Thread: China's Naval Game-Changer

China's Naval Game-Changer

Posted 08/06/2010 06:45 PM ET

Military Superiority: By the end of the year, China could deploy an anti-ship missile capable of hitting U.S. aircraft carriers at long range. The naval dominance that American foreign policy depended on may be at an end.

When the naval planners of Imperial Japan were laying out the attack on Pearl Harbor, the major question on their mind was — where are the American carriers? In the end, their failure to find them doomed Imperial Japan to defeat.

Since World War II, every president alerted to a crisis has asked the same question — where are the carriers? These floating air bases the size of small towns were visible signs of American power, that we meant business and were able to project that power deep within a potential enemy's territory.

Now our naval supremacy is being challenged with the final testing and imminent deployment of the Dong Feng 21D, a land-based ballistic missile capable of traveling 10 times the speed of sound and hitting fast-moving and heavily-defended American carriers at a distance of 900 miles with deadly hull-penetrating warheads.

China is building its own carrier fleet, but it does not have to match us ship-for-ship with such a long-range carrier-killer. "China can reach out and hit the U.S. well before the U.S. can get close enough to the mainland to hit back," said Toshi Yoshihara, an associate professor at the U.S. Naval War College.

Such carrier-killers "could have an enduring psychological effect on U.S. policymakers," Yoshihara told the Associated Press. "It underscores more broadly that the U.S. Navy no longer rules the waves as it has since the end of World War II."

It gives new weight to the warning China issued when the U.S. recently conducted a four-day "Invincible Spirit" naval exercise, including the aircraft carrier George Washington, with its 1,092-foot flight deck loaded with F-18 Super Hornets and 6,250 personnel, off the Korean Peninsula.

Interestingly, an article posted on Xinhuanet, the Web site of China's official news agency, paints a picture of the sinking of the George Washington in a scenario where it is dispatched to defend Taiwan. The article describes three Dong Feng salvos, the first piercing the hull, starting fires and shutting down flight operations, the second knocking out the ship's propulsion and the third sending the George Washington "to the bottom of the sea."

It would be easy to dismiss this as mere Chinese bravado, but we'd be foolish to remain as convinced of our invincibility as we were on the morning of Dec. 7, 1941. The Pentagon sees this as an "anti-access" weapon designed to limit our options in a crisis.

How would the U.S. with a dwindling fleet respond to this new threat? "One approach is to withdraw, of course," says Paul Giarra, a former Navy commander and senior Japan country director at the Defense Department. "But that's the whole point the Chinese are trying to make."

Admiral Timothy Keating, when head of the Pacific Command, reported that a Chinese admiral had suggested to him that "the U.S. take Hawaii East and we, China, will take Hawaii West and the Indian Ocean. Then you will not need to come to the Western Pacific and the Indian Ocean."

"The Navy has long had to fear carrier-killing capabilities," says Patrick Cronin, a senior director at the nonpartisan Center for a New American Security. "The emerging Chinese anti-ship missile capability, and in particular the DF 21D, represents the first post-Cold War capability that is both potentially capable of stopping our naval projection and is deliberately designed for that purpose."

Except for some mild expressions of concern out of the Pentagon, the administration has said little about this rising threat and done even less. As China's military budget races with double-digit increases, ours shrivels to record lows as a percentage of GDP as our Navy shrinks and advanced weapons programs are curtailed.

We won the first Cold War. We might not be so lucky next time. In more ways than one, this may indeed be a Chinese Century.

http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysi ... anger.aspx

Which is why we have embarked on joint naval exercises with Vietnam. They are concerned, too.

And I read somewhere that our folks were working on a technological defense of some kind.