(ontheworldmap.com)
Inasmuch as the cited games demonstrate that the Americans still enjoy an advantage with respect to key military capabilities, that advantage – once enormous – is shrinking dramatically. In some fields, such as air superiority, in light of the development of the Chinese air force, their proximity to the likely location of the potential conflict means that the domination of the United States over Asia’s littoral waters de facto already does not exist. It also fails to function in the area of satellite reconnaissance and the capability to counteract it.
However, the Americans still have a significant advantage in, for example, submarine warfare and in capabilities for conducting airstrikes on ground targets. Basically, in a comparison of combat systems, the United States continues to enjoy a significant military advantage. Yet, China has a huge geographical and operational advantage, operating close to their own territory, which in large part eliminates the technological superiority of the United States.
The bulk of the United States’ armed forces would be beyond the theatre of operations in the initial phase of a potential conflict. Part would be outside the area affected by China’s reconnaissance-strike complex intentionally, to avoid serious losses, and a major part will be occupied with America’s global activities as a superpower. In order to avoid destruction, in a period of mounting tensions heralding a conflict and based on intelligence information, the most important ships must sail beyond the effective combat range of China’s missile and air forces, and yet – in the event of tensions in the region – America’s allies would demand their presence. Their absence might be construed as capitulation, which in turn could give rise to pro-Chinese political calculations in the region, even among allies. Paradoxically, what is politically expedient may be militarily detrimental, since units and ships in forward bases may be destroyed in the first minutes and hours of the war.
Cyber- and electromagnetic warfare units must immediately spring into action. Dynamic changes in the cybernetic field mean that they must be regularly mapped for a ‘hot’, ‘physical’ conflict, so that they can strike at weak points at the appropriate moment. From this perspective, it is clear that the cybernetic conflict will precede the armed one and will be a harbinger of imminent escalation.
The United States’ armed forces must be prepared to withstand the initial attack and minimise their own losses as much as possible. The AirSea Battle Concept proposes detailed solutions, such as: improving early warning systems, active and passive defence systems, preparing reserves, strengthening the most important parts of bases (shelters, bunkers), preparing repair procedures for bases and airfields, preparing planes for air strikes, rebasing key system elements to the rear (including airfields that remember the Second World War at Tinian, Saipan and Palau), the dispersal of forces and resources as well as logistics.
The main task will be the protection of large surface vessels from a Chinese attack utilising A2AD capabilities. The Chinese capabilities for destroying ships at sea consist of: over-the-horizon observation, ballistic and cruise missiles, and the submarine fleet. Insofar as, in 1996, American warships could sail with impunity in the immediate vicinity of the Chinese coast and ports, currently this is impossible, even at further distances. Chinese A2AD capabilities for combatting the American fleet are multidimensional, and this causes a problem in itself. They include: mine warfare, submarine warfare, aviation and ballistic and cruise missiles. The counteractions and defences against these numerous threats, which are different for each capability, considerably complicate maritime operations for the United States.
The Americans are currently working on methods to break this sequence, in order to not lose ships in the early stages of the war. As part of their strategy to expel the United States fleet from their littoral waters, after 1996, the Chinese introduced new combat systems, intended to create the desired A2AD capabilities with respect to the fleet and air force of the United States. These include: new Russian- and Chinese-built submarines (Kilo 877, Kilo 636, Song, Yuan, Jin and Shang classes), new destroyers equipped with OTH systems (Sovremenny class), new air defence ships (Luyang I, II and III classes), new military satellites (Ziyuan class), new IV generation aircraft, capable of attacking over-the-horizon targets on the ground and at sea (Su-30MK2), new spy satellites (Yaogan I class), their own production AWACS aircraft (KJ-20 AEW), a new, powerful ground-based OTH radar system in Xiangfan, using the reflections of waves from the ionosphere, electronic intelligence (ELINT) satellites (Yaogan 9 class) and a fleet of UAVs ensuring communications and situational awareness.
The war simulation in the RAND report cited above demonstrates that the greatest danger posed to the United States is by submarines, whereas ballistic missiles, a technological innovation, capable of destroying aircraft carriers in the open sea, are for all that, less dangerous. Nevertheless, the AEGIS system, in operation on dozens of US Navy destroyers and cruisers, and on which the entire air defence of the United States fleet is based, was not designed for ballistic defence and its effectiveness against ballistic missile attack, particularly massed, saturation attacks, is de facto, unknown.
With the current state of technology, it is not possible to defend bases with anti-missile systems, since an intensive response to a saturation attack would swiftly exhaust defensive reserves. Probably, therefore, only select crucial installations, command systems and radar stations will be defended. War game simulations carried out by the RAND Corporation addressing a ballistic attack on the United States air base at Kadena in Japan demonstrate that even a small number of accurate ballistic missile strikes would eliminate the base from military operations for the first few, critical days of the conflict, and a coordinated and intensive attack might put it out of service for many weeks.
This will result in the inability of the Americans to support this key base, located close to China, in the first few critical days for example during an air battle over Taiwan (whether fighters or tankers for aircraft taking off from carriers sailing beyond the range of Chinese A2AD capabilities). Even greater damage can be done to aircraft densely packed on the tarmac. To this should be added the possibility of an attack by cruise missiles at precise targets, in particular hangars and ammunition dumps. This is a serious danger for the United States air force which can be mitigated only thanks to a technological breakthrough; there is a chance that directed energy weapons might provide it.
This is one of the reasons that the Chinese are building landing strips on artificial islands in the South China Sea, so that fighter planes can take off from there, and provide air cover for cruise missile-carrying bombers. This would be impossible without the airfields on the artificial islands due to the short range of the Chinese fighter planes, which significantly impacts the execution of missions by the bombers tasked with hitting US bases and installations in the region.
The most important part of the operations against the Chinese will be to conduct and to win a modern scouting battle, that is, the destruction or reduction of the Chinese reconnaissance-strike system so that China cannot see “deep” and could not strike ‘deep’ at targets in the First and Second Island Chains, at the bases, ports and ships of the United States and its allies. Winning the scouting battle by rolling up Chinese battlefield situational awareness further in the direction of China will allow the movement of combat resources, ships and strike platforms closer to the enemy.
This would enable the intensification of the military campaign through the introduction of the carrier air force into the battle, which had spent the initial phase beyond the range of the Chinese reconnaissance-strike complex, and therefore outside its own combat range.
Analysts in the United States are concerned by the development of the Chinese integrated air defence system. The system consists mainly of long-range 200 km launchers, it is mobile and Chinese operators practice concealing themselves and setting traps for strike aircraft. It is linked with new air superiority aircraft and a modern reconnaissance system based on Chinese AWACS class early warning aircraft. While it is true that, over the last few years, the American Air force, apart from employing stealth technology and electronic battle capabilities, has developed its capabilities for attacking over-the-horizon and from a distance (stand-off), and has also improved its arsenal of precision munitions, yet the war game simulation conducted by the RAND Corporation, intended to assess capabilities of penetrating Chinese air defences, demonstrated that, at the level of Taiwan, the risk of losses for the United States air force is very serious.
The simulations show that the Americans will be able to bombard Chinese airfields and make them useless for at least a week in both scenarios. With a longer conflict, however, there would be a problem with supplies of precision munitions, without which the chances of the Americans diminish rapidly. The decision whether to strike at airfields in China proper, and the attendant threat of escalation, will have to be taken after serious consideration at the highest political levels. It must always be remembered that China would not be an easy target, due to the modern integrated air defence system, but also to passive resources, such as tunnels, bunkers and shelters in the mountains.
A scenario that assumes that the air operations over Taiwan will depend above all on the base at Guam is, therefore, highly probable; the carrier-based air forces will not replace the air forces of either Taiwan or the United States, since they will be forced to remain beyond the range of the Chinese reconnaissance-strike complex, otherwise they would run the serious risk of the aircraft carriers being sunk. Shlapak calculates that Taiwan’s air forces can generate 650 air sorties daily by their 317 multi-role fighters, and the aircraft from the five (in an optimistic assumption) American aircraft carriers can generate 550 sorties. Obviously, the United States Air Force currently enjoys technological superiority over the Chinese, but it will be operating in the face of the numerical advantage of an adversary with tactical flexibility, operating close to its own bases.
In any case, only the F-22 and the new F-35, just entering into service, enjoy a significant advantage in quality over their Chinese counterparts. Gons accepts that the Andersen Air Force Base on Guam can accept 250 fighter jets and provide operations for four or five squadrons of combat aircraft.
Assuming that Kadena Air Base, situated on the Japanese island of Okinawa, has not been put out of action by a pre-emptive strike, it would be able to ensure the permanent presence of 12 F-22 air-superiority fighters over Taiwan. These are modest numbers, and they demonstrate how profoundly the geography of the Pacific impacts military force projection capabilities. One solution to these operational problems for the United States may be to make use of the large number of civilian airports in Japan.
At the same time, the Chinese will be able to attack the American tanker aircraft and AWACS early warning planes – making operations over Taiwan completely impossible – or launch sporadic missile attacks at airfields in the region, complicating the already stretched lines of logistics and the ability to mount combat sorties.
The Chinese have declared an intention to introduce new generation aircraft – J-31 and J-20into service. This leads to the conclusion that the Americans could lose the air battle over Taiwan.
The simulation of the air battle over the Spratly Islands in the South China Sea comes out more to the advantage of the United States than that of the battle over Taiwan, since the Chinese are also forced to operate far from their bases (over 900 km from the base on Hainan Island), but the Americans will also have to deal with problems, and air supremacy – above all due to the geography of the region – is extremely hard to achieve. In other words, according to the RAND report, a key element of the attack on the Chinese situational awareness system will be the submarine fleet armed with cruise missiles, launching strikes from waters within the First Island Chain. Submarine warfare is the best card in the US’s deck anyway, since this is the area where the Americans display the greatest advantage. First of all, combat systems capable of destroying American satellites will be targeted; next the radars enabling over-the-horizon observation, transmission and communications systems, undersea cables and communications systems and sensors, including civilian ones. Alongside the unceasing scouting battle, the brunt of the attack will move deep into China’s reconnaissance-strike complex. In this area, the assumptions of the concept are at their vaguest. It would appear that China has too large a territory, too dispersed a system of shelters, mountains and tunnels and command and control systems to be able to make an impact in a short space of time with minimal losses.
With respect to ground-to-ground missile strike systems, in particular those based on mobile systems, the period preceding an open armed conflict is a very important aspect, since mobile ground-to-ground missile systems are such an important target for the enemy that they are subject to intensive reconnaissance and scouting. This is connected to the struggle for domination over the broadly-understood virtual battlefield (communications, command, situational awareness, the electromagnetic sphere and cyberspace) that precedes open conflict. In addition, the type of projectiles and the entire architecture associated with their guidance is not insignificant, i.e., their range, target detection, guidance and impact control systems.
Such systems, particularly mobile ones, are very dangerous weapons, which are practically impossible to completely eliminate pre-emptively, and their strikes at the enemy’s sensitive points can fundamentally alter the course of a confrontation in a very short space of time.
It is worth emphasising that, in the virtual domain that holds the system together, the modern ‘scouting battle’ will rage continuously, and will begin before the first engagements; it will be with the use of cybernetic tools, employed to ‘roll-up’ or to take over the system that coordinates the strike systems, thus rendering the other side ‘blind’. This battle will commence long before the beginning of the conflict, due to the combat value represented by mobile surface-to-surface systems that are difficult to detect and destroy preemptively using conventional military methods. It will be waged because the systems for transmitting enormous amounts of data over such long distances, essential for a cohesive architecture, need to be constantly ‘remapped’, both by the US and China. Both sides will be continually trying to do this, so as to find the enemy’s weak points and deactivate their architecture at the moment before the conflict begins.
The United States will treat the necessity of neutralising the situational awareness and long-range strike system as a priority. As has already been pointed out, on condition that they prevent the ‘rolling-up’ of their architecture underpinning the operation of the system, the Americans will be striking at unveiled mobile systems as among the first targets. This is an extremely difficult task, of which the Americans became convinced during the war in Iraq, where they were unable to neutralise the outdated Iraqi ‘Scuds’, in a desert landscape. In the vast mountainous tracts of China, replete with potential hiding places, hunting these weapons will be even harder. It is not possible to combat them using long-range cruise missiles, of stand-off type long-range munitions, since the mobility of the units means that the target must be acquired in real time and eliminated by planes in a direct air strike. This leads to the risky commitment of the strike air force directly at the target, which, with the competent preparation of air defence systems, will make it easier to set traps for American planes, and this far from their home bases. This will result in the commitment of the USAAF in large numbers, risking losses and – equally importantly – pulling them away from performing other combat missions. In addition, the experience of recent conflicts shows that the Americans will no longer be able to count solely on the ‘suppression’ (as opposed to destruction) of the Chinese surface-to-surface system.
Considering all of the above, it appears impossible for the Americans to be in a condition to achieve the choking, or ‘suppression’ of the Chinese missile forces.
Following an intensive initial engagement, the operation of transferring maritime and aviation units to the theatre of operations will begin; this will take several weeks due to the huge distances involved. Planes will be relocated from the United States to Japan and planes from Europe and the Middle East to Australia, beyond the range of China’s strikes. For instance, a ship on a combat mission takes about a week to sail from the Persian Gulf to Singapore. At the same time, convoys with supplies and ammunition will commence their journeys, which will require a serious effort to escort them. Once the scouting battle is won and ‘rolled up’, and the ‘tunnels’ taken by stealth strike aircraft and free of Chinese air defences are widened, older-generation Air Force and US Navy carrier-based aircraft will enter the fray. This is to lead to the gathering of a sufficient weight of mass air strikes at targets in China and the maintenance of a permanent presence of strike-aircraft above them. After the first, initial stage, the second phase of the Operation would commence; the long-term reduction or destruction of China’s military potential. This would have to be combined with a significant logistical effort (in particular in bases in eastern Japan) and the rapid increase of military production, in particular precision munitions.
Simulations prove that the result of the air battle over the littoral seas and islands in the First Island Chain is uncertain and, as a rule, Americans will not be able to provide full, round-the-clock control of airspace over the combat area.
This, in turn, could impact the results of ground engagements on the islands and at sea in the First Island Chain where, without the United States Air Force, it may be difficult to oppose Chinese landings or their fleet. The Americans have not had to face a situation like this since 1943-44, when the German Luftwaffe tried to challenge the Allied air superiority over Western Europe.
Autor
Jacek Bartosiak
CEO and Founder of Strategy&Future, author of bestselling books.
Strategy&Future
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