Chapter 2 Theoretical Frameworks
2. Security Dilemma and Military Interaction between U.S. and China
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while concentrating on multi-role functions. With the military technology, the origin of security dilemma suggested by the offense-defense balance theory, therefore, should be considered other important elements and its characteristics such as a doctrine, an operational concept, and a tactic for example.
2. Security Dilemma and Military Interaction between U.S. and China
From the offense-defense balance perspective, how can the security dilemma between U.S.
and China explain specifically? Historically and traditionally U.S. has guarded freedom and democracy. With this background, U.S. has wielded strong influence in East Asia in order to protect regional nations like South Korea, Japan, and Taiwan from communists while maximizing national interests. Nevertheless, China’s expansionism and ambitious attitude having emerged since collapse of the Cold War are challenging to U.S. hegemony squarely while being a critical threat on U.S. security. Especially, the A2/AD, a Chinese maritime strategy, has been realized since the early of 1980s and it is also expansionism in terms of military perspective. U.S. is sensitive to the military trend of the People’s Republic of China because the U.S. has to hold its power via maritime space too.
People’s Liberation Army, Navy, and Air Force are now extending scope of the People’s War over all area of East Asian region, leaving main land where Chinese army had preferred to make a protracted war with attrition. The military trend will become a prerequisite condition for protecting China’s sovereignty spreading to the world as well as guaranteeing
30 F-16 is one of representative multi-role fighter. By its weapon operation capability, it can take a variety of air missions. For example, F-16C Block 50/52 series can employ AIM-9M, AIM-120A/C Air-to-Air missiles for defensive air mission. For Air-to-Ground missions, the aircraft can deliver and release Laser Guided Munitions as well as JDAMs with LANTIRN pod for precision guided strike. Republic of Korea Air Force, Korean Air Force Tactics, Techniques & Procedures (KAFTTP) 3-3 Volume 5: Basic Employment Manual F-16C, Republic of Korea Air Force (__: October, 2005), 4-167, 5-1.
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national development in the future. China’s core security objectives in Asia can be categorized by exerting control over its bear seas, defending and advancing Chinese sovereignty claims, and regional economic integration.31 To realize the strategic objectives, China has developed and acquired a variety of weapon systems including short and medium-range ballistic missiles, ground and air-launched cruise missiles, anti-ship ballistic missiles, advanced fighter jets including stealth jet fighters, long-ranged military capabilities, and other defensive systems.32 Therefore, U.S. understands the A2/AD strategy that can delay the assembly of U.S. power-projection forces, keep them beyond effective range of Chinese territory, or defeat them once they come within range including attacks on logistics, transportation, and support forces while dissuading the allied forces from granting U.S. forces operational access to their bases.33 Like that, U.S. is now appreciating that China has intention to attack the U.S. forces through preemptive attacks for example, but the China government strenuously denies about it, only mentioning that ‘it has only peaceful intentions and does not believe in launching aggression and that it fights wars only to defend its sovereignty and territorial integrity’34
On the other hand, although U.S. insists that ‘ASB is not about war with China or containment of China but rather part of a larger offsetting strategy,’35
31 Bonnie S. Glaser, “‘China’s Grand Strategy in Asia’: Statement before the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission” (paper presented at the meeting for the CSIS, Washington DC, March 2014).
the ASB is a military doctrine to counter-act the China’s military challenge. Detailed in the chapter 3, the U.S. war
32 Generally those weapons are categorized to offensive weapons in terms of operational capabilities, purpose of using, and characteristics of targets which the weapons are designating..
33 Roger Cliff, et al., Entering the Dragon’s Lair: Chinese Anti-access Strategies and Their Implications for the United States (Santa Monica: RAND, 2007), 51-71.
34 Gurmeet Kanwal, “China’s New War Concepts for 21st Century Battlefields,” IPCS 48 (2007): 2.
35 Richard A. Bitzinger and Michael Raska, The AirSea Battle Debate and the Future of Conflict in East Asia (Singapore: Nanyang Technological University, 2013), 5.
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fighting concept is a projection operation force that fights out of homeland by expeditionary forces. Therefore, the A2/AD could impede freedom of using space on the sea or in the air and it could also threaten U.S. military assets and facilities located in the oversea forward deployed bases. To overcome these threats, the ASB concept was designed to defense the enemy’s attack including preemptive strikes in initial phase while guaranteeing stereoscopic operations in the operation access phase for securing initiative. More importantly, it has also offensive intention in the flowing phase. With distant blockade, some expectable operations on the ASB doctrine include striking missions targeting strategic nodes in the Chinese territory.36 Moreover, the ASB has ambiguous intention and unclear end status on the concept whether it means neutralization of the Chinese military forces or elimination of the Chinese Communist Party. It could make the Chinese regime more anxiety with calling military distrust. As a result, continuous military competition between the great powers would be kept by the regime with more severe arms race. About this dilemma, Joshua Rovner said that ‘deep inland strikes could be mistakenly perceived by the Chinese as preemptive attempts to take out its nuclear weapons, thus concerning them into a terrible use-it-or-lose-it dilemma.’37
For the offense-defense balance perspective, the propensity of military technology and weapon system is an important element to form security dilemma. In the respect, the present arms race between U.S. and China is also a critical element to their dilemma. Military expenditure of China has increased steadily since the end of Cold War, and the budget in 2013 closed with 191,228 US million dollars (2.02% of GDP). U.S. also had increased military expenditure since the Cold War (although the budget was reduced recently due to the
36 Ibid., 3-4.
37 Billington, “Air-Sea Battle Is a Plan for War on China,” 30.
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financial sequester action).38 However, while the Chinese government doesn’t open detail expenses of the budget, the U.S. estimates that the military expenditure can be more increased because China omitted sensitive parts of it.39 Additionally, U.S. appreciates that arms modernization trends of China are mainly focused on offensive capabilities and the capabilities contains long range operation ability within China’s strategic lines the 1st & 2nd Islands Chains while enforcing offensive capabilities in the space and the cyber space.40
Recently, military technology trends of U.S. tend to pursue multi-purpose mission concept that can exert defensive and offensive roles from a single platform because of highly increased development costs for weapons. For example, USS Arleigh Burke-class DDG that operates AEGIS system developed for fleet air-defense mission originally has not only SM-3 missiles for ballistic missile defense but also cruise missiles for offensive missions. Similarly, USAF F-35 JSF fighter was developed to intercept the leaking enemy aircrafts without detection thanks to its stealth technology while it strikes ground targets by the Precision Guided Munitions. In the case of THADD (Terminal High Altitude Area Defense) missile defense system, it literally sounds like a pure defensive weapon but it can indirectly enhance offensive mission rate by protecting friendly forces taking offensive missions from the enemy’s massive missile attacks. Eventually, synergy effects generated by the interaction between offensive and defensive technologies should be considered into the security dilemma issue. Thus, the dilemma will be more escalated while China could be suspicious about the
38 See more detailed data on ‘Appendix A. Military Expenditure Trends of the US and the PRC.’ “SIPRI Military Expenditure Database,” accessed May 1, 2015,
http://www.sipri.org/research/armaments/milex/milex_database.
39 Office of the Secretary of Defense, Annual Report to Congress: Military and Security Developments Involving the People’s Republic of China 2014 (Washington DC: Department of Defense, 2014), 43.
40 See more data on Appendix B. China’s Arms Modernization Trends and Developing Capabilities.’ Ibid., 27-39.
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In this situation the ASB concept is aggressively aiming at China, Chinese communists might think that its regular military forces are not enough to minimize the dilemma because U.S. military capabilities are still superior in the conventional military technology and in the quantitative/qualitative scales of the force including actual experiences of war. Again, they will search for other ‘roundabout’ solutions in order to alleviate the escalation, realizing that the head-on confrontation against U.S. is no meaningful to overcome the ambiguous circumstance. Under the slogan ‘local war under high-technology condition,’ China armed forces, in fact, have propelled arms modernization since the end of Gulf War. Nevertheless their military ability to overshoot U.S. is insufficient yet. For example, the Chinese military are still staying in a transition stage although modern warfare strongly requires joint operations based on enforced ability to integrate heterogeneous operations of each military service. Especially, their network-centric C4ISR system lags considerately behind U.S. and retained weapon systems should be linked to the system are not a common concept yet for the Chinese soldiers. Of course, it is true that their weapon systems acquired recently are outstandingly improved than before but human resource such as operators controlling new weapons lacks experiences to adapt the improvement (even their operation procedures are still developing in the initial stage).
Besides these disadvantageous conditions, China regime would encounter other different problems when military confliction or war breaks out actually. Some domestic nationalism movements having a grievance against the coercive CCP would give rise to political chaos, taking advantage of war time. Also, it would cause collapse of the regime in severe cases.
Plus, the regime has to encounter a political crisis if Chinese SLOCs are blocked by the enemy’s military actions because China’s economy structure has a high level of dependence
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on overseas. Accordingly, China should consider somewhat different alternatives through irregular and asymmetric ways rather than regular war that is expensive but difficult to maintain the military balance when considering the complex problems.
Ambiguous intention or goal brings about the dilemma alongside uncertainty. The ambiguous ASB doctrine will make Chinese political regime more nervous so the regime will maintain its survival by all means available including nuclear bombs. However, using nuclear weapons will make the regime worry in politic, economic, diplomatic and military dimensions like nightmare of the Cold War whereas it cannot exclude possibility of nuclear retaliation of U.S. If then, China’s practical option is taking unconventional military actions based on irregular and unique ways.
Even though there are certainly offensive intentions among the two rivals, the security dilemma will be highly escalated like Jervis’s the first world by uncertainty derived from ambiguous attitudes of the states, blatant ‘demonstration effects’ for retaining offensive capabilities and its involved military technologies of weapons, and psychological effects worrying about unstable security caused by former two reasons. To solve the situation, the weak China will exert unthinkable and irregular military alternatives while escaping from the unfavorable status in the regular war. Moreover, U.S. military ignores the irregular warfare because of its conservative norms and culture prefers regular war based on high-technology, but for China it will be a decisive opportunity to maximize their inferior condition. This is essential of war and a real military technology!
3. Characteristics of Environment in Future War
Generally speaking, military policies of a state (as an overall meaning to cover a strategy, an operation, a tactics, a weapon and a doctrine that is fundamental principle) can be
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designated to its directions and concrete scales in accordance with threat level analyzed by understanding security situations exactly. By the way, the policies might have shortages not to deal with unthinkable and strange threats as well as it could not cover those threats effectively in the case of building up military forces according to the bureaucratic procedures calculated preliminarily. To supplement the bureaucracy, military academia has attempted to expect war patterns through case studies of the past, but most studies have limited discussing its scales within conventional concept and have largely concentrated on regular fighting styles or technological means. Nonetheless, those stale perspectives cannot explain recent asymmetric confrontations between regular war and irregular war and disappointing performance of the unusual conflicts, so it needs to take a converted view point by a fresh perspective.
‘Paradigm’ is a concept referring theory, law, knowledge, belief, and habit which a specific field or total society of an era have shared, and paradigm revolution breaks out when existing institutions cannot solve problems derived from it.41 Like that, paradigm in war patterns means a newly perceived idea from changes of diverse military environment such as ideas about war or war fighting styles.42
If so, where can we find the causes changing the paradigm and what are the causes? It can be enumerated to five ones largely; military technology, transition of civilization, values change, constrains of war resources, and military doctrine. Firstly, military technology has It is also a turnover process of cognizable ideas while identifying environmental elements differentiated from the war patterns what we are encountering at present.
41 Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1996), 35-42.
42 Won Ko, “War Paradigm Shift and its Implications for Korea Military Operation,”
GukbangJeongchaekYeongu (Defense for Policy Analysis) 26 (2010): 12-13.
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repeated its development, having a question how to attack the enemy without friendly’s fratricide. The technology has also been advanced by complementary cooperation between military and civil domain. For example, the origin of ‘Internet’ was begun by the DARPA, as one of military communication technologies in 1962 and its first name was the ARPANET.43 After emergence of the internet, it could achieve splendid development today passing through commercialization phase because a variety of application technologies could be devised during the phase while useful technologies for military purpose have re-accepted into the military domain again. Specifically, ‘Network-Centric Warfare’ concept could be realized by that interactions and diverse military solutions are more depending on the civil domain as portion of cyber warfare gets more large. While the technological phenomenon is currently spreading out over the world, Won Ko insists that the phenomena can be categorized into two domains; hardware domain such as space warfare system, unmanned weapon systems;
software domain for operating the hardware such as human resources and supporting institutions. Moreover, he strongly argued that ‘technical hyper link’ offers a technical source to employ existing conventional forces with future-oriented forces together, integrating those two domains.44
43 Barry M. Leiner, “A Brief History of the Internet,” ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review 39 (2009): 23.
However, the technical element is not only for super powers. Its development mixed with civil sector has enabled massive proliferation of various kinds of weapon with reducing production costs. The result brought that weak countries including non-government actors can enjoy the technical benefits. Actually, some poor states such as North Korea and Iran can effectively but inexpensively hack into U.S. military networks (especially their tighten network centric war-fighting systems), and electronic hyper-link nodes which U.S.
44 Ko, “War Paradigm Shift and its Implications for Korea Military Operation,” 17-18.
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military assets fully rely on could be attacked by those poor actors or even specific privates in the asymmetric way.
Transition of civilization can be explained, focusing on ripple effects of information. For instance, ubiquitous communization of information and its unlimited proliferation can de-concentrate a conventional combat style into a shapeless spot style by its non-leaner nature, massive application of information derived from out-of-order configuration, and automation of those things.45
Today people’s value change is described a phenomena concerning individual safety increasingly rather than unconditional sacrifice for public interest. Representatively, the individualism is observed very easily on a number of SNSs and it is also true that diverse NGOs are expanding their roles gradually with circulation of anti-government movement. In this circumstance, justification of war can be raised seriously when some collateral damages like recent mistaken bombings on innocent civilians in the Operation Enduring Freedom are opened while spreading out over the world. Thus, people would not support their government any longer as much as in the past and decision processes on war would be more sensitive thanks to those public opinions about anti-government.
The transnational operation system of Al-Qaeda emerged around the 9/11 eluded the grasp of the U.S. and its allies through internet network dispersed as a huge number of spots and the unconventional organization sent shockwaves throughout the world in the way that it cannot be removed completely.
Within limited military budget condition, arms modernization in peace time and conduct of war have been a touchy issue since the era of the ‘nation-state’ of the Peace of Westphalia.
Because war has been only conducted for people’s interests and sovereignty with their lives
45 Ibid., 22-24.
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since then, the budget has had to be used by the people’s approved range. However, the problem would be more critical than before because not only to manage modern military organization will require enormous amount of financial support but also to cost of war will astronomically increase, so the modern military should complete missions in spite of the restricted budget situation. Reduction of the military organization is one of current issues of RMA and this situation effects on using other war materials including petroleum, munitions as well as the defense budget itself. Thus, modern military troops must manage its organizations economically and must conduct its war and warfare effectively too. Under these limitations, the military would lose people’s supports while suffering humiliation that it is regarded as a crippled and useless pain in the neck if it cannot smartly respond disconcerted threats including irregular and asymmetric ones.
Accordingly, military organizations have attempted to renovate their doctrine ‘how to fight’
in order to adapt those difficult environments because war concept can be improved by basis on improved doctrine in terms of which the doctrine offers specified principles in war fighting style. For example, to overcome reduction of costs and cut-downed strength, U.S.
has tried to make a doctrinal innovation such as ‘surgical strike’ concept to maximize operation effectiveness by pin-point strikes to selected core nodes of enemy states in late of 1980s. This effort proved its effectiveness in the Gulf War. In detail, U.S. military forces neutralized strategic targets located in rear area of Iraqi soils despite standing face to face with the terrified Iraqi Republican Guard at the front line. This being so, they could reduce casualties and prevent protracted war. In the respect, military doctrine should be modified its mean and application depending on change of environments in order to provide a fundamental method how to conduct war.