China's main army is being downgraded as naval, air, cyber, and space power are emphasized. This is both a problem for America and an opportunity.
China's army is having trouble justifying its role:
Unlike China’s relatively cogent thinking on future warfare in the air, maritime, cyber and space domains, its thinking on land combat has been increasingly incoherent. Indeed, the strategic priorities the Chinese Communist Party has been setting for the military since the 1980s have required a shift in emphasis from land power to air and sea power. With the Soviet Union gone and China’s land borders largely settled (disputes with India notwithstanding), the People’s Liberation Army Ground Force (PLAGF) has struggled to find a meaningful purpose in China’s future force structure beyond sustaining the capability needed to win a limited war on the Sino-Indian border.
Some of the incoherence is best laid out by military commentators within China itself. In an article in the People’s Liberation Army Daily, Wang Ronghui seeks to explore the role armoured forces will have in future warfare. Writing with much jargon and little detail, Wang argues that the recent history of armed conflict has confirmed the armoured forces’ role as the ‘king of land warfare’.
Strategically, I'd rather push China's focus back to ground forces and an inland focus to help protect America's allies from China's naval-air power. Fifteen years ago I noted that America has been strengthening alliances in Asia and arming Taiwan, but this shouldn't be the end of the mission:
While all this looks good for building an alliance to fight and defeat China, this is not playing the Great Game. This is making the best of a worst case scenario--war with China. Sure, if we must fight I'd rather win, but just going to war is going to cost us in lives and money.
One can say that we hope that by becoming strong enough we deter the Chinese but this is still only second best. A deterred China will always be on the verge of attacking, just waiting for the moment when we cannot stop them for one reason or another and so cannot deter them for even a short window of opportunity.
No, defeating China makes the best of the worst case and deterring China makes the best of the second worst case. We need to shovel the Snow back north. We need to play the Great Game in Asia to achieve our best case--a China pointed away from the south--Taiwan and the United States and our other allies--and pointed toward the north and the interior of Asia.
It seems like there are forces pushing China inland for economic reasons and away from the sea. Apparently that trend is not yet pushing China to upgrade their ground force priority.
As long as Chinese land power is downgraded, that actually gives America an edge in land power that America could potentially exploit in large scale operations around China's periphery with allies or in limited operations directly against China, as I wrote about in Military Review:
In many ways, given the hard-earned experience gained in Iraq since 1991 and Afghanistan since 2001, American ground forces have a greater relative advantage over China’s ground forces than American naval and air power have over their opposite numbers. Just maintaining a ground war option against China will cause China to divert resources from air and naval capabilities, giving American air and naval assets a greater chance of defeating Chinese A2/AD to enter and remain in the western Pacific.
America needs to encourage China to look inland, both to reduce pressure on American forces and allies in the western Pacific and to add friction to the brittle Russian-Chinese alignment.
But if China does not shift its focus inland, as long as the Navy/Marines and Air Force--with space and cyber support, of course--can maintain access and lines of supply to the Asian mainland, I think that opens an opportunity for America's battle-tested Army to provide its core competency to a campaign--large-scale combat operations:
The full potential of the Army to contribute significant numbers of brigade combat teams for land campaigns appears largely ignored in the vast expanse of PACOM. Without disembarking the Army on the shore, what is the point of being able to penetrate A2/AD weapons and remain off the coast of China as their area denial strategy seeks to prevent America from doing? Is it really important merely to sail at will off the coast of where those people and those armies live and deploy?
The tyranny of the shores is absolute. Asia is an Army problem, too.
Just the threat of such an option will stress China and stretch their forces by making them worry about where the Army might descend on China.
