Sea Control - Sea Control 361 - Carrier Killers with Gerry Doyle and Blake Herzinger

Episode Date: July 10, 2022

LinksCarrier Killer: China’s Anti-Ship Ballistic Missiles and Theater of Operations in the early 21st Century, by Gerry Doyle and Blake Herzinger, Helion, 2022. 

Hey folks, it's Jared. Today I'm joined by co-authors Jerry Doyle and Blake Herzinger, and we'll be discussing their new book, Carrier Killers, available now wherever you purchase your books. This episode was edited and produced by David Syeda. I'd like to pause here to highlight our local chapters. Whether you're in South Korea, Egypt, Singapore, France, New York, India, or the Caribbean, chances are there's a SimSec local chapter near you. You can find a full listing of our local chapters and contact information on our website at simsec.org, so if you're interested please reach out and get involved 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 pot of iron brew bottles wherever you download your podcasts and with that kimber's men you're listening to sea control hosted by the center for international maritime Hello, Hashimates, and welcome back to Board Seat Control. My guests today are the co-authors of the book Carrier Killer, China's Anti-Ship Ballistic Missiles and Theater of Operations in the Early 21st Century, Jerry Doyle and Blake Hersinger. So, Jerry, Blake, welcome. Jerry, would you mind introducing yourself to our listeners, please? Sure. My name is Jerry Doyle.

I'm an editor on the Global News Desk at Reuters. I've been in Asia for probably going on 14 years, and my work out here tends to focus on geopolitics, defense, and security. Thanks, and Blake, you've been here a few times before, but could you remind the listeners of your background, please? Yeah, you bet. Career naval officer, left active duty a few years ago and became a foreign area officer in the reserve. I used to work maritime security as a day job in Southeast Asia on behalf of the U.S. Pacific Fleet, and now work in the private sector doing something totally different, and all this stuff has kind of joined the reserve as my side hustle. Well, thank you both for coming on. As a reminder to the listeners, all opinions are our own and not representative of any institution with which we might be otherwise associated. So, Jerry, I'll start with you. Who is the target audience for this book and why?

But we wanted to write a book that was accessible to anybody who's sort of interested in a topic which seems to be capturing a lot of headlines lately, which is China's sort of ascendance and military go-about out here in Asia. But we also wanted to make sure that we had material that would be of interest and would help the work of people who are already focused on this area, specialists, people who are interested in security and defense and china's military and military equipment so we wanted to write a book that had the accessibility of something anybody could pick up and have the information of something specialists could use blake why did china decide to develop the df-21

so i think that you know there's a number of factors but i think at the end of the day it's Because when they started developing that missile, they had to think of ways to fight the American way of war or fight against the American way of war without building an American-style military and leading with an American-style Navy. So they need to counter the aircraft carrier without building their own. And so they started down this asymmetric path kind of on the heels of the 1991 war in the Middle East, Operation Desert Storm. u.s operations in the balkans and in the taiwan straits crisis the third taiwan straits crisis basically all these events sort of highlighted to them american sea power and air power from the sea is too much for us and it's too much for military similar to us and so we need to develop this you know assassin's mace to counter these these aircraft carriers until we can build our own

navy and now we see them they've got the missiles in hand and now they're building the navy so that was going to be my follow-up question is uh are we are we now seeing them at a transition point where they do try to build their american style military because we see them building i think three aircraft carriers now with possibly some more under construction yeah i think it's fair to say you know if you want to be a great power you need a navy And China is certainly looking for parity and equality on the world stage, and they want the global reach that a navy provides and a true blue water navy that can protect Chinese economic interests and national interests all around the world. Jerry, why did you choose to describe the DF-21D as, quote, a whole card in a billion dollar poker game, unquote? well the billion dollar poker game is of course the uh the military build-up and development that

you guys were just discussing if you want to have a great power navy you got to spend money now the u.s has already spent quite a bit of money building out its navy not as much as some folks including blake would like them to spend you have a fair number of aircraft carriers powered by magical nuclear rocks. They can sail anywhere in the world, deliver squadrons of aircraft anywhere in the world, and those aircraft can carry all kinds of incredible weapons. That's the billion-dollar poker game. The whole reason the DF-21D is a whole card is because, as a concept, it's fairly simple. You build a ballistic missile, and that ballistic missile can get

a ship. But in practice, it's a fairly complicated thing to actually pull off. It's complex. There's a lot of obstacles and challenges to it. And to this point, China has not actually proven that it can hit a maneuvering and dependent target at sea with one of these things.

But the fact that it spent money developing them and it has enough of them on shore, fielded, crewed, ready to launch, that sort of is in essence like the card up their sleeve. We don't know whether they're going to work or how well they're going to work.

But the fact that they might work It's a thing that the West and Western Navy had to adjust to and take into account, not just in terms of developing their own technology and strategy, but in terms of trying to figure out where they can operate and how they can operate. Blake, what role does the carrier play in U.S. naval strategy? throughout kind of the modern era that the american way of war has revolved around the aircraft carrier and we're able to project power all around the world that other countries would be lucky to project over their own territory and can do that because we have mobile airfields that we can send off their coastline the chinese watched that when we kind of ran that play in you know in the persian gulf through the taiwan strait in in the mediterranean off in over the

Balkans. And they watched that happen. They watched how fast we dismantled the Iraqi military, which at the time really resembled what the Chinese military looked like. A lot of the same equipment, similar-ish doctrine, and they were terrified. This was existential terror that they were feeling. And that's the kind of power that an aircraft carrier has. As you know, the popular tagline that we like is 100,000 tons of diplomacy. It's hard to think of a better, bigger way to show the flag than to sail that carrier strike group into somebody's EZ and just say, hey, wave on the way by. You know, it's the key to most things we do. You know, we have aircraft carriers so that we can put planes in the air wherever we want and whenever we want in

the space of days. And as you observe, you know, the Chinese now that they have the economy and the industrial base, they're building their own because the carrier is not dead. These missiles, The idea is not new. This is a Cold War idea. And as Jerry mentioned, we don't know how well it's going to work. And they're building carriers now because they know that there is value in that platform. I think we'll continue to see them refine and develop how they use it. That's a good transition.

You both sort of hinted at what you may believe the answer to this is already. But Jerry, why do you believe the reports of the carrier's death are greatly exaggerated? Well, you call it the, you know, feeding into my question, I call it Blake stealing my answer. The short answer to this is just what Blake described. The reports of the carrier's death are greatly exaggerated because we see the impact of carrier operations every day, not just in terms of, you know, actual airstrikes, but the power projection is showing the flag, the potential for having that mobile airfield operating just offshore or within a striking distance of, nearly any place in the planet.

That is a very real thing and it still carries weight. But the even shorter answer is China is building its own aircraft carriers. It's even invested a lot of money in building anti-ship ballistic missiles that are supposed to obviate the aircraft carrier. You don't build aircraft

carriers, right? But China is. So clearly they feel there's a role and their carrier program is still some way behind other Western military aircraft carriers and certainly the U.S. Navy. And so I think it's pretty clear that carriers still have a role. And certainly, the United States is still putting a lot of money, a lot of resources, a lot of effort into figuring out how to better defend carriers against this sort of threat.

It's not just sort of sitting around waiting to see if DF-26 or DF-21B actually works as advertised. I think the carriers are well defended, and they're going to continue to sail until somebody proves they can. Blake, how does China's history inform its strategy here? There's a really deep, and if you want to like really dig and really stretch, you can find some people that kind of exoticize some principles within Chinese strategic tradition. But I think if we look at it at a very base level, the People's Republic of China since 1949 has been fighting to create stability at home and make itself first a rich country and then a rich country with a large military. This entire rejuvenation of the Chinese nation under Xi Jinping has really been driven by a sense of nationalism tying back to this century of humiliation. When, you know, former colonial powers were sailing gunboats up Chinese rivers and carving out cantons where they could live and be exempt from Chinese law, that has really been weaponized within society to drive this military buildup, the creation of an economic powerhouse. They are interested in keeping foreign invaders at arm's length, keeping instability off their borders, and the sea has traditionally been a source of instability.

China, throughout its history, with very few exceptions, has been a land power. They have looked inward. They've been internally focused. Arguably, most authoritarian governments in the modern day are similar. You don't have a lot of time to look outward when you're just looking inward to make sure that nobody is talking about something you don't want them to on WeChat or circulating JPEGs of Winnie the Pooh. But now they're kind of proving they can walk and chew gum.

A lot of ins, a lot of outs, a lot of what have yous, as the dude would say. and they can maintain domestic stability while also projecting power externally. Thank you, Blake. And for the listeners, you can never see, but every time we interview Blake here, he wears his Lebowski sweater. And it's actually the highlight of the interview before we even start talking about anything. So Lebowski sweater is like, this is the one exception where I would make to do a screenshot, but I'm still not going to do it. Jerry, next couple of questions you and i'm going to kind of combine them into one can you describe the likely detect to engage sequence to employ a ballistic missile and then why is targeting such a difficult problem because

you mentioned like the difficulty of actually hitting a moving target at sea sure although before i do that i'd like to point out that i also am wearing a good shirt i can't believe you haven't said anything about it so far oh it's a good shirt like nothing against the shirt hawaiian shirt we've seen those before i have a special fondness for the lebowski sweater particularly because i know that's 90 plus degrees there right now and i just always think it's funny that blake hoes to tradition and where's the lebowski sweater you gotta suffer for your art man yeah you know you gotta suffer for your art targeting is a really tough problem for a ballistic missile to hit a ship because that precision ballistic missiles are nothing new they're not even that

complex in terms of what sort of level or you know nature of force can operate something like I saw it during Iran ballistic missile strikes on U.S. forces in Iraq a few years ago. Those missiles were developed by a country that was crippled by sanctions, didn't have access to a lot of the high technology that major powers did, and they still work pretty well. So hitting a small-ish target with an intermediate or long-range ballistic missile is not all that hard. You know where the target is. You know where the launch point is. All you've got to do is work some math, and the missile will end up where it needs to end up. GPS makes it more accurate.

Star sightings and other methods of aiming and navigation make it more accurate. Now, hitting and moving targets is, of course, more complicated, whether you're using a rifle or a ballistic missile or anything else. You have to read the target. You have to know where it's going to be by the time the round ends up where it's going to end up. Once the target starts maneuvering, it gets even more complex. once the target had defenses, I think that's even more complex. Now, the thing that's really tricky about this, though,

is the problem of ISR, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance. You have to find the ship first, and that information, or the strike group first, and that information has to make its way to analysts, and it has to make its way from the analyst to decision maker, and it has to make its way from the decision maker to whoever is going to actually push the launch button, and that all takes time. creating larger circle in the ocean where the carrier where the target is going to be

and the longer that time period is the bigger the circle is going to be you add in the flight time of the missile the circle gets even larger so then you have to launch a whole bunch of missiles to sort of cover that area and make sure that at least one of them is going to pick up the ship on the way down and we don't know what type of seeker exactly what type of seeker china's ASBMs have, but one assumed that it wouldn't cover the entire probability radius of where the ship would be. The smaller that ratio is, so even if we say the ratio of the missile kill radius to the targeting location and say half of it, to even get a 50% probability of kill, you're looking at dozens of missiles need to be volleyed in that part of the ocean. And then those missiles have

to contend with defenses and contend with uh jamming and other lots of launch stuff uh they have to contend with interception in space they have to contend with interception on the way down missiles fail and so it becomes an extremely non-trivial problem attacking a target not only moving but maneuvering defended and you have an adversary that try and prevent you from getting the targeting information you need to find that target to begin with it's not an easy thing by any stretch of the imagination, if not one, that China has been able to solve to its satisfaction, as far as we know. To what extent is your appreciation for the difficulty of that problem informed now by the Russia-Ukraine war and kind of what we've seen unfold there

from the perspective of Western eyes looking at what we thought was a very capable military struggle in a modern conflict? You know, I think it certainly opened a lot of people's eyes to the idea that high-tech uh weapons or weapons that are well regarded in terms of precision strike only precision strike uh don't always work the way that we expect them to and they certainly haven't worked the way that russia has expected them to so that's definitely a problem that china might have to contend with using its asdms in combat for the first time we just don't know and neither do they you know they they started testing these targets on land and these sort of like massive mock-ups of ships and ports, port facilities in the desert.

And then they moved to testing them, again, stationary target targets at sea. And then most recently, they tested them again, moving targets at sea, straight-line targets. But during none of these at-sea tests, they were producing any evidence, any video, photo, anything of the missiles actually hitting their targets. And in fact, after the last test at sea, they moved the whole thing back to land. and set up moving targets and ship-sized moving targets on rail that are moving over several kilometers in the desert on sort of an S-shaped path. They're launching missiles at those again.

So to me, this indicates that at the very least, they're not confident that these missiles are going to do exactly what they want to do. They clearly see there's some promise there, as anybody might. Having a weapon that works like this would be a huge deal, but i i don't think they're there yet and i don't think they feel like they're there yet either like what publicly available material is out there for the df-21 and df-26 you can read all of the global times op-eds uh touting their carrier killing anti-imperialist death strikes that you have the stomach for there are plenty of those out there

And that's actually something we go into in the book, how they've sort of ramped up that messaging. So really anything that exits China about these missiles is pretty much propaganda related, which, as Jerry pointed out, is why they can't. If they're not quite working, they can't say that. And they're not testing where we can watch because then we'll know. So there's not a ton out there. The DF-21, you know, it wasn't a brand new missile anyway. It's based on an older one. And then the DF-26, the big thing that we know about that is that it's going to be a hot swappable missile.

It is a hot swappable missile. So you can take the warhead off in the field and exchange it for something else. So, hey, I want an anti-ship warhead or I want a nuclear warhead. So that really complicates what we're looking at with these missiles. So when we start talking about what's available, not a lot, which was another reason we wanted to write this book. there's some great research that people like Andrew Erickson have done the folks

on the arms control wonk team they've done excellent work kind of gleaning these graphs of information and putting them into one place and we hope that our book kind of broadens the aperture for people who might be interested in learning more about that

you might say like a good rug it sort of ties everything together absolutely nailed it nailed it all right blake uh final question you and jerry if you have any thoughts on this obviously jump in as well but how do you expect the arms race around df-21 df-26 and then potential adversary countermeasures to continue to evolve so this is one of those places that when we say arms race arms race gets applied to the navy a lot as well you know this arms race

that china's in and like they're racing themselves right we're not in that race we're barely moving we're still probably in the blocks. We missed the gun. So they built the DF-21 Delta and they've built the DF-26. They're investing heavily in production for the DF-26 and DF-21 is kind of reduced. They're fielding the DF-17, the hypersonic glide vehicle. They've got a bevy of new cruise missiles. So they are really complicating that picture for us in the South China Sea and the China Sea. I don't think we have to worry too much about proliferation. This is certainly something they want to keep under wraps and keep kind of to themselves. If we're looking in terms of a US response, you could start thinking that maybe the US government is thinking about these

in terms of our own hypersonic weapon development, which is scary when you start discussing the fact that the DF-26 is nuclear capable and hot swappable. So you're looking at potentially targeting weapons that you will have no idea if it's armed with a nuclear warhead or not creating a use lose dilemma for the people's liberation army and that is not something we want to do so there's some kind of scary questions in there that we really need to ask ourselves before we go too far down the road of sure let's develop hypersonic weapons but let's have a real conversation about how we think we're going to use those and against what targets because when we start talking about attacking the territory of a nuclear power, things get scary. And we

haven't had to think about that in a long time. And I think that's something that the Ukraine-Russia war has... I mean, hopefully we start having a credible debate around that because the people were like, no, we need to start enabling the Ukrainians to attack Russia and maybe we should attack Russia. And it's like, guys, there is a lot of literature that says we should probably not do that there's there's a there are plenty of reasons uh to include i don't want you know an unnatural suntan i think there's a lot left to go and a lot that we will learn over the next 10 or 20 years on kind of where this is going to go i think that's right and you know in terms of things like countermeasures you know everybody loves to hate missile defense and um that won't

change, but I think that's one area that the U.S. particularly is going to keep investing in, especially since they've got Aegis working reasonably well, a lot better than the ground-based missile defense. And other sort of more escalatory and creepier ideas like monkeying with satellites and cyber warfare, that stuff will continue to develop as well. But I also think it's important to note that the capabilities of the DF-26, nuclear aside, like it is a precision missile and they have a bunch of them and they can take one, right?

So even if they never launch a single one at a ship, that's still a capability, that's still a weapon that the U.S. is going to have to contend with in terms of, you know, planning for it, planning to defeat it, planning to anticipate a strike and so on. Well, unfortunately, that's all that we have time for.

I'd like to thank my guests, Blake Herzinger and Jerry Doyle. Blake, where can we find you online and what are you working on next? You can find me way too often on Twitter. You'll never guess what time zone I live in because I keep my hours very unpreachable. But I'm at B.D. Ersinger there. And right now I'm actually working on a maritime security primer with a few co-authors and friends of Sea Control, as well as a report on the Quad with the U.S. Study Center at the University of Sydney.

and I'll be speaking at the Indian Ocean Region Forum in Bangkok with the NISID Center on 21 June talking about information sharing and the value of data. Excellent.

Jerry, where can we find you and what's your next project? You can find me on Twitter as well, unfortunately. I'm Jerry with a G, Doyle. My work as a journalist,

you can find my byline, my edit and credit kind of all over the place on writer.com one of your favorite search engines. As a journalist, like I said, I focus quite a bit on security

and defense stuff out here. So, you know, I'll be working on more Korea. I'll be working on Japan, Ukraine, all kinds of things. As an author, hopefully Blake and I

can set our sights on some other interesting military topics out here in Asia. Well, thank you both again for coming on to the listeners. Thanks for tuning in. We'll see you next time. © BF-WATCH TV 2021

The wines of white and red Oh, put it on the shimbo now So help me, Bob, I'm pulling the alley Why are they pulling the alley? Help me, Bob, I'm pulling the alley Put it on the shimbo now