Early in September, a Navy P-8A Poseidon reconnaissance flight over the South China Sea was harshly warned off by Chinese radio operators stationed on a fortified islet of Mischief Reef: “U.S. military aircraft, you have violated our China sovereignty and infringed on our security and our rights. You need to leave immediately!” The plane was traveling in international airspace at the time, but the Chinese operators repeated the warning eight times before the naval aircraft began its return to Okinawa.
The flights have continued at regular intervals. So have the warnings.
In October, the Chinese protested vehemently when the Pentagon sent two warships through the Taiwan Strait, signaling American resolve to maintain freedom of navigation in international waters—and to defend Taiwan’s independence from a regime in Beijing that claims that island as its own sovereign territory, and seems ever more ready to seize it by force.
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These incidents are indicative of a broader development: The Pentagon is now taking a much more assertive response to China’s military muscle-flexing in the Indo-Pacific region than it did just a few months back.
Just a decade ago hopes were high that China’s unprecedented economic ascendency would lead to its playing a constructive role in supporting the rules-based international order embodied in the UN and the International Court of Justice in the Hague.
Those hopes have dimmed considerably recently, as President Xi Jinping’s vision of his nation’s “peaceful rise and development” has come more clearly into focus. It turns out Xi’s grand strategy for “national rejuvenation” relies heavily on coercive diplomacy and military intimidation throughout the Indo-Pacific region. China has been bullying its neighbors, e.g., Vietnam and the Philippines, into accepting its claims to natural resources under their own sea beds and asserting military control over vital international shipping lanes.
A central element of Xi’s strategy is to challenge America’s strategic dominance of Indian and Pacific Oceans with its own military forces, especially the People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN). In a recent article in Foreign Affairs, the leading journal of international politics in the United States, Dartmouth Professor Jennifer Lind expressed the consensus view among defense analysts and sinologists in the West. The People’s Republic of China (PRC), she wrote, “is using economic coercion to bend other countries to its will. It is building up its military power to ward off challengers. It is intervening in other countries’ domestic politics to get friendlier policies. And it is investing heavily in educational and cultural programs to enhance its soft power.”
In short, says Lind—among many others—China is pursuing a policy of “regional hegemony.” The evidence that this is so is abundant, and growing. Despite a 2016 ruling by a UN tribunal that the PRC has no legitimate claim to the South China Sea, China has continued to militarize seven islets within the Sea’s confines in the Spratly Islands, building fighter jet runways, surface to air missile sites, radar, and communications facilities.
Many defense experts say China’s rising naval power in the Pacific constitutes the most serious strategic challenge to the American military since the Cold War struggle against the Soviet Union. And that challenge is clearly heating up as the end of the year approaches.
The head of the U.S. military’s Indo-Pacific Command, Admiral Philip Davidson, has said that China “is already capable of controlling the South China Sea in scenarios short of war with the United States.” Since about one-third of global sea trade flows through the sea lanes there, it’s little wonder Davidson and his boss, Jim Mattis, are determined to respond vigorously to China’s strategic challenge.
The U.S. Navy is the primary institution for enforcing freedom of the seas throughout the world, but Beijing has invested heavily to expand both the size and lethality of its naval presence in Asia. The PLAN is now capable of challenging the U.S. Navy’s presence in the Western Pacific, thanks to formidable anti-access—area denial capabilities in the form of anti-ship ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, satellites, and highly advanced radar systems.
China has also built up its naval fleet in the past several years to include two aircraft carriers, a new class of guided missile cruisers, and some 30,000 Marines for amphibious operations. In 2017, Beijing opened its first overseas naval base, at Djibouti on the Horn of Africa. As part of its ambitious “Belt and Road” infrastructure initiative, China has built deep-water ports in Pakistan, Namibia, and Sri Lanka, all of which could be converted to naval use very easily, given the growing economic leverage it holds over those nations.
Military analysts widely believe that the Trump administration has been too slow in responding to Beijing’s military buildup. At the Shangri-la conference for leading defense officials and experts this past June in Singapore, a Chinese military officer went so far as to quip, “Everybody is asking, where’s the beef?”
There are clear signs this is changing.
The Defense Department has made it clear that the Indo-Pacific is its priority theater of operations, and in recent months has increased the number of freedom of navigation air and sea patrols in the South China Sea. British, French, and Japanese warships have also begun to undertake such missions there, and in a number of areas of the Pacific China claims as its own.
Graham Allison, a highly regarded expert on U.S.-China relations who teaches at Harvard, recently remarked that while it’s too late to turn back China’s possession of the Spratly islands, “the Trump administration now means to fight back vigorously on all fronts.”
Administration officials have been uncharacteristically blunt recently in defending Taiwan’s independence at high-level meetings, while Beijing continues to assert that the island is sovereign Chinese territory. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo told Chinese officials in a Nov. 14 meeting in Washington that the United States will continue to maintain its strong ties to Taiwan, and that “we are increasingly concerned about China’s effort to coerce others” into placing strict limits on their political and trade relations with the island.
The statement seems to have been read by the Chinese delegation as an oblique way of saying that the United States would resist any overt attempt to extend its control over Taiwan, and it drew an unusually strident response from Beijing’s Defense Minister, Gen. Wei Fenghe. “To advance unification with Taiwan is a mission for our Party and our country,” he said. If “this territorial integrity is under threat,” China would maintain it “at any cost.”
As the contest heats up, Vice President Mike Pence has emerged as the administration’s point man in speaking out against China’s military adventurism. His plane recently flew within 50 miles of the Spratlys en route to a summit meeting of the Association of Southeast Asian nations in Singapore. On the plane, Pence told a Washington Post reporter, “We will not be intimidated. We will not stand down. We will continue to exercise Freedom of Navigation” in waters China asserts are its own. At the summit, Pence lobbied intensively for support from other nations for America’s push back against China’s assertiveness, and by most accounts seems to have made some headway.
Meanwhile, Secretary of Defense Mattis traveled more than a half dozen times during the past year to Asia to confer with U.S. allies and potential partners about strengthening their armed forces’ ties to the U.S. military. Mattis is keenly interested in improving the interoperability of foreign navies and air forces with those of the United States in light of China’s increasingly aggressive behavior.
In fact, strengthening America’s military alliances in the region, several of which China has been trying to erode by dangling economic incentives and thinly veiled threats in front of their leaders, is one of two leading themes in America’s new military strategy for dealing with an ascendant China. This reflects Mattis’s long-held view that nations with effective alliances win wars, and those without lose them. Securing stronger military alliances, of course, depends in large degree on the Trump administration’s ability to develop attractive commercial and political relationships, which is the province of Pompeo’s State Department. It’s a good bet this is very high on Pompeo’s to-do list as the end of the year approaches.
The other key element in Mattis’s strategy for dealing with China, as outlined in his Summary of the 2018 National Defense Strategy, is to develop “a more lethal force” worldwide, but particularly within Adm. Davidson’s Indo-Pacific Command, where China has closed the capability gap between its forces and those of the United States and its allies. The goal of enhancing U.S. military assets in the region, argues Mattis, isn’t to try to contain China’s military or economic growth, but to deter its leaders from engaging in acts of overt aggression by making the cost of those acts prohibitively high.
The Indo-Pacific Command today consists of about 375,000 personnel, 200 ships, and 1,100 aircraft. Adm. Davidson has said that his command “is highly dependent on high-end warfighting capabilities, including 5th generation aircraft, munitions capable of penetrating China’s [anti-access-area denial] environment; undersea warfare dominance… and survivable mission partner networks.” Exactly how Indo-Pacific Command’s capabilities are going to be improved remains classified, but defense analysts have been able to make some well-educated guesses based on written and oral statements by DOD officials and senior military officers of the Command.
For one thing, Davidson’s command is likely to be the beneficiary of naval assets that are now attached to other theater commands. According to defense analysts, it’s quite possible that an additional aircraft carrier strike group and one or more amphibious ready groups of 5,000 sailors and Marines will deploy to the region before too long. Davidson has made it clear he would like to increase his arsenal of munitions capable of knocking out Chinese warships and land-based medium-range ballistic missiles from great distances.
One such weapon is Lockheed Martin’s Long Range Anti-Ship Missile (LRASM), adapted from an Air Force’s stealthy cruise missile. According to defense analyst Loren Thompson, “LRASM is ideally suited to dominating the choke points in the first island chain so that Chinese naval might is bottled up close to home—and then, if necessary, destroyed. First, it is stealthy; Chinese naval radars can’t see it, so they can’t intercept it. Second, it has greater range than legacy anti-ship missiles, enabling U.S. forces to launch from beyond the reach of Chinese weapons. Third, it can be launched from numerous “platforms”—Air Force bombers, carrier-based fighters, vertical-launch systems installed in warships, canisters on the deck, and even trucks on land.”
Mattis’s defense strategy summary says that the Pentagon is working on a new management system, the “Global Operating Model” to move military assets quickly to the region at first signs of a crisis, as well as “layered missile defenses and disruptive capabilities” against China’s increasing offensive capabilities.
Davidson stated plainly in the spring that his command suffered from insufficient intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance assets. It’s a sure bet that this gap has already been closed significantly, given the rapid technological advances the PLAN has enjoyed of late. It’s likely, too, that plans are currently in the works to enhance the survivability of command and control, and communications networks for American and allied forces in the region.
While the Navy moves to strengthen its posture in the Indian and Pacific Oceans, Secretary Mattis continues to encourage his Chinese counterpart, Wei Fenghe, to keep the lines of communication open with a view to avoiding a crisis neither side wants to have to confront. The guess here is that there is going to be a great deal for these two gentlemen to talk about over the coming months.
