China prepares for World War Z

  

 Chinese military conjures world war Z scenario of all-out conflict

    Assessment of weapons has focused mostly on combat capabilities in a regional conflict but the PLA is now factoring in a ‘total war’ scenario.
    ‘It is unlikely that this paper is intended as a horror movie,’ commentator says.


The Chinese military has recently added a “total war” scenario when testing and evaluating the performance of new weapons as the risk of military conflict between China and the US reaches its highest in decades, according to scientists involved in the project.

Total war means all available resources and efforts of a nation are mobilised towards winning the war. It involves not only the military but also the civilian population and the economy, such as occurred in World War I and II.

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    Assessment of weapons has focused mostly on combat capabilities in a regional conflict but the PLA is now factoring in a ‘total war’ scenario.
    ‘It is unlikely that this paper is intended as a horror movie,’ commentator says.

In their latest evaluation of warships, Chinese navy scientists designated the doomsday scenario with Z.

In mainland China, the performance assessment of conventional weapons involves computer-based war games and field tests. It has focused mostly on evaluating the weapons’ combat capabilities in a regional conflict, such as direct military intervention by two or more foreign aircraft carrier groups around Taiwan or in the South China Sea.

But in Z, “there is a clash of strategic willpower. The regional conflict escalates to a total war”, said the team led by researcher Fang Canxin of Unit 91404 in China’s People’s Liberation Army.

Fang’s unit is responsible for the sea tests of some of China’s newest and most powerful naval weapons, according to openly available information. The Z-war scenario was declassified for the first time in their peer-reviewed paper published in the Chinese Journal of Ship Research this month.

Fang and his colleagues did not name any country but the enemy hardware that appeared in the paper, such as the Arleigh Burke-class destroyer, belongs to the US Navy and its allies. They were tagged the “blue alliance”.

There is increasing concern about the risk of a military conflict between China and the US.

“If I would place the scale of an imminent war on a scale of one to 10, I would place the situation right now on a 7,” said Rodrigo Duterte, former president of the Philippines, in a radio show at the weekend.

Under the Trump presidency, some senior officials in the US State Department defined the row between the two countries as a “clash of civilisations” and in 2019 labelled the Chinese “the first great power competitor that is not Caucasian”.

The racially divisive remarks, together with more recent sanctioning of Chinese hi-tech companies and US military operations off China’s coastline, were widely perceived by Chinese society as a deliberate effort to contain China’s future development.

More Chinese military researchers proposed bringing the war to the US homeland if it could not be avoided.

Some cutting-edge weapons, such as hypersonic missiles and nuclear-powered torpedoes that can penetrate US defence networks, are either deployed or being developed, according to openly available information.

But the idea of bracing for a total war has not been standard thinking in the Chinese government, according to some public opinion leaders.

Hu Xijin, the former editor-in-chief of the nationalist newspaper Global Times and a prominent figure on China’s social media, said most officials in the Chinese government believed the country should remain calm and not be intimidated into engaging in a “war of annihilation” with the US.

“If a war were to occur between China and the United States in which the strategic interests of both sides were equally at stake, the United States would be able to easily mobilise its forces and engage in a life-and-death struggle with China,” Hu said in a Weibo post on June 18 as US State Secretary Antony Blinken was visiting Beijing.

“In such a scenario, I believe that China does not have a chance of winning,” he added.

Hu had proposed shooting down the plane carrying former US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi when she visited Taiwan last year. The sudden softening of his words has prompted some heated backlash on China’s social media.

Sima Nan, another prominent nationalist figure on Weibo, challenged Hu’s estimation that China would be defeated by the US in a total war. “It’s not based on a war game or other rigorous assessments,” Sima said in a short video.

Engaging in a total war between two nuclear superpowers would have catastrophic consequences for human civilisation around the world.

In their paper, the Chinese scientists focused on the fate of a ship.

The Z-war mode assumed the Chinese military was under an all-out-attack by the hypothetical blue alliance.

The Chinese navy, for instance, currently has nearly 50 destroyers. Each was attacked by more than 11 missiles and more than three torpedoes, according to Fang’s team.

These weapons came from various directions in multiple ways, making it challenging to defend the ship.

The blue alliance generated jamming noises over 30 times stronger than the signal used by China’s warships for communication. The detection range of the Chinese radars was reduced to well under 60 per cent of their normal distance.

These extreme conditions severely curbed the Chinese warship’s combat capabilities, according to Fang’s team.

For instance, almost a third of the destroyer’s air-defence capabilities would be lost immediately after the attack. Only half the surface-to-air missiles could hit the incoming targets.

Fang’s team said Chinese naval experts had independently assessed the test evaluation results and “believe the figures are realistic”.

The fate of a warship can be negligible to the overall cost of a total war which could include the loss of millions, or even billions, of lives and extensive damage to infrastructure such as cities, transport systems, communication networks and industrial facilities.

If nuclear weapons are used, the war could also cause lasting and detrimental effects on ecosystems, agriculture and the overall environment that could lead to food shortages, genetic mutations and higher rates of cancer and other diseases.

But a detailed, technical assessment is still necessary, according to a Beijing-based computer scientist who helped develop a commercial war-game software.

It is not uncommon for military researchers to consider worst-case scenarios and evaluate the capabilities of their equipment in such scenarios.

It can help military forces better understand their strength, weakness and limitations, said the researcher who asked not to be named because of the sensitivity of the issue.

Fang’s team presented a serious discussion of total war in the context of the potential threats that surface ships might face in such environments, he said.

By evaluating weapons’ combat capabilities in doomsday scenarios, military forces can showcase their readiness and deter potential adversaries from engaging in conflicts that could lead to such catastrophic outcomes.

“It is unlikely that this paper is intended as a horror movie,” the researcher said.