PLAN SCS Bases/Islands/Vessels (Not a Strategy Page)

plawolf said:

True, if Chinese also constructs large underwater hydrophone arrays. But as I understand it, the PLAN has deep reservations about such arrays.

Those concerns could largely be summed up as usefulness and cost.

When the US and NATO faced off against the USSR, they enjoyed massive geographical advantages.

The Soviet navy were largely bottleneck by geography, and there are certain places their ships and subs pretty much had a pass in order to break out into the Atlantic and Pacific.

As such, the US was able to focus their efforts in those natural choke points, and build hydrophone arrays pretty much directly under the route Soviet subs were forced to take, therefore given them the best results possible.

The USN faces no such constraint, so the Chinese would have to build a network orders of magnitude larger to achieve similar results. The costs of such a comprehensive network will be quite phenomenal.

The other major problem with hydrophone arrays is that they are static, and takes considerable time to build, as such any opponent you might need such arrays for would know where they are being built. If you don't build a comprehensive network that covers everywhere, the enemy could easily skirt round your coverage.

In addition, the static and undefendable nature of these arrays, they are easy targets for opponents and enemies to manipulate/sabotage.

At the crudest level, it would not be hard for a top power to place remote controlled explosive charges at key points along the network that would allow them to cripple or even effectively destroy it with the flick of a switch at the onset of open hostilities.

If they were to be a little cute, they would also install bugs (thereby effectively commandeering your hydrophone array to work for them by allowing them to use it to record the signatures of your own subs) and/or tempering devices. Like say a shunt, that allows them to effectively shut off part of the array without you knowing about it.

Then they could sneak assets through from where you least expect them and hit you while you are busy watching elsewhere.

Those are just the general problems with hydrophone arrays, to deploy them in the SCS around the Chinese constructed islands also carry additional specific problems.

The chief one being again geography. The waters around those islands are very shallow, so no decent sub skipper would want his boat anywhere near them anyways. Shallow waters are also inherently much more noisy with wildlife and surface noises. So the usefulness of underwater listen assets around those islands are going to be highly questionable.

The shallow waters also makes sabotage and manipulation much easier to carry out and harder to detect.

The legal status of the islands, specifically the fact that they cannot claim 12nm territorial waters around them means there is precious little the Chinese could do about it even if they catch someone tempering with their underwater listening arrays.

Based on all of this, I do not think China will make any serious effort to establish comprehensive underwater monitoring outposts on those islands.

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joshuatree said:

Continuing developments at the other sites.

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Bltizo said:

I consider the suggestions in this article to be moderate and sensible.

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Michael E. O'Hanlon | September 18, 2015 10:15am

Don’t be provoked: China and the United States in the South China Sea


With President Xi Jinping’s pending visit to the United States, it is important to take stock of the subjects uniting China and America and those over which disagreement is inevitable. The latter subjects include cybertheft and China’s continued repression of various elements of free speech, personal freedoms, and minority rights within its own territory. The former include most elements of the trade relationship and cooperation on environmental sustainability, among other matters.

Where does the South China Sea fit in? For some American strategists, this is the place where right now China is showing the most worrisome tendencies towards great-power brutishness. It is reclaiming reefs and sand bars and turning them into islands with potential military capabilities, while occasionally winding up in skirmishes with neighbors like Vietnam and the Philippines (the latter a formal U.S. ally) over specific reefs, shoals, and the like.

It is true that we need to keep a close eye on Chinese behavior in this region. In particular, Beijing’s establishment of a “nine-dash line” that encompasses almost all the South China Sea (with its key trade routes), islands, and seabeds (with their own associated economic resources) is very worrisome. If China literally intends to enforce sovereign claims to all these zones and assets, we are in for a very difficult period ahead. The United States should stand firm in opposing any such claims, and also in insisting that China pursue its claims in the region peacefully and with full respect for the rights of all nations to use the crucial sea lanes in this busy body of water.

Separating the wheat from the chaff

But in another sense, I believe there is a way to defuse some of the problems with China in this region. The United States should not view every development of an artificial island, or even a modest military airfield, as a threat to our interests or those of other states. To some extent, this is expected behavior for a new great power. It is also in a sense hard for us to object to. In a way, China is building “stationary aircraft carriers” that are analogous to our actual aircraft carriers. We sail our ships to the region from thousands of miles away; they base some military assets on artificial islands from a homeland hundreds of miles away.

It is not entirely clear how our actions can be legal and legitimate and theirs fundamentally illegitimate. To be sure, international convention has long condoned the rights of any nation to use international waterways for its naval and commercial vessels. Island reclamation is a new phenomenon. But that does not, to my mind, make it automatically threatening.

What we can demand of Beijing is transparency, and moderation, in how much it builds up militarily in this region, and a commitment to the non-use of force in how it pursues its interests in the region. China also must not be allowed to claim broad territorial waters and economic rights around these artificial islets; again, they can and should be treated like ships, not land formations. But we would be better advised not to push back equally hard against all aspects of Chinese behavior in the South China Sea. Some aspects of China’s rise in that region are nearly inevitable, and so we should focus our attention on trying to shape or change those aspects of China’s behavior that are truly objectionable and threatening.

Click to expand...

Bltizo said:

I consider the suggestions in this article to be moderate and sensible.

Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!

Michael E. O'Hanlon | September 18, 2015 10:15am

Don’t be provoked: China and the United States in the South China Sea


With President Xi Jinping’s pending visit to the United States, it is important to take stock of the subjects uniting China and America and those over which disagreement is inevitable. The latter subjects include cybertheft and China’s continued repression of various elements of free speech, personal freedoms, and minority rights within its own territory. The former include most elements of the trade relationship and cooperation on environmental sustainability, among other matters.

Where does the South China Sea fit in? For some American strategists, this is the place where right now China is showing the most worrisome tendencies towards great-power brutishness. It is reclaiming reefs and sand bars and turning them into islands with potential military capabilities, while occasionally winding up in skirmishes with neighbors like Vietnam and the Philippines (the latter a formal U.S. ally) over specific reefs, shoals, and the like.

It is true that we need to keep a close eye on Chinese behavior in this region. In particular, Beijing’s establishment of a “nine-dash line” that encompasses almost all the South China Sea (with its key trade routes), islands, and seabeds (with their own associated economic resources) is very worrisome. If China literally intends to enforce sovereign claims to all these zones and assets, we are in for a very difficult period ahead. The United States should stand firm in opposing any such claims, and also in insisting that China pursue its claims in the region peacefully and with full respect for the rights of all nations to use the crucial sea lanes in this busy body of water.

Separating the wheat from the chaff

But in another sense, I believe there is a way to defuse some of the problems with China in this region. The United States should not view every development of an artificial island, or even a modest military airfield, as a threat to our interests or those of other states. To some extent, this is expected behavior for a new great power. It is also in a sense hard for us to object to. In a way, China is building “stationary aircraft carriers” that are analogous to our actual aircraft carriers. We sail our ships to the region from thousands of miles away; they base some military assets on artificial islands from a homeland hundreds of miles away.

It is not entirely clear how our actions can be legal and legitimate and theirs fundamentally illegitimate. To be sure, international convention has long condoned the rights of any nation to use international waterways for its naval and commercial vessels. Island reclamation is a new phenomenon. But that does not, to my mind, make it automatically threatening.

What we can demand of Beijing is transparency, and moderation, in how much it builds up militarily in this region, and a commitment to the non-use of force in how it pursues its interests in the region. China also must not be allowed to claim broad territorial waters and economic rights around these artificial islets; again, they can and should be treated like ships, not land formations. But we would be better advised not to push back equally hard against all aspects of Chinese behavior in the South China Sea. Some aspects of China’s rise in that region are nearly inevitable, and so we should focus our attention on trying to shape or change those aspects of China’s behavior that are truly objectionable and threatening.

Click to expand...