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Defence & Arms Last Updated: Apr 29, 2021 - 11:40:22 AM


Bombs in the Box: China’s Trojan Horse Navy
By Jonathan Broder, Spy Talk, 27/4/21
Apr 28, 2021 - 4:44:37 PM

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Missiles hidden on container ships could soon be in a port near you

Thomas “T.X.” Hammes was a senior Marine Corps intelligence officer in 2010 when he first learned that Russia was marketing a long-range hypersonic cruise-missile system that could be hidden inside a standard international shipping container. Intrigued by this simple innovation that could turn any merchant vessel into a deadly military platform, Hammes began closely following the development of these containerized weapons systems.                                                    

 

  • A few years later, Hammes heard that China was also pursuing the idea of hiding missiles on container ships.  At a 2016 trade show, Beijing not only confirmed those rumors, it was offering for sale its own precision-guided system, consisting of four hypersonic cruise missiles, each with a 1,500-mile range, all neatly concealed inside a standard 20’x8’x 8.5’ shipping container.  In 2017, Israel entered the containerized weapons bazaar, test-firing its LORA ballistic missile from a standard shipping container sitting on the desk of a commercial freighter.


Pop Goes the Missile

Then, in 2019, Hammes noted, China tested an upgraded version, this one using a new hypersonic cruise missile said to have a 4,000-mile range. And just last year, Beijing sent nine satellites into space aboard a single ballistic missile that had been  launched from a container on the deck of a large commercial freighter in the Yellow Sea.

“This has created a new and dangerous capability,” Hammes, now senior research fellow at the National Defense University’s Institute for National Strategic Studies in Washington, told SpyTalk recently. “Our ability to defend against these missiles is limited.”

With the world’s largest commercial fleet, hundreds of Chinese container ships are in U.S. ports on any given day. Determining which ones might be hiding missiles on deck is virtually impossible and may depend on the U.S. having spies somewhere in the system. 

Mounting concerns over the threat posed by China’s containerized missiles have now prompted some former U.S. admirals and military planners to support a plan to respond in kind, by equipping U.S. commercial ships with containerized long-range missile systems.They say it’s an economical, and quick,way to bolster the Navy’s slowly growing fleet as well as its fire-power. But as Congress and the Pentagon debate the future architecture of the U.S. military, both lawmakers and senior officers remain focused insteadon so-called “exquisite” or state-of-the art weapons systems, such as the F-35 joint strike fighter jet and the new Ford-class aircraft carrier, despite their enormous cost and vulnerability to China’s cheaper, long-range missiles.

As China rises in both economic and military strength, many U.S. and Chinese military thinkers alike regard an eventual military confrontation between the two countries as inevitable, especially given U.S. challenges to Beijing’s territorial claims to the South China Sea,  not to mention Washington’s support for Taiwan, a democratic island which Beijing views as a renegade province of China.

Over the past year, Chinese President Xi Jinping has steadily escalated threats toTaiwan by routinely sending his warplanes into the island’s airspace, in what some analysts view as a possible prelude to an amphibious invasion.  Admiral Phillip S. Davidson, commander of U.S. Indo-Pacific forces, recently predicted in a congressional hearing that Xi would move on Taiwan within the next six years.

Superior U.S. military forces, at present, would make that difficult for Beijing, most experts say.  So China has reached for what some former military officials and experts now call  the “assassin’s mace,” referencing the ancient Chinese strategy of employing a “surprise weapon” to defeat a superior adversary. 

Enter the container ship missiles.

“Let’s assume that China decides to deliver a blow to keep us from attacking them while they’re invading Taiwan,” retired Navy Captain James Fanell, the former intelligence chief for the U.S. Navy’s Indo-Pacific Fleet, told SpyTalk in a recent telephone interview. “What better way than to have Chinese commercial ships carrying containerized missiles prepositioned in the ports of Seattle, Long Beach, Charleston, Norfolk, New York and Baltimore all at the same time?

“They can easily get these containers into our ports because we don’t have a strict regime that tracks, opens and inspects every cargo container,” says Fanell, who estimates U.S. officials check the cargos of no more than 10 percent of containers arriving at U.S. ports. ”Then, by launching their missiles at nearby American military installations, they could generate electromagnetic pulses that would take out our military’s communications without the risk of using a nuclear weapon to accomplish that.”

Port Calls

Fanell and other former military officials add that the long range of China’s cruise missiles also means that a merchant ship carrying such containerized weapons wouldn't even have to get  very close to key U.S. facilities to be an immediate threat.

“If the Chinese put one of their merchant ships in the Gulf of Mexico and one off the West Coast of the United States, all of our bomber bases and tanker bases would be within range,” Fanell says. “That's a big concern for me.”

Veteran naval commanders say that without detailed prior intelligence, it would be virtually impossible to spot a shipping container carrying missiles among the myriad standard international shipping  containers moving millions of tons of goods across the globe every day, often on the decks of huge freighters.

With no known technology that can determine a container’s contents without inspecting it, “it would be like finding a needle in a haystack,” said retired Vice Admiral Michael Franken,  a 40-year Navy veteran who last served as the deputy director of military operations for the U.S. Africa Command.

Moreover, under Xi’s global Belt and Road initiative, China operates or is building a string of deep water ports in several strategic locations around the world, including in the nearby Bahamas, Jamaica and Panama, and on Pakistan’s Arabian Sea coast, all of which could be used as ports-of-call for commercial ships covertly carrying containerized missiles, Hammes and other military experts say. China also maintains a naval base in Djibouti on the Horn of Africa, which commands the strategic Bab el Mandeb Strait at the southern entrance to the Red Sea.

Hidden Dragon

Franken adds that U.S intelligence doesn’t even know for sure whether China has deployed its containerized cruise missiles aboard any ships in its commercial cargo and fishing fleets, which are the largest in the world.

“We just don’t know,” he said. “But isn’t that the whole point when you conceal your missiles in a standard shipping container?”

Fanell, the former Pacific Fleet intelligence chief, however, has no doubt China already has placed its containerized weapons systems aboard its commercial ships.

“Given the fact that the Chinese were pursuing this containerized missile system, they don’t just put it on ice and not develop it further,” Fanell said. “They clearly have made progress in the last two years. And given everything they’ve done with their rocket forces, the idea that they haven't continued to develop this containerized capability seems far-fetched.

“Trust me, they are on it,” he added. “And the fact that China has the largest commercial shipping fleet in the world gives them the opportunity to use this as an asymmetric weapon.”

China has developed other asymmetric weapons for a possible military confrontation with superior U.S. forces. These include land-based long-range anti-ship missiles that, according to some experts, have effectively neutralized the U.S. Navy’s aircraft carriers by forcing them to operate at least 1,500 miles out at sea from China’s east coast. That places China’s land-based anti-ship missile batteries far beyond the 450-mile range of the Navy’s carrier-born warplanes.

At the Pentagon, a bitter inter-service turf war has reached a fever pitch over whether the  U.S. should develop its own, long-range cruise missiles for use against the Chinese missile batteries. The Tomahawk cruise missile has a range of about 1,000 miles. The Navy’s submarine-launched ballistic missiles, such as the Trident and the Typhoon, have ranges of 3,000 miles, but they are designed to carry nuclear warheads. The Army wants to see long-range cruise missiles developed and deployed in the Pacific, but Air Force Gen. Timothy Ray, whose Global Strike Command bombers traditionally have had  the mission of destroying land-based missiles and artillery, opposes the move, calling it “stupid.”

“Why in the world would we entertain a brutally expensive idea when we don’t...have the money to go do that?” Ray said during the Mitchell Institute’s Aerospace Advantage podcast in March.

Pentagon officials say they’re counting on Congress to resolve the issue in the fiscal 2022 defense authorization bill, must-pass legislation that historically reaches the president’s desk by the end of the year.

Crouching Tiger

Meanwhile, after two decades in the Middle East, the Marine Corps is restructuring its forces to confront China inside the coastal waters that its anti-ship missiles protect. According to Rep. Rob Wittman of Virginia, ranking Republican on the House Armed Services Seapower subcommittee, the restructuring will include, among other things, new, fast-moving amphibious ships equipped with long-range cruise missiles hidden inside containers.

“The good news is the Chinese will have no idea what’s inside those containers,” Wittman told SpyTalk. “It could just be supplies for Marine Corps units, or it could be a battery of anti-ship or long-range strike missiles.”

The Navy, however, is also locked in its own intra-service debate over converting merchant ships into weapons platforms by equipping them with containerized missile systems.

The squabble began in 2019 when the U.S. Naval Institute published a paper by several military planners and retired senior naval officers ,who argued that placing containerized missile systems aboard commercial ships could ease the strain on the Navy’s fleet in the face of China’s rapidly growing navy.

The U.S. Navy has a total of 296 ships, compared with China’s 360-ship navy,  with the gap expected to widen as Beijing’s shipbuilding outpaces that of the United States. By 2025, China will field as many as 400 vessels, experts say, whereas the United States plans to field 355 by 2030.

Floating the Boats

Under the Trump administration, the Pentagon envisioned a future navy with as many as 534 ships by 2045, except with fewer aircraft carriers and large surface warships and more smaller combatant vessels, unmanned ships and submarines. But the Congressional Budget Office determined that even achieving the 355-ship navy will require nearly 60 percent more spending on shipbuilding than recent budgets—an unlikely allotment of resources when the Army and Air Force also are clamoring for their own costly weapons systems.

In light of such budgetary constraints, “the Navy should acquire and arm merchant ships, outfitting them with modular weapons and systems. . . providing capability more rapidly and less expensively than traditional acquisition efforts,”  the authors of the USNI paper wrote. It’s for “the win,” the headline said.

One of the authors of the paper is the National Defense University’s Hammes. In a separate article, he argued the Pentagon needs to pay far more attention to China’s development and deployment of small, smart and cheap weapons, such as drones and containerized cruise missiles, which have greater range than America’s arsenal of aircraft carriers, fighter jets and cruise missiles, giving Beijing the ability to surprise U.S. forces.

“The key question,” Hammes wrote,  is whether U.S. military leaders will make the mistake of “continuing to invest in obsolete systems and then be ‘surprised’ when newer, cheaper weapons use their superior range


Source:Ocnus.net 2021

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