OPINION — The Senate Armed Services Committee last week voted to provide the Pentagon with $6 billion over the next two years to create a new program called the Pacific Deterrence Initiative (PDI).
Chairman Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.) and ranking member, Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.), said the PDI would sharply increase defense spending in the Pacific region to prevent “Chinese aggression by strengthening the credibility of American deterrence.” A similar proposal has been introduced in the House by Rep. Mac Thornberry, ranking member of the House Armed Services Committee.
PDI has been compared to the Obama administration’s 2014 European Defense Initiative (EDI), to bolster opposition to Russia after its incursion into Ukraine. Since then, EDI has drawn $22 billion, with another $4.5 billion included in the 2021 Trump defense budget.
PDI comes in response to the Trump White House claim last month that “Beijing’s military buildup threatens United States and allied national security interests and poses complex challenges for global commerce and supply chains.”
In its May 20, report to Congress entitled, “U.S. Strategic Approach to the People's Republic of China,” the White House said Beijing was “engaging in provocative and coercive military and paramilitary activities in the Yellow Sea, the East and South China Seas, the Taiwan Strait, and Sino-Indian border area.”
Last week in The Cipher Brief, Ambassador Joseph DeTrani, wrote, “China is moving aggressively in the South China Sea, with the establishment of two new administrative districts in contested areas and the sinking of a Vietnamese fishing vessel; its brinkmanship in the Himalayas with Chinese troops crossing into Indian-controlled territory of Ladakh and the spate of disinformation about COVID-19 originating in the U.S."
The fiscal 2021 Defense Authorization bill, approved by the committee last week, directs Defense Secretary Mark Esper “to create a spending plan” for PDI $1.4 billion in the 2021 measure, plus another $5.5 billion proposed for fiscal 2022.
The committee’s summary of the bill said it wanted to “focus [PDI] resources on key military capability gaps, [to] reassure U.S. allies and partners, and bolster the credibility of American deterrence in the Indo-Pacific.”
The summary provided no specifics but mentioned improving active and passive defense against theater cruise, ballistic, hypersonic missiles for bases, operating locations, and other critical infrastructure” as well as “transitioning from large, centralized, and unhardened infrastructure to smaller, dispersed, resilient, and adaptive basing.”
It also called for “increasing the number of capabilities of expeditionary airfields and ports; enhancing pre-positioning of forward stocks of fuel, munitions, equipment, and materiel; and improving distributed logistics and maintenance capabilities in region.”
Strengthening alliances and partnerships by increasing joint capabilities and information sharing were mentioned as well as additional support to “information operations capabilities with a focus on countering malign influence.”
Given Chinese current military activities, a U.S. buildup might lead to a real clash, something Inhofe and Reed jointly wrote about in describing PDI on the May 28, on the website War on the Rocks.
PDI “will focus resources on efforts to convince the Chinese Communist Party that there is no quick, easy, or cheap victory to be had against the American military. A well-distributed posture [of American troops and equipment] will complicate Chinese targeting of U.S. forces and infrastructure. More capable missile defenses at American bases will make them more difficult and costly to strike. Greater numbers of combat-credible U.S. forces in the Indo-Pacific will make it harder for China to seize and maintain the advantage early in a conflict. More resilient logistics will make it harder to take U.S. forces out of the fight or delay reinforcements.”
One element proposed by the Inhofe/Reed team can be read also as adding an offensive capability in the name of deterrence. The senators called for “new land-based, long-range strike capabilities [that] will provide a new source of resilient and survivable U.S. power projection to ensure the sustainment of logistics under persistent multi-domain attack.”
Much of what PDI appears to contain, reflects the “investment plan” contained in Indo-Pacific Commander Adm. Phillip S. Davidson’s May 2020, unclassified report to Congress entitled, “Regain the Advantage,” which he claims would provide the needed link between Trump strategy for the area and required military capacity and capability to carry it out.
Davidson’s plan starts defensively, arguing his “number one unfunded priority” for defending the U.S. homeland begins in Guam, which he described as “our most important operating location in the Western Pacific.” It is, Davidson said, “not only a location we must fight from, but we must also fight for [given] future threats.”
At that point, Davidson inserted the need for what can only be viewed by China as offensive elements.
He called for “Long-Range Precision Fires,” which involve deployment of offensive weapons such as “the Navy’s Maritime Strike Tomahawk, the Air Force’s Joint Air-Surface Standoff Missile with Extended Range, the Army's Cross Domain Army Tactical Missile System, and the Marine Corps' Naval Strike Missile for High Mobility Artillery System.”
These would provide what Davidson called “a precision-strike network along the First Island Chain,” a Chinese phrase which describes the East Asian coastline which runs southward from the Japanese home islands through the Ryukyu islands, Taiwan, and the Philippines. A Pentagon report on Chinese military power also traced the First Island Chain from the Philippines westward to central Vietnam.
James R. Holmes, a professor of strategy at the Naval War College, wrote back in 2014, arming the chain “would present a formidable barrier to exit from or entry into the China Seas.” He added, “Contingents scattered on and around the islands and straits comprising the First Island Chain could give Beijing a bad day should things turn grim over the Senkaku Islands, Taiwan, or some other geopolitical controversy.”
One other element in Davidson’s plan is worth noting: joint exercises with allies beginning in fiscal 2022 that will train forces to deny the Chinese “ability to control the air and sea around the First Island Chain. U.S. forces must be capable of fighting in highly contested environments against technologically advanced opponents, while also minimizing detection across domains.” He said the Joint Forces lack that capacity now.
In claiming that PDI is designed for deterrence, the Senate program ignores a lesson that should have been learned from the Cold War strategic nuclear arms race. Some programs designed to deter also look to an enemy as programs for an offensive first strike.
It is also worth noting that offensive U.S. intermediate-range cruise and other missiles placed along the First Island Chain, thousands of miles from the U.S. homeland, may appear to Chinese President Xi Jinping the way Russian nuclear intermediate-range missiles based in Cuba looked to President Kennedy back in 1963.
Read more expert-driven national security insights, perspective and analysis in The Cipher Brief
