Golez: A good strategy: "3 Ways the US, Japan, Should Handle China’s Island Building" @PhilstarNews @inquirerdotnet https://t.co/wgJ8Nc12Sc
I quote from this Japan Forward article:
3 Ways the US, Japan, Should Handle China’s Island Building
Yoshinari Kurose (Sankei Shimbun Washington DC bureau chief)
Diplomacy & Security August 22, 2017August 22, 2017 Yoshinari Kurose
1. "First of all, the most basic point is that China now has a strategic foothold in the heart of the South China Sea, and that is a new phenomenon.
"China had virtually zero presence. If you rolled the clock back to even 15 years ago, China had some partial presence in Mischief Reef, an island they seized in the mid-1990s and then, of course, the Paracel Islands. That was the extent of China’s position. But with Scarborough Shoal and then the island building elsewhere, like Fiery Cross, China now has a firm presence. So that is certainly a change. "
2. "Another change, I think, that is worth thinking about over the longer term is how these islands fit into China’s larger military strategy. I think that is often not discussed either.
3. The artificial islands have interlocking support foreach other: "If you think about the islands in China’s larger military strategy, you could conceivably imagine China deploying anti-access/area denial weapons on the islands and that the islands are located close enough to each other that you could create essentially interlocking support amongst the islands.
"But not only that, these islands are in turn supported by a whole host of longer range firepower from the Chinese mainland, from Hainan Island, from the Paracels."
"So, I see them as an interlocking set of a much larger structure of China’s defense. So you can see, basically, these anti-access bubbles, if you will, covered by a much larger bubble from the Chinese mainland. And so, if you think about it as an integrated architecture, I think these islands do have some significant military and operational value. "
"I say this also because you can’t take the islands out of the strategic context. So, if a shooting war were to break out, it would have to happen for some reason and it is not going to be necessarily about the islands themselves. The casus belli of any great power war, where we would make the decision to wipe out Chinese forces on the island, would mean something really bad has happened. It would have to occur in the context of some kind of a great power conflict between China and the United States which is, you know, a pretty big deal.
4. It will take a lot of firepower to destroy the islands, however vulnerable they are: "These opportunity costs could potentially be quite large…. If you look at the scale of these islands, I think there has been some really interesting Google Map comparisons. Some of these islands are the size of the District of Columbia. One of the islands is comparable to Pearl Harbor. So, these are big. These are big assets. So, it is not going to take three cruise missiles to take out these islands. It could possibly take hundreds of cruise missiles. So, if we used a hundred cruise missiles on—let’s just say, hypothetically—maybe even 50 cruise missiles on one of these islands, that’s 50 fewer cruise missiles we could use for other potentially more important strategic targets for the actual war that we are fighting.
"So, I think having these islands imposes opportunity costs on us and, unless we have the spare capacity to deal with this, this is an added operational burden on our part. So that, even in theory, if we have the capacity to wipe them out, it could come at great cost to us, cost that we would otherwise prefer not to spend. So I think that might be one way of thinking about the value of those islands.
5. Excessive claim of nine-dash line: "But it is also the claims they are making, the ambiguous claim, the “Nine Dash Line,” the excessive restrictions based on the Chinese restrictive interpretation of the Exclusive Economic Zone.
"Those are the things that worry the United States more than the actual islands themselves or the actual military utility, because the claims the Chinese are making is a challenge to the larger US-led liberal international order which we live in today, we will live in tomorrow, it is ongoing throughout this peacetime interaction."
"So, even though people say, again, these are valueless islands, we’re not concerned about the islands themselves per se. It’s really China’s challenge to the order through their claims of the sea space around the islands that worries the United States, and should worry everyone else, including Japan and our other allies and friends in the region."
And, in reality, the islands are there. And they are claiming their Nine Dash Line, and laying out all of these claims regarding the islands. The thing is, what are you going to do?
Right. So, I think, they have now created a new reality on the ground, so what do we do about that?
5. Need for conventional deterrence: "Well, first of all, I think the key is that conventional deterrence is still kind of the backbone, the backstop to everything that is doable on our part.
"So, strengthening our posture for conventional deterrence. Because, ultimately, it’s our conventional deterrence that deters China from pushing too far. That if we can demonstrate that in an escalation ladder, that we can still climb higher than the Chinese, that will compel, in theory, the Chinese to conclude that today is not a good day to push any further.
"And the longer that we can convince the Chinese that today is not a good day, tomorrow is not a good day, and it is not a good day the day after tomorrow—the longer we can do that, I think that is all to the good because it helps us, obviously, maintain the current status quo and to continue to shape Chinese behavior in the current liberal international order.
"So, I think maintaining conventional defense is key and I think it is often ignored, too, that China’s gray zone tactics—salami slicing with its coast guard, maritime militia, and fishing boats and so on and so forth—all of those instruments gained their leverage from China’s conventional deterrent force.
Chinese Coast Guard: "The only reason that the coast guard has any real leverage is because the coast guard knows that behind it is the Chinese navy and the other military services. As long as we can show the Chinese that our conventional deterrent rivals and can climb the ladder higher than the Chinese conventional military, that gives us the ability to decrease the coercive leverage that comes from the civilian, the non-military instruments of Chinese power.
"So I think we have to always fall back to this principle that conventional deterrence is still the key underwriter of this push and pull of this competition between China and the United States. So that’s one: continuing to bolster our conventional deterrence.
6. Help the frontline states: "The second, of course, is to continue to enable the frontline states to deal with Chinese maritime coercion, both in Southeast Asia and in the East China Sea. Japan, of course, has its own capacities, but our Southeast Asian partners frequently do not. So, I think we still have a long way to go, but we need to do so and I think it is not just the United States, but we need to count on Japan and other frontline states to provide the capacity for countries like the Philippines and Vietnam to have their own independent capacity, both conventional deterrence, but also their own non-military instruments of power to push back against China."
7. Need for greater regional cooperation: "I think we need to have greater regional cooperation to gain greater maritime situational awareness, greater surveillance capabilities to get a sense of what the Chinese are doing. So, in some ways, a more transparent picture of both China’s non-military but military deployments in the South China Sea.
8. Assert the ruling of the Permanent Court of Arbitration: "Although the Chinese have completely ignored the Permanent Court of Arbitration’s ruling last July [2016], that is a real advantage for us. That is still a win for us. In other words, the PCA’s ruling gives us essentially what is permissible, what the United States can actually do because it largely invalidates China’s Nine Dash Line, many of their excessive claims. They have identified the features as all non-islands, including—surprising many people—even Taiwan’s Itu Aba, Taiping Island is not an island."
"That severely limits all of the claimants’ claims. Well, we should go with that ruling, maximize the legal possibilities of that ruling by exercising our seafaring rights to the maximum extent that the ruling permits."
9. Missed opportunity: "In a sense, that is why I felt like it was a real missed opportunity when we didn’t push harder after July of last year.
10. Improve the narrative about Freedom of Navigation. That China has no legitimate claims: "And then, of course, I think one of the problems was we mishandled the narrative. We were terrible at telling our story. And part of it was, the way we defined freedom of navigation was, in some ways, preemptively recognizing Chinese claims. My view is that we should have said, “Because the sovereignty of the islands remained disputed, then none of the claims by the claimants over those islands are valid, in terms of their maritime claims beyond the baseline of the islands.”
"But we were conducting innocent passage through some of these areas, we were conceding that China actually had some legitimate claims. So I think we muddled the messaging. We muddled the legal parameters of our challenge to China. I also thought that even last October’s passage through the Paracel Islands was also muddled. I think we tried to describe it as something like a “non-provocative something drill.” We were kind of lawyering ourselves to death with these things. I think we should make it unambiguously clear that our naval operations are a full exercise of our seafaring rights, rather than getting into the details. I think that muddles our message"
3 Ways the US, Japan, Should Handle China’s Island Building
(1st of 3 Parts)
As China continues with its policy of expansionism in the region, combining military intimidation and economic inducements toward its neighbors, we publish in 3 parts an instructive interview by the Sankei Shimbun’s Washington bureau chief, Yoshinari Kurose with Dr. Toshi Yoshihara.
Yoshihara is a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, an independent, non-profit think tank based in Washington, DC. The center specializes in US defense planning, budget, and strategy.
In the South China Sea, China reportedly has almost completed its militarization of man-made islands. What is your take on this?
I think that you have probably read in certain quarters that the Chinese have essentially presented a fait accompli, that some people have called it “game over.” I think that is a little too pessimistic and, frankly, an exaggeration of China’s position.
The game is never over, frankly. The game continues. In some ways, I see this really as the initial steps, I think, in a longer term competition between China and the United States.
It’s better to take the long view about this and not be too narrowly focused on the actual operational status of the islands. This is related to the larger great power competition that is emerging between China and the United States, although it is certainly a symbol, symptomatic of China’s advances in the region, both in terms of its position and its military modernization.
Its engineering ingenuity, if you will, to be able to do these tremendous dredging activities—in some ways, it is also symptomatic of China’s status as an infrastructure superpower.
But that doesn’t mean the game is over. I would say the game has just begun.
It doesn’t mean that the South China Sea has fallen into China’s hands?
I don’t think so. [But] certainly there are things that worry me. First of all, the most basic point is that China now has a strategic foothold in the heart of the South China Sea, and that is a new phenomenon.
China had virtually zero presence. If you rolled the clock back to even 15 years ago, China had some partial presence in Mischief Reef, an island they seized in the mid-1990s and then, of course, the Paracel Islands. That was the extent of China’s position. But with Scarborough Shoal and then the island building elsewhere, like Fiery Cross, China now has a firm presence. So that is certainly a change.
Another change, I think, that is worth thinking about over the longer term is how these islands fit into China’s larger military strategy. I think that is often not discussed either.
And I think, to understand that, it is again unhelpful—just like the people who say it’s “game over”—[to have] a very simplistic answer to a very complex question, to have this notion that…the islands aren’t really a tactical or operational challenge for the United States, that they are very vulnerable, that we could take them out very easily at the outset of any conflict and it would be all over.
So, in essence, what I think some people are also saying is that the islands have limited military value. There was a recent article written by Mark Valencia, he is a western scholar who is basically based out of China, paid for by the Chinese government, on the South China Sea, who basically said, “Well, you know, the islands don’t have much military value.”
I disagree. If you think about the islands in China’s larger military strategy, you could conceivably imagine China deploying anti-access/area denial weapons on the islands and that the islands are located close enough to each other that you could create essentially interlocking support amongst the islands.
But not only that, these islands are in turn supported by a whole host of longer range firepower from the Chinese mainland, from Hainan Island, from the Paracels.
So, I see them as an interlocking set of a much larger structure of China’s defense. So you can see, basically, these anti-access bubbles, if you will, covered by a much larger bubble from the Chinese mainland. And so, if you think about it as an integrated architecture, I think these islands do have some significant military and operational value.
I say this also because you can’t take the islands out of the strategic context. So, if a shooting war were to break out, it would have to happen for some reason and it is not going to be necessarily about the islands themselves. The casus belli of any great power war, where we would make the decision to wipe out Chinese forces on the island, would mean something really bad has happened. It would have to occur in the context of some kind of a great power conflict between China and the United States which is, you know, a pretty big deal.
We may assign a very low probability to it today, but if we were to think through that scenario, then we have to ask. “Why would something like this happen?” The easiest scenario might be a conflict over Taiwan, kind of the classic scenario that draws in the United States. In that kind of a conflict, the islands would pose, I think, a whole host of operational costs on the part of the US military. So, if we wanted to maneuver through the South China Sea, we would have to eliminate this threat.
But for every asset that we allocate to these, in the future, very heavily defended interlocking defenses of these islands, every asset we deploy to neutralize that challenge is one fewer asset we can deploy to actually fight the actual war over Taiwan.
These opportunity costs could potentially be quite large…. If you look at the scale of these islands, I think there has been some really interesting Google Map comparisons. Some of these islands are the size of the District of Columbia. One of the islands is comparable to Pearl Harbor. So, these are big. These are big assets. So, it is not going to take three cruise missiles to take out these islands. It could possibly take hundreds of cruise missiles. So, if we used a hundred cruise missiles on—let’s just say, hypothetically—maybe even 50 cruise missiles on one of these islands, that’s 50 fewer cruise missiles we could use for other potentially more important strategic targets for the actual war that we are fighting.
So, I think having these islands imposes opportunity costs on us and, unless we have the spare capacity to deal with this, this is an added operational burden on our part. So that, even in theory, if we have the capacity to wipe them out, it could come at great cost to us, cost that we would otherwise prefer not to spend. So I think that might be one way of thinking about the value of those islands.
But I would also say that for the United States, the “so what” is not the military issue, and it is not even the islands themselves. We are, in some ways, fighting or contesting principles. It’s the principle of China not only unilaterally changing the status quo, but being the worst offender.
We tend to have some moral equivalence which is, “Well, Vietnam built facilities and Taiwan did it, so China, of course, has the right to do so.” But the scale—there is such an asymmetry in the scale of China’s buildup that there is no moral equivalence. So, it is not just the unilateral nature of the change, but the scale of the change.
But it is also the claims they are making, the ambiguous claim, the “Nine Dash Line,” the excessive restrictions based on the Chinese restrictive interpretation of the Exclusive Economic Zone.
Those are the things that worry the United States more than the actual islands themselves or the actual military utility, because the claims the Chinese are making is a challenge to the larger US-led liberal international order which we live in today, we will live in tomorrow, it is ongoing throughout this peacetime interaction.
So, even though people say, again, these are valueless islands, we’re not concerned about the islands themselves per se. It’s really China’s challenge to the order through their claims of the sea space around the islands that worries the United States, and should worry everyone else, including Japan and our other allies and friends in the region.
And, in reality, the islands are there. And they are claiming their Nine Dash Line, and laying out all of these claims regarding the islands. The thing is, what are you going to do?
Right. So, I think, they have now created a new reality on the ground, so what do we do about that?
Well, first of all, I think the key is that conventional deterrence is still kind of the backbone, the backstop to everything that is doable on our part.
So, strengthening our posture for conventional deterrence. Because, ultimately, it’s our conventional deterrence that deters China from pushing too far. That if we can demonstrate that in an escalation ladder, that we can still climb higher than the Chinese, that will compel, in theory, the Chinese to conclude that today is not a good day to push any further.
And the longer that we can convince the Chinese that today is not a good day, tomorrow is not a good day, and it is not a good day the day after tomorrow—the longer we can do that, I think that is all to the good because it helps us, obviously, maintain the current status quo and to continue to shape Chinese behavior in the current liberal international order.
So, I think maintaining conventional defense is key and I think it is often ignored, too, that China’s gray zone tactics—salami slicing with its coast guard, maritime militia, and fishing boats and so on and so forth—all of those instruments gained their leverage from China’s conventional deterrent force.
The only reason that the coast guard has any real leverage is because the coast guard knows that behind it is the Chinese navy and the other military services. As long as we can show the Chinese that our conventional deterrent rivals and can climb the ladder higher than the Chinese conventional military, that gives us the ability to decrease the coercive leverage that comes from the civilian, the non-military instruments of Chinese power.
So I think we have to always fall back to this principle that conventional deterrence is still the key underwriter of this push and pull of this competition between China and the United States. So that’s one: continuing to bolster our conventional deterrence.
The second, of course, is to continue to enable the frontline states to deal with Chinese maritime coercion, both in Southeast Asia and in the East China Sea. Japan, of course, has its own capacities, but our Southeast Asian partners frequently do not. So, I think we still have a long way to go, but we need to do so and I think it is not just the United States, but we need to count on Japan and other frontline states to provide the capacity for countries like the Philippines and Vietnam to have their own independent capacity, both conventional deterrence, but also their own non-military instruments of power to push back against China.
I think we need to have greater regional cooperation to gain greater maritime situational awareness, greater surveillance capabilities to get a sense of what the Chinese are doing. So, in some ways, a more transparent picture of both China’s non-military but military deployments in the South China Sea.
Although the Chinese have completely ignored the Permanent Court of Arbitration’s ruling last July [2016], that is a real advantage for us. That is still a win for us. In other words, the PCA’s ruling gives us essentially what is permissible, what the United States can actually do because it largely invalidates China’s Nine Dash Line, many of their excessive claims. They have identified the features as all non-islands, including—surprising many people—even Taiwan’s Itu Aba, Taiping Island is not an island.
That severely limits all of the claimants’ claims. Well, we should go with that ruling, maximize the legal possibilities of that ruling by exercising our seafaring rights to the maximum extent that the ruling permits.
In a sense, that is why I felt like it was a real missed opportunity when we didn’t push harder after July of last year.
And then, of course, I think one of the problems was we mishandled the narrative. We were terrible at telling our story. And part of it was, the way we defined freedom of navigation was, in some ways, preemptively recognizing Chinese claims. My view is that we should have said, “Because the sovereignty of the islands remained disputed, then none of the claims by the claimants over those islands are valid, in terms of their maritime claims beyond the baseline of the islands.”
But we were conducting innocent passage through some of these areas, we were conceding that China actually had some legitimate claims. So I think we muddled the messaging. We muddled the legal parameters of our challenge to China. I also thought that even last October’s passage through the Paracel Islands was also muddled. I think we tried to describe it as something like a “non-provocative something drill.” We were kind of lawyering ourselves to death with these things. I think we should make it unambiguously clear that our naval operations are a full exercise of our seafaring rights, rather than getting into the details. I think that muddles our message.
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