American counterweight strategy with Chinese features
Introduction
During the Cold War era, the US military relied on technological superiority to “balance” or balance the advantages of the Soviet Union in time, space and size of military force. Military-technical superiority allowed the United States Armed Forces to adopt a military-building strategy and operational concepts that generally offset the numerical superiority of the conventional forces of the Soviets without the need to compare tank-to-tank and soldier-to-soldier capabilities. After the end of the Cold War, this same military-technical advantage provided the US military with decisive superiority in conventional forces over regional opponents by more than two decades.
However, at present, the so-called "irresponsible" regional countries, which have long occupied the attention of the United States, have given way to two great powers with significantly greater capabilities. A resurgent and revanchist Russia and a muscle-building, strengthening China are committing aggressive actions that threaten regional security and stability, and challenge the existing international order. Of these two powerful competitors, China is undoubtedlyоThe biggest challenge in the long run. Since about 1885, the United States has never come across a competitor or even a group of competitors with a gross domestic product (GDP) greater than their own. In 2014, China surpassed the United States in purchasing power parity and is projected to have the largest GDP in the world in absolute terms by 2030. For comparison, the Soviet Union, our main opponent during the Cold War, who suffered from unacceptable economic contradictions, ultimately collapsed due to external and internal pressure. In the best years, its GDP was about 40 percent of the United States.
If this does not make enough impression on the strategic planning bodies of the United States, then it is worth reminding them that China's technological capabilities are growing as fast as its economic power. The Soviet Union was never able to achieve, not to mention surpassing the level of technological development of America. In the case of China, the situation may be radically different. Indeed, China has seriously focused on bridging the technological gap from the US military, striving with all its might to achieve technological parity and ultimately technological dominance.
As is characteristic of the Chinese in general and Chinese strategists in particular, they describe their goals in a rather veiled way. Nevertheless, after analyzing everything that the Chinese military has technologically achieved in less than two decades and what they plan to do in the coming decades, any objective assessment should consider at least the possibility that the US military may become a victim of a prudent, patient, backed up by all available resources of the military-technical counterweight strategy. The purpose of the article is precisely to describe this strategy and outline the directions of its development.
American Cold War Counterweight Strategies
Since the start of World War II, the United States has relied on decisive military-technological superiority to balance the numerical superiority of conventional forces often found in its adversaries and competitors. This strategy is based on the experience of confronting the Axis countries (Germany, Italy and Japan). Dwight Eisenhower understood this well, saying right after the Second World War: “While some of our allies were forced to build a wall of blood and flesh as their primary defense against aggression, we were able to use machines and technologies to save the lives of our soldiers ".
As for the military operations of the state with the state, the advantage in military-technical terms contributes to the achievement of confident military superiority of conventional forces at the tactical and operational levels. And the stronger the perceived traditional superiority, the stronger the traditional containment potential. Having a decisive advantage is especially important when confronting the great powers with nuclear weapons, when weak deterrence by conventional forces can lead to a more aggressive strategic “probing”, which can lead to an open confrontation with the associated risks of nuclear escalation.
In the Cold War era, the Soviet Union, hoping for an overwhelming number of traditional forces, followed a restraining approach, the essence of which can be described with the old military dictum "quantity always comes to quality sooner or later." But with the outbreak of the Cold War, President Eisenhower refused to suffer financial losses that seemed unreasonable to him, related to attempts to catch up with the Soviets in line with the “tank against tank"Or" soldier versus soldier. " Instead, Eisenhower relied on his experience of World War II, as well as on the original US nuclear monopoly in order to counter the numerical superiority of the USSR in conventional weapons with lesser military force, equipped with guided and unguided missiles and artillery shells equipped with low-power nuclear weapons. In other words, Eisenhower turned to military nuclear weapons to deter the conventional attacks of the Warsaw Pact. This was the first American Cold War era counterweight strategy.
By the beginning of the 70's, the deterrent power of the First Counterweight Strategy was undermined by two objective processes. First, the Soviet Union’s nuclear arsenal equaled the United States’s nuclear arsenal. Given these circumstances, the proactive use of tactical nuclear weapons becoming ineffective - the danger of nuclear escalation was simply too great. Secondly, in the 60 and 70 years, the Soviets modernized their already superior conventional strike forces stationed along the common German border, deploying there additionally thousands of new tanks, armored personnel carriers, anti-aircraft missiles and artillery, which were equal in characteristics to their counterparts from NATO countries.
In this regard, Secretary of Defense Harold Brown and head of the Defense Research and Development Directorate William Perry concluded that NATO containment policy is outdated and decisive steps are needed to restore it. One idea was to attack and bloodless the large armored armies of the Warsaw Pact before they even reached NATO’s advanced defensive positions. Thus, Brown and Perry turned to several new technologies that were then being developed to give the US armed forces and their NATO allies the ability to "see further and destroy targets on enemy territory." As a result of their activities, a strategy has emerged that is currently known as the “Second Counterweight Strategy."
A second counterweight strategy was born in the bowels of the Pentagon's Long-Range Research and Development Planning Program (LRRDPP). After considering and abandoning a new family of nuclear weapons and exploring the use of conventional guided munitions in Vietnam and the Middle East, the LRRDPP project concluded that the United States should develop conventional weapons that could "hit with almost zero deviation." Their report was supplemented by a study by the 1976 Ministry of Defense Scientific Council in which it was proposed to develop a “deep strike system” capable of targeting and attacking the Warsaw bloc’s troops as far as possible from NATO’s forward positions with conventional guided munitions throwing anti-tank weapons.
In 1978, Perry tasked the Office of Advanced Defense Research (DARPA) with the task of integrating various deep-strike technologies (striking targets deep in defense) and demonstrating their combat potential. The final program, called the Assault Breaker, combines the Pave Mover airborne target detection and tracking station, guided missiles and aviation bombs with guided anti-tank striking elements and a ground-based data processing station. The data processing station or “attack coordination center” was taken from the BETA experimental combined-arms project (Battlefeld Exploitation and Target Acquisition), which was the first attempt to demonstrate the feasibility of processing tactical information, combining it with other reconnaissance data and transmitting real-time accurate information about targets in army missile units.
All of these components date back to the 1982 year when Assault Breaker demonstrated on a reduced scale what military designers currently call a tactical combat network using conventional guided ammunition. And as historian Morgan Friedman noted, the Assault Breaker project was a nightmare for Soviet strategists who “believed that their American opponents were scientific wizards - what they said they could do.” The Soviet General Staff concluded that the emergence of tactical combat networks that use guided weapons - they called it reconnaissance-strike complexes - gave rise to a new military-technical revolution. In this new mode of warfare, precisely targeted conventional guided munitions can provide an impact comparable to that of tactical nuclear weapons. Thus, his appearance helped strengthen NATO’s conventional deterrence positions and end the Cold War without the need to build up NATO’s core forces. As Brown noted: “Better to excel in technology and not chase quantity.”
Fortunately, the US military never had to verify this statement in fierce battles with Soviet troops in Europe. But the case nevertheless introduced itself. They later demonstrated the potential power of a military-controlled combat network in confrontation with a combat-ready Iraqi army equipped with Russian and Chinese weapons and trained in accordance with Soviet military doctrine. During Operation Desert Storm in 1991, Iraqi armored formations were actually turned into sets of targets and individual points awaiting their fate. The 100 hours of land warfare that followed the five-week aerial bombardments of guided and unguided munitions was like beating a baby. And although only 8 percent of the total amount of conventional ammunition spent in the war by the United States was manageable, the armies of the world instantly realized that a new military paradigm had to be reckoned with. The US military has gained a powerful advantage in traditional weapons, which will be difficult to replicate, not to mention the appropriate technology.
After the fall of the Soviet Union, the Second Counterweight Strategy served the US military well. It has enabled the United States armed forces to dominate conventional arms over any regional opponent for more than two decades. But the nature of strategic competition lies in the fact that serious competitors just do not concede a military advantage to their opponents. This is especially true for ambitious, growing powers that understand that if they have to deal with American tactical combat networks, they will first have to develop countermeasures and then develop their own reconnaissance and strike systems. This is precisely what China, full of determination to get rid of its status of a secondary military power to the country, began to fulfill.
Counterweight Strategy with Chinese Features
Although China has been a de facto strategic partner of the United States for the past two decades of the Cold War, the collapse of the Soviet Union automatically made the United States a major strategic threat to Chinese military planners. Shortly afterwards, in 1993, when the impressive demonstration of America’s military power in Operation Desert Storm was still fresh in memory, President Jiang Zemin ordered the Chinese army to prepare for "conducting local warriors in high-tech conditions." He did not name the country that is now the most likely potential adversary, but the recent impressive Desert Storm results left no doubt as to who it might be.
The planning of local wars in high-tech conditions will be determined by two main provisions. First, wars will be limited geographically, in time and in terms of tasks. Second, high-tech weapons will prevail in wars, in particular high-precision weapon attacks, such as those demonstrated during the Desert Storm. These two provisions focused the subsequent development of the strategy and doctrine of the Chinese army on short-term, devastating high-intensity wars. China learned from the Desert Storm campaign of 1991 of the year the main lesson - it is extremely important to deliver quick and powerful strikes at the very early stages of the war, since after the cession of the initiative it will be almost impossible to regain positions, given the opponent’s ability to carry out shelling and bombing round the clock and in any weather precision munitions.
From the very beginning, the Chinese decided to develop a counterweight strategy with Chinese features. Instead of striking a balance of forces and means, China has in some way aimed at reducing the technological gap from the Americans. Moreover, in connection with the actions of the Americans, soon after the end of the Cold War, this process was significantly accelerated. In 1996, in response to the missile tests carried out by China over and in the territorial waters of Taiwan, the United States gathered the largest strike force in the Pacific since the Vietnam War to demonstrate power. They sent two aircraft carrier groups directly across the Taiwan Strait, clearly demonstrating that the Chinese are not even able to escort surface groups, not to mention the means of stopping US intervention. Later, on 7 on May 1999, during the bombing of Serbia by NATO aircraft, American planes dropped five guided bombs at the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, killing three people and wounding 20. The United States apologized for the incident, saying it loaded the wrong coordinates in the bombs. The Chinese did not accept an apology, believing that such a mistake could not be made in the US integrated combat networks.
National humiliation and anger forced the Chinese leaders to accelerate their plans to reduce the military-technical backlog of the Americans. But the events in the Taiwan Strait and in Yugoslavia showed the Chinese military strategists how much work they had to do before they could equal the US armed forces and talk with them on equal terms. The Chinese sensor systems were not capable of targeting at long ranges, their operational control and intelligence networks were not able to combine sensor data and manage military operations, and their combat systems relied almost entirely on unguided or technically uncomplicated guided weapons. It took time to solve all these problems.
Evaluating past events, it seems obvious that the most important aspect of China’s counterweight strategy was the recognition by the high command of the Chinese army in the mid-90s that the country was involved in a long-term military-technical competition with the United States and its strategic goals would certainly be achieved in several separate time steps:
- At the first stage, the Chinese military will compete with the United States in terms of technological imperfection. At the end of the 90-s and the beginning of the 2000-s, the ways of defeating a more technologically advanced adversary were studied and outlined in Chinese military works, and this strategy should be adhered to until the country's modernization efforts will reduce the advantages that American military. In particular, the Chinese army should receive for its transformations precisely that period of time in which it does not have “opportunities for a deep and multidirectional strike” comparable to those of the US military.
- The second stage will come when the Chinese have reached approximate technological parity in guided munitions and military operations based on combat networks, which significantly increases China's chances of successfully containing American invasion of the coastal regions of Southeast Asia.
- The third stage represents the desired final state, when the Chinese military will have complete technological superiority over the American armed forces, which will allow the Chinese army to confidently advance from its first island chain and squeeze American forces out of the second island chain and even further.
The time division of the Chinese military-technical counterweight strategy will be supported by a steady and sufficient increase in China's military spending. China's annual defense spending has increased slightly by 620 percent in real terms from 1996 to 2015 year, and this is the annual average increase by 11 percent. Such a huge increase in military spending contributed to a real increase in China's military capabilities and capabilities. This increase turned out to be surprisingly effective, since the priority of the approaches, systems and forces that the Chinese army determined was formed and guided by an ordered and coordinated strategy of a military-technical counterweight. The goal of this strategy is to dramatically raise the cost for the United States of interfering in Chinese military operations in the Western Pacific so that Washington perceives such actions as forbidden. In this regard, an analysis of the exact investments attracted by the Chinese army since 1996 of the year suggests that the counterweight strategy of China includes five main areas of activity:
- Industrial and technical espionage and the integration of civilian and military resources with the goal of quickly acquiring military capabilities comparable to those that the United States has developed over decades, so that the Chinese army can adequately respond to any invasion from any direction.
- The development of capabilities and concepts with the aim of waging a "war to destroy systems" - the incapacitation of command, control, communications and information systems of the American combat network.
- An effective attack is the first due to the accumulated arsenal of high-precision long-range missiles and advanced guidance systems that will provide a high probability of breaking through the American defense in the open stages of the conflict.
- The development of the concept of “Killer Rod” (in ancient Chinese folklore, the term for a weapon that, despite its nondescript appearance, can defeat a much more powerful opponent), that is, the development of new weapons systems that are held in reserve until the outbreak of war to surprise the enemy with attacks from unexpected directions.
- Become a world leader in artificial intelligence and then use this technology to achieve military superiority.
The following sections detail each of these areas.
Продолжение следует ...
Information