The Changing Maritime Scene in Asia

Rising Tensions and Future Strategic Stability

Geoffrey Till, Geoffrey Till

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781137506320
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Politique militaire

Is naval conflict in the Asia-Pacific region becoming more likely? On the face of it, this seems likely; nearly all countries in the region are rapidly modernising their navies and expanding their maritime capabilities at a time of increasingly rancorous disputes over sovereignty. This is especially the case in the East and South China Seas, with their supply of fish and largely untapped resources in oil and gas. Across the region there is a growing recognition of the economic importance of the sea, both for its resources and for the crucial shipping it facilitates. But economic growth goes both ways, developing increasing interdependence between the countries of the region. Expanding trade is subject to serious threats from pirates, drug-smugglers and other forms of maritime crime, and navies and coastguards are coming together to combat them. Which will prevail, the tendency to compete, or the tendency to cooperate? In reviewing the maritime policies of the major countries of the region, this volume aims to answer this question.

1

Introduction: Themes and Issues

Geoffrey Till

Abstract: Maritime Asia is the scene of both continuity and change. Rising tensions over the South and East China Seas have coincided with a major increase in the naval power of the countries of the Asia-Pacific region. The strategic relationship between China and the United States and the conflict between concepts of sea control and sea denial are at the heart of this turbulence. Local countries have to chart their own passages across these choppy waters.

Till, Geoffrey (ed.). The Changing Maritime Scene in Asia: Rising Tensions and Future Strategic Stability. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. DOI: 10.1057/9781137506320.0004.

This book was the product of a workshop held in 2012 by the Maritime Security Programme of the Rajaratnam School of International Studies at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. In preparing the papers from this workshop for later publication, the editor was reminded of two apparently paradoxical aspects about Asia’s relationship with the sea. The first is that it is always changing mainly as a consequence of the sheer pace of wider events in the region. Since we held the workshop, the US Rebalance towards the Asia-Pacific region has come under much more scrutiny not just for its strategic and naval consequences, but also for its sustainability in the light of Washington’s continuing problems with sequestration and the strategic distractions of an increasingly turbulent Middle East. The US 7th fleet currently operates 60 to 80 ships and submarines, 140 aircraft and more than 40,000 personnel in the vast area that stretches from the international date line to the India/Pakistan border but questions have arisen about what that figure will be in a decade’s time and how it will compare with the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) Navy at one level and with the general demands of America’s commitments and interests at another.

At the same time, there are 34 other significantly maritime states in the Asia-Pacific region with navies and air forces that operate side by side in international waters and air space. Asia’s leaders have been emphasizing more and more their countries’ dependence on the sea. It was entirely symptomatic of this that the new presidents of both China and Indonesia have dramatically announced ambitious plans to realize the maritime potential of their countries.¹ In both these cases and indeed elsewhere in the region too, the consequent investments will include substantial investment in the maritime industries, the navy, coastguard and other maritime law enforcement agencies and in the country’s institutional and legal maritime support infrastructure.

Unfortunately this implicit recognition of the growing importance of the maritime domain has also, connectedly, seen an increase in the maritime competitiveness of most countries in the region. For this reason, tensions over the complex jurisdictional disputes in both the East and South China Seas have risen, with a notable deterioration in the maritime relations that China has with Vietnam, the Philippines and Japan in particular.² This has resulted in a string of worrying incidents including the imposition of a new Air Defence Identification Zone in the East China Sea; stand-offs and water cannon fights between the Japanese and Taiwanese coastguards around the Senkaku/Diaoyutai islands and between the Chinese and Vietnamese coastguards in the northwest part of the South China Sea; and ‘jostling’ incidents between Chinese and Philippine vessels around Scarborough and Second Thomas shoals, together with Manila opening up a new front in its campaign by seeking to take its case to the International Tribunal on the Law of the Sea.³ As though this were not enough, the projected opening of a base for strategic ballistic firing nuclear submarines at Ya Long bay near Sanya on the island of Hainan and the general increase in the relative power of the Chinese navy’s Southern fleet when compared to its Northern and Eastern fleets have made the South China Sea even more important strategically for China, and indeed for everyone else.

In the background of all this there is the broader developing relationship between the rising China and the United States, with President Xi Jinping calling publicly for a new kind of relationship at a time when that relationship is plagued with a mutual wariness that results in a whole range of frictions stretching from radically different policies being pursued about economic cooperation in the Asia-Pacific region to near collisions between warships such as that which occurred in the South China Sea between a Chinese destroyer and the USS Cowpens in December 2013.

While none of this should be exaggerated, not least since more recently the atmosphere seems to have lightened a little,⁴ it is hard to avoid the conclusion that the Asia-Pacific region is a turbulent and fast changing area, not least in its maritime domain. In consequence of this, these workshop papers have had to be significantly updated simply in order to cope with the rapid pace of events.

But, at the same time, many aspects of that Asian maritime domain have in fact stayed the same, even if their latest manifestations in the maritime domain have changed a little. The first and most obvious of these points is that the Asia-Pacific region remains intensely maritime strategically, politically, economically and culturally and so whatever goes on at sea both reflects and helps determine the broader international context ashore. Accordingly the maritime domain provides an excellent window through which the region’s security characteristics can be examined. As but one indication of this, the region’s expenditure on naval forces, its patterns of acquisition and the use to which those new capabilities are being put have continued to develop as the years go by.

A substantial naval modernization programme is undeniably in place through much of the Asia-Pacific region. This modernization process of Asian naval forces began in the 1980s as part of a rapid growth in its share of global defence expenditure. A natural reflection of Asia’s growing economic clout and political confidence, together with a need to replace obsolescent second-hand equipment acquired decades before, this was more a ‘festival of competitive modernization’ than a potentially destabilizing naval arms race as generally understood. In any case, it was largely brought to a halt by the Asian financial crisis of the late 1990s.

By the early 2000s most countries in the region had recovered from this crisis sufficiently to resume naval modernization programmes funded by steadily increasing levels of defence expenditure. The US-based naval consultancy firm AMI International anticipates a naval spend in the Asia-Pacific of US$ 173 billion by 2030; the Asia-Pacific naval market as a whole is ‘expected to move past NATO countries to become the second largest source of future naval spending after the United States’. Asia already spends more on defence in general than does Europe, a truly historic development. As early as 2009, the French naval armaments firm DCNS described the Asia-Pacific region ‘as a future centre for defence business. The defence market in the Asia-Pacific should be, in about 2016, a major market – even above the US’.⁵

This increase in focus and effort is especially evident in Northeast Asia, an area primarily engaged in the acquisition of platforms, weapons and sensors such as anti-ship/land attack cruise missiles, submarines, anti-submarine capabilities, sea-based air and missile defence capabilities, electronic warfare capabilities and so on, which at first glance only really makes sense for operations against peer competitors. With its acquisition of submarines and modern frigates, something of the same behaviour may be seen in Southeast Asia too. Whether this process of modernization will finally turn into a destabilizing naval arms race remains an issue of debate.

Those who point to this danger often cite the developing tensions between China’s ‘anti access/area denial concept’ (A2/AD) on the one hand and the US Air-Sea Battle (ASB)⁶ construct on the other, as the clearest evidence of this concern. China’s investment in anti-ship ballistic missiles, more advanced fighter aircraft, more sophisticated submarines and surface ships seems mainly motivated by the desire to deny its ‘near seas’ to intruding naval forces, especially in a time of crisis. The ASB by contrast was, and is, represented by the Obama administration spokespeople simply as an operational concept and not a strategy, a military-technical response to the perceived rise around the world of sea and area denial capabilities, and not a military strategy to contain China.⁷ And yet, unsurprisingly, that is how it is seen in Beijing and among American hawks and the less admiring sections of Asian opinion. Authoritative treatments of ASB, such as Aaron Friedberg’s Beyond Air-Sea battle: The debate over US military strategy in Asia, freely concede that this is a debate about what the United States should do in the Western Pacific in the face of a stronger and more confident China.⁸

The A2/AD versus ASB line up is simply a manifestation of yet another continuing strategic issue with both maritime causes and maritime consequences, namely the developing relationship between the United States and China. This can be seen as simply the latest iteration of the timeless process in the Asia-Pacific region, as elsewhere, of adjusting to the relative rise and fall of the power of individual states, a process that cascades down from the great powers to the middle and minor powers who adjust and trim their sails accordingly, but whose own developing relationships can sometimes produce shifts in the power hierarchy above. This has led to vibrant debate in China, the rest of the Asia-Pacific region and in the United States about both the extent of the anticipated transformation in this bilateral strategic relationship and its projected consequences.⁹ The United States of course has announced its intention to resume paying the level of attention to the Asia-Pacific region that its strategic importance warrants. In President Obama’s words,

As a Pacific nation, the United States will play a larger and long-term role in shaping this region and its future, by upholding core principles and in close partnership with our allies and friends.¹⁰

In the wake of the American ‘re-balance’ towards the Asia-Pacific, the requirement for the establishment of a new and positive strategic relationship between China and the United States seems the most fundamental of these consequences. Building such a relationship seems key to the enduring national security objective of ensuring a safe, stable and prosperous international environment.¹¹ This has been characterized by President Xi as ‘a new type of great power relationship’ and by Washington as the ‘central, sort of, organizing principle’ of international relations.¹² The chief characteristics of this new relationship, the extent to which they will be shaped and illustrated by shifts in the soft, sticky and hard aspects of relative national power and the implications of this for the role in the region of the US and Chinese militaries and especially their respective navies, repay closer consideration.

Past experience is another source of continuity for both good reasons and bad ones. Geographic realities are relatively permanent and over the years have established patterns of behaviour and national expectation that continue to shape current and future events. In their maritime dimension they may, and do both reflect and determine what happens at sea and ashore. In the South and East China seas, these historic experiences result in arcane and vigorous debate about who owned what at sea first, or last as the case may be. The relationship between Japan, China and South K...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1  Introduction: Themes and Issues
• 2  The Maritime Balance in Asia in the Asia Century
• 3  The Rebalance and the Dangers of Americas Creeping Containment of China
• 4  Maritime Asia: A Chinese Perspective
• 5  Maritime Asia: An Indian Perspective
• 6  Maritime Asia: A Southeast Asian Perspective
• 7  Maritime Asia: A Japanese Perspective
• 8  Maritime Asia: An Australian Perspective
• 9  Maritime Asia: A South Korean Perspective
• 10  Maritime Asia : A Taiwanese Perspective
• 11  Conclusions?
• Index