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  1. CHINA IS A TOUGHER RIVAL THAN EVER

CHINA IS A TOUGHER RIVAL THAN EVER

Like the mythical Poseidon, China has its own trident: a three-pronged strategy to defend its homeland and prevent any intervention by the United States and its allies. It consists of implementing an ASCEL strategy in the ECS, creating an assured retaliation capability in the SCS, and establishing a support area in the Indian Ocean. These strategies mirror the Soviet navy’s approaches in Eastern Europe, the Sea of Okhotsk, and the Mediterranean Sea during the Cold War. The contrast between the Soviet Union’s unbalanced economy (which led to its ruling regime’s collapse) and China’s stronger economy, the economic levers it provides, and its close integration with naval strategy illustrates why the Chinese trident shows prospects superior to those of the Soviet naval strategy over the medium term.

However, there remains widespread concern among leaders of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) that China could fall victim to the same fate as the Soviet Union. This motivated long-term research into the Soviet collapse, which concluded that “military stresses caused by the Cold War” exacerbated “overemphasis on defense industries and military sector of economy” and led to “domination of Eastern Europe and other client states,” resulting in the collapse of the Soviet Union.68 In other words, the CCP understands that too much investment in militarization could cause a Chinese collapse—a lesson that informs the Chinese trident.

Some may argue that the size of the SCS—let alone the vastness of the Indian Ocean—makes it difficult, perhaps impossible, for China to defend its SLOCs effectively, and that it thus will remain vulnerable to blockade. But Chinese strategists have been contemplating mitigation measures against this vulnerability. Fang Liang, a professor at the People’s Liberation Army National Defense University, says that Chinese naval power can protect the Sea Silk Road, a subset of the BRI that includes the SLOCs from the SCS to the Indian Ocean.69 She recognizes the potential for armed conflict in the SCS and advocates for developing a spectrum of defenses against blockades for both peacetime and wartime situations. If a crisis escalates in a disputed area, the PLAN would project naval force using forward patrols and exercises, hoping to raise the cost and escalatory risk to the United States and its allies of implementing a blockade. During open armed conflict, the PLAN could take “corresponding-retaliation” measures commensurate with the degree of the blockade. As an example, Fang suggests that the PLAN would block other important choke points to impose costs on the blockading coalition.70 Carrying out such measures—which were proposed in official People’s Liberation Army media in 2015—would require substantial and potent naval force, but China already has the world’s largest navy numerically, which makes the execution of such proposals more plausible.71

As for the United States and its allies, China’s strategy presents serious burdens and dilemmas. It likely would be too costly for the U.S. Navy to attempt to counter all three of China’s strategic thrusts—in the ECS, SCS, and Indian Ocean—on its own, as well as blunting PLAN forces that will go on the offensive once a conflict starts. The German theorist Carl von Clausewitz believed that war structurally favors the defender, in part because attackers are forced to consume their advantages, gradually depleting their chance to win.72 This difficulty—validated by war games that have examined possible Pacific conflict scenarios—is what U.S. forces would have to confront when attempting to fight through the three prongs of China’s trident.73 Chinese ASCEL operations would complicate severely the U.S. Navy’s efforts to break into China’s buffer zone in the ECS.74 If China develops and matures its ability to conduct CSG operations in the Indian Ocean, the U.S. Navy would be hard-pressed to push the PLAN back into the South China Sea or Pacific Ocean. Compounding this challenge, the U.S. mainland’s extraordinary distance from the ECS, SCS, and Indian Ocean presents significant logistics difficulties, and the U.S. Navy would require a sound sustainment plan to support maritime combat in the western Pacific and Indian Ocean regions.75 Ironically, in some ways a peacetime or gray-zone environment may present more complexities logistically than does a wartime one, because until “the balloon goes up” the U.S. Navy must maintain presence in all three of these regions to prevent power vacuums and the erosion of its strategic position vis-à-vis China, while still marshaling capacity and capability for potential offensive operations in the event of a conflict. Addressing this multitude of strategic fronts and efforts simultaneously imposes high costs on the United States—which is itself a feature of China’s approach.

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