Thứ Năm, 14 tháng 5, 2020

As the Chinese military has continued its show of force across the South China Sea and to the Straits of Taiwan in recent months – from sailing its aircraft carriers or launching jet fighters close to Taiwanese airspace – the U.S. Air Force has also continued to track those movements quite carefully using a mix of aircraft and increasingly the use of drones.

This week FoxNews reported that B-1B Lancer bombers have been flying out of Guam in support of Indo-Pacific Command, and have been specifically conducting missions over the South China Sea. In early May the B-1Bs were deployed to the region to conduct bomber task force operations out of Andersen Air Base, Guam. Four bombers and approximately 200 airmen from the Bomb Squadron, 7th Bomb Wing, Dyess Air Force Base, Texas, were deployed to support Pacific Air Forces' training efforts with allies, partners, and joint forces. The bombers have been conducting strategic deterrence missions to reinforce the rules-based international order in the Indo-Pacific region.

The Air Force also conducted a rotation of 319th Reconnaissance Wing Det. 1's RQ-4 Global Hawk surveillance drones to Yokota Air Base, Japan to ensure continuous operations in support of the Indo-Pacific Command's reconnaissance requirements. The high-altitude, long-endurance remotely piloted and unarmed drones were moved from Andersen Air Base to Yokota as the Japanese base was seen to provide a more stable location from which the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) platform can operate – notably inclement weather such as typhoons that could hinder their readiness.

"Having alternate locations to execute our mission during seasons of inclement weather ensures our ability to continue executing U.S. Indo-Pacific Command and the Alliance reconnaissance requirements in support of the defense of Japan and to maintain international peace and security in the region," explained Lt. Col Ben Craycraft, 319th Operations Group Det. 1 commander via a statement from the Indo-Pacific Command.

"I am extremely excited to return to Yokota Air Base and continue to build our partnership with this extremely capable base and its supportive community," added Craycraft. "As in 2019, Yokota Air Base continues to provide the most ideal location for our operations due to the Kanto Plain's favorable weather and our ability to conduct operations without causing impacts to Yokota's flight operations or the local communities surrounding the base."

The Air Force is flying the B-1B bombers and the Global Hawk drones in the South China Sea and other areas within the Pacific theater as part of a broad strategy to sustain surveillance in the region.

The Global Hawk's mission is to support a broad spectrum of U.S. intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) collection capabilities; and to support joint combatant forces in worldwide peacetime, contingency and crisis operations. The drones can also be used for humanitarian assistance and disaster relief operations. The UAVs are designed to provide persistent, day and night, high-resolution, all-weather imagery of large geographic areas with an array of integrated sensors and cameras.

According to past reporting from The National Interest, the Air Force operates some 34 of the high-flying Global Hawks, and has announced plans to retire as many of 24 of those to replace them with a more advanced surveillance UAV platform – likely the stealthier RQ-180. In the meantime, the RQ-4 Global Hawk has been regularly rotated to Yokota Air Base.

"Yokota Air Base continues to demonstrate it is one of the most effective and capable bases to safely receive aircraft and personnel during annual rotations or during a crisis or contingency," explained Col. Otis Jones, 374th Airlift Wing commander. "Whether it's an unseen enemy like the coronavirus or more visible threats like typhoons, Team Yokota is ready to ensure our partners and allies can continue their mission from a reliable airfield."

Peter Suciu is a Michigan-based writer who has contributed to more than four dozen magazines, newspapers and websites. He is the author of several books on military headgear including A Gallery of Military Headdress, which is available on Amazon.com.

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An experimental version of a new cruise missile is fired from San Nicolas Island, Calif., last August, part of the Pentagon's effort to develop new intermediate range missiles that could be based in Asia. (Scott Howe / Department of Defense)

World

U.S. seeks to house missiles in the Pacific. Some allies don't want them

David S. Cloud

LA TimesJune 10, 2020, 3:00 AM PDT

https://www.yahoo.com/news/u-seeks-house-missiles-pacific-100024065.html

The governor of a Japanese territory where the Pentagon is thinking about basing missiles capable of threatening China has a message for the United States: Not on my island.

“I firmly oppose the idea,” said Gov. Denny Tamaki, the governor of Okinawa, in an email to The Times.

Officials in other Asian countries are also signaling they don’t want them.

But Pentagon planners aren’t backing down after the Trump administration withdrew last year from a 33-year-old arms-control treaty that barred U.S. land-based intermediate range missiles in Asia.

Senior officials now say that putting hundreds of American missiles with non-nuclear warheads in Asia would quickly and cheaply shift the balance of power in the western Pacific back in the United States' favor amid growing Pentagon concern that China’s own expanding arsenal of missiles and other military capabilities threaten U.S. bases in the region and have emboldened Beijing to menace U.S. allies in Asia.

The missile plan is the centerpiece of a planned buildup of U.S. military power in Asia projected to consume tens of billions of dollars in the defense budget over the next decade, a major shift in Pentagon spending priorities away from the Middle East.

But it also highlights the complex relationship between the U.S and its Asian allies, many of whom feel increasingly threatened by China but are reluctant to back new U.S. military measures that might provoke Beijing, which has built the biggest navy in the world in the last decade.

Australia and the Philippines publicly ruled out hosting American missiles when the Trump administration first floated the idea last year. South Korea is also considered an unlikely location, current and former officials say.

In Japan, the decision on whether to allow U.S. missiles on its territory will be made by the central government in Tokyo. Gov. Tamaki said officials at the Pentagon and in Tokyo have told him there are no definite plans to put missiles on Okinawa. But Tamaki isn’t reassured.

With a Japanese mother and an American father who served with the Marines on Okinawa before abandoning the family, Tamaki personifies the complex relationship between the U.S. and its allies in Asia. He was elected two years ago after pledging to oppose expansion of the already-substantial U.S. military presence on the island.

More than half of the 50,000 U.S. military personnel stationed in Japan are in Okinawa, most concentrated at a Marine base surrounded by residential areas in the largest city. Opposition to the 70-year-old U.S. military presence has sparked local protests for years, which would likely intensify if there were a move to base missiles there.

“If there is such a plan, I can easily imagine fierce opposition from Okinawa residents,” Tamaki said.

For the last year, the Pentagon has been testing several new types of short and intermediate range missiles — those with ranges up to 3,400 miles — including a ballistic missile that could be placed in Guam, a U.S. territory, and mobile missiles carried on trucks.

The first of the new weapons could be in operation within two years, though no decision has been announced about where they will be based. Similar missiles are now carried on U.S. warships and planes based in Asia, but there are no land-based systems.

U.S. officials say that many allies are privately supportive of the missile plan and may come around to permitting them on their territory but don’t want to provoke opposition from Beijing and their own public before decisions are on the table.

The U.S. has a defense treaty with Japan, as it does with South Korea, the Philippines and Australia. Taiwan is not a formal ally but has close, unofficial defense ties with Washington.

“We are very attentive to our allies’ concerns, and we recognized their political challenges,” said a senior defense official, who agreed to discuss Pentagon planning if he was not identified. “Everything that’s said in the media is not necessarily what’s said behind closed doors.”

To lessen the political opposition, the U.S. could rotate missile batteries in and out of locations around the region or place them in strategic locations without publicly disclosing it.

"It wouldn't make much sense to announce plans now, which would stoke Chinese anger and possibly play into the domestic politics," said Randy Schriver, who was a senior Pentagon official responsible for Asia until his resignation last year.

A decision to go ahead in Asia would intensify an arms race between the region’s two biggest powers whose relations — already tense over President Trump’s confrontational trade agenda and Chinese President Xi Jinping’s hawkish policies — have nosedived since the coronavirus outbreak.

“It’s naïve and dangerous,” said Alexandra Bell, a former Obama administration arms control official and a critic of deploying U.S. missiles. “Instead of looking at how we can prevent a full-out arms race, that’s our opening salvo?” added Bell, a senior policy director at the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation in Washington.

Putting land-based missiles in Asia capable of attacking China is not a new strategy.

In the 1950s and 1960s, the U.S. kept them at bases across the region, including in Okinawa, where hundreds of nuclear-armed warheads were stored secretly for decades even though Japan’s constitution prohibited the presence of nuclear weapons on its territory.

The missiles were gradually taken out of service in the 1960s and 1970s, due to budget cuts and a shift in U.S. strategy away from defense of the region focused on nuclear weapons. In 1987, the Reagan administration signed an arms control treaty that prohibited the U.S. and the Soviet Union (and later Russia) from deploying any land-based intermediate range missiles, including in Asia.

China was not a signatory, leaving it free to build up its missile arsenal.

The Trump administration withdrew from the treaty last year after accusing Russia of developing new land-based missiles that violated its terms. The exit opened the way for the Pentagon to consider reintroducing ground-launched missiles in Asia.

With mobile missiles around the region, the U.S. could pose an even bigger challenge for China, forcing it to hunt for hundreds of launchers capable of targeting its planes, ships and bases, strategists say.

“Ground-based missiles aren’t some kind silver bullet,” said Eric Sayers, a former consultant to U.S. commanders in the Pacific and a fellow at the Center for New American Security, a Washington think tank. “But they are a way in the near term ... to create dilemmas for the [People's Liberation Army] planners.”

Although the risk of large-scale conflict with China seems low, tensions have continued to ratchet up over Beijing’s crackdown in Hong Kong, its military maneuvers near Taiwan, its border dispute with India and its offshore maritime claims in the East China Sea and South China Sea.

Nearly a quarter of world trade travels through the South China Sea, making the contest between Beijing and Washington over control of its sea lanes and rich resources especially tense and certain to continue, no matter who wins the U.S. presidential election in November.

The U.S. Navy for decades dominated the “first island chain,” as strategists call the area of the western Pacific stretching from Japan to Taiwan to the Philippines that fell within America’s defense umbrella after World War II.

But American reliance on bases, warships and airfields in the region has become increasingly risky, officials and analysts say.

China has developed its own missiles, sophisticated radars and anti-satellite weapons as well as a growing fleet of warships and submarines in recent decades that could threaten American bases and other targets early in a conflict, said Collin Koh, a research fellow in Asian maritime security at the Rajatnam School of International Studies in Singapore.

China’s People’s Liberation Army can project significant firepower on U.S. and allied military installations in the western Pacific and “threaten to overwhelm” American forces “in times of armed conflict,” Koh said.

The Chinese weapons in many cases have ranges that exceed those on U.S. warships, though the U.S. retains a significant advantage in attack submarines and in advanced fighters and bombers armed with cruise missiles that can be fired from long distances.

"Their capability and their reach has created vulnerabilities for our legacy basing structure," said the defense official, who agreed to discuss U.S. planning on the condition that he not be identified.

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World

The Covert Art of China’s Military Activity in the East China Sea

Michael Auslin

The National InterestJune 8, 2020, 1:26 PM PDT

https://www.yahoo.com/news/covert-art-china-military-activity-202600856.html

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[This is adapted from Michael R. Auslin, Asia’s New Geopolitics: Essays on Reshaping the Indo-Pacific (Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, 2020)].

Faced with China’s expansion in East Asia over the past decade, U.S. policymakers have attempted to reassure allies over American commitments, maintain a constant presence in the waters of the Indo-Pacific region, and ensure a superiority of U.S. force in the region should an armed conflict break out. Yet bedeviled by distance, global commitments, and an increasingly capable Chinese military, Washington risks being forced over time into a predominantly reactive stance, attempting to still the shifting tides of the balance of power until the dangers associated with maintaining its traditional position become too onerous to accept.

The question of upholding both American promises and interests is not a light one. As Walter Lippmann admonished in U.S. Foreign Policy: Shield of the Republic (1943), foreign commitments must be brought into balance with national power. Writing, like the geopolitical analyst Nicholas Spykman, during the dark days of World War II, he asserted that an imbalance was a direct cause of war. Lippmann scathingly faulted U.S. foreign policy in the Pacific from 1899 to 1942 with failing to recognize the imbalance between U.S. commitments and its power in relation to the rise of Japan. Since 1945, however, except for a limited challenge by the Soviet Union, America has not had a credible challenger in the Pacific. Not since Vietnam nearly a half-century ago—which was the last time it brought localized power to bear on the Asiatic rimland—has Washington had to ensure that its Asian commitments and its power were in balance.

America now faces a credible challenger for local control. This challenger may not yet be able to defeat the full force of U.S. power today, but it is gaining in power. More importantly, that challenger has identified control of the Asiatic Mediterranean as its goal and is acting to permanently change the geopolitical balance, such as through the island-building campaign. Thus, Washington is at risk of failing to meet this challenge in two respects: in ensuring that its commitments and its power in the region are in balance, and in appropriately recognizing the full scope of the challenge and its holistic nature.

The concern in Washington over China’s capabilities and intentions is a belated recognition of these facts. Policymakers are now increasingly worried that American power is not commensurate to U.S. commitments, especially if the commitment is understood as the continued stability of the marginal seas and ensuring that no one power controls them. From that perspective, Washington’s alliance structures ironically may be secondary to the primacy of control of the marginal seas; losing that control would make fulfilling alliance commitments even more difficult or costly.

Effectively responding to China’s challenge requires adopting a larger geostrategic picture of the entire Indo-Pacific region and America’s position in it. To do so, it is useful to exhume a concept discussed briefly during the 1940s: that of the integrated strategic space of East Asia’s “inner seas,” or what was called the “Asiatic Mediterranean.” The utility of this concept will make clear that the geopolitical challenge the United States and its allies and partners face is an emerging struggle for control for the entire common maritime space of eastern Asia. It is helpful briefly to review the evolution of geopolitical thought in relation to this region if Washington is to adopt such an approach.

The academic field of geopolitics began with Halford Mackinder and his oft-quoted, oft-misunderstood “heartland” thesis. Mackinder’s famous 1904 article, “The geographical pivot of history,” in fact discusses only briefly the idea of the heartland, essentially steppe Eurasia, as the ultimate goal of any world power. Mackinder may have written “whoever controls the heartland controls the world,” but his real insight was into the struggle over the “rimlands” that both guard and give access to the heartland. The rimlands properly include the European peninsula of the Eurasian landmass, as well as the littoral areas of Asia and the Middle East. As Wess Mitchell and Jakub Grygiel have recently reminded us, it is the rimlands that both Vladimir Putin and China seem to be trying to contest today.

Four decades after Mackinder’s original thesis, during the darkest days of World War II, the Yale geopolitical thinker Nicholas Spykman returned to the rimland thesis and further modified it to take into account recent great power warfare in the twentieth century. In a posthumously published book, entitled The Geography of the Peace (1944), Spykman provided the insight that it is in the rimlands that the real struggle for mastery has taken place. More importantly, he argued that attaining control of the “marginal” or “inner” seas adjacent to the rimlands, bordered by the offshore “outer crescent” of island nations like Great Britain and Japan, was the prerequisite to dominating the rimlands. Thus, according to Spykman, the most crucial waterways for global power were the North Sea and the Mediterranean in Europe, the Persian Gulf and littoral waters of the western Indian Ocean in the Middle East, and the East and South China Seas, along with the Yellow Sea, in Asia.

Spykman’s claims put a new twist on Alfred Thayer Mahan’s assertion that control of the high seas was the great goal of the maritime powers. Instead of looking at the vast global maritime highway, like Mahan, Spykman instead concentrated on the areas where the majority of the global population lived, where production was most concentrated, and where trade was most intensely conducted. In a 1943 Foreign Affairs article, “The round world and the winning of the peace,” Mackinder himself had already modified his earlier position. Mackinder, like Spykman, now emphasized the importance of the rimlands and their marginal seas. The great naval battles of World War II, except for the Battle of the Atlantic, the Coral Sea, and Midway, were in fact fought largely in the inner seas of Europe and Asia.

Control of the inner seas was not a new military concept. It explains the decades-long war waged by the British Royal Navy against Napoleon’s ships in the English Channel and French littoral waters, as well as the Imperial Japanese Navy’s reduction of the Chinese and Russian fleets in the Yellow Sea in both 1894 and 1904, giving it control of access to Korea and China. As both these examples also point out, the struggle for control of the inner seas is often the first step to a larger contest over the rimlands, and this maritime-based competition can last years before a move is made on land or the issue is decided by opposing armies.

Technological advances since the Great War had come fully to fruition by the 1940s, and Spykman struggled to expand his thesis to incorporate the most modern type of combat: aerial warfare. Command of the skies and the ability to effect devastating results on the ground from the air only became a feasible military capability in World War II. The ferocious aerial warfare of the Battle of Britain was one example of the struggle for the inner seas being expanded to the realm of aerospace. Indeed, due to the limitations of the 1940s-era aircraft, aerial warfare was almost wholly restricted to the littoral and rimlands regions. The objective, however, remained the same: control the maritime/aerial commons that give access to the rimlands.

Yet World War II was the last major war where command of the sea, whether the high or inner seas, was a strategic necessity. In the post–World War II era, the United States dominated the oceans and most of the skies, except over the Soviet Bloc. The new era required a new geopolitical concept, and Spykman’s thesis was modified by the Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington. Prior Eurasian struggles for mastery had taken place among Eurasian powers. Now, with the balance of global military might be held by a nation in a different hemisphere, how could the idea of maintaining geopolitical control fit traditional models?

Huntington provided an answer in his well-known 1954 article in the U.S. Naval Institute’s Proceedings. “National Policy and the Transoceanic Navy,” recapped the eras of U.S. naval strategy and argued that, in the modern era, the power of the U.S. Navy would be employed over trans-oceanic range, but for the same goals. Huntington presciently saw that naval power in the post–World War II era would be used almost solely for effecting land-based struggles in the rimland (and he could have made the same argument about the U.S. Air Force). Huntington’s insight helped explain Macarthur’s landing at Inchon in 1950, U.S. carrier-based air operations against North Vietnam, the air and amphibious operations of the 1991 Gulf War, and the Iraq War two decades later. No longer was naval power concerned with command of the sea, since the United States had it uncontested, except perhaps in the submarine race with the Soviets during the Cold War.

Today, America has lost a conscious understanding of the strategic importance of the inner seas, at a moment when it faces the greatest challenge to its control of them since 1945. Washington focuses serially on one area when a problem crops up, and then returns to a posture of benign neglect after taking short-term tactical action. It should instead acknowledge the matter bluntly: China is contesting for control, not of the high seas like Germany in World War I or Japan in World War II, but of the marginal seas and skies of Asia, even while the United States remains dominant on the high seas of the Pacific.

Acknowledging this fact not only clarifies our understanding of Chinese military activity in the region, but it also maps out the area under risk: the Asiatic Mediterranean. The integrated waters of the Sea of Japan, the Yellow Sea, and the East China Sea and South China Sea, are as vital to the history, identity, and trade of eastern Asia as the Mediterranean is to Europe. While it is geographically a stretch to connect the Asiatic Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean, the passageways between the two remain among the world’s most vital waterways, through which one-third of global trade passes in the form of over seventy thousand ships per year moving into the Asiatic Mediterranean. The great factories and workshops of China, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Vietnam and others, on which the global trading network depends, are located along the littoral of the Asiatic Mediterranean. It forms the hinge between maritime Eurasia and the entire Western Hemisphere. To return to Spykman’s formulation, control of the Asiatic Mediterranean means control of Asia.

The challenge posed by China is thus two-fold. It threatens the maritime freedom of the Asiatic Mediterranean, and thus ultimately of Asia’s productive and trading capacities. It also is positioning China to have a preponderance of power that can be brought against Asia’s rimlands, as well as against what Spykman called the “outer crescent,” which, in Asia, includes Japan, the Philippines, Indonesia, and Australia. These rimlands and the outer crescent, it should be remembered, are uniquely comprised of continental, peninsular, and archipelagic landforms. Japan’s control of Korea and Formosa (Taiwan) in the 1930s facilitated its invasion of China, which found its greatest success in the rimland, and only became enmeshed in a quagmire when it attempted to extend towards China’s heartland or out into the trackless Pacific.

China today is attaining the capability to threaten Japan and Southeast Asia, not solely from the homeland, but from its expeditionary bases in the inner seas. From this perspective, the air defense identification zone that Beijing established in the East China Sea in November 2013 is another element in its attempt to establish control over the inner skies of Asia. Only by conceiving of the strategic environment in this expansive, integrated sense—as the Asiatic Mediterranean—can we fully understand, appreciate, and respond to China’s long-term challenge.

America needs to recover its appreciation of the strategic importance of Asia’s inner seas and rimlands if it is to come up with a realistic strategy to preserve both its power and its influence in the Indo-Pacific region. Losing one part of the Asiatic Mediterranean will certainly cause allies and partners in other parts to consider either severing ties with the United States or declaring neutrality, so as to preserve their own freedom of action. A geopolitically isolated United States is an operationally weakened United States. Being pushed out of one sea will require the U.S. military to expend national treasure to fight its way back in. The better course of action is to keep the Asiatic Mediterranean whole, balanced, and stable. Only then can America be certain that the vital rimlands of Asia will remain free from conflict. To paraphrase Benjamin Franklin, the Asiatic Mediterranean must certainly hang together, or it will assuredly hang separately.

Michael Auslin is the Payson J. Treat Distinguished Research Fellow in Contemporary Asia at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. His latest book is Asia’s New Geopolitics: Essays on Reshaping the Indo-Pacific.

Image: Reuters

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World

Philippine defense chief flies to disputed island amid feud

JIM GOMEZ

Associated PressJune 9, 2020, 3:14 AM PDT

https://www.yahoo.com/news/philippine-defense-chief-flies-disputed-101419405.html

Philippines South China Sea

In this handout photo provided by the Department of National Defense PAS, Defense Secretary Delfin Lorenzana, 4th from right, and the other military officials are welcomed by residents wearing masks during a short ceremony at the newly built beach ramp at the Philippine-claimed island of Pag-asa, also known as Thitu, in the disputed South China Sea on Tuesday June 9, 2020. The Philippine defense chief and top military officials flew to a disputed island in the South China Sea Tuesday to inaugurate a beach ramp built to allow the "full-blast" development of the far-flung territory but would likely infuriate China. (Department of National Defense PAS via AP)

MANILA, Philippines (AP) — The Philippine defense chief and top military officials flew to a disputed island in the South China Sea on Tuesday to inaugurate a beach ramp built to allow the “full-blast” development of the territory in a move likely to infuriate China.

Defense Secretary Delfin Lorenzana brought journalists to witness the ribbon-cutting ceremony on the island, internationally called Thitu, in what he said was a milestone in efforts to make the island, long occupied by Filipino forces and fishermen, more livable without militarizing it.

The island, which Filipinos call Pag-asa, or hope, lies near one of China’s man-made islands in the Spratlys, the most hotly contested area of the South China Sea.

Lorenzana said the Philippines has the right to develop its nine occupied islands as other claimants have done. He played down the prospect of a hostile Chinese reaction, citing cozier ties between Manila and Beijing under President Rodrigo Duterte.

“This is a disputed area,” Lorenzana told journalists on the island in remarks provided by the Department of National Defense. “The Chinese have said that they will not attack us so we’re safe here.”

The beach ramp will allow Philippine navy and cargo ships to dock and unload construction materials and heavy equipment for new projects, including the repair of a seawater-eroded airstrip. Military barracks, more civilian homes, a school, an ice plant for fishermen, solar and diesel power supplies and a radio station for weather reports are also planned, Lorenzana said.

A fishermen’s shelter is being completed with plans for it to be inaugurated on Friday when the Philippines marks its Independence Day, he said.

With the beach ramp now usable, “we can go full blast,” the defense chief said.

China, the Philippines, Vietnam and Malaysia have had increasingly tense territorial spats in the region in recent years after China turned seven disputed reefs into missile-protected island bases, including three with runways. Taiwan and Brunei also have claims in the busy waterway. Indonesia is not officially involved in the conflicts but has had confrontations with Chinese fishermen and coast guard vessels which it has accused of encroaching into the Natuna Sea near the disputed waters.

Lorenzana said the government has no plan to militarize the island by arming it with missiles, cannons or other heavy weapons.

Three nearby sand bars collectively called Sandy Cay have become a new front in the disputes after China accused the Philippines of attempting to construct structures there a few years ago. Since then, flotillas of Chinese fishing boats and coast guard and navy ships have kept a close watch on Sandy Cay, sparking protests from the Philippines.

In April, the Philippines protested China’s establishment of two districts to administer the Spratlys and another group of islands and reefs. The Philippines also lodged a protest over a Chinese navy ship’s aiming of its weapons control radar at a Philippine navy ship in mid-February. The radar locks weapons on a target prior to an actual attack, although the Chinese navy ship did not fire, the Philippine navy said.

China has denied it aimed a weapon at the Philippine ship, a Philippine official said, but it has continued to warn foreign military ships and aircraft, including those of the United States, from approaching its island bases.

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World

America Is Using Its Navy to Deter China Around Taiwan and the Spratly Islands

Kris Osborn

The National InterestJune 8, 2020, 1:23 PM PDT

https://www.yahoo.com/news/america-using-navy-deter-china-202300892.html

Click here to read the full original article.

The U.S. Navy has conducted a Taiwan Strait transit to “demonstrate the U.S. commitment to a free and open IndoPacific,” according to a statement from Naval Sea Systems Command.

Navy destroyer USS Russel conducted the transit in the area, which borders the areas just North of the much-disputed South China Sea. Recent Chinese maneuvers, such as moving aircraft carriers into areas of potential threat to Taiwan, got the attention of U.S. and allied international observers, sparking public comments regarding the need for peaceful navigation and non-provocative exercises.

“The U.S. Navy will continue to fly, sail and operate anywhere international law allows,” the NAVSEA twitter post states.

While stated in a non-inflammatory way, the Navy transit does appear as a clear message to Chinese maneuvers in the region to remind the world of its commitment to Taiwan’s independence. Clearly, the Navy does not wish to be aggressive or provocative, but does want to express its resolve to challenge or counter Chinese activities it may deem somewhat threatening. While being on the periphery of the South China Sea, sensitivity regarding waterways near Taiwan to pertain to the broader, long-standing tensions regarding the South China Sea. While concern has never fully disappeared in recent months, it is increasing and moving back to the forefront in light of U.S.- Chinese tensions surrounding the Coronavirus.

The area in question is a group of highly disputed islands south of China in the South China Sea called the Spratly Islands. The small islands in the area, some of which are claimed by China, Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia and Taiwan, are rich in resources and of strategic geographical importance in the Pacific region.

Pentagon officials have, for quite some time, widely criticized an ongoing Chinese effort to erect artificial structures nearby or on top of its claimed island territories in the Spratly Islands. Called “land reclamation” by the Pentagon, the activity has added more than 2,000 acres to island territories claimed by China. In response to what the Pentagon regards as inaccurate and irresponsible claims, they have made the statement that there will at times be Freedom of Navigation Operations (FONOPs) to merely demonstrate that the U.S. military will fly, sail and operate wherever it chooses to according to international law. The FONOPs are explained as a peaceful way to take issue with what the Pentagon calls aggressive or expansionist behavior by the Chinese.

According to a United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea—an international treaty supported by, but not yet formally joined by the U.S. —2-miles off the coast of a given territory is considered to be sovereign waters owned by the respective country. Therefore, on several occasions in recent years, U.S. Navy ships have ventured into a 12-mile vicinity of some South China Sea territories which, according to the U.S. and its allies, are erroneously claimed by China. These exercises have, in several instances, prompted immediate condemnation from Chinese authorities.

The ongoing “land reclamation” by China in the area appears to be a rather transparent attempt by China to reinforce and bolster extended territorial claims in the South China Sea.

However, the Law of the Sea Convention does not recognize artificial or man-made structures and legitimate island territories to be claimed. Therefore, the U.S and its Pacific allies do not support or agree with China’s aggressive territorial claims. In fact, citing the definition of islands articulated in the Law of the Sea Convention, Pentagon officials do not recognize the artificial structures as islands—but instead, refer to the effort as “land reclamation.” Under the U.N. Law of the Sea convention, negotiated in the 1980s and updated in the 1990s, an island is defined as a “naturally formed area of land above the water at high tide.” Also, article 60 of the U.N. Convention says, “artificial islands are not entitled to territorial seas.”

Kris Osborn is the new Defense Editor for the National Interest. Osborn previously served at the Pentagon as a Highly Qualified Expert with the Office of the Assistant Secretary of the Army—Acquisition, Logistics & Technology. Osborn has also worked as an anchor and on-air military specialist at national TV networks. He has appeared as a guest military expert on Fox News, MSNBC, The Military Channel, and The History Channel. He also has a Masters Degree in Comparative Literature from Columbia University.

Image: Reuters

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World

Does America Have Enough Access in the Western Pacific?

Blake Herzinger, Elee Wakim

The National InterestJune 5, 2020, 5:00 PM PDT

https://www.yahoo.com/news/does-america-enough-access-western-000000990.html

Click here to read the full original article.

“Having therefore no foreign establishments, either colonial or military, the ships of war of the United States, in war, will be like land birds, unable to fly far from their own shores. To provide resting places for them, where they can coal and repair, would be one of the first duties of a government proposing to itself the development of the power of the nation at sea.”–Alfred Thayer Mahan, The Influence of Seapower Upon History, 1660-1783

Since before the completion of the transcontinental railroad, the United States has determined that “American security, economic prosperity, and values would be fundamentally put at risk if a rival hegemonic power dominated the Pacific.” The United States has ensured this end by various ways and means since the defeat of the Spanish Empire in 1898. Given the vast distances between continental North America and the western Pacific littorals, the United States’ ability to project power and influence is necessarily based upon expeditionary maritime capabilities and globe-spanning military infrastructure. The cornerstone of this power projection complex in the western Pacific is forward deployed military forces, which are in turn enabled by the availability of proximate and friendly basing in theater. However, the ability of the United States to sustainably conduct expeditionary operations in the strategic chokepoints and littorals of Asia could crumble in the absence of the allied access it has come to rely on.

Access to the local, dual-use infrastructure the United States enjoys today is the result of years of sustained investment of all elements of American power to align mutually interested states into a network that allows the United States to project power from their shores. In recent years, these investments have been diffused across a broad number of states, such that the mortar is crumbling under a lack of recapitalization. This critically enabling influence of forward partners is waning as the PRC rapidly expands its influence, turning the political will of forward allies into strategic choke points of another sort.

The U.S. is therefore forced to consider whether those locations it relies on to sustain its overseas presence – whether by formal agreement or informal association – would still be available in the event of a military confrontation between the United States and China. How would this sudden loss of access affect how the U.S. fights as a force and projects power into the western Pacific?

While there are many detractors who will lampoon the proposition that the U.S. would ever be deserted by its overseas partners – perhaps citing years of historic partnership and common interest – it is important to ask if the U.S. is willing to bet the farm on this untested and assailable assumption. If not, what must the United States do in order to hedge against the loss of its heretofore unchallenged access to the western Pacific littorals and attendant infrastructure?

Access for What?

The American military presence in the Indo-Pacific largely reflects the vestiges of the Cold War and has its roots in the exigencies of conflicts ranging from World War Two to Vietnam. The United States has military relationships with nearly every country within the First Island Chain, ranging from limited partnerships to full military alliances. U.S. security cooperation plans keep most of those relationships on ever-increasing trajectories of investment, but this may be more a function of inertia than strategic acumen. American joint doctrine makes clear that the creation of access for U.S. forces is one of the three reasons for conducting security cooperation operations. This investment has created an unparalleled network of ports and airfields capable of supporting U.S. expeditionary operations and logistics in unchallenged environments (see Table 1).

Table 1: U.S. Military access arrangements among South China Sea littoral states
Country	Acquisition & Cross Servicing Agreement (ACSA)	Hosts U.S. Base or Rotational Deployments	Routine Base Access
Brunei	x
Cambodia
Indonesia	x
Malaysia	x
Philippines*	x	x	x
Singapore	x	x	x
Taiwan
Thailand	x		x
Vietnam

*In question after cancellation of U.S.-PHL Visiting Forces Agreement

As the United States and China continue to jostle for position, allies and partners are pulled in separate directions. The long-relied upon American security guarantee is confronted by China’s growing military and economic strength, and geographic proximity. Despite the deep history and genuine bonhomie between the U.S. and its security partners, this confrontation jeopardizes the carefully-laid peacetime network built over decades, which must be carefully regarded as great power competition in the Indo-Pacific continues to intensify.

For those that might decry this argument as alarmist or discounting years of partnership, consider the state of the U.S.-Philippines alliance. Linked by a Mutual Defense Treaty, the two states’ militaries have stood prepared to fight shoulder-to-shoulder for decades. In February of this year, Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte announced his intention to terminate the Visiting Forces Agreement that, in large part, undergirds that same alliance. The U.S. expectation of access, a key planning consideration, evaporated overnight.

Looking back three decades, we see the U.S. military evicted from its Philippine bases in Clark and Subic Bay in a similar vein. President Duterte has been vocal since his election regarding his intention to rebalance Philippines’ foreign relations, with the subtext being a move closer to China. It is easily posited that this decision is largely motivated by the expectation of economic benefit and uncritical security assistance. And this is coming from one of the supposedly closest U.S. allies in Southeast Asia.

What then of the defense partnership with Thailand, where the U.S. has long-relied upon the U-Tapao Royal Thai Navy Airfield to support combat operations, from Vietnam to Afghanistan? Thailand’s military is now led by openly pro-China officers and their branches have recently concluded a number of high-profile purchases of major weapons platforms from China. Should the U.S. and China enter into hostilities, would Thailand offer the use of its strategic airfield with the knowledge that it might be severing ties to the source of its own military equipment? This is, of course, only the military aspect. China is also Thailand’s largest trading partner.

If the depth of U.S investments and shared interests with its closest Southeast Asian allies are crumbling during peacetime, what then does this portend for access with less formally aligned states during open conflict with the PRC? In the face of mounting evidence to the contrary, should the U.S. government continue to rely on the prospect of unfettered access to logistical support and conduct offensive operations, as it has for the past 30 years? Or is it setting up the possibility of the Joint Force having to play a scratch game as its forward elements are ejected by non-belligerents at the outset of a conflict?

All Dressed Up with Nowhere to Go

Spanning from critical repair and replenishment functions to overflight permissions and divert airfields, the premise of access in nations such as Singapore, the Philippines, Thailand, Japan, Korea, and elsewhere is crucial to American operational plans. This loss will reduce the force generation capacity in theater, constrict avenues of approach, constrain operational flexibility, render the forward logistics chain brittle, and introduce friction into the crucial opening hours of a conflict as American forces potentially scramble to adjust to a new, unpracticed reality.

One of the first and most likely casualties to a restriction on access is the loss of crucial airfields. These airfields enable everything from air dominance operations and anti-submarine warfare, to battlefield awareness and transportation of personnel and material. While their loss does not mean that the United States and coalition partners will be unable to conduct air operations within the First Island Chain, both the number of sorties and on-station time will be significantly reduced as aircraft have to fly from more distant locales. This in turn will strain the U.S. aerial refueling capability, which will be hard pressed to sustain long range operations as well as facilitate reinforcement transfer to the theater. Further, it raises the specter of increased losses, as damaged aircraft or those without return tanker support will be without a proximate place to land. Finally, it will curtail the effectiveness of the forward arming and refueling points (FARPs), which are currently touted by the Joint Force as a way of conducting distributed and short duration aviation operations from non-fixed points.

Singapore offers a multi-faceted case study. Viewed by many as the Southeast Asian partner closest to the United States, Singapore hosts the U.S. Navy command responsible for organizing logistics operations across the U.S. Seventh Fleet, as well as theheadquarters which controls U.S. Navy Littoral Combat Ships in the region. As a related aside, the U.S. military presence in Singapore began when Singapore offered its Sembawang facility to the U.S. Navy when it was evicted from its bases in the Philippines in 1993. U.S. ships today are rotationally deployed to Singapore’s Sembawang port facility, and the Changi Naval Base was expanded for the express purpose of accommodating U.S. nuclear-powered aircraft carriers. U.S. P-8A routinely fly from Singapore’s Paya Lebar Air Base.

However, Singapore’s Prime Minister has already warned the U.S. publicly that forcing a choice between supporting the U.S. or China would be “very painful,” pointing out that, notwithstanding Singapore’s partnership with the United States, its economy is far more reliant on China. Singapore prides itself on charting a balanced course between the two competing superpowers and in the event of a U.S.-China war, its preferred position would be neutrality. The port, airfield, and logistics support currently enjoyed by the United States would place Singapore’s domestic infrastructure at unacceptable risk during a major conflict with China. Unless Singapore’s interests were directly affected by this hypothetical war, it seems very likely that U.S. forces would politely be asked to relocate, and by a partner proximate to one of the most significant chokepoints in the region.

It is not too much of a stretch to imagine that non-belligerents, under PRC pressure and having curtailed access to their territory, might conceivably restrict permission to overfly their country as well. This would severely limit the avenues of approach of air power and reinforcements flowing into theater as they are forced to detour around the airspace of erstwhile partners. This in turn would allow the PRC to concentrate its forces – backed up by a mainland-basedreconnaissance strike complex (see Figure 1) – on these narrow vectors, such as the Luzon and Singapore straits. While coalition aircraft could overfly this previously friendly territory, to do so might invite armed challenge in response to violations of the nation in question’s sovereignty. It also risks poisoning the narrative concerning the justification of the conflict.

The issues attendant with the loss of access are further compounded by an insufficient amount of long-range munitions. While the United States plans to buy an additional 1,625 long range “missiles with ship-killing potential” between Fiscal Year 2020 and 2025, it has only acquired approximately 1,050 weapons since Fiscal Year 2011. Comprising the Long Range Anti-Ship Missile (LRASM), Standard Missile-6 (SM-6), and Maritime Strike Tomahawk (MST), the latter two weapons are multi-purpose, and consequently may be in high demand across a globe spanning force. When considered in the context of a dearth of available shipboard launchers, the potential loss of proximate locations for USMCexpeditionary advanced bases, a lack of a robust mining capability, a fragile logistics chain, and an inability to conduct forward reloading of VLS, the reduced sortie rate induced by the loss of access becomes very problematic indeed. While the Defense Department is working to address many of the identified issues, they are still extant today, raising the specter of the United States being unable to achieve its stated goal of deterrence by denial.

Where Do We (Figuratively) Go From Here?

If we accept the premise that access to forward fighting positionsmay be curtailed in the event of a conflict with the People’s Republic of China for foreign political or diplomatic reasons, then the United States must make prompt investments to maintain credible deterrence. While the Pacific is primarily a maritime theater – indeed, as Bryan McGrath wrote, “if it is […] the desire of the United States not to be displaced, American seapower will have to shoulder a disproportionate share of the load” – the response will require investments across the Joint Force. While some of these investments are already being made, not all are being undertaken with sufficient alacrity or scale, and are likely to be high on the divestment list in the event of declining defense budgets. Many of these initiatives – from sealift recapitalization to additional defenses for Guam – have been talked about for years, during which little to no action was taken. If the United States is to maintain a credible deterrent posture vis-a-vis the PRC, investments must be made in this “priority theater” promptly and at scale. They will not only hedge against a loss of access, but may sufficiently reassure regional partners to ward off such an outcome.

The United States will have to examine the difficult prospect of violating the sovereignty of non-belligerents in a time of war. There may well come a point when the Joint Force will have to seize key positions along the South China Sea periphery – for example, in the Philippines, Indonesia, or Malaysia – for short durations in order to facilitate operations. These operations could conceivably span from landing covering forces for chokepoint transits, or establishment of sea denial positions, to replenishment of naval vessels in calm bays or setting up FARPs in austere locales. This introduces a number of issues, including raising the risk of severe reputational damage – possibly poisoning popular will against the U.S. war effort – and the prospect of the violated party’s forces challenging these temporary occupations with force. Preparing informal access arrangements, messaging narratives, and seizure CONOPs will be vital to achieving temporary operational access when it is otherwise denied. A unified joint Foreign Area Officer team will need to stand prepared to broker these agreements when the time comes.

Japan’s invasion of the Malayan peninsula in 1941 perfectly illustrates the consequence of the failure to prepare for this scenario. Britain, unwilling to violate Thai neutrality, allowed the Imperial Japanese Army to conduct a mostly-unmolested amphibious landing which would lead to the fall of Malaya 73 days later.

Conclusion

Hedging against the risk of an unexpected and unceremonious eviction from forward positions at the onset of major war is not something to be dismissed because it is an inconvenient scenario, nor does the response require particularly imaginative solutions. It requires the expansion of existing or in-development capabilities to a capacity capable of supporting large-scale expeditionary operations by the Joint Force. Indeed, there are many commonalities between what has been discussed, and the effects of a first strike on U.S. forward positions by the PLA’s Rocket and Air Forces, namely the loss of enabling shore-based infrastructure. The key difference is that the Joint Force will not be able to rely on surging temporary forces – ISR, logistics, strike, and others – onto alternate or austere sites on the territory of allies and partners in certain scenarios.

The U.S. must prepare, today, for the possibility of a zero access environment in a western Pacific contingency to preserve military options and avoid losing a conflict before the first shots are fired. Failure to prepare may leave the United States in a situation akin to that of Rear Admiral Dewey’s fleet in 1898 when they were forced to depart from neutral Hong Kong “without a home base or reliable source of coal in wartime,” essentially to conquer or die. This time, the away team won’t be facing a decrepit Spanish fleet, but the most formidable military challenger in a generation.

Blake Herzinger (@BDHerzinger) is a civilian Indo-Pacific defense policy specialist and U.S. Navy Reserve officer. The views expressed in this article are those of the author alone and do not represent those of his civilian employer, the U.S. Navy, the Department of Defense, or the U.S. government.

Elee Wakim (@EleeWakim) is a surface warfare officer in the U.S. Navy Reserve and a Presidential Management Fellow. The views expressed here are his own and do not represent those of the U.S. Navy, the Department of Defense, or the U.S. government.

Their article first appeared at the Center for International Maritime Security on June 2.

Image: Vietnamese Navy honour guard march to take position prior to the arrival of U.S. President Barack Obama for a welcoming ceremony at the Presidential Palace in Hanoi, Vietnam May 23, 2016. REUTERS/Hoang Dinh Nam/Pool.

Click here to read the full original article.

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Business Insider

In a war with China, the US Navy's warships might not be the first target

insider@insider.com (Christopher Woody)

Business InsiderJune 5, 2020, 3:14 PM PDT

https://www.yahoo.com/news/war-china-us-navys-warships-221422509.html

US Navy/Photographer's Mate Airman Justin Lee Losack

To fight a war in the Pacific, the Navy and Marine Corps would rely on the military's logistics fleet for food, fuel, and ammunition.
But that aging fleet, already taxed by technical problems, is likely to be one of the first things China attacks, a former chief of US naval operations said this week.
Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

US Navy warships have been on the front lines in the Western Pacific, carrying out freedom-of-navigation operations and other exercises to counter Chinese claims and to bolster allies in the region.

But in a conflict with China, those ships won't be the only or even the first targets, as Beijing will seek to eliminate the logistical support on which the US military relies, according to retired Navy Adm. Gary Roughhead.

"We neglect logistics, and logistics is how this country has won wars," Roughead, who was the chief of naval operations from late 2007 until his retirement in 2011, said at a House Armed Services Committee hearing Thursday.

"I will share an exchange I had with Chinese admiral during the time when I was on active duty," Roughhead added. "He made it very clear to me that our logistics ships were a primary target, because if he can take out logistics, he takes out the lifeblood of the fighting ships, if you will."

US Navy/MCS 3rd Class Jordan R. Bair

As the US military reorients for "great-power competition" with Russia and China, its ability to sustain military operations in a conflict has gotten renewed attention, especially in the Pacific, where vast ocean and far-flung islands would complicate resupply and reinforcement efforts.

"The distances that we're talking about the Pacific are huge compared to what we have been used to," Roughead said.

The military has been able to operate in the Middle East with "logistic impunity," Roughhead added. "We've been close to ports. It's been a benign flow on sea lanes, and we have to rethink that."

The resupply issue goes beyond food, fuel, and mail. US warships can't rearm with missiles underway and would have to return to port to stock up, but China's growing arsenal of missiles can now reach much the first island chain — which includes the Philippines, Taiwan, and Japanese islands like Okinawa — where many US bases are located.

"I do believe that many of the ports that we routinely rely upon, particularly out in the Western Pacific, are going to be vulnerable," Roughead said.

US Navy/MCS 2nd Class Richard A. Miller

A recent exercise that saw the submarine tender USS Emory S. Land sail into the Ulithi Atoll, a major World War II logistics hub, suggested the Navy is thinking of ways to do resupply on-the-go.

Marine Corps Commandant Gen. David Berger — who has already proposed a dramatic redesign that would make his force better equipped to fight a war in the Pacific — has also admitted that logistical challenges need to be resolved.

The Corps' challenge is "to develop an entirely new logistics footprint, which includes new ships to support resupply and maneuver Marines around the first island chain, littorals, and in a high-threat environment," Berger said at an event on Capitol Hill in February.

"We've got ground to make up" on logistics, Berger added. "Because if ... you're going to fight as a dispersed force, you've got to sustain that force. And our supply lines have not been challenged in 70 years. We have not worried about what's behind us. We need to focus on that now, because ... they're going to try to sever our lines."

U.S. Navy photo/Petty Officer 2nd Class Brian P. Caracci

A major problem for the military's logistics force is the logistics force itself, Bryan Clark, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and a former Navy officer, said at the hearing Thursday.

"There are problems in basically the two different elements of logistics force," Clark said.

The combat logistics force, which would support operating forces deployed overseas, faces challenges with its "fit," Clark said, "meaning it may not be designed to support a more distributed Navy because it's composed of a relatively small number of relatively large logistics vessels. So we need a more distributed logistics force to support that more distributed operating Navy."

The other element is the sealift force, which would transport troops and equipment oversees. Its deterioration has been a major concern among military officials for years.

In September, US Transportation Command performed a large-scale no-notice readiness exercise with the 61 sealift vessels assigned to the Organic Surge Fleet — US-based ships expected to be ready on short notice.

Photo by LPhot Dan Rosenbaum

The exercise was a disappointment, with less than half the sealift fleet able to get fully prepared to set sail in the allotted timeframe.

"Readiness goals aim for the Organic Surge Fleet to have an 85% availability on any given day to support large-scale force deployments," Transcom said in an assessment. "The low Cumulative Fleet Success Rate of 40.7% suggests the Organic Surge Fleet is challenged to meet these objectives."

Those aging sealift ships need to be recapitalized, Clark said. The Navy knows that but has so far been unable to settle on a way to do it.

Clark suggested an expansion of the maritime security program — which gives the military access to government-owned and privately owned US-flagged ships — to fill the gaps. Clark has also singled out a lack of tankers as a major national-security concern.

The expenditures made so far in response to the coronavirus pandemic are widely expected to take a bite out of future defense spending, but Roughead said that investing in the defense industrial base, and on shipbuilding in particular, could aid the economic recovery.

Referring to his testimony to the committee, Roughead suggested that "now's the time to perhaps jump on some opportunities that may be there, particularly in sealift. The prices are going to be extraordinarily good for recapitalization of that fleet, [and they] might not last very long."

Read the original article on Business Insider

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World

Will China Set Up an Air Defense Identification Zone in the South China Sea?

Alexander Vuving

The National InterestJune 5, 2020, 8:25 AM PDT

https://www.yahoo.com/news/china-set-air-defense-identification-152500180.html

On May 4, Taiwan’s Ministry of Defense reportedly confirmed that China is planning to set up an air defense identification zone (ADIZ) in the South China Sea. According to a source from within China’s military, plans for the South China Sea ADIZ have been in the pipeline since 2010, the same year Chinese authorities told a Japanese delegation visiting Beijing that they were considering establishing an East China Sea ADIZ. Ever since China announced its first ADIZ in the East China Sea in November 2013, a Chinese ADIZ has hung like a sword of Damocles over the South China Sea. On the day China declared its East China Sea ADIZ, the Chinese Ministry of Defense’ spokesman proclaimed, “China will establish other air defense identification zones at an appropriate time after completing preparations.”

If China sets up an ADIZ in the South China Sea, then it would not be the first in that theater. Early in the Cold War, the Philippine established its ADIZ in 1953, and South Vietnam also had one during the Vietnam War. Today, however, the Philippine ADIZ is inoperative, and the South Vietnamese ADIZ died forty-five years ago with the state that created it.

On the contrary, an ADIZ that follows China’s excessive and, from the perspective of international law, invalid maritime claims in the South China Sea would be highly disruptive. Thousands of flights every week, not just military but mostly civilian, not just international, but also domestic within Vietnam, the Philippines, and Malaysia, and regional within Southeast Asia, would be disturbed.

Will China set up an ADIZ in the middle of Southeast Asia? If it does, then when will it do so, and with what size and scope? More generally, how does one predict the Chinese ADIZ?

The Animal That Is China’s ADIZ

A dog that hasn’t barked, China’s ADIZ in the South China Sea can turn out to be one of three animals: 1) a dog that will eventually bark, 2) a dog that never barks, or 3) a dog that barks under the guise of a different animal. Which of these animals is the South China Sea ADIZ? Perhaps even China’s strategic planners do not have a consistent answer. But it is worth considering to what extent these animals exist.

Observers who think this dog will eventually bark have the support of two paramount signs. In terms of official statements, China has never ruled out the possibility of another ADIZ in the South China Sea. Occasionally, sources close to the Chinese military told foreign journalists that China had plans and was ready to impose an ADIZ in the South China Sea. Statements aside, China’s facilities on the disputed islands in the South China Sea suggest their main job is to help China turn this maritime heart of Southeast Asia into Beijing’s own lake. Some of these facilities include four three-thousand-meter-long runways with hangars that can hold dozens of aircraft on Woody Island, Fiery Cross Reef, Subi Reef, and Mischief Reef and high-frequency radar stations on these islands and Cuarteron Reef. China has also deployed to these islands long-range surface-to-air and anti-ship missiles that can reach 250 miles (about 400 kilometers). More recently, satellite images detected KJ-500 air-born early warning and control aircraft, as well as KQ-200 anti-submarine patrol planes on Fiery Cross Reef. Imagery also shows a Type 071 (Yuzhao)-class landing platform dock in the harbor of the reef. The ship could be used to seize a disputed reef in the region. If these infrastructure and weapons systems are China’s instruments to achieve mastery of the South China Sea, then an ADIZ would provide a convenient legal ground for their deployment.

Observers who think the South China Sea ADIZ is a dog that never barks have different reasons to believe so. Some speculate that China has learned a lesson from its East China Sea ADIZ and concluded that this game is not worth the candle. As this argument goes, China’s ADIZ in the East China Sea, which is nearly seven years old now, is as effective as nothing. Setting up one more in the south would tarnish China’s international image and prompt other littoral states to declare overlapping ADIZs of their own. However, this is just one of many possible lessons China can learn from the East China Sea ADIZ. One Chinese analyst has argued to the contrary that the benefits it brings have outweighed the risks. If this reflects the thinking of the Beijing leadership, a Chinese ADIZ in the South China Sea is waiting in the wings.

But some argue that an ADIZ may undermine the ambiguous nature of China’s claims in the South China Sea. Ambiguity has served China’s interests well, so China will have to think twice before it imposes an ADIZ in the South China Sea.

Another reason that may render China’s plans for a South China Sea ADIZ forever plans is the possibility of tit-for-tat by China’s neighbors. These neighbors are holding cards that can deter China from declaring an ADIZ in the South China Sea. Vietnam can declare an ADIZ of its own over the Paracel Islands, which can reestablish some forms of Vietnamese administration over the islands, thus weakening China’s position. Vietnam and Malaysia can sue Beijing’s unilateral activities in their exclusive economic zones (EEZs), activities that are illegal based on the Permanent Court of Arbitration rulings of 2016. Vietnam and a post-Duterte Philippine administration can also grant the U.S. military regular access to strategic places on the South China Sea coast such as Cam Ranh Bay and Da Nang in Vietnam or Ulugan Bay, Subic Bay, and Zambales Province in the Philippines, thereby equalizing several advantages of China’s facilities on the artificial islands in the middle of the sea. Taken together these will redress the regional balance of power and neutralize China’s ADIZ.

But a hypothetical ADIZ by China in the middle of Southeast Asia can also deter others. If Beijing thinks an ADIZ works best when it is unborn, then it will keep it unborn.

Finally, the South China Sea ADIZ may already bark, but it is camouflaged as an exclusion zones not using the name of ADIZ, or it may be a quasi or de facto ADIZ that is undeclared but nevertheless actively enforced. In the view of the Philippine judge Antonio Carpio, China has already effectively enforced a quasi-ADIZ in the South China Sea by warning Philippine planes flying over the Spratlys via radio to “stay away from the area.” Ships and aircraft from Vietnam, the United States, Australia, and India, to name just a few, have also reported to have received similar warnings. However, China’s quasi-ADIZ appears to cover no more than twenty nautical miles from the shores of the Chinese-controlled features.

Why Does China Need an ADIZ?

People tend naturally to assume that an ADIZ is what its name implies—an air defense zone or a military tool of territorial control. But like any things invented by humans, it can perform many functions beyond the original one.

In the original function, an ADIZ is an early warning mechanism. When the United States created the first ADIZs during the Cold War, it wanted to reduce the risk of a surprise aerial attack from the Soviet Union. China today may be more concerned about surveillance and “freedom of navigation operations” (FONOPs) conducted by the United States than a surprise attack, but an early warning is always better than no warning.

In a second function, an ADIZ is an exclusion zone. China’s ADIZ in the East China Sea has taken this function, among others. By requiring even aircraft that transit the international airspace and not bound to China to identify themselves, that ADIZ provides a legal basis for denying foreign aircraft access to almost the entire East China Sea.

As China is engaged in intense sovereignty disputes with most of its maritime neighbors, an ADIZ can serve as a sovereignty marker. Although an ADIZ is itself not a territorial claim, it can be used to exercise some forms of sovereignty rights and administration over the airspace of a territory. Acceptance or acquiescence by foreign aircraft of an ADIZ may then be interpreted as recognition of the ADIZ-declaring state’s effective exercise of sovereignty over a territory.

While effective enforcement is a prerequisite for an ADIZ to function as an early-warning mechanism or an exclusion zone, it is unimportant for an ADIZ as a sovereignty marker. Some poor enforcement may be enough to register the exercise of sovereignty and no actual enforcement is required to elicit recognition by foreign states.

As with everything else in the diplomatic realm, an ADIZ can be used as a bargaining chip, specifically to boost the position of the state that declares it in some game it plays with foreign states. This is also one of the functions of China’s East China Sea ADIZ. It has strengthened China’s position against Japan’s in their disputes over the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands by 1) giving a legal basis for China to scramble its jet fighters against Japanese planes, 2) broadening the domain of physical dispute to include not just the islands’ adjacent waters but also their airspace, and 3) creating new facts on the ground. As two analysts have argued, “The PRC would acquire strategic advantage by asserting a maximalist position, then seeming to back down, while preserving some incremental gain—akin to a ‘ratchet’ effect.”

In a fifth utility, an ADIZ is a signaling device. Declaring an ADIZ in the face of foreign opposition or in violation of international law may signal resolve, even strength. It may also signal anger when responding to a preceding event that hurts the ADIZ-declaring state. All this can signal formidability, while the effective enforcement of an ADIZ signals capability.

Some suggest that an ADIZ can be employed to reassure others of the declaring state’s cooperative intention. One observer argues that China tried to use its East China Sea ADIZ as an “instrument of engagement, not aggression.” However, the international opposition to China’s ADIZ is proof that only a fool would use it to signal cooperation.

The sixth function of ADIZ is that of a deterrent. By signaling formidability and capability, one can deter others. But even when an ADIZ is still unborn, a hypothetical ADIZ can also serve as a threat to deter others. China has developed a consistent narrative on the South China Sea ADIZ, saying whether it will declare an ADIZ in the South China Sea depends on the threat level it faces. In this sense, China’s South China Sea ADIZ has already been employed.

When Will China Impose an ADIZ in the South China Sea?

If China wants to use a South China Sea ADIZ for military purposes (early warning and anti-access/area denial), then effective enforcement is a key requirement. With several large artificial islands equipped with four long airstrips and many support facilities in the middle of the sea, China already has sufficient infrastructure needed for this job. Each of the four airbases on these man-made islands has enough hangars to accommodate twenty-four combat aircraft and four to five larger planes such as reconnaissance, transport, refueling, and bomber aircraft. Adding to these well-located air bases, China has since December last year homeported its second aircraft carrier, the Shandong, at Sanya on Hainan Island. While the airfields on the man-made islands at the middle of the South China Sea can accommodate up to ninety-six air-superiority aircraft, the Shandong can add thirty-six more to the number of frontline fighters China can operate at one time in the South China Sea.

Note that of the countries with comparable coastline along the South China Sea, Vietnam has a total of fifty frontline aircraft for its entire territory, Malaysia has thirty-eight, and the Philippines has zero. When a Nimitz-class aircraft carrier of the United States enters the South China Sea, it can add ninety aircraft, including typically sixty-four air-superiority fighters, to the challenges a Chinese ADIZ has to face. Still, supported by the airfields on China’s mainland, Hainan Island, Woody Island, Subi Reef, Fiery Cross Reef, Mischief Reef, and the Shandong, aircraft under China’s Southern Theater Command, including about 198 air-superiority fighters, can more than match the combined air forces of all the major Southeast Asian claimants plus one U.S. aircraft carrier.

Three years after the completion of the major artificial island-building in the South China Sea, China already has the capability to effectively enforce an ADIZ as large as its territorial and maritime claims in the region—the illegal “nine-dash line.” The question for China in the South China Sea is not whether it has the capability to enforce an ADIZ, but what utility it wants to get from an ADIZ and, if it needs to declare an ADIZ, when is the best time to do so.

If China employs its ADIZ as a sovereignty marker (to register sovereignty over the South China Sea territories and get international recognition or acquiescence), then a bargaining chip, or a signaling device, a declaration is more important than de facto enforcement. China does not need an ADIZ to signal its strength and resolve in the South China Sea; its coast guard, militia, and survey ships alone are able to perform the job, as demonstrated repeatedly in its ability to halt Vietnam’s drilling of new oil and gas wells within Vietnam’s EEZ since 2017 and its ability to unilaterally conduct a survey in large areas within the EEZ of Vietnam and Malaysia since 2019, activities that are illegal based on the 2016 rulings of the Permanent Court of Arbitration. An ADIZ can add more to this signaling but its risks appear to outweigh its value-added.

As a sovereignty marker, an ADIZ can be better than the nine-dash line since the latter was invalidated by the international arbitration court in 2016. An ADIZ can also be a weighty bargaining chip in China’s negotiation of the Code of Conduct in the South China Sea (COC) with the ASEAN members. China’s endgame in the South China Sea is a new normal where it is in charge, and the job of the COC, from Beijing’s perspective, is to freeze that new normal. Since China has told the ASEAN members that it wanted to conclude the negotiations of the COC by 2021, Beijing needs to race against this deadline to create new facts on the ground and solidify the new normal. This accelerated aggression in turn will put pressure on many members of ASEAN to finish the negotiation. It is in this context that China has stepped up aggression in the South China Sea in the last years, including the survey activities by the Haiyang Dizhi 8 within the EEZ of Vietnam and Malaysia since last summer. Although Beijing can save an ADIZ to use in the future, its value as a bargaining chip may be highest in the COC negotiations.

If ADIZ is used as a deterrent, then it will lose its value the moment it is declared. With its growing capability, China can impose its early warning systems and exclusion zones under names other than ADIZ, or it can enforce them undeclared on a de facto basis.

Size and Scope

China can manipulate the risks—and with them, the benefits—of its ADIZ by selecting different scopes and sizes for its coverage. Generally, a larger scope will affect more neighbors directly and thus provoke more opposition. The benefits of an ADIZ, however, do not always grow in line with the size. An ADIZ would bring the most benefits for China if it hugs the nine-dash line, China’s invalid claim in the South China Sea. A larger scope will cause much additional opposition while bringing little additional utility.

There are four groups of islands within the nine-dash line—all are disputed. They give China five major options in terms of the scope of a South China Sea ADIZ. The cost-benefit ratio of an ADIZ varies with its scope, depending on the number and opposition of the states that lay sovereignty claims on the territory it covers.

Option 1 would cover the Paracel Islands, which lie between China’s Hainan Islands and Vietnam’s central coast and are disputed by China and Vietnam. The island group has been occupied by China since 1974 but it was administered by successive states from Vietnam, including France as the protector of Vietnam, at least from the eighteenth century until then.

Option 2 would encompass the Pratas Islands, which lie 180 nautical miles southeast of Hong Kong and are currently under Taiwanese administration.

Option 3 would be the sum of option 1 and option 2, hugging China’s South China Sea coast and covering both the Paracel Islands and the Pratas Islands.

Option 4 would stretch out from China’s southern coast and involve the Pratas, the Paracels, and Scarborough Shoal. The latter lies within the Philippine EEZ about one hundred nautical miles off the coast and had been administered by the Philippines at least since the eighteenth century until China seized it during the 2012 Scarborough Shoal standoff.

Option 5 would hug the nine-dash line and contains roughly all the area China claims in the South China Sea, including the Pratas, the Paracels, Scarborough Shoal, the Spratly Islands, including the waters between and surrounding them. The Spratly Islands are claimed entirely by China, Taiwan, and Vietnam, and partly by the Philippines and Malaysia. Brunei claims Louisa Reef to the south of the archipelago. This option will have the largest number of opponents but also the largest benefits among the different versions of a South China Sea ADIZ.

All Things Considered

China’s decision to set up an ADIZ will most likely be the result of its cost-benefit calculation. If China has plans to declare an ADIZ in the South China Sea, then it will likely make the announcement when the anticipated benefits exceed the anticipated costs. The benefits derive mainly from the utility of an ADIZ; the costs depend largely on foreign reaction.

The coronavirus pandemic and the last stage of the COC negotiation, which are incidentally concurrent, offer an opportunity for China to announce its South China Sea ADIZ. The low number of flights over the South China Sea caused by the travel bans to restrict the spread of the virus and the focus of everyone on the coronavirus outbreak would greatly reduce foreign reaction. Except for Vietnam, the hands of Malaysia and the Philippines are additionally tied by China’s aids to help them fight the virus, which ironically originated from China. At the same time, the deadline of the Code of Conduct urges China to maximize its advantage in a new status quo that would be frozen for a while after the Code of Conduct is signed.

The current balance of power also suggests that other countries cannot do much more than largely symbolic actions to challenge China’s ADIZ in the South China Sea. Several governments, most notably the United States, Japan, Taiwan, Vietnam, Australia, Britain, and France, will flatly reject the Chinese ADIZ. But most other countries, including some ASEAN members, will acquiesce to Chinese power. The United States will fly some military aircraft into the Chinese ADIZ within the first hours of its declaration, but the Pentagon will have to think twice when deploying a carrier strike group to waters under the Chinese ADIZ. Vietnam and Malaysia may or may not declare an ADIZ of their own.

But a Chinese ADIZ will aggravate the animosity between China and most of its maritime neighbors. It will also intensify the strategic competition globally between China and the United States and regionally between China on one hand and Japan and India on the other. Less internationally but no less strategically, it will hit a big nail on the coffin of Chinese influence in Vietnam and mark a point of no return in Sino-Vietnamese relations. Vietnam’s top defense diplomat, Nguyen Chi Vinh, noted in a January 2014 interview that a Chinese ADIZ “would be more dangerous than even the nine-dash line” and it would “kill” Vietnam.

If China declares its South China Sea ADIZ this year or the next, then it can win more than it loses—in the short term. In the longer term, however, that coup will be a Pyrrhic victory.

Alexander L. Vuving is a professor at the Daniel K. Inouye Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies. The analysis in this article is based on a primer on the South China Sea ADIZ by the same author, published in The National Interest four years ago. The author wishes to thank Harry Kazianis for his encouragement and Carleton Cramer for his valuable comments. The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect those of the U.S. government, the Department of Defense, or DKI APCSS.

Image: Reuters

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World

U.S. military commander says China pushing territorial claims under cover of coronavirus

Tim Kelly

ReutersJune 5, 2020, 2:38 AM PDT

https://www.yahoo.com/news/u-military-commander-says-china-093800767.html

TOKYO, June 5 (Reuters) - China is using the coronavirus as a cover to push territorial claims in the South China Sea through a surge in naval activity meant to intimidate other countries that claim the waters, the commander of U.S. Forces in Japan said on Friday.

There has been a surge of activity by China in the South China Sea with navy ships, coast guard vessels and a naval militia of fishing boats in harassing vessels in waters claimed by Beijing, said Lieutenant General Kevin Schneider.

"Through the course of the COVID crisis we saw a surge of maritime activity," he told Reuters in a phone interview. He said Beijing had also increased its activity in the East China Sea, where it has a territorial dispute with Japan.

Beijing's increased level of activity would likely continue, predicted Schneider: "I don't see troughs, I see plateaus," he said.

China says its maritime activities in the area are peaceful. The press office at the Chinese embassy in Tokyo was not immediately available to comment outside of normal business hours.

Japan hosts the biggest concentration of U.S. forces in Asia, including an aircraft carrier strike group, an amphibious expeditionary force and fighter squadrons. In addition to defending Japan, they are deployed to deter China from expanding its influence in the region, including in the South China Sea.

The latest U.S. criticism of China comes as relations have frayed amid accusations by Washington that Beijing failed to warn it quickly enough about the coronavirus. China has dismissed that criticism as an attempt by President Donald Trump's administration to cover up its own mistakes.

Beijing has built military island bases on reefs in the energy-rich South China Sea, in or near waters claimed by other countries, including the Philippines, Vietnam and Malaysia. It imposed a unilateral fishing ban until Aug 16. (Reporting by Tim Kelly Editing by Peter Graff)

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World

U.S. warship sails through Taiwan Strait on Tiananmen anniversary

ReutersJune 4, 2020, 5:46 PM PDT

TAIPEI, June 5 (Reuters) - A U.S. warship sailed through the sensitive Taiwan Strait on Thursday, the U.S. and Taiwanese militaries said, on the same day as the 31st anniversary of China's bloody crackdown on pro-democracy demonstrators in and around Tiananmen Square.

China, which considers Taiwan its territory, has been angered by the Trump administration's stepped-up support for the self-ruled, democratic island, such as more arms sales and nearby U.S. patrols.

Taiwan's Defence Ministry said on Friday the U.S. warship had transited the narrow Taiwan Strait that separates the island from the mainland, heading south.

Taiwan's armed forces monitored the ship, which it described as being on an "ordinary mission", the ministry added, without providing further details.

The U.S. Pacific Fleet, in a post on its Facebook page, named the ship as the USS Russell, an Arleigh Burke-class destroyer.

The United States has in recent months stepped up its sailings through the Taiwan Strait, to China's anger, adding to tensions over everything from Beijing's response to the coronavirus pandemic to trade and human rights.

Public events took place in both Taiwan and Chinese-ruled Hong Kong on Thursday to mark the 1989 Tiananmen anniversary.

Police pepper-sprayed some Hong Kong protesters on Thursday who defied a ban to stage candlelight rallies in memory of the crackdown, accusing Beijing of stifling their freedoms too.

(Reporting by Ben Blanchard. Editing by Gerry Doyle)

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The National Interest

Keeping Watch: America's Drones Just Got Better at Keeping an Eye on China

Kris Osborn

The National InterestJune 5, 2020, 9:00 AM UTC

Click here to read the full article.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/keeping-watch-americas-drones-just-090000773.html

Image: Reuters

The Air Force is now flying B-1b bombers and Global Hawk spy drones over the South China Sea and other areas within the Pacific theater as part of a broader strategy to sustain surveillance and deterrence missions in the region, following the increased U.S.-Chinese tensions.

The B-1bs are flying out of Guam in support of Indo-Pacific Command and, according to an Air Force report, they are specifically conducting missions over the South China Sea. At the same time, the Air Force is rotating its Global Hawk drones to an Air Base in Japan called Yokota, a move which further bolsters a U.S. operational presence in the region. Such missions are likely taking on a new urgency in light of reports that China has been conducting two-carrier exercises in the South China Sea, something making Taiwan increasingly nervous about a potential Chinese invasion.

The Globalhawk surveillance drones, in tandem with their Guam-based Navy Triton maritime partners, are increasingly engineered with advanced algorithms bringing new levels of autonomy. Pre-programming mission objectives wherein an aircraft can autonomously make adjustments to emerging circumstances and quickly process large volumes of information at one time, allows U.S. Commanders to improve and extend mission scope in the region and possibly overcome the much discussed “tyranny of distance” characterizing the vast, geographically expansive Pacific theater.

One such technical program, engineered for greater airborne autonomy, is called Distributed Autonomy (DARC), enables unmanned systems to better form “mesh” networks through air and ground nodes to perform a greater range of functions without needing to have each small move coordinated by a ground-based human decision-maker. The Northrop made DARC system seeks to distribute greater measures of autonomy into the aircraft itself. “ instead of flying it, you tell it what effect you want in an area,” Scott Winship, Northrop Program Manager, told TNI in an interview.

For example, a Global Hawk could draw upon onboard processing speed to gather, organize and analyze large volumes of ISR data such as video feeds, determine the relevance of specific information and transmit streamlined data to human decision-makers. Better networked aerial surveillance assets can offer another way to address the geographical challenges presented by the Pacific, by enabling drones to exchange data of great relevance across otherwise disparate areas of operation.

“Now our processing capability is so fast and we have so much storage that we are meeting that mission. Algorithms run fast enough so that if we watch our track, it will dump that data if nothing is happening. We only concentrate on the things we want to concentrate on,” Winship explained.

If one drone in a family of interconnected airborne surveillance assets encounters weather obscurants or veers off course, other air “nodes” can help offer direction and enable aircraft to autonomously make the proper adjustments. This not only decreases a “cognitive burden” or human workload, but massively improves latency or combat-critical sensor-to-shooter time.

Much of this is made possible by real-time analytics; for instance, onboard computers can, in some instances, utilize machine learning programs to bounce new mission data off of existing information to make rapid determinations of consequence to a mission before sending organized data to commanders.

In tactical terms, this amounts to having a Globalhawk stare at a strategically relevant portion of the South China Sea and instantly identify moments of importance such as a Chinese surface ship passing through.

“We have finally broken through the barrier of the amount of processing power you can have and get information processing aboard the airplane. We can hit 18 targets in one pass,” Winship added.

Image: Reuters

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World

Taiwan Wants Harpoon Missiles to Counter China's Growing Naval Might

Peter Suciu

The National InterestJune 3, 2020, 4:00 AM PDT

https://www.yahoo.com/news/taiwan-wants-harpoon-missiles-counter-110000596.html

Last week the Taiwanese Ministry of National Defense announced that it is seeking to purchase Harpoon coastal batteries from the United States. Deputy Defense Minister Chang Che-ping confirmed the military’s intentions to lawmakers at a committee meeting, which was reported by the local media in Taiwan.

The island nation, which the government in Beijing sees as a breakaway province, has already developed its own anti-ship missile, the Hsiung Feng II (HF-2), which was developed in the 1990s. As far back as 20 years ago there were plans to replace the HF-2 with the American made RGM-84 Harpoon. It serves in dozens of countries on a number of platforms.

Taiwan has also developed its Hsiung Feng III, a supersonic missile that uses solid-fuel propellant as a booster and liquid fuel to power a ramjet. It was originally conceived as an anti-ship missile, but its range is limited to just 75 to 90 miles. With that in mind, Taipei has taken another look at the American Harpoon—and it isn’t the only power in Asia that sees the potential of the aging U.S. missile platform.

In April, the United States Department of Defense (DoD) Defense Security Cooperation Agency (DSCA) announced that the State Department had approved the foreign military sales of the AGM-84L Harpoon to India.

Taipei will still have to make a formal request to Washington, but given that the weapon was sold to India, it is largely suggested that such a sale could be quickly approved. The Taiwan military seeks to acquire the missiles by 2023.

According to a report from The Drive, Chang wasn’t clear exactly which type of Harpoons that Taiwan was seeking, but it would likely be the Block II variants. The Taiwan Air Force already has air-launched Block II AGM-84L Harpoons in its arsenal, while the island nation’s Navy has submarine-launched UGM-84Ls. Two former U.S. Navy Kidd and Knox-class ships serving with Taiwan also are armed with the older surface-launched RGM-84 variants.

Tensions have increased in the region in recent months.

In April, the Chinese People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) aircraft carrier Liaoning, sailed past Taiwan in a show of Chinese naval strength in the region while the American aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt (CVN-71) was sidelined in port in Guam due to an outbreak of the novel coronavirus among its crew.

Also in April, to mark the 70th anniversary of the PLAN, Beijing announced that it had created a new unit of marines, even as China had approved the reduction of its army by 300,000 soldiers. That signaled a shift in military strength from the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) to the PLAN Marine Corps—and according to reports, the latter force could grow by 400% from 20,000 marines to more than 100,000.

Given that Beijing is ramping up an amphibious force, has a second carrier that is undergoing sea trials and continues to expand its presence in the region it is no wonder that Taipei seeks to ensure that it has the right counter-measures in place.

Image: Reuters

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World

Philippines' Duterte U-turns on scrapping of U.S. troop deal

Karen Lema

ReutersJune 2, 2020, 5:45 AM PDT

https://www.yahoo.com/news/philippines-suspends-scrapping-troop-agreement-124533716.html

FILE PHOTO: U.S. Marines officer Lt General Lawrence Nicholson and his counterpart from the Armed Forces of the Philippines Lt General Oscar Lactao unfurl the "Balikatan" flag in Quezon city Metro Manila

By Karen Lema

MANILA (Reuters) - Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte has suspended his decision to scrap a two-decade-old troop deployment agreement with the United States due to political and other developments in the region, his foreign minister said on Tuesday,

The termination of the Visiting Forces Agreement (VFA), which is central to one of Washington's most important alliances in Asia, was due to take effect in August and was Duterte's biggest move yet towards delivering on longstanding threats to downgrade ties with the Philippines' former colonial ruler.

Foreign Secretary Teodoro Locsin said the news that the Philippines was no longer abandoning the pact was well received by the United States.

The mercurial Duterte, known for his stinging rebukes of Western powers, has clashed with Washington over numerous issues and has been open about his disdain for his country's most important diplomatic ally and main provider of military hardware and training.

His embrace of historic rival China, a country deeply mistrusted by his U.S.-allied defence apparatus, has attracted considerable criticism, with opponents accusing him of gambling with sovereignty in pursuit of massive investments that have not materialized.

The VFA provides the legal framework for which U.S. troops can operate on a rotational basis in the Philippines and experts say without it, their other bilateral defence agreements cannot be implemented.

Duterte pulled the plug on the VFA on Feb. 11 in an angry response to the revocation of a U.S. visa held by a former police chief-turned-senator who led his war on drugs.

The official reason for Duterte's withdrawal was to enable the Philippines to diversify its foreign relations.

The U.S. Embassy in Manila welcomed the suspension.

"Our long-standing alliance has benefited both countries, and we look forward to continued close security and defense cooperation with the Philippines," it said.

Critics had said the suspension was a knee-jerk reaction that would weaken the Philippine military, denying it access to scores of annual training exercises, including expertise in tackling Islamist militants, natural disasters and maritime threats.

The official notice of the suspension said the decision was taken "in light of political and other developments in the region". It did not specify what those were.

(Reporting by Karen Lema; Writing by Martin Petty; Editing by Angus MacSwan)

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World

Cambodian leader denies China's navy granted basing rights

SOPHENG CHEANG

Associated PressJune 1, 2020, 7:32 AM PDT

Cambodian leader denies China's navy granted basing rights

PHNOM PENH, Cambodia (AP) — Cambodia’s leader declared Monday that China has not been given exclusive rights to use a naval base on the country’s southern coast, and that warships from all nations, including the United States, are welcome to dock there.

Prime Minister Hun Sen was responding to persistent news reports and concern expressed by Washington that Beijing had been granted basing privileges at Cambodia’s Ream naval base on the Gulf of Thailand.

Speaking at a road construction ceremony in the coastal city of Sihanoukville, Hun Sen said he recently received a message from foreign envoys in Cambodia about the issue.

He repeated denials he issued last year after The Wall Street Journal reported that an early draft of a reputed agreement seen by U.S. officials would allow China use of the Ream naval base for 30 years, where it would be able to post military personnel, store weapons and berth warships.

Hun Sen pointed out that Cambodia’s Constitution does not allow foreign military bases to be established on its soil, but visiting ships are welcome.

“If one country’s warship is allowed to dock at our navy base, the other countries’ warships will be able to dock, too. We are not going to close it to anyone,” he said.

Hun Sen questioned what benefit Beijing would get from having a base in Cambodia while it already has bases in the South China Sea, to the east. China’s bases were established in waters that are also claimed by other Southeast Asian countries.

Many analysts believe basing rights in Cambodia would extend Beijing’s strategic military profile considerably, and tilt the regional balance of power in a manner that would pressure adjacent countries in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations whose security concerns traditionally have been aligned more closely with the United States.

Hun Sen also said Cambodia was open to holding joint military exercises with all foreign countries, but they would have to be conducted after the threat from the coronavirus has passed. Cambodia has been only mildly affected by the virus, according to official figures.

In 2017, Cambodia informed the United States that it was canceling an annual joint military exercise that year and the next. It has not been resumed. Cambodia hosted a joint military exercise with China in March as the coronavirus crisis was growing.

China is Cambodia’s biggest investor and closest political partner. Chinese support allows Cambodia to ignore Western concerns about its poor record in human and political rights, and in turn Phnom Penh generally supports Beijing’s geopolitical positions in international forums on issues such as China’s territorial claims in the South China Sea.

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World

China home-built aircraft carrier conducting sea trials

Associated PressMay 29, 2020, 8:56 PM PDT

China home-built aircraft carrier conducting sea trials

BEIJING (AP) — China’s Defense Ministry said the navy’s only entirely home-built aircraft is carrying out sea trials to test weapons and equipment and enhance training of the crew.

Ministry spokesperson Ren Guoqiang said Friday the exercises were being conducted as planned, apparently unaffected by the country’s coronavirus outbreak.

The Shandong's commissioning last year by Chinese President Xi Jinping underscored the country’s rise as a regional naval power at a time of tensions with the U.S. and others over trade, Taiwan and the South China Sea.

It is the second Chinese aircraft carrier to enter service after the Liaoning, which was originally purchased as a hulk from Ukraine and entirely refurbished.

Both are based on a Soviet design with a ”ski jump” style flight deck for takeoffs rather than the flat decks used by much larger U.S. aircraft carriers. It is powered by a conventional oil-fueled steam turbine power plant, compared to the nuclear fuel American carriers and submarines use.

China is seen as striving to overtake the U.S. as the dominant naval power in Asia and already boasts the world’s largest navy in numbers of vessels.

Beijing says aircraft carriers are needed to protect its coastline and trade routes, but they are also seen as backing up its claims to self-governing Taiwan and the South China Sea.

The highly secretive Chinese military was credited with aiding in the response to the epidemic in the epicenter of Wuhan earlier this year, but no information has been released about cases among military personnel or any change in the armed forces’ readiness status.

The U.S. Navy, in contrast, saw a public controversy over the spread of the coronavirus aboard the USS Theodore Roosevelt and the firing of the aircraft carrier’s skipper in April.

The Roosevelt was operating in the Western Pacific when the first crew members fell sick in late March. About 1,100 crew members eventually tested positive for the cornonavirus and one died. The ship was sidelined on Guam for nearly two months.

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Home | News | China

US Conducts 2nd Freedom of Navigation Operation in Paracels in a Month

2020-05-28

https://www.rfa.org/english/news/china/usa-southchinasea-05282020143930.html

An MH-60R helicopter lands aboard the flight deck of the guided-missile destroyer USS Mustin as it sails near the Paracel Islands, May 28, 2020.

US Navy photo

The U.S. Navy on Thursday sailed a guided missile destroyer close to the Paracel Islands, its latest freedom of navigation operation in the disputed South China Sea, drawing a furious reaction from Beijing.

The USS Mustin passed within 12 nautical miles of Woody Island and Pyramid Rock, which are both occupied by China, according to an unnamed U.S. Navy official cited by CNN.

The operation took place at an extremely delicate time in U.S.-China relations after Washington declared that Hong Kong no longer qualifies for special status under U.S. law, after Beijing moved to impose national security legislation on China’s freest city.

It was also the second freedom of navigation operation, or FONOP, the U.S. has conducted near the Paracels in a month, and follows weeks of elevated tensions in the South China Sea as Beijing has moved to assert its sweeping territorial claims, drawing U.S. criticism and diplomatic protests from other claimants in Southeast Asia.

Lt. j.g. Rachel Maul, a spokesperson for the 7th Fleet, said in a statement to RFA that the USS Mustin “asserted navigational rights and freedoms in the Paracel Islands, consistent with international law.”

The exercise was not aimed at only China but also Vietnam and Taiwan, which also claim the Paracels, she said.

" Unlawful and sweeping maritime claims in the South China Sea pose a serious threat to the freedom of the seas, including the freedom of navigation and overflight and the right of innocent passage of all ships,” the spokesperson said.

The People’s Liberation Army (PLA) Southern Theater Command, which is responsible for China’s military conduct in the South China Sea, called the U.S. operation a “naked act of hegemony” and claimed to have sent aircraft and warships to monitor the USS Mustin’s passage.

The statement said the Mustin passed through the “territorial waters” of China’s claimed features in the Paracels. Territorial waters typically refers to the 12 nautical mile limit around an island or coast.

DESRON 15, the Destroyer Squadron that the USS Mustin belongs to, released two photos of its transit through the Paracels with an accompanying caption, stating the USS Mustin “is underway conducting operations in support of security and stability in the Indo-Pacific.” DESRON 15 describes itself as “U.S. 7th Fleet’s principal surface force,” the 7^th Fleet being the U.S. Navy force based at Yokosuka, Japan.

The FONOP follows a bilateral exercise between the U.S. and Singaporean navies on Sunday and Monday, also in the South China Sea. The USS Gabrielle Giffords joined the RSS Steadfast for the first ever drill involving a U.S. littoral combat ship alongside the Singaporean navy.

The USS Gabrielle Giffords is currently based at Singapore’s Changi Naval Base. In mid-April it patrolled the South China Sea near the site of a Chinese pressure campaign against a Malaysian-contracted drillship in Malaysian waters. That stand-off has since ended.

“Meeting our partners at sea gives our navies the opportunity to practice maritime proficiencies, and further strengthen the bond between both countries,” said Capt. Ann McCann of the U.S. Navy’s DESRON 7 in a press release. “Engaging with our network of partners in the region is essential to maintain a free and open Indo-Pacific.”

The last FONOP near the Paracels was on April 28. The maneuvers are meant to exercise the right to innocent passage even in disputed waters, and underline the U.S. position that China’s sweeping maritime and territorial claims in the South China Sea are unlawful. Brunei, Malaysia, the Philippines, Taiwan and Vietnam also have claims in the area overlapping China’s.

On Tuesday, Philippine Defense Chief Delfin Lorenzana discussed the South China Sea with his counterpart in Japan, Defense Minister Taro Kono, the Philippine News Agency reported. That same day, Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte spoke by phone with Vietnam’s Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan, according to Vietnamese state media. Both leaders agreed to a peaceful resolution of the South China Sea issue and to continue the Association of Southeast Asian Nations’ Code of Conduct negotiations with China.

UPDATED at 7:20 P.M. EDT on 2020-05-28

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Defense News

Inhofe, Reed back new military fund to confront China

Joe Gould, Aaron Mehta

Defense NewsMay 28, 2020, 9:41 AM PDT

https://www.defensenews.com/congress/2020/05/28/inhofe-reed-back-new-military-fund-to-confront-china/

The Liaoning aircraft carrier is accompanied by frigates and submarines on April 12, 2018, conducting exercises in the South China Sea. (Li Gang/Xinhua via AP)

WASHINGTON ― As the U.S. Congress hardens against Beijing, two key lawmakers publicly added their support for a new military fund to boost deterrence against China in the Pacific, virtually assuring a Pacific Deterrence Initiative of some kind will be in the next defense policy bill.

Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Jim Inhofe, R-Okla., and ranking member Jack Reed, D-R.I., announced their new stance in a War on the Rocks op-ed Thursday. They said their version will back investments in land-based, long-range strike capabilities, but also “theater missile defense, expeditionary airfield and port infrastructure, [and] fuel and munitions storage,” to enable new modernized platforms, rather than buying more of the platforms themselves.

“With the stakes so high, the time for action is now,” Inhofe and Reed wrote. “The Pacific Deterrence Initiative will enhance budgetary transparency and oversight, and focus resources on key military capabilities to deter China. The initiative will also reassure U.S. allies and partners, and send a strong signal to the Chinese Communist Party that the American people are committed to defending U.S. interests in the Indo-Pacific.

“The Pacific Deterrence Initiative will focus resources on these efforts and others with the aim of injecting uncertainty and risk into Beijing’s calculus, leaving just one conclusion: ‘Not today. You, militarily, cannot win it, so don’t even try it.’”

The Senate leaders follow House Armed Services Committee Chairman Adam Smith, D-Wash., and ranking member Mac Thornberry, R-Tex in supporting the idea of a PDI. Smith has backed the idea in concept but has not publicly disclosed his priorities for the fund, while Thornberry has proposed spending $6 billion in fiscal year 2021 on priorities that include air and missile defense systems and new military construction in partner countries.

As Congress looks to replicate the multi-year European Deterrence Initiative — which consumed $22 billion since its inception after Russia invaded Ukraine and illegally annexed Crimea in 2014 — it has yet to be negotiated how much could be spent in the Pacific, what it would buy there and how long the fund would endure. Those questions will likely be part of talks within the Armed Services and Appropriations committees.

“I expect to see some new money applied to these priorities in the budget,” said Center for New American Security analyst Eric Sayers, who has advocated for the fund. “The real challenge now will be convincing the appropriators to join them and then the Pentagon building it into their 2022 budget.”

Though Defense Secretary Mark Esper has said China tops DoD’s adversaries list, the Pacific spending proposals reflect some frustration within the Armed Services Committees that the Pentagon has not prioritized the region in line with the National Defense Strategy’s emphasis on great power competition. Inhofe and Reed’s op-ed criticized the Pentagon’s emphasis on platforms when they argue it should be emphasizing missions and the force posture, capabilities and logistics that would enable those missions.

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World

Taiwan eyes further U.S. arms purchases with new anti-ship missile

ReutersMay 28, 2020, 12:29 AM PDT

https://www.yahoo.com/news/taiwan-eyes-further-u-arms-072952446.html

TAIPEI (Reuters) - Taiwan plans to buy land-based Boeing-made Harpoon anti-ship missiles as part of its military modernisation efforts, its defence ministry said on Thursday, the latest purchase from the United States to deal with a rising threat from China.

The United States, like most countries, has no official diplomatic ties with Taiwan, but is bound by law to provide the democratic island with the means to defend itself.

China, which claims the democratically-ruled island as its own territory, routinely denounces U.S. arms sales to Taiwan.

Answering questions in parliament, Deputy Defence Minister Chang Che-ping confirmed that Taiwan was planning to buy Harpoon missiles from the United States to serve as a coastal defence cruise missile.

If the United States agrees to sell the Harpoons, Taiwan should receive them in 2023, Chang added.

Taiwan has been bolstering its defences in the face of what it sees as increasingly threatening moves by Beijing, such as regular Chinese air force and naval exercises near Taiwan.

While Taiwan's military is well-trained and well-equipped with mostly U.S.-made hardware, China has huge numerical superiority and is adding advanced equipment of its own such as stealth fighters.

The U.S government last week notified Congress of a possible sale of advanced torpedoes to Taiwan worth around $180 million, further souring already tense ties between Washington and Beijing. [nL4N2D31SL]

China has denounced the Trump administration's increased support for Taiwan. Beijing believes Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen is a separatist bent on declaring the island's formal independence.

Tsai said Taiwan is already an independent country called the Republic of China, its official name.

(Reporting by Ben Blanchard; Editing by Gareth Jones)

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U.S. masses planes at Japan base to show foes and allies it can handle coronavirus

Tim Kelly

ReutersMay 21, 2020, 2:01 AM PDT

https://www.yahoo.com/news/u-masses-planes-japan-show-090146904.html

By Tim Kelly

U.S. soldiers wearing protective face masks are seen during a military drill amid the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) outbreak, at Yokota U.S. Air Force Base in Fussa, Japan

TOKYO (Reuters) - U.S. Air Force transport aircraft on Thursday massed at Washington's key Asian military air transportation hub, Yokota Air Base in Japan, to show potential foes and allies it was ready for action despite the coronavirus emergency.

"It shows both our adversaries as well as our allies in Japan the importance of our placement, the importance of our ability to execute our mission," base Vice Commander, Colonel Jason Mills, said.

U.S. forces are stationed in Japan to defend Washington's key Asian ally from attack from North Korea, but also to check China's growing influence in the wider region, including Southeast Asia and the South Pacific.

As Washington tries to tackle the coronavirus pandemic, some officials worry outbreaks in the military may provide fodder for Beijing to question U.S. strength in the region.

"When you’re dealing with COVID-19 induced domestic chaos, you just can’t pay as much attention to foreign affairs," said Grant Newsham, a research fellow at the Japan Forum for Strategic Studies and a former U.S. Marine colonel who liaised with Japan's Self Defense Forces.

In April, the U.S. aircraft carrier Theodore Roosevelt was forced to dock in Guam after a coronavirus outbreak infected several hundred sailors. Carriers such as the Ronald Reagan that is forward deployed in Japan and others that regularly pass through Asian waters are among the most conspicuous symbols of U.S. military might.

Yokota has had to quarantine sailors passing through the base who have tested positive for the virus.

Yokota's air wing, including C-130 transport planes and helicopters, moves troops and equipment around the Asia Pacific. Like other bases in Japan, which hosts the largest concentration of U.S. military personnel outside the United States, it has declared a public health emergency.

Troops at the base in western Tokyo are under orders to keep a distance from each other and local people and wear face masks. Commanders have also split personnel into shifts to lessen contact.

The coronavirus, like the rain that reduced visibility on Thursday, was another issue for air and ground crews to deal with to keep their aircraft flying, said Mills.

(Reporting by Tim Kelly; Editing by Christian Schmollinger)

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U.S. to sell Taiwan $180 million of torpedoes, angering China

ReutersMay 20, 2020, 5:30 PM PDT

https://www.yahoo.com/news/u-sell-taiwan-180-million-003000415.html

FILE PHOTO: Taiwan Kee Lung (DDG-1801) guided-missile destroyer (C) and navy vessels take part in a military drill near Hualien

TAIPEI (Reuters) - The U.S government has notified Congress of a possible sale of advanced torpedoes to Taiwan worth around $180 million, further souring already tense ties between Washington and Beijing, which claims Taiwan as Chinese territory.

The United States, like most countries, has no official diplomatic ties with Taiwan, but is bound by law to provide the democratic island with the means to defend itself. China routinely denounces U.S. arms sales to Taiwan.

The U.S. State Department has approved a possible sale to Taiwan of 18 MK-48 Mod6 Advanced Technology Heavy Weight Torpedoes and related equipment for an estimated cost of $180 million, the U.S. Defense Security Cooperation Agency said in a statement on Wednesday.

"The Defense Security Cooperation Agency delivered the required certification notifying Congress of this possible sale today," it added.

The proposed sale serves U.S. national, economic, and security interests by supporting Taiwan's "continuing efforts to modernise its armed forces and to maintain a credible defensive capability", the agency said.

In Beijing, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian said China had lodged "solemn representations" with Washington about the planned sale.

China urged the United States to stop all arms sales to, and military ties with, Taiwan to prevent further damage to Sino-U.S. relations, Zhao added.

The U.S. announcement came on the same day Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen was sworn in for her second term in office, saying she strongly rejecting China's sovereignty claims. China responded that "reunification" was inevitable and that it would never tolerate Taiwan's independence.

China has stepped up its military drills near Taiwan since Tsai's re-election, flying fighter jets into the island's air space and sailing warships around Taiwan.

China views Tsai as a separatist bent on formal independence for Taiwan. Tsai says Taiwan is an independent state called the Republic of China, its official name, and does not want to be part of the People's Republic of China governed by Beijing.

(Reporting by Ben Blanchard; Additional reporting by Cate Cadell in Beijing; Editing by Lincoln Feast and Richard Pullin)

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B-1 Bomber May Become the New Face of US Military Power in the Pacific

Oriana Pawlyk

Military.comMay 20, 2020, 10:19 AM PDT

https://www.yahoo.com/news/b-1-bomber-may-become-171932170.html

B-1 Bomber May Become the New Face of US Military Power in the Pacific

The Air Force's B-1B Lancer bomber is about to move front and center in the U.S. military's power-projection mission in the Pacific.

As part of its mission "reset" for the B-1 fleet, the Air Force is not only making its supersonic bombers more visible with multiple flights around the world, it's also getting back into the habit of having them practice stand-off precision strikes in the Pacific, a dramatic pivot following years of flying close-air support missions in the Middle East.

The "nice thing about the B-1 is it can carry [the Long-Range Anti-Ship Missile], and that's perfectly suited for the Pacific theater," Maj. Gen. Jim Dawkins Jr., commander of the Eighth Air Force and the Joint-Global Strike Operations Center at Barksdale Air Force Base, Louisiana, said in an interview Tuesday.

"Not only are we resetting the airplane's mission-capability rates and the training done for the aircraft, we're also resetting how we employ the airplane to get more toward great power competition to align with the National Defense Strategy," added Dawkins, who supports the warfighting air component to U.S. Strategic Command, as well as operations within Air Force Global Strike Command.

According to the 2018 NDS, "China is a strategic competitor using predatory economics to intimidate its neighbors while militarizing features in the South China Sea."

Former Air Force Secretary Heather Wilson stated that China has become "a pacing threat for the U.S. Air Force because of the pace of their modernization" in the region.

The Pentagon's strategy prioritizes deterring adversaries by denying their use of force in the first place.

That's one reason four bombers from Dyess Air Force Base, Texas, have been launching from Andersen Air Force Base, Guam, for patrols across the East and South China Seas since May 1, according to Air Force social media posts. The bombers deployed to Andersen after the service suspended its continuous bomber presence mission in the Pacific for the first time in 16 years.

During a simulated strike, crews "will pick a notional target, and then they will do some mission planning and flying through an area that they are able to hold that target at risk, at range," Dawkins said.

Close-air support, the B-1's primary mission in recent years, is a much different skill set than "shooting standoff weapons like JASSM-ER and LRASM," he said, referring to the Long-Range Anti-Ship Missile and Joint Air to Surface Stand-Off Missiles-Extended Range.

While Dawkins wouldn't get into specifics of how crews are conducting the practice runs in the Pacific, the non-nuclear B-1s have been spotted recently carrying Joint Air to Surface Stand-Off Missiles.

Photos recently posted on DVIDS, the U.S. military's multimedia distribution website, show Dyess' 9th Expeditionary Bomb Squadron Aircraft Maintenance Unit weapons crew members loading a JASSM into the belly of a plane. The B-1 is capable of carrying 75,000 pounds -- 5,000 pounds more than the B-52 Stratofortress -- of both precision-guided and conventional bombs.

The JASSM's newer variant, JASSM-ER, has a higher survivability rate -- meaning it's less likely to be detected and shot down -- due to low-observable technology incorporated into the conventional air-to-ground precision-guided missile. It is said to have a range of roughly 600 miles, compared with the 230-mile reach of JASSM, according to The Drive.

The LRASM, a Navy missile integrated on both the B-1 and F/A-18 Super Hornet, is able to autonomously locate and track targets while avoiding friendly forces.

The precision-guided, anti-ship standoff missile was first tested on a B-1 in August 2017. A single B-1 can carry up to 24 LRASMs, or the same number of JASSM-ERs. The LRASM missile achieved early operational capability on the bomber in 2018.

The vast expanses of the Pacific are well-suited for training with these kinds of missiles, Dawkins explained. Stateside ranges, which may lack surface waters or enough distance between two points, depending on location, cannot always accommodate the needs of bomber crews training with these long-range weapons.

Also, "[when] we deploy, for instance to Guam, taking off from [the U.S.] and going to the Pacific, it allows us to do some integration with our allies, as well as exercise the command-and-control ... and also allows us to practice our long-duration flights and work with the tankers," he said.

Prior to the Dyess deployment, a B-1 from the 28th Bomb Wing at Ellsworth Air Force Base, South Dakota, flew a 30-hour round-trip flight to Japan in late April. There, it operated alongside six U.S. Air Force F-16 Fighting Falcons, seven Japan Air Self Defense Force F-2s and eight JASDF F-15s over Draughon Range near Misawa, Pacific Air Forces said in a release.

The flight was part of the Air Force's new unpredictable deployment experiment to test crews' agility when sending heavy aircraft forces around the world, since the need to improve the bombers' deployability rate is also crucial, Dawkins said.

Mission-capability rates refers to how many aircraft are deployable at a given time. The B-1 has been on a slow and steady track to improve its rate -- which hovers around 50% -- after being broken down by back-to-back missions in the desert, officials have said.

The B-1 could become the face of the Pacific for the foreseeable future, Dawkins said.

"We want ... to be the roving linebacker, if you will, particularly in the Pacific," he said, adding the mission could also pave the way for incorporating hypersonic weapons into the bomber's arsenal.

In August, the Air Force proved it can transform the Lancer to hold more ordnance, a first step toward it carrying hypersonic weapons payloads.

Gen. Tim Ray, head of Air Force Global Strike Command, has expressed support for the B-1 as a future hypersonic weapons platform.

"Basically, the configuration we're seeking is external hardpoints that can allow us to add six Air-Launched Rapid Response Weapons [ARRW, pronounced "Arrow"], and then you still have the bomb bay where you can carry the LRASM or the JASSM-ER," Ray told reporters last month. LRASM or JASSM-ER could also be carried externally, he added.

"They're not doing any testing with the hypersonic on the B-1, but that's definitely in the mix," Dawkins said.

If configured with that payload in the future, that would be "quite a bit of air power coming off that airplane, whether it's JASSMs, JASSM-ERs or some combination of those, and hypersonics," he said.

-- Oriana Pawlyk can be reached at oriana.pawlyk@military.com. Follow her on Twitter at @Oriana0214.

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FOX News Videos

US ramps up military pressure on Beijing

May 16, 2020, 3:14 PM PDT

https://www.yahoo.com/news/us-ramps-military-pressure-beijing-221454521.html

Gen. Jack Keane joins Arthel Neville to discuss U.S. military pressure on Beijing amid tensions in the South China Sea.

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China plans landing drill for Pratas Islands as US ramps up military activity in sensitive Taiwan Strait

Source: https://www.yahoo.com/news/chinese-military-plan-landing-drill-131231420.html

Nicola Smith

May 14, 2020, 6:12 AM PDT

The Chinese military is planning to conduct a large-scale landing drill in August to simulate the possible future seizure of the Taiwan-controlled Pratas Islands amid rising tensions between China and the United States in the South China Sea, according to Japanese media reports.
Both Beijing and Washington have ramped up military activities near Taiwan in recent months, including regular Chinese air force drills near the island and several US sailings through the sensitive Taiwan Strait.
The US navy said on Thursday that the USS McCampbell, a guided-missile destroyer, had transited the narrow waterway on Wednesday, just one week before Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen's inauguration for a second term in office.
Japan’s Kyodo News reported earlier this week that the Chinese People’s Liberation Army intended to hold a beach landing simulation off Hainan Island, China’s southernmost province, which would mobilise marines, landing ships, hovercrafts and helicopters.
It cited unnamed Chinese sources as indicating the exercise may game out a scenario of capturing Pratas, also known as Dongsha, which is strategically important for China’s advance into the Pacific Ocean.
The island, 530 miles southwest of Taipei, is home to a small airfield used mainly by the Taiwanese military.
In response to the reports, Taiwan’s defence ministry said that it was monitoring movements of “hostile forces” through intelligence gathering and surveillance and that it had contingency plans to defend the island.
China has not announced the drill. Chinese state news outlet, the Global Times, neither confirmed nor denied the reports, but claimed it had “sparked fear” in Taiwan.
Beijing seeks to annex Taiwan, which operates like any other nation with its own democratically elected government and military.
“Chinese mainland experts said on Wednesday that the Dongsha Islands are a strategically important location, and the PLA can turn any exercise into action if Taiwan secessionists insist on secession,” the Global Times reported.

A naval soldier views through a pair of binoculars - Reuters

https://www.yahoo.com/news/chinese-military-plan-landing-drill-131231420.html

The Global Daily Watch and National Security

HỒ SƠ THỀM LỤC ÐỊA và BẢN ÐỒ VIỆT NAM CỘNG HÒA VAC-NORCAL ÐỆ TRÌNH LHQ 13/5/2009

Thứ Năm, 14 tháng 5, 2020

(The Military Activities in the East Sea and West Pacific Ocean)

https://quandiemvietnam.blogspot.com/2020_06_28_archive.html

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China Works On Undersea Cables Between Paracel Island Outposts

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Philippines South China Sea

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US Conducts 2nd Freedom of Navigation Operation in Paracels in a Month

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The Liaoning aircraft carrier is accompanied by frigates and submarines on April 12, 2018, conducting exercises in the South China Sea. (Li Gang/Xinhua via AP)

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https://www.yahoo.com/news/u-masses-planes-japan-show-090146904.html

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FOX News Videos

https://www.yahoo.com/news/us-ramps-military-pressure-beijing-221454521.html

Gen. Jack Keane joins Arthel Neville to discuss U.S. military pressure on Beijing amid tensions in the South China Sea.

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