The China Phantom

Yes, we’re a trading nation. The recent (and future) military spend-up has been premised[ on the alleged need to deter China from shutting down the vital trade routes that run through the South China Sea. But… Wait a second. Those trade routes may be vital to us, but they’re even more vital to China as a route for their exports and imports (e.g. oil) on which the troubled Chinese economy depends. Why on earth would China shut down its own economic lifeline? Answer: It wouldn’t.

The same goes for the threat China poses to Taiwan. Much as China may huff and puff, it has little capacity to follow on through. For starters, China has only a handful of the transit and landing craft that would be required to transport the hundreds of thousands of troops necessary for a successful invasion, and – fatally – that invasion force would be sailing for days and days across the open sea, where it would be a sitting duck for attacks by air, and by submarines.

Could China’s own air power have already pounded Taiwan’s defences into submission, pre-invasion? No. Taiwan’s defences are set well back within heavily armoured mountain redoubts. Basically, the Taiwan invasion scenario is a fantasy. Yet it is being peddled as a scary justification for those lucrative AUKUS (and NZDF) military contracts.

Paper dragons

No doubt, China has the troops and the national pride to fight a very solid defence of its homeland. Even on that score though, it is vulnerable. China has 14 countries on its borders, and many of those neighbours are not its friends. China is also ringed by huge US military bases, including those in South Korea, Guam and Okinawa. It is not at all self-sufficient in oil, so would have limited capacity to sustain a defence of even its own territory. As explained below, its ability to project military force beyond its shores is not impressive.

So here’s the thing. We have no need to spend money on building up our military capabilities, because China is already at a massive military disadvantage, when compared to the US and its allies on every conceivable measure: nuclear and conventional arms, air, sea, and land power, command and control communication cyber systems, and the extent of recent war-fighting experience.

Tedious though this exercise may be, I’m going to spell out some of those major imbalances, if only because the myths about the military threat posed by China are so prevalent, and so routinely taken as gospel. For this purpose, I’ve drawn heavily on the military assessments made by the U.S. Air Force’s Journal of Indo-Pacific Affairs. Only 18 months ago, the assessment by these USAF academics began with this telling observation:

The United States enjoys overwhelming advantages over China. The United States outweighs China in terms of gross domestic product (GDP), technology, and military spending. China’s GDP is 15 percent of global GDP, compared to 24 percent of the United States. The United States retains a technological edge in key areas like command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (C4ISR) and air, surface, and undersea weapon systems. The United States has spent $19 trillion on its military since the end of the Cold War. This spending is $16 trillion more than China spent, and is nearly as much as the rest of the world’s combined [military]expenditure during the same period.

Moreover, the US has been fighting conventional and unconventional wars on every continent for decades… In places like Korea, Vietnam, Panama, Grenada, the First Gulf War, Iraq and Afghanistan. China’s untried military has no external battlefield experience whatsoever. The US has military bases and alliances in Europe, the Middle East, and Asia, from which it can speedily deploy its forces into any location on the planet. China’s military outreach is minimal, and its defence alliances are just as threadbare. In recent years, the mode of warfare has shifted, but even then ( see below) the US is overwhelmingly dominant.

In the post–Cold War world, the United States achieved dominance through AirLand Battle. Now the United States is shifting its military assets to the Indo-Pacific as it prepares for a SeaAir Battle…..

Right. But China would be vastly out of its depth in any Sea/Air battle waged in the Indo- Pacific. The US operates 11 carrier groups and enjoys clear maritime supremacy.

The United States is in a familiar terrain in the Indo-Pacific, having fought during World War II, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War. INDOPACOM accounts for 60 percent of USN, 55 percent of the US Army, and 40 percent of US Marine Corps

If push did ever come to shove, it would be a brutal mismatch:

In a full-scale war China would be decimated by the nuclear and conventionally superior US military. China has not dealt with any external crisis, nor has fought full-scale wars in modern history. A technological gap exists between the United States and China. They definitely are not in the same league.

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