A U.S.-China War Scenario: How Would China's Military Attack a "Great Wall in Reverse"? Peering through a glass darkly now may help the allies discern what the red team may do.
suppose the United States and its allies erect a “Great Wall in reverse,” deploying anti-ship, anti-aircraft, and anti-submarine armaments on and around the islands constituting the first island chain.
China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) will not submit meekly while the allies curb its freedom of movement between its home waters and the Western Pacific. Instead, PLA soldiers, sailors, and aviators will try to puncture, outflank, or otherwise nullify the wall, regaining access to the wider world. They must—lest China forfeit the export and import trade that underwrites its “dream” of prosperity and national dignity, not to mention its capacity to project military might outside its immediate environs. But how?
Peering through a glass darkly now may help the allies discern what the red team may do. In turn, foresight may help them get ahead in the inevitable next round of strategic competition, devising countermeasures to defeat PLA efforts to defeat the wall. And on and on the competition will go.
Impelling a Great Wall strategy is the notion that the allies must reply to the challenge manifest in China’s theater-wide “anti-access/area-denial” defenses, which aim to make things tough on U.S. and allied forces seeking entry to embattled Western Pacific waters, skies, or landmasses. China has essayed access-denial on a grand geographic scale, hoping to ward off U.S. reinforcements dashing to the relief of Taiwan, Japan, or some other Asian friend. Rigging barricades across short, defensible narrow seas would remind Beijing that access-denial is not just a Chinese thing. The allies can contest access as well, and they can make geography their ally in a way China cannot.
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