Crouching Tiger by Peter Navarro

Author:Peter Navarro
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781633881150
Publisher: Prometheus Books
Published: 2015-10-09T04:00:00+00:00

We are the best submarine force in the world; and the Chinese have historically demonstrated a weakness in anti-submarine warfare. So at the same time that America is taking advantage of its inherent strengths, it is also exploiting one of China's inherent structural weaknesses.10

Echoing this theme, Cambridge professor and former White House advisor Stefan Halper insists that:

We have to take China's commitment to its area denial strategy very seriously; and taking it seriously means being aware of the limitations of using large naval platforms like aircraft carriers within range of their missiles and other ordinance that can take them down. It also means that we have to emphasize our submarine force because we need to be able to reinforce our friends and our allies, without putting these major assets in play.11

On the wisdom of a force restructuring scenario favoring more submarines, Halper adds: “the political effect” of losing an aircraft carrier to a Chinese attack “would limit our options going forward and compel us to a very forceful attack on Chinese mainland facilities. So having an aircraft carrier struck or a major capital vessel struck and sunk would be an option-limiting event that could be very dangerous in terms of escalation.”12

As for how a beefed up submarine presence in Asia might strategically turn the asymmetric warfare tables on China, in Yoshihara's vision, one of the key roles that attack submarines could play would be to serve as gatekeepers around the choke points along the First Island Chain so that any Chinese merchant or military ship attempting to go through a choke point could be sunk. In this way, the United States would be able to exert exactly the same kind of coercive pressure on China that China is now trying to exert on the US surface fleet with its “carrier killing” arsenal.

Of course, the major downside of any such a shift to an undersea strategy is that America would lose the important symbolic value that aircraft-carrier strike groups provide in advertising American force projection. Yoshihara, himself, is the first to acknowledge this downside. As he explains:

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.