Strike missiles and cheap drones: how Southeast Asia can deter China
Southeast Asian countries looking for security against China should shift the weight of their defence spending to deploying highly mobile, mostly inexpensive equipment that it would struggle to counter. These would be strike missiles, cheap drones and surface-to-air missile systems.
With such additions to their forces, these countries could greatly increase the potential cost to China of waging war against them. Such a military policy shift would reflect the effective tactics being used in the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East. It would also mirror the strategy that China itself is using against the US, one of deploying survivable weapons which are costly to counter and which restrict access to nearby maritime zones.
China’s military strategy emphasises the gathering and sharing of information and the ability to conduct integrated joint operations, which require a networked system-of-systems architecture. That architecture could be what Southeast Asian countries would hold at risk with mobile systems that would be hard for China to find and destroy. They could target China’s communication infrastructure, radars, air-surveillance aircraft and other sensors. They could also threaten satellite communication stations, which are critical components of the networked system-of-systems architecture. In hitting such targets, Southeast Asian countries would weaken China’s ability to know what enemy forces were where and to pass around information for dealing with them. In threatening that Chinese capability, Southeast Asian countries would to some degree deter Beijing from attempting to project power over them – for example, in a dispute over features in the South China Sea.
Among the biggest advantages of mobile equipment is survivability. Mobility and dispersion are key to surviving in a highly contested air warfare environment. Surface-to-air batteries and launchers of strike missiles and drones can shoot and scoot: fire and immediately leave the launch site. This means they can be extremely challenging to target.
Another great advantage of some of this equipment is affordability. . Propeller-driven one-way drones are cheaper than rocket-propelled interceptor missiles that may be needed to neutralise them. An Iranian Shahed-136 drone costs between US$20,000 and US$50,000, while the air defences used by Gulf countries and Israel cost between US$3 million and US$12 million per interceptor missile.
Southeast Asian countries can deploy cheap drone salvos to force China to use costly interceptor missiles, of which it has a limited number. This would weaken China’s air defence systems that protect its military communication infrastructure and would facilitate follow-on strikes by jet or rocket missiles. Iran has used a similar tactic of complementing strike missiles with cheap drones in the war with the US and Israel this year, targeting US bases and military communication infrastructure in the Gulf.
In adopting and employing such a force structure, Southeast Asian countries would need to overcome at least two obstacles. One is that they largely lack surveillance capabilities. To remedy this, they would need to acquire many surveillance drones.
Second, their armies, dominant in military policy, may stand in the way, preferring to concentrate on internal threats, as they long have. To make progress, the armies would have to look outward, and they would have to adopt a doctrine that emphasised joint operations with the other armed services.
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