"Approach and Excel": The Chinese People’s Liberation Army’s Asymmetric Blueprint for Indo-Pacific Dominance

The PLA’s Indo-Pacific Strategy to Win the War of the Future

Abstract

This article analyzes a new strategic framework, "Approach and Excel," which could guide the People's Liberation Army (PLA) in a potential future conflict against a technologically superior adversary in the Indo-Pacific. Drawing inspiration from tactical innovations like "Operation Spider Web," the doctrine posits that a technologically inferior force can gain a strategic advantage by leveraging proximity, precision, and psychological shock. The core of the strategy is twofold: "strangling the hub" and "tracking and counter-strike." The first aims to paralyze the enemy's fixed, high-value assets and infrastructure (hubs) by exploiting their geographical vulnerabilities within the Indo-Pacific's island chains. The second focuses on dynamically tracking and engaging mobile enemy forces, blurring the lines between peacetime presence and wartime operations. This comprehensive approach emphasizes a layered escalation, a dual-pronged survival strategy of "hard protection" and "soft confrontation," and a system-wide "information-fire integration." Ultimately, "Approach and Excel" seeks to transform a technological disadvantage into an asymmetric tactical and strategic initiative, providing a flexible deterrence option that could enable a weaker force to effectively challenge and contain a stronger one without resorting to a full-scale, direct confrontation.

by Gabriele e Nicola Iuvinale

1. The Paradox of Contemporary Military Conflict and the Value of "Operation Spider Web"

The fundamental contradictions of contemporary military struggle are undergoing profound changes, pushing military theory to new frontiers. In objective conditions where the technological gap is still evident and equipment performance is still a major factor, how to achieve the victory of the weak over the strong and the inferior over the superior has become one of the main contemporary issues facing military theory innovation.

The experience of the war in Ukraine, particularly the successful practice of the hypothetical "Operation Spider Web"—in which weapons were launched through platforms close to targets—provides us with important inspiration. This operational mode not only effectively bypasses the technological advantages of the enemy's long-range defense system but also achieves asymmetric controls and countermeasures in multiple dimensions: tactics, technology, and psychology.

The success of Operation Spider Web deeply reveals the tactical value of a platform that launches weapons close to the target, and its main advantages are reflected in three key dimensions:

• Evading the detection and interception advantage in the medium- and long-range defense system area: Traditional long-range attacks often require penetrating the enemy's complex and layered air defense network, an extremely costly and risky task. "Operation Spider Web" completely bypasses this problem by deploying drone platforms directly near the target through flexible infiltration methods, such as the use of civilian logistics. This approach completely bypasses the long-range early warning radar network and the medium-range air defense missile system of the Russian army. When the drone is activated in the target area, the reaction time of the Russian defense system is compressed to the limit, making it impossible to form an effective interception network. This "internal explosion" attack mode causes even the most advanced air defense systems, such as the S-400 and Tor, to lose their effectiveness, demonstrating a clever tactical innovation.

• Improving the precision and cost-effectiveness of the strike: By positioning the launch platform close to the target, the drone's flight distance is greatly reduced, minimizing navigation errors and external interference factors and significantly improving strike precision. More importantly, this approach significantly reduces the technical complexity requirements of the weapon system: there is no need to develop expensive long-range cruise or ballistic missiles, which makes the operation extremely more economical and scalable. The cost-effectiveness of this tactic is revolutionary, allowing significant strategic damage to be inflicted with relatively limited resources.

• Psychological shock and strategic deterrence effects: "Operation Spider Web" completely shattered the myth of the Russian military's "rear security," demonstrating that geographical depth is no longer a reliable defensive barrier. This psychological shock is often more fatal to the morale of the military and the population than physical losses, as it undermines confidence in the state's ability to protect its territory. At the same time, this action also demonstrated to the international community the Ukrainian army's ability to break the traditional war model and constituted a strong strategic deterrent to potential adversaries, signaling a new era of vulnerability for great powers.

  
  

2. "Strangling the Hub": The Strategic Shift from Defensive Advantage to Offensive Initiative

Currently, hegemonic countries are undergoing a profound strategic transformation. Given the serious situation in which "forward defense" can no longer effectively intercept our penetration operations, the strategic center of their capability building and combat deployment is reorganizing in the direction of "strike denial." The fundamental logic of this transformation is as follows: since it is impossible to completely prevent my infiltration and breakout into the periphery, then use highly lethal firepower and multi-domain attacks to damage, destroy, and suppress key points, core forces, and important operations to prevent me from entering specific areas and completing my mission.

This strategic adaptation means that the center of the operational problem domain has undergone a radical change. For the PLA, the strategic objective has shifted from "making the strong enemy unable to stop" to "being able to stop the strong enemy." In this transition between attack and defense, we must fully grasp the objective law that the attack is often more proactive, more advantageous, and easier to implement than the defense. The advantage of the offense is mainly reflected in the fundamental concept of "convergence and selection in decision-making and rapid concentration in action." The essence of "convergence" lies in the fact that the offensive side starts from its own intentions and objectives, and the decision space is clearer and more convergent than that of the defensive side, which must "prepare for all possible situations," making its decision space vague and divergent. The advantage brought by this convergence to the offensive side is an important manifestation of the clarity of strategic intentions.

The strategic value of "selecting the best" and "aggregating the best" is even more profound. Through a systematic evaluation of different strategic options, the attacker can choose the time, space, means, methods, and resource allocation that are most advantageous to them, and concentrate their superior forces to precisely strike the defender's disadvantages and weak points. The autonomy and selectivity in decision-making allow the attacker to "remove the weak board and supplement the strong," using their strengths to attack the enemy's weaknesses, while the defender falls into a passive situation of "removing the strong board and supplementing the weak."

Using inverse thinking, the PLA can trace back to the inevitable factors and internal connections of the attacker to gain advantages in counter-attacking. The inevitability of the enemy's material basis manifests itself in the fact that, regardless of the complexity of combat concepts, forces and weapons require a material basis for their support and movement, and this material basis is subject to objective laws.

These material bases have clear and deterministic characteristics in the near future: a surface force system with aircraft carrier strike groups, surface action groups, and amphibious expeditionary groups; powerful submarine stealth forces; and sea-based strike weapon systems such as ballistic missiles and hypersonic weapons. These platforms, weapons, and equipment are inevitably in a relatively fixed, concentrated, and vulnerable state during deployment, maintenance, and return.

The PLA's Theoretical Innovation Research Department has proposed the combat idea of "strangling the hub," and the strategic logic supporting it is based on this inevitability and certainty. In peacetime, the PLA controls the enemy's hub, conducts reconnaissance and surveillance, and exerts pressure and containment. In wartime, it decisively strikes and destroys the hub and its operational forces, trying to push the powerful enemy to the limit of its capabilities and create a key window of opportunity for subsequent operations. This concept fully exploits the positive factors of geopolitical conditions in the PLA's favor: the hub of the strongest enemy is surrounded by public areas, relatively geographically concentrated, and closer to China, which gives the PLA the practical ability to "block the field entrance," preventing and delaying the entry of enemy troops into the battlefield and destroying their capability generation and maintenance mechanism.

3. "Tracking and Counter-Strike": Dynamic Countermeasures to Handle Enemy Mobility and Dispersal

Facing the enormous threat of the "strangling the hub" strategy, powerful enemies will certainly not stand by. The dominant hegemonic country's "National Defense Strategy" has listed "dispersal and repositioning, mobility" as one of the priorities for military development. If a powerful enemy further improves the tactical flexibility and mobility of troops to make the hub more dispersed and sparse, the "tracking and counter-strike" combat concept has become an inevitable choice to address these strategic adjustments.

The fundamental mechanism of "tracking, defense, and counter-strike" is to actively establish and maintain a necessary relationship between the enemy and us, constantly tracking the troops deployed by powerful enemies in peacetime. This is a manifestation of the theory of relativity in combat: if the enemy moves, I move; if the enemy is stationary, I stay stationary, always maintaining a relative positional advantage over the enemy's key forces. "Defense and counter-strike" consists of intercepting the weapons fired by powerful enemies in the initial phase and quickly counter-attacking the shooter and related targets.

The historical depth of the Soviet Army's "combat service" provides us with valuable theoretical foundations and practical experience. This style, which kept the Soviet Armed Forces in a high state of combat readiness, blurring the traditional boundaries between war and peace, provided detailed, timely, and real-time intelligence information and demonstrated the strength and determination of the Soviet Navy.

The practical applicability of "tracking and counter-strike" is most evident in the current enemy situation in the Indo-Pacific Ocean. The natural barriers formed by the first and second island chains not only restrict the maneuver paths of the most powerful enemies but also create ideal conditions for the PLA's close-in operations. The key hubs of the enemies in the Western Pacific, arranged like a "necklace" from Yokosuka and Sasebo in Japan, to Anderson Air Force Base in Guam, and then to Darwin Port in Australia, are generally located within a range of 1,000-3,000 kilometers from China's coastal bases and fall within the effective coverage area of China's maritime forces. More importantly, the most powerful enemy fleets often move between these hubs through relatively fixed maritime channels, providing a predictable "path to cross" for continuous tracking.

The organic combination of tracking, counter-strike, and strangling the hub forms a complete combat cycle. Strangling the hub solves the "threat at the root," while tracking and striking targets solve the "mobility threat." The two complement and support each other. The chain of action "reaching the hub - close-in surveillance - sending off the enemy - tracking and deterrence - returning to port as needed" constitutes the core operational mechanism of this strategy, ensuring uninterrupted monitoring and a flexible response.

4. "Approach and Excel": The Main Road to Building a New Combat System

Through in-depth discussions on the two operational concepts of strangling the hub and tracking and counter-strike, the PLA's strategic thinking has found a theoretical basis for further upgrades. Getting close, staying attached, and sticking to the enemy can always enable the weaker side to exert greater force to effectively control and balance the stronger enemy. The operational concept of "Approach and Excel" is a systematic sublimation based on this understanding and answers the three fundamental questions of defeating the strong by the weak in modern conditions.

How to approach: Stay together in normal times and strengthen according to the situation in war

Strict implementation must follow the fundamental principle of "gradual escalation and precise control." In peacetime, the freedom of navigation is fully utilized to maintain a continuous presence. This normalized military presence has three values: intelligence gathering, deterrence, and readiness. When the situation shows signs of tension, the close-in strategy shifts to a "situational reinforcement" mode, increasing the frequency of patrols and deploying high-quality platforms. At the outbreak of a war, the strategy immediately changes to "rapid approach, hard and violent attack," leveraging accumulated intelligence and positional advantages to launch a sudden saturation attack.

How to survive: A survival strategy that emphasizes both defense and concealment

Although close-in combat offers advantages, it also exposes our troops to a high-threat environment from the enemy. The solution to the survival problem adopts a comprehensive strategy that combines "hard protection" and "soft confrontation." Hard protection involves building solid defensive capabilities and multi-layered defense systems. The "soft confrontation" strategy focuses on long-term ambush through concealment, shielding, using stealth technologies, and dispersed deployments. Above all, the fundamental guarantee of a survival strategy lies in deterrence credibility: a credible, reliable, and sufficiently terrifying counter-strike and retaliation capability will make it difficult for the enemy to make the determination to "fire the first shot." This is the dialectic of determination and courage: the more you dare to get close, the stronger your survival ability; the more reliable your counter-strike capabilities, the more easily you can dissuade the enemy from acting.

How to focus on excellence: Building a systematic force multiplication mechanism

The essence of "focusing on excellence" is that our short-range forces should not be content to simply use their own capabilities and resources to carry out defensive counter-attacks against specific targets, but should become the "nerve endings" and "firepower tentacles" of the entire combat system, both using the information of the system and providing information to the system, and both using the firepower of the system and providing firepower to the system, thereby achieving a real force multiplier effect. In the information domain, the short-range platform acts as an "advanced sensor," obtaining accurate information that long-range sensors like satellites and radar cannot provide. At the same time, this information is transmitted in real-time to the rear command center to provide decision support for the entire combat system. In terms of firepower, the close-in platform is both an independent strike unit and an important component of the system's firepower, implementing "point-to-point" precision strikes and coordinating with rear long-range firepower to create a three-dimensional attack situation that "combines long and short, high and low." This strategy of achieving "information and fire integration" through "me and the enemy as one" is the essence of this combat concept, allowing the PLA to always have the initiative on the battlefield.