Timothy Birdnow

So, where have the Houthi rebels been getting their ASBM rockets?

That technology is only available from China.

FTA:

So is Beijing proliferating missile technology? It sure looks that way.Occam’s Razorsays so. Whether it’s doing so inadvertently or deliberately is another question. Now, Chinese Communist Party potentates are on record opposing missile proliferation. China is not a partyto the Missile Technology Control Regime (MTCR), the informal nonproliferation body that strives to clamp down on the spread of guided missiles that could be used to deliver unconventional or conventional payloads. But it has applied for MTCR membership and agreed to enforce the regime’s guidelines on stemming proliferation while its application for membership remains under review.

Unwitting proliferation is a possibility. During the founding decades of the People’s Republic of China, in fact, the imperative to proliferate arms was etchedon the institutional culture of the PLA. The armed forces had every incentive to arm others for cash. They had to raise much of their own budget amid straitened finances. Those habits of mind and deed persisted into the post-Cold War years. It’s not impossible that illicit transactions could take place unbeknownst to the Chinese Communist Party.

But even if the impulse to proliferate persists within China’s military, it seems doubtful it would extend to surreptitiously exporting frontline armaments such as antiship ballistic missiles. As noted up front, the PLA has, or until recently had, a monopoly on ASBMs. That’s a monopoly worth guarding. Rocket Force DF-21D and DF-26 missiles anchor China’s anti-access and area-denial network, affording commanders the option to strike not just land targets but moving ships at sea up to 2,000 nautical miles distant. That PLA overseers, acting on their own, would transfer a weapon system of such potency to Iran—whence it might find its way into the Houthi, Hamas, or Hezbollah arsenals, given Tehran’s proclivities—seems a stretch. Military officialdom would balk at a move of that political magnitude.

Or so you would think.

A Great Britain in its imperial heyday, or a postwar America could maneuver around the Eurasian periphery, setting the political and strategic agenda from the sea. But as Spykman pointed out, that could only happen if the Royal Navy or U.S. Navy could get to the rimlands. A dominant navy couldn’t control events unless it could wrest command of the "marginal seas” around the periphery from local defenders.

Strategies aimed at warding off a dominant Western navy make eminent sense if you’re sitting in Beijing, or Tehran, or Moscow today. Enter the antiship ballistic missile. Over the past century-plus, advances in maritime weapons technology have superempowered lesser navies as well as coastal defenders fighting from shore. First came the torpedo and sea mine, which gave small craft such as submarines and torpedo boats the ability to land heavy blows against battleships and cruisers, then the coin of the realm of naval warfare. Then came military aviation, which enabled carrier and land-based warplanes to strike at capital ships at long range. And then came the guided-missile revolution, which further skewed the balance toward shore-based sea power.

Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at 02:45 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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