Return to Winter: Russia, China, and the New Cold War Against America (23 page)

So while the U.S. spends more on its military than the Axis powers combined, we could not or would not protect Georgia. Asymmetry, in the form of rogue-nation politics, deterred us from exercising our natural and measurable military advantages.

The future of that advantage, of course, is very much in question. Quite apart from the large funding reductions that it faces, the Pentagon must also come to terms with the Obama administration’s Asia Pivot strategy. It remains to be seen what this will mean in terms of the holes left in the strategic theaters being de-emphasized, though so far, given European paralysis over Ukraine, the prospects are not encouraging. A lot rides as well on how much the West continues to depend on Middle Eastern oil. America’s resources have limits—this much we have learned—and the Asia Pivot may mean that the U.S. will need to neglect other important areas.

Equally alarming, however, is the indication that with a fraction of U.S. spending, China has developed comparable military technology. Chinese citizens—unlike Americans—cannot vote and cannot push their government to reduce military spending or balance funding for civic and military projects so it’s in synch with the public’s preferences; we can therefore assume that Beijing can focus unhindered on its military ambitions. The U.S. cannot.

In the summer of 2012, at the height of the drone war against insurgents in Afghanistan, Americans woke to headlines saying that a reconnaissance drone had been captured by Iran—captured intact, so the Iranians claimed. A great deal of speculation ensued about whether Iran had indeed done so, and if it had, whether Tehran had leaked details of the drone’s component parts to the Chinese. What we do know is that, within a few months, a mysterious drone appeared above Israel and was shot down by Israeli warplanes, and that, in Syria, the opposition reported that the besieged Assad government was using reconnaissance drones. We also know that in June 2012, the University of Texas at Austin demonstrated to the Defense Department how easily third parties could commandeer a drone.
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Consider, too, the state of the stealth technology on which the U.S. has spent tens of billions of dollars. Some 30 Stealth bombers costing
up to $2 billion each are now operational. Yet during the Balkan war, the Serbians successfully shot down one such bomber, most likely with the help of Russian technology. According to local sources, Chinese operatives crisscrossed the region buying up pieces of the wreckage from farmers who had scavenged the matériel as souvenirs.

In January 2011, China conducted the first test of a stealth plane called the Chengdu J-20, hours before Robert Gates, then the U.S. secretary of defense, was due to meet with Hu Jintao, who was then China’s premier (we discussed this incident as well in Chapter 3). Gates himself had projected that the Chinese would not develop such a warplane until 2020. Most experts see distinct similarities between the J-20 and several other non-Chinese designs, specifically Russia’s Sukhoi-50 and America’s two most advanced warplanes: the Stealth bomber and the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter (JSF), which is slated to cost the U.S. some $300 billion. And now here were the Chinese, potentially adapting something similar, for a fraction of the cost—and in collaboration with the Russians.

We’ll probably never know the whole story behind the development and performance capability of China’s stealth warplane, but there can be no doubt of its purpose. Most experts believe, based on the size of the J-20, that it is a bomber. You don’t develop radar-evading systems for defensive uses. You don’t rush to build a cutting-edge bomber to repulse invaders from your own shores. No one in China’s periphery has asked for Chinese military hardware to help defend against outsiders. It’s clear, then, that no one but China intends to use these non-defensive planes.

Of course, the way some might see it, this merely puts China’s offensive capability on par with that of NATO and the United States. The analogy has no merit. NATO works in tandem with countries that fear Russian aggression; the U.S. collaborates with Asia-Pacific allies to
defend against Chinese intimidation. Nobody is interested in invading Russia or China. The same cannot be said of Russian and Chinese ambitions with regard to their neighbors. Beijing pointedly tested a stealth bomber on the eve of a visit by the American defense secretary, leaving him free to conclude that such war-making capabilities are aimed at the U.S. and its allies. The same goes for announcements of new drone systems that can reach American bases in the Pacific.

The fundamental reality here is that the Axis has specifically devoted its resources to countering U.S. stealth technology and targeting systems.

The Russian weapons industry, in particular, has evolved an “asymmetrical” philosophy of countermeasures against U.S. strike capability. The approach is based on acceptance that Russian weaponry cannot match American might head-on but can effectively target vulnerable areas of U.S. defenses—air refueling, cockpit avionics, communications and weapons guidance, and, above all, expense. In short, Axis weaponry is calibrated to operate for the sole purpose of neutralizing the U.S. and its allies. The battlefield inequities have balanced out alarmingly.
⁸⁴

During the 2006 Israeli invasion of Hezbollah territory in Lebanon, for instance, the Israelis deployed some 350 to 400 Merkava tanks, thought to be invincible in such an encounter. Through the use of somewhat modern Russian weaponry, Hezbollah was able to damage 52 of them.
⁸⁵
The crucial point to understand is the punishing cost differential. Whereas the Merkava tanks can cost more than $2 million each, the rockets that neutralized them cost less than $100,000. Even more alarmingly, Hezbollah knocked out an Israeli warship with missiles. The cost differential in that instance doesn’t even need detailing. (In March 2014, the Israelis intercepted an Iranian ship carrying Syrian-made missiles bound for Gaza.
⁸⁶
)

Consider the conflict in Syria. A Turkish air-force fighter—an American-made F-4 Phantom—was shot down off the nearby Syrian coast in June 2012.
⁸⁷
The Russians supply Syria heavily with both Russian personnel and anti-aircraft weaponry. Although it was only one instance, the incident lent some insight into what a “full theater” conflict might entail for the U.S. and it allies. At minimum, it would be prohibitively expensive. This kind of asymmetrical cost-benefit equation was enough to keep the U.S. from engaging the Assad regime actively or even imposing a no-fly zone.

In short, there is more than enough evidence of U.S. and Western inadequacy in the realm of technical superiority that we all take for granted. Perhaps
inadequacy
is not the right word; the problem, after all, is not with the weapons and technologies themselves, which rarely fail to perform as intended; it is in their vulnerability to asymmetric arms. Consequently, they do not give us the dispositive, conflict-ending advantage that we assume they will. Our complacency has little basis in objective reality.

Satellites in Space

In December 2013, China entered an exclusive club: It became just the third nation (after, naturally, the U.S. and Russia) to make a soft landing on the moon when the unmanned
Chang’e-3
probe landed after a 13-day journey. “The dream of the Chinese people across thousands of years of landing on the moon has finally been realized with
Chang’e
,” said the state-run China News Service. “By successfully joining the international deep-exploration club, we finally have the right to share resources on the moon with developed countries.”
⁸⁸

As Paul D. Spudis, a scientist at the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston, sees it, the mission of the
Chang’e-3
is to hone technology for future space exploration. “Although it will do some new science,
its real value is to flight-qualify a new and potentially powerful lunar surface payload delivery system,” Spudis told the
New York Times
.
⁸⁹
China might be the only country in the world with an operating space station after 2020, when the International Space Station is set to be decommissioned. Beijing shows every sign of regarding space as just another arena in which to compete with, and perhaps surpass, the U.S.

That’s one reason that the state-run
Global Times
in China sounded even more impassioned than usual in January 2013, defending the country’s right to develop anti-satellite (ASAT) weapons in space. “It is necessary for China to have the ability to strike U.S. satellites,” the paper’s editorial read. “This deterrent can provide strategic protection to Chinese satellites and the whole country’s national security.” The Global Times saw ASAT capabilities as a way to even the odds against the U.S.: “In the foreseeable future, [the] gap between China and the U.S. cannot be eliminated by China’s development of space weapons. The U.S. advantage is overwhelming. Before strategic uncertainties between China and the U.S. can disappear, China urgently needs to have an outer space trump card.”
⁹⁰

And that is how Beijing has treated ASAT capability over the last decade. In 2006, China targeted high-powered lasers at American satellites passing over its territory. The purpose of the lasers was not entirely clear, but the Union of Concerned Scientists speculated that they could have been used to blind the satellites’ delicate optical sensors or to track their motion. Satellites travel on predetermined pathways; tracking them could be the first step in targeting and incapacitating them with an ASAT.
⁹¹

In January 2007, China used a ground-based missile to destroy a defunct weather satellite in orbit some 500 miles above the earth’s surface. The exercise constituted the first test of its kind since the 1980s, when the United States and Russia developed the capability to shoot down orbiting satellites. The move seemed to suggest that
Beijing was entering a new phase of its efforts to counter American technological dominance—demonstrating to Washington that it could take down U.S. satellites.

“In my view, the Chinese are sending a strong signal here,” said Jeffrey Kueter, president of the George C. Marshall Institute, a nonprofit defense think tank. “They’re saying they can hold our space-based, war-fighting capability at risk, and are putting into doubt our ability to challenge them. They’re a rising space competitor.”
⁹²

Others agreed. “The Chinese are telling the Pentagon that they don’t own space,” said Michael Krepson of the Henry L. Stimson Center, another security think tank. “We can play this game, too, and we can play it dirtier than you. . . . [It] blows a hole through the Bush administration reasoning behind not talking to anybody about space arms control—that there is no space arms race. It looks like there is one at this point.”
⁹³

That became more apparent in July 2013, when the rumors that the
Global Times
had discussed in January finally came true: The Chinese military launched three ASAT satellites into orbit, where they were observed “conducting unusual maneuvers in space, indicating the Chinese are preparing to conduct space warfare against satellites,” as a U.S. official described it. One of the ASATs, equipped with what a space expert called “a robot-manipulator arm,” was thought capable of attacking orbiting U.S. satellites—a capability that the official called “part of a Chinese ‘Star Wars’ program.”
⁹⁴
China’s new capabilities in these areas—to the extent we understand what they are—have important consequences for the military and economic balance of power.

Satellites are America’s eyes on the battlefield, “the soft underbelly of our national security,” in the words of then-Representative Edward Markey.
⁹⁵
They provide key communications support. An attack on 40 or 50 low-orbit satellites like the one China destroyed could blind the American military in a matter of hours.
⁹⁶
China’s ASAT capabilities
specifically threaten America’s photographic intelligence, electro-optical, and electronic-intelligence satellites that operate in low-earth orbit. In a hypothetical conflict between the U.S. and China, these systems would probably be targets for Chinese ASAT missiles. China could also equip its ASAT missiles with electromagnetic pulse or nuclear weaponry, creating an even more serious threat to these systems.
⁹⁷
In short, ASATs are another in the growing arsenal of asymmetric weapons—and their development and use may have further-reaching consequences than any other.

CONCLUSION

In August 2013, as the violence in the Syrian civil war reached horrifying levels, the United States closed embassies and consulates in 19 countries in the Middle East and Africa after an abundance of terror threats that the government considered serious and credible. The countries involved produce one-third of the world’s oil, yet the United States had basically announced that it could not defend its personnel in these nations. The widespread closures seemed to symbolize the decline of America’s posture in the world—where we seem always to operate from a defensive crouch, confused, tentative, and unwilling to make hard choices to defend our interests in a dangerous world.

“Countries that are winning do not have to close their embassies in 19 countries,” wrote Newt Gingrich, as we cited in the epigraph to this chapter. “This is a statement of impotence and incompetence on a grand scale, an admission that the United States cannot even defend its own embassies (and this is after decades of turning our embassies into fortresses isolated from local communities).”
⁹⁸
Referring also to a series of prison breaks in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Libya, which set loose some 2,500 al-Qaeda-linked militants and other enemy fighters, Gingrich concluded: “So after 12 years of intense effort, two
overt wars, dozens of minor skirmishes in Somalia, Libya, Mali, and other countries, widespread use of drones to kill people, and a massive investment in power projection and intelligence gathering, the fact is, our enemies are widespread, growing, and increasingly dangerous.”
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