Australia-Papua New Guinea Mutual Defence Treaty Highlights Growing Challenge For China's Military
🇦🇺 🇨🇳 🇵🇬 Analysis
Papua New Guinea recently celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of its independence. Among the foreign dignitaries in attendance was the Australian prime minister, who planned to sign a long-anticipated mutual defence treaty with his Papua New Guinean counterpart. While the signing of the mutual defence treaty, which would have brought Papua New Guinea into a war with China in the event that China attacked either Australian forces in Australia or American forces in Australia, appears to be, in effect, indefinitely postponed, as a result of the combined effects of Chinese diplomatic pressure and Papua New Guinean domestic politics, the episode highlights an underappreciated dynamic: China’s long-range conventional strike capabilities remain inadequate in both qualitative and quantitative terms for the type of conflict that China is increasingly likely to encounter in the Western Pacific.
Discussions of China’s conventional strike capabilities tend to highlight the increasing sophistication of Chinese strike munitions rather than the size of China’s strike munitions arsenal. In large part, this reflects the paucity of information as to how many strike munitions of a given type exist in China’s arsenal. Observers operating with publicly available information must work with occasional, typically non-disaggregated, estimates of the People’s Liberation Army Rocket Force’s (PLARF) arsenal of ground-launched ballistic missiles and cruise missiles that are issued by the United States Department of Defense. Comparable publicly available estimates do not exist for the strike munitions that are possessed by the PLA Air Force (PLAAF), PLA Navy (PLAN), and PLA Ground Force (PLAGF). The size and composition of the strike munition arsenals of the PLAAF, PLAN, and PLAGF are increasingly important in a context in which increasingly capable and increasingly widespread ballistic missile defence systems of non-zero effectiveness partially blunt the effectiveness of the PLARF’s arsenal of strike munitions. More generally, China encounters a situation in which the PLA will likely have to attack tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of discrete aimpoints in a major war with the United States over the fate of Taiwan. The publicly available estimates of the PLARF arsenal provided by the United States Department of Defence indicate a PLARF arsenal that must be very substantially bolstered by the strike munitions operated by the PLAAF, PLAN, and PLAGF for China to prevail in such a conflict.
While the strike munitions operated by the PLAAF, PLAN, and PLAGF are likely to substantially bolster the PLARF’s strike munition arsenal when it comes to targeting Taiwan and parts of Japan, PLA service branches other than the PLARF remain poorly positioned to attack more distant targets, including very distant targets in Australia, Papua New Guinea, and nearby Pacific Islands more generally. While the PLAAF’s bomber force is equipped with air-launched cruise missiles and air-launched ballistic missiles, its H-6K and H-6N bombers cannot be credibly used to attack Lombrum naval base, which is located on the Papua New Guinean island of Manus, or the nearby Momote airport. These military facilities—upgrades to the Lombrum naval base are being funded by Australia and the United States—are located some 4300 kilometers from China, which is to say that these are some 1300 kilometers more distant from China than the American island of Guam. While the PLAN’s surface fleet and, in principle, its submarine fleet, can be used to attack targets on the island of Manus, there are practical challenges to doing so, and the PLAN is, more generally, likely to focus on higher priority targets and threats. The PLAGF’s strike capabilities are heavily oriented toward Taiwan and are, as such, irrelevant for the purposes of this post.
Although the Papua New Guinean island of Manus is likely to be within range of a variant of the PLARF’s DF-26 ballistic missiles as well as its rumoured DF-27 “hypersonic” boost-glide vehicle (BGV), these are expensive, scarce, and in-demand strike munitions that are best used against other, more lucrative and higher priority targets. Given the distance of some 4300 kilometers, attacks against Papua New Guinea, nearby Pacific islands, and Australia more generally will require a large, heavy, complex and, as such, expensive ballistic missile. More generally, a ballistic missile is essentially overkill against a target like Lombrum naval base, at least at the outset of a war in which there may be few, if any, American and Australian military forces present and, as such, little in the way of ballistic missile defence coverage to warrant the use of a high-end strike munition like the DF-26 and DF-27.
While the PLARF can, in principle, employ land-attack cruise missiles against the likes of Lombrum naval base, there are practical limits to the payload-range of a turbofan-powered (subsonic) land-attack cruise missile design. Moreover, the PLARF appears to have little interest in fielding a new long-range subsonic land-attack cruise missile design. The PLARF’s existing CJ-10/CJ-10A ground-launched land-attack cruise missiles lack the range to target the Lombrum naval base.
As things stand, it is unclear how the PLA will go about targeting the likes of Lombrum naval base and other locations in Papua New Guinea, nearby Pacific islands, and Australia more generally in a major war in which the United States is likely to disperse its forces across as many locations as possible and, more importantly, establish logistical hubs at locations that amount to relative sanctuaries given the qualitative and quantitative limits of the PLA’s existing long-range strike capabilities. While the combination of Chinese diplomatic pressure and Papua New Guinean domestic politics has resulted in the temporary and perhaps permanent deferral of the signing of the consequential mutual defence treaty between Australia and Papua New Guinea, the qualitative and quantitative limitations of China’s long-range strike capabilities are unlikely to go away any time soon.
Although China’s ongoing military modernization efforts and military buildup are likely to result in a PLA that is increasingly better-positioned to undertake long-range strikes against distant targets such as the Lombrum naval base in Papua New Guinea, any growth in Chinese military capabilities is likely to be at least partially offset by the growth in the military capabilities of China’s adversaries. There will, moreover, be more lucrative and higher priority targets for the likes of a new Chinese attack submarine equipped with land-attack cruise missiles, Chinese aircraft carriers, new Chinese bombers and strike aircraft, as well as new PLARF ballistic missiles and BGVs.
While the PLA appears to have so far decided against pursuing low-cost long-range strike munitions in the manner of Iran and, more recently, Russia, for reasons that are not public knowledge, observers should recognize that such a development lies well within the realm of possibility. A long-range propeller-driven fixed-wing strike drone—something in the vein of the Iranian Shahed-136 design—will constitute an inexpensive strike munition that the PLA can effectively use against distant low-priority targets that will likely otherwise remain beyond the practical reach of the PLA due to the qualitative and quantitative limitations of its strike capabilities. While a propeller-driven fixed-wing strike drone like the Shahed-136 is likely to have a low penetration rate against Taiwan (at least in the initial phase of a conflict) and Japan, countries like the Philippines—a treaty ally of the United States and home to a growing American military presence—and Papua New Guinea have little in the way of radar detection against low- and medium-altitude targets, let alone air defence capabilities through which to shoot down a Chinese propeller-driven strike drone or, more generally, any Chinese strike munition. Although Australia and the United States have air defence systems through which to defend potential targets like Lombrum naval base in time of war, there is far too much airspace for the militaries of these countries to surveil, let alone secure against aerial attack.