01/01/2005｜Robert D. Kaplan｜The Atlantic Monthly
（摘要）The Middle East is just a blip. The American military contest with China in the Pacific will define the twenty-first century. And China will be a more formidable adversary than Russia ever was.For some time now no navy or air force has posed a threat to the United States. Our only competition has been armies, whether conventional forces or guerrilla insurgencies. This will soon change. The Chinese navy is poised to push out into the Pacific—and when it does, it will very quickly encounter a U.S. Navy and Air Force unwilling to budge from the coastal shelf of the Asian mainland. It's not hard to imagine the result: a replay of the decades-long Cold War, with a center of gravity not in the heart of Europe but, rather, among Pacific atolls that were last in the news when the Marines stormed them in World War II. In the coming decades China will play an asymmetric back-and-forth game with us in the Pacific, taking advantage not only of its vast coastline but also of its rear base—stretching far back into Central Asia—from which it may eventually be able to lob missiles accurately at moving ships in the Pacific.
In any naval encounter China
will have distinct advantages over the United States, even if it lags in
technological military prowess. It has the benefit, for one thing, of sheer
proximity. Its military is an avid student of the competition, and a fast learner.
It has growing increments of "soft" power that demonstrate a
particular gift for adaptation. While stateless terrorists fill security
vacuums, the Chinese fill economic ones. All over the globe, in such disparate
places as the troubled Pacific Island states of Oceania, the Panama Canal zone,
and out-of-the-way African nations, the Chinese are becoming masters of
indirect influence—by establishing business communities and diplomatic
outposts, by negotiating construction and trade agreements. Pulsing with
consumer and martial energy, and boasting a peasantry that, unlike others in
history, is overwhelmingly literate, China constitutes the principal
conventional threat to America's liberal imperium.
How should the United States
prepare to respond to challenges in the Pacific? To understand the dynamics of
this second Cold War—which will link China and the United States in a future
that may stretch over several generations—it is essential to understand certain
things about the first Cold War, and about the current predicament of the North
Atlantic Treaty Organization, the institution set up to fight that conflict.
This is a story about military strategy and tactics, with some counterintuitive
twists and turns.
The first thing to understand
is that the alliance system of the latter half of the twentieth century is
dead. Warfare by committee, as practiced by NATO, has simply become too cumbersome
in an age that requires light and lethal strikes. During the fighting in Kosovo
in 1999 (a limited air campaign against a toothless enemy during a time of
Euro-American harmony; a campaign, in other words, that should have been easy
to prosecute) dramatic fissures appeared in the then-nineteen-member NATO alliance. The organization's end
effectively came with the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, in the aftermath of
which, despite talk of a broad-based coalition, European militaries have
usually done little more than patrol and move into areas already pacified by
U.S. soldiers and Marines—a job more suggestive of the United Nations. NATO today is a medium for the expansion of
bilateral training missions between the United States and formerly communist
countries and republics: the Marines in Bulgaria and Romania, the Navy in
Albania, the Army in Poland and the Czech Republic, Special Operations Forces
in Georgia—the list goes on and on. Much of NATO has
become a farm system for the major-league U.S. military.
The second thing to
understand is that the functional substitute for a NATO of the Pacific already exists, and is
indeed up and running. It is the U.S. Pacific Command, known as PACOM.
Unencumbered by a diplomatic bureaucracy,PACOM is a large but nimble construct, and
its leaders understand what many in the media and the policy community do not:
that the center of gravity of American strategic concern is already the
Pacific, not the Middle East. PACOM will soon be a household name, as CENTCOM (the U.S. Central Command) has been in
the current epoch of Middle Eastern conflict—an epoch that will start to wind
down, as far as the U.S. military is concerned, during the second Bush
administration.
The third thing to understand
is that, ironically, the vitality of NATO itself,
the Atlantic alliance, could be revived by the Cold War in the Pacific—and
indeed the re-emergence of NATO as
an indispensable war-fighting instrument should be America's unswerving aim. In
its posture toward China the United States will look to Europe and NATO,
whose help it will need as a strategic counterweight and, by the way, as a
force to patrol seas more distant than the Mediterranean and the North
Atlantic. That is why NATO's current commander, Marine General
James L. Jones, emphasizes that NATO's future lies in amphibious,
expeditionary warfare.
Let me describe
our military organization in the Pacific—an area through which I have traveled
extensively during the past three years. PACOM has
always been the largest, most venerable, and most interesting of the U.S.
military's area commands. (Its roots go back to the U.S. Pacific Army of the
Philippines War, 1899-1902.) Its domain stretches from East Africa to beyond
the International Date Line and includes the entire Pacific Rim, encompassing
half the world's surface and more than half of its economy. The world's six
largest militaries, two of which (America's and China's) are the most rapidly
modernizing, all operate within PACOM's sphere of control. PACOM has—in addition to its many
warships and submarines—far more dedicated troops than CENTCOM.
Even though the military's area commands do not own troops today in the way they used
to, these statistics matter, because they demonstrate that the United States
has chosen to locate the bulk of its forces in the Pacific, not in the Middle
East.CENTCOM fights wars with troops essentially
borrowed from PACOM.
Quietly in recent years, by
negotiating bilateral security agreements with countries that have few such
arrangements with one another, the U.S. military has formed a Pacific military
alliance of sorts at PACOM headquarters,
in Honolulu. This is where the truly interesting meetings are being held today,
rather than in Ditchley or Davos. The attendees at those meetings, who often
travel on PACOM's dime, are military officers from such places as
Vietnam, Singapore, Thailand, Cambodia, and the Philippines.
Otto von Bismarck, the father
of the Second Reich in continental Europe, would recognize the emerging Pacific
system. In 2002 the German commentator Josef Joffe appreciated this in a
remarkably perceptive article in The
National Interest, in which he argued that in terms of political alliances,
the United States has come to resemble Bismarck's Prussia. Britain, Russia, and
Austria needed Prussia more than they needed one another, Joffe wrote, thus
making them "spokes" to Berlin's "hub"; the U.S. invasion
of Afghanistan exposed a world in which America can forge different coalitions
for different crises. The world's other powers, he said, now need the United
States more than they need one another.
Unfortunately, the United
States did not immediately capitalize on this new power arrangement, because
President George W. Bush lacked the nuance and attendant self-restraint of
Bismarck, who understood that such a system could endure only so long as one
didn't overwhelm it. The Bush administration did just that, of course, in the
buildup to the invasion of Iraq, which led France, Germany, Russia, and China,
along with a host of lesser powers such as Turkey, Mexico, and Chile, to unite
against us.
In the Pacific, however, a Bismarckian
arrangement still prospers, helped along by the pragmatism of our Hawaii-based
military officers, five time zones removed from the ideological hothouse of
Washington, D.C. In fact, PACOM represents a much purer version of
Bismarck's imperial superstructure than anything the Bush administration
created prior to invading Iraq. As Henry Kissinger writes in Diplomacy (1994), Bismarck forged alliances
in all directions from a point of seeming isolation, without the constraints of
ideology. He brought peace and prosperity to Central Europe by recognizing that
when power relationships are correctly calibrated, wars tend to be avoided.
Only a similarly pragmatic
approach will allow us to accommodate China's inevitable re-emergence as a
great power. The alternative will be to turn the earth of the twenty-first
century into a battlefield. Whenever great powers have emerged or re-emerged on
the scene (Germany and Japan in the early decades of the twentieth century, to
cite two recent examples), they have tended to be particularly assertive—and
therefore have thrown international affairs into violent turmoil. China will be
no exception. Today the Chinese are investing in both diesel-powered and
nuclear-powered submarines—a clear signal that they intend not only to protect
their coastal shelves but also to expand their sphere of influence far out into
the Pacific and beyond.
This is wholly legitimate.
China's rulers may not be democrats in the literal sense, but they are seeking
a liberated First World lifestyle for many of their 1.3 billion people—and
doing so requires that they safeguard sea-lanes for the transport of energy
resources from the Middle East and elsewhere. Naturally, they do not trust the
United States and India to do this for them. Given the stakes, and given what
history teaches us about the conflicts that emerge when great powers all pursue
legitimate interests, the result is likely to be the defining military conflict
of the twenty-first century: if not a big war with China, then a series of Cold
War—style standoffs that stretch out over years and decades. And this will
occur mostly within PACOM's area of responsibility.
To do their job
well, military officers must approach power in the most cautious, mechanical,
and utilitarian way possible, assessing and reassessing regional balances of
power while leaving the values side of the political equation to the civilian
leadership. This makes military officers, of all government professionals, the
least prone to be led astray by the raptures of liberal internationalism and
neo-conservative interventionism.
The history of World War II
shows the importance of this approach. In the 1930s the U.S. military, nervous
about the growing strength of Germany and Japan, rightly lobbied for building
up our forces. But by 1940 and 1941 the military (not unlike the German general
staff a few years earlier) was presciently warning of the dangers of a
two-front war; and by late summer of 1944 it should have been thinking less
about defeating Germany and more about containing the Soviet Union. Today Air
Force and Navy officers worry about a Taiwanese declaration of independence,
because such a move would lead the United States into fighting a war with China
that might not be in our national interest. Indonesia is another example:
whatever the human-rights failures of the Indonesian military,PACOM assumes,
correctly, that a policy of non-engagement would only open the door to
Chinese-Indonesian military cooperation in a region that represents the future
of world terrorism. (The U.S. military's response to the Asian tsunami was, of
course, a humanitarian effort; but PACOM strategists
had to have recognized that a vigorous response would gain political support
for the military-basing rights that will form part of our deterrence strategy
against China.) Or consider Korea: some Pacific-based officers take a reunified
Korean peninsula for granted, and their main concern is whether the country
will be "Finlandized" by China or will be secure within an
American-Japanese sphere of influence.
PACOM's immersion in
Asian power dynamics gives it unusual diplomatic weight, and consequently more
leverage in Washington. And PACOM will
not be nearly as constrained as CENTCOM by Washington-based domestic politics.
Our actions in the Pacific will not be swayed by the equivalent of the Israel
lobby; Protestant evangelicals will care less about the Pacific Rim than about
the fate of the Holy Land. And because of the vast economic consequences of
misjudging the power balance in East Asia, American business and military
interests are likely to run in tandem toward a classically conservative policy
of deterring China without needlessly provoking it, thereby amplifying PACOM's
authority. Our stance toward China and the Pacific, in other words, comes with
a built-in stability—and this, in turn, underscores the notion of a new Cold
War that is sustainable over the very long haul. Moreover, the complexity of
the many political and military relationships managed by PACOM will give the command considerably greater
influence than that currently exercised by CENTCOM—which, as a few military
experts have disparagingly put it to me, deals only with a bunch of
"third-rate Middle Eastern armies."
The relative shift in focus
from the Middle East to the Pacific in coming years—idealistic rhetoric
notwithstanding—will force the next American president, no matter what his or
her party, to adopt a foreign policy similar to those of moderate Republican
presidents such as George H. W. Bush, Gerald Ford, and Richard Nixon. The
management of risk will become a governing ideology. Even if Iraq turns out to
be a democratic success story, it will surely be a from-the-jaws-of-failure
success that no one in the military or the diplomatic establishment will ever
want to repeat—especially in Asia, where the economic repercussions of a messy
military adventure would be enormous. "Getting into a war with China is
easy," says Michael Vickers, a former Green Beret who developed the
weapons strategy for the Afghan resistance in the 1980s as a CIA officer and is
now at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, in Washington.
"You can see many scenarios, not just Taiwan—especially as the Chinese
develop a submarine and missile capability throughout the Pacific. But the
dilemma is, How do you end a war with China?"
Like the nations involved in
World War I, and unlike the rogue states everyone has been concentrating on,
the United States and China in the twenty-first century would have the capacity
to keep fighting even if one or the other lost a big battle or a missile
exchange. This has far-reaching implications. "Ending a war with
China," Vickers says, "may mean effecting some form of regime change,
because we don't want to leave some wounded, angry regime in place."
Another analyst, this one inside the Pentagon, told me, "Ending a war with
China will force us to substantially reduce their military capacity, thus
threatening their energy sources and the Communist Party's grip on power. The
world will not be the same afterward. It's a very dangerous road to travel
on."
The better road is for PACOM to deter China in Bismarckian fashion,
from a geographic hub of comparative isolation—the Hawaiian Islands—with spokes
reaching out to major allies such as Japan, South Korea, Thailand, Singapore,
Australia, New Zealand, and India. These countries, in turn, would form
secondary hubs to help us manage the Melanesian, Micronesian, and Polynesian
archipelagoes, among other places, and also the Indian Ocean. The point of this
arrangement would be to dissuade China so subtly that over time the rising
behemoth would be drawn into the PACOM alliance
system without any large-scale conflagration—the way NATO was ultimately able to neutralize the
Soviet Union.
Whatever we say or do, China
will spend more and more money on its military in the coming decades. Our only
realistic goal may be to encourage it to make investments that are defensive,
not offensive, in nature. Our efforts will require particular care, because
China, unlike the Soviet Union of old (or Russia today, for that matter),
boasts soft as well as hard power. Businesspeople love the idea of China; you
don't have to beg them to invest there, as you do in Africa and so many other
places. China's mixture of traditional authoritarianism and market economics
has broad cultural appeal throughout Asia and other parts of the world. And
because China is improving the material well-being of hundreds of millions of
its citizens, the plight of its dissidents does not have quite the same market
allure as did the plight of the Soviet Union's Sakharovs and Sharanskys.
Democracy is attractive in places where tyranny has been obvious, odious, and
unsuccessful, of course, as in Ukraine and Zimbabwe. But the world is full of
gray areas—Jordan and Malaysia, for example—where elements of tyranny have
ensured stability and growth.
Consider Singapore. Its
mixture of democracy and authoritarianism has made it unpopular with idealists
in Washington, but as far as PACOM is
concerned, the country is, despite its small size, one of the most popular and
helpful in the Pacific. Its ethnically blind military meritocracy, its
nurturing concern for the welfare of officers and enlisted men alike, and its
jungle-warfare school in Brunei are second to none. With the exception of Japan,
far to the north, Singapore offers the only non-American base in the Pacific
where our nuclear carriers can be serviced. Its help in hunting down Islamic
terrorists in the Indonesian archipelago has been equal or superior to the help
offered elsewhere by our most dependable Western allies. One Washington-based
military futurist told me, "The Sings, well—they're just awesome in every
way."
PACOM's objective, in
the words of a Pacific-based Marine general, must be "military
multilateralism on steroids." This is not just a question of our future
training with the "Sings" in Brunei, of flying test sorties with the
Indian air force, of conducting major annual exercises in Thailand, or of
utilizing a soon-to-open training facility in northern Australia with the
approval of our alliance partners. It's also a matter of forging
interoperability with friendly Asian militaries at the platoon level, by
constantly moving U.S. troops from one training deployment to another.
This would be an improvement
over NATO, whose fighting fitness has been hampered by the
addition of substandard former-Eastern-bloc militaries. Politics, too, favors a
tilt toward the Pacific: tensions between the United States and Europe
currently impede military integration, whereas our Pacific allies, notably
Japan and Australia, want more military engagement with the United States, to
counter the rise of the Chinese navy. This would work to our benefit. The
Japanese military, although small, possesses elite niche capabilities, in
special-forces and diesel-submarine warfare. And the aggressive frontier style
of the Australians makes them cognitively closer to Americans than even the
British.
Military multilateralism in
the Pacific will nevertheless be constrained by the technical superiority of
U.S. forces; it will be difficult to develop bilateral training missions with
Asian militaries that are not making the same investments in high-tech
equipment that we are. A classic military lesson is that technological
superiority does not always confer the advantages one expects. Getting
militarily so far ahead of everyone else in the world creates a particular kind
of loneliness that not even the best diplomats can always alleviate, because
diplomacy itself is worthless if it's not rooted in realistic assessments of
comparative power.
At the moment the
challenges posed by a rising China may seem slight, even nonexistent. The U.S.
Navy's warships have a collective "full-load displacement" of 2.86
million tons; the rest of the world's warships combined add up to only 3.04
million tons. The Chinese navy's warships have a full-load displacement of only
263,064 tons. The United States deploys twenty-four of the world's thirty-four
aircraft carriers; the Chinese deploy none (a principal reason why they
couldn't mount a rescue effort after the tsunami). The statistics go on. But as
Robert Work, a senior analyst at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary
Assessments, points out, at the start of the twenty-seven-year Peloponnesian
War, Athens had a great advantage over Sparta, which had no navy—but Sparta
eventually emerged the victor.
China has committed itself to
significant military spending, but its navy and air force will not be able to
match ours for some decades. The Chinese are therefore not going to do us the
favor of engaging in conventional air and naval battles, like those fought in
the Pacific during World War II. The Battle of the Philippine Sea, in late June
of 1944, and the Battle of Leyte Gulf and the Surigao Strait, in October of
1944, were the last great sea battles in American history, and are very likely
to remain so. Instead the Chinese will approach us asymmetrically, as
terrorists do. In Iraq the insurgents have shown us the low end of asymmetry,
with car bombs. But the Chinese are poised to show us the high end of the art.
That is the threat.
There are many ways in which
the Chinese could use their less advanced military to achieve a sort of
political-strategic parity with us. According to one former submarine commander
and naval strategist I talked to, the Chinese have been poring over every
detail of our recent wars in the Balkans and the Persian Gulf, and they fully
understand just how much our military power depends on naval projection—that
is, on the ability of a carrier battle group to get within proximity of, say,
Iraq, and fire a missile at a target deep inside the country. To adapt, the
Chinese are putting their fiber-optic systems underground and moving defense
capabilities deep into western China, out of naval missile range—all the while
developing an offensive strategy based on missiles designed to be capable of
striking that supreme icon of American wealth and power, the aircraft carrier.
The effect of a single Chinese cruise missile's hitting a U.S. carrier, even if
it did not sink the ship, would be politically and psychologically
catastrophic, akin to al-Qaeda's attacks on the Twin Towers. China is focusing
on missiles and submarines as a way to humiliate us in specific encounters.
Their long-range-missile program should deeply concern U.S. policymakers.
With an advanced missile
program the Chinese could fire hundreds of missiles at Taiwan before we could
get to the island to defend it. Such a capability, combined with a new fleet of
submarines (soon to be a greater undersea force than ours, in size if not in
quality), might well be enough for the Chinese to coerce other countries into
denying port access to U.S. ships. Most of China's seventy current submarines
are past-their-prime diesels of Russian design; but these vessels could be used
to create mobile minefields in the South China, East China, and Yellow Seas,
where, as the Wall Street
Journal reporter David Lague
has written, "uneven depths, high levels of background noise, strong
currents and shifting thermal layers" would make detecting the submarines
very difficult. Add to this the seventeen new stealthy diesel submarines and
three nuclear ones that the Chinese navy will deploy by the end of the decade,
and one can imagine that China could launch an embarrassing strike against us,
or against one of our Asian allies. Then there is the whole field of ambiguous
coercion—for example, a series of non-attributable cyberattacks on Taiwan's
electrical-power grids, designed to gradually demoralize the population. This
isn't science fiction; the Chinese have invested significantly in cyberwarfare
training and technology. Just because the Chinese are not themselves democratic
doesn't mean they are not expert in manipulating the psychology of a democratic
electorate.
What we can probably expect
from China in the near future is specific demonstrations of strength—like its
successful forcing down of a U.S. Navy EP-3E surveillance plane in the spring
of 2001. Such tactics may represent the trend of twenty-first-century warfare
better than anything now happening in Iraq—and China will have no shortage of
opportunities in this arena. During one of our biennial Rim of the Pacific
naval exercises the Chinese could sneak a sub under a carrier battle group and
then surface it. They could deploy a moving target at sea and then hit it with
a submarine- or land-based missile, demonstrating their ability to threaten not
only carriers but also destroyers, frigates, and cruisers. (Think about the
political effects of the terrorist attack on the USS Cole, a guided-missile
destroyer, off the coast of Yemen in 2000—and then think about a future in
which hitting such ships will be easier.) They could also bump up against one
of our ships during one of our ongoing Freedom of Navigation exercises off the
Asian coast. The bumping of a ship may seem inconsequential, but keep in mind
that in a global media age such an act can have important strategic
consequences. Because the world media tend to side with a spoiler rather than
with a reigning superpower, the Chinese would have a built-in political
advantage.
What should be our military
response to such developments? We need to go more unconventional. Our present
Navy is mainly a "blue-water" force, responsible for the peacetime
management of vast oceanic spaces—no small feat, and one that enables much of
the world's free trade. The phenomenon of globalization could not occur without
American ships and sailors. But increasingly what we will need is, in essence,
three separate navies: one designed to maintain our ability to use the sea as a
platform for offshore bombing (to support operations like the ones in Iraq and
Afghanistan); one designed for littoral Special Operations combat (against
terrorist groups based in and around Indonesia, Malaysia, and the southern Philippines,
for example); and one designed to enhance our stealth capabilities (for
patrolling the Chinese mainland and the Taiwan Strait, among other regions).
All three of these navies will have a role in deflecting China, directly and
indirectly, given the variety of dysfunctional Pacific Island republics that
are strengthening their ties with Beijing.
Our aircraft carriers already
provide what we need for that first navy; we must further develop the other
two. The Special Operations navy will require lots of small vessels, among them
the littoral-combat ship being developed by General Dynamics and Lockheed
Martin. Approximately 400 feet long, the LCS requires only a small crew, can
operate in very shallow water, can travel very fast (up to forty knots), and
will deploy Special Operations Forces (namely, Navy SEALs).
Another critical part of the littoral navy will be the Mark V
special-operations craft. Only eighty feet long, the Mark V can travel at up to
fifty knots and has a range of 600 nautical miles. With a draft of only five
feet, it can deliver a SEALplatoon directly onto a beach—and
at some $5 million apiece, the Pentagon can buy dozens for the price of just
one F/A-22 fighter jet.
Developing the third type of
navy will require real changes. Particularly as the media become more
intrusive, we must acquire more stealth, so that, for example, we can send
commandos ashore from a submarine to snatch or kill terrorists, or leave
special operators behind to carry out missions in an area over which no government
has control. Submarines have disadvantages, of course: they offer less of a
bombing platform than aircraft carriers, and pound for pound are more costly.
Nevertheless, they are the wave of the future, in no small measure because
protecting aircraft carriers from missile attack may slowly become a pursuit of
diminishing returns for us.
Our stealth navy would be
best served by the addition of new diesel submarines of the sort that
Australia, Japan, South Korea, Germany, and Sweden already have in the water or
under development—and which China will soon have too. But because of our global
policing responsibilities, which will necessarily keep us in the nuclear-sub
business, we're unlikely to switch to diesel submarines. Instead we will adapt
what we've got. Already we are refitting four Trident subs with conventional
weapons, and making them able to support the deployment ofSEAL teams
and eventually, perhaps, long-range unmanned spy aircraft. The refitted
Tridents can act as big mother ships for smaller assets deployed closer to the
littorals.
None of this will change our
need for basing rights in the Pacific, of course. The more access to bases we
have, the more flexibility we'll have—to support unmanned flights, to allow
aerial refueling, and perhaps most important, to force the Chinese military to
concentrate on a host of problems rather than just a few. Never provide your
adversary with only a few problems to solve (finding and hitting a carrier, for
example), because if you do, he'll solve them.
Andersen Air Force
Base, on Guam's northern tip, rep- resents the future of U.S. strategy in the
Pacific. It is the most potent platform anywhere in the world for the
projection of American military power. Landing there recently in a military
aircraft, I beheld long lines of B-52 bombers, C-17 Globemasters, F/A-18
Hornets, and E-2 Hawkeye surveillance planes, among others. Andersen's
10,000-foot runways can handle any plane in the Air Force's arsenal, and could
accommodate the space shuttle should it need to make an emergency landing. The
sprawl of runways and taxiways is so vast that when I arrived, I barely noticed
a carrier air wing from the USS Kitty
Hawk, which was making live practice bombing runs that it could not make
from its home port in Japan. I saw a truck filled with cruise missiles on one
of the runways. No other Air Force base in the Pacific stores as much weaponry
as Andersen: some 100,000 bombs and missiles at any one time. Andersen also
stores 66 million gallons of jet fuel, making it the Air Force's biggest
strategic gas-and-go in the world.
Guam, which is also home to a
submarine squadron and an expanding naval base, is significant because of its
location. From the island an Air Force equivalent of a Marine or Army division
can cover almost all of PACOM's area of responsibility. Flying
to North Korea from the West Coast of the United States takes thirteen hours;
from Guam it takes four.
"This is not like
Okinawa," Major General Dennis Larsen, the Air Force commander there at
the time of my visit, told me. "This is American soil in the midst of the
Pacific. Guam is a U.S. territory." The United States can do anything it
wants here, and make huge investments without fear of being thrown out. Indeed,
what struck me about Andersen was how great the space was for expansion to the
south and west of the current perimeters. Hundreds of millions of dollars of
construction funds were being allocated. This little island, close to China,
has the potential to become the hub in the wheel of a new, worldwide constellation
of bases that will move the locus of U.S. power from Europe to Asia. In the
event of a conflict with Taiwan, if we had a carrier battle group at Guam we
would force the Chinese either to attack it in port—thereby launching an
assault on sovereign U.S. territory, and instantly becoming the aggressor in
the eyes of the world—or to let it sail, in which case the carrier group could
arrive off the coast of Taiwan only two days later.
During the Cold War the Navy
had a specific infrastructure for a specific threat: war with the Soviet Union.
But now the threat is multiple and uncertain: we need to be prepared at any
time to fight, say, a conventional war against North Korea or an unconventional
counterinsurgency battle against a Chinese-backed rogue island-state. This
requires a more agile Navy presence on the island, which in turn means
outsourcing services to the civilian community on Guam so that the Navy can
concentrate on military matters. One Navy captain I met with had grown up all
over the Pacific Rim. He told me of the Navy's plans to expand the waterfront,
build more bachelors' quarters, and harden the electrical-power system by
putting it underground. "The fact that we have lots of space today is
meaningless," he said. "The question is, How would we handle the
surge requirement necessitated by a full-scale war?"
There could be a problem with
all of this. By making Guam a Hawaii of the western Pacific, we make life
simple for the Chinese, because we give them just one problem to solve: how to
threaten or intimidate Guam. The way to counter them will be not by
concentration but by dispersion. So how will we prevent Guam from becoming too
big?
In a number of ways. We may
build up Palau, an archipelago of 20,000 inhabitants between Mindanao, in the
Philippines, and the Federated States of Micronesia, whose financial aid is
contingent on a defense agreement with us. We will keep up our bases in Central
Asia, close to western China—among them Karshi-Khanabad, in Uzbekistan, and
Manas, in Kyrgyzstan, which were developed and expanded for the invasion of
Afghanistan. And we will establish what are known as cooperative security
locations.
A cooperative security
location can be a tucked-away corner of a host country's civilian airport, or a
dirt runway somewhere with fuel and mechanical help nearby, or a military
airport in a friendly country with which we have no formal basing agreement
but, rather, an informal arrangement with private contractors acting as
go-betweens. Because the CSL concept is built on subtle relationships, it's
where the war-fighting ability of the Pentagon and the diplomacy of the State
Department coincide—or should. The problem with big bases in, say, Turkey—as we
learned on the eve of the invasion of Iraq—is that they are an intrusive, intimidating
symbol of American power, and the only power left to a host country is the
power to deny us use of such bases. In the future, therefore, we will want
unobtrusive bases that benefit the host country much more obviously than they
benefit us. Allowing us the use of such a base would ramp up power for a
country rather than humiliating it.
I have visited a number of
CSLs in East Africa and Asia. Here is how they work. The United States provides
aid to upgrade maintenance facilities, thereby helping the host country to
better project its own air and naval power in the region. At the same time, we
hold periodic exercises with the host country's military, in which the base is
a focus. We also offer humanitarian help to the surrounding area. Such civil-affairs
projects garner positive publicity for our military in the local media—and they
long preceded the response to the tsunami, which marked the first time that
many in the world media paid attention to the humanitarian work done all over
the world, all the time, by the U.S. military. The result is a positive
diplomatic context for getting the host country's approval for use of the base
when and if we need it.
Often the key role in
managing a CSL is played by a private contractor. In Asia, for example, the private
contractor is usually a retired American noncom, either Navy or Air Force,
quite likely a maintenance expert, who is living in, say, Thailand or the
Philippines, speaks the language fluently, perhaps has married locally after a
divorce back home, and is generally much liked by the locals. He rents his
facilities at the base from the host-country military, and then charges a fee
to the U.S. Air Force pilots transiting the base. Officially he is in business
for himself, which the host country likes because it can then claim it is not
really working with the American military. Of course no one, including the
local media, believes this. But the very fact that a relationship with the U.S.
armed forces is indirect rather than direct eases tensions. The private
contractor also prevents unfortunate incidents by keeping the visiting pilots
out of trouble—steering them to the right hotels and bars, and advising them on
how to behave. (Without Dan Generette, a private contractor for years at Utapao
Naval Station, in Thailand, that base could never have been ramped up to
provide tsunami relief the way it was.)
Visiting with these
contractors and being taken around foreign military airfields by them, I saw
how little, potentially, the Air Force would need on the ground in order to
land planes and take off. Especially since 9/11 the Air Force has been slowly
developing an austere, expeditionary mentality to amend its lifestyle, which
has historically been cushy in comparison with that of the other branches of
the armed forces. Servicing a plane often takes less on the ground than
servicing a big ship, and the Air Force is beginning to grasp the concept of
light and lethal, and of stealthy, informal relationships. To succeed in the
Pacific and elsewhere, the Navy will need to further develop a similar
outlook—thinking less in terms of obvious port visits and more in terms of
slipping in and out in the middle of the night.
The first part of
the twenty-first century will be not nearly as stable as the second half of the
twentieth, because the world will be not nearly as bipolar as it was during the
Cold War. The fight between Beijing and Washington over the Pacific will not
dominate all of world politics, but it will be the most important of several
regional struggles. Yet it will be the organizing focus for the U.S. defense
posture abroad. If we are smart, this should lead us back into concert with
Europe. No matter how successfully our military adapts to the rise of China, it
is clear that our current dominance in the Pacific will not last. The Asia
expert Mark Helprin has argued that while we pursue our democratization efforts
in the Middle East, increasingly befriending only those states whose internal
systems resemble our own, China is poised to reap the substantial benefits of
pursuing its interests amorally—what the United States did during the Cold War.
The Chinese surely hope, for example, that our chilly attitude toward the
brutal Uzbek dictator, Islam Karimov, becomes even chillier; this would open up
the possibility of more pipeline and other deals with him, and might persuade
him to deny us use of the air base at Karshi-Khanabad. Were Karimov to be
toppled in an uprising like the one in Kyrgyzstan, we would immediately have to
stabilize the new regime or risk losing sections of the country to Chinese
influence.
We also need to realize that
in the coming years and decades the moral distance between Europe and China is
going to contract considerably, especially if China's authoritarianism becomes
increasingly restrained, and the ever expanding European Union becomes a
less-than-democratic superstate run in imperious regulatory style by
Brussels-based functionaries. Russia, too, is headed in a decidedly
undemocratic direction: Russia's president, Vladimir Putin, reacted to our
support of democracy in Ukraine by agreeing to "massive" joint air
and naval exercises with the Chinese, scheduled for the second half of this
year. These unprecedented joint Russian-Chinese exercises will be held on
Chinese territory.
Therefore the idea that we
will no longer engage in the "cynical" game of power politics is
illusory, as is the idea that we will be able to advance a foreign policy based
solely on Wilsonian ideals. We will have to continually play various parts of
the world off China, just as Richard Nixon played less than morally perfect
states off the Soviet Union. This may well lead to a fundamentally new NATO alliance, which could become a
global armada that roams the Seven Seas. Indeed, the Dutch, the Norwegians, the
Germans, and the Spanish are making significant investments in fast
missile-bearing ships and in landing-platform docks for beach assaults, and the
British and the French are investing in new aircraft carriers. Since Europe
increasingly seeks to avoid conflict and to reduce geopolitics to a series of
negotiations and regulatory disputes, an emphasis on sea power would suit it
well. Sea power is intrinsically less threatening than land power. It allows
for a big operation without a large onshore footprint. Consider the tsunami
effort, during which Marines and sailors returned to their carrier and
destroyers each night. Armies invade; navies make port visits. Sea power has
always been a more useful means of realpolitik than land power. It allows for a
substantial military presence in areas geographically remote from states
themselves—but without an overtly belligerent effect. Because ships take so
long to get somewhere, and are less threatening than troops on the ground,
naval forces allow diplomats to ratchet up pressure during a crisis in a
responsible—and reversible—way. Take the Cuban Missile Crisis, in 1962. As the
British expert H. P. Willmott has written, "The use of naval power by the
Americans was the least dangerous option that presented itself, and the slowness
with which events unfolded at sea gave time for both sides to conceive and
implement a rational response to a highly dangerous situation."
Submarines have been an
exception to this rule, but their very ability to operate both literally and
figuratively below the surface, completely off the media radar screen, allows a
government to be militarily aggressive, particularly in the field of espionage,
without offending the sensibilities of its citizenry. Sweden's neutrality is a
hard-won luxury built on naval strength that many of its idealistic citizens
may be incompletely aware of. Pacifistic Japan, the ultimate trading nation, is
increasingly dependent on its burgeoning submarine force. Sea power protects
trade, which is regulated by treaties; it's no accident that the father of
international law, Hugo Grotius, was a seventeenth-century Dutchman who lived
at the height of Dutch naval power worldwide. Because of globalization, the
twenty-first century will see unprecedented sea traffic, requiring unprecedented
regulation by diplomats and naval officers alike. And as the economic influence
of the European Union expands around the globe, Europe may find, like the
United States in the nineteenth century and China today, that it has to go to
sea to protect its interests.
The ships and other naval equipment being built now by the Europeans are
designed to slot into U.S. battle networks. And European nations, which today
we conceive of as Atlantic forces, may develop global naval functions; already,
for example, Swedish submarine units are helping to train Americans in the
Pacific on how to hunt for diesel subs. The sea may be NATO's and Europe's best chance for a
real military future. And yet the alliance is literally and symbolically weak.
For it to regain its political significance, NATO must become a military alliance that no one doubts
is willing to fight and kill at a moment's notice. That was its reputation
during the Cold War—and it was so well regarded by the Soviets that they never
tested it. Expanding NATO eastward
has helped stabilize former Warsaw Pact states, of course, but admitting
substandard militaries to the alliance's ranks, although politically necessary,
has been problematic. The more NATO expands
eastward, the more superficial and unwieldy it becomes as a fighting force, and
the more questionable becomes its claim that it will fight in defense of any
member state. Taking in yet more substandard militaries like Ukraine's and
Georgia's too soon is simply not inNATO's
interest. We can't just declare an expansion of a defense alliance because of
demonstrations somewhere in support of democracy. Rather, we must operate in
the way we are now operating in Georgia, where we have sent in the Marines for
a year to train the Georgian armed forces. That way, when a country like
Georgia does make it into NATO,
its membership will have military as well as political meaning. Only by making
it an agile force that is ready to land on, say, West African beaches at a few
days' or hours' notice can we save NATO.
And we need to save it. NATO is
ours to lead—unlike the increasingly powerful European Union, whose own defense
force, should it become a reality, would inevitably emerge as a competing
regional power, one that might align itself with China in order to balance against
us. Let me be even clearer about something that policymakers and experts often
don't want to be clear about. NATO and
an autonomous European defense force cannot both prosper. Only one can—and we
should want it to be the former, so that Europe is a military asset for us, not
a liability, as we confront China.
The Chinese military challenge is already a reality to officers and
sailors of the U.S. Navy. I recently spent four weeks embedded on a
guided-missile destroyer, the USS Benfold, roaming around the
Pacific from Indonesia to Singapore, the Philippines, Guam, and then Hawaii.
During my visit the Benfold completed a tsunami-relief
mission (which consisted of bringing foodstuffs ashore and remapping the
coastline) and then recommenced combat drills, run from the ship's
combat-information center—a dark and cavernous clutter of computer consoles.
Here a tactical action officer led the response to what were often hypothetical
feints or attacks from China or North Korea.
Observing the action in the combat-information center, I learned that
although naval warfare is conducted with headphones and computer keyboards, the
stress level is every bit as acute as in gritty urban combat. A wrong decision
can result in a catastrophic missile strike, against which no degree of
physical toughness or bravery is a defense.
Sea warfare is cerebral. The threat is over the horizon; nothing can be
seen; and everything is reduced to mathematics. The object is deception more
than it is aggression—getting the other side to shoot first, so as to gain the
political advantage, yet not having to absorb the damage of the attack.
As enthusiastic as the crew members of the Benfold were
in helping the victims of the tsunami, once they left Indonesian waters they
were just as enthusiastic about honing their surface and subsurface warfare
skills. I even picked up a feeling, especially among the senior chief petty
officers (the iron grunts of the Navy, who provide the truth unvarnished), that
they might be tested in the western Pacific to the same degree that the Marines
have been in Iraq. The main threat in the Persian Gulf to date has been
asymmetric attacks, like the bombing of the Cole. But the Pacific
offers all kinds of threats, from increasingly aggressive terrorist groups in
the Islamic archipelagoes of Southeast Asia to cat-and-mouse games with Chinese
subs in the waters to the north. Preparing to meet all the possible threats the
Pacific has to offer will force the Navy to become more nimble, and will make
it better able to deal with unconventional emergencies, such as tsunamis, when
they arise.
Welcome to the next few decades. As one senior chief put it to me,
referring first to the Persian Gulf and then to the Pacific, "The Navy
needs to spend less time in that salty little mud puddle and more time in the
pond."
Robert D. Kaplan is an Atlantic correspondent and the
author of Imperial Grunts: The American Military on the Ground,
forthcoming in September from Random House—the first of several books he is
writing about the armed forces
