DEFENCE
Civil-Military Wargames: Planning for high-complexity hybrid operations in the South-West Pacific Melanesia is a potential setting for future hybrid conflict, writes Ben Morgan, and Wargames may be a cost-effective way to simulate integration of civil and military information operations in the region.
The Indo-Pacific region is currently the frontline of Sino-American competition, parts of which, like Melanesia, are especially fertile ground for the use of hybrid tactics that might leverage local colonial history, cultural differences and weak governance against conventional military capabilities. Any military seeking to engage successfully in this region needs to understand these considerations and develop tactics and doctrine that will win – not just the kinetic phase of war but also the information battle. In 2014, Robert Haddick wrote Fire on the Water China: America and the Future of the Pacific, highlighting China’s challenge to America in the Indo-Pacific region. He discusses America’s carrier task groups that for generations have dominated sea power, but argues their supremacy is waning. Although expensive, a carrier task group provides formidable power projection, being able to move quickly to a trouble spot, defend itself from most threats, and strike thousands of kilometres into enemy territory. If it is to compete with the United States, China needs to 24
develop a credible strategy to defeat carrier task groups, such as developing long-range anti-ship missiles and anti-ship ballistic missiles that can be produced in vast numbers and at relatively low cost. Haddick’s book identified that the threat posed by China’s ability to swamp an American carrier battlegroup with accurate longrange missile fire is credible. This creates an exclusion zone around
missile defended land, within which a carrier task group is at extreme risk. This strategy, ‘Area Denial,’ is a keystone of China’s conventional war-fighting doctrine. By denying America’s carriers access to an area of operations, China can compete there militarily, with ground or naval operations taking place under a protective ‘umbrella’ of precisionguided missiles.
Multinational ships moored at Pearl Harbour, Hawaii, during RIMPAC 2022. Courtesy US Navy.
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