Fortress America

Chinese Anti-Ship Ballistic Missile Threat Requires Navy, Space Force Cooperation

John Rossomando is a senior analyst for defense policy at the Center for Security Policy; he served as senior analyst for counterterrorism at The Investigative Project on Terrorism for eight years. He writes:

“The U.S. Navy views China’s antiship ballistic missile (ASBM) capabilities with great concern.

The United States has been able to project power all over the world with carrier strike groups (CSG)—an aircraft carrier with layered defenses. CSGs are more secure than land bases—it’s harder to destroy something that moves—and would allow aircraft to hit hundreds of targets daily for months.

China’s military considers its ASBMs “trump cards” against the U.S. Navy’s ability to deploy its ships off the Chinese coast, according to Andrew S. Erickson, a scholar of Chinese military strategy who taught at the U.S. Naval War College.

Vice Adm. Jeffrey Trussler, Deputy Chief of Naval Operations for Information Warfare, said at a virtual event hosted by the Intelligence and National Security Alliance: “I’m not going to get [into] much more detail of what we know and don’t know about it. But they’re pouring a lot of money into the ability to basically rim their coast in the South China Sea with anti-ship missile capability.

It’s a destabilizing effort in the South China Sea, in the East China Sea, all those areas. When the claim some of these contested islands—they’re militarizing those areas. “It’s something that confuses the

international order and concerns the allies in the region. It’s one reason we work to keep the global commons open and the free flow of traffic.”

ASBMs are a greater threat compared to conventional anti-ship missiles and can be launched from well outside the 100-nautical-mile maximum range of the SPY-1 Aegis radars. These radars are mounted on fleet escorts, such as the Ticonderoga-class cruisers and Arleigh Burke-class destroyers. The Chinese DF-21D missile has a range of 1,300 miles while the DF-26 has a range of 2,400 miles. This gives them the ability to launch a surprise attack that could make it harder to defend the fleet.

These weapons can be fired from mobile launchers. Experience from the 1991 Persian Gulf War showed that finding mobile missile launchers to destroy them can be among the most challenging things to do in a combat situation, because they can move, and it can be a bit like finding a needle in a haystack.

The U.S. Navy currently has 48 Aegis equipped vessels capable of fielding the Aegis Ballistic Missile Defense (BMD) system, which can intercept missiles and protect U.S. carriers and other warships. That number is projected to increase to 65 by 2025, and seven Japanese destroyers also have the BMD system. This system proved its worth during a November test. A Standard Missile-3 (SM-3) on the destroyer USS John Finn successfully intercepted an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) that had been launched from Kwajalein Atoll in the South Pacific.

However, serious upgrades of their capability to negate China’s ASBM advantages are needed.

Vice Adm. Jon A. Hill, director of the U.S. Missile Defense Agency, noted that “you can’t shoot what you don’t see.” Space Force-controlled Ballistic Missile Launch Detection (BMLD) satellites provide the fastest and most accurate missile defense. Hill stressed the need for cooperation between space assets and the Aegis system. Space assets are crucial because they can see targets beyond the range of the ship’s radar.

A year ago, the infant Space Force played an integral role in alerting American forces in Iraq that Iranian ballistic missiles were inbound. This warning saved lives and kept casualties to a minimum. The Space Force must do the same to support the Navy’s fleet activities in the Chinese theater of operations in the Western Pacific, Taiwan Strait, South China Sea, and the East China Sea.

Last August, China proved its “carrier killers” could hit moving ships when it test-fired its DF-21D and DF-26 ASBMs at targets located between Hainan Island and the Paracel Islands in the South China Sea. China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) fired the DF-26 from a base in northwestern China’s Qinghai Province and the DF-21D from a base in the country’s Zhejiang Province, located north of Taiwan.

The DF-26 can carry a nuclear warhead and can conduct precision strikes in the Western Pacific, Indian Ocean, and the South China Sea while remaining safely deep inside Chinese territory, the Pentagon’s 2020 report on Chinese military power states.

Intelligence analysis suggests that the DF-21D’s warhead can maneuver like an aircraft through the atmosphere upon reentry, which makes it harder for defenders to kill. China is believed to have approximately 94 launchers capable of firing the DF-21D missile. This necessitates the development of improved abilities to track and shoot down the hypersonic glide vehicles, capable of traveling at between Mach 5 and 10—between 3,806 and 7,680 mph—that are deployed by the DF-21D. By comparison, jetliners travel at 0.785 Mach or 583 mph.

The Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA) awarded a contract to Aerojet Rocketdyne a year ago to develop an interceptor to negate the advantage of hypersonic weapons under its Glide Breaker program. A sea-based component of this program that can counter theater-based weapons systems such as the DF-21D is a must. These improvements are crucial due to the short time between when the PLA would launch its ASBMs and when they would be in range for the Aegis system to intercept before they disable American carriers or other warships. [A laser-based BMD system is also in development that would make the speed of a ballistic vehicle irrelevant.]

A change in thinking is required such that the BMD can counter ICBM threats to the U.S. homeland and to the fleet. U.S. missile defense almost exclusively focuses on strategic threats from Russian and other nuclear missiles. The way the BMD system is deployed must be entirely reevaluated, and neutralizing China’s ASBM advantage must be the top priority. If aircraft carriers are vulnerable, America’s ability to protect itself and ensure freedom of navigation for the rest of the world will be in jeopardy.”

------------------------------------------------------------------

How America Can Win the Hybrid War Being Waged By China

From open-source intelligence: “Hybrid warfare is a theory of military strategy, first proposed by author Frank Hoffman, in his 2007 book Conflict in the 21st Century: The Rise of Hybrid Wars, which employs political warfare and blends conventional warfare, irregular warfare, and cyberwarfare with other influencing methods, such as fake news, diplomacy, lawfare, regime change, and foreign electoral intervention. 

By combining kinetic operations with subversive efforts, the aggressor intends to avoid attribution or retribution. The concept of hybrid warfare has been criticized by a number of academics and practitioners due to its alleged vagueness, its disputed constitutive elements, and its alleged historical distortions.

The Chief of Staff of the US Army defined a hybrid threat as an adversary that incorporates "diverse and dynamic combinations of conventional, irregular, terrorist and criminal capabilities." The US Joint Forces Command defines a hybrid threat as "any adversary that simultaneously and adaptively employs a tailored mix of conventional, irregular, terrorism and criminal means or activities in the operational battle space. Rather than a single entity, a hybrid threat or challenger may be a combination of state and nonstate actors."

The former US Army Chief George W. Casey Jr. talked of a new type of war that would become increasingly common in the future: "A hybrid of irregular warfare and conventional warfare."

According to the 2017-inaugurated European Centre of Excellence for Countering Hybrid Threats, "hybrid threats are methods and activities that are targeted towards vulnerabilities of the opponent" where the "range of methods and activities is wide" 

An article published in Global Security Review, "What is Hybrid Warfare?" compares the notion of hybrid warfare to the Russian concept of "non-linear" warfare, which it defines as the deployment of "conventional and irregular military forces in conjunction with psychological, economic, political, and cyber assaults."

The combination of military and non-military instruments and strategies is done not randomly but in a synchronized way to achieve synergistic effects. In other words, it is this synchronized fusion that optimizes the results.

One unconventional hybrid force results from the recruitment of disaffected citizens of a target country into an unconventional force to disrupt the normal functioning of a society. Certain enclaves of foreigners legally residing in a host country are prime hunting grounds for hybrid warriors, using propaganda or threats against relatives still in the home country. Prisons housing disaffected citizens are also exploitable.

The bottom line is that a particular country can potentially unleash physical force against an adversary to achieve certain goals. But if the use or threat of conventional or unconventional force is combined with and/or preceded by a degree of subversive tools such as cyber-attacks and disinformation, the overall damage inflicted on the antagonist can be optimized.

Despite state-driven hybrid warfare entailing a systematic integration of military, political, economic, civilian, and informational tools, it often plays out in grey zones below the threshold of a conventional war. In these grey zones, the military instrument is used unconventionally and innovatively to avoid attribution, responsibility, and sometimes even detection. So a hostile state can employ non-state actors or a non-attributable military force in a clandestine war to deny involvement, but at the same time achieve strategic objectives.

To counter a hybrid threat, hard power is often insufficient. Often, the conflict evolves under the radar, and even a "rapid" response turns out to be too late. Overwhelming force is an insufficient deterrent. Many traditional militaries lack the flexibility to shift tactics, priorities, and objectives constantly, like the "rigid" or static military taxonomy used by NATO to define the very concept of warfare.

-------------------------------------------------------------

So, What Is America To Do About Hybrid War With China?

First; Identify What Hybrid Tactics Are Being Used, And By Whom

Hybrid warfare takes place on three distinct human battlefields. They are the conventional battlefield, the indigenous population of the conflict zone, and the international community.

The Western democracies in particular are seeing conventional military capabilities, irregular tactics, irregular formations, disingenuous diplomacy, political “dirty tricks”, economic disruptions, terrorist acts, indiscriminate violence, political assassinations, organized criminal activity, espionage, cyber-attacks, electoral interference, and AI generated disinformation, and the use of clandestine actions to avoid attribution or retribution.

Hybrid forces are dispersed among the civilian population—overseas, and in the United States. Civilian collateral damage from airstrikes can be used as an effective recruiting tool, as well as a tool to gain the sympathy of ordinary people, in their press/media induced ignorance about what is really happening.

Hybrid forces now can use of advanced weapons systems and other disruptive technologies. Such weapons can be now bought at bargain prices from sympathetic state-actors, and money-hungry national actors.

Hybrid forces now use mass communication for propaganda. The growth of mass communication networks and their easy access offers powerful propaganda and recruiting opportunities. The use of fake-news websites to spread false stories on social-networks is a significant element of hybrid warfare.

The primary state-actors waging hybrid war on the Western democracies are China-Russia, Iran, and North Korea. They support, and are supported by non-state actors such as terrorist organizations supplied and controlled by Iran, such as Hamas, Hezbollah, al-Qaeda, ISIS, ISIL, the Taliban, Jemaah Islamiyah, Lashkar-e-Taiba, Al-Nusra Front, Boko Haram, Al-Akhtar Trust, and the Houthis-Ansar Allah.

Other sympathetic state-actors include Libya, Lebanon, Turkey, South Africa, Venezuela, and Cuba.

Second; the United States must establish a “bastion mentality”

This bastion, or fortress, must physically protect all Americans from all enemies, foreign and domestic, who are intent upon destroying the United States as we know it. This means becoming self-sufficient in everything needed to keep our society able to support the proposition that all Americans have an inalienable right to protect their life, liberty, and the pursuit of their own happiness.

Keeping the barbarians mentioned above outside the gates is fairly straightforward. Erect barriers at our borders and all ports of entry that are impenetrable, or if penetrated, that Customs, Border Security, and Immigration officials, as well as sovereign State officials, recognizing that illegal alien invaders have NO CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHTS, are provided with the tools, the manpower, and the funding to track down the invaders, and remove them immediately from the territory of the United States.

Keeping the effects and influences of the barbarians mentioned above out of the United States is another challenge entirely. The primary issue is that the use of electronic and digital pathways to infect the body politic within the United States is a constantly evolving problem. Our adversaries employ armies of technicians to constantly probe our digital pathways looking for vulnerabilities to exploit and disrupt the business of America, and the lives of Americans.

As for domestic enemies; conspiring, coordinating, or supporting through activities, to diminish, damage or destroy any legal and legitimate institutions that have traditionally been accepted by the People as essential to the survival and functioning of the culture and society of the United States of America, shall be declared domestic treason, and will result in loss of American citizenship and deportation from the United States, in lieu of prison.

“Death to America” adherents, “defund the police” supporters, “transgender rights” activists, election interferers, anti-religious activists, press/media/social media information/speech censorship or suppression practitioners, or persons working in the educational field who seek to undermine the United States through indoctrination tactics designed to inspire a Marxist or socialist worldview or civic disruption by their students—children placed in their care by parents to be protected from exploitation—are examples of anti-American activities subject to domestic treason investigations.”

Next time: China’s Spies Move to Cuba