Aviation Week & Space Technology 09-Apr-2001
Strategic Reconnaissance At Issue in Sino-U.S. Tiff
By Paul MannThe Sino-American row over the aircraft collision above Hainan Island prefigures the controversy that U.S. reconnaissance flights might cause in any future deployment of Pentagon missile defenses in Asia.
Intensely opposed to the prospect of U.S. theater-range ballistic missile defenses (BMD) for either Taiwan or Japan, Chinese officials had implied before the Apr. 1 aerial incident that BMD deployment might call into question the very legality of space overflights by American military or intelligence satellites, according to Jack Mendelsohn, a former U.S. arms negotiator, now vice president of Lawyers Alliance for World Security, an arms control group here.
PRIOR TO THE EP-3/F-8 collision, Chinese statements had even implied that Beijing might one day attempt to "interfere" with U.S. spy satellite operations as well as challenge aircraft reconnaissance, if Washington proceeded to deploy missile defenses, Mendelsohn said.
Like other U.S. experts, he doubts that China has any antisatellite weapons or lasers that could threaten U.S. space surveillance assets today. A space technology analyst, John Pike, says any such Chinese capability is probably 10 or even 15 years distant.
But Mendelsohn suspects that at least some portion of Chinese officialdom must be thinking that the Hainan collision "sends a very useful signal" to Washington that Beijing is serious when it warns that the fielding of American BMD would call into question the acceptability of unhampered overflights.
"That's difficult for me to imagine as an authoritative Chinese government position, because it would contravene long-established principles of space law in peacetime," said Pike, head of GlobalSecurity.org, a defense policy analysis organization. "The United Nations Outer Space Treaty codifies customary international law, established by Sputnik I in 1957, that it's legal for satellites to orbit the Earth."
Any pretensions of economic control that Beijing asserts over the South China Sea are also out of legal bounds in connection with reconnaissance, Pike added. "Under international convention, the Law of the Sea Treaty," he said, "all countries have exclusive economic jurisdiction over fishing and seabed minerals out to 200 mi. from their coastline. Tying that [rationale] to military recon is without basis in accepted international law. Basically, what the Chinese are asserting is that all those passenger planes flying from Japan to Indonesia, and all those oil tankers going from Saudi Arabia to Japan through the South China Sea, are crossing Chinese territory, and China is perfectly within its rights to prevent that." Pike and other U.S. authorities consider such claims legally preposterous.
ON THE OTHER HAND, Chinese deployment of antisatellite weapons is plausible, if a somewhat distant prospect. Western analysts generally consider the Chinese military backward, albeit checkered with some "pockets of excellence." Detailed analyses in the past year or so by respected think tanks in the U.S. and Britain--Rand, the Nixon Center, the International Institute for Strategic Studies, among others--gave low marks to the Chinese armed forces, citing their tiny strategic missile arsenal (about 20), antiquated air force and navy, meager combined arms capability and retrograde pilot training (AW&ST Jan. 17, 2000, p. 432.)
Beijing recently announced an extraordinary military budget increase of 17.2%, and took the second delivery of a Russian destroyer. But its forces are hobbled by old designs, 15-year weapons procurement stretchouts, botched systems integration, weak quality control and the waste of advanced military capability purchased from Russia. In the words of Rand, when a Chinese Su-27 pilot is trained only in one-on-one, tail-chase intercepts against nonmaneuvering targets, "he is being trained to waste his airplane."
"The more you look at the Chinese military, the more you really understand what it is to be a poor country," Pike agreed. Nevertheless, he cautioned, in time China might be able to build some version of the antisatellite (Asat) weapons the U.S. and the former Soviet Union developed during the Cold War. "If we stipulate that Chinese military technology lags that of the U.S. by a couple of decades, they should be able to build Asats about 10 years from now--air-launched or ground-launched, with explosive warheads or hit-to-kill kinetic energy, pop-up or co-orbital."
"POP-UP" REFERS to satellite interceptors launched from, say, underneath an aircraft's wing, and aimed directly at a space-based reconnaissance target. Pop-ups provide the advantage of short warning times, an approach once favored by the U.S. "Co-orbital" refers to Asats that operate by means of orbital rendezvous with the target. Such attacks take longer because the Asat requires a couple of orbits to catch up with the target satellite.
China could resort to satellite "mines," which fly the same orbit as the target satellite, following it from a close distance. The mines can be detonated at any time to destroy the target.
As for other counter-reconnaissance weapons, Pike noted that "the Chinese are not known to have multi-megawatt ground-based lasers, but in principle they could build one by around the end of this decade, or perhaps soon thereafter, say 2010-15."
Likewise, American theater missile defense deployments in Asia are probably 10-15 years away. Japanese BMD studies due in 2003 have been postponed until 2006, owing to technological problems, Japanese security experts say. A U.S. decision on an overall BMD scheme is pending and a system, whether theater or U.S.-based or both, would take years to build--many years if President Bush approves a more complex BMD system for the U.S. than the 100-200 ground-based interceptors President Clinton once envisioned.
But the White House is expected to decide this month what new military equipment to sell to Taiwan. The betting before the Hainan incident was that Bush would offer Patriot PAC-3 missile interceptors, but hold off on more provocative Aegis-equipped destroyers with BMD early warning capability. Whether the aircraft collision will tip the Taiwan sales one way or the other may depend in part on the outcome of the diplomatic minuet over who was responsible for the Hainan smash-up.
Bush's conservative allies in Congress have argued before that Taiwan should get Aegis and Amraam air-to-air missiles. They would defend against both China's continuing short-range missile deployments opposite Taiwan--90 mi. off the mainland coast--and China's multiple purchases of advanced combat aircraft and submarines from Russia.
Under a House bill shelved by the last Congress, Taiwan would have been the beneficiary for the first time of direct U.S. collaboration on both operational matters and field training. Direct communication links would have been established between Taipei and CINCPAC, the commander-in-chief of U.S. Pacific forces.
ALTHOUGH THE NEW 107th Congress is more closely divided than its predecessor--the Senate is split 50-50--congressional sentiment favoring Taiwan arms purchases has increased as the island nation's democracy has taken root, and as China has continued its menacing short-range missile buildup. Last October, lawmakers created a free-standing security commission to keep an eye on the national security implications of America's expanding trade and economic ties with China. A milestone low-tariff measure Congress adopted and then-President Clinton signed last year paved the way for Beijing's accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO), and what the West hopes will be China's full integration into the global economy.
Aside from the Taiwan sales, one of the major weapons issues pending in the Bush Administration's strategic review is whether to curtail fighter aircraft production in favor of more long-range bombers. That would follow from a White House decision, which may become known in May, to shift the locus of U.S. national security strategy toward Asia and away from Europe. A B-2 follow-on would offer both strategic and political flexibility, proponents say, because it could operate without forward U.S. operating bases, whose numbers have dwindled since the Cold War ended in 1991.
The China factor in the missile defense debate is a highly contentious one in Japan as well as Taiwan, says Kori J. Urayama of the Tokyo Foundation. Japan's theater missile defense advocates "increasingly support the initiative as a hedge against the rise of China," she said, on grounds it would effectively offset any attempt by China to use its missile buildup to conduct political blackmail against its Pacific neighbors in a crisis.
But many questions persist in Tokyo about the future of joint American-Japanese missile defenses, Urayama told a symposium at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University. Japan is divided about whether missile defense would deter or provoke missile proliferation in the region, and whether BMD would solidify American-Japanese defense collaboration or simply increase Tokyo's security dependence on Washington. The latter would limit Japan's room for policy and diplomatic maneuver, and the alliance's credibility might come to hinge solely on joint missile defense, some Japanese officials worry.
IN ADDITION to the legal issue China has raised about the conduct of U.S. reconnaissance in the region, there are BMD "connectivity" issues that Japan wants resolved. The operational links between a U.S.-based missile defense and a regional counterpart in Asia have yet to be articulated, Urayama points out. "Given the need for a joint, seamless command and control system based on real-time information-sharing, theater missile defense has the potential for strengthening the U.S.-Japan policy consultation process. [But] some [Japanese] question whether Japan is actually ready to assume such responsibility at this point."
Assuming such matters were resolved, the operational responsibilities Tokyo would have to bear would be considerable. Based on a 1998-99 accord, the U.S. and Japan are conducting research on a sea-based BMD for Japan, the U.S. Navy Theater Wide system. The geographic proximity of Japan and China would be an advantage for a sea-based system.
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