ESR looks at the concerns that China may be considering starting a war with the United States in the wake of the Wuhan Coronavirus:
To understand how limited the PRC’s war options are, we can start with a grasp on how difficult and unsatisfying any war of conquest would be due to the geographic box China is in. The obstacles around it are formidable.
To the south, the Himalayan massif makes all of South Asia other than a narrow coastal plain on the Southeast Asian peninsula inaccessible to serious troop movements. There are no roads or rail links. The last time the Chinese tried pushing in that direction, in 1979, they were unable to sustain an offensive at any distance from their railheads and withdrew after less than a month. Their war aim – forcing the North Vietnamese to withdraw its troops from Cambodia – failed.
To the west, the vastness and comparatively undeveloped state of China’s western hinterland is a serious logistical problem before one even gets to the border. At the borders, the Tien Shan and Pamir ranges present a barrier almost as formidable as the Himalayas. External road and rail links are poor and would be easily interdicted.
To the north, movement would be easier. It might be just within logistical possibility for the PLA to march into Siberia. The problem with this idea is that once you’ve conquered Siberia, what you have is … Siberia. Most of it, except for a small area in the south coastal region of Primorsky Kraye, is so cold that cities aren’t viable without food imports from outside the region. Set this against the risks of invading a nuclear-armed Russia and you don’t have a winning proposition.
To the east is the South China Sea. The brute fact constraining the PRC’s ambitions in that direction is that mass movement of troops by sea is risky and difficult. I recently did the math on Chinese sealift craft and despite an expensive buildup since the 1980s they don’t have the capacity to move even a single division-sized formation over ocean. Ain’t nobody going to take Taiwan with one division, they’ve has too much time to prepare and fortify over the last 60 years.
The PRC leadership is evil and ruthless, but it’s also cautious and historically literate and can read maps. Accordingly, the People’s Liberation Army is designed not to take territory but to hold the territory the PRC already has. Its mission is not conquest but the suppression of regional warlordism inside China itself. The capability for the PLA to wage serious expeditionary warfare doesn’t exist, and can’t be built in the near-term future.
It’s often said that the danger of aggressive war by China is a function of the huge excess of young men produced by covert sexual selection and the one-child policy. But to expend those young men usefully you need to get them to where they can fight and are motivated by some prospect of seizing the wives unavailable for them at home. The PRC can’t do that.
The military threat from China is, therefore, a function of what it can do with its navy, its airpower, and its missiles. And what it can do with those against the U.S. is upper-bounded by the fact that the U.S. has nuclear weapons and would be certain to respond to a PRC nuclear or EMP attack on the U.S. mainland by smashing Chinese cities into radioactive rubble.
Within the constraints of conventional warfare waged by navy and air force it is difficult to imagine an achievable set of PRC war aims that gains more than it costs.
It’s possible — even likely — that the Chinese military has something like the oft-rumoured “ship-killer missiles” that might be able to cripple or sink an American carrier … if it was in range. That makes the South China Sea, the East China Sea, and the west coast of Japan a possible no-go area for US Navy carrier strike groups. A good defensive weapon system to have on hand in case relations with the outside world go “hot”, but not a strategic game-changer. Nobody would be likely to consider anything as dangerous as a seaborne invasion of mainland China, even without the threat of wonder weapons like the ship-killer. And good defensive weapons won’t secure the trade routes that China depends on outside coastal waters.
In a lot of ways your strategic situation is like a scaled-up version of Japan’s in 1941 – you could seize the initiative with a Pearl-Harbor-like initial shock, but you can’t wage a long war because without sealane control you’ll run out of key feedstocks and even food rather rapidly. And unlike the Japanese in 1941, you don’t have the kind of serious blue-water navy that you’d need for sealane control outside the First Island Chain – not with just two carriers you don’t.
There is one way an aggressive naval war could work out in your favor anyway. You can count on the U.S.’s media establishment to be pulling for the U.S. to lose any war it’s in, especially against a Communist or Socialist country. If your war goals are limited to ending U.S. naval power projection in the Western Pacific, playing for a rapid morale collapse orchestrated by agents of influence in the U.S. is not completely unrealistic.
It’s playing with fire, though. One problem is that before you launch your attack you don’t know that your sucker punch will actually work. Another is that, as the Japanese found out after Pearl Harbor, the American public may react to tragic losses with Jacksonian fury. If that happens, you’re seriously screwed. The war will end with your unconditional surrender, and not sooner.
Update: Bone-headed typo in the headline fixed. It’s funny how you can’t see ’em until just after you click the Save button…
