BMD Focus: China may target U.S. carriers

WASHINGTON, May 24 (UPI) -- A new report by a leading U.S. military expert on China raises the disturbing possibility that Beijing may be trying to develop the capability to destroy entire U.S. aircraft carrier battle groups in the Pacific Ocean by targeting them with nuclear-armed ICBMs.

Defense News reported Monday that Larry Wortzel, commissioner of the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission and a leading American expert on China's military capabilities, issued the warning in a new report entitled "China's Nuclear Forces: Operations, Training, Doctrine, Command, Control, and Campaign Planning." The study was published this month by the U.S. Army War College's prestigious Strategic Studies Institute.

Defense News noted that the implication of Wortzel's report was that if the new Chinese strategy is confirmed, it could lower the bar for starting a nuclear conflict with the United States.

China's regular strategic nuclear force is still vastly inferior to that of the United States. Over the past 12 years, China has consistently followed a strategy of remorselessly building up its conventional ballistic missile arsenal facing Taiwan and the Taiwan Strait in a clear effort to prevent U.S. aircraft carriers from operating within the strait or preventing any serious Chinese move against the island of 25 million people that has enjoyed de facto, but not legal, independence from the mainland since the communist takeover there in December 1948.

However, even though this development has forced U.S. carrier groups to contemplate defending Taiwan from out in the South China Sea west of the island, rather than between it and the mainland, China cannot neutralize the massive air striking power of U.S. carriers or negate the protective air defense screens they could throw over Taiwan.

Until now, U.S. aircraft carrier battle groups were regarded as effectively invulnerable to Chinese pre-emptive or counter-strikes provided they stayed out of the Taiwan Strait and out of range of the land-based surface-to-sea missiles that China has been deploying there. The speed at which carriers sailed was regarded making them invulnerable to targeting by land-based Chinese ICBMs. U.S. carriers sailing at well over 30 knots could be out of range even of a Chinese nuclear explosion by the time China was able to reprogram any missile to strike the last reported U.S. carrier position, it was assumed.

However, Defense News reported that Wortzel in his paper has concluded the Chinese have made major strides in their capabilities of maneuvering and directing nuclear warhead re-entry vehicles. And this has already brought them close to having the ability to destroy U.S. carrier groups out in the vastness of the Pacific.

"For some time, American naval officers have dismissed this capability as beyond the grasp of the PLA (People's Liberation Army)," Defense News quoted Wortzel as writing. "The advances made in maneuvering re-entry vehicles and doctrine on attacking an aircraft carrier or naval battle group with ballistic missiles makes the Western Pacific a more dangerous place, especially as China improves its own sensor systems."

Defense News says the Wortzel report warns that China has been working on an infrared targeting system for the Dong Feng 21 medium-range ballistic missile that could give it the capability to zero in on U.S. warships.

Ted Galen Carpenter, vice president of foreign policy and defense studies at the Cato Institute, a libertarian Washington think tank, told UPI he believed the Chinese would not risk escalation to a nuclear exchange with the Untied States in the event of any conventional war over Taiwan. But the very possibility that they had such capabilities and might be prepared to use them against U.S. carrier groups could serve as a deterrent to the free use of such forces to defend Taiwan.

"I still do not think that China would initiate the use of nuclear weapons, but it wants the capability so it can hold the carriers hostage and seriously deter the United States from intervening on Taiwan's behalf -- much less threatening to escalate matters to the nuclear level," Carpenter said.

Also this week, senior Chinese officials played down a remarkable apparent offer by the U.S. commander in chief, Pacific -- or PACCOM, Adm. Tim Keating, on a visit to China -- for the United States to help Beijing develop its own aircraft carrier capabilities.

As UPI's Martin Walker noted in a commentary Wednesday, the Chinese reluctance to take Keating up on his offer appears to reflect their suspicion that the United States would use such intimate cooperation to learn everything it needed to about how China's navy and related armed forces operated.

Also, as Walker also pointed out, it costs a lot of money to build modern super-carriers, and they are increasingly vulnerable to new weapons like the Russian-made Skval super torpedo and the SS-22 Moskvit and S-27 Sizzler supersonic anti-ship missiles. Given these factors, it appears to make more sense to the Chinese to bet on their huge anti-ship missile arsenal and their growing fleet of relatively cheap diesel submarines as their weapons of the future to neutralize America's weapons of the past -- its fabled super-carriers.

"Almost everything that China's military is doing these days seems designed to advance the objective of deterring the Untied States from intervening to protect Taiwan," Carpenter said. "It would almost make one suspect that Beijing might be contemplating using force to achieve reunification someday, if other measures prove insufficient."