Sea Control - Sea Control 286 — Taiwan and Sea Denial with Collin Fox and Jonathan Selling

Episode Date: October 21, 2021

Links1. "The Porcupine in No Man’s Sea: Arming Taiwan for Sea Denial," by Collin Fox, CIMSEC, August 4, 2021.2. "Between the Giants: The Future of the Taiwanese Navy in an Era of Great Power Competition," by Jonathan Selling, CIMSEC, September 18, 2020.

Hey folks, Jared here. This week I'm joined by one of our editors and SimSec contributors, Jonathan Selling, as well as Colin Fox, who also supports the website. And they're going to be discussing Taiwan and sea denial. This episode was edited and produced by Joshua Gruver. We recently conducted our SimSec Forum for Authors and Readers in conjunction with the Center for Naval Analysis. You should be able to find a link on our main website and see a few of our great contributors presenting their work as well as answering audience questions. Finally, I want to take the opportunity to recommend our partners in the SimSec Podcast Network, the Bilge Pumps. You can find Alex, Jamie, Drack, and a pile of our own brew bottles wherever you download your podcasts. On that note, I'll turn it over to Kimbersman. You're listening to Sea Control, hosted by the Center for International Maritime Security.

Hello, how's your mates, and welcome back aboard Sea Control. Today, my guests are a pair of SimSec hands, Colin Fox, author of The Porcupine in No Man's Sea, Arming Taiwan for Sea Denial, and Jonathan Selling, one of the members of the Sea Control editing team and the author of Between the Giants, The Future of the Taiwanese Navy in an Era of Great Power Competition. So, gentlemen, welcome. Colin, I'm going to start with you. Can you tell us a little bit about yourself, what it is that you do for SimSec here, because you actually contribute for us on more than just an authorship stage? and yeah, a little bit about your background. Yeah, Jonathan, thanks. So I'm a man of many

talents, I like to think. I'm a, with CEMSEC, I am an editor. So I have the privilege of editing and reading through and helping develop those great articles that we've published. On my day job, I'm a Navy foreign area officer. I'm on assignment to the Department of State. So I've got a pretty wide and diverse academic and professional background that I think really helped inform the article, all the things that went into it. I've got a BS in history from the Naval Academy, a master of systems analysis from the Naval Postgraduate School, operations analysis oriented. And then I did the Chilean Naval War College. It's like the Naval War College, but in Chile and Spanish, which is not the same thing as Spanish. And then I've had a few tours

on strike groups and fleet staffs. And my most recent tour was down in Panama, speaking of strategic geography. Thanks. And Jonathan, you're, again, one of our sound editors. So one can tell the listeners a little bit about your background. And then two, you know, we just had Ed Sale on for one of his episodes. So this is the second time I've got to have one of the editors, quote-unquote, on the mic. If you could tell us a little bit about what you do as an editor, what your day-to-day consists of for us. Yeah, thank you for having me on. My name is Jonathan Selling. I received my MA in International Affairs from Boston University, where I focused on the Asia-Pacific and the rise of China and U.S. alliances in the region. And I came to SimSec

actually because I did a lot of work on the maritime disputes in the East and South China C, which is how I first got connected to SimSec. So currently I'm a sound editor for this podcast and my day-to-day duties are to edit out dead space or ums or ahs and really just to boost up the sound and make it, you know, sound nice and presentable. Thanks. And as a reminder, all opinions express our own and not reflective of any institutions with which we might otherwise be associated. Colin, I'm going to start with you, since your piece was kind of impetus for this podcast. What did you mean in your piece when you wrote omnipresent weapons and omniscient surveillance? Well, really, I just liked the alliteration. But seriously, there's two big

kind of mutually reinforcing trends that go into this. So on the one, the ocean is still really big, right? It's obvious. But it's getting a lot easier with every passing year to find ships and target them. There was the Proceedings article, is it Battleship or Chestnut Battleship? It's in the article. But in any case, the idea that once upon a time, it was really hard to find ships at sea. But with the proliferation of better sensors, satellites, UAVs, and then processing the data that those sensors produce with things like artificial intelligence providing for that data fusion, then the surface of the ocean is not completely visible. They're still hiding to be done, but it's a lot, a lot harder. And that's what I mean by omnipresent surveillance. And

that really catalyzes the power of long-range anti-ship missiles, and it makes them more effective. So for a long time, the limiting factor for long-range anti-ship fires was less of a physics problem of range, right? And more about finding and then striking the dynamic target from way over the horizon. So I had the privilege of editing John Hanley's recent SimSec article on routine fleet experimentation. And he relates his experience in that briefly in trying to employ the Tomahawk missiles in an anti-ship role in the 1980s, what we're doing now. And they did it in the Mediterranean, heavy ship traffic and lots of islands. And the experiments showed that the supporting technology just wasn't there to reliably find and strike targets at range. It was a command

and control problem. It was a targeting problem. It wasn't a physics problem. I mean, you could remanufacture a tomahawk made in the 80s and make it into an anti-ship missile. But now we have that, right? So that's the one piece of that technology. And so this ISR technology is getting better, but then so is the missile technology. I talk about how everybody's getting in this game. Serbia is making anti-ship missiles. Australia is making anti-ship missiles. And once upon a time, It was kind of the domain of the big boys, you know, like you had France making exosets and you had the Soviets making their anti-ship missiles and you had U.S. harpoon. But it wasn't like, you know, Serbia was making their own missiles or Australia. But now it's it's caused a lot of proliferation.

And then you throw that into a worsening global security environment that is very maritime and everybody wants to buy missiles. So the missiles may not be quite literally omnipresent, but again, I like the alliteration. But there are a lot more of them. But how the U.S. services adapted operating concepts to cope with the threat posed by persistent ISR? So at a very general level, the services have followed the same basic operational concept. Spread out, hide, use network fires from distributed forces to attack enemy forces. I mean, this is the same recipe as distributed lethality from 2016, which was actually my first SimSec article. I got called on the carpet the next day in a good way by Admiral Davidson, which is another story.

But anyway, I was working at Fleet Forces at the time, and I thought it was going to fly under the radar. But yeah, anyway, so the basic concept is there for all the services, and it's a viable concept, right? It has promise, but there are definitely risks. The first one, and this is more of a more of a recent one, as distributed lethality and this concept of spreading out, hiding and not looking too important when they're, you know, DF-26 is coming over the horizon. It's for ground based forces and they need host nation consent, which not just to be there, but to fire from their territory. Because if there are missiles coming out of the Philippines, the Philippines can't very well stay neutral in that fight, even if it's not Philippine forces that are firing the missiles. And since China will be there geographically long after the U.S. is not doing whatever they're doing, that has a major consideration. So we can't just say, oh, well, we're going to put, you know, missiles on foreign islands and it's going to be easy because we and as a foreign area officer, a lot of the stuff that we try to do is this, you know, status of forces agreements and international cooperation with our allies and partners.

So that's a problem, right? It's a political problem. It's a policy problem, but it has warfighting impacts on day one of any conflict and even beyond, right? So second, we don't really know how effective that dispersal of forces will be in protecting those forces. It's a hide-or-finder game, but how good are the hiders? How good are the finders? And who's going to win? We don't know. And that's true for both the ground side and the maritime side. Yeah, kind of an arms race. It's a continuing competition. And then third, we really don't know how robust that network will be. And that's the thing that brings everything all together when that network's under attack.

So Brian McGrath had a great insight on this last point on a previous Sea Control podcast back from 2016. And I quoted it at length in my Chilean Naval War College thesis on fleet architecture. And then that thesis led to a lot of the other articles that I've done since. He said, I'm relatively satisfied with the weapons, weapons programs and sensors. What I'm not satisfied with is the networking, the ISR and the connective tissue among all the elements. What we don't have is all the interstitial stuff that helps tie it all together. So that was five years ago. And while I know the DOD has been working hard on that problem with JADC2 and mosaic warfare concepts and things like that, I don't get the sense that it's mature, that it's something where it's just a slam dunk and we can just say, yep, we can count on that, you know, on day one of any conflict and on forward. Right. So when you bring those three risks, risks together of access, of protection of the network, defeat is possible.

Right. We can't just say, oh, it's going to bear itself out. And war games have borne this out. Right. Victory is not an American birthright. Defeat is possible. And we need to keep that in mind as we're thinking about our operational concepts. And for me, that really framed the problem to say, is this the right avenue or the exclusive avenue for us to attack this problem, this political problem of great power competition? These are useful warfighting concepts, but do we need to reframe the problem and think about another way to skin this cat? Jonathan, you've written about the Taiwanese Navy for us a couple of times at SimSec. How have the Taiwanese adapted to both the growth of their primary threat in the PLAN, and to a lesser extent, the PLAF, and the expansion of the sensor network? So traditionally, the Taiwanese Navy has really not had to worry much about the PLAN.

There was an essential guarantee that the United States would back it up, as it did in the 95-96 Taiwan Strait crisis. And in many ways, the Taiwanese Navy was able to match the PLAN close enough to essentially forestall any invasion threat. But with the rapid growth in the last 20 years of the PLAN, that has really gone out the window. So the PLAN, sorry, the Taiwanese Navy is a pretty standard mid-sized surface navy, mostly consisting of frigates, destroyers, with some small patrol craft. and as the chance of being able to to protect this the waters of taiwan have receded they have shifted to an area denial strategy which is um summed up in their uh new what they call the overall defense concept this uh sees a shift uh towards asymmetric um assets basically uh they're looking at acquiring large amounts of anti-ship missiles, both on vessels and on land, mines,

and increased use of submarines. And what this calls for is essentially to deny the PLA the ability to land on Taiwan itself. It ceased to harass and denigrate the invasion fleet in the Taiwan Straits and then send it out enough so that anything that gets through can be annihilated on the beaches. And this is essentially trading time for space for time. It's important to remember that in the event of an invasion, there is going to be a significant lead up before an invasion fleet can sail. Now, what the sensor network has done is essentially reinforced this. It has reinforce the shift to smaller, more hideable assets instead of the large surface fleets that they have used beforehand. And the Taiwanese, as such, have started relying on smaller ships and

more stealthy ships. In particular, the Tao Chang-class corvette has been adopted to be able to operate in this situation so jonathan what's this uh sort of transition to a sea denial strategy meant for the taiwanese for the existing taiwanese surface fleet where those ferguson destroyers supposed to do in the face of the might of the plan because i cannot imagine a scenario where they're interposing themselves in between the island and that force so the uh surface fleet It really does not have a great place in the new war plans. They really cannot operate within the Taiwan Strait in the event of war. And most likely, if war to break out, they would probably put out to sea to just escape the PLAN.

If the United States was to intervene, they'd likely link up with the United States Navy. but they're not going to be around the island. In some ways, they still have a use. You can use anti-ship missile. They can harass to an extent, but they really are not, at this point, going to play a significant role in preventing an invasion of Taiwan, and they're going to be more on the sidelines. Colin, in your article, you table a number of different suggestions from various sources. So can you walk us through sort of the body of your article here and what your suggestions were for the Taiwanese as a resisting force here? Yeah, certainly. So the bullet point elevator pitch is let's enable Taiwan for sea denial because sea control is hard and sea denial

is easy and getting easier. For a long time, it was something that we were frustrated about because we just assumed sea control. So anybody who tried sea denials, it was an annoyance. Just finished the strategy shelved Steve Will's new book from Naval Institute, which talks about this kind of period where that was the case. But piggybacking on Jonathan's point, enabling Taiwan to do what they are moving in the direction to do, but allowing them to do it faster would be a more expeditious, a more realistic, and a more feasible option vis-a-vis pretending that Taiwan is going to do nothing. And our allies are going to maybe do something, maybe not. And then rushing to the aid of Taiwan in the event of an invasion, because then that is really,

that forces our decision space. It forces our timeline. And then it's a, do you go or do you not go? And you've got a very short period of time to do that because the Pacific is still really big, and it takes a long time to cross it. So that is the crux of it. And the Lowy Institute, I'm glad that article came out, but it's every author's dilemma with when you think you've got a new idea. And I started working on the article back in March, and it focused a lot more on the parallels with World War I. And then the Lowy Institute report came out, and I was kind of frustrated. I felt like I'd been scooped, but at the same time validated, because it's like, these are all great ideas. And I encourage people to read the Lowy Institute report. It's got a lot

more than just the piece that I focused on. I'll read the crux of it that I put in the article, that if Taiwan acquires over roughly the next five years, large numbers of additional anti-ship missiles, more extensive ground-based air defense capabilities, smart mines, better train, more effective reserve forces, and significantly bolstered capacity for events of cyber warfare, large suite of ISR and strike systems, counter-strike capabilities to hit coastal targets on the mainland, it will continually increase the price China will have to pay to win a war. As Jonathan said, they're already doing this. But looking at it from the U.S. perspective, we could do basically what Britain did in the 19th century on the European continent.

Paul Kennedy's Rise and Fall of the Great Powers kind of takes this theme of how did Britain manage to do so well. And it was an offshore balancer, right? So applying that kind of strategic level approach to the operational realities and plans is something that is feasible to do because it's a lot less costly to subsidize someone else's defense than it is to attack your way into the theater on exterior lines of communication and then start fighting you know this is the same the geography is the same as it was with war plan orange uh in world war ii the geography is the same it has not changed and ships haven't gotten that much faster you know it's it's the same considerations so balance you know this taking this concept of external balancing and applying

it in the Taiwan scenario, you think about the DOD budget, $700-something billion a year. And the DOD's main challenge, all of the scenarios that come up, it's always a Taiwan scenario. It's always the, oh, we started a war game with Taiwan, and we've lost. And how can we spend almost a trillion dollars a year on this superb military that can't do this thing? Well, for context, I said, well, you know, we subsidize Israel's defense to the tune of $3.3 billion a year. And obviously, Israel has a unique status in the American domestic political scene. But if you take that number, which is also the amount for two armored brigades, the annual operating cost, and you said, let's buy a bunch of anti-ship missiles and mines, $3 billion a year would buy a lot of sea denial, and it wouldn't even have to be that much. so that's the basic idea and it would help us avoid this false choice between um that that has been proposed between like hey taiwan is just not worth it it's going to be it's better to

appease china this is a charlie glasser's proposal it's better to achieve appease china on taiwan than risk a world war between great powers or others um the the haas argument and and many others who have said, hey, we got to double down. We have to get away from strategic ambiguity because if we say, yes, we're going to do this thing, yes, we're going to come to Taiwan's aid like a treaty ally, then that will deter China. But deterrence by denial rests on credibility. And no matter how much you express that desire, if your military can't do it and you don't have a, or there's a doubt in the minds of your potential, well, your competitor, that you might not be able to do it, then deterrence doesn't work, right? Deterrence rests on capability. So it's about

what that could do in terms of influence and leverage of getting, of making these things happen, and also while bolstering this thorny geopolitical problem with military means. Yeah, sorry, kind of rambled there. But there's a lot in there. I guess my parting thought would be that US funding should be seen as fungible. That is, the same money that we pay for one thing, we can use for another. So if you could use the money that you would pay for two armored brigades within DOD, and you put it on Department of State or through Foreign Military Finance or Department of Defense 333, building partner capacity, and you achieve the same or better outcome, maybe the better outcome by orders of magnitude, then why would you not do that?

Acknowledging that China wouldn't be happy about it, but they're not happy about existing arms sales, and they would be ever less in a position to actually do something about it. That leads right into my next question. Is it reasonable to think that Taiwan could actually accumulate enough munitions to, quote unquote, stop an invasion? Or is what we're really discussing either some sort of buying time or a cost imposition strategy? Yeah, so frankly, I don't know how that would play out. You know, I mentioned I did an operations research or Operations Analysis Master's with the Naval Postgraduate School. And I could give you an uninformed opinion, but really you want to run the numbers, right? But that brings with it

assumptions and all that. So this is a lot more than just running missile exchange simulations or war gaming, I think, because it's really a question of national will on both sides of the Taiwan Strait. And that's really hard to anticipate. I mean, we're recording this a week after the fall of Kabul, right? So how is that going to play out? Where is that going to go? The thing we should be focused on is making sure that such a war does not break out. And that relies on conventional deterrence. So what we need to do to enable conventional deterrence is the main thing. So, you know, no one starts a war by definition without thinking that there's at least a decent chance of winning, of pulling it off, right? Nobody's like, well, we're going to start this

thing and we're going to lose, a war of choice. And so the point of the arms buildup I'm proposing for Taiwan is not to make it absolutely invulnerable or an invasion, absolutely impossible. There's no way to guarantee that. And depending on how long the timeframe that you're talking about is, especially a nation of Taiwan size and a nation of China's size, to give Beijing's military political leaders credible reason to think that invasion in any given year at any given time is all is a bad and risky uh decision that that's the that's the focus of of the proposal jonathan what your opinion should the taiwanese be using their surface feet for in the meantime if not high-end war fighting there is a lot that the surface we can do to preserve taiwan's

sovereignty. It's just not going to be incredibly useful in a time of war. And so the first one is simple, just patrolling Taiwan's waters and maintaining sovereignty. China has attempted salami slicing tactics in the South China Sea, and Taiwan has, in addition to lots of disputes within the South China Sea, they're very involved in that, but they also have plenty of offshore islands, which China has attempted to, you know, invade at times. And without the surface fleet to be able to patrol and provide a deterrence, it's very likely that China is going to attempt to slowly take over these. It's also important to note that these islands are a bit of a thorn inside of China. If they try to invade Taiwan, they really have to either spend time overtaking

them or bypass them and run the risk of them being able to harass the invasion fleet. So it's very important that Taiwan maintains these islands. The next one is that Taiwan can help burden sharing with the United States by engaging in freedom of navigation operations or just joint allied operations Taiwan can provide value to the United States and this and dispel this idea that it's like this helpless island that needs American protection and that's incredibly important in the long run in American politics because we've already seen we're already seeing as Collins alluded to this debate over whether to let Taiwan go or should we increase our commitment to it and And the more that they are involved in American defense in the Pacific, the more that's going

to be useful for them in the United States. And the final one is really that the surface fleet just offers a level of prestige to Taiwan. One in the fact that it can use, they can go in goodwill towards helping Taiwan in secure diplomatic recognition or maintaining it which is taiwan's main foreign policy goal you know for the last you know 40 years and that it just china maintains that taiwan's rebellious province and if taiwan is was to disband surfacely and only have you know missile and patrol craft and these these small ships designed for harassment, that looks like whatever small rebellious province has. And by having a large surface fleet, Taiwan can say, no, we are a sovereign state,

and this demonstrates it. And for that reason, they are going to continue to maintain a surface fleet. So Colin, final question to you then, what should the U.S. investment look like? The U.S. investment should be on things that are effective. So earlier in my career, I was on a expeditionary strike group staff, did a couple boat alligator exercises and ball tops exercises as a planner. And the three things that we always worried about for any amphibious operation were mines, missiles, subs. I mean, that was kind of our mantra of like, oh, shoot, you know, there's still a sub out there. There's an unlocated missile launcher, never mind hundreds of them. So that mantra is a pretty good place to start if you want to prevent or really complicate a landing. And these don't have to be, you know, exotic weapons, by the way.

It doesn't need to be the absolute cutting edge weapon where you're concerned that there might, you know, the technology is going to be a game changer if it's captured during a conflict or something like that. So, you know, mines often get overlooked. It could be beach zone mines, anti-invasion stuff, rising mines in slightly deeper water, pre-planted or artillery launched scatterbrill mines inland of the beach. So they could also be offensive mobile mines, a concept that I've been thinking about a little bit recently, that kind of blur the lines between an unmanned underwater or low profile surface vessel and a traditional mine, something that could self deploy or, you know, go deploy offensive mines. I mean, they could even target ports of embarkation on the mainland across the strait, right? And as Jonathan said, the invasion fleet is going to have a little bit of time between in anticipation of D-Day. If those ports are already full of mines as they're leaving, that's going to put a big crimp in things. on missiles. I focused on anti-ship missiles in the article. So lots of those. And I think that the reasoning is pretty evident, but the widespread deployment of manpads like Stinger would also add a lot of value given the large disparity. Well, actually let me, let me revisit that point before

I was about to address the submarines. The further you can push up the ISR assets, the harder of a time they have in doing things. And I used to be a helicopter pilot before I went for an area officer. And MANPADs scare the heebie-jeebies out of me. I mean, I just hate them. And especially advanced MANPADs like Stinger and, you know, like SA-18s, because countermeasures are, well, they're a reason why they're advanced and they're better than an SA-7. If you could do that, All those things. And then finally, the submarine question. I don't know if they would provide the same combat return on investment as mines and missiles. It really depends on how they're employed. And another component of that is not just the military value of those armaments, but also the geopolitical value of what they bring to the relationship. up. The part in my article was gifts come with strings. And yeah, anyway, read the article. It's

great. Don't just rely on the podcast. And I'll leave you with that. Thanks so much. I'd like to thank my guests, Jonathan Selling and Colin Fox. Jonathan, where can we find you online? And what are you working on next? You can find me through on LinkedIn. That's really the only social media I have at this time, and you can find that by searching my name. Right now, my current project is, which is more in the researching stage, is I'm looking at the growth of alliances in the Pacific, especially this idea of an anti-China alliance, and just going through what that would look like and issues with the potential for that. And Colin, where can we find you and what's your next project?

So I'm also on LinkedIn. Yeah, there's that. And I actually confess that I got a Twitter account in anticipation of this question. It's at C Reeves Fox. I think I've posted like nothing or I don't even know if that's the right term for Twitter. Tweeted. Anyway, yeah. And also, If you write for SimSec, I just might be your editor. So on things that I'm writing about, I have a long intent to write an article about don't take the Panama Canal for granted, because having served at the embassy down there, the entire focus was all counter narcotics and was like, hey, if this artery were severed, especially in wartime, it would be really, really bad. So there's that. I don't know when that's coming out. It's still in concept stage. And then I'm also working with one of my former professors at Naval Postgraduate School on I'm not I'm not really sure what yet, but we're going to work on something together and put it out there. So stand by to stand by. Gentlemen, I look forward to all those projects and hopefully we'll be able to have you on again to discuss them. But thanks again for coming on to the listeners.

Thanks for tuning in. We'll see you next time. A pot of rum and a pot of gin, oh, when I had a bully in the alley. A pot of wine, both white and red, oh, put it on the shimbo now. So help me, Bob, I'm bully in the alley. When I had a bully in the alley, help me, Bob, I'm bully in the alley. Put it on the shimbo now.