A Futurist's 20-Year U.S.-China Fantasy War Has Pissed off Everyone

By Derek Mead

This absolutely has to be the most Strangeloveian thing I’ve read: China, as well as folks in the U.S. military, is currently worked up about a 20-year long fantasy war waged between the U.S., as controlled by a 91-year-old futurist military strategist, and a theoretical, aggressive version of China.
The concept by Andrew Marshall is called simply “Air-Sea Battle,” and is the product of two decades of research into what the U.S. military could do in response to an unprovoked attack by China. The premise of the plan is based on a full-scale assault on American aircraft carriers and air bases by a technologically-advanced Chinese military. America’s only response, according to Marshall’s Pentagon-based office, would be to first destroy China’s long-range radar capabilities with stealth bombers and submarines. That so-called “blinding campaign” would be followed by a full on assault from sea and land.
The Washington Post has the scoop on a plan that is causing massive controversy in military circles right now. One side says that Marshall’s group of military planners and outside think tanks are simply taking the long view. Others say that they’ve become obsessed with worse-than-worst case scenarios that are simply costing the military money and time while raising diplomatic tension. From the Post:

A former nuclear strategist, Marshall has spent the past 40 years running the Pentagon’s Office of Net Assessment, searching for potential threats to American dominance. In the process, he has built a network of allies in Congress, in the defense industry, at think tanks and at the Pentagon that amounts to a permanent Washington bureaucracy.
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“The old joke about the Office of Net Assessment is that it should be called the Office of Threat Inflation,” said Barry Posen, director of the MIT Security Studies Program. “They go well beyond exploring the worst cases. . . . They convince others to act as if the worst cases are inevitable.”

Marshall dismisses criticism that his office focuses too much on China as a future enemy, saying it is the Pentagon’s job to ponder worst-case scenarios.

“We tend to look at not very happy futures,” he said in a recent interview.

Marshall, via Wired.

If it sounds like the Cold War all over again, it kind of is. Defenders of Air-Sea Battle say it’s a necessary precaution against a stratospheric rise in Chinese defense spending, which reached about $180 billion last year according to the Post. (That’s still only about a third of what the Pentagon gets every year.) Also disconcerting to the folks tasked with planning for the worst is China’s increased activity in the South China Sea.
While it’s understandable that Air-Sea Battle is politically quite sensitive, what’s fascinating about the whole concept is how it came about. It was first spawned by Marshall in the 80s thanks to his obsession with the idea that war would become ever-increasingly enhanced by technology, with bombs and missled delivered quicker and more accurately than ever before. (If this sounds like sci-fi, it’s because it’s about as close as one gets in real life.) Early on, Marshall (who was well-profiled by Wired in 2003) and his assistant, retired Lt. Col. Andrew Krepinevich, picked China as the biggest potential threat to the U.S. in the future. As China’s economy and military have gotten burlier in recent years, more and more people in the Pentagon started to pay attention to Marshall’s work.
Curiously, Krepinevich now heads the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, a defense think tank that receives a large portion of the $13 to $19 million that Marshall hands to outside agencies from his own research budget.
Again from the Post:

In the past 15 years, CSBA has run more than two dozen China war games for Marshall’s office and written dozens of studies. The think tank typically collects about $2.75 million to $3 million a year, about 40 percent of its annual revenue, from Marshall’s office, according to Pentagon statistics and CSBA’s most recent financial filings.
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The war games run by CSBA are set 20 years in the future and cast China as a hegemonic and aggressive enemy. Guided anti-ship missiles sink U.S. aircraft carriers and other surface ships. Simultaneous Chinese strikes destroy American air bases, making it impossible for the U.S. military to launch its fighter jets. The outnumbered American force fights back with conventional strikes on China’s mainland, knocking out long-range precision missiles and radar.

Interestingly, the Post notes that some of the opposition to the plan within the U.S. military is due to the potential for investment in Air-Sea Battle reducing the amount of spending available for ground combat. But mostly military folks are against it because they believe the plan is absolutely overkill:

An internal assessment, prepared for the Marine Corps commandant and obtained by The Washington Post, warns that “an Air-Sea Battle-focused Navy and Air Force would be preposterously expensive to build in peace time” and would result in “incalculable human and economic destruction” if ever used in a major war with China.

The plan would be expensive to carry out. In the past few months, as Air-Sea Battle has gained notice, the Army and Navy have said that a whopping 200 new defense initiatives are needed to prepare the military for the strategy. That, I think, is the most fascinating part of the story. For two decades, Marshall has worked on his fantasy war, while for the last half of that the U.S. was more concerned with rather low-tech threats in Iraq and Afghanistan.
But now that China is gaining prominence, Marshall’s work, which is admittedly dealing with the worst possible situations, is now a hot topic. What remains to be seen is if the military starts tossing money towards Air-Sea Battle, or if everyone will end up stepping back, taking a deep breath, and ask why China would attack the U.S. unprovoked when it holds $1.6 trillion of our debt and whose economy is intrinsically linked with ours. Just remember that Marshall doesn’t have a crystal ball, nor does he pretend to. He’s tasked himself with developing the worst-case scenario, and over the last 20 years, that’s what he’s done.
Follow Derek Mead on Twitter: @derektmead.

By Derek Mead 1 year ago Tags: war, China, US, military, business-and-politics