On the Possibility of a Chinese Invasion of Australia - Part #2

Part #1 here - http://futuredemons.blogspot.com.au/2014/08/on-possibility-of-chinese-invasion-of.html

The Axis powers in WW2 faced the problem of taking on the quantitatively and qualitatively superior fleets of the Allies. While they eventually lost the war, they did devise a number of cunning strategies which certainly kept the Allies on their toes.

The Japanese for instance, attempted to deal the American navy a crippling blow on the outset of war with the attack on Pearl Harbour, and succeeded in destroying two battleships and disabling five more. While the attack was ultimately seen as a disastrous strategic blunder, tactically it was a stunning success. American and Chinese military planners must no doubt be aware of the lessons of Peal Harbour - I doubt an attacking force would miss the American carriers twice...

More than a surprise attack, there is the possibility of sabotage to whittle away an opponent's numerical advantage in ships. A famous example also occurred during WW2 when Italian divers (or 'frogmen') raided the Port of Alexandria in December 1941, placing limpet mines upon the largest British ships they could find. Two battleships and an oil tanker were disabled and put out of action for many months. The Italians lost six men captured.

Aside from such tactical loopholes, the relevancy of aircraft carriers in general may not last forever. One of the most strategically significant events of the 20th century was the launch of the HMS Dreadnought in 1906. As the first 'all-big-gun' battleship it rendered all previous warships obsolete. While one may think this would give the British a great advantage, the reality was that it reduced their naval lead over rival powers to just one ship. This greatly contributed to the naval arms race pre-WW1.

A similar event could happen in the near future, or may have happened already. While the aircraft carrier has ruled the seas since WW2, it may eventually go the way of the Battleship. Anti-ship missiles may advance to the point where large ships such as carriers are too vulnerable to operate anywhere near a hostile coastline. A Chinese missile called the 'Dong-Feng 21' has been cited in the media as such a possible 'carrier-killer', though others question if its significance has been over-hyped - http://thediplomat.com/2013/10/lifting-the-veil-on-chinas-carrier-killer/

The modern world also offers other possibilities. 'Cyberwarfare' is a term that has gained a lot of currency as the internet has spread around the world over the past twenty years. The most successful example so far would seem to be 'Stuxnet' - what has been universally suspected, if officially denied, to be an Israeli/American operation to disrupt Iran's nuclear program. Reportedly the virus disabled a fifth of Iran's centrifuges - used to enrich nuclear material. While we don't know exactly to what extent cyberwarfare may affect future battles, it could be very significant indeed. Like the machine gun in WW1 or the tank in WW2, their true significance may only be seen in hindsight.

Lessons like this then, show that the American's advantage, while great, is not necessarily insurmountable in the long run. After all, there are only ten Nimitz-class carriers. At any given time several of these will need to be in dock undergoing maintenance, and stationing all the others off the Chinese coast at once would probably be impracticable.

Thus, if through a combination of surprise and sabotage the Chinese took out three or four of them, and assuming their own carrier building program comes to fruition over the next decade or two, they could just about achieve parity with the American navy in the South China Sea at the opening of any conflict. This combination of events would still be decades away however.

But lets assume the worst. Lets say that, around the year 2050, the Chinese and Americans wage a major war on land or at sea. Possible triggers for this conflict could be found in the Middle East, Kashmir, Korea or Taiwan. Lets further conclude that the Americans lose, and are forced to withdraw from the western Pacific and accede to Chinese dominance over the region. Others have written about this possibility -
http://www.hudson.org/research/8885-defeat-at-sea-the-u-s-naval-implosion-of-2050/

As well as myself -
http://futuredemons.blogspot.com.au/2011/06/world-war-three-united-states-and-china.html

Again, this would all be a necessary prelude to an invasion of Australia. Aside from kicking out the Americans, the Chinese would have to neutralize - through force or diplomacy, all of the intervening nations between us  (i.e. Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia and Indonesia).

Such a chain of events may be possible, but we're talking a seismic shift in international politics, one on the scale of the world wars. Nonetheless, the Japanese did manage to achieve most of this, albeit briefly, in the 1940s -

It would still take an enormous effort to mount a full-on invasion of Australia however. The distance from Hong Kong to Darwin is over 4,000km. For an invasion fleet to cross this distance, the invading power would need to have attained naval supremacy over the western Pacific region. A dozen Los Angeles-class submarines could put such an invasion force in jeopardy, so there would have to be a total collapse or withdrawal in US naval power for this to occur. This is not to mention our own Collins-class submarines.

One wonders roughly how many troops and ships you'd need to assemble in the first place, assuming you could safely transport them this distance. Australia is a big, big country. The only amphibious invasion of comparable size in all history, indeed, the only other amphibious invasion of a whole continent, would be the Normandy landings in June 1944.

Of course Australia's population is much smaller than Europe's, but the Allies in 1944 were not opposed by the French, but by the occupying Germans. As Hitler had committed most of the Wehrmacht's strength on the Eastern Front, roughly a million German soldiers remained to hold France.

By 2050, Australia is estimated to have a population of about 40 million. Using the World Wars as a guide (i.e. the last time industrialized nations fully mobilized for war) roughly one in ten people in a developed country can be put in uniform without collapsing the economy. This gives us a similar figure. It may even be an underestimate. Australia in WW2 had only 7 million people, yet just over a million served in all branches of the armed forces in total. Thus, we could conceivably put 2-3 million soldiers into the field.

Equipping them is another matter, but even if the Americans did not want to be drawn into a war directly, it would be simple for them to ship a few thousand excess tanks, guns and planes to Australia. Such a 'lend-lease' program to Britain and the other allies provided millions of tonnes of armaments during WW2. Given the necessity of the events described above, Australia would presumably have some years to prepare for an invasion.

Preparations for Normandy took years. The Allied invasion force eventually included some 7,000 ships, including 1,200 warships, 1600 support vessels and over 4,000 transport and landing ships. More than 150,000 troops were landed on the first day, and some three million by D-Day +90. Some 10,000 planes supported the invasion.

Even then, this armada only had to cross the English Channel, a distance of about 240km. This is comparable to the 130km width of the Taiwan Strait, a distance the Chinese probably could cross and perhaps even defend against American intervention, but Australia is thirty times more distant.

The largest long-distance amphibious invasion would probably be the American invasion of Okinawa in 1945, which involved 1300 ships, less than a quarter of the Normandy figure. Okinawa itself had about 500,000 inhabitants and a land area of 2,300 km2 - comparable to the ACT in Australia.

Admittedly Operation Downfall - the planned invasion of mainland Japan - would have been even larger. The Allies began assembling 42 carriers, 24 battleships and over 400 destroyers and other major warships for the landings. Even this vast fleet however, would have required the support of nearby bases like Okinawa to maintain.

As a preliminary to invading Australia then, the Chinese or anyone else would have to seize bases nearer to Australia as staging grounds. East Timor, the Solomon Islands or New Caledonia come to mind, or ideally they could bully or bargain with the Indonesians.

Even then however, there is the question of where in Australia you land your forces. When the Allies landed at Normandy in 1944, they were less than 200km from the Eiffel Tower.

As far as Darwin is from China, it is another 3,000km to Melbourne, comparable to the distance between Paris and Moscow. Northern Australia is only sparsely populated. Some 80% of Australians live in a broad coastal strip in the south and east between Adelaide and Brisbane.

Operation 'Death to the Foreign Devils Down Under' - June 2054

Upon landing in the north, any invaders would have to cross some 3,000km of jungles, deserts and mountains to reach Australia's main population centres. They would be vulnerable to air attack, ambush, roadside bombs and all other manner of man-made hazards all the way - not to mention cyclones, bushfires, saltwater crocodiles, red-back spiders, tiger snakes, box jellyfish and the dreaded drop bear...things which normally deter people from heading to Australia in and of themselves.

Finally, assuming that all of the above still happens, and the People's Republic of Australia is declared circa 2060, one wonders exactly what the invaders will have gained? They will have spent trillions of dollars building up a vast military machine, launched it on a war that will have killed millions of people, likely collapsing the world economy in the process, and ended up with...what?

We already sell billions of dollars worth of iron ore, coal and other minerals to Asia. The country is relatively underpopulated at present, but at half a million extra people a year it couldn't be growing much faster. Given that most of it is desert as well, it would be hard to support a much larger population anyway. A hundred million by 2100 is a remote possibility, but given China's projected population of 1.5 billion by mid-century, only a tiny portion of the excess could be resettled in Australia. Despite fears of a population explosion, most Asian countries have just about finished growing anyway, and many are coming to suffer from low birth rates. The one-child policy in China may actually leave them with a labor shortage in another generation or two.

So no, Australia is not the place to invade if you want more lebensraum, unless your master race is particularly fond of sand and giant earthworms.

One more scenario worthy of consideration are the after-effects of a major disaster affecting the nations north of Australia. If the severity of climate change exceeds most expectations, sea levels could rise by several feet by 2100. This would flood many coastal cities, potentially producing hundreds of millions of refugees worldwide. Other causes could be a major nuclear exchange, the sudden onset of a new ice age (not as remote a possibility as one may think), a terminator-style machine revolt, an asteroid strike or a technological singularity, beyond which all our predictions may be worthless.

All of these events, no kidding, may very well happen over the next century. Events away from our borders of this scale will most definitely affect us. The results would be more on the order of a 'massive wave of refugees' than an organized invasion however. Think of the few thousand 'boat people' we've had recently, and imagine what a few million may be like. If anything, this possibility is more likely than the organised invasion described above.

So yes, all that, Senator Lambie, is what it would take for a foreign invasion of Australia to occur.

Happy warmongering.

- DT

On the Possibility of a Chinese Invasion of Australia - Part #1

Palmer United Party Senator Jacqui Lambie warned a few days ago of the possibility of a Chinese invasion of Australia -

"If anybody thinks that we should have a national security and defence policy, which ignores the threat of a Chinese Communist invasion – you’re delusional and got rocks in your head. The Communist Chinese military capacity and level of threat to the western world democracies is at an unprecedented and historical high." - Jacqui Lambie.

She also suggested that Australia should double the size of its military to deal with such a threat.

While she's been roundly criticized in the press, I wonder whether she may, in the style of a broken clock, be on to something here. What are the odds that Australia could be invaded by a foreign power, including China, in the foreseeable future? And how might things unfold?

(1942 - The last invasion scare)

As a side-note, I'm reminded of the Tomorrow series of novels by John Marsden, which I read as a kid, and in which just this happens (the enemy is unnamed however). On a website dedicated to the books, I recall reading this great article a few years ago as well - http://www.rsimpson.id.au/books/tomorrow/explore/invasion.html

It explores the question of whether a full-on, high intensity invasion of Australia was a real possibility in the near future, and came up with four main reasons why this couldn't happen - 

1. This is specifically the threat that the Australian Army, Navy and Air Force are designed, built and trained to defeat 

2. It is just about inconceivable that the US would not honour its treaty obligations to assist in our defence

3. No one in our region has anything approaching the specialized military forces required to launch a full on overseas invasion covering a significant distance

4. The "Tyranny of Distance" cuts both ways.

The article was also written about ten years ago however, and no one would deny that our world is changing rapidly. So let us consider, are these four reasons still valid? And how long can we comfortably assume they will remain so?

China's ongoing economic growth is probably the best place to start. According to the Economist Magazine China's GDP is on track to overtake America's as soon as 2019 -

http://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2014/05/chinese-and-american-gdp-forecasts

It is worth noting that these figures use Official Exchance Rate GDP figures, not Purchasing Power Parity, by which measure China's economy is already approximately equal to the US in size.

The sheer GDP figure however, while useful, is just the starting point. The per capita figures (in PPP terms) for the US and China are $52,800 and $9,800 respectively. While many of its cities are booming, particularly along its eastern coast, large parts of rural, inland China remain poor and backwards, and it will surely take generations for this gap to close. The possible instability this causes cannot be ignored either.

Moving closer to the question of an invasion however, we must compare the total military spending and capabilities of both countries as well. Current US military spending now stands at $500 billion annually, plus another $80 billion or so in 'overseas contingency operations' (i.e. bombing brown people).

For China, figures are somewhat harder to come by. The official government budget in 2014 was $130 billion, but other estimates are often far higher. Most tend to congregate around the $200 billion mark, or about 50% higher than the official figure.

In sheer numbers, this narrows the gap between the two countries considerably, with the Chinese budget already 40% that of the American's. Furthermore the figure is estimated to be increasing at 10% annually, somewhat faster than the Chinese economy. At this rate, total spending between the two nations could be roughly equal by 2030 or so.

Spending is just one part of the equation however, and China has a number of disadvantages it will take a long time to overcome. Advanced military systems can take decades to develop, so a country's current military strength is not so much its current spending levels as the total of all it has spent in the last generation or so. 

Historically (i.e. since the 1950s) the Chinese have relied on two things for their defense - huge masses of soldiers and nuclear weapons. Only recently have they begun building up the specialized, high-tech conventional forces that lie between these two extremes, and which the Great Powers of the world have possessed since at least 1945. Thus, we can only expect the Chinese to overtake the US a number of years after their spending has reached parity - perhaps by 2050.

Even then, total military spending does not tell you what that money is being spent on. A fair comparison can be made (and I've made it several times before) between the US and China today and Britain and Germany back in the First World War. In both cases the newly rising power (Germany/China) eventually exceeded the waning one (Britain/America) in total spending and strength, but the former are predominately land powers while the latter are protected by ocean boundaries.

What this means is that the Chinese today, like the Germans of 1914, will have to focus their military predominately on land warfare. This means building more tanks and guns and arming more men. Indeed, in a conventional land war, the Chinese could possibly take on the Americans already. The Korean War (1950-53) for instance, pitted a China vastly poorer and more backward than it is today against an America at the relative height of its power. The result was a bloody draw. 

In the result of a major land war between the US and China today, its outcome would of course depend on its nature. The high-tech, contentional forces of the US are weakest in terrain where engagement distances are short - think jungles or mountains, as the Vietnam and Korean wars show.

Across open plains and desert however, the US still reigns supreme. The Gulf War in 1991 was a huge wake-up call to America's rivals. In a matter of weeks, the US military destroyed or neutralized the 650,000-strong Iraqi army - then the fourth largest in the world and fielding over 4,000 tanks - while suffering less than 800 casualties (and about half of these to accidents or friendly fire). This Blitzkrieg - the equal of anything seen in WW2 - showed powers such as Russian and China that sheer quantity of equipment can do little good against the best modern weapons.

Against this higher priority, their navy will have to be a secondary one. For a Chinese invasion of Australia to succeed, even looking many decades into the future, their navy would have to be at least comparable, if not outright superior, to the navies of the US and its allies.

Furthermore, as the Chinese are having to build their navy from the ground up, its unlikely the Americans would ever let them catch up. The British in 1914 had a policy of building a navy at least the equal of the next two largest powers combined. When the British and German fleets clashed in 1916 in the only large-scale fleet action of WW1 - the Battle of Jutland - 99 Germans ships were still facing 151 British ships, a ratio of 2:3. 

The Americans are likely to be thinking along similar lines. At the moment their navy has a tonnage of 3.4 million tonnes. This is equal to the next eight or nine navies combined. The Chinese and Russians both have around 900,000 tonnes each, while the next four powers - Japan, India, Britain and France, fall around the 300-400,000 tonne mark. Even if the Chinese doubled their tonnage, the Americans would be likely to increase theirs by a similar margin, thus maintaining their superiority.

Considering the specific ship classes involved, the American lead crystallizes still further. A single Nimitz-class aircraft carrier (of which the Americans have 10) has a displacement of just over 100,000 tonnes. This is approximately equal to the entire tonnage of the Greek or Australian navies. Each carries approximately 100 aircraft.

No other power on Earth maintains capital ships of this size and power.While about a dozen other navies do maintain aircraft carriers (including the British, Italians, Russians, Indians, Brazilians and so on) they are usually only of the 'STOVL' kind (short take-off and vertical landing - i.e. helicopters and jump-jets akin to Harriers). The French Carrier Charles De Gaulle is one of the few exceptions, but at 42,000 tonnes it is still less than half the size of the Nimitz class, and carries a proportionally smaller number of aircraft.

The Chinese currently have one active aircraft carrier - the refurbished Soviet ship Varyag, now renamed the Liaoning. However the ship is thirty years old and obsolete by modern standards, meaning it is only ever intended as a training ship.

Based on their experience with the Liaoning however, the Chinese are planning a further 5 or 6 carriers. Depending on how the construction process goes, these should be operational around 2025-2030 and are expected to have a tonnage similar to the Liaoning's 60,000 tonnes. This would still give them a total carrier tonnage only about a quarter of the American's however, with their 10 Nimitz-class carriers and 9 Wasp and Tarawa 'Amphibious Assault Ships' - which are similar to the STOVL carriers of other navies.

As for other major warships, the Americans have 22 Ticondederoga-class cruisers and 62 Arleigh Bourke-class destroyers, with displacements around the 8,000-11,000 tonne range. These are indisputably very powerful warships. The Arleigh Bourke-class maintain an arsenal of over 90 missiles, which can be either Harpoon missiles in the anti-ship role or Tomahawks to strike land targets hundreds of kilometers away. They are also effective in the anti-air and anti-submarine roles.

The Chinese are gradually closing the gap, but are still well behind in this area as well, with 25 destroyers and 42 frigates (with tonnages around the 7,000 and 4,000 ton marks respectively - classes may be defined somewhat differently to the US navy). Most of these ships are relatively new, with 15 destroyers and 24 frigates built since the year 2000.

In submarines - the weapon resorted to by the Germans in both world wars, the gap appears to be somewhat smaller. The Chinese have 65 submarines of all types. This includes 8 nuclear and 51 diesel-electric attack subs, plus 6 ballistic missiles submarines capable of launching nuclear-tipped missiles on a strategic basis.

In sheer numbers, the Americans are only slightly ahead, with 54 attack submarines - mostly the Los Angeles-class, and the 18 ballistic missile subs of the Ohio-class. Numbers don't necessarily mean everything however, and it seems the Americans have a huge technological lead over the Chinese.

Up until the 1990s the Chinese still utilized the 'type 033' submarine, which was basically a copy of the 1950s era Soviet Kilo-class submarines, which were in turn largely based on late-WW2 German submarines. When you contrast the armor and firepower of modern tanks and the speed and accuracy of modern aircraft with their WW2 counterparts, one begins to see how big a lead the Americans have opened up.

The type 033s have since been retired and replaced with newer designs, but most of these are still likely to be greatly inferior to their US counterparts. In submarine warfare noise is everything, and the Chinese will probably take decades to catch up. Recent news reports indicate that even their latest submarines are as noisy as 1970s Soviet era subs -

(http://lewis.armscontrolwonk.com/archive/2544/chinas-noisy-new-boomer)

Furthermore, the naval strength of America's allies are worth mentioning as well. The Japanese and South Koreans between them have another 38 Destroyers and 21 frigates, and combined could probably take on the Chinese navy in its present form even without American help.

Thus, while China's economy may very well overtake America's in the near future, and its land forces may be of comparable strength, in terms of their starting fleet strength, we can assume continued US naval dominance into the foreseeable future - at least until 2050. As long as this dominance continues, and unless for some reason the US failed to honour its obligations under the ANZUS treaty - a treaty Australia has sacrificed hundreds of soldiers to over the decades from Vietnam to Afghanistan to preserve - such an invasion could never succeed.

However, while the strength and number of your warships is one thing, it may not be the end-all, and after 2050, the future grows cloudier -

Part #2 - http://futuredemons.blogspot.com.au/2014/08/on-possibility-of-chinese-invasion-of_21.html