Abstract
In May 2013 the Pentagon released an unclassified summary of the top-secret Air-Sea Battle (ASB) Concept. ASB serves to focus the Pentagon’s efforts to organize, train and equip the armed forces against advanced weapons systems that threaten the US military’s unfettered freedom of access and action in the global commons. While officials claim ASB is merely improve service interoperability and could be applied in any number of conflict situations, this article argues that in fact the doctrine represents the Pentagon’s plan for confronting China’s increasingly capable and confident military. This raises two urgent questions: how does ASB fit into an overall US foreign policy toward China – and, if a military confrontation cannot be avoided, are there less risky alternatives, such a maritime blockade, that can achieve the same ends as ASB?
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Notes
‘In truth, the Air Sea Battle Concept is the culmination of a strategy fight that began nearly two decades ago inside the Pentagon and US government at large over how to deal with a single actor: the People’s Republic of China’ Gertz, 2012.
Air-Sea Battle: Service Collaboration to Address Anti-Access and Area Denial Challenges, p. 2.
For example, China deployed its navy to the Gulf of Aden in 2009 on an anti-piracy mission, a navy hospital ship conducted a humanitarian mission in Africa in 2010, and most recently a frigate that had been operating in the Gulf of Aden was used to evacuate Chinese citizens from Libya (Weitz, 2009).
For example, in 2004 China relinquished a large part of Chinese Siberia that had been seized by Russian tsars in the nineteenth century in order to peacefully settle a border dispute (Turnbull, 2012).
‘Remarks by President Obama to the Australian Parliament’, The White House Office of the Press Secretary, 17 November 2011.
Zoellick (2013) points to private investment, strong and flexible social safety nets, trans-Pacific agribusiness, and the energy and environmental sectors as areas in which the United States and China stand to benefit from increased cooperation.
A group of American and Chinese scholars have developed a position paper along these lines (communitariannetwork.org/endorse-mutually-assured-restrain-position-paper). For my own views, see Etzioni (Forthcoming). A major approach to MAR is found in an excellent new book by James Steinberg and Michael E. O’Hanlon called Strategic Reassurance and Resolve: US-China Relations in the Twenty-First Century.
ASB-architect Krepinevich (2012b) makes a similar suggestion: ‘Tokyo should increase its investment in A2/AD capabilities, such as submarines, antisubmarine warfare aircraft, anti-ship cruise missiles, defensive mining, air and missile defenses, and military base hardening and dispersion, reducing both the likelihood of any Chinese or North Korean attack and the burden on US forces responsible for the defense of Northeast Asia’.
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I am indebted to Ashley McKinless for extensive research assistance on this article.
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Etzioni, A. The Air-Sea Battle ‘concept’: A critique. Int Polit 51, 577–596 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1057/ip.2014.27
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/ip.2014.27