ASIA AS A WARFIGHTING ENVIRONMENT

Roy Kamphausen

STRATEGISTS ENDEAVOR to grasp factors that shape potential wartime environments in peacetime to more effectively wage future conflicts. Part of that process involves determining how strategic geography influences warfighting. Additionally, it involves knowing the battlespace to estimate how decisive terrain benefits those who control it, just as analysts study terrain features before wars commence to support military planning.

However, an appreciation of strategic geography alone cannot discover the causes or patterns of war, which does not conform to terrain-based or mechanistic decision models. Nations engage in wars for various reasons and even wage them despite adverse strategic environments. For instance, despite a prevailing view that US strategic interests in Asia are primarily maritime based and related to preserving unfettered freedom of navigation, America conducted four land wars in the region over the past sixty years, including the recent conflicts in Southwest Asia. This suggests that something more than geography influences war and peace. Nonetheless, a process for studying strategic geography can help in understanding a dimension in which military operations are planned and executed.

Certain aspects of Asian strategic geography may be characterized as decisive, which describes physical features that offer strategic advantages by establishing conditions for either the success or inhibition of military protagonists. Decisive terrain is not always the most prominent terrain but rather the terrain that provides the military advantage to the side that controls it. In sum, decisive geography is linked to the success of military operations. For that reason, decisive terrain conveys military advantage through means that include physical presence, diplomatic relations, and security alliances.

This chapter supports some preliminary conclusions about Asian strategic geography and its implications for military operations. Moreover, it looks at how man-made features and technological developments can modify or even transform strategic geography. Finally, it provides a net assessment of the problems and benefits that Asian strategic geography, together with decisive terrain, can bring to bear on US and allied militaries.

Asia constitutes the eastern portion of the Eurasian landmass, extending eastward from a north–south line that starts in the Ural Mountains and runs down to the Caspian Sea. It includes Central Asia (Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan), South Asia (Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka), mainland Southeast Asia (Burma, Cambodia, Laos, Malaysia, Thailand, and Vietnam), insular Southeast Asia (Brunei, Indonesia, the Philippines, and Singapore), and North Asia and Northeast Asia (China, Japan, Mongolia, South Korea, North Korea, and Taiwan). It also encompasses partial entities, such as the eastern orientation of Iran and the Russian Far East.

GEOGRAPHIC IMPLICATIONS

The major geographic features of South Asia are mountains that form a belt around both its southern and central subregions and contain all the peaks in the world higher than twenty-three thousand feet. A mountain's importance in military affairs is relative to the surrounding terrain. For millennia the Himalaya and Karakorum Mountains have served as barriers between South Asia and the rest of the continent.

The unique nature of the land geography in South Asia contributed to modern warfare. For instance, the concept of the air bridge first emerged during World War II when Allied transports flew over the Himalayas from India on a route known as the Hump to resupply China. The mountains of South Asia also acted as natural obstacles to the Japanese in southern China. Moreover, Indo-Pakistani wars since Independence have involved large-scale combat operations, but they did not escalate and draw in other nations. Finally, the Sino-Indian War that broke out in 1962 waned before it could turn into a broader conflict, arguably because of the influence of geographic constraints.

These mountain ranges shape contemporary military operations in two ways. First, channelized terrain and the difficulty of sustaining forces at elevations above sixteen thousand feet impede maneuver warfare. High altitudes and inhospitable terrain in mountainous areas frustrate the rapid advance of armored and mechanized forces in support of conventional military operations. The border war between China and India in 1962 demonstrated the debilitating effects of high elevation on combat operations. Intended by the Chinese as a coercive-punishment campaign to teach India a lesson, the conflict was largely conducted at elevations above sixteen thousand feet and resulted in some six thousand dead or wounded on both sides. Hostilities ended after a month, largely because of the difficulties in sustaining combat operations at those extreme elevations.

Second, the mountain ranges in South Asia also prevent intraregional conflict from becoming broader transregional war even as they can deter such war. The long-standing tensions in Kashmir between India and Pakistan and disputes over Aksai Chin and Arunachal Pradesh between China and India have not resulted in broader conflict, in part because of the limiting effects of the geography. To be sure, the differences are rooted not in the strategic utility of the geography itself but rather in the political borders of the contested areas. The constraints on the escalation of violence that the Himalaya-Karakorum ranges provide notwithstanding, the mountain regions exercise little influence on diminishing tensions.

However, the ways geography might limit the horizontal escalation of a conflict increase the potential for catastrophic vertical escalation, which may take two forms. First, long-range missile strikes may become de rigueur for all protagonists. This action-reaction cycle is occurring with deployments by India of BrahMos missiles in Arunachal Pradesh, by China of short-range ballistic missiles in Tibet, and by Pakistan of short- and intermediate-range missiles. Second, and arguably of...