Air-Sea Battle and Offshore Control are not Mutually Exclusive: The Case for a Full-Spectrum U.S. Conventional Deterrent in East Asia

Over the past two years, the debate over U.S. military options for defending East Asian allies from potential Chinese aggression has primarily been between proponents of the Air-Sea Battle operational concept and proponents of the Offshore Control strategic concept. The conventional wisdom appears to be that the two concepts are mutually exclusive. Such a view makes no sense. Simply put, there is no reason why key elements from both cannot be integrated within a single holistic strategic concept that provides circumstance-based flexibility in covering the entire spectrum of potential Sino-American conventional conflict.

In order to see why this is so, let’s first examine how the two concepts are defined in their authoritative source materials and then summarize both sides’ main arguments (with a few linked representative examples).

Air-Sea Battle

Air-Sea Battle is a U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) operational concept that outlines the Joint combined arms capabilities, doctrinal tenets, and Command, Control, and Communications (C³) approaches necessary for maintaining U.S. forces’ access to and freedom of maneuver within opposed theaters. Air-Sea Battle’s present contents flow from the unclassified, clearly-articulated, and widely-overlooked January 2012 Joint Operational Access Concept (JOAC). DoD leadership, senior service leaders, and Air-Sea Battle Office personnel have been consistently explicit in stating Air-Sea Battle is not a strategy in its own right (or even a campaign plan), and that it is not specifically targeted against any particular country.

Nevertheless, many Air-Sea Battle proponents outside DoD assert that the concept is highly applicable to deterring—and if that fails, then waging—a Sino-American war. This school largely believes it would be impossible to prevent a major Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) fait accompli against a U.S. ally in East Asia, let alone have a chance at eventually inducing China to restore the geostrategic status quo ante should a major conflict erupt, if U.S. and allied militaries were incapable of (at minimum) quickly bogging down a PLA offensive and then rallying to restore key defensive ‘facts on the ground.’ Given the region’s geography, the most important of these ‘facts’ would arguably be the security of the trans-oceanic and intra-theater maritime lines of communication America’s allies depend upon for military reinforcement and economic sustenance. Air-Sea Battle proponents therefore argue that U.S. forces must be capable of performing conventional, cyber, and electronic attacks against PLA infrastructure and forces in order to protect friendly maritime lines of communication as well as arrest PLA offensive operations. While most such attacks would likely occur within the contested maritime zone, the proponents assert U.S. forces would also need to be capable of striking PLA infrastructure and non-nuclear forces on the Chinese mainland if strategically necessary. Lastly, while this school generally believes Air-Sea Battle would be incapable of winning a war on its own, they also believe the success of any grand strategy for deterring aggression against allies on China’s doorstep (and defending them if need be) would depend in large part upon the latent availability (and selective use) of the concept’s tools and methods.

Many critics of Air-Sea Battle argue strikes against mainland China would carry unacceptable risks of triggering inadvertent or accidental escalation to the nuclear threshold. Some of the concept’s critics believe these strikes would be automatically executed regardless of the conflict scenario, or that they could only be practicably executed in the form of an escalation precedent-setting preemptive strike by the U.S. Other critics assert Air-Sea Battle’s allowance for land-attack strikes implies the concept embraces a strategy of coercively bombarding an opponent into submission. Additional critics declare that such strikes reflect a deterministic and techno-centric way of war in which the means employed are disconnected from the ends sought. Lastly, a number of critics point out that Air-Sea Battle is not directly applicable to countering China’s ongoing ‘salami tactics’ campaigns in the East and South China Seas.

Offshore Control

Unlike the official Air-Sea Battle concept’s adversary-agnostic focus on the operational level of war, Offshore Control is an unofficial strategic concept conceived by defense academia specifically to address the Sino-American military competition. Offshore Control consists of two main thrusts, both of which are intended to deter war through the latent threat of their credible implementation. The first would be a distant blockade of China’s sea lines of communication that would be primarily achieved by U.S. or allied militaries’ control over Indo-Pacific maritime chokepoints lying beyond the PLA’s effective reach. This blockade would be aimed at compelling conciliation through economic punishment, namely by reducing China’s access to oil and other vital raw materials (and possibly forcing it to pay higher prices on the margins for what it imports overland), as well as by reducing China’s ability to sell its wares in major overseas markets. Offshore Control’s other element would consist of traditional campaigns by the U.S. to prevent effective PLA control of the East and South China Seas, directly defend threatened allies’ territories, and secure control of the maritime lines of communication connecting these allies with the world—all without engaging in any kind of strikes into China.

Offshore Control’s advocates assert that their concept would be more scalable in terms of intensity and controllable in terms of escalation than Air-Sea Battle to match up to the nature of the Chinese acts of aggression that precipitated a given conflict. They also assert that Offshore Control is built around a coherent theory of victory: the raising of Chinese leaders’ costs to an intolerable level by preventing them from militarily attaining their political objectives, as well as by coercively—yet reversibly—economically punishing the Chinese people.

While critics of Offshore Control typically agree that maritime blockades can play strategically useful supporting roles in a conflict, they caution that any embargo is inherently dependent upon the cooperation (or coercion) of neutrals including other great and regional powers, might be too permeable or insufficiently painful to effectively coerce the targeted nation’s leaders and citizens, and is not devoid of horizontal or vertical escalation risks. Other critics argue that the global economic repercussions of a blockade of China would risk catastrophic international political blowback against the U.S. Just about all critics of Offshore Control’s blockading element argue against the belief that the leaders of a great power as large and resourceful as China could be compelled to concede primarily through blockade or any other strategy of political-economic coercion. A few go further to caution that allocation of forces and their supporting infrastructure (e.g. surveillance, reconnaissance, logistics) to blockade enforcement would in many cases trade off against allocation of forces and infrastructure to the primary effort: direct defense of allied territories and lines of communication. Indeed, these critics note  that the aforementioned defensive tasks would be made incredibly difficult by virtue of allied countries’ close proximities to mainland China; PLA forces’ ever-increasing reach in the form of theater ballistic missiles and standoff-range missile-armed aircraft; and the PLA’s unquestionable in-theater quantitative superiority. These critics conclude that allowing PLA forces to strike from mainland China with impunity against allied territories and lines of communication—and thus cause U.S. and allied defensive forces deployed on or operating from those territories (not to mention any allied populations) to wither on the vine—would be strategically ruinous. The same would be absolutely true in a conflict of any scale with respect to allowing the PLA’s mainland-located surveillance resources to observe the contested zone unhindered.

It should be noted that a variation on Offshore Control exists that discards the concept’s coercive blockading element while retaining its maritime denial element and its foreswearing of strikes into China. However, the above critiques regarding the concept’s ability to handle scenarios in which the PLA employed mainland-based aerospace strike forces or mainland-located maritime surveillance resources still apply, and thus I do not assess it separately.

Synthesis

Several truisms can be derived from the preceding arguments. Regarding Air-Sea Battle, it would be illogical and ahistorical to assert that any kind of U.S. coercive strike campaign against Chinese economic or civil infrastructure could successfully defend embattled allies at an acceptable level of risk. It would also be illogical and ahistorical to assert that U.S. forces’ abilities to conduct wartime operations in the East Asian maritime would inherently depend upon them executing preemptive conventional strikes against PLA infrastructure and forces located in mainland China, or that ‘high-end’ operations in general would be appropriate for all conceivable scenarios. That said, it ought to be observed that no authoritative DoD source or credible Air-Sea Battle advocate has ever publicly made such assertions.

Turning to Offshore Control, it would be unsound to assert that a notional U.S. campaign to defend an ally (or restore freedom of maneuver within East Asian waters) could succeed under all conceivable scenarios without ever having the need to conduct any form of strikes against the PLA inside China’s borders. It would also be quite deterministic to assert that an economic blockade would assuredly induce China to restore the status quo ante within a politically acceptable amount of time without hazarding Chinese escalation.

Once we discard these problematic assertions, it becomes quite obvious that much of Air-Sea Battle and Offshore Control actually overlap to a remarkable degree. It is therefore impossible to escape the impression that there is no reason why specific elements from both concepts cannot be unified within a single coherent strategic concept. In fact, their integration where logical and appropriate creates a range of incrementally-intensifying options for responding to notional Chinese acts of aggression. This merger’s logic becomes readily apparent when we consider several variables that thus far have been largely overlooked in the debate: the belligerents’ characterization and valuation of their political objectives, and a confrontation’s unique political and strategic circumstances. As Clausewitz tells us, these variables combine to directly influence the means the belligerents choose to employ and the scale of their clash. This becomes evident when we examine plausible scenarios along the spectrum of Sino-American conflict. 

Tomorrow, addressing high-end salami tactics and limited war scenarios. 

Some Thoughts on Salami Tactics and Diplomatic “Offramps"

My SSQ article on conventional deterrence last winter focused primarily on deterring relatively low likelihood but severe consequence ‘high-end’ contingencies involving Chinese aggression in East Asia. One apt commenter noted that I did not say much regarding deterrence of an opponent’s low-level ‘salami tactics’ that do not cross the threshold into a traditional conventional military offensive. Unlike the theoretical scenarios covered in my article, China is presently and actively using People’s Liberation Army (PLA) forces, coast guard forces, and ‘civilian’ activists such as its state-sponsored (and likely coordinated) fishing fleet to probe its neighbors’ maritime defenses, perform coercive psychological operations, and occasionally seize individual remote shoals. Even so, the extant body of conventional deterrence theory contains little that addresses this segment of the conflict spectrum.

As I mentioned in my article and in another piece here this fall, it would seem that forward-positioned constabulary forces such as coast guards, gendarmeries, or national law enforcement agencies with paramilitary capabilities are central to low-end conventional deterrence. Given China’s use of its sizable fishing fleet as a paramilitary offset against its neighbors’ uniformed maritime constabularies, it might also be reasonable if not necessary for those neighbors to cultivate similar state-controlled paramilitaries within their own respective fishing fleets. Doing so would expand East Asian maritime states’ options for symmetrical responses to Chinese probes, as well as introduce risk variables that they could manipulate to deter further Chinese escalations. Indeed, a defender will seldom want to be the party that sets the intra-crisis precedent of having one of its military assets engage an opponent's constabulary asset or 'civilian' actors. It certainly seems that one objective of China’s salami tactics is to maneuver East Asian states into choices between setting these kinds of provocative and diplomatically-exploitable precedents or otherwise conceding on their claims. This kind of gambit would be even more applicable should Chinese leaders manufacture a maritime crisis in order to induce a neighboring state’s  military into committing an act Beijing could cite as a casus belli.

It must also be appreciated that constabulary and paramilitary forces are more readily configurable and trainable for handling these kinds of ‘grey’ scenarios. Take this year’s Russo-Ukrainian crisis, for example. Just as traditional police are under-armed and under-trained for retaking civil infrastructure sites and the like that have been seized by an adversary’s intelligence operatives, special forces, ‘political tourists,’ or sponsored ‘indigenous’ militias, militaries that are necessarily structured and trained for conventional inter-state warfare are ill-suited for ‘high-end’ domestic law enforcement duties. What’s more, professional military units’ esprit de corps may serve as a moral barrier that dissuades them from employing force against people who appear to be civilians, if not fellow citizens. One could make a strong argument that if the Ukrainian government had been able and willing to quickly deploy reliable, well-disciplined, and well-armed constabulary forces against the initial seizures of Crimean and eastern Ukrainian civil infrastructure by Russian operatives and proxies, Kiev might have been able to either prevent those Russian faits accompli or delay if not deter their follow-on moves elsewhere in eastern Ukraine. The effective deployment of such forces would certainly have presented the Russian regime with additional costs, risks, and uncertainties; at least one of NATO’s Baltic members has evidently taken note of this for its own contingency plans. Still, Ukraine’s lack of credible military forces (or membership in a credible defensive military alliance) meant that effective Ukrainian constabulary force employment against the ‘separatists’ early-on might have prompted a limited but decisive Russian military invasion—which is essentially what happened this past summer in response to the Ukrainian military’s and Kiev-sponsored paramilitaries’ broader rollback operations in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions. This is why the low-end conventional deterrence provided by constabulary forces or state-controlled paramilitaries must be latently supported by military forces positioned ‘over-the-horizon’ that possess the requisite qualities and asset quantities to bog down if not arrest an adversary’s offensive. This tandem approach is the best way to create doubts in an opponent’s leaders' minds about the wisdom of pushing salami tactics too far in a given confrontation.

An even more dangerous problem nevertheless emerges if circumstances reach the point that a revisionist power runs out of cheap and relatively low-risk salami tactics that can help it make progress towards achieving its political objectives. For instance, if the revisionist has seized de facto control over all the waters or isolated territories that it contests with an opponent, and if the revisionist still seeks to manipulate the opponent into bending to his political will or otherwise score gains at the opponent’s expense, then what low-stakes pressure points remain for military coercion? Alternatively, the revisionist may assign high value to certain political objectives that salami tactics simply cannot address. Contemporary Western crisis management theory embraces the idea of providing an opponent ‘offramps’ to deescalate a confrontation, usually through a combination of some demonstration of resolve and the potential for further escalation combined with some diplomatic concession (whether symbolic or substantive) that is designed to allow the opponent’s leaders to ‘save face.’ This is all fine and good if the opponent can be convinced that he overstepped and that a way-out is desirable. We must appreciate, though, the opponent will only accept such an offer if one of his most highly-valued political objectives is avoiding the uncertainties associated with further escalation—if not the certainty of a war should the defender’s deterrence policy be structured as such—more than the political objective(s) that drove his aggressive moves in the first place. Not all opponents at all times will take an offramp deal; sometimes the other side’s leaders come to value some political objective(s) far more than they do restoring the peace. As such, offramps may not work (or even be offerable) depending upon how the two sides characterize and value their respective political objectives. Though their calculus may seem ‘unthinkably’ irrational from our perspective, if the aggressor’s leaders want something badly enough they will do whatever they think they need to do and pay whatever costs they think they must pay to obtain it.

--Update 11/24/14 9:17PM--

I highly recommend Robert Haddick's serendipitous article at the National Interest from earlier today on this very topic. I think he and I broadly agree on the importance of constabulary forces and the potential uses of state-sponsored fishing fleets. He makes several additional suggestions regarding maritime information-sharing and surveillance cooperation amongst America's East Asian allies and partners. I believe his most important idea is for these countries and the U.S. to begin developing mechanisms that could support cooperative management of crises.

Terminology: First Strike

            One of the most important elements of modern warfare, whether nuclear or conventional, is the first strike. As this concept figures prominently in my writings, I believe it is important to explain up front what I mean when I use the term.

A first strike is a major attack used by the initiating belligerent to either open a war or to rapidly escalate an ongoing conflict from a relatively limited level towards a more general level. It is characterized by the attacker’s employment of operational-tactical surprise, an intense tempo, massed firepower where appropriate, and precision-targeting where possible. A modern first strike unfolds over the course of a few hours to perhaps a bit longer than a day. It consists of multiple offensive tactical actions synchronized within a single major operation, or alternately within multiple parallel operations divided along geographical, service, or mission/task boundaries. These actions may occur not only within a contested zone, but also in depth within the defender’s territories and against his Command, Control, and Communications networks. They may even occur at widely separated locations throughout the combat theater, an example of which would be the Japanese air raids against U.S. forces at Pearl Harbor, Wake Island, Guam, and Luzon over the course of several hours on 7-8 December 1941.

An effective first strike disorients the defender’s political and military decision-makers as well as attrites the defender’s relevant military potential to such degrees that it becomes exceptionally difficult to prevent the attacker from achieving some or all of his political objectives. A defender’s overall prewar qualitative and/or quantitative military power advantages in theater relative to the attacker may be erased in a first strike’s aftermath if the defender’s positioning, capabilities, plans and doctrine, and/or relative combat readiness are inadequate for parrying the attack in its specific forms, timing, and scope.[1] In fact, the integration of wide-area surveillance and reconnaissance with precision-guided offensive conventional weapons suggests that under permissive circumstances, a successful modern first strike could be far more decisive in determining a conflict’s outcome than was possible during industrial-age warfare.[2] This echoes Clausewitz’s observation that a first battle’s impact upon the rest of a war “will be on a scale proportionate to its own.”[3] A defender’s deterrence policy must therefore be designed to convince its opponent that any conceivable first strike by the opponent would not be able to inflict enough damage or sow enough confusion to prevent the defender from preserving and rapidly reconstituting enough combat-effective forces to arrest or defeat the opponent's subsequent operations.

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[1] Thomas C. Schelling. Arms and Influence. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1966), 235.

[2] Richard K. Betts. Surprise Attack. (Washington, D.C.: The Brookings Institution, 1982), 155.

[3] Carl Von Clausewitz. On War, Edited and Translated by Michael Howard and Peter Paret. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), 80.