Marine Corps legend Chesty Puller was fond of noting that the road to Hell is paved with the good intentions of 2nd lieutenants. If so, it is also littered with the overconfidence of generals and admirals who underestimated their adversaries.
One of the most egregious recent examples of the latter was found in the remarks of General Eric Smith, the Commandant of the Marine Corps, to the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Institute’s National Defense Forum. Smith told the audience that the recent combat experience of Americans in Iraq and Afghanistan would enable U.S. forces to defeat China in a war because China had not fought one since the time that images of war were confined to canvas.
The implication here is that the Chinese have grown soft and weak while Americans have developed a “warrior culture” due to our recent combat experience. That assumption is wrong on several levels and it is disturbing because Smith is one of the architects of an extremely questionable new strategy aimed specifically at China. Let’s examine the basic fallacies of Smith’s assumption.
First, as former Marine and Ph.D. candidate Josiah Lippencott points out, Smith’s comments reflect the pre-World War II assumption of many Western military leaders that the Japanese were not first-class warriors due to poor eyesight and inferior technology. As it turned out, the Japanese were actually excellent night fighters in the air and on land or sea. In the early months of the war, Japanese Zero fighters dominated the sky and their surface ships embarrassed both the British and Americans.
Second, the assumption that recent combat experience, which we have had and the Chinese have not, gives us a qualitative advantage is not supported by modern experience. Following World War I, the British and French gained vast experience from their colonial wars in Africa and Asia. The Germans no longer had colonies and, for over a decade, were limited to an army of only 100,000 men. For 21 years, they had no combat experience. When a high-intensity war broke out in 1939, the Germans humiliated the Western allies by asymmetrically using similar technologies while deploying well-trained and motivated troops.
Finally, Smith’s assertion that the Chinese have not fought a war since Korea illustrates an appalling ignorance of recent military history that is troubling coming from one of our nation’s highest-ranked military leaders.
In fact, since the end of the Korean War, China has waged border wars with Vietnam and India. These conflicts are not remembered by many in the West but were conducted on a scale much larger than our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. In the Sino-Vietnamese war, thousands died and China learned hard lessons about modern combined arms combat that Smith may not know but the Chinese have not forgotten.
The reality is that America, not China, has not fought a large-scale conventional war since 1954. As costly as Vietnam was, it is still considered to be a low-intensity conflict. It produced higher casualties than Korea, but they were incurred over the span of a decade. After the last Korean War vet dies, no active duty or retired American military veteran — including me — will have had large-scale combat experience of the type that we would encounter in a conflict with China.
It would be one thing if these faulty assumptions regarding the Chinese were mere bloviating in front of an academic audience, but Smith and his predecessor have acted on them. The current Marine Corps strategy and force structure — called “Force Design 2030” — is China-oriented. Its operational manifestation — Expeditionary Advanced Base Operations (EABO) — relies heavily on the placement of small Marine Corps forces on islets and shoals in the South China Sea, armed with anti-ship missiles. The hope is that the Marines will help the Navy deny China control of the sea. Toward that aim, the Marines divested much of their traditional combat power to buy the missiles and sensors to implement EABO. (RELATED: The Marine Corps Has Gone Off the Rails)
This most recent set of assumptions underestimating an Asian adversary echoes the Navy-Marine Corps misreading of Japanese capabilities and intentions prior to the outbreak of World War II in the Pacific. At that time, the two services assumed that a Marine advanced base force on Wake Island could delay a Japanese fleet advancing on Hawaii long enough for the U.S. Pacific Fleet to arrive and defeat it in a decisive battle. The debacle of Pearl Harbor negated that assumption and the isolated garrison on Wake was forced to surrender after a gallant, but doomed, defense. It was one of many humiliations inflicted on an overconfident and under-skilled American military by the supposedly inferior Japanese early in the war.
A recent Congressional Research Service report casts grave doubts on the basic logistics assumptions regarding EABO and wargames conducted by the Center for International Strategic Studies and questions the effectiveness of EABO in any Sino-American conflict. In addition, several investigative reports by the Wall Street Journal and Marine Corps Times have cast grave doubts about how thoroughly the Force Design and EABO assumptions were tested by Smith and his predecessor before beginning implementation.
George Patton believed that the only way to truly know an enemy is to fight him. I would submit that Smith’s chest-thumping on the subject is both unwise and dangerous. Since he is not a real expert on the subject of Chinese military competence, he would be well advised to take the same advice I received from one of his predecessors: “If you don’t know what you are doing, never waste an opportunity to keep your mouth shut.”
Gary Anderson played the Chinese side in several war games when he was a senior member of the Defense Adaptive Red Team. He lectures on Red Teaming at the George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs.
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