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April 30, 2005

Six Tools to Keep China From Making Trouble

Just how scary is China? There's a new batch of articles you might like to read, but let's be honest about what we don't know. "Will there be war with China?" is not a question you should ever answer with "Yes" or "No." That's like asking "Will there be a big earthquake in California next year?" The honest answer is a probability, like "There's a one in five chance" or "Fifty-fifty." So the useful question is not "How scared should we be about China?" but "What can we do to lower the odds of China coming out scary?"

Most people are still writing on the "China problem" instead of suggesting "China solutions." So before we talk about solutions, a roundup of what's being written on the problem: Robert Kaplan has one of his usual marvelous essays (echoed for nonsubscribers here) on what the officers at America's Pacific Command are thinking about possible conflicts with China. John Mearsheimer has a Foreign Policy screed arguing that rising powers like China naturally make trouble; he thinks that faced with Chinese might, the United States will eventually have to retreat from Asia. Matthew Yglesias sides with Zbigniew Brzezinski in the Foreign Policy article: their argument is that China won't push America out of Asia, because without America, China's own neighbors could be even more dangerous to it. Daniel Drezner notes that China's been pretty growlsome at the world lately. Praktike observes that war between China and America would be stupid for both. Of course, stupid wars have happened before.

So here's the top six things the United States could do over the next decade to reduce the odds of China "going bad":

1. Push China for more democracy.
2. Get Europe and Japan to push for democracy too.
3. Build strong ties with India. (And with Vietnam, and with China's other neighbors.)
4. Push Taiwan to talk less about independence and spend more on its defense.
5. Get our Navy more invested in small underwater drones.
6. Get our Air Force more invested in cheap long-range missiles.

1. Push China for more democracy.

As we've discussed before, if China goes to war with us or anyone, it'll be because China's leaders want to seem more legitimate with China's citizens. But the more that elections continue to creep into Chinese politics, the less China's leaders are going to need to improvise more dangerous tools (like political war) to prove they're entitled to keep power. And if China gets all the way to being a true democracy, war with other democracies becomes much less likely.

So it's in our interest to encourage China to open up more of its political offices to competitive elections. Over the last twenty years, American pressure has been focused on human rights, and we've made a difference there. But now America's best use of pressure is to ask not for more dissidents to be released, but for more town and city officials to be elected. Since some of those officials already want to hold freer elections than the national government allows, quiet American pressure could make a real difference in making China more democratic.

There are circumstances in which partially democratized countries turn more aggressive than regular dictatorships. But in general, the more democratic China is, the less likely China will be to pick a needless fight with America. So if you want peace with China, push for more elections in China.

2. Get Europe and Japan to push for democracy too.

China depends for its growth on exports to the three economic superpowers: America, Europe, and Japan. If the United States cut off trade with China, China's growth would stopped for half a decade. But if America, Europe and Japan all cut off trade, China's growth would be stopped for half a century. Trade sanctions are just an example of a larger principle: when they show a united front, the Europe-Japan-America "Big Three" have far more influence on China than America acting alone.

We saw this just recently with the China arms embargo. America doesn't sell weapons to China, but the European Union was considering allowing it, and American complaints were't changing Europe's mind. Then China passed a law officially approving war as a means to retake Taiwan, and the Europeans got a bad taste in their mouth again about giving weapons to China. America alone couldn't limit China's weapons technology, but America, Europe and Japan together are slowing China's military.

That same cooperation can push China toward democracy. Japan worries about China even more than America does, but doesn't want to get in a military arms race with it, and knows it would backfire if Japan alone were pressuring the noticeably Japan-distrusting China. Meanwhile, the Europeans have long wanted to be world leaders like America, and they want to prove that their peaceful pressure can be as strong as American military influence. What's more, the Europeans have had a string of recent successes in using European Union access as a lever to get authoritarian countries to reform. So if America offered to let European leaders get the credit, the Europeans might well be persuaded to a joint European-American-Japanese initiative to push for more democracy in China.

In the last thirty years, China has done its best to play the big powers against each other. It's about time the big democracies tried ganging up -- politely -- to pressure China toward democracy.

3. Build strong ties with India. (And with Vietnam, and with China's other neighbors.)

China's military fantasies rest on the hope that America won't care enough about Asia to fight, while the other Asian powers will be too weak to fight. China's military nightmare is that America and China's Asian neighbors cooperate and combine Asian commitment with American firepower. The closer America is to India, Japan, Vietnam, South Korea and China's other neighbors, the more China has to think twice about starting a new era of war in Asia.

A good example came a few months ago, when Japan for the first time joined America in expressing its "security interest" in "keeping the Taiwan Straits peaceful." China all but threw a fit: a joint Japanese-American commitment to keeping Taiwan defended from China is a lot stronger than either nation expressing that interest alone. It's a lot harder to intimidate groups than lone persons, because no one in the group wants to let down their buddies. This is as true of international politics as it is of kids on the playground. (In fact there's an alarming resemblance between the two situations.) So by pulling Japan closer, America made China's military calculations a lot more complicated.

Of course, China is growing, and "America plus Japan" may not intimidate China forever. So we should go for one more key alliance partner in Asia -- and that's India.

India is about the same size as China, and it's growing pretty fast itself. More than that, India is a democracy with a long record of rivalry with China. Right now, India doesn't much trust the United States, because we're so closely allied with Pakistan, for the sake of fighting the Islamic terrorists who hide out inside Pakistan. But as we approach four years since September 11 -- four years without an attack on American soil -- we need to look to our world after the Global War on Terror. Keeping China peaceful is a big part of what we want that world to look like. Keeping India as well as Japan close to us is a big part of keeping China peaceful.

We shouldn't abandon Pakistan to chaos, since they've got both nukes and nutcases -- a very bad combination. But we should start investing in a close alliance with India. And we should pull close as many of China's other neighbors as we can -- Vietnam, Mongolia, Kazakhstan, even South Korea and Russia if they can get over their current anti-Americanism. A China facing a solid coalition ready to fight against it is a China that isn't going to want to start a fight.

4. Push Taiwan to talk less about independence and spend more on its defense.

Taiwan, like Israel, Pakistan, and Egypt, is one of America's "strategic allies." And like most of our strategic allies, Taiwan often feels free to rely on American support even when it does things that make trouble for America. In recent years, Taiwan has been making a lot of gestures to say "we're not part of China and we like it that way" -- changing Taiwan's passports, altering Taiwan's constitution, and so on. These gestures delight Taiwanese voters. They also humiliate and infuriate Chinese leaders.

At the same time as Taiwan humiliates the Chinese leaders, it doesn't bother spending much to defend from Chinese attack. Taiwan's defense budget is about 2.3 percent of its GDP. The United States spends about 3.5 percent of its GDP on the military. China officially spends about 3 percent, and in reality is estimated to spend about 4.5 percent. So even as China threatens to invade Taiwan, Taiwan is proportionately making only two-thirds of the national commitment that America makes to defense -- while China, despite being poorer on average, commits twice as much of its economy to the military.

In other words, Taiwan is provoking China yet taking it for granted that American muscle will keep China from attacking. That needs to stop. Not because Taiwan doesn't deserve to be protected, but because the United States deserves to have its allies be at least as committed to preserving the peace as America is. More to the point, Chinese leaders are a lot more impressed by Taiwan's ability to defend itself than by America's ability to defend Taiwan, because they like to think they can convince us to let Taiwan go -- but they know the Taiwanese will fight if China comes. So dollars spent by Taiwan on its defense go a lot further to keeping the peace than dollars spent by America. At the same time, a Taiwan that officially is committed to joining China "eventually" is a Taiwan that's much harder for China to invent excuses to fight.

We don't want to let our alliance with Taiwan turn into an opportunity for an accidental war between America and China. That's about how World War I started, when Europe's leading countries felt obliged to fight each other, even though they hadn't done anything to each other. World War I was fought by the great powers, and nearly destroyed them all, for the sake of those great powers' alliances with much less important and much worse governed nations. We need to get a lot more serious about pushing Taiwan's government to turn down its anti-China rhetoric and turn up its defense spending. "Walk softly and carry a big stick" is a good motto for American policy. It's an even better motto for Taiwan. Peace with China will be easier to keep if Taiwan is quiet, polite, and armed to the teeth.

5. Get our Navy more invested in small underwater drones.

Most of China's excuses to start a war involve offshore islands, whether we're talking about the really big offshore island of Taiwan, or the much smaller Paracel Islands China disputes with Vietnam, or the Senkaku-shoto islands it disputes with Japan. You can't seize an island without boats, and China can't move boats if the American Navy gets in the way. So major Chinese military adventures depend on being able to keep the American Navy at a distance for long enough to seize whatever island China is after.

Embarrassingly, our current Navy is vulnerable to a lot of Chinese equipment. China has diesel-powered submarines, which are in principle capable of being quieter and stealthier than American nuclear submarines, and which could make enormous trouble for American ships in waters near China. China has vast quantities of antiship missiles, which are in principle capable of knocking out an American aircraft carrier; that missile threat could force the Navy's airpower to stay well away from Chinese military activity for vital hours or days. It's only a modest exaggeration to say China's entire defense investment for the last ten years has been geared toward exploiting every vulnerability that can hold back American power long enough for China to achieve a military success.

The American Navy would still defeat China's forces if it had to. But in order to keep the peace, it's not enough for China to believe that America could stop it -- China has to believe America could stop it easily. Otherwise, China can hope that Americans will decide we "value Los Angeles more than Taipei," and that we'll abandon our allies and let China have its way. So if we want a military that will keep China peaceful, we need a Navy with firepower that's immune to China's current "silver bullets".

We do have the beginnings of a new kind of Navy, one that China will be very hard pressed to match. It's a navy that you can see in infant form in the USN's latest anti-submarine warfare plan. It's a Navy built on robots.

Technically, the term to use is UUV -- unmanned underwater vehicle. Like the Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) such as the Predator drones, the toys that have seen so much use over Iraq, today's UUVs are expensive and unintelligent. On the other hand, like the UAVs, they're getting smarter and cheaper very quickly. (Since unmanned systems' brains are just computers, they improve almost as fast as computers improve, which is very fast indeed.) Most importantly, UUVs are immune to almost all the weapons and tactics in China's arsenal.

UUVs break all the rules of ordinary ships, and weapons and systems deisgned to defeat ordinary ships tend to flunk against UUVs. UUVs are so much smaller than manned submarines that they can be far stealthier than even a diesel-powered sub; UUVs are so much cheaper than big ships that they can be sent right through danger zones where a manned fleet would have to slow down; and UUVs, being small, cheap and underwater, make really lousy targets for big, expensive, above-water antiship missiles. An anti-UUV operation would be in principle a lot like a mine-clearing operation; they're both about cleaning up a sea full of small machines that are trying to kill you. But mine-clearing is itself one of the most slow, difficult and painful modern naval missions. A manned fleet could sweep an area clean of UUVs with time and patience. But China can't afford to give the American Navy's regular manned forces time to close in. The one thing China won't have in any island-seizing effort is time and patience.

Right now, underwater unmanned vehicles are where unmanned aerial vehicles were ten years ago -- more experiment than arsenal. But UUVs happen to naturally combine the very traits the Chinese are least well able to work against. Even a primitive flock of UUVs would be enough to provide targeting information, or (if armed) torpedo or minelaying attacks, sufficient to derail a Chinese assault. And China won't be able to counter a UUV flotilla until it's gotten a lot closer to American levels of technology. So if you want to screw up China's military plans, have our Navy buy a lot of robots.

6. Get our Air Force more invested in cheap long-range missiles.

One reason we have to rely on the Navy to keep China tame is that Chinese waters are too far from most Air Force bases for the Air Force to do its job. Even the F-22 (or F/A-22) won't be able to do much over the Taiwan Straits when it has to pick up each bombload from an airbase on Okinawa (about 500 miles away) or Guam (1500 miles away). Worse, since China (unlike Afghanistan or Iraq) has a serious air force, any aircraft we send to drop bombs on Chinese installations or ships will need plenty of protection from other aircraft -- and big slow bombers like the B-52 will be sitting ducks. (Even the stealth bomber would be in trouble if China's radars were good enough, or if it tried to drop bombs amid hostile aircraft in the daytime.) RAND pointed out this "geography problem" in a study it did for the Air Force years ago. The Air Force's bombers don't have the protection and Air Force's fighters don't have the range, so the current Air Force has little value for America's strategy on China.

But the Air Force doesn't have to stay irrelevant. In fact, with the right investments, the Air Force could become more effective as a counter to Chinese adventurism than the Navy. The trick is to stop thinking about bombs and start thinking about missiles.

China's aircraft and air defenses are designed, understandably, to stop enemy aircraft from coming in to drop bombs. Like all air defenses, they're much weaker at stopping missiles than aircraft, because missiles are smaller and travel faster. Now, America's bombers were originally designed to fly right over a target and drop their bombs. But it's not too hard to fit them out to fly to a point a hundred or even two hundred miles away from a target, drop a missile into the air, and let the missile fly the rest of the way to the target. The Air Force has the technology, though not the current setup, to let its bombers do the "long haul" of carrying missiles from our airbases on Guam to the area of fighting, and then let the missiles take care of the "dangerous sprint" through enemy planes and missiles to the target.

Our current Air Force isn't designed for this, because our current Air Force was conceived back when bombs had to be dropped right over the target, and when missiles had to be given their exact destination at the moment they were launched -- and even the dumbest smart bombs were hugely expensive. Now, we have missiles that can change targets in flight; we have unmanned aerial vehicles like the Global Hawk that can provide targeting information from higher altitudes than most antiaircraft missiles can reach; we have, if we want, all the ingredients for an Air Force campaign in which no manned aircraft comes within a hundred miles of the enemy.

It would take building some new equipment, and modifying some old equipment. But the technology is there.

This is, in fairness, a big shift in concept for the Air Force, and not one they'd take for the sake of being relevant on China alone. Nor would we want to give up manned fighters when we can actually use them, simply because the human eye is a lot better than any existing robot camera. But if and when the Air Force does develop a "standoff arsenal" of long-range missiles trucked by long-range bombers and guided by high-altitude spotters, the US Air Force will be able to stop Chinese military adventures as or more effectively than the US Navy. After all, China can sink an aircraft carrier, but it can't very well sink Guam.


...so there you have it. Six tools to keep China from making trouble. Hopefully we'll never need any of them. But if you want to make war with China less likely, there's a start for how you'd do it.


[E1] Mudville OPL.

Posted by danielstarr at April 30, 2005 03:33 AM

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Comments

for point 1, democracy did not stop the US from attacking iraq on the basis of ties with al-queda and wmds.

Posted by: Forster at May 3, 2005 08:18 AM

Established democracies aren't notably peaceful overall, but they are peaceful with other democracies.

If both countries are democracies, war is unlikely. If only one country of a pair is democratic, war is just as likely as if both countries are dictatorships.

So it's not surprising that Iraq and the USA went to war, since Iraq wasn't a democracy. What would be surprising would be if war broke out between the USA and India, or between Japan and South Korea.

If China becomes a democracy, it still might well go to war with, say, Vietnam (if Vietnam is not a democracy by that time), but will be much less likely to go to war with Japan or the United States or even Taiwan.

Having said that, it's worth noting that the period where a country has become only partly democratic can be the most warlike of all, as leaders use crude hate-the-foreigner appeals to gather votes. So there may come a period when the USA has to be especially careful with China to get China through the "belligerent phase" of democratization and safely through to democratic peace.

Democracies tend to work out conflicts with other democracies short of full-blown war. No one yet has solidly proven the causes of this statistically observed "democratic peace," although there are several plausible theories.

Posted by: Daniel Starr at May 3, 2005 08:56 AM

RE: Cheap cruise-type missiles... the U.S. military is ahead of you with a program called "The Affordable Weapon". It's designed to have a range of a few hundred miles, and cost about 1/10 as much as current cruise missiles.

http://www.defenseindustrydaily.com/2005/05/323m-for-test-eval-of-affordable-weapon-missiles/index.php

Posted by: Joe Katzman [TypeKey Profile Page] at May 24, 2005 04:59 PM

As you point out, Joe, the technology is there; the problem is getting the Air Force to change the way it fights so as to benefit from that technology. Everybody's developing cheaper and longer-ranged missiles, but the Air Force is terrified of adapting their doctrine to rely on them.

Notice, for example, that in the article you cite, it's the Navy, not the Air Force, who are the lead developers on the Affordable Weapon, even though it's the Air Force, not the Navy, who could most benefit from cheap cruise missiles.

If you're interested in the technology, there are in fact not one but many "cheap precision missile" programs in development. There's the "Advanced Precision Kill Weapons System" (APKWS) for precision-guided helicopter or MRLS rockets, the LOCAAS loitering submunition, the NLOS-LS "rocket in a box" loitering missile, and so on. (Arguably the NLOS-LS program is the most important to watch, because it literally puts precision indirect firepower in boxes that can fit on the backs of Humvees. More than any other near-term system, that's the one that's going to give small numbers of American light troops a decisive firepower response against foes in armored vehicles or holed up in buildings. Or, rather, give them a decisive firepower response that doesn't depend on exposing themselves to the enemy or waiting for airpower or division artillery.)

The most relevant program for the Air Force is the AGM-158 JASSM (Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missile). Technologically, the JASSM and/or its extended-range upgrade are just the sort of thing I'm talking about above.

The catch is that it's not enough for the Air Force to have appropriate weapons types; you need the commanders, the sensors and the delivery systems organized around achieving success with those weapons types. Just as the Future Combat Systems are currently being held up not by gun or missile problems but by the FCS radio technology (JTRS), so too the Air Force won't be able to achieve much with JASSM unless it deploys sensor craft and support craft in a way that makes JASSM a good replacement for close-range bombs.

What do I mean? Well, there's no point in switching to long-range missiles unless that lets you reduce the number of fighters who have to get close to the target. But if you're going to reduce your fighter cover, you need somehow to make up for it in other "sensor packages" to provide targeting information on the moving targets. And that means either a lot more Predator-style camera drones, or Global Hawk-style radar drones, or JSTARS or Rivet Joint style manned sensor planes, than the Air Force is now set up to use. Having the right missile in stock is not the same as being ready to wage a successful missile-centric campaign. Human eyeballs are really good sensors, and a bombing campaign without lots of human eyeballs overhead is going to take more than just good missiles.

The best historical analogy is the development of tank doctrine in between the two World Wars. France figured on parcelling tanks out in piecemeal "penny packages" to assist infantry to fight in the usual trench-warfare style. But the German staff under leaders like von Seeckt and Guderian moved toward using massed tanks as spearheads to puncture enemy lines. When the clash came in in WW2, the French had technologically superior and more numerous tanks than the Germans. They were crushed just the same. The Germans, unlike the French, had been smart enough to adapt their way of fighting to the new tools, and not the other way around.

So I don't mean to imply that the Air Force is behind in developing missile technology. I mean they're behind in developing the doctrine, the supporting equipment, and the way of war that will let them exploit those missiles for better victories.

Posted by: Daniel Starr at May 24, 2005 07:18 PM

May I suggest a couple of more? First, we need to hold China to its international commitments. There are legions of them and right now they're skating by. Second, we should encourage China (and even help it) to address its genuine internal problems including environmental degradation, corruption, insufficient internal market, etc. Encouraging democracy is synergistic with the the second but isn't a substitute for it. I think a legitimate fear we might have is that the Chinese leadership will use war or other fomented international crisis as a device for distracting the people from the failure to solve problems.

Posted by: Dave Schuler [TypeKey Profile Page] at May 24, 2005 08:30 PM

The Air Force will need to be pushed to develop missiles. Most of its top leadership still think of themselves as the flight jock branch of the military, and over-riding that mindset will be difficult.

Posted by: Final Historian at May 24, 2005 08:41 PM

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