The US-China War Began in 1944

with the firebombing of Wuhan

The man who is skilled at obtaining the support of the people is also the man who is skilled in using military force. Skillfully gaining the support of the people is the essence of military undertaking. It’s that simple.—Xunzi

This two-part introduction to China’s defense provides perspective on Part III: why America’s hidden deficits – military, social, economic, financial, regulatory, health, literacy – render it incapable of mounting a successful attack on China. GR.

In December, 1944, the US Air Force firebombed Wuhan, killed forty-thousand civilians and set fires that burned for three days and nights. The following year President Truman ordered Mark-4 nuclear capsules transferred to the Ninth Bomber Group and signed an order to use them on China stating, “I am prepared to authorize the use of atomic weapons in order to achieve peace in Korea”.

On March 1st, 1945, 44 B-24 Liberators dropped 387 incineration 500-pound bombs on residential areas of Tainan, Taiwan, one of the island’s largest and oldest cities. Two weeks later another 84 1,000-pounders were unleashed on citizens below. On the 20th 34 B-24s finished off Tainan with 260-pound fragmentation bombs, 100lb. napalm bombs and 100lb. incineration bombs, burning untold thousands to death. On May 31st, 117 B-24s returned and dropped 3,800 bombs in the heart of the city in three hours.

In 1949, Mao warned colleagues that China would remain ‘insecure, unconsolidated, and delegitimized’ until it transformed both itself and the imperial world order.

In 1951, in Operation Hudson Harbor, B-29s bombed coastal Dandong, fighters strafed civilians in several Chinese cities, buzzed coastal Shantou, and launched biological warfare on China. In 1953 President Eisenhower repeated Truman’s nuclear threat and in 1955 added, “In any combat where these things can be used on strictly military targets and for strictly military purposes, I see no reason why they shouldn’t be used just exactly as you would use a bullet or anything else''. In 1957, Eisenhower deployed Matador nuclear cruise missiles to Taiwan and, in 1958, ordered the deployment to Jinmen of howitzers capable of firing nuclear shells, ordering that they be made visible to the Chinese.

In 1992, after the US Defense Department promised to prevent a rival superpower emerging in Asia, the Navy held a Chinese cargo vessel, the Yinhe, at gunpoint in international waters for three weeks, claiming she was carrying contraband (she wasn’t). Two years later President Clinton sent the most powerful fleet ever assembled through the Taiwan Strait and in 1998 dropped five precision bombs on China’s Belgrade embassy, killing three diplomats and seriously wounding twenty (CIA director George Tenet later told Congress, “It was the only target we nominated”.

In 2014 a US Navy article proposed laying mines off China’s coast and destroying her maritime lines of communication while sending special forces to arm minorities in Xinjiang and Tibet. In 2017 the Air Force reassured Congress of its willingness to launch nuclear attacks and in 2018 the Navy practiced blocking the Malacca Strait to cut off oil to China.

But by then, says defense analyst Michael Thim, such gestures were meaningless, “Even in 1996 China’s Navy already had sufficient capabilities in place such that sending Carrier Strike Groups into the Taiwan Strait would be suicidal. The situation has only become more challenging for the Navy in recent years, not because the PLA Navy has acquired an aircraft carrier of its own, but because China has greatly enhanced and modernized its existing anti-access/area-denial capabilities''.

The Maritime Militia, China’s first line of naval defense, counts one-hundred eighty-thousand ocean-going fishing boats and four thousand merchant freighters (some towing sonar detectors), crewed by a million experienced sailors transmitting detailed information around the clock on every warship afloat. Their intelligence goes to shore bases that fuse their reports with automated transmissions from Beidou satellites and forward the data to specialists operating vessel management platforms, collating, formatting, and sending actionable information up the command chain. Ashore, eight million coastal reservists train constantly in seamanship, emergency ship repairs, anti-air missile defense, and light weapons and naval sabotage while shipyards launch a new warship every month (in 2023, they launched five Burke-class simultaneously). China’s battle fleet now outnumbers the US Navy’s and the differences are fascinating.

Commander Yang Yi, the youngest (and first female) Chief Designer in naval history, created a fleet of eighty Type 022 missile patrol boats. 140 feet long, with a range of three-hundred miles, they carry eight C-802 anti-ship missiles with 500lb. warheads that travel fifteen feet above the surface at 650 mph to targets a hundred miles away. One disabled an Israeli warship off Lebanon’s coast in 2006.  Commander Yang says four of her little boats can cover the Taiwan Strait while sheltering behind China’s coastal islands.

Supporting the patrol boats are thirty Type 056 frigates with a range of 2,500 miles, each armed with YJ-83 anti-ship missiles and six torpedo tubes and protected by eight SAM launchers. One frigate can sink Taiwan’s entire navy without coming within range of its American-supplied weapons. Behind the frigates are twenty Type 052D Arleigh Burke-class destroyers. Their sixty-four missile tubes fire unique Yu-8 anti-submarine missiles that fly twenty miles then release 60 mph torpedoes into the water near unsuspecting targets.

Type 055 cruisers, the world’s most powerful surface combatants, each carry one-hundred twenty-eight missile tubes armed with surface-to-air, anti-ship, land-attack and anti submarine missiles. In the waters below them, seventy nuclear and conventional submarines carry YJ-12 anti-ship cruise missiles and wake-homing torpedoes that deliver five-hundred pound warheads at sixty mph from fifteen miles away.

The nuclear subs have JL-3 missiles that can strike US targets without leaving Chinese waters. Their arsenal includes CM-401 high-supersonic ballistic missiles designed for rapid precision strikes against medium-size ships within two hundred miles. The CJ-10, a subsonic missile that carries a half ton payload with a forty foot radius of accuracy for two-thousand miles would be used to attack regional bases like Guam. Analysts say that the first salvo of 1,000 CJ-10 missiles would cripple seventy percent of bases in the region and create a strategic dilemma for the White House. Since no Chinese missile struck the United States, an American retaliatory strike on a Chinese target would be seen as escalation, and it would be done in the full knowledge that Seattle or Los Angeles would vanish a few hours later.

The greatest threat to carrier fleets was born when the US Navy invited a Chinese admiral to visit the carrier Nimitz. He was deeply impressed by the ship’s complexity and the crew’s expertise but what really impressed him was its size, “I’ve just seen the world’s biggest target. If we can’t hit an aircraft carrier we can’t hit anything”.

Thrifty engineers simply attached a new guidance system to mass-produced, million-dollar rockets and created a unique weapon. The DF-21D ballistic ‘carrier killer’ missile carries a half-ton warhead one thousand miles into the stratosphere then falls at 7,500 mph onto a $12 billion aircraft carrier. US Navy analysts say it can destroy a carrier in one strike and that there is currently no defense against it. Its sibling, the DF-26D, carries twice the payload twice as far: to Australia’s Darwin Port.

The last US carrier to pass through the Taiwan Strait was the USS Kitty Hawk in 2007. Navy officers say they risk defeat in a serious conflict off China’s coast and avoid provoking the PLAN in the ‘Three Seas,’ the South China, East China, and Yellow Seas.

“We are at a disadvantage with regard to China today in the sense that China’s ground-based ballistic missiles threaten our basing and our ships in the Western Pacific,” Admiral Harry Harris told the US Senate in 2018, and Robert Haddick warned, “China’s anti-ship missile capability exceeds America’s in terms of range, speed, and sensor performance”. Captain James Fanell added, “We know that China has the most advanced ballistic missile force in the world. They have the capacity to overwhelm the defensive systems we are pursuing”.

The Rand Corporation says that, for conflicts close to the mainland or Taiwan, the People’s Liberation Army Air Force, PLAAF, can deploy more fifth generation J-20 fighters than the US. The J-20 costs half as much, flies twice as far and carries twice the payload of America’s F-35C or the F-22 Raptor. Its YJ-12 anti-ship cruise missiles travel two hundred miles and deliver thousand-pound warheads at supersonic speed in a corkscrew trajectory. The US Navy says a single strike will render any vessel inoperable and warned that, even against alerted warships, one-third of missiles score hits.

The J-20 also carries the unique PLA-15 AAM. Propelled by novel dual pulse rocket motors on a semi-ballistic trajectory, it homes in on AWACS and airborne tankers loitering behind battle lines. General Herbert Carlisle, who warned Congress that his two hundred F-22 Raptors carry six missiles each while the more numerous J-20s carry twelve, added, “Look at the PLA-15, at the range of that weapon. How do we counter that?” The US Air Force subsequently canceled its E-8C AWACS recapitalization program because they would be easy prey for the PLA-15 and the Pentagon withdrew its entire strategic bomber fleet from Guam in 2022.

The PLA-15’s smaller sibling, the PLA-10, is no less deadly, says ISIS airpower specialist Douglas Barrie, “For the notional Western combat aircraft pilot, there is no obvious respite to be found in keeping beyond visual range of the PLA-10. The PLAAF will be able to mount an increasingly credible challenge and at engagement ranges against some targets that would previously have been considered safe. As one former USAF tanker pilot drily noted, ‘That’s aimed right at me.’”