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China’s Growing Ability To Drive Away U.S. Forces

Bradley Perrett
If there is a theme to China’s military developments, it is pushing the adversary back. A vast and growing assembly of sensors and weapons is the modern expression of what the former Soviet Union called a reconnaissance-strike complex. The targets are ships, submarines and bases in the Western Pacific, most obviously the U.S. Navy’s ships, its base on Guam and the U.S. Air Force facilities on that Pacific island. The message: Go away.

The same idea of pushing back appears in the field of air combat, in which the PL-XX missile has such obviously long range that commanders may have to pull vulnerable support aircraft away from the enemy.

The Soviet Union could never focus like this. Warding off the seaward threat from the U.S. was only one major military task for Moscow in the Cold War. For China, intent on having a free hand in dealing with Taiwan, driving U.S. forces from the Western Pacific has become the core of strategy.

Focus brings results. Year after year, China introduces new systems to find, track and attack U.S. targets beyond the first chain of islands to its east; year after year, the deployed numbers rise. The resources China spends facing other directions are modest by comparison. The U.S., like the former Soviet Union, has other priorities; it cannot put the bulk of its military effort into dealing with the one problem of maintaining access to East Asia.

“China is developing a dense, overlapping set of strike capabilities, including anti-ship ballistic missiles, anti-ship and land-attack cruise missiles, strike aircraft, surface combatants, submarines, aircraft carriers, etc., etc.” says analyst Dean Cheng of the Heritage Foundation in Washington. The overlapping of capabilities is important: China is generally not relying on any one method to deal with any one kind of target.

• The effort is broad and deep, not based on any one system
• Reconnaissance systems and weapons advance together

The strike capabilities are complemented by an equally dense and overlapping intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance network. Cheng says this could allow China to monitor the air, sea, sub-surface and space domains out to the second island chain: Guam, the Marianas and Australia. The ability to do so within the first island chain—Japan, Taiwan, the Philippines and Indonesia—is already in place.

If all this keeps the U.S. at bay, not only will Taiwan’s freedom be imperiled. Other neighbors of China may have to bend to the will of the nationalist, authoritarian government in Beijing. Excluding the U.S. from the Western Pacific would also prevent it from fulfilling treaty obligations to protect Japan.

“This is still a solvable problem for the U.S.,” says Roger Cliff of the Center for Naval Analyses in Washington, who says the government is not paying enough attention. “But it will get harder over time as the numbers and range of China’s systems increase, particularly if the U.S. continues to ignore the problem or tries to solve it by investing in next-generation technologies that will only come to fruition decades from now.”

An Avic Xian H-6K at the 2016 Airshow China at Zhuhai. Credit: Bradley Perret/AW&ST

Chinese area-denial capability is advancing fast not because of the appearance of any one breakthrough system, analysts emphasize. Rather, there is the broad accumulation and deepening of capabilities, which in many cases help each other. Still, particular advances of the past few years stand out. The best known is the introduction of two types of ballistic missiles with the revolutionary ability to home in on moving ships and thereby present a hypersonic challenge to defenses. First came the DF-21D, initially operational by 2010 and with a range of at least 1,500 km (900 mi.), then a version of the DF-26, a 4,000-km missile that was deployed in 2016. In a ground-bombardment version, the DF-26 threatens Guam. U.S. Adm. (ret.) James Stavridis emphasizes the importance of those weapons and also points to China’s construction of artificial islands in the South China Sea, now outfitted with surface-to-air and anti-ship systems, and the country’s improved offensive cyberwarfare capability. “In all three areas, China is pressing forward with accelerated developments, and all three areas are synergistic, creating an offensive capability that is greater than the sum of the parts,” says Stavridis, a former supreme allied commander at NATO. Cliff names two sensor categories among key recent advances for the area-denial effort. One is enhancement of China’s ability to detect distant ships with sky-wave over-the-horizon radars. Exactly how far they can see is not known, and it depends on the varying condition of the ionosphere, but Australia’s similar Jindalee radars have a range of at least 3,000 km (1,900 mi.). Then there is China’s ever-expanding number of reconnaissance satellites. “China now has a large constellation of optical and synthetic-aperture radar satellites with resolution sufficient to identify individual ship and aircraft types and frequent revisit rates,” says Cliff. “This will enable the [armed forces] to know whether enemy aircraft are present at a given airfield and to determine whether a ship formation detected by over-the-horizon radar consists of merchant ships or warships and, in particular, whether it includes aircraft carriers.” By Japan’s count, in 2017 China had six times as many reconnaissance satellites as 10 years before, and its total was approaching that of the U.S. (see graph).

Source: Japanese Defense Ministry

The satellites will presumably acquire more distant targeting data when China’s ballistic missiles gain hypersonic gliding reentry vehicles. This equipment, first tested no later than 2014, will push the reach of China’s nonstrategic ballistic missile force beyond that of the DF-26, points out Cliff. A hypersonic glider, able to maneuver, is also harder to shoot down. Chinese cruise missiles have gained speed, threatening land and sea targets. China has probably loaded its diesel submarines with the YJ-18 anti-ship cruise missile, which is also going aboard surface warships. The YJ-18 accelerates to perhaps Mach 3 as it approaches the target, giving the defenses little reaction time and a difficult target. The earlier YJ-12 anti-ship cruise missile, also supersonic, is carried by the H-6 bomber, which the navy is reportedly now receiving in a form based on the air force’s H-6K modernized version. Cheng calls the bomber-missile combination, harking back to Soviet Cold War technique, a tried-and-true method of maritime area denial. Indeed, the H-6 is based on the 1950s-era Tupolev Tu-16, which the Soviet Union used for the mission. It is vulnerable to fighters and surface-to-air systems, but the U.S.-based Missile Defense Advocacy Alliance credits the YJ-12 with a range of 400 km—so the bomber can launch far beyond the range of Aegis air-defense destroyers and cruisers. U.S. aircraft carriers, meanwhile, no longer carry fighters with features adapted for dealing with such bomber attacks: long range and endurance and far-flying air-to-air missiles. The Chinese bomber-missile combination could become a good deal more effective when the country deploys a stealth bomber, the H-20—around 2025, the Pentagon estimates. The H-20 will soon make its first flight, a Chinese military analyst has told the Global Times newspaper in Beijing. State television reports the program is making great progress. In its one reference to the new bomber, the Chinese air force has said it would have long range; this contrasts it with the H-6, which the Chinese classify as a medium-range bomber, and has a strike radius of more than 2,000 km in its updated H-6K version and a gross weight that may exceed 90 metric tons (200,000 lb.). A size above 150 metric tons therefore seems possible for the H-20; with four engines, that would be achievable with the thrust of several turbofan types that have been available. A few hints suggest that the H-20 will have an all-wing configuration.

Credit: U.S. Defense Department

Cheng points out the scale of saturation attack that such a big bomber could mount: If each H-20 carried two 10-missile rotary launchers, one Chinese bomber could launch 20 missiles; a regiment of 12 could launch 240. Even without the big new aircraft, cruise missiles from bombers and submarines and ballistic missiles from ashore could present U.S. Navy aircraft carrier battlegroups with the risk of exhausting their stocks of defensive weapons. Chinese drones, perhaps quite cheap and maybe adapted from obsolete fighters, could soak up more surface-to-air missiles. Stavridis says the U.S. could not afford to stay on the receiving end. “Ultimately, defeating a complex, robust, deeply embedded area-denial system will require initial offensive strikes to destroy the launchers, air bases and submarines before they can be used to attack U.S. forces,” he says. “We will have to kill the archer before the arrows can be launched. This, of course, is extremely destabilizing and could lead to an even greater level of conflict between the two nations.” Destroying land-based ballistic and cruise missiles before they are fired looks impracticable, since their launchers are mobile, says Cliff. “Finding them in the vast and complex terrain of eastern China is simply too hard. However, the numbers of these systems are finite, and by themselves they are not sufficient to deny the U.S. access to the Western Pacific area.” To win, China would need to combine its ballistic missiles with the other kinds of strike equipment. But aircraft operate from airfields, which could be attacked, Cliff suggests; ships could be sunk. Submarines are hard to find, but since China’s are mostly diesel boats their slow speed limits their ability to get into position. The effect of Chinese missile attacks could be minimized with decoys and rapid runway repairs. The U.S. could jam, blind or spoof China’s satellites and ground radars and satellites—assuming the two sides do not destroy each other’s spacecraft, for greater certainty of effect, filling valuable orbital altitudes with debris. Sometimes, preventing strikes such as those for which China is preparing is presented as a potentially easy task, especially when the target is a ship. The argument is that the defender needs only to break the kill chain somewhere—that is, prevent any one of the many steps the attacker must achieve to make a hit. The steps can include detection, localization and tracking of the target, repeated passing of information (for cueing, launch orders and mid-course correction), acquisition by the weapon seeker and more—foil one and you foil the attack. But Cheng points out that the sensors used for targeting of one Chinese class of weapon could be used for another; various communications channels could be shared, as well. The extent to which China has achieved such networking is unknown, but the result would be not a kill chain but a kill web, which would need to be cut in several places. That does not look so easy.