China Expands Its Military Reach

Oct 14, 2011

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By Bradley Perrett Beijing

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How far is China’s military reach? The answer depends on what it wants to do. A Chinese warship deployed to the Mediterranean this year, so, by that yardstick, global reach is at hand. But the isolated ship only supported civilian evacuations from Libya, and had no real military potential. Pull focus back to 300 km (200 mi.) from China’s coast and it is a different story: More than 1,000 short-range ballistic missiles are ready to clear the way for around 2,000 increasingly modern aircraft. Zoom in a bit, and the airspace is dominated by powerful surface-to-air missile systems. “China’s power-projection capacity is in its early stage of development,” says analyst Andrew Davies of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute in Canberra. “It reduces rapidly with the distance from China’s coastline.” The key reason is that the capability has been shaped for the need to assault Taiwan, the farthest part of which is just a few hundred kilometers from the mainland. The trump card held against the island—short-range ballistic missiles—can fly only about 300 or 600 km and the unrefueled combat radius of Chinese fighters is similar. Less obvious but just as critical, intelligence, reconnaissance and surveillance (ISR) get harder and costlier as the distance from the Chinese mainland increases. Yet, a number of programs under way are providing the capability the country needs to fight intensively and farther—more than 1,000 km—from its shores. No single program makes China a regional superpower; they all add up to a gradual lengthening of military reach. In geopolitical terms, this means China’s military strength is seeping further into the South China Sea, the scene of a territorial claim that ranks behind only Taiwan in importance. It will continue to seep. An example is the Tomahawk-like DH-10 cruise missile. Although overshadowed in the Western media by China’s ballistic missiles, it is credited with a range of more than 1,500 km and is more practicably usable against U.S. targets, because it is unlikely to be mistaken for a nuclear weapon. China has been turning out perhaps 100 DH-10s a year. An air-launched version carried by H-6 bombers could reach 3,300 km, enough to hit Guam, Okinawa and, from a regional perspective, all the way down the South China Sea, across the Indonesian archipelago and into the Indian Ocean. The reach of the combat aircraft force is subtly lengthening as short-leg fighters based on Cold War Soviet types are retired while squadrons re-equip with J-10s and especially J-11s (Flankers), with their enormous internal fuel capacities. Fielding fighters with longer range not only gives China an ability to strike targets farther from its shores; the air cover means that Chinese warships can be brought into play at the same distances, and so can vulnerable aircraft such as maritime patrollers. China’s ability to fight enemy warships at a distance is rising, too. About 40 ­H-6Ds are assigned to the anti-ship role, although ISR is especially problematic for aircraft with such ranges, since the targets will move far while they and their missiles are in flight; their performance will benefit from China’s growing constellation of ISR satellites. Distant combat also needs aircraft for airborne early warning and for detecting enemy radio emissions; such programs are under way. Bolstering that effort, China is working on surveillance drones, and it shows interest in the class of very high-flying aircraft known as near-space vehicles—for command and control as well as ISR. The information gathered and passed by these systems stands to greatly boost the effectiveness of the one arm of the Chinese military that can already fight thousands of kilometers from home: the submarine service. Closer to shore, China’s naval aviation forces are probably looking forward to moving on from their fleet of 80 or so JH-7 attack aircraft and C-803K anti-ship missiles (ASM) to the much larger, stealthier and possibly super-cruising J-20, whose apparent size suggests a strike radius above 1,000 km, plus the range of its missile. A squadron of Su-30MK2s already has Russian supersonic Kh-31A ASMs. And then there is the DF-21D, a potentially revolutionary anti-ship ballistic missile. The Pentagon estimates it has a range of more than 1,500 km and is operational; China says it is still in development.

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