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| P-8 Poseidon ( Image credits- Wikipedia- United States Navy)
The close encounter on Aug. 19 between a US Navy P-8 Poseidon patrol aircraft and a Chinese Air Force J-11 fighter-bomber over the South China Sea is a reminder of the growing clash of interests between the two great powers.
Pentagon spokesman Rear Adm. John Kirby accused the Chinese fighter pilot of flying within 20 feet of the P-8 and said his conduct was “not only unprofessional, it’s unsafe and it is certainly not keeping with the kind of military-to-military … relations that we’d like to have with China.”
Yang Yujun, Kirby’s counterpart at the Chinese Ministry of Defense, rejected Kirby’s description and offered advice on how the US could prevent future such incidents: “[T]he #US side should, from a perspective of building new models of major power relations between China and the US and in line with the principle of ‘no conflict, no fighting, mutual respect, cooperation and win-win’, adopt practical measures to reduce and eventually stop its reconnaissance activities against China, so as to create a good environment for the development of bilateral military relations.”
We should assume US policymakers will not follow Yang’s advice any time soon. In that case, we should expect more such incidents as China continues to press its maritime territorial claims in the East and South China seas. US officials will then have to face up to the risks involved with resisting China’s assertions in the two seas.
The standard playbook in the past during such confrontations has been to quickly send reinforcements to US forward bases in the region and order an aircraft carrier strike group or two to sail to the trouble spot. The United States ran this play during the March 1996 Taiwan Strait crisis with a seemingly happy outcome.
But #China also learned a lesson from that event: The #PLA would build up its missile, aerospace and naval power to dissuade the US from successfully running that play a second time.
China’s subsequent military modernization program, two decades old and still ongoing, has been designed to specifically exploit fundamental weaknesses in the US force structure in the Western Pacific. China’s “access denial” land-attack and anti-ship missile forces, along with its growing submarine fleet, increasingly threaten US forward bases in the region and its surface naval forces, such as its carrier strike groups.
US policymakers who in a future crisis think they could simply rerun the March 1996 Taiwan Strait play might next time find a Chinese counterpart confident in his preparations and ready to escalate. That would come as a shock to US policymakers, who have taken the superiority of their conventional forces for granted.
US policymakers and military planners have become complacent about their operational concepts and the structure of their forces in East Asia. An excessive reliance on short-range tactical aircraft has forced planners to concentrate most of America’s firepower in the region at a few forward bases, all of which are highly vulnerable to Chinese missiles.
Although the #US #Navy has invested heavily in weapons and technology to defend its aircraft carriers and other surface ships, cheap yet smart supersonic anti-ship missiles delivered from a variety of platforms in saturation, multi-axis attacks, threaten to overwhelm ship defenses.
Pentagon planners are attempting to match China’s growing military power by deploying even more ships and aircraft at the already-crowded and vulnerable forward bases. But that will only heighten instability as it gives both sides the incentive to strike first during a crisis under the logic of “use it or lose it.”
Instead, the Pentagon needs to rebalance its investments toward longer range, stealthy and less vulnerable platforms and payloads. These should include greater reliance on the next-generation bomber based outside the theater instead of short-range aircraft; a much larger fleet of submarines instead of vulnerable surface ships; and a rethink of continuing compliance with the archaic 1987 Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty, which prohibits the #US from taking the cheapest path to counterbalancing China’s growing missile power.
But it will take more than new hardware to manage an open-ended peacetime security competition in Asia-Pacific. The United States and its allies need to marshal the full range of diplomatic, political, economic, conventional and unconventional #military tools into a comprehensive strategy to influence Chinese behavior in ways that protect the interests of all countries in the region. The Asia-Pacific’s long run of stability and prosperity can continue, but it will require a better strategy from the US and its partners.
About the author- Robert Haddick is a former US Marine Corps officer and a research contractor at US Special Operations Command. He is the author of “Fire on the Water: China, American, and the Future of the Pacific.
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