Sea Control - Sea Control 401 - Defeat China's Navy, Defeat China's War Plan with Robert Haddick

Episode Date: January 5, 2023

Links1. "Defeat China’s Navy, Defeat China’s War Plan," by Robert Haddick, War on the Rocks, September 21, 2022.2. "Michèle Flournoy testifies before the House Armed Services Committee on DOD’s role in the competition with China," January 15, 2020.3. "Fire on the Water: China, America and the Future of the Pacific, 2nd Edition," by Robert Haddick, U.S. Naval Institute Press, 2022. 

Hey folks, it's Jared. My guest today is Robert Haddock. You'll be hearing from him again soon as he's also recording an episode with Dr. Ed Salo. But today we're going to discuss an article he authored for War on the Rocks entitled, Defeat China's Navy, Defeat China's War Plan. This episode was edited and produced by Joshua Gruber. At SimSec, we believe 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 nonprofit on Amazon Smile. 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 local chapters and contact information on our website, 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 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. Aloha, shipmates, and welcome back aboard Sea Control. My guest today is Robert Haddock, and we're discussing his piece for War on the Rocks entitled Defeat China's Navy, Defeat China's War Plan. So, Robert, welcome. Could you start by introducing yourself to the listeners, please? Jared, well, first, thanks for having me on the show.

This is great, and I'm really happy to be here. I work for the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies in Arlington, Virginia, just nearby the Pentagon. I'm a visiting senior fellow there, and I've recently published a new book published by Naval Institute Press out of Annapolis. Anyways, the book is the second edition of Fire on the Water, China, America, and the Future of the Pacific. And the first edition came out eight years ago. This new edition is about 85% new material. It's basically a new book. It extends the analysis of projections of the PLA's capabilities into the 2030s and does a new thorough analysis of the U.S. strategic response to China's strategy and military modernization. and reaches some new conclusions and recommendations on how to sustain deterrence by denial in the Indo-Pacific region. So that's how I arrived at this point. And it was the War on the

Rocks essay that we're going to talk about today explores one of the themes in the book and was written coinciding with the publication of the book. Well, thank you for highlighting that. We'll be sure to drop a link to the book for U.S. and I on the notes page of the podcast. As a reminder to the listeners, all opinions are our own and not reflective of any institution with which we might be otherwise associated. So, Robert, why did you describe China's force structure as quote-unquote counter-intervention? What does that force structure look like? Well, China's counter-intervention, and that's their term, the PLA's term, grew out of the third Taiwan Straits crisis from the mid-1990s and where the U.S. response by Pacific Command and the Clinton administration back then, almost 30 years ago now, was to sail two well-equipped U.S. aircraft carrier strike groups towards Taiwan in response to

the PLA's intimidating missile shots that they were directing against Taiwan. That seemed to resolve the crisis, but the PLA went back and analyzed what happened, and they said, we're going to make some changes and modernization of our forces to make sure that we're never put in that situation again. So they've embarked on this very expansive military modernization over the past three decades, which has a focus of countering intervention forces such as the U.S. Navy and Air Force from interfering in their operations around the first island chain, should it ever come to that. And so the composition of those forces, as I mentioned in the War on the Rock's article, is this ever-expanding air power capability of the PLA, which is contained in both

the PLA Air Force and the PLA Navy, which both operate ever-growing inventories of fighter attack aircraft and bomber aircraft. Over 200 H-6 bomber types now operated by the two Chinese services and 1,400 strike fighter, fighter attack aircraft operated by the two services equipped with state-of-the-art anti-ship cruise missiles, such as missiles that have Mach 3 capability, very sophisticated sensor packages on them, the YJ-12, YJ-18 models, more capable than the U.S. Harpoon missile. And they've also built out sensor and communications network to support these forces with ISR and communications support to direct strike operations against U.S. surface naval forces and U.S. fixed bases along the First and Second Island chains. So that's been the

description of PLA's modernization program since the third Taiwan Strait crisis. And it's a modernization effort that continues to grow. They continue to put more hardware on their bases every day. Training is getting better. Integration of forces is getting better. And it poses a real threat to traditional U.S. operating concepts in the region. He wrote, and I quote, Chinese planners hope that tens of thousands of U.S. casualties inflicted over just a few days will result in demoralization and political defeat, end quote. We'll timestamp this for the listeners. You and I are recording this Sunday, October 16th. So if there's something I reference in Ukraine or you, the listener, think that I should be referencing Ukraine that happened in late October, early November. That's why we're not talking about it. It hasn't happened yet.

We're on month eight of a theoretical three day invasion of Ukraine where an invader overestimated or underestimated a will to fight. So if that is an actual planning assumption, do you think it's a faulty one, given the way that Americans have typically reacted to attacks in the past? Well, it could it could very well be. We all remember Pearl Harbor and the U.S. cultural response to that. It's a big part of U.S. cultural memory. That could very well be a faulty Chinese planning assumption, but it might not be. And I think one of the points I wanted to make in my War on the Rocks article is that the U.S. response to a Chinese lunge for Taiwan or the Senkakus or some similar type operation does not have to run risks like that in terms of accepting high U.S. casualties and making assumptions about a vigorous patriotic

response by U.S. society. U.S. planners and policymakers have other choices to respond to PLA aggression that don't have to risk high casualties, high force destruction, critical centers of gravity, critical and iconic center of gravity targets, exposing them to the PLA's firepower. There are other courses of action that don't have to risk U.S. centers of gravity, but can hold Chinese centers of gravity at risk. And that's what I describe in the article. So why do you think bombers are the correct first response to an attack on Taiwan and why is China's Navy? And I put in our notes here, parentheses, maritime forces, because the PLA Navy, depending on how you want to count, could encompass a lot of things to include a bunch of fishermen running around enforcing sovereignty claims.

But why do you think that's the optimal target? Well, the PLA cannot accomplish the seizure of Taiwan or the Senkakus or so forth if they lose their maritime power. And their surface naval forces are just as vulnerable as U.S. and allied surface naval forces are. They represent a vulnerable center of gravity target that the PLA would present to U.S. firepower. And the U.S. bomber force, if it was properly equipped with the right munitions and C4ISR support, could be an excellent matchup of one of our strengths versus a PLA vulnerability in this scenario. But there are a lot of things that U.S. planners and Congress and Title X organized train and equip bureaucracy back inside the D.C. Beltway needs to do in order to get the bomber force into a position where it can exploit this opportunity. Michelle Florina, testifying before Congress in 2020, suggested the U.S. need to be able to sink every ship in the Chinese Navy within the initial 72 hours of a conflict, which would seem to align with your thesis.

And you've kind of hinted at the answer to this question already, but I'll give you the opportunity to expound on it a little bit more. But does U.S. magazine debt support her plan or yours? Not yet, but it could. And with modest investment and without great technological risk, because the technology is already there to create and stockpile the necessary munitions in short order and without technical risk. So, yes, I agree with Secretary Flournoy's view on this. I actually cite her testimony on this in my new book. Former Deputy Secretary of Defense Robert Work has said the same thing along the same lines. And establishing this U.S. capability and displaying it to Chinese decision makers would go a long way towards reinforcing deterrence by denial in the Indo-Pacific. What solutions are you proposing both to provide more launch platforms as well as to address the munitions stockpile issue?

First, the Lockheed Martin at their Troy, Alabama facility, that's the assembly plant for both the joint air-to-surface standoff missile and long-range anti-ship missile. And the long-range anti-ship missile is probably well known to your listeners. It's an excellent missile, which both the U.S. Navy and U.S. Air Force are acquiring. It is a variant of the Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missile. But what is puzzling is how few both the U.S. Air Force and the U.S. Navy are buying of the LRASM variant. The Air Force has plans to buy many thousands of the JASM land attack missile, which is very deadly but only against fixed targets, and just a relative handful. maybe around 150 or so over the entire program of the anti-ship variant. And the Navy's plans to buy several hundred.

But it's odd that there's this imbalance between buying so many of the land attack versions and very, very few of the anti-ship version. And so one of my recommendations, and it's just not mine, and many other military analysts have also made this recommendation, is that just have Lockheed Martin make fewer of the land attack JASA missiles and more of the LRASMs so that the bomber force and also the Navy's F-18s will be in a position to be well-equipped with the anti-ship variant and ready to focus their attention on China's maritime power to deter aggression along the First Island chain.

So that's one recommendation. One of my colleagues at the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies, Mark Gunzinger, a retired Air Force colonel, former B-52 pilot, and an expert on long-range strike, has described a simple, straightforward, easy-to-produce, inexpensive, sort of mid-range munition with, say, 50 to 100-mile range to it that could be launched, air-to-surface munition that would be capable against moving targets. The sensors that would be used for this munition already exist and are in other applications. And this type of munition would be, like I said, inexpensive per unit cost and stockpiles could be established rapidly. And it would be a munition

that the stealthy aircraft, F-35s and B-2s and B-21s could use to attack moving surface targets such as ships, and do so from safe areas outside of enemy air defense engagement capabilities and for the stealthy aircraft. And so that's a recommendation to the Congress and the Armed Services Committees have yet to take up, but could be done and could be done within a few years during this dangerous decade that we're in right now uh regarding uh deterrence in taiwan so a follow-up question there because we talked a lot about the munitions side but uh how about launch platforms as far as uh i know that b-21 is going to be coming online here in the course of the next few years i don't

know when the uh the initial operational capability will be actually resident within the air force is there talk of like bringing some older platforms along here as far as what's able to deploy these missiles well that's that's a great question every few months we seem to get some kind of positive surprise on the on the b-21 program first uh you know maybe nine months ago uh it was thought that there were just two prototypes uh being assembled not then we learned that there were five and now there's six some modest uh number of b-21s may be available earlier than previously expected but we cannot you know hope is not a plan and uh one must always assume that there will be hiccups and glitches in uh that program as there are with most any

new weapon program so one cannot count on that but amazingly the uh last year the The U.S. Air Force retired 17 B-1 bombers and sent them to the boneyard because the Air Force and the Congress were not interested in appropriating a few hundred million dollars, really a rounding error in the Pentagon's budget, to repair these planes and maintain their flying status. And so they were retired out of the inventory. Each B-1 bomber can carry 24 LRASM anti-ship missiles on a single sortie. So just restoring 10 of these, appropriating, say, $300 million to repair 10 B-1s that were sent to the boneyard last year, bringing them back into service would add 240 missile shots against China's maritime capacity for a modest expense. That's an example of how to add more shooting capacity quickly and at modest expense.

Thanks. And then just one final question, because the other thing that didn't really come up here is the sensors. I don't know what these Air Force aircraft fly with as far as sensor capability to actually detect the target that they're trying to engage at that range. My guess is they're reliant on somebody who's a lot closer to the target to provide that cueing. So I would assume that there's some discussion that would need to happen between the Air Force, the Navy, and probably the Marine Corps, based on everything that you're doing with Force Design 2030, as far as getting some local forces in close enough to establish where any forces to be targeted are. Is that discussion ongoing? Well, yes. As your listeners know, the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command continues to run very useful joint force exercises like Valiant Shield and others where the Navy, Air Force, other services get to cooperate on these sorts of tactical problems and establish effective targeting and data sharing networks. networks. There are amazing things happening right now in the private sector with the synthetic aperture radar satellite constellations, which are providing near real-time imaging with 50 centimeter resolution or even down into single-digit centimeter resolution to identify

with less than 20-minute latency targets on the surface. And these vendors are selling their imagery to the Department of Defense, the National Reconnaissance Office, the Air Force, and the Joint Intelligence Organization. Cooperation between Pacific Fleet's attack submarine force, which could be very useful around Taiwan, identifying targets and transmitting that targeting data to strike aircraft you know is another operational concept that I'm sure is used and should be exercised and deep in that relationship further and so the developments across

the enterprise with joint all domain command and control of course these are widely dispersed efforts right now and I make the recommendation in the book that But as a first priority, the joint all-domain command and control effort should be focused on the Taiwan problem and support to the U.S. bomber force against China's maritime power. That would give them a specific tactical problem to focus on when designing and developing this sort of first generation of JADC2. So these are all recommendations that address questions that you just asked me and really help organize and focus efforts and get things done in a rapid manner over the next couple of years while we're kind of going through this dangerous window in the 2020s regarding Taiwan scenario. I'm sorry, that's all that we have time for today. I'd like to thank my guest, Robert Haddock. Robert, where can we find you online and what are you working on next? Well, you can find me at the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies, and I'm continuing to write essays for various outlets that explain some of the concepts and ideas in Fire on

the Water, second edition. Your listeners should keep an eye out for those forthcoming pieces. Well, thank you again for joining us. I'll remind the listeners there's links both to the War on the Rocks essay, Michelle California's Testimony, and Fire on the Water, Second Edition. Those will be down in the show notes. But thank you again for joining us. So listeners, thank you for tuning in.

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