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Fighting China: Airsea Battle and Australia

Journal Edition
Volume 9, Number 3, Summer

Abstract

This article examines the origins and implications for Australia of the US concept AirSea Battle. It argues that the US preparations for AirSea Battle will shape warfare in Australia’s region and will require a refocusing of the preparation of the ADF.

Introduction

In mid-2010, Washington-based think tank The Center of Strategic and Budgetary Assessments (CSBA) published AirSea Battle: A Point-of-Departure Operational Concept, which prescribed an approach through which the United States should meet the challenges presented by the growing strength and assertiveness of China.1 Of itself this was not novel. In the decade following the end of the Cold War, China had begun to gel in many US minds as the next threat that would have to be faced. As a result the problem of dealing with ‘Anti Access-Area Denial’—or A2AD—had, by the late 1990s, become the focus of US Army and Navy Title 10 war games and had been the trigger for the Marines’ Ship-to-Objective Manoeuvre, the Army’s Army After Next experimentation (that spawned the Future Combat System) and Navy ideas including littoral combat ships, arsenal ships and the conversion of fleet ballistic missile submarines into Special Forces carriers among others. This thinking had been interrupted by the terrorist attacks of 2001 and the consequent campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq. As effort is lifted off these campaigns, the bureaucratic trajectory of a decade earlier is simply being re-asserted.

The publication of an operational concept by a Washington think tank is not normally an earth shattering event. However, despite its basic lack of novelty, AirSea Battle reflected some of the thinking embedded in the 2010 Quadrennial Defense Review and served a number of institutional agendas; as a result it has proven to be remarkably influential. In October of 2010 the US Navy adopted the terminology and, underpinning ideas as doctrine,2 in 2011 a joint Navy-Air Force AirSea Battle Office was established in the Pentagon and the term increasingly appeared in speeches by senior officials. In January 2012, the Pentagon published the Joint Operational Access Concept (JOAC) which transforms the CSBA concept into force development leading vision by the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. AirSea Battle is now officially how the United States intends to fight.

As mentioned above, the CSBA concept was specifically directed at countering the rise of China.3 Official publications and pronouncements since have not been so pointed and the idea of countering A2AD systems has been made a more generic idea. This is something of a smoke screen. In reality, only China presents both the capacity to develop and, for the United States, the potential need to overcome an A2AD system. It is both a nascent superpower and faces the United States over a sea-air gap that is the principal theatre in which the competition between A2AD and AirSea Battle will be played out. Although it is not inconceivable that other states or actors could develop modest A2AD capabilities, the reality is that US general military superiority over any but nascent superpowers is so great that no special preparations would be required.

AirSea Battle should therefore be seen as a conceptual operational approach to a specific strategic problem—the competition between the United States and China. It is intended though to lead the development of US military power over the next couple of decades and, despite the vicissitudes of bureaucratic competition, will inevitably lead to a model of US power that is different to the one we see today. This has an impact on Australia. The reality is that the United States shapes the character of warfare between states either directly, by defining how first rank states fight, or indirectly, by triggering avoidance behaviours. The United States defines ‘the conventional’ as that for which we prepare. It is inevitable then that AirSea Battle provides the context for ADF concept and force development.

AirSea Battle should therefore be seen as a conceptual operational approach to a specific strategic problem—the competition between the United States and China.

The Strategic Need - America's Mare Nostrum

The United States is a status quo power. Its role as the progenitor of the United Nations and the International Monetary Fund reflects the desire to establish and sustain a rules-based international order—albeit one in which it (mostly) makes the rules. This means it is essentially satisfied with the existing world order. To buttress its position it has established an array of relationships with states across the globe. Despite its commitment to organisations such as NATO, most of these relationships are bilateral and the United States has generally been cautious of multilateral arrangements both because of their inherent weaknesses and because they tend to reduce the advantages in decision making that result from the obvious disparities between the United States and any other single actor. The result of this is that, at least in the Western Pacific and Asia, the United States has a number of important bilateral security relationships ranging from alliances with South Korea, Japan, the Philippines, Australia and New Zealand, through growing links with Singapore, India, Indonesia and Vietnam, to the tacitalliance but ‘unofficial’ relationship with Taiwan.

These relationships provide the United States with influence in the Western Pacific and Asia and form the foundations of a system to contain the growth of Chinese diplomatic and military influence. For each of the junior partners, the US relationship offsets the power disparities between them and China, and offers a hedge against the Chinese tendency for unilateralism. From the point of view of the junior partners these relationships are, however, built on hope and confidence. Hope that the United States will be sufficiently engaged in the junior partner’s problem to be willing to exert itself and confidence that it will have sufficient military capacity to have the final say in the disposition of events. Hope springs eternal but AirSea Battle aims to underpin the confidence. To do this it seeks to:

  • Defend US territory (such as Guam) and critical bases and facilities
  • Defend key allies
  • Protect US and friendly seaborne commerce
  • Defeat Chinese military forces, and
  • Interdict Chinese seaborne commerce.4

Strategically then, AirSea Battle can be seen as a twenty-first century operational response to a strategic problem that would have been familiar to Thucydides or the Roman senate: how to maintain a web of clients that can prevent any outsider from intruding into your own sphere of influence.

... AirSea Battle can be seen as a twenty-first century operational response to a strategic problem that would have been familiar to Thucydides or the Roman senate ...

The Strategic Need - China's Mare Nostrum

China defines the extent of its territorial waters as including the island waters contiguous to its territorial land, Taiwan, and the various affiliated islands, including Senkaku Islands, the Pescadores, Pratas Islands, Paracel Islands and the Spratly archipelago. In essence, China claims maritime sovereignty over the majority of the East and the South China seas.5 However, all of these territorial claims are contested by one or more of Taiwan, Japan, Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia or Brunei. All of these have occupied islands in one form or another and there are intermittent but increasingly regular clashes between fishermen and commercial and naval vessels. In the case of the South China Sea normal nationalist competition is further spurred by the belief that the area is rich in oil and gas deposits.

By claiming the South China Sea (East Sea to Vietnam, West Philippines Sea to the Philippines and Cham Sea to some South-East Asians) as territorial waters, China also places itself in direct confrontation with the United States, which claims that the shipping lanes passing through the area are international waters open to free navigation. As Chinese power has grown so has its readiness to assert what it believes are its rights. This has led to a number of clashes with the United States and littoral countries over the last decade. In July 2012, China established the new city of Sansha on an island of two square kilometres located 350 kilometres south-east of Hainan to administer a prefecture covering two million square kilometres and extending as far as Malaysian Sarawak—some 1800 kilometres from the Chinese mainland.6

There is no foreseeable path to the resolution of these issues. China refuses to deal through regional bodies, preferring to deal bilaterally in order to maximise the impact of power disparities. A recent ASEAN foreign minister’s meeting concluded without producing a communique because the Cambodian Chair (Cambodia is closely aligned with China) refused to countenance mention of the issues surrounding the South China Sea. For exactly the same reason most of the other disputants refuse to deal except through regional bodies. International law tends to ratchet up tensions because failure to confront other disputants weakens a country’s legal claim.7

China is increasingly prepared to act unilaterally and could be perceived as a regional bully. As well as the example of Sansha city, in July 2012 China’s Global Times editorialised that China should challenge Japan’s sovereignty further up the Senkaku-Ryuku island chain including sovereignty over Okinawa.8 Other examples include Chinese willingness to apply economic levers to resolve territorial disputes with the Philippines and Japan. China generally places sovereignty and national interest over the desire for cooperation—the strong do what they will and the weak suffer what they must.

China is increasingly prepared to act unilaterally and could be perceived as a regional bully.

China’s determination to control its adjacent seas is not the result of whimsy. The flow of resources to, and products from, Chinese industry is both the source of its strength and the foundations of state legitimacy and stability. For China, interdiction of traffic through the South China Sea would threaten state survival. If the area generates the amounts of oil and gas that are expected, unilateral Chinese control would greatly reduce its reliance on energy flows through Hormuz and Malacca—places where the United States potentially has its foot on China’s throat.

Former US Secretary of State Zbigniew Brzezinski once noted that ‘negotiation is submission unless the shadow of power falls across the table’. From the perspective of strategy, therefore, the United States has to be able to extend its power and influence into waters that China claims as its own. If it can’t, the various small regional powers, bereft of US support, will inevitably be forced to accommodate China’s demands with the result that the United States will be excluded from the West Pacific—this is arguably China’s proximate grand strategic objective. To prevent its exclusion, the United States must be able to offer reliable support to regional countries—but the ability to offer this support presents an existential threat to China. Ultimately, China is playing for higher stakes than the United States.

Anti-Access Area Denial

In 1997 Jiang Zemin, Secretary General of the Chinese Communist Party directed that the Chinese Navy ‘should focus on raising its offshore comprehensive combat capabilities within the first island chain, should increase nuclear and conventional deterrence and counterattack capabilities, and should gradually develop combat capabilities for distant ocean defence’.9 The ‘first island chain’ is generally thought to run from the Japanese main islands through the Ryukyus, Taiwan, the Philippines and Borneo, thus roughly bounding the East and South China seas.

In response to this direction, CSBA notes that ‘many of the capabilities the Chinese military is acquiring reflect a deliberate anti-access and area-denial (A2AD) operational approach that is specifically designed to keep the military forces of the United States and other potentially unfriendly powers from approaching close to China’,10 which, from the Chinese perspective, would appear entirely reasonable. A2AD comprise:

  • Anti-access: Those actions and capabilities, usually long-range, designed to prevent an opposing force from entering an operational area. In China’s case these include building close relationships and potentially bases in regional countries to support the establishment of a defensive perimeter akin to that established by the Japanese in the Second World War. Military capabilities include antishipping and land attack ballistic missiles, air- and submarine-launched cruise missiles, cyber, electronic and space warfare capabilities, and possibly terrorism. According to CSBA the aims of Chinese anti-access capabilities are:
    • Deny the United States operational sanctuary in space and exploit US reliance on space for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, command and control, communications, precision navigation, and precision timing
    • Threaten all US operating bases in the Western Pacific
    • Threaten major US Navy surface forces out to 1200+ nautical miles, to push aircraft carriers beyond the ranges of their strike, and surface warships beyond the range of their land-attack cruise missiles.11
  • Area-denial: Those actions and capabilities, usually of shorter range, designed not to keep an opposing force out, but to limit its freedom of action within the operational area. Military capabilities include shorter range aircraft, littoral antisubmarine warfare capabilities, land and sea mines, anti-shipping missiles, land manoeuvre forces and air and missile defence troops intended to:
    • Impede US submarine operations in the littorals including the deployment of advanced arrays of undersea sensors and potentially weapons in littoral waters and narrows
    • Contest US air operations over or near mainland China and adjacent allied territory through advanced integrated air defence systems with hardened, command and control networks.

CSBA anticipates that the Chinese would initiate hostilities with cyber, space and electronic warfare capabilities to destroy or disrupt US satellite constellation. Following this, salvoes of ballistic and cruise missiles would be fired to destroy critical bases, carrier strike groups and logistics nodes prior to exploiting the resulting US weakness to establish air and maritime superiority.12 Setting these conditions might be intended to:

  • Inflict so much damage to US military capabilities that the United States would choose to discontinue the fight
  • Make the prospect of an eventual US victory appear too prolonged or costly, or
  • Drive a major US ally out of the war.

The A2AD tag doesn’t reflect a new approach. Any state establishing an operational defensive posture would seek to resist the approach of enemy forces and then limit their options for tactical and operational manoeuvre. Arguably, however, A2AD is useful because it highlights the differences between earlier conventional approaches and the anticipated future and, in particular, the prevalence of missiles technologies.

The Operational Response - Airsea Battle

Although the original CSBA concept outlined a generic campaign with seven lines-of-effort,13 at its heart is the need to achieve air, space, cyber and sea control. In both it and the JOAC, once control over some or all of these operational domains is established, other operations are conducted to reach a decision. This is encapsulated in the JOAC’s leading idea of ‘cross-domain synergy’, which describes the desire to combine actions across all the operational domains in order to achieve what we would consider combined arms effects. In this sense, AirSea Battle and the JOAC are simply descriptions of updated approaches to joint integration to achieve control over whatever domains are necessary for a specific subsequent operation.

Although the original CSBA concept outlined a generic campaign with seven lines-of-effort, at its heart is the need to achieve air, space, cyber and sea control.

The details of AirSea Battle are not important. At its core though is an important idea: the battle for air, space and sea control, and to a lesser extent control of cyberspace, is one now dominated by missiles and that this domination will become more complete in the future. As a result, the exchange of cruise, ballistic and other missiles lies at the heart of AirSea Battle. Missiles rely for their effectiveness on a functioning system to provide cueing, targeting and navigation, and any combat between missile arrays is therefore a battle to degrade the opposing system to the extent that it becomes a practical victim. The system includes space based surveillance, communications and navigation; command and control structures; launch platforms; the missiles themselves; logistic systems and bases to replenish and support launch platforms; and the industrial base that produces the missiles. All of these systems elements will potentially be the target of attacks.

It would be possible to view AirSea Battle as entirely symmetrical involving two sides exchanging cruise missiles in the same way that Napoleonic era infantry exchanged musket volleys. There is certainly some prospect of this but the aspiration of cross-domain synergy is to create opportunities to open assailable flanks. So like most examples of state versus state warfare there are opportunities to achieve surprise, but they will require creativity and innovation if they are to be seized.

Questions for Australia

At the beginning of this article it was noted that AirSea Battle will provide the context within which Australian concept and force development will take place. The strategic competition that underpins the concept and the operational approach it describes are clearly primary drivers but it is not as clear where they are driving us. This section examines some of the questions that arise from reading AirSea Battle.

Does AirSea Battle make war between China and the United States inevitable? As described above AirSea Battle is a product of the strategic competition between a satisfied power (the United States) and a dissatisfied power (China). This strategic competition could escalate into open warfare but such an eventuality is unlikely in the foreseeable future. The reasons for this include:

  • Even fighting with a home ground advantage, China is several decades away from any kind of military parity with the United States. Until that parity is achieved, conflict with the United States would lead to interdiction of Chinese trade in areas remote from the South China Sea and Western Pacific and the consequent rapid collapse of the Chinese ability to wage a protracted war.
  • Our limited experience of conflict between nuclear powers suggests that every effort will be taken to limit it. This usually means that conflicts are conducted at the periphery and through proxies, the Cold War is a useful example. In reality, the Cold War was only cold in Europe. In East Asia, South East Asia, Africa and Central America it was hot, sustained and bloody. Even in extremis China and the United States are likely to be wary of shooting cruise and ballistic missiles at each other’s homelands.
  • China might be able to get there in an indirect way. As the resident power, China has time to gradually exclude the United States from the region without coming into direct confrontation. In the Chinese board game Goh there is a saying that ‘the corners are golden, the edges silver, and the centre dross’. Applying Goh logic to control of the South China Sea suggests that China’s best way forward is to build influence with the other littoral states through trade, tourism and diplomacy. In the extreme, the subversion of regional states could seek to draw the United States into protracted stabilisation campaigns in order to exhaust its desire to remain engaged. Although China’s behaviour at the moment demonstrates a degree of impatience, as suggested above, the development of the AirSea Battle doctrine and capabilities that underpin the US pivot towards Asia encourages moderation.

Does AirSea Battle make war between China and the United States inevitable?

Australia is committed to a long term security relationship with the United States. The rotation of Marines and other US forces through Darwin and the close cooperation between the two countries already contribute to the US implementation of the JOAC. Beyond this the question is: should we seek to supplement or complement the AirSea Battle? Supplementation would develop the capabilities to add to the missile exchange while a complementary approach would seek to develop capabilities in other areas.

The limiting factor in the missile exchange is not the availability of missile shooters but of the missiles themselves, and this ultimately rests on the depth of US stockpiles and the capacity of the US industrial base. Any contribution by Australia would rest on the same US foundation—we would be drawing missiles from the same sources and therefore, even when Force 2030 is fully mature, we would not be adding anything substantive to the effort. The array of high-end warfighting capabilities developed to participate in AirSea Battle would certainly enhance Australia’s military standing in the region but would also potentially lead to an unbalanced force prepared specifically for an unlikely situation—open conflict between the United States and China.

The array of high-end warfighting capabilities developed to participate in AirSea Battle would certainly enhance Australia’s military standing ...

Under a complementary approach the force would be developed in a balanced way and prepared to participate in the range of operations that may arise within the grand strategic stability that the US capacity for AirSea Battle makes more likely. As in the Cold War, the underpinning strategic competition between nuclear armed great powers is more likely to be manifest in small wars at the periphery than in a central cataclysm at the heart. For the ADF, our next twenty years may not be too dissimilar from our last fifteen.

AirSea Battle is also a harbinger of the character of modern warfare and hints at some important drivers. Warfare between states in the missile age will probably diverge from our current notions. Cruise missiles, possibly given a target after launch from sources other than the launch platform, are expected to become cheaper, longer-range and faster. At the upper end of capability, examples of what is possible are provided by the US Prompt Global Strike initiative which aims to develop the capability to strike anywhere on the globe within an hour. Indicative capabilities include the X-51 Waverider hypersonic cruise missile with a projected speed in excess of Mach 7 (due in service in 2015) and the Advanced Hypersonic Weapon which in a test flight in November 2011 flew 3500 kilometres in under half an hour.14 Because such weapons are likely to remain more expensive and scarce than lower performance cruise missiles, they will most likely be aimed at only the most critical nodes, but a handful of successful strikes by such weapons may greatly enhance the chances of success of swarming attacks employing very large numbers of more conventional missiles.

The advent of hypersonic and high supersonic cruise missiles create a new challenge for air defence systems both ashore and afloat. The response times and performance required of air-defence weapons able to counter Mach 7 missiles are extreme and preparations to counter penetrating conventional aircraft are likely to be increasingly nugatory. If Australia is to continue to prepare to counterattacks by another state, the nature of the preparations may need to be changed. Certainly, systems based on manned fighters are unlikely to form part of the solution that eventually emerges. Similarly, the ability to simply overwhelm or exhaust the launch systems of AEGIS cruisers and destroyers will become easier as the missiles become cheaper.15 Arguably a different and more integrated approach is required if we are to prepare for the next threat rather than the last.

Conclusion

At its inception this article was intended to provide a comprehensive debunking of AirSea Battle. However, on closer examination, the strategic competition that underpins it is real, important and accelerating. For any reader of history, the situation in the western Pacific has some parallels with that leading up to the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941 and many more with the early days of the Cold War. There are also strong resonances with the glory days of realpolitik in Europe in the nineteenth century. It is hard to argue with the proposition that AirSea Battle was produced in response to an emerging strategic need.

It is hard to argue with the proposition that AirSea Battle was produced in response to an emerging strategic need.

It is also hard to support the proposition that AirSea Battle is guilty of somehow creating its own strategic need—that it is both cause and effect. Chinese strategic assertiveness is fully understandable when viewed from China but it makes many other spectators uneasy. At least some of those spectators are turning to the United States to balance growing Chinese military and economic power. AirSea Battle is a response to this need—it did not create the need.

In his latest book The China Choice,16 Hugh White outlines the dangers presented by US-Chinese strategic competition and argues that they should cooperate to form a ‘Concert of Asia’. It is hard to see this proposition as anything other than a naive desire to escape reality. China is rising but remains a long way short of matching US military, economic or soft power. The benefits of the United States cutting itself loose from its allies and friends in the western Pacific—which would be a Chinese precondition for such a concert—are not clear; what is in it for the United States or for its ‘former’ friends and allies? Equally, if China displays patience and plays a long game, as a resident power with good long term prospects, why should it trade away its future opportunities in exchange for a short term stability that is not in its interests? There is presently no basis for a redistribution of the balance of power and no foundation for a ‘win-win’ solution. At present Realism rules.

In any event, the balance of power system established by the Concert of Europe (which seems the most likely model for White’s proposal) arose to manage the strategic vacuum created by the defeat of Napoleon—which it did imperfectly. We are not dealing here with a vacuum. In any event, the concert didn’t prevent war, it merely shaped the context for the Crimean (1853–56), Austro-Prussian (1866) and Franco-Prussian (1870–71) wars and a variety of dynastic wars at the periphery as well as establishing the relationships that transformed the Franco-German war of 1914 into the Second World War.

The details of the AirSea Battle concept itself are not that important—all wars reflect their immediate strategic contexts and no forward-leaning concept is ever likely to pass into detailed war, campaign or operation planning. However, the view presented in the concept on the character of future wars between states is important and raises critical questions that need to be answered if Australian force development can claim to be rational. The ADF has a number of views of what ‘conventional’ warfare might look like; if we accept the view taken by AirSea Battle and the JOAC, most of them are wrong.

We do indeed live in interesting times.

About the Author

Justin Kelly is a retired Army officer who retains an interest in strategy and military concepts. He has published a number of articles in the Australian Army Journal and other professional journals.

Endnotes

1     Jan van Tol, Mark Gunzinger, Andrew F Krepinevich and Jim Thomas, AirSea Battle: A Point-of-Departure Operational Concept, 18 May 2010 <http://www.csbaonline.org/publications/2010/05/airsea-battle-concept.pd…;

2     Hon. Robert O Work, ‘AirSea Battle: Power Projection in the Mature Guided Munitions Era’, AIE Counter A2/AD Conference, 26 October 2010 <http://www.clashofarms.com/files/US%20Navy%20Air-Sea%20Battle%20Doctrin…;

3     ‘Today, it is incontestable that the only state with the long-term potential to pose a serious and sustained challenge to US influence and power projection in its region for the foreseeable future is China.’ van Tol, et al, AirSea Battle: A Point-of-Departure Operational Concept, p. 10.

4     Ibid.

5     David Bennett, ‘An Analysis of the China’s Offshore Active Defense and the People’s Liberation Army Navy’, Global Security Studies, Spring 2010, Vol. l, No. 1, p. 127.

6     R Callick, ‘Awash on a Sea of Trouble’, The Australian, 30 July 2012.

7     M Wesley, ‘Sea of Discontent Threatens more than Asian Unity’, The Australian, 27 July 2012.

8     Callick, ‘Awash on a Sea of Trouble’. This idea was reinforced on 15 August 2012 when a boatload of protesters from Hong Kong planted the Chinese flag on one of the Senkaku Islands and declared Chinese sovereignty over all the islands.

9     ‘People’s Liberation Navy – Offshore Defense, GlobalSecurity.org <http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/china/plan-doctrine-offsho…;

10    van Tol, et al, AirSea Battle: A Point-of-Departure Operational Concept, p. 3.

11    Ibid., p. 20.

12    ‘Initiation’ requires some clarification. It seems unlikely that China would attack the US ‘out of the blue’. More likely, China would resist US involvement in a dispute between some regional country and itself. Alternatively, echoing the lead-up to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, ‘flexible deterrent options’ employed by US planners could ratchet up tensions to a level at which China is driven to act either by domestic or realpolitik pressures.

13    The AirSea Battle campaign has two stages. The initial stage, commencing with the outbreak of hostilities, comprises four distinct lines of operation: withstanding the initial attack and limiting damage to US and allied forces and bases; executing a blinding campaign against PLA battle networks; executing a suppression campaign against PLA long-range intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance and strike systems; and seizing and sustaining the initiative in the air, sea, space and cyber domains. The follow-on second stage would comprise various operations designed to support US strategy by creating options to resolve a prolonged conventional conflict on favourable terms. These would include: executing a protracted campaign that includes sustaining and exploiting the initiative in various domains; conducting ‘distant blockade’ operations; sustaining operational logistics; and ramping up industrial production (especially precision-guided munitions).

14    The X-51 had an unsuccessful test flight in mid-August 2012 but the project is understood to be progressing satisfactorily.

15    The Hobart class AWD has a single 48-cell vertical launch system (VLS). The characteristics of the VLS preclude it from being replenished at sea. US Aegis cruisers have 120 VLS cells with similar restrictions. Despite the enormous power of these vessels they only need to be over-tasked once by swarms of cruise missiles.

16    Hugh White, The China Choice: Why the US Should Share Power, Black Inc, Collingwood, 2012.

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