Stop Building Battleships, Start Building Fear
It is too early to tell what advice President Trump received from military leaders concerning the strategic ramifications of the recent Venezuelan operation. We Americans are superb military tacticians. However, in the past two decades, U.S. military leaders have lost sight of strategic art and have recently not given their civilian leaders sound advice.
Policy toward China is a good example. While the Chinese are placing vertical launched missiles in boxes aboard container ships to augment their navy, we are building battleships. Our generals and admirals see the massive Chinese warship building program as an overwhelming group of targets and agonize over losing an attritional sea battle. They should be viewing the Chinese surface fleet as an expendable matador’s cape aimed at distracting us into wasting valuable and limited amounts of anti-ship missiles while the Chinese overwhelm their true objective whether it be Taiwan, the Philippines, or some other U.S. ally such as Japan.
Chinese President Xi Jinping has stepped up his rhetoric to unify Taiwan and China by force if necessary.
The art of identifying centers of gravity and critical vulnerabilities has largely been lost and with it our ability to truly deter Chinese aggression. I have said in this publication on a number of occasions that Beijing’s real strategic center of gravity is her export economy and her critical vulnerability is her need to import oil. Her surface combatants are pawns to be sacrificed early in a conflict to mask her real intentions. The container ship missile are just the tip of the iceberg. In the event of a Taiwan attack, we would be better off concentrating our drones and missiles on Chinese amphibious ships than cruisers and destroyers.
Instead of flattering President Trump with the possibility of naming a battleship after him, the admirals should be threatening unlimited naval warfare targeting Chinese imports and exports world-wide. This should be an unlimited naval campaign aimed at bringing China to her economic knees in the event of an attack on Taiwan, the Philippines, Japan, or any other U.S. ally. The threat and ability of the U.S. to totally blockade China in the event of a conflict would be a real deterrent to war. Any thoughts of a conventional naval battle are merely playing into Beijing’s hands.
History may not repeat itself, but it often rhymes. A good example is the run-up to War II in Europe. Germany always had the potential to isolate Great Britain by conducting a naval campaign against her imports of food, oil, and other raw materials needed for waging war. Instead of building an overwhelming fleet of attack submarines, Hitler hedged his bets by wasting precious resources on building two super-battleships (Bismarck and Tirpitz). These ships were designed to be huge anti-commerce raiders. Instead, the Bismarck was quickly sunk by the British Navy after aircraft had crippled her. After that, the Tirpitz never ventured into the open ocean and was eventually sunk in port by British naval aircraft. The Germans had the right idea but lacked the resources to properly implement it. In the Pacific the Japanese did much the same thing, squandering precious limited resources on the super-battleships Yamato and Musashi.
Even the Marine Corps has been mesmerized by the Chinese matador’s cape. The Corps has retooled its primary function away from world-wide crisis response to an attritional missile firing force in the South China Sea. This is something the other services are much more capable of doing. The Marine Corps should scrap its missile strategy called Force Design and concentrate on its proved ability to seize and board commercial vessels worldwide on the high seas.
Chinese President Xi Jinping has stepped up his rhetoric to unify Taiwan and China by force if necessary and backed up his intention with naval exercises designed to show that he can blockade or invade Taiwan. These are not idle threats. He obviously does not respect or fear our current strategic posture. A threat of unlimited naval war backed up by radically expanding our attack submarine fleet would send an unambiguous message. Such a conflict would hurt America, but would ruin China. The promise and demonstrated capability to fight such a conflict would deter it from ever happening.
Instead of naming battleships after the President, the Navy should be building Trump class attack submarines.
READ MORE from Gary Anderson:
Learning From the Past, Leading in the Present
Rules of Engagement and Command Decisions
Celebrating Marines While Questioning Their Future
Gary Anderson is a retired Marine Corp Colonel. He was Chief of Staff of the Marine Corps Warfighting Lab and served as a civilian special Advisor to the Deputy Secretary of Defense