GREAT RED FLEET: How China Was Inspired by Teddy Roosevelt.
China has come a long way since 1949. Roosevelt’s America was a power on the rise, vying with stronger empires bestriding its neighborhood. China is now a power on the make, contending with a stronger empire—the informal empire administered from Washington—that dominates its neighborhood. Small wonder patriotic statesmen on each shore of the Pacific Ocean alighted on similar strategies for managing their saltwater environs. There are only so many ways for the weak to overcome the strong. Make yourself strong and your antagonists weak, and you may go far.
And to be sure, under Mao’s successors China’s Maoist strategic thought has started merging with the Mahanian vision Roosevelt prescribed. But China can do Roosevelt, Mahan, and other oldtimers one better. The state of military technology has vaulted ahead over the past century. The PLA can employ land-based armaments not only to defend seaports, but also to hoist a protective aegis over the PLA Navy battle fleet while it cruises the briny main far from port.
Tactical aircraft and shore missile emplacements can rain supporting fire on hostile fleets scores if not hundreds of miles offshore—supplementing PLA Navy firepower with that furnished by the PLA Air Force and Strategic Rocket Force, alongside super-empowered coastal-defense craft that would be instantly recognizable to Mao. Latter-day coastal artillery constitutes a difference-maker for an outgunned Chinese fleet—an option not open to Roosevelt’s navy, fettered as it was by rudimentary weapons and fire-control technology.
What Mahan once branded a “radically erroneous” mode of sea combat—keeping a battle fleet under protective shelter from shore fire support—is swiftly coming of age.
If Fortress China’s coastal-defense-on-steroids pans out, it can accomplish the goal Roosevelt envisioned for shore gunnery—shielding China’s coastlines on a grand scale while freeing the fleet for expeditionary endeavors in remote seas. China will have deployed a genuinely free-range fleet without placing homeland security in jeopardy.
We’re in a similar position Britain was in during the 150 years before World War II. The US is the predominant maritime and trading power, with global interests to protect — but the Royal Navy was given a shipbuilding priority ours has been lacking.