Well, I am going to put in my threepeneth in on this subject.
There is one overriding factor that will have a major determination on the effectiveness of China's anti access stratagems and that of course, is the precise nature of the opponent that they will be looking to deny access too.
The main opponent is of course the USA and its formidable military machine and yet when you follow the news coming from Washington, it is news that is really only in one direction: Cuts, Cuts and more Cuts, with one series of major cuts (many representing sums greater than the entire military budgets of many middle and even top income nations) which seem to be nothing more that the set up for even greater cuts in the future.
Even in recent weeks, after several years of progressive cuts worth hundreds of billions of dollars, we are told that at 15% of military forces need to be cut, even before the effects of sequestration kick in. We have the Pentagon briefing against the F35 project and warning that it could be scrapped entirely. We also have warnings that to try and minimise the effects of cuts on current capability, that R&D funding for future weapons may need to be abolished.
I am also aware of the bizarre language of the Asian Repivot, which talks blandly of repositioning 60% of the USN into the Pacific Theatre. That is a strange thing to say and astonishingly noncommittal.
If you are planning to counter a potential threat, you analyse that threat and design a mission to counteract it. You then package the force you need to ensure that you can successfully complete the mission if required. This is something that you measure in terms of design capability and then in terms of Fleets, Battle Groups and Airwings. In other words real capabilities expressed in terms of real formations. Simply to talk about percentages is meaningless waffle. Hopefully they intend to round the percentage up to the nearest whole ship?
I read this as meaning that the Pentagon knows it is facing such savage, rolling cuts from now and into the foreseeable future, that it no longer has the confidence to express its policy in terms of actual capabilities or actual ship/aircraft numbers. Instead it simply issues a bland assurance that whatever the Inventory levels may fall too, that 60% will be deployed in the Pacific.
How much faith then can we put into talk and announcements of new wonder weapons and next generation systems etc? Probably not very much.
It seems increasingly likely that the story of the rest of this decade and beyond will be a USN, Airforce and Marine Corps that will be progressively shrunk and trying to maintain its present capabilities by operating only its current weapons and platforms and unlikely to modernise significantly for the foreseeable future. We are aware of problems in all US services in being able to maintain quality and maintain specialists and this is only likely to increase with time, further degrading US Capability
In contrast we have a PLA now entering the second half of its total modernisation and completing its radical qualitative revolution.
At the end of the day, simple mathematics and finance may well prove the only Anti Access Strategy that China needs!
