Toward a Western Pacific Defense Concept

The People’s Republic of China’s (PRC’s) military buildup, the largest and most comprehensive military modernization program since World War II, is well into its third decade. It is arguably the single most important driver of the epochal change in international politics that has ended US military predominance. China has shifted the military balance in its favor in the western Pacific, which is, together with Europe, the world’s most vital region.

The PRC does not hide its grand ambitions to remake the world order or its perception that the United States is the one country that stands in its way. Indeed, Chinese Communist Party (CCP) General Secretary Xi Jinping has emphasized to his cadre that the current period is one of “protracted struggle” as the US slowly wakes from its slumber regarding China’s rise and resists China’s growing power and influence.¹ In March 2023, Xi told delegates to the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference that “Western countries led by the United States have implemented comprehensive containment, encirclement, and suppression against us, bringing unprecedented severe challenges to our country’s development.”²

The PRC’s strategy is to overcome this perceived containment and build its sphere of influence by harnessing and accumulating national power and coercive leverage. Beijing already uses coercive force to advance its interests but may escalate its low-intensity conflicts into an all-out war for primacy in the Pacific. The US and its allies need a defense strategy that deters China from intensifying its aggression by moving from its ongoing campaigns of coercion into a full-scale war to break the US alliance system.

This chapter builds on the work of Andrew Krepinevich and the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments to develop an operational concept for a coalition of US alliances and partners to defend the western Pacific.³ Such a concept can help policy leaders in Congress and the executive branch focus their diplomatic and economic statecraft efforts and properly resource national defense.⁴ The diplomatic tasks of stitching together a global coalition to deter a major Chinese attack are immense. But such efforts can be enhanced when diplomats know more specifically what each potential coalition partner needs and when the US and others are willing to pay the economic and other costs of forming a coalition. While Australia, Japan, and the US must form the core of the coalition, many other countries are needed to effectively defend the western Pacific from Chinese hegemony.

Breaking alliances and replacing them with security partnerships that place China at the center of geopolitics is an oft-stated Chinese grand-strategic goal. Indeed, Chinese aspirations for hegemony cannot be achieved if the US alliance system is still operable. That is why alliance-breaking goals were central to Xi’s announcement of a “new era” of geopolitics in 2017.⁵

Beijing has two options to break the alliance system. It can continue to pursue its current strategy, which includes supporting Russia’s attempts to fracture NATO while China coerces and pressures its own neighbors into obeisance, or it can go to war against the US and its allies and win decisively. Beijing may start such a war against Taiwan, the Philippines, or even Japan.⁶ But Taiwan is the most likely place China would attack to start a war that breaks the alliances. And as this chapter demonstrates, China cannot successfully invade and occupy Taiwan without committing acts of war against US allies.⁷ Thus, a Chinese attack on the democratic island is not just a contingency, as CCP propagandists would have it; rather, it would be a major attack on the US alliance system. Indeed, this is likely why China has not yet gone to war.

Unless China achieves the short, sharp victory it is planning, this war will likely become protracted, and the US will need a strategy of exhaustion supplemented by attrition to win it.⁸ This will require not only attriting Chinese forces and denying them the ability to invade and occupy Taiwan or other territory but also degrading and depleting China’s means of fighting and will to endure. A global coalition will likely be needed to fight a protracted war of exhaustion and attrition based on a Western Pacific Defense Concept (WPDC).

As this chapter shows, the WPDC is not a call for global economic warfare. The WPDC would require the coalition to disrupt, delay, and defeat invasion forces. But in the likelihood that China will not stop fighting after the war’s first phases, the WPDC would have to also include blockades of key Chinese sea lines of communication (SLOCs). Indonesia and India, now nonaligned, and Singapore, a wary US military partner, would need to join the coalition. To fight a war of exhaustion, the coalition would have to garner support from China’s key commodity suppliers to restrict exports to China and from China’s major trade and investment partners to cut commercial relations in wartime.⁹ Washington must approach its coalition diplomacy with a sense of urgency, convincing skeptical countries that such preparations need to be put in place now to persuade China not to start a war.

Some might argue that developing a coalition around a warfighting concept puts the operational cart before the strategic horse. However, an effective and realistic alliance operational concept would add immeasurably to the United States’ grand-strategic goal of frustrating China’s strategic designs and strengthen the US position in Asia. When Admiral Phil Davidson, a former head of the US Indo-Pacific Command, pushed for an Indo-Pacific warfighting concept to stabilize regional deterrence, he said any “new warfighting concept must deliver a similar sense of assurance to our allies and partners today that AirLand Battle provided to NATO member states in Europe in the 70s and 80s.”¹⁰ Put another way, while cautious US partners may initially resist a coalition warfighting concept, over time it will reassure them that Washington has a plan to stabilize deterrence. The alternative is a hegemonic China.

Strategic Impediments

Washington is hindered in these efforts for strategic and political reasons beyond the US military’s power to resolve. First, there is not necessarily broad agreement in the would-be coalition that China seeks to build a Greater China—incorporating Taiwan; the South China Sea, including islands belonging to Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Taiwan, and Vietnam; Japan’s Senkaku Islands and possibly the Ryukyus; and parts of Nepal and India¹¹—or that China is preparing to fight. The US and the core of the coalition, Japan and Australia, should redouble their diplomatic efforts to persuade their allies that China is preparing to fight a war that will damage all of them. The core partners need only remind their allies of China’s strategic history. Contrary to Beijing’s propagandistic campaigns to persuade its neighbors that it does not seek forceful hegemony, China’s strategic culture evinces a strong belief in the efficacy of using force to achieve strategic goals.

China has a long military history that includes conquests of great masses of territory that it still holds today, including Xinjiang and Tibet. Moreover, after the collapse of dynastic China, the CCP ascended to power through a long and bloody civil war. It then fought wars against the US and South Koreans in Korea, against India, and against Vietnam. Since its 1979 war with Vietnam, China has continuously used force to expand its territory and coerce other countries to submit to its will. Thus, China’s post-1993 military modernization program is a continuation of its long military history. Australian, Japanese, and US persuasion efforts must situate China’s daily use of coercive power as part of a well-thought-out and deliberate move to Finlandize the western Pacific out to the second island chain.¹²

Second, at a grand-strategic level, the hub-and-spoke bilateral alliance system that emerged after World War II falls short of a collective defense system that can pool allied strength. In contrast to a multilateral defense arrangement like NATO, the hub-and-spoke model is characterized by a dominant, security guarantor “hub” (the United States), which projects power through a series of bilateral alliance “spokes” (US treaty allies and partners). This alliance structure means that even countries aligned with the US about the nature of the threat, such as Australia, Japan, the Philippines, and Taiwan, are not obligated to fight for each other. Other countries, such as Indonesia, Singapore, South Korea, and Vietnam, are more conflicted about their approaches to China and the US. Potential coalition partners that rarely exercise together and hardly engage in combined strategic and operational planning will be ill prepared to fight side by side.

All Indo-Pacific countries also face unrelenting Chinese economic and political influence campaigns to break their will to join a coalition. Even in the Philippines, which is aligning with the US on security, China dominates many key sectors of the economy and can influence politics. This dynamic is even sharper in Indonesia, Malaysia, and Thailand—countries that do not yet see eye to eye with the US on the threat China poses. To truly contain China’s expansionism, US grand strategy must not only persuade the broader coalition of China’s threat but also form a more collective alliance system. Only by doing so could the US adequately expand and diversify its military posture, be assured that key countries would join a coalition in a major war, and help allies build militaries additive to deterrence.

Third, the US has under-resourced its military power for decades, a problem that must be solved at the political level. The US defense industrial base is in crisis, stretched to the breaking point as it supports allies in Europe and the Middle East in a global conflict while deterring PRC aggression. Defense under-resourcing has been well documented. For example, Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Roger Wicker released a report that found the US is on track to spend just 3 percent of its gross domestic product on defense, a low not seen since the end of the Cold War. The report states,

Of all the categories of federal spending defense has actually grown most slowly since 2000. 2024 will be the first time in U.S. history that we will spend more financing the debt than we spend on defense. In 2018, after a lost decade of defense cuts under the Budget Control Act, Congress reset the defense budget, but since then, the defense budget has largely grown with inflation.¹³

The result is a “death spiral” for the Pentagon’s buying power, even as the demand for US military power has grown. The report puts it bluntly:

In short, the overall mission tasking assigned to the U.S. military has grown significantly since the early 1980s, but the capacity of the armed forces has shrunk precipitously. The clearest examples of this phenomenon are in the U.S. Navy fleet and the U.S. Air Force aircraft fleets.¹⁴

The US nuclear submarine fleet, which is, together with the long-range bomber fleet, the most important capability in the western Pacific, is retiring faster than it can be recapitalized. The mix of tremendous Chinese firepower, China’s top-tier battle network and associated surveillance and reconnaissance, and the distances US military assets need to travel from relatively safe zones to the center of the fight mean coalition bombers and attack submarines will be the workhorses of a coalition warfighting strategy. But due to inadequate recapitalization, “one third of the navy’s attack submarines are idle at depot maintenance shipyards.”¹⁵ Similarly, due to maintenance problems, a large portion of the bomber fleet is not mission capable. Nor are these two services buying sufficient munitions to support their missions. US military and weapons stockpiles shrank after the Cold War, with the government purchasing smaller stockpiles supplemented by just-in-time production.

This has resulted in a boom-and-bust cycle of procurement that sees a ramp-up in purchases when needed during conflicts to a quick de-prioritization following the conflict’s conclusion.¹⁶ Stop-and-go weapons procurement has resulted in another death spiral of acquisitions, as a lack of purchasing stability has disincentivized the industry from “investing in facilities, modernization, or advanced manufacturing capabilities.” Due to this, the industrial base is now unable to surge production when needed.¹⁷

Finally, Taiwan, the most likely place China would start a conflict, is not part of a regional security architecture or US alliance system. The US cooperates with Taiwan based on the Taiwan Relations Act, which authorizes de facto diplomatic relations and security assistance.¹⁸ The United States’ official policy on Taiwan’s defense is “strategic ambiguity,” meaning its security commitment to the island is highly contingent. The lack of a formal treaty with Taiwan or ironclad commitment to its defense against aggression, combined with the absence of commitments even similar to the Taiwan Relations Act from any other nation, are substantial obstacles to helping Taipei improve its deterrent posture.¹⁹ Potential coalition partners such as Australia and Japan have almost no security cooperation with the island. The gap between the strategic stakes of a successful defense of Taiwan and the limits on coalition defense cooperation with the island is dangerously wide.

These four problems have stood in the way of the US forming an alliance-centered operational concept similar to what it developed during the Cold War to deter and contain the Soviet Union. Strategically, the US needs to weave together a cohesive warfighting coalition that can deter conflict, properly resource its military, and tie Taiwan into a more cohesive alliance structure. Operationally, the US must think and plan as if it is the late 1970s and early 1980s, after the loss of the Vietnam War. Back then, as now, the US faced the operational challenge of deterring a technologically sophisticated, numerically superior enemy preparing to fight a high-intensity conflict close to its homeland, and a demoralized US military still managed to develop alliance warfighting concepts that resolved what seemed like insurmountable operational challenges.

Like the Chinese today, the Soviets had strategic depth and could operate along interior lines of communication. Through many years of trial and error, the US military developed AirLand Battle and the Follow-On Forces Attack concepts. The basic idea was that smaller frontline allied forces would block and blunt the first wave of Soviet forces while so-called deep-strike forces made of combat aircraft, missiles, and artillery would reinforce frontline forces and defeat the second and third waves of Soviet forces. The US Navy developed a distinct maritime strategy that would secure SLOCs across the Atlantic Ocean to help the US reinforce the front line.

These warfighting concepts helped focus US diplomacy and defense strategy and helped Department of Defense managers develop specific defense programs. Diplomats and statesmen knew what type of access agreements to negotiate and could focus diplomatic efforts on keeping European partners aligned around a very forward-leaning concept of deterrence. Civilian defense officials could prioritize the procurement and training that would support the alliance’s operational concept. In that era, the Department of Defense and the defense industry developed the Army Tactical Missile System, Apaches, and advanced sensors like Global Hawk, among other breakthroughs, all of which are still in use today. All these systems served the warfighting concept. It was the beginning of the American formation of its precision reconnaissance strike complex that it used to great effect in subsequent wars. This was the result of the US military solving dangerous operational challenges in the Cold War’s central front. The US can rise to the occasion again.

How China Wants to Fight: Across Domains; Short and Sharp

Designing a coalition warfighting concept requires an understanding of how China wants to fight an alliance-breaking war. China plans on fighting a short, sharp war that delivers a rapid knockout blow to its enemies. It is practicing multi-domain operations to leverage surprise, using its home court advantage to fight on interior lines, and taking advantage of US allies’ lack of strategic depth. The allies have only a relatively small forward-deployed force in the first island chain, far away from reinforcements.²⁰

Chinese military doctrine emphasizes the need to strike first to surprise the enemy, set the operational tempo, and achieve victory before suffering heavy losses.²¹ The People’s Liberation Army (PLA) has developed an operational concept, translated as the “Joint Island Landing Campaign,” to project decisive power in the first island chain. This strategic plan requires mutually reinforcing operations that dominate the information, electromagnetic, air, and maritime domains to support the projection and sustainment of combat forces that will seize and control territory.²² Absent the ability to seize and control territory, the PLA is unlikely to succeed.²³

Given the aforementioned massive modernization program, the PLA can now amass enormous combat power in the first island chain. According to Robert Haddick, retired Rear Admiral Mark Montgomery, and Isaac “Ike” Harris, the PLA now has more warships than any navy in the world, the most airpower in Asia, and the greatest inventory of missile power in the Indo-Pacific.²⁴ It has developed the sophisticated reconnaissance and command and control systems necessary for high-tech and high-intensity military operations. According to the authors,

The result is a region spanning battle network, combining sensors and long-range missiles, that is specifically designed to destroy US naval forces underway out to Guam and the Second Island Chain and to devastate the US military’s air and naval bases in the Western Pacific.²⁵

The authors estimate that the PLA Air Force can launch 1,400 precision-guided land attack and anti-ship missiles per day, “day after day,” at allied bases and warships up to 3,000 kilometers from the Chinese coast—a distance that encompasses the second island chain. In addition, in 2023, the Department of Defense estimated that the PLA has up to 2,800 land-based surface-to-surface ballistic and cruise missiles, some of which are capable of precision attacks against Guam. The PLA Navy has an equally large number of cruise missiles in its arsenal.²⁶ This amounts to massive firepower knitted together by a very sophisticated battle network.

Should China decide that control of Taiwan is its first and main target, it would need to establish sea control across the Taiwan Strait by fighting in and dominating multiple domains. As Krepinevich has outlined, local sea control would require not only warships and submarines but also space, cyber, and electromagnetic capabilities to jam communications, corrupt data, interfere with logistics systems, and blind satellites.²⁷ Early in a conflict, the PLA would attempt to cripple the coalition’s central nervous system—its battle network. The PLA would likely attack forward-deployed coalition forces, including air and naval bases, missile bases, aircraft carriers, and large warships. It would seek to suppress and destroy allied integrated air and missile defense systems. If the PLA crippled coalition forces in the first island chain, it would set the conditions for a massive invasion force to get across the strait and decisively defeat coalition forces on Taiwan.

The Five Ds of Success: Deter, Delay, Disrupt, Defend, and Defeat

To defeat this likely war plan, the US-allied warfighting concept should organize, train, and equip to deter, delay, and disrupt PLA forces before counterattacking to defend and defeat.²⁸ Although the coalition should make every effort to deter Chinese aggression in the region, the following strategy assumes that deterrence has failed and coalition forces must therefore implement strategies focused on the remaining four Ds.

Coalition forces on the front lines of a Chinese conflict—those in Japan, the Philippines, and Taiwan—must delay and disrupt invasion forces. US doctrine defines delaying actions as operations “under pressure [that trade] space for time by slowing down the enemy’s momentum and inflicting maximum damage on enemy forces without becoming decisively engaged.”²⁹ During these initial operations, frontline delaying and disrupting forces do not need decisive victories. Rather, they need to buy time for air and sea power to engage decisively from safer zones originating from Guam, other Pacific territories, Australia, Hawaii, and the continental United States.³⁰

Delaying and disrupting actions buys the coalition time to defend and ultimately defeat Chinese invasion forces. In the initial phases of a conflict, coalition forces must create the conditions for reinforcing forces to move to a counteroffensive that attrits Chinese forces and exhausts China’s means of continuing to fight.

Phase I: Delay and Disrupt—a Strategy to Buy Time

To buy time for a counteroffensive, coalition “delay and disrupt” forces must be trained and equipped to contest Chinese attempts at air superiority, sea control, and information dominance and to disrupt attempts to come ashore and establish a lodgment.³¹ As they conduct these operations, the coalition forces can begin to mass air and naval forces outside this Chinese kill zone where they enjoy some sanctuary from Chinese missile ranges.

Therefore, the coalition must increase the quantity of US and allied ground forces equipped with cruise and ballistic missiles. Lethal, dispersed mobile and networked allied ground forces along the first island chain should be backed by naval, air, and electronic forces that can maximally disrupt a Chinese invasion force.³² A new alliance warfighting concept would transform islands in the first island chain into defensive strongpoints that can withstand Chinese assaults.³³ This force structure would also begin to incorporate an emerging tactical reconnaissance strike complex (TRSC) used to great effect by Ukraine and Russia. A term coined by Frederick W. Kagan of the American Enterprise Institute and Kimberly Kagan of the Institute for the Study of War, the TRSC is

the combination of pervasive tactical reconnaissance, primarily by drone; drone-corrected precision artillery fire; precision munitions delivered by fixed- and/or rotary-wing aircraft; drone-launched precision munitions; and large numbers of FPV [first-person view] loitering munitions with support from extensive offensive and defensive electronic warfare systems and operational and strategic reconnaissance assets.³⁴

This TRSC—which has highly developed, layered integrated air and missile defense systems—has reduced the effectiveness of mass air and missile strikes in a cost-effective manner. It has also reduced the effectiveness of operational-level maneuver.³⁵ This development could be promising for defense against amphibious forces. While the millions of aerial drones buzzing around the battlefields of Ukraine have not been used at scale to sink ships, properly repurposed, they could wreak havoc on a maritime invasion force, potentially achieving many mission kills in the maritime domain.

Frontline forces must build up sea-denial capabilities that degrade Chinese maritime forces so they cannot successfully land invasion forces on allied territory. Frontline forces also must prevent a maritime breakout that allows the PLA Navy to cut off the SLOCs for reinforcing forces. Diplomats must keep working toward tighter coordination among Japan, Taiwan, and Southeast Asia to limit PRC entry into the Pacific and Indian Oceans.

Fundamentally, the WPDC requires allied forces to use East Asia’s geography to US and allied advantage and exploit China’s geography as a vulnerability. China’s one, long coastline, which faces US allies, potentially limits its routes into the Pacific and Indian Oceans. Denying this access is key to the success of allied defeat and defend missions. In initial phases, the coalition must keep its own SLOCs open so reinforcements can flow to the front lines. Right now, the coalition is in a disadvantageous position, as China’s ongoing hybrid warfare has militarized the South China Sea islands, removing strategic depth while extending the range of Chinese fires.

Ground forces are critical not just in denying air and sea control to Chinese forces. Frontline ground forces from the Philippines and Taiwan (and possibly Vietnam), where China may seek to grab territory, should also be trained in irregular warfare so they resist occupying forces, a prospect that concerns China’s strategic planners. Such forces, augmented by US and coalition special forces, could field what is known in military parlance as advanced precision-guided rockets, artillery, mortars, and missiles. They can use similar tactics to what Hezbollah used against Israel in the 2006 Lebanon war. Hezbollah employed guerrilla and conventional methods, combining irregular and scattered rocket units, a ground force trained to delay Israeli attempts to grab and hold territory and neutralize targets, and a hardened network of tunnels and command bunkers. Hezbollah proved that well-trained and disciplined irregular cells can deny the objectives of a stronger, conventional force that controls the air and the sea and is equipped with heavy armor.³⁶

Phase II: Defend and Defeat—a Strategy of Exhaustion

It is safe to assume that if coalition forces succeeded in the first phases of fighting, both sides would continue fighting. The coalition would then move from a strategy of delay and disrupt to a strategy of defend and defeat. Most likely, this would require not only sinking much of the Chinese invasion fleet and destroying its invasion forces but also depleting China’s means of offsetting losses and continuing to fight. This strategy would require attriting Chinese forces outside China and, to a limited extent, on the mainland. It also would require economic warfare to degrade China’s means to continue to fight.

A new WPDC would thus take advantage of China’s position as the world’s largest importer of raw materials. Its seaborne imports traverse three straits in East Asia—Lombok, Malacca, and Sunda. Here again, coalition forces could adopt an irregular warfare mindset and make China’s massive merchant shipping fleet a vulnerability. Land-based forces could intercept ships heading to China, similar to Houthi tactics in the Red Sea. The Houthis have targeted a key maritime choke point—the Bab al Mandeb strait—with missiles, drones, and unmanned vessels, resulting in disrupted trade and immense pressure on regional powers. Coalition forces could similarly conduct maritime interdiction operations against Chinese vessels at strategic maritime choke points. Indonesia and Singapore are key to such a strategy, and India could support these efforts from the Andaman and Nicobar Islands.³⁷

The WPDC would attempt to exploit other Chinese vulnerabilities as well. China has land borders that span 14,000 miles. Its air defenses are heavily focused along its coast, but China cannot discount India’s involvement in a major war and would need to dedicate some assets to protecting against such a scenario. If India joined a coalition and continued to focus investment on long-range strikes, China would have to move more of its defensive forces to its west, exhausting more of China’s forces. Over time, the WPDC should work to disallow China’s complacency over the security of its land borders. A longer-term task for US diplomats is to improve relations with Central Asian states bordering China to get China to divide its finite defense resources. But China is way ahead in this dimension of the competition, as its alliance with Russia is driven in part to secure cooperation on pacifying its land borders.

There is a robust academic debate about whether the US should pursue “deterrence by punishment” or “deterrence by denial.”³⁸ The former would demonstrate to China that it will suffer punishing costs if it starts a war while the latter would demonstrate to China that it cannot achieve its military objectives. The notional WPDC stays clear of the debate. Rather, it recognizes that denying China its initial war aims will not necessarily defeat China’s war plans. Exhausting China’s means of continuing to fight while attriting its forces without massively targeting the mainland should be the basis of sound strategy. If the Chinese war machine can offset Chinese losses, the war will continue. The WPDC acknowledges that securing cooperation from the nonaligned Indonesia and the wary Singapore will be the most challenging diplomatic tasks.

The Criticality of Japan and Australia. Simply put, without Japan and Australia, there can be no alliance warfighting concept and deterrence in the western Pacific will fail. Japan is critical to every phase of a potential conflict: from providing frontline forces that can delay and disrupt a Chinese invasion to serving as a logistics and sustainment hub for reinforcing forces. To this end, the US and Japan must continue their efforts to diversify basing arrangements and force structure. Fortunately, Japan’s defense posture is changing fundamentally. It has been improving defenses along the Ryukyu Islands, which run parallel to China’s coast. Forces along this island chain will be equipped with surface-to-air missiles and anti-ship cruise missiles, and Tokyo is extending the ranges of these systems.³⁹

Japan has also begun developing longer strike capabilities that can hold Chinese assets operating in the East China Sea at risk. They are also able to hit key military and economic targets along much of China’s northern coast. In 2022, Japan changed its policy to allow the Japan Self-Defense Forces to strike enemy bases that are preparing to launch attacks. To this end, Japan’s Ministry of Defense is considering developing several types of missiles, including hypersonic missiles, that its forces can launch from land, sea, and air.

In addition, allied use of Australia as a launch point for longer-range attacks, logistics, and sustainment is key. If the SLOCs from forward positions back to the continental US are kept open, the allies can reinforce the front line from bases in Australia, Guam, and other Pacific nations and territories. Australia is a key staging area for long-range forces outside the most lethal parts of the PRC battle network. Long-range bombers and nuclear submarines are key for the initial delay-and-disrupt missions and the counterattack that defeats Chinese invasion forces. A successful Australia-UK-US Agreement program would provide Australia with Virginia-class submarines and their equivalent, which the Royal Australian Navy can use to help defend the frontline states in the first island chain and secure SLOCs between the US and Australia. Canberra should also be encouraged to extend its long-range strike capability and provide more firepower to the delay and degrade missions.

Conclusion

The PRC is pursuing a grand strategy that amasses comprehensive power, bending the international governance system to its will, supporting Russia in attempting to fracture NATO, and pursuing alliance breaking in Asia through coercion. Meanwhile it is training and equipping its military for a major war. The US has no chance of winning a war against China without a strong coalition willing to leverage its geography for strategic advantage. Such a coalition must forge an operational concept that survives a massive conventional first strike against frontline states and forces, delays and disrupts Chinese invasion forces, and buys time to organize a decisive defeat. Given China’s system-upending grand-strategic goals, it is very unlikely that China would stop fighting if it did not achieve its initial war aims. A fully mobilized PRC would likely continue to fight until it advanced at least some of its strategic objectives.

Thus, after successfully delaying and disrupting Chinese invasion forces, the coalition must be prepared to shift its strategy to one of exhaustion of Chinese means to fight. This would require economic warfare and extended attrition of Chinese forces. While Australia, Japan, and Taiwan are key to the coalition’s success, India, Indonesia, the Philippines, Singapore, and Vietnam will also be important in the latter stages of fighting. US security assistance policy should focus on helping Vietnam and the Philippines build their own anti-access and area-denial capabilities to turn the South China Sea into a vulnerability and work with Indonesia and Singapore to deny China the use of key straits for merchant shipping.

The trend lines on building an alliance warfighting concept are mixed. China’s influence in many parts of Southeast Asia is growing in strategic locales such as Bangladesh, Cambodia, Myanmar, and Pakistan. It has significant influence in Singapore and Indonesia as well. It has funded the expansion of the Ream Naval Base in Cambodia on the Gulf of Thailand and is expanding a Cambodian airport as well. It is exercising and equipping Thai forces. China is clearly looking for alternative routes into the open oceans. Meanwhile, its success in controlling and militarizing part of the South China Sea has expanded Chinese power while dealing a blow to US prestige. It is also growing its influence in the south Pacific through malign economic influence by providing police and other internal security forces.

A WPDC will not solve all of Washington’s challenges in East Asia. But it can give allies a sense of reassurance that China can be defeated in a major war and thus stabilize that deterrence. This will require deft diplomacy, a properly resourced US military, and reshaped and focused security assistance efforts.

Authors