships automatically replaced after twenty-five years of service life. He lowered that figure to twenty years after the Royal Navy commissioned HMS Dreadnought, a revolutionary all-big-gun, oil-fired, turbine-driven battleship that demoted to secondary status battleships that had stood at the vanguard of naval technology a short time before.8 In a real sense, then, the Anglo-German naval arms race began anew in 1906 when Dreadnought slid down the ways.⁹ Germany had to start over, and it needed to refresh the fleet regularly by fielding new ship classes. Hence, Tirpitz agitated to lock in budgets, guaranteeing funding for his construction program.

Tirpitz calculated the optimal size of the High Seas Fleet by studying British martial traditions and the politico-military configuration of late nineteenth-century Europe. His conclusions were on the flimsy side. He postulated, first, that Germany could accomplish its purposes with a fleet smaller than the Royal Navy fleet kept at home to defend the British Isles. In part this was because he believed Germany could offset numerical inferiority with superior ship design by constructing vessels able to withstand battle damage and deliver heavy firepower more swiftly and accurately than could their British counterparts.¹⁰

Tirpitz thus saw little need to match Royal Navy numbers hull for hull; fewer ships but better would suffice. His estimate of the strategic situation only reinforced his thinking about ship and fleet design. Notes historian Holger Herwig: “Citing British naval history, Tirpitz argued that Britain would always be the attacker in war and, consequently, would require 33 percent numerical superiority; conversely, Germany would have to construct a fleet only two-thirds the size of the British, a ‘risk’ fleet … that London would hesitate to challenge for fear of losing its global positions in a naval Cannae in the North Sea.”¹¹ (Carthaginian general Hannibal’s army encircled and annihilated a Roman army at Cannae, giving European strategic thinkers schooled in the classics part of their vocabulary for debating military affairs.) Britain, Tirpitz believed, would shy away from the Romans’ fate. It would shun risk at sea to preserve its navy—and thus its empire.

Yet German officers reasoned in circles. They seemed to believe the Royal Navy would take the offensive because the Royal Navy always took the offensive. For evidence they commonly invoked the Battle of Trafalgar, the 1805 clash in which Lord Horatio Nelson’s outnumbered fleet crushed a Franco-Spanish fleet off the southwest coast of Spain. Trafalgar comported with British strategic traditions and thus indicated how British mariners would prosecute operations. Never mind that the battle was now a century in the past and the Royal Navy had spent the intervening decades waging imperial police actions that bore little resemblance to Nelson’s triumph.

Tirpitz thus foretold that Britain’s Grand Fleet would stand into the North Sea at the outbreak of war, accepting battle on the Germans’ terms despite the risk. Though he seldom agreed with Tirpitz, Admiral Wegener concurred that British mariners had prosecuted a perpetual strategic offensive, seeking to better the empire’s geographic position and mercantile interests in wartime and peacetime alike. Restlessness was the soul of British maritime strategy.

The other premise underlying Tirpitz’s vision of German naval development was that fellow European powers such as France would band with Germany to escape Britain’s maritime dominance. The High Seas Fleet would form the nucleus of an “alliance fleet” that would match or even surpass the Grand Fleet in numbers. But this premise overlooked how the Kaiser had systematically alienated prospective allies since 1890, when he fired Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, an advocate of diplomatic restraint. Wilhelm’s clumsiness rendered him an unlikely superintendent for a naval coalition against Great Britain.12

Worse, from Berlin’s standpoint, the Royal Navy supplied the international public good of maritime security that benefited all seafaring nations—and muted potential opposition to British naval mastery. In short, British highhandedness rankled continental Europeans from time to time, but European leaders preferred the British devil they knew to the German devil they did not.¹³ Great Britain posed too minor a menace to cement a coalition to oppose it.

For an officer obsessed with a rival navy’s capabilities, Tirpitz was deaf to the diplomatic signals his own helter-skelter shipbuilding efforts broadcast. Tirpitz intended to menace the Royal Navy in home waters, so German shipwrights fitted battleships with stout armor to protect against large-caliber British guns. Rugged construction added weight, however, consuming extra fuel while truncating the ships’ range. Since the cruising radius of German battlewagons was too short to let them operate beyond the North Sea, it became plain to British observers that the High Seas Fleet was aimed squarely at Britain.

Indeed, Paul Kennedy aptly describes the German battle fleet as a “sharp knife, held gleaming and ready only a few inches away from the jugular vein” of the premier sea power of the day.14 This was not a force built for colonial or sea-lane defense but for apocalyptic battle in European seaways. Self-defeating though Tirpitz’s strategic ideas were, Herwig declares that they had hardened into “dogma, inviolable and sacrosanct,” by World War I.¹⁵

Alfred Thayer Mahan hints at the dangers of obfuscating about maritime strategy. In a commentary on Berlin’s 1900 Navy Law, Mahan observes that the law set forth a principle that was to govern German naval development “over a term of many years,” namely “that it was essential to possess a navy of such force that to incur hostilities with it would jeopardize the supremacy of the greatest naval power” of the age.¹⁶ In effect, lawmakers designated Great Britain as the primary foe and the benchmark for German shipbuilding while remaining coquettish about the true purposes of the High Seas Fleet.

Since the German naval leadership was not “transparent”—to use today’s parlance for openness in large institutions—about its motives for constructing big-gun ships of war, the British were forced to infer German intentions from German capabilities and hardware. A fleet of short-range, heavily gunned, thickly armored warships stationed just across the North Sea from the British Isles could have only one purpose: to dispute Royal Navy control of European waters. Net assessment, then, acted as the prime mover for Great Britain’s reciprocal buildup. Political judgment played little part because no one could fathom German politics.

Both the United States and China are guilty of similar evasiveness to one degree or another. The American sea services steadfastly refused to name an opponent in their 2007 “Cooperative Strategy for 21st Century Seapower,” the most authoritative statement of how they view the nautical world and the proper strategic responses to perceived threats. When the U.S. sea services agitated for a big, hightech fleet while insisting that the United States currently faces no conventional naval threat, Chinese naval strategists were compelled to read between the lines—and to devise their own strategy based on U.S. capabilities rather than official statements of intent. Revised in 2015, the latest “Cooperative Strategy” does name names and thus represents a step toward candor despite taking a blunter tone.

For its part, the Pentagon hectors the PLA for obscuring the purposes of the impressive fleet China is assembling. And indeed, Beijing is prone to use such formulas as “a certain country” or a generic “powerful adversary” to refer to the United States rather than frankly stating its views. Washington, too, must plan against China’s capabilities, since evidence about Chinese intentions remains nebulous. The two of us took part in a gathering some years ago where Fudan University scholar Shen Dingli declared frankly that “we compete.” One could wish for more of Shen’s brand of outspokenness. Theodore Roosevelt advised diplomats to speak softly, but he was not urging them to dissemble. Candor is a virtue even—or perhaps especially—with prospective foes.

It is unfair to condemn German thought or deeds without identifying better strategic alternatives that were open to Berlin. As noted above, the German naval command made no effort to outflank Britain in a geographic sense to improve Germany’s strategic position. Nor did the naval leadership exert itself to develop an asymmetric strategy that harnessed new technology. Early on, Tirpitz ruled out the strategy of the lesser naval power that French thinkers had championed since midcentury. Strategists of the jeune école, or “new school” of naval warfare, abjured head-on confrontations against superior fleets in favor of cruiser warfare overseas and sea denial close to home.17 Jeune école navies, as a consequence, favored minelayers and torpedo-armed light craft over capital ships meant for toe-to-toe combat.

Such measures were anathema to Tirpitz and the Kaiser. For Mahan and his German disciples, “the backbone and real power of any navy” were “the vessels which, by due proportion of defensive and offensive powers,” were “capable of taking and giving hard knocks.”18 That description meant either battleships or battle cruisers, battleships’ speedier, more lightly armored brethren. Cruiser and sea-denial warfare, in short, represented an asymmetric strategy premised on assailing weakness—thinly guarded sea-lanes frequented by merchantmen—while avoiding the strength manifest in an imposing enemy battle line. Such indirection affronted strategists intent on decisive fleet encounters.¹⁹

Partisans of the jeune école presumably would have applauded navies that experimented with asymmetric means before World War I. For its part, the German Navy built no submarines until 1906—in large part because Tirpitz feared that undersea warfare would siphon resources away from battleship construction. Innovations in mine warfare and torpedo boats lagged as well. As a consequence, Germany joined a symmetrical arms race it could not win at acceptable cost while foreswearing unorthodox means that would have let it contest vital waterways. In short, its apathy toward such new technologies as U-boats, mines, and torpedoes resulted in a major missed opportunity for the German naval command.²⁰

This is not an opportunity China will pass up. The jeune école philosophy is second nature for Chinese mariners. Steeped in China’s sparse maritime tradition, its weakness during the post–World War II years, the legacy of Mao Zedong’s guerilla-warfare strategy, and the influence of Soviet naval doctrine, the PLA Navy embraced a minimalist posture from its founding.²¹ China’s navy long remained an adjunct to ground forces as it deployed submarines, torpedo boats, and shore-based aircraft that hugged the coast. As we showed in chapter 4, it was not until the late 1970s, amid Deng Xiaoping’s reform and opening campaign, that Beijing articulated a more expansive vision of sea power. Urged on by PLA Navy commander Admiral Liu Huaqing, the Chinese leadership directed the navy to develop hardware and methods to mount a forward defense of the mainland—both within and beyond the first island chain.

Even so, the service’s brown-water mentality—that is, its ingrained habit of thinking in terms of defending waters just offshore—and force structure persisted well into the early 1990s. To this day, the PLAN operates missile boats useful for coastal defense, albeit in stealthier, more lethal forms than their Maoist forerunners.22 This apparent handicap in strategy conceals an advantage. Unlike Imperial Germany, which rushed into building a top-heavy naval force structure that still proved no match for its main antagonist, the Chinese have approached sea power in a patient, methodical, sequential manner. Admiral Xiao Jinguang’s concept of “sabotage warfare at sea,” profiled in chapter 4, admittedly resulted from necessity rather than choice. Yet, the very defensive-mindedness of early PLA naval doctrine applied a catalyst for imaginative thinking about how to defeat a technologically superior foe at sea.

Recognition of one’s failings makes an excellent starting point for strategic thought. Chinese planners long assumed, correctly and realistically, that the PLAN would fight from a position of weakness should it be pitted against U.S. forces. Accordingly, they sought to array comparative Chinese strengths against critical American vulnerabilities to even the odds. PLA strategists formulated what the Pentagon terms an “anti-access strategy,” covered in detail in ensuing chapters. Anti-access strategy combines military with nonmilitary measures in an effort to delay the arrival of U.S. and allied forces in a particular Asian theater of operations, preclude or disrupt the use of regional bases that are critical to sustaining U.S. military operations, and hold off U.S. power-projection assets as far from Chinese shores as possible.²³

By selectively developing inexpensive, readily available weapon systems such as submarines and antiship missiles (or purchasing them abroad) and by tailoring operational concepts to China’s local circumstances, the PLA has put itself in position to execute an antiaccess strategy. Beijing can contest American command of the common, much as jeune école theorists aimed to deny a stronger antagonist maritime command—and thereby frustrate its operations and strategy—a century ago.

China’s hope is that anti-access defenses can in effect erect a no-go zone for U.S. forces along the East Asian seaboard. Disputed command—either real or perceived—softens American political resolve while foreclosing certain U.S. military options. It also frees up maneuver room for the Chinese, improving the likelihood that the PLA can stage a breakout from the first island chain under the protective aegis of anti-access forces. Shackled by geography and relatively short-range weaponry, Imperial Germany had no such strategic option in the North Sea.

MAP 3—China’s Anti-access Strategy

Adaptation by Chris Robinson based on Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments (CSBA) images used with permission.

Beyond the potential operational advantages, Chinese investments in access denial promise flexibility and efficiency in terms of force structure and costs. Beijing long eschewed an overtly symmetrical buildup of naval forces, including prohibitively expensive big-deck aircraft carriers. Even today the PLAN is taking an unhurried approach to developing carriers, having refitted a Soviet-built flattop, improved the design after taking it to sea, and constructed an upgraded version at Chinese yards.

In contrast to Tirpitz, the Chinese seem unfazed by lopsided force ratios because anti-access involves qualitatively different measures of effectiveness. The proper measure for PLA adequacy is the power of the PLAN fleet plus the shore-based firepower that air and strategic rocket forces can concentrate at the scene of battle to augment the fleet. Taken in isolation, then, the fleet’s power matters little; what matters is joint PLA combat power at the decisive place and time. If joint PLA combat power equals or exceeds that of U.S. and allied forces on the scene, then it meets China’s needs—no matter what symmetrical comparisons between the navies might indicate. This is consistent with the idea that the PLAN will pursue command of the sea with Chinese characteristics, as sketched out in chapter 1. Maritime command is a joint affair for Beijing.

Recognizing this, the PLA naval command has wisely refused to run a ship-for-ship arms race. With little pressure to compete numerically, the navy and shipbuilders enjoy the luxury of testing and refining surface and subsurface combatants, producing and field-testing a new ship class every few years before committing to mass production. This leisurely but fruitful process is ideal for “fleet experimentation.” It keeps the risk of technological failure at a minimum while producing a superior end product. In fleet building as in geographic position and strategic willpower, then, China is outperforming Imperial Germany. We next examine the development of the PLAN’s surface fleet before turning to the nonmilitary component of Chinese sea power.

China’s Surface-Warfare “Big Stick”

The Chinese navy’s surface fleet is a force on the march. To conjure up Theodore Roosevelt, the navy represents Beijing’s “big stick,” much as the U.S. Navy’s Great White Fleet was Roosevelt’s. The surface fleet comprises destroyers, frigates, corvettes, and fast-attack craft, along with—most strikingly—China’s first aircraft carrier, a refurbished Soviet-built flattop dubbed Liaoning. Since the early 2000s the PLA Navy has fielded new classes of indigenously built destroyers, frigates, and corvettes. Of particular note, the Type 052D Luyang III destroyer, the Type 054A Jiangkai II frigate, and the Type 056 Jiangdao corvette have all gone into serial production, adding mass, balance, and punch to the fleet.

A bit more than a decade has elapsed since China began to commission these modern fighting ships. Coming so far so quickly constitutes an impressive feat by any standard. The PLAN’s metamorphosis from a coastal-defense force composed of largely obsolescent Soviet-era technologies into a modern naval service has riveted attention within the U.S. defense community. By 2009 the ONI—a body not known for hyperbole—was already hailing the advances of China’s surface fleet as “remarkable.” According to ONI’s 2015 report on the PLAN, “In 2013 and 2014, China launched more naval ships than any other country and is expected to continue this trend through 2015–16.”24 And indeed it did.

The Pentagon’s 2017 annual report on Chinese military power follows in this vein, observing that the PLAN is “the largest navy in Asia, with more than 300 surface ships, submarines, amphibious ships, and patrol craft.”²⁵ Retired rear admiral Michael McDevitt likewise points out that “when one counts the number and variety of warships that the PLAN is likely to have in commission by around 2020, China will have both the largest navy in the world (by combatant, underway replenishment, and submarine ship count) and the second most capable ‘far seas’ navy in the world.”26

While the Chinese surface fleet’s modernization program may not rival the massive buildups witnessed in the years before World War I and World War II, it is nevertheless reshaping the naval balance of power in Asia. To better appreciate the implications of the PLAN’s growth spurt, we will first examine the PLA Navy’s premier destroyer, the Type 052D, as a case study that highlights the durability of China’s maritime challenge, and then chart the trajectory of the U.S.-China competition at sea.

The PLAN’s Workhorse

The aircraft carrier Liaoning captured the popular imagination after joining the fleet in 2012, but the PLAN’s surface combatants constitute the true vanguard of seaborne Chinese endeavors. These workhorse vessels will make China’s turn to the seas felt in maritime Asia and beyond. In the coming years they will serve as pickets guarding the carrier, project power in their own right at the core of surface action groups, show China’s flag in disputed waters, defend good order at sea in distant theaters, and conduct naval diplomacy around the world.

Let us start with the Type 052D Luyang III–class guided-missile destroyer (DDG). The PLAN commissioned the first of the class in March 2014 to great fanfare. The new vessel is an improved and slightly larger variant of the Type 052C, itself a man-of-war Chinese naval enthusiasts touted as “China Aegis.”²⁷ They portray the PLAN DDG as a peer of state-of-the-art U.S. Navy cruisers and destroyers outfitted with the Aegis combat system—a combination radar, computer, and fire-control system capable of autonomously engaging multiple air and missile targets at long range.

Do such comparisons stand up? To a point. The Type 052D is a stealthy 7,500-ton, gas-turbine-driven ship with a cruising range of 4,500 nautical miles. Its phased-array radar system can reportedly detect, identify, and track hundreds of surface and air targets simultaneously at distances of several hundred miles. The DDG boasts 64 VLSs; a VLS cell is essentially a silo embedded in a ship’s hull. Each can disgorge one to four missiles, depending on the types and sizes of the missiles housed within it. Outfitting a combatant with VLS permits quick firing of antiair, antiship, or land-attack missiles without the bother, delay, and technical hassles associated with uploading munitions onto launchers from magazines deep within the ship.

On paper, at least, the Type 052D appears to be a humbler cousin to the U.S. Navy’s Aegis-equipped Arleigh Burke–class DDGs and Ticonderoga-class guided-missile cruisers. The PLAN DDG displaces less than the U.S. Navy warships, which displace 9,600 and 11,000 tons, respectively. Lesser tonnage indicates that it has smaller capacity for fuel and stores, and thus a shorter cruising range than its American counterparts. On the other hand, it is slightly larger than the Royal Australian Navy’s Aegis-equipped Hobart-class “air-warfare destroyers” now entering service, which displace 6,350 tons fully loaded.

The Luyang III’s dimensions appear more than adequate to discharge the types of regional missions it will likely shoulder in China’s near seas—the waters that lap against China’s shores—and the Indian Ocean. Its armament is smaller than that of the Burkes and Ticonderogas, which carry 96 and 122 VLS cells, respectively. The Hobart has only 48 VLS cells, leaving the Australian DDG at a disadvantage on a one-to-one basis. But again, this Chinese destroyer packs a punch for local conflicts in Asian waters—especially since it will operate within reach of shore fire support in most cases. Geographic proximity lets the fleet summon land-based antiship weaponry to scenes of impact, evening the firepower balance.

China’s navy did not rest after fielding the Luyang III class; it moved on to more ambitious designs. In mid-2017 the news broke that the PLAN had launched the Type 055 DDG, a destroyer with dimensions exceeding those of American Burkes and Ticonderogas.28 If the Type 055 meets China’s needs, it could go into production alongside the Type 052D. That would open up new horizons for PLA naval operations. The U.S. Navy deploys Aegis cruisers and destroyers with its carrier strike groups and with surface-action groups, tailoring forces to likely threats while holding down the cost of procuring and maintaining the fleet. The PLAN too could adopt a “high/low mix,” combining various ship types as tactical circumstances warrant. It could also designate the more capacious, more heavily armed, longer-range Type 055 for expeditionary duty in, say, the Indian Ocean while reserving Type 052Ds for East and Southeast Asian missions where shore-based fire support is on call.

Since commencing its naval buildup in earnest in the late 1990s, Beijing has taken an eminently sensible approach to fleet development. So long as China’s strategic surroundings remained hospitable and the United States was content guaranteeing safe passage through international waters and skies, the PLAN could pursue methodical fleet experimentation. Shipwrights built small classes of ships, identified and kept the best features of each, and discarded the rest. This risk-averse approach made technological sense while the Chinese were attempting a qualitative leap in naval engineering.

Until recently, the Chinese surface fleet bore out this go-slow approach. Over roughly a ten-year period beginning in the mid-1990s, China built no more than two hulls apiece for five classes of destroyers and frigates. It constructed two Luhus, one Luhai, two Luyang Is, one Luzhou, and two Jiangkai Is.²⁹ Designating these ships as fleet experiments, however, does not mean they remain close to home or forgo regular maritime operations. The PLAN has extracted real operational value from them. New-design vessels have stood into distant waters to fine-tune crews’ skills, develop doctrine, and smooth out technical kinks. Counterpiracy patrols in the Indian Ocean have paid real dividends in this regard, as have forays into the China seas and the open waters of the Pacific Ocean.

Ultimately, however, the PLAN had to settle on a single design for mass production. Larger force structure developments have likely prodded Chinese planners to draw the fleet-experimentation phase to a close. The PLAN’s first aircraft carrier, Liaoning, the refitted Soviet-built Varyag, has undergone a series of sea trials since entering service in 2012. The PLAN has been flight-testing the J-15, a reverse-engineered derivative of the Russian Su-33 fighter plane that can operate from Liaoning’s decks. The chief element missing from an initial PLAN carrier group is a versatile picket ship to defend the capital ship against air and missile threats. Unless and until the Type 055 proves its mettle, it appears the PLAN has found its premier surface combatant in the Type 052D.

Admittedly, a new DDG will merely complete the strictly material dimension of China’s carrier ambitions. Assembling a Chinese carrier battle group on par with its American counterparts will remain a daunting challenge. Chinese planners will need to combine the carrier, its air wing, surface combatants, and possibly a screen of nuclear attack submarines into a seamless, mutually supporting team. This is no easy feat.

But the destroyer’s usefulness will not hinge entirely on the fate of China’s carrier program. A multipurpose DDG could be put to many other uses while the PLAN methodically masters the art of carrier operations. Notably, the Type 052D could join a surface action group or amphibious task force to support and defend high-value ships other than carriers. It could also act as the centerpiece of such a group or cruise independently, much as U.S. surface combatants sometimes do. And it could execute these functions across broad sea areas. Since 2008, surface action groups numbering up to eleven ships have transited the international straits separating the Ryukyu island chain to reach the open western Pacific. Such naval activism strongly suggests that the surface action group will be a key organizing principle around which surface combatants will be deployed, with the Type 052D leading the way.

What, more specifically, will the Chinese do with their DDGs? Improved Luyangs could fend off air attacks against China’s Soviet-built Sovremennyy-class destroyers, which specialize in ship-killing engagements. They could also accompany the small but growing numbers of amphibious assault ships, including the Yuzhao-class amphibious transport dock that Beijing has constructed to project power ashore. Such expeditionary strike groups easily outmatch those deployed by Southeast Asian navies. They would be particularly well suited to seize islands in the South China Sea or to fend off assault on the artificial islands Chinese engineers have manufactured from rocks and atolls. The Type 052D, furthermore, could extend its protective air-defense umbrella over the nimble and stealthy Type 022 Houbei catamarans. These craft belie their diminutive size, sporting long-range ship-killing cruise missiles that allow them to assert or deny control of the seas vis-à-vis superior fleets. Type 022s—quintessential jeune école combatants—can accomplish much if shielded from aerial attack.

In a Taiwan contingency, moreover, cutting-edge DDGs would offer Beijing a sea-based air-defense option that would further threaten the survivability of the embattled Taiwan Air Force. With its long detection and engagement horizon, a single Type 052D could cover wide swathes of airspace near or over the island, beyond the effective firing range of shore-based surface-to-air missile units emplaced on the Chinese mainland. Type 052Ds cruising east of Taiwan could in effect surround the island’s air defenders, mounting a threat from all points of the compass when pilots take to the air.

Finally, the PLAN could dispatch these imposing frontline warships overseas, showcasing China’s military prowess to foreign audiences while advancing naval diplomacy. They represent tokens of political commitment that may help coerce or deter foes and hearten allies and friends. The bottom line is that more—and more capable—large-displacement destroyers will allow China to mix and match different elements of its naval power imaginatively for a multitude of missions.

Is it likely that the regional naval balance of power will shift as a result of China’s DDG buildup? The short answer is yes. A casual calculation based on reports from the Pentagon and ONI is telling. Such sources estimate that the PLAN will put to sea at least ten Type 052Ds, giving China a fleet of sixteen or more Aegis-equivalent warships even in the unlikely case that it builds no more combatant ships of this type. (The Type 055’s debut appears to settle the question of whether the PLAN intends to keep manufacturing capital ships.)

Japan and South Korea are the only Asian powers with similar Aegis-equipped heavyweights in their navies. Southeast Asian powers that buck China’s will would be utterly outmatched in surface engagements against the PLAN. They have nothing remotely comparable. On paper, at least, the Type 052D’s debut makes China’s the leading indigenous Asian navy. Once the full 052D contingent joins the fleet, the PLAN can expect to take on any regional fleet—excluding the U.S. Navy, of course—with better than average prospects of success.

Will the prospect of a tilt in China’s favor spur a new round of naval construction across the region in the coming years? Much depends on the staying power of the United States in the region and on Asian countries’ capacity and willingness to bear the costs of an arms race.

The Challenge to the U.S. Navy

Despite compelling evidence that Chinese naval power is growing in quantity and quality, skeptics doubt the PLA Navy will translate this material heft into real combat effectiveness. One sanguine view holds that the U.S. Navy surface fleet is more than a match for any rival in the contest for sea control—the arbiter of any naval war—and will remain so for the foreseeable future. The implication is that, while Beijing may be able to exact a price from the U.S. Navy for attempting to use the seas and airspace in China’s environs, the United States will still command the seas when the chips are down.

At the tactical level, this comforting narrative holds that U.S. naval forces remain able to land a devastating blow before opposing warships get close enough to fire their first shot. In a fleet-on-fleet engagement, for example, carrier-based warplanes would unleash missiles at enemy surface combatants from standoff distances—that is, beyond the engagement range of the opponent’s antiship arsenal. This scenario conforms to the long-standing American doctrinal preference for shooting the “archer” (an enemy warship or warplane) before the archer can let fly his “arrow” (antiship weapon). This tactical and technological margin of superiority will endure and perhaps even widen, this storyline goes, and the U.S. Navy will perpetuate its dominant position in maritime Asia.

Such a soothing narrative is quickly losing cogency as the PLAN’s surface fleet catches up across the board. China’s mariners are cementing core competencies while closing the capability gap. For years, Chinese ships’ paucity of sophisticated area-wide air defenses exposed them to air and missile attacks. This shortcoming reaffirmed U.S. commanders’ conviction that carrier aviators would handily defeat the PLAN in a fight. Now, however, near-state-of-the-art systems on board some Chinese combatants outrange the antiship weaponry sported by U.S. aircraft. ONI reports that the Type 052D carries a new variant of the HHQ-99 surface-to-air missile with a range of eighty nautical miles, comparable in reach to the U.S. Navy’s premier air-defense missile, the Standard Missile-2. (The Navy is now deploying the SM-6, its first interceptor capable of antiair, antisurface, and ballistic-missile defense [BMD] missions. If successful, the SM-6 will boost Aegis vessels’ range as high as two hundred nautical miles.)30 The Luyang-class DDGs are apparently equipped with phased-array radars similar in appearance—and, according to Chinese pundits, in capability—to the American Aegis combat system. The Type 055 destroyer, which displaces more than 10,000 tons and carries 112 VLS cells, will reportedly join the Type 052Ds to thicken fleet air defenses.³¹

At the same time, the PLAN has armed its warships to the teeth with a family of Russian- and Chinese-made antiship cruise missiles (ASCMs) boasting ranges of 120–130 nautical miles. Worse, from the American standpoint, the Pentagon pegs the range of the supersonic YJ-18 ASCM now entering service on board PLAN combatants at an impressive 290 nautical miles. The only comparable weapon currently in the U.S. inventory is the subsonic, four-decades-old Harpoon antiship missile, whose advertised striking range is around 70 nautical miles. (The SM-6 will do much to correct the range mismatch, but it appears the YJ-18 may outrange even the U.S. Navy’s newest missile. Much depends on what the true range of the SM-6 is—as opposed to the range given in unclassified settings.) In other words, major Chinese combatants can not only keep U.S. aircraft at bay, they can also unleash volleys of ASCMs at the U.S. fleet from beyond American weapons’ range. Even if PLAN vessels remain inferior to their U.S. Navy counterparts on a ship-for-ship basis, getting in several missile engagements before a U.S. fleet can return fire could provide the PLAN with its great equalizer against a stronger foe. Chinese archers may now hold the initiative.

Both the defensive and offensive sides of sea combat, then, are stacking up in China’s favor and progressively eroding or nullifying altogether some of the U.S. Navy’s tactical advantages. In short, the U.S. Navy’s surface battle capacity has fallen behind the times. Since the Cold War, the navy has grown accustomed to operating in uncontested waters. Indeed, as we will show in chapter 8, the leaders of the U.S. sea services resolved that no one was likely to dispute American command of the sea, and thus that the fleet could and should devote its energies exclusively to projecting power ashore from this safe nautical sanctuary. Having taken such strong bureaucratic signals to heart, the surface fleet let the skills and hardware for striking at sea atrophy. Why practice fighting for something that no one is going to dispute?

Other missions have preoccupied the service since the Cold War. Naval aviators have spent the past decade supporting ground forces rather than training to duel enemy armadas. Dropping smart bombs on insurgents and terrorists in Iraq and Afghanistan demands different skills than evading enemy defenses and pummeling enemy men-of-war. Meanwhile, DDGs have been burdened with an ever-wider array of missions, including BMD. Competing missions—some of which, like BMD, command national-level scrutiny—siphon finite resources, crew attention, and physical space on board ship away from the fleet-on-fleet combat function.

In effect the Navy has demoted war at sea—the raison d’être for any navy—to afterthought status. Both the hardware (weaponry, sensors, and hulls) and the software (training and exercises) for sea control have suffered as a result. Reversing two decades of steady decline in surface warfare in an era of tight budgetary constraints will be neither easy nor quick. U.S. naval officials have conceded the need to rectify the situation and have initiated, for instance, a crash program to develop and field new long-range shipboard ASCMs. They have instructed the fleet to experiment with “distributed lethality,” arming more surface vessels more heavily to confront antagonists. The SM-6 has been successfully tested against surface targets as part of distributed lethality, while a new long-range antiship missile is under development for firing from B-1 bombers, F-18 fighter/attack jets, and, ultimately, VLS-equipped surface ships.32 Furthermore, Tomahawk cruise missiles may be repurposed for antiship missions—reconstituting a capability dismantled after the Cold War.³³

Nonetheless, it would be a grievous mistake to concentrate wholly on the technical and operational progress the PLA Navy surface fleet has made or the tactical travails that could hold back the U.S. Navy surface fleet. Competition is about more than gee-whiz weaponry and comparing entries in Jane’s Fighting Ships. It is about politics. It is about how much of a nation’s naval power the political leadership is prepared to hazard in combat considering the political stakes and competing requirements elsewhere around the world.

The only meaningful standard for gauging a seagoing force’s adequacy is its ability to mass superior combat power at the decisive time, at the decisive place on the nautical chart, to overpower the strongest probable adversary. This is a tough standard to meet when operating across intercontinental distances. An Asian power fighting close to home can fling most or all of its forces into battle. A faraway global power may have no such luxury. Unless it diverts forces from pressing commitments in other theaters, placing those commitments in jeopardy, Washington can commit only a fraction of U.S. naval forces to action. And it ranges from difficult to impossible for a fraction of one force to defeat the whole of a peer competitor’s force.

It is far from clear that the United States retains its accustomed supremacy by this unforgiving standard, or that it retains matchless technological supremacy. Budgetary factors are also at work. It costs the United States far more than it costs China to stage a unit of combat power at a given scene of action in maritime Asia. Distance from the theater demands more capacious ships able to carry more fuel, arms, and stores. Forward bases and a sizable logistics fleet are a must, as are dedicated personnel. Whether the Pentagon can afford to mount superior strength in a rival great power’s backyard, whether the sea services are investing in the right people and hardware to constitute that strength, and whether American seafarers have the requisite skills to prevail when battle is joined are questions worth pondering.

Doubts about U.S. maritime mastery have cast U.S.-China competition in a whole new light. And to further compound the strategic and operational dilemma, a purely fleet-on-fleet engagement is improbable within the China seas or the western reaches of the Pacific Ocean, where Beijing has the luxury of throwing the combined weight of Chinese sea power into a sea fight. It can dispatch not just the PLAN surface fleet but ASCM-armed submarines and swarms of missile-armed patrol craft—its ultramodern answers to the jeune école—to trouble spots.

Furthermore, land-based implements of sea power can strike a blow in any fleet action that takes place within their combat radii. PLA Air Force warplanes can join the fray, making land-based airfields into de facto aircraft carriers to supplement the fleet’s combat power; so can ASBMs lofted by the PLA Rocket Force. Lord Horatio Nelson, who knew a thing or two about operating fleets under the shadow of shore-based weaponry, counseled that “a ship’s a fool to fight a fort.” Nelson would blanch at a Fortress China that can strike hundreds of miles out to sea without even ordering fleets to get under way.

Because the U.S. sea services are scattered throughout Asia and the world, then, one part of the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps could conceivably be called on to confront the whole of China’s maritime might. To estimate the outcome of a fleet action, we must determine how whatever contingent the U.S. Navy is likely to commit to battle, including its aerial and subsurface components along with any assets supplied by allies like the Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force, stacks up to the massed power of the PLA Navy fleet backed by the array of anti-access weaponry at PLA commanders’ disposal. This assumes Chinese commanders do the smart thing in wartime and combine their three regionally based fleets for action, of course. If China’s navy outmatches the U.S. and allied fleet contingent under such conditions, it is adequate to the tasks political leaders in Beijing have entrusted to it. If not, the advantage resides with the United States and its allies.

The unenviable task before Washington, then, is to regain, preserve, or extend the margin of superiority of the fraction of its naval force that is deployed to Asia over the entire maritime force—sea and land—that Beijing can use to shape events on the high seas. It will be tough to pull off such a feat, especially under present circumstances. Finances are straitened, and overall numbers are endangered as a result, as is the military’s capacity to innovate. To make ends meet, the U.S. Navy is substituting light combatants such as its new littoral combat ships for multimission warships with heavier firepower. To aggravate these problems, the fleet finds itself outranged by its most likely antagonist and could well take a beating while trying to close to missile range. This problem will persist until new antiship missiles restore long-range hitting power to the fleet or until exotic armaments such as electromagnetic railguns or shipboard lasers augment combatants’ main battery.

From a grand-strategic standpoint, the lag in U.S. weapons development could open a danger zone in which Beijing is tempted to strike before its range advantage disappears. Imperial Japan made a similar now-or-never calculation in 1904 after realizing that rival Russia was constructing new battlewagons for its Pacific Squadron. Japan’s navy struck before St. Petersburg could amass insuperable strength in Far Eastern waters. In 1941, likewise, Tokyo hit the U.S. Pacific Fleet before the entirely new fleet being built under the Two-Ocean Navy Act of 1940 could arrive in the theater to shift the naval balance against Japan. U.S. and allied leaders must remain watchful lest Beijing too succumb to the temptation to settle disputes around its nautical periphery by force. China would be far from the first combatant to act before a window of opportunity slams shut.

Are submarines the remedy for what ails the Navy? Do they constitute a game changer akin to the “assassin’s mace” that so beguiles Chinese strategists? (A weaker opponent armed with an assassin’s mace strikes down a stronger opponent by assailing some fatal weakness.) Many Westerners appear to think so, assuming that the U.S. Navy can simply dive beneath the waves and pummel the PLA Navy from below. Submariners voice confidence in the superiority of American and allied boats over anything China has put to sea. We see no reason to question the allies’ qualitative superiority in this sphere, and indeed, we have depicted the subsurface fleet as a core competitive advantage for the United States.

But while quality remains on the allies’ side, brute numbers of hulls are problematic. Under the Obama administration’s “pivot” to Asia—a strategy the Trump administration has evidently adopted, though not by name—60 percent of the U.S. Navy’s sixty-nine-vessel submarine force now patrols the Pacific Ocean.34 But eighteen of the sixty-nine are Ohio-class nuclear-powered ballistic-missile boats (SSBNs) or cruise-missile boats (SSGNs) meant for shore bombardment. The submarine force operates fourteen SSBNs and four SSGNs. They do not fight for sea command. (This could change once Tomahawk ASCMs join the fleet. SSGNs could then do double duty between shore bombardment and fleet combat.) That leaves fifty-one nuclear-powered attack submarines (SSNs) suitable for a tilt against the PLA Navy. Sixty percent of that figure, thirty or thirty-one SSNs, will be in the Pacific theater.

That may sound like ample strength, but bear in mind that no ship or plane is ready for service all of the time. Routine upkeep, extended overhauls and refueling, crew rest, and training lodge inexorable claims on a vessel’s schedule. A hoary U.S. Navy axiom holds that it takes three U.S.-based ships to keep one on foreign station. One is in the shipyards and completely out of service; another is preparing for deployment; and the third is actually on patrol. According to Congressional Research Service naval experts, the three-to-one ratio overstates the proportion of ships available for combat duty.35 Using this ratio for the sake of discussion, however, U.S. naval commanders can expect to have eleven fully combat-ready subs at their disposal at any time. Assuming the rhythm from overhaul to deployment holds up, another eleven may be available in varying states of readiness. Permanently basing ships overseas improves the readiness ratio, but even then a safe rule of thumb is that it takes two hulls to ensure that one is battleworthy.³⁶

Twenty-two SSNs, no matter how good they are individually, constitute a slender force to cover the vast China seas and western Pacific in wartime. Theorist Julian S. Corbett advises commanders to post vessels at the origin of an enemy fleet’s voyage; at its destination, if known; or at focal points such as straits where shipping has to congregate when passing from point A to point B. Otherwise, it may be hard to make contact. Monitoring Chinese seaports along with narrow seas such as the Luzon Strait and the passages through the Ryukyu Islands will stretch the tactically proficient but lean U.S. submarine fleet. That, in turn, will cede broad operating grounds to the PLAN.

American SSNs are further constrained because they are armed only with torpedoes for antiship missions. Unlike Chinese boats, they do not routinely carry ASCMs to expand their strike range. Indeed, the strike range of the U.S. submarine force’s standard Mark 48 heavyweight torpedo is ten nautical miles tops, as opposed to well over one hundred nautical miles for ASCM-toting PLAN submarines. Depending on short-range weaponry sharply limits the area on the map an individual SSN can cover and leaves sizable expanses uncovered. Trying to get the job done under these conditions stresses the undersea fleet’s numbers even more.

Undersea warfare, then, remains an advantage for the U.S. Navy, but it is not the silver bullet the hype implies. The Navy needs more mass—meaning more boats, preferably with extended-range armament—if it is to vanquish China’s navy from the depths. Practitioners and pundits err if they view the silent service, as currently configured, as a cure-all for what ails the surface Navy. Indeed, doubling the Navy’s submarine inventory would represent a prudent move for Washington in its strategic competition with Beijing. The service might accelerate the acquisition of SSNs, or it might even consider fielding a diesel-submarine contingent. It could procure—or coproduce with Japan, a premier submarine builder—several conventional boats for the price of one SSN. Such measures would stretch finite shipbuilding dollars. Fielding a submarine-launched ASCM would extend American subs’ combat reach even farther. An antiship Tomahawk missile will help ameliorate the range problem, but full-scale Tomahawk conversion remains some way off.

Where does all of this leave us? China watchers tend to make the U.S. Navy the benchmark by which to judge the PLA Navy’s size and composition. As we have noted, however, the proper yardstick is the navy’s capacity to fulfill the goals assigned to it by political leaders, in the expanses that matter, against the strongest likely opponent. Beijing’s immediate goals and its likely opponents fall within reach of the abundant shore-based armaments festooning Fortress China. Combining those weapons with sea-based implements of marine combat yields a force far more potent than side-by-side comparisons of surface fleets would indicate. The PLA Navy may not need a surface fleet symmetrical with the U.S. Navy’s—measured by flattops, air wings, destroyers, and so forth—to get its job done.

As we have underscored time and again, observers must apply standards unique to China to determine whether China’s navy has struck the right balance of capabilities. Comparing it with a globe-spanning navy like America’s reveals little.

China’s growing surface fleet is just one expression of Beijing’s larger, longer-term challenge to stability in maritime Asia. China’s “comprehensive national power,” to use a term coined by Chinese strategists, furnishes the foundation for developing durable sea power. Despite slackening GDP growth, the Chinese economy is already roughly half the size of America’s. China is also one of the largest shipbuilding powers in the world, and its naval yards are riveting together warships of every kind at breakneck speed.

Such sinews of national power will not only help the Chinese navy catch up more quickly with the U.S. Navy but will also keep Beijing competitive at sea over the long haul. China’s current economic, financial, and industrial position relative to the United States is enviable compared with Japan’s on the eve of Pearl Harbor or the Soviet Union’s during the late Cold War. (Japan’s economy was about one-tenth the size of America’s in 1941.) Even so, both the Japanese and the Soviet navies posed a formidable threat to the United States.

The inputs of naval power are inherently long lasting as well. High-end vessels such as the Type 052Ds are built to stay in service for twenty to thirty years. (The U.S. Navy tries to wring even more service out of its surface combatants.) A ship commissioned in 2016, in other words, could in theory ride the waves until midcentury. Provided the PLAN turns out to be a good steward of its capital-intensive assets, undertaking regular maintenance and repairs, China promises to maintain a standing presence in Asian waters.

Moreover, the warships that entered serial production over the past decade were almost certainly designed, developed, and procured years in advance. Thus there is a built-in time lag between the initial Chinese decision to launch a new ship type and the physical construction of that vessel at a shipyard. The new developments we are observing today are products of much earlier plans. It is anybody’s guess what additional new classes of warships—and in what volume—the PLAN has in store for the region. The Type 055 remained mostly a rumor until it debuted publicly in June 2017. As noted before, the vessel reportedly displaces more than U.S. Navy DDGs or cruisers—suggesting increased capacity for fuel, munitions, and armaments. Consequently, once it joins the fleet in numbers, the Type 055 will extend the PLAN fleet’s operating radius while amplifying its combat punch.

The changes afoot may be a sign of things to come. A balanced regional fleet is now in the making, and it will no doubt alter the geometry of the naval balance in maritime Asia. Even if economic growth rates continue to slow in the coming years, China will have laid the basis for a competition that will be measured in decades. The United States and its allies must think beyond the technical, tactical, and operational implications of the PLAN’s burgeoning surface fleet and adjust to the fact that they confront a long-term rivalry against a resourceful and resilient antagonist.

China’s Nonmilitary “Small Stick”

If the PLA Navy is China’s big stick—a navy that fights for objects in dispute—the China Coast Guard, maritime law enforcement services, and maritime militia represent its “small stick.” Together the military and nonmilitary components constitute China’s national fleet. The constable’s nightstick makes a fitting metaphor for China’s approach to consolidating “indisputable” or “irrefutable” sovereignty over contested expanses and geographic features, especially in the South China Sea and East China Sea. China polices what it claims as though its sovereignty were already an established fact, daring rival claimants with feeble navies and coast guards to do something about it. If they cannot, China is left in possession of the disputed turf. It appears sovereign, and over time it may become sovereign in fact, albeit not under treaty law.

China’s turn to small-stick diplomacy marks an abrupt departure from the approach it was pursuing when the first edition of this book appeared in 2010. At that time it was waging a “charm offensive” meant to mollify Asian neighbors wary of China’s meteoric ascent to maritime might. Ming Dynasty admiral Zheng He lent his appealing visage to the charm offensive, helping Beijing broadcast the message that China—unlike European conquerors—was an innately trustworthy great power incapable of trampling Asians’ rights and privileges the way imperial powers once did.

Within a decade China abandoned the charm offensive, perhaps because it was no longer considered necessary. The world got a taste of its souring mood in March 2009 when a PLAN intelligence-gathering ship, a Bureau of Maritime Fisheries patrol vessel, a State Oceanic Administration patrol boat, and two fishing trawlers harassed USNS Impeccable in South China Sea international waters. This standoff, although not the first, represented a culmination of previous confrontations at sea, including a troubling encounter between USNS Victorious and a fisheries patrol boat in the Yellow Sea. That same year the CCP leadership submitted a map to the United Nations delineating its claims to land, sea, and sky in the South China Sea.37 A “nine-dashed line” inscribed on the map enclosed some 80–90 percent of regional waters, including enormous stretches of Southeast Asian neighbors’ two-hundred-nautical-mile EEZs.³⁸ Beijing soon took to proclaiming that it commanded sovereignty within the nine-dashed line, notwithstanding clear provisions set forth in the law of the sea—an accord to which China had freely assented.³⁹

And then China set out to enforce these claims. Fast-forward to 2012, when Beijing set the pattern for its gray-zone operations. Philippine and Chinese ships faced off at Scarborough Shoal, 120 or so nautical miles west of Luzon. China dispatched noncombat vessels to uphold its territorial claims. No Chinese warships appeared on the scene. Beijing’s muted approach conformed to its pattern of calibrating deployments of force to prevailing circumstances while holding overwhelming military might in reserve to deter or compel recalcitrant Southeast Asian states. The Scarborough standoff inaugurated a Chinese strategy we dubbed “small-stick diplomacy.”⁴⁰ This was a quintessential gray-zone endeavor, an enterprise designed to achieve gains normally associated with warfare without actual resort to arms.

China brought similar pressure to bear against Japan in September 2012 after the Japanese government purchased the Senkaku Islands from private owners to head off a worsening dispute with Beijing. Instead of taking the islands out of contention, however, Tokyo’s move elicited an angry response. First, Beijing accused Japan of changing the islands’ territorial status quo. Then it dispatched two law enforcement vessels to the waters surrounding the Senkakus. Indeed, China has sent cutter flotillas near the islands regularly since 2012. In effect it has demonstrated to Japan and the world that Beijing “coadministers” the waters adjoining the archipelago. This state of affairs has obliged Japan Coast Guard vessels to work overtime to monitor and trail every Chinese intrusion lest Tokyo tacitly concede Beijing’s claim to sovereignty; in practice, though, Tokyo has more or less acquiesced.

In these cases, small-stick diplomacy constituted savvy diplomacy. Rather than deploy the big-stick manifest in capital ships, Beijing dispatched the least force necessary to gain its ends. It made nonmilitary ships from its maritime surveillance and law enforcement services—the “five dragons stirring up the sea,” as some Chinese authors call them—the mainstays of its strategy.41 (In 2013 China fused these services into a single China Coast Guard.)⁴² It also resumed using the fishing fleet as an arm of Chinese sea power, much as maritime militia acted as an auxiliary force in a 1974 battle against the South Vietnamese Navy over the Paracel Islands.⁴³

China took—and continues to take—an all-consuming view of what constitutes sea power, as indeed it should. Despite the tenor of Western commentary, sea power is about more than fighting ships and ship-launched aircraft and armaments. Fortress China constitutes an immense military asset for nearby contingencies. Shore-based missiles, aircraft, sensors, and command-and-control infrastructure can influence events on the high seas. So can coast guards and maritime enforcement agencies. Even privately owned assets such as merchantmen and fishing boats represent an arm of sea power if they can transport war materiel, monitor foreign ship movements, lay sea mines, and the like. And so, as we have learned in recent years, can outlying islands dredged up from the seafloor.

Regarding sea power as a continuum hands China’s leadership a range of options, including the option of brandishing a small stick to accomplish its goals. It can do so because Manila and fellow claimants to regional islands and seas know full well that Beijing can unlimber its big stick—in the form of PLA ships, warplanes, and missiles—and wallop them if they defy its will. Advantage: China.

Neither the Philippines nor any other Southeast Asian state stood much chance of amassing enough physical power to resist small-stick diplomacy on its own in those events; that left balancing strategies. But presenting a united front is hard for the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN), the most obvious candidate to act as a balancing coalition. ASEAN is a notoriously loose regional consortium, not a military alliance. Its members never mustered a consensus on the Scarborough Shoal standoff or similar controversies that followed—even in 2013–14 when Beijing began constructing and arming artificial islands in the region.

Nor was the Obama administration eager to take sides. The U.S. leadership professed agnosticism toward conflicting maritime claims to islands, atolls, and rocks, demanding only that navigational freedom be preserved.

By pivoting to small-stick diplomacy, Beijing displayed an impressive capacity to learn from its mistakes in 2010, when its overbearing tactics threatened to stampede China’s weaker neighbors into making common cause among themselves and with the United States. “China is a big country and other countries are small countries, and that’s just a fact,” proclaimed China’s foreign minister during one shockingly undiplomatic public exchange with his Singaporean counterpart.44

The unsaid but unmistakable message behind such domineering language was get used to it. Minor powers situated near major ones take that message to heart—hence Southeast Asians’ newfound receptiveness to diplomatic and military cooperation with one another and with outsiders such as the United States, India, and Japan. From 2010 forward, realizing the error of its ways, Beijing pressed its maritime claims with a lighter touch.

By exercising restraint, Beijing sought to divide and conquer. Chinese leaders insisted on negotiating with Southeast Asian governments on a one-to-one basis. That kept ASEAN members from pooling their diplomatic and military resources and ensured that any bilateral parleys would favor China.

Beijing, in short, grasped the efficacy of a small stick. Accordingly, the five dragons have expanded faster than the PLA Navy. The maritime enforcement services have recruited new personnel and converted decommissioned naval vessels for police duty. The coast guard has also accepted civilianized versions of state-of-the-art Type 054 frigates and Type 056 corvettes into its fleet. Equally worrisome, China has put to sea cutters displacing about 12,000 tons, making them the largest of their kind in the world. In May 2017 the 3901 cutter conducted its first patrol in the contested waters of the South China Sea. These vessels can patrol the farthest reaches of the China seas and handily outmuscle rival claimants should confrontations escalate. They promise to help China sustain a visible and credible presence in waters where it asserts sovereign jurisdiction.

Beijing’s buildup of the coercive but nonmilitary dimension of sea power is testimony to its balanced, comprehensive approach to managing China’s nautical surroundings. Its apparent preference for employing nonnaval assets in clashes over disputed territory revealed an artful, methodical strategy for securing China’s maritime claims throughout Asian waters. Best of all, from China’s standpoint, this strategy widened cracks in ASEAN’s already shaky edifice.

How did small-stick diplomacy work at Scarborough Shoal? First, using coast guard–like assets reinforced China’s diplomatic messaging. Navies exist to fight for objects in dispute. Had China sent warships to shoo away Philippine ships, it would have admitted silently that it was competing for territory claimed by others. Sending enforcement vessels, by contrast, signaled matter-of-factly that China was policing sovereign waters. Moreover, Chinese skippers could act against foreign vessels while Chinese diplomats condemned Southeast Asian governments for infringing on China’s sovereignty and violating its domestic laws—lawbreakers being defined as rival Southeast Asian navies, coast guards, and fishing fleets.

Furthermore, relying on nonnaval vessels partly inoculated Beijing against the charge that it was practicing gunboat diplomacy. China’s diplomatic narrative boiled down to this message: this isn’t diplomacy at all; it’s routine law enforcement.

Second, the lopsided power mismatch between China and the smaller competitors made it possible to take a softer touch. Beijing could afford to deploy lightly armed ships against maritime rivals whose navies barely rated as coast guards. PLA Navy involvement would constitute an overmatch in most cases. Imagine the press photos if a Chinese frigate or destroyer had faced off against an outclassed Philippine Navy vessel. China would have looked like an imperial power in regional eyes. Better to don an inoffensive visage.

The first Philippine vessel to respond off Scarborough Shoal was the frigate Gregorio del Pilar. The flagship and pride of the Philippine Navy fleet, Gregorio del Pilar is a retired, mostly disarmed U.S. Coast Guard cutter of 1960s vintage. Though grandiosely rebranded a frigate, it boasts minimal combat power. The vessel is Bambi to the PLA Navy’s Godzilla. There can be no doubt which ship would prevail in a battle, but China’s public image would suffer enormously in the process. Entrusting coercive diplomacy to the maritime enforcement services reduced the chances of a diplomatic debacle without forfeiting Chinese interests.

Third, employing nonmilitary vessels eschewed escalation and kept confrontations local. Using a blunt military instrument like the PLA Navy would have internationalized any minor incident, bringing about the outcome China feared most—a hostile coalition. Shots fired in anger by PLA gunners likely would have provoked region-wide protests while igniting nationalist passions. Unobtrusive methods, by contrast, kept contests bilateral while still stacking the deck in China’s favor.

Fourth, paramilitary vessels empowered Beijing to exert low-grade yet unremitting pressure on rival claimants to South China Sea islands and waters. Constant patrols probed weaknesses in coastal states’ maritime surveillance capacity while testing their political resolve. Moreover, keeping disputes at a simmer granted China the initiative to turn the heat up or down as strategic circumstances warranted.

If all else failed, Beijing could employ its navy as a backstop to civilian maritime agencies. Indeed, the small stick carried clout precisely because China’s rivals knew full well that the big stick lurked over the horizon, waiting in reserve. That China—unlike weaker contenders—had the option to climb the escalation ladder only magnified the intimidation factor at Scarborough Shoal and elsewhere within the nine-dashed line. Indeed, the mere threat of naval coercion might induce opponents to back down in times of crisis.

Innocuous in themselves, then, peacetime coast guard patrols carried weight when backed by the firepower of a great fleet, and Manila, Hanoi, and other claimants knew it. Given the strategic benefits of nonmilitary sea power, maritime law enforcement remained a growth industry in China in the years after 2009. Beijing sought to achieve its goals through discreet methods while applying a solvent to opposing coalitions before they could come together.

This constituted an impressive approach to nautical diplomacy. And it enjoyed good prospects for success until international law intruded in July 2016, when the Permanent Court of Arbitration (PCA) at The Hague struck down China’s excessive claims to jurisdiction over South China Sea waters.45 Unable to prevail through diplomacy or international law, China was left with its seagoing forces as the tool remaining in its depleted toolkit. It could make its national fleet so strong that no one could reverse its territorial gains and few would dare to try.

A National Fleet Executes a “Cabbage Strategy”

Official CCP sources confirm the general approach: China deploys nonmilitary shipping as an arm of sea power, with naval and military force as a fallback should things go wrong. While the PCA ruling sent this strategy into overdrive, it has been visible at least since the encounter at Scarborough Shoal. In May 2013, for instance, China’s State Oceanic Administration published a commentary proclaiming: “We should claim our nation’s legitimate rights and interests in our territorial waters through normal fishing production and through the routine patrol of fishery administration ships, marine surveillance ships, and other law enforcement ships, and should also safeguard our nation’s maritime rights and interests with the backup of our Navy and Air Force” (our emphasis).⁴⁶ In other words, fishing craft ply their trade in disputed fishing grounds, and law enforcement agencies protect the fishing fleet from low-level resistance from rival coast guards. The PLA Navy and Air Force remain watchful in case Beijing decides to rush heavier firepower to the scene, creating a power mismatch in its favor and, if all goes well, cowing the opponent into retreat.

At the risk of mixing metaphors, then, Beijing deploys its small and big sticks to prosecute what some Chinese commentators dub a “cabbage strategy,” encasing disputed objects with concentric layers of unarmed or lightly armed hulls while hardening the outer layer with military force. In May 2013 the Xinhua Domestic Service carried an unattributed editorial explaining how the cabbage strategy advanced China’s grand strategy for consolidating its territorial claims. Precipitating the article was a clash between Manila and Beijing over Second Thomas Shoal, a feature some one hundred nautical miles west of the Philippine island of Palawan and deep within the Philippine EEZ. The Xinhua editorialist restated the legal groundwork, insisting that China held indisputable sovereignty over South China Sea land features and the adjacent waters. It framed China’s actions in moral terms, claiming the actions were “beyond reproach” while denying that China was bullying a weaker neighbor. It implored rival claimants to comply with the 2002 Declaration of Conduct of Parties in the South China Sea and refrain from “actions that expand and complicate disputes, and that influence the peace and stability of the South China Sea.” And it applied a historical patina to Beijing’s case, insisting that Chinese fishermen had “always” used the shoal as a fishing ground.47

In short, the editorialist reiterated China’s brief for sovereignty, conjuring up the full range of political and legal arguments. Chinese emissaries grasp an elemental truth about diplomatic persuasion: it is not enough to say something once. A message must be broadcast early, often, and consistently in order to persuade. Having done so, the Xinhua editorial turned to “noted military expert” Zhang Zhaozhong—a retired rear admiral, NDU professor, well-known television personality, and prolific author of nationalistic navalist books for popular consumption—to explain how a cabbage strategy works. The strategy, Zhang says, can be encapsulated in “just one word, which is squeezing.” His explanation is worth quoting at length:

For every measure there is a countermeasure.…If you send fishing vessels to resupply, then we will use fishing vessels to keep them out; if your coast guard sends supplies, then we will send marine surveillance to keep them out. If your Philippine Navy ships hurry over, we will use naval vessels to keep them out. There is nothing to be afraid of, and we must stick it out to the end. The cabbage strategy of which I have spoken many times is to surround them layer by layer, and make them unable to enter [Second Thomas Shoal].48 (Our emphasis)

Zhang’s summary is rich in content. In strategic terms, the approach he espouses evokes an axiom from German general Helmuth Moltke the Elder, who maintained that the “tactical defense is the stronger” form of war, while “the strategic offensive” constitutes “the more effective form.”⁴⁹ Julian S. Corbett interprets Moltke’s idea of combining strategic offense with tactical defense as follows:

This form of war presupposes that we are able by superior readiness or mobility or by being more conveniently situated to establish ourselves in the territorial object before our opponent can gather strength to prevent us. This done, we have the initiative, and the enemy being unable by hypothesis to attack us at home, must conform to our opening by endeavoring to turn us out. We are in a position to meet his attack on ground of our own choice and to avail ourselves of such opportunities of counter-attack as his distant and therefore exhausting offensive movements are likely to offer.⁵⁰

In other words, says Corbett, if the combatant waging a strategic offensive can seize ground it covets, it can then defy its antagonist to reverse its occupation of that ground. From a military standpoint, defending something is easier than taking it away. Tactical defense is stronger, after all. And from a diplomatic standpoint, the combatant trying to retake turf from rival forces could come off as the aggressor even though its rival committed aggression first. China can create the new normal of Chinese ownership of some disputed feature, then plead with challengers not to disturb the peace—and play the aggrieved party if they do.

This is a particularly effective approach in the gray zone, that shadow land between peacetime diplomacy and outright warfare. As Zhang notes, China’s national fleet so outclasses any individual Southeast Asian claimant that China will control escalation in any one-on-one confrontation. If Manila or Hanoi sends fishing boats to uphold its claims, Beijing can probably send more. If Manila or Hanoi escalates, dispatching coast guard white hulls, Beijing can probably send more, bigger, and more capable white hulls. Indeed, the China Coast Guard could outpunch the Philippine Navy. And if any opponent escalated to military force, it would do so in full knowledge that the PLA Navy was ready to steam into action, building up an insuperable edge in physical might for Beijing. The cabbage strategy is hard to beat.

But there is also an inward-facing component to the cabbage strategy that is implicit in Zhang’s depiction of it as an exercise in squeezing adversaries into submission. If Chinese forces can mount a layered defense against outward opponents and deny them access, they can also lay siege to an opponent already holding the disputed island or atoll. They can squeeze that opponent into submission, constricting its supply lines and fending off outside relief until the occupants must abandon their redoubt or starve. This is the approach China has taken at Second Thomas Shoal, where the Philippine government has marooned a rusty amphibious transport, Sierra Madre, in an effort to preserve sovereignty over the feature. The handful of marines clinging to Sierra Madre are lonely defenders of Philippine claims to Second Thomas Shoal.51 That tactical defense represents the stronger form of war must come as cold comfort to them, encircled as they are by vastly stronger forces and facing scant prospect of relief.

American commentators frequently deride Zhang as an uninformed propagandist. Nevertheless, he identifies elemental features of China’s gray-zone tactics. While we acknowledge that Zhang may not speak with authority about Chinese foreign policy or strategy, we see real value in his metaphor of the cabbage strategy for a tactical and operational concept. His message is useful analytically even if observers harbor misgivings about the messenger.

Fleet Building Is about More than the PLA Navy

Chinese maritime strategy is a grand strategy of a type Alfred Thayer Mahan and B. H. Liddell Hart would instantly recognize. For China, sea power is about more than the PLAN. It encompasses any implement able to mold events out at sea, whether that implement is a navy warship or a PLA Air Force stealth fighter/attack plane or a ballistic missile fired by the PLA Rocket Force. It encompasses law enforcement vessels from the China Coast Guard and sister maritime surveillance or enforcement agencies. And it encompasses unofficial implements such as fishing boats crewed by militiamen or trawlers packed with electronic snooping equipment.

Clearly, then, America and its allies confront a multifaceted Chinese challenge. Recent history suggests the allies must fashion a likewise all-encompassing maritime counterstrategy for the China seas or surrender their nautical rights and privileges to China by default. They must band together while harnessing every resource available to them.