a
An Introduction to Anti Access/Area Denial Challenges
by Nicholas Greaves-Tunnell, Eurasia Center
August, 2014
The current global posture of American forces is intended to best support the goal of
maintaining American primacy, yet the security commitments and allocation of
resources that it adheres to does not do so. Present American strategy continues to
overvalue and throw money at its already existing monopoly on the global
commons, and anachronistically ignores the increasing importance of 21st century
geopolitical challengers.
As part of its determined efforts to maintain its primacy, America has dedicated
itself to complete control over, and full autonomy within, what Barry Posen termed
the global commons.b Controlling and mitigating external security environments
and providing global public goods requires dominance within maritime trade routes
and international air space. However, as with almost any system requiring
investment of capital to achieve benefits, America's determined investment in
command of the commons suffers from diminishing marginal returns. The massive
continued expenditure designed to further projection of military strength almost
b
Posen, Barry R. "Command of the Commons: The Military Foundation of U.S.
Hegemony." International Security 28.1 (2003): 5-46. Web.
uniformly around the globe has left the United States with an increasingly poor
return on its investment at the same time that it has diverted materiel and funds
away from specific geographic regions more deserving of scrutiny. Chief among
these emerging zones of challenges to American primacy is East Asia, specifically
with China as the primary regional challenger.
According to an analysis of China's recent rise as a regional power by the Carnegie
Endowment, China constitutes the greatest geopolitical threat facing the United
States in the 21st century.c This is arguably an overly grave assessment, especially
given that less than a fifth of the century has passed. It is certainly true, however,
that the rise of China is a unique one that has thus far been met with insufficient
focus and scrutiny. Popular assessment of China's rise as a regional hegemon has so
far singled out its economic growth as the primary concern. It is somewhat ironic
that this rise has been made possible only by the global liberal economic order
facilitated by the United States. The absence of an apparent direct and imminent
challenge from China (we are faced instead with a highly intertwined economic one)
coupled with anticipation of internal demographic and other economic stumbling
blocks has led to a Pivot to Asia that has occurred only rhetorically. The economic
growth of China is inextricably linked with a tandem growth in both its regional
interests and in its stake in military modernization. It would be the height of naivete
to presume that China will inevitably falter economically and thus falter militarily: a
national strategy to preserve regional interests in East Asia must presume the worst
case and hope to be surprised by the best. China has already made use of its
impressive economic growth to deliberately pursue acquisition of Anti Access/Area
Denial war-fighting capabilities within its military. The modernization of the
Chinese military has thus far displayed a determination to combat the projection of
American maritime and air power in the region, and in doing so to restrict American
freedom of action. As China's economic power, and its attendant military strength,
continues to develop, American military superiority in the region will become
c
Tellis, Ashley J. "Balancing Without Containment: An American Strategy for Managing
China." Carnegie Endowment for International Peace(2014). Web: pg 1.
increasingly necessary to reassure Asian allies that deepening their economic ties
with China will not simultaneously render them more vulnerable to Chinese
influence. America must remain heavily involved in the region in order to remain
the indispensable and ultimate guarantor of regional prosperity and security.d
Therefore, preserving American military superiority in East Asia, specifically with
an eye to combating the increased pursuit of A2/AD capabilities, must necessarily
be a part of any strategy that desires to continue American regional presence and
freedom of action.
Anti-Access/ Area Denial capabilities seek to exploit a central axiom of warfighting,
that military strength degrades over distance. A2/AD capacity is intended to serve
two purposes: Anti-Access refers to the ability to prevent an opposing military force
from gaining access to the theater of operations, and therefore involves long-range
weapons systems; Area Denial by contrast involves short-range weapons and
capabilities that restrict an opposing force's ability to move freely within the theater
of operations.e A logical counter to such attempts to deny an operational foothold to
a military seeking to gain forcible access to a region is simply to maintain forwardadvanced bases and other means of projecting force extension.f This forward
posture also serves to reassure regional allies and deter local adversaries by
demonstrating commitment to an ability to respond quickly and to guarantee
regional access. The Joint Operating Environment 2010 report envisioned a future
of inter-state conflict increasingly characterized by unpredictable interactions,
increasingly rapid change, and action in the face of uncertainty.g It can only be
presumed in the face of the continued global trend of drastic weapon technology
improvement coupled with the persistent use of crude capabilities as creative
d
Tellis, Ashley J. "Balancing Without Containment: An American Strategy for Managing
China." Carnegie Endowment for International Peace(2014). Web: pg 55.
e
United States of America. Department of Defense. Joint Operational Access Concept. Web.
<http://www.defense.gov/pubs/pdfs/joac_jan%202012_signed.pdf>: pg 7.
f
United States of America. Department of Defense. Joint Operational Access Concept. Web.
<http://www.defense.gov/pubs/pdfs/joac_jan%202012_signed.pdf>: pg 7.
g
United States of America. United States Joint Forces Command. The Joint Operating
Environment 2010. Web. <http://www.fas.org/man/eprint/joe2010.pdf>.
obstacles to forward deployed forces that AA/AD will continue to dramatically
complicate forcible access for the United States.
Warfighting that relies on AA/AD capabilities is deliberately asymmetrical. Its goal
is to deny the opposing force the ability to gain operational access and freedom by
preventing it from establishing a foothold that might allow the adversary to exploit
advantages of a superior ability to project cross-domain superiority. Weapons
systems and capabilities employed in the pursuit of either longer range anti-access
or shorter range area denial may themselves be technologically advanced or crude,
but they must be wielded towards countering military mismatch. Toward that end,
there are a variety of possible weapons systems that can serve this purpose, and
which are increasingly available not only to wealthy, large states but also to smaller
ones and even to non-state actors.
For the purposes of examining East Asia with China as the primary regional
competitor employing A2/AD strategies it should be noted that American forces are
to a large extent already present in the region. Clearly America has a variety of
forward-deployed bases throughout the region designed to provide a rapid and agile
response to local security concerns at the same time that they reassure regional
allies. These bases provide America with the luxury of an already existing forward
posture that seeks to project air, maritime, and land superiority even at
considerable distance. Despite this precondition of some American presence in the
region, there still exists a variety of anti-access capabilities that pose a serious
threat to the establishment and maintenance of a regional operational foothold.
These include an array of ballistic and cruise missiles able to accurately target local
American installations as well as long-range logistical support from outside the
immediate region. At its most basic, operational access requires not only the ability
to initiate forcible access in a distant region but also the ability to maintain it despite
the accompanying logistical challenges. Arsenals of highly accurate ballistic and
cruise missiles threaten not only the forward deployment of American forces and
the local installations that house them, but also components of the logistical chain
required to support these forces, even at ranges of greater than 1,000 milesh
(according to the Nuclear Threat Initiative China possesses at least 7 different
ballistic missile systems capable of reaching targets at ranges of 1000 miles or
greateri). The ability to attack local installations and logistical support certainly goes
a long way toward contesting local maritime, air, and land superiorities without
even requiring the fielding of opposing forces in these respective domains.
Additionally, anti-satellite weapons systems such as the kinetic kill and directed
energy system are intended to impair the American ability to communicate and
target effectively in distant regions, and thus impair the ability to leverage and
exploit local superiorities.j China has possessed kinetic-kill anti-satellite capabilities,
involving the ability to target and destroy a satellite directly with a ballistic missile,
since at least 2007, when it chose to demonstrate by firing a missile into its own
aging weather satellite in a clear message to the international community.k
Furthermore, China possesses at least three confirmed directed energy anti-satellite
weapons systems designed to disrupt their electronics and transmission capabilities
primarily by means of high-powered microwave technologies.l Although some
analysts argue that the weaponization of space and anti-satellite weapon systems
contain too high a risk of blowback against the state that uses them, and thus that
some level of “space deterrence” can be assumed, it must be considered that the
existence and proliferation of these capabilities poses a lasting threat to American
force projection.m
h
United States of America. Department of Defense. Joint Operational Access Concept. Web.
<http://www.defense.gov/pubs/pdfs/joac_jan%202012_signed.pdf>: pg 9.
i
"Design Characteristics of China's Ballistic and Cruise Missile Inventory."Nuclear Threat
Initiative. James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies, 2012. Web.
j
United States of America. Department of Defense. Joint Operational Access Concept. Web.
<http://www.defense.gov/pubs/pdfs/joac_jan%202012_signed.pdf>: pg 10.
k
"China Confirms Anti-satellite Missile Test." The Guardian. The Guardian, London, 22 Jan.
2007. Web.
l
McGrath, Bryan. "Directed Energy and Electric Weapons Systems."Information Dissemination.
31 May 2012. Web. <http://www.informationdissemination.net/2012/05/directed-energy-and-electricweapon.html>.
m
Thompson, Julia. "Anti-satellite Weapons, Deterrence, and Sino-American Relations." Ed.
Michael Krepon. Stimson (2013). Stimson,org. 2013. Web. <http://www.stimson.org/images/uploads/Antisatellite_Weapons.pdf>.
In addition to serving the purpose of assaults on local installations and long-range
logistic disruption, missile arsenals also serve area denial capabilities. The Chinese
DF-21 anti-ship ballistic missile is designed to contest maritime superiority and
increasingly constrain regional freedom of action. Advances in targeting capabilities
have lent a greater importance to the role of systems intended to attack surface
targets such as guided rockets, artillery, missiles, and mortars.n The Chinese military
already possesses all of these means of enacting anti-access and area denial
strategies, and the continued advance of weapons systems practically ensures that
an American strategic response must treat the threat of AA/AD as a lasting concern.
In response to the growing challenge and proliferation of AA/AD strategies globally,
the Department of Defense (DoD) developed the Joint Operational Access Concept
(JOAC). The development of this response to the rise of integrated A2/AD systems
advocates neutralizing them through the use of cross-domain synergy. Essentially, it
advocates making greater use of domain mismatches in order to exploit weaknesses
in these systems: “To meet the challenge described above, future joint forces will
leverage cross-domain synergy...to establish superiority in some combination of
domains that will provide the freedom of action required by the mission.”o The
intent of leveraging cross-domain synergy is to take advantage of the presumably
inevitable existence of asymmetric domain advantages; this will require the ability
to identify and to act upon the possible existence of air superiority to neutralize
anti-ship systems or the possible existence of relative naval superiority to neutralize
air defense systems, etc. The determined pursuit of technological and multi-domain
superiority will necessarily yield domain mismatches in the adversary's A2/AD
system, and will thus allow for an exploitation of this asymmetry in order to gain
greater freedom of action in other, more evenly matched domains. The consequence
n
United States of America. Department of Defense. Joint Operational Access Concept. Web.
<http://www.defense.gov/pubs/pdfs/joac_jan%202012_signed.pdf>: pg. 10.
o
United States of America. Department of Defense. Joint Operational Access Concept. Web.
<http://www.defense.gov/pubs/pdfs/joac_jan%202012_signed.pdf>: pg 14.
of this exploitation is the ability to then leverage increased freedom of action into
the opportunity to attack defense systems in depth and not just at their perimeter
deployment.p This strategy requires, of course, the existence of a fighting force with
sufficient relative domain superiority such that its branches can compensate for
each other's vulnerabilities and exploit those of the adversary. Essentially, the JOAC
presupposes a forward-deployed and technologically advanced multi-domain
fighting force that has the ability to react with speed and agility in order to take
advantage of asymmetries in a defensive system.
The American military remains the most technologically advanced in the
world, and maritime and naval forces deployed in the Pacific region include its most
advanced systems. As the challenges of A2/AD continue to emerge and develop, the
United States must remain committed to staying on the forefront of weapons
technology and warfighting doctrine if it is to also remain committed to sustaining
its position of global leadership. Regional peace and stability in the the Asia-Pacific
require a determined and prepared military posture that is prepared for the
inevitable stress of a rising China that may become increasingly tempted to resort to
coercion, either economic or military, to resolve disputes. The overarching goal of
American policy in the region must be to deter sources of instability and buttress
our allies; this broad ambition does not mean placing China at the heart of military
considerations, but it does require acknowledging the potential discord brought on
by rising Chinese influence in the region. Towards this end, America's best option
lies with increased focus on regional challenges that reflects the magnitude of the
challenge that is being faced: working to erode the problems presented by antiaccess/ area denial systems in the region requires a force posture capable of living
up to the preconditions of the Joint Operational Access Concept. This is a difficult
task that will require enormous revaluation of other global interests, but it is a task
that will be necessary to underpin the future security of the Asia-Pacific region.
p
United States of America. Department of Defense. Joint Operational Access Concept. Web.
<http://www.defense.gov/pubs/pdfs/joac_jan%202012_signed.pdf>: p 20.