Question: Which of these elements make China highly vulnerable to a blockade strategy?
- Economics
- Geography
- Both 1 and 2
We have discussed China's “tyranny of geography” at length before. However, it is well worth a reprise in any net assessment of an Offshore Control strategy.
Geographically, China is a continental power almost perfectly contained or encircled by a First Island Chain of American allies and democracies that Beijing's authoritarian rulers must stare forebodingly out at every day from mainland shores. In effect, this “Great Wall in Reverse” runs from Japan's home islands and through Japan's Okinawan territories out to the midpoint of Taiwan; it then continues to the Philippines and through to the Indonesia Archipelago where it culminates in the globe's ultimate naval-blockade choke point, the narrow and perilous Malacca Strait.
The Malacca Strait is, however, hardly the only choke point Chinese merchant and military vessels must worry about in the event of a blockade. For example, at the eastern end of the First Island Chain, there is the Soya Strait between the northern tip of Japan's home islands and the southern tip of the Kuril Islands. It is one of just two passageways from the Sea of Japan to the Pacific Ocean.
In addition, the entire run of islands along the “Ryukyu Island arc” that constitutes Japan's Okinawan territories represents one of China's most difficult hurdles to reaching the Western Pacific. Yet another key choke point along this arc is the Miyako Strait located about 190 miles from Okinawa.
At present, the Miyako Strait is a preferred route for China's navy, and particularly its submarines, from the East China Sea into the Western Pacific.1 However, on the west side of this strait, over the strong protests of China, Japan has added an arsenal of Type 88 surface-to-ship missiles to its already elaborate radar installation. These missiles can easily range any Chinese surface ships passing through the Miyako Strait.
Moving further west, there is also the 160-mile-wide Luzon Strait between Taiwan and the Philippines. It played a key role first as an invasion route in Japan's conquest of the Philippines in 1941 and then as a critical choke point for America's naval and air blockade of Japan toward the culmination of World War II.
Of course, once China's merchant or military ships transit into the South China Sea and begin to seek an exit into the Indian Ocean, numerous other choke points abound. These include the two major alternative routes to the Malacca Strait as a gateway to the Indian Ocean—the equally perilous Sunda and Lombok Straits in Indonesian waters.2
Taken as a whole, these numerous choke points would make it very difficult for both Chinese merchant and military vessels to access the deeper waters of either the Pacific or Indian Oceans in the event of a naval blockade by the United States and its First Island Chain allies. Moreover, this difficulty stems not just from the threat of submarines and over-the-horizon aircraft-carrier strike groups but also from the ability of China's enemies to lace those choke points with mines—a “turnabout is fair play” gambit if there ever were one given China's major emphasis on mine warfare.
As for China's “tyranny of its economy,” this stems from its exceedingly heavy reliance on both imported oil for its energy and selling exports to the world for its economic prosperity. As part of this tyranny, China's “factory floor to the world” also needs vast amounts of everything from copper and iron ore to nickel, tin, and lumber. Most broadly, China's heavily export-dependent economy depends on global trade for more than half of its entire Gross Domestic Product growth—while its citizenry is increasingly dependent on the importation of food and agricultural products such as corn and soybeans.
Given these economic and geographic tyrannies, it would appear China is indeed highly vulnerable to a blockade, and it is upon this strong premise that experts like Colonel T. X. Hammes of America's National Defense University and Captains Wayne Hughes and Jeffrey Kline of the US Naval Postgraduate School have built their strategy of Offshore Control.3 Here's how Captains Kline and Hughes describe its “ends, ways, and means”:
The war-at-sea strategy is to deter Chinese land or maritime aggression and, failing that, deny China the use of the sea inside the “first island chain”…during hostilities. The ways are distant interception of Chinese shipping, widespread submarine attacks and mining inside the first island chain, offensive attacks by a flotilla composed of small missile-carrying combatants to fight in the China seas and patrol vessels for maritime interdiction at straits and choke points, and Marine expeditionary forces positioned to hold the South China Sea islands at risk, with no intention of putting ground forces on China's mainland. The means are a force structure with a better combination of conventional air forces, battle-group ships, and submarines, and a forward-deployed flotilla of U.S. and allied small combatants.4 (emphasis added)
This is indeed nothing short of, in Colonel Hammes's ice-cold phrasing, “a war of economic strangulation.” To Hammes, the strategy's elegance lies in seeking “to force China to fight in ways that maximize US strengths while minimizing China's strengths”5—a theme echoed by Kline and Hughes who describe the strategy as “plying long-standing American maritime strengths against China's dependence on the seas.”6
At this point, it may be useful to ask: Just what is the strategic goal of Offshore Control beyond economic strangulation? That is, what is the “theory of victory?”
To Hammes, the goal is not to vanquish China. In fact, he believes the complete defeat of a thermonuclear power in today's times is not just impossible, but that it will be a “pyrrhic event” in which both sides take each other down in a final paroxysm of nuclear exchanges.7
To avoid this cataclysm, Hammes argues that “victory” should lie simply in first stopping, and then rolling back, whatever China's territorial grab may have been to start the war in the first place—a Taiwan conquest; a Senkaku Islands invasion; the taking of oil and natural gas or fishing rights from the Philippines or Vietnam, a blitzkrieg seizure from India of Arunachal Pradesh, the denial of freedom of navigation or overflight to the United States, and so, we have learned, our possible triggers, trip wires, and flash points for war may go.
As a second aspect of Hammes theory of victory, he also presumes that the global economy is going to need China's 1.4 billion consumers and massive production capacity if the world is to continue to grow and prosper. That Offshore Control does no damage to China's infrastructure precisely because it refrains from any Air-Sea Battle–type strikes on the mainland thus is the superior approach on this ground. As Hammes points out: “By not destroying Chinese infrastructure, this facilitates restoration of global trade after the conflict.”8
Still a third part of Hammes's argument rests on the famous Clausewitzian trinity of “passion, chance, and reason” as causes for war. From this Clausewitzian perspective, Air-Sea Battle makes the fatal mistake of inflaming the passions of the Chinese people with direct strikes on their homeland—and thereby ensures a long war with little prospect of settlement.
As Hammes frames the problem against the nationalistic backdrop of China's century of humiliation:
When you bomb China, it becomes a passion over reason issue, making it harder to get China to negotiate a peaceful settlement. Bombing makes it so much harder to return to the status quo before the conflict.9
Echoing this sentiment, Captain Mark Morris of America's National War College notes in his favorable assessment of Offshore Control:
Direct attacks on the homeland change the legitimacy equation of the Chinese Communist Party to that of the defender of the Middle Kingdom against the foreigners.10
As a final pillar of Offshore Control, there is this virtue: The strategy's various pressures can be applied slowly and in stages—more akin to a python rather than the quick strikes on the mainland of an Air-Sea Battle rattlesnake. As Captains Kline and Hughes note:
The capacity for sea denial within the First Island Chain and executing a distant blockade would provide American leadership graduated options before undertaking the potentially escalatory step of strikes on mainland China.11
To both Hammes and the duo of Kline and Hughes, this python approach allows enough time and space for critical negotiations to begin between the two warring parties before the missiles start to fly; and in this way, Offshore Control is likely to be far less escalatory than the much faster moving trajectory of an Air-Sea Battle engagement.
While Hammes makes a persuasive case, there is, as with Air-Sea Battle, no shortage of potential problems with Offshore Control. For starters, while China may be highly vulnerable to a naval-blockade strategy at this particular point in time, its leaders clearly understand this vulnerability. In response, they are rapidly developing land-route alternatives to moving both energy and tradable goods from and to world markets.
For example, as an end run around its “Malacca Dilemma,” China has built both oil and natural-gas pipelines linking Burma's deepwater port of Kyaukphyu in the Bay of Bengal with Kunming in China's Yunnan Province. In a similar risk-hedging vein, China is also well into the process of constructing an elaborate Trans-Eurasian air, road, rail, and pipeline network in the hopes of fashioning a new “Silk Road Economic Belt” that bypasses any blockaded seas entirely.
This new Silk Road already links China via its Xinjiang Province to Central Asian states like Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. At the same time, China has already inaugurated a direct rail line that passes through Moscow on its way to Hamburg, Germany—thereby cutting the transit time for Chinese exports from fully five weeks at sea to a mere twenty-one days.12
As a second significant issue with Offshore Control, there is also this sobering reality: While it is all well and good for American naval vessels to pull back to deeper waters well outside the range of China's anti-access, area-denial capabilities, that still leaves America's forward bases in Japan, South Korea, and Guam as sitting ducks for intense missile salvos. In the face of such punishing salvos, it would be hard for US politicians and military commanders to resist Air-Sea Battle–like counterstrikes on the mainland. Indeed, absent such counterstrikes, China may be able to inflict enough damage to allied air and naval power and their logistical support that it would make it impossible for the United States to enforce the “no-go zone” within the First Island Chain—at which point Offshore Control may fall apart.
Fig. 33.1. American B-52s on the runways of Guam—“sitting ducks” for a Chinese missile attack. (Photograph from the Andersen Air Force Base website.)
Third, as Hammes readily acknowledges, any blockade would take considerable time to have the desired effect on the Chinese economy and political landscape. In this waiting game, the economies of the United States and its key blockade allies of Australia, Japan, and South Korea would suffer crushing blows. While Hammes argues that over time, global trade would recover as other nations around the world found alternatives to the China trade, it is difficult to imagine that a nuclear-tipped China would tolerate being left out in the global-market cold for any extended period.
Perhaps more to the point, this observation raises the even more fundamental question as to whether America and its allies would even stay the course as a cohesive Offshore Control unit. Would, for example, South Korea and Australia be willing to sacrifice their economies for the preservation of Taiwan's independence? Similarly, would Japan stand by America if it came to the aid of its treaty ally, the Philippines? As Professor James Holmes of the US Naval War College has framed the problem:
Prolonged economic warfare cuts both ways. It exhausts not just the enemy but friendly powers, not to mention one's own constituents who depend on foreign commerce for their livelihoods. Keeping the populace and the allies on the same sheet of music while their economic self-interests suffer poses a challenge, to say the least.13
As a final problem14 with Offshore Control—and perhaps its true Achilles’ heel—there is also the uncomfortable truth that a “waiting game” blockade strategy blows the door wide open to Chinese faits accomplis.
Indeed, it is far too easy to imagine that after significant lives and treasure have been lost and the global economy has been pushed to the brink of collapse, America and its fractured alliance will simply throw in the towel and allow China to keep whatever prize it took that started the war to begin with—Taiwan, Japan's Senkaku Islands, the Philippine's Second Thomas Shoal, India's Arunachal Pradesh, Vietnam's oil and gas rights, and so on. Of course, with Taiwan in particular, it would be hard to imagine China ever surrendering its so-called renegade province once it successfully occupied it.
From our review of Air-Sea Battle versus Offshore Control in these last two chapters, it would seem then that as choices go, this is one that lies between the proverbial rock and a very hard place—or for those with a literary bent seeking an appropriately maritime setting, a choice that seeks to sail between Scylla and Charybdis.
While it is easy to get lost in the complexity of this difficult choice, the following may well be the most salient point for our detective story: While Air-Sea Battle may well offer the fastest escalatory route to nuclear war—that's one of the big imponderables—it does have the virtue of denying China any mainland sanctuary from which to launch missile salvos with impunity at the ships and military bases of America and its allies. Accordingly, it may be unwise to take retaliatory strikes on the Chinese mainland completely off the table before any possible conflict starts. Uncertainty in the Chinese mind may well be a friend of American deterrence here. As Professor Toshi Yoshihara of the US Naval War College notes on this point:
What kind of signal would we be sending to the Chinese if we simply said: “Yes, you can attack our forward military bases on allied soil; and your targets on the mainland are, essentially, off-limits.” That doesn't mean deep strikes against the mainland will be automatic, but we need to at least preserve the option to maintain that level of strategic ambiguity so that there is at least some doubt in the minds of the Chinese. Here, the more ambiguity and the more caution that we can impose on the Chinese, the more sturdy deterrence will be.15
This observation leads us to our last question on this critical strategic issue: Should Air-Sea Battle and Offshore Control perhaps be used in tandem as an American response to an attack by Chinese forces? That's a question perhaps best left on the table to ponder until we arrive at that part of our inquiry focusing on possible pathways to peace.
Suffice it to say for now that while both strategies may have their virtues, the best way to avoid the pitfalls of each is to prevent any conflict to begin with. While that is a very tall order, we must do our very best in this inquiry to at least give peace a chance.
That said, before we move to our final “pathways to peace” section of our inquiry, we must close this part of our detective story with an analysis of just what “victory” might look like if war does indeed break out. In fact, this candid assessment should serve as the ultimate motivation for finding ways to avoid any military conflict with a rapidly rising China.