The Perfect Soldier: Special Operations, Commandos, and the Future of Us Warfare by James F. Dunnigan
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India Has A Solution To The Chinese Threat
by James Dunnigan
February 3, 2016
Even if the United States bases forces in the Philippines that will not mean the U.S. will go to war over continued Chinese control of Filipino offshore waters. Despite a mutual defense agreement the U.S. did not consider the Chinese seizure of Mischief Reef in 1995 and Scarborough Shoal in 2012 an attack on the Philippines that American forces had to resist. More recently the United States refused to answer Filipino queries about whether the U.S. would intervene if China used violence to enforce its offshore claims by only attacking Filipino forces offshore. Filipinos can count and they know that the expansion of Chinese air and naval power since the 1980s makes any planned increase in Filipino military power useless. The Chinese are too numerous and too strong and if they become too aggressive the Philippines will not be able to resist with current and planned forces. That might changes if the Philippines bought affordable weapons that would damage Chinese forces. One way to do this is by using land based anti-ship missiles with enough range and heft to hit Chinese ships. One of the best candidates is from India, which manufactures and offers for export the PJ-10 BrahMos. This three ton missile is 9.4 meter (29 foot) long and 670mm in diameter. It is based on a Russian the Yakhont. Lacking the cash to finish development and begin production of the Yakhont the Russian manufacturer eventually made a deal with India to get it done. India put up most of the $240 million needed to finally complete two decades of development, an effort which produced the long delayed Yakhont and the more capable BrahMos. The PJ-10 entered service in 2006 and is being built in Russia and India, with the Russians assisting India in setting up manufacturing facilities for cruise missile components. India hopes to export up to 2,000, but no one has placed an order yet. Russia and India are encouraged enough to invest in BrahMos 2, which will use a scramjet, instead of a ramjet, in the second stage. This would double the speed and make the missile much more difficult to defend against. The 3.2 ton BrahMos has a range of up to 300 kilometers and a 300 kg (660 pound) warhead. Perhaps the most striking characteristic is its high speed, literally faster (at up to a kilometer per second) than a rifle bullet. The maximum speed of 3,000 kilometers an hour makes it harder to intercept and means it takes five minutes or less to reach its target. The BrahMos is designed to go after high value targets that require great accuracy and a large conventional warhead. The BrahMos can take out land bases or ships. The high price of each missile, about $2.3 million, restricts the number of countries that can afford it. If China lost some warships to a Filipino BrahMos and sought to stop such attacks with air strikes on the Philippines that would trigger the mutual defense treaty with the United States. China has other ways to retaliate, especially economic. China might pressure Russia to prevent India from selling the Brahmos to the Philippines. But at the moment the Philippines doesn’t have too many workable defenses against the Chinese takeover of Filipino offshore waters, reefs and small islands, which makes new ideas, like land based anti-ship missiles a possibilty.
Meanwhile China continues to insist that it owns the South China Sea despite what anyone else in the neighborhood believes or international treaties say. The neighbors (especially Taiwan, Vietnam and the Philippines) continue to protest and build up their much smaller air and naval forces. Many Filipinos doubt that the United States would stand fast if China pushed hard. There are no signs that China is going to back down when it comes to its many territorial claims on neighbors.
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