Posted on January 10, 2020

How the U.S. Could Lose a War With China

Kathy Gilsinan, The Atlantic, July 25, 2019

If a war broke out between the United States and China, the clash between two of the world’s most powerful militaries would be horrific. And the United States could very well lose.That’s a concern among current and former defense officials and military analysts, one of whom told Breaking Defense earlier this year that in war games simulating great-power conflict in which the United States fights Russia and China, the United States “gets its ass handed to it.”Speaking at the Aspen Security Forum last week, Admiral Philip Davidson, who oversees U.S. military forces in Asia, called China “the greatest long-term strategic threat to the United States and the rules-based international order.” He described China’s rapid military buildup in nearly every domain—air, sea, land, space, and cyber—and said that while China’s capabilities don’t outnumber America’s in the region for now, it’s possible they could overtake the United States’ within the next five years.

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The question is what could actually cause the United States to fight China. What if China invades and occupies Taiwan, a democratic U.S. partner and arms customer? Would America actually risk World War III? What if China forces its claim to the Senkaku Islands, which the United States considers to belong to Japan?

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Notably, the likeliest U.S.-China war scenarios take place in Asia—it’s not that a Chinese “victory” means the Chinese Communist Party takes over Washington, but that the U.S. can’t successfully eject China from Japanese-claimed territory or Taiwan.

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It has missiles that can sink ships. It has missiles that can down airplanes. And it has missiles that could theoretically reach U.S. regional bases in Japan and Guam, leaving planes and runways vulnerable to attack. “Many Chinese observers suggest that missile strikes on air bases would be part of the opening salvos of a war,” notes Rand’s “U.S.-China Military Scorecard.” Shutting down such a base even for a matter of days, according to Rand, could be enough to change the course of the conflict.

“The Chinese don’t have to comprehensively defeat the United States militarily in order to achieve their near-term objectives,” David Ochmanek, a senior international and defense researcher at Rand, told me. “If their objective is to overrun Taiwan, that in principle can be accomplished in a finite time period, measured in days to weeks.”

Ochmanek participated in the Rand war games that showed the U.S. losing. “It’s not just that they’ll be attacking air bases in the region. They’ll be attacking aircraft carriers at sea,” Ochmanek said. “They’ll be attacking our sensors in space. They’ll be attacking our communications links that largely run through space. They’ll be corrupting the databases in our command systems. They’re going to try to suppress us in every dimension that they can.”

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Yet the growth of Chinese capabilities represents a big change from about 20 years ago, when President Bill Clinton sent aircraft carriers near the Taiwan Strait to deter Chinese threats against the island. {snip} “When that carrier was deployed by President Clinton, the Chinese couldn’t even find it,” Chris Brose, the former staff director for the Senate Armed Services Committee, said at a separate talk at the Aspen forum. “And they’ve spent 25 years not only figuring out how to find systems like that, but how to overwhelm them with very large volumes of precision weapons.”

If the U.S. were to deploy an aircraft carrier near the strait when there was a real possibility of conflict, Brose said, “let’s put it this way, I wouldn’t want to be on that aircraft carrier.”

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{snip} Chinese officials have said they aim to be a global power, but what that really means is not clear. Are they trying to build a defensive buffer zone around their borders? A lot of countries do that. Or is their intent something more sinister?

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