zenpundit.com

Chinese Navy

[by Mark Safranski, a.k. a. “zen“]

The editors of the excellent War of the Rocks invited me to post a short rebuttal to the op-ed “How Not to Go to War With China”, by Scott Cheney-Peters, which appears in their “Hasty Ambush” section:

UNDERSTANDING CHINA: THE REAL KEY TO AVOIDING WAR

….A place to begin our efforts in avoiding war with China might be avoiding engagement in some of the same incorrect mirror-imaging assumptions we once made about the Soviet Union, not least of which was MAD.  As a doctrine, Soviet leaders never accepted MAD and the Red Army general staff ignored it in drafting war plans to fight and prevail in any nuclear war. While the Soviets had no choice but to tackle the logic of deterrence as we did, the operative Soviet assumptions were predicated on a different strategic calculus, a different force structure and above all, different policy goals from their American counterparts.  A dangerous gap between American assumptions of Soviet intentions and the reality of these intentions came to light when in 1983 the Reagan administrationdiscovered to their alarm that Soviet leaders had interpreted the NATO exercise Abel Archer 83 as preparations for a real, imminent nuclear first strike on the USSR and ordered Soviet nuclear forces on high alert.

The military-to-military confidence-building initiatives outlined by Cheney-Peters intended to construct “habits of cooperation” are not entirely useless. There is some value in ensuring that high-ranking American military officers have personal and limited operational familiarity with their Chinese counterparts in the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), but as potential game-changers, they need to be taken with a grain of salt. Such a policy misses the essential strategic and political centers of gravity in the Sino-American relationship.  Namely that for the first time in 600 years, China is building a blue water Navy that will foster power projection as far away as the Indian ocean and Australia.  Secondly, this naval expansion, coupled with a new Chinese foreign policy, aggressively presses grandiose territorial demands on nearly all of its neighbors, including India and Japan.  These are fundamental conflicts with American interests that cannot be explained away or papered over by banquet toasts with visiting delegations of Chinese admirals. […]

Read the rest here.

Also read another WotR  China piece “99 Red Balloons: How War with China would Start” by Matthew Hipple

[by Mark Safranski, a.k.a. “zen“]

Octavian Manea branches out from COIN to the realm of power projection:

The Role of an Air Sea Battle-Centric Posture in Strategic Reassurance: SWJ Interview with Elbridge Colby 

SWJ: In a time when the PLA is intensively investing in anti-access/area-denial (A2/AD) capabilities, how would you characterize the Chinese way of war? What are they preparing for?

EC: My understanding of what the Chinese are trying to accomplish is the ability to effectively counter a third party intervention. If you look at the strategic landscape in the Western Pacific, more or less starting from 1945, the US dominated the aerial and maritime spheres. Obviously, we had less success on the Eurasian landmass, but the whole system was predicated on the ability of the US fleet and airpower to dominate the Pacific.

The particular contingency for which this was most relevant was Taiwan. Now, the US continues to have a policy guided by the Taiwan Act which, at the very least, suggests that we might intervene militarily. This is something that the Chinese are not comfortable with. It [the claim to Taiwan] is a core element of their regime’s legitimacy. This issue became more salient after the Taiwan Strait crisis in 1995/1996. That was a wakeup call for the Chinese, and in its aftermath they decided to build up the ability to try to effectively push back the US military. The trajectory of Chinese military development has therefore been to build forces that would potentially enable them to prevent the US from operating effectively in the areas that we need to be able to dominate if we decide to defend Taiwan in the event of Chinese military attack or attempted coercion. In this context they have spent a lot of time and resources on more accurate ballistic and cruise missiles, aerial forces and naval forces, basically with the overarching idea of creating an A2/AD bubble in order to deny the US the ability to exercise its power in the Western Pacific. That challenge to our power projection ability has been compounded because of the centralization of the US military posture following the Cold War, becoming increasingly focused on Guam and a few other nodes in the Pacific region.

SWJ: What are the implications of China’s military build-up for the United States?

EC:  As we go forward and the Chinese economy likely continues to grow, they will presumably continue to put significant resources into these military capabilities. If we think about the basic military problem, the US is trying to project its power across the greatest expense of water on the globe, very far from our shores, using naval and airpower, all while the Chinese are operating from their mainland. The Chinese basically are trying to frustrate our ability to enter, while we are trying to get there and accomplish our objectives. As the Chinese military become more sophisticated, it will become a great problem for us.

SWJ: Are the Chinese A2/AD capabilities a long-term threat to the credibility of the deterrence capital that the US is providing to the region?

EC: Absolutely. We can see this in the case of Japan, where we see a lot more interest, focus, and essentially need for a stronger military posture. Publicly the Japanese are talking about North Korea, but what they are really worried about is China. The Senkaku Islands are the tip of the iceberg. A few months ago the Chinese state-affiliated press started to talk about the Chinese claims on the Ryukyu Islands, of which Okinawa is a part. It is a classic example of the downside of accommodation or appeasement in that the potential adversary can get hungrier rather than sated due to accommodation. And Taiwan’s closer relationship with mainland China is, in part, a result of the shifting regional military balance. More broadly, in these kinds of strategic competitions, perceptions of capability and resolve are crucial. If everyone thinks we are growing weaker, then they are likely to behave accordingly. 

A lengthy interview – read the rest here.

[by J. Scott Shipman]

Military Strategy, A General Theory of Power Control, J. C. Wylie

Mark your calendar; March 15, 2014, the USNI Press will rerelease J.C. Wylie‘s classic Military Strategy. A couple years ago I reviewed here.

If you have not read Wylie, I strongly recommend adding his little book to your list.

And a big “Thank You!” to the USNI Press!

POSTSCRIPT: A representative of the USNI notified me that an eBook will be forthcoming, too. 

[by Mark Safranski, a.k.a. “zen“]

Busy writing a book review for Pragati Magazine that should be published on Friday. In lieu of a post, I wanted to make a few completely disconnected observations.

First, Charles Cameron in his recent post on Pattern Recognition had a link to an interesting paper, “Outline of a Psychology of War”, that I did not want readers to miss.

Secondly, there is a bitterly apoplectic piece on The Tea Party and National Security by conservative defense intellectual Dov Zakheim that should stir some debate.

In a move that meshes the paranoid control-freakishness of some senior military leaders, penny-wise and pound-foolish military budget cutting, a political desire to outsource futurism to crony capitalists like Goldman Sachs, and the zealous intolerance of the administration’s “Chicago wing” for dissenting opinions or even informed advice – creeping apparatchiks in the Obama administration have their knives out for Andrew Marshall and the Office of Net Assessment.

This is the Joint Chiefs  intellectual equivalent of the longstanding USAF desire to kill the A-10. Seldom am I in complete agreement with The Lexington Institute but on this issue they are correct.

Readers can sound off on these or any issues they wish in the comments…….

[by Mark Safranski, a.k.a. “zen“]

Several weeks ago, Cheryl Rofer wrote an important post analyzing the report “Strategic Terrorism: A Call to Action” by Microsoft billionaire, venture capitalist, theoretical mathematician and cookbook author, Dr. Nathan Myhrvold. I found Cheryl’s argument quite persuasive and would like to add a few points of my own; because while some of the concerns raised by Myhrvold are valid and his intent is no doubt well-meaning, the approach he suggests is, at times, problematic.

If in the past ten years you have been a serious student of terrorism studies, insurgency and COIN, national security, counter-terrorism policy, counter-proliferation policy,  intelligence community affairs and military theory, there is little that will be new for you in the first part of the report. Many of these problems had previously been raised (at least in part) by figures as disparate as Michael Scheuer, John Robb, Martin van Creveld, Thomas P.M. Barnett, William Lind,  Robert Bunker and dozens if not hundreds, of thinkers, practitioners and scholars. In addition, this ground was also covered by government agencies like the National Intelligence Council in its periodic Global Trends reports, and in classified analysis by the Office of Net Assessment and various three letter agencies. The blogosphere also had a lively discussion of catastrophic WMD terrorism, superempowered individuals, 4GW/5GW, apocalyptic Mahdism and related subjects throughout the mid to late 2000’s.  Diffusion of society-shifting power into the hands of small groups and individuals was a theme of Alvin and Heidi Toffler back in the 70’s and 80’s, so this is an old rather than new problem.

Dr. Myhrvold is a polymathic character, but his original area of specialization was mathematical research so it is not surprising that his approach to things “strategic” is dominated by scalar considerations. Namely, a threat taxonomy based upon potential magnitude of  disaster events up to the extinction of the human race (High M 10).  Wondering here, as the bibliographic references of this report are extremely scanty, if Myhrvold was influenced by Herman Kahn‘s ideas on escalation or game theory based literature on deterrence or something else. Regardless, while there’s some merit to this definition – obviously if your civilization is destroyed or everyone is dead you have suffered the ultimate in strategic defeat – there are weaknesses too as the linear progression of destruction implies an apolitical environment and inevitable process. That’s not how things work with strategy in the real world, neither today nor back in the era of Cold War superpower nuclear brinksmanship. Even John Foster Dulles and Vyacheslav Molotov were more politically nuanced than that.

This is an important point. Myhrvold is focused on capacity alone rather than in conjunction with political purpose in defining strategic threats.  Capacity in bad hands is worth worrying about and Myhrvold is right when he criticizes the government for their obstinate refusal to develop a robust threat detection system for shipping to US ports of entry ( that’s boring, hard work with little payoff from a political perspective, but the NSA building a system for surveilling all Americans is fun and gives government bureaucrats great potential power to ruin anyone they wish); that said, outside of comic books and James Bond movies, people do not historically initiate violence on an epochal scale out of a Joker-like admiration of nihilism, not even terrorists. Instead, they have a political end in mind for which violence is a tool. This variable appears to be absent from Myhrvold’s thinking.

More troubling, Myhrvold’s solution to the potential threat of bioweapon terrorism would appear to be, as I infer it, even greater centralization of power in the hands of a national security surveillance state. As I expect Dr. Myhrvold is a great respecter of data-driven, probabilistic logic, he might want to consider that nearly every man-made, high magnitude, lethal event in the past century and a quarter years has been initiated by governments for reasons of policy, up to and including the auto-genocide of tens of millions of their own citizens. Most people on this planet are in far greater danger of harm at the hands of the state than they are as a result of terrorism or foreign attack and it would seem foolish, in light of such statistics, to increase our risk by delegating greater grants of power to the entity most likely to cause us harm. In the words of the late defense and security expert Dr. Fred Ikle, we would be risking Annihilation from Within.

Ikle anticipated years ago much of what Myhrvold wrestled with in his report and, in my view, prescribed better answers.