Sun Tzu said: Whoever is first in the field and awaits the coming of the enemy will be fresh for the fight; whoever is second in the field and has to hasten to battle will arrive exhausted. WASHINGTON: Because China believes it is much weaker than the United States, they are more likely to launch a massive preemptive strike in a crisis. Here’s the other bad news: The current US concept for high-tech warfare, known as Air-Sea Battle, might escalate the conflict even further towards a “limited” nuclear war, says one of the top American experts on the Chinese military. [This is one in an occasional series on the crucial strategic relationship and the military capabilities of the US, its allies and China.] What US analysts call an “anti-access/area denial” strategy is what China calls “counter-intervention” and “active defense,” and the Chinese appraoch is born of a deep sense of vulnerability that dates back 200 years, China analyst Larry Wortzel said at the Institute of World Politics: “The People’s Liberation Army still sees themselves as an inferior force to the American military, and that’s who they think their most likely enemy is.” That’s fine as long as it deters China from attacking its neighbors. But if deterrence fails, the Chinese are likely to go big or go home. Chinese military history from the Korean War in 1950 to the Chinese invasion of Vietnam in 1979 to more recent, albeit vigorous but non-violent, grabs for the disputed Scarborough Shoal suggests a preference for a sudden use of overwhelming force at a crucial point, what Clausewitz would call the enemy’s “center of gravity.” “What they do is very heavily built on preemption,” Wortzel said. “The problem with the striking the enemy’s center of gravity is, for the United States, they see it as being in Japan, Hawaii, and the West Coast….That’s very escalatory.” (Students of the American military will nod sagely, of course, as we remind everyone that President George Bush made preemption a centerpiece of American strategy after the terror attacks of 2001.) Wortzel argued that the current version of US Air-Sea Battle concept is also likely to lead to escalation. “China’s dependent on these ballistic missiles and anti-ship missiles and satellite links,” he said. Since those are almost all land-based, any attack on them “involves striking the Chinese mainland, which is pretty escalatory.” “You don’t know how they’re going to react,” he said. “They do have nuclear missiles. They actually think we’re more allergic to nuclear missiles landing on our soil than they are on their soil. They think they can withstand a limited nuclear attack, or even a big nuclear attack, and retaliate.” What War Would Look Like So how would China’s preemptive attack unfold? First would come weeks of escalating rhetoric and cyberattacks. There’s no evidence the Chinese favor a “bolt out of the blue” without giving the adversary what they believe is a chance to back down, agreed retired Rear Adm. Michael McDevitt and Dennis Blasko, former Army defense attache in Beijing, speaking on a recent Wilson Center panel on Chinese strategy where they agreed on almost nothing else. That’s not much comfort, though, considering that Imperial Japan showed clear signs they might attack and still caught the US flat-footed at Pearl Harbor. When the blow does fall, the experts believe it would be sudden. Stuxnet-style viruses, electronic jamming, and Israeli-designed Harpy radar-seeking cruise missiles (similar to the American HARM but slower and longer-ranged) would try to blind every land-based and shipborne radar. Long-range anti-aircraft missiles like the Russian-built S-300 would go for every plane currently in the air within 125 miles of China’s coast, a radius that covers all of Taiwan and some of Japan. Salvos of ballistic missiles would strike every airfield within 1,250 miles. That’s enough range to hit the four US airbases in Japan and South Korea – which are, after all, static targets you can look up on Google Maps – to destroy aircraft on the ground, crater the runways, and scatter the airfield with unexploded cluster bomblets to defeat repair attempts. Long-range cruise missiles launched from shore, ships, and submarines then go after naval vessels. And if the Chinese get really good and really lucky, they just might get a solid enough fix on a US Navy aircraft carrier to lob a precision-guided ballistic missile at it. But would this work? Maybe. “This is fundamentally terra incognita,” Heritage Foundation research fellow Dean Cheng told me. There has been no direct conventional clash between major powers since Korea in the 1950s, no large-scale use of anti-ship missiles since the Falklands in 1982, and no war ever where both sides possessed today’s space, cyber, electronic warfare, and precision-guided missile capabilities. Perhaps the least obvious but most critical uncertainty
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