Weapons of the Next War

For the last two decades, the Asia-Pacific has represented a positive story in geopolitics, at least compared to the chronic instability in the Middle East. There was an integration of economies on both a regional and global level, a rise in prosperity unprecedented in human history, and a relative absence of major conflicts either between nations or within them. This era of stability is ending, however. In the 21st century, this very same good news story has put the region on the geopolitical center stage, and not in a good way.

China has enjoyed a political, economic, and now military rise that Foreign Affairs magazine has said may be the “most important international relations story of the 21st century.” The problem is that no one knows how that story might end. Disputes with every one of its maritime neighbors over islands and sea rights are helping to fuel a regional arms race. But underlying these disputes are larger geopolitical questions centering on Beijing’s vision of emerging as the leading global power of the next 100 years, the American response, and whether this reordering will be one that remains only within the realm of politics and economics.

Henry Kissinger remarked in a 2012 essay that U.S.-China relations have long been “…heading for confrontation rather than cooperation.” This confrontation is purposeful, not careless. Even the “China Dream” now has the country becoming, in strategist Liu Ming Fu’s concept, “the most powerful country in the world” – a world that he defines as “post American.” This is not merely top-down thinking: The Chinese Communist Party is carefully encouraging a more nationalist Chinese public to become aligned with this ambition. According to one survey, more than 80 percent of those polled think China should return to its status as the world’s strongest power in both political and military terms. It is an alignment that combines historical longing and 21st century ambitions, nurtured by a Party leadership that has harmonized its strategy with popular priority. Indeed, the Party’s Global Times newspaper last September featured an editorial “As possibility of a Third World War Exists, China Needs To Be Prepared” by a professor at PLA Defense University who made the case as explicitly as possible: “Without large-scale military power, securing China’s overseas interests seems like an empty slogan.”

The risk is obvious: The once unthinkable is more thinkable by the day, a brewing Cold War between great powers, one that could even turn hot. The Pacific Ocean covers nearly a third of the Earth’s surface, making it a large canvas on which to paint a picture of the digital age’s first war between great powers. The potential locales could be the Taiwan Strait or an artificial islet in the South China Sea created by Chinese military construction teams. Or the spark for such a conflict may come halfway around the world, driven by China’s growing presence in strategically vital areas like the Middle East or Africa’s resource regions. If the parallel for today is the period before World War I, as Henry Kissinger worries, remember that there were numerous crises and standoffs between Great Britain, France, and Germany before 1914, with friction points from South Africa to Algeria to the Pacific. Yet it was an assassination in Sarajevo, at the other end of Europe from Berlin and London, which led both the world’s leaders and their publics to see logic in a war they once thought impossible in an age of globalization and progress.

High Technology, High Tensions

Were this competition to remain in the realm of politics, economics, or even low-level cyber spats, it would be a formidable challenge for the U.S. and the Asia-Pacific region. Yet there are clear trends that this “dangerous strategic competition,” as Foreign Policy magazine recently put it, is manifesting in the world’s top two spenders on defense each building new generations of technology designed specifically to counter the other.

In the U.S., the Pentagon is pursuing a classically American strategy of seeking technological dominance in all domains of warfare. The recently announced “Third Offset” Strategy seeks to establish the kind of enduring edge the U.S. could count on during the 20th century Cold War, while imposing painful decisions and costs on the potential adversary list, which now includes China and Russia. The challenge is that this type of military dominance risks becoming a historical anecdote, a hallmark of an era of American power that will never be seen again. A raft of civilian and military technologies from all over the world are shaking up everything from mobile phones to autonomous robotics. Yet the Pentagon bureaucracy still takes a decade or more to build its most capable weapons systems and is confounded by its inability to onboard the latest innovations.

Technological dominance may have been a reasonable strategy with the walled-in Soviet Union. When it comes to technology, China has shown a voracious appetite for innovation developed outside its borders. What is known as the Introduce/Digest/Absorb/Re-innovate (IDAR) process exemplifies this. As China defense expert Andrew Erickson explains, “IDAR takes existing technology and adds value to it by making it cheaper, better suited to Chinese needs, or otherwise improving it.”

The result is China is engaging in what The Economist has noted is the “world’s biggest military expansion” and it is gaining new defense capabilities designed to match, neuter, or surpass not just its regional rivals like Japan, but the world’s best funded military – America’s.

With a rise in defense spending of nearly 10 percent a year for the past decade, these outlays will begin to give China new options for projecting power. The U.S. Defense Department’s annual report to Congress estimates that China’s spending in 2014 was $165 billion – the official Chinese government tally was $136.3 billion. Aided by a blockbuster economy and a renewed sense of national destiny during the past 20 years, the People’s Liberation Army went from being primarily a land-focused military of millions of soldiers depending on sheer size to win a war of attrition to a force confidently developing everything from stealth fighters to a modern battle fleet of carriers and destroyers equipped with shipboard battle computers capable of truly networked warfare for the first time.

China’s military is embracing the cutting edge, rather than shying away from it, without any risk of irritating a penny-pinching Congress or hawkeyed watchdogs on the lookout for costly failures. From fielding the world’s fastest supercomputer to advanced robotics programs, the desire to lead in key military technologies is clear. A perfect example is the numerous hypersonic vehicle tests, notably more than the U.S. has done, conducted by Chinese engineers, who are bent on developing a high-speed flight capability like the WU-14 hypersonic glide vehicle, an aircraft that could transform military aviation in a way not seen since the dawn of the Jet Age.

War With China: Too Important To Talk About

Technology and tensions can be a dangerous combination, which inspired us to explore these trends and the “what if” that no one should actually want to happen. Our new book, Ghost Fleet: A Novel of the Next World War, blends a fictional wartime scenario set at the end of the next decade pitting China and Russia against the U.S. for dominance in the Pacific Ocean. This novel is based on real-world research into how such a conflict would evolve: the latest tactics and technologies used by naval forces, soldiers and even insurgents of today, crossed with a new generation of science fiction-like technology poised to become battlefield reality tomorrow.

Despite the calamity that a major conflict in the Asia-Pacific would represent, there is a relative reticence to talk about it publicly in U.S. military circles. Plenty of attention is heaped on the disparate legal, economic, or military elements of a U.S.-China rivalry. Little to no attention is focused on tying it all together into a larger discussion of how and where a Third World War might be fought.

Indeed, silence on the topic is a deliberate choice, reflecting a desire to not rock the boat, economically speaking, between two countries whose trade added up to more than half a trillion dollars in 2014. The chief of U.S. Naval Operations said as much last year: “If you talk about it openly, you cross the line and unnecessarily antagonize” China, whose trade ties to the U.S. are too important for that. Those in the Navy who have spoken up have been dealt bureaucratic blows. Last year, a top U.S. Naval Intelligence officer who spent much of his career tracking the PLA in the Pacific effectively lost his position for publicly calling out what he saw as Chinese military readiness to wage a “short, sharp” war against U.S. allies like Japan.

A problem too big for Navy captains and admirals to discuss publicly makes for a perfect subject to broach. To help define this future reality, we researched for the book by talking with the real-life versions of our characters. This included U.S. Navy captains, Chinese generals, Silicon Valley billionaires, hackers, veteran special operators, and others who had much to say on the subject but would sink their careers if they did so publicly.

This helped anchor our fictional story firmly in the world of nonfiction so that we might publicly explore how World War III might start, and how it might actually play out. Simply put, it is too important a topic to leave behind closed doors.

Perhaps the biggest lesson from the book is a familiar one: Technology matters but not in the ways most people expect. A conventional “spend more for victory” approach won’t win the next world war, and may even make it more likely. Rather, if the simmering tensions between China and the United States in the Asia-Pacific region were to turn hot during the next decade, a mix of mastery of new military technologies and the ability to repurpose existing weapons in smart new ways will make the difference between victory and defeat. One of the biggest reasons why this matters so much is that the next world war will not just be limited to the traditional domains of air, land and sea.

A Battle of Domains

A major war with China in the Pacific would invert our understanding of modern warfare when compared with the past decade’s campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan. Those fights were counterinsurgency-oriented ground wars without distinct air or sea battles. In the Pacific, land forces like the U.S. Army would have a far smaller role as the White House is unlikely to order an invasion of the Chinese mainland. Nor is China likely to attempt to occupy the continental United States. The very geography of the Pacific makes air and sea dominance crucial, a realization driving changes in military planning on both sides of the Pacific.

Yet, the “where” that may matter most are the two domains great powers have never fought in before: space and cyberspace. Those same networks that make ATM transactions seamless will be as critical in a future Pacific war as the Midway Islands were in 1942. If China knocks out America’s GPS satellite network and spy satellites or takes down the commercial satellites the U.S. military relies on, even basic navigation at sea will be newly hazardous. A destroyer captain’s view of the war may be limited to whatever can be seen from the ship’s bridge with a pair of binoculars. This would give a Third World War characteristics like past world wars, despite their 21st century technologies. Imagine naval squadrons blindly searching out their quarry across the Pacific while new capabilities turn the electronic pathways of our interdependent world into digital killing fields.

Air

Recent generations of American soldiers, Marines, and sailors went to war knowing they could count unequivocally on U.S. fighters to sweep the skies of any threats. It is a bedrock assumption that America owns the skies. Yet this will be one of the first truisms to fall in a major war with China.

So-called fifth-generation warplanes can hide from most radar because they are specially designed to cheat this cornerstone of air defenses around the world. On some jets, special engines allow supersonic flight without an afterburner. The latest radar, sensors, and communications equipment can turn them into flying servers so the jets can share enormous amounts of data.

The U.S. planned to be the world’s top builder of fifth-generation fighters with the F-22 and F-35 Joint Strike Fighter; that is, until China rolled out its own versions.

While Russian fighter designs remain the staple of the current PLA Air Force, China’s surging economic and engineering might have ushered in a new era with profound implications for airpower in the region. When China revealed its Chengdu J-20 fighter in 2011 during a visit by then-Defense Secretary Robert Gates, it presented an unmistakable challenge to America’s assumptions about air dominance. Even if the stealthy twin-engine fighter owes more than Beijing will ever acknowledge to stolen U.S. plans, the PLA will be operating a plane unlike any other in Asia’s arsenals.

Behind the scenes, China has also reorganized its defense industry to make it more efficient and capable as it seeks to churn out hundreds of next-generation fighters in the coming decades. Another Chinese warplane in development, the Shenyang Aircraft Corp. J-31, is an unmistakable cousin of the F-35, clearly leveraging the Pentagon’s investment in the most expensive weapons program ever at more than $1 trillion.

However, the real game-changer may be the next generation of fighters beginning to take shape. Pilots may need not apply.

The U.S. Secretary of the Navy said in April that after the F-35, the Navy and Marine Corps may never buy another manned strike fighter as autonomous weapons systems will be “the new normal in ever-increasing areas.” The Navy has recently flown a new flying-wing drone, the carrier launched X-47B alongside a manned fighter, in a display of next-generation airpower.

This may make software and hardware designers the next aces as real advances in unmanned aircraft leap from today’s advances to the next generation. The PLA is keenly interested in operating unmanned aircraft, and exporting them too. The U.S. Defense Department believes China is working on three long-range strike drones right now, and there are almost assuredly more in the works under wraps. According to the U.S. Defense Department’s 2015 annual report to Congress, during the next eight years, “China plans to produce upwards of 41,800 land- and sea-based unmanned systems.”

Sea

While China’s aerospace engineers still must overcome expertise gaps in areas like supersonic jet-engine development, shipbuilding is an industry area where it is among the world’s most successful nations, churning out millions of tons of new commercial and military vessels each year. In approaching military naval engineering, the PLA Navy (PLAN) decided to forego patience for leap-ahead improvements in design and production. Within five years, China could have the world’s No. 2 navy by size; in 15 years it could potentially match the U.S. fleet of naval warships, according to defense analyst Andrew Erickson. Meanwhile, the U.S. has seen a steady decline in its military shipyard production facilities in the past 20 years, a trend that bodes poorly if there were an urgent wartime need like the U.S. saw during World War II. A top Navy official earlier this year told a Senate committee that four of the eight U.S. shipyards building warships are one contract from running out of work, which would put their workers and facilities in financial jeopardy.

The PLAN is now making do with an overhauled Russian carrier, but a Chinese aircraft carrier development program is underway. At some point during the next decade or two, China’s first fully domestically built aircraft carrier may make a port of call in a U.S. city. Think about that for a minute and the very different world it bodes, even if the U.S. and China were never to go to war.

Though carriers are iconic national strategic assets, they are far from the only element of China’s naval ambition. Just over a year ago, Chinese websites leaked images of a testbed for a new kind of cruiser, a Type 055, which could be between 525 to 590 feet long. The Type 055 would be the biggest surface warship from Asia since World War II. Size is important in a warship but the Type 055 will also be highly advanced, showing new Chinese plans to operate far from China’s shores. It is designed to act as a sort of quarterback to protect entire Chinese fleets from air attack as well as using missiles to destroy land and sea targets with more missile launch cells (up to 128) than the United States’ Ticonderoga class (which has 122).

China’s DF-21D “carrier killer” and the U.S. Navy’s LRASM (the Long Range Anti-Ship Missile) are the next generation of missiles, but future battles at sea may see more exotic new weapons. American engineers are working on a deployable electromagnetic railgun, a cannon capable of shooting a projectile as far as 100 miles at a velocity off more than 5,000 miles an hour. So destructive is the impact that the high-speed projectile does not rely on a conventional explosive warhead like traditional naval cannons. While these power hungry weapons, however, have been a challenge to make usable, new ship power systems aboard warships like the Zumwalt (DDG-1000) may make science fiction a reality. Lasers are also moving out of the realm of the possible to the practical. Only one out of five U.S. defense experts surveyed by CNAS in 2014 believe lasers will be used in war. Yet the U.S. Navy has already deployed prototype laser weapons in the Middle East that can target small boats and missiles, while China has also conducted laser-weapons tests.

The most pressing concern in U.S. military circles is China’s next-generation precision ballistic missile warheads and hypersonic cruise missiles, which could quickly sink U.S. aircraft carriers with a barrage coming from the upper atmosphere or skimming the sea surface. Though the Type 055 seems to be trying to outdo U.S. cruisers, the PLAN weapons development plan is really trying to level the playing field by going after the U.S. Navy’s distinct advantage for the last 70 years, namely the world’s foremost fleet of aircraft carriers.

The U.S. faces a choice of either shifting a legacy of naval carrier aviation toward unmanned systems and smaller ships or doubling down on the supercarrier. So far the latter seems to be winning out as the Navy announced it will be building another new Ford-class supercarrier. The Ford class also brings leap-ahead technologies to bear on naval aviation like electromagnetic catapults. But even that may not matter as the ship can increasingly be targeted at sea by threats that range from long range missiles to a new fleet of submarines.

When it comes to undersea warfare, the U.S. holds a decisive, arguably asymmetric, advantage – for now at least. The U.S. nuclear-powered submarine fleet is modern, well-armed, and its sailors have decades of hard-won operational expertise embedded in their training and doctrine. There are also plans afoot to increase the lethality of frontline submarines like the Virginia-class attack subs by more than tripling the number of Tomahawk cruise missiles they can carry, up to 40 – an increase of 28.

The U.S. cannot count on holding this edge forever. China already has so many diesel-powered submarines that its undersea fleet is on par with the United States’ – and is expected to outnumber it in the coming decade. These stealthy designs have drawbacks owing to the fuel that powers them, but they are extremely quiet when running on batteries and can operate in shallower, riskier waters where Navy brass will not send U.S. nuclear subs. China’s submarine drivers are excellent peacetime hunters, to be sure, regularly stalking heavily armed U.S. battle groups at close range during the past decade to gain valuable operational experience.

The next generation of Chinese submarines will be more formidable and include new classes of nuclear powered subs. The Type 095 submarine will be able to stay submerged longer yet will retain the speed of the current Type 091 and 093 submarines. In addition, the Type 095 will be quieter and have more land- and sea-attack cruise missiles, allowing it to maneuver and then strike from within close range of a U.S. battle group. As with the Type 055 Cruiser, these new subs will have improved communications and combat networking capabilities that will enable the kinds of connected maneuvers at which U.S. forces excel.

Such developments require the U.S. to take its own asymmetric tack. Swarming autonomous vessels on the surface and undersea are coming that will patrol waters on their own. Some designs look nothing like the shipbuilding status quo. Unconventional undersea vessels like the long-duration WaveGlider are in development and their descendants have a role in reconnaissance missions. The U.S. Navy has also begun experimenting with robotic surface ships that could hunt submarines while working in packs. A more advanced swarming-vessel approach, the Anti-submarine Warfare Continuous Trail Unmanned Vessel, or ACTUV, takes this to the extreme with high speed and a purpose-built ship- and submarine-killing design.

How much confidence should the U.S. then place in its ability to out-innovate China’s naval engineers in order to remain the most feared naval fighting force on any ocean? That will depend on developments in another crucial area: submarine detection. New technologies based on long-range detection, highly advanced sensors, and “big data” processing could fuse together a precise picture of a submarine’s location. Once found, a submarine then loses its key tactical advantage: stealth. If this happens, then the fearsome sharks of the deep can be turned into prey. As with the potential loss of a generation-spanning airpower advantage to new Chinese fighters, this kind of revelation would similarly upend the American way of war in the Pacific.

Space

The opening battle in space will be a historic, and tragic, moment for the world as it has been the one realm that human conflict has not yet touched. All the same, neither U.S. nor Chinese military planners want to cede the opening moments of a conflict in space because whichever side takes a first victory will have an insurmountable advantage.

Since China’s 2007 shoot down of one of its own satellites 537 miles above the Earth, Beijing has tried to play down its growing anti-satellite capabilities. The head of U.S. Space Command was candid about the implications during a recent speech: “Soon every satellite in every orbit will be able to be held at risk.”

The U.S. response has been another manifestation of the brewing U.S.-China arms race, recently revealing a plan to spend $5 billion during the next five years on space warfare technologies. Will that be enough? Consider that military and intelligence satellites take years to produce. Yet the most critical phase of a conflict with China could last only hours. This is not just about military satellites, however. Even with recent innovations in tiny satellites that distribute tasks among a pack of devices instead of a single big one, the U.S. military is dependent on the GPS constellation, commercial communications satellites, and increasingly commercial imagery from space too.

The stakes are high in space for other reasons as well. Just as civilian aerial bombing in World War I ushered in a new paradigm in modern warfare, the targeting of satellites will forever change how we think of space in a strategic sense. For astronauts it raises another question: Will they be warriors more than scientists and explorers from here on out?

The U.S. is on the cusp of a commercial space launch revolution that could actually become strategically decisive in the event of a major fight with China. The ability to replace satellites quickly and affordably could be the 21st century equivalent of the railroad’s military role in the 19th century.

Cyber

During a major conflict in the Pacific, hackers and uniformed cyber warriors will be on their own frontlines around the clock. China’s notorious ongoing theft of U.S. industrial information from just about every important sector of the American economy – even a labor union got hacked, according to the FBI last year – gives it what many cybersecurity experts believe will be a leg up in a major conflict.

A U.S.-China war would reframe how people think about “cyberwar,” taking it from IP theft and crime to battlefield implications. A Defense Science Board panel in 2012 concluded that the U.S. “cannot be confident that our critical Information Technology (IT) systems will work under attack from a sophisticated and well-resourced opponent utilizing cyber capabilities in combination with all of their military and intelligence capabilities.” Privately, government officials have a long list of weapons systems that have been hacked by China, including soon-to-be frontline aircraft like the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter and missile-defense systems deployed to the Asia-Pacific. This year, a report from the Pentagon’s top weapons tester showed that his office “found significant vulnerabilities” on “nearly every acquisition program” that underwent cybersecurity testing and evaluation. Many of these vulnerabilities were exploited without very sophisticated techniques, the report added. In turn, as the Snowden revelations show, the NSA has been busy targeting Chinese networks.

Unlike espionage-oriented exploits, such as the recent hacking of the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, actual cyber weapons would also likely be employed by both sides for the first time between two great power nations. These are variants of software designed not to steal but to wreak real physical damage, akin to the Stuxnet virus that targeted industrial control systems in Iranian nuclear research facilities. The software vulnerable to such new classes of weapons can be found on mundane systems like traffic lights as well as strategically vital ones like in U.S. Navy warship engine rooms.

These new weapons will be employed by new forces, too. Just as the new Army Air Corps became a key player in World War II, official entities like the PLA’s 61539 unit and those marshaled by the U.S. Cyber Command will play a central role in future conflict. They will be joined, and sometimes eclipsed by, proxies like Chinese cyber militias comprising university students or American private contractors. Another wild card: unaffiliated organizations like Anonymous. Although such groups of hacktivists may not choose sides, it is also unlikely they will just stand idly by as war rages through a domain they are devoted to protecting from official intrusion and overreach.

Lessons From the Next World War

Pulling together all of these elements, there are two major lessons to take away from a serious consideration of what a war between China and the U.S. might look like in the Pacific. The first is the paradox that any future war will also involve going back in time.

A good illustration of this comes from the way in which the likely combatants of the next world war are training now. The U.S. Naval Academy this year set up a new cyber warfare major but it has also gone back to teaching all midshipmen celestial navigation. The reason is that the web of satellite-enabled global surveillance and communications networks we take for granted today could be pulled from the future battlefield, taking part of the fight back to the pre-digital age. Indeed, the same warships armed with electromagnetic railguns might find themselves reliant on signal flags to communicate with one another.

The second lesson is that the old lessons of war from Thucydides to Sun Tzu to Clausewitz still hold. Victory is never quick, never easy, and thinking that way sets nations up for a fall. So much of the technologies underpinning the modern world are instant-on and on-demand, which leads too many in both government and the public to think victory in war can be too. Indeed, a 2014 poll found that 74 percent of Chinese believe their military would be victorious in a war with the U.S.

The temptation for military and civilian leaders throughout the Asia-Pacific is not just to believe that the technological advantages pursued by their side offers the promise of quick and decisive victories, but also that conflicts can be contained in geographic scope, such as to the Taiwan Strait or South China Sea. In fact, the opposite is true. To blind an enemy at sea, satellites in space must be destroyed first. To thwart a rearmament effort, cyber warriors may go after civilian electrical grids powering shipyards and aircraft production lines. Long-range missiles can destroy targets on the Chinese mainland or pinpoint U.S. carriers rushing to aid allies. What appears to be a military option for ultra-precise and casualty-free strikes could quite easily turn into a drawn-out conflict that reaches into the American and Chinese homefront because of the technological interconnectedness that makes such lightning-strike tactics seem viable in the first place.

Many believe it impolitic to talk about a great power war, as if raising the idea makes it more likely. The reality is that both China and the United States are committed to developing next-generation military technologies that suit their respective strategic aims. Their arms race underscores how the possibility of conflict is indeed real, and should be openly discussed, as a 21st century war in the Pacific could only be seen as a tragedy of historic proportions.

The 20th century teaches us that wars can start through deliberate provocation or through simple miscalculation. But believing conflict to be impossible may have been the most terrible mistake of all, as it allowed dangerous narratives and false promises to take hold. Better we talk about the risks in the real world, so that the fighting itself stays in fiction.