Sleeping Tigers

From Armed Forces Journal, November 2011 issue

[excerpt]

Sleeping tigers

Naval mines are China’s quintessential asymmetric ‘A2/AD’ threat

By Scott C. Truver

 

In a recent New York Times op-ed, Princeton Professor Aaron L. Friedberg focused on China’s asymmetric “anti-access/area-denial” strategies, operations and weapons that could neutralize U.S. forces and those of our Pacific Rim allies and friends in some future crisis or conflict. He wrote:

 

“Rather than trying to match American power plane for plane and ship for ship, Beijing has sought more cost-effective ways to neutralize it. It has been building large numbers of relatively inexpensive but highly accurate non-nuclear ballistic missiles, as well as sea- and air-launched cruise missiles. Those weapons could destroy or disable the handful of ports and airfields from which American air and naval forces operate in the Western Pacific and sink warships whose weapons could reach the area from hundreds of miles out to sea, including American aircraft carriers.