Sea Control - Sea Control- 404 An Updated Perspective on China with Robert Haddick

Episode Date: January 14, 2023

Links1. "Fire on the Water: China, America and the Future of the Pacific, 2nd Edition," by Robert Haddick, U.S. Naval Institute Press, 2022.2 “Which ships will be combatants in the Taiwan Strait?�� by Robert Haddick, Lawfire, October 7, 2022.3. "Sea Control 401 - Defeat China's Navy, Defeat China's War Plan with Robert Haddick," by Jared Samuelson, CIMSEC, January 5, 2023.4. "Defeat China’s Navy, Defeat China’s War Plan," by Robert Haddick, War on the Rocks, September 21, 2022.5. Robert Haddick biography.

Hello, and welcome to the Sea Control Podcast. I'm Nathan Miller. Today, your hosts, Dr. Edward Salo and Robert Haddock, discuss Haddock's book, Fire on the Water, China, America, and the Future of the Pacific. This episode was edited and produced by William McQuiston. 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 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 Welcome to Sea Control. Today we are talking to Robert Haddock, the author of Fire on the Water, China, America, and the Future of the Pacific. The second edition of this book has recently been published by the Naval Institute Press. Robert Haddock is a visiting senior fellow at the Mitchell Institute of Aerospace Studies, the Air Force Association. He is a former U.S. Marine Corps officer with expertise in Southeast Asia and Africa. He was a contractor for the U.S. Special Operations Command and performed research for the Pentagon's Office of Net Assessment. He was a national security columnist at the Foreign Policy Magazine and has delivered lectures

on strategy across the U.S. government. Welcome to Sea Control. It's great to be here, Ed. Thanks for having me on. So, can you tell us a little more about yourself and your background and your current position? Sure. After I left university, I entered the U.S. Marine Corps as an officer. This was during the late Cold War period. I did all my service in the Pacific and Indian Ocean region, deployed there, engaged in security force assistance, training exercises and operations with U.S. allies and partners across the Indo-Pacific region. And after that, I went on to do other things. And in the, I'll say about 15 years ago,

I moved to Washington, D.C. to continue national security work there. One of my first jobs, as you mentioned, was writing a weekly column for Foreign Policy Magazine on national security issues, which I did for four years. After that, I moved to work as a contractor at U.S. Special Operations Command out of the MacDill Air Force Base headquarters in Florida, and worked on many projects for them. And now I'm at the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies, and there I've completed projects for Office of Net Assessment on air power history and campaign strategy, nuclear command and control, modernization, conventional and nuclear deterrence issues, long-range strike, etc., and continue to support the mutual institutions' research efforts on the roles of air, space power, cyber power, and so forth, and how they link into national strategies. well thank you so this is the second edition of your book what was the original purpose of the

book and why do you feel uh there needed to be a second edition well the the origins of fire on the water go back to about 2012 i was completing a project at that time for u.s special operations command on strategy in the indo-pacific region and as i completed that project i felt that I had more to say on the subject, and I had things to say on the subject that others weren't saying then about the Chinese threat, the buildup of the People's Liberation Army and its potential capacity in the decades ahead. And so I approached Adam Kane, who was then an acquisitions editor at Naval Institute Press about extending into a book-length treatment some of the unclassified research that I had done

on this topic for U.S. Special Operations Command and pitched him on that. And he agreed to take on the project, sponsor the book, which I wrote. And that first edition came out in September of 2014. And the purpose of that first edition of Fire on the Water was to basically alert readers to the growing China threat, the potential of the People's Liberation Army, what it could mean to U.S. forces and operational concepts in the Indo-Pacific theater. And a lot of people were not paying attention at that time to the rising military threat from China because they were so focused on operations and problems in the Central Command region. But the book got a favorable response. And as I said, the purpose of the book was to alert people to this problem. And I'm happy

to say that over the years since it came out, that certainly has been the case. And now everybody's quite energized and activated about the Chinese military threat. Well, in 2020, about seven, six, seven, eight years after the first project, the project of the first edition, Adam Kane, who's now the director of Naval Institute Press, approached me to write a second edition and brought up the point that so much has changed since the first edition came out, not only new facts and new estimates about the PLA's potential, but also much to say about the U.S. strategic response over the past decade. And so I agreed to write the second edition. And your listeners should understand that the second edition is almost a completely

new book. It's about, I'd say, 85% new material, fully updates, facts, and estimates on the PLA's modernization forecasts into the 2030s in that regard, and provides a critique to the U.S. response to the PLA's modernization over the past decade. Thank you. In the introduction, you described China as a true peer, the likes of which the U.S. has not faced in its hundred years of being a great power. Can you elaborate a little on that? I thought that was a really interesting statement? Well, it's because of China's economic power and the resources available to it far exceed those that were available to the Soviet Union during the Great Cold War and even exceeds China's economic potential and, of course, the economic capability or capacity that China has

to support the PLA even exceeds what the Allies had to face against the Axis powers during World War II. So it really is something completely different in terms of the magnitude of the PLA's military potential compared to the Cold War competition or even World War II. And so that's That's that's what what makes the threat so much more challenging, sort of on an institutional and industrial level for the United States. So the book is basically divided into two parts. The first few chapters kind of take us to where we are now, and the rest is the book gives recommendations. So, I guess just kind of starting out, what are the sources of conflict in the Indo-Pacific region between China and the U.S. and its allies? Well, this is sort of a fundamental situation that recurs through history when two great powers face each other in a region of the world.

So it should not be unfamiliar to listeners who are students of history going all the way back, say, to the ancient Greeks and all the way forward from there. But in specifics, the Chinese leadership is no longer comfortable about the U.S. and its coalition partners, allies and partners in the region, their control over the sea lines of communication in the Indo-Pacific region. China faces this great dilemma over the Strait of Malacca and the access for oil and natural resources flowing in to power the Chinese economy and the fact that the United States and its allies have control over those straits and those sea lines. As is very typical with great powers, the Chinese Communist Party wants more control over its near abroad and would prefer to have pacified neighbors. And this repeats themes from history. The Chinese Communist Party wants its authoritarian system viewed as a legitimate form of government throughout the world. And I think China's leaders also fear democratic influence and open society influence taking hold inside China and what that could mean to the longevity of their rule over China.

And so summing all this up, I think China's leaders think that a strong PLA military force will give them options to defend the party's rule in China over the long run. Looking at the other side of the table, the United States and its allies, by contrast, want to simply maintain the status quo in the region. And what's ironic is that that status quo has benefited China so greatly over the past four decades. I really enjoyed your history of the American military presence in the region. As a historian, those chapters always get with me.

But can you briefly explain how we got into the region militarily? Sure. It was all a consequence of the great Pacific campaigns against Japan during World War II. And even in 1943, almost two years before World War II ended, policy planners, military planners, and diplomacy planners in Washington, D.C. were already planning for what the U.S. posture would be after the war ended. And I discussed this and have citations about all this in the book. And I agree it was a kind of fascinating part of my research on this. But anyway, so in 1943 there, even before the Tarawa campaign in the Gilbert Islands, these planning groups were already planning for U.S. military posture. And their conclusion from what they had already seen in World War II

was that the splendid isolation and offshore balancing didn't work to protect the U.S. interests and would no longer be U.S. policy after World War II ended. The new policy would be what has been termed perimeter defense in depth, with the defense of the United States beginning on the Eurasian supercontinent itself, with U.S. forces deployed along the perimeter of Eurasia to defend the United States on the other side of the ocean. And that's been the policy ever since then. But there were consequences that flowed from that. U.S. military thus sort of was designed to fight wars from bases in the theater on the perimeter of Eurasia.

And therefore, the development of U.S. military forces, equipment, and operational concepts were focused around relatively short-range systems because they would be fighting from bases close to where military action would take place. And now the problem, all these 80 years later or 70 years later, is that adversaries like the PLA now possess vast inventories of precision-guided munitions, and they can now shut down and suppress those bases along the Eurasian perimeter from which the U.S. has long been used to fighting from. And studies from the Office of Net Assessment in the 1990s

and a series of quadrennial defense reviews beginning in the 1990s and extending for 20 years after that predicted the problems with this approach and the threats to these U.S. bases. But the services unfortunately ignored these warnings because the implications were too disturbing to their institutional cultures. And that kind of brings us, you've been touching on this, how is China countering the U.S. military in the region? Well, China is exploiting what I call the sensor missile military technical revolution.

And this is basically the advancement of microprocessors, microelectronics installed in sensors and missile guidance systems and so forth has become ubiquitous and has allowed advanced military powers like the United States and the PLA to acquire precision-guided munitions, which vastly increased the efficiency of military operations. And now, with ubiquitous networks of sensors tied to long-range precision-guided munitions, targets on the surface, fixed land targets, air bases and so forth, ports, but also ships at sea are very vulnerable to precision guided munitions that have been developed and are guided by the sensor missile military technical revolution. And there's a little bit of irony to this because

back 15 years ago, maybe 10 years ago, Admiral Jonathan Greenard, who's a former chief of Naval Operations for the U.S. Navy, wrote an interesting essay for Naval Institute Proceeding magazine called Payloads, Not Platforms. And the theme of that essay was that if a military force has great munitions, that's more important and gives them more capability than having great platforms from which those munitions are launched. And that's exactly what the PLA is doing now. They have some of the best anti-ship cruise missiles and land attack cruise missiles, and they've really emphasized their military technology, developing these great precision-guided munitions and the sensor networks to guide them. And now just looking at the PLA's air power, which resides both in the PLA Air Force and in the aviation arm of the PLA Navy, that combined PLA air power has the capacity to fire, to launch about 1,400 precision missile shots per day, both land attack and anti-ship missiles per day at a sustained rate of fire day after day after day. And this missile shot capacity has doubled over the past 10 years.

And so surface targets land and at sea inside the PLA's missile engagement zone. And that missile engagement zone extends out 3,000 kilometers deep away from China's coast. Those targets are in grave jeopardy. And so, therefore, U.S. and coalition war plans that are based on fighting from surface bases inside the PLA's missile engagement zone, those are plans that will result in severe casualties and likely failure for the U.S. and its allies. Well, that brings us to the question of what has the U.S. been doing to counter that threat right now? Well, unfortunately, and I discuss this in detail in sort of the middle portion of the book, as a group, and of course there are individuals that are exceptions to this, but as a rule and as a group, I'd say that senior officials, military and civilian, inside the Department of Defense have yet to reckon with the implications of the PLA's employment of the military. technical revolution. A truly effective response that would really recognize the threats to surface forces is just too disruptive to the institutional cultures inside the Pentagon and on Capitol Hill

and among the defense contracting system. And thus, in my view, there's been very little response to the PLA missile threat, there's been tinkering at the edges, but the response has not been large enough to be effective against the threat that has now emerged, in my view. And basically, every war game that think tanks and planning staffs inside the Pentagon run and up at Naval War College in Newport and elsewhere, all these war games reveal this to be true. But responses are yet to come about, unfortunately. So the next three chapters deal with what you call a new approach to a conventional deterrent

to China. Can you discuss the elements of this proposed new deterrent? Well, yes. The United States and its allies and partners in the region need an operational concept better than what seems to be present right now. And they need an operational concept that matches U.S. strengths against China's vulnerabilities. And that new concept also needs to avoid exposing United States, U.S., and allied centers of gravity to the PLA's firepower. We don't know what the Indo-Pacific Command's war plans are. Obviously, they're top secret. But we do know what the Department of Defense has invested in for many years. And we can see from that, that as I mentioned earlier, the U.S. has postured to fight, to attempt to fight from inside the PLA's missile

engagement zone, which for reasons I've already explained, doesn't appear to be a great idea. So what to do? Well, the basic idea is that the U.S. needs to make a critical assessment of what its strengths and vulnerabilities are, and then look at China and see what its strengths and vulnerabilities are, and try to match up U.S. strengths against China's vulnerabilities and avoid having the same done to the United States the other way. And one of China's great vulnerabilities is its own navy, its own surface fleet, and that China needs that surface fleet if it's going to succeed in conquest of Taiwan or the Senkakus or other offensive military operations in the region. And so there are opportunities for the United States to match up its strengths in long-range

strike, its bomber aircraft equipped with anti-ship cruise missiles and so forth, and match them up against China's vulnerability, its surface navy. And so under a concept like that, the mission of the U.S. bomber plus attack submarine force would be to destroy China's maritime power, and not just its Greyhound Navy, but other parts of China's maritime power broadly defined, destroy that maritime power as rapidly as possible. One way to construct a force to do this, and this can be done based on extensions of forces that the U.S. already possesses, would be to maintain a tripwire force along the first island chain that China would have to attack in order to achieve any aggression goals in the region, but that would ensure that the U.S. would be a combatant in the war. But that tripwire force should not be large enough to be a center of gravity that would cause the United States to lose the war.

The big hammer for the United States should come from over the horizon, and that would be the bomber force and the Navy's attack submarine forces, which the PLA cannot really get to. They cannot interdict those forces like they can surface forces west of the Second Island chain. And that big hammer coming from over the horizon would be the force that would actually do the job of defeating China's surface forces if they attempted aggression in the region. So you comment that your recommendations are more for managing the peace and not a war plan. In your opinion, how can a good strategy preserve the peace and create a military that is able to win a war if that occurs? Yes, well, the whole point of everything I discuss in the book is to prevent a war from occurring in the first place by strengthening deterrence and convincing China's leaders

that they don't have feasible military options for aggression. And this is going to be an open-ended competition, and we have to assume that it's going to last for decades, just as the competition against the Soviet Union was open-ended and lasted for decades. And so U.S. deterrence strategy and modernization of U.S. conventional forces to create deterrence by denial in the region has to be a strategy that's economical and affordable and something that the U.S. public and the U.S. policy process will support over the long term over many administrations of all political parties and so forth. Now, we did this against the Soviets during the Cold War, and we can do it again against China in this century. But to have an economical and affordable military investment strategy, that strategy has to economize. It has to focus on the best competitive matchups, what we do, our U.S. enduring strengths versus China's enduring vulnerabilities. And my conclusion, as I discussed in the last chapter of the book, is that there could be a happy outcome on this, that the United States and its allies can sustain conventional deterrence by denial over the long run and at an affordable price to society. We have some factors benefiting us in this regard. China and its society and economy

are actually on a bad trajectory for the remainder of the century. China's labor force is declining rapidly. That's an artifact of one-child policy. And according to projections from the United Nations, China can expect its labor force to decline by 40 percent between now in the end of the century, whereas the U.S. labor force will continue with steady growth during that period. China's economic productivity is stagnant relative to the United States. And now, because of China's increased belligerence, our allies and partners in the region are now more motivated to work with the United States and are more energized against the Chinese threat and now cooperate more than ever with the United States on military preparation,

interoperability, training exercises, and so forth. So my conclusion from all this is, as I said, the coalition, U.S.-led coalition, can sustain this competition at a reasonable cost over the long run. But doing so is going to require better civilian leadership than has existed at most times since the end of the Cold War. And I discuss in the book, contrast U.S. civilian leaders during the Cold War, how in many cases, these leaders were presidents themselves, like Eisenhower and Kennedy and Carter and Reagan. They were very knowledgeable about defense issues. They had strong views. They had studied the details and they frequently pushed through dramatic changes in strategy and investments to counter the Soviet Union and the changing strategic situation with

the Soviet Union. Unfortunately, since the end of the Cold War, the U.S. defense policy processes have got complacent, and senior policymakers didn't engage so much on defense issues anymore, and the services have basically been left to manage their own affairs. And this is not resulted in a good solution because we don't have the coordinated, integrated, reformed strategy that we need to confront the rapidly rising threat that China now presents. So the allies and the partners the U.S. have in the region, they seem pretty critical to the strategy. Would you agree? Yes. U.S. allies and partners are very important and very helpful. I'd say that the

cooperative relationship that the U.S. has with its partners and allies in the region has never been better than it is now. And a lot of that is the result of the clear gravity of the Chinese threat, which nobody can deny now and everybody is responding to. So the U.S. relationship with its allies is in good shape now compared to where it was 10 or 20 years ago. And we can see that with the military training exercises that occur and what's happening with coordination on interoperability of military forces and so forth. And there's always more to do in that regard. The U.S. should always be a reliable ally and should always do what it can to be a good ally and to further strengthen these relationships and never leave that in doubt. But the United States

It's also, it's always good to assume the worst when making long range plans for your defense needs. And ultimately, though, the United States needs defense programs and operational concepts that don't absolutely require partner consent to achieve U.S. security. And so ultimately, the United States needs military investments and concepts that will will allow it to win a war on its own if necessary. But having said that, we should cherish our allies and partners and always be a great ally ourselves. So kind of ending up the interview with the elephant that's always in the room, Taiwan.

In your opinion, do you feel that there is going to be a major crisis or is this going to be something that both parties saber-rattle with, but isn't going to be the major thing that causes conflict? Well, there's no question, Ed, but that Taiwan is the great flashpoint, and it's the key strategic objective for both sides of the competition in the region. And naturally, I do discuss the Taiwan flashpoint quite a bit in my book. Xi Jinping just reminded President Biden about how critical, what a core issue Taiwan is to the PLA leadership, to the CCP leadership, to him personally. So this is the key test of deterrence by denial. It's China's core strategic goal, but it's also the hardest challenge for U.S. military strategy in the region.

But there's no need for war over Taiwan if the U.S. builds its elements of deterrence, builds the three factors of deterrence that make deterrence successful. Firstly, having a military capability that will defeat China's war plan that China can't do anything about. And I've described that in this podcast already, long range strike forces, plus the Navy's attack submarines and a sensor network that supports that operational concept. So first, to have a capability that China can't do anything about. Then the second part, second factor of deterrence is displaying the will to use this capability. And this was a regular feature during the Cold War against the Soviet Union, where the U.S. and its European allies regularly

displayed their nuclear forces with exercises and displays that convinced the Soviet leadership that we had the forces and we had the will to use them if we were provoked to do so. And then the last factor of deterrence is to make sure that the adversary understands the first two factors, capability and will, within that adversary's own cultural framework. And this requires knowledge about how the adversary's cultural framework functions. So you need all three of these deterrents. Ever since the end of the Cold War, U.S. policymakers have been a little bit shy about building and displaying military power for the purposes of deterrence. But now with China's assertiveness and the rapid growth of the PLA, these policymakers

need to learn more from their Cold War era predecessors about how to build these three elements of deterrence and drop their shyness and show their willingness to display these components of deterrence in order to prevent a war over Taiwan or anywhere else in the region from occurring. Well, thank you. So what are you currently working on now and how can our listeners follow you on social media or other places? Well, I think the best way to follow me is through the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies website and the work of my colleagues there. What I'm currently working on is I'm continuing to write essays and record podcasts that explain the themes in the book, Fire on the Water, second edition.

For example, in September, I had an essay on War on the Rocks that discussed this matchup against U.S. long-range strike versus the PLA Navy. Last week, I believe it was, I had an essay in The Hill that talked about the Australia-UK-U.S. defense sharing agreement and how to save that agreement and keep it moving forward. Politico just made a mention of my book in their one book, three questions section in their weekly China newsletter. I'll have podcasts forthcoming from the Air University, Asia Pacific Research Center, and later from Aerospace Advantage podcast from the Mitchell Institute itself, my home base. So more to come, talking about the themes of the book and trying to get that message out.

Well, thank you for your time. And like I said, I really enjoyed the book. It was very thought provoking and something that is definitely timely right now. So this is, again, Sea Control. And we thank you and see you next episode. © BF-WATCH TV 2021 We'll be right back.