China’s rapidly improving military capability and its increasingly aggressive effort to keep U.S. military forces out of striking range are raising concerns about America’s future ability to protect its vital interest and its allies in Northeast Asia.
Beijing’s expanding and modernizing navy, air, and missile forces, the recent revelations of an apparently operational anti-ship ballistic missile, and the first flight of what could be a fifth-generation, stealthy fighter are part of China’s attempt to create what is known as an anti-access, area-denial (A2/AD) shield. Those advanced combat systems, combined with improving intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) capabilities, are intended to nullify America’s superior naval and air power and make it unacceptably dangerous to attempt to project military power into China’s expanding zone of influence.
The threat was highlighted in a comprehensive 2010 report by the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments (CSBA), a highly regarded Washington think tank, which warned that China’s “ongoing efforts to field robust A2/AD capabilities are threatening to make U.S. power projection increasingly risky and, in some cases and contexts, prohibitively costly.”
“If this occurs, the United States will find itself effectively locked out of a region that has been declared a vital security interest” for 60 years, and it also would “leave longstanding U.S. allies and partners vulnerable to aggression, or more likely, subtle forms of coercion,” the CSBA report stated/.../
The CSBA report, written by a quartet of retired military officers and former Pentagon analysts, welcomed the Schwartz-Roughead agreement to develop an AirSea strategy to counter the Chinese threat.
But, it argued, a successful counter would require U.S. forces to withstand the initial attacks with minimal losses, to launch kinetic and non-kinetic attacks to blind China’s battle networks and to suppress its long-range ISR and strike capabilities, then to seize the initiative in the air, sea, space, and cyber domains.
To do that, the authors said, the U.S. military would have to begin investing heavily in long-endurance, penetrating ISR and strike capabilities, aerial tankers, forward base hardening, the combat logistics force, and directed energy weapons for missile defense. The current focus, they noted, is on short-range tactical aircraft and other systems geared to the present counterinsurgency operations against low-tech irregular adversaries.
In addition, U.S. air bases in Japan, South Korea, and Guam must be hardened to withstand ballistic missile attacks and protected by land- and ship-based missile defense systems and dispersal bases created on islands such as Tinian and Saipan.
The U.S. Air Force and Navy also would have to develop new cooperative doctrine that utilizes their capabilities in unusual ways, such as Navy ballistic missile defense ships protecting Air Force bases, instead of their own battle groups, while Air Force bombers attack enemy surface ships and lay minefields to block the Chinese fleet. Although Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates and Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, both praised the Air Force-Navy agreement, so far, the response has been less than dramatic/.../