Avoiding War with China

Two Nations, One World

Amitai Etzioni

• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780813940045
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political History & Theory
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Are the United States and China on a collision course? In response to remarks made by Donald Trump's secretary of state, China's state-run newspaper Global Times asserted, "Unless Washington plans to wage a large-scale war in the South China Sea, any other approaches to prevent Chinese access to the [disputed] islands will be foolish." Some experts contend that conflict is inevitable when an established power does not make sufficient room for a rising power. In this timely new work, renowned professor of international relations Amitai Etzioni explains why this would be disastrous and points to the ways the two nations can avoid war.

The United States is already preparing for a war with China, Etzioni reveals. However, major differences of opinion exist among experts on the extent of military commitment required, and no plan has been formally reviewed by either Congress or the White House, nor has any been subjected to a public debate. Etzioni seeks here to provide a context for this long overdue discussion and to explore the most urgent questions: How aggressive is China? How powerful is it? Does it seek merely regional influence, or regional dominance, or to replace the United States as the global superpower?

The most effective means of avoiding war, several experts argue, requires integrating China into the prevailing rule-based, liberal, international order. Etzioni spells out how this might be achieved and considers what can be done to improve the odds such an integration will take place. Others call for containing or balancing China, and Etzioni examines the risk posed by our alliances with various countries in the region, particularly India and Pakistan.

With insight and clarity Etzioni presents our best strategy to reduce tension between the two powers, mapping out how the United States can accommodate China's regional rise without undermining its core interests, its allies, and the international order.

1

WHO AUTHORIZED PREPARATIONS FOR WAR WITH CHINA?

The United States is preparing for a war with China, a momentous decision that so far has failed to receive a thorough review from elected officials, namely, the White House and Congress. This important change in the United States’ posture toward China has largely been driven by the Pentagon. There have been other occasions in which the Pentagon has framed key strategic decisions so as to elicit the preferred response from the commander in chief and elected representatives. A recent case in point was when the Pentagon led President Obama to order a high-level surge in Afghanistan in 2009, against the advice of the vice president and the US ambassador to Afghanistan. The decision at hand stands out even more prominently, because (a) the change in military posture may well lead to an arms race with China, which could culminate in a nuclear war; and (b) the economic condition of the United States requires a reduction in military spending, not a new arms race. The start of a new term, and with it the appointment of new secretaries of state and defense, provide an opportunity to review the United States’ China strategy and the military’s role in it. This review is particularly important before the new preparations for war move from an operational concept to a militarization program that includes ordering high-cost weapons systems and force restructuring. History shows that once these thresholds are crossed, it is exceedingly difficult to change course.

In the following pages, I first outline recent developments in the Pentagon’s approach to dealing with the rise of China; I then focus on the deliberations of the highest civilian authorities. These two sides seemed to operate in parallel universes, at least until November 2011 when the pivot to Asia was announced by the White House—though we shall see that their paths hardly converged even after that date. I conclude with an outline of what the much-needed civilian review ought to cover.

I write about the “Pentagon” and the “highest civilian authorities” (or our elected political representatives), rather than contrast the view of the military and that of the civilian authorities, because the Pentagon includes civilians, who actively participated in developing the plans under discussion. It is of course fully legitimate for the Pentagon to identify and prepare for new threats. The question that this chapter raises is whether the next level of government—which reviews such threats while taking into account the input of the intelligence community (which includes nonmilitary agencies such as the CIA and NSA) and other agencies (especially the State Department)—has adequately fulfilled its duties. Have the White House and Congress properly reviewed the Pentagon’s approach and found its threat assessment of China convincing? Have they approved the chosen response? And if not, what are the United States’ overarching short- and long-term political strategies for dealing with an economically and militarily rising China?

In the Pentagon

Since World War II, the United States has maintained a power-projection military built upon forward deployed forces with uninhibited access to the global commons—air, sea, and space. For more than six decades the United States’ unrivaled naval and air power has underwritten the maritime security of the Western Pacific. However, starting in the early 1990s, Chinese investments in sophisticated but low-cost weapons—including antiship missiles, short- and medium-range ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, stealth submarines, and cyber- and space arms—began to challenge the United States’ military superiority, especially in China’s littoral waters. These “asymmetric arms” threaten two key elements of the United States’ force-projection strategy: its fixed bases (such as those in Japan and Guam) and aircraft carriers. Often referred to as anti-access/area denial capabilities (A2/AD), these Chinese arms are viewed by some in the Pentagon as raising the human and economic cost of the United States’ military role in the region to prohibitive levels. To demonstrate what this new environment means for regional security, military officials point out that in 1996, when China conducted a series of missile tests and military exercises in the Strait of Taiwan, the United States responded by sending two aircraft carriers to the South China Sea, a credible display of force that reminded all parties of its commitment to maintaining the status quo in the region.¹ However, these analysts point out, if in the near future China decided to forcefully integrate Taiwan, the same American aircraft carriers that are said to have once deterred Chinese aggression could be denied access to the sea by the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) antiship missiles. Thus, American interests in the region, to the extent that they are undergirded by superior military capabilities, are increasingly vulnerable.

Two influential American military strategists, Andrew Marshall and his protégé Andrew Krepinevich, have been raising the alarm about China’s new capabilities and aggressive designs since the early 1990s. Building on hundreds of war games played out over the past two decades, they gained a renewed hearing for their concerns following Pacific Vision, a war game conducted by the US Air Force in October 2008. The game was financed in part by Marshall’s Office of Net Assessment, a division of the Pentagon focused on identifying emerging security threats to the United States. The Air Force Magazine reported at the time that the simulation convinced others in the Pentagon of the need to face up to China, and “when it was over, the PACAF [Pacific Air Force Command] staff set about drawing up its conclusions and fashioning a framework for AirSea Battle”—a plan to develop the new weapons and operation capabilities needed to overcome the challenges posed by A2/AD.²

With Marshall’s guidance, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates instructed the Chiefs of Staff to begin work on the AirSea Battle (ASB) project and, in September of 2009, Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Norton Schwartz and Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Gary Roughead signed a classified memorandum of agreement endorsing the plan.³ ASB received Gates’s official imprimatur in the 2010 Quadrennial Defense Review, which directed the United States military to “develop a joint air-sea battle concept... [to] address how air and naval forces will integrate capabilities across all operational domains—air, sea, land, space, and cyberspace—to counter growing challenges to U.S. freedom of action.”⁴ In late 2011 Gates’s successor, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta, also signed off on the ASB and formed the new Multi-Service Office to Advance AirSea Battle. Thus, in only a few years, ASB was conceived, born, and began to grow.

ASB called for “interoperable air and naval forces that can execute networked, integrated attacks-in-depth to disrupt, destroy, and defeat enemy anti-access area denial capabilities.”⁵ The hypothetical battle would begin with a campaign to reestablish power-projection capabilities by launching a “blinding attack” against Chinese anti-access facilities, including land- and sea-based missile launchers, surveillance and communication platforms, satellite and antisatellite weapons, and command and control nodes. American forces could then enter contested zones and conclude the conflict by bringing to bear the full force of their material military advantage.

At the time the Pentagon proposed ASB, contemporary US technologies and force structures were unprepared to carry out such a hypothetical campaign; its architects urged investments in penetrating, long-endurance ISR (intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance) and strike capabilities; aerial tankers; and forward base hardening. Strategists also encouraged the navy to “develop and field long-range/endurance UUVs [unmanned undersea vehicles] for multiple missions germane to intelligence preparation of the undersea battlespace” and recommended that the air force and navy stockpile precision-guided munitions “in sufficient quantities to execute an ASB campaign.”⁶ ASB also involved a considerable shift of budgetary priorities from the army and marines to the navy and air force.

Some argue that ASB is merely a limited “operational concept.” However, it has already shaped acquisition decisions and decisions about Pentagon force structure. General Schwartz wrote in 2012, “The first steps to implement Air-Sea Battle are already underway here at the Pentagon. In our FY 2012 and FY 2013 budgets we increased investment in the systems and capabilities we need to defeat access threats.”⁷ Admiral Greenert points to the investments in antisubmarine warfare, electronic warfare, air and missile defense, and information sharing that were included in the president’s 2012 budget as one aspect of ASB’s implementation, and he notes that the 2013 budget “sustains these investments and really provides more resilient C4ISR [Command, Control, Communications, Computers, Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance] investments.”⁸ The New York Times reported that the new Littoral Combat Ship, which is able to deftly navigate shallow coastal seas, is “central to President Obama’s strategy of projecting American power in the Pacific.”⁹ So far, two of the planned fifty-five ships have been completed, and the first were deployed in Singapore in 2013. A press report in August 2012 stated that “the Air-Sea Battle concept has prompted Navy officials to make significant shifts in the service’s FY2014–FY2018 budget plan, including new investments in ASW [antisubmarine warfare], electronic attack and electronic warfare, cyberwarfare, the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter (JSF), the P-8A maritime patrol aircraft, and the Broad Area Maritime Surveillance (BAMS) UAV [unmanned aerial vehicle].”¹⁰ Some point out that many of these weapons would have been ordered even if there were no ASB, and that some purchases merely constitute technological updates. However, it is also true that a smaller defense budget means making choices about the allocation of resources, and evidence suggests that the Pentagon has made the hardware of ASB a high priority. In addition, a 2012 report by the Congressional Research Service on the implications of Chinese naval modernization disclosed that there has been a “redeployment of various advanced U.S. nuclear submarines and Aegis SM-3 based missile defense vessels to the Pacific in close cruising distance to China and North Korea. Other vessels in the Pacific were recently moved to Guam and Hawaii to presumably cut transit time to areas of possible conflict. All of this would be helpful if AirSea concepts are employed.”¹¹

In January 2015, the Joint Chiefs of Staff released a memo announcing the “development, evaluation, and implementation” of a Joint Concept for Access and Maneuver in the Global Commons (JAM-GC), which the memo stated was a new name for the concept “formerly known as AirSea Battle.”¹² The AirSea Battle Office is responsible for “support[ing] and oversee[ing] the writing and development of the new JAM-GC concept,” and will dissolve when the Joint Staff approves the concept, at which point “the ASB Office will become the JAM-GC Office,” a representative of the AirSea Battle Office stated.¹³ A number of experts agree that JAM-GC is virtually indistinguishable from ASB, and that the decision to rename the concept without substantially revising the concept itself suggests the Department of Defense was motivated by “getting the topic out of the daily headlines” and “engender[ing] little scrutiny or debate.”¹⁴ Navy Captain Terry Morris, the deputy director of the AirSea Battle Concept program, however, contests this suggestion; he says that JAM-GC is meant neither “to replace Air-Sea Battle [... nor to] throw the Air-Sea Battle concept out and start all over again.” He characterizes JAM-GC as an expansion of the ASB concept’s focus in response to new regional threats and intra-armed forces issues.¹⁵ Jacek Bartosiak of the Potomac Foundation supports this assessment, saying that a wide variety of A2/AD threats have emerged since ASB was first proposed, and that JAM-GC will be developed with an eye to each of them, whereas ASB was focused exclusively on China.¹⁶ However, it is a safe assumption that JAM-GC is dedicated to the same objectives and approaches as the original ASB concept, even if it incorporates additional elements.

One should note that several officials also maintain that ASB is not aimed at China. At a background briefing on ASB, one Pentagon official stated, “It is not about a specific actor. It is not about a specific actor or regime.”¹⁷ General Norton Schwartz has said that questions about China’s place in the concept are “unhelpful.”¹⁸ However, the consensus of most observers is that “Air-Sea Battle is billed as the answer to growing anti-access/area-denial capabilities generically, but as everyone knows, specifically China,” as former Marine Corps officer J. Noel Williams put it.¹⁹ And according to a senior navy official overseeing the forces modernization efforts, “Air-Sea Battle is all about convincing the Chinese that we will win this competition.”²⁰

Indeed, as far as one can determine, the Pentagon decided to embrace the ASB concept over alternative ways for sustaining American military power in the region that, critically, are far less likely to lead to escalation. One such is the “war-at-sea” option, a strategy proposed by Jeffrey Kline and Wayne Hughes of the Naval Postgraduate School which would deny China use of the sea within the first island chain (which stretches from Japan to Taiwan and through the Philippines) by means of a distant blockade, the use of submarine and flotilla attacks at sea, and the positioning of expeditionary forces to hold at-risk islands in the South China Sea. By forgoing a mainland attack, the authors argue that the war-at-sea strategy gives “opportunities for negotiation in which both sides can back away from escalation to a long-lasting, economically-disastrous war involving full mobilization and commitment to some kind of decisive victory.”²¹ In the same vein, the “Offshore Control Strategy” put forward by National Defense University’s T. X. Hammes “seeks to use a war of economic attrition to bring about a stalemate and cessation of conflict” by establishing a distant blockade and a maritime exclusion zone within the first island chain, while dominating the surrounding waters “to ensure the continued flow of trade to our allies while tightening the blockade against China.”²² This would not bring a decisive victory, but would allow the United States to achieve its objectives of protecting its allies and maintaining free access to sea-lanes, while giving China space to back down. Indeed, even Krepinevich in 2015 advocated a strategy he called “Archipelagic Defense,” which was closer to Offshor...