Paul Giarra on China's Anti-Ship Ballistic Missile System
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DEFENSE FORUM FOUNDATION CONTROLLING THE SEA FROM THE SHORE: WELCOME AND MODERATOR: SPEAKER: FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 18, 2009 Transcript by J. WILLIAM MIDDENDORF: Good afternoon. I am Bill Middendorf, the chairman of the Defense Forum Foundation. This is a Navy program, basically, something dear to my heart. By way of background, just to tell you that I was former secretary of the Navy and these programs we started many, many years ago and they are coming to fruition today, the anti-missile defense. The Cold War did not end with the collapse of the Soviet Union. There are great threats out there today, not just Iran and North Korea but China – the capabilities of China are growing exponentially in this area. And I don’t know what their intentions are – the speaker may have a better idea than I on that – but I do know about their capabilities. They’re rapidly approaching – or will be very shortly – the power of the Soviet Union with their submarine forces and what have you, at least those forces that can threaten us, within the next 10 or 15 years. Since most of our programs through the Navy Department need a long lead time – eight to 10 years to fruition – those of you young people here today have the responsibility to make sure that we build these long-lead-time programs in order to match the potential threat. I welcome you to this Congressional Defense and Foreign Policy Forum, focusing on the security implications of China’s anti-ship ballistic missile system. As you know, our carriers are our final shield and now it appears that they could be vulnerable. Today’s forum is part of a series we’re sponsoring on China in which we are looking at both their unprecedented buildup of military capability, as I mentioned, as well as the internal conditions – dear to Suzanne’s (Scholte, DFF president) heart with her work in Korea – as well as the internal human rights conditions and the growing call among Chinese citizens for democracy and reform. There’s a kickback now on the blackout of the Internet, and we’ll hear more about that in an upcoming forum. We welcome those of you who are participating for the first time and hope that you will be a regular participant. Before I introduce today’s guest speaker I’d like to acknowledge the Defense Forum board and staff. This is Henry Song here. He’s director of Grants and Projects. And our beloved intern, Hyoju Kim, who we’re going to miss because she’s going back to Korea to do great things there, and she’s been with us for some time. We’re just honored to have her. And of course Suzanne Scholte, our president. I’d also like to introduce an old friend of mine, a colleague who’s advised me over many, many years and is one of the great leaders on the congressional scene, Howard Seggerman– beloved Howard. Our speaker today is Paul Giarra. He leads Global Strategies & Transformation, which provides national security and defense strategic analysis. He’s the manager of the National Defense University’s Institute for National Strategic Studies for the paper, “America’s Security Role in the Changing World: A Global Strategic Assessment.” I always wonder how they come up with these names, but it’s as good as any. This document has over 20 original narratives and there are 125 contributors. Paul is a strategic planner, a war gamer, a security analyst for China, Japan, East Asia, and NATO’s futures, and a U.S. Naval War College Maritime Strategy “Greybeard”. He’s properly attired today with his gray beard (laughter). During his naval career he was a naval aviator. He flew P-3Cs in the Pacific as well as in the Atlantic and the Mediterranean. He was a naval strategic planner, and a political military strategic planner for Far East/South Asia/Pacific issues. His last assignment for the Navy was as the senior country director for Japan in the Office of Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs. He established the U.S.-Japan Theater Missile Defense Working Group. That’s very significant. Then his work in Japan led then-Secretary of Defense Bill Perry to award him the Defense Superior Service Medal, and calling the historic significance of his achievements. He’s also the recipient of one of our highest awards, the Navy Meritorious Service Medal, and it’s a great honor to have Paul address this critical security challenge facing the United States. Paul. (Applause.) PAUL GIARRA: Well, good afternoon. Thanks for coming. It’s a pleasure to see you and to be here. Ambassador – I should say Secretary Middendorf, thank you very much for that very kind introduction. And I should say in return that the secretary – and I say secretary because of his service as the secretary of the Navy – was instrumental in and really led the development of the Aegis missile defense system, which is really key to many of the things we’ll be talking about today, or at least alluding to, and that was a signal achievement and accomplishment for American national security. Thank you, Suzanne, for inviting me and for hosting this event. I really appreciate it. Ladies and gentlemen, I feel like Moses today trying to talk about the Ten Commandments and having 20 minutes to do it, so I’m probably going to cover about two of them. It means I’m going to have to skip over a lot of things and I’m going to have to go fast. You’ll probably be as dissatisfied as I am by the time we’re done, but we’ll see if we can get through this together. I’m delighted to be here. I plan to discuss one particular implication for the United States of China’s naval modernization that has particularly far-reaching consequences, and this is something that’s never been done before. It’s China’s landmobile, maneuverable reentry vehicle-equipped anti-ship ballistic missile. Say that fast a couple of times. And for the duration of my remarks I’ll just simply say ASBMs. Nobody has ever been able to hit a moving target with a ballistic missile yet, so that’s what the significance of this is. I want to emphasize that these views on ASBMs expressed here are mine alone and they have been developed solely from unclassified sources. And although they’re my views, they have benefited greatly from unclassified consultation with many colleagues. In particular I’d like to commend to you the work of Mr. Mark Stokes of the 2049 Institute here in Washington; Dr. Andrew Erickson of the U.S. Naval War College’s China Maritime Studies Institute, who spoke here in the last session; and Mr. Rick Fisher of the International Assessment and Strategy Center. I want to use my time today to address the question of national and naval implications of a developing Chinese capability that only now is attracting widespread unclassified notice. Now, I’m going to show you the two-slide version of my briefing, and it starts this way: With today’s audiences I have to remind myself that some may have never seen the Cold War black comedy, “Dr. Strangelove”, starring Peter Sellars in three separate roles. This is Slim Pickens, otherwise known as Major “King” Kong, riding a nuclear weapon down to its point of impact. In the movie it’s quite a scene – you’d have to have been there – from “Dr. Strangelove.” And this is the Slim Pickens’ view of anti-ship ballistic missiles. This is what the Chinese are trying to do with ballistic missiles, which is target our carriers and other capital ships from thousands of miles away, and we’ll talk more about that. Now, public awareness of this Chinese ASBM capability is just now gaining steam. This unprecedented anti-axis capability has numerous implications for the U.S. Navy that can probably be best summarized as threatening the Navy with losing air dominance and perhaps air control over the high seas. Now, professionals know what that means, and during World War II, to give you an example, German soldiers had to figure out how to disguise their positions and hide. American soldiers had to figure out how to identify their positions so that they wouldn’t be bombed by accident because the only airplanes flying by that time, in ’44 and ’45 were American aircraft and allied aircraft. So you don’t want to lose air dominance or air control. Now, this is the cover from the May issue of the U.S. Naval Institute’s Proceedings magazine. I think you were able to pick up a copy of this, and if you weren’t able to on the way in, I can get a copy to you. It’s a painting by maritime artist Tom Freeman, and it depicts a Nimitz aircraft carrier and its escort in flames. This is a pretty dramatic, I would say horrifying, picture. There’s a back story to this. Proceedings apparently had this picture for two years before it chose to publish it, and that’s because its time hadn’t come really until this spring. So publicly this is a very new issue. And here is the carrier. These splashes here are not from debris from the flight deck and the air wing exploding on the flight deck. These are from the submunition warhead that’s just attacked this carrier. Tom Freeman actually painted two versions of this, one with the submunitions warhead with these splashes and one without them. And you see back here – you probably can’t see it from where you’re sitting, but that’s one of the Aegis destroyers or cruisers in flames, also having been attacked. Fundamentally these ASBMs, in what appears to be China’s asymmetric strategy for control of the sea from the shore – which is pretty interesting if you think about it – have profound consequences for the U.S. Navy and for American global strategy. Now, we have to go back to the beginning of American military strategy to understand how important this is. Historically and today, American security strategy has depended upon unfettered, overmatching military access, aspects of which date to the beginning of the republic – access in order to ensure and maintain economic competitiveness and advantage, access to be able to prevent the rise of a hegemonic competitor, and access in order to be able to intervene when necessary. Whether or not you agree with that, that’s what we’ve had to be able to do all this time, especially since the middle of World War II, in particular. For the United States, future security depends upon unimpeded naval power that provides global strategic mobility. That means that the U.S. can move military force wherever it wants whenever it wants to do so. We’ve become so used to this that we take it for granted. The Chinese are not taking it for granted. In order to deal with the complex, fractious and increasingly insecure world - comprised of not just nation states but non-state actors as well - will require being able to exploit maritime external lines of communication. Now, if you think of the world as a series of continents, they are surrounded by oceans, and the oceans are the highway on which the U.S. Navy is able to move virtually unchallenged now. This means that the Navy has to be able to continue to move anywhere on the maritime periphery in order to establish influence and project power. China wants to thwart this American global strategic mobility and power projection. China’s strategic intent is to put at severe risk the eyes, the ears, and in this case the fists of American naval power projection systems, which are built for short-range, persistent operations in the Asian littoral and China’s maritime approaches. Chinese ASBMs are a “keep out” capability. They are designed to range and attack naval surface platforms, which are the centerpiece of American naval power and a key element of U.S. global deterrence and crisis response strategy. Now, I have to explain something about the way navies work. Range and risk in naval warfare are the ways that commanders think about operations. First consider that there are only about two dozen capital ships in the U.S. Navy – 11 or 12 heavy aircraft carriers operating in carrier strike groups and about a dozen aviation-capable, what the Navy calls straight-deck amphibious assault ships operating in expeditionary strike groups. Even adding to these numbers the other high-value units of the U.S. and potential coalition fleets, there are relatively few capital ship targets. Thus, this competition becomes a numbers game very soon. To put things in perspective – and I’ll get to this in a minute – the U.S. warships and especially aircraft carriers are tough but they’re not unsinkable. But first let me talk to you about range and risk. This is what the Chinese call the “first island chain,” and this is what the Chinese call the “second island chain.” If you can see this, the first island chain basically runs through Japan, through the tip of Indonesia here through Thailand and then on up through India. And the second island chain goes out into the Indonesian archipelago. This is, by the way, from the OSD China Military Power Report of May 2007. And this, from the RAND report, the “Dragons’ Lair” of 2007, shows that this is the littoral that’s basically being contested now by Chinese anti-access systems, not just anti-ship ballistic missiles. So this is sort of a trade space where we need to keep forward and the Chinese are trying to push us back. So that should give you some idea of what’s initially at stake here. But remember, as I’m talking about relatively short-range ballistic missiles, once this capability is developed it can go on missiles of any range. So keep that in mind too. Okay, now I told you that aircraft carriers are tough, and here are some pictures. Here’s the USS Enterprise on workups to go to Vietnam in 1969 off Hawaii. There was a terrible fire on the flight deck. The Navy almost lost the ship. She was back on line in two months. Here is USS Saratoga off Iwo Jima. I’m sorry this is such a dim picture, but these are basically big holes in the flight deck, and Saratoga was back on the firing line in five days after this. And here is USS Franklin. She lost 850 men in this Kamikaze attack. The Catholic chaplain won the Medal of Honor. You heard the saying, praise the Lord and pass the ammunition? That’s where this kind of – this really happened. And she was brought back and rebuilt. But Navy carriers and other capital ships and surface platforms are not unsinkable. So here is Lexington, sunk in the Battle of Coral Sea. Here is Wasp, sunk in the Battle of Guadalcanal. And here is Gambier Bay, sunk in the Battle of Leyte Gulf. Now, there is no other data after that because Enterprise, Oriskany and Forrestal had fires during the Vietnam War but they were all accidents aboard the ship and nobody has shot at the U.S. Navy with any seriousness since ’44 or ’45. Okay, so they’re not unsinkable, and that’s important to remember. And we take for granted that the Navy is going to keep on sailing, but this is really where the rubber meets the road for this kind of weapons capability. So China’s development of anti-ship ballistic missiles is going to make moving to and remaining in these littoral seas problematic because the naval commanders don’t want to put their ships in harm’s way this way. This is the range equation, and I’ll talk a little bit more about this here in a little bit, about how if you’re within somebody else’s range – the range of someone else’s weapons, you have to take action. In other words, getting there is going to be half the fun. We haven’t had to worry about this sort of challenge since the end of the Cold War, but military planners now are going to have to consider new challenges to their assumptions regarding mobility and access. Chinese ASBMs represent a remarkably asymmetric Chinese attempt to control the sea from the shore. This is a reinforcing Chinese cultural asset. It needs to be carefully considered, given the Chinese predilection for land forces, despite their naval buildup. They’re a land-based power. Now, I want to point out before I go any further that this Chinese ASBM capability is not yet in hand, but all indications are that it is coming soon. Unclassified estimates are that it will be tested at sea within the next several years. Now, imagine very long artillery with great accuracy that is land-mobile, making counter-battery fire virtually impossible. Then imagine that someone had the idea to turn it seaward and make it capable of hitting a ship underway. This is an unprecedented capability, as I said at the outset. It’s not been done before but it’s what the Chinese are aiming for, and that’s what China’s ASBM amounts to: extraordinarily long-range coastal artillery, thousands of miles potentially. Now, this is what old coastal artillery used to look like. This is Battery Williston at Fort Weaver in Hawaii in the 1920s. This is Battery Wallace at Fort Barry in San Francisco in the 1930s. And this is what the future of coastal artillery looks like. This is the Chinese DF-21 medium-range ballistic missile. And this is the missile we’re talking about for the present. This apparently is the missile that the Chinese have chosen to design this capability around. So that’s the beast we’re talking about. Now, this is from DOD China Military Power Report of 2009, this year. And I’m sorry this is so indistinct also. This yellow line here gives you an idea of the coverage of that DF-21 from inland Chinese firing positions. So you can see how far out it comes. DOD estimates that China’s first ASBM will be a DF-21 variant with a range of approximately 1,000 nautical miles, and that’s what the yellow range arc represents. In better resolution you would really appreciate this graphic. Here is China here, and here is the DF-21 firing out to this line. Here is the – excuse me, the DF-15. Here is the DF-21 that we’re talking about presently, out to this line. Here is Andersen Air Force Base, carriers on station and so on. And here is the putative potential DF-25 coming out to about 3,200 kilometers. And this is from – and I’ll refer to this a little bit later – this is from Mark Stokes’ report on China’s evolving conventional strategic strike capability from the Project 2049 Institute. Now, among other things, this Chinese ASMB capability depends upon and represents the real advent of network warfare. These missiles are not self-contained. They have to be aimed at the general area of a network-detected naval target where the ASBM’s internal guidance systems can then take over. I should note that any advances in Chinese network warfare have the defects of their virtues for the Chinese because dependency upon networks cuts both ways. So this is a potential vulnerability for this system for the Chinese. Like the Soviets before them who tried exactly this same capability, the Chinese are now trying to solve this difficult reconnaissance-strike problem. This requires extensive over-the-horizon and on-orbit reconnaissance, surveillance and targeting assets to get the missile into the right part of the ocean before its on-board sensors can take over. There is lot riding on whether the Chinese can actually succeed in developing an ASBM. The Chinese unclassified writings are quite confident that they can do so. Now, one reason that they feel this way is – this is a Pershing II medium-range ballistic missile. It’s a surface-to-surface land attack missile, and it has this maneuverable reentry vehicle trajectory here, if you can see that. This is the same trajectory described in Chinese writings about their anti-ship ballistic missile program. You can see the same maneuvering here. And, by the way, this is one of the reasons why this is going to be so hard to deal with: because our missile defenses against ballistic missiles depend upon a predictable ballistic trajectory. This is not a predictable trajectory, and the reason that this missile makes this maneuver is, among other things, to slow down, because it has to slow down in order to target the ships that it’s looking for. But this makes it very hard for our developed systems, like the Aegis weapons system as an example, to target. Now, for persistent, long-range operations, at least currently, the U.S. Navy is based primarily on aircraft carriers and their embarked air wings. Without extraordinary efforts to provide for air-to-air refueling, naval aircraft in a typical naval air wing have an effective tactical radius of less than a thousand miles, typically closer to 500 miles. The DF-21, which is a relatively short-range option for ASBMs, has a comparative range of 1,000 miles, according to DOD’s China report. So you can see here that now there is going to be an operational level of war standoff between these two capabilities if this anti-ship ballistic missile capability comes online. Now one of the reasons this is important is because occasionally technology advances really make a difference in warfare, and I can give you several naval examples. Those are the ones I know best but there are other kinds of examples as well. One is aircraft at sea, for instance on aircraft carriers. Another is the Monitor and the Merrimack, the first modern iron-clad ships. A third is steam propulsion at sea. And the fourth, which I think is really the most intriguing, is the development of the torpedo and the submarine. Before the development of this torpedo – not the torpedo in the Battle of Mobile Bay, where Admiral David Farragut said, “Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead.” Those were what we think of as stationary sea mines. But this kind of mobile torpedo pictured here decoupled the power of the warship from the size of the warship. Before this, in order for a ship to be very powerful it had to have large guns and the large guns meant that it had to be a big ship. A submarine doesn’t have to be big, and in comparison it’s quite small, obviously. This is an early 20th century submarine, World War I vintage. This is an example of the kind of operational technical change we’re talking about that made a tremendous difference. Was it the end of the world? No. Were submarines a huge problem for everybody? Yes. Did we develop our own? Yes, and so on. But it really changed things, both naval warfare specifically and the balance of military power in general. We almost lost World War I because of submarines. We almost lost World War II because of submarines. Of course, conversely we won World War II because of submarines in the Pacific and so on, but the point is technical operational changes can make a real difference. Now, this is not just a Navy problem. Chinese ASBMs have dramatic implications for the other services and for joint and combined and multilateral operations in the Pacific and elsewhere. No other American military operations – air, ground or amphibious – are feasible in a region where the U.S. Navy cannot operate. It just is not going to happen. This is particularly consequential for force structure such as the Marines, who want to operate from 50 or 100 miles offshore for ship-to-objective maneuver. In this environment, that’s not feasible. Conversely, land attack ballistic missiles ranging American bases and en route facilities like Guam make naval operations as well as Air Force operations throughout the region very problematic,. Now, as I mentioned, this becomes a numbers game very quickly. Numbers are going to be in China’s favor. Now, consider this: In a wartime situation, even if fleet ASBM defenses were otherwise perfect and every U.S. interceptor hit and destroyed an inbound ASBM, naval missile magazines are very limited and cannot be reloaded at sea. This reload deficiency is a glaring defect for the U.S. Navy. In every other aspect of operational logistics the Navy replenishes at sea. Not being able to reload shipboard missiles and magazines at sea severely limits our defense and turns what would be otherwise a high-tech network warfare competition favoring the United States into a simple battle of attrition favoring the offense, in this case China. Also consider that bad news does not improve with age. Once the Chinese develop this capability, it will escalate in sophistication and effectiveness and proliferate widely over time. It will become the gift that keeps on giving and further complicate our global military posture. This is an opportunity now – really yesterday – for U.S. Navy technical and analytical introspection regarding the resources, organizations, processes and continuity that we must have for coming to grips with this and other complex operational and technical challenges. And I want to let you in on a secret. This paper started as an examination of the kinds of resource organizations, processes, and continuity required for coming to grips with complex operational challenges. However, when I started doing the research, the anti-ship ballistic missile became so significant that it became about ASBMs more specifically. Now, we’re talked about game changes. We’ve talked about Chinese trying to change the terms of the game and so on. Typically it’s very difficult to come to grips with game-changers. This picture is from the Army-Navy football game program of November 29th, 1941, just nine days before the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. This is a picture of USS Arizona, and the caption says, “A bow-on view of the USS Arizona as she plows into a huge swell. It is significant that despite the claims of air enthusiasts, no battleship has yet been sunk by bombs” – this was nine days before Pearl Harbor, 20 years after the Navy did its own tests and proved that battleships were vulnerable to air attack. Everybody knows about Billy Mitchell; nobody knows about the tests that the Navy itself did the year before, in 1920. So that it’s hard to get an old idea out when things change is very important. The analysis of this current ASBM problem has to be widespread and it has to inculcate itself into the force and the fleet. I want to now go into a slightly new territory for my discussion of anti-ship ballistic missiles because what we’re talking about is China trying to deny sanctuary to the U.S. Navy. And what I mean by that is that sanctuaries in modern naval warfare are an integral factor of American planning and operations. Sanctuaries are embedded in the American naval psyche by our defining geographic circumstances, first and foremost, with extensive boundary oceans east and west. As a result, the Navy has learned to operate at extended range, exploiting the opportunities of having to take the fight to the enemy by taking advantage of the extraordinary strategic depth that has been a fact of life for naval commanders. Strategic depth imparts sanctuary. There are two aspects to sanctuary in naval war, similar to fundamental air warfare doctrine: preserving and extending one’s own sanctuaries and denying sanctuary to the Navy. Okay, now this is where I had fun. Why am I showing you a picture from the Revolutionary War of the Battle of Guilford Courthouse, in what’s now Greensboro, North Carolina in 1781, other than the fact that I majored in early American history? This is an example – an early example that captures in one frame the whole notion of sanctuary on the battlefield, superbly depicted, in my view, by military artist Dale Gallon. This is the Battle of Guilford Courthouse. This is Hoskins House here. On the far horizon, right about there, those are the American forces. That’s us. These are the Red Coats in their forward positions. These are the Red Coats in the rear waiting to advance. Here are wounded. Here are staff officers. Here are supplies. On this battlefield, this is the sanctuary. And there’s another sanctuary similar to this one just on the other side of the American lines as well. So in 1781, sanctuary was hundreds of yards from the battlefield. These kinds of things happen all the time. I don’t have the slide, but a friend of mine at RAND showed me last week a picture of the military buildup in Kuwait prior to the first Gulf War. It was astounding, this overhead view of – it was about 16 square miles, literally, of warehouses and rows of vehicles and tanks and so on. So this whole concept of sanctuary is really very important here. And if the Chinese, with this new capability of anti-ship ballistic missiles can overturn the U.S. Navy’s reliance on being able to fall back, regroup, rearm, refuel, move forward again, it’s going to change the entire strategic circumstance first in the Pacific and then elsewhere, The Battle of Guilford Courthouse is an example from early in our history. Now let me talk to you a little bit more, because I think it’s interesting and important, about sanctuary at sea. In the days of sail, sanctuary was provided by darkness, by range and by the weather gauge. What that meant was if you were to windward you could either accept or refuse battle. And so if you were upwind, that was a good thing. The advent of steam power changed the nature of sanctuaries at sea but not their utility. With steam it became range that provided sanctuary, not wind. As a result, because of the adoption of steam power, it became range of gunnery that provided sanctuary, and warship tonnage increased in order to mount larger guns. That’s why ships got so big and so heavy. Today the U.S. Navy operates from ranges beyond which sanctuary exists, from beneath the surface where lack of detection provides sanctuary and so on. Sanctuaries are planned into U.S. Navy operations as a base for replenishment and repair. For instance, continental U.S., mid-ocean island, and forward-deployed allied bases have been a mainstay of modern U.S. operations across the board, just as coaling stations were sanctuaries for the Navy in an earlier era. Which comes first, the base or the sanctuary? It’s hard to define, but Alfred Thayer Mahan, the father of modern American naval doctrine, understood that in order to protect such way stations, control of the sea – in other words, sanctuary – was a necessary prerequisite. The Chinese have translated Mahan in something like a half a dozen different editions, so the Chinese are quite aware of this, and the Chinese, as their economic and political interests expand, are, in my view, expanding their military reach. Now, in the future, because of the proliferation in particular of ballistic missiles, these forward bases will become much less of a sanctuary with the proliferation of precision-guided weaponry, including cruise missiles, by the way. Sanctuary also has implications for U.S. Navy strategic mobility, permitting what the U.S. Navy is famous for, which is using the theater periphery as a point of concentration from which to launch strategic and tactical thrusts. So in this regard, it is crucial to consider that Chinese ballistic missile operations consider mobile, naval and fixed-based targets as part of a coherent whole, and only one in a broad front of emerging Chinese military capabilities. Now, the Chinese understand – and we should understand – what the consequences are of losing naval sanctuaries, which are a refuge to which to retire between combats. Their loss has profound consequences for the outcome of modern naval warfare. The German navy lost the Battle of the Atlantic in 1944 and 1945 when the Bay of Biscay and French ports no longer were the U-boat sanctuaries they had been earlier in the war. Similarly, the Imperial Japanese Navy and the Japanese Merchant Marine had no sanctuaries after late 1942 and were decimated by submarine and air attack. The 1939 sinking of HMS Royal Oak at Scapa Flow was so spectacular because in doing so, Lieutenant Prien and U-47 penetrated what had been considered an impregnable sanctuary of the Royal Navy. And, ironically, the block ship assigned to guard the channel arrived 24 hours later. So these are some of the compelling reasons to focus the attention of naval and air planners working together, especially in the Pacific theater. Now, this is not just about the Navy and it’s not just about anti-ship ballistic missiles. This is just sort of an easily put together list of Chinese challenge areas. You can read them to yourselves, but look what they are: space warfare, energy weapons, fifth-generation fighter aircraft, 60-ton capacity airlifters, air-mobile army forces, and so on. I’m not making this list up. These are things that the Chinese are doing. You can verify this for yourself. It’s all unclassified research. So this is part of the bigger picture, but it’s part of a coherent whole from the Chinese perspective. We’ll see if it becomes coherent from ours. Now, earlier I talked to you about my colleagues who are not here, and in absentia I want to recognize them because their work here really is significant, okay? First, Mark Stokes of the Project 2049 Institute. He’s written – just published this week: “China’s evolving conventional strategic strike capability, the anti-ship ballistic missile challenge to U.S. maritime operations in the western Pacific and beyond”. Mark understands that what we’re really talking about here is bigger than anti-ship ballistic missiles. It’s conventional strategic strike capability, which has many more ramifications and parameters than just anti-ship ballistic missiles. Mark Stokes is a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel. I’ve never seen research like this before. This should be available on the Defense Forum Foundation’s website for you. I’ve made it available. So please look at this. It’s the most marvelous information gathering and analysis you can imagine, and all unclassified. Rick Fisher, another great America who gets after both the Russians and the Chinese, is an equal opportunity analyst. He’s written this: “Chinese Military Modernization: Building for Regional and Global Reach.” Rick really understands this, and he’s tenacious, persistent and very, very effective. And, finally, my colleague and editor for the results of this briefing, which are going to be a book chapter in a U.S. Naval Institute book published late in the spring, Andrew Erickson, who was my predecessor on this podium in the previous meeting, who has just published “Using the Land to Control the Sea: Chinese Analysts Consider the Anti-Ship Ballistic Missile.” This is what the Chinese are saying about this capability that they’re trying to develop. This appears in the autumn edition of the U.S. Naval War College review. And Andrew Erickson, if you don’t recall, is on the staff of the China Maritime Studies Institute at the U.S. Naval War College. So, finally, since the spring there has been a tremendous outpouring of work in writing on this subject. It’s very gratifying because it’s a very important subject. And the subject is bigger than itself because it implies and talks about and infers and gets at a much larger Chinese military defense industrial complex effort that’s very well organized. It’s internally competitive, and I mean that in the positive sense. The Chinese have set it up that way so that they’ll get the best results out of it. And it’s very broad-scale. Now, I’m not saying that the Chinese are 10 feet tall. Nor am I saying that anti-ship ballistic missiles can’t be defeated, but we can’t do any of that by just standing still. Any questions? Yes, sir. Q: John Liang with Inside Missile Defense. How many – (inaudible). How fast can the PRC, do you think, can develop a lot of these anti-ballistic missiles? How soon – (inaudible)? MR. GIARRA: I think the way to gauge that is going to be how soon they test – if I can say it this way – publicly at sea rather than against land targets in a way that can’t be denied if it can be seen more broadly. And as I mentioned, the unclassified predictions are in the next year or two. So many decisions have to be made by China, but it certainly looks like they can do this if they want to. Q: Just a follow up. One of the paintings – the painting you showed of the plane showed an Aegis ship, which I assume that – it’s supposedly a futuristic painting but we would assume that the Aegis BMD system that the U.S. Navy currently has and is developing failed. MR. GIARRA: If you recall, I mentioned two ways by which that can happen, just from my own simplistic analysis. One is that there are more offensive anti-ship ballistic missiles than there are ballistic missile interceptors in those magazines which are very limited in what they can carry, and they can’t be reloaded at sea. That’s the first one. The second way is that a maneuvering reentry vehicle provides a very difficult target to even the best ballistic missile defense because all of that is computational, remember, in the fire control computers and on the missile. Q: So the question is, how do you – at least on the first point. On the first point, how do you hope to counteract that reloading problem? MR. GIARRA: I am not the subject matter expert on this, but it seems to me that you simply need to bring more missiles to sea with you, and the way to do that is to build a barge that has lots and lots of missiles that will keep up with the battle force. The other way is to build entirely new classes of ships that can be reloaded at sea, have larger magazine capacities and so on. I suspect this is one of the reasons why the Navy is talking about new, very large nuclear-powered missile defense cruisers, but that’s just speculation on my part. Mr. Secretary? MIDDENDORF: You showed a list, Paul, of the different programs that the Chinese are working on. One of the programs they’re working on is the EMP threat. And as I understand it, basically they’re developing an EMP threat – and we had a session on this several months back here at the Defense Forum Foundation – where they can explode a nuclear device over middle America somewhere, take out pretty much all of our communications for quite a period of time. So many of our utility grids and what have you have a very narrow interface, and also most of our weapons systems are based on computers. And if they were going to begin a process of action against us, they would probably begin with an EMP threat. Now, the Navy assures me that we have the EMP threat covered at sea because of the lightening rods on these ships, so to speak, the equivalent of a lighting rod, but that doesn’t hold true on land. And can you address that, how we would be able to counteract that with their newly developed nuclear missile programs? MR. GIARRA: This is an area, Mr. Secretary, where I don’t think the doctrine has caught up with the technology. During the Cold War, I think there was a presumption that other than in a mutual assured destruction exchange, in other words a global thermonuclear war, that EMP strikes were impractical because we had to use nuclear weapons in order to generate the pulse. There are developments now that provide pulse generation at the tactical level without without large explosives, let alone nuclear detonations. And it strikes me that the doctrine of having to prepare for EMP environments hasn’t caught up with that new technology. I tend to think that an EMP attack against the United States would be tantamount to all out war because it would be an attack of mass effect, and it would be entirely devastating to the civilian infrastructure and it would disrupt the economy and the ability to produce food and other goods, probably for decades. So there maybe is a sense of deterrence involved there, but whatever the Navy thinks about its fleet defenses, the civil infrastructure is completely and totally defenseless. I don’t know if I’ve answered your question. MIDDENDORF: That’s the point we brought up in the previous sessions here, but what you’re saying and what has been said by most every expert we’ve had from DOD is that the CONUS, the civilian aspect here, plus a lot of the military installations here are totally defenseless in the United States. We’re practically naked against a EMP threat. MR. GIARRA: Yes, that’s right. And imagine having to support the cost of putting bulletproof glass in every window in America, as an example. That’s not relevant to EMP but it’s – what I’m trying to do is describe the kind of infrastructure protection efforts that would have to be undertaken to defend against that. And when you don’t build that way from the outset, going back and retrofitting is just – it’s insupportable. And I don’t – I can’t imagine how we’re going to get out of that conundrum. Some of these capabilities here – one of the things that’s not on this list is cyber warfare capabilities. And the Chinese have very advanced capabilities. Cyber warfare is as devastating potentially as would be EMP attacks. And this is another area where doctrine hasn’t caught up with technology. Yes, ma’am? Q: I don’t know about this – I don’t know how relevant it is, but I’m wondering, are there any other nations that are developing this kind of technology? Of course – (inaudible) – hysteria about Iran, but they seem like a nation that would also be very, very, very interested in this technology. Has it proliferated to that at all or is it still really only being developed in China? MR. GIARRA: First, I don’t know. Second, it would be too early to know. Third, my presumption is that it will proliferate. For instance, cruise missiles, there are thousands and thousands of naval cruise missiles – anti-ship cruise missiles in the world now. And that’s since 1967 when the Egyptians sank an Israeli destroyer during the 1967 war. So these kinds of things proliferate. They escalate. They have longer range, more capability. We see this time and time again. We’ve seen it with airplanes, for instance. That’s a perfect example. In World War I, aerial combat started out with the observers in aircraft throwing grenades down on the ground, and 20 years later we are bombing European cities into rubble with mass bomber raids. So I see the future of this in that same way. Now, the part that is difficult to proliferate is the targeting part; that is to say the over-the-horizon targeting aspects of this. So that will be one impediment in the spread of this capability. But the smarter the missiles get, then the different ways by which to figure out where the ship is that you want to hit. That will come. Proliferation of on-orbit systems and so on, we’ve already seen the effects of that. So I agree with you; I just don’t know when and where it will happen first. Sir? Q: Your closing graphic had the picture of the carrier with the new reentry vehicles coming in. I believe it was the number-three graphic. They’re the same only it had a little notation that said, “Chinese Internet.” Is there where we got it from? MR. GIARRA: Yes, that’s a Chinese graphic. Q: It’s a Chinese graphic. Q: And it is the source authoritative or – (inaudible)? MR. GIARRA: That’s a good question. It’s hard to tell who the source is. It’s on the open Internet. The point is, however, that it’s one pixel in a high-definition TV screen. And one of the reasons why this is important here is because the body of effort that the Chinese have undertaken starts to answer the question that the secretary asked at the beginning regarding intentions versus capabilities. And capabilities tend to illuminate intentions after a while, in my view. (Applause.) MIDDENDORF: Just a reminder that it’s not inevitable that we win automatically every war we go into, although we’ve had pretty good success. I remember that I was in the Pacific in the late ’40s – early ’40s and it was very obvious to most of us that we were losing that war. And we thought – most of us had this terrible feeling that it was going to be inevitable that the Japanese build up and the attacks and the successes and the German movements that we were behind the eight ball, and it was really touch and go. As we look back, and those of us – I feel comfortable about our defense, we now realize that we could win that war, because we did win it. But those of us that served in that war certainly didn’t have that feeling until late 1944 or early 1945 when the momentum shifted in our favor. Prior to that it was all negative. One of the things that I would like to emphasize is that – since I’m 85 and have been through depressions and a couple of wars and what have you, that one of the – the United States’ success in the military sense has always been based on our economic well being. Without our economic well being and the great, marvelous free enterprise system and the capitalistic system that creates these new jobs and new technologies out of hundreds if not thousands and thousands of new industries that are created at all times, we would not be able to maintain a strong defense. Right now the United States is hurting on the economic side and a lot of our military programs are being cut back, even some of the anti-missile defense programs we’ve been hearing about recently. And not only that but the departments are not being able to expand in the areas that, in my opinion, looking ahead at the long lead-time programs, that they should be developing. Everything now is concentrated on the very short-term aspect of the nearby wars. And it’s a huge price we’re paying for not building our long lead-time programs so as to offset the risks that were so clearly defined to us today by Paul. So, Paul, thank you very much for that. I wanted to mention also that our next two forums will be on October 23rd and also November 13th. The 23rd meeting will focus on human rights, and our speaker will be the 2009 recipient of the Civil Courage Prize, Sahrawi human rights activist Aminatou Haidar. |
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