Return to Winter: Russia, China, and the New Cold War Against America (21 page)

THE SUPERPOWER ADRIFT: AMERICA’S MILITARY PULLBACK

The attacks on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya, in September 2012, which resulted in the death of ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans, sparked one of the most intense political scandals of the Obama presidency. Why did the administration go public with the false story that an anti-Islamic video had caused the
violence? How much warning did the administration have about the attack, and who was in or out of the loop? How could the consulate have been left so poorly defended, especially on the anniversary of the worst terrorist attack in American history?

The questions only multiplied when it became known that military personnel were available to assist in the rescue of U.S. Consulate staff, but they were essentially ordered to stand down. The devastating January 2014 Senate Intelligence Committee report, which concluded that the Benghazi attacks could have been prevented, confirmed this. As the press release accompanying the report said, “The committee found the attacks were preventable, based on extensive intelligence reporting on the terrorist activity in Libya—to include prior threats and attacks against Western targets—and given the known security shortfalls of the U.S. Mission.”
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In short, Americans were left to die.

Post-Benghazi, the U.S. military undertook studies of how to improve its rapid-response forces, including adding 10-men special-operations teams to each ship carrying a Marine Expeditionary Unit (MEU). These MEUs already number 2,200 Marines possessing expertise in skills ranging from special operations to reconnaissance. With or without the 10-men additions, the MEUs are lethal, professional, highly efficient fighting forces, the best in the world. They didn’t save our people in Benghazi, not because they weren’t good enough—but because they weren’t available.

Mark Helprin explains:

       
From World War II onward, the U.S. Sixth Fleet stabilized the Mediterranean region and protected American interests there with the standard deployment, continued through 2008, of a carrier battle group, three hunter killer submarines, and an amphibious ready group with its MEU or equivalent. But in the first year of the Obama
presidency, this was reduced to one almost entirely unarmed command ship. No MEU could respond to Benghazi because none was assigned to, or by chance in, the Mediterranean.
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Helprin calls the Benghazi catastrophe “a brightly illustrative miniature,” and a “symbol of things to come.” It’s difficult to disagree when considering the scope of the U.S. defense retreat and defunding.

At the core of the issue is a planned trillion-dollar cut in defense spending over the next decade—a staggering sum with implications that cannot be overstated. Already some of this damage has been wrought even earlier than anticipated, because of Congress’s failure in 2013 to pass a budget, which led to the sequester. On its own, the sequester imposed a 20 percent cut in military operating budgets. The impact is sinking in across the Pentagon and around Washington. In January 2013, the Joint Chiefs of Staff sent a letter to Senator Carl Levin, the chairman of the Committee on Armed Forces. In this letter, cited as an epigraph to this chapter, the chiefs warned: “The readiness of our Armed Forces is at a tipping point. We are on the brink of creating a hollow force due to an unprecedented convergence of budget considerations and legislation that could require the Department [of Defense] to retain more forces than requested while underfunding that force’s readiness.” The cuts would force all major branches “to ground aircraft, return ships to port, and stop driving combat vehicles in training.”
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The combination of the long-range military cuts and the unanticipated hit from the sequester cuts led Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel to commission an internal study on the implications for the armed forces. The study, known as the Strategic Choices and Management Review, or SCMR (pronounced “skimmer” or “scammer”), laid out three main scenarios for how the Pentagon would deal with an
upcoming decade of massive cutbacks. None are positive or desirable. Washington merely faces choices that range from bad to worse.

       
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The first scenario is the most optimistic: It assumes that sequestration won’t be necessary after Fiscal Year 2013, and that Congress will approve President Obama’s long-term Pentagon budget, which would impose $150 billion in cuts, but mostly at the end of the decade.

       
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The second scenario is a halfway point between the best and worst cases, with an estimated $250 billion in cuts over the decade.”

       
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The third scenario is the harshest: The long-term budget caps under sequestration will go into effect, wiping out another $500 billion from defense spending between 2013 and 2021—cuts that Pentagon leaders call “devastating” and “dangerous.”

The optimistic scenario doesn’t look likely as this book goes to press. Congress has shown little indication that it can come to an agreement that would end the sequestration cuts, despite the warnings of Hagel and other Pentagon officials that they are hurting military readiness.

“During a visit to Fort Bragg last week, I heard from infantrymen whose units were short on training rounds for their weapons,” Hagel said in July 2013. “Each of the services have curtailed activities—flying hours have been reduced, ships are not sailing, and Army training has been halted. These kinds of gaps and shortages could lead to a force that is inadequately trained, ill-equipped, and unable to fulfill required missions.”
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Indeed, Pentagon observers are warning that the Joint Chiefs’ bleak post-sequester prediction about our “hollow force” has already come true. Only $37 billion of the $487 billion in cuts was imposed
in 2013, but the effects have been devastating. A quick summary of the impact on the four main service branches:

       
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The Army would cut training and maintenance, and delay equipment readiness, for as many as 100,000 troops and would slash 40,000 flying hours for pilots. These cuts would create “a pool of unready units,” in the words of General Ray Odierno, the Army chief of staff, and “there may not be enough time to avoid sending forces into harm’s way unprepared.”

       
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The deployment of the USS
Harry Truman
to the Persian Gulf, along with other Navy deployments, was delayed. Admiral Jonathan Greenert, the chief of naval operations, said: “We will not be able to respond in the way the nation has expected and depended on us.”

       
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The Air Force grounded an incredible 33 squadrons, amounting to approximately 250 planes, and delayed maintenance and upgrade for the F-22, the F-15, and F-16 fighters. General Mark Welsh, the Air Force chief of staff, said: “We can’t just all of a sudden accelerate training and catch up. It costs up to two-and-a-half times as much to retrain a squadron as it does to keep it trained.”

       
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General James Amos, the commandant of the Marine Corps, said: “Bring in sequestration and we’ll be down [from 23 planned infantry battalions] in the teens for battalions, and we will be very, very strained to be a one-MCO [major contingency operation] Marine Corps.”

As Hagel outlined it, the choice comes down to quantity versus quality: The U.S. can have a much smaller force, but with the most up-to-date weapons, or we can have a massive force with older weaponry. We cannot, apparently, have both.

Having high-tech supremacy won’t amount to much if we lack the troop force to mount and sustain critical large-scale operations. Having the manpower to project force around the world won’t be sufficient to overcome the disadvantages of outdated equipment and technologies, which will place the lives of our people at risk. Needless to say, neither option is desirable. Neither has ever been necessary during America’s entire time as a superpower, both before and after the Cold War. Only now do we face—through our own willful negligence—ultimatums that leave us so vulnerable. In short, with the ax it is taking to its military budget, the U.S. is entering uncharted territory.

“We would go from being unquestionably powerful everywhere to being less visible globally and presenting less of an overmatch to our adversaries,” says the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Martin Dempsey. “And that would translate into a different deterrent calculus and potentially, therefore, increase the likelihood of conflict.”
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BEHIND THE BUILDUPS: AXIS STRATEGIES AND GOALS

Why should Beijing feel the need for such a military buildup? The only conceivable adversary on any serious scale is the United States. Yet the U.S. has certainly not impeded China’s economic growth or in any way prevented China’s vast populace from gaining employment, comfort, and affluence. On the contrary, precisely the reverse has been true: Without the investment of funds and know-how in the Chinese market over the last two decades by the U.S. and its allies, the China’s economic miracle would never have happened. Beijing would not even be in a position to increase its armed might. So exactly what kind of threat is Beijing defending against?

The answer, alas, must be that Beijing’s military buildup—despite propaganda to the contrary—is aimed at
offense
, at dominating its region by force. And considering the projection that in perhaps 20 years,
China’s outlays will exceed the U.S. global military investment, one has to wonder whether China will stop at dominating
only
its region.

China’s military expansion can be seen in terms of two broad goals—one historical, the other quite new. First, Beijing is determined to prevail in any cross-strait conflict with Taiwan. The Chinese still smart from U.S. Navy intervention in the Third Taiwan Crisis in 1996. Although many experts believe another such conflict is increasingly unlikely, the threat posed by Taiwan—and especially by American support of Taiwan—has been a powerful factor in Chinese strategic thinking since the Cold War. Thus Beijing’s military-modernization effort has focused, at least in the short term, on developing military options in the event of an incident with Taiwan. The goal is to deter, or at least impede, U.S. naval and air forces.
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Second, beyond Taiwan, China also resents U.S. hegemony in the Asia-Pacific because it keeps China from assuming regional preeminence. Although it risks upsetting their largest export market, the United States, Beijing is pursuing a long-term military strategy: amassing enough deterrents, whether conventional or nuclear, to keep the U.S. from interfering in regional disputes.
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This second goal reflects China’s global-superpower status, which has been taking shape for some time. A decade ago, then-President Hu Jintao announced a “new historic mission” for the People’s Liberation Army, calling on the military not only to protect China’s national interests but also to “adopt a larger role in promoting international peace and security.”
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That UN-style wording, though, is more of a cover for China’s ambitions than a reflection of its desire to play global peacemaker.

Those broad regional and global interests also come to the fore in economic areas. Above all, the Communist Party stakes its claim to power on economic growth and on its track record of pulling hundreds of millions out of poverty since the late 1970s. The rise in living
standards has led to heightened expectations. To satisfy the demands of its 1 billion-plus people, China must look abroad for resources and opportunities. A necessary precondition for that is a stable and secure regional and global environment.

Consider the Chinese stake in a number of crucial areas.

Shipping Interests:
About 45 percent of all commercial goods, in terms of gross tonnage, cross the South China Sea. A large majority of this tonnage moves through the Strait of Malacca between Malaysia and Indonesia, a narrow strip of water that serves as the main shipping lane between the Indian and Pacific Oceans. Approximately 82 percent of China’s imported crude oil flows through this strait. Thus China would be enormously vulnerable to any disruption in the area and has a vested interest in securing primacy over the shipping lanes surrounding the Strait of Malacca and the South China Sea.
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Yet the U.S. Navy has traditionally played a critical role in securing global shipping lanes; it continues to dominate here. American leadership is making the Chinese increasingly uneasy.

Energy Interests:
In 2010, China became the world’s largest energy consumer, surpassing the U.S.
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Most of its energy is imported from abroad. Thus energy security is a top priority. Given traditional American naval-lane preeminence, Beijing will have to act more assertively in defense of perceived security threats.

Indeed, China has already made sweeping territorial claims in the South China Sea that conflict with U.S. interests. Beijing’s interest is understandable: The South China Sea contains, by one estimate, 900 trillion cubic feet of natural gas and 130 billion barrels of oil. Some liken it to a “second Persian Gulf,”
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and Beijing may need it to be exactly that if the country is to continue fueling its economic expansion. Secure access would allow China to lessen dependence on the Strait of Malacca and on Middle Eastern oil, limiting the risk of supply disruptions. The Chinese are also embroiled in a dispute with
the Philippines over the rights to the Scarborough Shoals, which sit atop oil and gas reserves.
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Territorial Disputes:
Given the interests involved, it shouldn’t be surprising that China and some other countries situated around the South China Sea have conflicting territorial claims to the resource-rich seabed and islands in the area. These islands are important mostly owing to the two interests cited above: shipping and resources. Emboldened by its growing naval capabilities, China has taken a more assertive stance in a number of these territorial disputes—not only its long-standing border dispute with India but also its maritime boundary disputes with Japan “over the East China Sea and throughout the South China Sea with Vietnam, Malaysia, the Philippines, Brunei, and Taiwan.”
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