What are they talking about in Newport, Rhode Island?
(Alamy)
There are probably two main reasons to visit Newport, RI. The first is to marvel at the opulence of the houses built by the first generation of American plutocrats as their getaways from the oppressive summer heat of New York. The Vanderbilts, the Astors and the Morgans referred to their Versailles imitations as “cottages”, showing a sense of self-parody not immediately apparent in the successor generation of Gates, Zuckerberg and Bezos. The second reason is to take the counsel of the US Naval War College.
The College was founded in 1884 and is today the pre-eminent global centre for the study of maritime conflict. It covers a lot of ground but has a particularly strong tradition of wargaming. In the 1920s it extensively modelled an Anglo-US conflict on the back of the unsatisfactory Geneva Naval Conference of 1927, a situation only resolved by the 1930 London Naval Treaty. But it was the series of games conducted in the 1930s, addressing conflict with Japan, that really made Newport’s name synonymous with the analysis of maritime warfare at the highest level. Indeed, an inscription in the entrance hallway makes the claim that Plan Orange — the blueprint to fight the Japanese at sea — foresaw every eventuality of the Pacific Campaign, except kamikaze attack. Today, the US Navy will be bringing the same rigour to figure out how it might fight China.
Before we look at how that could play out, it might be useful to just touch on some of the governing principles of oceanic warfare. Unlike the variable terrain upon which land warfare is fought, maritime geography is undifferentiated — there is no high ground to occupy or river lines to defend, flanks are always open and the scale is vast. As a result, sea space can never be definitively held and the best that the maritime commander can hope to achieve is the fleeting and ephemeral condition known in the business as sea control. It is a state that sets out to secure a defined sea area on, above and below the surface for a limited period of time in order to prosecute defined tactical aims. Effectively sequenced, a series of defined tactical aims becomes a maritime strategy. Other than in exceptional circumstances, which we will come to, sea control is an inherently impermanent condition.
The reciprocal condition to sea control is sea denial and the contest between the two has defined the history of maritime warfare. A traditionalist school of naval theorists, best represented by the 19th century American writer Alfred Thayer Mahan, holds that the contest is naturally resolved by a decisive engagement in the tradition of Trafalgar, Navarino or Tsushima. A revisionist school, best represented by the early 20th century British author Sir Julian Corbett, asserts it can never be as simple as that. Both can claim vindication by the events of the great wars of the 20th century.
The Second World War saw the two largest successful maritime campaigns in history, but they served fundamentally different purposes, The Battle of the Atlantic was exactly that — a battle that facilitated a strategy to sustain Britain and defeat Germany on land; it was never a war-winning strategy in itself. The Pacific Campaign, in contrast and with little historic precedent, projected American power over oceanic range and created decisive strategic effect from the sea, culminating in the dropping of atomic weapons by aircraft operating from a Pacific island base. And that is what makes the US Naval War College, as intellectual custodian of that tradition, a unique repository of maritime warfighting doctrine. The Pacific Campaign also shaped the culture and identity of the US Navy and there is a sense of history coming full circle as it again contemplates operations west of Pearl Harbour.
China has no such traditions to draw on, or at least none since the early 15th century. Zheng He was a eunuch admiral operating under the Ming Dynasty, when he made seven separate voyages to the “Western [Indian] Ocean” between 1405 and 1433, reaching as far as East Africa. The size of the individual ships and the flotillas within which they operated had no equal in Asia and were certainly comparable to anything existing in Europe at the time. Perversely, the Ming Dynasty then suspended naval operations, for reasons that remain largely obscure but owed something to a sense of Confucian complacency about the Mandate of Heaven and the self-sufficiency of Chinese society. It is only now, and at an annual cost of 55 per cent of its defence budget, that Chinese naval power has been restored.
There is a sense of imperial inevitability about this. Almost every empire — and China certainly meets that description in economic if not in territorial terms — discovers the value of maritime power in maintaining its position. Those that don’t, like Napoleonic France, tend not to endure. Using the sea for your own purposes and denying it to your enemies is what characterised the struggle between Greece and Persia, of Rome against Carthage, of Britain against Spain, France and Wilhelmine Germany, of the Allies against the Axis powers and of NATO against the Warsaw Pact. And now it’s shaping up again between China and America in the Western Pacific and, increasingly, in the Indian Ocean.
The strategic geography of the Western Pacific is defined by two island chains. The first takes a line drawn from the Japanese islands, through Taiwan and south to the Philippines, enclosing the East and South China seas. The second also starts with Japan but then bends east to Guam and on to Indonesia, enclosing the Philippines Sea. Within parts of the East China Sea, and contrary to a central tenet of maritime power, China has now established a condition resembling permanent sea control.
To give it its technical title, China is employing an Anti-Access/Area Denial strategy, made possible by a vast increase in naval and air power, the creation of a string of artificial islands to act as air strips and naval basing facilities, land-based anti-ship ballistic missiles with ranges in excess of 2,500 kilometres and the inherent advantage of acting on interior lines. Interior lines is a concept more usually associated with land warfare that refers to the advantage in terms of movement, supply and communication that attaches to the side close to its strategic base and unavailable to the side distant from its strategic base – a glance at a map of the Pacific Basin immediately makes the point.
What this all boils down to is that the Chinese instruments of sea denial probably have the drop on the American instruments of sea control, at least within the confines of the East China Sea, which, for strategic purposes, now looks like a Chinese lake. At the eastern edge of that lake lies Taiwan, which might well be the proximate cause of any shooting war between China and America.
Chinese provocations over Taiwan have become habitual, but there is a big difference between infringing territorial airspace and mounting an invasion. The sea gap of about 100 miles between continental China and Taiwan is a tricky distance, even with sea control, when strategic surprise is unavailable because of the ubiquity of satellite surveillance. Moreover, an opposed amphibious landing is a military operation of post-graduate complexity and not something to be undertaken by a force on its first maritime power projection outing. An alternative would be a kinetic bombardment strategy designed to intimidate Taiwan into submission. But this also has its difficulties, as the moral legacy of Guernica, Dresden and Hiroshima illustrate. Perhaps most likely of all would be a cyber-led bombardment strategy which, while it has had its trials in the Baltic States and Georgia, would be a first at this prospective scale. Taken overall and even with the local advantages it enjoys, there is enough risk for China to continue to be deterred for the time being.
The situation in the Indian Ocean is even less clear cut. The design of Chinese national strategy shouts out the acute vulnerability of the sea lines of communication which guarantee its supply of energy and raw materials. The Belt & Road initiative has a number of purposes but one is certainly to create a land-based transport infrastructure across Central Asia to mitigate its dependence on sea transportation. In the same way, the port facilities that have been acquired at Hambantota in Sri Lanka, at Gwadar in Pakistan and at Doraleh in Djibouti will facilitate naval basing from the Gulf to the Straits of Malacca. But these are long term projects; in the meantime and in extremis, China will have to depend on its navy — operating at the limits of its capability — to guarantee its economy.
China may now possess the biggest navy in the world, but it is manifestly not the best. It is institutionally unproven, optimised for sea denial over relatively short ranges and, in the Indian Ocean, would be operating on exterior lines — the obverse of interior lines and with all the disadvantages that brings. It would also face the most formidable instrument of maritime power in history. The US Navy is institutionally proven, culturally confident and optimised for sea control at oceanic range. It is also a member of the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (aka The Quad) which creates a strategic relationship with India, Australia and Japan, soon to be supplemented by AUKUS, which brings the United Kingdom into play in the Indian Ocean too.
Getting down to tactical brass tacks: during the Cold War the Greenland/Iceland/UK Gap gained totemic significance as the sea area that governed Russian naval access to the North Atlantic and thus became the focus of NATO sea control. Watch now as the Diego Garcia/Sri Lanka Gap takes on a similar significance as the area over which the Chinese navy must exercise an element of sea control during conflict, if its economy is to function. Not coincidentally, Diego Garcia is an American military base and for now and into the medium term Chinese sea control is unlikely to be a strategically tenable ambition. For all the noise and bluster about the inexorable rise of China, the simple fact is that in real conflict and for at least the next decade or so, America will be able to press its maritime boot on the economic windpipe of its putative enemy.
So, lots to talk about on the game floor at Newport and, whatever else may be uncertain in the world at the moment, we can be absolutely sure that this conversation is taking place there — right now.
A Message from TheArticle
We are the only publication that’s committed to covering every angle. We have an important contribution to make, one that’s needed now more than ever, and we need your help to continue publishing throughout the pandemic. So please, make a donation.
