The Air Force’s ability to carry out long-range strikes can play an important role in defending Taiwan against a Chinese attack—but must be carefully managed to avoid triggering a nuclear conflict, warns a new study by the RAND Corporation.
“Employing long-range strike assets judiciously, hardening them against nuclear attack, and protecting them from conventional attack should reduce escalation risks,” according to the report, which is titled “Denial Without Disaster—Keeping a U.S.-China Conflict over Taiwan Under the Nuclear Threshold” and was prepared for the Air Force. The report was released on Nov. 15.
Until the 2020s, RAND researchers write, China had only a limited nuclear capability and the risk of escalation was low. But since then, “everything changed,” they said. “China began a dramatic nuclear buildup, enhanced its survivability with the DF-41 road-mobile intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) and near-continuous nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarine (SSBN) patrols, and improved its ability to penetrate U.S. missile defenses with a nuclear-capable fractional orbital bombardment system (FOBS).”
Noting that a full determination of China’s secure second-strike capability requires a classified assessment, the authors argue here that “recent qualitative and quantitative advances in China’s nuclear capabilities mean that the United States must treat Beijing as if it already has a secure second-strike capability—especially by 2030.
Meanwhile, the U.S. is developing a variety of long-range strike weapons, including hypersonic missiles, conventional surface-to-surface missiles, and a new stealth bomber, the B-21 Raider, which will carry a mix of munitions, including stand-off weapons.
Planners have employed long-range weapons in wargames as one means to defend against a Chinese amphibious invasion of Taiwan. But the cost of such weapons is high, and the concept can only be effective, RAND notes, if the Air Force acquires an adequate supply.
RAND sees a greater risk of escalation into a nuclear conflict if those same long-range strike weapons were used to strike targets on the Chinese mainland. U.S. war planners would need to select targets carefully and shroud their long-range strike assets such that they don’t become an inviting target for a limited Chinese nuclear strike.
The RAND study also recommends establishing a new Escalation Management Center of Excellence within Air Force Global Strike Command to train junior and senior personnel and to help weigh the risk of escalation in peacetime and when picking targets, devising training exercises, and acquiring weapons.
“There will likely be a trade-off between military operational utility, force survivability, and escalation management,” the report states. “The United States might also have to adopt a slower war tempo, strike less ideal targets, and operate farther from the fight than desired to manage escalation dynamics.”
The study comes as the Biden administration seeks ways to reduce the need to increase the U.S. nuclear arsenal. Nuclear calculations are now more complicated given China’s rapid expansion of nuclear weapons and North Korea’s continued saber rattling.
The Pentagon submitted a report to Congress on Nov. 14 on the U.S. “nuclear employment strategy.” That document calls for simultaneously deterring China, Russia, and North Korea, in part by relying on “non-nuclear capabilities [to] support the nuclear deterrence mission.”
China sits some 7,000 miles from the U.S. mainland and 1,800 miles from Andersen Air Force Base in Guam. Both are well beyond the range of any fighter, but U.S. bombers can strike targets from that distance. B-52s, B-2s, and, in the future, B-21s are designed to carry both nuclear and conventional weapons great distances.
While strikes on mainland China could trigger escalation, some risk is inevitable if the U.S. is serious about defending Taiwan—and that the U.S. should make that plain to Beijing, said Mark Gunzinger, a former bomber pilot, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense, and now a senior analyst at AFA’s Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies.
“There are those who seem to accept that U.S. attacks on military targets in mainland China, like the PLA’s bomber and fighter bases and logistics that support their rocket forces, would be highly escalatory,” Gunzinger said. “Yet they also accept as a given that the PLA will attack our bases and other targets located on the sovereign territory of our allies, and even in Guam, which is U.S. territory. We need to think about how to deter those attacks, perhaps by communicating that strikes on our forces and bases in Japan and Guam would open the door to mainland attacks.”
There is a need to deny adversaries “operational sanctuaries,” Gunzinger added. “If we don’t factor mainland strikes into our war plans … we would be ceding mainland China as an operational sanctuary to the PLA.”