Lesson Forgotten By Us
by Thomas H. Moorer
-
March 05, 1999
The architect of our present naval superiority was Alfred Thayer Mahan who, in the late 19th century, emphasized the importance of the interaction of commercial and strategic considerations. He was particularly concerned with this interaction in the Pacific. Ironically, as we come to the close of this century we seem to have forgotten those lessons. Our "nodal analysis" of key strategic points in ocean shipping underlying and necessary to the operation of our two ocean "forward deployed" strategy in times of conflict seems to have been neglected even as the Chinese have increased their study of these matters. Nor have they limited themselves to study. Quietly they have moved to cut off our ability to support our technical naval and military superiority by taking advantage of the increasing "forwardness" of its deployment as we have abandoned our forward base at Subic Bay, a base without which we could not have waged the Vietnam conflict or any other such regional conflict and sustained our firepower at the front.
The more "forward" the deployment, the more dependent we are upon logistics with our lines of supply stretched over much greater distances. At the forward point of the long supply chain, out where the carrier groups' firepower perimeters are opposite those of the potential foe, we have a technological edge over Communist China's navy that is overwhelming at this time. They have no carrier task forces to match ours. They do not have, just to pick one example, submarines that can match ours. But why would we expect them to seek to match us at our strongest points?
I have already pointed out in extensive testimony how they have positioned themselves at our weakest link, the Isthmus of Panama, through the use of closely allied commercial entities. See my Senate testimony from this past Summer. Cutting us off at that weakest point would enable the Chinese Communist military to so weaken our capacity to keep our forward forces supplied with munitions and jet fuel that we would have to bring all the troops and ships home in a matter of days.
But there are other vulnerabilities which the Chinese would exploit and which we seemed to have abandoned thinking about. In addition to resupply and refueling there is the question of maintenance and repair. All of the maintenance and repair for the Western Pacific was done at Subic. After we abandoned Subic, the Chinese military, again through commercial fronts, tried to take it over. Then President Ramos (a graduate of West Point) alerted to this impending takeover, not by us but by private individuals and information, prevented them from doing so. At this point, our forward-most repair facility to support our forward-deployed fleet is at Guam. But here again it has been private action, not that of our government, that has preserved that facility in our hands and expanded it. Hearing of the impending takeover of the small shipyard there by non-U.S. interests, a private U.S. group, led by retired Admiral James A. "Ace" Lyons, bought the shipyard, turned it around and has now upgraded it. Our government and military planners do not appear to have played any role in either of these events. We have been oblivious to the need to maintain logistical support.
However, there seems to be no lack of planning on the Communist Chinese side. Indeed, they appear to be following a plan which Mao Tse Tung was implementing when he was interrupted by the Vietnam conflict, with which I was quite familiar. This plan involves moving Communist Chinese control outward to an island chain that, if you look at a map, can be seen to run from the southern part of the Japanese islands all the way to the Indonesian archipelago. One of the largest islands in this string of islands is Taiwan. Further, by
controlling these islands and the straits of Malacca, which, like Panama, is one of the seven key chokepoints of the world's maritime commerce, China breaks our power in the Western Pacific and installs its own in our stead. We now have reliable reports that piracy in recent years has increased in the Malaccan straits, although last year it appears to have decreased slightly. More importantly, there are reliable reports that Chinese Communist officials have protected Malaccan straits pirates who would otherwise have been brought to justice. Shades of the Spanish main. We have not seen piracy as an instrument of strategic control and intimidation for several hundred years, but it is cheap and effective and requires no technological upgrades. It is, in fact, how England began its defeat of a much larger and more militarily powerful foe, Spain in those faraway years.
So we see a vast chain of resupply, repair, maintenance and underlying need to control the maritime commerce supporting it that stretches from Panama across the Pacific to where its narrow head, like the head of an arrow, meets the chain of islands which I have described, which includes such groups as the Spratleys and the Paracels in addition to Taiwan and its surrounding islands. While we were still tied down in the Vietnam conflict, the Chinese Communist military began to occupy and fortify these islands, always doing so in a part of them that did not directly challenge our capabilities and with regard to which we were powerless to stop them due to geopolitical considerations of which they were well aware.
Most recently, for example, they have greatly built up and fortified an airstrip on Woody Island, one of the Paracels. It has a 7,300 ft. runway. From Russia they are buying fighters and developing their own fighter-bombers. In the Spratleys they have built up an extensive facility at a place called Mischief Reef. Islands, of course, as was said of Malta during World War II, are unsinkable aircraft carriers. Needless to say, today they are also unsinkable missile batteries. The additions that the Chinese Communists have been making to their navy include particularly swift destroyers designed to fire stand off
missiles. So while we have been reading about missiles that can reach Los Angeles and missiles bracketing Taiwan, the Chinese have been building capabilities that can force us to retreat dramatically if they do cut off our logistics in the rear, without having to challenge us where our technological superiority would cause them to lose. If the shaft of our arrow of logistics and resupply, maintenance and repair, is broken at its base, we have to pull back the head. It is that simple.
The Chinese military have studied American military actions and capabilities intensively since their preparations leading up to their entry into the Korean conflict. There they fought us to a stalemate, first by overwhelming us with effective if relatively unsophisticated tactics, and next because we elected not to use our superiority in air, naval and nuclear capability against their base in China itself. Public representations to the contrary notwithstanding, they teach their military trainees and their schoolchildren that we, the United States, are "the enemy." Under this administration their operatives have been brought into our Department of Defense and into all branches of our military operations, where their aggressive intelligence gathering has become legendary. Under their system, moreover, all "students" in this country, and there are thousands, are also assigned to the care of party or government overseers and are used to gather intelligence.
However, our studies of the strategy and tactics of the Communist Chinese military appear to have had artificial restrictions and to have been dominated in some cases by ideas that appear faddish. In the face of an increasingly evident intent to displace us in the Western Pacific and take Taiwan, we have been excessively preoccupied, for example, with information warfare and now with urban warfare and this seems to have resulted in a blindness to the obvious -- the overwhelming dependence of our military effort in actual
conflict upon ocean transit. For over two hundred years, with the exception of our own Civil War, we have been able, with extremely minor exceptions, to keep actual combat far from our shores. We are now in danger of eroding badly our capacity for forward deployment which has enabled us to have that protection. Why is this being allowed to happen is the question, and who is responsible for not dealing with it?
As a result of our failure to focus on the basic and the obvious, and of our forgetting the lessons of Mahan, the Chinese, as happened in Korea, now have us at a serious disadvantage despite our technological superiority at the point of forward deployment. Once again their methods are relatively unsophisticated but quite effective. By establishing their presence in the Isthmus, in the island chain and the straits of Malacca, and by moving forward their air war capability and creating flanking stand-off missile threats they place us in a position where our superiority can be neutralized and we will be unable to bring it to bear. They have used what they do have more effectively than we have used what we have. We have not countered their moves and they continue them unchecked. We do not even study their strategy any more.
The use of the technique of gaining control of your opponent's logistics in his rear while confronting him only where you have the advantage on his flanks should not be a surprise to us. It is classic Sun Tzu strategy, as he, their greatest general, expressed it centuries ago in his classic "The Art of War": The surest way to defeat an enemy is to so arrange matters that you do not have to go to war with him to win, for you have made it so that he cannot defeat you. You render him unable to sustain the battle and see that he knows that he cannot. Then, since he cannot defeat you, you advance your position forward at the expense of his. The mere capacity to damage the Canal and make it impassable creates this situation. It is accentuated by our failure to provide for forward maintenance and to counter each forward move of the Chinese communists as they increase their threat to our allied countries in the Western Pacific. They have employed their Art of War well. We have forgotten ours. It is they who have melded Mahan with Sun Tzu and it is we who have forgotten the lesson.
Not content with control of the key chokepoint at Panama and that in the Malaccan straits, they have now established an intelligence chokepoint on Tarawa, the scene of one of the bloodiest battles of World War II in the Pacific. They have taken a superb monitoring post right in the middle of our stretched out arrow of supply and maneuver. There has been a pattern of misleading about the Panama Canal and its strategic importance which is traceable from the report of a young staffer to whom I was asked to respond on the Helms Committee through testimony at the hearings last summer, to the testimony then submitted by the President through Ambassador Hughes which was critical of my own. When we have another Tarawa, will those who have misled take responsibility for it? When our failure to train and prepare to meet this very real threat costs lives and casualties, will those who have taken this position that a commercial threat only exists acknowledge that we should have prepared and trained for the communist Chinese expansion now occurring before our eyes and an attempt to capture the free people of Taiwan?
For it would seem that this pattern of misrepresentation is a far more dangerous type of "information warfare" than that which is now so frequently studied under that name. The point of information warfare, we are told, is to confuse the enemy, render him incapable of acting effectively and sap his will to fight and resist. Sounds like what the Chinese are doing to us now. For this concept, broadly conceived, encompasses not only the disruption of sophisticated command and control functions, and particularly computers and information networks, but also the ancient art of political penetration of your enemies' political structure and the influencing of his decisions in your favor, such is documented in "The Year of the Rat" concerning the threatening moves by the communist Chinese in the Taiwan straits in 1996. Who needs sophistication when through campaign donations you can control the high defense and foreign policy decisions of your opponent by those, including the leader, who are ostensibly making his decision?
One wonders what the sailors and marines of the fleet feel like as they realize that while they were out there at that point of forward confrontation it was their opponents who were making the decisions as to how American ships would be deployed and moved. How do those who have engaged in this pattern of deception feel about covering up for this kind of confusion of our will by a power which considers us the enemy? The recent announcement by Admiral Prueher, upon his retirement, that the Chinese communists were a strategic threat to us after all, should not have been forthcoming only upon retirement. It should have been the center of the debate all along. Who is preventing our high officers from speaking the truth before they retire? (Admiral Prueher also indicated recently the intention of the U.S. Seventh Fleet to soon step-up its patrols in the South China Sea and increase the number of elements involved. - t)
The recent announcement by the DoD (Department of Defense) that the Chinese communists will be in a position to take Taiwan by 2005 seems to be overly optimistic. Why would the Chinese wait until then when they can control our decisions now with our current president in office? Why would they risk having someone else in that position, someone whom they might not be able to control? Why would they risk having a president who might build our military up instead of down, who might have our military focus on the real threat instead of ones that suit a political agenda?
This president has not done a single thing to indicate that he has any intention of analyzing and countering the clear intent of Communist China to displace our power in the Western Pacific and become militarily dominant in the region, including taking Taiwan. Instead, he has done much to assist the Chinese communists in gaining military ascendancy at our expense. It is our will to resist that expansion that is being sapped by the continuing acts of misrepresentation and the failure to analyze and give an accurate picture. It is we, the American people, who are being confused -- and by our own leader. We have not only forgotten the lessons of Alfred Thayer Mahan, we have learned to help apply the strategies of Sun Tzu to ourselves, all to win domestic political gain for a leader who refuses to oppose a foe that ever more clearly seeks to displace us as a world power as soon as it can.
The British, leading up to World War II, erected powerful fortifications at Singapore, only they neglected to put any on the landward side, across the narrow straits from the Malaysian Peninsula. They assumed the Japanese would attack from the sea. The Japanese, however, landed on the peninsula, and employing such means as commandeering bicycles from the Malaysians, moved quickly opposite Singapore and took it from the landward side. Churchill, when challenged about this in parliament, stated that it had no more occurred to him that Singapore's fortifications had been built without defenses on the landward side than if a battleship had been built without a bottom. Presently, with the Chinese Communist presence in Panama and their push outward through island chains, and their growing presence in island countries all across the Pacific, such as the one that gave them Tarawa, our entire Pacific forward deployment and defense is effectively without a bottom. For it has to be bottomed upon our logistical support capabilities, and they have been either abandoned or compromised.
Now the Communist Chinese troops have targeted ours stationed at Taiwan in the straits. They have sent the signal, and the countries of Western Asia have seen it. To our recent demands the Communist Chinese have either not responded at all or have responded by telling us to mind our own business and have now even stated without equivocation that if we dare to try and protect Taiwan, they will give missiles and missile technology to other countries that are hostile toward us. With each futile pretense of a gesture from this president the Chinese Communists only increase their drive to dominate the Western Pacific. The message to all of the surrounding countries is as clear as it can be: China, not the U.S., is the real power in Western Asia.
Who among our legislators will now inquire into this, our Senate having been so thoroughly cowed? Have we a Churchill to acknowledge the error and take charge? If we had one would not his files be rummaged through? Would not Messrs. Blumenthal and Carville lie about him? Would not Messrs. Dershowitz and Rivera dutifully echo those lies? Would not this Attorney General investigate him? Would not Mr. Flynt print scurrilous stories about him, calling him a hypocrite? Churchill was, after all, as he himself was quick to admit, not a saint. Imagine if this crowd had been working on him, with this press so eager to join the attack. He never would have made it to Prime Minister. You can see where our commander-in-chief is leading, and it is not against our foe.
--------
Retired Admiral Tom Moorer is a former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Chief of Naval Operations, Commander-in-chief U.S. Pacific Fleet, Supreme Allied Commander Atlantic and Commander-in-chief U.S. Atlantic Fleet. |
