Imagine that! A weapon designed to "kill"!
Wednesday, April 1, 2009 at 3:14AM ARTICLE: Report: Chinese Develop Special "Kill Weapon" to Destroy U.S. Aircraft Carriers, U. S. Naval Institute, March 31, 2009
This has all the hallmarks of an analytic "duh!" (although if you click through the piece to the Information Dissemination piece, the analysis there is worth perusing). The Chinese military has actually created a weapon designed to kill! Thank God our carriers exist only to "project power" and "provide presence" instead of parking a death-wielding, mega-destructive air capability right off your coast!
Understand this: carriers represent our primary military threat to China's ability to threaten Taiwan's ability to stand up to the PLA. On that basis, is there any big surprise China works to diminish that U.S. capacity?
The big point to be remembered in this piece is that we've been expecting this capacity from the Chinese for years. There is no surprise here; there is only revelation in a public sense. The Chinese have not "snuck up" on us, we've been talking about this threat for most of my career.
Quite frankly, carrier "vulnerability" is overblown anyway in the sense that we have let ourselves get overly reliant on these giant single-nodes in our fleet that--in the end--cannot be kept invulnerable in the way we want. Everything in security affairs has trended toward the many and the cheap, and a sea-skimming, fast ballistic missile fits that bill nicely against a many-billion-dollar carrier. Eventually, we've going to have to ask ourselves if having a navy built around carriers is as much the strategic answer going forward that we've let it become up to now.
Having said that, the larger strategic reality still remains: you sink a US carrier and you've just bought yourself the full weight and strategic fury of the U.S. government--and people. If you dare to cross that line, expect to get seriously torched. That is simply a tripwire too damn big for us to ignore.
Holding the entire navy force structure hostage to some high-end requirement to keep carriers somehow "invulnerable" is--by plenty of objective standards--a waste of resources. What makes them invulnerable to state actors is what would result from sinking one of them--not their ability to avoid taking hits. As for non-state actors, that's a different ball of wax (force protection in the more prosaic sense).
Let's be clear: this is an impressive capability and a dangerous one, but it cannot be viewed in isolation (that glorious tendency in our national security community to view war-solely-win-the-context-of-war), as though sinking U.S. carriers is no big deal--just another chess piece knocked off the board. That's just not how it works in great-power war overladen with nuclear possibilities. In some ways, despite the high-tech nature of this Chinese capability, we have a tendency to view it in terms more akin to World War II thinking ("The Chinese will sink one of our carriers and then where will we be!"), when what we really need to be asking ourselves is whether or not it's particularly smart for the U.S. Navy to let its force structure be so heavily determined by the Taiwan scenario.
Viewed solely within the combat logic of that scenario, then this is a huge deal. We can't be sure we can dominate China's military vis-a-vis the Taiwan scenario. But honestly, at some point, we need to back off from these threat porn images and ask ourselves: is the military we want going forward going to have to account for domination over every rising great power's military in those scenarios in which the opposition is overwhelmingly advantaged--like Taiwan. I mean, that's an impossibly high standard that I really don't think my navy should be organized around, especially since every service traditionally pulls the same scenarioizing tricks to generate force structure requirements that are--in aggregate--simply unsustainable.
I admit: if I have this conversation with somebody like Galrahn, then it remains professional, but contextualizing rationality goes out the frickin' window when budgets are on the line. Then it's all, "So you're saying America should just put 5,000 of our sons and daughters in harm's way simply because we're unwilling to spend the money to defend our carriers!!!!"
[And yeah, the logical counter about staying deeper at sea with carriers and simply flooding the battlespace with more UAVs and cruise missiles, etc. {see Louis' comment} gets lost in the shuffle, because that's not how an admiral traditionally defends his fleet in budget battles.]
Would I like to have a military that can dominate any threat from any force at any time anywhere in the world? One that can instantly reverse any strategic gains sought or obtained by any opposition force?
Yeah, sure. Sounds great.
Do I expect America will live in that world going forward? No, I don't.
Again, we have to ask ourselves to place these amazing warfighting scenarios in the context of the actual world we find ourselves inhabiting today. Anybody out there who thinks we will slowly advance through some big-war scenario that sees the Chinese repeatedly sink our carriers is simply nuts. We would elevate rapidly, signaling that intent all the way. On the far side there wouldn't be a Taiwan you could inhabit, and China would end up getting crushed in a pointless manner. America would still be around, but deeply wounded by events.
In short, there is no faster way to turn both the US and China into secondary powers that to engage in some pointless war over Taiwan.
And yet, in a tough budgetary environment, expect to see oodles of carrier porn and fighter jet porn and all manner of force structure porn teased out endlessly. This isn't about defending Taiwan; this is about defending contracts and jobs and budget shares.
In short, it's a glorious sort of Orwellian phrasing: others' weapons kill, ours are for security; other nations' weapons are offensive, while ours are strictly defensive.
One telling bit from this article: it doesn't seem to indicate whether or not America already possesses the capability ascribed to this new-but-long-in-the-coming Chinese capability.
Question: Do we have this capability ourselves or not? Assuming we do (or are you telling me we spent the last decade waiting on the Chinese to develop this capability first?), did we expect to retain it solely forever?
So again, how much surprise in this discovery I've been hearing about for years and years?
If I'm the unsuspecting public who gets this "disturbing" report of China's "latest aggression" on Lou Dobbs tonight, I am simply stunned: "What is up with that? Why would the Chinese plan to sink our carriers!" And so on.
But nobody lays out the surrounding scenarios with any fidelity to a real-world I would recognize--as in, please, play out for me the 25k losses we take in the first week of major war with China over Taiwan. Tell me how that plays out with the American public, with T bills, with the global economy, with our allies. Tell me how that one ends in a manner I can live with, because if you can't, stop spinning me yarns of crazy-ass wars I simply will not end up fighting.
Imagine the history book you read decades from now that describes how the United States decided to torch global order by fighting China in a major war over something somebody in Taipei said or did one afternoon. Imagine how stupid that's gonna read.
So yeah, the navy community will run with this. Carriers will be declared all that more important. Billions will be set aside for this and that capacity. And the Navy will plan vigorously for the all-important major war with China.
By all means, be afraid. See the "inescapable logic" and call your Congressman, demanding action. Fence off another chunk of the big-war defense budget, like we're flush with cash.
But you know what? Porn desensitizes. In other words, it makes you stupid over time.
None of the larger strategic realities--both military and non-military--between China and the U.S. can be altered by technologies such as these.
But what the hell? In this depressive phase we're in, everybody's piling on the pessimism porn, the threat porn, the chaos porn.
Run with it, baby.
(Thanks: Michael S. Smith II)
Reader Comments (6)
Regarding naval expendability, If it floats or flies, it's expendable . . If that is not deemed fact, then lets not put anything in either the water or the air . . why waste the money?
Even during the difficult period (1996-2008) between Mainland China and Taiwan, the annual trading increase rate was on double digits almost every year. With such economic engagement, the military war in Taiwan's strait is unthinkable, if not absolutely impossible.
A war over Taiwan creates no winner, everyone will be a loser, just matter of bigger or smaller. Twenty years ago, we were talking about possibility of the war over Taiwan; Ten years ago, we were talking about NOT to have war; Today, we ought to talk about lasting peace. There are so many international issues need be resolved between US and China. Taiwan is not on top of the list, not even in the middle, should be on the bottom if it is on the list at all.
We have to say the Nixon/Kissinger's Status Quo policy is brilliant!!Taiwan's independency? NO;Military confrontation? NO;Unification? "You guys on your own."
Next round.
What bugs me is what fear-mongers will do with this "revelation" that I have been hearing about--literally--for years.
Christ, if all I wanted to do was scare the crap out of people, there is tons of stuff like this to be "revealed" on a daily basis.
I want to flood all the battlespaces with machines instead of American human beings. I read David Bellavia's book "House to House" and thought: We need a swarm of tiny vehicles and tiny UAVs and little guided bombs and whatever the Hell they can come up with to go into these places and kill these idiots. Why is someone as valuable as David Bellavia in a knife fight on the roof with some idiot when he is a point man for the so-called Global Hegemon?
We need more of this kind of thinking.