Joel Gehrke
China will attack the American homeland if “a major war” erupts over Taiwan or elsewhere in the Indo-Pacific, the U.S. Army’s top civilian expects.
“If we got into a major war with China, the United States homeland would be at risk as well with both kinetic attacks and non-kinetic attacks — whether it's cyberattacks on the power grid or on pipelines,” Army Secretary Christine Wormuth said Monday at the American Enterprise Institute. “They are going to go after the will of the United States public. They're going to try to erode support for a conflict.”
China's People’s Liberation Army forces are not yet prepared to launch an invasion of Taiwan, according to U.S. intelligence and military officials. Yet the “historical trajectory” of their recent military modernization campaign requires U.S. forces to speed up their preparations to deter such an attack, according to the region’s top Army officer.
“The payload of exercises in pathways is really at its zenith here in ’23,” said Gen. Charles Flynn, commander of U.S. Army Pacific, referring to an array of U.S. military exercises in the Indo-Pacific. “This is an important year to get in position [and] create enduring advantage ... so we're ready to do that and our forces are ready today to be able to respond if need be in the event that something goes in the direction we don't want it to go.”
Flynn and Wormuth touted the importance of the U.S. Army in the competition with China, an argument advanced at least in part to urge lawmakers not to forget about the Army in the upcoming spending process. Fiscal fights of the last decade often have forced the federal government to operate a funding mechanism known as a “continuing resolution,” which authorizes federal officials to spend money according to the plans set by previous budgets — a process that, according to Wormuth, has constrained the military’s ability to prepare for the risk of a clash with China.
“It is hard for us to compete effectively and do everything we need to do vis-a-vis the PRC, if, for six months of the year, we, for example, can't have any new starts for programs,” she said.
“Some of the key new weapons systems that the Army is developing will be impacted if we go into an extended continuing resolution. So that is very problematic at a time when everyone is worried about timelines.”
One major new weapons system — long-range hypersonic missiles — will come online in the coming months, the Army secretary added.
“By this fall, we will have our first battery of long-range hypersonic weapons, and that element will be part of our first multi-domain task force,” Wormuth said. “And we're also going to be bringing out the prototype for our mid-range capability, which provides us the opportunity to take out mobile targets at long range.”
China’s military is improving at an alarming rate, in large part due to its land-based missile force.
“They are rehearsing, they are practicing, they are experimenting, and they are preparing those forces for something ... you don't build up that kind of arsenal to just defend and protect, you probably are building that for other purposes,” Flynn said. “I can't go into great detail in here on what's happening on the ground, but I can tell you that the PLA army and the PLA Rocket Force and the strategic support forces are in dangerous positions.”
Yet their “anti-access/area denial” (A2/AD) plan to eject U.S. forces from the region has a major hole, he added.
“The A2/AD arsenal that the Chinese have designed is primarily designed to defeat air and maritime capabilities, and secondarily, it's designed to degrade, disrupt, and deny space and cyber,” he said. “It is not, however, designed to find, fix, and finish mobile, networked, dispersed, reloadable ground forces that are lethal and non-lethal that are operating amongst their allies and partners in the region.”
Still, China’s expected ability to target incoming ships and major bases puts pressure on U.S. forces to stash weapons and supplies in friendly states throughout the region. Pentagon officials enjoyed a breakthrough in early February when Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin inked an “enhanced defense cooperation agreement” that expands U.S. military access to the Philippines, a U.S. treaty ally locked in a long-term dispute with China over Beijing’s claim to sovereignty over most of the South China Sea.
“We look forward to talking to the Philippine army about what opportunities are going to be there for us to work with them,” Wormuth said. “There are possibilities with Japan ... there’s a lot we can do with Australia, and again, with the Philippines and the Singaporeans. Now, in those two cases, it would probably be non-lethal equipment that would be there, but that's the kind of thing that we need to be working on.”
For all their growing strengths, Chinese officials may be daunted by the extreme difficulty of launching an invasion across the Taiwan Strait.
“The complexity of a joint island landing campaign is not a small matter,” he said. "And you have to be [an] incredibly professional — well-trained, well-led — force. And they're working on it, but ... they’re not 10 feet tall. They have work to do. And I think that now is the time for us to get into position to be able to deter that event from happening.”
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