Is the United States headed for a “Suez moment” in a future confrontation with China? Despite the growing prospect of protracted war, U.S. defense strategy appears wedded to getting ready for decisive battle. But the high costs of an elusive short war could handicap Washington in a long fight.
In recent years, as U.S. defense officials have become increasingly concerned about what it would take to deter or defeat a Chinese assault on Taiwan, they increasingly have concentrated on developing the tools necessary to disrupt or degrade a People’s Liberation Army invasion force as it crosses the Taiwan Strait. That includes pursuing ambitious operational goals like inflicting enormous losses on an enemy fleet in a brief span of time. Beijing, it seems, has a strong preference for a short, sharp war that leverages its geographic proximity to the island and exploits Washington’s remoteness from the scene. Washington, therefore, must be able to fight a short, sharp war of its own to stop Beijing from executing a military fait accompli.
Each side might be pursuing rapid decisive battle, or something very close to it, but both sides cannot achieve rapid decisive battle. In war, no amount of mass, lethality, resolve, or luck would change the fact that at least one side, and perhaps both, would find their hopes dashed. Indeed, the historical record suggests that although many militaries plan to win big and win quickly, great-power conflicts are often protracted affairs characterized by gradual attrition. Seemingly decisive battles that do occur, moreover, can turn out to be just the first round of prolonged hostilities, not the precursor to a durable peace.
Consequently, despite the prevailing emphasis on stopping an invasion of Taiwan quickly, there are creeping doubts within the U.S. national security community about Washington’s quest for a swift, geographically contained, and clear-cut victory — and growing fears of a lengthy, global, and indeterminate war. To the extent that the United States is beginning to address these concerns, however, it is focused on mobilizing its defense-industrial base to carry out a lengthy fight if its initial campaign falls short of expectations, not on what the likelihood of a long war could mean for where, when, how, and to what ends the United States should fight from the very start.
Taking protracted warfare seriously means more than simply figuring out how the United States can carry on its preferred type of war over an extended time horizon. Rather, it entails reconciling the fundamental tensions that exist between the conflict that Washington envisions and the one that it is likely to face. A strategy that calls for smashing Chinese military forces in and around the Taiwan Strait might seem like it offers a straight line to victory, but it could leave the United States poorly positioned for a long fight. Preparing for a long fight, however, could require policymakers to make strategic choices that are deeply at odds with the contemporary American way of war, which emphasizes massing forces, responding quickly, and destroying the adversary’s frontline military forces in a limited conflict.
The Decisive Battle Bias
As most U.S. observers agree, China is the rightful pacing challenge for the United States due to its economic growth, military strength, and revisionist ambitions. Despite skepticism in some quarters, there is also an informal consensus that intervening to defeat an invasion of Taiwan should be the pacing scenario for Department of Defense planning given the island’s importance to China’s leadership, the potential strategic ramifications of its fall, and the belief among many defense planners that if the United States can develop the capabilities necessary for success in this contingency, it will be able to prevail in almost any other fight.
If China does opt for invasion, it has strong incentives to move as fast as possible and inflict as much damage on opposing forces as possible. Beijing would undoubtedly like to catch its adversaries off guard, before they disperse, hide, shelter, and fight back. In addition, it would want to take advantage of the time-distance problem that arises because many U.S. reinforcements will be thousands of miles away before rushing to the scene. It could also aim to exploit the nature of decision-making in democracies, which entails time-consuming deliberation and consensus-building, especially when it comes to matters as deadly serious as conflict with a nuclear-armed rival.
The need to turn back an invasion before losses mount and leaders lose their nerve limits U.S. defense strategy options. For instance, a rollback campaign to evict China from any seized territory would cede all or part of Taiwan from the outset, while a punishment campaign via maritime blockade would require so long to take effect that it probably would do the same. That seems to leave Washington with one remaining course of action: a defensively oriented, highly lethal denial campaign that would damage or destroy enough enemy forces to prevent China from gaining control over Taiwan in the first place. In short, if United States does not react quickly and forcefully, and if it does not inflict enormous losses on its opponent, Taiwan could fall, particularly as the military balance between the island and the mainland shifts further and further in the latter’s favor.
The reality for both sides is that decisive battle is historically rare, especially if both antagonists are unwilling or unable to inflict the level of destruction necessary to actually knock their opponent down for the count. Given that the United States and China appear to be preparing for limited war (not regime change or unconditional surrender), and have designed their kinetic forces for tailored attacks on military targets (not widespread attacks on war-related industry), a prospective conflict between them is unlikely to be the exception that proves the rule.
The United States, for example, would have a tough time inflicting attrition sufficient on the People’s Liberation Army to prevent an invasion of Taiwan, at least not without suffering significant losses of its own, due to its other military commitments, the geography of the theater, and the vulnerability of its own forces and posture. Even if it could, the theory of victory underpinning a successful campaign of denial does not explain how the destruction of China’s air and maritime forces would be anything other than the first round of a longer fight against a revanchist rival whose military-industrial capacity would remain untouched. For its part, China might be able to exploit vulnerabilities in U.S. forces and posture to impose a heavy toll on the United States, which could enable it to put forces on the island, depending on how well it fights and how long Taiwan can hold out. But it is highly unlikely that Washington would take these losses lying down, rather than gearing up for round two. And it is equally unlikely, for the time being at least, that Beijing could or would do enough damage to prevent the United States from rearming and reattacking eventually.
The reality, therefore, is that a collision between the United States and China would most likely be a drawn-out affair in which neither side is able to gain a decisive advantage quickly, or in which one side gains a temporary advantage that turns out to be the beginning of a much longer fight. That could lead to one of several possible scenarios: a protracted war over the disposition of Taiwan if China is unable to establish control over the island but is unwilling to stop trying; a protracted war to free Taiwan if the United States fails to stop an invasion but decides that it must restore the island’s independence; or a protracted war between the United States and China in which Taiwan, whatever its status, becomes a secondary consideration. Any of these outcomes seem more plausible than the military fait accompli that many U.S. strategists fear China will achieve or the massive defeat they hope the United States can inflict.
Strategies, Plans, and Assumptions
The bottom line is that U.S. defense strategy toward China is built on a highly questionable assumption that a historically aberrant outcome is a plausible end state for a future great-power war, and therefore that Washington can and should set its sights on a quick and decisive victory in a conflict with China over Taiwan. If rapid decisive battle is unlikely to be in the cards, though, why does it exert such a strong pull on defense planners?
The appeal of a pivotal clash is understandable: No-one wants to fight a long and costly war if a short and successful one could be possible. Nor do policymakers in the United States, or perhaps even China, seem willing to tolerate the enormous losses of blood and treasure that likely would be required to comprehensively defeat their adversary. There are, moreover, a variety of strategic, organizational, bureaucratic, and even psychological factors that can contribute to the conviction that rapid decisive battle is both necessary and achievable.
In the American case, formative historical experiences can shape the views of key leaders. Although it is now more than three decades in the past, the swift drubbing of Iraqi conventional forces during the First Gulf War still looms large in American strategic thought and stands out as the modern apex of American military achievement in a period of maximal American power. By contrast, the long and indecisive wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are the modern nadir.
In this context, the strategic demands associated with confronting multiple rivals in multiple regions exert a heavy influence on defense planners. If the United States no longer has the ability to successfully fight two wars at once, then keeping adversaries in a box might require winning the first war big and winning it fast, so that potential opportunists will remain on guard and on the sidelines.
At the same time, military organizations have incentives to focus on short wars. This is not necessarily because these organizations have a bias for offense over defense, but because planning scenarios used for strategy are often simultaneously used for constraining service budgets — all else being equal, shorter wars should be cheaper than longer wars. Bureaucratically, the assumption that wars will be relatively short also makes the planning and programming process a comparatively easy one because it privileges quantifiable and easy-to-measure issues such as force flows, exchange ratios, and attrition rates. Long wars, by contrast, turn as much — if not more — on qualitative and hard-to-measures topics such as adversary will and resolve, which gives planners added reason to avoid them. This privileges strategic efficiency over operational effectiveness.
Notwithstanding these factors that can drive policymakers and planners to embrace the goal of rapid decisive battle, concerns about the probability of protracted war are starting to rise within the U.S. national security establishment for a number of reasons, from analysis that highlights the costs both sides are likely to absorb in a Sino-American clash, to the grinding war of attrition still unfolding between a major power and its much smaller and weaker neighbor on the other side of the world. These developments have catalyzed new efforts to revitalize the American defense-industrial base so that it can eventually produce the quantities of materiel necessary to sustain a longer-than-expected war.
Although rectifying shortfalls in production rates, ramping up munitions stockpiles, and improving the ability to reconstitute forces lost in combat are important, these efforts do not address the underlying strategies that may demand more or less war materiel over time. Put differently, the sudden focus on defense-industrial base mobilization amounts to approaching protracted war from back to front — that is, treating it like a short war campaign conducted on a longer timeline when things go wrong, and therefore requiring added supplies to sustain operations beyond the point when they would otherwise run out. Policymakers, it seems, are unwilling or unable to approach protracted war from front to back — that is, reconsidering the objectives of a war and the outlines of a military campaign given the expectation, at the start, that it will extend far into the future.
How to Start a Protracted War and How to Finish It
Approaching protraction as a problem of strategy, not simply as an issue of materiel, entails confronting an uncomfortable dilemma: The tenets of rapid decisive battle, which have influenced American military planning for decades and continue to shape how the U.S. military manages the China problem, are directly at odds with the sources of success in a long war.
For instance, rapid decisive battle generally calls for mobilizing military assets in a theater of conflict, and doing so almost immediately, to set the stage for a showdown and stop an adversary from achieving its operational objectives. Victory is achieved, moreover, mainly by targeting an adversary’s frontline forces to degrade their cohesion and disrupt their ability to maneuver, not by expanding a conflict into peripheral theaters or through targeting a rival’s economy. Policymakers anticipating a protracted war need to make a very different set of calculations, however, both when a conflict begins and while it unfolds.
For instance, as a number of scholars have noted, the first principle of protracted war is to survive the initial fight. So long as the conflict continues and forces remain available, opportunities exist to impose costs on an opponent that might cause them to concede, or to wear down that opponent to a point that it can no longer continue. The quest for rapid decisive battle often goes hand-in-hand with the risk of decisive losses, however, especially when going up against an opponent like China that has designed its forces and operational concepts to cope with a potential U.S. military invention in a regional contingency. Even if Beijing were unable to achieve its objectives despite inflicting such heavy losses, Washington would be poorly positioned to break any stalemate and continue the fight. In a protracted war, therefore, force preservation is just as important, if not more important, than force responsiveness, especially when keeping an eye on having enough forces available over as many years as the war may last.
Meanwhile, making the leap from surviving to winning requires using those remaining forces, along with other military and non-military tools, to put the opponent in a much worse geopolitical and economic position, both in absolute and relative terms. Success in a long war does not come solely from decrementing an opponent’s military power, which can be reconstituted over time, particularly if that opponent has enormous economic and military-industrial capacity, as China does. Rather, success means degrading the sources of an opponent’s military power, including its economic and military-industrial capacity, both at home and abroad. Any strategy that focuses on inflicting materiel losses on military forces and personnel but does not impose significant costs on an opponent’s economic wealth and geopolitical position is unlikely to create the conditions for a meaningful victory. This clashes with the imperative to target frontline forces, especially within a small geographic box like the Taiwan Strait, in pursuit of decisive battle against an opposing military alone.
In the end, the United States appears to be pursuing a strategy, and designing a force, for a low probability scenario: an invasion of Taiwan that can be halted quickly at the point of attack, and at an acceptable cost, through the destruction of adversary frontline units. This fits well with the American military’s preference for a swift response, overwhelming force, and escalation management, even when it does not play to American strengths. By putting its forces at risk and keeping coercive options off the table, however, those decisions could leave Washington disadvantaged in the type of scenario it is more likely to confront, namely an indecisive conflict that drags on over time and extends far beyond the narrow confines of the Taiwan Strait.
Laying the Foundation for a Long War
During the interwar period, when confronted with an increasingly difficult military situation, U.S. strategists revised their assumptions about the character of a future war with Imperial Japan. That meant letting go of earlier plans to rush to the defense of American possessions in the Western Pacific and devising ways to gradually wear down its potential opponent. Today, serious planning for protraction with China will require similar efforts to grapple with the sources of American success in a long conflict, even if doing so represents a sharp departure from the contemporary American way of war. Yet that will require tackling political and strategic issues that policymakers have so far been eager to avoid.
Undermining an adversary’s geopolitical and economic position is just as important in protracted war as destroying its frontline forces. The United States, therefore, will need to think bigger and deeper when it comes to cost imposition and punishment. For decades, defense officials have sought to keep conflicts geographically constrained and minimize the damage inflicted on non-military targets, even though global force projection — including the ability to strike any target, anywhere in the world — remains an enduring American military advantage. That arguably has left the U.S. military ill-prepared and ill-equipped to degrade a rival’s economic and industrial capacity in a long war. At a minimum, policymakers should consider the range of options to do so, including cost-imposition against targets on Chinese territory and abroad, and begin to search for the most effective way to perform this mission.
Retaining the ability to impose costs and inflict punishment over time means that force preservation becomes increasingly important in protracted war. Washington cannot, then, rush its all of its most valuable assets to the rescue of Taiwan. Of course, it cannot simply ignore the invasion threat that China poses to Taiwan. Not losing, therefore, means finding low-cost ways to prevent China from establishing a military presence in Taiwan, or perhaps imposing pain on any units that it emplaces on the island. It could even mean minimizing direct military intervention at the outset of a conflict so that U.S. forces can be employed later at a time and place of their choosing, if the local military balance swings even further in China’s favor. Policymakers, therefore, need to consider the range of plausible outcomes that exist in between the unlikely extremes of a quick Chinese capture of Taiwan and a quick U.S. defeat of China, and determine which of those outcomes are actually acceptable.
Ultimately, Washington may be due for a fundamental strategy rethink as it ramps up its competition with Beijing. A genuine victory in the most likely conflict scenario — a prolonged, grinding fight — looks quite different from current theories of victory. It leverages different advantages than the current American way of war and it requires far more than a revitalization of the defense-industrial base.
Evan Montgomery is a senior fellow and the director of research and studies at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. He previously served as special advisor to the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Julian Ouellet is a researcher at the Institute for Defense Analyses. He previously served as vice director for Joint Force Development and Design Integration on the Joint Staff.
Image: Navy Petty Officer 1st Class Andre T. Richard via The Department of Defense
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