Maximum Asymmetry Against ‘The Plan’

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What would China's war of choice really look like, and what is our best course of action?

Few wars in history have had such a long leadup as China’s coming war of choice. The Chinese themselves have said it was coming for at least the last thirty years. We started taking them at their word about 20 years ago. Robert Kaplan wrote an article entitled How We Would Fight China in 2005. China has used the economic growth over those 20 years to build its military so that it could undertake its most fervent wish, a war against the United States, with a plausible chance of success.

In the leadup to Russia’s war of choice, many in the West didn’t believe that Putin would be stupid enough to start his war – that massing troops on the Ukrainian border was just bluster. Now he is in the position that his own life is at risk and over a thousand Russians are killed and maimed each day to put off that possibility. 

Russia’s failure in Ukraine was also a surprise to China, which had expected it to be a three-day walkover. Why that matters is because China can’t handle a war that goes on for long, certainly not the 1,000 days that the Ukraine War is about to clock up. This is because China imports 40% of the protein that its agricultural system is based on. China could survive by going back to involuntary vegetarianism but the population, now 65% urbanised, would be unemployed as well as on the brink of starvation. Normally, rational people would say that China will not survive a blockade and that they will have to wait until they get their population down to a more manageable number such as 600 million, which they could feed from their own resources on a balanced diet.

President Xi is already 71 years old and can’t wait that long. So they came up with a new plan under which another 50 million tonnes of grain would be grown as well as Russia promising to rail more across the Trans-Siberian Railway. To that end, fruit orchards and bamboo groves have been ripped up and tropical hillsides have been bulldozed in a modern echo of Mao’s Great Leap Forward of 1958. The Chinese regime appointed 80,000 rural inspectors to enforce the grain-growing directive; a fearful symmetry with the 80,000 tax inspectors appointed by the Biden regime to torment the middle class.

Japan made a similar choice in WW2. Japan couldn’t grow enough food to feed itself from within its own borders so it needed a constant shuttle of freighters to supply the shortfall. Its precarious food supply didn’t stop Japan from attacking the rest of Asia. Appropriately the campaign near the end of the war to use B-29 bombers to drop sea mines in Japanese waters to choke off Japan’s food supply was called “Operation Starvation.” It worked. The Japanese diet dropped to 1,680 calories per day on average.

But what indicates that China’s war-mongering is not just bluster is that just after completing a green belt around the western city of Chengdu at a cost of the order of $5 billion, they ripped it up to put it back under grain. Everything is sacrificed to the Precious — the war that will cement Xi Jinping’s place in Chinese history. Why we still trade with people who are setting out to kill us is an enduring mystery.

We can’t do anything about China’s war of choice. No amount of being nice to China will stop it from happening. Everyone should also be aware that this war has nothing to do with communism or whatever label you might put on it. As a Chinese friend who successfully escaped the big, open-air prison that is China puts it,

Marxism is within the Judeo-Greek—Christian-Liberalism tradition, an offshoot of the Enlightenment Movement. Xi does not understand this tradition at all. Xi is a stubborn, confident and complacent Chinese nativist and Han national chauvinist. His ideological home is Confucianism, Legalism, Taoism and Maoism. His political ambition is to be Qin Shihuangdi of the 21st century.

In effect, China’s war will be a race war and they expect the Han Race to come out on top.

The Chinese Communist Party is just a criminal gang parasitising the rest of society, much the same way that Russia is run.

Another thing that happened in the last 20 years is that the evolution of electronics favored the defense, which is what we will be doing. Instead of the enemy’s arrival on the battlefield being a surprise, we can see them tied up in port on the other side of the planet. Troop concentrations can be detected by their cell phone traffic. In the Ukraine War, quadcopter drones made in garage workshops have helped the Ukrainians make up for a lack of artillery. And at sea, Ukrainian drones have driven the Russian Navy 900 km from the nearest Ukrainian-controlled coastline. It would be easy enough to do the same to Chinese warships in the South China Sea.

There is another advantage to us in the form of China’s geography. If they attack north into Russia, as Japan did at Khalkhin Gol in 1939, China will get whacked, this time with Russian nukes. To the west is desert and to the south is Vietnam which China has been attacking for 2,000 years. Vietnam would also chew them up as they did in 1979. China recently kissed and made up with India, possibly clearing the decks for their war of choice.

So to have a war with a plausible chance of success, China is forced to go to sea and this means putting their troops in metal boxes — ships and aircraft. Which are so easily tracked and targeted from so far away. And the technology to do that cost-effectively is within our grasp. The particular optimum combination is the Army’s new missile, the PrSM Increment 2, carried by Boeing 767s. PrSM was developed to replace the ATACMS missile. Ground-launched range is 620 km. This would double to 1,200 km if air-launched. Its 90 kg warhead looks like a tungsten fragmentation effort.

PrSM Increment 2 uses a passive radio-frequency seeker and an imaging infrared seeker to lock onto ships at sea. GPS-assisted INS guidance to get to the general target area before switching over to this seeker system. Utilising passive systems instead of radar means that this system cannot be spoofed. The success rate of Excalibur artillery rounds in Ukraine fell to 6% because of Russian GPS jamming. PrSM Increment 2, fired from Palau, was successfully tested against a moving ship at sea in June this year.

Other militaries have successfully converted ground-launched missiles to air-launched including the Russian Iskander as the Kinzhal and the Israeli LORA as Air LORA. Missiles plunging vertically down on warships are difficult to defend against and could target a ship’s vertical launch cells. The terminal velocity of PrSM is likely to be of the order of 3,700 kmph and thus flight time would be about 15 minutes. Ukraine has been able to shoot down a high proportion of the Kh-101 cruise missiles launched by Russia. The PLAN might similarly be able to shoot down a high proportion of the cruise missiles attacking its surface vessels. In which case a backup system would be prudent.

Ideally, we would surge this anti-ship capability at the outset of China’s war before their ships have been used to do much mischief. Cost-effectively, this would be done by adapting civilian passenger aircraft to carry and air-launch PrSM missiles. This can be on the wings, fuselage, or internally. Used passenger and freight aircraft are readily available. Adapted for military service, they would have to fly only a few times per year. The most suitable is likely to be the Boeing 767 which combines a long fuselage and strong wings with a long range. The 767 has a return range of 5,000 km which, combined with the air-launched PrSM range of 1,200 km, would enable targeting of PLAN ships up to 6,000 km from the launch airfield.

This puts China’s coastline within range of Wake Island.  It is expected that China will start its war with DF-21 missiles fired at Guam. Wake is another 1,000 km beyond the DF-21’s range. It will take China a week to reload its transporter-erector-launchers (TELs) from the initial barrage. In the meantime the Boeing 767-PrSm combination could perform a mission a day.

A listing of used aircraft indicates pricing relative to remaining service life: a 767-300ER with 43,529 flight hours and 19,410 landings for $9.5 million. Converting it to carry missiles might cost a similar amount. As a freighter, the 767 can carry 52.7 tonnes. Thus the potential missile loadout would only be limited by potential wing hardpoints and fuselage geometry. It would likely pay for itself on its first mission.

Performance of Allied surface vessels in a war with China may fall short of expectations. The limited magazine capacity of air defence missiles in surface vessels has been demonstrated by the defence against Houthi missiles in the Red Sea. Once exhausted, ships have to spend weeks steaming to and from a port to be restocked.

David Archibald is the author of American Gripen: The Solution to the F-35 Nightmare.

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