Compass Points - Global Strategy
To counter China requires global Marines
Compass Points - Global Strategy
To counter China requires global Marines
December 23, 2024
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China is a global power with global ambitions. The United States cannot take a regional approach to China. Neither can the Marine Corps.
China experts have long understood that no matter what happens in the world, China sees itself as a global power and is always moving in that direction. For example, for decades the Rand Corporation has warned of China's global aspirations.
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What Are China's Security Objectives?
From the consolidation of China as a unified state under the Han Dynasty (in the 3rd century B.C.) through the emergence of the present Communist government, Chinese regimes have faced a common set of security problems.
First,
China has an astonishingly long border—more than 10,000 miles in all—to defend against local and distant threats. During the imperial era (from the 3rd century B.C. until the mid-19th century), raids by nomadic tribes threatened the Chinese periphery. In the early modern era (from approximately 1850), the periphery was threatened by great imperialist powers, including Russia, Germany, Great Britain, and France. Since World War II, militantly strong, industrialized states—India, Russia, Japan, and the United States—have posed new security threats to the periphery.
Second,
China's domestic political system has always been marked by a personality-based pattern of rule in which ultimate authority comes from the power and beliefs of individual leaders, not from legal and organizational norms and processes. In such a system, policy content and behavior—including external security policy—often become tools in the domestic power struggle among senior leaders. This tends to cause volatility within the government and internal political strife.
Third,
no matter what its relative geopolitical strength at any time, China thinks of itself as a great power. This self-image is based on China's historical role as a central political player in Asia and on its tradition of economic self-sufficiency. During imperial times, Chinese regimes usually held a deep-seated belief in China's political, social, and cultural superiority over its neighbors. In modern times, Chinese regimes have aspired to economic, technological, and military equality with, rather than superiority over, the other major powers.
These three key considerations have shaped China's basic approach to political and military security throughout its long history. Viewed through the prism of time, the security strategies employed by various Chinese regimes converge into an overall "Grand Strategy" that strives for three interrelated objectives:
(1) to control the periphery and ward off threats to the ruling regime;
(2) to preserve domestic order and well-being in the face of different forms of social strife; and
(3) to attain or maintain geo-political influence as a major, or even primary, state.
-- RAND, "Interpreting China's Grand Strategy"
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What does the Marine Corps need to learn from China's global ambitions? Former Marine Corps Commandant, General Charles Krulak has warned the Marine Corps must take a global view of the China threat, not a view that is narrow and regional.
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Defense officials and analysts acknowledge that China is no longer merely a regional power but a global power on the move. Its recent moves to restore diplomatic ties between Saudi Arabia and Iran, and to broker a peace agreement between Russia and Ukraine, show that China intends to overshadow the U.S. in the international community. As well, through its massive Belt and Road Initiative, China has been extending its influence through the Sumatra Straits and across the Indian Ocean to Iran, Pakistan and beyond.
. . . The Marine Corps [missile unit] campaign feeds nicely into the techno-centric D.C. groupthink that sees all future warfare as a contest of long-range precision weaponry. To make the flawed concept even more appealing, Marine Corps leaders have said they will pay for this supposed modernization by divesting “legacy” systems, not by requesting additional funds, which is music to the ears of many in Congress.
But, from a national perspective, what do the Marine divestment-investment decisions really mean? For one, they mean the Corps has given up significant operational capabilities for largely unproven capabilities, many of which will not be available for seven or more years, if ever. This divestment of capabilities needed today is an unacceptable risk to national security, a risk apparently unrecognized by the Department of Defense.
These unwise decisions also mean that in adding a small percentage of more anti-ship missiles to the fight, the Marine Corps has seriously degraded its capabilities to conduct combined arms operations, a fundamental component of modern warfare. To support the organizational structure needed to create anti-missile units, the Corps has drastically cut needed capabilities in the rest of its operational forces.
-- Krulak and McHale, "We Cannot Counter China’s Ambitions Without a Global Strategy"
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Years ago, the idea of the Marine Corps divesting much of its global, combined arms capabilities to concentrate on small Pacific island missile units, must have seemed to some in Washington as a clever, new idea. Now, however, the years have gone by and for the missile unit idea, the cleverness has worn off. The Army, Navy, and Air Force missile capabilities are already far ahead of what the Marine Corps was planning to field.
China is global power with global ambitions. The United States cannot take a regional approach to China. Neither can the Marine Corps. The Marine Corps cannot afford to spend any more time, funding, or attention on a missile unit plan that is unnecessarily duplicative, logistically unsupportable, and still not operational. To help counter the global China threat, the Marine Corps needs to upgrade, enhance, and restore its worldwide, combined arms, 9-1-1 force. Somewhere in the world, the next crisis will erupt soon. US policy makers must be confident that when they call for an always ready crisis response force, the Marines will answer.
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RAND Research Summary
Interpreting China's Grand Strategy
By Michael D. Swaine, Ashley J. Tellis
https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_briefs/RB61.html
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The Hill - 03/27/23
We Cannot Counter China’s Ambitions Without a Global Strategy
By former U.S. Congressman and Assistant Secretary of Defense and Colonel USMCR (Ret) Paul McHale and former Marine Corps Commandant, General Charles Krulak, USMC (Ret).
What is in the background of the last two Commandants that convinced them that they, and only they, see something that no one else can understand? Whatever it is, it must be excised immediately to keep it from spreading. Semper Fi
The larger question which the Rand Corporation discussion leaves loosely hanging, is “to what end?” China wishes to be a global power, has ambitious plans, but in order to control 1.4 billion citizens it has resorted to a unique strategy. Give them enough goodies, internal combustion engines for their cars, electricity, perfume, Rolex watches and other consumables and importantly smart phones to “inform” the citizens and importantly to track them for the security state. Belts and roads is an old idea, basically a Silk Road 2.0, colonialism is an old and basically failed idea. Global ambitions? They have a tiger by the tail with their own population, distractions abound, but ultimately it all comes a cropper.
Perhaps another way to look at China is “who gives damn about what they want to do?” If the industrial might of the USA is allowed to run again in full capacity in which we roll our own steel, build our own ships, extend cheap energy to businesses and residents and make a majority of our consumable goods to include antibiotics as examples here in the Western hemisphere, then let China and its global ambitions run wild. They will find sooner or later a nation of 1.4 billion that they can’t control and over stretched political ambitions that they can’t support. They are there already, the current iteration of Mao Zedong runs around creating mischief and telling us what he and his college aged CCP members with little red books are going to do to us. Good luck with that, as your flotillas cross the vast Pacific Ocean do you suspect we will do nothing? We will have drawn China out to our playground not a confined naval battle space between the mainland and Taiwan.
All that said, if General Berger had asked for an increase in the Marine Corps T/O of a regiment sized unit, with a T/E of older rocket technology and perhaps a couple of older sidelined amphibious vessels and said we are going to experiment on a broad basis with placing Marines on littoral outposts, starting in the Pacific, we may extend this to other regions, and importantly, we want to understand the issues, specifically of logistics to support these far flung isolated units, than most of us would have said great idea knock yourselves out. But he didn’t and we know it’s been a non starter and a fail as “divest to invest” has proved so non accretive that even Congress is waking up to the fact that the idea stinks.
Which brings the writer to the point. The Marine Corps has for most of its soon to be 250 years been a small highly mobile, mission specific, maneuver warfare fighting unit. Show us the mess and we will land and sort it. The book “The Banana Wars” by Lester D. Langley which chronicles Marine Corps activities in the Caribbean basin and in the Central and South Americas, from the late 1880 to just before WWII, is worth a read. Land the Marines. Straighten out the bad guys. Get the water running, get the lights on and pick up the garbage. Install a new despot so we can come back in 5-10:years. Sounds mundane, so much so that Navy Crosses and Medal of Honor were extended to Marines who exhibited courage above and beyond.
Returning the Marine Corps to its primary mission is not old thinking, it is an extension of existing thinking and supported by decades of experience and combat operations from the small to the largest possible in global world wars. We need new senior officers that have some real vision and strength of character. We have them back in front with the Chowder Society II, but that’s been a big ask of men who have already given so much and asked only that we get back the basics of the MAGTF construct and build on that strength. General Krulak is spot on, we will be far more likely to be engaged in smaller global messes that we can’t envision yet, but one need only look at the existing hotspots to see where we will be needed.
We need to keep pushing, reminding one and all that there is existing statue, that we are not meeting that statue and either change the law or comply. In the meantime quit playing games and word smithing a line of nonsense that only the blind, lame and lazy are listening to. If push comes to shove with China it will be so big that every combatant nation is going to be involved, but the size and scope of such a fight and the likelihood that it escalates to nuclear exchange makes it seem too big to imagine. So better to not imagine and get back the reality of being America’s 911 force in readiness, on ships that float and are not covered in rust plying, the waters of necessity as is where is. Go where we are sent, do what we are told, willingly, obediently and of course with our unique brand of elan, esprit, ethos and of course our famous gallows humor. One can also wish everyone here, but especially our deployed Marines a safe and Merry Christmas and Happy New Year.