What do you do with a problem like China? The strategic challenge of a rising power like China is now a bipartisan concern at all levels of the federal government. Or so it would seem. despite the recognition that a rising China is a threat both to the United States and to the liberal order that the United States seeks to lead, there is some debate over how America should respond to the China challenge. The debate extends through economics, politics, diplomacy, and security. It’s such a large issue that it might be difficult to wrap one’s head around it. This is what makes Beyond Air-Sea Battle such a useful volume in understanding the context of US-China relations and the security dimensions that might influence then.
Friedberg’s monograph evaluating American military strategy vis a vis Chinese strategy goes beyond mere tactics and strategic concepts to consider the historical backgrounds that informs Chinese war planning on the one hand, and the broader security environment America is engage with globally on the other.
How China compares itself to the US
When you evaluate a potential threat posed by a rising power it’s tempting to start thinking in terms of generalizations and monolithic entities. China, with its centralized system run by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is a particularly tempting object for such monolithic thinking. By briefly overviewing the shifts in Chinese strategic thinking that have occurred parallel to China’s economic rise, Friedberg disabuse any casual reader of such a notion as a general or common understanding of Chinese foreign and defense policy. Key to understanding China’s approach to security competition with the US are the dual ideas of a Chinese military very aware of its shortcomings relative to the United States, and a military closely observing American military prowess throughout the 1990s and 2000.
It’s these twin concepts Friedberg draws on to sketch the general strategic posture of the Chinese military. From the American perspective it’s easy to look at Chinese military budget growth, building man-made islands and military installations in the South China Sea, stockpiling weapons opposite Taiwan as aggressive, even belligerent actions. However, if you start with the premise of the Chinese military concerned about a technology gap with the United States and aware of its shortcomings in conventional warfare, then it might be easier to consider where China is putting its efforts in military technology as more defensive than offensive. That’s not to say that China won’t grow offensive in its military funding, but certainly its focus on anti-access/area-denial technologies and strategic planning within the first island chain all can speak to strategic posture of homeland defense. In Friedberg’s characterization, the Chinese military is not so much concerned about a massive land war with the US so much as it’s concerned with losing its access to sea lanes and being denied access to Taiwan should they wish to try to reunify the island with the mainland.
Air-Sea Battle: Doctrine or dogma?
It is this understanding of Chinese strategy as being inherently defensive, albeit rapidly closing the technological gap that turned such defensive postures and developments into a meaningful deterrent to the US, that Friedberg addresses the American doctrine of air-sea battle. Air-sea battle is a specific military strategy developed to respond to Chinese provocations in East Asia. It’s a doctrine that is heavily focused on Air Force and Navy assets assuming that any armed conflict with China would be limited in scope and duration and happen primarily in the air and on the sea. Friedberg does a great job of articulating the case for air-sea battle, but also identifies some of its major drawbacks. For example, air-sea battle presumes China won’t escalate to a nuclear conflict. China’s nuclear arsenal is seen as significantly smaller than the United States’ and therefore best used as a deterrent. Friedberg raises an eyebrow at such a conceptualization of the Chinese nuclear weapons. The way he sees it is the CCP would see any type of air-sea battle as essentially an existential threat not just because of the superior naval and air forces that America could deploy, but also due to the question of political legitimacy. In fact if there’s a core critique that Friedberg right raise against air-sea battle it is that it is a military strategy only and one that does not fully account for some of the political effects a war, especially a failed war, could cause for the CCP and the incentives that would provide to escalate to a nuclear conflict.
This concern about the possibility of escalation to a nuclear conflict does not exactly lead Friedberg to reject ASB outright, but to also note that it’s not the only way of pushing back against China. In evaluating a less direct approach to military action against China, Friedberg outlines two potential alternative options: distant blockade and maritime denial. Distant blockade is basically the US Navy acting in concert with allies and partners in the region to block shipments of energy imports from the Middle East and Africa through the strategic straits around and through Southeast Asia. The advantage of such a strategy allows the United States to work with partner nations in the neighborhood who are equally suspicious of Chinese expansion and aggression, as well as taking place outside the range of much of China’s anti-access/area-denial weaponry.
Of course, China can always expand the reach and range of its missile forces but even there, the technology required and the expense of building large precision guided weapon stockpiles might be prohibitive to China even in the midst of its economic good fortune. Closely linked to a distant blockade, maritime denial could actually work in concert with such a strategy as a step beyond the blockade should China choose to escalate in any way in response. Essentially understood to be tightening the noose around China’s coastal waters, in this case leveraging significant American advantages in terms of submarines and anti-submarine warfare. Friedberg notes that distant blockade, maritime denial and the air sea battle doctrine are not mutually exclusive concepts. In some respects, in a general military strategy related to China Friedberg sees how all three can be used as interlocking strategies to respond to Chinese escalation without going to a full war on short notice.
In other words, escalating from blockade to maritime denial to air-sea battle provides a very clear sequence of steps in which the US military would engage in an armed conflict with China, but at the same time providing several off ramps in which the warring parties could deescalate. Hovering in the background of each of these possibilities, however, Friedberg sees the political question and its possibly nuclear consequences. What would the desperate CCP do if faced with military defeat? Would the United States have the popular political will to sustain a longer wartime effort against a great power? What is the threshold for a nuclear escalation? Neither country has a first use doctrine, but Friedberg points out that a war going badly right on the Chinese doorstep could be an unacceptable loss of face for the CCP, rendering use of nuclear weapons a real possibility.
The perfect primer on US-China strategy
In journalistic publications from newspapers to magazines it’s not uncommon to hear a general reference to the possibility of Chinese-American military engagements. However, what the popular press lacks in detail in spelling out what such engagements look like, Friedberg supplies in an easy to read and accessible format that should be required reading for any American citizen concerned about the future of Chinese-American relations and the possibility of armed conflict.