By Zachary Keck
The U.S. military realizes it needs to do more to stop China’s salami-slicing. Unfortunately, it doesn’t know how.
On a number of occasions now, I’ve taken to a number of different publications to rant about how the U.S. Department of Defense is ignoring the most immediate Chinese military threat. Specifically, while Washington has fixated on China’s emerging anti-access/area-denial (A2/AD) capabilities, and formulated an Air-Sea Battle (ASB) concept in response, Beijing has been carving up the East and South China Seas with its salami slicing tactics.
To date, the Pentagon has largely acted as if these salami slicing tactics were not its problem. Instead, it has continued to fashion a future force geared toward executing its ASB concept. Being able to deter China’s high-end aggression is undoubtedly necessary and perhaps the most important task at hand.
However, there are at least two problems with this approach. First, so long as China is able to achieve its policy goals with salami-slicing tactics, it’s unlikely to move to more high-level aggression such as invading Taiwan, the Senkaku Islands, and Okinawa. After all, China has long pledged that it is committed to rising peacefully. There is little reason to doubt this assertion so long as it is able to achieve its policy objectives without resorting to war.
The second issue with the Pentagon’s approach is that it is building exactly the wrong force to deal with China’s salami slicing tactics. To execute an ASB concept, the Pentagon is sacrificing quantity for quality. That is, it is accepting a smaller force but one that is highly capable and at the leading edge technologically. Although this may allow the U.S. military to successfully execute ASB, it is precisely the wrong kind of force for countering China’s salami-slicing tactics. Countering China’s salami-slicing would require a large force to constantly patrol the massive waters of the East and South China Seas. These patrolling forces don’t have to be the most sophisticated technologically, as China generally relies on civilian maritime vessels to execute its salami slicing strategy.
Read the full story at The Diplomat