I just love this illustration, by Istvan Banyai, that accompanied Keir Lieber and Daryl Press’ article in The Atlantic. This is the first of a three part series on issues surrounding China’s newest ballistic missile submarine. The other posts will discuss how capable the submarine could be and what the new SSBN will mean for US defense planing.

Does the JIN-class submarine indicate that China’s deterrent will go to sea?

The simple answer to that question is “I don’t know.” Anyone who claims to know is blowing smoke up your, um, air intake tube. Even Chinese policymakers who strongly advocate such a course of action would do well not to count their submarines before they launch.

Continuous Operation?

China is, obviously, building at least one submarine. The question, however, is whether China will send the submarine on patrols armed with nuclear weapons.

The Office of Naval Intelligence thinks that China will build five SSBNs to maintain a more or less continuous deterrent at sea:

While China only built a single XIA SSBN, a fleet of probably five TYPE 094 SSBNs will be built in order to provide more redundancy and capacity for a near-continuous at-sea SSBN presence.

I note with some interest that DIA, with perhaps different bureaucratic priorities, predicted in 1999 that China would by 2020 have two JIN-class submarines and the XIA for a total of three boats.

The ONI estimate is the latest of a long line of predictions that China would deploy a fleet of SSBNs large enough to sustain continuous deterrent patrols. In 1974, an NIE predicted four Chinese SSBNs by 1980. In 1984, DIA was suggesting those four boats would be available by 1994.

In the end, China built one SSBN, the XIA-class submarine, that as far as I know never went on patrol, nor was armed with the JL-1 SLBM.

I mention these past assessments not to mock or discredit the intelligence community — but rather to observe a kind of analytic phenomenon.

These assessments were based mostly, I suspect, on the idea that China would send its deterrent to sea because that was the rational thing to do, or to put a finer point on it precisely because that is what we did. Indeed, the other four NPT-nuclear weapons states all maintain SSBNs, including Britain which relies exclusively on “a fleet of four submarines to maintain one continuously on patrol and … assure the invulnerability of the deterrent.”

That China would build a fleet of SSBNs was not a bad guess, although it didn’t turn out that way. Why China didn’t send its deterrent to sea is part of a larger story, I think, about how bureaucratic politics often play a decisive role in defense planning.

Why Did China Build Just One Xia?

The real wonder, to me, is that China built an SSBN at all. Nuclear powered submarines were well beyond the capability of the nascent People’s Republic and the resulting product — the 092 or XIA SSBN — was a dreadful military system

The XIA SSBN and the JL-1 programs were deeply troubled programs, as document in John Lewis and Xue Litai’s China’s Stategic Seapower. The short version is that the submarine itself was extremely noisy, while the missile had a short-range and a troubled testing history. These limitations meant that operational concepts for the SSBN stretched credulity, as Zhang Aiping pointed out to the designers:

At a meeting of the First Academy in April 1975, Zhang Aiping belittled the idea that the PLA might send a submarine as far as the Arabian Sea to launch a missile. Even from there, the closest Asian location, for a sub firing on Moscow, the distance to the Soviet capital would be too far for the JL-1. Zhang concluded with the judgment julang shangan [the Giant Wave (JL-1) must go ashore], and all participants accepted his ruling.

Moreover, I suspect some folks had real concerns that placing nuclear weapons at sea would fundamentally compromise leadership control over nuclear weapons. China has typically exercised rather tight control over its nuclear warheads, keeping the warheads stored separately from its missiles, apparently at separate locations. A sea-based deterrent force would upset those careful arrangements, requiring a much greater degree of trust in unit commanders than Beijing has demonstrated to date.

Of course, countries build stupid or ineffective weapons programs all the time. The XIA’s troubles did not play out in a vacuum, but rather within the competition among bureaucracies. And those bureaucratic interests may have been sufficient to doom even a modestly capable system.

What is now General Armaments Department (then a quasi-autonomous fiefdom eventually called COSTIND) played a central role in advocating for the development of nuclear weapons and maintains, I suspect, substantial influence in decisions about nuclear weapons policy, posture and doctrine. Any concern that the Central Military Commission might have over loosening command-and-control arrangements by placing nuclear weapons on submarines should overlap with a bureaucratic desire by those who currently maintain custody of the nuclear weapons — either General Armaments Department, the Second Artillery or both — to preserve their control and, presumably, influence.

The PLA Navy might have been a weak, or perhaps unenthusiastic, proponent of a sea-based deterrent, given the somewhat strained operational concepts and the pressing need to spend money on the modernization of the Navy as a whole.

Looking back, it is not difficult to see the XIA SSBN as a sort of “science project” dreamt up by an ambitious weapons bureaucracy that looked rather less appealing in the cold light of morning. In any event, as Deng Xiaoping consolidated power in the late 1970s and early 1980s, defense spending declined and more emphasis was given to conventional weapons. Plans for a second submarine were delayed and, eventually, canceled.

Things Could Be Different Now

The JIN-class submarine is probably much more capable than the XIA SSBN. How capable is a subject for later this week, but at the very least I don’t expect to hear stories about how sailors couldn’t sleep because the submarine made so much noise.

ONI is predicting five submarines based, as best as Hans Kristensen can figure out, on the idea that this is what would make sense — again, assuming that we are the ones making the decisions.

But we — that is to say American analysts, China watchers and arm-chair nuclear strategists —are not making the decision, rather Chinese military officials and party cadres are. And the interests of the Chinese participants are likely to reflect their own bureaucratic positions rather than an impartial defense analysis.

That is true for ONI, too, which is not without its own bureaucratic perspective on the growth of the Chinese navy. This is not to say that ONI’s employees are either cynical or wrong, but just that where one stands often depends on where one sits.

The idea of keeping a submarine at sea with a dozen or more nuclear weapons is a very different posture for China, one that would likely only occur with substantial changes in who (or Hu) is making decisions about strategic forces in China. If China keeps its new land-based mobile missiles say “assembled and in the garage” with its warheads in another location, then maybe China will also keep its ballistic missile submarines in port and away from US ASW platforms looking for a little training. One could imagine a force of one or two submarines that rarely, if ever, patrol.

That force would be very vulnerable, but it would replicate the basic balance we see currently in China between readiness, on the one hand, and, on the other, leadership control.

Of course, some of the bureaucratic structures that have underpinned China’s no-alert posture have undergone substantial change as the country has modernized. The old COSTIND, which was corrupt and rife with nepotism that it would make Dick Cheney blush, has been transformed into the General Armaments Department as part of a long running effort by the PLA to re-exert control over the quasi-autonomous unit. The degree to which GAD competes or cooperates with the Second Artillery isn’t really clear to me, although things may be less fractious than when COSTIND looked at the PLA much like a wolf looks at sheep.

The Second Artillery is vastly more professional today, as is the Navy. That professionalism may make possible a greater delegation of launch authority, or a much more capable effort to wrest control of the country’s strategic programs.

On the other hand, letting relatively junior officers out into the field with real missiles and real nuclear weapons isn’t something the Second Artillery has ever done — save for a 1966 test launch of a live nuclear warhead on a DF-2.

Absent evidence that China is patrolling sending nuclear weapons out into the field on a day-to-day basis, it is hard to see why a new system would — in and of itself — result in a change in posture. It would seem to me that sending the deterrent to sea would be part of a much larger change, let’s call it a sea-change, in how Chinese leaders look at nuclear weapons.

Wait For the Evidence

All this is a plea for patience. We can’t, I think, assume that China’s operational patterns will resemble our own just because we are that awesome.

Chinese leaders have their own concepts, petty bureaucratic feuds and asses to cover. Everything to date suggests that the technological imperative to develop systems has not resulted in Chinese forces that kept on alert.

In particular, I am interested in DIA’s suggestion that China might continue to operate the XIA submarine along with a fleet of two JIN class submarines. A colleague of mine has observed that China maintains a kind of “artisan’s” approach to defense procurement — building a few missiles, making some small changes, building some more — that is different from our defense procurement system.

Of course, China may choose to build a small fleet of submarines, sending the boomers to prowl the depths of the Pacific while DF-31s tear up the local highways. A more alert Chinese nuclear arsenal would require policymakers in Washington to think very differently about China’s nuclear weapons — something else that I’ll talk about later in the week.