SeaQueen
Posts: 1451
Joined: 4/14/2007 From: Washington D.C. Status: offline
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I wouldn't call destroying the islands a strategic victory because they're just one piece of an interlocking system intended to insure the Chinese maintain the ability to aggressively assert their influence over all the nations dependent on the South China Sea. Destroying the installations on their islands would be destroying a Chinese center of gravity but it'd be a lower level victory. Strategic victory would be broader. Wars are fought to pursue political objectives, which is to say a specific government policy objective. A "strategic victory" is always somehow related to policy. In this case, to achieve a strategic level victory, you'd have to severely limit the ability of the Chinese government's ability to pursue their policy objectives through violent means in the South China Sea. In this case, their policy is to enforce a claim on the entire South China Sea, and influence the policies of the nations dependent on the South China Sea, possibly through violent means. The US government contests that claim in favor of the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea's definition of territorial waters and while it is officially neutral on the issue of the Spratley Islands and natural resource ownership specifically, it opposes the resolution of those conflicts through violence. Knocking out the islands by themselves wouldn't advance US policy over Chinese policy, although it'd help. The islands are just one element of an overlapping system of defenses intended to aggressively enforce the Chinese claim on the South China Sea, and potentially pursue their regional policy objectives through violent means (e.g. interdicting shipping, attacking targets on land with bombers or strike aircraft). The system also includes their surface fleet, their land based aviation, their submarines, their ballistic missiles and their cruise missiles. By themselves, the Chinese surface fleet can't protect those locations forever but they aren't there by themselves. They seized or built the islands, defended them with land based SAMs, coastal defense cruise missiles and land based aircraft. In war time they would also probably surround them with submarines and mines and sail in carrier based aircraft and long-range ship-based surface to air missiles. All of this is under an umbrella of ballistic and cruise missiles. So you can't just sink the fleet or seize the islands' installations. You can sink the fleet and still lose. You can destroy the island installations and still lose. In order to achieve the highest level victory and deny them the ability to do things like interdict shipping, you've got to defeat a multi-layered system. Any one element by itself probably wouldn't be so terrible (e.g. Ballistic missiles? Never fear! AEGIS is here!), but you don't get to fight just one element of that system, you've got to fight them all in combination simultaneously. To do that you need to figure out what balance of resources works to quickly roll back each of the layers. That's tough, and I'm not sure there's a single "correct" answer to it, which is what makes it interesting. quote:
ORIGINAL: DWReese I'm fine with your example, and I understand it implicitly. That being said, the South China Sea situation seems odd to me. Allied ships can sail in, around, and through, all of the atolls, and China can protest all they want about it, but any battle would be random. If determined, the allied forces could send various platforms (ships/planes/missiles) to completely destroy the installations being built on these locations. Using your definition, they would achieve a strategic victory because they removed the installations that China was "illegally" occupying and constructing. Therefore, for the allied forces, it would seem best to simply avoid the area when Chinese vessels are around. The Chinese vessels, as I just pointed out, can't remain in the area forever and, therefore, can't 'really" protect the atolls from attack because they can't be "on-guard" 24/7 at each of the locations. Since they could all be destroyed before the Chinese to ever arrive to stop it, it almost seems a little foolish to become this worked up by their existence, at least at this point. Would China risk war with every nation in the region if, on any given day, and all out offensive was delivered to remove their illegal installations by taking military action? I don't know. But, the point is, unlike your mine-laying example, the installations could be destroyed (hence yielding a strategic victory) long before the Chinese could arrive to actually stop it. Just some food for thought. Doug
< Message edited by SeaQueen -- 1/25/2018 6:13:00 PM >
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