Chinese Type 039A (Yuan-class) SS
Tactical Scenarios: Near Shore and on the High Seas
Hughes considers two very broad categories of wartime
contingencies: (1) U.S. forces might close in on the coast of an adversary that
boasts considerable land-based defenses but lacks a fleet able to stand against
the U.S. Navy in open waters; (2) a prospective opponent might possess a fleet
able to meet the U.S. Navy in highseas combat, operating more or less
independently of land support. The permutations between the two paradigms are
endless, as Barry Posen suggests in his definition of “contested zones.”
As Posen observes, a skillful though weaker adversary enjoys
certain advantages when operating on its home ground, including nearby
shore-based assets and manpower, short lines of communication, and intimate
acquaintance with the tactical environment. A savvy power can parley these
advantages into distinct strategic and operational advantages over the United
States, imposing costs Washington might find politically unacceptable. If the
costs of fighting China prove steeper than the stakes merit, rational U.S.
leaders may refuse to pay them. Even a lesser foe, then, could induce U.S.
decision makers to hesitate or perhaps even to withdraw U.S. forces following a
traumatic event—say, the crippling or sinking of a major surface combatant or
aircraft carrier. This dynamic—and it is worth spotlighting its pronounced
psychological, nontechnical component—will characterize any military encounter
off Chinese coasts for the foreseeable future.
The prospects for variety in the operating
environment—especially in littoral combat—should give wise fleet tacticians
pause. Strategist Bernard Brodie points to a perverse facet of naval warfare:
“There are too few naval wars and far too few major naval battles to enable us
ever to prove the correctness of a tactical theory” (his emphasis). Even an epic
battle—a Trafalgar or Tsushima—represents just a single data point for
evaluating a theory. The U.S. Navy fought its last major engagement at Leyte
Gulf in 1944; China’s PLA Navy has never fought one. Fleet actions take place
too seldom to allow for rigorous trend analysis or confident findings. It is a
fallacy to extrapolate from one bit of information that may not even be
accurate.
As Brodie notes, even a marginally different configuration
of forces or tactics on the part of one combatant or the other could have
produced a different outcome to a particular engagement. Analysts would then
render a different—and possibly faulty, yet equally confident—verdict on the
efficacy of the tactics deployed. Brodie might add that the times and
technology change between the major battles that constitute the data points for
analysis. It is hard to draw trend lines between disparate combatants,
historical epochs, and geographic settings, and those who do should take care
to leave generous margins for error.
With all of that in mind, Wayne Hughes posits three
representative scenarios for naval engagements on the high seas: attack by
massed forces on massed forces, dispersed attacks that arrive on top of
targeted forces nearly simultaneously, and sequential attack. The latter refers
essentially to attacks dispersed in time rather than space.
Two caveats are in order. First, we are not predicting
specific Chinese tactics; we use these three possibilities only as crude
indicators of how Chinese forces might respond to a U.S. naval offensive.
The attacking force—“Force B” in Hughes’ nomenclature—could
represent a mix of Chinese shore- and sea-based missile shooters supplemented
by platforms such as minelayers or torpedo-firing submarines. The important question
is whether Chinese strategic and operational preferences incline Chinese
commanders toward massed, dispersed, or sequential attack. A related question:
would Chinese commanders prefer to keep the PLA Navy closer to home, in keeping
with the fortress-fleet approach, or would they feel comfortable dispatching
the fleet for independent operations beyond shore-based cover?
Tactics for Striking at an Approaching Naval Force
Second, in the formulae Hughes develops to gauge the
probabilities of U.S. defenses’ being overwhelmed or penetrated by “leakers”
(platforms or munitions that get past the battle group’s layered defense), he
avoids using the characteristics—ranges, warhead sizes, and so forth—of
specific weapons systems. We follow suit for the most part. Capabilities
change, while tactical principles apply across many contingencies. It falls to
those closer to tactical and technical questions than we are to put the analysis
and findings presented here into actual practice.
In short, China’s contested zone in littoral sea areas will
comprise some composite of land and sea defenses. As the Chinese military
extends its reach seaward—especially if a post-Taiwan era ever comes to
pass—the high-seas component will naturally come to predominate. In
Clausewitzian terms, as the PLA extends the range of land-based weaponry and
continues building its oceangoing fleet, China will thrust the “culminating
point of the attack” for its foes outward from its coasts. Clausewitz observes
that when one state invades another, the combat power of the invading army
starts to dwindle while the defending army grows stronger and stronger as the
lines of communication with its bases shorten and it takes advantage of
familiar surroundings.
The culminating point represents the crossover point at
which the defender’s strength starts to surpass that of the attacker. A fleet
that stands into an enemy’s maritime contested zone faces the same dynamic.
U.S. Pacific Fleet relief forces will exhaust themselves if they push too far
in the face of Chinese resistance. This phenomenon will bolster China’s
prospects for denying the U.S. military access to important waters and for
exercising sea control in those waters. Extending the reach of the PLA’s
anti-access armory farther out to sea means the PLA can strike at the Pacific
Fleet farther away and hasten the onset of the American culminating point. In
all likelihood the PLA will strike in dispersed fashion, concentrating combat
power from many axes atop its U.S. Navy targets at the same time.
Applying Maoist Active-Defense Grammar to Offshore
Operations
Wars are not—and should not be—fought for their own sake.
Politics and grand strategy impart the logic or purpose to warfare, assigning
statesmen, soldiers, and mariners the ends toward which they strive. War’s
grammar, on the other hand, is the ways and means whereby warring combatants
try to reach those ends. Alfred Thayer Mahan proffered both a Clausewitzian
logic of sea power premised on commercial, political, and military access to
important regions and a grammar of naval strategy, operations, and tactics.
Mahan’s sea-power logic remains persuasive in China, it
seems. Beijing has resolved to gain or preserve commercial, political, and
military access to theaters it deems important to China’s national interests.
Mahan’s writings on operational and tactical matters, on the other hand, have a
musty if not archaic feel about them. He affirmed that the “offensive element
in warfare” was “the superstructure, the end and the aim for which the
defensive exists, and apart from which it is to all purposes of war worse than
useless. When war has been accepted as necessary, success means nothing short
of victory; and victory must be sought by offensive measures, and by them only
can be insured.”
This vision of offensive battle comports with Chinese
strategic proclivities, as does Mahan’s advocacy of forward bases and a robust
merchant marine. But Mahan’s doctrine of battle between big-gun battleships is
obsolete in an age of high-tech combat. Nor do Chinese analysts draw detailed
lessons from his works beyond his injunctions to mass combat power at the
critical place to prosecute a fleet engagement and to size fleets accordingly.
That Mahan has fallen into disrepute in operational and
tactical matters is not surprising. As he admitted to Theodore Roosevelt, he
was an indifferent fleet officer—“I am the man of thought, not the man of
action,” he confided—and more than once he came up on the short end of a
technical debate. He feuded with W. S. Sims, for example, on the question of
whether new U.S. battleships should be fitted with all-big-gun main batteries
or with a composite battery of big guns and lesser-caliber naval rifles.
Richard Hough notes that Sims administered an “annihilating” rejoinder to
Mahan’s advocacy of mixed armament, upbraiding Mahan for ignoring the combat
punch of Japanese 12-inch gunfire at Tsushima.
Mahan’s poor performance in tactical debates in his own day
makes it scarcely surprising that American and foreign tacticians nowadays look
elsewhere for insight. Chinese officials, mariners, and scholars consult other
martial traditions as they draft a grammar of marine combat—including their
own. Chinese traditions offer a rich stock of land-warfare concepts, including
the writings of Sun Tzu and, in particular, Mao Zedong, who etched his
strategic outlook on contemporary China through personal example and voluminous
writings on political and military affairs.
Admiral Xiao Jinguang, for instance, drew inspiration from
Mao’s writings to develop his naval doctrine of “sabotage warfare at sea,”. One
component of China’s current maritime strategy, “offshore waters defense,”
takes its guiding precepts from the Maoist doctrine of active defense, an
approach to warfighting distilled from Mao’s experiences in land campaigns
against Imperial Japanese occupiers and the Chinese Nationalist Army. Indeed,
Deng Xiaoping explicitly paid homage to Mao’s formula when he articulated his
vision for China’s maritime strategy in the reform and opening era.
Mao scorned passive defense. His military writings are wholly offensive in character, even the material written during the wilderness years when his Red Army was vastly inferior to its enemies and had little choice other than to remain on the strategic defensive. Passive defense represented “a spurious kind of defense” for him, while active defense meant “defense for the purpose of counter-attacking and taking the offensive.” Even strategically defensive aims, then, were best attained through offensive ways and means. Passive measures were necessitated by an unfavorable balance of forces. They were transient. They were not the core of China’s national strategy, let alone its strategic preference. This outlook lends China’s quest for sea power much of its grammar.
To Chinese eyes, U.S. mastery of East Asian seas resembles
the Nationalist Army’s strategy of “encirclement and suppression” transposed to
the East, Yellow, and South China Seas. The Red Army did not reply to
Nationalist Army ground offensives through passive means. It unleashed tactical
offensives opportunistically to elongate the war, tire out enemy forces, and
shift the balance of forces in the Communists’ favor. Patient action
represented a precursor to a counteroffensive and ultimately to decisive
victory.
Prompted by Mao and Mahan, Chinese naval strategists today
talk routinely of prying control of the waters westward of the first island
chain from the U.S. Navy’s grasp. They intend to surround and control these
waters by offensive means, even if the United States still commands Asian
waters at large.
True, Mao did warn against risking engagements in which
victory was not assured, but it represents a grave mistake to equate such
prudence with acquiescence in military inferiority. The strategic defensive was
an expedient for Chairman Mao, not a desirable or permanent state of affairs.
If the PLA heeds his advice, its grammar of naval war should give the U.S. Navy
pause. America’s control of Asian waters does not render all naval battles
unwinnable for Beijing. Washington must take seriously the reality that Beijing
has adopted an intensely offensive naval strategy in its littoral waters. The
PLA Navy is making itself a force to be reckoned with.
In this context, dispersed attacks on exterior lines are
becoming increasingly thinkable for the PLA, as they were for the Red Army in
its struggles against the Imperial Japanese Army and the Nationalist Army.
(Operating along exterior lines is like operating around the circumference of a
circle while the competitor on interior lines is located at the circle’s center
and operates along its radii, with the advantages a central location confers.)
The dispersed approach confers a variety of benefits. First, Maoist preferences
predispose Chinese defenders to let U.S. forces close on Chinese shores,
casting Americans in the part of Mao’s “foolish” boxer who “rushes in furiously
and uses up all his resources at the very start.” Plunging deep into China’s
offshore defensive zone attenuates the strength of the U.S. forces, weakening
them before PLA defenders mount attacks from shore- and sea-based weaponry
scattered around the battle zone.
Nor will the PLA confine its fleet tactics to any particular
warfare domain. It will unleash missile barrages complemented by submarine
attack, minefields, and the panoply of other tactics and systems on which China
has lavished attention. As American forces come under the shadow of Chinese
coastlines, the PLA will assume the exterior lines, rendering dispersed attacks
possible along multiple threat axes. By deploying land-based implements of sea
power, Beijing can bring the full force of its contested zone to bear, creating
a 360-degree threat to U.S. expeditionary groups. In the ideal case, if those
land-based forces are successful, the PLA may not even need to hazard the PLA
Navy battle fleet in action.
Second, PLA commanders will concentrate their efforts on
individual vessels or small detachments. Despite the tenor of Chinese
commentary, U.S. commanders should not automatically assume that aircraft
carriers will be the prime target for PLA action. Amphibious ships, for
example, would make tempting targets in a Taiwan contingency, assuming U.S.
Marines attempted to land to succor Taiwanese defense forces. Disabling or
sinking one of the U.S. Navy’s Aegis warships would certainly give the United
States pause, stirring memories of the October 2000 attack on the destroyer USS
Cole and thus magnifying the political impact of such a feat of arms on the
American electorate.
The PLAN might even set its sights on U.S. combat-logistics
vessels transiting to or from the conflict zone. Despite the lower political
profile of tankers and stores ships, depriving carrier or amphibious task
groups of “bullets, beans, and black oil” would bring the U.S. effort grinding
to a halt. Even a nuclear-powered carrier demands refueling every few days.
Otherwise its complement of aircraft cannot fly, and it may as well have been
disarmed.
Third, and closely related, the PLA will incorporate
orthodox and unorthodox methods and weaponry into its defensive scheme in
keeping with Mao’s and Sun Tzu’s warfare precepts. Western naval analysts
commonly invoke the concept of saturation attack, implying that cruise missiles
will be China’s sole implements in such a confrontation, or at any rate its
implements of choice. This may be true. More likely, though, PLA saturation
attacks will involve the concerted use of cruise, ballistic, and hypersonic
missiles; aerial attack from manned or unmanned warplanes; mines; torpedo
attack; electronic warfare; and cyber warfare. All of those weapons are ideal
for a contested zone and complement more conventional means.
Antiship missiles might thus represent not the primary,
orthodox element of an active-defense campaign but the secondary, unorthodox
element. For example, missile attack would compel U.S. tacticians to look
skyward while Kilo-class diesel boats loosed salvoes of wake-homing torpedoes
(torpedoes that find their surface target by following the water turbulence
churned up by the target ship’s propellers) against U.S. surface combatants
from beneath. It also bears repeating that Maoist tactics emphasize fluidity.
Astute commanders shift between axes as circumstances permit, making the
unorthodox attack into the orthodox attack if it appears more promising, and
switching back again if need be. Distinguishing orthodox from unorthodox
tactics may prove next to impossible in the heat of battle—which is the point
of this supple approach.
And fourth, Beijing will merge nonmilitary instruments into its defensive efforts by using diplomacy to augment Maoist active defense. China constantly wages what strategists dub “three warfares,” deploying psychological, media, and legal measures to shape opinion in China’s favor. It carries on this shaping effort in wartime and peacetime alike, in the spirit of former premier Zhou Enlai’s dictum that “all diplomacy is a continuation of war by other means.”
For instance, Beijing could impress upon Washington the
lasting diplomatic and economic repercussions of taking on China over Taiwan.
It takes time to debate whether a military undertaking is worth its price and
hazards. The United States could pause to reflect, and its hesitation could
grant the PLA enough time to attain its goals before U.S. forces intervened.
Additionally, Chinese diplomats could act as coalition breakers trying to
weaken or pick off U.S. allies. Discouraging Japan from granting the use of
bases on its soil or impressing on Australia that it will pay a price for
supporting U.S. military action would impair America’s strategic position in
Asia. Indeed, without access to allied bases America has no strategic position
in Asia. Denying access to them incapacitates them, which is almost as good as
destroying them from China’s standpoint.
Beijing would turn operational achievements of Chinese arms
to propaganda advantage using its three-warfares strategy. Even small tactical
triumphs would weary the American populace while giving America’s allies second
thoughts about supporting the United States against Asia’s central political
and economic power. Asians understand that win or lose in a sea war, they will
have to live with a vindictive China that has a long memory. Asymmetries in
commitment to the allied cause could open fissures that China could pry open
further—degrading or dismantling the alliance system that lets U.S. forces
operate on exterior lines far from North American shores.
