Sea Control - Sea Control 399- The Need to Hedge for Taiwan's Security with Trevor Phillips-Levine and Collin Fox

Episode Date: December 22, 2022

Links1. "Hedging with Humility: Reassessing China's Power Projection Capabilities Against Taiwan," by Collin Fox, Trevor Phillips-Levine, and Kyle Cregge, War on the Rocks, September 1, 2022.2. “Amateur Hour Part I: The Chinese Invasion of Taiwan,” by Mike Pietrucha, War on the Rocks, May 18, 2022.3. Sea Control 288: Chinese Civilian Shipping and the Threat to Taiwan With Tom Shugart, by Walker Mills, CIMSEC, October 28, 2021.4. “Military and Security Developments Involving the People’s Republic of China 2021,” US Department of Defense.5. “Civilian Shipping: ferrying the People’s Liberation Army Ashore,” by Michael Dahm and Connor M. Kennedy, CIMSEC, September 9, 2021.6. “The Porcupine in No Man’s Sea: Arming Taiwan for Sea Denial,” by Collin Fox, CIMSEC, August 4, 2021.

Hello, and welcome to the Sea Control Podcast. I'm Nathan Miller. Today, your host, Walker Mills, talks to U.S. Navy Officers Trevor Phillips Levine and Colin Fox about their recent article, Hedging with Humility in War on the Rocks. Their piece discusses the feasibility of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan. David Ciccita edited and produced today's episode. At CIMSEC, we believe that victory in the maritime domain starts with great ideas communicated compellingly. Write, fight, win. Please help us continue to fulfill our mission by donating and making SimSec your preferred non-profit on Amazon Smile. I would 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 local chapters and contact information on our website at simsec.org. So if you're interested, please reach out. Finally, I want to take this opportunity to recommend our partners in the SimSec podcast network, The Bilge Pumps. You can find Alex, Jamie, Drack, and a pile 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 Security. Welcome back aboard the Sea Control Podcast from the Center for International Maritime Security.

I'm your host, Walker Mills, and today we're talking with Trevor Phillips-Levine and Colin Fox, both U.S. Naval officers, about their recent essay in War on the Rocks, Hedging with Humility, Reassessing China's Power Projection Capabilities Against Taiwan. Kyle Craig, a U.S. Navy surface warfare officer, is another author of the paper, but he was unable to join us for this podcast. Trevor, welcome back. Can you introduce yourself a bit to our listeners? Sure, Walker. Thanks for having me back. I am a naval aviator working at the Naval Air Warfare Development Center Joint Close Air Support Branch, and my interests span everything

from air power to ground-delivered work. And Colin, same to you. Can you tell us a little bit about yourself? Yeah, thanks. Happy to be here. So I'm a Navy Foreign Area Officer. I'm wrapping up a tour with the State Department. Some relevant background that went into the paper. On the operational side, I was a plans officer several years ago on an expeditionary strike group staff doing live amphibious exercises like ball tops and bolt alligator. On the academic side, graduated from the Chilean Naval War College a few years ago and the U.S. Naval Postgraduate school before that with a specialty in operations analysis. We're happy to have you guys both back

on the podcast. Trevor and Colin have helped out with SIMSEC in other ways and contributed other stuff to our website. It's good to have some of our own. Before we start, I'd like to remind our listeners that the opinions presented here are solely our own and should not be taken as representative of any of the institutions that we are associated with. So with that disclaimer down, Colin, can you start us off and give us maybe like a one paragraph summary of the article and the argument that you guys are making? It's a rebuttal of another We're on the Rocks article called Amateur Hour. That article claims that, and this is a quote, the People's Liberation Army lacks the necessary

power projection and sustainment capability and capacity, end quote, pull off across straight invasion of Taiwan. We thought that article framed the problem too narrowly, just looking at professional competence and amphibious lift and naval gunfire support, and we brought in the scope to reexamine the same question, could China pull it off? We looked at several different elements there that the original article didn't. China's massive shipbuilding industrial base, the role of its civilian fleet in the assault and the follow-on support, is looking at the different operational approaches like an initial blockade and seizure of outlying islands that those other elements could enable, the different timelines that those other elements could enable, And then the different ways of providing fire support, not just, you know, big guns from battleships and cruisers, but things like loitering munitions and missiles of all sorts. To wrap it up, we concluded that China's capabilities shouldn't be written off. So, Trevor, you know, understanding this is kind of a rebuttal article, what inspired you to write it every day? When we read stuff we don't necessarily write, feel motivated to write a direct rebuttal?

all three of us became motivated to write it pretty much at the same time and we all got together after we were discussing it amongst each other when we were talking about it what we really struck us was what we felt was kind of a dismissive tone about the PLA's capabilities was kind of not addressed was the overall military industrial capacity that the People's Republic of China has and while it's not 10 feet tall and is beset by its own problems it is problematic to dismiss what they have, what they have accomplished, and where they're headed. Take, for example, the fact that China has the world's largest shipbuilding capacity at this point and can crank out ships really at a speed that many countries, to include us,

would be very hard-pressed to match. They have the benefit of proximity. And even though there are meteorological and sea states that provide problems for getting across strait, the reality is they're a lot closer to them than we are. And they have a much larger economy, a much bigger industrial base in order to sustain those. They also are acutely aware of their issues. And under Xi, they've been steadily making progress for joint capabilities, leveraging very high technology solutions, both to deny the sea to us to prevent an intervention scenario, as well as subdue the island's defenses itself. So it's fair to say that you were basically motivated by a sense that this is a real threat that needs to be taken seriously and not kind of dismissed out

of hand. Exactly. What you don't want to have happen is be surprised. And all the assessments in the world cannot predict the future. And it's best to hedge and be ready and deter than it is to assume that an event will not occur and is impossible. And so I would assume from there, we get the title hedging with humility and basically a sense that it's better to hope for the best and prepare for the worst than otherwise. Exactly. Colin, just this past week, for the listeners we're recording at the end of October, both the U.S. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken and Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Gilday have said something to the effect that they, and these are separate reports, they weren't together, so that they expect that China

may move to attack Taiwan in a more aggressive timeline than previously thought. So is this validating to your argument? Or how does this kind of change how you feel about the paper? Yeah, absolutely. If anything, those statements reinforce it. And they obviously have a lot bigger staff than we do. We don't have staffs. We're looking at this as not quite as layman, but, you know, I'm not a China specialist. I don't work this in my day job, even though I've got a little bit of amphib background on sense of what's feasible. The road to war can happen really quickly. I think that's a valuable historical lesson. Think about the United States in the lead up to World War II, where we were in, say, 1937, or 1938, or 1939, in terms of

our war-making capacity, our readiness, the size of our armed forces, the capabilities that ended up being really decisive for that war, they weren't really obvious at the outset. I mean, you think about the Higgins boat, right? We leave the paper with that vignette. We would have had a completely different war if we weren't able to do an across-the-beach assault. The first Higgins boat prototype with a bow ramp was tested only six months before Pearl Harbor. That's the prototype. The amphibious fleet itself, the big ships, not the ship-to-shore connectors, but it went from zero ships. There were zero amphibious ships in the U.S. inventory when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor.

And by the end of the war, less than four years later, there were over 2,500 amphibs in the U.S. Navy, which is insane, right? We have an amphib fleet today of what, in the 30s, and China's amphib fleet is in the 50s. And that's just the Gray Hall amphib. We make the point in the article that Japanese and German analysts would have been really naive in 1940 to discount the possibility of an American invasion just because the United States had no military amphibious capacity and capability. It wasn't proven, right? it was not there at all. So what the United States did have is what China also has today, and that's industrial capacity. So to put this in a shipbuilding context, the entire invasion force against Sicily for Operation Husky, it was a bit less than 1 million tons of displacement.

And the total for Allied merchant shipping sunk in the entire Battle of the Atlantic through the whole war was something like 13 or 14 million tons. So that's, you know, that's what, six years of war, 39 to 45. So get this, in 2021, China produced over 26 million deadweight tons of seagoing ships in its shipyards. One year, almost double the total allied merchant shipping losses in the entire Battle of the Atlantic. I mean, it's just massive. So a lot of these ships, the ferries and the semi-submersible heavy lift ships, especially, they can deploy forces in the assault phase, right? They don't need to start cranking out Gray Hall military amphibs to make these ships relevant, although they could, they absolutely could change what they're producing.

So the acceleration curve on China's industrial base could be really quick. You can't say, oh, well, you know, China doesn't have enough amphibious shipping today, and therefore in two years, China could not invade Taiwan. Both of those premises are false. It just moves faster than sometimes people might expect. This also applies to other things other than shipbuilding, China's industrial capacity to build, to produce fires and not just amphibious lift. Where do most of the drones come from? It's from China. So it's not just shipbuilding. Trevor, do you want to follow up on that? China has a civil military requirements that sometimes we don't fully appreciate. And basically what that is, is that civilian industry will assist the military

when called upon or required, and they will collaborate. And one of the ways that you can see that is with the requirements or the specifications that their civilian ferries are made. I think it was since 1999, they've had a requirement that the ferries will have ramps that are capable for handling military vehicles and military operations. And then we've also seen civilian ferries participate in actual exercises with the PLA. China has a whole of nation approach to this and it's proving effective. I think those are really fascinating points. And personally, I've just been leaning much more into this kind of idea that historically, conflicts between large nations and certainly great powers are often measured in years and decades. I think that's a

really important point, this idea that the military capabilities at the outset are not nearly as important as the capacity to create and sustain capabilities throughout an extended period of time. And so this idea that what they have today is not necessarily what they're going to have in two years. And if you have a conflict that lasts three years, what they have in two years is actually much more important. So I think those are really important points. Trevor, I wanted to ask your article draws on a number of different studies and reports, and obviously you guys are not full-time China watchers. So you're drawing on mostly secondhand reporting and analysis. Were there any that you found particularly valuable or useful? I certainly

saw some notes to Tom Shugart's work, who we've had on the podcast before. He's done some really, really fascinating stuff about this amphibious lift question that Colin was talking about and what you were talking about, Trevor, with the civilian ferries, just to mention one. Yeah. So the reports that we heavily leveraged were the DOD's 2021 report on military and security developments involving the People's Republic of China. We kind of use that to frame or help assist in framing the argument in the paper. Other reports that we heavily leveraged came from the Naval War College, China Maritime Studies, as well as the war games executed by the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Kyle was able to get into and observe some of the

war games for the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Yeah, I thought it struck by reading the paper that was really well researched and seemed to bring in kind of all of these different important kind of analysis and groups and academics that are, academics and practitioners that are kind of looking at the China and the Taiwan situation. So Colin, I know we kind of already touched on it, but I was hoping we could get a little bit more into the issue of amphibious lift. You know, as a Marine, it's kind of near and dear to my heart. But when we think about the way that China would actually be able to put troops onto the island of Taiwan, what do we think that would look like? Or kind of what did you outline in the paper

for potential ways that could go. We've already kind of hit on the quality of scale and how having a lot of ships really helps just to begin with moving those forces and whether they're painted gray or otherwise, and a ship doesn't need to be painted gray in order to count. So one of the things that got me thinking about this was editing a paper on CEMSEC from last year, it came out about a year ago called Civilian Shipping Fearing the People's Liberation Army Ashore by Michael Odom and Connor Kennedy. That looks at the civilian angle that is really underappreciated or can be underappreciated for actually making the movement. So another aspect of that is the how and where those forces go once they get off the shipping.

The China Maritime Studies Institute report were really helpful in kind of laying out these various options of what the different forces are going to do, right? It's not just that it would be a D-Day style assault where ramps down and everybody just rushes ashore. The China Maritime Studies Institute lays out a range of options or of desired outcomes for the PLA to execute a joint island landing campaign and to shift it more towards several things, including airborne, air mobile, assault operations to seize ports of entry on the coast and airfields, to shift the center of gravity of Taiwan's defense from really that

initial over-the-beach assault to a more spread out operation. And that's the aspect of ports is also really important. And once a port is captured, if a port is captured, then a lot of shipping that was not initially relevant for the assault phase becomes really relevant for the sustainment phase to then mass more combat power ashore and actually take the rest of the island. I think those are really good points, and especially the piece about kind of airborne and air mobile, that it's not just by sea, you know, there's also this capacity to land, to come across the strait in helicopters or aircraft. Trevor, I also really appreciated the section of the article about fire support and how the PLA, that's the People's Liberation Army, might attack Taiwan with rockets and missiles. Can you kind of expand on that and talk a little bit about it? Just before we grab into it, I just want to tag on one thing about when we were talking about the air assault force. China has other nontraditional ways of getting troops across the street.

And one of them is their gyrocopter force, which I thought was kind of interesting and unique. So they just have a plethora of options available to them. As far as fire support, I think one of the important things, the PRC went to school on how we conducted Desert Storm. And they've taken note of our high use of both space-based assets and precision guidance systems. And they've also applied that to their rocket forces. And so the first island chain and inside, they've effectively made it so we cannot operate in a permissive environment. I would equate it to just an open field and every inch of that area is sighted. And so they can target those areas.

And one of the things that we thought was very interesting in the amateur hour part one was the comparison and or the lack of naval gunfire that the PLAN has available to it as a as a negative and discounting the other ways of delivering fire support. for example the rocket forces and reality of it is is that in modern warfare tube artillery just doesn't have the range to really affect a battle space without putting the firing platform at severe risk and we saw that even with the USS Savannah being the victim of the of a the first PGM attack essentially I believe it was off the coast of Sicily when you talk about the PLA they They can leverage, and the People's Republic of China, they can leverage, they have like a drone mothership, so they can launch hundreds of thousands of luring munitions and war games, for example, in which the Marine Corps ran their forces against an adversary that was

similarly equipped with luring munitions. They were losing entire Marine battalions. They had casualty rates in excess of 30%. And when they were talking about the javelin teams, which are usually two-man teams, so effective were the lowering munitions they essentially had to split that team in half where one guy was that guy got hit by a learning munition the other guy would run up and have to fire it and the other thing that you uh with precision munitions is we talk about like how mass and volume of fires is important it's something like recon by fire or uh blocking

barrages but what ukraine is kind of showing us is that the precision web precision effects on the battle space have a much more profound effect than the massive quantity of fires that you're able to deliver. And so the ability for China to accurately deliver weapons will probably have a bigger effect than necessarily the quantity that they can launch at the island. They have modernized significantly to have a lot of those precision weapons available to them. Really interesting points. And I think it kind of really highlights some of what's going on in the Ukraine right now, where we have this battle space where both sides have a mix of both precision and non-precision weapons, and we can start to see their relative effectiveness in some of the

ways that population terrorism, you know, that some of these Russian weapons that are not precision weapons, they really don't have much of a use case outside just shooting them generally into populated areas and at large infrastructure targets in the Ukraine. And Walker, real quick, one of the other interesting things that we've seen is that with precision weapons, you can actually get away with having less mass or less depth of magazine. And that just helps your case with sustainment and logistics, which in an invasion scenario, it will also be critically important. Absolutely. Yeah. When we're talking about expeditionary operations, you know, you have to be much more careful about your, your depth of magazine. So I think, you know, and this

is kind of for both of you that the million dollar question here is, you know, how worried should we be and what kind of a timeline should we look at? You know, we used to talk about the Davidson window. But now it seems like that may have been updated by the recent comments from Secretary of State Anthony Blinken or CNO Admiral Gilday. I know that this is not y'all's day job, but you want to take a stab at that? I'll hop on that to say that I honestly don't know. The thesis of the article is not certainty. It's not certain one way or the other about how this is going to go down, only that we shouldn't be so confident in ruling out the possibility that China could do this. We have to take it seriously, and that we should hedge against the most

dangerous possibility, because that would be really bad for everyone. So a lot of it depends on Xi, just like a lot of what's happening in Ukraine depended on Putin and still depends on Putin? Yeah, I think it would be a really bad and risky idea, especially in the near term for China. But like we said in the article, inadvisable has never meant impossible. It could try. I don't know if it would succeed or not. It would be bloody one way or the other. It would be a really bad thing. So I'll close with Michael Kaufman's go-to quote when asked for a prediction on Ukraine. It also applies here. War is highly contingent, and that war would also be highly contingent. For kind of a last question before we wrap up, I also want to ask you, Colin, you recently published an article with CIMSEC,

The Porcupine in No Man's Sea, Arming Taiwan for Sea Denial, about how we as the United States and how Taiwan itself might better prepare for this contingency, You know, if, God forbid, it came to pass and there was a Chinese attack on Taiwan, can you just talk a little bit about maybe moving forward, what are some of the things we should do? To back up a little bit, one of the things that motivated me to write that article was, you know, all of these war game results that are just really bloody, right? U.S. losses are huge. Yeah, the U.S. might prevail and achieve its desired outcome, but at great cost. And it would be a lot better if it never came to war, if deterrence succeeds and every day she gets up and says, well, you know what, not today. The odds are still not in my favor. So I'm not going to make this move. And it doesn't look like next year either, just because that the correlation of forces just isn't there. The U.S. is at a disadvantage in terms of geography because we always like to fight the away game.

right? We don't want to be fighting on the shores of the east or west coast. We have to cross oceans to do whatever we want to do first. That makes it harder operationally for the United States. We have to get there first. Taiwan, on the other hand, it's an unsinkable aircraft carrier, and it's got a lot more space than an aircraft carrier. And the tactical reality for modern naval combat is one of what I called in the article omnipresent weapons and omniscient surveillance, which is where tactical omniscience means you can see a lot of the surface of the ocean and that catalyzes long range precision weapons to create a massive maritime no man's land where a lot of ships are just going to be targeted by long range precision weapons and then

shot up, killed. But that works both ways. Sea denial works for everyone. So it makes it dangerous for the U.S. and allied forces to close too close to the first island chain or inside the first island chain during war, but it also makes it really dangerous to cross the Taiwan Strait. Sea denial works both ways. This is like, you know, John Mearsheimer's stopping power of water. My proposal there was that the United States should help Taiwan become a better porcupine by subsidizing and directing a new arsenal of democracy. And I tied that to the fungibility of funds you know the dod budget is what like 750 billion dollars a year but what would a few billion dollars a year dedicated to specific things like mines anti-ship missiles things like that

that could be put in place in the very near term they would have a greater impact on deterrence than the same money spent perhaps on something that has to cross the ocean and get there and then also has to fight on behalf of another country or of Taiwan rather than enabling Taiwan to defend itself. And I mean, for context, the U.S. subsidizes Israel's defense with $3.3 billion of funding per year. It's a bit less than the annual operating cost. for two armored brigade combat teams. Funding Taiwan's security to a similar level would create just an incredible A2AD challenge for China, while also reducing plausible American costs and risks for a Taiwan contingency scenario. You know, I wrote that like a year ago, and it was kind of

out there in terms of a policy proposal. But this year, there's the Taiwan Policy Act that proposes what, I think $10 billion of funding for Taiwan for these sorts of things over the next four years. It's not law yet, but it's just crazy how quickly these things move. Yeah, it seems like the Overton window of what's kind of acceptable and reasonable in the policy discourse over Taiwan has rapidly shifted. And we'll make sure that we put a link to that article in the show notes. Trevor, did you have any follow-up? As far as what Colin was talking about his article and the porcupine is the, in terms of like health moving, there are now proposals about shifting some of the industrial capacity of building warfighting materials to

Taiwan itself to help get those reserves and that material there faster and at speed. Interesting stuff. Well, I think we're just about out of time for today, but before we go, I'd like to give you both a chance to talk about what you're working on and where, if anywhere, I know where I can find you guys online, but where our listeners might be able to find you online over to you, Trevor. I have a couple of projects that I just not kind of ready to talk about quite yet, just because I want to make sure all the ducks are in a row, but the,

as far as finding me online, you can find me on LinkedIn or Twitter for Twitter is at, or excuse me, TP Levine 85. Well, we'll look for those coming out and Colin over to you. you? Where can our listeners find you online? And what, if anything, are you working on? Thanks. I'm also on Twitter and LinkedIn. My Twitter handle is at C Reeves Fox. Things that I'm working on, got a proceedings article, Naval Institute proceedings article, coming out with co-author here in hopefully the next few months that looks at long range precision strike in the form of carrier-launched cruise missiles based on a concept from the 1950s,

and not just a concept, but an operational system called the Regulus Missile, imagining what that could be like if carriers could launch cruise missiles with a 3,000 nautical mile range from their flight decks and free up the VLS cells of the cruisers and destroyers to do other things. So that'll be out coming out in proceedings, December, January. Yeah, we're at where else you can find me you can write for some sec, and I just might be your editor. Awesome. We'll look for that and I've been fortunate enough to see a couple drafts so our listeners should definitely be excited to see that article. Finally, I'd like to thank my guests Trevor Phillips Levine and Colin Fox for talking to us about their recent article hedging with humility, with Humility, reassessing China's power projection capabilities against Taiwan that you can find

because it was recently published by War on the Rocks. Take care. Help me, Bob, I'm pulling the alley. Pulling on the shimbo now. A porter of a porter, dear old. Way, hey, pulling the alley. A porter of white, both white and red, old. Pulling on the shimbo now. So help me, Bob, I'm pulling the alley. Way, hey, pulling the alley. Help me, help me, help me, put it in the alley, put it on the shimbo now.