Tag Archives: China

Strategic Outlook

Indonesia’s Strategic Flexibility

1 Comment

This post was cross-posted by permission from The Security Scholar and is republished with permission. It may be read in its original form here.

By Natalie Sambhi

Brad Nelson has a neat overview in the Jakarta Globe earlier this month of Indonesia’s strategic options vis-à-vis China and the U.S. Enabled by what he calls ‘strategic flexibility’ (which I think is actually an extension of Indonesia’s so-called ‘dynamic equilibrium’ approach), Indonesia can stay neutral, pick China or the U.S., be a mediator/conduit or play the big kids off against one another.

Natuna Islands
                            The disputed Natuna Islands

Nelson rightly identifies Indonesia as attempting to pursue a ‘conduit’-type role. In fact, to be an effective conduit and exert real influence on the U.S. and China, Nelson prescribes Indonesia build goodwill as a conflict mediator and regional problem-solver.

In theory, it’s a sensible option but I have my misgivings about how it’s presented in relatively unproblematic terms. I say this because I’m reminded of comments made at a recent workshop by a participant challenging Indonesia’s image as a neutral party in South China Sea disputes. They asked, how could Indonesia be a legitimate mediator if it refuses mediation itself on issues such as the Natuna Islands?

Not being an expert on Indonesia’s territorial disputes, I dug up some of I Made Andi Arsana’s writing to work out how much of an issue Natuna is. Arsana’s overview of the history around the Natuna Island EEZ reveals a complicated picture (excerpt):

On the other hand, China seems to have a different view. In 2010, for example, Chinese fishermen were caught fishing in waters off the Natuna Islands, which Indonesia unilaterally considers as part of its EEZ. When patrolling Indonesian officers approached to arrest the vessels, a large Chinese vessel arrived and demanded that the vessels be released.

This gives the impression that the fishing vessels were guarded by a large vessel known as the “Chinese fishery administration vessel”. It can be inferred that China has extended its maritime claim up to the area that Indonesia believes to be its.

The aforementioned incident implies that Indonesia is not totally free from the SCS conflict.

Nelson approach isn’t incorrect but it requires more detail than its current form to be a true representation of Indonesia’s strategic options. It might be strengthened by addressing questions about China–Indonesia strategic relations, found in other writings of Ristian Atriandi Supriyanto and Greta Nabbs-Keller, to name a few. With reports earlier this year of the Indonesian navy on alert for possible Chinese claims to Natuna waters, it seems like this isn’t over yet.

Natalie Sambhi is an analyst at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, editor of The Strategist and co-editor of Security Scholar. She is also a Hedley Bull Scholar and graduate of the Australian National University.

Drones

Evaluating China’s Anti-Ship Drone Swarms

Leave a comment

The Project 2049 Institute recently released a report on People’s Republic of China (PRC) UAV advances, with a focus on how those capabilities could be used to threaten U.S. Navy carrier strike groups.  China’s expanding land- and sea-based UAV inventory runs the range from small tactical systems to medium-ranged Predator-class to unmanned combat air vehicles (UCAVs) still under development.  This anti-access/area denial capability, or A2/AD in naval parlance, represents just one of several layers of offensive systems the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) is developing to exercise naval hegemony in the Western Pacific. 
 
The report argues that “UAV systems may emerge as the critical enabler for PLA long range precision strike missions within a 3000 kilometer radius of Chinese shores.”  This 3000 km radius represents an area well into the so-called Second Island Chain, control of which is commonly recognized as a long-term strategic goal for the PLA.

China's ASN-229A ISR and Strike UAV, just one of many friendly drones you'll find in the Project 2049 report.
China’s ASN-229A ISR and Strike UAV, just one of many friendly drones you’ll find in the Project 2049 report.

The report details Chinese strategists’ plans to use drones of swarms in a variety of ways to defeat opposing naval forces.  Decoy UAVs would draw fire and reduce the inventories of anti-aircraft missiles.  Electronic warfare (EW) UAVs would jam shipboard radars and anti-radition drones would attack them.  Reconnaissance drones could then cue anti-ship ballistic missiles (ASBMs) and armed UAVs in an attempt to overwhelm strike group defenses.

Defense against these swarms could take a number of forms.  First, dispersal of naval forces – over tens, hundreds, and thousands of kilometers – would prevent a drone swarm from doing too much harm to concentrated ship formations, also causing the PLA to prioritize its targets or disperse the swarm, limiting its effectiveness.  In an exchange against large numbers of low-cost drones, the engagement ratio, in both cost and number of weapons, is not favorable to air defense missiles such as those used by Japanese and U.S. Aegis ships.  A return to anti-aircraft cannon may be one option to reverse this asymmetry, though the introduction of directed energy weapons in the place of limited defensive missile inventories might be a better way to handle large numbers of incoming drones.  Interestingly, the U.S. Navy has announced it will deploy a prototype laser system, a previous version of which has been tested against UAVs, on USS Ponce in the Persian Gulf later this year.

It should also be noted that these systems would be susceptible to the same vulnerabilities cited by many observers of U.S. UAV operation: they can be jammed or spoofed, and the satellite or other communications links that control the drones can also be disrupted by various means. Finally, in the spirit of “it takes a network to defeat a network,” China would not have a monopoly on UAV development.  In time, PLA drone swarms would face large numbers of UAVs operated by other navies in the South China Sea.  Expect to see drones develop with air-to-air capabilities, defensive counter-measures, and programming to “sacrifice” themselves to protect surface fleets.

See more on China’s maritime UAV developments here.

This article was re-posted by permission from, and appeared in its original form at NavalDrones.com.

Capability Analysis

The Carrier and National Security Variables

2 Comments

 

Worth the price of influence?
Worth the price of influence?

The report At What Cost a Carrier? published by CNAS and written by CAPT Henry J. Hendrix contains all the necessary ingredients for a simple model-structuring discussion about the validity and viability of the “Carrier Force” concept. With such a model, individual variables can be discussed or discarded without undermining the need to answer the leading cost question or the model itself. These are the basic variables we get with a carrier:

  • Influence: The amount of influence a navy can project on the world is indirectly measured by carrier military power – sets of “90,000 tons of diplomacy” – and not limited to it. In fact, the rest most of the world uses other means to influence events in order to achieve favorable outcomes.  Other nations may want a carrier but, because they cannot afford one, have to look for alternatives.
  • Cost: The cost of achieving a carrier’s desired capabilities, whether measured by the price of procurement, life-cycle cost, or the cost to restore damaged capabilities during armed conflict. Inversely, not building carriers incurs the cost of losing industrial base and know-how.
  • Risk: This is commonly understood as vulnerability from a lack of assets (the risk of going without), but there are also consequences of losing a carrier. The magnitude of lost military power, cost, influence, and image in such a case would enormous.

Military effectiveness-related attributes, like striking power and affordability, are relatively easy to measure and remain at the center of discussions. On the other hand, political-value calculations are less structured (and harder to quantify) but probably represent the biggest threat to the carrier-centric concept, especially if linked with a shift in strategy. What is the acceptable Cost to have X amount of Influence? Or to reduce X amount of Risk? Is increasing Influence worth increasing Risk? What is our strategy to have Influence on opponent?

There are many examples of proposals aimed at undermining the delicate balance between the above attributes.

During the 1980s, Surface Action Groups (SAGs) built around battleships (then still in service) were considered partial substitutes for Carrier Battle Groups (CBGs). It was a compromise, which in effect supplemented carriers but did not replace them.

In the same category we can place contemporary “Influence Squadrons.”

“If the Navy rethinks the role of Carrier Strike Groups (Ferrari) and deploys new, scaled-down Influence Squadrons (Ford), the result will be 320 hulls in water for three-quarters the price,” said Capt. Hendrix. This fits well with the trends of other nations, purchasing LPH-class helicopter carriers as affordable naval air power, and spurs grim predictions for carriers from bloggers:

Were Humphrey a betting man, then he’d be willing to place a small wager that within 20 years, there will be six nations operating aircraft carriers (down from nine today), and only two of them will be in the West…

Sir Humphrey depicts the world (almost) without carriers and shows how easily – through the cascading effects of delayed deployments, reduced training, and backlogs in nuclear refueling – sequestration could drastically reduce U.S. naval air power (or its useful part). In this context, if the variables above are the right ones, than DF-21 is the modern equivalent of the Star Wars project and cruise missiles from Cold War-era. Development of these weapon systems created such strong financial pressures on their opponent that they ultimately put the enemy’s whole system on the edge of collapse. DF-21 is presented as a weapon targeting carriers’ vulnerabilities, but in a way it becomes strategic weapon with political calculations behind it.

Ballistic missiles represent yet another area of exploration, which potentially could result in changing the prime positions of carriers in a national defense portfolio. We’ve lately seen the latest attempts to reinvent conventionally armed Submarine-Launched Ballistic Missiles (SLBMs). These concepts are not new and in this case risk-calculation will probably prevail, as launching ballistic missiles from submerged submarines creates a danger of triggering nuclear conflict as the adversary may have a hard time differentiating the conventional launch from the nuclear variety.

 

Challenging the old calculus.
                             Challenging the old calculus.

The impression is that there is no threat today to aircraft carriers’ primacy because they still represent such a large capability to influence events. Experimenting with other alternatives shouldn’t be viewed as a budgetary threat to carriers but rather as a way to limit the risk if an opponent changes the balance between Influence, Cost, and Risk in favor of other means or weapon systems. The time elapsed between construction of HMS Dreadnought and the Jutland Battle was only 10 years. In the battle, the British Grand Fleet validated the concept of the distant blockade of Germany, but at the same time forced Hochseeflotte to switch resources toward U-Boats, which in turn made the Grand Fleet obsolete in maintaining a distant blockade. Preparing defensive measures against the new threat was costly during the war and forgotten in peacetime.

Przemek Krajewski alias Viribus Unitis is a blogger In Poland.  His area of interest is broad context of purpose and structure of Navy and promoting discussions on these subjects In his country

Strategic Outlook

Maritime Security and National Identity

Leave a comment

A recent sign posted on the window of a Beijing restaurant refuses to serve certain nationalities due to current international maritime disputes between state actors. Sarah Danruo Wang analyzes how historic disputes on sea (and on land) shape national identity

Restaurant SignAs I near graduation at the University of Toronto, I keep thinking about vignettes of my incredibly awkward, enlightening, and unforgettable first year that really shaped some of my research interests today.  In one such episode, as I was researching a paper on the Franco-Prussian War I encountered an odd little anecdote about how, decades back, a group of people watched an opera so cathartic that when it concluded, Belgium was born. Since then I have researched what it means to be “German” through the ambitions of Bismarck; “Soviet Russian” during Lenin’s implementation of national language policies; “Greek” during the fall of Constantinople; “Czechoslovakian” amidst such an unstable geography; and “Azerbaijani” in a seemingly ethnically homogenous, enigmatic Iran. Personally, I was born in Beijing and I have lived for four to five years each in Ottawa, the San Francisco Bay Area, Vancouver, and now Toronto – a mobile life that renders me identity-less. If our characters are formed through our reactions to our struggles, is a national identity similarly (re)created through the interpretation of conflict?

A restaurant in Beijing has a faded sign on its window: “This shop does not receive the Japanese, the Philippines (sic), the Vietnamese, and dog.” I admit that I am not shocked by this almost boastful racism from my hometown. Chinese signs were once the tangible symbols of losing something in translation, yet this one is succinctly clear. Why specifically these three countries? It turns out that each has a maritime dispute with China. China is obviously at odds with Japan over the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands; and with Vietnam and the Philippines over islands in the South China Sea. Although the sign is an isolated incident, provoking nasty reactions from the nationalities in question, the state has not asked the owner to remove the sign as the owner indicates that “this is my own conduct.” What many news outlets did not mention is that this sign is eerily reminiscent of a well-told Chinese story of a sign reading, “Chinese and Dogs Not Admitted”, in Shanghai’s Huangpu Park in the 1920s. Although Chinese people were barred from entering local parks, the exact wording of any signs is disputed. Nevertheless, the restaurateur’s homage, grafted from previous experiences to today’s prejudices, exhibits the tension between perceived relative statuses.

When I was living in the United States, I recited the pledge of allegiance every day. When I returned to Canada, I did not remember the words to the national anthem, let alone the Royal Anthem that we had to sing on the way out of every assembly. I watched my social studies teacher be the only one in the auditorium refusing to stand for “God Save the Queen” because of an alternate stanza belittling the Scots. The nationalism in my Chinese peers and their parents was diluted at best – cultural detachment and youthful apathy. I want to blame the decreased interest in politics on the events and aftermath of 1989, but I now know better, that it was the decision to prioritize economic opportunity, and the spread of a material culture in my generation.

But with a foreign conflict, specifically one that makes the average Chinese feel cheated over our poignant, invaded past, the Chinese public do not disappoint. A traditional Chinese hero is Zheng He, whom we proudly claimed to have travelled the seas centuries before the Europeans. Yet we rarely note that Zheng is not ethnically Han but of Muslim Hui descent. More recent victories and defeats at sea during the Sino-Japanese conflicts of the late 19th century were captured primarily in the Japanese visual style (see image below).

Japanese Style

Since the 1990s, when the nation was once again challenged by non-governmental oversight and the retreat of ideology, China has faced and reacted mostly to land-based or conceptual conflicts. China Can Say No, published in 1996, rejected Americanization of culture. The bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade in 1999 by NATO produced protests that were verbally supported by Vice-president Hu Jintao. The 2008 Summer Olympics was a triumphant display of cohesion and unity. And now, the historical antagonism with Japan is suddenly reignited over rocks. Is this solidarity perhaps just a defense mechanism to perceived (cultural or national) insecurity, rooted in a historical perspective of either relative inferiority or regional supremacy? Or perhaps, it is just a bit more comforting to confront the other in the company of one’s peers?

As for Canada, the Rush-Bagot Treaty of 1818 demilitarized the Great Lakes region by permitting only one naval vessel each for Britain and the United States on Lake Ontario. This demilitarization was seen as a first step testing the precarious trust after the War of 1812. Furthermore, the Naval Service Act of 1910 created the Canadian Navy with second-hand British vessels, the HMCS Niobe and HMCS Rainbow, and established the Naval College in Halifax. Opponents derided the effort, calling the formation the “tin-pot Navy”.  Yet this was a clear assertion of Canada’s self-protection autonomy – separate from, but loyal to the Commonwealth.

Canada’s maritime security hasn’t always been life-or-death serious. In 2002, Denmark erected a flag and left some Danish vodka on Hans Island in a bizarre attempt to provoke a reaction over a rock that burdens Canadian-Danish relations. Five years later, Russia similarly planted a flag in the seabed of the Arctic to prove “the Arctic is Russian,” illustrating that Russian cooperation and aggression will perpetually be a mercurial cycle. Current maritime concerns in the Arctic revolve around Canada’s ability to react to potential oil spills and pollution through drilling and shipping, and Ottawa’s assistance to indigenous maritime development.

I do not want to poeticize maritime divides, but any fifth grade geography class reveals that the continents were once fitted together like a finished puzzle known as Pangaea. It is appropriate that with continental drift, distance produced distinct people. Only with the advances of maritime technology, ambition, and the lust for adventure led to the discovery of the New World. Shipping and maritime security determined wealth and relative power, which enabled the early flourishing of The Netherlands and divorced England from the European continent.

Before man conquered the skies, maritime passages were the medium for the arrival of the other. It is ironic that for all the efforts China used to build a wall to keep barbarians on horses out, it was defeated by other barbarians on ships at its ports.

The dividing seas also facilitated asymmetric development, ideological escape, and the spread of commerce. The Austro-Hungarian Empire’s lack of a navy exacerbated its economic stagnation as it steadily lost its maritime-efficient proxies through successions or independence. A century later, a Russian ambassador asked why the Czechs needed a navy when the country was obviously landlocked (the Czech representative replied that he did not understand why Russians needed a ministry of cultural affairs). Lastly, incidents like the Komagata Maru and Pearl Harbor shape our collective sense of how national and human security is simultaneously enhanced and endangered by the oceans, as trouble can be carried on the tides.

The racist sign in the Chinese restaurant, among the vast stimuli of a city like Beijing, indicates how disputes trickle down to even the obscurest of places. Conflict on the seas – both today’s and from times past – shapes who we are, what we fear, and how we react.

Sarah Danruo Wang is currently a third year undergraduate student at the University of Toronto studying international relations, philosophy, and fine art history. Her research interests from first year has steadily moved east from Germany to the former Czechoslovakia to Russia and include broader issues in identity politics, EU and NATO eastward enlargement, and education policy. She has previously researched for the Advocacy Project, the Department of History at the University of Toronto, and the G8 Research Group.

This article was re-published by permission and appeared in original form at The Atlantic Council of Canada.