Still, the Pentagon's main focus is a rising China, the power believed to pose the greatest threat to America's long-term strategic interests. "China's historically unprecedented economic development has enabled an impressive military buildup that could soon challenge the U.S. across almost all domains," Admiral Harry Harris Jr., commander of the U.S. Pacific Command (USPACOM) and now the U.S. ambassador to South Korea, typically testified in March 2018. "China's ongoing military modernization is a core element of China's stated strategy to supplant the U.S. as the security partner of choice for countries in the Indo-Pacific."
As Harris made clear, any conflict with China would probably first erupt in the waters off its eastern coastline and would involve an intense U.S. drive to destroy China's A2/AD capabilities, rendering that country's vast interior essentially defenseless. Harris's successor, Admiral Philip Davidson, as commander of what is now known as the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, or USINDOPACOM, described such a scenario this way in testimony before Congress in February 2019: "Our adversaries are fielding advanced anti-access/area denial (A2/AD) systems, advanced aircraft, ships, space, and cyber capabilities that threaten the U.S. ability to project power and influence into the region." To overcome such capabilities, he added, the U.S. must develop and deploy an array of attack systems for "long-range strike[s]" along with "advanced missile defense systems capable of detecting, tracking, and engaging advanced air, cruise, ballistic, and hypersonic threats from all azimuths."
If you read through the testimony of both commanders, you'll soon grasp one thing: that the U.S. military -- or at least the Navy and Air Force -- are focused on a future war-scape in which American forces are no longer focused on terrorism or the Middle East, but on employing their most sophisticated weaponry to overpower the modernized forces of China (or Russia) in a relatively brief spasm of violence, lasting just days or weeks. These would be wars in which the mastery of technology, not counterinsurgency or nation building, would -- so, at least, top military officials believe -- prove the decisive factor.
The Pentagon's Preferred Battleground
Such Pentagon scenarios essentially assume that a conflict with China would initially erupt in the waters of the South China Sea or in the East China Sea near Japan and Taiwan. U.S. strategists have considered these two maritime areas America's "first line of defense" in the Pacific since Admiral George Dewey defeated the Spanish fleet in 1898 and the U.S. seized the Philippines. Today, USINDOPACOM remains the most powerful force in the region with major bases in Japan, Okinawa, and South Korea. China, however, has visibly been working to erode American regional dominance somewhat by modernizing its navy and installing along its coastlines short- and medium-range ballistic missiles, presumably aimed at those U.S. bases.
By far its most obvious threat to U.S. dominance in the region, however, has been its occupation and militarization of tiny islands in the South China Sea, a busy maritime thoroughfare bounded by China and Vietnam on one side, Indonesia and the Philippines on the other. In recent years, the Chinese have used sand dredged from the ocean bottom to expand some of those islets, then setting up military facilities on them, including airstrips, radar systems, and communications gear. In 2015, China's President Xi Jinping promised President Obama that his country wouldn't take such action, but satellite imagery clearly shows that it has done so. While not yet heavily fortified, those islets provide Beijing with a platform from which to potentially foil U.S. efforts to further project its power in the region.
"These bases appear to be forward military outposts, built for the military, garrisoned by military forces, and designed to project Chinese military power and capability across the breadth of China's disputed South China Sea claims," Admiral Harris testified in 2018. "China has built a massive infrastructure specifically -- and solely -- to support advanced military capabilities that can deploy to the bases on short notice."
To be clear, U.S. officials have never declared that the Chinese must vacate those islets or even remove their military facilities from them. However, for some time now, they've been making obvious their displeasure over the buildup in the South China Sea. In May 2018, for instance, Secretary of Defense Mattis disinvited the Chinese navy from the biennial "Rim of the Pacific" exercises, the world's largest multinational naval maneuvers, saying that "there are consequences" for that country's failure to abide by Xi's 2015 promise to Obama. "That's a relatively small consequence," he added. "I believe there are much larger consequences in the future."
What those consequences might be, Mattis never said. But there is no doubt that the U.S. military has given careful thought to a possible clash in those waters and has contingency plans in place to attack and destroy all the Chinese facilities there. American warships regularly sail provocatively within a few miles of those militarized islands in what are termed "freedom of navigation operations," or FRONOPS, while U.S. air and naval forces periodically conduct large-scale military exercises in the region. Such activities are, of course, closely monitored by the Chinese. Sometimes, they even attempt to impede FRONOPS operations, leading more than once to near-collisions. In May 2018, Admiral Davidson caused consternation at the Pentagon by declaring, "China is now capable of controlling the South China Sea in all scenarios short of war with the United States" -- a comment presumably intended as a wake-up call, but also hinting at the kinds of conflicts U.S. strategists foresee arising in the future.
The Navy's War vs. Bolton's War
The U.S. Navy sends a missile-armed destroyer close to one of those Chinese-occupied islands just about every few weeks. It's what the U.S. high command likes to call "showing the flag" or demonstrating America's resolve to remain a dominant power in that distant region (though were the Chinese to do something similar off the U.S. West Coast it would be considered the scandal of the century and a provocation beyond compare). Just about every time it happens, the Chinese authorities warn off those ships or send out their own vessels to shadow and harass them.
On May 6th, for example, the U.S. Navy sent two of its guided-missile destroyers, the USS Preble and the USS Chung Hoon, on a FRONOPS mission near some of those islands, provoking a fierce complaint from Chinese officials. This deadly game of chicken could, of course, go on for years without shots being fired or a major crisis erupting. The odds of avoiding such an incident are bound to drop over time, especially as, in the age of Trump, U.S.-China tensions over other matters -- including trade, technology, and human rights -- continue to grow. American military leaders have clearly been strategizing about the possibility of a conflict erupting in this area for some time and, if Admiral Davidson's remark is any indication, would respond to such a possibility with considerably more relish than most of them do to a possible war with Iran.
Yes, they view Iran as a menace in the Middle East and no doubt would like to see the demise of that country's clerical regime. Yes, some Army commanders like General Kenneth McKenzie, head of the U.S. Central Command, still show a certain John Bolton-style relish for such a conflict. But Iran today -- weakened by years of isolation and trade sanctions -- poses no unmanageable threat to America's core strategic interests and, thanks in part to the nuclear deal negotiated by the Obama administration, possesses no nuclear weapons. Still, can there be any doubt that a war with Iran would turn into a messy quagmire, as in Iraq after the invasion of 2003, with guerrilla uprisings, increased terrorism, and widespread chaos spreading through the region -- exactly the kind of "forever wars" much of the U.S. military (unlike John Bolton) would prefer to leave behind?
How this will all play out obviously can't be foreseen, but if the U.S. does not go to war with Iran, Pentagon reluctance may play a significant role in that decision. This does not mean, however, that Americans would be free of the prospect of major bloodshed in the future. The very next U.S. naval patrol in the South China Sea, or the one after that, could provide the spark for a major blowup of a very different kind against a far more powerful -- and nuclear-armed -- adversary. What could possibly go wrong?
Michael T. Klare, a TomDispatch regular, is the five-college professor emeritus of peace and world security studies at Hampshire College and a senior visiting fellow at the Arms Control Association. His most recent book is The Race for What's Left. His next book, All Hell Breaking Loose: Why the Pentagon Sees Climate Change as a Threat to American National Security , will be published later this year.
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