China's SCS Strategy Thread

[Hendrik_2000]

Hostile enemy fleets can not operate freely in the SCS when they know they are being tracked by sensors and surveillance assets deployed from those islands; and because they know those islands could pretty much turn into fortresses overnight. So they could not afford to simply bypass them on their way to strike at mainland targets or threaten Chinese shipping in the SCS, as they risk getting surrounded and destroyed. But attacking those islands on their way in would destroy their element of surprise while also dealing a mortal blow to their cause diplomatically.

While on paper, those islands might look vulnerable to attack right now. In reality, anyone foolish enough to attack those islands out of the blue would do very little to harm their military worth to China at best, or trap themselves trying to defend those islands from a Chinese counter attack and get ground to scrap by China’s overwhelming logistical and geographical advantages fighting in the region.

Exactly those island is not hopeless as some people thought
Modern sensor and SAM, fighter jet couple with interlocking and overlapping coverage of those airfield make it formidable air defense. The only real danger is from Submarine launch missile but we know China is in the process of building great wall undersea. So even that danger is minimized in couple year
Here is a map of the sensor and air defense coverage of Chinese anti access

 

[AndrewS]

Exactly those island is not hopeless as some people thought
Modern sensor and SAM, fighter jet couple with interlocking and overlapping coverage of those airfield make it formidable air defense. The only real danger is from Submarine launch missile but we know China is in the process of building great wall undersea. So even that danger is minimized in couple year
Here is a map of the sensor and air defense coverage of Chinese anti access
View attachment 42875

They really should add the J-11 combat radius.

Then we can see the Hainan bases covering the SCS bases, which are 1200km away.

 

[Jura The idiot]

now I noticed in Twitter

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an interesting link for those who like maps:

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you can select what claim(s) specifically you want to see for example this 'dense' area:

 

[Blitzo]

That is why I specifically mentioned a Pearl Habour like attack as a vulnerability. And that is one of the key reasons the Chinese are not forward deploying a lot of military assets on those islands.

Because think about it, without forward deployed military assets, what is there for an attacker to attack on those islands?

They will just be bombing civilians.

If China forward deployed a lot of military assets, that gives an attacker more legitimate targets for a surprise attack, and they will be able to materially weaken Chinese defences by taking out so many high value military assets in an opening attack.

As such, not forward deploying high value military assets to those islands is part of the Chinese defence plans.

Without those high value assets to strike, that only leaves invasion and occupation as a worthwhile military option for a surprise attack on those islands. Because to truly knock those islands out as Chinese assets, you need to occupy them or else the Chinese will just quickly replair any damage from the initial attack, no matter how devastating, and then forward deploy high value military assets who would be on a shoot on sight policy and won’t be caught out by a surprise attack.

A surprise attack is one thing, occupation is a very different ball game.

Even if we for the moment gloss over the absurdity of any hostile amphibious assault fleets going unnoticed and unchallenged as they got within strike range of all those islands and deployed troops, and just for the sake of argument say they took those islands within hours. Then what? Does anyone think China will just call quits at that point?

Now the attacker has a real nightmare of a problem because the logistical burden they would face trying to resupply and reinforce those islands so far away from friendly support bases.

Those islands are only fortresses for the Chinese because of the close proximity of their geographic location to mainland bases. Without that critical component, they would truly become the sitting duck liabilities that the western media tries so hard to paint them as, for any hostile occupation force. And any occupation troops they deploy on the islands are liable to get pounded to oblivion by Chinese counter attacks launched from those same close proximity mainland bases.

Without first systematically destroying or at least crippling Chinese long range strike and power projection capabilities, all a surprise invasion of those islands would achieve is to give China easy targets to shoot back at; while effectively tying down your fleets and giving up your greatest naval asset of mobility; and to put the cherry on top, you make any and all Chinese retaliatory military action bullet-proof diplomatically.

The Chinese strategy is not to build a fortress in the SCS, but to subtly lay the ground work to allow such a fortress to be created pretty much overnight.

By doing that, China both presents potential adversaries with a grim operating environment, but also deny them any juicy targets to hit along with any possible diplomatic pretext for a first strike.

Hostile enemy fleets can not operate freely in the SCS when they know they are being tracked by sensors and surveillance assets deployed from those islands; and because they know those islands could pretty much turn into fortresses overnight. So they could not afford to simply bypass them on their way to strike at mainland targets or threaten Chinese shipping in the SCS, as they risk getting surrounded and destroyed. But attacking those islands on their way in would destroy their element of surprise while also dealing a mortal blow to their cause diplomatically.

While on paper, those islands might look vulnerable to attack right now. In reality, anyone foolish enough to attack those islands out of the blue would do very little to harm their military worth to China at best, or trap themselves trying to defend those islands from a Chinese counter attack and get ground to scrap by China’s overwhelming logistical and geographical advantages fighting in the region.

To be the devil's advocate, from the US point of view, I'm not sure if they would have to commit to a very significant occupation of the islands at all, depending on what their strategic objectives are.

If I were the US, I would be fairly content just bombarding the islands in a surprise attack to deny the Chinese the ability to use them as any sort of air base, naval base, or listening post, and then deploy the rest of the US Navy as per usual in the SCS, to deny them the PLA the ability to use the islands in the rest of the conflict. From there, it essentially becomes a situation of an air-naval-missile conflict in the SCS, except the Chinese side will not have the ability to deploy to the island bases at all, and the battle becomes one of how the Chinese side will break into the SCS rather than how the Chinese side will hold the SCS.


That said, I strongly agree that China's strategy isn't to build a fortress in the SCS, but rather to have the ability to rapidly build one overnight in event of a contingency. But such a strategy does have a vulnerability to strategic level surprise attacks as you said.

 

[plawolf]

To be the devil's advocate, from the US point of view, I'm not sure if they would have to commit to a very significant occupation of the islands at all, depending on what their strategic objectives are.

If I were the US, I would be fairly content just bombarding the islands in a surprise attack to deny the Chinese the ability to use them as any sort of air base, naval base, or listening post, and then deploy the rest of the US Navy as per usual in the SCS, to deny them the PLA the ability to use the islands in the rest of the conflict. From there, it essentially becomes a situation of an air-naval-missile conflict in the SCS, except the Chinese side will not have the ability to deploy to the island bases at all, and the battle becomes one of how the Chinese side will break into the SCS rather than how the Chinese side will hold the SCS.


That said, I strongly agree that China's strategy isn't to build a fortress in the SCS, but rather to have the ability to rapidly build one overnight in event of a contingency. But such a strategy does have a vulnerability to strategic level surprise attacks as you said.

But the devil is in the details again.

1) how would the US realistically expect to build up enough forces in the region to risk open conflict without China noticing and deploying counter forces?

For the US to try openly attacking Chinese assets and forces would require at least 3 carrier battle groups it not more.

Any fewer and they risk getting instantly overwhelmed and obliterated by the inevitable Chinese counter strike to any US surprise attack.

If the US did assemble 3+ CSGs in the SCS, half the PLAN would also be deployed in the SCS to monitor them, with all PLAAF strike wings on high alert.

Any such gathering of force and corresponding political tension would also likely trigger Chinese forward deployment scenarios where sufficient air and missile forces are forward deployed to the islands to make them fully capable of defending themselves and hitting back at attackers.

It wouldn’t be a surprise attack but a full on pitched battle.

2) even if for the sake of argument we say the US somehow managed to pull off complete surprise and hit the islands in a surprise attack and then rushed past to form an effective blockade of the islands.

That would mean the USN will have to give up its biggest asset of mobility.

If they move out of the area, the Chinese would be able to reinforce and forward deploy forces on those islands.

So the USN is stuck guarding those islands, which they will have to keep bombing, since they are essentially giant construction sites with more than enough materials and machinery and trained workers to quickly repair any damage their bombing will do to key infrastructure.

That means the Chinese will know where the USN will be, and can just send waves after waves of missiles at them from standoff range. It will be little different from them having actually occupied the islands.

3) even if the USN can withstand that kind of attack, what is the end game? Those islands are not going anywhere, and the Chinese workers there can live off the sea to a large extent.

The Chinese can and will turn the conflict into one of attrition, with China having by far the shorter logistical chain. Able to maintain attacks pretty much indefinitely.

Even if we assume 100% intercept rates, it won’t be long before the USN fleet stands running out of missiles.

The USN would need to pretty much entirely deploy to this conflict to have 3 carriers on station at all times going by the 3s rule.

Even if we take the extremely silly position that no USN ships gets lost in all that saturation missile attack, just how long could the US sustain that kind of long range deployment and extreme munitions expenditure?

 

[AndrewS]

To be the devil's advocate, from the US point of view, I'm not sure if they would have to commit to a very significant occupation of the islands at all, depending on what their strategic objectives are.

If I were the US, I would be fairly content just bombarding the islands in a surprise attack to deny the Chinese the ability to use them as any sort of air base, naval base, or listening post, and then deploy the rest of the US Navy as per usual in the SCS, to deny them the PLA the ability to use the islands in the rest of the conflict. From there, it essentially becomes a situation of an air-naval-missile conflict in the SCS, except the Chinese side will not have the ability to deploy to the island bases at all, and the battle becomes one of how the Chinese side will break into the SCS rather than how the Chinese side will hold the SCS.


That said, I strongly agree that China's strategy isn't to build a fortress in the SCS, but rather to have the ability to rapidly build one overnight in event of a contingency. But such a strategy does have a vulnerability to strategic level surprise attacks as you said.

The islands can't be left to "wither on the vine" are they are too easy to resupply and reconstitute by China, after each bombardment.

And the islands can't be bypassed because they do control the shipping lanes in the narrow South China Seas.

It should be straightforward for China to surge enough forces for temporary air superiority, given the constrained waters of the SCS and how the islands are only 700km from the Paracel islands or 1000km from Hainan.

Then how much airlift or sealift would be required to place some surveillance and air defence assets? And remember the bases can still refuel seaplanes or jets even with minimal infrastructure.

 

[Richard Santos]

That is why I specifically mentioned a Pearl Habour like attack as a vulnerability. And that is one of the key reasons the Chinese are not forward deploying a lot of military assets on those islands.

A effective Pearl Harbor style attack by the US would be exceedingly Difficult to pull off. And if pulled off, is likely to offer at most marginal tactical advantage to the US while creating a nightmarish scenario for the US in terms of international and domestic opinion. First the logistics.

Unlike in 1941, it would be very difficult for the US to hide any deplyement of carriers into the region to launch such an attack, and their known presence by itself makes surprise extremely unlikely.

The deployment of sizeable number of long range bombers to regional bases would be difficult to hide as well. Also, I suspect no major ally, even japan, would permit the US to launch surprise attack against China from bases on their territory since china would see it as overt declaration of war and retaliate against the host nation. So a purely air borne surprise attack would need to involve long range bombers flying exceedingly long missions involving multiple inflight refuelings from more remote bases such as Diego Garcia or Pearl Harbor, or even continental US. The deployment of necessary air refueling assets to support such a long raid therefore also present significant risk that the Chinese would be alerted.

So the only viable option I see is by use of cruise missiles launched by submarines. But submarine launched cruise missiles require significant flight times, thus accurate and predictive intelligence of whereb exact targets will be. Also large volleys of cruise missiles may be detected by Chinese AWACS thus spoiling the surprise.

Now what will such a surprise cruise missile attack on the Chinese island bases do? The very necessity of creating the surprise means the assets won’t be in place to rapidly follow up and exploit any success the surprise attack achieved. The Pearl Harbor of 1941 took out the major capital assets of the US pacific fleet that would take years to make good. Without any follow up the Japanese still created for themselves a power vacuum in the pacific and total freedom of action in Southeast Asia. But here, unless the US simultaneously strike massively at the naval basis on the Chinese mainland, there would be no loss of Chinese capital assets. So If the US attacks just the islands without following up with a landing, it seem likely the Chinese could fly engineering assets to the islands, repair the runways, bring in addition air and air defense assets and be back in business more or less within a week or 10 days. So the attack would have triggered a war while gaining little advantage.

A US surprise attack on Chinese principle naval bases on the mainland to take out major capital assets of the Chinese navy would likely mean Chinese strategic nuclear retaliation at least against US principle naval base in Pearl Harbor, possibly San Diego.

The US could keep some cruise missile equipped submarines near by and continue to snipe at the Chinese to disrupt effort restore the islands, but the fact that these submarines have to fire cruise missiles means they would likely be easier ASW targets. The Chinese would also undoubted deploy their entire fleet to hunt these submarines between the initial attack and when they must redeploy to meet the US fleet, which presumably would require 5-6 days to redeploy from their normal operating stations at which they are keeping up the appearance of normality and thus preserve the surprise prior to the initial attack.

Now the politics; unlike with japan in 1941, it is improbable that a truly sudden surprise attack out of the blue by the US against a major foreign power would be well received domestically. A war thus lunched would not receive strong domestic support. It might be considered an impeachable offense. Just as the original Pearl Harbor attack in 1941 awoke a sleeping giant and filled its breast with a implacable and frightful resolve and desire for revenge that was only satiated by Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and the ceremony of surrender in Tokyo bay aboard USS Missouri, so thinking Americans would now wonder for how long and to what degree would the Chinese remain resolved to avenge themselves upon the Americans for this new surprise attack.

So if the US were to consider striking first against the Chinese islands, it can not truly be a surprise attack. Instead the US would need months in which to create the political atmosphere in the US favorable to the attack. This must involve months of efforts to shape the public view to accept the US attack as appropriate retaliation for some major armed Chinese transgression. But the US, being an open country with its media closely monitored everywhere in the world, can not possibly expect such a domestic public campaign to remain unknown in China or its purpose unsuspected. So the very requirement to lay the necessary domestic public groundwork for an attack on China makes surprise very difficult to achieve.

 

[Richard Santos]

China

The islands can't be left to "wither on the vine" are they are too easy to resupply and reconstitute by China, after each bombardment.

And the islands can't be bypassed because they do control the shipping lanes in the narrow South China Seas.

It should be straightforward for China to surge enough forces for temporary air superiority, given the constrained waters of the SCS and how the islands are only 700km from the Paracel islands or 1000km from Hainan.

Then how much airlift or sealift would be required to place some surveillance and air defence assets? And remember the bases can still refuel seaplanes or jets even with minimal infrastructure.

The notion that the islands are a key leverage on international navigation Which might be worth a war to dispute over seem to me to be a smoke screen. Between 1956 and 1980s, the fact that Arab Israeli war closed off the Seuz Canal didn’t strangle the trade between Europe and Asia. International trade took the long way around Cape of Good Hope. It seems unlikely to me that much of the world’s trade that currently goes through the Sunda Strait would wither and die if compelled to go the long way around Palau and Timor. The extra mileage is much less than going all the way around Africa.

The topography of the sea floor of SCS is that of an interior abyssal bowl inside shallow shelves formed by the drowned Sunda continent, and the islands of Indonesia and Philippines. It is relatively easy to seal off the the South China Sea and prevent nuclear submarines operating inside it from getting out, and also keep nuclear submarines outside from getting in. But it is difficult to find and track submarines in the deep interior bowl.

So SCS forms an idea bastion for Chinese SSBN force which can be defended by the Chinese surface fleet, and aerial ASW assets, and which would be difficult for US SSN to penetrate. The location of these island so happen to put them near the bowl. So they form idea bases to ASW Air cover to protect Chinese SSBN against US SSNs intending to penetrate the bastion and stalk Chinese SSBNS.

If the Chinese fully militarize these islands, and make them into basis to support continuous fixed wing and rotary wing ASW coverage of the bowl, then it make it much more difficult for US SSN forces to maintain permanent covert presence in the bowl and threaten the credibility of Chinese strategic nuclear submarine force.

If the Chinese has no permement ASW surface or air cover over the bowl, then the US could theoretically do to China what it successfully did to the USSR during the Cold War from 1968 to the end of the Cold War, which was to put a US SSN on the tail of every single soviet ballistic missile submarine that ventures out from their bases, ready to massacre the entire soviet ballistic missile force at the opening of hostility.

In 1988, while negotiating arms reduction with the USSR, the US pulled a stunt to impress upon the USSR the weakness and vulnerability of its SSBN force by having every US SSN that is tailing a Soviet SSBN on patrol world wide, that is to say all of the Soviet SSBNs on patrol, simultaneously send out a active sonar ping to reveal its presence to its quarry, letting the USSR know it’s entire SSBN force on patrol is useless in case of a nuclear war.

 

[solarz]

Coming back to my chess analogy, the value of the SCS islands is to decrease any opponent's options while increasing China's options.

The islands themselves are vulnerable, but their value lies in flexibility:

- If an enemy attacks the islands with limited forces, the islands have sufficient defense to supply and coordinate a limited naval engagement in the region.

- If an enemy attacks with overwhelming forces, the islands buy the Chinese forces enough time to prepare its mainland defenses.

- If an enemy tries to bypass the islands, they can be used to disrupt enemy lines and inflict major punishment.

- During peace time, the islands can serve as economic and law-enforcement centers for the exploitation of SCS resources.

 

[AndrewS]

China


The notion that the islands are a key leverage on international navigation Which might be worth a war to dispute over seem to me to be a smoke screen. Between 1956 and 1980s, the fact that Arab Israeli war closed off the Seuz Canal didn’t strangle the trade between Europe and Asia. International trade took the long way around Cape of Good Hope. It seems unlikely to me that much of the world’s trade that currently goes through the Sunda Strait would wither and die if compelled to go the long way around Palau and Timor. The extra mileage is much less than going all the way around Africa.

The topography of the sea floor of SCS is that of an interior abyssal bowl inside shallow shelves formed by the drowned Sunda continent, and the islands of Indonesia and Philippines. It is relatively easy to seal off the the South China Sea and prevent nuclear submarines operating inside it from getting out, and also keep nuclear submarines outside from getting in. But it is difficult to find and track submarines in the deep interior bowl.

So SCS forms an idea bastion for Chinese SSBN force which can be defended by the Chinese surface fleet, and aerial ASW assets, and which would be difficult for US SSN to penetrate. The location of these island so happen to put them near the bowl. So they form idea bases to ASW Air cover to protect Chinese SSBN against US SSNs intending to penetrate the bastion and stalk Chinese SSBNS.

If the Chinese fully militarize these islands, and make them into basis to support continuous fixed wing and rotary wing ASW coverage of the bowl, then it make it much more difficult for US SSN forces to maintain permanent covert presence in the bowl and threaten the credibility of Chinese strategic nuclear submarine force.

If the Chinese has no permement ASW surface or air cover over the bowl, then the US could theoretically do to China what it successfully did to the USSR during the Cold War from 1968 to the end of the Cold War, which was to put a US SSN on the tail of every single soviet ballistic missile submarine that ventures out from their bases, ready to massacre the entire soviet ballistic missile force at the opening of hostility.

In 1988, while negotiating arms reduction with the USSR, the US pulled a stunt to impress upon the USSR the weakness and vulnerability of its SSBN force by having every US SSN that is tailing a Soviet SSBN on patrol world wide, that is to say all of the Soviet SSBNs on patrol, simultaneously send out a active sonar ping to reveal its presence to its quarry, letting the USSR know it’s entire SSBN force on patrol is useless in case of a nuclear war.

Just a few comments.

Yes, all this talk that "islands are a key leverage on international navigation" is a smokescreen, as certain actors want to have the ability to shut down the sea lanes in the SCS in the event of a blockade of China.

But keeping trade flowing in the SCS in all scenarios is key for China, which is the world's largest trading nation, with most of that trade flowing through the South China Seas.

And if the East China Sea is blocked, then the South China Seas represents the only outlet for China's shipping.