Author: Rong ping source: official account: Rong Ping (id:rongping898) has been authorized to reprint
Although China and the United States are rivals, they both adhere to the same principle: when three people walk, there must be a teacher.
What do you mean by that?
Learn from each other what is excellent. Be modest!
In the past, China refused to play in the region, and the United States played in the large aircraft carrier fleet; Now China is playing with a large aircraft carrier and a large fleet, and the United States is refusing to play with the region. The script is completely reversed.
According to the defense news network, the Quincy Institute for national policy, a us think tank, recently released a research article on the theme that the US military should adopt an active refusal strategy to deal with China’s military superiority in the Western Pacific region.
The article points out that the possibility of military conflict between the two countries is greatly increasing with the deterioration of relations, but China is gradually changing the regional balance of power. The set of active attacks has no longer worked. In the future, it needs to turn to the active refusal strategy with defensive counterattack as the core, and weaken the opponent’s offensive through a series of military reforms and distributed operations.
As for the measures of military reform, the think tank suggested that the US military retire old aircraft and ships, reduce the forces of the army and the Marine Corps, withdraw large aircraft carriers from the front, focus on developing lightweight aircraft carriers that can carry unmanned aircraft, increase the proportion of unmanned equipment, and equip more fast mobile anti-ship missiles!
In fact, this is a bit like the air submarine fast tactics used by China to attack the US aircraft carrier in the early stage, that is, to use the speed and concealment advantages of the shore based combat aircraft of the near shore light combat ships and submarines to fight maritime mobile warfare and guerrilla warfare.
In view of the fact that the Pentagon is developing a similar mosaic warfare method, and that the Quincy national policy institute is mainly funded by the democratic and Republican parties, we have every reason to believe that the United States has reached a consensus on the new military reform specifically aimed at China from the political, strategic and military circles.
It is a new thing in the history of the US military to carry out tailored reforms against an opponent. Even the original Soviet Union did not have such “treatment”! It seems that the United States is really in a hurry.
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Clausewitz, the founder of modern military political relations theory, said that military is the continuation of politics. We can understand that all military means serve political purposes. With the rise of geopolitics and the advent of the era of European powers’ struggle for hegemony, the theory has expanded to mean that all military means played by countries outside their own territories serve the strategic purpose. The strategy in this “strategic purpose” naturally refers to the geopolitics that has shaped the basic form of great power struggle in the past 500 years.
In the western traditional cognition, military means is the first means to promote geopolitics and expand the sphere of influence.
Therefore, the change of U.S. military strategy changes with the change of his geopolitical demands!
A clear understanding of the changing course of us geopolitical demands will help us to have a comprehensive and profound understanding of the mentality and rigid needs of US military reform.
From the 1990s to the 1920s, the United States’ geopolitical demand in the Western Pacific – East Asia was to ensure absolute control over the region, which was a privilege conferred by the United States’ national strategic capabilities.
After the end of the cold war, the United States’ only political and military opponent disintegrated. At this time, China was busy developing its economy and military strength was still weak. Russia was too weakened to take care of it. Europe was committed to a large-scale eastward expansion to receive the legacy of the losers. Under the logic that military strength determines geopolitical shaping power, heaven
The invincible U.S. military has made the national strategic capability of the United States unprecedentedly strong. The benefits arising from this are that its expansion borders are infinite and the threshold of expansion is infinitely high!
However, the boundary and threshold of expansion are in a dynamic process of constant change for a long time. The growth of the strength of other countries or the change of interest demands will shrink the boundary and reduce the threshold.
Obviously, China’s rapid development after the second decade of this century has greatly shaken the threshold and boundary range of American expansion. At this time, although the United States still maintained absolute control over the Western Pacific and East Asia, its national strategic ability could not continue to maintain this control in reality, because the United States could not beat China here!
For details on the national expansion boundary, threshold and strategic capability, please refer to the above article will the United States disintegrate
Therefore, around the factors that may ignite the conflict between the two countries, a century of big problems were put before the government came to power: no government can afford to lose its political responsibility in the Western Pacific without firing a shot, but no government can afford to lose its political responsibility in the immediate disintegration of global military hegemony once the war is defeated!
In other words, the United States is neither fighting nor not fighting.
What should I do?
Find the middle point of “second to none” within the scope of our ability: lower the US strategic goal of Western Pacific East Asia from absolute control to maintain the presence of US forces in East Asia, that is, ensure that US forces are not completely and thoroughly swept out.
The two different strategic demands correspond to two different military means. Seeking absolute control over the Western Pacific and East Asia requires the U.S. military power to overwhelm any potential adversary or alliance of adversaries with absolute superiority, including China and Russia with a certain probability. To maintain the presence of US forces, it is not necessary to demand that the US military must win, but only to maintain its invincible position. The new military reform is formulated for the new strategic demand that the US Army will not lose the war and that the US forces will not be swept out!
According to the Pentagon, the new military idea was named mosaic warfare. Two years ago, the mosaic war was first proposed by Grayson, director of the strategic technology office of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency of the United States. Later, it was improved by Mitchell Aerospace Institute. This so-called new military theoretical system for high-end war between major powers was preliminarily formed.
The concept of mosaic warfare comes from mosaic art. Compared with the traditional image that cannot form a complete image without losing a color block, mosaic images are composed of complete small images. Losing one or several images is harmless.
At the military level, mosaic warfare is to build each small image that constitutes a complete image into an independent combat unit: they can not only form a systematic operation, but also quickly split into several units to fight independently in case of attack, and can also gather into several new small and medium-sized systems to support the whole campaign through rearrangement and combination!
From the above discussion, it is not difficult to see that the key content of mosaic warfare is decentralization, or that every unit in it is the center.
This is of great practical significance to ensure that we will not be defeated!
In modern warfare, the higher the technological gradient, the more the battlefield relies on the central platform for systematic operations.
The central platform of the air combat system is the early warning aircraft, which plays a command role in broadening the field of vision, assigning tasks, guiding attacks and so on. The central platform of the naval warfare system is the aircraft carrier, which is responsible for seizing air control and accurately bombing enemy fleets or important land targets. Other auxiliary warships such as cruisers, destroyers and anti submarine ships revolve around it.
Systematic operations that rely on the central platform have their own advantages and disadvantages. The advantage is that the detailed division of labor can greatly improve the efficiency and progress of the war. The disadvantage is that once the central platform is destroyed, it is not far from losing the war.
In the midway naval battle, after the four aircraft carriers of the Japanese Navy lost their combat effectiveness, even though there were still many battleships and cruisers, they were still kept at sea by the U.S. military and had no power to fight back; The war in the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia was also a three generation aircraft duel. MIG 29 without early warning aircraft was slaughtered by F16 with early warning aircraft.
In the Western Pacific Naval Battle envisaged by the United States, if Kadena and other forward air bases are bombed, the U.S. aircraft carrier will have to risk sinking and come close to our shore based fire coverage. If the aircraft carrier has another accident, the US Army that has lost its air control will certainly lose the war!
In short, in the systematic operation relying on the central platform, the opponent only needs to concentrate on attacking several key nodes to make the US Army lose its resistance.
Mosaic warfare no longer has this problem, because while it is decentralized, it also uses a large number of smaller but more intelligent unmanned weapons as the main force of various services.
In April this year, the U.S. Army held an experimental verification gateway exercise at Dewey proving ground, Utah, and successfully completed the combat experiment of 30 large-scale UAV clusters. The U.S. Army redefined the UAV cluster participating in this experiment from the past drone swarm to the drone wolf swarm, thus establishing the main position of unmanned equipment in the fifth space.
PS?
The aviation industry calls the space below 300 meters the fifth space.
About three weeks later, the Pentagon released the Congressional Research Service report, focusing on large unmanned surface ships and submarines. The report points out that the US Navy will purchase three types of large unmanned vehicles, namely large unmanned surface ships, medium unmanned surface ships and large unmanned submarines.
In the same month, the US Air Force announced the details of the next generation air superiority ngad project. It is not the sixth generation aircraft imagined by the outside world, but a set of strike systems. It consists of at least one manned fighter and an unknown number of unmanned aircraft.
It can be seen that all US services and arms are striding forward to the mosaic war with unmanned equipment as the core.
In the first quarter of this year, the US Marine Corps received metal shark long-range unmanned ships and established a new unmanned ship formation integration command
The war form in the Western Pacific East Asia region is naval warfare. In naval warfare, unmanned ships with a volume of several times or even tens of times that of manned ships have greater concealment advantages.
From the era of sailing to the era of armored ships to the era of aircraft carrier confrontation, there is always an insurmountable premise for the start of Naval Warfare: the discovery of the enemy fleet. As far as the battlefield environment is concerned, there are mountains, rivers and border lines on the land. The scope of the battlefield is relatively limited, and the reconnaissance difficulty is not particularly high. However, the ocean itself is vast. In addition, the four oceans are interconnected, which makes it possible for the battlefield to range from hundreds of kilometers to tens of thousands of kilometers.
In the case of equal strength between the two sides, the victory rate of naval battle often depends on who starts first, and the premise of who starts depends on who finds the other side first. In the midway naval battle, the US Army was able to win because it first discovered the Japanese fleet.
Despite the support of space satellite technology in recent years, due to the impact of ocean weather and merchant ships, it is difficult for satellites to monitor the exact position of aircraft carrier fleets in real time. This can be fully proved by the fact that it is necessary to send high-altitude and long endurance UAVs to approach for reconnaissance in the process of ballistic missile attacking aircraft carriers.
The advantage of unmanned equipment lies in this: the aircraft carrier is so large, and its fleet is in some fixed formation, so reconnaissance is still so difficult, not to mention the unmanned surface ships which are ten times smaller than manned ships and have no fixed formation?
The increased difficulty in reconnaissance means that the threshold for launching attacks has become higher. This is the first level for the United States to strive for invincibility.
The second layer is the new method of operation of the US Navy: distributed operation!
The key point of Distributed Warfare is to widely distribute all combat units in different areas hundreds or even thousands of kilometers deep depending on the breadth of the marine battlefield. Doing so can not only prevent the enemy from killing him at one blow, but also further increase the attack difficulty of the other party.
In addition, the mosaic war based on the vast number of unmanned platforms has another obvious advantage: finance!
The manufacturing industry has been hollowed out for many years, and the actual use efficiency of US military expenditure is far lower than that of China. According to statistics, for every $1 of China’s military spending, the United States needs to spend at least $3 to maintain a basic balance. If it exceeds that, it will have to spend more.
This also means that once the war drags on and falls into the rhythm of tug of war and war of attrition, the anti pressure of American finance is far less than that of China!
Take the central platform aircraft carrier of the traditional naval battle as an example. It was sunk. First, it would have an extremely serious negative political impact on the US government; Second, tens of billions of dollars have been lost.
There will be no such problems if unmanned equipment is used as the main force. Politically, even if a thousand unmanned ships sink in a battle, the political significance is not as great as that of an aircraft carrier; Financially, a Ford aircraft carrier costs US $13billion and a large unmanned surface ship costs US $200million; One F22 costs 150million US dollars, and one large unmanned aircraft costs 50million US dollars.
According to the National Policy Research Institute of Quincy, a large number of unmanned equipment substitution schemes are adopted, which can save us $75billion in military expenditure every year and greatly improve the financial pressure.
At this point, the new military reform plan of the United States around not losing the war and not being swept out has completely surfaced: the concealed advantage of unmanned equipment has raised the threshold for the opponent to launch attacks; The decentralized full core advantage and high maneuvering speed advantage make it more difficult for the opponent to hit accurately; The battlefield expansion advantage of distributed operations makes the opponent’s total annihilation pressure stronger.
To say the least, opponents are not afraid to name these equipment one by one. Because of the low cost, the United States has enough financial strength to buy these equipment, and then continuously deliver them to the battlefield. As long as the strength of the US Army is still on the battlefield, it indicates that the United States has not been defeated, and it is the most important sign of its presence!
US military deployment in Indo Pacific
Only from the point of view of the goal of ensuring that the United States does not lose the war and that its forces exist, the new American playing method is certainly excellent, but it has a fatal defect.
Strategically, all military means that do not aim at victory are useless!
We also fell into similar differences in those years. That was the dispute between the submarine faction and the aircraft carrier faction. The submarine faction believed that the submarine was a sharp weapon to snipe at the aircraft carrier, and the cost was very cheap, so it was unnecessary to spend a lot of money to build the aircraft carrier. However, those who supported the development of aircraft carriers convinced the submarine faction in one sentence: submarines can prevent the enemy from gaining sea power, but they cannot control the sea power by themselves.
The meaning of this sentence is that submarines can prevent others from winning naval battles, but they cannot win naval battles. But isn’t war aimed at winning? Only by winning the war can we gain political benefits! The war without political gains and wasting financial, material and human resources is essentially a failure. The result of the US military’s Korean War is just the most typical example.
To put it bluntly, the US military’s new method of warfare does not serve the US strategy, but the political interests of the US leadership. Its basic intention is: if a war breaks out, it will drag on. As long as it can drag on until the end of their term of office, there is no need to bear responsibility for the failure.
It’s also true. Sigh.
At the beginning of the 21st century, in the face of such a powerful aircraft carrier fleet of the United States, China is still thinking about how to use submarines, destroyers, frigates, second-generation aircraft and 022 stealth missile boats to fight a mobile guerrilla war with the idea of air and submarine speed, delaying the offensive front of the U.S. aircraft carrier fleet.
Now, it will only take 20 years, and time has changed. On the contrary, the US Army, which has 11 super aircraft carriers, is thinking about how to stop China’s offensive with maritime guerrilla warfare in the Western Pacific.
Thirty years east and thirty years West, the offensive and defensive momentum is different!