Type 001A aircraft carrier

Having reviewed more intangible aspects of Chinese maritime
strategy such as geopolitics, historical precedent, and strategic thought, we
now turn to more prosaic matters. How will China put its strategy into practice
using the implements it has assembled through fleet building? China’s navy is
maturing and developing the arsenal to carry out a forceful maritime strategy.
In the interim, however, “sea denial” is still the best concept for managing
the nation’s nautical surroundings. Such an approach will suffice until Beijing
has rounded out a fleet on par with the finest rival fleets likely to appear in
Asian seaways.

Sea denial aligns with long-standing Chinese traditions. A
successful sea-denial navy is at once humble and enterprising: it frankly
admits its inferiority to prospective antagonists while refusing to admit
defeat. It neither flees vital waterways nor resigns itself to passive defense.
That the weaker contender can win—or accomplish its goals by keeping its foe
from winning—sometimes escapes China watchers. In the late 1990s, for instance,
two prominent Sinologists declared that China’s innate feebleness at sea forced
it to shelter passively within the first island chain, where it would wage a
strategy of “protracted defensive resistance.” U.S. naval supremacy, they
maintained, was too stifling to permit anything more ambitious.

We dissent. A sea-denial force works around its weaknesses
while exploiting the advantages it does enjoy. It need not vanquish hostile
forces outright. Its function is to clear foes from designated waters for a
finite interval or, better yet, to deter them from entering in the first place.
A sea-denial strategy succeeds if it wards off stronger foes long enough for
the nation to fulfill its larger strategic objectives. Sea denial thus
constitutes a strategically defensive strategy that inferior powers prosecute
through offensive tactical and operational methods. Even if the PLA Navy
remains weaker than its likely opponents, it will stay on the operational and
tactical offensive. The U.S. Navy and its allies must anticipate that.

The hybrid offensive/defensive style of combat conforms
philosophically to Alfred Thayer Mahan’s dictum that even lesser navies can
impose local command on important waters—as indeed Mahan beseeched the U.S.
Navy to do in the Caribbean Sea and Gulf of Mexico, even though it remained
weaker on the whole than Great Britain’s Royal Navy. At the same time it
conforms to Mao Zedong’s concept of “active defense,” which yokes offensive
tactical means to defensive strategic ends. Today as in the age of Mao, the PLA
portrays active defense as the core of Chinese military strategy. China’s first
formal military strategy white paper, released in 2015, declares:

The strategic concept of active defense is the essence of
the [CCP’s] military strategic thought. From the long-term practice of
revolutionary wars, the people’s armed forces have developed a complete set of
strategic concepts of active defense, which boils down to: adherence to the
unity of strategic defense and operational and tactical offense.… Shortly after
the founding of the PRC in 1949, the Central Military Commission established
the military strategic guideline of active defense, and later, in line with the
developments and changes in the national security situation, had made a number
of major revisions of it.

Intriguingly, China’s Maoist approach likewise conforms to
precepts set forth in Sir Julian Corbett’s writings about maritime
strategy—writings Chinese strategists have investigated in recent years. “True
defense,” proclaims Corbett—a contemporary of both Mao and Alfred Thayer
Mahan—means balking a stronger opponent’s strategy while awaiting the chance to
administer a counterpunch. The British theorist even hit on the same term—“active
defense”—to show how a weaker navy can dispute a stronger navy’s maritime
command until it makes itself stronger and wrests away command for itself.
Active defense, clearly, is a concept with heft and longevity in China’s way of
sea warfare.

And China has structured forces around that method of
defense. The Chinese military possesses, is procuring, or plans to acquire
systems designed to make the seas and skies adjoining the Asian mainland no-go
territory for any opponent. Beijing has purchased arms from Russia lavishly
since the early 1990s. At the same time it has bolstered its domestic defense
industry, allowing the PLA to field a variety of indigenous weaponry. Infusing
new platforms and systems into the force alongside a more professional, more
battleworthy corps of mariners has produced a leap in offensive PLA combat
power.

Over the past two decades, modern diesel
submarines—difficult to detect, track, and target in shallow offshore
waters—have slid down the ways at Chinese shipyards or been purchased in
significant numbers from Russian suppliers. One aircraft carrier is in service,
another is nearing operational status, and future carriers are reportedly under
design or construction. Destroyers equipped with sophisticated radar suites
(touted as equivalent to the U.S. Navy’s state-of-the-art Aegis combat system),
antiship missiles, and air-defense missiles increasingly form the backbone of
the Chinese surface fleet. PLA Navy surface groups’ chances of withstanding
long-range missile or air bombardment are brightening commensurately. This is
doubly true so long as the fleet operates within range of shore-based fire
support that augments the fleet’s firepower with missiles and aircraft
dispatched from Fortress China itself. Shore fire support constitutes the
PLAN’s great equalizer.

Accordingly, surface forces typically cruise underneath that
protective umbrella. And the range and accuracy of shore-based assets are
growing. This allows the PLAN to extend its combat radius while still tapping
that great equalizer. Indeed, China may stand at the brink of rendering a
strategic concept condemned by Mahan—the “fortress-fleet” tethered to shore
fire support—viable for the first time. Mahan was writing in the context of the
Russian Navy’s dismal performance during the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–5. He
upbraided the Russian naval command for resorting to this “radically erroneous”
way of combat, which fettered Russian commanders’ freedom of maneuver—ships had
to remain within reach of the fort’s guns—while sapping their fighting spirit.

Mahan’s was a telling critique for an age of rudimentary
naval technology, when the effective firing range for artillery was a few
miles. It has lost cogency now that precision fire can reach scores if not
hundreds of miles offshore. One imagines the Russian Navy would have fared far
better against the IJN had shore gunfire boasted modern China’s range and
precision to pummel Japanese fleets throughout the Yellow Sea and Tsushima
Strait—the battlegrounds for climactic sea engagements in 1904–5. Russian
gunnery could have cut the Japanese down to size from afar while affording
Russian warships maneuver space aplenty.

In short, the day of the fortress fleet may have come. If
so, footloose PLAN units will be able to roam waters Beijing deems important
without leaving the protective cover of shore defenses. Defense will
increasingly blur into offense under this aegis, even eastward of the first
island chain. Advanced ground-based air-defense systems, capable naval
fighter/attack aircraft, long-range cruise missiles, and even ASBMs reputedly
able to find and attack vessels on the high seas are pivotal to China’s
military modernization effort. If the Chinese package these assets wisely while
developing the tactical proficiency to use them, they will gain confidence in
their ability to deter, delay, or defeat any foreign force bold enough to
attempt hostile entry into nearby seas or airspace.

China’s continent-spanning geography is invaluable to the
PLAN’s sea-denial strategy because it furnishes plentiful sites for coastal
bases and mobile missile batteries. Indeed, emerging military capabilities are
explicitly designed to assail targets in offshore expanses from bases on the
mainland. Furthermore, as weapons range improves, shore defenses can be
positioned farther inland. Technology will make China’s deep continental
interior a safe haven from which to punish intruding forces along the
coastline.

This sanctuary will serve the purely military purpose of
buffering PLA assets against attack. A PLA that turns strategic depth to
advantage can compel enemy forces to enter the combat range of its weaponry,
accepting battle on China’s political, geographic, and military terms. Such a
strategy would have found favor with Mao Zedong, who famously urged his
followers to lure enemies deep into Chinese territory. The Red Army would
enfeeble its antagonists in the process, setting conditions for a devastating
counterblow, and the weaker Chinese Communist legions would score a
conventional battlefield victory in the end.

Just as important, defending from deep inland dares an
opponent to escalate the fighting. Suppose U.S. forces struck at Chinese
antiship missile sites located well inland. They would risk inflicting
collateral damage under such circumstances, especially if targets adjoined
populated areas. Duly broadcast by Chinese media outlets, images of civilian
death or suffering could swing political sentiment behind Beijing—not just in
China but among influential audiences elsewhere in Asia and in the
international community. A backlash against a hardhearted or feckless America
could result, no matter how just the cause that prompted the United States to
take up arms.

Moreover, the United States would risk escalating a limited
naval conflict to full-blown war against China, its leading trading partner and
a fellow permanent member of the UN Security Council. China is a nuclear-armed
power that brandishes mobile, increasingly effective, land-based and undersea
strategic deterrent forces. The survivable retaliatory arsenal operated by the
PLA Rocket Force would remain in reserve should conventional deterrence fail.
No U.S. president would lightly make the decision to employ force under the
nuclear shadow.

The historical record supports that contention. Americans
showed restraint vis-à-vis the Chinese in the Korean and Vietnam Wars,
declining to escalate “vertically” up the scale of violence. History also
suggests that policy makers exercise caution before undertaking military
actions likely to prompt “horizontal” escalation to new places on the map. In
particular, the prospect of expanding the geographic scope of military
operations deep into China’s interior would be daunting if not unthinkable to
an American president. The repercussions from such a fight could well outweigh
the presumably modest strategic goals at stake for Washington.

The odds of U.S. leaders climbing down from a dispute would
improve under those circumstances, boosting the likelihood that China would
prevail without an actual exchange of fire. Small wonder that Chinese fleet
tactics fuse offense with defense; they come naturally to PLA Navy commanders
while promising handsome dividends.

Massed, Dispersed, or Sequential Tactics?

The PLA’s increasing ability to integrate surface, subsurface,
and aerial warfare into a defensive thicket against seaborne threats to China
is remaking the strategic environment in maritime Asia, and the U.S. armed
forces must keep pace. They must adapt their own methods and weaponry if they
hope to preserve the maritime supremacy that has served U.S. interests—not to
mention the interests of the region as a whole—so well since 1945.

Captain Wayne Hughes has supplied U.S. Navy mariners with a
primer for sea combat in Asia. Hughes’ classic Fleet Tactics (1986) and its
successors, Fleet Tactics and Coastal Combat (2000) and Fleet Tactics and Naval
Operations (2018), constitute a baseline for analyzing the challenges Chinese
antiship tactics pose. However useful his treatises, though, they cannot stand
alone. We mean no slight. Fleet Tactics aspires to school tacticians in a
variety of settings and against a variety of potential antagonists. Indeed,
Hughes describes his purpose as “to illustrate the processes—the dynamics—of
naval combat” rather than to prophesy how particular contingencies might turn
out. Thus, Fleet Tactics is largely silent on operational and strategic
matters, and it is entirely devoid of political, cultural, and strategic
context. As is the case with any good theory, its users can tailor it to
varying circumstances.

This flexibility is a strength, but it could become a
weakness if readers misuse Fleet Tactics. There is a decidedly technical feel
to such accounts on naval tactics, which are de rigueur in U.S. Navy training
institutions where warfighters learn their craft. The downside of the abstract
approach to naval warfare is that, taken in isolation, Hughes’ works strongly
imply that technology decides the outcomes of martial encounters. On the high
seas, enemy fleets slug it out with volleys of precision-guided arms. When
fighting close to enemy shores, defenders may fire antiship missiles at U.S.
task forces, land-based aircraft may disgorge missiles from aloft, or diesel
submarines may lurk below preparing to launch torpedoes or missiles. In both
modes of fighting, the combatants hammer away with everything in their
magazines, and the side that lands the first blow is the likely victor.

For Hughes, the arbiters of high-tech naval combat are (a)
“scouting effectiveness,” meaning the proficient use of shipboard and offboard
sensors, combat systems, and computer data links to find enemy units; (b)
“weapon range,” the ability to inflict damage at a distance; and (c) tactics,
which are determined by scouting effectiveness and the range of a fleet’s
weaponry. Hughes’ text conveys the dynamics of sea combat, but its scope is
limited. Seeker effectiveness or detect-to-engage algorithms will do much to
shape the results of any U.S.-China clash at sea, as will missile ranges. But
people, not machines, compete for naval mastery. Not for nothing did U.S. Air
Force colonel John Boyd, one of the leading strategic minds of the Cold War,
proclaim that people, ideas, and hardware—“in that order”—represent the prime
determinants of competitive endeavors, warfare in particular. More to the
point, Mao lambasted “the so-called theory that ‘weapons decide everything,’
which constitutes a mechanical approach to the question of war.… [I]t is
people, not things, that are decisive.”

Outdistancing an opponent’s sensors and weaponry is far from
the only challenge any U.S. naval offensive will face. Fleet Tactics shares
this deficit of vision with standard net assessments that tally up numbers of
platforms and their technical characteristics, often scanting the human element
of war and politics. A larger view is in order. Consider one data point from
Asian maritime history: Imperial Japan, which has emerged as a model for PLAN
development. Ni Lexiong, a leading Chinese proponent of sea power, faults
China’s Qing Dynasty for being insufficiently Mahanian in its 1894–95 tilt
against Japan. China, Ni says, should bear in mind that Mahan “believed that
whoever could control the sea would win the war and change history; that
command of the sea is achieved through decisive naval battles on the seas; that
the outcome of decisive naval battles is determined by the strength of fire
power on each side of the engagement.”

That distinguished analysts such as Ni now pay tribute to
Japanese sea power despite the bitter history of Sino-Japanese relations during
the twentieth century marks a striking turnabout in Chinese strategic thought.
Beijing’s willingness to consider the Japanese paradigm bespeaks increasing
openness to non-Chinese, noncommunist sources of wisdom on military and naval
affairs. Yet looking beyond Chinese traditions is eminently Chinese. Sun Tzu’s
Art of War, probably written in the fourth century B.C., remains a fixture in
Chinese strategic discourses. The Chinese sage counsels generals, “Know the
enemy and know yourself; in a hundred battles you will never be in peril. When
you are ignorant of the enemy but know yourself, your chances of winning or
losing are equal. If ignorant both of your enemy and of yourself, you are
certain in every battle to be in peril.” This may be a truism, but it is one
worth repeating, and it is important because it urges strategists to recognize
the strengths and weaknesses of each belligerent and reject analyses blinkered
by culture or ideology.

American commanders should heed Sun Tzu’s wisdom as well.
They need to understand U.S. forces’ material and human strengths; acknowledge
their own shortcomings; and come to terms with the ends, ways, and means likely
to guide China’s efforts in crisis or war. Only thus can they fashion strategy
for overcoming Chinese forces. The Mahanian geopolitical logic that helps
govern Chinese maritime strategy could also help goad Beijing into a trial of
arms involving the United States. Our purpose here is to explain what such a
prospect means in operational and tactical terms. A few propositions:

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

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

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

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

As Sun Tzu’s theories suggest, more acute understanding of
oneself and the adversary could provide the margin of victory in an armed
conflict against China. Now fast-forward from China’s Warring States period,
when Sun Tzu purportedly lived, to nineteenth-century Europe. Recall that Carl
von Clausewitz depicts war as “only a branch of political activity … that is in
no sense autonomous” (emphasis in original). “Is war not just another
expression of [peoples’ and governments’] thoughts, another form of speech or
writing?” he queries before answering his own question. “Its grammar, indeed,
may be its own, but not its logic.”

By this he means three things. First, war is the act of
pursuing policy aims with the admixture of military means. The addition of
violent means fires passions among the combatants—usually negative ones such as
fear, rage, and spite—while bringing chance and uncertainty to the fore.
Second, nonmilitary instruments such as diplomacy and economic coercion still
have a part to play after the shooting starts. And third, warlike preparations
and war itself are expressions of political and strategic thought. A violent
clash of human wills is not easily reducible to rules, formulas, or statistics.
Those schooled on Clausewitz cannot fully appreciate Chinese hardware and
tactics without grasping the larger strategic, political, and cultural
considerations that impart the logic—the purpose—to war.

Despite our dour tone, we are not prophesying naval war in
Asia. There is ample room for debate about China’s intentions and its vision of
its maritime destiny. Chinese naval power might evolve in a benign direction,
although that prospect appears dimmer than it did when the first edition of
this book appeared. We believe U.S. political leaders and commanders should do
their best to shape conditions in favor of a maritime entente with China, but
hoping for an agreeable outcome is not a strategy.

Washington, that is, can no longer afford a strategy of
neglect simply because it reckons that the probability of a clash with China is
low and wants to keep it that way. Nor, can the United States assume that its
traditional strengths in naval warfare, including air power and undersea
forces, will be sufficient to fend off China’s striking power at sea. By
investigating the logic and grammar impelling Chinese sea power, U.S.
strategists can estimate how the PLA Navy would mount an integrated,
offense-minded defense against U.S. Navy carrier, amphibious, and surface
action groups in Asian waters. Foresight will help them prepare for this
eventuality.