Quotulatiousness

April 13, 2020

Increasing hazards to navigation in the East China Sea

Filed under: Asia, China, Japan, Military — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

It’s odd that all the increased collisions seem to involve Chinese vessels:

Japanese Maritime Self-Defence Force ship JS Shimakaze (DDG-172), the second ship of the Hatakaze class, commissioned in 1988. She was slightly damaged in a collision with a Chinese fishing boat in the East China Sea on 30 March 2020.
Image via Wikimedia Commons.

Sci-fi genius Robert Heinlein warned readers never to attribute to villainy behavior that was adequately explained by stupidity. In other words, he believed malice should be the explanation of last resort for puzzling conduct on the part of people or groups of people; it shouldn’t be the default. Better to hunt for more benign explanations first. With apologies to Heinlein, I would amend his “razor,” or heuristic, slightly. It’s too narrow. There are other candidates than stupidity or purposeful villainy to account for misconduct. Factors like incompetence, bureaucratic inertia, and sheer accident form — and sometimes deform — human thought and action. They belong on the stupidity side of Heinlein’s ledger.

How about this: Never attribute to villainy behavior that can be adequately explained by human failings. That preserves the essence of Heinlein’s razor while widening its scope to fit reality.

Let’s use his revised heuristic to evaluate the Sino-Japanese collision. It’s certainly possible the mishap came about by accident. It took place at night, in crowded waters. If the U.S. Navy collisions of 2017 taught us nothing else, it’s that the crews of even frontline warships can suffer from a host of maladies, from overwork to shoddy personnel practices to doctrinal or training shortfalls. No amount of high technology — whether it’s Aegis radar or satellite navigation — can altogether forestall human error. It may be that the Japanese crew, the Chinese crew, or both blundered around in the dark and came to grief. By Heinlein’s lights that’s the generous and proper assumption until the facts become known. If they do.

Nevertheless, a silent corollary has to be appended to Heinlein’s razor: But don’t rule out villainy, either.

Especially when it comes to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). For decades Beijing has made militiamen embedded in the Chinese fishing fleet an arm of maritime strategy. The maritime militia is an irregular adjunct to regular naval forces, including the People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLA Navy) and especially the musclebound China Coast Guard fielded over the past decade. Beijing touted the militia’s combat prowess as long ago as 1974, when Chinese naval forces wrested a tottering South Vietnam’s holdings in the Paracel Islands from it in a brief but bloody sea battle. Militia craft backed by the coast guard have been a fixture in the South China Sea ever since 2009, when Beijing declared “indisputable sovereignty” over the vast majority of that body of water — including seas allocated to its neighbors by treaty. The irregular force went into overdrive in 2012 during the standoff with the Philippine Navy and Coast Guard at Scarborough Shoal, deep within the Philippines’ exclusive economic zone. Fishing craft flood the zone in CCP-claimed waters and dare local coast guards or navies to repulse them. If the locals resist, the China Coast Guard backs up the militia. PLA regular forces provide a backstop should things go awry.

H/T to Blazing Cat Fur for the link.

April 5, 2020

China’s geostrategic box

Filed under: China, Economics, Military, Pacific, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

ESR looks at the concerns that China may be considering starting a war with the United States in the wake of the Wuhan Coronavirus:

To understand how limited the PRC’s war options are, we can start with a grasp on how difficult and unsatisfying any war of conquest would be due to the geographic box China is in. The obstacles around it are formidable.

To the south, the Himalayan massif makes all of South Asia other than a narrow coastal plain on the Southeast Asian peninsula inaccessible to serious troop movements. There are no roads or rail links. The last time the Chinese tried pushing in that direction, in 1979, they were unable to sustain an offensive at any distance from their railheads and withdrew after less than a month. Their war aim – forcing the North Vietnamese to withdraw its troops from Cambodia – failed.

To the west, the vastness and comparatively undeveloped state of China’s western hinterland is a serious logistical problem before one even gets to the border. At the borders, the Tien Shan and Pamir ranges present a barrier almost as formidable as the Himalayas. External road and rail links are poor and would be easily interdicted.

To the north, movement would be easier. It might be just within logistical possibility for the PLA to march into Siberia. The problem with this idea is that once you’ve conquered Siberia, what you have is … Siberia. Most of it, except for a small area in the south coastal region of Primorsky Kraye, is so cold that cities aren’t viable without food imports from outside the region. Set this against the risks of invading a nuclear-armed Russia and you don’t have a winning proposition.

To the east is the South China Sea. The brute fact constraining the PRC’s ambitions in that direction is that mass movement of troops by sea is risky and difficult. I recently did the math on Chinese sealift craft and despite an expensive buildup since the 1980s they don’t have the capacity to move even a single division-sized formation over ocean. Ain’t nobody going to take Taiwan with one division, they’ve has too much time to prepare and fortify over the last 60 years.

The PRC leadership is evil and ruthless, but it’s also cautious and historically literate and can read maps. Accordingly, the People’s Liberation Army is designed not to take territory but to hold the territory the PRC already has. Its mission is not conquest but the suppression of regional warlordism inside China itself. The capability for the PLA to wage serious expeditionary warfare doesn’t exist, and can’t be built in the near-term future.

It’s often said that the danger of aggressive war by China is a function of the huge excess of young men produced by covert sexual selection and the one-child policy. But to expend those young men usefully you need to get them to where they can fight and are motivated by some prospect of seizing the wives unavailable for them at home. The PRC can’t do that.

The military threat from China is, therefore, a function of what it can do with its navy, its airpower, and its missiles. And what it can do with those against the U.S. is upper-bounded by the fact that the U.S. has nuclear weapons and would be certain to respond to a PRC nuclear or EMP attack on the U.S. mainland by smashing Chinese cities into radioactive rubble.

Within the constraints of conventional warfare waged by navy and air force it is difficult to imagine an achievable set of PRC war aims that gains more than it costs.

It’s possible — even likely — that the Chinese military has something like the oft-rumoured “ship-killer missiles” that might be able to cripple or sink an American carrier … if it was in range. That makes the South China Sea, the East China Sea, and the west coast of Japan a possible no-go area for US Navy carrier strike groups. A good defensive weapon system to have on hand in case relations with the outside world go “hot”, but not a strategic game-changer. Nobody would be likely to consider anything as dangerous as a seaborne invasion of mainland China, even without the threat of wonder weapons like the ship-killer. And good defensive weapons won’t secure the trade routes that China depends on outside coastal waters.

In a lot of ways your strategic situation is like a scaled-up version of Japan’s in 1941 – you could seize the initiative with a Pearl-Harbor-like initial shock, but you can’t wage a long war because without sealane control you’ll run out of key feedstocks and even food rather rapidly. And unlike the Japanese in 1941, you don’t have the kind of serious blue-water navy that you’d need for sealane control outside the First Island Chain – not with just two carriers you don’t.

There is one way an aggressive naval war could work out in your favor anyway. You can count on the U.S.’s media establishment to be pulling for the U.S. to lose any war it’s in, especially against a Communist or Socialist country. If your war goals are limited to ending U.S. naval power projection in the Western Pacific, playing for a rapid morale collapse orchestrated by agents of influence in the U.S. is not completely unrealistic.

It’s playing with fire, though. One problem is that before you launch your attack you don’t know that your sucker punch will actually work. Another is that, as the Japanese found out after Pearl Harbor, the American public may react to tragic losses with Jacksonian fury. If that happens, you’re seriously screwed. The war will end with your unconditional surrender, and not sooner.

Update: Bone-headed typo in the headline fixed. It’s funny how you can’t see ’em until just after you click the Save button…

May 14, 2018

China launches the second Type 001 aircraft carrier (Type 001A)

Filed under: China, Military — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In the New York Times, Steven Lee Myers reports on the newest People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) aircraft carrier departing from Dalian to undergo its initial sea trials:

China’s Type 001A aircraft carrier shortly after launch, 17 August 2017.
Photo via Wikimedia Commons

China launched its first domestically built aircraft carrier to begin sea trials on Sunday, reaching another milestone in the expansion of the country’s navy.

The aircraft carrier, as yet unnamed, left its berth at a shipyard in the northeastern port of Dalian after a blow of its horn and a display of fireworks, according to reports in state news media.

The Chinese Navy — officially the People’s Liberation Army Navy — already has one operational carrier, the Liaoning, which it bought unfinished from Ukraine after the collapse of the Soviet Union. That ship joined the Chinese fleet in 2012 and began its first operations four years later, putting China in the small group of seafaring powers that maintain aircraft carriers, led by the United States, which has 11.

The Liaoning, which appears to serve as a training vessel as much as a combat ship, was the centerpiece of a naval parade of 48 ships attended last month by China’s leader, Xi Jinping. The following week, it led a carrier battle group in live-fire exercises in the Taiwan Strait and in the East China Sea.

Since taking office, Mr. Xi has driven an ambitious effort to modernize the country’s military, reducing the traditional focus on readying the ground forces of the People’s Liberation Army to defend against an invasion of the mainland and increasing the emphasis on technology-dependent naval, air and missile forces.

The new carrier, built by the Dalian Shipbuilding Industry Company, has a similar design to the Liaoning but has been modified and expanded, according to Chinese and foreign experts.

September 10, 2013

China’s historical model for naval strategy

Filed under: China, History, Middle East, Military, Pacific — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:16

At The Diplomat, James Holmes explains the odd fact that China is a “good citizen” in their coalition work with other countries fighting piracy away from home, but bullies its neighbours in the waters closer to home:

The analogy is the doctrine of “no peace beyond the line” practiced in late Renaissance Europe. To recap: in a nifty bit of collective doublethink, European rulers struck up a compact whereby nations could remain at peace in Europe, avoiding the hardships of direct conflict, while assailing each other mercilessly beyond a mythical boundary separating Europe from the Americas. In practice this meant they raided each other’s shipping and outposts in the greater Caribbean Sea and its Atlantic approaches.

It feels as though an inverse dynamic is at work in the Indo-Pacific theater. Naval powers cooperate westward of the line traced by the Malay Peninsula, Strait of Malacca, and Indonesian archipelago. Suspicions pockmarked by occasional confrontation predominate east of the South China Sea rim, a physical — rather than imaginary — line dividing over there from home ground.

A non-Renaissance European, Clausewitz, helps explain why seafaring powers can police the Gulf of Aden in harmony while feuding over the law of the sea in the East China Sea and South China Sea. It’s because the mission is apolitical. Counterpiracy is the overriding priority for the nations that have dispatched vessels to the waters off Somalia. Few if any of them have cross-cutting interests or motives that might disrupt the enterprise. It’s easy to work together when the partners bring little baggage to the venture.

[…]

You see where I’m going with this. The expedition to the Gulf of Aden is an easy case. It proves a trivial result, namely that rivals can collaborate for mutual gain when they have the same interests in an endeavor. Now plant yourself in East Asia and survey the strategic terrain within the perimeter separating the Indian from the Pacific Ocean. China views the South China Sea, to name one contested expanse, not as a commons but as offshore territory. Indeed, Beijing asserts “indisputable sovereignty” there.

Such pretensions grate on Southeast Asian states, while the United States hopes to rally coalitions and partnerships to oversee the commons. But if Beijing is serious about the near seas’ constituting “blue national soil” — and our Chinese friends are nothing if not sincere — then outsiders policing these waters must look like invaders. How else would you regard foreign constables or armies roaming your soil — even for praiseworthy reasons — without so much as a by-your-leave?

South China Sea claims

September 4, 2013

Air-Sea Battle as a response to Chinese military expansion

Filed under: China, Military, Pacific, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 13:18

The Diplomat‘s Amitai Etzioni looks at the US Air-Sea Battle plan:

On the face of it, the Pentagon’s Air-Sea Battle plan makes eminently good sense; it is a clear response to a clear challenge. China has been developing a whole slew of weapons (especially anti-ship missiles) over the past two decades that are of great concern to the U.S. military. These weapons, known in Pentagon-speak as anti-access/area-denial (A2/AD) capabilities, could undermine the international right to free passage in China’s surrounding waters or, in the case of a conflict over Taiwan or contested islands in the South and East China Seas, prevent the U.S. from making good on defense commitments to its friends in the region.

In response, the Pentagon developed Air-Sea Battle (ASB), the employment of which entails, according to position papers developed to promote it, a blistering assault on China’s mainland. A report by the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments (CSBA) gives a detailed account of how an ASB-style war with China would unfold. In the opening “blinding campaign,” the U.S. attacks China’s reconnaissance and command-and-control networks to degrade the PLA’s ability to target U.S. and allied forces. Next, the military takes the fight to the Chinese mainland, striking long-range anti-ship missile launchers. Given that this is where the anti-ship missiles are located, it is only logical that the U.S. would target land-based platforms. And to go after them, one of course needs to take out China’s air defense systems, command control centers, and other anti-access weapons. In short, ASB requires a total war with China.

[…]

The main flaw Air-Sea Battle it is not merely that it is a particularly aggressive military response to the anti-access/area-denial challenge. The problem is that ASB is developing in a foreign policy vacuum. If the U.S. were to conduct a thorough review of China’s military capabilities and its regional and global ambitions — and found that the Chinese were planning to forcefully expand their territory or unseat the U.S. as the global power, perhaps Air-Sea Battle might be deemed appropriate.

February 5, 2013

Japan lodges formal protest after Chinese ship targets Japanese ship near Senkaku/Diaoyu islands

Filed under: China, Japan, Military — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:13

The BBC has the details:

“On 30 January, something like fire-control radar was directed at a Japan Self-Defence Maritime escort ship in the East China Sea,” Mr Onodera told reporters on Tuesday.

The minister said Japan’s Yuudachi vessel and the Chinese frigate were about 3km (one mile) [ed: conversion error here, 3km is about 2 miles] apart at the time, Japan’s Kyodo News reports.

Asked about the delay in filing the protest, Mr Onodera said it took the ministry until Tuesday to determine that a fire-control radar had indeed locked on the Japanese ship.

He added that a Japanese military helicopter was also targeted with a similar type of radar by another Chinese frigate on 19 January.

“Directing such radar is very abnormal. We recognise it would create a very dangerous situation if a single misstep occurred,” he said.

Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands

December 26, 2012

What we gain in accuracy we lose in romance

Filed under: History, Media, Science, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:27

What am I talking about? Digital maps:

It’s not often that maps make headlines, but they’ve been doing so with some regularity lately. Last week, tens of millions of iPhone users found that they could suddenly leave their homes again without getting either lost or cross. This was because Google finally released an app containing its own (fairly brilliant) mapping system. Google Maps had been sorely missed for several months, ever since Apple booted it in favor of the company’s own inadequate alternative — a cartographic dud blamed for everything from deleting Shakespeare’s birthplace to stranding Australian travelers in a desolate national park 43 miles away from their actual destination. As one Twitter wag declared: “I wouldn’t trade my Apple Maps for all the tea in Cuba.”

There was one potential bright spot, though: Among the many mistakes found in Apple Maps was a rather elegant solution to the continuing dispute between Japan and China over the Senkaku islands. Japan controls them; China claims them. Apple Maps, when released, simply duplicated the islands, with two sets shown side-by-side — one for Japan, one for China. Win-win. (At least until the software update.) Call it diplomacy by digital dunderheadedness.

As some may recall, it was not so long ago that we got around by using maps that folded. Occasionally, if we wanted a truly global picture of our place in the world, we would pull shoulder-dislocating atlases from shelves. The world was bigger back then. Experience and cheaper travel have rendered it small, but nothing has shrunk the world more than digital mapping.

[. . .]

There is something disappointing about the austere potential perfection of the new maps. The satellites above us have seen all there is to see of the world; technically, they have mapped it all. But satellites know nothing of the beauty of hand-drawn maps, with their Spanish galleons and sea monsters, and they cannot comprehend wanderlust and the desire for discovery. Today we can locate the smallest hamlet in sub-Saharan Africa or the Yukon, but can we claim that we know them any better? Do the irregular and unpredictable fancies of the older maps more accurately reflect the strangeness of the world?

The uncertainty that was once an unavoidable part or our relationship with maps has been replaced by a false sense of Wi-Fi-enabled omnipotence. Digital maps are the enemies of wonder. They suppress our urge to experiment and (usually) steer us from error—but what could be more irrepressibly human than those very things?

Update: And the Apple Maps fiasco has them leading most of the tech world’s “Top 10” lists for mis-steps, fumbles, and self-inflicted wounds.

There really could be only one pick for the number-one spot on this list. The Apple Maps fiasco has done more to hurt the company’s image than anything else this year, leaving their reputation — and those of some of its supporters — in the dust.

At the start of the year Apple was riding high. The loss of cofounder Steve Jobs had been handled better than many in the industry had expected, and Tim Cook looked like a safe pair of hands to take the company forward. Apple was on its way to being the most valuable in the world in dollar terms, and was beating the competition like a red-headed stepchild.

[. . .]

When iOS 6 with Apple Maps launched, there was initially little fuss. Apple’s policy of only letting friendly reviewers get advanced access to kit held up well, and virtually none of Cupertino’s chosen few even mentioned the mapping function in their glowing reviews of the new operating system. But then users actually tried it out and the results were plain to see.

Apple’s Maps app simply didn’t work correctly. Sure, it could get you from point to point — just about — but the level of detail included was poor and mapping information was frequently wrong. The list of cock-ups grew day by day as people realized that the application just wasn’t fit in any meaningful way.

Even the Australian police warned against using it for fear of getting lost in the desert.

September 3, 2012

Military-political jockeying in the East China Sea

Filed under: China, Japan, Military — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:26

At sp!ked, James Woudhuysen has a long essay on the many tiny islands in the East China Sea (and South China Sea) that may feature in future shooting wars:

Outside East Asia, very few people know where the Senkaku islands are. But inside East Asia, the Senkaku prompt great bitterness between Japan, China and Taiwan. At stake is the national pride of each country, which believes that it alone owns them. At stake also are each country’s hopes that it might find oil or gas nearby, and its desire to sail round them unimpeded. But there is more. The Senkaku, and islands like them, signify how, among all the continents in the world, Asia’s past century has been the most enduringly explosive — and how its next could follow the same pattern.

Two hundred nautical miles (nm) west of the Japanese prefecture of Okinawa, 200 nm east of the province of Fujian in the People’s Republic of China, and just 120 nm north-east of Taiwan, there lies an archipelago of five uninhabited islands, covering just seven square kilometres and covered in jungle. Coming from Tokyo, a team of 25 city officials, surveyors and — inevitably — estate agents circled the islands just this weekend, hoping to reinforce Japan’s control over them. In the past, similar moves by both Japan and China have prompted fury, and not a little diplomatic concern elsewhere.

In mid-August, a group of Chinese sailed to the islands in order to uphold Beijing’s claim to them, only to meet with deportation at the hands of Japan. A little later, 150 Japanese nationalists came by in a flotilla and 10 of them swam ashore to raise the Japanese flag. Then, in the latest of a series of tit-for-tat episodes stretching back years, demonstrators in several Chinese cities insisted that Japan get out of the islands. All that’s missing now is that, on top of Tokyo’s rule over what it calls Senkaku and Beijing’s claim over what it calls Diaoyu, is a Taiwanese incursion over what they call the Diaoyutai.

What’s going on? Could all this lead to some kind of fearsome war between Japan, China and Taiwan? And why are there disputes not only in the East China Sea, but also in the South China Sea? There, south-east of Hainan Island (China) and east of Vietnam, China controls the Paracel Islands and resists the complaints of Taiwan and Vietnam about them. There, too, all three parties occupy and are in contention over the myriad Spratly islands, which, lying west of the Philippines and north of Malaysia and Brunei, are also partly controlled and certainly contested by these three nations.

April 15, 2010

Uninhabited islands could be flashpoint in Sino-Japanese conflict

Filed under: China, Japan, Military — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 07:35

A group of uninhabited islands south of Okinawa have the potential to increase tensions between China and Japan. The Senkaku island group is subject to overlapping claims from China, Taiwan, and Japan:

Japan reports that, for the third time in the past 18 months, Chinese warships have been spotted south of the Japanese Island of Okinawa. This time, it was two Chinese submarines, running on the surface. That had never been seen before, in the area near the Senkaku islands (which are claimed by China, Taiwan and Japan). The Senkakus are eight uninhabited islands, which in the past were only used occasionally by fishermen. The Senkakus are 220 kilometers from Taiwan, 360 kilometers from China and 360 kilometers from Okinawa (which is part of Japan).

[. . .]

Five years ago, a Chinese oil drilling platform, in disputed waters halfway between China and the Japanese island of Okinawa, began producing natural gas, despite ongoing negotiations over who owns what in that patch of ocean. The Chinese spent two years building that platform, in waters claimed by Japan. A second platform was later built, as well as an underwater oil pipeline for both platforms. China regularly sends groups of warships to patrol the area, to underline their belief that this bit of water is under Chinese control. Japan would probably win any naval war with China, but since China has nuclear weapons, and Japan does not (at least not right now), such a war could go seriously against Japan. This has been brought up in Japan before, and it is feared that the issue may lead to Japan secretly, or openly, building nuclear weapons (which it could certainly do, and quite quickly.)

I’m certainly hoping that this is just speculation on the part of Strategy Page (the bit about nuclear weapons), as territorial disputes over islands do have a way of getting out of hand (see Falkland Islands, for example).

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