Were the US to come up against China in a war in the Pacific, indications are that Washington would have the worse of the exchanges.

There is evidence aplenty (from leaked documents and Rand Corporation reports commissioned by the Pentagon) that the US has been, and is, examining ways to invade China should the economic, political, cultural and trade warfare they are currently undertaking fail to convince China to give the expected subservience and blind obedience that the US has come to expect from the rest of the world. In that context, it is well to remember that the US military arsenal and strategy is built around overseas aggression and not around defence of the homeland. That is why it has more than 800 military bases scattered around the world and much of its remaining armament’s stockpiles after Ukraine are based in those, and other, locations, far from any possible use in the defence of the homeland.

It has also been necessary for the US to convince the rest of the world, and its own population, that this vast distribution of military power around the planet is solely concerned with protecting US national security. The inversion of logic and reason necessary to sustain such nonsense has made it de rigueur to never attempt to explain how its invasions and bombings of countries many thousands of kilometres from the US homeland add to US national security. Indeed, the result of these invasions have been demonstrably proven to greatly reduce US national security by encouraging the vast growth of terrorism that has occurred since the US invasions from the beginning of the century. A study by Peter Bergen and Paul Cruickshank found a sevenfold increase in yearly fatal jihadist attacks, including not only in Iraq but also globally.

So the question that arises is does the US retain the potential to successfully invade another superpower that it might have had at the end of World War II? The answer is a clear and unequivocal no. That conclusion derives from some very basic and indisputable facts. An invasion of China would require transporting millions of troops and many millions of tonnes of military equipment and supplies across the vast expanse of the Pacific while subject to a very large and sophisticated military opponent specifically armed to counter such an invasion. This is vastly greater and more hazardous than the volumes shipped during the D-Day invasion of Europe which dealt with an enemy the vast bulk of whose military resources were occupied in trying to defeat the USSR. In the D-Day invasion, the Allies used more than 6000 ships for the Normandy invasion (mostly US and British and mostly ships of the vast merchant marines maintained by them).

Even more modern comparisons demonstrate the US incapacity to mount such an effort. In Desert Storm (1991), the US moved 2.3 million tonnes of equipment by sea, but this took months and relied heavily on chartered foreign ships. An invasion of China would likely require 10 times the sealift capacity of Desert Storm, which the US doesn’t possess. In the last 40 years, the US has almost eliminated its merchant marine due to the pursuit of profit maximisation by companies and the availability of cheaper alternative from countries like China. As of 2024, the US-flagged ocean-going merchant fleet consists of only about 180 ships, down from more than 1200 in the 1950s. Only about 80 of these are militarily useful (container ships, tankers, and roll-on/roll-off vessels for heavy equipment transport).

China, by contrast, has a merchant marine of more than 5500 ships and in 2023, Beijing built 51% of the world’s merchant ships. In terms of the share of the global merchant fleet by ownership in 2021, China owned approximately 11.6% of the world’s merchant ships. However, if looking at the share of new ship orders, China secured 62% of the new ships ordered globally. More than 90% of global trade moves by sea, but the US controls less than 2% of the world’s commercial fleet. A conservative estimate of the number of merchant vessels necessary for an even marginally successful invasion, given the growth in size of such vessels over the last 80 years, is about 5000 vessels. That does not take into account the vast losses of such vessels that would be suffered in their passage across the Pacific.

That means the US would need to either commandeer the fleets of other countries or pay for their utilisation. That is a highly unlikely scenario as those other countries would realise that their fleets would be decimated in the process. In contrast, the US Navy’s Military Sealift Command maintains a fleet of about 125 civilian-crewed ships for logistics, including prepositioning ships (stationed near potential conflict zones with pre-loaded equipment).

In dealing with this vast, and self-imposed, diminution of logistics capacity by the US, China has built a formidable A2/AD network (missiles, submarines, mines, cyber warfare) that would make sealift operations extremely hazardous near its coast. Anti-Access/Area Denial (A2/AD) defences are military strategies and capabilities designed to restrict an adversary’s ability to enter a specific area and operate within it. This is achieved by using a combination of long-range, anti-ship, anti-aircraft, and ground-based systems, often including intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance capabilities. A2/AD aims to deny an opponent’s freedom of movement in both the access phase (A2) and the operational phase (AD).) The US would face massive losses in transport ships if it entered contested waters, requiring heavy naval escort, which the US Navy lacks.

Conclusion

The US lacks a big enough merchant marine to independently support a large-scale invasion of China. It would need to reactivate mothballed ships, seize foreign vessels which would be legally and politically difficult, rely on allies — and that is a vastly diminished number of countries based on current US tariff policies — and risk catastrophic losses due to China’s A2/AD defences. All this means that the US, through its own actions over the last 80 years, has rendered itself incapable of successfully invading China. It has limited options in its quest to halt and reverse China’s rise into a matching hegemon in a multipolar world. It has tried creating opponents of China on its periphery with extremely limited success. Its tariff policies are damaging itself far more than they are damaging China, as the economic indicators clearly demonstrate. Further evidence if it were ever needed of hegemonic decline.

The views expressed in this article may or may not reflect those of Pearls and Irritations.