Conventional War

[Guest guest]

At present, it appears the only possible conventional-warfare challenge to the United States would have to come from China. It's a war that neither party desires, but states often stumble clumsily into war. Thus, it's instructive to consider what a future war with China might look like, it only because its scale would be greater than any other unexpected, conventional clash.

First, it must be stressed again that a general war with china is unlikely to occur. Defense contractors have done their best to exaggerate China's military capabilities, but Beijing's forces remain two full generations behind our own technology and China's military has yet to display the culture of flexibility and internal communications essential in 21st-century warfighting. The Chinese have impressive military thinkers, but their executors lag far behind. Often accused of seeking to compete globally with the United States, most of China's far-flung endeavors are desperate attempts to secure the fuels and raw materials critical to the country's continued expansion. Beijing must maintain high growth rates to keep a restive population under control - China's leaders are far more worried about internal strife than about "American aggression." China may have interests from Sudan to Panama, but its armed forces would have difficulty reaching Taiwan in a war with the United States.

That said, we would be foolish not to accept the possibility of war with China - as long as we do not allow our analysis to become a self-fulfilling prophecy. And an honest model of a conflict with China raises a number of potential surprises for which our own armed forces and government are not adequately prepared.

Our recent conventional operations have been ground-force heavy, with swift armored advances followed by gritty infantry combat in cities. We've seen that our Army and Marine Corps are too small for their global responsibilities. Yet, a war with China would be overwhelmingly a naval and air-power conflict - at least in its initial phases. Unless China came apart in the course of the conflict, we would be unlikely to invest ground forces in an effort to control Chinese territory. Instead, we would attempt to devastate China's military and essential infrastructure from a distance. The most probable land encounter would be to the south, in Myanmar, for control of the Burma Road, a trade lifeline for southern China (although we would first seek to control the route through a naval blockade - which would require Indian support).

In the broader struggle, we would be apt to get some unpleasant surprises. First, a war with China would be long, not short, and could well spread to other parts of East or Southeast Asia as Beijing tried to alter the terms of the struggle. Our initial strikes from the air and sea would rapidly demonstrate the limitations of precision weaponry to inflict decisive - or even convincing - destruction on a power enemy with great strategic depth. China's larger number of aircraft would begin to tell as our ordnance and even our pilots grew exhausted, leaning to a standoff in the air.

At sea, the initial exchange would be similar, but grimmer. Instead of repeating the great fleet actions of World War II on a strategic scale, our naval encounter with China would look uncannily like Jutland, Part Two: the Pacific Version. After inflicting more damage on our fleet than we anticipated in our war games, the Chinese would grasp that the price of sustaining their effort was too high. Withdrawing to the protection of their air-defense umbrella, Beijing's navy would become as immobilized as the German Imperial Fleet in the Great War - while our Navy would dominate the crucial sealanes, without being able to close in for the kill.

This would still be a naval war - but our Navy's decisive role would come in a postmodern form of commerce-raiding, closing off all trade with China (for years, not weeks or months), while standoff strikes interdicted future pipeline routes across Central Asia. The crucial theatre of war would be the Indian Ocean, the waters that carry vital trade that allows China to function as a modern, industrial state. Virtually all of the grandiose studies on high-tech wars brought to swift conclusions will prove worthless, while the old naval theorists who recognized the criticality of controlling seaborne trade will be vindicated: The strategic truth we ignore is that globalization has made control of the world's sea-lanes more important than ever before. Instead of great fleet-on-fleet battles, our Navy's essential contribution will be stopping, seizing and occasionally sinking merchant vessels on the high seas. Our future Navy will combine the traditions of the Union Navy's blockade of the Confederacy with a 21st-century version of the South's bold commerce raiders.

A conventional war with China would also have daunting unconventional aspects, but those are discussed below.

(I will post the last two sections and the closing tonight or tomorrow: )