Question: What percent of American naval ships sunk or seriously damaged since the end of World War II were struck by mines?
- 0%
- 20%
- 40%
- 80%
The US Naval War College Review is not exactly known for its comedy, but in a seminal article, analyst Scott Truver managed several introductory quips that perfectly capture the acute danger that mine warfare poses. To wit: “A mine is a terrible thing that waits,” and “any ship can be a minesweeper—once.”1
As to our lead question above, since the end of World War II, a total of nineteen American naval ships have been sunk or seriously damaged by hostile forces. While missiles, torpedoes, small aircraft, and smaller boats all had their day in that sinking sun, mines accounted for fully fifteen of the mission kills—just about 80 percent.
It's not really the sinking of ships per se that makes the mine such a powerful weapon. Rather, it is the psychological impact mines have on the battlefield and their collateral ability to terrorize, and thereby paralyze, an opposing navy.
To understand this impact, imagine you own a sprawling five-thousand-acre ranch; then further imagine that you know that just a single land mine capable of blowing off your legs has been planted somewhere on your property. How inclined would you be to hike your acreage? And just how much time and money would it take to “sweep” for that needle-in-a-haystack mine before you found it and resumed your unrestricted activities?
In fact, the primary purpose of mine warfare is to deny access to an area through a combination of psychological terror and the lengthy time it takes to effectively sweep mines. In this way, mines represent the epitome of an asymmetric weapon designed to execute an area-denial strategy—and mines thereby fit like hand in glove into China's emerging war-fighting capabilities.
The ability of mine warfare to terrorize and paralyze is readily apparent in a long history that Chinese strategists themselves have meticulously studied. In fact, America—both as a mine perpetrator and as a mine victim—has taught China much of what it is now operationalizing on the battlefield today.
On the “America as perpetrator” front, one of the most effective strategies used by the United States in the Vietnam War was the mining of Haiphong Harbor. On May 8th, 1972, during Operation Pocket Money, American planes from the aircraft carrier Coral Sea dropped what would be the first of over eleven thousand mines into the waters of North Vietnam's most important seaport.2 By paralyzing shipping lanes, this mine gambit effectively cut off over 80 percent of imports into North Vietnam—and this economic blow had a good bit to do with getting North Vietnam back to the Paris bargaining table.
Chinese strategists likewise have closely studied the important contribution that mine warfare played in forcing Japan's unconditional surrender at the end of World War II. Here, while the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki typically take all the credit for Japan's surrender, the aerial laying of more than twelve thousand mines by B-29 bombers around Japan's home islands also played an important supporting role.
In noting the effectiveness of what was accurately dubbed Operation Starvation, Rear Admiral Kenneth Veth calculates that “the total tonnage of Japanese shipping sunk or damaged by mines in the last six months of the war”—over a million tons—was “greater than that which can be attributed to all other agents combined, including submarines, ships’ gunfire, and Allied bombing.”3 Veth goes on to point out that based on interviews with Japanese civilians and military leaders, it is clear that this mine warfare campaign did indeed play a significant role in Japan's surrender.
This kind of “paralysis by mines” echoes an earlier era when, during the Korean War, North Korea deployed more than three thousand mines and thereby “utterly frustrated an October 1950 assault on Wonsan by a 250-ship United Nations amphibious task force.”4 Rear Admiral Allen Smith perfectly captured the frustration of the moment when he grimly quipped: “We have lost control of the seas to a nation without a navy, using pre-World War weapons, laid by vessels that were utilized at the time of the birth of Christ.”5
As for Scott Truver's minesweeper joke leading off this chapter, it may be useful to add here that during the attempt to sweep the North Korean mines, three minesweepers were sunk, five destroyers were severely damaged, and over a hundred sailors were killed or wounded.
What has perhaps been most informative to Chinese strategists about these American experiences is just how effective extremely low-cost mines can be at destroying very high-cost capital ships. Mines truly are the weapon of choice for a “poor man's navy”—and the epitome of asymmetric warfare.
On this point, consider that during the First Gulf War in 1991, one single Italian-made Iraqi mine costing a mere $25,000 scored a mission kill on the billion-dollar USS Princeton. This vessel is one of the most sophisticated of America's Aegis cruisers,6 and the irony of its crippling is that while the Princeton was scanning the horizon and the skies above for Iraqi Scud missiles, it was felled by a lowly mine with no Iraqi naval vessel within fifty miles of it.
While mines may be the ultimate weapon for a poor man's navy like that of Iraq or Iran, put in the hands of a rising superpower like China, mines can be truly devastating. This is not just because China can afford to stockpile vast quantities of them—it claims to have over fifty thousand mines and the world's largest inventory;7 China has also brought to bear its increasing technological prowess to develop and deploy a whole range of new and innovative smart mines. By China's own admission, this arsenal consists of over thirty varieties of contact, magnetic, acoustic, water-pressure, remote-control, mobile, and rocket-rising mines.8
Just consider the rocket-rising mine: Hidden in waters as deep as six thousand feet, this deadly spear lies in wait for its computer to recognize any one of a number of signatures of a passing military ship—acoustic, electric, magnetic, or pressure. After ten large cargo ships might go by, along with four more civilian oil tankers and hundreds of fishing boats, a Japanese destroyer or a US nuclear-powered submarine comes within range and presto, the rising mine is lifted by rocket to close to its target through the water at speeds of over 175 miles per hour.9
Fig. 11.1. The PLA Navy practices laying down mines in the busiest global trading route in the world. (Photograph courtesy of China Defense Forum.)
Beyond the matter of China's rapidly expanding mine-warfare capabilities, there is this disturbing—and highly destabilizing—aspect of China's area-denial mine strategy. To wit: Rather than rely solely on military planes, ships, and submarines to seed its mines, China is actively recruiting its vast, putatively “non-combatant” civilian fishing fleet to the effort. As US Naval War College professors Andrew Erickson, Lyle Goldstein, and William Murray note: “Chinese writings frequently mention the incorporation of civilian shipping into naval service for such functions as mine warfare.”10
In this vein, Chinese military analyst Hai Lin offers this sobering math: “China currently has 30,000 iron-hulled mechanized fishing trawlers” and “each vessel can carry 10 mines.” In addition, “there are another 50,000 sail-fishing craft,” and “each can carry two to five sea mines.” Similarly, Chinese scholar Ying Nan extols the virtues of using civilian vessels because they “offer sufficient numbers, ‘small targets,’ reasonable mobility, and unsuspicious profiles.” Of course, such a blurring of the line between civilian and military ships runs totally contrary to international norms.11
As to just exactly what China wants to achieve strategically with its arsenal of mines, there are numerous possibilities. For example, as Professors Erickson, Goldstein, and Murray write: “In a conflict over the Spratly Islands [in the South China Sea], Beijing could choose to reinforce its claims to specific islands with carefully limited minefields as an alternative to a prolonged, expensive, and potentially more provocative surface warship presence.”12
Similarly, mines would no doubt play a lead role in any attempt to take Taiwan by force. The likely targets “would be Taiwan's ports, most of which are highly susceptible to mining, given the shallow waters that surround most of Taiwan.”13 In fact, with its large mine arsenal, the Chinese navy “is already fully capable of blockading Taiwan and other crucial sea lines of communication in the Western Pacific area.”14
As we shall see in the next chapter, however, China's rapidly growing mine-warfare capabilities are hardly the only undersea threats raising the temperature of Asian waters.