The Navy’s War vs. Bolton’s
War
The Pentagon’s Spoiling for a
Fight -- But With China, Not Iran
The recent White House
decision to speed the deployment of an aircraft carrier battle group and other
military assets to the Persian Gulf has led many in Washington and elsewhere to
assume that the U.S. is gearing up for war with Iran. As in the lead-up to the
2003 invasion of Iraq, U.S. officials have cited suspect intelligence data to justify elaborate war
preparations. On May 13th, acting Secretary of Defense Patrick Shanahan
even presented top White House officials with plans to send
as many as 120,000 troops to the Middle East for possible future combat with
Iran and its proxies. Later reports indicated that the Pentagon might be making plans to
send even more soldiers than that.
Hawks in the White House, led
by National Security Advisor John Bolton, see a war aimed at eliminating Iran’s
clerical leadership as a potentially big win for Washington. Many top officials
in the U.S. military, however, see the matter quite differently -- as
potentially a giant step backward into exactly the kind of low-tech ground war
they’ve been unsuccessfully enmeshed in across the Greater Middle East and
northern Africa for years and would prefer to leave behind.
Make no mistake: if President
Trump ordered the U.S. military to attack Iran, it would do so and, were that
to happen, there can be little doubt about the ultimate negative outcome for
Iran. Its moth-eaten military machine is simply no match for the American one.
Almost 18 years after Washington’s war on terror was launched, however, there
can be little doubt that any U.S. assault on Iran would also stir up yet more
chaos across the region, displace more people, create more refugees, and leave
behind more dead civilians, more ruined cities and infrastructure, and more
angry souls ready to join the next terror group to pop up. It would surely lead
to another quagmire set of ongoing conflicts for American soldiers. Think: Iraq
and Afghanistan, exactly the type of no-win scenarios that many top Pentagon
officials now seek to flee. But don’t chalk such feelings up only to a
reluctance to get bogged down in yet one more war-on-terror quagmire. These
days, the Pentagon is also increasingly obsessed with preparations for another
type of war in another locale entirely: a high-intensity conflict with China,
possibly in the South China Sea.
After years of slogging it out
with guerrillas and jihadists across the Greater Middle East, the U.S. military
is increasingly keen on preparing to combat “peer” competitors China and
Russia, countries that pose what’s called a “multi-domain” challenge to the
United States. This new outlook is only bolstered by a belief that America’s
never-ending war on terror has severely depleted its military, something obvious
to both Chinese and Russian leaders who have taken advantage of Washington’s
extended preoccupation with counterterrorism to modernize their forces and
equip them with advanced weaponry.
For the United States to
remain a paramount power -- so Pentagon thinking now goes -- it must turn away
from counterterrorism and focus instead on developing the wherewithal to
decisively defeat its great-power rivals. This outlook was made crystal clear
by then-Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis in testimony before the Senate Armed
Services Committee in April 2018. “The negative impact on military readiness
resulting from the longest continuous period of combat in our nation’s history
[has] created an overstretched and under-resourced military,” he insisted. Our rivals, he added, used those same years to
invest in military capabilities meant to significantly erode America’s
advantage in advanced technology. China, he assured the senators, is
“modernizing its conventional military forces to a degree that will challenge
U.S. military superiority.” In response, the United States had but one choice:
to reorient its own forces for great-power competition. “Long-term strategic
competition -- not terrorism -- is now the primary focus of U.S. national
security.”
This outlook was, in fact,
already enshrined in the National Defense Strategy of the United States of America,
the Pentagon’s overarching blueprint governing all aspects of military
planning. Its $750 billion budget proposal for fiscal year 2020, unveiled on
March 12th, was said to be fully aligned with this approach. “The operations
and capabilities supported by this budget will strongly position the U.S.
military for great-power competition for decades to come,” acting Secretary of
Defense Shanahan said at the time.
In fact, in that budget proposal, the Pentagon made sharp
distinctions between the types of wars it sought to leave behind and those it
sees in its future. “Deterring or defeating great-power aggression is a
fundamentally different challenge than the regional conflicts involving rogue
states and violent extremist organizations we faced over the last 25 years,” it
noted. “The FY 2020 Budget is a major milestone in meeting this challenge,” by
financing the more capable force America needs “to compete, deter, and win in
any high-end potential fight of the future.”
Girding for “High-End” Combat
If such a high-intensity war
were to break out, Pentagon leaders suggest, it would be likely to take place
simultaneously in every domain of combat -- air, sea, ground, space, and
cyberspace -- and would feature the widespread utilization of emerging
technologies, such as artificial intelligence (AI), robotics, and cyberwarfare.
To prepare for such multi-domain engagements, the 2020 budget includes $58 billion for advanced aircraft, $35
billion for new warships -- the biggest shipbuilding request in more than 20
years -- along with $14 billion for space systems, $10 billion for cyberwar,
$4.6 billion for AI and autonomous systems, and $2.6 billion for hypersonic
weapons. You can safely assume, moreover, that each of those amounts will be
increased in the years to come.
Planning for such a future,
Pentagon officials envision clashes first erupting on the peripheries of China
and/or Russia, only to later extend to their heartland expanses (but not, of
course, America’s). As those countries already possess robust defensive
capabilities, any conflict would undoubtedly quickly involve the use of
front-line air and naval forces to breach their defensive systems -- which
means the acquisition and deployment of advanced stealth aircraft, autonomous
weapons, hypersonic cruise missiles, and other sophisticated weaponry. In
Pentagon-speak, these are called anti-access/area-defense (A2/AD) systems.
As it proceeds down this path,
the Department of Defense is already considering future war scenarios. A clash
with Russian forces in the Baltic region of the former Soviet Union is, for
instance, considered a distinct possibility. So the U.S. and allied NATO countries
have been bolstering their forces in that very region and
seeking weaponry suitable for attacks on Russian defenses along that country’s
western border.
Still, the Pentagon’s main
focus is a rising China, the power believed to pose the greatest threat to
America’s long-term strategic interests. “China’s historically unprecedented
economic development has enabled an impressive military buildup that could soon
challenge the U.S. across almost all domains,” Admiral Harry Harris Jr.,
commander of the U.S. Pacific Command (USPACOM) and now the U.S. ambassador to
South Korea, typically testified in March 2018. “China’s ongoing military
modernization is a core element of China’s stated strategy to supplant the U.S.
as the security partner of choice for countries in the Indo-Pacific.”
As Harris made clear, any
conflict with China would probably first erupt in the waters off its eastern
coastline and would involve an intense U.S. drive to destroy China’s A2/AD
capabilities, rendering that country’s vast interior essentially defenseless.
Harris’s successor, Admiral Philip Davidson, as commander of what is now known
as the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, or USINDOPACOM, described such a scenario this way in testimony before
Congress in February 2019: “Our adversaries are fielding advanced
anti-access/area denial (A2/AD) systems, advanced aircraft, ships, space, and
cyber capabilities that threaten the U.S. ability to project power and
influence into the region.” To overcome such capabilities, he added, the U.S.
must develop and deploy an array of attack systems for “long-range strike[s]”
along with “advanced missile defense systems capable of detecting, tracking,
and engaging advanced air, cruise, ballistic, and hypersonic threats from all azimuths.”
If you read through the
testimony of both commanders, you’ll soon grasp one thing: that the U.S.
military -- or at least the Navy and Air Force -- are focused on a future
war-scape in which American forces are no longer focused on terrorism or the
Middle East, but on employing their most sophisticated weaponry to overpower
the modernized forces of China (or Russia) in a relatively brief spasm of
violence, lasting just days or weeks. These would be wars in which the mastery
of technology, not counterinsurgency or nation building, would -- so, at least,
top military officials believe -- prove the decisive factor.
The Pentagon’s Preferred
Battleground
Such Pentagon scenarios
essentially assume that a conflict with China would initially erupt in the waters
of the South China Sea or in the East China Sea near Japan and Taiwan. U.S.
strategists have considered these two maritime areas America’s “first line of
defense” in the Pacific since Admiral George Dewey defeated the
Spanish fleet in 1898 and the U.S. seized the Philippines. Today, USINDOPACOM remains the most powerful force in the region
with major bases in Japan, Okinawa, and South Korea. China, however, has
visibly been working to erode American regional dominance somewhat by modernizing its navy and installing along its
coastlines short- and medium-range ballistic missiles, presumably aimed at
those U.S. bases.
By far its most obvious threat
to U.S. dominance in the region, however, has been its occupation and militarization
of tiny islands in the South China Sea, a busy maritime thoroughfare bounded by
China and Vietnam on one side, Indonesia and the Philippines on the other. In
recent years, the Chinese have used sand dredged from the ocean bottom to
expand some of those islets, then setting up military facilities on them,
including airstrips, radar systems, and communications gear. In 2015, China’s
President Xi Jinping promisedPresident Obama that his country wouldn’t take such
action, but satellite imagery clearly shows that
it has done so. While not yet heavily fortified, those islets provide Beijing
with a platform from which to potentially foil U.S. efforts to further project
its power in the region.
“These bases appear to be
forward military outposts, built for the military, garrisoned by military
forces, and designed to project Chinese military power and capability across
the breadth of China’s disputed South China Sea claims,” Admiral Harris testified in 2018. “China has built a massive
infrastructure specifically -- and solely -- to support advanced military
capabilities that can deploy to the bases on short notice.”
To be clear, U.S. officials
have never declared that the Chinese must vacate those islets or even remove
their military facilities from them. However, for some time now, they’ve been
making obvious their displeasure over the buildup in the South China Sea. In
May 2018, for instance, Secretary of Defense Mattis disinvited the Chinese navy from the biennial “Rim of
the Pacific” exercises, the world’s largest multinational naval
maneuvers, sayingthat “there are consequences” for that country’s
failure to abide by Xi’s 2015 promise to Obama. “That’s a relatively small
consequence,” he added. “I believe there are much larger consequences in the
future.”
What those consequences might
be, Mattis never said. But there is no doubt that the U.S. military has given
careful thought to a possible clash in those waters and has contingency plans
in place to attack and destroy all the Chinese facilities there. American
warships regularly sail provocatively within a few miles of those militarized
islands in what are termed “freedom of navigation operations,” or FRONOPS,
while U.S. air and naval forces periodically conduct large-scale military
exercises in the region. Such activities are, of course, closely monitored by
the Chinese. Sometimes, they even attempt to impede FRONOPS operations, leading more than once to
near-collisions. In May 2018, Admiral Davidson caused consternation at the
Pentagon by declaring, “China is now capable of controlling the South
China Sea in all scenarios short of war with the United States” -- a comment
presumably intended as a wake-up call, but also hinting at the kinds of
conflicts U.S. strategists foresee arising in the future.
The Navy’s War vs. Bolton’s
War
The U.S. Navy sends a
missile-armed destroyer close to one of those Chinese-occupied islands just
about every few weeks. It’s what the U.S. high command likes to call “showing
the flag” or demonstrating America’s resolve to remain a dominant power in that
distant region (though were the Chinese to do something similar off the U.S.
West Coast it would be considered the scandal of the century and a provocation
beyond compare). Just about every time it happens, the Chinese
authorities warn off those ships or send out their own vessels to
shadow and harass them.
On May 6th, for example, the
U.S. Navy sent two of its guided-missile destroyers, the
USS Preble and the USS Chung Hoon, on a FRONOPS mission near
some of those islands, provoking a fierce complaint from Chinese officials.
This deadly game of chicken could, of course, go on for years without shots
being fired or a major crisis erupting. The odds of avoiding such an incident
are bound to drop over time, especially as, in the age of Trump, U.S.-China
tensions over other matters -- including trade, technology, and human rights -- continue to grow. American military
leaders have clearly been strategizing about the possibility of a conflict
erupting in this area for some time and, if Admiral Davidson’s remark is any
indication, would respond to such a possibility with considerably more relish
than most of them do to a possible war with Iran.
Yes, they view Iran as a
menace in the Middle East and no doubt would like to see the demise of that
country’s clerical regime. Yes, some Army commanders like General Kenneth McKenzie, head of the U.S. Central Command,
still show a certain John Bolton-style relish for such a conflict. But Iran
today -- weakened by years of isolation and trade sanctions --
poses no unmanageable threat to America’s core strategic interests and, thanks
in part to the nuclear deal negotiated by the Obama administration,
possesses no
nuclear weapons. Still, can there be any doubt that a war with Iran would
turn into a messy quagmire, as in Iraq after the invasion of 2003, with
guerrilla uprisings, increased terrorism, and widespread chaos spreading
through the region -- exactly the kind of “forever wars” much of the U.S.
military (unlike John Bolton) would prefer to leave behind?
How this will all play out
obviously can’t be foreseen, but if the U.S. does not go to war with Iran,
Pentagon reluctance may play a significant role in that decision. This does not
mean, however, that Americans would be free of the prospect of major bloodshed
in the future. The very next U.S. naval patrol in the South China Sea, or the
one after that, could provide the spark for a major blowup of a very different
kind against a far more powerful -- and nuclear-armed -- adversary. What could
possibly go wrong?
Michael T. Klare, a TomDispatch regular, is the five-college professor
emeritus of peace and world security studies at Hampshire College and a senior
visiting fellow at the Arms Control Association. His most recent book is The Race for What’s Left. His next book, All Hell
Breaking Loose: Why the Pentagon Sees Climate Change as a Threat to American
National Security, will be published later this year.
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