Ch. 10: Crouching Tiger Serialization

The Missiles R Us of the World

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Question: Which country has the largest, and most diverse, conventional missile arsenal in the world?

1.     China

2.     Russia

3.     The United States

While there is considerable speculation as to the size of China’s strategic nuclear missile arsenal, there is far more agreement on this fact: China has become, in the colorful words of journalist Bill Gertz, the “missiles R us” of the world.

In fact, China’s non-nuclear conventional missile buildup has followed logically from its strategic commitment to a relatively inexpensive asymmetric weapons strategy as well as historically from Chairman Mao Zedong’s tactical preference for “swarming” or overwhelming an enemy. 

China’s missile focus has also followed inevitably from its assessment of the Asia-Pacific chessboard.  Notes the Economist magazine on this point in describing missiles as “the pillar of China’s military modernization”:

After awesome demonstrations of American firepower, in Operation Desert Storm in the first Gulf war, and then in 1996, when the United States sailed two carrier strike groups close to Taiwan to deter Chinese aggression, China felt that it could no longer depend on sheer manpower for its defence. So it has invested heavily in the strength and technical sophistication of its missiles.

As for the nature of the Chinese missile threat itself, while journalists these days have tended to become fixated on China’s new carrier-killing anti-ship ballistic missile, experts like Professors Bernard Cole of America’s National Defense University and Lyle Goldstein of the US Naval War College believe that the cruise missile, which has been around for a very long time, may ultimately be even more dangerous.

To Cole, the emerging and “very challenging” China cruise missile threat comes not from China’s ability to produce vast numbers of increasingly faster and more sophisticated missiles.  Rather, this threat ultimately comes from China’s development of “space-based assets and other sorts of radars” that allow China to far more accurately detect and track its targets.

Here, Professor Goldstein drills down on some of the dangers of one particular type of Chinese cruise missile – the anti-ship cruise missile.  Says Goldstein:

[S]ome of the latest versions of Chinese anti-ship cruise missiles are superior in range and speed to American systems like the Harpoon missile, which is not as capable. So this is an area where they're ahead of us, and that's very disturbing. But another aspect that's disturbing is just how many different ways China can deploy its cruise missiles, whether it be through missile catamarans, very capable surface ships, and also submarines.

As for the numbers themselves, Taiwan alone is reported to be in the crosshairs of over 1,500 Chinese missiles – a likely overkill if there ever were one but more likely simply a coercive tool to deter Taiwan from ever declaring its independence.  On this point, Mark Stokes of the International Assessment and Strategy Center laconically notes:

As early as 1993, all the way up until the present day, whoever sits in the presidential office within Taiwan, in essence, is within seven minutes of destruction. And so that puts a certain psychological pressure upon the population.

Taiwan, however, is hardly the only Chinese target with a Maoist swarm of missiles pointed at it.  Consider, for example, the plight of Japan – which is now locked in an increasingly contentious territorial dispute over the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands in the East China Sea.  As Professor Goldstein describes the potential battlefield:

When we look at the breakdown of how different capabilities would alter the strategic balance in, say, the East China Sea, to me, the Japanese navy faces a very grave threat from land-based [missile] systems. For example, the anti-ship cruise missiles based on [China’s] shore could range Japanese naval units in the vicinity of the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands and could, I think, probably decisively defeat them. So the cruise missile threat is huge; and one concern I have is that the focus purely on anti-ship ballistic missiles probably may, in effect, take our eye off the ball, which is the cruise missile threat.

Beyond Taiwan, there is also the increasing vulnerability of America’s forward bases stretched along the First and Second Island Chains.  While America’s reasonably mobile aircraft carriers have at least a fighting chance of evading China’s anti-ship missiles, America’s fixed forward bases are, in effect, GPS sitting ducks for pounding Chinese salvos.  They are also likely very dead ducks if America’s missile defense systems fail because virtually – and perhaps inexplicably – none of America’s forward bases are “hardened” to any significant degree against missile attack.