A race between Chinese and U.S. military forces to gain crucial advantages in a potential conflict to control the South China Sea is well underway, and neither side will hide it any longer.
“What the Chinese strategy aims at is to shift the balance of power so clearly that … the Americans will butt out, because the U.S. Navy will no longer have the capability to do anything,” Center for Strategic and International Studies senior fellow Gregory Poling explained this week.
That strategy depends on an array of new military capabilities tailored to defeat the U.S. military, perhaps none more troubling for U.S. strategists in recent years than Beijing’s vaunted DF-26 ballistic missile. After years of state media propaganda about the perils of the so-called “aircraft carrier killer,” reportedly located deep in Chinese territory yet capable of striking U.S. military positions thousands of miles away, Pentagon officials are signaling that the Chinese Communist regime’s confidence in the new weapon is misplaced.
“I hope they just keep pouring money into that type of thing,” Vice Adm. Jeffrey Trussler, the deputy chief of Naval Operations for Information Warfare and director of Naval Intelligence, said with a smile during an Intelligence and National Security Alliance event this week. “That may not be how we win the next war.”
That confident posture caught the attention of the Chinese military establishment. “What Trussler is saying is that the U.S. has sufficient power to handle the anti-ship missile threat from China,” former People’s Liberation Army instructor Song Zhongping told the South China Morning Post on Friday. “The U.S. is emphasizing that threat and it will further boost its defenses against Chinese missiles.”
An effective U.S. counter to the “carrier killer,” a term that Trussler acknowledged, could throw a wrench into Chinese military plans.
“They’re pouring a lot of money in the ability to, basically, rim their coasts in the South China Sea with anti-ship missile capability,” Trussler said. “When you see that, those are troubling developments. They’re probably aimed and specifically developed toward the United States Navy, so we watch them very closely.”
China has claimed the vast majority of the South China Sea, a swath of open ocean “more than twice [the size] of the Mediterranean Sea,” in defiance of the territorial rights of several neighboring countries. Functional control of those sea lanes would bring major economic advantages, while the increasing vulnerability of U.S. allies and American forces in the region might necessitate a retrenchment enables Beijing to bring any future conflict to American shores.
“We made a decision after World War II that our national security interests were best served with this network of alliances and forward-deployed bases so that we never again have to face an adversary on our side of the Pacific,” Poling, the CSIS analyst, explained. “There’s no world in which you concede the South China Sea and anybody buys the credibility of the U.S. alliance system.”
Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte is a wayward allied leader who has been candid about his belief in the inevitability of China’s military dominance in the area, making Trussler’s stated confidence in U.S. military capabilities a potentially significant diplomatic signal to allies in the region.
“At present, the U.S. military possesses a comprehensively developed missile defense network, which features a heavy element of ship-based systems,” Singapore-based military analyst Collin Koh told the South China Morning Post.
In addition to the missile defense tests, U.S. military officials recently have highlighted the fact that the U.S. Air Force’s B-52 aircraft can bomb the Chinese military on just 28 hours’ notice. Yet, more work remains to be done, U.S. analysts say.
“If you’re trying to be able to effectively deter — or at least raise the cost on China — then you do need to get around this brutal math, which is: China’s got more boats in the theater, and more planes, and more missiles, and they’ve got better radar and signals intelligence coverage,” Poling said. “Other than submarines, they’ve got the advantage on pretty much every front.”
