Japan Explores War Scenarios With China

... three of five scenarios explored by the defense ministry recently involve the Self-Defense Forces squaring off against the People’s Liberation Army (PLA).

While contingencies involving North Korea’s ballistic missiles and Russia were among the scenarios the defense ministry explored, the top three all involved a crisis in the East China Sea. 

The first scenario examined a war between China and Japan over the disputed Diaoyu/Senkaku islands in the East China Sea. Earlier on Tuesday Japan summoned the Chinese ambassador in Tokyo for the first time since Shinzo Abe was sworn in as prime minister to protest the continued presence of official Chinese ships in waters around the islets, which are claimed by Japan, Taiwan and China.

The second scenario, meanwhile, expands on a Senkaku contingency and looks at a widening war involving PLA attempts to seize the Ishigaki and Miyako Islands west of northern Taiwan.

The third, and perhaps most controversial, scenario focuses on how Japan would react to a Chinese invasion of Taiwan in 2021, a date reportedly chosen because it coincides with the 100^th anniversary of the founding of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). According to the scenario, the PLA would rely mostly on amphibious vehicles, special forces, ballistic missiles, and a fighter blockade to achieve its ends.

Although the latter scenario makes it clear that the hostilities would primarily involve the PLA and Taiwanese military forces, it nevertheless raises the possibility that China would attack U.S. and Japanese bases on Okinawa, while using long-range ballistic missiles, such as the DF-21D and DF-31, to threaten aircraft carriers in the region and the Western United States should U.S. forces attempt to intervene in the conflict.

Interestingly, Japan would have a responsibility to come to Taiwan’s aid in the event the PLA engages Taiwanese forces, the Japanese-language Sankei Shimbun said in its reporting on the scenarios on Jan. 1.

There has been much speculation over the years about whether Tokyo would intervene if the PLA ever invaded Taiwan. 

Reports in 2007 alleged that Japanese and U.S. officials, alarmed by growing Chinese might, were considering a plan to coordinate their actions under such a contingency, with Japan providing rear-area support for U.S. forces as stipulated under the Guidelines for Japan-U.S. Defense Cooperation. It is no coincidence that the efforts in 2007 also occurred when Abe, who is regarded as pro-Taiwan, was in power.

The two countries late last year also agreed to negotiate possible changes to the bilateral guidelines to better reflect changes in the strategic situation as well as give Japanese forces more room to maneuver.

While the scenarios remain in the realm of speculation, Japan’s inclusion of a Taiwan contingency again underscores the importance Tokyo places on Taiwan remaining de-facto independent. Certainly, China’s assertiveness in 2012 in both the East China and the South China Sea has done little to reassure Tokyo that it could live comfortably with a CCP-controlled Taiwan so close to its waters and territory. As such, rather than being amenable to “abandoning” Taiwan, as a handful of U.S. academics have been arguing for the sake of “improved” ties with Beijing, Tokyo may become more inclined to ensure that the island continues to serve as a natural barrier to Chinese expansion.

Via: "The Diplomat"

Taiwan Plans To Rule The Waves

By James Holmes and Toshi Yoshihara
March 31, 2010
Courtesy Of Asia Times Online

The Republic of China Navy (ROCN), or Taiwan Navy, has an ambitious vision for its future strategy. According to the "ROC Navy Vision", which is available on the navy's website, "Based on the guidance of 'command and control automation, three-dimensional mobile strike capabilities and missile-oriented weapon system', and through measures such as enhancing intelligence reconnaissance and surveillance, extending strike zone depth, expanding combat radius, accelerating response and contingency protection, the navy aims to construct an effective deterring and three-dimensional mobile strike force that is elite, highly efficient, rapidly deployable and capable of performing long range strikes."

In other words, this "ROC Navy Vision" statement means that the Taiwanese navy intends to field surface, subsurface and aerial forces that share a common operating picture of the waters and skies around the island, fight together cohesively and can strike at targets far distant, at sea or ashore, with ship-launched missiles. Can the ROCN follow through on such an ambitious vision?

Naval operations fall into several categories, including sea control, sea denial, power projection ashore, attacks on or defense of the sea lines of communication (SLOCs), and naval diplomacy. Of these, the first - sea control - is most relevant to a cross-strait contingency, the driving factor in Taipei's defense strategy. For the sake of economy, the authors set aside the other functions and assess the ROCN's capacity for sea control.

Sea Control

The Taiwan Navy advertises its chief missions as breaking blockades and providing for SLOC security. Winning control of the seas and skies adjoining the island is a prerequisite for both of these missions. Indeed, this is the stiffest challenge the ROCN faces. Sea control connotes the ability to operate "with a high degree of freedom in a sea or ocean area ... for a limited period of time," writes Milan Vego.

For Taiwan, this means the liberty to operate in the waters around the island in the face of a People's Liberation Army Navy (PLAN), whose margin of superiority is steadily widening, giving the mainland an advantage not only in numbers but in the quality of ships, aircraft and armaments. Unless the ROCN is equipped to contend for temporary dominance of vital sea and air expanses, it will be unable to take to the seas to fend off a Chinese invasion force or protect shipping bound to or from Taiwanese seaports.

The outlook for ROCN sea control is worsening by the day. For one thing, in the event of an imminent conflict, Taipei must contend with the likelihood of a preemptive attack from China's growing force of short-range ballistic missiles, which can strike at targets like ports and airfields.

With the ROCN fleet concentrated in a few ports like Tsoying, Suao and Keelung, this constitutes a critical vulnerability in the island's defenses. In a much-discussed 2008 article, William Murray of the US Naval War College opined that China "has shifted its anti-Taiwan military strategy away from coercion by punishment toward denying Taiwan the use of its air force and navy". Neither the ROCN nor the Republic of China Air Force (ROCAF), says Murray, "is likely to survive such an attack".

For another, Taiwanese air superiority is in bad shape, and sea-control operations can hardly proceed without it. Until recent years, the standard wisdom held that the ROCAF would gain air superiority if not air supremacy - in other words undisputed control - of the skies over the Taiwan Strait in the opening hours of a China-Taiwan war. Such assumptions now appear fanciful.

US administrations have denied repeated requests from Taipei to purchase 66 F-16 C/D Fighting Falcon fighter aircraft to replenish a force made up of earlier variants of the F-16, elderly fighters like the F-5 Tiger, and maintenance-intensive aircraft like the French-built Mirage 2000. (Technically speaking, Washington has not rejected Taipei's entreaty but has taken it "under consideration", meaning that it remains in indefinite bureaucratic limbo).

The US Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) recently sounded the alarm about the readiness of Taiwanese warplanes. While the air force possesses some 400 fighters, reports DIA, "far fewer of these are operationally capable", owing to age and maintenance problems. Taiwan's fleet of tactical aircraft is stagnating, then, even as the People's Liberation Army Air Force upgrades and modernizes its own combat planes.

Nor is the Taiwanese fleet configured particularly well for sea control. The ROCN submarine "fleet" barely merits the name. Two Dutch-built Zwaardvis-class diesel-electric boats, along with two World War II-era Guppy-class boats no longer suitable for combat comprise the navy's undersea force.

Factoring in the cycle of maintenance and crew training, only one Zwaardvis boat will normally be ready for sea at any given time. The most modern surface combatants in the Taiwan Navy inventory are six French-built Lafayette-class frigates, known in Taiwan as the Kang Ding class. The Kang Ding can carry eight vertically launched Hsiung Feng II surface-to-surface missiles and four vertically launched short-range Sea Chaparral surface-to-air missiles.

Advertised as comparable to the US Harpoon anti-ship missile, the Hsiung Feng II has a maximum range of 160km, or just over 99 miles. The Sea Chaparral has a range of 9km, or under six miles - too small a buffer to allow much response time against evasive supersonic missiles. The Kang Ding is equipped with hull-mounted and towed-array sonar, with torpedoes for anti-submarine warfare (ASW). From a technological standpoint, the stealthy Kang Dings are impressive vessels, but they carry too few rounds to slug it out for long against numerically superior PLAN surface and undersea units operating from bases scattered along the mainland coast.

Most of the ROCN's anti-air warfare (AAW) capability resides in four Kidd-class guided-missile destroyers (DDGs), renamed the Keelung class upon being transferred to the ROCN. Built for the shah of Iran, the Kidd class represented the state-of-the-art in US Navy AAW in the early 1980s, just before the advent of the Ticonderoga-class Aegis cruisers.

The Keelung carries medium-range Standard Missiles for AAW and 8 Harpoon anti-ship missiles for battling enemy surface fleets. (With no towed-array sonar to listen passively for undersea contacts - the best way to find enemy submarines without broadcasting one's own position - the Keelung's ASW capability rates as so-so at best). These DDGs remain potent as AAW platforms, but at nearly 30 years old, their "New Threat Upgrade" combat-systems suite is falling behind the new technologies being developed and fielded across the strait.

The rest of the ROCN surface fleet is comprised of modest vessels like guided missile frigates (FFGs) modeled on the US Perry-class frigates. Designed for low-intensity threat environments, FFGs are outfitted with limited defensive and offensive weaponry. Finally, the ROCN's Knox-class frigates are capable yet aging ASW vessels dating from the early 1970s.

None of these warships are optimal for fleet operations on a difficult maritime terrain like the Taiwan Strait, where reaction time against air or missile strikes is compressed and submarines can lurk undetected in shallow water before conducting torpedo or anti-ship missile attacks. With Taiwanese air power on the decline and the navy's ASW capacity in doubt - US submariners insist the best ASW platform is another submarine - the ROCN's prospects for wresting sea control from the PLAN in wartime appear slight. With few new acquisitions or upgrades in the works, the ROCN stands little chance of significantly enhancing the survivability, combat punch or combat reach of its sea-control fleet - that is to say, of fulfilling the goals set forth in the ROCN Vision.

Disparaging Views In China

Chinese observers by and large agree that, for a variety of reasons, the Taiwan Navy is not up to par regarding the sea-control functions outlined in the ROCN Vision. Condescension pervades Chinese analyses of the ROCN. Writing in Modern Navy, Yang Peng notes that Taiwan's surface fleet is acutely vulnerable to guided missile-strikes. The fleet's AAW pickets are particularly susceptible to saturation missile attacks (baohe daodan gongji) and rely excessively on the protective umbrella hoisted by tactical air power.

Yang forecasts that Taiwanese ships will hesitate to venture beyond the range of land-based air cover. This reticence severely constricts the Taiwanese Navy's tactical radius. Wu Letian not only questions the Taiwan Navy's ability to prosecute anti-submarine and minesweeping operations, but also deprecates its capacity to fight at sea for very long.

More specifically, Chinese analysts voice dismissive attitudes toward Taiwan's main surface combatants. For instance, they appear not to take the Kidd-class destroyers, the island's capital ships, very seriously. Sea-power theorist Alfred Thayer Mahan famously defined capital ships as "the backbone and real power of any navy", meaning "the vessels which, by due proportion of defensive and offensive powers, are capable of taking and giving hard knocks". By this standard, the ROCN falls woefully short - as Chinese thinkers rightly observe.

Tian Ying, for example, doubts that the Kidds would survive in the complex threat environment of the Taiwan Strait. Dated hardware is one shortcoming. Tian predicts that DDGs would find themselves hard-pressed to cope with multidirectional, saturation missile attacks launched from Chinese fighter aircraft, surface ships and submarines. Notably, the author expresses confidence that sea-skimming missiles fired from fighters flying at very low altitude would remain undetected until it was too late for the Kidds to take effective defensive measures.

More mundane reasons also help explain this low regard. The ROCN is chronically short on spare parts for the Kidds' combat systems. The US Navy no longer stocks spares for New Threat Upgrade ships, all of which it retired long ago, and cannibalizing decommissioned vessels only goes so far. Indeed, logistical shortfalls prompted one commentator to prophesy that DDGs may amount to "a pile of scrap metal" in serious fleet combat.

Hai Dun questions whether the Taiwan Navy can maximize the ASW suite on board the Knox-class frigates. Hai reminds readers that the Knox was designed to search for Soviet nuclear submarines in the open ocean. The ship's blue-water ASW suite is a wasted asset for the relatively shallow waters of the Taiwan Strait.

This explains the ROCN's seemingly mysterious decision to base the Knox at Suao Naval Base, along the island's eastern seaboard, facing the deep waters of the Pacific. Since Taiwan's major ports and urban centers dot the western coast, and since the main threat axis emanates from China to the west, the Knox is poised to protect the least vulnerable, least critical Taiwanese frontier. The Knox is a platform in search of a mission, and may remain so until the PLAN undersea fleet develops the capacity to patrol off Taiwan's east coast, creating demand for the ROCN to perform deep-water ASW.

Nor, to Chinese eyes, will reorganizing the ROCN fleet for forward defense fully offset these tactical and hardware shortcomings. Yue Kaifeng and Tian Shuangxi argue that Taipei's decision to create mobile flotillas centered on the Kidd- and Lafayette-class vessels entails major strategic risk for Taiwan. In theory, surface action groups (SAGs) would expand the strategic depth around the island.

However, these Chinese analysts estimate that the ROCN cannot afford both a sea-control fleet organized into SAGs and forces designed for close-in defense. Siphoning off resources from coastal defense to sea-control missions thus imperils the ROCN's readiness to fight off an amphibious invasion force close in along Taiwanese shorelines. Perversely, Taipei might forego its last line of defense for the sake of forward defenses that stand little chance of surviving a Chinese onslaught. This would denude Taiwan of its most effective defense against amphibious assault.

Taipei's vision of offensive sea control, then, appears less and less tenable, and Beijing knows it. Chinese naval thinkers have shrewdly and accurately taken the Taiwan Navy's measure. Whether the ROCN will candidly evaluate its own shortcomings - and adapt its strategy, doctrine and forces to compensate - remains to be seen.

James Holmes is an associate professor of strategy at the Naval War College and co-author of Chinese Naval Strategy in the 21st Century: The Turn to Mahan. The views expressed here are his own. Toshi Yoshihara is an associate professor of strategy at the Naval War College and co-author of Chinese Naval Strategy in the 21st Century: The Turn to Mahan. The views expressed here are his own.

(This article first appeared in The Jamestown Foundation. Used with permission.)

(Copyright 2010 The Jamestown Foundation.)

The Pentagon Runs Amok

Obama Is Letting The Generals and Contractors Roll Over Him

By Dan Simpson
Source: Pittsburg Post-Gazette
February 3, 2010
Courtesy Of Global Research

It is not possible to believe that it is coincidence that just as the Pentagon is being called upon to justify its immunity from the across-the-board budget freeze that President Barack Obama is declaring for the federal government, at least three provocative U.S. arms sales have been announced -- to Taiwan, Poland and four Persian Gulf states. The announcements were clearly scheduled to provoke, respectively, China, Russia and Iran. Each will now bark loudly, and perhaps take retaliatory action. Their responses will, in turn, serve as justification by the Pentagon for the 7.1 percent increase in proposed defense spending, even as painful cuts are being administered in other fields. The other beneficiaries of this move will be the defense contractors -- the happy band of manufacturers and trainers and their lobbyists -- into the ranks of which many senior military officers and Pentagon officials retire once their active duty days are done. The timing is extraordinary, if one had any inclination to consider it to be coincidental. The other "coincidental" development was the failure -- again -- of the missile-defense system in a $150 million trial that took place Sunday. That system, a dog that has been around for years, cleverly conceived and presented as an umbrella over the United States and some of its allies against Iranian or North Korean missiles, has two basic problems. First, it is expensive. Second, it doesn't work, although those two flaws do not necessarily deter Pentagon planners or defense contractors. The three newly announced arms sales were surer bets, in the sense that each is sure to alarm or enrage some serious country. The biggest sale, announced Friday, and the most serious in terms of impact, is a plan to sell $6.4 billion in arms to Taiwan. China considers Taiwan to be part of China. The island will receive from the United States 60 Black Hawk helicopters, 114 missile-defense rockets, 12 anti-ship missiles and two mine-hunting vessels, as well as communications and surveillance equipment. The timing of the U.S. announcement -- unless the furious Chinese reaction is seen as helping the Pentagon's budgetary case with the Congress -- would seem to be particularly unpropitious. The United States is asking China to sign on to sanctions against Iran. It continues to rely on China to keep North Korea in line. Mr. Obama's new initiative to double U.S. exports is dependent on China's adjusting its currency, a step it is reluctant to take in any case. And in general, China's relations with Taiwan have been improving steadily, tending more toward enhanced commercial ties, as opposed to military competition. The new U.S. arms sales would seem to cut counter to this evolution of relations and must have been a difficult decision for the Taipei government to take, one certainly encouraged by U.S. defense equipment exporters. The Chinese reaction will probably not be pleasant for the United States. It immediately is likely to exclude U.S. companies involved in the sale, such as Boeing, from operating in China. It also will cut for the time being military-to-military contacts with the United States, and perhaps others. The most serious action China can take -- one which it was already moving toward -- is a reduction in its purchases of U.S. debt. That would have a grave initial and then secondary impact on the U.S. economy. It would mean, first, that the U.S. government would have to pay higher interest rates to borrow the cash necessary to cover its enormous, growing budget deficits. Second -- and probably most serious -- it would mean that the U.S. government would have to compete in U.S. financial markets to a greater degree for the capital needed to restart the engines of American industry. That is absolutely the last thing that the Obama administration needs at this point. It makes one wonder how much pressure was put on Mr. Obama by defense industry lobbyists to obtain authorization for the arms sales to Taiwan -- or worse, whether he understood what he was doing. The second arms deal was made public when Poland announced that the United States would sell it surface-to-air missiles for deployment 35 miles from the Russian border by April. Russia has consistently opposed such U.S. action, considering it provocative and inconsistent with Mr. Obama's declaration of his intention to reset relations with Russia. Where and how Russia's reaction will come is not yet known, although cooperation on sanctions against Iran and/or the signing of a new arms reduction treaty may now be out the window. The third major arms deal announced in recent days was that the United States will sell Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and perhaps other Arab Persian Gulf states new anti-missile defense systems, targeted against nearby Iran. Apart from the financial aspects of the deal for companies like Raytheon, the theory is that the new weapons will make the Gulf states more comfortable hosting the U.S. military installations already on their territory. The theory also is that Israel will be more comfortable with U.S. missile-defense systems in the Gulf to protect it from Iranian retaliation if Israel were to bomb Iranian nuclear installations. This theory is severely flawed in that Israel could equally well conclude that it now can attack Iran with less risk of Iranian retaliation against America's allies in the Gulf. The easy way to prevent Israel from starting a major Middle East war by attacking Iran is simply to tell it that the United States will not come to its rescue if it does so and then finds that it can't handle the Iranian counterattack. The budget line for defense stands at $708 billion, 53 percent of discretionary spending, eight times more than the next largest item, health and human services. Does that reflect America's priorities? Is that who we are? Dan Simpson, a former U.S. ambassador, is a Post-Gazette associate editor (dsimpson@post-gazette.com, 412 263-1976). More articles by this author

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