A conflict with China in the Pacific would tax the U.S. military’s logistical ability to supply and sustain itself in extreme ways, according to the second-highest ranking officer of the United States Marine Corps.
“While our pacing threat is China, our pacing challenge or pacing function is logistics,” said General Eric Smith, the assistant commandant of the Marines.
“I don’t want to undersell how difficult logistics will be if we transpose that into the Pacific theater, where the expanse of the Pacific, the distances, create genuine, not intractable, but genuine wicked problems for us.”
Smith delivered the comments during a July 18 discussion on maritime security at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington-based think tank.
The remarks closely echoed those made by Marine commandant, General David Berger, earlier this month.
Berger said that the Corps “got comfortable” with relatively uncontested logistics during the Global War on Terror, and would need to vastly improve to prepare for a potential conflict with another great power such as China.
To that end, Smith said that the Marine Corps was continuing to evolve its Force Design 2030, a concept that aims to better integrate the Corps for joint warfare in a maritime environment. Central to that effort, he said, was deploying new technologies and creating a more agile force.
“The pacing threat of China is constantly evolving and moving, and if you’re static, you’re not going to do too well,” Smith said.
“If you fight today’s war using yesterday’s formations, tactics, techniques, procedures, using yesterday’s technology, you will die.”
Smith said that China’s ever-expanding suite of drones was a particular problem, and that its ability to deploy over-the-counter drones as loitering munitions was shaping the way the United States though about the expansive theater of the Pacific.
“The ability of those drones to be nearly ubiquitous across the battlefield, because they’re so inexpensive, you have to contest with that and you have to drop your signature,” Smith said. “If you’re seen, either because you radiate or because you’re physically seen, you’re targeted almost immediately.”
Smith added that he did not believe China’s communist leadership was showing any signs of improving its behavior, and that he expected the regime’s assault on international norms and rules to continue.
“Any senior leader should note that where China’s heading is continued bad behavior,” Smith said.
He singled out the regime’s recent announcement that it would not recognize any international waters between China and Taiwan as one such example of this behavior. International law stipulates that a nation’s territorial waters end 12 nautical miles from its coastline, he noted. The Taiwan Strait is roughly 97 nautical miles wide.
“They’re heading to a place that would seek to deny the free and open transit of trade, exercises, preparation training, and that is not where we see the Pacific [going],” Smith said.
“We’ve been defending a free and open Pacific since the end of World War II. We’re not going anywhere. We have a lot of friends in the area and I would say China has quite a bit fewer friends.”
