House China committee’s mission: Military imbalance is foremost among many challenges

The House of Representatives finally has a Select Committee on China, a sorely-needed instrument to drive China policy debate in Congress and, if its agenda is set properly, prompt the White House to consider its approach to Beijing in a clearer light.

As committee chair, Mike Gallagher (R-Wis.) will set the panel’s mission. Its central task should stem from geopolitical reality. The military balance has shifted severely against the United States after decades of neglect, particularly naval neglect. This shift has undermined the strategic status quo in Europe and in Asia. Unless the U.S. addresses it, primarily through a major expansion of naval forces and a commensurate increase in defense industrial capacity, it is a matter of time before an element of the strategic status quo cracks. The most likely fissure will involve Taiwan.

The success of Ukrainian resistance has blinded the U.S. and its allies to strategic history. Russia’s Feb. 24 invasion of Ukraine was only its latest move in the struggle for Eurasian mastery that resumed early in the last decade. At the time, the global financial crisis, America’s withdrawal from Iraq and military spending cuts reduced U.S. power; defense spending as a percentage of GDP dropped to 1990s levels by President Obama’s second term. Yet the 2010s were not the 1990s, and Putin’s Russia overran Crimea and deployed to its “near abroad.”

The most severe modifications, however, occurred in Asia, where growing Chinese power — and declining American capabilities — have upended the status quo without even a small military confrontation.

Rep. Gallagher’s charge as China Committee chair is to grapple with this reality.

Taiwan in context

The U.S. does not defend Taiwan primarily because of its democratic bona fides. The Taiwan-U.S. defense relationship extends back to the 1950s, when Taiwan was decidedly undemocratic but still preferable to Maoist China. When the Eisenhower administration concluded the 1954 Sino-American Mutual Defense Treaty, it did not expect Taiwan to reclaim the Chinese mainland. Nor is the issue relevant now: Even those among Taiwan’s nationalist Kuomintang party who retain an affinity towards the mainland do not seriously expect to displace the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and rule China.

Rather, the issue is strategic. Taiwan lies at the heart of the First Island Chain, the string of archipelagoes that restricts Chinese access to the world’s oceans. This has commercial relevance, given the Taiwan Strait is the focal point of all north-south traffic in east Asia. This also has military relevance: The Luzon Strait and Bashi Channel are the most viable deep-water links between China’s littoral seas and the Philippine Sea, and thus crucial for Chinese submarine operations. Taiwan in Chinese hands would serve as a gateway into the Western Pacific – Chinese missiles and aircraft forward-deployed to Taiwan could dominate the Philippine Sea, splitting Japan and the Philippines off from the United States.

The Taiwan-U.S. relationship, then, stems from considerations of military strategy. Taiwan is the keystone of the U.S. defense system in Asia. Without it, ensuring Philippine, Japanese, Korean and Australian membership in a U.S.-led alliance is impossible, at least barring a major fleet action in the Philippine Sea during which the U.S. would lose (based on historical parallels) around 10,000 men in victory, and even more in defeat.

In turn, Taiwan’s status rests squarely upon American power. Taiwan alone always would have struggled to repel a Chinese invasion, although the cost of a strictly Sino-Taiwanese war would have been high, given China’s limited naval capabilities. U.S. forces, however, had to be included in the balance and, until this century, they held the balance quite decisively.

Naval parity?

The United States resolved the first three Taiwan Straits crises because of conventional capabilities. Nuclear use was considered in the 1954 crisis, but it was the U.S. Navy’s support for Taiwanese forces, not U.S. nuclear brinksmanship, that halted Chinese aggression beyond Taiwan’s outlying islands. In the 1958 crisis, U.S. air-naval power also was decisive; the U.S. broke China’s blockade of Taiwan’s outlying islands through a convoy operation and provided Taiwan with newly developed air-to-air missiles that tipped the aerial balance in its favor. In the 1995-96 crisis, the U.S. sailed a carrier battle group through the strait to demonstrate China’s impotence against U.S. power.

Today’s balance is radically different.

China’s navy now has more ships than the U.S. Navy, making it notionally capable of a long-term blockade against Taiwan. America’s capital ships — the aircraft carriers and big-deck amphibious warships that form the core of its combat power — still provide a tonnage advantage. But China’s navy and air force can, at minimum, reach parity with any U.S. air “surge” to the Taiwan Strait; long-range Chinese missiles can target U.S. carriers well into the Philippine Sea.

Hitting and sinking a warship at sea remains a tall task, but the U.S. carrier air wing, lacking effective organic refueling capability and long-range strike platforms, may need to push closer to Taiwan to counter a Chinese invasion, thereby risking the loss of a capital ship.

China’s marine corps, airborne forces and army have limited amphibious and air assault capabilities, and still rely on civilian ships and aircraft to ensure heavy lift. But unlike at any other point since 1950, China has a fighting shot in a cross-strait war. It needs either better nerves than the U.S. to blockade Taiwan and compel the U.S. to back down, or a few lucky hits on U.S. warships in Japanese ports and U.S. bases on Guam and elsewhere to keep America out of the fight.

Indeed, that China can, with fortune and fortitude, gain several weeks of dominance in the Taiwan Strait should shock any observer. It demonstrates that the foundation of the cross-strait status quo — U.S. conventional dominance — has vanished. Combined with China’s failure to attract Taiwanese unification through economic inducements, Taiwan’s de facto independence, and the Taiwanese population’s increasing willingness to distinguish itself from mainland Chinese, and it all points to the use of military force.

Our Pacific allies understand

China may repeat two contrary propositions — that the cross-strait situation is untenable, and that time remains on China’s side. It has held the same propositions for decades. But today, time is on China’s side only if the conventional balance tips decidedly in its favor. The most likely result of a Taiwan war is a long, bloody conflict that China may win, but at immense cost. Unless the path of U.S. and Chinese arming changes in five, ten, or 20 years, China is likely to outclass the U.S. military in-region.

U.S. regional allies, particularly Japan, understand the existential stakes of the Taiwan question and are moving to bolster Taiwan’s defense more directly. South Korea, has expanded its military-industrial capacity; Australia, under the AUKUS pact, is poised for a defense industrial expansion. India, through the Quad and its own interest in countering China, is at minimum a sympathetic power in any anti-Chinese coalition, as is Vietnam. The political and strategy dynamics for an encircling coalition are in place.

If China’s bet against the U.S. is wrong, if the U.S. system can mitigate its domestic divisions, revitalize its defense capacity and undergird this coalition, then China faces a potentially intractable long-term strategic problem.

It is this problem — the potential for an encircling coalition backed by American naval power — that will deter China from assaulting Taiwan or defeat China if it does.

Focus on the fundamentals

The China Select Committee’s horizon is broad. It likely will consider all manner of issues, ranging from Chinese influence operations in the U.S. to Sino-American trade policy and the legal framework for U.S. financial engagement in China.

In a competition as complex as the Sino-American rivalry for Eurasia, every aspect is relevant.

But Rep. Gallagher and his future colleagues should not lose sight of the fundamental facts of Sino-American competition. The U.S.-China conventional military balance is the foundation of today’s Indo-Pacific situation; this balance has shifted against the U.S. over two decades, encouraging Chinese probes, if not outright aggression.

The U.S. can correct this, but only with prudence, foresight and a commitment to expand its military and industrial capacity alongside effective diplomacy. The China Committee’s fundamental task, then, is to begin the correction of the balance.

Seth Cropsey is founder and president of Yorktown Institute. He served as a naval officer and as deputy undersecretary of the Navy and is the author of “Mayday: The Decline of American Naval Supremacy” (2013) and “Seablindness: How Political Neglect Is Choking American Seapower and What to Do About It” (2017).