Oil Security and Conventional War: Lessons From a China-Taiwan Air Scenario

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Introduction

In the past, conventional militaries were plagued by wartime oil shortages that severely undermined their battlefield effectiveness. Both Germany and Japan in World War II found themselves crippled by skyrocketing military fuel requirements that their naturally petroleum-poor territories had no hope of meeting. Fuel supply limitations forced the German army to rely heavily on horse-drawn transportation, resulting in military disaster when the Wehrmacht encountered the highly mechanized Red Army on the eastern front.[1] By 1945, Allied attacks on Japanese oil tankers had so devastated military fuel stockpiles that the Japanese navy retrofitted its fleet to run on coal. Meanwhile, kamikaze attacks were increasingly used as a means of conserving oil because “suicide flight[s]…required fuel for one way only.”[2]

Could oil shortages threaten military effectiveness in a large-scale conventional conflict today or in the future? Or are troubles of the kind faced by Germany and Japan things of the past? The answer matters for more than understanding the roots of battlefield performance. As recent research shows, expectations about military and essential civilian fuel needs in wartime influence countries’ strategic calculations, and thus their foreign policies. [3] Beyond contributing to Germany and Japan’s military defeat in World War II, oil deficiency also profoundly shaped each country’s behavior prior to and throughout the conflict. Anticipating wartime oil shortages, Germany invested heavily in alternative fuels and pursued economic alliances with Europe’s two largest producers, Romania and Russia. Japan took a more drastic step: it invaded the oil-rich Dutch East Indies and destroyed the U.S. Pacific fleet at Pearl Harbor to eliminate the American naval threat to petroleum shipping. As these cases illustrate, understanding a country’s military fuel situation can provide insight into its current and future geopolitical behavior.

Yet wartime fuel requirements are poorly understood. Observers commonly assume that the amount of oil consumed today for military purposes is small compared to production and civilian demand, and thus that wartime shortages are unlikely. But, this assumption has not been subject to rigorous evaluation in the unclassified literature. Closer scrutiny reveals it to be flawed.

This paper analyzes a specific conflict scenario—an air war between the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and Taiwan (also known as the Republic of China or ROC)—to enhance broader knowledge about fuel requirements in wartime. (Examining an air war scenario is especially significant because China would have to establish air superiority over Taiwan before any plausible amphibious invasion attempt.) Insight gained from modeling such a conflict makes it possible to provide a rough estimate of potential fuel requirements and assess whether military demand could strain countries’ supplies in the present, as it did in the past. If it can, this suggests that oil-deficient countries are likely to pursue foreign policies with an eye toward preserving petroleum access in the event of a crisis or emergency. In addition to the broad implications, modeling fuel requirements in a PRC-ROC war has inherent value because the dispute is one of few flash points that could conceivably draw China into conflict with the United States.[4] The results confirm that oil and fuel supplies could become significant constraints on China and Taiwan in the event of war.

Methodology: Estimating Military Demand in a China-Taiwan Air Confrontation

Analyzing wartime fuel requirements requires making assumptions in the face of uncertainty. Even the most transparent countries, including the United States, avoid divulging military fuel needs. (Although the U.S. Department of Defense releases fuel procurement numbers, these are incomplete because they do not include consumption by contractors and fail to account for oil received as in-kind contributions from allies. [5]) Military planners and policy analysts alike must grapple with this. This paper adopts maximalist assumptions that set a “worst case” ceiling for petroleum demand (“worst case” in the sense that its estimates are of the upper limit of the quantity of oil needed to fight effectively). This is appropriate because “worst case” thinking dominates international politics and especially military planning. It is reasonable to believe that pessimistic assumptions regarding petroleum are most likely to reflect countries’ strategic calculations and drive their foreign policies in regards to oil.

To estimate “military demand” for fuel, this paper focuses on the petroleum-based fuel necessary to power military transportation during a period of combat operations. This fuel consists of the gasoline, diesel, bunker oil, and jet fuel burned to create motive energy for vehicles such as trucks, ships, and aircraft. To simplify, this definition of military demand is narrowed to exclude petroleum products used for other purposes, such as lubricants, asphalts, or generator fuel used to produce electricity in the field. It likewise excludes demand by manufacturers within the country’s military-industrial base responsible for producing the weapons, machinery, or other goods that lay the broad economic foundation for military power.

The following basic equation is used to estimate demand for military aviation during a PRC-ROC wartime scenario:

(fuel/sortie) x (sortie/day) = fuel/day

Fuel Per Sortie

To calculate fuel per combat sortie, it is necessary first to determine a likely order of battle for both the People’s Liberation Army Air Force (PLAAF) and the Republic of China Air Force (ROCAF).

Models of the scenario constructed by RAND Corporation in 2000 and 2009 suggest that China would devote 967 aircraft to a Taiwan air conflict—including the majority of the PRC’s most advanced fourth-generation fighters—out of a total PLAAF fleet numbering roughly 2,120 operational combat aircraft, according to U.S. government estimates. This number reflects three operational constraints identified by the RAND authors. First, because China’s air force currently lacks a robust capability for in-flight refueling, the PRC could only field aircraft from PLAAF airbases within unrefueled range of Taiwan. (“Unrefueled range” means that an aircraft can travel roundtrip to and from the target without refueling.) Airbase capacity limitations, therefore, play a critical role. Second, the compact size of the operational theater would limit the amount of air traffic that either side could maintain in the skies at one time. Third, PLAAF efforts would be hampered by command and control problems arising from its inexperience with massive air battles. RAND projects that, of the 967 aircraft China could field at any given time taking into account base capacity, command and control issues, and the limited airspace over Taiwan, the PLAAF force would consist of 631 fighters, including 73 Su-30, 116 Su-27, 100 J-10, and 342 J-8 fighters, as well as 336 bombers, including 40 JH-7, 200 Q-5, and 96 H-6 fighters. The ROCAF is projected to deploy 317 aircraft in this scenario, consisting of 132 F-16 fighters, 57 Mirage 2000 fighters, and 128 IDF fighters (see Tables 1 and 2).[6]

For simplicity, assume that the amount of fuel burned per sortie flown is equal to the aircraft’s maximum internal fuel load, which varies by aircraft model. What this means is that planes take off with their internal tanks 100 percent full and stay in the air as long as their fuel supplies allow, only returning to base when low fuel levels force them to do so. (This is a maximalist assumption that may slightly overestimate demand because, in practice, some aircraft may return to base with partially filled tanks if they use all of their ammunition before running low on fuel, or because combat damage necessitates repairs.) If instead a plane gets shot down during the mission, its fuel tank is also lost and thus effectively “used.”

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[1] R. L. DiNardo, Mechanized Juggernaut or Military Anachronism? Horses and the German Army of World War II (New York: Greenwood Press, 1991), pp. 3, 8, 52.

[2] Jerome B. Cohen, Japan's Economy in War and Reconstruction (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1949), pp. 143-144.

[3] Rosemary A. Kelanic, "Black Gold and Blackmail: The Politics of International Oil Coercion" (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Chicago, 2012).

[4] Charles L. Glaser, "Will China's Rise Lead to War?: Why Realism Does Not Mean Pessimism," Foreign Affairs vol. 90, no. 2 (2011)

[5] "Kuwait, US in Fuel Payment Row," al-Jazeera (English), March 16, 2005; Office of the Secretary of Defense, Report on Allied Contributions to the Common Defense (Washington, DC: United States Department of Defense, 1992), Appendix C.

[6] United States Department of Defense Office of the Secretary of Defense, "Military and Security Developments Involving the People's Republic of China 2012," (Washington, DC: Office of the Secretary of Defense, 2012), p. 29; David A. Shlapak and others, A Question of Balance: Political Context and Military Aspects of the China-Taiwan Dispute (Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 2009), p. 54; David A. Shlapak, David T. Orletsky, and Barry Wilson, Dire Strait? Military Aspects of the China-Taiwan Confrontation and Options for U.S. Policy (Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 2000), pp. 13-14. As of 2012, the PLAAF possessed only 10 H-6U air-to-air refueling planes. The Military Balance, vol. 112 (London: Institute for Strategic Studies, 2012), p. 238.