The Senkaku Paradox: Risking Great Power War Over Small Stakes 2019001454, 2019009148, 9780815736905, 0815736908

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THE SENKAKU

PARADOX

RISKING GREAT POWER

WAR O V E R S M A L L S TA K E S

MICHAEL E. O’HANLON

The Senkaku Paradox

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The Senkaku Paradox Risking Great Power War Over Small Stakes

Michael E. O’Hanlon

Brookings Institution Press Washington, D.C.

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Copyright © 2019 the brookings institution 1775 Massachusetts Avenue, N.W., Washington, D.C. 20036 www.brookings.edu All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without permission in writing from the Brookings Institution Press. The Brookings Institution is a private nonprofit organization devoted to research, education, and publication on important issues of domestic and foreign policy. Its principal purpose is to bring the highest quality independent research and analysis to bear on current and emerging policy problems. Interpretations or conclusions in Brookings publications should be understood to be solely those of the authors. Library of Congress Cataloging-­­in-­­Publication Data Names: O’Hanlon, Michael E., author. Title: The Senkaku paradox : risking great power war over small stakes / Michael E. O’Hanlon. Other titles: Risking great power war over small stakes Description: First edition. | Washington, D.C. : Brookings Institution Press, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2019001454 (print) | LCCN 2019009148 (ebook) | ISBN 9780815736905 (ebook) | ISBN 9780815736899 (pbk. : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: United States—Military policy. | National security—United States. | Russia (Federation)—Strategic aspects. | China—Strategic aspects. | Deterrence (Strategy) | Aggression (International law) | War—Economic aspects. | Great powers— History—21st century. | Geopolitics. Classification: LCC UA23 (ebook) | LCC UA23 .O347 2019 (print) | DDC 355/.033573—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019001454 987654321 Typeset in Adobe Caslon and Obvia Composition by Elliott Beard

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For my many awesome students over the years, from Georgetown and Johns Hopkins to Syracuse and Denver to Columbia and Princeton and beyond. And for Alice Rivlin, dear friend and Brookings’s all-­time greatest, as well.

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Contents

Acknowledgments ix

Map of Europe

xi



Map of the Indian Ocean Basin

xii



Map of the Western Pacific

xiii

ONE

Introduction 1 T WO



Plausible Scenarios

19

THR EE



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China and Russia Scenarios in 2040

53

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Contents

viii

FOUR



Military Elements of Integrated Deterrence

77

FIV E



Integrating Economics into War Plans

109

SI X



Conclusion and Recommendations

147

A PPENDI X 1



The So-­Called Revolution in Military Affairs, 2000–20

159

A PPENDI X 2



Forecasting Change in Military Technology, 2020–40

183

Notes 209

Index 250

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Acknowledgments

I AM GRATEFUL to so many for help with the ideas in this book, as it includes elements of almost everything I have been learning and analyzing for decades, from high school in Canandaigua, New York, to college at Hamilton and Princeton, to graduate school at Princeton, to the Congressional Budget Office, to the Brookings Institution—­and all the places I’ve been privileged to teach along the way as well (including with the Peace Corps in the Democratic Republic of the Congo). For this project in particular, however, I would like to give special thanks to Duncan Brown and colleagues at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab, to Tom Ehrhard, Steve Rosen, and their colleagues at the Long-­Term Strategy Group, to Jim Miller, Pat Cronin, Richard Fontaine, Bridge Colby, and other friends at the Center for a New American Security, to Mike Green and colleagues at the Center for Strategic and Institutional Studies, to Kurt Campbell at the Asia Group, to Harlan Ullman and his fellow advocates of “porcupine” strategies at Newport, to Ryan Williams and Jim Steinberg at Syracuse, to Ken Pollack and many more at the American Enterprise Institute, to Dave Mosher and other erstwhile colleagues at the Congressional Budget Office, to Phil Gordon and others at the Council on Foreign Relations, to Amy Chua and others at Yale, as well as to Dick Betts, Robert Jervis, Dipali Mukhopadhyay, and Steve Biddle at Columbia, to Keir Lieber and others at Georgetown, as well as Hal Feiveson, Ryan Crocker, and others

ix

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x

Acknowledgments

at Princeton, to Richard Caldwell and Rachel Epstein at Denver, to several anonymous reviewers, and to a slew of brilliant Brookings scholars and friends who made specific contributions—­including but not limited to John Allen, Celia Belin, Ben Bernanke, Richard Bush, Dan Byman, Tarun Chhabra, David Dollar, Robert Einhorn, William Finan, Cliff Gaddy, Bill Galston, Ted Gayer, Samantha Gross, Ryan Hass, Susan Hennessey, Steve Heydemann, Fiona Hill (in an earlier period), Jamie Horsley, Martin Indyk, Bruce Jones, Bob Kagan, Mara Karlin, Jamie Kirchick, Don Kohn, Cheng Li, Ian Livingston, Suzanne Maloney, Richard Nephew, Jung Pak, Ted Piccone, Steve Pifer, Alina Polyakova, Richard Reeves, Molly Reynolds, Bruce Riedel, Alice Rivlin, Frank Rose, Natan Sachs, Amanda Sloat, Mireya Solis, Constanze Stelzenmueller, Jonathan Stromseth, Strobe Talbott, Caitlin Talmadge, Shibley Telhami, John Thornton, Adam Twardowski, David Wessel, Tamara Wittes, and Tom Wright. Brookings and I are also grateful for the financial support of the Smith Richardson Foundation and the Sydney Stein Jr. Chair, as well as a number of other donors.

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EUROPE O'Hanlon_Senkaku Paradox_i-xiv_1-258.indd 11

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INDIAN OCEAN BASIN O'Hanlon_Senkaku Paradox_i-xiv_1-258.indd 12

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WESTERN PACIFIC

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ONE

Introduction Expanding the Competitive Space

ACROSS THE L AND AND AROUND THE WORLD, a debate rages over Russia’s return and China’s rise.1 These challenges require a multifaceted policy response to address problems ranging from theft of intellectual property and advanced technology, to election meddling and other attempted subversions of modern democracies, to the promotion of authoritarianism and mercantilism. A wide range of resolute Western responses is needed. Attempts at dialogue and cooperation and the development of ideas for new security architectures also merit consideration.2 The challenges will, however, be longlasting and profound. The Trump administration has rightly highlighted such concerns in its 2017 National Security Strategy and 2018 National Defense Strategy. But over what issues might war against Russia or China erupt? And if war were to occur, how might it be contained before it took the world to the brink of thermonuclear catastrophe? These are the concrete questions, set within the broader context of hegemonic change and great power competition, that this book attempts to answer. Specifically, I examine how a localized crisis started or stoked by Moscow or Beijing could expand and escalate. It is my contention that, especially in this period of history, such conflicts pose the greatest risk to

1

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The Senkaku Paradox

great power stability and world peace. The signature case, which I have adopted for the title of the book, concerns the uninhabited and disputed Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands in the East China Sea, claimed by both Japan and China. But the general problem has many possible manifestations. That one of these potential adversaries would launch a bolt-­from-­the blue, all-­out attack against a U.S. ally seems much less likely than such limited aggression. It is hard to imagine a major Chinese invasion of the main islands of Japan or the metropolitan area of Seoul in South Korea, for example. And for all of Vladimir Putin’s recent adventurism, the forcible annexation of an entire NATO country, even a small Baltic state, strikes most as implausible. Such attacks, even if initially successful, would and should risk massive responses by the United States and its allies.3 President Donald Trump’s tepid support for NATO, and for U.S. alliances in general, may muddy the deterrence waters somewhat. But even under his presidency, U.S. alliance commitments remain formally in place and American troops remain forward deployed from Korea and Japan to the Baltics and Poland. It would amount to a huge roll of the dice for an aggressor to seek to conquer any one of these states. To be sure, U.S. defense policy should continue to display resoluteness and create capacities of the type needed to deter such large-­scale attacks, not just wishfully assume them away. But on balance, deterrence failure on such a massive scale seems very unlikely. Strong American-­led alliances, conventional and nuclear deterrence, and economic interdependence all militate strongly against any conscious decision by an adversary to initiate large-­scale war. However, smaller tests of U.S. and allied resolve by Beijing or Moscow and more patient, incremental challenges to the existing global order that do not threaten the lives or main territorial possessions of America’s friends and allies are much easier to imagine in the modern world, as I argue in more detail in chapter 2.4 With China and Russia both flexing their muscles near countries that the United States is sworn to protect, and both seeking to challenge and to modify the U.S.-­led regional and global security orders that prevail today, the risks are real. The possibility exists that Washington could be forced to choose between risking war and appeasing Chinese or Russian aggression in ways that could ultimately lead to much graver threats to international peace.5 In the event of a limited enemy assault, what should Washington do? How could the United States together with key allies avoid a profound dilemma: either allow a direct attack against an ally or close friend to go

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Introduction

3

unaddressed, and thereby potentially watch the world order that it has helped construct since 1945 gradually slip away, or risk nuclear war over stakes that seem too small to warrant such a cosmic roll of the dice? This is the “Senkaku paradox” to which my title alludes. In the event of limited enemy aggression, a large-­scale U.S. and allied response could seem massively disproportionate—­but a nonresponse would be unacceptable, and inconsistent with American treaty obligations as well. It seems that Washington could be faced with two equally senseless and unacceptable options. Without suggesting that America or its allies formally renounce the possibility of a direct response to liberate allied territory, I propose that an asymmetric defense—­for purposes of deterrence and, should deterrence fail, for purposes of response—­would be more effective. It would combine military elements with economic warfare. The military components would feature strengthened forward defenses, and perhaps limited military options against Russian or Chinese assets in other theaters. The instruments of economic warfare would include offensive elements, notably various types of sanctions that might evolve and expand with time during a crisis and perhaps beyond.6 Such economic instruments would also have to include defensive measures to ensure the resilience of the United States and its allies against possible enemy reprisal.7 In recent years, the United States has taken some steps to improve deterrence in key regions. For example, President Obama’s European Reassurance Initiative and subsequently President Trump’s European Deterrence Initiative have been modest but prudent measures. Some new ideas in defense planning, such as the U.S. Army Operating Concept and the Defense Department’s “Third Offset” in the later Obama years, as well as then Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis’s National Defense Strategy more recently, have refocused the defense community on deterring great power conflict.8 Deterrence may still not be robust for certain crucial scenarios, however. Potential aggressors may doubt America’s will to risk war over inherently small stakes. Perhaps conflict might erupt in a city in the eastern part of a Baltic country—­one like Narva, Estonia. Or perhaps it could happen in a much smaller town, which Russian “little green men”—­troops in unmarked green uniforms—­might seize on false pretenses. Or perhaps China might occupy an uninhabited Senkaku/Diaoyu island in the East China Sea on the pretext of rescuing marooned fishermen or the like. Other contingencies are also easy to imagine. One might be a par-

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The Senkaku Paradox

tial Chinese blockade of Taiwan, a scenario considered at some length in this book. Another might begin with a Chinese military occupation of the disputed Scarborough Shoal, claimed by both the Philippines and China—­especially germane if the U.S.-­Philippines security partnership is repaired in coming years so that the bilateral treaty again clearly implicates the United States in the defense of the Philippines. Even more blatant and unambiguous might be a violent Chinese attack on Filipino fishermen seeking to fish in waters near the shoal or on Filipino naval vessels defending those fishermen.9 Yet another scenario might involve Russian hazing of a NATO ship that resulted in an accident and the inadvertent loss of dozens of NATO lives. These last two types of incidents might be especially problematic if Russia or China, rather than apologizing or attempting redress, threatened to attack any other ships entering the same waters in the future. Russia and the United States could wind up in a skirmish in Syria, perhaps, too. A more comprehensive Russian attack on Ukraine could create similar dilemmas. Although Ukraine is not a formal treaty ally, the 1994 Budapest Memorandum did commit Washington (along with London and Moscow, ironically) to help uphold Ukraine’s defense. The commitment was not ironclad enough to persuade the United States to retaliate with its own military in response to the Russian annexation of Crimea or Russian aggression in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine. But it might be seen as sufficiently binding that Washington would not watch the heartland of Ukraine invaded by Russia without attempting a strong response in reply.10 Today, it may seem less than essential that the Western alliance system counter any single limited act of aggression by Russia or China, insofar as no global expansionist ideology similar to communism animates their foreign policy. But precisely for that reason, Beijing or Moscow may compute that they could get away with seizing a small and seemingly unimportant piece of allied territory that the United States was sworn to defend. In general, the United States could not protect many such assets from an initial attack; its capabilities, and those of its allies, near the presumed areas of aggression are too limited.11 Why are such scenarios worth worrying about? I do not mean to suggest they are necessarily imminent. But they are far from inconceivable. China or Russia could have many motives to consider such risky action. They might simply want to flex their muscles to boost national pride and assert prerogatives. They may hope to weaken American global leadership

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Introduction

5

together with U.S.-­led alliance systems, and thereby enhance their own regional dominance near their respective borders. Even if they did not seek to overturn the existing order or threaten existentially a key American ally or interest, Washington could not be sure. It would have to worry about a worst-­case scenario. Because the American proclivity toward activism and assertiveness in national security policy has become deeply ingrained in the nation’s foreign affairs DNA since World War II, there would be a substantial chance of a very strong—­possibly even excessive—­U.S. response. A major war could develop out of an initially very small-­scale aggression. The state of technology, and expected trends in future innovation, compound the problem. Deployment of large U.S.-­led military force packages into the lion’s den of the western Pacific near China’s coasts or into the Baltic region of Europe near Russia is becoming a harder and harder proposition to entertain. The spread of the type of precision technology that the United States once effectively monopolized accounts for much of the reason why. The problem is exacerbated by other technological realities or near-­term weapons possibilities, such as miniaturized robotics that function as sensors or even weapons, individually or in swarms; small satellites that could function as clandestine space mines against larger satellites; homing antiship missiles, and various types of superfast hypersonic missiles in general; and threats to computer systems from both traditional human-­generated hacking and artificial intelligence (AI)–generated algorithms. On balance, it will probably become increasingly difficult to project large military forces near another great power’s territory. This is not quite the same thing as arguing that the “offensive-­defensive balance” will tilt in favor of defense at all times and under all conditions, or even that there is a single offensive-­defensive balance of general validity. But a plethora of relatively small, fast, precise, inexpensive, autonomous weapons could threaten large exposed objects such as ships, planes, ports, and rail lines—­to say nothing of other fixed infrastructure, such as fiber-­optic cables, electricity-­generating equipment and transmission lines, bridges and tunnels, and other infrastructure of crucial importance to modern militaries on the move. This book wrestles with the fundamental strategic dilemma of how to address small-­scale enemy attacks with large strategic consequences in an era of rapid technological change. It attempts to look beyond current debates over matters such as trends in the U.S. defense budget, the size of the U.S. Navy, the enforcement of “red lines” from Syria to the South

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China Sea, and other immediate issues in U.S. national security policy. Such issues are all important, to be sure.12 But even if these matters trend favorably in America’s direction, the conundrum of how to protect distant allies against limited attacks by regionally powerful adversaries will remain. The problems will also remain even if countries like the Baltic states and Taiwan expand their self-­defense capabilities (as all of them should). China’s rise, Russia’s revanchism, the tyranny of geography, and trends in modern weaponry virtually ensure it. Washington needs better, less escalatory, and thus more credible options for such limited but serious scenarios. They should not formally displace existing policy, under which there is a strong implication of prompt U.S.-­led military action to liberate any allied territory that might be attacked or seized by an aggressor. This current policy may have deterrence benefits, as well as reassurance benefits for allies, so it should not be formally scrapped. Indeed, it is important to avoid comments like President Donald Trump’s, after the July 2018 Helsinki summit, when he raised doubts about U.S. willingness to defend a NATO ally like Montenegro.13 But such commitments may well prove inadequate. They may not be fully credible, even with an American president less inclined to question publicly the wisdom of U.S. alliances. They also may not give U.S. and allied policymakers sufficiently flexible and smart options in the event of deterrence failure. Thus the new paradigm I propose here is intended to complement existing concepts and plans. Rather than supplant existing concepts for deterrence and warfighting, it seeks both to repair weaknesses in their credibility and to avoid unnecessary dangers that could result from their prompt implementation. Under the new paradigm, the United States and its allies would not be obliged to fire the first shot, or to quickly escalate after a hypothetical Russian or Chinese aggression. They would have indirect and asymmetric options. By adopting a more complex and multidimensional approach to national security policy that made fuller use of economic instruments of national power, Washington would in a sense just be catching up with Beijing and Moscow.14 Russia has used economic punishment tactics against Ukraine in the energy and banking sectors, employed cyberattacks against a number of NATO countries, and interfered in Western elections through various methods of information warfare. China has used economic coercion against a number of its neighbors. It banned shipments of rare earth minerals to Japan for a time in 2010, froze imports of Norwegian salmon

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Introduction

7

after the Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo won the Nobel Peace Prize that same year, restricted imports and tourists from the Philippines in a dispute over the Scarborough Shoal in the South China Sea in 2012, and punished South Korea economically after the deployment of a U.S. THAAD (Terminal High Altitude Aerial Defense) missile defense system to the latter in 2016–17.15 It has also stolen intellectual property from more advanced nations, not only to enhance its own economy but also to close the military-­technological gap with the West. These countries realize that economics is often at the heart of security strategies. The United States itself has understood this same fact very well in the past, such as during the Cold War. Thus I am not proposing a radically new theory so much as suggesting we dust off, enhance, and expand old ideas for modern times. This strategy would integrate the twin concepts of deterrence by punishment and deterrence by denial. Deterrence by punishment would center on economic reprisal after an initial enemy aggression, though it could include military forms of cost imposition, too. Deterrence by denial would emphasize military power. It would not, however, be based on the unrealistic expectation that all initial enemy aggressions could be stopped or quickly reversed. It would instead seek to prevent any further conquests after an initial attack, especially those of a more strategically significant scale. It would do so by rapidly repositioning forces, establishing clear trip wires, and then ultimately deploying strong forward defenses in locations near the initial adversarial aggression. By pursuing a strategy that included deterrence by punishment, the United States and its allies would seek to convince would-­be foes they had more to lose than to gain from the successful use of force. Ideally, Russia or China would suffer more than the U.S.-­led coalition imposing the costs, even if it retaliated in kind, as would have to be expected. But it is not essential that they suffer more than America and its allies, provided that the threat to apply such punishment was credible and sustainable. The Western world is collectively so much stronger than Russia or even China—­indeed, even the China of 2030 or 2040—­that an effective sanctions-­based policy need not literally hurt the other side more than it hurts the initiator. What is important is that the punishment be commensurate in scale with the magnitude of the initial aggression and have the potential to be intensified and broadened. In addition, it should be both politically and economically sustainable, thus credible, and thus effective as a deterrent. For such punishment to be politically sustainable,

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the nature of the adversary’s aggression must be widely recognized as serious, even if it is small in initial scope. The economic pain associated with a sanctions-­first response also needs to be seen as preferable to the risk of war. And for sanctions to be economically sustainable, the United States and its allies need to understand vulnerabilities in their supply chains, financial dealings, and other economic relationships and develop strategies in advance to mitigate those vulnerabilities. Deterrence by denial is also important. Even if modest initial aggressions cannot be reliably prevented in all cases, it is essential that the real spoils of conquest—­major allied territory, control of the commons in large swaths of the western Pacific or the Baltic Sea or Black Sea—­be denied to Russia or China. Otherwise, if its initial aggression were successful, Moscow or Beijing might find its territorial appetite whetted enough to be tempted to confiscate more strategically important territories. China in the South China Sea and Russia in Ukraine have recently demonstrated that they are willing to challenge norms of global behavior in pursuit of their ambitions. But in such cases to date, they have not directly attacked U.S. allies. They are probably reluctant to do so, fearing the consequences. However, they may still take risks if they believe the immediate stakes are small enough that a major American and allied response would seem disproportionate and thus would not ultimately happen. The strategy I propose would address this dilemma by making deterrence more credible through a response that was more proportionate and less escalatory than a prompt, large-­scale military counteroffensive of some sort. And while it would be judicious as well as proportionate, a sanctions-­ based strategy would not be weak. Indeed, it could be gradually amplified and broadened, once the stakes were recognized to merit the associated pain and cost. Such a strategy might ultimately even lead to a fundamentally different kind of economic relationship with China or Russia over the longer term. Especially if a crisis persisted, with no attempt at reversal of the aggression or resolution of the dispute by Moscow or Beijing, the Western world might raise the stakes. It could seek not only to punish the perpetrator for its specific action but to limit the future growth of one (or both) of those powers, out of recognition that its strategic aims had become fundamentally untrustworthy or hostile. Export controls and permanent sanctions could replace temporary punitive measures over time. This overall strategy requires military counteroffensive capabilities, too.16 Indeed, the United States needs to improve and increase its capa-

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Introduction

9

bilities in areas such as long-­range strike and stealth, hypersonic weapons, missile defense, general resilience to enemy attack, and a number of other key technology domains. But advantages in these areas do not necessarily need to be so great as to guarantee successful forward defense of all allied territory, or a quick reversal of any aggression close to China’s or Russia’s territories. That is probably not a realistic goal in the era of precision strike, cyber-­and space attack, robotics, and AI. Even if it were achievable, insisting on prompt liberation of the notional small Estonian town or uninhabited Senkaku island could, in effect, destroy the village to save it. Such a direct counterattack might also greatly increase the danger of escalation, including to nuclear war. A Russia or China that found itself decisively losing a conventional conflict might choose to create nuclear risks or even utilize nuclear weapons tactically, in the hope of changing the conflict’s course. Historically, a country’s ambitions often escalate during war. As Thucydides underscored, this can happen for reasons of fear, interest, or pride. For Russia, its motives could be influenced by a sense that it was gradually becoming weaker—­that time was not on its side—­combined with bitterness over the course of post– Cold War history. For China, the strategic calculus could be informed by a powerful nationalistic view that its previous “century of humiliation” must never be repeated.17 Indeed, China increasingly aspires to play a central role on the world stage in global affairs, at least on par with the role of the United States, as reflected in conclusions from 2017’s Nineteenth Communist Party Congress.18 In addition to such human passions, technical and operational dynamics could raise the risks of escalation. Warning and communications systems can fail or be overwhelmed during war, thereby making it harder for one or multiple combatants to control the battlefield. These risks are heightened when conflict occurs close to the territories and the main military assets, including warning and command and control systems, of a major power.19 These arguments echo views prominent during the Cold War, when Washington and Moscow knew it would be foolish to fight each other directly. That said, during the Cold War, war-­w inning strategies were prevalent in the early years. They survived in one form or another in nuclear-­warfighting plans even during more recent decades. The fact that a military strategy is illogical or risky does not mean it will be repaired. Bad ideas often endure.

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Today’s American military establishment and national security community tend to hew to the belief that being able to defeat China or Russia in combat wherever an ally might be attacked is a realistic and essential goal. This prevalent opinion requires rethinking in light of fundamental technological trends and the military resources available to Russia and especially China. Secretary Mattis was likely correct when he argued, in releasing the Trump administration’s National Defense Strategy in January 2018, that America’s competitive edge vis-­à-­v is other great powers had been eroding in recent years. However, Trump administration officials may be wrong if they believe that a 10 percent increase in the U.S. defense budget, along with modest reorderings of current military priorities, can in and of itself change that fact—­or change it enough to restore U.S. military preeminence in all regions immediately adjacent to Russian and Chinese territory. Trends in technology, combined with Russian and Chinese strategic ambitions and geographic advantages, require a fuller reconceptualization of American grand strategy. Even some of the most creative ideas in defense thinking today, such as those emphasizing the need for more distributed, stealthy platforms involving mixes of manned and unmanned systems with improved weaponry and electronic warfare assets, seem more likely to mitigate the trends in warfare and technology than to reverse them.20 Operating effectively near a major power’s territory in wartime will remain very hard—­much harder, for example, than was the case for the United States near China’s coasts throughout the twentieth century. Sustaining a healthy measure of military preeminence is a worthy and desirable goal for American military planning. But general preeminence is one thing; being able to guarantee rapid victory anywhere, anytime is another. Recognizing this distinction—­global military preeminence, yes; decisive war-­w inning capacity for any and all scenarios, perhaps not—­is crucial. The latter aspiration probably is not attainable even with a doubling of the defense budget. Article 5 commitments within NATO and the U.S.-­Japan alliance are typically interpreted as absolute and inflexible, especially within American defense and national security circles. Article 5, which commits all allies to action if any one of them is attacked, is the essence of NATO’s mutual defense pledge. A somewhat similar Article 5 is the backbone of the U.S.-­ Japan Security Treaty as well, and a related kind of stipulation is found in Article 4 of the U.S.-­Philippines military and defense accord. Specifically, NATO’s Article 5 reads as follows: “The Parties agree that an armed

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Introduction

11

attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all and consequently they agree that, if such an armed attack occurs, each of them, in exercise of the right of individual or collective self-­defence recognised by Article 51 of the Charter of the United Nations, will assist the Party or Parties so attacked by taking forthwith, individually and in concert with the other Parties, such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force, to restore and maintain the security of the North Atlantic area.”21 The language in the Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security between Japan and the United States from 1960 reads: “Each Party recognizes that an armed attack against either Party in the territories under the administration of Japan would be dangerous to its own peace and safety and declares that it would act to meet the common danger in accordance with its constitutional provisions and processes.”22 The 1951 Mutual Defense Treaty between the United States and the Republic of the Philippines states: “Each Party recognizes that an armed attack in the Pacific Area on either of the Parties would be dangerous to its own peace and safety and declares that it would act to meet the common dangers in accordance with its constitutional processes.”23 Any incursion onto any part of an ally’s territory is to be treated as a fundamental threat to that country’s security and to alliance credibility and cohesion. But none of these provisions automatically commits the United States to a specific type of counterattack. We have every right, and reason, to be creative and smart—­and, as former Secretary Mattis underscores, unpredictable—­in our chosen means of retaliation. Today, U.S. military commands make little use of the economic instruments of warfare. Experts on economic warfare are rarely embedded within combatant commands and have limited sway within the DoD in general. The U.S. government is mostly stovepiped when it comes to combining economic, diplomatic, and military instruments of power in contingency planning.24 Sanctions and related tools are generally seen as the policy domain of agencies such as the Treasury Department, the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative, and the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States. However, these latter entities probably do not feel they have the prerogative to develop strategies for economic warfare. NATO is afflicted by similar limitations as the U.S. government; almost assuredly, so are virtually all other American allies. The result is a situation aptly described by former State Department official Edward Fishman when he wrote in 2018 that “U.S. officials almost never design sanctions

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until crises are already under way.”25 Nor is it likely that U.S. officials sufficiently contemplate the question of the potential vulnerability of the U.S. economy to adversarial actions that might take place during protracted economic warfare. For some defense planners, it may seem inappropriate to think too much about economics. After all, that is the “turf ” of other agencies in the U.S. government. What business do military experts have integrating economic matters into war plans? The reason that they must do so, in full and ongoing consultation with other parts of the government, is straightforward, however. Otherwise the U.S. government’s only strong and serious recourse to an enemy aggression might be an escalatory military response that would run the high risk of leading to all-­out war. War planners will do their country no favor if that is the result of their polite efforts to avoid thinking hard about instruments of national power that seem outside their own bailiwick. As Robert Blackwill and Jennifer Harris rightly argue, “Despite having the most powerful economy on Earth, the United States too often reaches for the gun instead of the purse in its international conduct.”26 There may also be situations, such as the kinds of scenarios considered in this book, in which both the gun and the purse should be employed by the United States and allies. Nonetheless, future presidents should not expect the DoD to run roughshod over other departments’ perceived prerogatives or territories. They should themselves instruct the whole of government to work together, requiring nonmilitary agencies also to contribute expertise and personnel to the kind of analysis and preparation that this strategy requires, both at DoD combatant commands and within their own home institutions. Ignoring economics as a routine part of war planning is not only wrongheaded, it is dangerous. An example of what can then result is AirSea Battle, a popular concept in recent years. (Formally, it has since given way to a DoD idea known as the Joint Concept for Access and Maneuver in the Global Commons, but it is not clear what the latter does differently from the former.) AirSea Battle had some good aspects. But it was also strongly associated with several think tank proposals to attack targets on the Chinese mainland early in a possible conflict.27 That approach could have been highly escalatory in a number of scenarios. Even if formal war plans do not currently incorporate such ideas, those war plans could be quickly changed by a secretary of defense or a president who had been influenced by more offensive theories of victory, just as the war plans for invading Iraq were

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Introduction

13

quickly and radically changed by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld prior to the start of that war in 2003.28 An indirect, asymmetric, nonkinetic approach to certain types of aggression may also elicit stronger allied support than an immediate resort to military force. The world’s recent experience with applying sanctions against Iran, Russia, and North Korea gives some basis for hope in this regard. Pertinent here are the findings of a poll conducted by the Pew Charitable Trusts in 2015, shortly after the Russian attacks on Ukraine, when moral outrage was still fresh in people’s minds. Nonetheless, the survey revealed a deep ambivalence among many NATO citizens about whether a hypothetical Russian aggression against an eastern member state should lead to a NATO military response. Indeed, clear majorities in a number of countries expressed opposition to any such action.29 (Yet strong sanctions were supported.) As the alliance has expanded eastward, farther from original NATO nations and closer to the Russian heartland, the uncertainty about when NATO would really be willing to fight to defend all its members has likely continued to grow. This may be particularly true for aggressions that are limited in geographic scope, duration, and lethality. Basing a U.S. national security strategy on asymmetric response, without ensuring prompt liberation of occupied allied territory, may seem defeatist to some Americans and some allies. But that kind of approach effectively formed much of the basis of the containment strategy during the Cold War. Militarily, the West sought to prevent further Soviet conquests, after a number of them had already occurred. Tragically, that did not do much to ensure the independence and sovereignty of much of eastern Europe, which had to wait decades for its freedom. In broad foreign policy terms, however, this approach turned out to be an extremely successful long-­term strategy for promoting democracy, prosperity, and peace. The military instruments provided a bulwark against further aggression well enough for the economic, diplomatic, political, and cultural instruments of America and its allies eventually to produce victory—­and what became the most prosperous and stable international order the world had ever known. So playing good defense with military policy is a time-­ tested and sound philosophy that can allow the softer, quieter tools of power and influence, including economics, to shape the world in favorable ways. This is particularly the case when an enemy attacks territories or interests that are modest in scale, scope, strategic significance, and in their

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The Senkaku Paradox

direct bearing on the lives of citizens in allied nations. Economic sanctions do not typically compel changes in adversarial behavior quickly, and they sometimes do not produce such results at all. But when the stakes involve unoccupied territories or other very modest interests, a patient strategy can make sense. Moreover, the combination of additional forward military deployments and economic sanctions can signal resoluteness. It can also create military conditions that deter further aggression without unnecessarily risking war or escalation in the meantime. For Americans and America’s allies, this should be seen as a preferred outcome compared with the alternatives. Some might counter that today’s global order is in such dire danger that to countenance any tolerance of any act of aggression against a U.S. ally or close security partner would be even more dangerous than in more normal times. They might also worry that to suggest anything less than full readiness to defend or liberate every inch of allied territory could raise questions in foreign capitals and lead some allies to doubt the commitment of the United States to their security. They might then seek their own recourse, such as the development of nuclear weapons arsenals. I want to challenge such concerns on three fronts. First, a strategy involving asymmetric military and economic responses combined with reinforced forward defense would not be tantamount to tolerating the aggression. In fact, it could very well improve deterrence of adversaries—­and thus reassure allies—­by telegraphing a more credible Western response to possible aggression that discouraged the aggression in the first place. Moreover, in some cases such a strategy might constitute only the initial response, with more direct military action considered later if the initial aggression did not cease or even escalated. Again, this new strategy would not supplant existing policy, which implies a high probability of an immediate U.S. military response to aggressions against the territories or assets of allies and other close security partners. The United States should not telegraph in any detail which kinds of scenarios might ultimately lead to the use of military force—­and, therefore, which other scenarios might not. My proposed paradigm is designed to increase available options, not foreclose them. Taking this approach should also ease the challenge of persuading U.S. allies that adoption of the new strategy was not tantamount to weakening the American commitment to their defense. That said, concern for allies’

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Introduction

15

sensitivities should not be taken too far. If existing policy is not credible but is dangerous, that fact is the real problem, and the United States with its allies should seek to redress the problem together. Some might claim that recent aggressions by China in the South China Sea or by Russia in Ukraine invalidate the plausibility of a sanctions-­first deterrence strategy. After all, the argument might go, Russia is still present in Ukraine, and China continues to reinforce its military positions in the South China Sea after promising not to militarize the area several years ago. But these cases do not involve formal American alliances or clear mutual defense pledges. Moreover, it is not clear that deterrence against truly unacceptable actions by Russia or China has actually failed in the cases noted. Russia has not invaded a NATO ally (or overrun Ukraine’s core populated areas and territories); China has not sought to impede other countries’ access to the sea-­lanes of the South China Sea, despite its “nine-­dash-­line” claim to the sea’s waters. Most of all, it is important to understand that the kinds of American and allied responses employed in these cases have been mild compared with what is proposed in this book as part of a strategy of asymmetric defense. Were such a strategy adopted as part of official U.S. policy, it should improve further the likelihood that deterrence will work in the future in regard to key American allies and security partners. Second, if it is militarily implausible that the United States and allies could ensure the prompt liberation of any and all allied territory that might be attacked, we cannot change that fact simply by denying it. Military balances have a reality and a meaning beyond our own preferences and perceptions. Reassurances to allies that ignore military realities are ultimately not meaningful reassurances at all, once it is understood that they cannot in fact be backed up. For certain scenarios, the stakes do not warrant the very high risks associated with a prompt military response, and some plausible military responses may not even be likely to produce victory for the United States and its allies. Third, today’s world, while under considerable stress, does not appear to be anywhere near the brink of strategic collapse. While we need to be resolute and vigilant, and aware of the need to shore up the global order, the United States and its allies also need to stay calm and respond proportionately to crises that may erupt, cognizant of their underlying assets and advantages.

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The Senkaku Paradox

Notably, although progress has plateaued of late, and been set back in places, democracies have become far more common than ever before. By Freedom House’s definition, about 120 countries, or nearly two-­thirds of the nations on the planet, qualified for the designation “electoral democracy” by the turn of the twenty-­first century. Yes, there has been regression—­but the net effect has been modest. In 2016, Freedom House assessed that 25 percent of all countries were not free, compared with 23 percent in 2006. This is an unfortunate development but not a catastrophic one; the world is not on the brink of a general democratic decline. Moreover, as Bruce Jones and I have underscored, if one considers the number of people living under a democratic form of government, rather than the number of democratic governments, there has been no setback at all. The fraction of people living in “free” countries rose modestly, from 44 percent to 45 percent, over the last dozen years. The fraction living in “not free” countries declined slightly over that period, from 37 percent to 36 percent. (The remainder live in countries evaluated as “partly free,” and that figure has held steady.30) Robert Kagan is surely right to warn that human progress to date is fragile, as cases such as Turkey and Hungary underscore, not to mention Russia.31 But we should remember the underlying strengths of the current global order, too.32 In strategic terms, the United States leads a coalition or loose alliance of some sixty states that together account for some 70 percent of world military spending (and a similar fraction of total world GDP). This is extraordinary in the history of nations, especially by comparison with most European history of the last several centuries, when variable power balances and shifting alliances were the norm. Even in the absence of a single, clear threat, the NATO alliance, major bilateral East Asian alliances, major Middle Eastern and Persian Gulf security partnerships, and the Rio Pact have endured. Most of the countries in these alliances are democracies, moreover, and a well-­accepted reality of international politics is that established, constitutional democracies rarely fight each other.33 This fact may not provide much solace in handling the challenges posed today by Russia and China. But the underlying strength of much of today’s global order should not be dismissed, nor should the strength of the U.S.-­ led community of democracies, which largely function together on key matters of war and peace, at least when the chips are truly down. To be sure, this Western-­led system is under stress economically and politically, and perhaps even in terms of self-­confidence.34 But it is worth

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Introduction

17

bearing in mind that this Western community of nations exists, with income levels far superior to those of China or Russia and with far more high-­tech innovation than any other group of nations. Such a tilted distribution of global power is probably conducive to international stability as well.35 Part of the reason for the Western community’s longevity is surely that it operates in a way that allows individual nations to make their own choices, in real time, about when and how they will employ force in defense of the interests of the broader community of states as a whole.36 The overall trajectory of the international community since World War II has been highly unusual by historical standards and highly beneficial to the planet. Because it is unusual, it should not be taken for granted. But it also has many strengths that improve the prospects of its durability.37 Thus the case for a more patient strategy focused on economic punishment and forward defense, rather than on prompt military counteroffensives and the liberation of any seized territory, comports with the basic character of today’s global order. It is under duress, yes. But it is also strong and resilient. It will remain stronger and more resilient if our military strategies play to our advantages, including on matters of military power, geography, and economics.38 Indeed, many other countries may be more impressed by U.S. leadership if it is realistic, smart, and proportionate in handling potential threats to the global order rather than quickly seeing a Munich-­like danger to the peace in any limited Chinese or Russian aggression and overreacting in a way that unnecessarily raises the risks of escalation to general war. Put differently, the United States may be more likely to lose partners and allies by overreacting, perhaps in unilateralist fashion, than by somehow being seen as purportedly leaving allies in the lurch after a limited attack. To be sure, there are risks associated with the strategy I propose, beyond the fact that it could take time to achieve its goals. Economic warfare is itself dangerous and potentially escalatory. To take one prominent example: the wide-­ranging and biting U.S. sanctions against Japan before World War II, however justified, were surely among the factors that convinced leaders in Tokyo to attack America at Pearl Harbor.39 Sanctions need to be employed judiciously, with full awareness of their potential to worsen crises and a recognition of their limitations. But whatever their risks, economic instruments of warfare, even if combined with limited kinetic strikes, are inherently far less escalatory than major military campaigns conducted near or on the borders of major nuclear powers. Economic measures do not directly cause physical damage or bodily harm to

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The Senkaku Paradox

human beings; and to the extent they do so indirectly, the process generally takes time. As such, the potential for mistakes during confusing periods of crisis management is much reduced with a strategy relying more heavily on economics than on massive uses of military force near the national territories of other nuclear-­weapons states. Moreover, most of the sanctions regimes proposed here will not quickly bring a large power like Russia or China to its knees. That is in many ways their chief limitation: there is generally no assurance, with the strategies proposed in this book, of a rapid reversal of the initial aggression. But by the same token, the sanctions regimes do not seem likely to raise the kinds of existential concerns for either Beijing or Moscow that could seem to require a military escalation or preclude the kinds of face-­saving deals that could produce a negotiated end to the crisis. They would cause substantial pain; they might not achieve a strangulation-­like effect. That is probably the right balance. The proposed strategies are designed to be proportionate to the scale of the initial attack and the magnitude of the resulting risks to the world order, neither underplaying nor overplaying their significance. As for the final possible element of a strategy of asymmetric defense, namely, the limited use of American and allied military force, this choice would indeed be riskier than purely economic sanctions or nonlethal military deployments. That would be true even if such a strategy were employed in distant theaters and focused on achieving narrowly tailored objectives (and even if primarily nonlethal weapons were employed). Thus the use of military force would generally make sense only when the initial Russian or Chinese aggression had already drawn blood, crossing the threshold into significant violence, or continued over an indefinite period in a way that caused significant harm, as for example with a blockade of Taiwan. The remainder of this book seeks to achieve two main purposes. First, in chapters 2 and 3, I analyze the difficulty and danger of scenarios in which China or Russia commits limited and local acts of aggression against American allies or close security partners. Chapter 2 examines the current world. Chapter 3, backed up by technical analyses presented in the appendixes, seeks to extrapolate the scenarios out to 2040, so that any new strategy will look far enough into the future to have durability. In chapters 4 and 5, I develop an alternative strategy of integrated defense and deterrence, combining military with economic elements, with a chapter on each main part of the overall approach. Chapter 6, the conclusion, summarizes my policy recommendations.

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T WO

Plausible Scenarios

TO DRAMATIZE THE ISSUES AT STAKE, and to examine the likely military dynamics of major wars fought near Russia or China, this chapter develops several combat scenarios. They are designed to represent a broader category of contingencies that might be described as limited conflicts with few if any likely casualties—­yet major global consequences. Two of the scenarios involve an attack on a U.S. ally that would formally commit the United States to consider employing all means of national power, including military force, in response. In other words, these are Article 5 scenarios—­one involving NATO, the other the U.S.-­Japan alliance. The third involves a very close security partner, Taiwan. The first scenario envisions a limited Russian foray into a Baltic state—­say, Estonia or Latvia—­that results in an occupation of at least a sliver of that NATO member’s territory. The other two involve possible aggressions ordered by Beijing: a Chinese seizure of one or more of the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands and a People’s Republic of China (PRC) attack on Taiwan featuring a naval blockade. These scenarios, or others like them, may not be likely in the years ahead. But they are far from implausible. They do not involve bolt-­from-­ the-­blue nuclear volleys, surreptitious biological weapons attacks, or other extreme and nihilistic actions.1 None would involve seizure or annexation

19

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The Senkaku Paradox

of major populated areas of a U.S. ally or other close friend. None need involve much loss of life. None necessarily implies any further aggressive action by Moscow or Beijing. All these realities may make them seem less risky to a possible aggressor. Moreover, they could succeed. They could be carried out so fast, in areas where defenses were so modest, that a “military entrepreneur” or ambitious political leader might elect to roll the dice.2 The aggressions may also seem quickly reversible, further limiting the stakes. Yet such scenarios, though limited in one sense, could have enormous consequences. If there were no response, and the aggressions were allowed to stand, the international order that has made interstate war extremely rare since World War II could be seriously imperiled. Historically, it is often through a series of individually modest actions or events that a global order weakens and ultimately collapses.3 For that reason, Washington and other capitals would feel strong pressure to respond militarily. Once that happened, escalation could occur even if neither side had initially sought it. Once this process got going, it would be hard to know where it would end. Thus America and its allies need responses that are resolute and punishing, but also as nonmilitary and nonescalatory as possible, consistent with the specifics of the scenario at hand. An additional if secondary advantage of my proposed approach of asymmetric defense is that it would provide a more viable recourse than going to war against both China and Russia at once, in the unlikely but not inconceivable event that they somehow decided to coordinate their attacks. These scenarios are intended to be illustrative. There are other ways that similar dilemmas could arise, that is, that crises or conflicts could create a serious risk of war over seemingly modest initial actions. For example, a Russian aircraft buzzing a NATO ship in Black Sea or Baltic Sea waters could crash into that ship accidentally, killing dozens of NATO sailors. Especially if Moscow somehow blamed NATO or insisted on compensation or demanded that proximate NATO patrols be ended in the future, a major crisis could ensue. Or a U.S. naval maneuver near one of China’s reclaimed islands in the South China Sea or a Filipino ship near the Scarborough Shoal (claimed by both the Philippines and China) could be directly challenged by the PRC. If loss of life or serious property damage occurred and if no obvious agreement existed on how to prevent such incidents in the future, a serious showdown could result.4 Perhaps

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Plausible Scenarios

21

China or Russia would then escalate to limited but direct assaults on allied territory. I do not consider most of these scenarios, or others like them, in detail. But the general question they spark could be similar to my Baltic, Senkaku, and Taiwan cases. Should the United States and its allies respond primarily with a direct military counter at the point of initial attack? Or should they emphasize an asymmetric and integrated response, with a heavy premium on strengthening forward defenses to prevent further attacks, combined with economic reprisals and possibly certain careful and targeted military responses in other theaters? This is the central conundrum around which this book is organized.

A Scenario with Russia I will consider first a case in which Russia uses several hundred or thousand troops, backed up by tens of thousands more just across the border, to slice off a section of Estonia or Latvia. These Baltic states directly border Russia, and the share of Russian speakers in each is about 25 percent. Back in 2003, in the days of overwhelming U.S. superiority and primacy, MIT professor Barry Posen famously wrote of America’s military “command of the commons.” Since then, U.S. military dominance over Russia and China has eroded, NATO’s original European members have collectively grown weaker, and the alliance has extended its membership to the Baltic states as well as other parts of eastern Europe. These latter areas are not so obviously part of any global commons. Nor are they near the industrial regions that George Kennan famously identified as crucial in the early years after World War II—­the United Kingdom and western parts of continental Europe (Kennan’s list also included Russia, Japan, and the United States). Nor are they particularly close to the North Atlantic, NATO’s original center of gravity. They are close to Russia. Russia could threaten one or more of the Baltic states in numerous ways, from cyberattacks to quick maneuvers by “little green men” like those used in the stealthy invasion of Crimea in 2014 to some type of partial naval blockade against shipping.5 The most stressful case for U.S. force planning purposes would probably be a classic invasion to seize one of the small countries outright. Indeed, Russia may have hoped to conjure up fears of such a capability with its summer 2017 exercise in Belarus, which

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The Senkaku Paradox

involved many tens of thousands of troops.6 However, the most realistic—­ and thus to my mind the most concerning—­scenario would involve a more limited form of overland aggression. Moscow might hope that, if it could pull off a fait accompli similar to the annexation of Crimea, perhaps after manufacturing a pretext for the intervention, such as the purported mistreatment of Russian speakers, it could get away with the action. After all, as noted in chapter 1, Article 5 is not a predesignated plan for a military response; it requires interpretation in any given situation. Again, it reads as follows: “The Parties agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all and consequently they agree that, if such an armed attack occurs, each of them, in exercise of the right of individual or collective self-­defense recognized by Article 51 of the Charter of the United Nations, will assist the Party or Parties so attacked by taking forthwith, individually and in concert with the other Parties, such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force, to restore and maintain the security of the North Atlantic area.” 7 The phrase “including the use of armed force” would seem to suggest an inevitable military response, but the preceding words, “as it deems necessary,” convey considerable ambiguity. Some allies might invoke this ambiguity to opt out of a military response and even to disapprove of a formal NATO decision to authorize force. Why might some NATO allies choose not to fight, even when their sworn obligations to each other would seem to require it? Beyond the semantic ambiguity inherent in the language of Article 5, there are deeper strategic reasons. Some allies might believe there was little plausible threat to them, even if the initial aggression was allowed to stand, since Russia’s current military posture presents little plausible capacity to conduct a deeper penetration of NATO territories.8 By contrast, other allies might fear provoking Russia into a larger war. Russia does have some capacity to bring in reinforcements over time, a result of improvements to its land forces west of the Urals in recent years.9 And, of course, it has nuclear weapons. Against this backdrop, some NATO states might prefer not to risk further arousing the Russian bear, even if it had already committed an initial limited act of aggression. If Russia carried out the aggression in a way that maintained a semblance of deniability, with “little green men” instead of regular troops, few would really be fooled even for a short time. But some NATO countries looking to avoid confrontation might invoke

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Plausible Scenarios

23

Moscow’s excuse as a reason to delay any military response and give diplomacy a chance to reverse the aggression. Russia’s Possible Motivations and Calculus Why would Russia consider such an idea? Why would President Vladimir Putin or another leader in the Kremlin order such a risky move? The odds of such a contingency do seem rather low. But they are significantly greater than zero, and could even grow someday under a successor to Putin who might share the latter’s general worldview but have a more reckless and risk-­prone temperament. If Russia could get away with slicing off even a modest chunk of territory of a NATO member state, that deed would call into question the very meaning of NATO’s Article 5 mutual-­defense pact and thus the very purpose of an alliance that Putin and many other Russians clearly abhor. Whatever Article 5’s ambiguities, if in fact NATO could not agree on a response to a Russian aggression against a member state, many would likely reach the conclusion that the alliance’s mutual defense pledge was a paper tiger. NATO could well be plunged into existential crisis. Weakening, neutering, or even ending that alliance would for Putin surely count as a major strategic victory. He might also come to believe that he could get away with such a limited invasion if he created a partially believable pretext (using disinformation campaigns and other tools) that Russian speakers in the area of interest were somehow under threat. His government’s recent claims of a right to protect Russian speakers (or any others considering themselves “Russian people”) anywhere in the world could provide a strategic predicate for such an aggression.10 That such Russian strategic ambitions could extend to areas that were once part of the Soviet Union, especially regions inhabited by large numbers of Russian speakers, seems particularly plausible. Moscow might further believe that once it had succeeded in its aggression, NATO would find it difficult to dislodge Russian forces. A nuclear threat by NATO—­to attack Russia if it did not pull its forces out of NATO territory immediately—­does not seem likely. The danger of such a move is obvious. And the history of the Cold War underscores the difficulty of achieving such compellence—­using a threat to persuade a country to reverse an action that has already been taken, in contrast to preventing one that has not yet been carried out.11 Putin might also reason that if NATO did choose to respond force-

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The Senkaku Paradox

fully, he could declare the supposedly threatened Russian speakers to now be safe before those NATO forces arrived in significant numbers. As a result, he could pull back his forces, avoiding war while declaring “mission accomplished.”12 New military concepts emerging from Russia of late, including “maskirovka” (or masked, camouflaged warfare), “hybrid warfare,” and “escalate to de-­escalate” (threatening to employ nuclear weapons to persuade an adversary to back down), suggest active thinking in Russia’s strategic and military communities about exactly these kinds of scenarios.13 To be sure, none of this thinking is sound, in the sense that Russia is not threatened by the West and should not be risking war in an effort to counter or weaken NATO. But Moscow’s decisions in recent years suggest a much more risk-­tolerant strategic calculus than is rational or responsible. NATO’s Dilemma and NATO’s Likely Response This kind of Russian aggression against a Baltic state, even if very limited in territorial scope, would be hugely consequential. Regardless of one’s position on the expansion of NATO to include these countries in the first place, any Russian designs on a NATO member state would create enormous risks.14 Were an aggression to be overlooked, the entire fabric of NATO could be called into question. However ambiguous it might be with regard to specifics, Article 5 is absolute and allows for no exceptions. Nor does the Washington Treaty distinguish between original NATO members and newer members, in terms of the central importance of the mutual defense concept undergirding the alliance. An attack on one is an attack on all.15 The kind of Russian aggression described above would be a test of allied will and cohesion; for the sake of the alliance’s future, and to ensure deterrence of any possible further Russian ambitions, it would be crucial that NATO pass the test. Yet chest-­thumping about NATO’s resoluteness must not preclude us from seeing clearly the dilemma this kind of Russian provocation would give rise to. There would be a stark incongruity in the idea of alliance forces conducting a potentially huge conventional military operation, and possibly risking nuclear war, over a few square kilometers of allied territory. The immediate stakes would be trivial compared with the dangers and potential costs. What, then, should NATO do? Let’s consider what might ensue if NATO chose to reverse the aggression with a counteroffensive. Alas, geography would work against NATO

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Plausible Scenarios

25

in this case. The region presents relatively open terrain for the movement of large armies,16 and Russia is much better positioned to act quickly with large forces in this area. As the presumed aggressor in this scenario, Russia would have the added advantage of surprise. As the immediate neighbor of the territory it proposed annexing, it would have the further advantage of convenient staging bases for reinforcements. If the attack were against Estonia or Latvia, each with only 5,000 to 6,000 uniformed military personnel, the aggrieved state might choose not to respond to the initial aggression out of fear that any action on its part might precipitate a larger Russian offensive with regular forces from across the border. NATO’s more distant powers typically have only a grand total of some 5,000 troops in the three Baltic states (plus Poland) combined, in addition to a handful of fighter jets. The United States also has been establishing a prepositioned stock of another brigade’s worth of heavy equipment in eastern Europe, but strewn across some nine separate nations.17 In the Cold War, although estimates varied, it was generally believed that the Soviet Union could move at least forty divisions (out of 200 total), and thus around half a million soldiers, into Central Europe within two to three months of beginning to mobilize, reinforcing the dozens of divisions the Warsaw Pact already had there.18 Today, Russia could not reach that same standard. Its military is just a quarter the size of Cold War levels and until recently had sustained years of relative privation after the dissolution of the Soviet Union.19 But much of the infrastructure that would have facilitated Warsaw Pact reinforcements is either still intact and in operation or within the capacity of the future Russian state to repair and refurbish. As such, the physical capacity of Russia’s internal lines of communication, in the western part of the country and on into the Baltic region, could in theory allow the movement of up to several hundred thousand Russian troops into the immediate region. An operation of this scale would be daunting but is hard to rule out as a possibility. Were NATO to decide that it needed to liberate the contested territory, the required undertaking would be dramatic. According to recent RAND wargames, just to have a partially viable defense in the Baltic states, NATO might require some seven brigades—­meaning perhaps 50,000 total uniformed personnel, after adding support and airpower capabilities.20 To be confident of success in a major counteroffensive operation, by contrast, NATO would likely need to deploy a multidivision force of several hundred thousand troops. A force of at least 300,000 would likely

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The Senkaku Paradox

be considered necessary. NATO would need not only the combat punch to defeat Russian forces, including possible reinforcements, but also the capacity to establish and protect bases and supply lines in the theater. With such a capability, if and when it was successfully deployed to the battlefield in intact condition, NATO would have a very high probability of defeating any plausible Russian force arrayed in a similar location.21 But achieving such a deployment would be no mean feat. The simple matter of generating several hundred thousand troops and getting them to the eastern parts of allied territory turns out to be not so simple. Most parts of NATO are poorly prepared to meet such a standard today. At its Wales summit in September 2014, NATO proposed creating a rapid reaction force of 4,000.22 Such a force, however useful for trip-­w ire deterrence, would have a meager combat capability against plausible Russian threats.23 Within about a month, Britain, France, and Germany might each be able to deploy a brigade, putting their combined contributions at somewhat more than 10,000.24 A 2018 NATO proposal would expand these numbers to 30,000 ground troops plus supporting ships and aircraft, to be deployable within thirty days.25 This is the worthy “Four 30s” initiative, subsequently released as a formal NATO declaration after the July 2018 Brussels summit. It envisions NATO having the capacity to deploy thirty battalions, air squadrons, and combat ships with thirty days’ notice.26 But even if attained, and even if the forces were suitably modernized and interoperable with each other, such a capability would be inadequate either to prevent a limited initial aggression or to mount a serious counterattack. Europe does not really build military force with the goal of power projection centrally in mind—­at least not adequately so. European members of NATO do not possess the kinds of strategic transport or mobile logistics and support capabilities needed for combat operations in remote areas.27 Although NATO is now officially committed to developing more power projection capabilities, as reflected in the 2016 Warsaw Summit Communiqué, among other key documents and official policies, it has a long way to go. Its present ambitions include creating a division-­sized high-­readiness capability—­again, a rather modest aspiration for the greatest military alliance in history. And its goals of having each member state devote 2 percent of GDP to its military and 20 percent of its military budgets to acquisition, even if achieved, will not guarantee any solution to this problem if any such added funds are misspent.28 It is doubtful that Europe in aggregate can project as many as 60,000

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troops to a remote combat region. During the Afghanistan surge of 2010– 11, European NATO militaries together deployed about 40,000 troops to Afghanistan and nearly another 20,000 or so in peacekeeping missions around the world, despite having ample time to prepare the deployments. These combined efforts probably constituted Europe’s maximal plausible power-­projection capacity, with many of the deployments being to locations with relatively benign conditions.29 That 60,000 figure equals the 1999 Helsinki Headline Goal that was established for EU member states—­a goal that was never truly reached, even though it was for less demanding operations than the high-­end combat scenario considered here.30 Of course, eastern Europe is closer to most NATO nations, and connected by better infrastructure, than is Afghanistan. However, the eastern European infrastructure could come under attack. And what often limits European (as well as Canadian) power projection is the logistical capacity of given combat units—­the trucking, mobile depots and mobile hospitals, engineering and construction assets, and the like—­as much as infrastructure or strategic lift. Thus, most of the mobile forces would have to come from the United States. Under the best of circumstances it would take at least two to three months to deploy such a multidivisional force.31 The basic math is fairly simple to understand. Even if a stateside combat unit was highly ready and poised for rapid deployment—­which is only sometimes the case—­it would still typically require two to four weeks to load up and move domestically to a port of debarkation and then transfer equipment onto ships. Ocean transit would require up to another two weeks, even with fast sealift (an average speed of twenty to twenty-­five knots for up to twenty-­four hours a day, plus slower movements near ports). Unloading, marshaling forces, and preparing to move out would require another couple of weeks even if bottlenecks could somehow be avoided. Official U.S. doctrine has never aspired to faster deployments—­and real-­world deployments are typically much slower than official doctrine or aspirational goals envision, often by a factor of two or more.32 For example, deploying the first 200,000 U.S. forces used in Operation Desert Storm took more than two months in 1990. Even though the United States has purchased more strategic lift since then, few places on Earth would have better infrastructure than American forces enjoyed in Saudi Arabia in 1990. Those U.S. forces were substantially larger, and were widely seen as substantially more ready, than today’s forces. Moreover, none of the above timelines presuppose active

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Russian efforts to interfere with the deployments, which could not only slow movements but cause attrition. So a counteroffensive to liberate an eastern NATO member state from a partial Russian occupation would be a much greater challenge than Operation Desert Storm, or Operation Iraqi Freedom a dozen years later. Defeating Saddam Hussein was difficult in the sense that it took big forces and incurred real costs, measured in both blood and treasure. Yet the outcome was not in serious doubt in either case. A Russia scenario would be very different. There would also be multiple plausible paths to escalation, even nuclear war. Russian Military Operations to Disrupt the NATO Deployments Ultimately, NATO would probably not be dissuaded from its planned buildup by Russian disinformation and propaganda. Thus it is certainly plausible that at some point in NATO’s gradual buildup process, Russia would elect to test the mettle of the allies by attempting to interfere physically in their military movements. This could be done in the first instance without directly killing anyone. The most obvious approach would be cyberattacks against infrastructure in and near the Baltic states, or in other NATO ports and airfields where forces were massing for embarkation. This vulnerability is probably considerable today, in the United States as well as in other NATO nations. To quote a U.S. Coast Guard cybersecurity study from 2015, “Cyber technologies have ushered in an unprecedented era of progress and efficiency, yet they have also given rise to grave threats and risks. These risks pose significant challenges to Coast Guard readiness and mission performance, and could have devastating impacts to the Maritime Transportation System.”33 Even in cases where Defense Department systems may be robust or resilient, commercial infrastructure and assets may not be. As then commander of Transportation Command General Darren McDew put it in 2016, “Consider the fact that our commercial partners account for about half of our wartime-­movement capability. Because of this, any one of their cyber vulnerabilities becomes a weakness for all of us.”34 NATO electricity grids crucial to the operation of key transportation infrastructure might also be taken down through cyberattack or even direct kinetic attack, despite the broader societal and economic consequences that would likely ensue. Perhaps Russia would employ a limited

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cyberattack against one NATO country’s grid to demonstrate capability and to warn about the possibility of a broader attack against more countries unless the military deployments were reversed or dramatically scaled back.35 Cyberattacks against other elements of the nation’s civilian infrastructure, even if less directly related to the deployment and operation of military forces, could serve as a further shot across the bow signaling Moscow’s intent to escalate further if NATO continued its preparations for combat.36 Disabling or destructive attacks against satellites would be another option, especially those useful for targeting and for communications.37 Russia and China already have latent antisatellite (ASAT) potential in the form of nuclear weapons; they are capable of other kinds of more targeted ASAT attacks too, and those capabilities will surely advance quickly in coming years.38 NATO would likely respond in kind to any such attacks on satellites. So at this point in the presumed crisis, both sides might be partly blind even as they sought to manage the situation, maneuver and operate their military forces, and discern each other’s activities and intentions. Fiber-­optic communications cables on the ocean floors could also be cut without directly killing anyone from a NATO country. These privately held arteries of global data flows carry more than 95 percent of all communications that cross the oceans; certainly the U.S. military depends on them substantially. Russian surveillance around these cables, including in deeper-­water locations, where they would be very tough to repair, has increased substantially in recent years. Russia may even have nuclear weapons tailored to use against such cables—­though it would surely have other means as well.39 The combined effect of attacks against cables and space assets and other infrastructure could pose considerable risks to stability by impeding communications between authorities and their radars, warning satellites, ballistic missile submarines, and other such capabilities. They could also largely shut down large-­scale data flows across the continents for extended periods.40 None of these Russian steps would itself physically stop NATO from deploying forces to eastern regions of alliance territory. They could, however, cause significant material damage, slow down a deployment, and signal Moscow’s willingness to take stern action, with the implied possibility of more assertive and possibly lethal steps down the road.

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Escalation? Once war begins, it is often difficult to control. Confidence about quick wins, controlled escalation, and managed stakes has often afflicted policymakers in previous eras—­often with disastrous results.41 The combined effects of all the nonlethal actions discussed above could be so radically disruptive to the functioning of not just national military forces but civilian economies as well that it challenges credibility to believe both sides would see and respect a clear firewall. Escalation could result. The current potential vulnerabilities of nuclear command and control systems, combined with residual nuclear doctrines from the Cold War era that are still fairly offensive-­minded, exacerbate the dangers. They make it hard to know whether a war that began with limited nuclear exchanges, or even just conventional attacks against the warning and command, control, and communications systems also important for nuclear stability, could be kept limited.42 Moscow would not need to throw caution to the winds to consider at least some lethal operations. For example, Russia might undertake limited attacks against discrete, localized targets on land or at sea, with the initial intention of minimizing loss of life in any such operation. Airfields would present natural targets, since NATO would need them to deploy forces and for any ensuing counteroffensive to ensure air superiority.43 Ports, large rail marshaling yards, or large truck depots would also be critical to NATO’s deployment of forces into eastern Europe. (Because the Suwalki Gap between Kaliningrad and Belarus leading from Poland into Lithuania is less than 100 kilometers wide, Russia could easily range the rail and road lines with shorter-­range conventionally armed missiles of the type still allowed it under the INF Treaty. It could also develop more longer-­range strike options.) Most such assets could not be attacked with any realistic hope of avoiding casualties. But if attacks happened at night, Russia might hope that the casualties would number in the dozens rather than thousands, and perhaps thereby decide the escalatory risk was tolerable. Yes, initiating the use of lethal force against NATO would be a momentous decision with grave risks. But Moscow might argue that NATO’s deployment had forced its hand, since Russia could not be expected to tolerate the unencumbered arrival of a huge force with substantial counteroffensive capacity some 500 miles from its national capital. Such logic would be specious under the postulated circumstances. But it would not

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be surprising. Nor would Moscow likely resist the temptation to threaten such an action, hoping it could persuade some NATO nations to develop cold feet. Modern conventional missiles, owned by Russia as well as China, are so accurate over several-­hundred-­k ilometer trajectories that such attacks would likely succeed in rendering operations infeasible at least until the damage could be repaired. Some missiles may have “circular error probables,” or CEPs—­essentially, typical miss distances—­of ten meters or less. Even if the actual CEPs are twenty or thirty meters, assets such as runways, or large container loading and unloading equipment at major ports, could be severely damaged with salvos of no more than five to ten missiles.44 The math here is quite simple and does not require complex modeling to understand. If a missile’s CEP is comparable to the lethal radius of its warhead, then any one shot has roughly a 50 percent chance of doing serious or lethal damage to its target. For the target to survive multiple hits, it needs lots of luck: Chances of one shot not damaging/destroying a target: 0.5. Chances of two shots not damaging/destroying target: 0.5 × 0.5 = 0.25. Chances of four shots not damaging/destroying target: 0.5 × 0.5 × 0.5 × 0.5 = 0.0625. Russia might also attack NATO ships. It could also attempt to use attack submarines, or conventionally armed ballistic and cruise missiles, or perhaps even precision-­strike ordnance from attack aircraft to strike at transport ships as they neared ports of debarkation in Europe. The attack submarines might have been surged to sea before any Russian aggression in the Baltics; even if that turned out not to be the case, it is dubious that NATO would choose to fire on them preventively in the course of a military deployment that had not yet led to any appreciable number of casualties on either side. Moreover, today, NATO considers it very hard to find Kilo-­class submarines in the Baltic Sea.45 If Russia attacked NATO transport ships in the Baltic Sea, the results could be devastating.46 In very rough numbers, the “kill probabilities” of advanced ordnance—­torpedoes, antiship missiles, laser-­guided bombs, and the like—­reach or exceed 50 percent. Sometimes a target is too big

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to be destroyed by a single hit, but just one strike is often enough to incapacitate a ship.47 NATO might be able to intercept many of these incoming threats, of course. Missile defenses have improved enough to where they can often “strike a bullet with a bullet.” Shorter-­range systems have succeeded in more than 80 percent of tests; longer-­range interceptors have about a 50-­50 track record. But tests, whether of long-­range homeland or theater defense systems, have generally addressed the scenario of a single interceptor pursuing a single offensive missile or warhead.48 Large-­scale saturation attacks are an entirely different matter, and the odds would be against the defender in such situations, if success is defined as robustly protecting most or all of the assets at risk. The history of modern naval combat reinforces these points. Even though there have only been a few significant episodes over the last generation, such as with the Falklands/Malvinas War in 1982 and conflicts in the Persian Gulf and Middle East, the data clearly show that undefended ships are likely to be hit by incoming missiles. Even ships with their defenses alert and working tend to be struck by 10 to 30 percent of advanced threats.49 NATO could easily see an armada largely destroyed by such action. Unlike the case with the Battle of the Atlantic in World War II, it would have put most of its eggs in a small number of ships. It could not easily afford to do on-­the-­job training with its cargo fleet, sacrificing many initial convoys and developing new tactics and capabilities to defend future ones.50 Today the United States would rely primarily on a grand total of some thirty mega-­ferry ships consisting of large medium-­speed roll-­on/ roll-­off transport vessels (LMSRs) plus SL-­7 Fast Sealift Ships for most of its prompt transport of heavy army equipment. (Some of these ships are prepositioned already relatively near forward theaters, loaded with dedicated stocks of equipment for rapid delivery.) There are also comparable numbers of somewhat smaller ships in reserve, plus enough additional lift for the equivalent of nearly two Marine Corps divisions.51 Let us focus on those thirty LMSRs and SL-­7s, the heart of the U.S. capability. The typical transport ship would carry one-­fifth to one-­tenth of a full heavy division’s worth of equipment.52 The army has fifteen active-­ duty armored brigade combat teams (ABCTs), roughly the equivalent of five divisions.53 Thus most of this entire capability could be deployed in a single sailing of the large LMSRs and SL-­7s, at least in principle.

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If Russia put its mind to preventing such an armada from reaching port, the result could be a modified version of D-­Day—­w ith many fewer direct casualties, since soldiers would generally not be aboard the transport ships, but potentially with far greater implications for the prognosis of the mission. The United States could literally lose the majority of its top-­ line combat equipment in a single battle. Suppose these thirty transport ships were accompanied by ten escorts—­top-­of-­the-­line U.S. destroyers with Aegis-­radar-­based ship defenses. Those escorts could pack lots of defensive punch, to be sure, since each has some ninety-­six vertical-­launch system tubes that can carry a range of weaponry, including surface-­to-­air missiles. But because of the uncertainties of missile defense, each would do well to carry out ten successful intercepts of incoming threats with their suite of several dozen defensive interceptors each.54 Any Russian launch in excess of 100 incoming threats could therefore inflict significant damage, according to this notional but reasonably realistic calculation. If a typical ship could absorb three to four hits before going out of action, a Russian launch of 200 total missiles or other ordnance could in theory sink the fleet (even without help from submarines). If it sank even half the fleet, the United States would not have enough conventional military power to achieve preponderance in a future war set in the Baltic region. It could have to build more roll-­on/roll-­off ships, or hope that it could safely deploy additional forces to undamaged ports farther west in Europe (unless some ports near and in the Baltics had somehow been spared devastation and could continue to be protected). It might also have to produce or upgrade more weapons platforms, precision-­strike ordnance, and other specialized capabilities that had been lost in the initial attack, since such capabilities often are not stocked in abundance by today’s NATO militaries This is a simplified calculation, of course; an actual battle would naturally proceed somewhat differently. Most of all, one would hope that NATO would not expose itself to a large-­scale attack that exploited what proved to be a single-­point-­of-­failure vulnerability. But the basic math is still indicative of what could take place. Are the above calculations, and some others in this chapter, too pessimistic about the prospects of the United States and allies in these kinds of war? Perhaps. Any combat prognostication requires establishing higher and lower bounds of likely losses and acknowledging considerable uncertainty about predicted results—­as the United States should have done much more carefully before invading Iraq in 2003, for example.55 But the

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unfavorable outcome sketched here is plausible and cannot be ruled out. American war plans always need to account for plausible worst-­case scenarios; that should be a precept of any responsible strategic analysis. Perhaps the United States would try again after such a potential fiasco, planning to take down as much Russian air and naval capability as possible before a second attempted armada landing (or, alternatively, electing to unload supplies in Western Europe and gradually trudge across the continent by land to reach the battlefield). However, this effort would be slow and difficult. The transportation infrastructure in much of Europe is not conducive to such movements at present, owing to weak bridges, tight passages, and mismatched rail gauges, among other challenges.56 And while the United States has several thousand tanks in storage, along with large amounts of other combat equipment, readying them for deployment could take many months—­even a year or two, if they had to be upgraded first. Finding additional shipping could take at least as long. The prospect of such a delayed reaction could weaken deterrence by making a response seem less than credible. As such, the United States and NATO partners would undoubtedly feel intense pressure, at the first sign of visible preparations for attack by Russia, to disable Russia’s surveillance and command and control capabilities and to preempt any missiles or aircraft or submarines before they could get within range of the target. That could, of course, entail direct attacks against airfields, ports, and other facilities on Russian soil, not just those that happened to be directly involved in the Baltic state occupation. In other words, NATO might strike first, rather than leave itself vulnerable to ambush. In light of the alliance’s consensus decision-­making procedures, that possibility seems unlikely—­but it must also be remembered that this scenario is premised on a situation in which Russian forces occupy at least a small swath of NATO territory, so certain thresholds would already have been crossed by enemy action. Regardless, the stage would be set for an extremely dangerous dynamic. If any initial conventional engagements went against its interests, Russia might also consider limited nuclear employment options. Indeed, some of its strategists currently entertain an “escalate to de-­escalate” concept that would attempt to intimidate NATO allies into reversing their plans. Russia might detonate a nuclear weapon high in the atmosphere to create a powerful nuclear-­induced electromagnetic pulse (EMP) that could prove lethal to air defense radars, military communications sys-

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tems, and much civilian infrastructure over a region many hundreds of kilometers in radius. A Russian EMP burst using a high-­a ltitude nuclear weapon would be an extremely provocative and risky move, to be sure.57 But some Russian leaders could argue that it was not strictly speaking a nuclear attack, since no humans would be killed by the direct explosive effects of such a weapon—­and thus might delude themselves into thinking it was a relatively low-­risk option. In fact, the risks could be very high. Some types of EMP attacks (or even cyberattacks) by Russia could disable large chunks of the U.S. or European electricity grids for many months.58 A severe attack of this type might even lead to a U.S. nuclear response, in light of the new nuclear doctrine of the Trump administration.59 Beyond the EMP option, Russia could use nuclear weapons directly against ships that carried military equipment, missile defense radars, or other capabilities. Indeed, it threatened to target nuclear missiles at any Danish ships joining the U.S.-­led missile defense effort in 2015. Again, the provocation would be enormous—­but the direct human stakes might be fairly limited, since only dozens of sailors, or at most a couple hundred, might be on a given naval vessel.60 Moscow might, perhaps delusionally, think the risks were acceptable. Of course, there would be enormous significance and risk to crossing the nuclear threshold in any way. But if weapons were used against isolated military targets (as both sides contemplated in various ways during the Cold War), Moscow again might convince itself, rightly or wrongly, that escalation risks could be tolerated and managed. That might be particularly true for attacks limited to the kinds of target sets that posed disproportionate vulnerability and dependence for NATO. These could include cargo ships at sea, rail marshaling yards where train tracks change gauge (necessitating unloading and reloading) at the Poland-­Lithuania border, or particularly weak bridges without nearby alternative routes.61 If Russia could limit NATO fatalities to hundreds of sailors and not itself present any target sets that were characterized by a similar combination of relatively high military importance and relatively great separation from vulnerable civilian populations, NATO might not have a good recourse. Moscow might hope as much, at least—­and so elect to roll the dice. Such a decision would be reckless and foolish, but perhaps not beyond the pale of how human beings have behaved historically in wars they felt they were otherwise likely to lose.

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The Outcome of the Scenario: Toward a Net Assessment With all these factors in motion, how would this kind of conflict likely play out? A NATO military response to the postulated Russian aggression seems very likely. Perhaps evidence of its preparations to move forces into position to defend its ally and liberate its territory from Russian occupation would be enough to catalyze a diplomatic resolution of the crisis. If not, however, the stage would be set for the possible eruption of World War III. Russia might try to impede a deployment through cyber-­, space, and other such attacks, which would likely only slow the deployment, not stop it. Thus escalation could easily result.62 Once shots were fired, NATO would be unlikely to back down. Not every nation would necessarily send significant military forces, to be sure, but some key countries would probably remain resolute. Much more likely than acceptance of defeat would be a redoubled commitment to complete the mission—­and, if Russian nuclear weapons had been used by that point, even in a limited attack, to respond in kind. Put differently, if Russia did choose to try to physically prevent the deployment of large forces into eastern NATO territory in likely preparation for a counterattack, there would be two possibilities. If that attempt failed, a showdown in the east on land would still loom. If it succeeded, NATO would then face a momentous decision: accept defeat, or reinforce dramatically with conventional forces (perhaps after a period of repairing damage and building more equipment and weaponry, depending on how many losses it had already suffered), or escalate to the nuclear level. In situations of this sort, the parties to the conflict might find themselves living scenarios like those that nuclear theorists pondered throughout the Cold War. They could be engaged in behavior that Thomas Schelling might have described as “the threat that leaves something to chance” or that Herman Kahn might have placed on the lower rungs of a nuclear escalation ladder that reached potentially to all-­out war.63 American planners saw these kinds of escalatory ladders and options as ideas that might serve U.S. interests; thus it would not be too surprising to see Russian planners invoke them now.64 And whatever the dangers during the deployment phase, they would snowball during any actual maneuver warfare in eastern Europe. For example, it is entirely imaginable that an operation designed to liberate a

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Baltic state from a Russian occupation would trespass onto Russian territory to cut off supply lines and possible reinforcements.65 Moscow may or may not simply take NATO’s word that it has no designs on the country’s government. In other words, it might even fear that NATO’s counteroffensive could aspire to regime change in Russia. It may or may not have a clear picture of the kind of attack it is experiencing, as command and control systems would be compromised in the course of conventional battle, quite possibly including those systems commonly used for nuclear weapons.66 I conclude that, for a hypothetical conflict occurring sometime in the near future, enough uncertainties exist to make the outcome of the war somewhat unpredictable. One cannot simply assert that NATO’s numerous advantages guarantee a victory. The Baltics’ exposed geographic location, NATO’s limited means of deploying reinforcements to the region reliably, Russia’s options in domains ranging from cyberspace to outer space, and the possible use of nuclear weapons even in just a limited, tactical role make it uncertain that NATO could confidently expect victory despite collectively outspending Russia by more than ten to one in the military arena. For example, it is not clear that the United States could safely send most of its major ocean transport vessels to ports of debarkation and unload supplies there in the face of a conventional military threat. And if it lost a substantial fraction of its top-­line supplies and ships to Russian attacks in its first attempt, the United States might need time to prepare for a second effort, which might then have to begin further west in Europe where disembarking and marshaling of forces could be carried out more safely, before those forces gradually made their way eastward. NATO would probably win such a conventional war, but it could take many months or even years. And even then, the deep uncertainties associated with possible nuclear escalation make it unclear whether victory could even be meaningful. Few would say that a few thousand square kilometers of Baltic territory logically warrant nuclear risks. But human beings are not always logical. Nuclear brinkmanship over a limited-­war scenario in eastern Europe would not be unthinkable, based on what we know of history and human nature. And if nuclear weapons were ever used, even in small numbers at first, all bets are off as to where and how the conflict would end.

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Two Scenarios with China Consider the following thought experiment. Officials in Washington and Tokyo wake up one morning to discover that Chinese forces, perhaps numbering a couple hundred troops in all, have seized one of the larger Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands. (There are five actual Senkaku islands and three rocks that do not qualify as islands, all northeast of Taiwan and about 200 miles from the Chinese mainland. Ownership of these islands, known as the Senkaku Islands in Japan and the Diaoyu Islands in China, is a perennial source of dispute between the two states.) What should they do? Here is second dangerous if more familiar scenario: China decides to use force against Taiwan. Such an attack might center on a naval blockade, perhaps complemented by cyberattacks as well as targeted kinetic strikes on Taiwan’s command and control systems. The Chinese aggression might result from a perception or misperception in Beijing that leaders in Taipei were pursuing something akin to independence (or starting a program to build nuclear weapons, another possible casus belli, though that seems less credible).67 China might find a blockade against the trade-­dependent island to be a very appealing option, with limited risk of large-­scale loss of life or property damage yet with considerable impact.68 China’s Possible Motivations and Calculus Why would China undertake either of the above uses of force? The Taiwan contingency has been discussed for years. Indeed, China has engaged in brinkmanship in the past, including Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) missile launches that landed near Taiwan in the mid-­1990s and the threat of action during another crisis in the early 2000s. China considers Taiwan part of its territory and a “core interest” of the state. Thus the stakes are very high in any development that Beijing might interpret as a move toward attempted independence by leaders in Taipei.69 The Taiwan-­China relationship has been calmer over the past decade, largely because former Taiwan president Ma Ying-­jeou pursued an accommodating foreign policy and because President Tsai Ing-­wen since her inauguration in 2016 has been prudent as well, despite having generally more nationalistic views than her predecessor. But the structure of the situation remains potentially fraught; indeed, it was quite tense at

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times even when Ma was in office.70 Meanwhile, China, sensing its greater strength, has been quietly ratcheting up pressure on Taiwan and on American firms showing sympathy toward Taiwan or any hesitancy in expressing their full-­throated support for the “one China” policy.71 The recent U.S. passage of the Taiwan Travel Act in 2018 could also roil the waters. It could lead to more meetings between American and Taiwan officials and thus greater reason for Chinese worry—­justifiable or not—­about possible Taiwan movements toward independence.72 As Richard Bush and I wrote several years ago: The reasons why that war could occur, are as follows: • First, China really does consider Taiwan its own, and even as it has arguably adopted a more subtle and sophisticated approach to the Taiwan challenge in recent years, it has explicitly kept the threat of force on the table. • Second, China’s military capabilities are growing fast even as Taiwan’s begin to stagnate, meaning that Beijing could sense an opportunity—­if it can keep the United States out of the fight. • Third, Taiwan could push the sovereignty issue in a way that China interprets as the pursuit of full independence. While China would probably be wrong in reaching any such conclusion, perceptions could matter more than reality in such a situation. • Fourth, while Washington’s commitment to Taiwan is longstanding, it is also somewhat ambiguous, so leaders in China might convince themselves that the United States really would sit out a China-­Taiwan war.73 Since we wrote those words, China’s military budget has doubled again, Chinese military priorities have continued to reflect an emphasis on power projection by high-­end joint forces in an “informatized” environment, China’s military has been streamlined and organized more clearly on key theater commands, and Taiwan’s military budget has stayed relatively flat. These realities, plus trends in technology, have meant that any American effort to come to Taiwan’s military assistance in a shooting war would be much more difficult than before.74

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Moreover, the kind of scenario postulated here would be quite serious for Taipei. Taiwan would suffer severe and continually worsening pain if even a “leaky” blockade continued for long.75 A Senkaku/Diaoyu scenario seems less central to Chinese national aims and also less likely to lead immediately to war, insofar as none of the islands are inhabited. However, these two facts could partially cancel each other out: Beijing might assess that it could get away with a limited use of force precisely because the threat to Japan might seem modest. The insult to Japanese pride would be severe, and thus the likelihood of a response would be high. But in Beijing, where the “history issue” remains prominent, provoking Japan might seem as much opportunity as danger. Domestic political pressures within China may push further in this same direction. Some Chinese leaders might relish the chance for a confrontation. They might also expect, perhaps wrongly, that any American response would be mild, in light of the limited stakes and Washington’s own ambivalence as to who rightfully owns the islands (even as the United States also recognizes that Japan administers the islands today, and thus that the U.S.-­ Japan Security Treaty should apply to their protection). China may have an interest in gradually exercising greater control over not just the East China Sea but also the South China Sea for reasons ranging from access to fisheries and other economic resources to protection of undersea bastions for its nuclear-­capable submarine force.76 The ongoing activity of Chinese vessels within the territorial waters of the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands suggests that the chances of a crisis are significantly greater than zero. They are certainly too high for comfort.77 The U.S. Dilemma and Likely Responses What would the United States and its regional allies and partners do, should China elect to use force either to seize a Senkaku/Diaoyu islet or to punish and coerce Taiwan? When the same question concerning the Senyaku/Diaoyu Islands was put to the senior American Marine in the region several years ago by a reporter, Lieutenant General John Wissler noted that the United States (and Japan, of course) could surely take them back.78 Indeed, Article 5 of the U.S.-­Japan Treaty could make such a response seem quite natural, if not virtually essential in the eyes of some. Article 5 begins as follows: “Each Party recognizes that an armed attack against either Party in the

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territories under the administration of Japan would be dangerous to its own peace and safety and declares that it would act to meet the common danger in accordance with its constitutional provisions and processes.” 79 President Obama was the first U.S. president to say explicitly that Article 5 applied to the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands. Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis reiterated the commitment in February 2017.80 General Wissler suggested that bombing might be the preferred military tactic for responding to any hypothetical Chinese seizure or occupation of one of the islands, implying that Chinese casualties would be the inevitable result (indeed, the goal) of such a campaign. Wissler’s comments were militarily well informed. They reflected a serious consideration of the tactical options that would be available to the United States and Japan in such a hypothetical situation. It is also probably good, for deterrence purposes, that Beijing understand such options could be considered by Tokyo and Washington. Indeed, Japan might respond forcefully on its own, though one would hope that the two allies would consult each other and agree on a joint plan of action. Nonetheless, Wissler’s words also produced a bit of a diplomatic brouhaha, and for understandable reasons. Once blood had been spilled, with perhaps several dozen or more troops killed, it is not obvious how such a conflict would be ended. (The initial Chinese seizure of the island in question would likely not cause casualties since no one lives on these islands and no Japanese or U.S. military personnel are routinely deployed on them.) The situation could be even more murky and fraught if, for example, China emulated Russia and its maskirovka tactics and feigned the “rescue” of a group of tourists or fishermen who just happened to be near the islands when a storm hit that forced them to make landfall and left them stranded and purportedly in need of rescue. What if the Chinese troops used such a pretext to go ashore, and then stayed indefinitely? One additional problem with bombing the hypothesized Chinese contingent: Would the United States do that by itself, or with the Japanese, or ask Japan to do it unilaterally? Any option is bad—­the first for its unilateralist U.S. ways and the free ride it would give Japan, the second and third for grievously worsening what is already a very tense relationship between East Asia’s two greatest powers. Thus, rather than be the end of the matter, General Wissler’s comments should be a catalyst to more serious discussion of what options Washington and Tokyo might consider should China seize a disputed island.

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The Senkaku Paradox

My best guess as to what American and Japanese decision makers would do in response to Chinese troops landing on one or more of the Senkaku/ Diaoyu Islands is that they would consider a blockade of the island in an effort to starve the troops off the islands over time. This approach would in some ways follow the precedent of the Cuban missile crisis. Indeed, the analogy may be more apt than it first appears. Although a company or two of PRC soldiers on an uninhabited Senkaku island possesses a far less menacing capability than nuclear weapons on a communist-­r un island just off U.S. shores, the potential for serious escalation among nuclear-­armed powers would exist in the Senkaku/Diaoyu case as well. While the imposition of a blockade may sound relatively benign compared to a bombing raid, there would be nothing benign about it. China might interpret the action as an act of war, since it claims ownership of the islands in question. (A blockade is generally defined as establishment of a cordon around an enemy’s territory. Since ownership is disputed in this case, interpretation of whether a blockade constituted an act of war would likely be disputed as well.) Japan and the United States would see it differently than Beijing, with the former claiming the island itself and the United States taking no position but recognizing and supporting Japan’s administration of the islands at present. For these two countries, an operation designed to prevent reinforcement of Chinese troops on one or more of the islands could be defined as simple self-­defense.81 How might such a standoff end? Would China try doggedly to sneak supplies ashore, perhaps by planes or submarines, or in small boats disguised as commercial vessels? Would Japan and the United States be prepared, if necessary, to use lethal force to impede such resupply? Would China shoot at the American and Japanese planes and ships enforcing the blockade? One thing seems clear: the potential for escalation to violent conflict would exist in this scenario. Moreover, it is hard to say who would have the upper hand militarily.82 Thus, either side might be tempted to pursue maximalist ambitions, rather than to seek a compromise resolution. The escalation could broaden geographically, as well. For operations in this region, China would depend on coastal bases in the central and southern parts of its littoral. The United States and Japan would depend on bases on Okinawa and other parts of the Ryukyu island chain, and perhaps in Kyushu as well as other locations on mainland Japan. These facts raise the possibility of broader attacks by each country against military bases in densely populated parts of the other’s respective homeland,

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and against ships and aircraft operating in the broader area, once the first shots were fired.83 It seems implausible that tiny uninhabited islands could lead to general war involving the United States, Japan, and China. But it also is hard to predict with confidence just how this scenario, once started, would end. A possible Chinese blockade of Taiwan, on the other hand, clearly has even higher stakes, and history suggests that crises may again occur in connection with Taiwan. Beijing might convince itself that a blockade-­centered operation against Taiwan, designed to force it to reverse whatever purportedly offending action or rhetoric had caused China’s reaction in the first place, might not be hugely risky. In principle, China could scale back or suspend enforcement of the blockade at any point if it needed to, and could do so while saving face, especially if the blockade was conducted principally by submarines. Moreover, Beijing might believe that even a partially effective naval blockade could be a potent instrument of coercion against Taiwan. Such a blockade would almost assuredly be nowhere near complete or airtight.84 However, China would not need to stop all commercial ships transiting into and out of Taiwan. It would simply need to deter enough ships from risking the journey that Taiwan’s economy would suffer badly. The goal would likely be to squeeze the island economically to the point of capitulation. This solution might seem quite elegant from Beijing’s point of view: it could involve little or no loss of life, little or no damage to Taiwan itself, and the ability to back off the attack if the United States seemed prepared to intervene or if the world community slapped major trade sanctions on China in response.85 In any such blockade, China might well combine various elements of military power, including cyberattacks, into a multidimensional operation.86 It could attack command and control as well as reconnaissance capabilities both on land and in space (the latter intended largely to blind the United States). The centerpiece of the approach would probably be the PRC submarine fleet introducing a significant risk factor into all maritime voyages into and out of Taiwan by occasionally sinking a cargo ship, either with submarines or with mines it had laid in Taiwan’s harbors.87 The PRC submarine force has improved by leaps and bounds in recent decades. Over the past twenty years, China’s fleet of modern attack subs has grown from roughly two to forty.88 China’s precision-­strike capabilities have improved to the point that China could conceivably use a preemptive missile and air

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The Senkaku Paradox

attack against Taiwanese airfields and ports and associated infrastructure to hobble Taiwan’s ability to strike back, though it might choose not to attack Taiwan’s territory in the first instance.89 To allow humanitarian supplies to reach Taiwan, Beijing might offer countries the option of first docking in a PRC port for inspection before sailing to their destinations. In this and other ways, it could limit the dangers to innocent civilians. Since this strategy might require the Chinese submarine fleet to sink only a few ships to achieve the desired aims, even in the worst case Beijing might believe that it was acting humanely—­ threatening the lives of only 100 to 200 commercial seamen. Given the perceived stakes involved, Beijing could well consider this a reasonable risk. If they chose to try to break the blockade, the basic concept of operations for the United States and Taiwan would probably be to assemble enough forces in the western Pacific to set up a protected shipping lane east of Taiwan. To carry out that mission, the United States would need to establish air superiority throughout a large part of the region, together with Taiwan (and perhaps other countries such as Japan). The United States and Taiwan, and perhaps others, would also need to protect ships against Chinese submarine attack while coping with the threat of mines near Taiwan’s ports. And they might have to do all this without assured access to much of their satellite architecture, especially for imagery and some types of signals intelligence. That is because China’s abilities to shoot down or disable low Earth orbit satellites, through direct-­ascent interceptors or directed-­energy weapons or other means, have improved in recent years (even as some aspects of U.S. access to space have become more distributed and resilient as well).90 China might well be willing to shoot at American satellites even if it sought, at least initially, not to attack U.S. ships or aircraft. However, its willingness to do the latter in addition should not be dismissed, in light of Taiwan’s importance to Beijing. And its willingness would likely grow very quickly after the first Chinese submarine was sunk, which could happen if the U.S.-­Taiwan blockade-­busting and convoy escort operation shot back at a PLA submarine that had just attacked a cargo vessel. Escalation could happen fast. Later in a conflict, China might even consider using nuclear weapons in such an attack, despite its official no-­first-­use policy, as Columbia professor Thomas Christensen has argued.91 While the term “surgical nuclear strike” is almost oxymoronic and Strangelovian,

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to the extent it has any faint resemblance to reality, it is probably in a situation like an attack on a lone ship at sea. Establishing air superiority has become much harder for the United States and Japan in these kinds of scenarios because of the PLA Air Force’s modernization trends in recent years, combined with the limited options for basing U.S. aircraft in the region. Fortunately, modern U.S. stealthy or “fifth-­generation” aircraft are still far superior to Chinese planes. Unfortunately, China now has close to 1,000 “fourth-­generation” fighters roughly comparable to U.S. aircraft such as the F-­15 and F-­16. And it can base perhaps 1,000 aircraft within several hundred miles of Taiwan. A RAND simulation estimates that China might be able to surge about half that number in an attack on Taiwan or on the shipping around it, including a mix of air-­to-­air, air-­to-­ground, and electronic-­warfare planes. Using a basic model and some simplifying assumptions, RAND estimates that the United States could prevent such a surge force from reaching most of its targets only by continuously keeping some two wings or about 150 aircraft airborne near Taiwan. The United States and its partners would likely succeed in such an effort because, according to RAND’s model, the United States’ fifth-­ generation aircraft—­F-­22s and F-­35s, and to a lesser degree F/A-­18E/F Super Hornets—­could have 50 percent more lethality and up to 90 percent less vulnerability than Chinese combat jets.92 But the success would come at a price, and only with considerable effort and difficulty. China could choose the time and place of its surge, and the United States (with any allies) would therefore have to be vigilant at all times. It would need to keep fighters airborne near Taiwan essentially for as long as the crisis endured. It would also need the continued presence of airborne warning aircraft in the vicinity. Bases on Okinawa are about 750 kilometers away from Taiwan, or about an hour of flight time; aircraft carriers might be kept roughly that close too. But other bases in the area—­Misawa Air Base on Japan’s main Honshu island, Andersen Air Force base on Guam—­ would be 2,500 kilometers or more distant, meaning some three hours of flying each way to get to station and then return after flying a patrol. If aircraft and crews are limited to a daily flight average of about six hours a day, jets from Okinawa could average 1.5 sorties per day and those from the more distant bases slightly less than one sortie per twenty-­four hours. That would translate into three hours a day on station flying from Kadena and 1.5 hours a day flying from Guam or Honshu. Put differently:

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The Senkaku Paradox

Eight aircraft (plus or minus) based on Kadena would be needed to sustain one on station near Taiwan. Sixteen aircraft or so based at Misawa or Andersen Air Force Base would be needed to keep one on station near Taiwan. Averaging this out, keeping two wings of fighters aloft at a time could require about ten to twelve times that number being based in the region, or twenty to twenty-­four wings—­more than half the total U.S. military aggregate. (The RAND study actually estimates that fourteen to thirty would be needed, depending on specific assumptions; I have simplified the analysis above.93) Moreover, the United States could lose a number of aircraft in this process, perhaps even dozens. China could lose dozens or even hundreds. The backdrop would be set for escalation. Both sides would be increasingly tempted to attack the land bases and aircraft carriers from which planes operated.94 Ballistic missiles and ballistic missile defense would be important in this kind of engagement, too. China now has missiles, such as the medium-­range DF-­21 in the Dong-­Feng series, that are capable of being fired from its homeland and reaching ships east of Taiwan. It is not clear whether the United States could blind China’s sensors adequately to deprive the PLA of targeting information. Any PLA attack against military facilities in a place like Okinawa therefore could well shut down runways for at least some stretch of time and destroy aircraft or ordnance and fuel stocks not in underground areas or hardened shelters.95 Again, Chinese nuclear attacks against American and any allied naval assets in the region are hard to dismiss categorically. The antisubmarine warfare (ASW) effort could have multiple aspects. The United States would probably be tempted to deploy its own attack submarines as close as possible to China—­certainly in the Taiwan Strait, maybe just outside PRC ports. This approach would provide American submarines a good prospect of destroying PRC submarines at their source, before they were in position to fire on commercial shipping (or U.S. aircraft carriers) in more distant waters. However, this type of ASW could be escalatory if it involved attacks in Chinese territorial waters. Whatever happened near Chinese shores, there would surely be additional layers of American ASW farther out to sea. American ASW assets on ships and planes would accompany convoys of merchant ships as they

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sailed in from the open ocean waters east of Taiwan. These convoys might form a thousand miles or more east of Taiwan and enjoy armed protection from that point onward as they traveled to the island, and then later as they departed. The ASW assets would use sonar to listen for submarines, and for the sound of any torpedoes being fired. The United States would have to deploy significant numbers of surface combatants and airplanes such as P-­3s and P-­8s, as well as helicopters, to the region for this mission. Some would help protect U.S. aircraft carriers east of Taiwan. Others would provide additional protection to merchant ships or mine warfare vessels as they operated near Taiwan’s shores. Any Chinese submarine wishing to fire a torpedo at a merchant ship or aircraft carrier would then first have to run a gauntlet (if it were firing long-­range antiship missiles, it could avoid some of the gauntlet, but would depend on targeting information provided by another platform). It would likely have to evade submarine detection as it left port, avoid any open-­ water search missions that the United States and Taiwan established, and then somehow penetrate the defensive ASW perimeter of whatever convoy it was attacking as it approached its target. To survive the overall engagement and return to port, it would then need to successfully negotiate all of this in the other direction. Unfortunately for Chinese submarines, this would be risky business. Unfortunately for the United States, Taiwan, and any other allies participating in the effort, it would also be risky for their assets, and some would surely be lost in the operation. During the Cold War, the effectiveness of ASW operations was commonly assessed at 5 to 15 percent per barrier. (Cold War barriers were often more linear and literal perimeters than would be likely here, but the fact remains that Chinese submarines would have to survive perhaps three types of pursuers on three different parts of their journey to or from home base.) By those odds, the typical Chinese submarine would do well to survive for two or three round-­trip missions from base.96 But it might succeed in getting off several shots against valuable, and vulnerable, surface ships before meeting its own demise.97 A recent major RAND study on the U.S.-­China military balance concurred with this broad result, especially in cases where Chinese submarines could be cued by sensors to a general area where a target such as a U.S. aircraft carrier might operate. In that case, a given submarine might have multiple opportunities to get off shots at lucrative surface targets.98 China might hope that a quick strike that

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The Senkaku Paradox

sank a major U.S. ship and killed hundreds of Americans (or even thousands, in the event of a carrier sinking) would cause Washington to waver in its future commitment to the defense of Taiwan. The United States might face serious challenges in waters near Taiwan as well, despite the proximity of land-­based assets that could join in the ASW hunt. Shallow waters are complex sonar environments in which sound waves bounce back and forth in multiple and unpredictable directions. This makes ambush a real worry, especially for the mine warfare vessels and surface ships that would have to escort commercial vessels all the way into Taiwan’s ports.99 Toward a Net Assessment Where does this leave us? Although I have not provided a detailed scenario analysis or combat modeling exercise here, the broad contours of the situation drive home some central points. They are also consistent with the more detailed modeling work of others, such as RAND. Once a Chinese blockade operation against Taiwan began, it would be difficult to be confident that it would end without a significant and escalating conflict pitting the United States, Taiwan, and perhaps Japan against China. If that occurred, sustained naval, aerial, and missile combat in and around Taiwan would likely lead to substantial losses on all sides. American advantages in fifth-­ generation combat aircraft and modern attack submarines would give the United States and its partners in the operation a significant edge. However, that edge is less than it used to be. China would clearly have the edge in geography, and it also increasingly possesses good attack submarines and precision-­strike missiles as well. Myriad uncertainties, including the survivability of space and cyber systems, as well as ships and land bases, make it hard to be confident in predicting outcomes. Indeed, when I modeled uncertainties with respect to a possible U.S.-­ led invasion of Iraq in 2002, I produced a likely band of possible casualties in which higher estimates were literally ten times greater than lower estimates. This broad approach was eventually vindicated: it initially appeared, in April 2003, that U.S. losses might be very modest, but over the course of several years it became clear they were much higher. A U.S.-­ China war would be far more uncertain.

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For most scenarios involving blockades and other possible intense operations over and in the waters of the western Pacific, the United States and allies could probably muscle their way to victory over China at this point, as we approach 2020. Taiwan could also likely endure the privations that would be experienced during the military campaign before victory was assured.100 My best guess is that both sides would lose most low-­a ltitude satellites and some cyber as well as command, control, and communications capability, so the war would ultimately be fought in a certain fog. Yet American high-­tech advantages in weapons platforms would ultimately provide an important and probably decisive edge. This somewhat sanguine conclusion is far from certain, however. It hinges in part on a willingness in Washington to accept many thousands of American battlefield dead and at least some risk of nuclear escalation. Even though U.S. nuclear forces far exceed those of the PLA, China might conclude that its disproportionate interests in the Taiwan issue warranted nuclear brinkmanship, especially if China had already possibly lost thousands of its own people in conventional combat, which would heighten the stakes as well as the reputational importance of the outcome of the conflict. These concerns could be amplified if the United States, intentionally or not, began to strike the nuclear assets of the PLA in the course of conventional fighting near Taiwan. If that happened, China might face a “use them or lose them” dilemma.101 Nuclear attack against a carrier, or a high-­a ltitude nuclear airburst over a base like Kadena (designed to destroy people and equipment immediately below, without generating lots of fallout), might seem particularly attractive options to Beijing. Nuclear escalation might happen in another way as well. Perhaps China would attempt a large-­scale cyberattack against the United States (and quite possibly Japan too) in the course of such a conflict. Its hope might be, for example, to incapacitate the U.S. electricity grid—­as National Security Agency director Admiral Michael Rogers said in 2014 that China might well be able to do. Such a result could badly incapacitate many of the Defense Department systems in the United States that require civilian-­ produced electricity to function.102 Even if such systems could be restored quickly, the U.S. electrical system as a whole might remain damaged for many months, as might national infrastructure needed to deploy military forces abroad. Whether the United States could muster a major military response at a time when its national capacities were needed to take care of the many Americans left in the cold and dark, without medicine or sanita-

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tion or clean water or viable living quarters, is an open question. China might hope that U.S. military assets would be devoted to missions closer to home, to prevent mass famine, privation, or disease, after such a catastrophe. China might do this, if already losing in a conventional conflict or expecting to lose, even if its own cyber systems could be just as vulnerable to attack.103 Countries sometimes start wars or escalate not out of complete confidence that they will succeed but after concluding that the risks of inaction outweigh those of even risky action.104 And if China conducted such a cyber operation, it might be the very type of non-­nuclear strategic attack that the Trump administration’s Nuclear Posture Review envisions as a plausible basis for possible American nuclear first use.105

Conclusion In terms of brute conventional force capabilities, U.S.-­led coalitions could probably prevail today in the kinds of fights considered in this chapter. Those encounters include most notably an attempted Chinese blockade against Taiwan, a PLA seizure of a Senkaku island, or a Russian attempt to “slice off ” a piece of a Baltic state. Even if U.S. and allied forces suffered serious attrition from attacks by Russian or Chinese missiles and submarines and airpower, their combined capacities are so great as to probably be capable of overwhelming the PLA or the armed forces of the Russian Federation. Modeling just the conventional combat would predict allied victory, for a controlled and bounded analytical exercise, with reasonable confidence about the outcome (though with considerable uncertainty about casualty levels and the duration of the war). Yet such military scenarios would be highly fraught undertakings even today. Cyber, space, and fiber-­optic assets, as well as the major infrastructure needed to move and operate military forces, could be attacked in ways that would throw monkey wrenches into prognostication. Even if they began as very limited battles that no one expected or wished to go nuclear, such conflicts could develop escalation dynamics that would be hard to control. The possible employment of small numbers of nuclear weapons for specific battlefield purposes, in controlled geographic confines, could not be entirely dismissed as a possibility. Once that happened, predicting outcomes would be highly difficult and uncertain—­if meaningful at all.

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Escalation dangers would rise precipitously. On balance, victory would be likely but not guaranteed for the United States and its allies, and the dangers of true nuclear war would be quite real. In the broadest terms, that is my net assessment of the military balances today involving the United States, its regional partners, and either Russia or China. The question now is, where are technology trends likely to take us in coming years? That is the subject of the next chapter.

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THR EE

China and Russia Scenarios in 2040

HOW MIGHT THE T YPES of scenarios presented in chapter 2 evolve over roughly the next two decades—­a reasonable time horizon for strategic and military planning? To answer this question, it is necessary to make some assumptions about technology and military innovation. The scientific basis for my prognostications is developed in the appendixes and is derived from core principles of physics and from my reading of the defense literature as well as consultations with experts at places like the nation’s top weapons laboratories. As a first step in crystal ball gazing, it is essential to establish some assumptions about how Russia and China will change, along with their military forces, in the years ahead. No particular precision can be claimed for such assumptions. For a variety of reasons, including the uncertain march of technology and unpredictable trends in the GDP growth and military budgeting of the key actors, the figures projected here should be viewed as very rough estimates that could easily vary by 25 to 50 percent relative to the numbers provided. For such an estimation to be done properly, at least two alternative sets of possible futures would be needed, and two sets of respective analyses.1 But because the inherent uncertainties in combat itself are probably even larger than the uncertainties about the

53

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future economic and military progress of Russia and China, I develop a simple single baseline for the latter countries, as well as the United States and its key allies, and then address the issue of uncertainty when considering combat scenarios. In other words, I attempt to account for uncertainty primarily through quantitative and qualitative discussions of combat outcomes, which themselves can vary by at least 25 to 50 percent, even if matériel inputs were precisely knowable. My argument, in brief, is that scenarios that would be highly uncertain and dangerous for the United States and its allies today will likely become more so by 2040. The proliferation of advanced sensors, robotics, precision-­strike and hypersonic weaponry, and other advanced technology will make it increasingly difficult to project large and inherently unstealthy forces near an adversary’s bastions of military power. Both the pace of technological advances and uncertainties over which militaries will prove to be the most innovative and entrepreneurial make prediction difficult. Many of the fastest-­changing technologies have the added complexity of being small and hard to monitor when they are developed abroad. Combat models that have been based largely on the technologies and war outcomes of the late twentieth and early twenty-­first centuries may also become increasingly unreliable when used to forecast the future. Indeed, it will become increasingly difficult to project who would likely win a given battle. Even if we conclude that the United States and its allies would still often have the net edge in various scenarios, the costs of victory could be enormous. I believe this conclusion will be correct even if the United States is relatively ambitious and successful in pursuing the kinds of innovations that are prioritized in then Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis’s 2018 National Defense Strategy (including or building on earlier American military concepts such as the Third Offset, AirSea Battle, and the Multi-­Domain Battle). Those innovations are important, and generally desirable and advisable. But they are not likely to be enough to restore the degree of overwhelming American military dominance in maneuver warfare near Russian and Chinese borders that might have prevailed in the 1990s and 2000s. As such, finding ways to avoid the kinds of operations spelled out in chapter 2 will become even more pressing and is the subject of chapters 4 and 5.

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Future Economic Strength, Scientific and Technical Capabilities, and Military Resources of Russia and China What will the global distribution of economic power and technological excellence look like in 2040? There are many dimensions to such a question, including not just raw GDP figures and not just raw industrial capability but also strength in various sectors of innovation and cutting-­edge manufacturing. Nonetheless, to begin the discussion, it is useful to start with GDP projections. The figures in table 3-­1 come from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development for several major poles of world economic power: table 3-1

GDP in Trillions of U.S. Dollars, Purchasing Power Parity, 2010 Dollar Conversion Rate Country

2018

2020

2040

China

16.0

17.7

36.5

Russia

2.9

3.0

4.7

16.9

17.7

27.5

4.2

4.3

5.5

13.2

13.8

20.2

United States Japan EU 15 plus U.K.

Source: OECD, “GDP Long-Term Forecast” (Paris, 2016). For reference, China’s GDP in 2018 at market exchange rates, expressed in U.S. dollars, was about $13.1 billion; see International Monetary Fund, “World Economic Outlook Database” (Washington, October 2017). Note: The category of “EU 15 plus U.K.” includes all the major economies of Western Europe.

The estimates in table 3-­1, though not the only set available for the next twenty years, make several key points. First, by 2040, if not well before, China will probably be the world’s largest economy (by some estimates it already is the world’s largest economy in purchasing power parity [PPP] terms). To be sure, sustaining Chinese growth rates well above the world average will require good policymaking and further reforms.2 Yet on balance, the consensus view is in favor of a sustained and strong, if gradually slowing, Chinese growth trajectory. Some economists have speculated that China’s economic advances by mid-­century could slow dramatically as a result of demographics and the challenge of reaching a higher level of development within an unfree political and economic system—­problems

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related to the so-­called middle-­income trap. Indeed, it is not implausible that, after falling into second place in the next decade or two, the United States will regain its standing as the world’s largest economy thereafter.3 But for the next couple of decades, even if China’s growth rate slows to 5 or 6 percent, it is very hard to see how it would not surpass the size of the U.S. economy by 2040.4 Second, however, the United States will not necessarily be far behind China, particularly if one focuses on market exchange rates rather than on PPP in estimating GDP. Without PPP adjustments, China’s 2040 GDP might end up closer to $30 trillion, only modestly larger than the expected U.S. level. For estimating military power and high-­tech potential, moreover, comparisons using market exchange rates may be more appropriate than PPP estimates. Third, regardless of which system of measurement is used, the collective Western world will still be much more economically powerful than China as the world approaches mid-­century (even if Australia, Canada, and South Korea are excluded from this evaluation, to say nothing of India). Fourth, Russia will most likely muddle along, growing slowly but remaining well behind the economic strength of Japan and far behind that of either the EU or the United States. Yet given its moderately large (if gradually declining) population, huge land area, ample natural resources, strong military traditions, nuclear weapons capabilities, scientific know-­ how, and political willingness to channel money into its armed forces, Russia will not become a shrinking violet on the world stage, despite the predictions of some. How will these GDP projections translate into military budgets? These estimates are even more speculative and uncertain since they require predictions of future policy decisions, too. Again, actual numbers could easily vary by 25 to 50 percent from my point estimates here. Let’s consider first today’s levels, as shown in table 3-­2, taken from IISS. Other estimates of current Chinese military spending are sometimes higher. The U.S. government estimates total PRC military spending—­ not just what is captured in the official budget but spending that would be considered military by NATO standards yet is not found officially in China’s military accounts—­as closer to $200 billion or somewhat more in 2018. That corresponds to 1.5 percent of GDP at official exchange rates. In the broad scheme of things, U.S. military spending has been trend-

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Military Spending of Russia, China, and the United States, 2016 Country

U.S. $billions

Percentage of GDP

China

145

1.3

Russia United States

46.6

3.7

604.5

3.3

ing downward relative to GDP, though it has notched back up in 2018–19. That may or may not continue during the whole Trump presidency, but the broader trend since the peak of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars (and the end of the Cold War, as well) is unmistakable. On balance, I therefore assume that China will devote 1.5 percent of GDP to its armed forces in 2040 and the United States will devote 2.5 percent. Europe writ large I estimate at 1.5 percent as well—­less than the NATO goal of 2 percent but about what European allies average at present. For my calculations, Japan’s investment is held steady at 1 percent of GDP and Russia’s at 3.5 percent. With these broad and rough assumptions, the estimates in table 3-­3 might be offered for military budgets in 2040, though the range of uncertainty here is at least plus or minus 25 percent (and thus I round figures in table 3-­3, to avoid conveying a false sense of precision). These estimates still suggest a substantial margin in favor of the United States and allies, even without factoring in all the cumulative investment advantage that would have occurred in previous years in which the Western lead over Russia and China was even larger. But the advantage will diminish over time. table 3-3

Projected/Possible Military Spending in 2040 (U.S. 2010 $billions)

China

550

Russia

170

United States

700

Japan EU 15 plus U.K.

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Even more important than the dollar figures themselves are the kinds of investment decisions and military innovations that America’s rivals may achieve using these growing budgets. It is at the intersection of resources, technological opportunities, and military and strategic entrepreneurship that the threats to U.S. interests could truly emerge. For example, what might each country or bloc’s main combat forces look like by 2040? To the extent specific assumptions are needed in my analyses, my simplified approach was to begin with current force structure and main combat capabilities for each country as they exist today. Then I assumed that the guiding philosophy of each country would be to preserve the existing force structure while modernizing it, with the caveat that China is expected to continue making its military smaller but more modern. (Specifically, I assume China preserves its main naval and air capabilities while cutting its main battle tank holdings in half.) Because the time frame of twenty to twenty-­five years is roughly the duration of an entire tactical aircraft modernization cycle but only half that of a major shipbuilding cycle, I assumed that China can replace all its older fighters by 2040. I further assumed that already today, Russia and the United States field exclusively what can be loosely described as “modern” equipment—­fourth-­or fifth-­generation combat aircraft, Kilo-­class or better submarines, and so forth. This approach is probably generous to Russia, especially if equipment readiness is taken into account, in addition to theoretical capability. I did not give particular credence to any country’s existing plans for force modernization or expansion, such as the U.S. Navy’s plan to grow from today’s fleet of about 285 ships to 355 ships, for such plans are fickle and tend to evolve. For present purposes, my goal here is to be “roughly right rather than precisely wrong,” in Alain Enthoven and K. Wayne Smith’s famous phrase, and to keep the focus of attention on evolving military technologies and capabilities rather than on the details of force structure.5 In terms of technology, I further assume that Russia will not fall back any further relative to the United States in most main areas of technology. In an era dominated largely by advances in precision ordnance, robotics, advanced computational capabilities, and advanced electronics systems, Russia’s budget limitations, while notable, will not prevent many types of important military modernization from taking place. China will likely close the gap with Western technology in such areas as aircraft and submarine quieting. In areas of modern electronics, including cyber capabili-

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ties, artificial intelligence (AI), and robotics, China will probably reach parity with the United States by 2040 or sooner.6

The Likely Technology Environment in 2040 What are the likely trends in key areas of military technology and associated innovations in warfighting concepts over the next twenty years? Integrating these trends with the above projections for GDP, military budgets, and force postures, we can then ask how the scenarios outlined in chapter 2 might be expected to evolve over the next twenty years. To summarize the findings of chapter 2, major combat contingencies against Russia or China and near the borders of either of those two countries would already be very challenging for the United States and its allies today. The common observation that China and Russia have developed “anti-­access, area denial” (A2/AD) capabilities is surely correct. Their recent modernization strategies, which feature such capabilities as much more precise cruise and ballistic missiles, homing warheads on antiship ballistic missiles, advanced sensor-­shooter networks employing large satellite arrays, and the ongoing acquisition of fourth-­generation stealthy aircraft and quiet submarines, have transformed the situation. On top of that, the United States has baked vulnerabilities into its many cyber networks, including those used by military systems and critical national infrastructure with high relevance to any future wartime operations, which will surely invite exploitation by adversaries. Second, in regard to expected developments in technology (discussed in appendix 2), revolutionary progress will continue in a number of cyber and robotics realms. (These can be seen in table A2-­1 in appendix 2.) Relatedly, the next twenty years will almost surely see the advent of many applications of big data, machine learning, and AI, with enormous implications for military policy worldwide. Many of these advances will occur abroad; many will also occur in the commercial sector, making their rapid proliferation even more likely.7 Combined with progress in AI, autonomous vehicles operating either independently and separately, or as teams or in swarms, will become potent and prevalent for at least some important applications in modern warfare. They may be able to execute ambushes, provide blocking defenses, or simply establish sensor and monitoring grids

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in ways never before imagined.8 These are the changes that seem most likely to be revolutionary, not only in their inherent characteristics but in their integrative effects on key battlefield dynamics, over the next twenty years. Major technological progress is also probable in such areas as directed-­ energy systems, nanomaterials, additive manufacturing, high-­speed missiles, and miniaturized satellites. Enough progress is possible in these kinds of realms—­both by the United States and by its rivals—­that then Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis, in releasing the 2018 National Defense Strategy, was correct to argue that the United States must generally prioritize creating lethality and new capabilities over increasing the capacity or size of the force.9 Mattis also rightly expressed concern that earlier U.S. advantages in various realms of military capability have continued to recede in recent years. He attributed that partly to technological change, partly to modernization efforts by Russia and China, and partly to American budgetary ineptitude (including funding the Department of Defense through continuing resolutions rather than new budgets for nine of the last ten years, a practice that is especially hard on acquisition programs that should advance from one year to the next, rather than effectively be placed on autopilot).10 Not all areas of major military technology will undergo radical change, however. Transformative progress is not likely in sensor systems that might hypothetically defeat stealth or render submarines easy to find. Nor is major change likely in the basic physics of most major vehicles, on land or sea or in the air or space. Nor is it particularly likely in the realm of weapons of mass destruction, with the possible exception of advanced biological pathogens (which will remain difficult to detect, whether advanced or not, from a distance and in real time). In other areas, competing innovations may partially cancel each other out in their net effects on the battlefield. For example, with regard to missiles and missile defenses, competition will continue, and defenses will improve—­perhaps aided by directed-­energy systems. But the offense will continue to hold many advantages (as missiles themselves continue to improve). For example, Russia and China will likely improve their decoys and other countermeasures against midcourse ICBM/SLBM defenses.11 Antisubmarine warfare (ASW) will on balance remain very difficult when conducted against high-­quality submarines. High-­priced stealth aircraft will be able to continue to operate in relatively safe and surviv-

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able ways. By contrast, most surface ships and ground vehicles will not become stealthy in a militarily significant way. No major breakthroughs in fuels or batteries are anticipated that would revolutionize the basic character of ground warfare or of intercontinental transport operations; these will remain large-­scale and highly visible undertakings. Space launch too will probably remain very expensive, though the growing capabilities of smaller, cheaper satellites will ease access to space considerably. The net assessment of what these changes will mean for warfare must be provisional at this point. In addition to the potential inaccuracy of some of my prognostications in specific areas of technology, it is difficult to predict how military organizations will take advantage of new opportunities to create innovative operational concepts.12 Still, a few broad predictions can be hazarded. Computer systems will become more elaborate and capable—­but may also remain quite vulnerable to cyberattack and high-­altitude nuclear-­induced electromagnetic pulse (HEMP), as well as to attacks on the space systems and fiber-­optic cables that make possible their networking and communication. Sensor systems, especially on satellites, will be vulnerable to attack, much more so than in recent decades. But they will also feature greater redundancy and resilience, owing to the growing numbers of small satellite constellations. Data processing will be aided by machine learning and AI, which may allow easier detection of numerous military systems.13 In other words, the domains of sensors, command, control, and communications will be quite contested, with no obvious verdict possible now on whether offense or defense, or one country or another, will gain decisive advantage in the years to come.14 It is also worth noting that the history of warfare is one of weapons becoming continually more potent over greater distances. That basic trend does not seem likely to change in the next twenty years based on technologies such as hypersonic missiles and directed-­energy systems. Humans have increasingly found new ways to hurt each other more effectively from farther and farther away, and to do so with greater industrial efficiency. The historian Trevor N. Dupuy devised a notional lethality index that shows exponential increases in the typical number of people that can be killed by a single shot or round or explosion, with weapons at the turn of the twenty-­first century roughly 10,000 times more powerful than in 1800 and roughly 1 million times more powerful than in 1500.15 In his classic study of military history, John Keegan argues that these kinds of

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trends—­ the industrialization and mechanization of killing—­ had rendered obsolete, or at least no longer acceptable and even reckless, Carl von Clausewitz’s dictum that war is a continuation of politics by other means.16 Stephen Biddle argues that “the modern system” of warfare, which combines advanced technology with excellent training and fast-­ paced operations, has produced the potential for very lopsided and rapid outcomes when adversaries are mismatched. That is especially true for combat circumstances like those under discussion here, in which NATO units approach enemy territory in massed formations. In such situations, NATO forces would have a difficult time employing terrain, other means of concealment, maneuvers, and other tactics to protect themselves while attacking the adversary. It is under such circumstances that militaries can be highly vulnerable to the lethality of modern weaponry.17 When these trends in the character and weaponry of war are combined with apparently timeless verities about human nature and decision making, the potential for instability is evident. As Geoffrey Blainey writes, political leaders often persuade themselves that a new weapon or tactic or other advantage will allow them to achieve a quick and low-­cost victory, a narrative that often produces a false sense of confidence and raises the risks of war.18 As Richard Betts has written, even in the face of clear tactical signals auguring the onset of conflict, many political leaders hew to the belief that they will not be attacked until it is too late. When these human tendencies are combined with technology trends, it is easy to see how a war could begin, escalate, and then produce ruinous results very quickly.19 The rest of this chapter builds on these basic observations to explore how the scenarios of chapter 2 might play out twenty years hence. Some limited degree of simple modeling is used to illustrate several points, but most of the discussion is qualitative. My main conclusion is that any U.S. national security strategy based on a high confidence of being able to prevail decisively in such engagements is likely to be on increasingly shaky ground as the years go by.

A Baltic Scenario Revisited A hypothetical scenario in which Russia creates a pretext to slice off a piece of an eastern Baltic state, occupying it in purported “defense” of native

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Russian speakers there, could already cause enormous problems today if NATO chose to reverse the aggression. In that event, in the best case, it could require a massive deployment of Operation Desert Storm-­like proportions to liberate the territory while facing down any Russian reinforcements that might be sent. In a less successful case, Russia could interdict major elements of that attempted NATO deployment through some combination of cyberattacks, high-­a ltitude nuclear bursts causing EMP, targeted missile or aerial strikes on ports and major ships, and perhaps even an “escalate to de-­escalate” series of carefully chosen nuclear detonations against very specific targets on land or sea.20 While the latter concept of nuclear preemption is not formally part of Russian military doctrine, it could be influencing actual Russian military options today.21 Alternatively, the NATO deployment could succeed, only to face subsequent Russian nuclear strikes once evidence of NATO’s conventional superiority on the Baltic battlefields had presented Moscow with the dilemma of either escalating or losing.22 By 2040, some aspects of this kind of scenario could improve for American and NATO interests. The clarity and perhaps the scale of NATO’s security commitments to the Baltic states might have strengthened, reducing the chances of deterrence failure in the first place and improving the initial capacity for resistance to any Russian aggression.23 But on balance, technological innovation makes it quite possible that things could also get worse. Most aspects of the nuclear situation are unlikely to change. Missile defenses may improve, and may include lasers for point defense in some places. These laser defenses could help protect ships or ports or airfields against various types of attack. But because such laser weapons inevitably fall off rapidly in power (as the square of the distance between the weapon and its target), it will be challenging for missile defenses to provide area protection. Thus, while it is at least conceivable that ports and airfields could become much better protected, it is hard to escape the prediction that rail lines, road networks involving large numbers of bridges, tunnels, or elevated routes, and large concentrations of supplies in depots or warehouses will be at least as vulnerable in 2040 as they are today. To be sure, missile defenses will improve. But so will the missiles they have to counter, in terms of their speed and ability to maneuver warheads, along with the use of multispectral sensors or seekers. Satellites in space are likely to remain highly vulnerable to nuclear

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attack. That is especially true of those in low Earth orbit, or LEO (their orbits are located at altitudes similar to those traversed by ballistic missiles on typical flight trajectories, so they can be attacked by ballistic missile defense technologies). They are also vulnerable, over a period of months, to the residual effects of nuclear detonations in the Van Allen belts—­areas of the Earth’s magnetic field where protons and electrons generated by nuclear explosions can “get stuck,” damaging satellites on each orbital pass. Shielding can in theory protect against more distant nuclear explosions and against such radiation-­pumped Van Allen belts, at a typical cost of perhaps 10 percent of that of the overall satellite. However, it is unlikely that most commercial satellites will be shielded unless the government subsidizes such endeavors. Even with shielding, moreover, advanced imaging satellites and other high-­value assets in LEO will remain vulnerable since they may be individually and directly attacked by an adversary.24 By 2040, many cyber systems controlling NATO weaponry and other platforms should be more resilient to attack. That is because NATO will have had two decades to address problems that are now widely understood. That is unlike the case twenty years ago, when, even though the Y2K debacle and other scares should have sobered people to the risks of inadequate computer security measures, a general sense of complacency about great power relations discouraged meaningful action against threats to electronics from hacking, high-­a ltitude nuclear bursts, malicious supply-­ chain actors who might compromise the integrity of semiconductor chips, and so on. Admittedly, this conclusion assumes greater vigilance on the part of NATO states than will perhaps prove to be the case. Regardless, progress in this arena will probably not be uniform. In particular, it seems relatively unlikely to result in meaningful hardening of the critical civilian infrastructure on which militaries depend. Even if classic computer hacking, spoofing, advanced persistent threats, and related measures gradually lose some of their effectiveness, a new set of challenges is appearing on the horizon. One challenge could be a more efficient form of advanced persistent threat in which efforts to penetrate an adversary’s computer systems employ automated capabilities with massive raw computational power that continually adjust tactics to the defenses encountered. Another major complicating development could be the advent of constellations or swarms of smart robotic devices. For example, by 2040, large

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numbers of smart sea mines could pose enormous threats to shipping.25 The devices might in effect be miniature submarines, with sensors and explosives as payload. Russia is already strong in submarine technology26 and could probably master this type of system in the years to come. Such unmanned underwater vehicles (UUVs) could be widely deployed in places like the Baltic Sea in times of crisis. Rather than having to hunt for a couple dozen Russian submarines, as might be the case today—­a lready a daunting proposition—­NATO forces seeking to reach Baltic ports might need to search for hundreds or even thousands of potent threats. It seems implausible that arms control agreements would prevent the development and deployment of such autonomous systems, not only because of the verification challenges but also because the United States itself will feel powerful incentives to create more autonomous systems, including those with the ability to employ lethal force under certain types of conditions, as Paul Scharre has convincingly argued.27 In another scenario, swarms of quadcopters (unmanned helicopters with four rotors), each packing several kilograms of explosives and thus able to destroy a modern jet if detonated at the right location, might attack NATO air bases and the aircraft on them. Terminal defenses using lasers could possibly destroy some of the incoming threat devices or weapons. But the swarm could then choose a different attack route or seek to overwhelm a defense with a saturation attack. Swarms could also deploy in the airspace surrounding an airfield, staying out of range of any such directed-­ energy defenses and attempting to strike aircraft as they left or approached a runway. Let’s consider a couple of examples in more detail. Imagine loitering aerial devices akin to the sensor fuzed weapon (SFW) that has been part of the U.S. armamentarium for years. This weapon is somewhat controversial: it is categorized as a “cluster munition,” a type of weapon banned by international convention (though the United States is not a party to the accord).28 However, it is better thought of as a type of robotic weapon. The benefit of such technologies in combat was discussed extensively as far back as 1998, when a RAND study envisioned their use in situations such as an Iraqi armored vehicle attack against Saudi Arabia on major highways. In that model, which considered technologies available at the time, some 10,000 weapons carrying forty Skeet submunitions, or perhaps the Brilliant Anti-­Tank (BAT) weapon, would suffice to destroy several thousand armored vehicles and effectively halt an enemy assault. The total cost

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of the ordnance was estimated at several billion dollars.29 Such munitions could be used in a similar way against NATO movements on major roads in Europe, advancing from western points toward Poland and the Baltic states, with the munitions delivered in the future by small robotic devices. Swarms of robotic devices carrying munitions payloads could also be used to attack trains or road convoys in transit, perhaps after being positioned by special forces that had penetrated into NATO territory. Another type of robotic swarm might be used to create an interconnected network of unmanned aquatic systems functioning, in effect, as mobile mines or torpedoes. This is not presently a technology concept that the U.S. Navy has come close to operationalizing; a 2013 RAND study lists the technology maturity of such systems as between 1 and 3 on a Technology Readiness Level scale that goes from 1 to 9.30 However, the constituent technologies, such as automated sensors, are already largely available.31 As AI improves, a constellation of such devices could be made largely autonomous. Indeed, drug-­trafficking organizations have been using semisubmersibles to transport drugs to the United States for years, for example, including craft with very slender vessel designs that are efficient at cutting through waves (though still slower than most warships).32 A decade ago, it was already possible to build such boats with a payload of ten tons and at a cost of less than $1 million per vessel; they were often manned then, but making them fully autonomous would not be a major leap.33 Such capabilities create the specter of not just “smart mines” (able to distinguish one type of ship from another before detonating) but mobile, redeployable, and agile mines operating as autonomous networks. Since mines have been responsible for most U.S. Navy ship losses since World War II, this is a particularly unsettling prospect.34 In modern times, the U.S. Navy has stayed clear of mines more by avoiding waters where they might be deployed than by having any particularly effective counter to them. The main alternative, as outlined by Caitlin Talmadge, would be to conduct extensive clearing operations to create relatively narrow channels for movement, if enough time is available for such purposes (Talmadge estimated a month or more in a scenario in which Iran mined the Persian Gulf and the U.S. Navy with allies then sought to clear the waterways).35 Used against America’s enemies of recent decades, this might have been a doable proposition. But when a U.S. Navy vessel has to approach a Baltic port against a Russian foe of 2025 or 2030 or 2035 or 2040, the situation

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could be very different. Clearing operations against what would in effect be mobile and self-­healing minefields populated by devices that can communicate with each other and reposition themselves to create dense, lethal networks will be much more difficult than clearing current threats. If NATO figured out how to jam the communications between smart, unmanned, mobile mines, the adversary’s robotic systems might simply be deployed in redundant patterns to be sure there were no gaps in coverage. They could also be programmed to change their positions every so often to elude neutralization and to repair any potential gaps in their coverage—­ even if there were no central data processor that actually knew where the gaps were located and even if space-­based navigation systems were disabled (since the UUVs could have various types of inertial or bottom-­following guidance).36 The network could be set up simply to play the odds, in an environment of little communication and poor information exchange. How many such UUVs might be needed to achieve the desired effect of rendering transport ships highly vulnerable as they approached a port such as Talinn or Riga? As one possibility, the devices might be released from Kaliningrad with instructions to move eastward toward the littoral waters of those port cities. Even existing battery technology makes a “swim” of such distance within reach.37 Progress in nanomaterials and other constituent elements of batteries may further improve performance in the years ahead. One way to estimate the quantitative requirements for such a UUV network is to compute how long a picket line might be needed near those ports to cover all possible lines of approach, and then estimate the needed density of separate armed devices along that line. Whatever estimate followed from this simple calculation might then be multiplied by two or three or four to account for attrition of some devices as a result of NATO antimining efforts or malfunction. Here is one notional estimate. The approach to Riga, Latvia, is through a body of water about forty miles wide at points near the port. The picket line might be set up roughly three to five miles offshore, where water depths are 100 feet or more—­making it hard to detect any submersible object visually.38 The math might then go something like this: If the range of each UUV’s lethal mechanism is similar to that of a modern torpedo such as the U.S. Mark 48, then they might be spaced every one to five miles—­based on the fact that these

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torpedoes can typically lock on to targets from a distance of 4,000 yards.39 To improve the density of the picket line and allow multiple shots to be taken at a given transport, the spacing might be kept at perhaps one mile, meaning that forty UUVs would be needed to populate a given picket line. With multiple picket lines, perhaps 200 to 500 UUVs in all, at a cost of no more than several hundred million dollars, it would be very difficult to approach the wharves at Riga. Of course, the United States and other NATO countries could attempt to thwart the operations of these UUVs. They could try to destroy them en masse at their source before the UUVs could be released. They could also create their own robotic swarms designed to find, identify, and neutralize the attacking weapons. But there would be a fundamental difference from today’s situation. The kind of impunity that U.S. forces have enjoyed for decades during intercontinental movement would be threatened to some degree and could no longer be assumed. And even Russia’s relatively modest military resources would still be ample for the kinds of investments needed in these domains, in purely financial terms, as the above calculations underscore. If necessary, NATO could avoid some of these problems by staying out of the Baltic Sea. U.S., Canadian, and U.K. forces could deploy to France or the Netherlands or Germany and then move eastward toward Russia, picking up allied help along the way. This strategy might eventually work—­but with considerable time delays and with vulnerabilities during movement along road and rail networks. Moreover, Russia might doubt that NATO would have the will to mount such a response. Thus the key goal of upholding deterrence might be lost, even if in theory a war could eventually be won. Because of NATO’s strategic depth and its enormous resource disparity when measured against Russia’s—­two advantages the United States and its Pacific allies would likely not have in the Pacific theater against China—­NATO would still be favored to win a conventional-­only conflict in eastern Europe twenty years from now. But the degree of difficulty would be quite considerable and the degree of escalatory risk highly unsettling.

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A Taiwan (or Senkaku) Contingency Revisited How might new technologies and operational concepts affect a maritime operation by the United States and its partners against China, over Taiwan or the Senkakus, in the 2020s or 2030s? As in the Russia case just discussed, the situation might not be radically changed from today’s picture. But the new technological capabilities should disabuse us of any confidence that key U.S. investments between now and 2040, such as those envisioned in Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis’s National Defense Strategy, can restore the kind of overwhelming U.S. superiority and freedom of action that might have existed near both Chinese and Russian borders in the 1990s and early 2000s. Let’s consider a region east of Taiwan where American aircraft carriers might operate to help establish air superiority for a blockade-­busting effort. From the U.S. vantage point, such operations currently would need to be conducted within a distance of no more than 1,000 kilometers, and ideally much less, from Taiwan. In theory, air superiority efforts could be attempted from land or sea bases as far away as Guam or Misawa, 2,000 or more kilometers from the zone of interest. But pilot fatigue, the need to refuel, and slowness in responding to any unexpected needs would all argue against such a distance—­though the future development of long-­ endurance, high-­performance unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) capable of establishing air superiority could mitigate that problem. Before turning again to robotics, let us consider how the Chinese submarine threat to U.S. surface ships might evolve over the next twenty years. A People’s Liberation Army (PLA) force structure that had few modern submarines in 2000 but forty by 2020 would likely be fully equipped with modern submarines by 2040. If its fleet size held steady, that could translate into a total of some sixty modern attack submarines at that point. Such a development would probably greatly intensify the potential submarine threat to the U.S. Navy, despite the latter’s continued progress in ASW technologies by then. One simple way to estimate the increased threat is as follows. Assume that modern submarines would experience an attrition rate of 5 percent per ASW barrier and older submarines an attrition rate of 15 percent. Assume further that the United States (and Taiwan and possibly Japan) can create the equivalent of three barriers any attack submarine trying to fire on a convoy would have to traverse before firing. (There would then be

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three more barriers the submarine would have to survive before reaching port to rearm and refuel.) So, to get off its first round of shots or torpedoes, a submarine would need to transit three barriers successfully, with an expected survivability of 0.85 × 0.85 × 0.85 = 0.61 for an older sub. To get off a second volley, it would need to transit nine barriers. To get off a third volley, it would need to survive running an ASW gauntlet fifteen times, and so on. Assume further six torpedoes per submarine, each with a kill probability of 50 percent for newer submarine-­torpedo combinations and 25 percent for older ones. Modern submarines can also carry a dozen or more antiship missiles, which could pose an additional threat to ships. For simplicity, I focus on torpedoes, since a submarine can operate autonomously in firing them and since a ship’s air and missile defenses are not relevant against them. To the extent that missiles are factored into the computation, they could of course change the specific numbers, but they would only reinforce the two main points, namely, ships are vulnerable to submarines and are especially vulnerable to modern submarines carrying advanced weapons. So, focusing on the torpedo threat, the math would then go something like this: Older Sub Probability of getting into firing position without being destroyed, on first sortie: 61%. Probability of getting into firing position on second sortie: 23%. Probability of getting into firing position on third sortie: 9%. Thus the typical older submarine would manage to fire on a convoy of ships only once or twice before meeting its own demise. To simplify, if we round off the math and assume 1.5 missions per submarine before it is sunk, then: Kills per sub = 1.5 sorties per sub per lifetime × 6 torpedoes per sortie × 0.25 success rate per torpedo, = 1.5 × 6 × 0.25, = 2.25 successful torpedo attacks per sub. If we assume further that it will typically take two hits to sink a ship, the typical older Chinese submarine might destroy one ship before itself being destroyed. If we assume roughly one U.S. Navy ship for every five

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cargo ships, that translates into 0.2 Navy ships sunk per older submarine. Should China devote thirty older submarines to this operation, it might sink six to twelve U.S. Navy or allied naval ships as a result.40 The same basic kind of math could then be applied to attempted attacks by modern Chinese submarines, as follows: Modern Sub Probability of getting into firing position without being destroyed on first sortie: 86%. Probability of getting into firing position on second sortie: 0.86 × 0.86 × 0.86 = 63%. Probability of getting into firing position on third sortie: 0.63 × 0.86 × 0.86 = 46%. Probability of getting into firing position on fourth sortie: 0.46 × 0.86 × 0.86 = 34%. Probability of getting into firing position on fifth sortie: 0.34 × 0.86 × 0.86 = 25%. According to these calculations, a typical submarine would survive long enough to carry out perhaps two to four separate attacks with six torpedoes each. To simplify, the average modern Chinese submarine might fire three to four volleys of six torpedoes before meeting its own demise, for a grand total of about twenty torpedoes fired. Thus it might hit on average ten ships, and if we further assume that two hits are needed to sink a given ship, it might destroy five ships (either cargo vessels or U.S. Navy vessels). If we also assume there will be one U.S. Navy ship for every five cargo ships across the theater of operations and that the submarines fire at both without preference as they encounter them, a typical modern submarine might sink an average of almost 1.0 warships before itself being destroyed. Were China willing to use half its entire submarine fleet in this mission, it could then sink twenty-­five to thirty U.S. Navy or allied naval ships. In summary, for a period like that before 2000, in which almost all of China’s submarines were noisy and obsolescent, the PLA might have been able to sink a couple of U.S. Navy ships at most in a U.S.-­led counter-­ blockade contingency near Taiwan. Today, with the PLA using a mix of older and new submarines, the total might be twenty or more (about twenty from the twenty modern subs the PLA dedicated to the mission

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and another couple from the ten older submarines it employed). By 2040 the figure might approach thirty. These numbers are admittedly notional and approximate. But they suggest the pace at which circumstances are probably changing in the early decades of the twenty-­first century—­ especially since China is likely to be able to improve the performance of its submarine fleet faster than the United States and allies can improve their ASW capabilities because of the relative maturity of the technologies underlying the ASW mission today. In addition to chasing U.S. Navy ships with submarines, China might attempt to locate them by other means, hoping then to fire antiship ballistic missiles with homing warheads or other kinds of antiship missiles against them. As Stephen Biddle and Ivan Oelrich convincingly argue, it could be difficult to do so with standard radar platforms, because with increasing distance from the Chinese mainland, China would increasingly need to put radars on ships that would themselves become vulnerable (as would satellites or aircraft attempting the same task). Other kinds of longer-­ range sensors such as over-­the-­horizon radar would be too imprecise or unreliable to achieve the same effectiveness as line-­of-­sight radar, meaning that the PLA would ultimately fall victim somewhat to the tyranny of distance.41 China could also have difficulty communicating any targeting information from sensors to weapons based on land or in submarines, if the United States brought down or jammed its communications satellites. Unfortunately, China may have other options by 2040. One possibility is microsatellites. As discussed in appendix 2, advances in microsatellite development are remarkable, with constellations of nearly 200 satellites already circling Earth and providing daily photographic updates on objects as small as several meters on dimension. These satellites are inexpensive, with average value in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. If costs decline further over the next twenty years, in part a result of falling computational costs (Moore’s law), China or even Russia could certainly deploy satellite constellations comprising thousands of separate devices. What could the United States then do? Taking down imaging satellites one by one would be very difficult. The United States could attempt nuclear weapon bursts to destroy large numbers of satellites at once. But using nuclear weapons in combat would mean crossing a perilous threshold and would damage U.S. satellites in the process. Or the United States could try to jam the downlinks from the satellites to stations from which information is sent on to weapons-­carrying platforms. But that tactic

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might prove quite difficult against a nation that builds dozens of ground stations on various parts of its territory and dozens of mobile receivers as well. China could have yet more options. Perhaps it could build and, when needed, deploy swarms of small UAVs carrying sensors as well as simple communication devices. Those devices could create a long communications link back to PLA weapons platforms, spacing themselves every few kilometers or so, or perhaps link up with larger UAVs in areas closer to China. In other words, the swarm could fly east of Taiwan but maintain some elements both near Taiwan and west of it such that a continuous communication channel could be established. The UAVs east of Taiwan (or the Senkakus) could then search for ships locally. What kinds of numbers might be needed for this purpose? If the typical UAV could be deployed with sensors capable of “seeing” 100 kilometers and also communicating with sister UAVs that same distance away, then a lattice might be set up. To be conservative, perhaps the UAVs would be placed every 50 kilometers or so along a given dimension. To cover a region of, say, 1,000 kilometers by 1,000 kilometers, therefore, one would need twenty UAVs along a dimension: 20 UAV positions along the x-­a xis. 20 UAV positions along the y-­a xis. Total of 400 positions to populate the entire matrix. Total of 800 to 2,000 UAVs to provide redundancy and communications back to China. If instead of a zone 1,000 kilometers on a side, the goal was to cover one 2,000 by 2,000 kilometers, the numbers would quadruple, for example to 3,200 to 8,000 UAVs for the entire operation. Relatively simple UAVs that had an endurance of several days, enough propulsive power to deal with strong winds, and a payload of several kilograms for sensors and radios could already be built today at an individual cost of $1 million or less. Hence this entire sensor/targeting network could probably be built for a total cost in the low single digits of billions of dollars once the necessary software was developed. How might the UAVs be deployed to where they would do their monitoring work? And how would they survive against various kinds of threats? The first problem might be addressed by predeploying the UAVs by ship or

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sub, especially if China had some control over the timing of the beginning of the crisis and could anticipate the future course of events. Or perhaps it will become possible to have increasingly efficient UAVs self-­deploy. The laws of physics do not preclude UAVs with the kinds of energy efficiency and range exhibited by the Canada goose, which, as Greg Allen and Taniel Chan point out, can fly 1,500 miles in twenty-­four hours without substantial food intake. The goose has already demonstrated that such efficiency is physically possible; the question now is how close engineering can come in the future to replicating or rivaling what nature has already produced.42 The second challenge, survivability, might be handled by emplacing the UAVs within small watertight containers that could be remotely activated to release their contents on command. Hiding on or even just below the ocean surface, they would be less vulnerable to detection by standard airborne radar in the period before they were activated. Once activated and made airborne, their sheer numbers would offer a form of herd protection against many kinds of enemy weapons. Some of the UAVs might be lost, but many might survive long enough to do their jobs and put U.S. ships at risk. Allen and Chan, quoting Paul Scharre of the Center for a New American Security, also cite the possibility of a country someday manufacturing billions of miniaturized UAVs with the capacity to carry small amounts of explosive or agent and the ability to search for targets (including aircraft or individual sailors or soldiers).43 Such a density of UAVs could probably only be defended against through area-­effect weapons such as directed-­ energy systems. If these proved unavailable in certain weather conditions or a certain location, the potency of the threat cloud could be very serious and difficult to mitigate. So far we have considered some simplified, stylized calculations of what next-­generation Chinese submarines might do to U.S. and allied ships and how Chinese microsatellites or UAVs could contribute to the targeting mission. It is also of interest to ask about likely trends in missile defense. Could next-­generation U.S. missile defenses be effective against the kinds of missiles that China might launch at American ships if able to find them at sea? Could they defend airfields on land as well? Specifically, let’s consider the possibility of a 100-­k ilowatt laser operating on ship or shore. There is a good chance, though no certainty, that such a system could be made available and militarily dependable within the next one or two decades. It would be much stronger than today’s small

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shipborne lasers, though still roughly thirty times weaker than the Airborne Laser system that was pursued by the United States in the 1990s and 2000s. The latter system was powerful enough to down missiles from great distances. Specifically, it might have destroyed a solid-­f uel missile at some 150 kilometers’ range if allowed a five-­second dwell time on target. That was against the body of an ICBM holding fuel and still burning. These calculations are based on the premise that a certain amount of energy must be deposited on a given area of the incoming missile to weaken it or make the missile buckle. Thus, dwell time would be roughly halved if applied power per unit area were doubled. For simplicity I assume the same energy requirement to destroy an incoming antiship missile in its terminal stage of flight.44 How well could such a 100-­k ilowatt laser defend a given area? We can extrapolate from the airborne laser and its testing history. In the following equation, let P be the power of the laser, t be the dwell time, C be a constant coefficient, and R be the distance from the laser to the target. Then the amount of energy (E) deposited on a surface will vary approximately as follows: E ~ CPt/R 2. If the laser in question has one-­thirtieth the power of the Airborne Laser, it would need just over 0.001 seconds to deposit a lethal dose of energy on a missile one kilometer away. Even if an incoming antiship missile could be hardened to be capable of absorbing ten times as much energy per square centimeter before failing, the missile could be shot down in just over 0.01 seconds. If the incoming missile were moving at Mach 10, or roughly three kilometers per second, it could move only thirty meters or so in that amount of time—­meaning the system could handle multiple shots in a saturation attack. Indeed, assuming nearly instantaneous retargeting of the laser, this system could defend against a saturation attack of up to dozens of missiles reaching the vicinity of the ship simultaneously. It is for this reason that directed-­energy missile defense could be a game-­changer, if able to work in various weather conditions. Thus, not all technology trends are guaranteed to favor the attacker. Some could help the defense. But then again, missiles would be only one of the threats such ships might face. And laser weapons perform less well in the rain, as a rule. Overall, the central point that Biddle and Oelrich seek to advance is largely persuasive: “By 2040, competing spheres of influence are more likely than either Chinese or U.S. military hegemony in the Western

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Pacific.”45 However, there is a caveat. Newer technologies, notably microsatellites, as well as robotic swarms of sensors or sensor-­shooters operating in the air or underwater, could make the spheres of influence themselves far from safe. Even at considerable distances of more than 1,000 kilometers out to sea, American forces might find themselves within lethal range of various Chinese attacks. That could be true despite U.S. forces having destroyed or otherwise incapacitated most large Chinese sensor satellites.

Conclusion Already today, it is far from clear which side would win a war fought over a Baltic state or a Senkaku island or Taiwan in response to an initial Russian or Chinese aggression in the coming decades. In strictly conventional terms, the United States and its likely allies and partners in such operations would probably have the edge. But there are enough uncertainties over cyber vulnerabilities, submarine operations, precision-­missile strikes against key infrastructure or big ships, and other matters that the outcome cannot be predicted with complete confidence. Moreover, in each scenario, the potential exists for the conflict to go nuclear, probably not in the form of initial strikes against big cities but instead with more limited battlefield uses as the side that was losing sought to regain an advantage. Once this kind of limited nuclear war began, it is not clear how or when it would end. The situation will likely grow even more indeterminate by 2040. China will have achieved something much closer to economic and military parity with the United States by then. Even Russia will have had ample opportunity to build new kinds of military capabilities that emphasize relatively inexpensive technologies such as microsatellites, robotic swarms, and other unmanned systems. Great power war in the twenty-­first century will, if it occurs, not be easy to control. Nor will its outcomes be easy to predict. If China or Russia carries out a limited attack against a U.S. ally, we will need other strategies than simply an increasingly unbelievable promise that the United States would promptly and directly defeat the aggression or liberate the occupied territory. That approach would in effect destroy Rome (or Estonia, or Taiwan) in order to save it. Worse, it might not even work. Other options, some of them developed and discussed in advance, are necessary if deterrence is to be robust.

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FOUR

Military Elements of Integrated Deterrence

DIRECT DEFENSE OR PROMPT LIBERATION of any allied territory subject to attack by Russia or China is not an adequate military strategy for the United States, especially when the attack does not directly target populated regions or major territories of the victim nation. The previous chapters underscore that trends in military technology, trends in Russian and Chinese resources for their armed forces, and the exposed positions of certain American allies and partners near Russian and Chinese coasts make such an approach unpromising. Yet it appears likely that, whether implicit or explicit, such a direct defense and prompt liberation paradigm pervades the U.S. national security community. Indeed, by a certain reasoning, it would appear to be directly required by treaty obligations. The United States should not change its declaratory policy. It is better that Beijing and Moscow have some uncertainty as to whether the United States, with allies, would quickly aim to defend or liberate a slice of Baltic territory or a besieged island in the western Pacific after an attack. But it is also not entirely credible that Washington would elect to mount huge military operations to address quite minor assaults, even if the latter did target territories that were covered by formal mutual defense treaties. As such, under current policy, the chances that deterrence could fail in these places are probably growing. If deterrence did fail, it would not be enough

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for the United States and its allies to have as their only recourse a huge and direct frontal assault to reverse the aggression. Risking World War III to liberate a Senkaku island or a single farming village in eastern Estonia or a partially blockaded Taiwan strains credulity. America’s allies themselves should not expect, and ultimately probably would not believe, assurances of a U.S. military response that would be massively disproportionate, militarily unpromising, and hugely costly. Moreover, in light of current trends in warfare, it may not even be possible for the United States and its partners to guarantee successful combat outcomes in the near future—­w ith or without enemy use of nuclear weapons. The essence of my analysis applies to a broader range of scenarios as well. As noted in chapter 2, China or Russia could cause an incident over a U.S. naval maneuver in the South China Sea, Black Sea, or Baltic Sea that led to loss of life on one or both sides. Rather than acknowledge an error and back down, the aggressor could then double down, attempting to push American forces farther from its shores permanently. Or there could be attacks against the Philippines, or perhaps against non-­NATO ally but close friend Sweden or Finland. Or there could be some other highly fraught yet geographically confined crisis. The United States needs a new strategy for such cases. It should not replace the possibility of direct defense or prompt liberation of allied territory but should combine that option with a more credible declaratory paradigm in which costs and risks are more realistically aligned with the immediate stakes in play. If war occurred, I submit that this new, indirect, integrated approach would be the better recourse under most circumstances. This chapter and the next develop this approach. Such a strategy is built primarily on both military and economic foundations. The fact that my approach would try to avoid major kinetic operations to liberate occupied allied territory immediately does not mean that it avoids or downplays all military instruments of policy. As such, this chapter develops the military components of the new strategy, and the next chapter focuses on economics. The two are interrelated, however, and a number of the military measures I propose here are intended to bolster the effectiveness of the sanctions concepts proposed in chapter 5. The military components of a strategy of integrated deterrence and indirect defense could include the following possibilities:

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• Rapid reinforcement of locations near the point of initial adversarial attack to create trip wires, and over time more robust forward defenses, against any further aggression. • Broader changes in the U.S. global military posture designed to support, reinforce, and complement these specific changes in forward defense posture. • Consideration of the use of limited amounts of military force asymmetrically, in regions perhaps quite distant from the initial conflict, to apply economic pain and punishment to an adversary, partly in support of multilateral economic sanctions (discussed in greater depth in the next chapter), particularly for more egregious kinds of possible enemy attack, such as a Chinese blockade of Taiwan or a Russian direct occupation of a swath of a Baltic state territory. • A U.S. military force structure reoriented more toward use of flexible and longer-­range strike options, with some of the changes occurring soon (even before any possible aggression). These ideas are developed at greater length below, starting with general principles that apply globally, followed by specific illustrations that apply more to either Russia or China.

Rapid Response to Deter and Defend against Any Further Aggression Any Russian or Chinese attack that took even a square inch of land owned or administered by an American ally that the United States was sworn to protect would be a grave development. Nothing about my proposed strategic alternative suggests otherwise, and nothing about any such act could be viewed lightly. That same logic effectively extends to a possible Chinese attack on Taiwan, even though the latter is no longer a formal U.S. ally. As such, strong and decisive military responses would be in order even if they did not extend to the actual firing of live ordnance against adversarial units. As a first requirement, the United States together with any willing allies should immediately start to deploy military forces that could act as

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a nearby trip wire against further aggression. These forces should be sent near the point of initial attack with the goal of reducing the odds and the scope of any further expansionist aggression by the offending military. Ideally, they should be deployed incrementally and in modest amounts, both to ensure a rapid response and to signal a nonthreatening one, lest they invite preemptive attack by the adversary in question. Over time, however, they could be reinforced as needed. This deployment should be undertaken after the United States first states publicly and clearly that no U.S. use of kinetic force is intended and that the operation is defensive in purpose. Beijing or Moscow might choose not to believe that declaration, but they would have powerful incentives themselves not to fire the first shot in what could then easily become a full-­on hot war. The deployments should in the first instance probably emphasize forces such as infantry troops, therefore, to underscore the nonoffensive intent of the deployment. This would imply that, for example, the ready brigade of the 82nd Airborne Division would be a natural initial capability to reach the theater of crisis. Special forces, including Ranger forces, might also be part of the effort. Hundreds or thousands of troops might be involved in this first wave, which could occur within days and establish initial positions near contested territories within the first week. Where specifically might the forces go? I do not presume to construct a complete time-­phased force deployment plan (or TPFD) here. But the logical concepts could include the following: • For an attack by Russia against a small town or region in Estonia or Latvia, deployments of U.S. or NATO troops close to that same town or region, with perhaps company-­sized forces in each of the nearest half-­dozen communities, and the goal of joining Estonian or Latvian troops to patrol within and between those communities in short order. Force deployment might or might not involve parachuting into position; in the sort of scenario I postulate, it may be adequate to fly into regular airports and then drive to the eastern parts of the country, where the Russian troops would most likely have carried out an attack. • For an attack by China against one or more Senkaku islands, deployment of U.S. and Japanese troops on other Senkaku islands (prob-

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ably necessitating parachuting in, unless the deployment involved a nearby shipborne Marine Expeditionary Unit). • For a blockading attack or other limited use of force by China against Taiwan, which would likely pose problems of a different character from those associated with the Baltic and Senkaku scenarios, if other measures such as massive airdrops of weaponry and other supplies proved inadequate, even a possible deployment of U.S. forces into Taiwan (to reduce the odds of an actual invasion attempt or any major intensification of direct PLA kinetic assault on the island). Of course, once initial forces were in place, any trip wire would need to be thickened and reinforced. As such, after the initial deployment of, say, the ready brigade of the 82nd Airborne and related forces, additional troop movements should occur. In the opening days and weeks, these would be of comparable overall magnitude to the initial wave of troops and would continue to consist primarily of light infantry, with an eye to creating a presence and a patrolling capability. The main means of deploying these forces would continue to be aircraft and perhaps some limited amount of Marine amphibious capability that happened to be nearby (likely no more than 2,000 Marines, since the standard Marine Expeditionary Unit on deployment would be of roughly that size). For a scenario in the South China Sea, and perhaps other cases, Ely Ratner’s proposal to help regional partners build and fortify their own bases should be considered.1 During a response to a crisis, the main assets of the United States would include a global base network with a major presence in Europe, East Asia, and the Middle East. They would also feature a strategic transportation network built around massive roll-­on/roll-­off transport ships; additional Navy ships to transport Marine amphibious forces; dedicated strategic airlift plus refueling tankers, as well as additional airlift capacity in the nation’s commercial airline fleets; and prepositioned supplies on land and at sea in key locations in the western Pacific, Indian Ocean, Persian Gulf, and Europe. In some respects, the U.S. global base network is enormous, with hundreds of facilities overseas and at least a modest military presence in dozens of countries (table 4-­1). But in operational terms, the overseas presence of the United States is much simpler and easier to understand.2 Major capabilities are in three fairly limited, specific regions—­the broader

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table 4-1

U.S. Active Duty Troops Based in Foreign Countries

(As of December 2017; early 2018 for Iraq/Syria and Afghanistan) Country or region

Number of troops

Europe

Belgium Germany Italy Spain Turkey United Kingdom Other Subtotal Former Soviet Union

79 44,889 23,580 939 69,408

North Africa, Near East, and South Asia

Bahrain UAE Qatar Other Subtotal

Number of troops

Sub-Saharan Africa

879 35,002 12,457 3,905 1,851 9,123 2,693 65,910

East Asia & Pacific

Japan Korea Other Subtotal

Country or region

7,193 1,099 529 1,138 9,959

Djibouti Other Subtotal

820 610 1,430

Western Hemisphere

Cuba (Guantánamo) Other Subtotal

761 1,589 2,350

11,321 Subtotal: all foreign countries, not including war deployments Unknown or other

Contingency operations support

Afghanistan Kuwait Iraq/Syria Other/Unknown Subtotal Total currently abroad

14,000 2,082 7,000 UNK 23,082 183,539

Sources: Department of Defense, “DoD Personnel, Workforce Reports and Publications (www. dmdc.osd.mil/appj/dwp/dwpreports.jsp); Matthew Pennington, “US, Afghan Leaders Agree on Peace Push,” Associated Press, March 4, 2-18; Editorial Board, “Keep U.S. Troops in Syria for Now,” USA Today, April 5, 2018. Notes: Only countries with at least 500 troops are listed individually. These totals do not include U.S. Navy and Marines at sea. In 2018, contingency operation number reports ceased. “Unknown or other” includes 6,052 reported as unknown, and also troops in Guam, American Samoa, and Antarctica.

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Persian Gulf region, Northeast Asia, and Western Europe. These are also the primary destinations for the U.S. Navy when it deploys ships (almost all of them operating out of U.S. ports) on routine or crisis operations. By contrast, the U.S. naval presence in the Mediterranean and most other areas around Europe is now episodic and transitory (and deployments near Latin America and Africa are modest to minimal). Most deployments ultimately center on the broader Persian Gulf region and the western Pacific. In each of these latter two overseas locations, the United States has some 70,000 to 100,000 military personnel stationed or deployed at a time, at sea and on land. In the broader Middle East, the most important U.S. military presence is associated with ongoing combat operations in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria. Other sites with capabilities include the Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar, the headquarters of the U.S. Navy’s Fifth Fleet in Bahrain, the Incirlik Air Base in Adanan, Turkey, and a major logistics and operational hub in Kuwait. An airfield and port on Diego Garcia, a British-­owned island in the Chagos Archipelago in the middle of the Indian Ocean, are also quite significant.3 In Northeast Asia, most forces are found in Japan and South Korea. The facilities in South Korea are focused primarily on the North Korean threat and emphasize U.S. Air Force and U.S. Army presence. The facilities in Japan have a more regional and global orientation and feature primarily U.S. Navy, Marine Corps, and Air Force units. Other important regional capabilities are centered on the American territory of Guam (and, in a broader sense, the U.S. states of Alaska and Hawaii), and to a lesser extent Australia and Singapore.4 In Europe, about half the total U.S. military presence is found in Germany—­primarily Army and Air Force capabilities and personnel. The two other major locations for U.S. bases and forces are the United Kingdom and Italy, with the former focused on airpower and the latter including important assets from all four services. Smaller but still significant U.S. capabilities in Europe are found in Spain, Belgium, and now Poland (as part of Operation Atlantic Resolve and the European Deterrence Initiative, formerly the European Reassurance Initiative).5 All these bases provide regional bastions or potential bastions of U.S. and allied military strength that can be further developed and fortified in the event of a crisis with Russia or China. They represent places from which power can be projected and aggressor nations’ assets or interests

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threatened as necessary. They also provide hubs in the global transport network that can help extend the reach of the main U.S. strategic transport capabilities. Those transport assets include the following: 6 • More than thirty U.S. Navy amphibious ships to transport and support Marines, with a capacity for some two Marine expeditionary brigades that include airpower. • Roughly thirty very large roll-­on/roll-­off ferry ships, either based in U.S. ports for rapid loading and deployment or prestationed overseas in locations such as Guam and Diego Garcia, with additional sets of equipment already stocked on them, and in total a combined carrying capacity of three to four divisions of equipment and initial supplies. • Roughly 300 long-­range transport aircraft, made up of the C-­5 and C-­17 fleets, with a typical load of up to fifty tons per voyage and thus a combined fleet capacity approaching 15,000 tons in a single sortie (for reference, a heavy division weighs about 100,000 tons and the support equipment for a fighter wing weighs about 1,000 to 2,000 tons). • Some 400 tanker aircraft, the KC-­135 and KC-­10 fleets (the latter are also usable for strategic transport). • In terms of long-­range strike assets, roughly 140 bombers (the B-­1, B-­2, and B-­52 fleets), as well as an attack submarine force of some fifty-­five vessels and an aircraft carrier fleet of eleven battle groups. At this point the Russia and China scenarios diverge considerably because the former is essentially a defense contingency for protecting a land border or region, whereas the latter would be a maritime mission, whether it involved the Senkaku Islands or Taiwan. As such, the two cases are analyzed separately. Russia and the Baltics Forces deployed to address a Russian invasion of a Baltic state would be vulnerable at first.7 But their small size and limited firepower and maneuver capability would likely make it clear that they did not possess a counter­

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invasion capability. For that reason, and because of the stakes involved, Russia would likely leave them alone rather than start what could soon become World War III. Washington would also have publicly underscored its commitment to a defensive operation. Of course, Moscow may not find such a promise fully believable. Just as the Desert Shield deployment to Saudi Arabia in 1990 evolved into Operation Desert Storm, a confrontation with Russia over a Baltic state could escalate too. The risk would have to be weighed against the risks of current policy, which points toward a massive deployment designed to liberate the seized territory. For the current presumed strategy, enough forces might be deployed that they could better defend themselves during the approach, but since they would be vulnerable in transit, it is as likely that they would meet with a violent Russian military response. It is a question of mitigating and managing risks rather than thinking a risk-­free option existed in this situation. Because the scenario imagined here has Russia desiring not so much a large land grab as a limited operation designed to weaken NATO, the idea that Russia would quickly escalate to general war seems unlikely. Over time, NATO would presumably feel the need to establish some degree of defensive cordon along the entire Estonian-­Latvian border with Russia, which is more than 300 miles in combined length, and perhaps also along the borders of Latvia, Lithuania, and Poland with Belarus, which extend another 700 miles or so.8 If defensive lines were formed efficiently, not every mile would need to be defended, but presumably all significant towns and villages would be. Even with that limitation, a defensive perimeter several hundred miles long would be needed. In the weeks after the initial postulated Russian aggression, the United States (and, one hopes, other NATO countries) would therefore have to continue to deploy forces to the region as a matter of reasonable precaution. As noted before, a RAND war game conducted in 2016 estimated that a NATO force undergirded by some seven brigades of ground-­combat capability could be enough to prevent a rapid conquest of the Baltics by Russia once it was in position.9 A force of such size, with a combined weight of some 100,000 to 300,000 tons, depending on the types of units involved, might take two weeks to two months to deploy under current circumstances because of the reduced capability the United States maintains in Europe today. The exact timing would be a function of which type of asset, aircraft or ships, was used to do most of the force movements and where

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the carriers were unloaded. As a good rule of thumb, U.S. strategic mobility forces can in theory carry up to 30,000 tons of equipment per day on average during a deployment, but in practice, actual deployment levels are often less than half theoretical maximums, owing to the inevitable frictions and inefficiencies and setbacks involved in any major logistics operation.10 Whether seven brigades would be sufficient is open to debate. It could be argued that defending the most exposed eastern NATO states would be tantamount to NATO’s defense of the intra-­German border during the Cold War. In theory, therefore, to maintain a comparable force-­to-­space ratio, NATO might need to deploy several hundred thousand troops along the Baltic-­Polish frontier.11 However, such thinking is unrealistic for several reasons. First, Russia’s 800,000-­strong military is potent, especially near home territory, but it is only one-­fifth the size of the Soviet force of Cold War times. Second, force-­to-­space metrics are not a particularly compelling way to size forces for forward defense, as Joshua Epstein has persuasively argued.12 Third, the need to deploy such a forward defense in modern times seems out of proportion to even the dangerous situation postulated in this scenario. Vladimir Putin seeks Russian revanchism and aggrandizement, but there is no evidence that he is animated by a worldview compelling him to pursue expansion at the clearly foreseeable risk of large-­scale nuclear war. (That is a different matter, however, from the possibility that escalation could occur during a crisis or a war in a way that no one had anticipated or intended, as discussed in earlier chapters.) On balance, it seems reasonable to speculate that, depending on how the crisis unfolded, NATO might choose to wind up with a total forward force roughly 50,000 to 100,000 strong to have a reasonably credible defensive capability against Russian armed forces.13 China and the Senkaku Islands or Taiwan The same two scenarios discussed before—­China’s seizure of a Senkaku island or a blockade of Taiwan—­I view as quite plausible in themselves, but they are also representative of a broader set of possible problems that could arise with the PRC, in the context of limited crises over small but important stakes with the real potential for major military escalation. Were Beijing to authorize a small, quick operation to occupy a Senkaku island, the situation might resemble the seizure of Crimea by Rus-

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sian “little green men” in 2014. It could be over before the United States even knew it was under way. Indeed, it could quite possibly be even faster and easier than the annexation of Crimea or Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990, as there might be literally no opposition whatsoever. Yes, Japan might see the Chinese coming, and might have a coast guard cutter in the vicinity. But if the PLA forces came in by air, the first unambiguous sign that they were taking the island might be the unfurling of their parachutes. The response time might be essentially nil. Or China might take several of the islands. Three of the five, plus the three rocks that also are part of the Senkaku/Diaoyu group, are within visual range of each other. (They are also the closest of all the islands to Taiwan and China.) Two of them are nearby twins, called Kita Kojima and Minami Kojima in Japanese and Bei Xiaodao and Nan Xiaodao in Chinese; the larger, separate one is called Uotsuri Shima or Diaoyu Dao.14 Taking this entire set (with a combined land area of less than two square miles) would deny Japan and the United States an easy option to establish a nearby foothold of their own. Of course, a crisis could develop in other ways as well. Consider this scenario as sketched out by the mayor of Japan’s nearby Ishigaki island, Yoshitaka Nakayama: “The situation I am worried about is this: a Chinese ship or fishing boat would come to the island, and fishermen land on the island. Then Japanese police and coastguard officials would go on the island to remove them. Then the Chinese will give a reason to deploy warships to the island, saying ‘we need to protect our citizens’.” 15 Because of the many variables, it is impossible to detail a specific course of action for the United States and Japan that could cover all contingencies. However, several principles should guide policymakers in Washington and Tokyo. First, those islands that were not seized by China should be occupied promptly by allied infantry forces with at least enough capability to patrol and establish a trip-­w ire force. At least dozens of soldiers, and perhaps up to a company per island (a couple hundred troops), should be deployed. Second, allied coast guard and navy presence should be introduced into the nearby waterways as well, including within twelve nautical miles of any PLA-­occupied islands, and robust freedom of maneuver/freedom of navigation activities should be initiated. Washington and Tokyo might also declare a keep-­out zone near the islands they were protecting, promising to use force to defend them if need be. They should also publicly

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under­score at this juncture that any further Chinese aggression that targeted their military forces (or fishermen or other civilians) would be met with a firm military response. Larger fractions of the U.S. Navy’s Seventh Fleet and the Japanese Naval Self-­Defense Forces should also be allocated to the general region as a further show of resoluteness and further effort at deterrence. There would be a temptation to blockade Chinese forces on whichever islands they held. In my judgment, that temptation should probably be resisted, as long as no lethal force had yet been employed by any country against another. At one level, it would be entirely justifiable under international law for Japan and the United States to assert their Article 51 rights under the UN Charter to defend what was rightfully Japan’s—­or at least commonly recognized to be administered and controlled by Japan. If there were a reliable way to keep Chinese resupply convoys away from the island without the use of lethal force, it might make sense to gradually starve out the Chinese forces (perhaps providing them only with water until they capitulated and agreed to evacuate). However, even if the most convenient approaches for larger sea vessels could be blocked, China could try to sneak supplies ashore for a presumably small contingent of infantry by using submarines, small ships, or, if necessary, aircraft (through an airdrop operation). Blocking all these means of access might or might not prove possible without taking an action that resulted in loss of life. On balance, it may not be worth the risk to try, especially because these are uninhabited islands whose ownership is disputed. Later, if the crisis could not be resolved diplomatically, and if the United States and Japan could gain substantial international support for their position, it might be worth reconsidering a blockade, especially if other countries agreed to join the effort. A Chinese blockade of Taiwan would present different challenges. The historically most likely response to such an attack—­direct U.S. military help to Taiwan to break the blockade and restore something akin to normal commerce between Taiwan and the outside world—­would be an increasingly difficult, fraught, and perhaps even untenable strategic course of action in the years to come. Again, other options are needed. A better choice might include placing U.S. military forces directly on Taiwan, perhaps even signaling a likely long-­term presence. That could have the effect of establishing a new trip wire before China could attack those forces. Once the troops were inserted, their presence could be an-

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nounced, creating enormous complications for Beijing should it wish to escalate later to direct attacks on Taiwan. But the main response would occur in the maritime and air domains. Even if the United States elected not to attempt to break the blockade directly, it would not want to concede the western Pacific waters near Taiwan to Chinese domination. Numerous maritime and land-­based assets would need to be strengthened in the region. The United States would want enough capability in the region that if any assets came under attack, help would be quickly available, from places like Okinawa, the Tokyo region, and Guam, as well as the Philippine Sea. Indeed, anticipating the kinds of specific military operations considered below, the United States and its allies would want to work toward creating regional military superiority in places such as the Strait of Malacca and the sea-­lane approaches to Japan and South Korea—­areas where American and allied basing options would deprive China of any automatic advantage based on geography (unlike the situation near Taiwan or the Senkakus). In light of the global assets of the United States and the capabilities of Japan, South Korea, and Australia, not to mention Canada and other NATO countries, a favorable regional balance of power should be achievable even against a China of 2030 or 2040. Sustaining such a buildup over the longer term, should the crisis not quickly be resolved, would likely require a broader U.S. military force increase to create an adequate rotation base from which to draw forces. As with a possible future force posture in Europe to counter a Russian aggression, and associated increases in the overall size and capability of the U.S. armed forces writ large, any estimate of what might be needed after a Chinese attack in the western Pacific can only be conjectural. Many factors would enter into the calculus, including how long the crisis lasted and whether it escalated militarily elsewhere. But the discussion can begin rather simply. Today the U.S. Navy has an advantage in total naval capacity of more than 3 million tons over China. Of course, tonnage is far from the only metric of naval power and perhaps not even the most significant. But it is still a useful, basic, and not irrelevant gauge of relative capability. In rough terms, by 2020 the United States will possess something close to 6 million tons of ship weight; China will have around 2 million tons or perhaps slightly more. Leaving aside allied capabilities for the moment, and recognizing that the U.S. Navy now seeks to keep roughly 60 percent of its fleet in the broader Indo-­ Pacific region after the Obama administration’s “rebalance,” that would

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imply a regional advantage of roughly 3.5 million tons to 2 million tons.16 (Of course, beyond 2020 the balance could be different, depending on the future naval investment decisions of the two countries.) One plausible American response to a Chinese aggression against a U.S. ally or partner in the region might be to attempt to restore the U.S. tonnage advantage over China to what it had been in, say, 2010 or 2012, before China’s assertive period of recent activity began. This would take time, but the kinds of actions postulated in this book, especially the more serious ones, would be game-­changing developments that would affect relations with Russia or China not just for years but probably for decades. As such, a strategy could be implemented over time. It is not likely that Western weaknesses would be so acute as to require immediate redress in any event; a patient policy of resoluteness should suffice. Back in 2010–12, China had just over 1 million tons of aggregate naval capacity, and the United States had something in the range of 3 million tons devoted to the broader region, for an advantage of 2 million tons. Regaining that advantage might therefore imply adding another half million tons of shipping to the U.S. Navy (all of which could presumably be devoted to the Asia-­Pacific region), above and beyond whatever other shipbuilding plans were being executed. This is a very rough figure that could be influenced by all the respective investment decisions the two sides will have been otherwise making and implementing by whatever point in the future the presumed crisis takes place. Thus it should not be interpreted too literally.

Asymmetric Pressure and Asymmetric Attack Options The essence of the alternative strategy of asymmetric or integrated defense and deterrence is to avoid combat as long as possible without risking further enemy aggression and without condoning or tolerating the aggression that has already occurred. Thus the main pillars of the strategy are the forward defense and deterrence measures outlined earlier in this chapter, together with the economic sanctions and pressure strategies discussed in chapter 5. But there is an additional, important element to the military part of the recommended approach that could be required in some more serious and protracted crises. It involves the means by which military pressure

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might be applied elsewhere, in the least threatening and escalatory manner possible, yet in a way that reinforces the punitive aspects of the overall response to the adversary’s actions. It can perhaps be best understood as a complement to and reinforcement of the economic pressure of sanctions. In an actual crisis, these kinetic actions might not be undertaken initially. Indeed, for scenarios of more limited (though hardly insignificant) consequence, such as a Chinese seizure of a Senkaku island, they might never be used. They could be risky. They are also hardly guaranteed to succeed in leading to a prompt undoing of the initial act of aggression that produced the crisis at hand. It is well established that compelling an adversary to reverse an action already taken or under way is much more difficult than deterring an initial action. For this reason, the modern track record of limited military options is mixed at best, even against weaker foes than China or Russia.17 But it would still be desirable that Moscow or Beijing realize that the United States and its partners had the means to ratchet up the pressure if a crisis endured or intensified, and were prepared to use those means. Thus the prospect of such additional military measures being implemented could also deter against escalation by the aggressor. Several themes or broad principles should guide the development of this strategy. Notably, it should seek to cause property damage or prevent the flow of goods, not cause loss of life. Tools such as cyberattacks and nonlethal weapons should be used as vigorously as possible. In addition, the means selected should be applied to crucial choke points and other specific geographic regions where the greatest effect can be produced at least risk to friendly assets. Among other implications, building toolkits to achieve such ends would require emplacing economics experts within combatant commands and creating protocols that explicitly sought synergies between the application of sanctions and military action. A detailed understanding of the vulnerabilities of the Chinese and Russian economies would no longer be just a preoccupation of parts of the Treasury Department but of the Department of Defense as well. And war planning would not be the exclusive responsibility of the DoD. Treasury and other agencies, in addition to supporting DoD combatant commands, would carry out more rigorous internal studies and analyses to anticipate how multistep economic wars might play out. The first consideration above suggests that large assets with few if any people around or aboard them should be the main targets of any mili-

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tary action. These targets could include large container and tanker ships, large oil platforms (especially at times when fewer people were working on them), major ports (again, to be attacked at quieter times when fewer people were present), and major transportation arteries or choke points (through the use of such means as missiles, torpedoes, mines, or the deliberate sinking of vessels in shallow waters to impede subsequent movement of ships). Ideally, any attacks that did require attacking manned platforms or assets would use nonlethal weapons where possible, such as radiofrequency weapons. The second consideration suggests that any attacks be concentrated near places where China or Russia either accesses key raw materials or delivers goods to large markets. The Persian Gulf is an obvious example of the first category. The Strait of Malacca, other straits leading to the South China Sea, the Suez Canal, seas near Gibraltar, and the Greenland-­ Iceland-­U.K.-­North Sea gaps connecting the Arctic Ocean to the North Atlantic region are examples of the second. Washington would have to anticipate that Moscow or Beijing would consider retaliating against U.S. friends and allies in proximity to Russia or China. This threat could be particularly concerning for Japan, South Korea, and eastern members of NATO. To minimize the odds of easy retaliation, it might make sense for the United States not to ask those countries to participate in any attacks against Russian or Chinese assets. These considerations together would also require the United States to explore how it might build bastions of military power in key regions, such as the broader Middle East, where today it has much more limited (and vulnerable) concentrations of military power. The necessary effects would require a blend of long-­range strike capabilities and shorter-­range forward-­deployed capabilities that would help defend allies located near the presumed areas of possible military engagement. In addition, the United States and its allies should give serious consideration to protecting the sea-­lanes, particularly against long-­range Chinese submarines. Russian Attack on the Baltics In the scenario laid out earlier, if Russia were to seize and occupy a swath of eastern Estonia or Latvia, prompting a robust forward defensive deployment from NATO, along with the imposition of severe economic sanctions, what if any types of additional military action might NATO

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consider in other theaters? Ideally, military force might be avoided altogether, if economic measures deliver the punishment and create the leverage necessary for diplomacy to deliver the solution to the crisis. But if an inability to reverse the aggression, concern over Russian escalation, or some other consideration made Washington and other NATO capitals feel the need to show their resolve through the use of military force, kinetic action of some kind might be considered. To be relatively nonescalatory, military measures should minimize or avoid casualties. They could be kinetic without being lethal. They might be used to incapacitate or damage property but not people, and ideally they would be launched far from Russian territory, or at least from major Russian population centers. They would also ideally be carried out in such a way that NATO would have “escalation dominance” for any modest intensification of the crisis, so that Russia’s most natural possible military responses in kind would not produce any perception of advantage in Moscow. Perhaps the most logical recourse would be to use military force to ensure or enhance compliance with any sanctions that had been imposed. For example, if Russian gas exports had been banned by NATO decision, Russian tanker ships or pipelines carrying gas to countries outside NATO might be struck. For the ships, in the first instance, high-­powered microwave weapons might be used to incapacitate the ships. If that attempt failed, very small bombs might be used to destroy propellers or cause other damage that would render a transport ship immobile without leading to fire, explosion, or rapid sinking. Pipelines could be targeted in remote areas where few if any people were present. Even though the sanctions would presumably not have been applied by the UN, owing to Moscow’s veto over any Security Council resolutions, a group of like-­minded states might argue that Article 51 of the UN Charter allowed a self-­defense response to the initial attack and that the indirect economics-­based strategy chosen by NATO was the least dangerous of all options. Of course, Russia might find ways to reduce its vulnerability to such punishment by shipping gas through pipelines and otherwise seeking workarounds to whatever prohibitions NATO had established. This course might be acceptable. NATO’s overall strategy would not necessarily require an immediate resolution of the crisis. While the occupied town(s) of the eastern Baltics would understandably prefer a rapid resolution, in broader strategic terms, the West could afford to be patient. (Moreover,

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if those occupied Baltic towns insisted on a rapid resolution, they might find that in a situation of escalatory dynamics, NATO’s response might wind up effectively “destroying their villages to save them.”) The alliance’s preeminent goals would be to bolster defense and deterrence capabilities against any further possible aggression while punishing the perpetrator to a degree that was commensurate with the original offense—­and in a way that was affordable as well as sustainable for the countries applying that punishment. What if Russia escalated? It might, for example, start attacking Western commercial shipping or naval vessels, deliberately risking general war, to test the mettle of the NATO states and try to get them to back down or accept a compromise negotiated outcome. This possibility would be hugely concerning. But NATO would likely have the upper hand, owing to its economic strength, its naval capacities, and the geographic theaters in which this type of conflict would play out. Engaging in a naval competition on the open oceans plays to U.S. and NATO strengths in expeditionary warfare and takes the fight farther from Russian shores, relative to a direct response in the Baltics. It also probably lowers the likelihood that Moscow would feel the need to consider nuclear escalation out of existential fear, since NATO would not have mounted a huge force with inherent offensive capability near Russian borders. To be sure, NATO submarines prowling near Russian ports would create dangers of their own, should such efforts become part of a general naval conflagration. But they would not precipitate the same kinds of worries about territorial conquest, or even regime change, that a massive NATO air-­ground deployment in eastern Europe would likely engender. No option is free of escalation risks; the goal should be to push them as far as possible from the Russian heartland, where both Russia’s military capabilities and its perceived vulnerabilities are greatest. China and the Senkaku Islands or Taiwan Continuing with the same sort of logic, what kind of limited but active military response to a Chinese seizure of a Senkaku island, or a PLA attack on Taiwan, would make the most sense? Again, several watchwords should apply: proportionality, legality/legitimacy, and escalation control. Any military action should seek to apply limited, if significant, punishment that is somehow linked in scale and scope to the original offense.

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It should be supported by international action of some type that, even if lacking UN Security Council blessing, owing to a presumed Chinese veto, carries weight as an action endorsed by a premier international body. These might include NATO and perhaps other bodies as well. And the action should be applied at a time and in a place and manner to reduce the risk that China would have an obvious or appealing recourse or would see an opportunity to escalate. However, the challenge would probably be greater than in the scenario involving Russia. China is a large, increasingly diverse, increasingly advanced, and growing economy. That said, now and for the foreseeable future, the broader Western community of nations—­more than a billion strong, if one counts NATO or the EU, Japan, South Korea, and Australia, and the United States plus Canada and Mexico—­w ill be far wealthier than China. More to the point, China will continue to depend on Western markets for its economy and its wealth. To be sure, the interconnections are strong and deep; any economic war against China will hurt Western nations greatly too. But they would be in a strong position in any showdown by reason of economic fundamentals. A crisis over the Senkaku Islands serves to explore the concept of proportionality I advocate here. To the extent they have any value at all beyond the purely symbolic, the islands are associated with some nearby fishing grounds, as well as possibly recoverable oil and gas deposits. To the extent that ownership of the islands—­arguably not really islands at all under the Law of the Sea convention because of their small size and lack of clear capacity to support human habitation, and thus not necessarily linked to exclusive economic zones extending 200 miles beyond their shores—­ carries any economic privileges, these could be itemized and quantified. The international community might then attempt to deprive China of an equivalent amount of revenue from some other, existing dimensions of its current international trade. Or perhaps it might seek to deprive China of two or three times that amount, in recognition of the severity of the crisis that China had caused and the associated military (and economic) costs the international community would bear as a result of the crisis. If one or more of the Senkaku Islands were the target of the Chinese attack, the United States and Japan might decide to respond only with economic reprisals, at least at first. Using lethal or destructive force might be viewed as a disproportionate and unnecessarily risky response. Nonetheless, some use of force might be considered, especially if the Chinese

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undertook an occupation of one or more islands and seemed to be settling in for the long haul, or if the PLA somehow used lethal force itself in the operation. The United States and Japan could respond by seizing and holding Chinese fishing boats operating farther out in the Pacific or in the Indian Ocean. Chinese mining assets in Africa could be taken over temporarily in countries that assented to such action. Ports in those same countries usable for foreign trade could be blockaded, with any ships known to be associated with Chinese trade denied access (whether or not the countries in question assented). If the situation deteriorated further and Chinese aggression expanded, more risky military options could be considered. These options might also apply in the case of a Chinese blockade of Taiwan, which would be a much more serious problem than a Chinese seizure of the Senkakus because it would affect millions of people’s lives immediately. In such cases, ships transporting oil or gas from the Persian Gulf to China could be either seized or incapacitated using the kinds of precision ordnance (explosive or nonlethal) discussed in the Russia scenario. Even if it could not always be known which vessels were headed for China, since supertankers sometimes “set sail” before buyers for their oil have been determined, such methods could still be effective.18 The assets of companies that continued to trade with China, or ships that had been determined to be previously involved in evasion of sanctions, could be subsequently targeted in an operation that strengthened over time. Specific options tailored to back up the economic sanctions strategies chosen for the specific case should be implemented (integrating economic sanctions into military plans is discussed in chapter 5). In such a situation, what scale of naval presence near the Strait of Hormuz would be required to establish an ability to monitor—­ and control—­tanker traffic coming out of the Persian Gulf? (The Persian Gulf would be the most credible place to carry out such an operation since most Chinese oil originates there and since the United States has many military bases in the region, unlike in the Strait of Malacca, the other obvious candidate if monitoring and enforcing actions were to occur at a choke point rather than on the open oceans.) On a daily basis, nearly 20 million barrels of oil transit the Strait of Hormuz, between the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman; this flow could involve anywhere from just a dozen super-­large tankers to several dozen, depending on the specific vessels in question

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(with each ship typically having a crew of up to a couple dozen people).19 In principle, this mission could be undertaken without aircraft carriers, but it is assumed here that establishing robust air supremacy against any unexpected threat (from Iran, from China) would be seen as a necessary hedge. The latter effort could probably be handled by two aircraft carriers within a couple hundred miles of the coast, since standard doctrine suggests that two carriers, alternating primary responsibility for the mission, can maintain coverage against a limited threat. But because of the stakes involved, the nature of the crisis, and the potential capabilities of the principal adversary, it might be considered more prudent to devote four to six carriers to the mission, with land-­based airpower in the region and in Europe providing support. Such a show of force would discourage any wishful thinking by China that a lucky shot by one of its attack submarines, for example, could measurably weaken Western military capability in the region and lead to a reassessment and possible termination of the mission. Whether it might be deemed essential that this naval armada have the means to board every ship is open to debate. It might be sufficient to check many ships by basic transponder indicator or crew identity. Of course, some of these ships could be attempting to evade the sanctions and actively seeking to deceive the assembled international enforcement flotilla about their identity, so end-­to-­end monitoring of their voyage would be necessary. (Some degree of evasion could be tolerated, provided that a reliable degree of punishment was exacted.) If several dozen ships per day had to be physically boarded, that could imply a need for one to two dozen additional ships (including coast guard variants) in addition to the carrier force. Alternatively, reprisals could be emphasized for ships that had previously been known to be involved in evading sanctions, with no boarding necessary. The real challenge in this situation would clearly arise if there were sustained opposition to the actions or Chinese retaliation against other countries’ commercial and shipping assets. At that point, the possibility of escalation to a general war would require a full-­fledged combat analysis. At that point too, direct attacks on the Chinese mainland to deny the PLA use of airfields, ports, and other military capabilities would become difficult to rule out. Before that point, but after the initial U.S.-­led coalition’s punitive at-

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tacks, China might decide to test the mettle of the coalition with some modest responses of its own. It could do so knowing full well that it would likely not prevail in any major escalation in a theater such as the broader Persian Gulf but might nonetheless hope that some members of the coalition would lose their resolve if the chances of a dynamic that could lead to all-­out war seemed uncomfortably high. As such, the coalition would need to maintain the potential for establishing escalation dominance at any likely level of hypothetical combat in this broader theater. It would not be enough simply to outmatch China in any possible category of weaponry—­most notably, attack submarines, long-­range strike aircraft and possibly long-­range conventionally armed missiles, short-­range aircraft and missiles launched from regional bases, and so on. It would also be essential to anticipate “assassin’s mace” types of attacks in which, for example, Chinese attack submarines working with teams of smaller unmanned underwater vehicles (UUVs) created substantial threats to aircraft carrier battle groups that could not be confidently countered. China might also try to employ the kinds of robotic swarms discussed in chapter 3, deploying sensor networks near the expected operating zones of the carrier battle groups in an attempt to gather intelligence on them, which would facilitate long-­range missile attacks from land bases in the broader region (or even western China) or from submarines. Such robotic weapons could be prestationed on military bases in regions that China is already gradually developing today or at least gaining more frequent access to, such as Djibouti, on the Horn of Africa, and Gwadar, Pakistan.20 Particularly for a first volley of attacks, when the U.S. guard might not have been fully raised and when attacks designed to destroy or incapacitate satellites might not yet have been countenanced, China’s ability to strike in this way could be considerable. If China managed to damage or sink several of the large ships in the original U.S.-­led flotilla that was controlling sea traffic near the Persian Gulf, Washington might then decide to reinforce its position by sending more carriers from the United States, accompanied by a large contingent of attack submarines to screen the carrier force and help protect it against further PLA strikes. Meanwhile, the United States would also likely seek to destroy Chinese attack submarines wherever it could find them worldwide—­possibly even in port, but certainly at any point beyond Chinese waters. The United States would likely prevail in this showdown before it lost much more of its carrier fleet, but it would be difficult to pre-

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dict outcomes confidently. In such an engagement, relative to the kind of naval showdown discussed in chapter 3 to the east of Taiwan, the United States would have three notable advantages: • Chinese submarines would have to travel much farther to reach the combat theater. • Chinese submarines would probably have to transit additional tight waterways where antisubmarine warfare (ASW) barriers could be established by the United States and its allies. • Chinese land-­based assets for intelligence gathering would be much harder to come by, making it less likely that the PLA could find and target U.S. Navy ships. In chapter 3, I crudely estimated the damage that China’s future submarine force might do to ships east of Taiwan as follows, when examining the expected life cycle of a modern attack submarine during a period of war. The calculation assumes the submarine would hunt ships, then return home to rearm and refuel if needed, then run the ASW gauntlet again: Probability of getting into firing position without being destroyed on first sortie: 86%. Probability of getting into firing position on second sortie: 0.86 × 0.86 × 0.86 = 63%. Probability of getting into firing position on third sortie: 0.63 × 0.86 × 0.86 = 46%. Probability of getting into firing position on fourth sortie: 0.46 × 0.86 × 0.86 = 34%. Probability of getting into firing position on fifth sortie: 0.34 × 0.86 × 0.86 = 25%. Thus a typical submarine would survive long enough to carry out perhaps two to four separate attacks with six torpedoes each. To recall, the average modern Chinese submarine might fire three to four volleys of six torpedoes before meeting its own demise—­for a grand total of about twenty torpedoes fired. Thus it might hit on average ten ships, and if we further assume that two hits are needed to sink a ship, it might destroy five ships (either cargo vessels or U.S. Navy vessels). If we assume also

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that there will be one U.S. Navy ship for every five cargo ships across the theater of operations and that the submarines fire at both without preference as they encounter them, a typical modern submarine might sink an average of almost 1.0 warships before itself being destroyed. Were China willing to use half its entire submarine fleet in this mission, it could then sink twenty-­five to thirty U.S. Navy or allied naval ships. That calculation was done for submarines and vessels in the waters east of Taiwan. For the waters near the Persian Gulf, the United States might be able to roughly double the effective number of ASW barriers per journey, if it could set up patrols near both ends of the Strait of Malacca, for example. That could make any attack sortie much more dangerous for PLA submarines, roughly halving the expected number of missions a typical submarine might conduct before being sunk. That might take the total number of expected ships lost down from the range of twenty-­five to thirty to the range of twelve to fifteen. Moreover, China would have fewer options for targeting at such a great distance from its own territory. Its land-­based aircraft, swarms of predeployed robotic sensors, and commercial vessels masquerading as innocent civilian ships but in fact equipped with sensor packages would all be less common in distant Indian Ocean settings. It might still have enough survivable satellites to compensate for the loss of other assets, so it is difficult to dismiss the possibility that up to fifteen U.S. Navy ships could be lost (with perhaps two or three of these expected to be aircraft carriers). However, there would also be good odds of a much-­reduced risk: many of the submarines that survived the ASW barriers might never acquire a target to shoot at before having to return to base. Thus an expected U.S. Navy ship loss total of twenty-­five to thirty vessels from combat east of Taiwan might decline to just five or ten ships lost in combat near the Persian Gulf, for the type of mission postulated here. This is just a simple way of notionally and crudely putting into numbers the obvious qualitative point: China will lose the home-­field advantage if a future naval battle happens far from both American and Chinese shores rather than in the western Pacific. By contrast, there would be less uncertainty about the ability of long-­ range U.S. airpower to continue to threaten shipping coming out of the Gulf. It would not have the same ability to interrogate ships as would a more standard maritime enforcement operation. But at this point in the crisis, the United States might put the onus on any ship that wished safe passage, declaring that it would fire on any vessel it could not positively

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identify as a friendly vessel with contents not headed for China’s ports. Both China and the United States could seek to deploy land-­based combat aircraft near the Persian Gulf, to threaten and protect such long-­range aerial assets or to carry out strikes of their own. The United States would begin with major advantages in this domain and in long-­range strike assets, especially stealthy bombers. A combination of short-­range aircraft (manned or unmanned) operating from regional bases, perhaps robotic swarms of waterborne sensors, small UUVs, and small, survivable satellites would provide the requisite intelligence about which ships sought to transit the strait and at what times and places. What recourse would China (or Russia, for earlier scenarios) have against these kinds of asymmetric military options? Clearly, they could embargo shipments of certain goods on which they knew the United States and allies depended. They might be even more inclined to do so after military attacks than in response to the earlier imposition of some economic sanctions. In China’s case, embargoes could be imposed on shipments of rare earth minerals to Korea and Japan, electronics to the United States and other countries, and key components in industrial supply chains to Taiwan, among many other possibilities. Beijing could also stop buying goods from countries like Australia. In Russia’s case, the banned trade could involve energy supplies to eastern Europe and key industrial components such as titanium sold to U.S. firms (as discussed in more detail in the next chapter). But in terms of direct military response, the most obvious choices for Beijing and Moscow would be to put pressure on trade routes to such countries as the Baltic and Nordic states or Korea and Japan. Attacks could be either of the harassment variety or more systematic. These attacks would represent extremely risky and potentially escalatory decisions, but Russia or China might find it had little choice under the circumstances. Even though the American actions in theaters like the Middle East would have been designed to be proportionate, targeted, and relatively nonescalatory, the risk of retaliation would remain. It is for these reasons that the military actions discussed earlier should be avoided initially if possible, why diplomatic solutions to the crisis should be pursued vigorously, and why economic sanctions for the more serious scenarios in which Taiwanese (or other) people were at real risk should be designed to work fast. It is also for such reasons that any military actions should be discrete, proportional, and nonlethal if possible.

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These considerations also put a premium on enhancing the resiliency of key U.S. allies, especially against the kinds of limited harassment attacks and partial supply cutoffs that would seem the most likely Russian or Chinese recourses. These are discussed further in chapter 5. At the same time, the United States would have to prepare capabilities for a more sustained global naval and air competition, including in theaters relatively close to the rival great powers. These kinds of operations would probably be less risky than general combat to break a blockade of Taiwan or reverse a ground attack on a Baltic state. But they would still require attention to overall capacity for sustaining a favorable balance of power in each theater, which in turn would highlight the importance of the military budget considerations examined below, and to a prompt start to expand the U.S. military as any such crisis began, even though doing so would take time. Moreover, although the essence of my proposed strategy is to avoid direct combat near Chinese coasts, in some scenarios the United States and allies might have to consider breaking a blockade to ensure Taiwan’s survival. Being able to sustain some of the necessary patrolling, ASW operations, and naval supply and maintenance operations from bases in the broader western Pacific would make sense. To create the means for such an option, if a crisis of the time postulated here actually began, the United States should promptly explore longer-­term policies such as the following: • Creating bastions on western islands in the Philippine archipelago, should Manila assent, to include airfields with hardened shelters and underground fuel and munitions stocks, protected by air and missile defense systems and enough ground forces to discourage raids by PLA special forces. • Homeporting of more American surface warships and submarines in places such as Japan, the Philippines, Guam, and even Vietnam as a way to facilitate sustained forward operations at acceptable strain on the fleet. • The expedited development of unmanned ships to play a growing range of roles, making it possible to carry out reconnaissance and even strike operations with less risk to American military personnel and ideally also at lower cost per ship in some cases.21

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• The creation, over time, of some U.S. merchant marine capability that could, if necessary, resume under military auspices some of the commercial ship traffic that China had managed to scare away from Taiwan with its partially tight blockade. • Appeal to European allies to assist more fully in military operations in the broader Persian Gulf, with naval and coast guard capabilities as well as land-­based airpower and missile and air defenses, so that U.S. forces are not overstressed by their expanded operations in the broader Persian Gulf region (so that they could expand operations in the western Pacific). The pace at which such options might actually be implemented would, of course, be a function of how the crisis unfolded. It is possible that it could last years. However, there would also be powerful incentives for all sides to undertake more serious and creative diplomacy as this kind of scenario, with its extensive economic pain and nontrivial military risks, played out.

Implications for the Defense Budget What would the implications of all the above be for U.S. military planning and budgeting? In other words, if one of the scenarios postulated in this book did play out, how might American defense budget priorities change in the ensuing years? Let’s begin with the forward defense requirements of the strategy and consider first the Russia-­Europe scenario. An open-­ended forward stationing of several tens of thousands of U.S. and other NATO forces in eastern Europe would likely require a larger U.S. military force structure and defense budget. Even if the additional brigades and other forces that were ultimately stationed quasi-­permanently in eastern Europe could remain there without being rotated in and out, those brigades would be largely unavailable for other global contingencies. As such, a U.S. Army that was already fairly small for the world of pre-­2014 might be hard-­pressed to sustain other commitments and deter other conflicts. It would need to grow. One way to estimate the necessary increased size of the U.S. Army would be simply to add to the force structure whatever number of brigades

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had now been anchored in eastern Europe. That might mean anywhere from three or four to as many as ten American brigades, each of more than 3,000 soldiers. Beyond brigade combat teams, the main combat-­capable type of unit in the U.S. Army, supporting such capabilities as combat aviation brigades, air defense and artillery, and mobility and logistics capabilities, would be required. That would make for a net increase in the Army’s standing combat force structure of some 10 to 30 percent, and thus a corresponding increase in its budget of up to roughly 20 percent.22 Some increases might be necessary for the Air Force, as well—­probably a comparable increase of up to 20 to 30 percent in tactical combat squadrons, bombers based out of theater and thus more survivable, and supporting capabilities such as electronic warfare aircraft. Together, such increases imply an increase of as much as 15 or 20 percent in the overall U.S. Air Force budget as well. In very rough terms, a 15 to 20 percent increase in the U.S. Army and Air Force budgets relative to current base funding levels would exceed $50 billion in the annual Pentagon top line. Initial costs might be much higher, however, as units were created (often necessitating purchases of new equipment) and new bases built. So if the average annual cost over a twenty-­or thirty-­year period were $50 billion, the typical annual cost in the first five to ten years of any such policy decision could certainly reach $100 billion. To estimate the budgetary costs of handling a crisis in the Pacific, let us begin with the estimate made above for an expanded U.S. Navy—­roughly a half million tons of additional capacity. In crude terms, that might translate into about thirty ships, with a likely combined value of something in the range of $100 billion to $150 billion (assuming no more than one or two were flat-­deck aircraft carriers). If that additional shipbuilding expense were distributed over a ten-­year period, the investment costs might average $15 billion a year and the additional operating costs another $10 billion annually.23 That would make for an increase of about $25 billion in the annual Navy budget. Similar increases might be wise within the Air Force budget, for capabilities such as a larger bomber force and more hardened operating bases throughout the broader Pacific—­and indeed, the Indian Ocean region as well, in light of the kinds of asymmetric military operations in other theaters that the United States should consider in this situation. The hardened, secure bases would imply a role for the Army and Marine Corps too, though perhaps on a somewhat less expensive scale.

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Again, as in the Russia example explored earlier, a very rough first-­blush estimate of the needed increase in the overall Pentagon annual budget resulting from the postulated kind of crisis or conflict could approach $100 billion. It might well need to be sustained at that higher level for a number of years because of the deterioration in great power relations that would be nearly inevitable in such a situation even if the initial crisis were resolved. The above calculations presume that a crisis has already begun. But what about the kinds of military changes the United States might consider now, to enhance its capacities to carry out the sort of integrated deterrence and asymmetric responses that could be required to back up my proposed alternative paradigm for deterring small-­scale aggression? My conclusions, fortunately, do not require any major adaptations in U.S. global military posture, since the United States retains a rapidly deployable capability with major concentrations of bases in the three key areas of Western Europe, the broader Middle East, and the East Asia/ western Pacific region. But they do reinforce the need for sustaining prompt global strike capabilities, above and beyond whatever might be needed in a crisis or conflict elsewhere (such as North Korea). Thus this logic reinforces the case for some type of two-­crisis/two-­war capability with a wide range of military capabilities. Again, most of the pieces for this capability are already in place. The United States needs to work to maintain it, while also keeping an eye on the elements of global military power, such as long-­range strike and survivable command, control, communications, and intelligence, that are in shortest supply today when measured against plausible two-­war scenarios. A number of technologies should be at the center of the ensuing modernization agenda. Beyond modernized bombers and fighters, an influential RAND report emphasizes the importance of developing improved long-­range antiship missiles, high-­speed long-­range antiradiation missiles and air-­to-­air missiles, mobile air and cruise missile defense systems, improved electronic warfare systems for all major types of platforms, deployable miniature munitions and submunitions to use against armor on land or as mines against ships at sea, and resilient space-­based capabilities.24 Other ideas should be seriously explored as well, such as Tom Ehr­ hard’s proposal a decade ago for an unmanned version of the then-­B-­3 bomber (now the B-­21), perhaps to be developed initially as a reconnaissance platform.25 Indeed, there are numerous reasons to consider a larger stealthy bomber force, manned or unmanned. One is the possibility of a

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cyberattack against the bombers themselves. Such a risk should be mitigated in the development of the plane, but as an important Defense Science Board report in 2017 underscored, the computer systems of even the most critical U.S. military systems today may not be invulnerable.26 It is conceivable that vulnerabilities will persist in newer weaponry as well. Second, to the extent that enemy attacks degrade America’s space assets and means of conducting reconnaissance and sharing information in real time, the effectiveness of any given bomber against a range of targets would be expected to decline in percentage terms, since the probability of a successful detection and acquisition of a target will be reduced. Whatever the mathematics justifying a force of a given size against a given set of targets, the math would change—­and the needed number of bombers to conduct successful strikes against a range of targets (especially mobile ones) would naturally increase. This point not only reinforces the case for buying stealthy air-­breathing reconnaissance aircraft but also reminds us not to be overconfident that a bomber force sized through a somewhat idealized algorithm will suffice in an actual operation.27 Third, even though B-­3 bombers and other long-­range platforms will generally be based in the United States and often in relatively remote areas, their bases should not be viewed as perfect sanctuaries. Alan Vick and colleagues at RAND have documented 645 attacks by special forces against aircraft on the ground since 1942 that damaged or destroyed more than 2,000 planes.28 To be sure, these attacks were not generally against aircraft stationed in the continental United States (or even Alaska and Hawaii). But the advent of microrobotic technologies such as quadcopters and the difficulty of detecting such systems when they are being smuggled into the United States (or manufactured here through 3-­D printing, perhaps) mean that adversaries could have new and effective means of threatening even the most well-­protected U.S. assets. Again, the same point rings true: whatever number of aircraft the United States might think it needs to conduct operations in a given scenario, it should have a cushion on top of that as a form of attrition reserve. Many different technologies should be pursued for hardening, protecting, and repairing bases as well, and effective systems should be robustly funded. In pursuing these kinds of capabilities, the DoD should strive for a culture of continuous, ongoing innovation and improvement rather than hope that some new approach to acquisition—­such as the “commercial off-­ the-­shelf ” and “rapid acquisition strategy” approaches of yesteryear—­can

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somehow provide a silver bullet.29 To be sure, using commercial technology makes sense, and trying to reduce unneeded bureaucratic delay also is wise. But it is also worth remembering that haste makes waste, and that the process of invention generally cannot be rushed.

Conclusion If Russia slices off a sliver of a Baltic state under manufactured pretenses, or if China pursues its claims on the Senkaku islands or Taiwan—­or if some other limited aggression against a core American asset, interest, or ally results from Chinese or Russian machinations—­Washington will have options. It need not quickly resort to an immediate liberation of the seized allied territory, which could wind up destroying the metaphorical village in order to save it. Without ruling out such options definitively, the United States could expand its choices, and thereby arguably make its deterrence more credible, with an indirect response. To paraphrase Secretary Mattis and the Trump administration’s National Defense Strategy, it could be strategically predictable but operationally unpredictable. It could also “expand the competitive space.” Military responses would be needed in response to most types of even limited aggression. But in the first instance, their purpose can be deterrence of any further attack or any longer-­term continuation of an initial attack, more than a literal reversal of the aggression. The United States and its security partners could respond to a limited but serious aggression with a nonkinetic response—­especially at the site of the initial offense. These rapid military deployments need not be of a scale, character, or intent as to prepare the way for a massive counteroffensive, at least not at first. In addition, the United States and its coalition could develop means to put military pressure on the aggressor in regions that played to its strengths. Because the United States is, and will remain, by far the world’s best expeditionary military power, and because it has by far the widest range of allies in the world, any military engagement occurring in “neutral territory” such as the Persian Gulf will ensure that it enjoys major advantages and escalation dominance in such theaters. The United States, moreover, can reinforce these advantages by emphasizing capabilities such as long-­range strike and survivable command, control, communications,

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and intelligence systems in its future modernization efforts. The guiding principle in any military operations it would conduct in such places would be to support economic sanctions strategies with military enforcement to ensure that the attacking country suffered more than it could possibly gain from its transgressions. These asymmetric military operations should, again at least initially, seek to minimize loss of life and thus minimize the danger of escalation. As potent as these options would be for the United States and its partners and allies, the military dimensions of any response should be seen largely as supporting a broader strategy of economic punishment. To be sure, shoring up deterrence to prevent a worsening military crisis would be important. But the real punishment (and thus the real deterrence) should be generated through patient exploitation of the economic advantages of the Western alliance community—­something that not even China can rival, now or in the coming decades. This is the safest way to make sure that aggression will not pay for China and Russia while at the same time reducing the chances of all-­out war over stakes that themselves are not worth such a risk. It is to the fuller development of such an economics-­first strategy that the next and final main chapter of the book now turns.

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FIV E

Integrating Economics into War Plans

THE CENTRAL QUESTION of this book is how the United States and its allies should respond to an attack against a country or interest they are sworn to defend when the immediate physical stakes are too limited to warrant the risk of major great power war as a result. In this situation, Washington would face a terrible dilemma. It could do nothing, and see its credibility erode and its allies’ interests damaged, with no guarantee that the aggressor’s ambitions would thereby be satisfied rather than whetted. Or it could take steps that might ignite an escalatory spiral and risk hegemonic or even nuclear war. Either choice would be unacceptable—­hence the “Senkaku paradox.” There is a solution. While not likely to be perfect or immediate in its effects, it should be generally up to the task at hand, in terms of protecting America’s core strategic goals and obligations. The kinds of forward defense measures outlined in chapter 4 can stanch the bleeding and help prevent future losses if U.S. and allied forces act fast and deploy quickly. Asymmetric military strikes or enforcement measures in other theaters, probably far away from Russia or China, might even be considered to exact military punishment and reinforce sanctions in a restricted and relatively nonescalatory way for the more serious and acute contingencies considered here.

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Finally, the United States and its allies could engage in economic warfare. Such warfare need not be all-­out or indiscriminate, but it should be intense enough to be commensurate with the damage caused by the initial aggression from Moscow or Beijing. And it needs to telegraph a resoluteness—­and thus a willingness to do more, should the adversary take further unacceptable steps—­that would reinforce intrawar deterrence, preventing a further deterioration of the situation. The economic reprisals would probably not be inexpensive for America or its allies. Compared with the risks of great power war, however, they would be tolerable. Indeed, for the specter of sanctions to achieve deterrence, or to help limit war should initial deterrence measures fail, they need not be inexpensive. It would not even be essential that they initially cost the United States less than they cost the enemy, provided that the United States and its partners had a degree of resilience against likely adversary retaliation.1 To be sure, a response to Chinese or Russian limited territorial aggression that centered on economic punishment, forward military deployments, and possible asymmetric military actions would hardly be risk-­free. If effective, the economic punishment strategies could prove so painful to their targets as to prompt not only economic but also military escalation. However, economic instruments of warfare tend to be more gradual and less lethal than military operations. They could be applied gradually and intensified only slowly, with multiple off-­ramps available to the parties involved. The United States and its partners would need to make it clear that most sanctions would be removed once the crisis was resolved. For all these reasons, and because of the further deterrent effects of nuclear weapons, it is doubtful that the bite of sanctions would be so debilitating as to make great power war seem a rational response in Moscow or Beijing.2 A downside of an economics-­centric strategy is that it might not pack enough punch to coerce the adversary into reversing its aggression on any foreseeable timeline. (This is true of punishment strategies in general, even those employing massive bombardment in sustained wartime operations. Compellence and coercion are difficult to achieve in any kind of warfare.) 3 There are many reasons to question the potency of economic warfare as a means of changing an adversary’s behavior, owing to its very mixed track record.4 American citizens, companies, and allies may not be very enthusiastic to suffer the kind of pain associated with the sustained application of sanctions over what some might see as a relatively minor offense.

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(Indeed, one very well-­regarded study of Britain before and during World War I showed that democracies can be resistant to the imposition of sanctions against adversaries even when the stakes are high and an aggression is brazen.) 5 This reluctance to start down the path of economic warfare might be particularly palpable in the event China was the culprit, especially if its initial aggression was modest (say, very limited punitive action against Taiwan, or seizure of a Senkaku island). China’s massive economic size, its role in many global supply chains, and its resulting importance to many partners around Asia and the world may mean that the pain and the risks associated with economic warfare would not be viewed as worth it.6 That said, the recent track record of applying sanctions gives some reason to hope that they can achieve important results. They can certainly inflict punishment in various graduated and targeted ways. If properly and proportionately framed, they can often elicit substantial allied support. Cases in point are recent sanctions regimes against Iran, Russia, and North Korea. Sanctions targeted on trade, investment, and banking in Iran helped bring that country to the bargaining table—­an important accomplishment achieved over the course of two American presidencies of two different parties (whatever one thinks of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action that resulted from subsequent negotiations). Sanctions levied against individuals, companies, and cronies of Vladimir Putin in Russia that targeted their assets, travel opportunities, and the ability of Western firms to do business with them caused significant pain after the aggression against Ukraine beginning in 2014. The bite of the sanctions has eased some since then, but the message of Western resoluteness may have helped dissuade Putin from pursuing any more ambitions in Europe. Finally, the international sanctions against North Korea that intensified dramatically, both in official scope and in enforcement, after the nuclear and missile tests of 2017 may have helped create a diplomatic opportunity there as well. Moreover, for most of the cases and scenarios considered in this book, there would be more important concerns than promptly reversing any initial aggression. Preventing further offensive action by Russia or China and preventing an escalation of the crisis to general war would be even more crucial. Thus a sanctions-­based strategy could succeed in containing the crisis even if it failed in quickly reversing the initial aggression. This chapter offers a conceptual framework for the application of economic instruments of warfare in the modern era. It includes both offensive and defensive strategies. Offensive strategies are means by which the

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United States and partners can actively damage the economies of adversaries. Defensive strategies are means of limiting the harm to one’s own economy as the adversary potentially retaliates. It is important to consider both first steps and subsequent rounds of likely responses. Discussions of sanctions often lack conceptual clarity. They can amount to little more than litanies of specific sanctions placed on various entities, often with poor understanding of how they affect a broader economy. To reduce this risk, I begin this chapter with a broad overview of the main international workings of today’s global economy. Only with such a framework in place is it possible to logically identify points of leverage and vulnerability. Then, drawing on the work of Jonathan Kirshner, Juan Zarate, Richard Nephew, and others, I sketch out a taxonomy of economic instruments of warfare and discuss them notionally for scenarios involving Russia or China. The offensive tools of economic warfare feature several categories of sanctions. Some focus on certain individuals and companies within a country (their assets or their access to visas, for example). Other types target areas of technology that are especially sensitive for economic and military purposes. Others emphasize financial transactions and holdings. Yet other possible sanctions aim at broad sectors of an economy, or even the entire GDP of a country.7 On the defensive side, several concepts are paramount. At the top of the list is the resilience of the United States and its allies in the face of an adversary’s possible embargoes of raw materials, intermediate goods, or finished products.

A Thumbnail Sketch of Today’s World Economy The world economy today is complex, diverse, and increasingly interconnected. Its main features can be limned with a few broad facts, figures, and observations, some of which are summarized in the text, with more detail given in the tables. In the arena of natural resources, major areas of mineral exploitation include North America, Brazil, China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Ukraine, Australia, and the southern third of Africa.8 Major global breadbaskets for food production include the Americas, Europe, and parts of China and South and Southeast Asia.9 Major areas of hydrocarbon production include the broader Persian Gulf region, Russia and some other

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former Soviet republics, North America, parts of South America, and the coast of western Africa from Nigeria through Angola to South Africa.10 Generalizations can also be offered about scarcity. The world’s worst water shortages are found in the broader Middle East, the Sahara and the Sahel in Africa, and parts of China. Bangladesh, Egypt, and China are among the major countries with limited arable land per capita. All countries now face constraints on ocean fisheries, with nearly 90 percent of the world’s fish stocks in oceans either fully exploited, depleted, or in recovery.11 As for manufacturing capacity, it might be helpful to begin with a bit of historical perspective. In the nineteenth century, the United Kingdom led the world in most realms, with other parts of Western Europe important as well; in the early years of the twentieth century, Germany and the United States moved to the forefront.12 After the world wars, George Kennan identified five major industrial centers of the world possessing important industrial, and therefore military, capacity or potential—­Japan, Russia, the United Kingdom, continental Western Europe, and the United States.13 All these areas remain important. Since then, the eastern rim of continental Asia has certainly joined any short list. Another chief characteristic of today’s world economy is the ongoing development of “emerging markets.” Following a trend that began with the smaller East Asian tigers and now extends to much larger countries, the world is on a trajectory to see such emerging economies represent half of global GDP within fifteen years. The economist Antoine van Agtmael writes of a three-­stage historical process that has brought this shift about, beginning with foreign direct investment (FDI) in overseas plants, followed by outsourcing and offshoring, and culminating in peer-­to-­peer competition (together with the ongoing expansion of numerous global supply chains).14 Global Trade and Investment Today Global trade patterns can be very broadly summarized as follows. Out of aggregate global gross domestic product (GDP) of roughly $75 trillion a year as of 2016, countries share just over $20 trillion a year in total trade and services. More than $15 trillion of that is in merchandise, broken down into about $11 trillion in manufactured goods and $4 trillion in agricultural products plus raw materials. Another $5 trillion is in “com-

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mercial services” as defined by the World Trade Organization—­notably, maintenance and repair, transport and travel, insurance, financial services and accounting, paid access to intellectual property rights, telecommunications, engineering, and architecture.15 Average tariffs on trade are now quite low globally; they have declined from 20 to 30 percent in the early decades of the twentieth century to 4 percent as of 2009. Trade agreements today also typically have a “deep integration” agenda that includes matters such as protection of intellectual property, prevention of corruption, and upholding of environmental and labor standards.16 The United States leads the world in both exports and imports of commercial services (in 2016 it provided more than $700 billion in exports and received almost $500 billion in imports).17 China is the top exporter of merchandise, with 13.6 percent of the world’s total as of 2016, followed by the United States at 9.4 percent. The EU collectively exported 38.4 percent of the world total, with Germany leading the way at 8.7 percent. Japan accounted for 4.2 percent; South Korea, Hong Kong, Australia, New Zealand, and four other East Asian economics collectively produced 11.3 percent. In terms of imports, the numbers are not radically different, though the United States and China swap positions: the United States accounted for 14.3 percent of world imports in 2016, with China at 10.0 percent, Europe collectively at 37.5 percent (Germany’s total being 6.7 percent), Japan at 3.8 percent, and the South Korea category at 10.3 percent (figure 5-­1).18 Nearly $10 trillion of the $15 trillion in global merchandise trade in 2016 took place within three main regional trading blocs: the EU, NAFTA, and ASEAN plus neighbors. Much of the rest of world’s trade is intercontinental, often traversing the Mediterranean Sea, the Atlantic Ocean, the Persian Gulf, the Pacific Ocean, the South China Sea, or the Indian Ocean. For example, of China’s exports in 2016, 37 percent went to other countries in Asia, 26 percent to North America, and 20 percent to Europe. For Japanese exports that same year, 53 percent went to other parts of Asia, 25 percent to North America, and 12 percent to Europe.19 The largest U.S. merchandise export markets are Canada and Mexico, followed by China and Japan; America’s top source of merchandise imports is China, followed by Mexico and Canada, then Japan and Germany. Another way to understand the importance of trade to today’s global economy is to note that in 1950, the typical country had some twenty-­five to thirty trading partners; by century’s end, that figure was typically up to

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U.S. Trade in Goods with China

50,000

Exports Imports

40,000

30,000

20,000

Jan-85 Oct-85 Jul-86 Apr-87 Jan-88 Oct-88 Jul-89 Apr-90 Jan-91 Oct-91 Jul-92 Apr-93 Jan-94 Oct-94 Jul-95 Apr-96 Jan-97 Oct-97 Jul-98 Apr-99 Jan-00 Oct-00 Jul-01 Apr-02 Jan-23 Oct-03 Jul-04 Apr-05 Jan-06 Oct-06 Jul-07 Apr-08 Jan-09 Oct-09 Jul-10 Apr-11 Jan-12 Oct-12 Jul-13 Apr-14 Jan-15 Oct-15 Jul-16 Apr-17 Jan-18

10,000

Source: United States Census Bureau, “Trade in Goods with China.” Note: All figures are in millions of U.S. dollars on a nominal basis, not seasonally adjusted.

seventy or seventy-­five.20 So a great deal of worldwide trade is with any given nation’s neighbors, but a very large amount moves across the oceans and through key choke points. At least $7 trillion of global merchandise trade is in intermediate goods, underscoring the importance of global supply chains or global value chains in the contemporary world economy.21 Companies often invest in one country to produce components for products such as consumer electronics, automobiles, industrial machinery, engines, and many other things that may be finished elsewhere. As Brookings economist David Dollar explains, high-­tech industries have the greatest proclivity to employ global-­ value-­chain strategies. Roughly one-­sixth of their total global output involves complex global value chains in which value-­adding goods cross international borders at least twice in the course of the manufacture of a given end product.22 As Mireya Solis puts it in her fine book, Dilemmas of a Trading Nation, “In the past, trade and FDI could be seen as substitutes (with production abroad motivated by the desire to jump tariffs); in the global supply chain they are complementary.”23 In addition to goods and services crossing borders in today’s globalized economy, money does too. For example, over the past decade or so, worldwide FDI from one country in another has typically amounted to some-

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thing between $1 trillion and $2 trillion a year. Most FDI now involves manufacturing and service industries, not the production or extraction of raw materials. Cumulatively, more than $25 trillion now exists in FDI stock—­the rough amount that foreign companies, individuals, and other actors own in other nations. Indeed, by 2011 the stock of FDI relative to world GDP had grown to 29 percent, from a level of only 8 percent in 1990.24 Western nations and China lead the way in this domain, though some countries in the broader Middle East and elsewhere are key players too.25 Competitiveness A further broad observation about the state of today’s world is that America’s, and the West’s, purported declines have been substantially exaggerated. Yes, China does now lead the world in overall manufacturing and in a number of key industrial sectors such as steelmaking and vehicle production; yes, it is gradually catching up in some other areas, such as aerospace, and has prioritized leading-­edge technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) in its future economic plans. But the United States remains a formidable manufacturing power in high-­tech domains such as aerospace and chemicals, not to mention its excellence in R&D and product design, even in areas where China leads in production, such as consumer electronics.26 When Germany, other EU countries, Japan and South Korea, Canada and Mexico, and other friendly nations are factored in, the U.S.-­led Western alliance system substantially outproduces China in overall industrial output. In shipbuilding, for example, China is often in front of South Korea in total tonnage of production, but the gap is narrow, and Japan also produces a large fraction of the world’s total.27 In vehicle manufacturing, China easily produces the most units per year, but the output of all Western nations combined easily outdistances China’s, even without taking into account differences in the relative value of the individual vehicles (tables 5-­1 and 5-­2). The United States continues to outspend any other major country or group of countries in research and development. Although China is catching up to the United States, the Western world retains a substantial lead overall. In rough numbers, the United States spends a bit more than $500 billion a year on R&D; China ranks second, at $450 billion (using purchasing power parity measures); the EU spends about $400 billion in all;

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table 5-1

117

Top Twenty Countries on the World Economic Forum’s Global Competitiveness Index, 2017–18

Switzerland United States Singapore Netherlands Germany Hong Kong SAR Sweden United Kingdom Japan Finland

5.86 5.85 5.71 5.66 5.65 5.53 5.52 5.51 5.49 5.49

Norway Denmark New Zealand Canada Taiwan Israel United Arab Emirates Austria Luxembourg Belgium

5.40 5.39 5.37 5.35 5.33 5.31 5.30 5.25 5.23 5.23

Source: World Economic Forum, The Global Competitiveness Report 2017–2018, p. ix (https:// www.weforum.org/reports/the-global-competitiveness-report-2017-2018). Note: countries are ranked on a scale of 1 to 7. Rankings are from the 2017–18 report.

table 5-2

Top Countries for Vehicle Production, 2017

China United States Japan Germany India South Korea Mexico Spain Brazil France

29,015,434 11,189,985 9,693,746 5,645,581 4,782,896 4,114,913 4,068,415 2,848,335 2,699,672 2,227,000

Canada Thailand United Kingdom Turkey Russia Iran Czech Republic Indonesia Italy Slovakia

2,199,789 1,988,823 1,749,385 1,695,731 1,551,293 1,515,396 1,419,993 1,216,615 1,142,210 1,001,520

Source: International Organization of Motor Vehicle Manufacturers (www.oica.net/category/ production-statistics/2017-statistics/). Note: Rankings include private plus commercial vehicles as of 2017.

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Japan logs in at $170 billion; South Korea spends $80 billion; and Russia spends $40 billion annually.28 The United States also has far and away the best universities in the world, with one recent ranking placing fifteen of the world’s top twenty institutions of higher education within U.S. borders.29 The United States remains at the top of the charts, among major economies, in the World Economic Forum’s competitiveness rankings, scoring second overall, behind only Switzerland (table 5-­3). The rating, whatever its precision, reflects America’s large consumer market, culture of innovation, adequate infrastructure, good legal protections for investment and trade, strong financial system, outstanding universities, use of English as the main language of business, and other attributes. The other large countries that give it a run for its money in that index are allies such as Germany, the United Kingdom, and Japan (all in the top ten), not China or Russia (which rank twenty-­seventh and thirty-­eighth, respectively).30 Dependencies and Vulnerabilities The United States is blessed with many economic advantages that are favorable not only for its prosperity but also for its resilience to hypothetical future forms of economic warfare. It is endowed with ample water, farmland, and rich mineral deposits, together with hydrocarbons. It has neighbors in the Western Hemisphere with both similar and complementary resources. It also possesses a large and strong workforce and a broad-­based table 5-3

Top Countries for Aerospace Exports, 2017 (U.S. $billions)

United States France Germany United Kingdom Canada Ireland Singapore Spain Italy Japan

131.2 51.6 41.8 21.1 9.7 6.9 6.6 6.5 4.6 4.2

Brazil China Israel South Korea Netherlands Malaysia Switzerland Austria Russia Turkey

4.0 3.7 3.0 2.6 2.4 2.0 2.0 1.7 1.7 1.5

Source: World Exports (http://www.worldstopexports.com/aerospace-exports-by-country/).

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manufacturing sector with world-­class capabilities in high-­tech sectors such as aerospace and chemicals. It has many other strong allies around the world. What it does not possess or produce, especially in terms of crucial raw materials and higher-­end manufactures, they generally do. That said, the United States does have dependencies that could constitute weaknesses or vulnerabilities during protracted economic warfare. Most are not severe, and most can also be further mitigated to the extent they cause worry. The key first step is simply to understand where these potential Achilles’ heels exist. The vulnerabilities can be grouped into four categories. One is natural resources, notably certain minerals. In some cases the United States, its immediate neighbors, and its closest allies have important dependencies on faraway places and potentially hostile actors. A second vulnerability is in key manufactured goods, either finished products themselves or crucial inputs to other technologies, including advanced military systems. A third is in finance. The fourth is in the economic vulnerabilities of those same allies who collectively give the United States additional resilience. Because the United States is treaty-­bound to ensure the protection of these countries, and because it would need their help in any future economic warfare campaign, their potential vulnerabilities become U.S. weaknesses, too. There are also issues relevant to the long-­term strength of an advanced economy. They may not be crucial for crisis management, but they should be kept in mind because of their importance to the gradual rise and fall of nations. This category of subjects includes the infrastructure, R&D base, and general health of an economy. It also includes people, certainly the most important raw ingredient to economic success of all. These matters should influence fiscal priorities in the United States. They should also influence how the United States conducts immigration reform, which should have as one goal seeking to attract and keep strong talent.31 Such considerations should also affect the provision of visas to individuals from China and Russia in particular (who presumably should not be encouraged to work in particularly sensitive cutting-­edge sectors of the economy unless they can be confidently expected to remain in the United States down the road). Table 5-­4 shows the main mineral dependencies of the United States. These minerals are important for manufacturing. Of course, it would be possible to economize, recycle, and substitute in many cases, were supplies to become tight. Thus a certain modest dependence on supplies from

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The Senkaku Paradox

Mineral Commodity Net Import Reliance of the United States, 2016

Commodity

Percent

Import Sources a

Arsenic

100

China, Japan

Asbestos

100

Brazil

Cesium

100

Canada

Fluorspar

100

Mexico, China, South Africa, Mongolia

Gallium

100

China, Germany, United Kingdom, Ukraine

Graphite (natural)

100

China, Mexico, Canada, Brazil

Indium

100

Canada, China, France, Belgium

Manganese

100

South Africa, Gabon, Australia, Georgia

Mica, sheet (natural)

100

China, Brazil, Belgium, Australia

Niobium (columbium)

100

Brazil, Canada

Quartz crystal (industrial)

100

China, Japan, Romania, United Kingdom

Rare earthsb

100

China, Estonia, France, Japan

Rubidium

100

Canada

Scandium

100

China

Strontium

100

Mexico, Germany, China

Tantalum

100

China, Kazakhstan, Germany, Thailand

Thallium

100

Germany, Russia

Thorium

100

India, France, United Kingdom

Vanadium

100

Czech Republic, Canada, Republic of Korea, Austria

Yttrium

100

China, Estonia, Japan, Germany

Gemstones

99

Israel, India, Belgium, South Africa

Bismuth

95

China, Belgium, Peru, United Kingdom

Titanium mineral concentrates

91

South Africa, Australia, Canada, Mozambique

Potash

90

Canada, Russia, Chile, Israel

Germanium

85

China, Belgium, Russia, Canada

Stone (dimension)

84

China, Brazil, Italy, Turkey

Antimony

83

China, Thailand, Bolivia, Belgium

Zinc

82

Canada, Mexico, Peru, Australia

Rhenium

81

Chile, Poland, Germany

Garnet (industrial)

79

Australia, India, South Africa, China

Barite

78

China, India, Morocco, Mexico

Fused aluminum oxide

>75

China, Canada, Venezuela

Bauxite

>75

Jamaica, Brazil, Guinea, Guyana

Tellurium

>75

Canada, China, Belgium, Philippines

Tin

75

Peru, Indonesia, Malaysia, Bolivia

Cobalt

74

China, Norway, Finland, Japan

Diamond (dust, grit, powder)

73

China, Ireland, Romania, Russia

Platinum

73

South Africa, Germany, United Kingdom, Italy

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Commodity

Percent

Import Sources a

Iron oxide pigments (natural)

>70

Cyprus, France, Austria, Spain

Iron oxide pigments (synthetic)

>70

China, Germany, Canada, Brazil

Peat

69

Silver

67

Mexico, Canada, Peru, Poland

Chromium

58

South Africa, Kazakhstan, Russia

Magnesium compounds

53

China, Brazil, Canada, Australia

Aluminum

52

Iodine

>50

Canada

Canada, Russia, UAE, China Chile, Japan

Lithium

>50

Chile, Argentina, China

Silicon carbide

>50

China, South Africa, Netherlands, Romania

Zirconium mineral concentrates

>50

South Africa, Australia, Senegal

Zirconium (unwrought)

>50

China, Japan, Germany

Bromine