U.S. TAKES PART IN WAR GAMES CLOSE TO CHINA WITH 73 WAR VESSELS SENDING MESSAGE TO CHINA
JULY 8 2010
CLIP FROM BELOW --> Closer to China, CARAT 2010 - for Cooperation Afloat Readiness and Training - just got under way off Singapore. The operation involves 17,000 personnel and 73 ships from the U.S., Singapore, Bangladesh, Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines and Thailand. (See "Hu's Visit: Finding a Way Forward on U.S.-China Relations.")
AND
I LISTED THEM MOST IMPORTANT FIRST --->The submarines aren't the only new potential issue of concern for the Chinese. Two major military exercises involving the U.S. and its allies in the region are now under way. More than three dozen naval ships and subs began participating in the "Rim of the Pacific" war games off Hawaii on Wednesday. Some 20,000 personnel from 14 nations....
If China's satellites and spies were working properly, there
would have been a flood of unsettling intelligence flowing into the Beijing
headquarters of the Chinese navy last week. A new class of U.S. superweapon
had suddenly surfaced nearby. It was an Ohio-class submarine, which for
decades carried only nuclear missiles targeted against the Soviet Union, and
then Russia. But this one was different: for nearly three years, the U.S. Navy
has been dispatching modified "boomers" to who knows where (they do travel
underwater, after all). Four of the 18 ballistic-missile subs no longer carry
nuclear-tipped Trident missiles. Instead, they hold up to 154 Tomahawk cruise
missiles each, capable of hitting anything within 1,000 miles with non-nuclear
warheads.
Their capability makes watching these particular submarines especially
interesting. The 14 Trident-carrying subs are useful in the unlikely event of
a nuclear Armageddon, and Russia remains their prime target. But the
Tomahawk-outfitted quartet carries a weapon that the U.S. military has used
repeatedly against targets in Afghanistan, Bosnia, Iraq and Sudan. (See
pictures of the U.S. military in the Pacific.)
That's why alarm bells would have sounded in Beijing on June 28 when the
Tomahawk-laden 560-ft. U.S.S. Ohio popped up in the Philippines' Subic Bay.
More alarms were likely sounded when the U.S.S. Michigan arrived in Pusan,
South Korea, on the same day. And the Klaxons would have maxed out as the
U.S.S. Florida surfaced, also on the same day, at the joint U.S.-British naval
base on Diego Garcia, a flyspeck of an island in the Indian Ocean. In all, the
Chinese military awoke to find as many as 462 new Tomahawks deployed by the
U.S. in its neighborhood. "There's been a decision to bolster our forces in
the Pacific," says Bonnie Glaser, a China expert at the Center for Strategic
and International Studies in Washington. "There is no doubt that China will
stand up and take notice."
U.S. officials deny that any message is being directed at Beijing, saying the
Tomahawk triple play was a coincidence. But they did make sure that news of
the deployments appeared in the Hong Kong–based South China Morning Post - on
July 4, no less. The Chinese took notice quietly. "At present, common
aspirations of countries in the Asian and Pacific regions are seeking for
peace, stability and regional security," Wang Baodong, spokesman for the
Chinese embassy in Washington, said on Wednesday. "We hope the relevant U.S.
military activities will serve for the regional peace, stability and security,
and not the contrary." (See pictures of the most expensive military planes.)
Last month, the Navy announced that all four of the Tomahawk-carrying subs
were operationally deployed away from their home ports for the first time.
Each vessel packs "the firepower of multiple surface ships," says Captain
Tracy Howard of Submarine Squadron 16 in Kings Bay, Ga., and can "respond to
diverse threats on short notice."
The move forms part of a policy by the U.S. government to shift firepower from
the Atlantic to the Pacific theater, which Washington sees as the military
focus of the 21st century. Reduced tensions since the end of the Cold War have
seen the U.S. scale back its deployment of nuclear weapons, allowing the Navy
to reduce its Trident fleet from 18 to 14. (Why 14 subs, as well as bombers
and land-based missiles carrying nuclear weapons, are still required to deal
with the Russian threat is a topic for another day.) (See "Obama Shelves U.S.
Missile Shield: The Winners and Losers.")
Sure, the Navy could have retired the four additional subs and saved the
Pentagon some money, but that's not how bureaucracies operate. Instead, it
spent about $4 billion replacing the Tridents with Tomahawks and making room
for 60 special-ops troops to live aboard each sub and operate stealthily
around the globe. "We're there for weeks, we have the situational awareness of
being there, of being part of the environment," Navy Rear Admiral Mark Kenny
explained after the first Tomahawk-carrying former Trident sub set sail in
2008. "We can detect, classify and locate targets and, if need be, hit them
from the same platform."(Comment on this story.)
The submarines aren't the only new potential issue of
concern for the Chinese. Two major military exercises involving the
U.S. and its allies in the region are now under way.
More than three dozen naval ships and subs began
participating in the "Rim of the Pacific" war games off Hawaii on Wednesday.
Some 20,000 personnel from 14 nations are involved in the biennial exercise,
which includes missile drills and the sinking of three abandoned vessels
playing the role of enemy ships. Nations joining the U.S. in what is billed as
the world's largest-ever naval war game are Australia, Canada, Chile,
Colombia, France, Indonesia, Japan, South Korea, Malaysia, the Netherlands,
Peru, Singapore and Thailand. Closer to China,
CARAT 2010 - for Cooperation Afloat Readiness and Training - just got under
way off Singapore. The operation involves
17,000 personnel and 73 ships from the U.S.,
Singapore, Bangladesh, Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines
and Thailand. (See "Hu's Visit: Finding a Way Forward on U.S.-China
Relations.")
China is absent from both exercises, and that's no oversight. Many nations in
the eastern Pacific, including Australia, Japan, Indonesia, South Korea and
Vietnam, have been encouraging the U.S. to push back against what they see as
China's increasingly aggressive actions in the South China Sea. And the U.S.
military remains concerned over China's growing missile force - now more than
1,000 - near the Taiwan Strait. The Tomahawks' arrival "is part of a larger
effort to bolster our capabilities in the region," Glaser says. "It sends a
signal that nobody should rule out our determination to be the balancer in the
region that many countries there want us to be." No
doubt Beijing got the signal.
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