China War Strategy - Blockade

Various strategies have been put forth for conducting a war with China.  Why is having a strategy important?  Because the strategy determines what equipment, assets, training, and tactics we should be focusing on.  Is the LCS (or F-35 or Zumwalt or whatever) useful?  Well, that depends on the strategy that we envision using. 

One of the common China war strategies put forth is the distant blockade.  In simple terms, this strategy envisions a long range, stand off, world wide blockade imposed to deny raw materials.  Over time, China will lose the ability to continue waging war and will be forced to accept some sort of negotiated peace settlement.

Before I go any further, let me clearly state that this is simply an objective evaluation of one possible strategy.  It is not the strategy that ComNavOps would endorse! 

This strategy has the following attributes.

• It ensures a very long term process.  China has immense natural resources available within its own borders and has many overland supply routes through other countries.  It is highly unlikely that the US would be willing to interdict many of the overland supply routes since they pass through other countries.

• It minimizes large scale, direct combat in favor of small, lower end blockade actions and counteractions.

• It requires world wide military actions and necessitates using a large number of ships and aircraft, possibly more than we have available.

• It would be almost exclusively an Air Force and Navy action.

• It would cause immense disruption of the world’s economy for an extended period of time (to be fair, any war between superpowers will disrupt the world’s economy – the time frame being the key issue).

• It would result in a war of attrition.

Let’s examine the basic premise: that China could be “starved” into peace.  As stated, China has large amounts of natural resources within its borders.  Consider how long N.Korea and Iran have held out in the face of severe sanctions (an uncontested blockade, in essence) and neither of those countries has the resources that China does.  In WWII, Japan was able to continue feeding the homeland and securing sufficient raw materials to continue waging war for four years despite being a very small country and an easily isolated island nation.  Likewise, Germany was able to continue producing war materials right up until the end of the war.  Yes, each experienced shortages of various materials (as did the US) but the overall war production effort carried on and the populations were at least minimally fed.  China is many times larger and can’t be physically isolated.  How much longer could China hold out?  Does anyone think the welfare of its citizens is the Chinese government’s main concern?  We’re probably looking at decades before any serious degradation of war effort would occur.  Could the US and world economies withstand this?  Could we absorb decades worth of attrition?

In order to be successful in any useful time frame, the blockade would have to extend to China’s overland supply routes.  This would require very long range forays by aircraft to attack the routes, pipelines, etc. and would necessitate flying through other country’s airspace.  Many of those countries would be unlikely to allow such intrusions – Russia, notably, comes to mind.

The final and most important aspect of such a strategy is the end result.  What would the end result be?  Answering that starts with understanding the beginning of the war.  The US will not initiate a war with China.  Thus, the assumed start of the war would, undoubtedly, entail the seizure by China of islands, land, or, specifically, Taiwan in an initial “blitzkrieg”.  Then, after many years of blockade the end result would be a negotiated peace settlement demanded by a war-weary Western world that can’t match the long term willingness of China to continue the conflict.  The reality, in such a peace negotiation, is that China would offer to return a few pieces of land or allow a semi-autonomous governing of Taiwan under Chinese control (to be later, slowly, scrapped).  There would certainly be no return to the original boundaries and conditions.  Thus, a negotiated settlement would be a win for China.  China would have secured the vast majority of its war objectives.

In fact, if China were smart, they would grab a few extra pieces of land at the start of the war, that they don’t really want, to use as bargaining chips during eventual peace talks at which point they would “magnanimously” offer to return them, thereby demonstrating their commitment to, and extreme desire for, peace.

After the negotiated settlement giving China most of what it wanted, China would pause, rebuild its military and prepare for the next round of annexation and conflict.

We see then, that the net result of the blockade strategy is to allow China to achieve the majority of its wartime goals at a relatively small cost while leaving China with a fully functioning military and supporting defense industry and completely intact civilian infrastructure, thus ensuring that the entire cycle will be repeated down the road.

The blockade strategy is a flawed strategy that accomplishes nothing for the US.