U.S. military leaders and defense industries are looking for a sufficiently impressive foe to help scare more money out of Congress. The Chinese Navy (or, more correctly, the Chinese Peoples' Liberation Army Navy) is now the favorite candidate, for navy and defense industry analysts, to become the new Big Bad. Just how dangerous are these Chinese sailors and their ships? It turns out that, on closer inspection, not very.
I'll even agree with their analysis that China is not what they try to appear to be. But I think Strategypage misses the point. One, just appearing to be superior to us will peel away our allies near China. If we retrench our excellent military while China asserts their outwardly improving (but weaker than it looks) military, we will lose out in peacetime competition with China because the trajectories of power will appear to be in China's favor regardless of the exact point we are at.
Second, China does not have to become a global power to challenge us in their own neighborhood. And China can hurt us a great deal just pushing us back 500 miles from China. If China's military grows strong enough to defeat nearby opponents and at least nullify our forward-deployed forces, China can achieve quick victories before we can reinforce our forces in the western Pacific. Will we continue a fight against a nuclear-armed power to reverse those gains?
China increasingly has the power to hurt our forward deployed air bases and naval forces. Last year, we increased the uncertainty that China must feel by deploying 3 of our 4 Ohio-class SSGNs that each pack 154 Tomahawk cruise missiles within range of China and popping them up all at once to be seen.
This year, we showed that the boat works as planned:
With nearly all of Libya overrun by rebels, it was possible to get a close look at how well the American Tomahawk TLAM-E did in its first combat use. The missile performed as predicted. Most of these Tomahawks were fired during the initial air attack on March 19th. Moreover, most of the Tomahawks (over a hundred) launched on that day were fired by one ship; the nuclear submarine USS Florida. This was the first time an SSGN saw combat[.]As an aside, it's nice to see my assumption that Florida led the effort to kick down the door in Libya was right.
We are quickly coming to a time when our forward deployed forces near China must be hardened to endure the first strike and remain mission capable, be invisible to the Chinese, be able to stop the first bolt from the blue, or be expendable.
Anything not in those categories will need to be held back in Hawaii and Alaska to reinforce what survives the initial blast. The Ohio boats surely fit in the first category of frontline forces.
China may not be the Big Bad global peer competitor that some think it will become (and I doubt they will achieve parity), but they will be big enough and bad enough to be the power to beat in East Asia during the first three months of any war.
