How China Would Try to Win a War Against the US in the Pacific

By James Holmes, Warrior Contributor, Navy

Kill the Logistics Fleet: The U.S. armed forces can accomplish little in the Western Pacific without ample and regular supplies of all types, from fuel to ammunition to foodstuffs. Prospective foes—read China—know this. They will go after the logistics fleet hauling matériel to the fighting forces, making it a priority target set.

And why not? That’s what I would do were I in charge of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA). Deprive hostile forces of what they need to accomplish their combat missions and you may as well have defeated them in a decisive battle. They slink away when they run out of supplies.

Better yet, they may never even reach the battleground.

The U.S. Army gets this. Or at least army chieftains are saying the right things. Army Chief of Staff James McConville recently told an event hosted by Politico, “we believe we’ll have what we call contested logistics” and intend to devise ways to assure that stores get through. Adds Army Secretary Christine Wormuth, supply “isn’t the sexiest thing, frankly, the Army does, but it is very important. Just look at how the Russian military in Ukraine has struggled to resupply and feed its soldiers. That shows you the importance of logistics today on a contested battlefield.”

But logistics isn’t just important; it’s central.

Military grandmaster Carl von Clausewitz depicts a combatant’s “center of gravity,” in lyrical and seemingly less-than-actionable terms, as “the hub of all power and movement, on which everything depends.” The center of gravity derives from a belligerent’s “dominant characteristics,” and represents “the point against which all our energies should be directed” in order to triumph in battle. Once commanders have ascertained what constitutes a fighting force’s center of gravity and struck at it, they should rain “blow after blow” on it to keep the foe from recovering from the initial shock.