U.S. model for a future war fans tensions with China and inside Pentagon
The Washington Post, August 1, 2012
When President Obama called on
the U.S. military to shift its focus to Asia earlier this year, Andrew Marshall, a 91-year-old futurist, had a vision of what to do.
Marshall’s small office in the Pentagon has spent the past two
decades planning for a war against an angry, aggressive and heavily
armed China.
No one had any idea how the war would start. But the
American response, laid out in a concept that one of Marshall’s
longtime proteges dubbed “Air-Sea Battle,” was clear.
Stealthy
American bombers and submarines would knock out China’s long-range
surveillance radar and precision missile systems located deep inside the
country. The initial “blinding campaign” would be followed by a larger
air and naval assault.
The concept, the details of which are
classified, has angered the Chinese military and has been pilloried by
some Army and Marine Corps officers as excessively expensive. Some Asia
analysts worry that conventional strikes aimed at China could spark a
nuclear war.
Air-Sea Battle drew little attention when U.S. troops were fighting and dying in large numbers in Iraq and
Afghanistan.
Now the military’s decade of battling insurgencies is ending, defense
budgets are being cut, and top military officials, ordered to pivot
toward Asia, are looking to Marshall’s office for ideas.
In recent
months, the Air Force and Navy have come up with more than 200
initiatives they say they need to realize Air-Sea Battle. The list
emerged, in part, from war games conducted by Marshall’s office and
includes new weaponry and proposals to deepen cooperation between the
Navy and the Air Force.
A former nuclear strategist, Marshall has
spent the past 40 years running the Pentagon’s Office of Net
Assessment, searching for potential threats to American dominance. In
the process, he has built a network of allies in Congress, in the
defense industry, at think tanks and at the Pentagon that amounts to a
permanent Washington bureaucracy.
While Marshall’s backers praise
his office as a place where officials take the long view, ignoring
passing Pentagon fads, critics see a dangerous tendency toward alarmism
that is exaggerating the China threat to drive up defense spending.
“The
old joke about the Office of Net Assessment is that it should be called
the Office of Threat Inflation,” said Barry Posen, director of the MIT
Security Studies Program. “They go well beyond exploring the worst
cases. . . . They convince others to act as if the worst cases are
inevitable.”
Marshall dismisses criticism that his office focuses
too much on China as a future enemy, saying it is the Pentagon’s job to
ponder worst-case scenarios.
“We tend to look at not very happy futures,” he said in a recent interview.
China tensions
Even as it has embraced Air-Sea Battle, the Pentagon has
struggled to explain it without inflaming already tense relations with
China. The result has been an information vacuum that has sown confusion
and controversy.
Senior Chinese military officials warn that the Pentagon’s new effort could spark an arms race.
“If
the U.S. military develops Air-Sea Battle to deal with the [People’s
Liberation Army], the PLA will be forced to develop anti-Air-Sea
Battle,” one officer, Col. Gaoyue Fan, said last year in a debate
sponsored by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a
defense think tank.
Pentagon officials counter that the concept is focused solely on defeating precision missile systems.
“It’s not about a specific actor,” a senior defense official told reporters last year. “It is not about a specific regime.”
The
heads of the Air Force and Navy, meanwhile, have maintained that
Air-Sea Battle has applications even beyond combat. The concept could
help the military reach melting ice caps in the Arctic Circle or a
melted-down nuclear reactor in Japan, Adm. Jonathan Greenert, the U.S.
chief of naval operations, said in May at the Brookings Institution.
At
the same event, Gen. Norton Schwartz, the Air Force chief, upbraided a
retired Marine colonel who asked how Air-Sea Battle might be employed in
a war with China.
“This inclination to narrow down on a particular scenario is unhelpful,” Schwartz said.
Privately,
senior Pentagon officials concede that Air-Sea Battle’s goal is to help
U.S. forces weather an initial Chinese assault and counterattack to
destroy sophisticated radar and missile systems built to keep U.S. ships
away from China’s coastline.
Their concern is fueled by the
steady growth in China’s defense spending, which has increased to as
much as $180 billion a year, or about one-third of the Pentagon’s
budget, and China’s increasingly aggressive behavior in the
South China Sea.
“We
want to put enough uncertainty in the minds of Chinese military
planners that they would not want to take us on,” said a senior Navy
official overseeing the service’s modernization efforts. “Air-Sea Battle
is all about convincing the Chinese that we will win this competition.”
Like others quoted in this article, the official spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the subject.
A military tech ‘revolution’
Air-Sea Battle grew out of Marshall’s fervent belief, dating to
the 1980s, that technological advancements were on the verge of ushering
in a new epoch of war.
New information technology allowed
militaries to fire within seconds of finding the enemy. Better precision
bombs guaranteed that the Americans could hit their targets almost
every time. Together these advances could give conventional bombs almost
the same power as small nuclear weapons, Marshall surmised.
Marshall
asked his military assistant, a bright officer with a Harvard
doctorate, to draft a series of papers on the coming “revolution in
military affairs.” The work captured the interest of dozens of generals
and several defense secretaries.
Eventually, senior military
leaders, consumed by bloody, low-tech wars in Iraq and Afghanistan,
seemed to forget about Marshall’s revolution. Marshall, meanwhile,
zeroed in on China as the country most likely to exploit the revolution
in military affairs and supplant the United States’ position as the
world’s sole superpower.
In recent years, as the growth of China’s
military has outpaced most U.S. intelligence projections, interest in
China as a potential rival to the United States has soared.
“In
the blink of an eye, people have come to take very seriously the China
threat,” said Andrew Hoehn, a senior vice president at Rand Corp.
“They’ve made very rapid progress.”
Most of Marshall’s writings
over the past four decades are classified. He almost never speaks in
public and even in private meetings is known for his long stretches of
silence.
His influence grows largely out of his study budget,
which in recent years has floated between $13 million and $19 million
and is frequently allocated to think tanks, defense consultants and
academics with close ties to his office. More than half the money
typically goes to six firms.
Among the largest recipients is the
Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, a defense think tank run
by retired Lt. Col. Andrew Krepinevich, the Harvard graduate who wrote
the first papers for Marshall on the revolution in military affairs.
In
the past 15 years, CSBA has run more than two dozen China war games for
Marshall’s office and written dozens of studies. The think tank
typically collects about $2.75 million to $3 million a year, about
40 percent of its annual revenue, from Marshall’s office, according to
Pentagon statistics and CSBA’s most recent financial filings.
Krepinevich
makes about $865,000 in salary and benefits, or almost double the
compensation paid out to the heads of other nonpartisan think tanks such
as the Center for Strategic and International Studies and the Brookings
Institution. CSBA said its board sets executive compensation based on a
review of salaries at other organizations doing similar work.
The
war games run by CSBA are set 20 years in the future and cast China as a
hegemonic and aggressive enemy. Guided anti-ship missiles sink U.S.
aircraft carriers and other surface ships. Simultaneous Chinese strikes
destroy American air bases, making it impossible for the U.S. military
to launch its fighter jets. The outnumbered American force fights back
with conventional strikes on China’s mainland, knocking out long-range
precision missiles and radar.
“The fundamental problem is the same
one that the Soviets identified 30 years ago,” Krepinevich said in an
interview. “If you can see deep and shoot deep with a high degree of
accuracy, our large bases are not sanctuaries. They are targets.”
Some critics doubt that China, which owns $1.6 trillion in U.S. debt and
depends heavily on the American economy, would strike U.S. forces out
of the blue.
“It is absolutely fraudulent,” said Jonathan D.
Pollack, a senior fellow at Brookings. “What is the imaginable context
or scenario for this attack?”
Other defense analysts warn that an
assault on the Chinese mainland carries potentially catastrophic risks
and could quickly escalate to nuclear armageddon.
The war games
elided these concerns. Instead they focused on how U.S. forces would
weather the initial Chinese missile salvo and attack.
To survive,
allied commanders dispersed their planes to austere airfields on the
Pacific islands of Tinian and Palau. They built bomb-resistant aircraft
shelters and brought in rapid runway repair kits to fix damaged
airstrips.
Stealthy bombers and quiet submarines waged a counterattack. The allied approach became the basis for the Air-Sea Battle.
Think tank’s paper
Although the Pentagon has struggled to talk publicly about
Air-Sea Battle, CSBA has not been similarly restrained. In 2010, it
published a 125-page paper outlining how the concept could be used to
fight a war with China.
The paper contains less detail than the
classified Pentagon version. Shortly after its publication, U.S. allies
in Asia, frustrated by the Pentagon’s silence on the subject, began
looking to CSBA for answers.
“We started to get a parade of senior
people, particularly from Japan, though also Taiwan and to a lesser
extent China, saying, ‘So, this is what Air-Sea Battle is,’ ”
Krepinevich said this year at an event at another think tank.
Soon, U.S. officials began to hear complaints.
“The PLA went nuts,” said a U.S. official who recently returned from Beijing.
Told
that Air-Sea Battle was not aimed at China, one PLA general replied
that the CSBA report mentioned the PLA 190 times, the official said.
(The actual count is closer to 400.)
Inside the Pentagon, the Army
and Marine Corps have mounted offensives against the concept, which
could lead to less spending on ground combat.
An internal
assessment, prepared for the Marine Corps commandant and obtained by The
Washington Post, warns that “an Air-Sea Battle-focused Navy and Air
Force would be preposterously expensive to build in peace time” and
would result in “incalculable human and economic destruction” if ever
used in a major war with China.
The concept, however, aligns with
Obama’s broader effort to shift the U.S. military’s focus toward Asia
and provides a framework for preserving some of the Pentagon’s most
sophisticated weapons programs, many of which have strong backing in
Congress.
Sens.
Joseph I. Lieberman (I-Conn.) and
John Cornyn (R-Tex.)
inserted language into the 2012 Defense Authorization bill requiring
the Pentagon to issue a report this year detailing its plans for
implementing the concept. The legislation orders the Pentagon to explain
what weapons systems it will need to carry out Air-Sea Battle, its
timeline for implementing the concept and an estimate of the costs
associated with it.
Lieberman and Cornyn’s staff turned to an unsurprising source when drafting the questions.
“We asked CSBA for help,” one of the staffers said. “In a lot of ways, they created it.”
Julie Tate contributed to this report.
