With present magazine levels, we won't even make it past the first line of wire

Reprinted with permission from Commander Salamander

War, at sea, ashore, and in the air, has a tidal action as technology emerges, develops, and finds its niche. The more disruptive it is, the longer it can dominate the other side until new technology, techniques, and procedures are developed to counter it. In and out the tide goes; the defensive is supreme then the offensive is supreme.

WWI saw the machine gun, and barbed wire make the defensive supreme ashore. Submarines made independent steaming by merchant ships suicidal and the offensive from the (under)sea supreme.

Then, came the tanks, massed heavy artillery, storm troopers, depth charges, ASDIC, and aircraft. By the end, defenses no longer dominated the battlefield as they once had and submarines could no longer operate with near impunity—and only national exhaustion from the Central Powers brought the war to an end before the complete tidal shift at sea and ashore could take place.

The war ended, then developments continued. Hints in places such as the Spanish Civil War gave clues of what was to come again in the next war.

The tank, the carrier air wing, the submarine made the offensive king again until better tanks, the proximity fuse, radar, and advanced ASW in numbers shifted the tide once again.

Cycles. Always cycles.

In our conversation last month on the Midrats Podcast with TX Hammes, at about the 45-minute mark, he reminded me of a concept from that war that related directly to the challenge facing us in the Western Pacific. How do we fight through the thousands of conventional short, medium, and intermediate ballistic missiles the People’s Liberation Army Rocket Forces (PLARF) have covering the approaches to her shores and still have enough defensive weapons to close the enemy. Once we get there, were we so heavily weighted with defensive weaponry in our finite number of VLS cells that whatever offensive weapons we had available were worth the sacrifice to get them within range?

The concept?

The Dead Zone.

…in World War I there was a dead zone out to the range of machine guns and light artillery went out to about 7,500 meters, nothing above the surface of Earth could survive there because someone would observe it, someone dug in with overhead cover with good optics, would observe it, as soon as you moved, you got shot at and killed.

Everything in the last four years from the Black Sea to the Red Sea—with second and fourth-rate powers with only a whisper of the power the People’s Republic of China (PRC) will be able to bring to the fight in the Western Pacific—one thing is clear: blue water navies are going to face a prohibitively more dangerous environment the closer they get to shore. Put the extensive mine, submarine, and air launched cruise missiles from manned aircraft to the side, the PRC has thousands of attack drones, a variety of generations of anti-ship cruise missiles, and first to the punch, anti-ship ballistic missiles to welcome any hostile power to their side of the Pacific.

We risk littering the floor of the ocean between Guam and Taiwan with the American Navy ships in numbers unseen over 80 years.

From a naval point of view, being that we have consciously deprived our carrier air wings of any reasonable range in order to project power ashore or even conduct War at Sea strikes, how close to the shores of mainland Asia can we get until we are tickling the edge of the maritime version of a Dead Zone?

If you are looking to the USAF to fill that conventional strike gap, I would simply ask, “With what?”

The B-52? The B-2? The B-1? Have you actually looked at their inventory, not just in aircraft but of standoff strike weapons? Their land based strike aircraft? From what airfields being refueled from tankers flying exactly from where outside the PLARF’s range?

How close are we to Admiral Davidson’s 2021 estimate of the PRC’s 2025’s inventory? How many SM-2/3/6 will we expend fighting our way through each 100-nm closer we get west from Wake?

Where does that Dead Zone start? Can we fight our way inside 1,500km to at least get a foothold in the Philippine Sea? Maybe 1,000km?

Once we empty most of our VLS cells on the way to the shelter of Luzon, how will we reload, repair, and replenish for the final push up to Taiwan and the approaches to Japan?

I don’t know, but it only reinforces what I have been warning of for the last half-decade that I do know.

Should we find ourselves in a Great Pacific War with the PRC, as our fleet heads west across the International Date Line, we should expect in the first 90-180 days to lose somewhere in the neighborhood of 8-10,000 Sailors and Marines...at sea alone.

That is the most-likely outcome; not the most-positive or most-dramatic. Two CVN, a few large deck amphibs, a handful+ of DDG/CG/LCS and SSN—all sunk in the first 90-180 days. That doesn't even start to outline what will happen to ground-based support from Guam west.

In spite of that, we will have to continue an aggressive fight without rest. If we have a uniformed leadership that, from PAO to Shipyards, do not have plans to deal with such losses, then they should all be invited to seek excellence in the civilian sector. If our civilian DOD leaders are not conscious of this fact and are not demanding their staff prepare for it, then they are in the wrong job.