After a month of unsafe interceptions in both the sea and air, China’s incremental adoption of close-in and low-tech bullying tactics is now impossible for Asia to ignore. As Asia highlights China’s “backing, blocking, and banging” defense strategy in the South China Sea and Western Pacific, too few are considering what, short of war, comes next.
The question is a particular challenge for the United States. America’s antiseptic bet on the deterrence value of long-range engagement has been undermined by China’s apparent appetite for brute force and close “in your face” confrontation.
Despite repeated U.S. warnings and diplomatic initiatives, China seems perfectly content to raise the stakes.
In the air, China, is using ever-more-dangerous intercepts to threaten the West’s less numerous and higher-value fleet of bombers and patrol craft. This week, a Chinese fighter crept within ten feet of a U.S. Air Force B-52 bomber. At sea, China, after tapping a few Philippine vessels, seems on the verge of bringing ramming, a maritime tactic straight from the Bronze age, back into tactical prominence.
Cultural differences and long-standing operational habits aren’t helping to defuse things. Territorial dustups in the Asian littoral are relatively common events, and regional tolerance for direct confrontation—ramming and other dangerous “in-your-face” maneuvers—has usually been quite high. Legal norms are often dismissed, and, for years, aggressive confrontations were downplayed. Every time, after every violent outburst, regional relations settled into their usual state of contentious normalcy.
But times are changing. Increasingly vocal complaints against China’s intimate exercises in intimidation are reaching a receptive audience throughout Asia, stiffening public resolve. As the Asia-Pacific mood shifts, the appetite for inflicting real costs on China’s bullying and coercive tactics is rising as well.
Direct confrontation seems inevitable.
Asia’s tolerance for high-stakes maritime jousting is at a tipping point, but, right now, there are simply too few tools, short of a threat of war, to signal regional impatience.
With the escalatory ladder missing a few rungs, the already high stakes in Asia are only getting higher.
Brace For Collision:
At sea, the stressful, exacting and messy business of direct physical engagement is, at heart, a dangerous and costly game of attrition. The metal-bending challenge of close quarters maneuvering and direct physical confrontation requires great navigational skills, and a willingness to sacrifice a few nimble, robust ships and aircraft.
The problem is that China knows America, the ultimate guarantor of an orderly, law-abiding maritime, has neither a big arsenal nor a willingness to sacrifice precious weapons or sensor platforms in ceremonial jousting matches.
After an explosive-laden skiff nearly sank the USS Cole (DDG-67) in 2000 and a Chinese J-8II fighter brought down a U.S. EP-3E Aries II reconnaissance aircraft in early 2001, America focused on the timid business of risk management while China doubled down on exploiting America’s longstanding distaste for close-in engagements, pressing ahead and building a force for direct, intimate confrontations.
China has all the tools to escalate right up to the razor edge of open war.
It wasn’t a surprise. Over the last decade, China built a massive low-tech maritime militia fleet—a disposable, ragtag force of tough, steel-hulled “fishing” boats, and backed it with an aggressive Coast Guard. In the air, China has steadily expanded their encroachment into neighboring airspace, expanding from a handful of intrusions into neighboring Air Defense Identification Zones in the early 2000s to hundreds—if not thousands—of intrusions per year today.
Rather than engage, the United States inexplicably continued to back away from engaging China’s low-tech bruisers. Throughout the 2000’s, repeated harassment of U.S. undersea surveillance ships went largely unanswered.
America had no means to respond.
In 2005, after the USS Mcfaul (DDG-74) and the USS Winston S. Churchill (DDG-81) collided during shouldering practice, doing $1.3 million in damage to the two ships, the Navy completely disavowed complex shoving and shouldering maneuvers, refusing to accept any concrete requirements to address aggressive incidents at sea.
At the time, Rear Adm. Raymond Spicer, now CEO of the U.S. Naval Institute, the Navy’s unofficial maritime think tank, announced that “shouldering is a relic of the Cold War era…in the new millennium, we do not want to shoulder a boat that could be manned with suicide bombers and loaded with high explosives.”
In 2017, a series of collisions and wider concerns over the U.S. Fleet’s poor vessel navigational skills pressed unconfident American forces to sheer farther and farther away from physical confrontation at sea.
It was a tremendous mistake. America’s wholesale retreat from Asia’s rough-and-tumble littorals has proven to be an enormous strategic misstep and a massive failure of imagination on the part of Navy leaders.
America’s retreat simply made little strategic sense, Any casual observer of the region knew that physical contact between government or “quasi-government” vessels is a relatively regular feature in Asian seas. The U.S. Navy also knew China’s communist government was focused on direct confrontations, building on successful swarming and shouldering experiments from as far back as the fifties and sixties.
It wasn’t just China, either. Maritime forces from China, South Korea, North Korea, Japan, Taiwan, and Vietnam have all bumped and ground against each other at various times. And it isn’t just government vessels, either. Smugglers, migrants, infiltrators, fishing boats charge government vessels—and each other.
It is a rough maritime region that demands exacting operators and rough and ready platforms. And with the U.S. refusing to engage in Asia’s maritime jousting matches, China simply filled the vacuum.
Today, with Asia willing to push back, eager to impose more diplomatic and military costs on China, America now has few non-kinetic tools readily available to help rebuff China’s coercive behavior. The U.S. has far too few tugs or other inelegant bruisers capable of engaging in South China Sea jousting matches.
Instead, the region must now rely on the deterrence value of warning China that America has no option than to forgo the long-held, almost ceremonial rituals of the South China Sea maritime confrontation, and reminding China that the U.S. has few options but to interpret any further coercive behavior at sea as a warlike act.
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