Monday 16 March 2009
U.S. vessel’s standoff with Chinese sub ‘dangerous,’ analyst says
The recent confrontation between a U.S. surveillance vessel and five Chinese naval ships appears to be another episode in “a wider and dangerous cat-and-mouse game” between the Chinese submarine fleet and American sub-hunters, a military analyst said.
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U.S. vessel’s standoff with Chinese sub ‘dangerous,’ analyst says
By Mark Mcdonald
12 March 2009
HONG KONG: The recent confrontation between a U.S. surveillance vessel and five Chinese naval ships appears to be another episode in “a wider and dangerous cat-and-mouse game” between the Chinese submarine fleet and American sub-hunters, a military analyst said.
Hans Kristensen, who is with the Federation of American Scientists, said the U.S. ship, Impeccable, was probably monitoring China’s new nuclear-powered attack submarine when a standoff occurred Sunday in the South China Sea.
The Pentagon said the Chinese vessels blocked and surrounded the American ship, which claimed right of free passage in the area. A U.S. Navy spokesman, Captain Jeffrey Breslau, called the Chinese actions “dangerous.”
China, likewise, criticized U.S. naval activities in the area.
“We urge the United States to respect our legal interests and security concern,” said a Defense Ministry spokesman, Huang Xueping, according to the official Chinese news agency, Xinhua. He called the U.S. surveillance activities “illegal.”
Breslau acknowledged that the Impeccable had been towing an underwater listening and mapping device known as a Surtass array. At one point, he said, the Chinese tried to snag the tow-line with a long grappling hook.
The incident occurred 120 kilometers, or 75 miles, south of the Chinese island of Hainan, the Pentagon said. Kristensen, in his blog on the federation’s Web site, said a Chinese Shang-class nuclear sub had recently been spotted in satellite photographs at a covert naval base on Hainan.
China claims an “economic exclusion zone,” which extends out 200 nautical miles from its coastline, with exclusive rights to oil and gas exploration, drilling and fishing. For other activities and normal sea passage, international territorial waters are typically defined as 12 miles offshore.
“And there’s a long proud tradition of intelligence collection underwater,” said Andrew Davies, director of operations and capability at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute in Canberra. “The limits were often breached underwater during the Cold War, even well inside the 12-mile limit.”
Kristensen said the U.S. Navy has been “busy collecting data on the submarines and sea floor to improve its ability to detect the submarines in peacetime and more efficiently hunt them in case of war.”
He also noted that U.S. and Soviet ships had similar skirmishes during the Cold War, “when Soviet spy ships were lurking off U.S. naval bases and U.S. ships were lurking off Soviet bases.”
“That resulted in the Incidents at Sea Agreement, which Beijing and Washington need to copy to guide their interactions at sea,” he said. “This is not an us-versus-them issue or who is most to blame, but about regulating military operations so they don’t mess up relations and increase distrust.”
In a recent visit to Hong Kong, the commander of U.S. forces in the Asia-Pacific region, Admiral Timothy Keating, said “nascent initiatives” had begun between Beijing and Washington to develop a code of conduct at sea.
“We want them to understand there are rules of the road, both literal and figurative,” Keating said of his Chinese counterparts. “It is very much in their interest to observe and operate by those rules.” Hu Jintao, the Chinese president, did not mention the naval confrontation when he addressed officers from the People’s Liberation Army in remarks reported on Thursday. In brief comments on state-run TV and in the newspaper China Daily, he urged the military to “staunchly defend national sovereignty, security and territorial integrity.”
Otherwise, state media did not play up the incident on Thursday. And both the Chinese foreign minister, Yang Jiechi, and U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, meeting in Washington, said they were clearing the air over the incident. Yang said U.S-China relations were “at a new starting point.”
The Chinese navy also appears to be a new starting point, especially in terms of its reach, analysts said.
In its first modern deployment of warships beyond the Asia-Pacific region, China recently sent two destroyers and a supply ship to the pirate-infested Gulf of Aden, at the mouth of the Suez Canal. The ships have escorted Chinese-owned merchant vessels and are collaborating with navies from other nations.
“The significance of that shouldn’t be underestimated,” Davies said. “It’s sophisticated. It’s something grown-up navies do.”
He said China was “clearly a strategic competitor” of the United States now, and its growing naval confidence is “certainly consistent with a more assertive China.”
The Chinese also have indicated they intend to build their first aircraft carrier. They have bought a mothballed Soviet carrier to use as a template for assembling a new carrier, a project that one analyst called “reverse engineering.” The navy also bought an old Australian carrier, ostensibly for scrap, but which has become part of the carrier project.
Chinese fighter pilots, Davies said, also have been practicing on an airstrip built to the same size and scale as the landing strip on the deck of a carrier.
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