Two 2020 Proceedings articles debated the relevance of Alfred Thayer Mahan and Julian Corbett to war with China, but both overlooked two aspects of modern warfare that supersede both theorists: nuclear weapons and cyberspace.1 China’s nuclear weapons make any kinetic action against that country extremely risky. Likewise, its strength in cyberspace is a potential deterrent to kinetic action and a viable option for competition in lieu of open war. Neither Mahan nor Corbett could have addressed nuclear weapons or cyberspace, having written when neither technology existed. Modern situations call for modern, applicable theories.
Nuclear Weapons Deter War
All interactions between the United States and China occur in the shadow of nuclear weapons, and those nuclear weapons encumber military strategy. While the United States currently holds an overwhelming advantage in the nuclear weapons balance, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) Rocket Force, which controls China’s nuclear weapons, can strike at U.S. interests, territories, and the continental homeland.2 Contemplating military action against China today is not the same as when Mahan and Corbett were writing. If the United States attacks China or its interests, it might create a nuclear crisis.
China’s nuclear strategy is different from that of the Soviet Union or Russia (which inherited the Soviet arsenal and strategy), but China’s nuclear weapons should still constrain U.S. military strategy. The Soviet Union competed with the United States for nuclear superiority and was able to exchange salvos blow-for-blow. China, in contrast, has—until recently—developed fewer weapons and intercontinental delivery systems. A smaller nuclear arsenal creates more strategic ambiguity. China exploits the uncertainty about its nuclear forces to deter on the cheap.3 A reduced nuclear arsenal saves money, but a different strategy does not imply Chinese unwillingness to use nuclear weapons. China’s recently revealed intercontinental ballistic missile construction may eventually ensure second-strike capabilities, further demonstrating a willingness to use nuclear weapons.
China’s nuclear posture reflects a thoughtful strategy and a willingness to deploy nuclear weapons. China possesses the full “triad” of nuclear delivery vehicles: aircraft, submarines, and ballistic missiles.4 It collocates its conventional command-and-control (C2) assets with nuclear C2, neutralizing potential preemptive strikes.5 Attacks on conventional C2 nodes, a common first move in U.S. military campaigns, would be indistinguishable from a first strike against nuclear forces and encourage China to launch its surviving weapons early in any conflict. Destroying nuclear C2 also makes deescalation difficult because degrading C2 reduces the ability to call back mobilization and launches. China’s force posture signals it is willing to use nuclear force in extremis.6
U.S. naval strategy must take additional consideration of Chinese nuclear forces because assets at sea make especially tempting targets. Naval operations close to China are within range of regional nuclear weapons delivery systems and shorter-range aircraft. Nuclear strikes on ships carry lower risk of collateral damage and civilian casualties. Should a naval operation—such as a blockade—threaten China’s national security, a nuclear response against U.S. naval assets would remove the specific military threat to China without using scarce intercontinental delivery systems. While the U.S. public would likely be outraged, it is not clear that a nuclear attack on ships at sea carries the same imperative for nuclear retaliation that nuclear strikes on the U.S. homeland does. Nuclear attacks against seaborne military targets might share more similarities with deterrence extended outside the homeland (known as Type II deterrence) than with deterring attacks on the homeland (Type I).
Nuclear Weapons Constrain Competition
Nuclear weapons and geography mercifully reduce the potential conflict over vital interests between the United States and China, though indirect conflict could escalate tensions. The only current potential conflict is over the need for the United States to maintain freedom of access to the sea, and China’s ambiguous claims to the South China Sea (SCS) that Beijing considers a vital national interest.7 In addition to direct conflict, the United States may determine that preventing the forcible reunification of Taiwan with mainland China is a strategic necessity to preserve freedom of navigation. Finally, U.S. allies might “chain gang” into a war if conflict breaks out between a U.S. ally and China, such as Japan over the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands.8
Of the three potential causes of war, the actions of a third party are the most dangerous, because the prospect of miscalculation is highest in multilateral competition.9 Bilaterally, the United States and China at least know their own power and limitations, and pay close attention to each other, treading carefully to avoid unnecessary crises. Third parties may miscalculate both Chinese and U.S. capabilities and commitment. Third parties may also have interests that either the United States or China has not thought deeply about but must commit to once a crisis unfolds.
If there is a clash over vital interests, the contest may be about the sea, but not necessarily take place on the sea. Thinking of a potential flashpoint as a conflict’s objective rather than its cause can lead to adverse outcomes. The U.S. government’s primary tool to implement policy at sea is the Navy. Since nuclear weapons constrain military operations at sea, few viable military strategies remain. Thinking of competition in the western Pacific as purely or even primarily a naval conflict focuses on essentially impossible strategies at the cost of viable, potentially fruitful strategies.
Competition, Not Conflict
U.S. military strategy toward China must focus on competition, not conflict, and therefore cannot include strategies proposed by either Mahan or Corbett. International competition happens all the time, and can even be beneficial. Even hostile competition that includes diplomatic and economic conflict, as currently seen between the United States and China, must not include military conflict. Since the point of military strategy, according to Mahan and Corbett, is to win the kind of war the United States must now avoid with China, their utility is marginal.
The folly of conflict on the high seas with China comes into stark relief when examining the risks of blockade. Both 2020 Proceedings articles authors, Daniel Ward and Marine Corps First Lieutenant Matthew Suarez, agree that a naval blockade would be a useful strategy against China, though each looks to a different theorist for justification. Suarez correctly explains, “The seizure of property on the commons is an attack on an enemy’s national life,” which is precisely the problem. Successfully attacking China’s “national life” might seem like a military victory, but once China’s national life is under threat, so is the well-being of the people who control China’s nuclear weapons.
China has a “no first use policy,” but pressed too aggressively, there are both national security and personal reasons leaders might change policy. If a blockade began to impose severe costs on Chinese civilians, ending a blockade with a limited nuclear strike might seem like a plausible option. Increasing pressure on the population tends to galvanize leaders and the population to action, rather than lead to concessions.10 Even if pressure on the population led to unrest threatening to topple the government, leaders are not necessarily going to surrender. Losing power in China has rarely been bloodless, and if the government is faced with the choice of death by coup or using nuclear weapons in a limited way to achieve victory, the latter becomes an attractive option.
Using nuclear weapons to avoid a domestic crisis may seem madness to U.S. observers, but it is completely reasonable in China. Nothing informs China’s domestic and international politics more than the Cultural Revolution, in which political chaos consumed the country, including the elites. Xi Jinping himself was rusticated during the Cultural Revolution, and his father was denounced and imprisoned. The Cultural Revolution was just the most recent acute episode of chaos engulfing China in the past 200 years, including the Chinese Civil War (1927–49), the 1905 Revolution, the Boxer Rebellion (1899–1901), and the Taiping Rebellion (1850–64). More recently, Chinese leaders have not forgotten the fate of Libya’s Muammar Ghaddafi in 2011 or Romania’s Nicolae Ceauşescu in 1989. The calculations surrounding nuclear weapons use look different if losing a war means losing power and losing power means losing your life.
Competing while avoiding conflict is a “whole of state” problem, and the military is the most dangerous part of the state in many ways. An adversary’s military can inflict the most pain on any branch of its opponent’s government, and that adversary is more likely to retaliate militarily when under military attack. Therefore, competing while avoiding conflict requires the U.S. government to embrace a strategy in which its military is less important. The military can sometimes support non-military government and civil society options for competition, but above all else must not risk nuclear war.
Cyberspace Makes Competition Possible
Both the United States and China have important interests in cyberspace, but none are so important (at least for now) that they are likely to provoke nuclear war. Internet-fueled economic growth has contributed substantially to both countries’ economies over the past two decades and consequently is an important part of Chinese and U.S. power. Because neither China nor the United States can afford to abandon the internet, both are using it to compete against the other.
China’s cyber competition with the United States includes cyberattacks to undermine U.S. economic and government institutions. Cyberattacks on Experian and the Office of Personnel Management are among the most high-profile Chinese attacks, but they are part of a more widespread online campaign.11 China also pursues an explicit policy of intellectual property theft to offset U.S. technological advantages.12 Understandably, some observe the attacks as attempts to coerce the United States into accepting China’s new rising status, and individual attacks may have such a short-term objective.13 However, China’s rampant cyberattacks are strategically more consequential in affecting U.S. power.
The U.S. counterattack to China’s cyber campaign is the internet itself, and U.S. support for online democratization. U.S. strategists might balk at thinking of democratization as a strategy. However, sincere support for democratization inherently threatens Chinese Communist Party control. The party cannot open China’s political system without risking losing power. Though losing power through domestic revolution is no less threatening than losing power through military defeat, democratizing pressure does not present a similar escalatory risk. There is neither an obvious moment nor a target for nuclear retaliation against incremental pressure for democratization.
As the United States promotes both the internet and democratization, the Chinese government responds accordingly. Early U.S. strategy assumed the internet alone, together with some support for information freedom, might lead to democratization.14 China responded by developing the largest and most sophisticated censorship regime in history.15 The United States has consequently developed counter-censorship tools and made information freedom part of its foreign policy.16
Cyber competition parallels the mechanisms for competition implicit in naval strategy during military conflict. Chinese strategy includes attacks against U.S. economic and international political interests. U.S. strategy undermines the Chinese central government’s ability to dominate China. Both Chinese and U.S. online cyber operations cause less damage in each instance than military attacks. They are spread out over time, making each instance less important and therefore less provocative. It is easy to imagine a routine U.S. freedom-of-navigation patrol escalating to a shooting conflict if two ships collide and sink, but hard to imagine that happening because of most cyberattacks (cyberattacks against nuclear infrastructure are notable exceptions). As long as China and the United States compete below the military conflict threshold, there are few opportunities for precipitous escalation. Both the U.S. and Chinese governments dislike the other’s policies, but at no point has Chinese hacking or U.S. democracy promotion changed the status quo so quickly that war would not be unambiguously worse.
Whither Corbett and Mahan?
Mahan and Corbett both retain value for strategists concerned with Sino-American competition, just not as sources for actual strategies. Good strategists identify mechanisms to achieve specific strategic objectives and elaborate those mechanisms using the technology of their age. Even after technology changes, the mechanisms to achieve strategic objectives may still apply. Corbett prescribes using naval power to defeat fielded ground forces, whereas Mahan prefers using naval power to effect national power. Similar debates continue today surrounding nuclear weapons or airpower, reflecting the durability and portability of Corbett and Mahan’s underlying logic.17
The trap strategists must avoid is importing the time-specific strategic prescriptions when looking at the general logic. Even as Corbett and Mahan wrote, blockades were fading as effective strategies, overcome by technology. Nuclear retaliation is only one reason why a blockade against China would not be wise. Geography, China’s domestic economy, and globalization also all work against modern blockades.18 Strategists planning the invasion of Iraq did not work from a map of Vietnam, even as they applied the lessons learned therein. Strategists today must look to the world as it is, while applying still valuable logic from the past.
Long-dead strategists have utility, but contemporary realities require today’s strategists to place them in proper historical perspective. All education relies on history to some extent, and history is especially useful to understand military strategy and international relations. History allows instructors and students a useful “sandbox” to develop and evaluate ideas. Unfortunately, introducing historically important strategists as educational tools can also inadvertently encourage students to treat their texts authoritatively. However remarkable for their time, Mahan and Corbett were making the best sense they could of complicated situations in their times. While contemporary strategists should learn from their past, the 21st century is no place for 19th-century strategies. Today’s strategists must develop strategies for our time.
1. Daniel E. Ward, “Going to War with China? Dust Off Corbett!” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings 146, no. 1 (January 2020); First Lieutenant Matthew Suarez, USMC, “Going to War with China? Ignore Corbett. Dust Off Mahan!” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings 146, no. 12 (December 2020).
2. Bates Gill and Adam Ni, “The People’s Liberation Army Rocket Force: Reshaping China’s Approach to Strategic Deterrence,” Australian Journal of International Affairs 73, no. 2 (January 2019).
3. Vipin Narang, Nuclear Strategy in the Modern Era: Regional Powers and International Conflict (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014).
4. Jonathan Madeira and Matthew Wallin, “Nuclear Arsenals of the U.S., Russia, and China: Fact Sheet,” American Security Project, September 2020.
5. Caitlin Talmadge, “Would China Go Nuclear? Assessing the Risk of Chinese Nuclear Escalation in a Conventional War with the United States,” International Security 41, no. 4 (Spring 2017): 50–92.
6. Keir A. Lieber and Daryl G. Press, “The New Era of Counterforce: Technological Change and the Future of Nuclear Deterrence” International Security 41, no. 4 (Spring 2017): 9–49.
7. Andrew Scobell, “The South China Sea and U.S.-China Rivalry,” Political Science Quarterly 133, no. 2 (Summer 2018): 199–224.
8. Thomas J. Christensen and Jack Snyder, “Chain Gangs and Passed Bucks: Predicting Alliance Patterns in Multipolarity,” International Organization 44, no. 2 (Spring 1990): 137–68.
9. Kenneth Neal Waltz, Theory of International Politics, Addison-Wesley Series in Political Science (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley Publishing Co., 1979).
10. Robert Anthony Pape, Bombing to Win: Air Power and Coercion in War, Cornell Studies in Security Affairs (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996).
11. Jason Chaffetz, Mark Meadows, and Will Hurd, “The OPM Data Breach: How the Government Jeopardized Our National Security for More Than a Generation,” Research Report (Washington, DC: U.S. House of Representatives, Committee on Oversight; Government Reform, 2016).
12. John Lee, “Cyber Kleptomaniacs: Why China Steals Our Secrets,” World Affairs 176, no. 3 (September/October 2013): 73–79.
13. T. Casey Fleming, Eric L. Qualkenbush, and Anthony M. Chapa, “The Secret War Against the United States: The Top Threat to National Security and the American Dream; Cyber and Asymmetrical Hybrid Warfare; an Urgent Call to Action,” The Cyber Defense Review 2, no. 3 (Fall 2017): 25–32.
14. Richard Fontaine and Will Rogers, “Internet Freedom: A Foreign Policy Imperative in the Digital Age,” Research Report, Center for a New American Security, 1 June 2011.
15. Gary King, Jennifer Pan, and Margaret E. Roberts, “How Censorship in China Allows Government Criticism But Silences Collective Expression,” American Political Science Review 107, no. 2 (May 2013): 326–43; Peter Lorentzen, “China’s Strategic Censorship,” American Journal of Political Science 58, no. 2 (April 2014): 402–14.
16. Laura Cunningham, “Countering Chinese Censorship,” U.S. Agency for Global Media, 8 August 2019.
17. Bernard Brodie, Strategy in the Missile Age (Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 1959); Pape, Bombing to Win; Thomas C. Schelling, Arms and Influence (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1966).
18. Daniel W. Drezner, The Sanctions Paradox (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2009); Jennifer Lind and Daryl G. Press, “Markets or Mercantilism? How China Secures Its Energy Supplies,” International Security 42, no. 4 (Spring 2018): 170–204.