AMERICA´S NEW PLAN TO FIGHT A WAR WITH CHINA / THE ECONOMIST

Rumble in the jungle

America’s new plan to fight a war with China

Readying for a rumble in the jungle

Photograph: U.S. Air Force

IT COULD BE a giant archaeological dig. Bulldozers tear at the jungle to reclaim the history of the second world war and its dark finale: the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki 80 years ago this month. 

The work on Tinian, a speck in the Pacific Ocean, has exposed the four runways of North Field. 

Glass protects the cement pits where Little Boy and Fat Man, the first and only atom bombs used in war, were loaded onto American B-29s. 

For a time Tinian was the largest air base in the world, but it was soon mostly abandoned.

With China as its new rival, America is reviving old wartime facilities across the Pacific. 

Tinian once allowed its bombers to smash Japanese cities. 

These days China wields the long spear: it has built up a vast stockpile of missiles that can blast American bases in the region. 

Any war between the superpowers would be a cataclysm. 

And both now have nuclear weapons.

As in the cold war, nuclear worries go hand in hand with preparations for conventional conflict. 

The air force is expanding Tinian’s small commercial airport as a backup landing place. 

On the day your correspondent visited, two F-22 jets—America’s most capable fighters—took off with a deafening roar. 

Crews huddled in tents as C-130 transporters brought gear.

Two U.S. Air Force Airmen from the 563rd Rescue Group are hoisted up to an HH-60W Jolly Green II helicopter after receiving jungle training during exercise Resolute Force Pacific in Tinian. / Photograph: U.S. Air Force

The fighters had deployed from Alaska for the recently concluded REFORPAC exercise—part of the biggest air-force war game in the Pacific since the cold war—involving more than 400 aircraft and 50 locations thousands of miles apart. 

It demonstrated America’s ability to bring forces quickly from the American mainland. 

It was also a test of “Agile Combat Employment” (ACE), a doctrine of hide-and-seek whereby American aircraft disperse to small bases to survive attacks by China, rejoin in the air to punch back and then scatter again—like a murmuration of starlings.

Because of China’s reach, the air force can no longer mass its planes in big bases close to the action, as it has done in recent decades. 

It must plan to survive and fight throughout China’s deep “kill zone”, learning from the island-hopping campaigns of the Pacific war and more recent conflicts. 

Ukraine has shown how, even under relentless attack, its planes can keep fighting by hiding and moving. America intends to do the same on a grand scale. 

“In a peer conflict our airmen will be under constant threat,” explains General David Allvin, the chief of the air force. 

“We must be lethal and agile, aggregating for effect and disaggregating for survival.”

Even so, it faces formidable difficulties, including the vastness of the Pacific; the density of China’s firepower; the paucity of usable airfields; the shortage of bomb-proof hangars; the vulnerability of air-refuelling tankers; the complexity of logistics; and the disruption of data networks.

China would be fighting mostly in its backyard, within the “first island chain” that runs from Japan to Malaysia—with Taiwan, about 100 miles away, at its heart (see map). 

Most American forces would be rushing in from the far side of the vast ocean, thousands of miles away. 

Many of China’s ballistic missiles have a greater range than the usual combat radius of America’s fighter jets (typically 500-600 nautical miles, or nm).

A U.S. Air Force F-22 Raptor is marshalled by Senior Airman and a crew chief, both deployed with the 3rd Air Expeditionary Wing, during exercise Resolute Force Pacific 2025 in Tinian. / Photograph: U.S. Air Force

Calculations for The Economist by Timothy Walton of the Hudson Institute, an American think-tank, illustrate the challenge. 

His model suggests China could rain about 2,000 bombs or missiles a day on targets within 500nm, including hundreds on Kadena, a big American air-force base in Okinawa. 

It could simultaneously drop some 450 munitions a day over the second island chain, including Guam and its vital complex of bases, 1,600nm away; 60-odd over important rear bases in Alaska; and perhaps a score a day over faraway places such as Hawaii, the headquarters of America’s Indo-Pacific Command (INDOPACOM), 3,600nm back. 

Missiles can strike quickly and accurately, though most munitions would in fact be delivered by aircraft. 

(These theoretical figures assume that no planes or missiles are shot down, and Chinese facilities are not attacked.)

Ride into the danger zone

There are relatively few good landing spots east of the first island chain before reaching the continental United States. 

Mr Walton counts just 21 in American and allied territories with the runways, aprons and fuel supplies to take tankers, bombers and larger aircraft. 

Smaller fighter jets could use up to 125 airfields, but most are farther from China than their usual range, even with air-to-air refuelling. 

All this assumes host countries would grant permission for “ABO”—access, basing and overflight—and risk China’s wrath.

Aircraft-carriers, which helped win the Pacific war and have symbolised American power ever since, are increasingly vulnerable to China’s long-range “carrier-killer” missiles, such as the DF-26B with a range of more than 2,000nm. 

Unlike carriers, which may sink when struck, airfields can be repaired, often within hours.

Thus the importance of Tinian. 

Its four new runways, once refurbished, will provide valuable alternatives to the two at Andersen air base on Guam, and two more that have been refurbished nearby. 

The air force, which says it just needs “places, not bases” to make ACE work, is concentrating on dispersal and improved air-defence systems for the likes of Guam. 

But the more it scatters, the more places it must defend.

U.S. Air Force Staff Sgt. 3rd Air Expeditionary Wing defender, demonstrates the use of a tool during exercise Resolute Force Pacific 2025 in Tinian. / Photograph: U.S. Air Force

American think-tanks say it is neglecting passive defences such as hardened aircraft shelters made of concrete. 

Portable pop-up shelters that can stop shrapnel would be useful, too, since China would have to fire more missiles to hit all of them, including empty ones, in a high-stakes shell game. 

Generals talk of dispersing planes within airfields and “flushing the force” by getting planes in the air before a missile can strike.

And yet, even during the ACE exercise, about two dozen fighter jets were parked close together in the open in Guam—convenient for pilots and ground crews, but an easy target for missiles. 

Similar concerns apply to fuel dumps and, indeed, ground crews. 

It is also unclear how far the air force is responding to newer threats, exemplified by Ukraine’s use of lorry-launched drones to destroy Russian bombers thousands of miles from the front.

In a war, America would fire at Chinese ships crossing the Taiwan Strait and other targets with long-range bombers, submarines and ground units lurking on islands. 

It would require vast amounts of air-to-air refuelling. 

Yet tankers and bombers are precious assets and, apart from the B-2, easy to see on radar. 

Moreover, America’s tanker fleet is more than 50 years old, on average. 

Mr Walton says China is optimising missile warheads to seek big planes such as tankers and airborne radars. 

Most may have to be held far back. 

But the farther planes must commute to war, the less effective they are.

Hiding and moving complicates China’s targeting, but also America’s logistical task. 

Fuel, crews and spare parts must be brought to the right place at the right time. 

Supply convoys would be juicy targets. 

Logisticians are thinking about how to move them through safer routes, via Australia. 

3D-printing of spares in theatre will help, as will artificial intelligence. 

The lesson of the second world war, notes General Kevin Schneider, the head of Pacific Air Forces, is that “logistics and sustainment are absolutely key to generating air power.”

Co-ordinating an ever-shifting military kaleidoscope requires robust command-and-control systems. 

Combatants will seek to wreck each other’s data systems, not least by attacking satellites. 

Even so, top brass argue, data flows may be degraded but not permanently severed. 

Units will have “windows” of connectivity. 

Above all, they will rely on “mission command”, the ability to act without explicit orders in line with the commander’s intent. 

That initiative, say generals, gives America an advantage over rigidly controlled Chinese forces.

Is that enough to win? 

China may not need to defeat America, only hold it at bay for long enough to take Taiwan. 

War games suggest that, as China runs out of long-range munitions, American forces could move closer and defeat a landing, albeit at great cost. 

But America is short, too, and China’s greater industrial capacity may give it the means to outlast America.

Out along the edges

David Ochmanek of the RAND Corporation, another think-tank, reckons China has enough firepower to overwhelm airfields in the first island chain for as long as needed, and may soon be able to do so in the second chain. 

He argues that, close in, the air force must shift to drones that do not need runways. 

These would be bigger than the hand-held quadcopters ubiquitous in Ukraine, or even the loitering munitions that INDOPACOM is thinking of to create a “hellscape” for China near Taiwan. 

Air-combat drones with greater range, sensors and even weapons could be fired from rails, lorries or rockets, he argues.

During Cope North 24 a U.S. Air Force B-52 Stratofortress is flanked from left to right by fighter jets during a multinational formation over Tinian and Saipan. / Photograph: Pacific Air Forces

The air force is far from giving up on pilots, though this year it will start testing prototypes of the Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA), a drone that for now will use runways and be controlled by crewed aircraft to augment their firepower. 

Yet even if drones can be made “runway independent”, they will still need ground crews, fuel and munitions.

For all the Trump administration’s boasts of a trillion-dollar defence budget, it has provided only a sugar rush in its “Big Beautiful Bill”. 

Its core defence-budget request is flat, ie, a cut after inflation.

After Tinian’s capture in 1944, construction teams started building North Field. 

B-29s were using it within six months. 

The modern restoration is slower. 

Eighteen months after starting work, engineers are still clearing vegetation. 

When might the first F-22 be able to use it? 

Enveloped in smoke and rain, the officer in charge shrugs. 

China’s leader, Xi Jinping, wants his armed forces ready to invade Taiwan by 2027. 

America, though, is still preparing for war with a peacetime mindset.