Southeast Asia and the Rise of Chinese and Indian Naval Power: Between Rising Naval Powers 2009036705, 9780415559553, 9780203856024, 0415559553, 0203856023

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Southeast Asia and the Rise of Chinese and Indian Naval Power

This book examines the emerging maritime security scene in Southeast Asia. It considers highly topical implications for the region of possible strategic competition between China and India – the rising naval powers of Asia – with a possible naval ‘arms race’ emerging between these countries both with naval force development and operations. As part of its ‘Look East’ policy, India has deployed naval units to the Pacific Ocean for port visits and exercises both with East Asian navies and the US Navy, but India is also concerned about the possibility of the Chinese Navy operating in the Indian Ocean. Even as the U.S.–India defence relationship continues to deepen, the U.S. and China are struggling to build closer links. China’s and India’s strategic interests overlap in Southeast Asia. Maritime strategic competition, or even conflict, between these two rising powers might be played out in the Bay of Bengal, the Malacca and Singapore Straits and the South China Sea. The sea lines of communication (SLOCs) through Southeast Asian waters constitute vital ‘choke points’ between the Indian and Pacific Oceans carrying essential energy supplies for China and other Northeast Asian countries. Any strategic competition between China and India has implications for other major maritime players in the Pacific and Indian Oceans, especially Australia, the Republic of Korea and Japan, as well as the U.S. This book identifies possible cooperative and confidence-building measures that may contribute to enhanced relations between these two major powers and dampen down the risks associated with their strategic competition. Sam Bateman retired from the Royal Australian Navy as a Commodore and is currently Professorial Research Fellow at the Australian National Centre for Ocean Resources and Security (ANCORS) at the University of Wollongong, Australia. He is also Senior Fellow and Adviser to the Maritime Security Programme at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS), Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. He is a co-editor of Lloyd’s MIU Handbook of Maritime Security and Security and International Politics in the South China Sea: Towards a Cooperative Management Regime. Joshua Ho is a Senior Fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, Singapore and Coordinator of its Maritime Security Programme. He is a serving Naval Officer with 22 years of service and currently holds the rank of Lieutenant Colonel. He is co-editor of Best of Times, Worst of Times: Maritime Security in the Asia-Pacific; The Evolving Maritime Balance of Power in the Asia-Pacific: Maritime Doctrines and Nuclear Weapons at Sea and Globalisation and Defence in the Asia-Pacific.

Routledge security in Asia Pacific series Edited by Leszek Buszynski, International University of Japan and William Tow, Australian National University

Security issues have become more prominent in the Asia Pacific region because of the presence of global players, rising great powers and confident middle powers, which intersect in complicated ways. This series puts forward important new work on key security issues in the region. It embraces the roles of the major actors, their defense policies and postures and their security interaction over the key issues of the region. It includes coverage of the United States, China, Japan, Russia, the Koreas, as well as the middle powers of ASEAN and South Asia. It also covers issues relating to environmental and economic security as well as transnational actors and regional groupings. Bush and Asia America’s evolving relations with East Asia Edited by Mark Beeson Japan, Australia and Asia-Pacific Security Edited by Brad Williams and Andrew Newman Regional Cooperation and Its Enemies in Northeast Asia The impact of domestic forces Edited by Edward Friedman and Sung Chull Kim Energy Security in Asia Edited by Michael Wesley Australia as an Asia Pacific Regional Power Friendships in flux? Edited by Brendan Taylor Securing Southeast Asia The politics of security sector reform Mark Beeson and Alex J. Bellamy Pakistan’s Nuclear Weapons Bhumitra Chakma

Human Security in East Asia Challenges for collaborative action Edited by Sorpong Peou Security and International Politics in the South China Sea Towards a co-operative management regime Edited by Sam Bateman & Ralf Emmers Japan’s Peace Building Diplomacy in Asia Seeking a more active political role Lam Peng Er Geopolitics and Maritime Territorial Disputes in East Asia Ralf Emmers North Korea’s Military-Diplomatic Campaigns, 1966–2008 Narushige Michishita Political Change, Democratic Transitions and Security in Southeast Asia Mely Caballero-Anthony American Sanctions in the Asia-Pacific Brendan Taylor Southeast Asia and the Rise of Chinese and Indian Naval Power Between rising naval powers Edited by Sam Bateman and Joshua Ho

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Southeast Asia and the Rise of Chinese and Indian Naval Power Between rising naval powers Edited by Sam Bateman and Joshua Ho

ROUTLEDGE

Routledge Taylor & Francis Group

LONDON AND NEW YORK

First published 2010 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2010 Sam Bateman and Joshua Ho for selection and editorial matter; individual contributors their contribution Typeset in Times New Roman by Glyph International Ltd.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Southeast Asia and the rise of Chinese and Indian naval power: between rising naval powers / edited by Sam Bateman and Joshua Ho. p. cm. – (Routledge security in Asia Pacific series) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Southeast Asia–Foreign relations–China. 2. China–Foreign relations–Southeast Asia. 3. Southeast Asia–Foreign relations–India. 4. India–Foreign relations–Southeast Asia. 5. China. Zhongguo ren min jie fang jun. Hai jun–History. 6. India. Indian Navy–History. I. Bateman, W. S. G. (Walter Samuel Grono) II. Ho, Joshua. DS525.9.C5S677 2010 359 .030959–dc22

2009036705

ISBN 13: 978-0-415-55955-3 (hbk) ISBN 13: 978-0-203-85602-4 (ebk) ISBN 10: 0-415-55955-3 (hbk) ISBN 10: 0-203-85602-3 (ebk)

Contents

Notes on contributors Preface List of abbreviations Editors Introduction

x xii xiv xvi 1

A RU N PRA KASH

PART I

Regional strategic environment: contemporary regional relations

7

1

9

Between rising naval powers: a broad strategic overview C. RA JA MOHAN

2

The PLA Navy: expanding into uncharted waters

22

H UANG JING

3

Growing Chinese and Indian naval power: U.S. recalibration and coalition building

36

BRO NSON PERC IVAL

4

Naval competitions and confidence building: a Japanese perspective

48

MA SASHI N ISH IHAR A

5

Southeast Asia and the maritime balance of power: a historical perspective EMRY S CH EW

56

viii Contents 6 Regional maritime security environment: a Chinese perspective

72

CAI PENGHONG

7 Korean perspective on the maritime security environment of the region

80

PA RK CH ANG KW OUN

8 Regional maritime security environment: the Malaysian perspective

87

MO HD NIZAM B ASIR ON AND SUM AT HY PE R MA L

PART II

Contemporary regional maritime security 9 Regional maritime security: threats and risk assessments

97 99

SA M BA TEM AN

10 Maritime security and the cooperative mechanism for the Straits of Malacca and Singapore

114

ROBERT BEC KM AN

11 Shaping naval power: implications of the naval build-up in Asia

129

N ORMA N FR IE DM AN

12 The future development of the PLA Navy

146

ZHANG JU NSHE

13 Regional maritime security environment: an Indian perspective

152

D EV BRAT CHAKR AB OR T Y

14 Regional naval developments and deployments: a perspective from the United States

163

MICH AEL M C DE VIT T

15 Japanese civilian cooperation in maritime security since 1999 TAKESH I K OHNO

172

Contents ix 16 The Australian Navy in the Asian century: setting a new course

184

RORY MED CA L F

PART III

Looking to the future

195

17 Maritime cooperation and confidence-building

197

PRADEEP CH AUHAN

18 China participates in East Asian maritime cooperation: growing activism and strategic concerns

211

LI MINGJIANG

19 Cooperation and confidence building: a Southeast Asian perspective

227

K WA CH ONG GUAN

Conclusion: Do rough seas lie ahead?

232

SA M BA TEMAN

Index

245

Contributors

Admiral Arun Prakash IN (rtd) is Chairman of the National Maritime Foundation, India. Professor Bronson Percival is currently a senior advisor with the Center for Strategic Studies, Center for Naval Analyses and an adjunct professor at the School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University. Professor C. Raja Mohan is a Professor at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. Professor Cai Penghong is Research Professor at Institute of Asia-Pacific Studies, Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences (SASS). Dr Chang Kwoun Park is a chief of U.S. study division at the Korea Institute for Defense Analyses as well as a navy captain. Dr Emrys Chew is Assistant Professor at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS) in Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. Professor Huang Jing is a Visiting Professor at Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy of National University of Singapore. Kwa Chong Guan is Head of External Programs, S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, Nanyang Technological University and an Adjunct Associate Professor at the Department of History, National University of Singapore. Dr Li Mingjiang is Assistant Professor at S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS), Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. Professor Masashi Nishihara is President of the Research Institute for Peace and Security, Tokyo and also President of the Japanese Association for International Security. Rear Admiral Michael McDevitt, USN (rtd) is a Vice President and Director of CNA Strategic Studies, a division of CNA in Washington D.C.

Contributors xi Mohd Nizam Basiron is presently Research Fellow and Head of MIMA’s Centre for Maritime Security and Environment. Commodore Nalin Dewan is currently Executive Director at the National Maritime Foundation, New Delhi. Dr Norman Friedman is a strategist known for his ability to meld historical, technical and strategic factors in analyses of current problems. Vice Admiral Pradeep Chauhan IN is Commander, Western Naval Command (previously Assistant Chief of Naval Staff, Foreign Cooperation & Intelligence). Dr Robert C. Beckman is an Associate Professor at the Faculty of Law of the National University of Singapore (NUS). He is an advisor to the Maritime and Port Authority of Singapore (MPA) and to the Legal Committee of the Singapore Shipping Association (SSA). Rory Medcalf has directed the International Security Program at the Lowy Institute for International Policy since March 2007. Sumathy Permal is a Researcher at the Centre for Maritime Security and Environment, Maritime Institute of Malaysia. Dr Takeshi Kohno teaches social movement theory and security issues at the National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies (GRIPS) in Tokyo. Senior Captain Zhang Junshe is Deputy Director of the Naval Institute of Military Science, PLA Navy, China.

Preface

Commencing in 2007, the Maritime Security Programme of the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS) and the National Maritime Foundation (NMF) of India have been pursuing a collaborative project on maritime security in the Indo-Pacific region. In November 2008, the two institutions jointly organised a conference in Singapore to examine the implications of the rise of China and India as naval powers, with particular consideration being given to the impact of these developments on Southeast Asia. The conference was premised on the notion of Southeast Asia as a maritime region lying between ‘rising naval powers’, and that the relationship between these two powers would increasingly become a major factor in the very important context of regional maritime security. China’s and India’s strategic interests overlap in Southeast Asia. This region is the prospective ‘meat in the sandwich’ in maritime strategic competition, or even conflict, between India and China. India is working more closely with Japan and the United States on defence and security issues, but China considers this to be part of a possible process of maritime strategic containment. Meanwhile China is showing greater interest in the Indian Ocean region, including ensuring the security of its energy supplies from this region, but India sees this as China potentially trying to contain India strategically between the Indian Ocean and the great land mass of South and Central Asia where the two countries have territorial disputes and have previously been at war. Given the naval expansion of China and India and the concern of both countries for their maritime security, any conflict between them would likely have a significant maritime dimension. This might be played out in the Bay of Bengal, the Malacca and Singapore Straits and the South China Sea; all areas where Southeast Asian countries have vital maritime interests. The sea lines of communication (SLOCs) through Southeast Asian waters constitute vital ‘choke points’ between the Indian and Pacific Oceans; these are of vital concern to both India and China, but particularly so for China. These SLOCs carry essential energy supplies for China and other Northeast Asian countries. There are also implications of any strategic competition between China and India for other major maritime players in the Pacific and Indian Oceans, especially Australia, the Republic of Korea and Japan, as well as the United States.

Preface xiii This edited volume contains many of the papers and commentaries from the Singapore conference. Although there have been other recent texts that have addressed the rise of India and China generally and the implications for Southeast Asia, there has been no other work that we are aware of that looks specifically at what the increased naval power of China and India and their strategic competition mean for Southeast Asia and regional maritime security. The chapters in this book address the possible threats and risks, as well as areas of common interest, including navigational safety and SLOC security, between China, India and Southeast Asia. A key objective of the work is to see what might be done through preventive diplomacy to manage what could become an increasingly difficult situation with significant implications for the security of Southeast Asia. This work seeks to identify cooperative and confidence-building measures that may contribute to enhanced relations between these two major powers and dampen down the risks associated with their strategic competition. It makes a number of suggestions in this regard. We believe that this book is both important and timely. It should be of interest to two groups of scholars, students and general readers. The first group comprises those interested in strategic developments and regional relations in Southeast Asia, as well as those concerned more generally about prospective strategic competition between China and India. The second group comprises people interested in contemporary maritime strategy and naval developments at both the global and regional levels. It should also appeal to general readers interested in contemporary Asian affairs. We would like to thank RSIS and the NMF for supporting the conference on which this book is based. We would also like to thank Ms Jane Chan, our research associate in the Maritime Security Programme at RSIS for her excellent and invaluable editorial assistance in the preparation of the final manuscript. We would finally like to thank Professor Leszek Buszynski, co-editor of the Routledge security in Asia series, for his support and interest in bringing this work to fruition. Sam Bateman Joshua Ho Singapore, July 2009

Abbreviations

AIS APEC APRI ARF ASEAN ASW AWD CBM CSCAP CSI DWD EAS EEZ EU FTA GDP HADR ICJ IMO INCSEA IN IONS ISM ISPS JCG JMSDF ISC LHA LHD LPA LST LNG

automatic identification system Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation Asian Peace Research Institute ASEAN Regional Forum Association of Southeast Asian Nations anti-submarine warfare air warfare destroyer confidence-building measure Council for Security Cooperation in the Asia-Pacific Container Security Initiative deadweight tons East Asia Summit exclusive economic zone European Union Free Trade Association gross domestic product humanitarian assistance and disaster relief International Court of Justice International Maritime Organization Avoidance of Incidents at Sea Agreement Indian Navy Indian Ocean Naval Symposium Inter-Sessional Meeting (ARF) International Ship and Port Facility Security Code Japan Coast Guard Japanese Maritime Self-Defense Force Information Sharing Centre landing ship, assault landing ship, helicopter dock amphibious transport (landing platform amphibious) landing ship tank liquefied natural gas

Abbreviations xv MALINDO INCSEA MALSINDO MEH MARPOL MCSBM MDA MOOTW nm NMF OPRC-HNS

PLA PLAN PRC PSI RAN ReCAAP ROE RSIS SAR SIPRI SLBM SLOCs SOLAS SSN SUA TEU TOC TSS TTEG UN UNCLOS UNIDIR UNDP USN USNS WMD WPNS

Malaysia-Indonesia Prevention of Incidents at Sea Agreement Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia joint patrols Marine Electronic Highway (Malacca Strait) International Convention for the Prevention of Pollution from Ships maritime confidence and security building measure maritime domain awareness military operations other than war nautical miles National Maritime Foundation (India) Protocol on Preparedness, Response and Co-operation to Pollution Incidents by Hazardous and Noxious Substances People’s Liberation Army People’s Liberation Army Navy People’s Republic of China Proliferation Security Initiative Royal Australian Navy Regional Cooperation Agreement on Combating Piracy and Armed Robbery against Ships in Asia Rules of Engagement S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies search and rescue Stockholm International Peace Research Institute submarine launched ballistic missile sea lines of communication Safety of Life at Sea Convention nuclear powered submarine Suppression of Unlawful Acts against the Safety Of Maritime Navigation Convention twenty foot equivalent units (sea containers) UN Convention Against Transnational Organised Crime traffic separation scheme Tripartite Technical Experts Group United Nations 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea UN Institute for Disarmament Research UN Development Programme United States Navy United States Naval Ship weapons of mass destruction Western Pacific Naval Symposium

Editors

Dr Sam Bateman retired from the Royal Australian Navy as a Commodore and is now a Professorial Research Fellow at the Australian National Centre for Ocean Resources and Security (ANCORS) at the University of Wollongong, and a Senior Fellow and Adviser to the Maritime Security Programme at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS) at the Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. His current research interests include regional maritime security, piracy and maritime terrorism, regional issues with the Law of the Sea and maritime cooperation and confidence-building. He has written extensively on defence and maritime issues in Australia, the Asia-Pacific and Indian Ocean. In 2009, he co-authored the report Sea Change: Advancing Australia’s ocean interests for the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI), and the Policy Paper Good Order at Sea in Southeast Asia – Policy Recommendations for RSIS. Recent co-edited publications include Security and International Politics in the South China Sea: Towards a Cooperative Management Regime; and Lloyd’s MIU Handbook of Maritime Security. He has been appointed by the Australian Government to be a member of the expert and eminent person’s group established by the ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF) to advise on regional security issues. Lieutenant Colonel Joshua Ho is a Senior Fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, Singapore and Coordinator of the Maritime Security Programme. He has an MA from Cambridge University, U.K. on an SAF (Overseas) Scholarship and also holds a MSc (Management) (Distinction) from the Naval Postgraduate School, California, where he was awarded the Graduate School of Business and Public Policy Faculty award for Excellence in Management awarded to the top student in the faculty. He is also a Fellow of the Cambridge Commonwealth Society. Joshua is a serving Naval Officer with 22 years of service and currently holds the rank of Lieutenant Colonel. He is co-editor for the volumes Best of Times, Worst of Times: Maritime Security in the Asia-Pacific, The Evolving Maritime Balance of Power in the AsiaPacific: Maritime Doctrines and Nuclear Weapons at Sea and Globalisation and Defence in the Asia-Pacific. He has also published in local and overseas journals like Asian Survey, Australian Army Journal, Contemporary Southeast Asia, Defence Studies, Maritime Affairs, Maritime Studies, Marine Policy, Military Technology, Journal of the Australian Naval Institute, Pointer and Security Challenges.

Introduction Arun Prakash

The National Maritime Foundation (NMF) of India was honoured to join with the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS) in hosting the conference in Singapore in November 2008, which provided the papers now included as chapters in this book. This conference was in pursuance of a Memorandum of Understanding between the two institutions, and after the NMF had organized an initial conference in Delhi in 2007. The NMF is a relatively young organization, and we look forward to not just an exchange of views and ideas, but to meetings with scholars of sister institutions. The choice of theme for the conference and the title of this book: Southeast Asia and the Rise of Chinese and Indian Naval Power: Between rising naval powers is singularly apt, and certainly topical. This is not because there is the need for any alarm or anxiety in Southeast Asia, but rather because when you examine and discuss the growing maritime power of China and India, this bring into focus a larger issue of relevance, which is the rise, per se, of China and India. It seems eminently logical that this particular question should be posed by a Singaporean institution. After all, geography has located Singapore not just at the notional median point between these two large aspiring (or competing) powers, but also right on the Malacca and Singapore Straits, the throbbing jugular vein of world maritime traffic. Before the recent market crash and looming world-wide recession brought ignominy on the heads of economic pundits, their crystal balls had thrown up some interesting predictions. They had forecast that by 2050, or about 40 years down the road, three of the world’s four biggest economies would be in Asia: China, Japan and India. By then, China and India would be consuming a third of the world’s energy resources, and the combined populations of the two at that time would be such that every third person in the world would either be Indian or Chinese. The question in everyone’s mind is; how will we traverse the distance between now and 2050.

2 Arun Prakash In his new book called Rivals,1 Bill Emmott speculates about the contours of what he sees as a forthcoming power struggle between China, India and Japan. He has this to say: … Asia is piled high with historical bitterness, unresolved territorial disputes, potential flashpoints and strategic competition that could readily ignite even during the next decade … if you were a senior defence strategist in India, China or Japan … you would propose that your country builds its military and technological capabilities … as a form of insurance, recognizing that intentions of other powers could change with time … with an eye on the distant future, you would propose that your country should have a space programme … with an eye on the medium term, you would propose a strengthening of your navy, especially by adding aircraft carriers and submarines … to project power throughout the Indian Ocean … This is an accurate reflection of what is actually happening in Asia because high economic growth rates permit greater expenditure on national security. The economic downturn may slow down things a little, but the rise of China and India is obviously something that can neither be ignored nor wished away. At the risk of over-simplification, I would venture to say that Asians are generally polite and self-effacing by nature. They are uncomfortable with confrontational situations and would take long detours to avoid them if possible. Therefore I think that RSIS is rendering a sterling service by highlighting an issue of some sensitivity, which needs to be discussed at a Track II level, within a non-volatile academic environment, and in a free and frank manner. The American philosopher, George Santayana, confounded his followers by first dismissing history as ‘a pack of lies about events that never happened … ’, and then forecasting that those who could not remember the past were ‘condemned to re-live it’. Notwithstanding these paradoxical messages, prudence demands that we cast a passing glance at our past while preparing for a future fraught with uncertainty. Both China and India have certain common threads running through their history, and this helps rationalize their contemporary behaviour as nation-states. Both are ancient civilizational entities with a very strong religious-cum-cultural underpinning which explains the enduring nature of their mores and traditions. About 500 years ago, these two nations were so prosperous that, between them, they contributed over 50 per cent of the world’s GDP. Both have experienced invasions; for most part from Central Asia, but from the fifteenth century onwards, increasingly across their shores. While the overland invaders, whether they prevailed or were defeated, became assimilated into the two resilient cultures, it was the Western interlopers, coming by sea, who inflicted subjugation and humiliation on both nations. This has created a deep national urge never to allow a re-run of history, and to regain past glory as early as possible. China has had an imperial tradition of long-standing, and a well-defined heartland overwhelmingly populated by ethnic Hans, surrounded by a periphery

Introduction 3 of states over which she has exerted a domination. China’s ‘great-power’ self image has historically been reinforced by the abundance of resources, economic self-sufficiency and vastness of the imperial state. This characteristic was inherited from the last Qing Dynasty by its Kuomintang successor, and has been consolidated by the current regime. Under the leadership of Deng Xiaoping, the Chinese Communists, displaying dramatic pragmatism, adapted socialist dogma to embark on a capitalist marketeconomy enterprise. China’s authoritarian political system has enabled rapid change, and her economy has been growing at an unprecedented rate, for 30 years. This will allow her to acquire the military and economic attributes of a great power within a few decades. India, on the other hand, except for brief spells, was never an imperial power in the true sense. Ethnically more diverse than China, a perpetual endeavour was necessary by the central authority to keep outlying territories from breaking away. The deep Hindu imprint that we still find in Southeast Asia is the result of repeated Indian incursions into this part of the world. However, these putative ‘invasions’ were achieved through the soft power of religion and culture, undertaken by intrepid Indian merchants and missionaries sailing from her east coast during the first and second millennia bce. Two centuries of colonial rule by the British completely sapped India economically, and left her technologically handicapped. Indians today long to make up for the lost time. The method of governance adopted by India after independence is modelled on the Western system of liberal democracy, which allows full freedom to citizens in every sphere. However, the consensual approach required by the system permits only slow and halting economic progress even after the economy was liberalized and thrown open two decades ago. Nevertheless, there is tremendous potential of every kind in the country, and the past decade has witnessed some excellent growth. Barring a catastrophe, India should be a power to reckon with by mid-century. A great deal will, however, depend on how the international environment evolves. Over the centuries, wise men have been commending the virtues of selfishness, and Lord Palmerston put it succinctly in his much quoted aphorism that as far as nations are concerned, they should focus exclusively on vital longterm interests rather than worrying too much about transient friendships and enmities. In keeping with this, we have seen that the international system retains many elements of anarchy; and inter-state relations are conducted on the basis of Realism. The Realist school of thought focuses on state security and power above all else. It assumes that nation-states seek to maximize their own security and chances of survival through the amassing of scarce resources and territorial expansion, if necessary at the cost of others. Aggression is only constrained by opposing power, and inter-state relations will be decided by military and economic capabilities. The clash between the ‘realist’ and ‘liberal’ schools of thought is not new and we encounter it some centuries before the Christian era in the History of the

4 Arun Prakash Peloponnesian War written by Thucydides. The mighty Athenian state presented the citizens of a small island called Melos, with a choice between becoming a tributary and surviving, or opposing enslavement and facing destruction. Rejecting Melian arguments, pleas and entreaties of every kind, they offer a blunt and oft quoted formula of hard realism: ‘the strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must’. Two thousand five hundred years later, the basic rules of international relations have not changed significantly, and might continues to be right. Another relatively recent theory of international relations propounded by George Modelski posits that hegemonic dominance occurs in a series of long cycles, each lasting a century.2 Citing past cases of Spain, Portugal, Holland, Great Britain and the United States, he argues that the current nation-state system has indeed been characterized by cyclical trends in which the decline of great powers from hegemonic status, through over-extension, leads to a global conflict, and commencement of a new great power era and a fresh cycle. The long cycles are said to be underpinned by naval power and commercial dominance, and Modelski pronounces that 1973 marked the beginning of America’s decline and the commencement of a fresh cycle.3 Against this somewhat gloomy backdrop, the questions that are addressed in this book include: •

• •

Does the acquisition of maritime capabilities by the two rising Asian powers, China and India, have to be a zero sum game in which one gains advantage to the disadvantage of the other? If there is an overlap of aspirations, can we prevent it from becoming a conflict? And should their quest for maritime superiority be a cause for alarm for Southeast Asian nations?

Prima facie, one could say that there is adequate space for both these Asian maritime powers to grow simultaneously, and in peace. Moreover, there are enough tasks to be undertaken on the high seas, jointly for the common good of the region, to keep their maritime forces gainfully employed. The control of rising piracy and hi-jacking off the Horn of Africa presents just one such worthy cause. However, this assumes a degree of bilateral trust, mutual understanding and rapport between the two nations which is absent today, despite burgeoning bi-lateral trade. Many factors on the ground contribute to making the present state of Sino-Indian relations somewhat complicated. With time, and accretion of economic, as well as military strength, it is likely to grow even more complex. It is my sincere hope that the deliberations and proceedings of the conference in Singapore in November 2008, along with the chapters in this book, will make a positive contribution towards acquiring a better understanding of the emerging situation, and perhaps even provide guidance for a way ahead.

Introduction 5

Notes 1 Bill Emmott, Rivals: How the Power Struggle Between China, India and Japan Will Shape Our Next Decade, London: Allen Lane/Penguin, 2008. 2 George Modelski, Long Cycles in World Politics, London: Macmillan, 1987. 3 George Modelski and William R. Thompson, Seapower in Global Politics, Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1988.

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Part I

Regional strategic environment Contemporary regional relations

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1

Between rising naval powers A broad strategic overview C. Raja Mohan

Introduction The purpose of this chapter is to lay out a broad context for the more detailed discussion that follows on the consequences to Southeast Asia from the rise of China and India, and the steady expansion of their naval and maritime power. The chapter begins with a brief survey of the altering distribution of power in the international system and the deepening of Asian multipolarity. The second part of the chapter evaluates the context in which ASEAN emerged as the driving force in the construction of a regional framework for Asia. The third part deals with the growing constraints on the ability of ASEAN to sustain its leading role in the construction of an Asian security order given its relative decline vis-a-vis China and India. The fourth part of the chapter offers an assessment of how the two rising powers – China and India – might relate to each other in the coming years. The fifth and final part focuses on the sources and structure of the unfolding maritime rivalry between China and India and its implications for Southeast Asia.

Towards a multipolar Asia The discussion of Asia’s rise and its implications for regional and global order is now more than two decades old. Nevertheless there are some important differences in the nature of the debate two decades ago and now. If the predicted shift in the international balance in favour of the East was aspirational for the Asians two decades ago, it was no more than speculative for those in Europe and North America. The West, triumphal after its victory in the Cold War, was in no mood to believe or act on the premise of the rise of Asia. Today, especially as we are in the midst of a global financial crisis, the idea of a shifting power balance in favour of the East is immediate and tangible. The geographic framework of the perceived change has also evolved during the last two decades. The theme twenty years ago was the emergence of the Pacific century, with the idea of the Pacific involving many of the older powers, including the United States and Japan. The emphasis is now on Asia, marked by the dramatic rise of China and the somewhat slower emergence of India. Three decades of sustained high economic growth rates in

10 C. Raja Mohan China and the recent impressive economic performance of India have made the notion of a transformed world a palpable one. Two reports during this decade from the U.S. intelligence community underline the changing Western perceptions as well the consequential character of the unfolding change in the international power distribution in favour of Asia and the non-Western world in general, and China and India in particular. The first report, released at the end of 2004, argued that Western Europe, Japan and Russia were on a relative decline and that China and India were rapidly rising in the international system. The study pointed out that ‘by 2020 China’s gross national product (GNP) will exceed that of individual Western economic powers except for the United States. India’s GNP will have overtaken or be on the threshold of overtaking European economies’.1 It went on to offer an important insight into the rise of China and India. First, it suggested that China and India could be powerful long before they are rich by Western standards: ‘Because of the sheer size of China’s and India’s populations—projected by the U.S. Census Bureau to be 1.4 billion and almost 1.3 billion respectively by 2020—their standard of living need not approach Western levels for these countries to become important economic powers’. Second, the report suggested that there might be factors other than size, for example the growing Chinese and Indian investments in advanced technologies, that could make the rise of the two Asian giants an enduring shift in global power balance. Reflecting on the consequences, Mapping the Global Future argued that the shift would ‘render obsolete the old categories of East and West, North and South, aligned and non-aligned, developed and developing. Traditional geographic groupings will increasingly lose salience in international relations … competition for allegiances will be more open, less fixed than in the past’.2 The next report of the U.S. National Intelligence Council (NIC) four years later was even more dramatic in its delineation of the rise of China and India and the accelerated trends towards a multipolar world. The Global Trends 2025 argued: ‘In terms of size, speed, and directional flow, the transfer of global wealth and economic power now underway—roughly from West to East—is without precedent in modern history’. It suggested that China would be one of the world’s leading military powers and could be its largest importer of natural resources and the biggest polluter. It also indicated that India would not be too far behind China in these trends and would contribute to the emergence of a multipolar world.3 The global financial crisis that enveloped the entire world at the end of 2008, analysts argue, will only accelerate the trends towards multipolarity and offer significant relative economic and strategic gains for China and India. As a former Wall Street banker and senior White House official has argued: The financial and economic crash of 2008, the worst in over 75 years, is a major geopolitical setback for the United States and Europe. … Although China, too, has been hurt by the crisis, its economic and financial power has been strengthened relative to those of the West. China’s global influence will thus increase, and Beijing will be able to undertake political and

Between rising naval powers 11 economic initiatives to increase it further. … India may also survive the crisis relatively unhurt. … But India does not have nearly the wealth or the internal cohesion of China … and is not particularly equipped to advance its geopolitical standing.4 All analyses of the world after the financial crisis have tended to emphasize that among the major consequence would be an irreversible shift in favour of China and India. The financial crisis and the sense of crisis in Western capitalism has reinforced and vindicated the strong strain of Asian triumphalism. Even before the financial crisis was upon us, Kishore Mahbubani was championing the idea of Western incompetence and Asian competence.5 The notions of Asian cultural difference, if not superiority, and Asian values as different from those of the West, have been argued about repeatedly over the last century. The triumphalism in Asia, however, has not gone unquestioned. While Mahbubani frames the debate in terms of Asia versus the West, there are others, such as Bill Emmott, who point to the power plays among the Asian powers.6 Irrespective of the merits of the two arguments it stands to reason that the rise of China and India would create as many challenges for Asia as it might for the rest of the world. The two ends of the spectrum represented by Mahbubani and Emmott have strong intellectual foundations in International Relations literature. The pessimists suggest that changes in power distribution and the rise of new powers lead to inevitable conflict. The optimists insist that economic integration would lessen the imperatives for war. The pessimists argue that the unstable balance of power politics is an inevitable consequence, while the optimists hope for collective security arrangements amidst the emergence of global and transcendental threats. The optimists bet on the promise of institutions to moderate conflict and the pessimists are resigned to the fact that power politics influence the very formation and functioning of international institutions. While there is no expectation that this debate might be resolved any time soon, the leaders and policy-makers in Southeast Asia have no option but to come to terms with the unfolding multipolarity.

ASEAN and the Asian multipolarity The above analysis is not meant to suggest that multipolarity is new to Asia. On the contrary, it could be argued that multipolarity has been a central feature of recent international relations of Asia. What is important and consequential at this stage is the prospect that the rise of China and India alters the hierarchy among the multiple power centres in Asia. The Second World War, the peace settlements that followed it and the decolonisation of Asia offer ample evidence of Asia’s multipolar character during the last century. The complex dynamic in the middle of the last century was shaped by declining European colonial powers, the challenge to their dominance by the rising Japanese power, and the emergence of new global super powers – the United States and the Soviet Union. During the Cold War, Asia never did fit itself into the bipolar framework that so dominated Europe.

12 C. Raja Mohan China moved from a military alliance with the Soviet Union in the 1950s towards a strategic partnership with the United States to contain Moscow in the 1970s and early 1980s before settling down to what it now calls an ‘independent foreign policy’. Other major Asian countries, such as India and Indonesia, refused to accept the Cold War strait-jacket and insisted on developing a ‘non-aligned’ foreign policy. New Delhi did experiment with an alliance-like relationship with Moscow during the Cold War, but that was more a function of its conflict with Beijing than a consequence of the great global divide between Washington and Moscow. Many of the multilateral Cold War alliances that the United States and the West set up in Asia, the Central Treaty Organization (CENTO) and Southeast Asian Treaty Organization (SEATO), did not survive the complexity of the region’s politics. Given this record of Asia, it would seem that ASEAN’s performance is an impressive one. It has lasted more than four decades, crafted sustained regional cooperation in a location that was widely seen as the Balkans of Asia, promoted a measure of regional economic integration, and set out a timeline for a wider regional community in the whole of East Asia.7 But the academic assessments of ASEAN, vary widely. Those who see the ASEAN record as significant, assess its success in drawing all the major regional and global actors into the ambit of its expanding regional institutions as a rare political triumph.8 Mahbubani argues that in some areas, such as diplomacy and peace-making, it is even superior to that of the European Union, the model for regional integration worldwide. Admitting to ASEAN’s limitations on economic integration, Mahbubani points to its role in being ‘single-handedly responsible for spawning’ regional ventures such as the ARF, APEC, ASEAN+3, ASEM and EAS. He insists that ASEAN ‘should be viewed as a diplomatic superpower: it is the region’s peacemaker. It has absorbed and is implementing a culture of peace’.9 Others, however, dismiss ASEAN as little more than a talk-shop, with a poor record of implementation of signed agreements and its inability to overcome power-politics and clashes of national interests.10 While this debate goes on, it is important to recall the broader political context that facilitated many of ASEAN’s successes and allowed it to play a leading role in Asian regionalism over the last four decades. First, the post-war constraints on Japan limited the role of Asia’s first state to embark on economic and political modernisation. Second, both China and India, the two Asian giants that had ambitions of leading Asia, turned inwards by the end of 1950s, talked of the third way between Western Capitalism and Russian Communism, steadily cut themselves off from the global economy and marginalised themselves from regional institutions. As China and India return to the centre-stage of Asia the balance between them and ASEAN as a collective is bound to change. As a consequence, the ability of ASEAN to ‘manage’ the rise of China and India becomes less and less credible. When China and India were beginning to reconnect to the world after prolonged isolation, it was easy for ASEAN scholars to talk about the organisation’s pivotal role in ‘socialising’ Beijing and New Delhi. Acharya, for example, argued, ‘The norms and processes of ASEAN – such as inclusiveness, dialogue, moderation, restraint, non-confrontational posture,

Between rising naval powers 13 and consensus building – have helped to draw other, more powerful Asian and non-Asian nations into a framework of regional socialisation’.11 ASEAN’s presumption and narcissism are beginning to wear thin, as Southeast Asia scrambles to cope with the rise of Chinese and Indian power. When China and India began to globalize, ASEAN was clearly an example they studied and emulated. As Beijing and New Delhi rapidly became the biggest beneficiaries of globalisation, ASEAN has had to confront some immediate negative consequences. These include competition for foreign direct investment, diminution of ASEAN’s comparative advantages of cheap labour and outperforming the Southeast Asian countries in export markets. With more than 500 million people collectively, ASEAN does not lack in size when competing with China and India. But so long as ASEAN is not a single economic community, it is unlikely to keep pace with the growing weight and influence of Beijing and New Delhi.

Rising powers and regional institutions Whatever might have been the exaggerations of ASEAN scholarship, Southeast Asian political leaders were quick to see the long-term challenges associated with the rise of China and India and recognize the imperatives of reconstituting regional organisations. As a new debate on Asian order was taking place in the first decade of the twenty-first century, Singapore’s Senior Minister, Goh Chok Tong, underlined the importance of coping not just with the rise of China, Japan and India but also managing how the three Asian giants might relate to each other: As they grow and take on new roles, it is inevitable that China, India and Japan will loom larger on each other’s radar screens. And since East Asian integration will be loosely multipolar, the jostling between New Delhi, Beijing and Tokyo that will certainly ensue must be squarely confronted. … However, competition need not lead to conflict if it can be managed within an agreed framework. This, for example, was the original, and remains the essential, raison d’etre of ASEAN.12 Goh was also clear on the continuing centrality of the United States in managing the new power dynamic in Asia and argued that ‘an East Asian architecture that does not have the U.S. as one of its pillars would be an unstable structure’. While the leadership of Southeast Asia was crystal clear about the centrality of the power balance in the region, the academic writings tend to take a more tortuous framework to explain this dynamic.13 The problem, however, is that the ability of ASEAN to drive the process of building regional institutions is beginning to diminish amidst the changing power balance and hierarchy within the region as well as within ASEAN itself. There is no doubt that ASEAN offered the broadest possible stage for debating regional institution building. It is not clear whether ASEAN can sustain even that limited role in the future.

14 C. Raja Mohan Most Asian leaders agree with the widespread criticism that the region is underinstitutionalized. Considerable diplomatic energy in the region has been devoted to correcting this imbalance. While new institutions might not necessarily prevent conflict, it is hoped that they will help limit many of the potentially negative trends in the region. Good intentions need not necessarily lead to good results. The very process of building new Asian institutions has become susceptible to power politics. The tendency towards the creation of exclusive political and security institutions and the jockeying for primacy have emerged as major sources of mutual suspicion among the great powers. The question of what constitutes ‘East Asia’ and which nations should be part of it, as well as that of how different tracks of Asian regionalism interface with each other, have become big contested issues. China seemed reluctant to let India, Australia and New Zealand into the East Asia Summit (EAS). For many nations in East Asia the presence of these countries was seen as an insurance against potential Chinese domination of the EAS. Although the three countries were eventually admitted to the EAS, Beijing has succeeded in making ‘ASEAN Plus Three’ the driving force for East Asian integration. Meanwhile the exclusion from the EAS of the United States too, has generated considerable anxieties in Washington.14 At the same time ASEAN’s own centrality has been challenged by other powers. Until recently it was fashionable for ASEAN enthusiasts to say that only they could bring China, Japan and the Koreas onto a single platform. Mahbubani, for example, has argued that the ‘only forums where the three Northeast Asian leaders can meet comfortably and discuss common challenges have been the meetings convened by ASEAN, especially ASEAN+3 (China, Japan, South Korea)’.15 Since then the ‘Plus Three’ countries have chosen to meet on their own, for the first time at the end of 2008 in the Japanese town of Dazaifu. They had agreed to institutionalize annual summit meetings between the three leading economies of Asia. Calling it the ‘three minus ASEAN’ summit, a leading scholar of Southeast Asian studies raises some fundamental questions about the future of ASEAN-driven mechanism of 10+3 or APT (ASEAN Plus Three): The new East Asia trilateralism raises questions about aspects of ASEAN’s APT strategy. There had been an ASEAN assumption that the political differences among its East Asian partners were so deep that they could not be overcome in a cooperative arrangement without the neutral playing field of ASEAN. ASEAN imagined its organisational significance to China, Japan, and South Korea derived in part from what was thought to be its pivotal role in a multilateral framework in which the consensus mechanism was ASEAN’s insistence on its central agenda-setting role. This would allow ASEAN to balance and hedge in its own relationships with the East Asian actors in the APT. It now seems clear that the deepening economic ties among, and the common global challenges to, the East Asian economic giants transcend the loose regionalism of the APT, diminishing ASEAN’s claim to be an agenda setter or a necessary actor in the management of Japan-China-South Korea relations.16

Between rising naval powers 15 ASEAN’s claim to be the driver of regional integration has also been challenged by Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s 2008 proposal for ‘a regional institution which spans the entire Asia-Pacific region – including the United States, Japan, China, India, Indonesia, and the other states of the region’.17 It did not take long for a section of the Southeast Asian elite to criticise what they saw as an Australian attempt to privilege the membership of Indonesia at the expense of the ASEAN. The Australian call to recognize the special role of Indonesia has been matched by a growing measure of disenchantment with ASEAN in Indonesia. There have been gathering political sentiments in Jakarta that Indonesia must return to playing a larger independent role in world affairs. Jusuf Wanandi made the case in a succinct manner: Can ASEAN as a diplomatic institution and a limited economic entity face these new challenges, such as the rise of China and India, without deepening cooperation and integration among its members? The answer is obviously no, because ASEAN still consists of 10 sovereign countries as members. This could be acrimonious or limited to the lowest common denominator. If ASEAN cannot move beyond its lowest common denominator, as defined by Laos or Myanmar, it is likely that Indonesia will seek to become more independent from ASEAN. In the last 40 years, Indonesia has become too dependent on ASEAN as the instrument of its foreign policy, and has constrained its freedom of action and use of other vehicles to implement its free and independent foreign policy. This was right in the first decades of ASEAN, to enable Indonesia to get the trust back from its neighbors. And Indonesia has achieved that. However, for the future, Indonesia needs to pursue its own national interests, on top of its loyalty and solidarity with ASEAN. … This means that we should be more active in strengthening our bilateral relations with the big countries in the region: Japan, China and India, besides the United States. We should strive to develop closer cooperation with the big democracies among developing nations, such as Brazil, India and South Africa.18 What we see here is the inevitable consequence of the changing distribution of power within ASEAN, the increasing international interest in Indonesia as a rising power, and the aspirations of the Indonesian elite to reclaim a foreign policy that matches its changing global status. While the debate on future Asian architecture has been an important one, it is not the only one that is taking place in Asia. China’s open and successful campaign against Japan and India (along with Germany and Brazil) for permanent membership of the United Nations Security Council has left Tokyo and New Delhi with deep suspicions about Beijing’s strategic intentions. China will find it hard to convince all others that its own rise is natural but that of Japan’s as somehow illegitimate. Beijing’s reluctance to let India into the East Asian security structures is not acceptable to Indian policy-makers. Nor can New Delhi forget China’s efforts to prevent the Nuclear Suppliers Group from endorsing the Indo-U.S. civil

16 C. Raja Mohan nuclear initiative in 2008. China, too, has its own grievances against New Delhi’s attempts to limit Beijing’s role in the subcontinent. It is apprehensive about India’s great power aspiration and its growing security cooperation with the United States and Japan.19 Meanwhile, the rise of China has prompted the U.S. to strengthen its traditional bilateral alliances with Japan and Australia. It has also begun to build a new strategic partnership with India. Japan has announced a bilateral defence agreement with Australia and is keen to expand its security cooperation with India. Washington and Tokyo have intensified the multilateralization of its bilateral partnerships in Asia by promoting the idea of political cooperation among the democratic powers in Asia. Although the idea of a democratic quad – involving coordination among Washington, Tokyo, New Delhi and Canberra – has not taken off, it has not been buried either. India, the United States and Japan conducted their first trilateral naval exercises in April 2007 and held another in April–May 2009. India’s conduct of a multilateral exercise involving the quad and Singapore saw diplomatic protests from China. If the Bush Administration had focused on a hedging strategy against China, a section of the Obama Administration seems enamoured with the idea of a ‘Group of Two’ – Washington and Beijing – taking the lead to manage the global economic crisis. Put simply, the rise of China and India has opened up a range of new possibilities for a potential realignment in Asia that go way beyond the traditional discourse on a modular expansion of the ASEAN-driven structures.

Sino-Indian relations The nature and context of Sino-Indian relations remains poorly understood not just in the West but also in Asia. The quaint-coded formal statements between New Delhi and Beijing often tend to obfuscate the tension between the two rising powers. How China and India relate to each other will have significant consequences for the rest of Asia; the following is a brief survey of the emerging competitive dynamic between the two countries. Even before they were constituted into the modern states of India (1947) and China (1949), the national movements in the two countries and their intellectual leaders reached out to each other to find the bases for cooperation. As two great civilizational states emerging out of prolonged decline and marginalisation, the Chinese and Indian nationalists believed that they were destined to reshape Asia and the world together. Yet as the Second World War engulfed them, they found it impossible to cooperate. Despite the extraordinary solidarity extended by the Indian national movement to the anti-Japanese struggle of the Chinese, the structure of great power conflict and the fact that India and China faced different imperial powers prevented political cooperation between the two national movements when it mattered the most. As Japan advanced closer to the subcontinent in the 1940s, Britain got Chiang Kai Shek to travel to India and urge the Indian nationalists to ease their confrontation against London and focus on the war effort against Tokyo. The Indian leaders, including Gandhi, refused. At the intellectual level too, the big ideas that moved China and India did not

Between rising naval powers 17 always match, and despite their common struggle to cope with the new domination of the West, they did not see eye to eye on critical political and philosophical assumptions.20 In the early years after claiming their independent nationhood, India and China once again embarked on a new effort to build political cooperation. Their romanticism was marked by the slogan of ‘Hindi-Chini Bhai Bhai’ in the 1950s. Yet by the late 1950s, the turbulence in Tibet and their unresolved boundary dispute began to sour the relationship which culminated in a brief military conflict at the end of 1962. This was followed by a prolonged chill until an effort to normalize the bilateral relations in the 1980s. While the boundary dispute dominated the relationship, China and India found that their world views were radically different: their interests clashed in Southeast Asia and South Asia, their differences on the future of the security order in Asia and the Indian Ocean were strong, and they found themselves on the opposite sides of the Cold War when it came to a conclusion. No wonder that the classic review of Sino-Indian relations in the twentieth century was characterised as ‘protracted contest’ and an unending rivalry.21 At the turn of the twenty-first century, Sino-Indian relations seemed to enter one of their best ever phases. The normalization efforts in the final years of the twentieth century seemed to bear fruit as two-way trade between the two countries galloped from about 1 billion dollars in 1998 to nearly 50 billion in 2008. Sustained highlevel exchanges and broadening people-to-people contacts were supplemented by important efforts at military confidence building and political attempts at resolving the all-important boundary dispute. Yet, the notion of an all-encompassing rivalry began to take hold of their bilateral relationship. Some have seen this rivalry rooted in the relentless logic of geography.22 Since they shared the same space in Asia and both countries sought to expand their influence on the nations across their borders, a contestation for influence in Central Asia, South Asia and Southeast Asia became inevitable. This rivalry was not limited to their immediate environs, however. It expressed itself in far-flung places, from Siberia, in the Russian Far East, to Columbia in Latin America and from Africa to the South Pacific, thanks to their growing dependence on resources – both energy and mineral – far from their shores. In their enhanced bilateral engagement at the turn of the twenty-first century, both China and India have sought to downplay the prospects of mutual rivalry. They continually declared that they were not a threat to each other. They also insisted that there was enough space in the world for the peaceful rise of both China and India, and that cooperation between them would be critical for the emergence of the Asian century.23 Despite the repeated formal declaration of the commitment for political cooperation and the rapidly expanding bilateral economic engagement, China and India constantly sought to limit the influence of the other. And despite the tall talk of building ‘Chindia’, what has emerged in the past few years is an unmitigated rivalry. In their attempt to hedge against each other’s rise, Beijing and New Delhi found that their bilateral relationship was increasingly sensitive to their relationships with other powers. Both have used

18 C. Raja Mohan their relationships with the United States, Japan and Russia to gain advantage over the other. As a consequence, the fear of encirclement by the other has gained ground in both capitals and laid the basis for what could be a deepening security dilemma between the two countries. What one nation sees as a necessary step in protecting its own interests has been seen by the other as an aggressive move to undercut its positions. As we noted above, the notion of a Sino-Indian rivalry is not new. What makes it different today are a number of factors. Rising China and emerging India are more powerful nations today on the cusp of great power status, have interests that are wide-ranging, are driven by a strong nationalist impulse, have staked their domestic political legitimacy on their ability to sustain high rates of growth, which in turn depends on their ability to achieve external objectives in an increasingly inter-connected world, and have often found themselves at odds in seeking to influence their shared neighbourhood and expanding their respective roles in international institutions, including the global non-proliferation regime and the United Nations Security Council.

Sino-Indian maritime rivalry: Implications for Southeast Asia One of the new elements of the Sino-Indian relationship has been the extension of the countries’ competition from land spaces to the maritime domain. As China and India rely increasingly on access to natural resources in far-away territories and on secure sea lanes to protect their critical sea-borne trade, both have begun to put increasing emphasis on developing strong navies and to project their influence into both the Indian and Pacific Oceans. The subsequent chapters in the volume go into considerable detail on the naval strategies. Our task is to note briefly the broader dynamic shaping the maritime policies of China and India and the competitive dynamic that has emerged between them. Sustained high economic growth rates have meant that both nations have the financial resources for the expansion and modernisation of their strategic and military capabilities. The military and civilian leaders in China and India are convinced that investments in strong military forces and prestigious high technology programmes are absolutely necessary and are a natural part of their rise to great power status in the international system. The growing strength of nationalism in China and India has meant there is no real questioning of the rationale, utility and efficiency of these costly programmes. The political, military and technological elites today have relative autonomy as well as access to significant resources to pursue grand strategic ambitions. It is not surprising that despite their relatively low per capita incomes, China and India have become leading space-faring nations with clearly defined objectives for both civilian and military missions in outer space. In both Beijing and New Delhi, the idea of a strong presence in outer space and ocean space and the inter-connections between the two realms is fully understood. The construction of blue-water navies with the capacity to operate far from their shores are now justified in terms of manifest destiny that is inviting the two nations to play a larger role in the world.

Between rising naval powers 19 The growing dependence on imported mineral and energy resources and the protection of sea-lanes have become the principal arguments for a rapid expansion of naval capabilities in both China and India. China’s reliance on Africa and the Gulf for these natural resources has meant China looking beyond its traditional and enduring security interests in the Western Pacific to focus on the Indian Ocean.24 India, on the other hand, has sought to consolidate its position in the Indian Ocean while beginning to explore strategic opportunities, especially in the South China Sea and more broadly in the Western Pacific Ocean.25 In order to minimize the risk of disruption in the supply of energy and other mineral resources, India and China have sought to develop maritime access in the Indian Ocean littoral. India is deeply concerned about the Chinese activity in building port infrastructure in and around South Asia, including Gwadar (Pakistan), Chittagong (Bangladesh), Sittwe (Myanmar) and Hambantota (Sri Lanka), under the so-called ‘String of Pearls’ strategy.26 New Delhi watches warily Beijing’s diplomatic offensive in the small island states of Western Indian Ocean for potential naval facilities, while Beijing closely monitors India’s port calls and access arrangements in the Malacca Straits and the South China Sea. China might indeed have good reasons to seek reliable maritime access in southern Asia as it mulls over the threat of being squeezed at various chokepoints such as the Malacca Straits through which its energy supplies currently traverse.27 New Delhi, on the other hand, given the history of its rivalry with Beijing, fears a potential Chinese encirclement and is determined to contest its rising naval profile in the Indian Ocean.28 As the naval capabilities of China and India rapidly increase and the strategic elites in Beijing and New Delhi signal the political will to operate in distant waters, it is inevitable that Southeast Asia, which links the Indian and Pacific oceans, will be at the very centre of a new power play. The presumed spheres of influence of China and India have been part of Southeast Asia’s political memory.29 Yet those participating in the discourse on regional security in Southeast Asia have been reluctant to come to terms with the implications of rising Chinese and Indian naval power. Although specific issues such as the security of the Malacca Strait did get significant attention in recent years, there has been no overarching construction of a strategic framework to understand the changing dynamic of the region’s maritime politics. Three broad reasons might be suggested. First, the towering presence of the U.S. Navy in the waters of the region has meant that the strategic thinking on maritime issues could largely be ceded to Washington. Occasional attempts by the United States to get the region to think comprehensively about regional maritime security, such as the proposal for a regional maritime security initiative, met with fierce political resistance in Southeast Asia, suggesting the entrenched reluctance in the region to confront the broader challenges of maritime security. Second, the debate on maritime security was seen largely as an addon to the new attempts to build Asian institutions. The emphasis on promoting regional economic integration and devising a road map for the construction of an Asian community did open up the space for considering functional cooperation on specific issues but prevented an examination of the unique nature of maritime politics.

20 C. Raja Mohan The third reason was the delusion that power politics was now as passé in Asia as it was in Europe. This infected not just the regional political elites but also the grand strategic thinking in the U.S. Navy. The sense of absolute American naval superiority meant the U.S. Navy had no reason to worry about competition with other powers, extant or rising, and could emphasise such notions as a 1,000-ship navy that is focused on regional maritime cooperation rather than burdened by the past concerns of rivalry with other great powers. The benign neglect of the maritime dimension of Asian security, or a narrow approach to it, in simple functional terms is no longer credible amidst the rapid rise of China and India. Although the expanding naval capabilities of China and India are no match to those of the U.S. Navy, they have begun to define maritime security environment in specific local contexts as well as shape the larger balance of power in the waters of Asia. As China and India joust for new influence in the waters of Southeast Asia, the region must begin to attach the highest intellectual and policy priority to understanding and mitigating the unfolding Sino-Indian maritime rivalry.

Notes 1 U.S. National Intelligence Council, Mapping the Global Future (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, December 2004). 2 Ibid. 3 U.S. National Intelligence Council, Global Trends 2025: A Transformed World (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, November 2008). 4 Roger C. Altman, ‘The Great Crash, 2008: Geopolitical Setback for the West’, Foreign Affairs, January/February 2009. 5 Kishore Mahbubani, The New Asian Hemisphere: The Irresistible Shift of Global Power to the East (New York: Public Affairs, 2008). 6 Bill Emmott, The Rivals: How the Power Struggle Between China, India and Japan Will Shape Our Next Decade (London: Allen Lane, 2008). 7 For a first-hand account, see Rodolfo C. Severino, Southeast Asia in Search of an ASEAN Community: Insights from the former ASEAN Secretary General (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2006). 8 See for example, Amitav Acharya, Constructing a Security Community in Southeast Asia: ASEAN and the Problem of Regional Order (London: Routledge, 2000); see also Muthiah Alagappa (ed.), Asian Security Order: Instrumental and Normative Features (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003). 9 Mahbubani, The New Asian Hemisphere, pp. 82–5. 10 David Martin Jones and Michael L. R. Smith, ‘Constructing Communities: the Curious Case of East Asian Regionalism’, Review of International Studies, Vol. 33, No. 1, January 2007, pp. 165–86. 11 Amitav Acharya, ‘Constructing Security and Identity in Southeast Asia’, Brown Journal of World Affairs, Vol. 12, No. 2, Winter/Spring 2006, p. 156. 12 Goh Chok Tong, ‘Constructing East Asia’, Speech at the Asia Society 15th Corporate Conference, Bangkok, 9 June 2005. 13 Evelyn Goh, ‘Great Powers and Hierarchical Order in Southeast Asia: Analyzing Regional Security Strategies’, International Security, Vol. 32, No. 3, Winter 2007/08, pp. 113–57. 14 For a discussion of the power politics that shaped the first East Asia Summit, see, Mohan Malik, ‘The East Asia Summit’, Australian Journal of International Affairs, Vol. 60,

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26

27 28 29

No. 2, June 2006, pp. 207–11; See also, T. Terada, ‘Forming an East Asian Community: A Site for Japan-China Power Struggles’, Japanese Studies, Vol. 26, No. 1, pp. 5–17; for a theoretical discussion, see, Robert S. Ross, ‘Balance of Power Politics and the Rise of China: Accommodation and Balancing in East Asia’, Security Studies, Vol. 15, No. 3, Fall 2006. Mahbubani, The New Asian Hemisphere, pp. 84–5. Donald E. Weatherbee, ‘Three Minus ASEAN: The Dazaifu Summit’, PACNet, No. 2 (Honolulu, Hawaii: CSIS Pacific Forum, 9 January 2009). The full text of the Rudd Speech at Asia Society, Sydney, 4 June 2008 is available online at http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,23812266-5013871,00. html. See also Rudd’s Singapore lecture, ‘Building on ASEAN’s Success – Towards an Asia Pacific Century’, 12 August 2008. Available online at http://www.pm.gov.au/ media/Speech/2008/speech_0419.cfm. Jusuf Wanandi, ‘Indonesia’s Foreign Policy and the Meaning of ASEAN’, PacNet, No. 27 (Honolulu, Hawaii: CSIS Pacific Forum, 15 May 2008.) David Scott, ‘Strategic Imperatives of India as an Emerging Player in Pacific Asia’, International Studies, Vol. 44, No. 2, April/June 2007, pp. 121–40; See also, Harsh Pant, ‘India in the Asia-Pacific: Rising Ambitions with an Eye on Rising China’, Asia Pacific Review, Vol. 14, No. 1, 2007, pp. 54–71. Stephen Hay, Asian Ideas of East and West: Tagore and his Critics in China and Japan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970). John Garver, Protracted Contest: Sino-Indian Rivalry in the 20th Century (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001). David Scott, ‘The Great Power “Great Game” between India and China: “The Logic of Geography” ’, Geopolitics, Vol. 13, No. 1, January 2008, pp. 1–26. See the declaration issued at the end of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s visit to Beijing in early 2008: A Shared Vision for the 21st Century of the People’s Republic of China and Republic of India, 14 January 2008. Available online at http://www.mea. gov.in. James Holmes and Toshi Yoshihara, ‘China’s Naval Ambitions in the Indian Ocean’, Journal of Strategic Studies, Vol. 31, No. 3, June 2008, pp. 367–94. See C. Raja Mohan, ‘India’s Geopolitics and Southeast Asian Security’, in Daljit Singh and Tin Maung Maung Than (eds), Southeast Asian Affairs 2008 (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2008), pp. 43–60; see also, Lisa Curtis, ‘India’s Expanding Role in Asia: Adapting to Rising Power Status’, Backgrounder No. 2008 (Washington, DC: Heritage Foundation, February 2007). Available online at http://www.heritage. org/Research/AsiaandthePacific/upload/bg_2008.pdf. For a review of this strategy, see, Christopher J. Pehrson, String of Pearls: Meeting the Challenge of China’s Rising Power Across the Asian Littoral (Carlisle, PA: Strategic Studies Institute, US Army War College, July 2006); see also, Lawrence Spinetta, ‘Cutting China’s “String of Pearls” ’, U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings, Vol. 132, No. 10, October 2006, pp. 40–2. You Ji, ‘Dealing with the Malacca Dilemma: China’s Efforts to Protect its Energy Supplies’, Strategic Analysis, Vol. 31, No. 3, May 2007, pp. 467–89. James R. Holmes and Toshi Yoshihara, ‘India’s “Monroe Doctrine” and Asia’s Maritime Future’, Strategic Analysis, Vol. 32, No. 6, November 2008, pp. 997–1011. See Garver, Protracted Contest, pp. 243–313.

2

The PLA Navy Expanding into uncharted waters Huang Jing

On 26 December 2008, the People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) deployed two destroyers – Luyang II-class 171 Haikou (Type-052C) and Luyang-class 169 Wuhan (Type-052B) – accompanied by a 30,000-ton supply ship 87 Weishanhu, to Somali water. From the operational point of view, this seems to be an excessive use of force, given that the mission of the fleet is merely to protect Chinese vessels and crew from pirate attacks off the coast of Somalia. But the significance of this high-profile voyage is that it symbolizes the return of the Chinese Navy to blue water 600 years after the Ming Dynasty’s royal fleet, led by Zheng He, made seven voyages to the Indian Ocean in 1405–33. Indeed, the PLAN has been the fastest-growing force in the Chinese military. In the past three decades it has developed from a virtually inshore navy into a formidable, modern navy with blue-water capability. While such a fast naval buildup has substantially improved China’s capability of projecting power overseas to safeguard her national security and interests, it has also drawn serious concerns from the world community, especially the Asia-Pacific region, about Beijing’s commitment to peace and stability. This chapter begins with a review of the PLAN’s build-up in the past three decades and its (projected) future development. I will then examine the evolution of China’s naval strategy and its implications, since China is rising as a naval power. Finally, the analysis will focus on the dilemmas China faces and policy options available to Beijing as the PLAN develops into a blue-water navy.

PLAN’s rapid expansion: 1980–2020 1980–1995: Embarking on modernization The PLAN’s modernization was an important part of the “defense modernization” started by Deng Xiaoping in the late 1970s.1 With the reduction of one million PLA men in the mid-1980s, the focus of the modernization program was shifted to improving the quality of the armed forces. Thus, the CCP Central Military Commission (CMC) made the development of the second-generation warships a key area of its endeavor for naval modernization. By the end of the Eighth Five-Year Plan (1991–95), the PLAN had established a fleet of 50 major

The PLA Navy 23 surface combatants. Among its 18 guided missile destroyers, 17 were DDGs Luda (Type-051), with only one DDG Luhu (Type-052), upon which a series of more advanced destroyers (Type-052A, B, and C) to be developed in the next decade would be based. But it was in the PLAN’s frigate fleet that we saw a more substantial improvement. In addition to 26 Type-053 Jianghu-class frigates, the PLAN launched four FFGs Jiangwei (Type-055) and two FFGs Jiangwei-II (Type-057).2 Meanwhile, the PLAN upgraded its effort to modernize its outdated submarine force. By 1995, although the old Romeo-class submarines were still the dominant force in the PLAN submarine forces – there were 29 units of SS Romeo in service – the PLAN added 10 units of SS Ming (Type-035), one SS Kilo, five SSN Han (Type-091), and one SSBN Xia (Type-092) to its submarine fleet. Despite the decrease in the total number of submarines (from 117 units in 1985 to 46 units in 1995), the combat capability of the PLAN submarine force increased tremendously as the bigger and more capable Ming-class attack submarines began to replace the smaller and outdated Romeo-class ones3 (see Table 2.1). In retrospect, the PLAN’s modernization program in this period focused mainly on increasing its capability of defending China’s offshore areas in the North, East, and South China Seas. The PLAN streamlined and modernized its forces by decommissioning a large number of older ships, replacing them with more advanced and indigenously built destroyers, frigates, submarines, supply ships, landing ships, and other smaller vessels to its fleets. With the new Luda and Luhu-class destroyers, Jiangwei-class frigates, Ming-class diesel, and Han-class nuclear-powered submarines, the PLAN became more confident in projecting power in the North, East, and South China Seas, as demonstrated in the 1995–96 missile crises in the Taiwan Strait. However, despite its improvements in anti-air warfare (AAW) and antisubmarine warfare (ASW), the PLAN as a whole was not capable of defending itself in the modern maritime warfare due to its lack of area air and missile defense capabilities. Thus, by the end of last century, the PLAN was virtually incapable of combat missions in blue water; hence its operation was confined to offshore areas within the protective range of the land based air and missile forces. 1996–2008: Building up blue-water capability It was in this period that we have observed an extraordinarily fast PLAN build-up, not just in size but in capacity.4 The purchase of the Sovremenny-class destroyers from Russia in the late 1990s indicated that the PLAN began to focus on developing warships that can not only engage hostile ships by means of precision missile strikes, but also provide area defense against air, submarine, and missile attacks. Moreover, the PLAN endeavored to acquire modern weaponry systems that could counter potential adversaries operating on naval platforms or from land bases in the East and South China Seas, particularly the stand-off weapons such as long-range anti-ship cruise missiles (ASCMs) and land-attack cruise missiles (LACMs).

24 Huang Jing Table 2.1 The PLAN inventory (1985–2020) Class

Source

1985 1990 1995 2000 2005 2008 2010 2015 2020

Submarines SSBN Jin SSBN Xia SSN Shang SSN Han SS Kilo SS NEWCON SS Yuan SS Song SS Ming SSB Golf SS Wuhan SS Romeo SS Whiskey

Type 094 Type 092 Type 093 Type 091 Sov Kilo Song/Yuan Type 041 Type 039 Type 035 Type 031 Type 033G Type 033 Type 03

117 – 1 – 3 – – – – 2 1 1 90 20

63 – 1 – 4 – – – – 3 1 1 53 –

48 – 1 – 5 1 – – – 10 1 1 29 –

50 – 1 – 5 4 – – 1 17 1 1 20 –

55 – 1 1 5 10 – 2 10 17 1 1 7 –

64 2 1 2 3 12 – 2 16 16 1 1 8 –

63 2 1 3 4 12 – 2 20 17 1 1 – –

71 4 – 4 2 12 10 2 20 15 1 1 – –

78 5 – 6 1 12 20 2 20 12 1 1 – –

Destroyers DDG Luzhou DDG Hangzhou DDG Luyang II DDG Luyang I DDG Luhai DDG Luhu DDG Luda DD Anshan

Type 051C Sovremenny Type 052C Type 052B Type 052A Type 052 Type 051 Type 07

15 – – – – – – 11 4

18 – – – – – – 16 2

18 – – – – – 1 17 –

19 – 1 – – – 2 16 –

24 0 2 2 2 2 2 14 –

27 2 4 2 2 1 2 14 –

26 3 4 3 2 1 2 11 –

25 6 4 4 2 1 2 6 –

26 9 4 6 2 1 2 2 –

31 Type 054 – Type 057 – Type 055 – Type 053 20 Type 053K 2 Type 053 5 [mod-Sov Riga] Type 01 4 [ex-Sov Riga]

37 – – – 26 2 5

32 – 2 4 26 1 –

40 – 6 4 30 – –

46 2 10 4 30 – –

47 6 10 4 27 – –

47 12 10 4 21 – –

47 22 10 4 11 – –

47 28 10 4 5 – –

4

2

–

–

–

–

–

–

Frigates FFG Jiangkai FFG Jiangwei II FFG Jiangwei I FFG Jianghu FFG Jiangdong FF Jiangnan FF Chengdu

Source: Global Security at http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/china/navy.htm (Accessed on 20 January 2008).

Such an impressive development resulted in a rapid expansion of the PLAN’s major surface combatant fleet – the number of major combatants has increased from 50 units (18 DDGs and 38 FFGs) in 1995 to 75 units (26 DDGs and 49 FFGs) in 2008. More revealing is that all the new additions are bigger, constantly improved warships. Among the 25 newly added major combatants, most noteworthy ones include: • •

Two Luzhou Type-051C DDGs (115 Shenyang and 116 Shijiazhuang) Two Luyang-II Type-052C DDGs (170 Lanzhou and 171 Haikou)

The PLA Navy 25 • • •

Four Sovremenny-class DDGs (Project 956: 136 Hangzhou and 137 Fuzhou; and Project 936/EM: 138 Taizhou and 139 Ningbo) Two Luyang Type-052B DDGs (168 Guangzhou and 169 Wuhan) Four Jiangkai-II Type-054A FFGs (529 Zhoushan, 530 Xuzhou, 568 Chaohu, and 570 Huangshan)5

Equally, if not more impressive, was the progress achieved in building up the PLAN submarine fleet. The number of PLAN submarines increased from 48 units (6 nuclear and 43 diesel) in 1995 to 64 units (8 nuclear and 56 diesel) in 2008. The outdated Romeo-class submarines have been virtually eliminated – only 8 were still in service (mainly for training purpose), but the Kilo-class (12 units) and Type-039 Song-class (16 units) submarines have become the major combat forces; and at least two more advanced SS Yuan (Type-041) were launched in 2008. Meanwhile the PLAN commissioned at least two Type-093 Shang-class nuclear attack submarines and two Type-094 Jin-class ballistic missile submarines in this period. While the former was based upon (and will eventually replace) the aging SSN Han (Type-091),6 the latter has been dramatically improved upon the SSBN Xia (Type-092) (see Table 2.1).7 These new additions have not only dramatically enhanced the combat capacity of the PLAN’s submarine fleet, but also helped to establish a credible second-strike capability with its new, more sophisticated nuclear-powered submarines. But the most significant development in this period is that all the newly added Type-051C, Type-052C, and Sovremenny destroyers (and to some extent Type-054A frigates) are equipped with the weaponry system mimicking the Aegis Combat System, anti-submarine helicopters, anti-ship missiles, torpedoes, and comprehensive electronic warfare systems. It is true that these Type-051C and Type-052C destroyers will serve as testing beds for further improvements or new warships,8 but with their Aegis-like combat systems and improved C4ISR (command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance), these newly acquired combatants have for the first time enabled the PLAN to ‘break the first-island chain in a hostile environment’ and to engage an adversary naval force beyond the range of land-based air and missile-protections.9 Meanwhile, the dramatically improved PLAN submarine fleet is not only a formidable opponent in contested waters such as the South China Sea and the Western Pacific, but also poses a strategic deterrence with its credible second-strike capability. 2008–2020: Toward a blue-water navy China’s rapid naval build-up in 1995–2008 was essentially driven by the Taiwan contingency in which the PLAN may have to confront the mighty U.S. Navy in Taiwan waters.10 Although the cross-strait rapprochement has stabilized crossstrait relations since President Ma Ying-jiou came to power in May 2008, it is unlikely that the momentum of PLAN build-up will slow down in the near future.

26 Huang Jing As China’s 2008 Defense White Paper stipulates, the PLAN will continue to “upgrade its weaponry and equipment system,” with efforts “being made to build new types of submarines, destroyers, frigates, and aircraft, forming a preliminary weaponry and equipment system with second-generation equipment as the core and the third generation as the backbone.”11 Thus, it is projected that the PLAN submarine fleet will continue to expand from today’s 63 units to around 78 units in 2020, with five/six units of SSBN Jin, six of SSN Shang, and more than 50 of Kilo, Yuan, and Song-class attack submarines (see Table 2.1 and Chart 2.1). Thus, the total (submerged) displacement of the PLAN submarines is projected to increase from around 190,000 tons in 2008 to over 300,000 tons in 2020 (see Chart 2.2). There will be little change in the number of PLAN major combatants – about 75 units – as the smaller and aging combatants will be gradually replaced by the newer, bigger, more advanced, and indigenously built destroyers and frigates 25

20 SSBNJin/094 SSBNXia/092 SSShang/093 SSNHan/091 SSKilo SSYuan/041 SSSong/039 SSMing/035

15

10

5

0 2000

2005

2007

2010

2015

2020

Chart 2.1 From green water to blue water: Submarines. Source: Sino-defense at http://www.sinodefence.com/navy/default.asp (Accessed on 20 January 2008).

200,000 180,000 160,000

Tons

140,000 120,000 100,000

Nuclear Diesel

80,000 60,000 40,000 20,000 0 2000

2005

2007

2010

2015

2020

Chart 2.2 From green water to blue water: Submarine displacement (submerged). Source: Sino-defense at http://www.sinodefence.com/navy/default.asp (Accessed on 20 January 2008).

The PLA Navy 27 18 16 14

Luzhou/051C Sovremenny LuyanglI/052C Luyangl/052B Luhai/052A Luhu/052 Luda/051

12 10 8 6 4 2 0

2000

2005

2007

2010

2015

2020

Chart 2.3 From green water to blue water: Destroyers. Source: Sino-defense at http://www.sinodefence.com/navy/default.asp (Accessed on 20 January 2008).

35 30 25 20 15 10 5 0 2000

2005 Jiangkai/054

2007 Jiangweill/057

2010 Jiangweil/055

2015

2020

Jianghu/053

Chart 2.4 From green water to blue water: Frigates. Source: Sino-defense at http://www.sinodefence.com/navy/default.asp (Accessed on 20 January 2008).

(see Charts 2.3 and 2.4). Despite its stable size, the total displacement of the PLAN’s major combatants will increase from 250,000 tons in 2008 to more than 350,000 tons in 2020 (see Chart 2.5). Moreover, it is reported that the PLAN is developing various weaponry systems for long-range precision strikes, including theater-range ballistic missiles (TBMs), land-attack cruise missiles (LACMs), and anti-ship cruise missiles (ASCMs).12 Meanwhile, the PLAN will continue to acquire modern anti-submarine and antiaircraft weapon systems, with a focus on improving C4ISR and data links required for area defense missions, especially when countering low-observable aircraft and cruise missiles. It is expected that the engineering efforts to develop and improve these air and missile defense systems, which will be capable of detecting and engaging such attacks from adversary naval platforms or land-based systems, will

28 Huang Jing 200 000 180 000 160 000 140 000 Tons

120 000 Destroyers

100 000

Frigates

80 000 60 000 40 000 20 000 0 2000

2005

2007

2010

2015

2020

Chart 2.5 From green water to blue water: Warship displacement. Source: Sino-defense at http://www.sinodefence.com/navy/default.asp (Accessed on 20 January 2008).

result in substantial enhancement of the PLAN’s combat capability in blue water in the next decade. With the credible claim that China will soon build (or is building) its aircraft carrier(s),13 it is not groundless to project that China will have a credible blue-water navy by 2020.

The PLAN’s expansion and its impact on China’s naval strategy Offshore defense and its limitations The essential consequence of the PLAN modernization since the 1980s is that the PLAN “has realized a strategic transformation [from inshore] to offshore defensive operations.” As such, the PLAN operational plans are in accordance with the “active defensive” strategy, under which the PLAN is prepared to safeguard “China’s maritime security and maintaining the sovereignty of its territorial waters, along with its maritime rights and interests.”14 Although this “active defense” strategy – a doctrinal shift away from Mao’s “People’s War” strategy which focused on the large-scale, land-based warfare – stresses defense rather than offense, it stipulates that the PLAN should be on the offensive to “strike and get the better of the enemy after the enemy has started an attack,”15 even if the PLAN fleets would have to conduct combat beyond China’s territorial waters. In the 1980s and early 1990s, this “offshore defense” doctrine required the PLAN, organized into three fleets (the North Sea, East Sea, and South Sea Fleets), to make fast responses to the contingencies in the offshore waters such as the Yellow Sea (Korea and Japan), the Taiwan Strait, or the South China Sea. With the

The PLA Navy 29 protection from the land-based air force and missile forces, the combat missions of PLAN fleets in this period included: • • • •

present credible deterrence against potential enemies; defeat (or at least hold-off) the enemy in offshore water; cause maximum damage to the enemy in a massive confrontation; deny entrance (mainly by submarines) of the adversary naval forces into the offshore waters critical for China’s security in war-time.

In retrospect, the essential aim of such “offshore defense” operations was not necessarily to “win the war”, as the PLA has officially propagated, but to obtain an advantageous position or to achieve “credible intimidation” Beijing needs to accomplish political, military, or diplomatic goals without having to rely on overwhelming force-on-force superiority.16 However, China’s external security environment was deteriorating dramatically in the 1990s, partly because of the downturn of Sino-U.S. relations after the 1989 Tiananmen incident, and partly due to the emerging tension in the Taiwan Strait after President Lee T’eng-hui’s “private visit” to Cornell University in July 1995.17 With fighting the mighty U.S. Navy (allied with Japan) in the Taiwan Strait looming into the PLAN’s primary contingency, the PLAN had to readjust its development priorities and combat plans. As made clear by the first Gulf War in 1991, and the missile crisis in the Taiwan Strait in 1995–96, the PLAN could hardly accomplish its missions in modern warfare against a formidable adversary (e.g., United States, Japan, and even Taiwan), who could launch a lethal attack against China from waters beyond the reach of the PLAN, which had to confine its operations to the offshore waters because of its dependence on the protection provided by the land-based air and missile forces.18 Thus, it was imperative for the PLAN to readjust its plans for “offshore defensive operations,” which have in turn exerted a far-reaching impact on the PLAN’s development as well as on its operational strategy. Restructuring the PLAN fleets and forward position in “Active Defense” As discussed above, the fast naval build-up since the late 1990s – focusing on acquiring the weaponry systems for long-range precision strikes and area defense against air, cruise missile, and submarine attacks – has enabled the PLAN to gain blue water capability in the twenty-first century. As a result, the PLAN’s operational strategy has been readjusted to fit its newly acquired blue-water capability in order to prevail in “local maritime wars in conditions of informatization.” Specifically, the PLAN is seeking to improve its sustainability and combat capability “in distant waters …, so as to push forward the overall transformation of the service.”19 Accordingly, the PLAN seems to be restructuring its fleets in order to optimize their combat capabilities and effectiveness while minimizing (potential) damage

30 Huang Jing in maritime warfare. Although the basic structure of the three major fleets – the North Sea, East Sea, and South Sea fleets – remains intact, the PLAN has reorganized its combatants into various battle groups around the destroyers with Aegis-type combat systems. Such a battle group consists of a Type-051C (or a Type-052C, or a Sovremenny) destroyer, a Type-052B destroyer, and a couple of Type-054A frigates as the core combatants, supported by several less advanced destroyers and frigates.20 As such, each of these battle groups is expected to conduct an independent mission on the sea and respond quickly to an emerging contingency, resulting in the improvement of both flexibility and combat effectiveness of the PLAN fleets. Obviously, with the Aegis-type combat system provided by the flag ship (051C, 052C, or Sovremenny DGG) and improved C4ISR and data links, such a battle group is blue-water oriented; and the recent voyage by a Type-052C DDG (171 Haikou), a Type-052B DDG (169 Wuhan) and a supply vessel to the Gulf of Aden is but a footnote to the on-going restructuring of the PLAN fleets. With the PLAN increasingly less dependent on protection provided by the land-based air and/or missile forces, in combat missions its fleets and/or battle groups can be positioned forwardly beyond offshore waters. Although the PLAN still upholds the “active defense” strategy as the guiding principle in its operations, the forwardpositioning capability has enabled the PLAN fleets to be more proactive when maneuvering against an emerging contingency.21 Thus, it is not surprising that, after more than two decades of off-and-on discussions, the demand for building aircraft carriers has recently regained momentum in the PLAN development plan.22 And the newly developed combination of combatants, as discussed above, has provided a prototype for the expected PLAN aircraft carrier battle group. With the carrier battle group(s) being in service in the near future, forward-position will not only be more practical, but also strategically rational for the PLAN operation. Safeguarding China’s future development with a blue-water strategy As China is rising to become a global power, so is its stakes in international affairs. Thus, China’s security concerns are increasingly involved with the happenings far beyond its territorial borders. Now with a navy of blue-water capability, China’s security experts have begun to discuss the necessity to protect “the boundary of national interests” rather than that of national territory. They argue that as China has risen to a global power, its national interests have extended beyond its land, sea, and air territories and extended to the areas such as the vast oceans navigated by Chinese cargo ships and even to outer space. For example, Huang Kunlun, a PLA commentator, claims that “the armed forces need to defend the boundaries not only of ‘national territory’ but also of ‘national interests’.”23 Such a position is also echoed by China’s 2008 Defense White Paper, which emphasizes “the protection of national sovereignty, security, territorial integrity, safeguarding of the interests of national development, and the interests of the Chinese people above all else.” Thus, China’s national defense policy “basically

The PLA Navy 31 includes … ensuring the interests of national development.” Accordingly, the PLAN “is responsible for such tasks as safeguarding China’s maritime security and maintaining the sovereignty of its territorial waters, along with its maritime rights and interests.”24 With this novel concept that China’s national security involved China’s “interests and rights” relating to its future development, it seems all but natural for China to seek improvement in its capabilities of projecting power beyond its borders. In this regard, continuous expansion of the PLAN’s “legitimate” operational areas is inevitable. The ultimate question, however, is how a blue-water PLAN will redefine and execute “offshore defense” in its operations. Will it continue to follow the officially propagated doctrine that the PLAN would stay put unless it is attacked (or perceived to be attacked) first, and then launch a fierce offensive against the invading enemy in the offshore water? Or, as has becoming increasingly evident in recent PLAN operations and training, will the PLAN adopt a strategy of (some kind of) “preemptive response” – the PLAN would respond actively to the perceived threat by operations such as denying the entrance of the potential adversary into the contested water or even executing blockade before the war “formally” breaks out – in order to safeguard China’s national interests and rights “relating to [its] future development”? While the former was obviously more practical for a PLAN that was confined to the offshore water in its operations, the latter does appear strategically more rational and logical for a blue-water PLAN, although such an action of preemptive response can still be reckoned as defensive in nature. Indeed, while a PLAN entrusted to defend just China’s “national sovereignty and territorial integrity” should not provoke a conflict unless China is being attacked or its “core interests” violated, a PLAN committed to safeguard not only China’s security but also its “national interests and right” (relating to its future development) will have to respond actively to any perceived threats that can otherwise do substantial damage to China’s development. Beijing’s recent decision to deploy PLAN warships to the Gulf of Aden is not just a test case operation to gain blue-water battle experience, but it signals the Chinese leaders’ growing willingness to use military means for the protection of China’s ‘national interests’, either in China’s offshore water or on the high seas.

Concluding remarks: The PLAN’s dilemmas and options in uncharted waters Although China’s rise has indeed been peaceful so far, there are growing concerns about the PLAN’s rapid build-up among the Asian countries, especially those in South and Southeast Asia. As a big power with global influence, China deserves a strong navy to protect its national security and interests. But the anxiety over China’s naval development stems largely from the uncertainty about the PLAN’s strategic intention and goals. While a strong PLAN can certainly offer a credible deterrence necessary for China’s security and development, it can also be used as an active policy tool in international relations, especially in the disputes over territories and energy resources in the region.

32 Huang Jing It is precisely in this regard that China’s hasty naval development can prompt to a race with the other rising naval powers such as India. Such a race in naval build-up can lead to a more complicated and capricious security environment in the region. As a matter of fact, some pundits have already advocated that India needs to speed up its naval build-up and “adopt a more forward-thinking naval policy designed to forestall the emergence of a Beijing-oriented Asia … in concert with the Japanese, U.S. and other friendly navies.” And in doing so, as they claim, “Japanese-Indian naval cooperation and collaboration have become inescapable.”25 It is evident that China has endeavored to ease the anxiety about the PLAN’s rapid development by engaging the regions other countries in maritime affairs. In the past two years China has hosted jointly with Indonesia and Thailand respectively the Round Table Discussion of ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF) on maritime security issues. With the improvement of the Sino-Japanese relationship following Prime Minister Abe’s visit to Beijing in October 2006, the two Asian naval powers have made their first exchange of port calls by naval ships, and held the first consultation over the establishment of a maritime liaison mechanism between their teams of experts. Moreover, in the past two years the PLAN conducted a series of bilateral joint maritime training exercises with the navies of Russia, the United States, Pakistan, and India. The PLAN has also held several multilateral joint maritime training and rescue exercises with navies from various countries in the region. In March 2007, China held the “Peace-2007” joint maritime training exercise in the Arabian Sea with seven other countries, including Pakistan. In May 2007 the PLAN and navies from eight other countries, including Singapore, conducted a multilateral joint maritime exercise in Singapore waters within the framework of the Western Pacific Naval Symposium (WPNS). In October of the same year the PLAN and the Australian and New Zealand navies staged a joint maritime search-and-rescue training exercise in the Tasman Sea.26 However, these consultations on maritime affairs and the joint naval exercises between China and the other countries in the Asia-Pacific region were more symbolic than substantial. Given the deep-seated suspicion and strategic mistrust between China and the other regional powers, the PLAN’s rapid build-up in recent years has in fact helped to intensify the hedging efforts by various regional powers. A looming situation with a potentially far-reaching impact is that the United States, the hegemonic naval power in the world, has began to maneuver against the potential contingencies related to the PLAN’s rapid expansion. According to Michael Richardson, a visiting senior research fellow at the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies in Singapore, “the U.S. has been steadily transferring more aircraft carriers and other warships from its Atlantic fleet to the Pacific. As a result, the Pacific fleet’s share of the 280 ships in the Navy has risen from 45 per cent in earlier years to around 54 per cent and continues to increase. The U.S. Pacific fleet now includes six of the Navy’s 11 aircraft carriers, almost all of the 18 Aegis cruisers and destroyers that have been modified for ballistic missile defense operations, and 26 of the 57 attack submarines.”27 Indeed, the PLAN’s fast development has exposed a growing dilemma in China’s security planning. Unlike the previous powers (e.g., Great Britain,

The PLA Navy 33 Germany, Japan, and the former Soviet Union) the rises of which were preconditioned by the development of a globally capable military force, China has yet to develop a military that has a global (or even regional) capability. Thus, China adopted a development strategy of integration in the 1980s. That is, through the “Reform and Open-up” policy, China has integrated herself into the existing international system, one that is based on the market economy and led by democracies. An obvious advantage of this strategy is that China has a freeride of the international security system, which is fundamental for ensuring the regional peace and stability that is indispensible for the country’s development.28 However, the international security system in the Asia-Pacific is essentially based on the U.S.-led security alliances in the region. As China’s capability of projecting power overseas increases, due to the PLAN’s rapid growth, Beijing will have to make a choice between adapting (or aligning) China’s security strategy and planning to the existing international security system – and therefore be a “responsible stakeholder” – or developing her own security strategy and warfare doctrine consistent with China’s rapidly growing military power. While the former would undoubtedly require China to continue her accommodative approach in maritime affairs, the latter might set the country on a collision course with the existing international security system. This dilemma explains China’s inconsistency in maritime affairs in the past few years. On the one hand, the PLAN has been increasingly active in engaging the other naval powers, including the United States, in maritime affairs (as cited above). This reflects Beijing’s effort to accommodate common interests in regional maritime security through consultation and cooperation. On the other hand, however, China has remained reluctant to be fully transparent in her naval strategy and goals. Accordingly, the PLAN has been resistant to any further participation in maritime operations led by the United States and her allies in Asia-Pacific. For example, although Beijing does not seem to be the object of the U.S. Proliferation Security Initiative (PSI),29 the PLAN has refused to participate in the PSI, arguing that the PSI operations could violate the existing international laws when involving taking the interdiction measures at sea. In reality, Beijing is highly suspicious of the United States’ “strategic intentions” behind the PSI, as some Chinese security experts argue that the PSI embodies aggressive and coercive collective mechanism, because it was essentially based on the Bush doctrine of “preemptive strike” predetermined by unilateralism.30 The other case in point is that China has cold-shouldered Washington’s proposal for a Global Maritime Partnership (or the so-called Thousand-Ship Navy), a U.S.-led grand scheme of “global cooperation” in maritime affairs, despite Washington’s repeated requests for China’s participation.31 Obviously, China remains skeptical of this U.S. plan; and some in Beijing even see it as a façade of the United States’ endeavor to develop a Washington dominated global naval regime aimed at securing American dominance in maritime affairs while constraining the other naval powers, including China.32 But this fundamental dilemma China has faced in her security planning will be further exposed as the PLAN continues to push into blue water; and it seems

34 Huang Jing that Beijing would not have (or prefer not to have) a solution but would rather remain strategically ambiguous on the strategic intention and goals of the PLAN’s continuous build-up. This is not just because of the lack of strategic trust between China and the other regional powers, but essentially because of inconsistent, and even conflicting, security interests that China would encounter in dealing with these other nations on her ascendency to a global power. Indeed, as the PLAN is expanding into uncharted waters, how Beijing handles the inevitable conflicts of interest with the other countries will exert a far-reaching impact not only on China’s continuous “peaceful development” but also on the peace and stability of the world, especially that of the Asia-Pacific region.

Notes 1 Deng announced the launch of the Four Modernizations (industry, agriculture, science and technology, and defense) at the Third Plenum of the Eleventh National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in December 1978. This ambitious program was originally put forward by late Premier Zhou Enlai at the Fourth National People’s Congress in 1975. 2 Global Security at http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/china/navy.htm at http://www.wpeu.net/article/list.asp? (Accessed on 20 January 2008); classid=78 (Accessed on 20 January 2008) 3 Ibid. ” (The PLAN sees the third high tide of 4 See “ Outlook Weekly, 26 July 2007. warship building), 5 Sino-defense at http://www.sinodefence.com/navy/default.asp (Accessed on 20 January 2008); Global Security at http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/china/ navy.htm (Accessed 20 January 2008). 6 It is widely reported that construction of the first unit of SSN Shang (Type-093) began in 1997–98 in the Bohai Shipyard, Huludao. The 2003 report on China’s military by the U.S. Department of Defense indicated that the first SSN Shang (Type 093) was launched in 2002 and commissioned in 2004. Also compare with Andrew S. Erickson, Lyle J. Goldstein, William S. Murray, and Andrew R. Wilson (eds), China’s Future Nuclear Submarine Force (Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 2007). 7 The first SSBN Xia was launched in 1981. Compare with “New Chinese SSBN Deploys to Hainan Island,” at http://www.fas.org/blog/ssp/2008/04/new-chinese-ssbn-deploysto-hainan-island-naval-base.php (Accessed on 20 January 2008). 8 The past record shows that such a build-to-improve scheme has been effective in following the PLAN to close the gap with the advanced naval powers. According to a senior PLAN officer the author interviewed on 10 December 2006 in Shanghai, the PLAN will continue such a development model because the “pressing situation simply does not allow us (i.e., the PLAN) to build a new ship with a sophisticated design first.” 9 Author’s interview with two PLA senior officers in Beijing on 11 December 2008. 10 See Huang Jing with Li Xiaoting, Inseparable Separation, the Making of China’s Taiwan Policy, Ch. 6, The World Scientific Publishing Co., 2009 (forthcoming). 11 China’s National Defense in 2008, issued by the Information Office of the PRC State Council, January 2009, p. 33. 12 See Ronald O’Rourke (a specialist in naval warfare for the Congressional Research Service), China Naval Modernization: Implications for U.S. Navy Capabilities – Background and Issues for Congress, updated on 4 April 2008. O’Rourke also told the U.S. Congress last November that there was credible evidence that the PLAN was developing anti-ship ballistic missiles (ASBMs). These missiles, launched by rocket propulsion high into the atmosphere, carries maneuverable re-entry vehicles

The PLA Navy 35

13 14 15 16 17 18

19 20

21

22 23 24 25 26 27 28

29

30

31

32

with warheads designed to hit moving naval ships, and it can travel as fast as 24,000 km per hour when coming down. See Xinhua (English), “Defense Ministry Spokesman: China to ‘Seriously Consider’ Building Aircraft Carrier,” 23 December 2008. China’s National Defense in 2008, p. 31. Ibid, p. 10. See, among others, Thomas Christensen, “Posing Problems without Catching Up: China’s Rise and Challenges for U.S. Security Policy,” International Security, Vol. 25, Issue 4 (Spring 2001), pp. 5–40. Huang with Li, Inseparable Separation, the Making of China’s Taiwan Policy, pp. 159–77. The author’s interviews with China’s security experts in various occasions in 2005– 2008. Also see Robert Suettinger, “U.S. ‘management’ of three Taiwan Strait ‘crises’,” in Michael Swaine and Zhang Tuosheng (ed), Managing Sino-American Crisis (Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2006), pp. 276–87. China’s National Defense in 2008, p. 31. It has been noted, however, that there are fewer frigates in the North Sea Fleet, and the five frigates – four Jianghu-II class and one Jianghu class – they have are relatively outdated. In comparison, the East Sea Fleet has 27 frigates, including 4 Jiangkai (I and II) class and 10 Jiangwei (I and II) class; and the South Sea Fleet has 17 frigates, including two Jiangkai-II class and four Jiangwei-II class. Compare with http://www. sinodefence.com/navy/surface/default.asp (Accessed on 20 January 2008). The author has had several intensive discussions with several senior officers and security experts in Beijing on the impact of the Chinese-Aegis destroyers (Type 051C and Type 052C). Despite some substantial differences, it is a consensus among the Chinese experts that the changes brought about by these warships are nothing short of “revolutionary” in terms of the PLAN’s combat plans and their executions. See, among others, Kenji Minemura, “China to start construction of 1st aircraft carriers next year,” The Asashi Shimbun, 31 December 2008. People’s Liberation Army Daily, 4 December 2008; and 4 January 2009. Compare with China’s National Defense in 2008, pp. 8 and 31. Cesar Chelala, “China plays maritime chess,” The Japan Times, 22 January 2009. China’s National Defense in 2008, pp. 71–4. Michael Richardson, “Beijing takes aim at U.S. aircraft carriers,” The Japan Times, 22 January 2009. Huang Jing, “China and America’s Northeast Asian Alliances: Approaches, Politics, and Dilemmas,” in Michael H. Armacost, and Daniel I. Okimoto (eds), The Future of America’s Alliances in Northeast Asia (Washington DC: The Brookings Institution Press, 2004), pp. 237–9. PSI was initiated by John Bolton in his capacity of Under-Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security. Officially launched on May 31, 2003, the PSI entails broad U.S.-led “international cooperation” to conduct naval surveillance, interdiction and eventually unbridled military action in all the world’s oceans for world peace and security. ‘ ’ ’ (A commentarial analysis of U.S. Gu Guoliang, ‘ (American Studies), No. 3, 2004, “Proliferation Security Initiative”], pp. 30–44. According to a senior PLAN officer and Chinese security experts the author interviewed in Beijing from 10 to 12 December 2008, the Bush Administration again asked China to participate in the Thousand-ship Navy plan after Beijing announced its decision to dispatch a PLAN fleet to the Gulf of Aden. ’ (What truly is the purpose of the ThousandLi Jie, ‘ (Modern Navy), No. 1, 2007, pp. 26–9. ship Navy plan?),

3

Growing Chinese and Indian naval power U.S. recalibration and coalition building Bronson Percival

Introduction Americans are preoccupied with their most severe economic crisis in seventy years. When they think of China and India, they think primarily of rising economic powers. The modernization of China’s military is noted in policy circles, but the strategic landscape in Asia is stable, and relations among Asia’s powers are seldom consistently antagonistic. From the American perspective, bilateral relations with Asia’s major states – China, Japan, India, and Indonesia – are good. Thus, unless and until China is perceived to be rapidly exploiting U.S. preoccupation with domestic affairs, gradual recalibration is likely to characterize the application of U.S. maritime strategy to the Asian–Pacific region. The American administration that came to office at the dawn of the new century was determined to downgrade relations with a possible “strategic competitor” and to revitalize ties with allies and friends. Its initial steps to vigorously implement these policies fell by the wayside after the 9/11 terrorists attacks on the United States, when the Middle East and Afghanistan came to preoccupy the Bush administration. Though the terrorist threat temporarily raised Southeast Asia’s profile, it simultaneously diminished East Asia’s overall priority in Washington. Moreover, as China stressed its peaceful rise and moderated criticism of American policy, U.S. attitudes became increasingly ambivalent and pragmatic. A U.S.–Indian “strategic partnership” was declared, and meat is being added to the bones of this relationship now that agreement has been reached on nuclear issues. The Obama administration has not signaled an intention to radically alter U.S. policies in Asia. China’s rise provides fodder for commentary about a grand U.S. strategy of “hedging” or “soft balancing” in Asia. However, the potential to leverage India (or for India to leverage the U.S.) against China has been only one factor in the evolving “strategic partnership.” Moreover, the United States does not consider itself to be involved in zero-sum competition with China for influence in Southeast Asia, and no one overarching theme dominates U.S. policy across East, Southeast, and South Asia.

Growing Chinese and Indian naval power 37 China’s dramatic economic growth and less dramatic military modernization have also spawned speculation about naval rivalry between China and India at some time in the future. These rising powers now share growing dependence on imported energy that transits the Indian Ocean and Southeast Asia. However, careful analysis shows that this speculation is often based on assumptions about the future implications of current developments that may or may not prove to be valid. Indian and Chinese naval aspirations may someday bump up against each other, but China is unlikely to be able to deploy, sustain, and protect significant naval forces beyond the Strait of Malacca in the Indian Ocean for at least a decade. In the meantime, the U.S. Navy – which has dominated Asian waters for decades – continues to adjust to a changing mix of challenges and burdens. In essence, it seeks to build relationships and coalitions to shift part of the burden of policing these waters and to moderate maritime rivalry among Asian states, while also maintaining essential war-fighting capabilities. Although hazarding predictions about the future is particularly problematic during a global economic crisis, the following factors seem likely to influence U.S. naval policy in Asia over the coming years: • •

•

The overall U.S. defense budget will probably be capped at current levels and the “gentle decline” in the number of U.S. warships will continue.1 China’s growing ability to deny U.S. naval forces access to China’s coast threatens to eventually alter a key element in the East Asian balance of power. Absent greater transparency, U.S. national security experts will remain wary about China’s intentions. The United States will continue to encourage maritime cooperation to address common challenges, a major theme in the new national maritime strategy. Under the label of Global Maritime Partnerships, the U.S. has pragmatically sought to build coalitions with other states to address such threats as piracy and terrorism.

U.S. maritime strategy in Asia Overview The breadth, depth, and nature of U.S. engagement on maritime issues with China, India, and Southeast Asian nations depends primarily on the state of U.S. relations with individual countries. At the same time, the United States has gradually adjusted its security footprint in Asia. In addition, the U.S. Navy is implementing a global maritime security strategy throughout the Asia–Pacific region. From an American perspective, the links between U.S. naval missions with regard to China, India, and Southeast Asian states are tenuous. The U.S. Government is organized to execute U.S. policies for East, South, and Southeast Asia, focused primarily on bilateral relations with countries in specific geographic regions. Long-term concerns about China’s growing power and influence do not now drive U.S policy in South and Southeast Asia. Moreover, from a naval

38 Bronson Percival perspective, the United States faces different challenges off China’s coast, in helping to police maritime choke-points in Southeast Asia, and in strengthening one component in a larger partnership in the Indian Ocean. Thus, the U.S. Navy is best viewed as one instrument in U.S. relations with specific countries. Furthermore, maritime strategy is a component of the broader U.S. security footprint in Asia, which was gradually adjusted under the Bush administration. How the United States views its security alliances and partnerships in Asia helps set the parameters for naval strategy. In turn, the new U.S. Maritime Strategy, increasingly focused on Asia, provides guidance on how the Navy will implement its component of broader U.S. security strategy. Although navy-tonavy interaction usually reflects the state of overall bilateral relations, security relationships can either lead or trail other components in relationships. For example, navy-to-navy ties with India provided a less politically sensitive “overthe horizon” means to strengthen the Indian–U.S. strategic partnership during internal controversy within India about a nuclear agreement with the United States. In the past few years, Beijing has curtailed Chinese–U.S. military-to-military ties to signal its displeasure over larger policy issues. Nonetheless, the United States has welcomed the addition of Chinese naval ships to assist in suppressing piracy off the coast of Somalia.2 Thus, the interaction between the state of relations and the application of maritime policy can be complex.3

The U.S. security footprint in Asia Although U.S. defense relationships in East Asia are mostly an inheritance from the Cold War, under the Bush administration the United States steadily adapted its security footprint. These adjustments include reductions in U.S. forces in South Korea, revised basing arrangements in Japan, and increased reliance on Guam as a major base. The number of U.S. forces stationed in Asia has dipped slightly below the stated U.S. goal, though “real capabilities” have been maintained. These adjustments in Northeast Asia may have only tangential implications for Southeast Asia, though the maintenance of a balance of power further north is also important for Southeast Asian’s security.4 One of the debates – at times almost theological – to emerge in the United States during the Bush administration pitted support for a renewal of bilateral security alliances and “coalitions of the willing” against participation in multilateral organizations. In fact, the U.S. proved flexible in practice. Formal alliances with Australia and the Philippines have been enhanced; but more directly relevant for Southeast Asia have been increasingly complex and intensive patterns of bilateral and multilateral security naval cooperation with Southeast Asian states, with the exception of Myanmar. With the increasing prominence of maritime issues in Southeast Asia, the U.S. partnership with Singapore has arguably come to overshadow formal security alliances with the Philippines and Thailand. Under the pragmatic Obama administration, this ideological debate is likely to continue to fade as Washington acknowledges that a variety of security relationships – bilateral, coalition, and multilateral – can complement each other.5

Growing Chinese and Indian naval power 39 As a new U.S. administration further adjusts the U.S. security footprint, the U.S. armed forces are likely to continue to play a major role in maintaining a U.S. presence throughout Asia. No elaborate review of either U.S. security policy or of U.S. policy in Asia is necessary to maintain this footprint. Instead, the U.S. armed forces are already on the ground (or the water) in an era of diminishing resources. Other branches of the U.S. Government will find it difficult to secure resources to “catch-up” in an era of tight budgets for foreign and national security affairs.6

Maritime strategy The U.S. Navy’s 2007 “A Cooperative Strategy for 21st Century Seapower,” argues that the “United States and its partners find themselves competing for global influence in an era in which they are unlikely to be fully at war or fully at peace. Our challenge is to apply seapower in a manner that protects U.S. vital interests even as it promotes greater collective security, stability and trust … We believe that preventing wars is as important as winning wars.”7 Particularly relevant for Asia are two ideas. The new strategy states that: (1)

(2)

“Credible combat power will be continuously postured in the Western Pacific and the Arabian Gulf/Indian Ocean to protect our vital interests, assure our friends and allies of our continued commitment to regional security, and deter and dissuade potential adversaries and peer competitors.”8 In practice, this suggests – with fewer ships anticipated in the future – that the U.S. will shift naval resources from the Atlantic to the Western Pacific and the Indian Ocean. “The creation and maintenance of security at sea is essential to mitigating threats short of war, including piracy, terrorism, weapons proliferation, drug trafficking and other illicit activities.” In addition, the document pledges to “foster and sustain cooperative relationships with more international partners. Expanded cooperative relationships with other nations will contribute to the security and stability of the maritime domain for the benefit of all.”9

This strategy, promulgated in 2007, is the culmination of several years of intense review of U.S. maritime policies in the wake of the terrorist attacks in the U.S. in 2001, the rapid expansion of global trade over the past decade, and more prominent concerns about the security and safety of sea lanes of communication (SLOCs). While this review was underway, the United States responded to new challenges pragmatically. At one end of the Indian Ocean a combined task force, predominantly composed of ships from the U.S. and European navies, has patrolled parts of the Arabian Sea in the U.S. Central Command’s Area of Responsibility (AOR). At the other end, the U.S. has provided support and assistance to littoral states as they improve security and safety in the Malacca Strait, within the U.S. Pacific Command’s AOR. To deal specifically with the transportation of weapons of mass destruction, the United States also proposed and conducted an intensive

40 Bronson Percival diplomatic campaign to recruit other nations to participate in the Proliferation Security Initiative (PSI). More broadly, the U.S. recognized that it could not unilaterally deter potential adversaries and mitigate threats short of war. Ships designed for combat are not always the best platforms for anti-piracy patrols. Moreover, concerns about common threats to security and safety at sea are precisely that – common threats. Thus, the U.S. Navy advanced the “1,000 ship navy concept,” essentially a call on others to voluntarily assist in improving maritime domain awareness and reducing crime at sea. This concept eventually morphed into the proposal for the “Global Maritime Partnership (GMP).” Moreover, as the U.S. State Department has stressed “The United States will actively support GMP activities but it encourages other maritime entities to assume leadership in embracing GMP to address local and regional problems regardless of US involvement.”10 Indicative of the more comprehensive strategy, in a recent speech, Admiral Gary Roughead, U.S. Chief of Naval Operations, stressed U.S. support for humanitarian operations, such as those implemented by the hospital ship USNS Mercy in Asia, and for the joint Indonesian, Malaysian and Singaporean Malacca Strait Patrols (MSP) to rid the Malacca Strait of pirates.11 Nonetheless, the U.S. Navy will continue to have to manage tensions between its different missions. This is one of the reasons why the Navy has been cautious about unilaterally charging into the breach in response to the recent spike in piracy off the coast of Somalia.12 More broadly, in the future it will have to decide whether to attempt to leverage the closer relationships it hopes to develop with other states to shape China’s naval ambitions or to manage threats short of war.

Key relationships China The Sino–U.S. relationship is inherently complex and a challenge for both governments. Relations have improved steadily since 2001. However, both countries’ approaches are contingent on their perceptions of the others’ intentions. Moreover, the U.S. trade deficit with China and its accumulation of $2 trillion in foreign exchange reserves, as well as the modernization of China’s military forces, bedevil bilateral relations. At the same time, convincing evidence that either power views Southeast Asia (or the Indian Ocean) as a major arena for Sino–U.S. competition does not exist. In 2001, the Bush administration displayed a “notably less solicitous approach to China than the Clinton administration.”13 But after an incident between a U.S. EP-3 plane and a Chinese fighter in April 2001, Chinese leaders apparently concluded that restraint and moderation toward the U.S. were necessary to avoid further deterioration in relations. Debate continues about “whether China has really settled into a strategy that plays down differences and resistance to the U.S. in favor of an approach of ever-greater cooperation with the American government.”14 But by 2003, Beijing, as it emphasized China’s peaceful rise, had

Growing Chinese and Indian naval power 41 clearly moderated anti-U.S. statements and actions in Southeast Asia. Washington has responded by encouraging China to become a “responsible stakeholder” in the region. Recognition that U.S. naval capabilities also serve such Chinese interests as guaranteed sea lanes of communications – increasingly important given China’s growing dependence on imported energy – may also play a role in Chinese calculations. Nonetheless, both sides remain wary. At least some experts argue that “China suspects that the U.S. is trying to counter-balance, if not contain, it through alliances with Japan, Australia, and South Korea and by befriending India.”15 The Chinese military build-up, targeted at Taiwan and at possible U.S. intervention in the Taiwan Strait, has maintained U.S. suspicions of Chinese intentions. From the American perspective, the fundamental problem is that “China is putting in place a credible way to deny access to US forces by knitting together broad area ocean surveillance systems, a large number of submarines, land-based aircraft with cruise missiles, and a ballistic missile system that can target ships on the high seas. The operational objective is to keep US naval power as far away from China as possible in case of conflict.”16 The consequences are potentially profound because China is beginning, albeit largely for defensive purposes from China’s perspective, to alter a key element in the balance of power between continental and maritime powers that has been so successful in preserving stability in Asia. China’s desire to push the U.S. Navy as far away as possible from China’s coast, rather than overlapping claims in the South China Sea, provides the context for assessing the implications of the harassment in March 2009 of an unarmed U.S. surveillance vessel by Chinese ships. The USNS Impeccable, a civilian manned ship of the U.S. Military Sealift Command, was involved in marine data collection for military purposes about 120 kilometers south of Hainan. Such data collection is not regulated by a coastal state under UNCLOS because it does not “fall within the legal regime of marine scientific research.”17 Nonetheless, though the legal case seems clear, China had apparently asked the USNS Impeccable to leave its exclusive economic zone (EEZ) and sees such data collection within its EEZ as insensitive. U.S. National Intelligence Director and former PACOM commander Admiral Dennis Blair called the harassment the “most serious” military dispute between China and the U.S. since 2001.18 This incident again highlights the importance of transparency and trust in U.S.–China military relations. In comparison to incidents such as the harassment of the USNS Impeccable, the U.S. attitude towards Chinese offers to help improve maritime security in the strategic Strait of Malacca has been relaxed. In fact, the United States has worked with China on an International Maritime Organization-sponsored safety project in this Strait. However, absent greater transparency on China’s intentions, additional Chinese naval deployments to the South China Sea, would draw U.S. attention.19 Further from China and beyond the Strait of Malacca lies the Indian Ocean. U.S. consultants have suggested that Chinese commercial projects in the Indian Ocean region may in the future be transformed into a series of maritime places/bases, or a “string of pearls” crossing the Indian Ocean, to protect Chinese energy

42 Bronson Percival supply routes.20 Suffice it to note that the U.S. Navy is well aware of the Chinese Navy’s current limitations and vulnerabilities should it seek to deploy into the Indian Ocean. With regard to China’s naval deployment to the farthest reaches of the Indian Ocean to assist in combating piracy off the coast of Somalia, PACOM Commander Admiral Timothy Keating “expressed optimism that Chinese participation in naval patrols in the gulf ‘could be the springboard for (a) resumption of dialogue’ between U.S. and Chinese military forces.”21

India The United States views democratic India as a natural partner. India’s interest in simultaneously engaging and balancing China may also be echoed in some corridors of power in Washington. In addition, it may also be true that balancing China’s rise has been an “important subtext in the dramatic expansion of the Indian–U.S. relationship during the Bush years.”22 But there is little evidence that speculation about an evolving strategic triangle composed of the United States, China, and India has yet had concrete implications for Southeast Asia. Washington does not look to New Delhi to help it contain Chinese influence in Southeast Asia.23 Much has been written about India’s ambivalent relationship with China. Several commentators have stressed divisions within Indian opinion. India’s civilian leadership is attracted by the commercial possibilities involved in rapidly expanding trade while India’s armed forces remain warily focused on China’s military capabilities. One American expert has written that it is “unclear whether the future relationship between India and China will be primarily competitive or cooperative. … The quest for ever larger quantities of energy will almost certainly be the major issue that shapes their relationship in the future.”24 Meanwhile, India’s “Look East” policy for Southeast Asia, initiated almost two decades ago, was designed primarily to tap into Southeast Asia’s booming economies. However, there has always been a security dimension. India’s broad security objectives are to cooperate against threats of piracy and terrorism in the approaches to Southeast Asian maritime choke-points and to seek better relations with regional states – and the U.S. – to maintain a balance of power in Asia. “The challenge is to achieve these security objectives without antagonizing China or irritating the countries of Southeast Asia.”25 In contrast, India is seldom factored into U.S. policies in Southeast Asia, except during crises such as the 2007 suppression of civil unrest in Myanmar, known as the “saffron revolution.” Moreover, in that case Washington hoped not to stoke Chinese–Indian rivalry but to convince India to modify its competition with China for influence with the repressive Myanmar regime by pressing for greater human rights within Myanmar. India declined to do so for two important reasons: it seeks to import energy from Myanmar and to provide an alternative to Chinese influence. The rapid expansion of Indian–U.S. bilateral defense cooperation is one element of the new U.S.–Indian “strategic partnership” that may have implications for Southeast Asia. The naval component of shared security objectives and

Growing Chinese and Indian naval power 43 growing defense cooperation has attracted considerable attention. Multilateral naval exercises in 2007 involving India, the United States, Japan, Australia, and Singapore, prompted New Delhi to assure Beijing that these exercises were not designed to contain China.26 There is no evidence that Washington viewed these exercises as a means to signal Beijing or to shape Chinese naval plans. From the U.S. perspective, they were first and foremost a means to rapidly expand the navy-to navy relationship with India. In the Indian Ocean region, the United States is obsessed neither with Chinese commercial activities nor with concerns within some Indian circles about China’s growing influence among India’s neighbors. Instead, the U.S. Navy’s priority is to improve maritime security against pirates and potential terrorists. Thus, just as U.S. naval planning with regard to Chinese naval capabilities is focused on a contingency involving Taiwan, U.S. naval cooperation with India is focused on Indian Ocean sea lanes of communication. Indeed, the United States is arguably now more interested in the Indian Navy’s contribution to suppress Somali pirates off the coast of Africa than in an Indian naval role in assisting littoral states to improve security in the Malacca Strait, where the situation is much improved. It is also more interested in finding ways to leverage Indian naval capabilities across U.S. regional command lines (Central and Pacific Commands) to deal with pirates than it is in hypothetical Chinese naval deployments into the Indian Ocean.27 The Indian Navy plays a more prominent role than its Chinese counterpart in efforts to expand their respective countries’ influence in Southeast Asia. And the Indian Navy did provide escorts for some high-value U.S. cargo through the Malacca Strait in the early years of the Bush administration. No public comment on U.S. views with regard to Indian (and, potentially, Chinese) naval exercises with Southeast Asian states appears to be available. But the nature of navy-tonavy relations suggests that the United States would probably be inclined to welcome Indian Navy visits to Southeast Asia and exercises between the Indian and Southeast Asian navies. On the other hand, the U.S. is acutely aware of national sensitivities about maritime security in Southeast Asia and unlikely to publicly support Indian offers to assist in protecting Southeast Asian maritime choke-points.

Southeast Asia The United States has often seen Southeast Asia primarily through the prism of broader, extra-regional interests, such as the containment of communism or the suppression of international terrorism. Thus, many Southeast Asians are prone to criticize U.S. policies in their region as episodic or erratic. Southeast Asia is often referred to as strategically important to the United States. Most of it isn’t, though parts of it are of great and growing strategic importance. Since the end of the Second World War, the United States has had two core interests in the region. First, it has an enduring strategic interest in the ability, if necessary, to control sea-lanes and maritime choke-points that connect the

44 Bronson Percival Indian and Pacific Oceans. Through these flow not only the armed forces of the U.S. but the energy resources that power East Asia’s economies. In the absence of clear threats to these SLOCs, the United States pays little attention. As long as it retains the potential to dominate these SLOCs, Myanmar, for example, is of little strategic interest to the United States. Second, the United States continues to pursue its old goal of equal commercial access to Southeast Asia. Despite attempts by elements early in the Bush administration to portray Sino–U.S. rivalry as inevitably extending to Southeast Asia, the preponderance of opinion in the U.S. Government has been that the United States is not engaged in zero-sum competition with China in the region. As the U.S. Deputy Secretary of State said publicly, “the theme is not U.S. versus China in Southeast Asia.”28 China has minimal security ties with states in maritime Southeast Asia, such as Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore. There is no evidence that the United States has seen Southeast Asia through a China lens at least since September 2001. Instead, when the Bush administration paid attention to Southeast Asia, it did so in terms of the “second front in the global war on terror” and subsequently in terms of human rights in Myanmar. Despite grumbling in Southeast Asia about U.S. insensitivity to regional conditions in countering terrorism, the U.S. “tailored its regional policy to de-emphasize military responses, stress cooperation to capture al Qaeda-linked terrorists, and leave regional (Southeast Asian) Islamic terrorists and insurgents to Southeast Asians.”29 The result was U.S. assistance for successful, primarily Southeast Asian, policies. One consequence is improved U.S. relations with Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Singapore. For most Southeast Asians, “the fundamental complaint against the U.S. involves not its policies in Asia, but the perceived assault by the United States and its allies on Muslims elsewhere.”30 Traditional U.S. concern about SLOC security, determination to unravel international terrorist networks, and an old interest in reviving security alliances with allies and friends in Southeast Asia, coalesced to support a major effort to assist Southeast Asian states in ridding the Malacca Strait of piracy and, potentially, maritime terrorism. Thus, in 2003, the U.S. Government began to organize itself to offer assistance to the littoral states of Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore. Unfortunately, in 2004 misleading press reports about U.S. intentions in the Malacca Strait complicated cooperation.31 Controversy did, however, spur Southeast Asian states to take the lead. In contrast to the direct U.S. approach in the Arabian Sea, in Southeast Asia U.S. planning had always been to play a supportive rather than a direct role. Such U.S. assistance as support for Indonesia’s marine police and for a series of radars along the Malacca Strait and in the maritime triangle between Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines was not highlighted by the U.S. Government and received remarkably little attention in the press. American diplomacy repeatedly stressed U.S. support for Southeast Asia leadership in improving maritime security and safety, while the United States simultaneously extended more assistance to Southeast Asia for maritime security than any other donor.32 At the same time, this new U.S. focus on Southeast Asia has led to rapidly expanded exercises and

Growing Chinese and Indian naval power 45 other less publicized forms of interaction between the U.S. Navy and Coast Guard and their Southeast Asian counterparts. The best known include the Cooperation Afloat Readiness and Training (CARAT) and Southeast Asia Cooperation Against Terrorism (SEACAT) exercises. From the U.S. perspective, none of the U.S. Navy and Coast Guard’s expanded cooperation with Southeast Asian states to improve maritime security has either a Chinese or an Indian security policy angle.

Conclusion Perhaps, at some time in the future, “the task of the U.S. Navy will … be to quietly leverage the sea power of its closest allies – India in the Indian Ocean and Japan in the western Pacific – to set limits on China’s expansion … at the same time it seizes every opportunity to incorporate China’s navy into international alliances.”33 In the meantime, the U.S. Navy is likely to continue to gradually recalibrate the priority it assigns to its different missions in different parts of Asia. The links between U.S. naval missions in East Asia, Southeast Asia, and the Indian Ocean will remain tenuous unless and until China builds and trains a navy that it can deploy, sustain, and protect in Southeast Asian waters and/or the Indian Ocean. Prior to the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the United States, the U.S. Navy focused on fighting and winning wars by projecting power “from the sea.” Now, as China seeks to impose unacceptable costs on U.S. carrier strike forces closing in on China’s coast, the U.S. Navy must maintain the capability to intervene effectively should Beijing employ force against Taiwan. But after 9/11, the U.S. Navy also sought a role in the U.S. “global war against terrorism.” As it placed new emphasis on the threat posed by non-state actors, the Navy’s old role in policing the maritime commons received renewed attention. Without the resources to police all the seas, it sensibly sought to build pragmatic coalitions to protect the global maritime commons against terrorists, pirates and other criminals who threaten sea-borne international trade. In 2007, the U.S. Navy promulgated a new strategy for the twenty-first century and announced that it would maintain its forward presence in the Indian Ocean and the Western Pacific, even as the total number of U.S. Navy ships continues to gradually decline. The United States has been particularly active in building coalitions in Southeast Asia and the Indian Ocean. It has been pragmatic. In the Arabian Sea, combined task forces were formed first for an anti-terrorist mission and subsequently for an anti-piracy mission. Several thousand miles away across the Indian Ocean, at the Southeast Asian choke-points linking that ocean and the Pacific, it adopted a strategy of supporting a coalition of littoral states to achieve the same objectives. India has the naval capabilities to potentially contribute significantly to coalitions throughout the Indian Ocean. The Chinese and Indian economies are increasingly dependent on maritime trade. Their national security establishments have developed a new appreciation for their maritime vulnerabilities and are seeking to build larger and more capable navies. But so far these developments have not significantly altered U.S. naval

46 Bronson Percival missions in distinct parts of Asia, and they are unlikely to do so for many years to come.

Notes 1 Gregg K. Kakesako, “CNO Says Navy Numbers in ‘Gentle Decline’,” Star Bulletin, 8 May 2007, http://starbulletin.com/2007/05/08/story05.html 2 Jacquelyn S. Porth, “United States Eager to Team with China to Deter Pirate Attacks,” United States Mission to the European Union, 23 December 2008, http:// useu.usmission.gov/Article.asp?ID=86b3a5dc-e3e8-41fe-8dfb-2b0ed10a1f48 3 This essay analyses U.S. engagement with China, India and Southeast Asia, but a comprehensive assessment should include Japan. Japan is a factor in the naval balance in northeast Asia and the Japanese “Navy” has the potential to play a major role elsewhere in Asia. However, space constraints preclude a consideration of Japan’s potential naval role. 4 Southeast Asian governments support the status quo with regard to Taiwan. 5 In the absence of a regional multilateral organization capable of improving security in Asian or Indian Ocean waters, the United States has not considered its possible views on such an organization. 6 The downside of this new military-to-military engagement is that, as U.S. Defense Secretary Gates noted in reference to U.S. national security policy more generally, U.S. foreign policy may have become over “militarized.” For example, the U.S. Pacific Command’s impressive work, including in response to natural disasters such as tsunamis, may have the perverse effect of leading the U.S. to rely on the Pacific Command (PACOM) as a substitute for the nurturing of more comprehensive relationships in Southeast Asia. 7 “A Cooperative Strategy for 21st Century Seapower,” October 2007, Introduction. 8 Ibid. p. 7. 9 Ibid. p. 9. 10 “Global Maritime Partnerships,” U.S. Department of State Unclassified Telegram, May 13, 2008. 11 Roughead, Gary, Chief of Naval Operations, U.S. Navy, Current Strategy Forum Speech, June 17, 2008, U.S. Naval War College, Newport, Rhode Island. 12 Mulrine, Anna, “In the Battle Against Modern-Day Pirates, the Pentagon Eyes its Role Warily,” US News and World Report, December 23, 2008, www.usnews.com/…/in-thebattle-against-modern-day-pirates-the-pentagon-eyes-its-role-warily.html 13 Sutter, Robert G., Chinese Foreign Relations, Power and Policy since the Cold War, Rowman & Littlefield, Lanham, MD, 2008, p. 172. 14 Ibid. p. 156. 15 Han Sung-Joo, “The U.S. Role in Northeast Asia,” America’s Role in Asia, San Francisco: The Asia Foundation, 2008, p. 17 (available at: http://asiafoundation.org/ resources/pdfs/3NEAsiaNKARA2008.pdf 16 McDevitt, Michael, Unpublished Paper, “Asian Military Modernization: Key Areas of Concern Paper,” June 5, 2008. 17 See Patrick J. Neher, Raul A. Pedrozo, and J. Ashley Roach, “In Defense of High Seas Freedoms,” RSIS Commentaries, March 24, 2009, and Sam Bateman, “Clashes at Sea: When Chinese vessels harass US ships,” RSIS Commentaries, March 13, 2009. 18 Kelly, Mary Louise, “China’s Military Threat in Focus after Naval Incident,” NPR, 26 March 2009, http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story/php?storyld=102371127 19 “A Pentagon report last year said China could maintain only a ‘symbolic’ naval presence beyond its coast, but was interested in extending its presence to the Malacca Strait and the Indian Ocean.” The Economist, January 6, 2007, p. 46.

Growing Chinese and Indian naval power 47 20 For more on the alleged “string of pearls,” see James R. Holmes and Toshi Yoshihara, “China’s Naval Ambitions in the Indian Ocean,” The Journal of Strategic Studies, Vol. 31, June 2008, and notes on page 377 that the “string of pearls” term “has become common parlance, for instance, among Indian sea-power analysts. But the term is based more on inferences US observers have drawn from Chinese activities in the region than on a coherent national strategy codified in Beijing’s doctrine, strategic commentary, or official statements.” An Indian analyst notes that the string of pearls “argument remains speculation, backed by frail and somewhat disjointed evidence.” See Gurpreet Khurana, “China’s ‘String of Pearls’ in the Indian Ocean and its Security Implications,” Strategic Analysis, Vol. 32, No. 1, January 2008, p. 1. 21 “United States Eager to Team With China to Deter Pirate Attacks,” U.S. Department of State, December 23, 2008. 22 Mohan, C. Raja, “India’s Quest for Continuity in the Face of Change,” The Washington Quarterly, Autumn 2008, p. 148. 23 For more on the alleged strategic triangle, see James R. Holmes and Toshi Yoshihara, “China and the United States in the Indian Ocean,” Naval War College Review, Summer 2008, Vol. 61, No. 3. 24 Andersen, Walter K., “The Rise of India and China: Impact on Asia,” Shanghai Forum Conference Paper, Published in Chinese in Shanghai Forum Annals, May 2008, p. 2. 25 Ibid. p. 22. 26 One Indian reaction to China’s concerns has been to limit the 2008 Malabar exercise to the U.S. and India. New Delhi is only gradually asserting itself in the Indian Ocean, and debate continues about how far and how fast to move forward. On the other hand, India participated in a trilateral naval exercise with Japan and the U.S. in 2007 off the coast of Japan and had planned another off Japan in late 2009. 27 See “Statement of Admiral Timothy J. Keating, U.S. Navy Commander, U.S. Pacific Command, Before the Senate Armed Services Committee on U.S. Pacific Command Posture,” March 24, 2009, p. 12. 28 Kessler, Glenn, “US Seeks Improved SE Asia Ties; Zoellick Trip is Aimed at Building Economic, Political Links,” Washington Post, April 30, 2005. Also see Bronson Percival, The Dragon Looks South, China, and Southeast Asia in the New Century, Greenwood Press, Westport, CT., 2007, pp. 128–39. 29 Bronson, Percival, “Countering Terrorism in East Asia,” America’s Role in Asia, Asian, and American Views, The Asia Foundation, San Francisco, CA, 2008, p. 247. 30 Ibid. p. 246. 31 Testifying before Congress, PACOM commander Admiral Thomas Fargo stressed that the U.S. sought to help Southeast Asian countries reduce maritime security threats, but his response to a question was incorrectly interpreted as suggesting that the U.S. planned to place U.S. special operations forces in the Malacca Strait. 32 Since 2004, the U.S. has quietly provided Indonesia and Malaysia with assistance valued at more than $60 million for maritime security. 33 Kaplan, Robert D., “Center Stage for the Twenty-First Century, Power Plays in the Indian Ocean,” Foreign Affairs, March/April 2009, p. 24.

4

Naval competition and confidence building A Japanese perspective Masashi Nishihara

As globalization becomes more widespread, many countries are increasingly depending upon foreign maritime resources and sea transport. As a result, some countries in the Asia-Pacific region are competing to build stronger navies, although the global financial crisis that began in the summer of 2008 may slow its progress. Despite the tension that this competition has created in the region, these countries are also attempting to gain mutual confidence through disaster relief and a standard code of conduct. But whether these confidence-building measures can limit this competition for naval capabilities is not yet clear.

China’s naval build-up: a major concern for Japan As a maritime nation dependent on foreign resources and the safety of sea lines of communication (SLOCs), Japan naturally pays close attention to maritime security environment. Its current concern is China’s fast-growing naval capabilities and the drastic increase in its defense budget. As China’s naval capability grows, the possibility of conflict between the Chinese and Indian navies and between the Chinese and U.S. navies also grows. China now has 75 destroyers and frigates, 62 submarines (including three nuclear powered strategic submarines equipped with SLBMs), and 10,000 marines plus a large number of 62 J-10 fighters 116 Su-27 fighters and 116 Su-30 ground-attack fighters.1 In 1989 when the Cold War ended, China’s defense expenditure was ¥21.8 billion (U.S. $5.86 billion), compared to China’s 2007 defense budget of ¥350 billion (U.S. $46.7 billion). The International Institute for Strategic Studies in London estimate in its Military Balance 2008, however, that China’s actual defense spending in 2006, which included military expenditures not included in the budget, was U.S. $122 billion.2 Until the 1990s, China’s naval strategy was to defend its coastal perimeter. Now, however, China is creating a new maritime strategy that includes a denial capability against adversary forces that cross a line extending from the Japanese home islands to the Marianas and Palau. This area also includes the island of Guam, which the United States is currently reinforcing with new naval facilities.

Naval competition and confidence building 49 The naval wing of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) recently purchased four diesel operated Sovremenny class destroyers from Russia, equipped with Chinese or Russian made anti-aircraft missiles. In addition, it has two modern, Chinese made, Luyang II class destroyers, regarded as the country’s equivalent of Aegis destroyers. China also had equipped more than 30 of its diesel operated submarines with high stealth capability (low detectability).3 Moreover, since 1996 it has imported 12 Kilo class submarines from Russia, and in 2006 it deployed two of its own Yuan class submarines, modeled on the Russian Kilo class submarines. In 2007 two strategic Jin class submarines, equipped with SLBMs capable of reaching targets 8,000 miles away, were detected at a naval base in Hainan.4 China’s naval activities around the Japanese islands have raised concern for Tokyo. In November 2004 when it detected a Chinese nuclear submarine near the small islands off southern Japan, Japan’s Maritime Self-Defense Force tailed it until it left the country’s territorial waters.5 On October 20 2008, China’s missilecarrying destroyer and three other ships crossed the Strait of Tsugaru between Hokkaido and Honshu on the way out to the Pacific.6 On November 2 2008, another group of four destroyers was detected while sailing south of Okinawa to the Pacific.7 Finally, in October 2008, the Japanese Navy detected China’s attack submarine submerging and waiting for the U.S. aircraft carrier George Washington in the Western Pacific.8 China’s plan to construct aircraft carriers is also progressing. In December 2008 several Chinese sources disclosed that in 2009 the PLA would start building two carriers of 50,000 to 60,000 tons to be completed by 2015.9 The PLA also plans to purchase about 50 Su-33 jet fighters from Russia to be loaded on the carriers, for which a special pier has already been built in Hainan.10 China justifies its plan to build aircraft carriers on its concern about the security of the Strait of Malacca and the Indian Ocean. While watching China build port facilities in Myanmar and construct refueling facilities in Pakistan for its own ships, Japan has been considering their impact on the security of the Indian Ocean. Tokyo has concluded that China wants to demonstrate its blue-water naval capability to the Japanese and Americans. Any tension between China and India and between China and the United States would thus have serious implications for Japan and Southeast Asia. In the case of armed tension, one navy might try to block its adversary’s use of the Strait of Malacca. Because Japan depends on the Middle East for more than 85 per cent of its imported oil, the security of the sea lanes in this region is vital to Japan’s economy.

The Indian Navy as a counterweight to China The Indian Navy is growing quickly as well, with ambitious plans to construct warships. Currently, the Indian Navy has 16 submarines and 48 principal surface combatants, which includes one aircraft carrier, eight destroyers and 15 frigates.11 Over the next decade the navy plans to acquire 140 to 145 vessels, half of which will be ocean going.12 In 2005, the navy began building a carrier to replace its

50 Masashi Nishihara current carrier, which will retire soon, and the navy also plans to purchase another carrier from Russia. Thus, the Indian Navy’s future fleet will be built around two carrier battle groups. The navy’s acquisition plan also includes 24 diesel powered submarines.13 Japan does not consider the Indian naval power as a source of threat. In fact, in April 2007, Indian ships sailed to the western Pacific, and Japan, the United States and India held a trilateral naval exercise. Then in September of that year, Japan, along with India, the United States, Australia and Singapore, participated in the five-nation naval exercise, involving three aircraft carriers, in the Bay of Bengal.14 The rivalry between China and India appears to be growing in the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea. In addition, the tensions between India and Pakistan and the India–U.S. alignment, have driven Pakistan closer to China. Consequently, China and Pakistan have grown closer, with Pakistan’s Gwadar serving as a refueling port for Chinese naval ships.15 And because China is now importing more of its oil from the Middle East, the sealanes between the Middle East and Chinese ports in the western Pacific have become crucial to its national security. India also competes with China for influence over Southeast Asian nations. Given these circumstances, therefore, Japan tends to perceive India as a counterweight to China.

The Russian Navy’s comeback In recent years, with the increase in its oil revenues, Russia has been able to refurbish its Pacific navy, which has been yet another security concern for Japan, despite its improved relations with Moscow. For 2006 and 2007, Russia’s military spending rose by 20 per cent over the previous year,16 and in announcing Russia’s new maritime doctrine, President Vladimir Putin emphasized the importance of its maritime defense. Accordingly, although its Pacific Fleet had 16 submarines in 2000 and only 10 in 2001, the number rose again in 2007, to 23.17 It is notable that 23 of a total of 42 submarines in the entire Russian Navy are deployed in the Pacific. Global warming, which has spread even to the far North, has given the Russian Navy access to and control over underwater maritime resources in the Arctic Ocean, as well as the ability to cross the Bering Sea and the Sea of Okhotsk even during the winter months. This expansion of the Russian Navy’s area of activity has made Japan reluctant to use Arctic sea lines of communications, which are likely to be subjected to competition for control between the United States and Russia.

The South Korean Navy on the rise The growth of the Republic of Korea’s Navy has been similarly remarkable. In the past, the main purpose of the South Korean Navy was to defend its coasts, to prevent intrusions by North Korea, and to protect South Korean fishermen from

Naval competition and confidence building 51 assault and abduction by North Korea. For emergencies, the South Korean Navy depended on the U.S. Navy. Then, during the 1980s Seoul came to recognize the importance of having a stronger navy that could cope with such contingencies by itself. Because South Korea is also a maritime nation, it now sees the importance of securing its own three sealanes, to Japan, to Southeast Asia and the Middle East, and to North America. Its potential adversaries are Japan and China. The ROK’s Navy currently possesses 44 principal surface combatants and 12 submarines,18 and is planning to construct ships to control what is called the East Sea (i.e. the Sea of Japan), the West Sea (the Yellow Sea) and the South Sea (the East China Sea). According to the ‘Defense Reform 2020,’ which was announced by the Roh Moo Hyun government in 2005 to promote ‘a self-reliant national defense’, the navy will deploy for each region a light aircraft carrier in a battle group that includes eight Aegis-equipped destroyers and six submarines. The total of three light aircraft carriers, 24 Aegis destroyers and 18 submarines, compared with the current size of the Japanese Maritime Self-Defense Force, which has one light aircraft carrier, 53 destroyers (including 5 Aegis destroyers) and 16 submarines, means that South Korea’s naval capability will soon surpass that of the MSDF, if its plan is carried out. In July 2007 South Korea constructed a large amphibious landing destroyer that could carry seven helicopters, six tanks, seven landing assault armed vehicles, and 720 troops. The ship was named Dokdo, the Korean name of a disputed island between Japan and South Korea, and the naming of which was regarded as provocative to the Japanese. In December 2007 South Korea, also deployed its second air independent propulsion submarine.19 In addition, Seoul intends to build a base for submarines in Cheju Island. All these moves by South Korea could well create new tensions with Japan.

The U.S. naval transformation: Helping the naval balance in the Pacific In the past, the U.S. military presence in the Asia-Pacific region helped maintain the balance against potential adversary forces. Today as well, the U.S. presence continues to be indispensable for its formal allies – Japan, South Korea, Australia, the Philippines and Thailand – and for its partners such as Singapore and India. Recently, however, the United States has been changing its military posture in the Asia-Pacific region by reducing its troop levels and relocating its bases in South Korea. It has also agreed to transfer its wartime command in South Korea in 2009. In September 2008 the Pentagon sent a nuclear powered aircraft carrier, George Washington, in Yokosuka, Japan, to replace the diesel-operated Kitty Hawk. It also agreed with Japan on some 8,000 Marines to be relocated by 2014 from Okinawa to Guam, the southernmost island of the Marianas.20 In addition, Washington has been reinforcing its military facilities on Guam and plans to build a dock that can accommodate three aircraft carriers as well as to provide a base there for nuclear-powered submarines.

52 Masashi Nishihara The U.S. Navy has a plan to equip its nuclear powered submarines (SSNs) operating in the Pacific with special forces, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), and unmanned underwater vehicles (UUVs), in addition to Tomahawk missiles, which are capable of reaching targets with high accuracy. These American submarines will thus operate close to the shores of China, a potential adversary. According to the Quadrennial Defense Review 2006, the U.S. Navy plans to deploy at least six aircraft carriers and 60 per cent of its submarine forces in the Pacific.21 The United States reduced its troop levels in South Korea in recognition of South Korea’s better equipped military and strengthened leadership. Some 8,000 U.S. Marines will be transferred to Guam, as was mentioned above, because they do not have to be trained in Okinawa. The U.S. forces based on Guam can meet most military action coming from China with little risk of being attacked, Guam being beyond China’s shooting range. With its greater capabilities in Guam, the United States can also project power more effectively from San Diego to Hawaii, Guam, Singapore, Diego Garcia and to the Middle East. The U.S. posture not only helps maintain the naval balance in the Pacific and thus being greatly beneficial to Japanese security, but it also strengthens the projection of U.S. power around the globe.

Japanese response to the environment During the Cold War, the primary mission of Japan’s Maritime Self Defense Force was to keep track of the Soviet Union’s Pacific Fleet. Then when the Cold War ended, the MSDF shifted its attention to China’s rapidly expanding naval activities and to the tension between mainland China and Taiwan. In recent years, as was mentioned earlier, the development of South Korea’s Navy has also become one of Japan’s concerns. Japan has tried to check China’s military activities by several means, one of which is strengthening its alliance with the United States. In May 2005 Japan’s foreign and defense ministers and their American counterparts attended a meeting of the Japan–U.S. Security Consultative Committee and issued a joint statement itemizing ‘the peaceful solution of cross-strait relations’ as one of their ‘common strategic objectives’.22 This statement was a way for Japan and the United States to warn China that they were concerned about its use of force over the Strait of Taiwan. Japan has also joined the United States in urging China to make its military activities more transparent. China has not yet offered an adequate explanation of why its defense budget has increased more than 10 per cent each year since 1989. In addition, China does not include in its defense budget such items as the purchase of arms from foreign countries and the research and development of arms. These military expenditures are presumed to be quite substantial. Consequently, in nearly all defense-related meetings, Japan presses China to make its military activities more transparent. Still another means is Japan’s diplomatic efforts to forge closer relations with South Korea, Australia and India, thereby demonstrating to China Japan’s options

Naval competition and confidence building 53 for a balance-of-power approach to any adversary forces. Again, South Korea’s naval development under President Roh Moo Hyun was a concern for Japan, since the South Korean president advocated ‘a self-reliant national defense’, a political posture that made it difficult for Japan to work with South Korea. But under the current president, Lee Myung Bak, relations between Tokyo and Seoul and between Seoul and Washington have improved greatly, and now trilateral security relations among Japan, South Korea and the United States seem possible. When both countries were led by security minded prime ministers, Shinzo Abe and John Howard, Japan sought closer security ties with Australia. In March 2007 the two leaders signed a joint declaration for security cooperation, and in September of that year the two leaders and President George W. Bush met in Canberra, marking the beginning of another trilateral relationship. When he visited India in the previous month, Prime Minister Abe also had taken a diplomatic interest in forming ‘a strategic partnership’ with India. Although the U.S.–Indian agreement to cooperate on civilian nuclear power, which was formalized in October 2008, created some tension in Japan’s foreign policy community, Prime Minister Taro Aso’s government has so far managed to develop closer relations with India.

The way forward As these nations expand their naval capabilities, they also should find means of preventing their competitions from developing into armed conflict. Although keeping the power of potential adversaries balanced has proved to be useful in the past, it does not stop mutual distrust. Accordingly, confidence-building measures (CBMs) should now be considered. CBMs may be either bilateral arrangements or multinational institutional arrangements (cooperative security arrangements). Bilateral arrangements include exchange of navy bands, officers, ship visits and naval exercises, and the establishment of hotlines. The transparency of naval activities is also an essential CBM. Today, the Japanese Maritime Self-Defense Force conducts bilateral naval exercises and exchanges ship visits with one of its former adversaries, Russia. And in 2007 and 2008, for the first time since the Second World War, Japan and China exchanged ship visits. A Chinese destroyer visited the Bay of Tokyo in November 2007, and a Japanese ship reciprocated in June 2008 by visiting a naval port at Zhanjiang, Guangdong. Since the Cold War ended, the Asia-Pacific region has formed many multinational institutional arrangements. The Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), which started with just five nations in 1964, has now expanded into an organization of 10 nations. Besides bringing together its own members, ASEAN serves as a core for the ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF) and the ASEAN Plus Three, and the ASEAN Plus Six (the East Asia Summit). ASEAN has its own Treaty of Amity and Cooperation (TAC), which more than 10 other nations have signed. This treaty stipulates several principles concerning the relations between

54 Masashi Nishihara states, including mutual respect for each other’s independence, sovereignty, territorial integrity, non-interference in internal matters, as well as the settlement of differences by peaceful means. Both these organizations and the treaty help build confidence among the members. Despite ASEAN’s adoption of its own charter and ARF’s annual foreign ministers’ conferences and numerous other meetings, they have failed to slow the region’s naval competition. Nor have they been able to organize ‘naval disarmament talks’, although the ARF, for instance, has promoted seminars and conferences for defense authorities and various ranks of officers. The six-party talks, organized in 2003, are another example of multinational institutional arrangements. Although the talks have not yet succeeded in persuading North Korea to stop producing nuclear weapons, they have been able to head off confrontations between North Korea and some of the members, namely, the United States and South Korea. Through its consultations, the talks have developed mutual confidence, particularly by offering an opportunity for the participating nations to exchange their views with their North Korean counterparts. Perhaps more successful is the code of conduct that ASEAN presented to China to encourage it to refrain from certain confrontational actions regarding the South China Sea. In November 2002 ASEAN and China signed the Joint Declaration on the Conduct of Parties, which called for, among others, prohibitions against the use and threat of force, the exercise of self-restraint and the peaceful settlement of international disputes. Although China seems to prefer dealing with such nations on a bilateral basis, it has in reality observed the declaration. Almost no incidents involving Chinese military actions over the disputed Paracel and Spratly islands have been reported. Equally successful is the Regional Cooperation Agreement on Combating Piracy and Armed Robbery against Ships in Asia (ReCAAP), which was established in 2006 under Japan’s initiative.23 It is to share information on piracy and armed robbery and set up a network of cooperation among countries in the region, including ASEAN nations, Bangladesh, China, India, Japan, South Korea, and Sri Lanka. As a result, the number of incidents of piracy and armed robbery has declined sharply. Likewise, the Cooperative Mechanism, established in 2007 by Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore, at the initiative of the International Maritime Organization (IMO) to ensure the safe passage and environmental protection of Malacca Straits, is also highly useful. Other interested states and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) have been able to join them by contributing to the Aids to Navigation Fund. In 2006 the aforementioned three nations agreed to sign the Malacca Strait Patrol Standard Operating Procedures to govern their armed forces’ sea and maritime air patrols. In sum, using the Cooperative Mechanism as a model, all concerned states can work together in the future to enhance maritime security in the Malacca Strait, with cooperation among the major naval powers – the United States, Japan, China, and India – regarded as essential.

Naval competition and confidence building 55

Notes 1 The Military Balance 2008, International Institute for Strategic Studies, London: Routledge, 2008, pp. 377–9. 2 Ibid. p. 376. 3 David Lague, ‘China Enhances Fleet of Modern Submarines’, International Herald Tribune, February 8, 2008. 4 Ibid. See also Sankei Shimbun (Tokyo), June 4, 2008. 5 Japan Defense Agency, Defense of Japan 2005, Tokyo: Inter Group, 2005, pp. 207–10. 6 Sankei Shimbun, October 21, 2008. 7 Sankei Shimbun, November 3, 2008. 8 Sankei Shimbun, October 17, 2008. 9 Asahi Shimbun (Tokyo), December 30, 2008. 10 Asahi Shimbun, December 30, 2008. 11 The Military Balance 2008, p. 342. 12 Ibid. p. 336. 13 Ibid. 14 Ibid. p. 331. 15 Ibid. 16 Ibid. p. 212. 17 The Military Balance 2000–2001, p. 123; The Military Balance 2001–2002, p. 115; and The Military Balance 2008, pp. 213–14. 18 The Military Balance 2008, p. 390. 19 Defense of Japan 2008, p. 95; and Sankei Shimbun, September 30, 2007. 20 ‘United States–Japan Roadmap for Realignment Implementation’ (May 1, 2006), in Defense of Japan 2008, pp. 467–8. 21 U.S. Department of Defense, Quadrennial Defense Review 2006, Washington, DC: U.S. DoD, 2006, p. 47. 22 ‘Joint Statement U.S.–Japan Study Consultative Committee’ (February 19, 2005), in Defense of Japan 2008, p. 456. 23 Defense of Japan 2008, pp. 73–5, 101.

5

Southeast Asia and the maritime balance of power A historical perspective Emrys Chew

Southeast Asia is a porous, fragmented geographic region of enormous variety and fluidity, consisting of both ‘mainland’ and ‘maritime’ components. Encompassing the world’s largest archipelago and major sea-lanes connecting the Indian and Pacific oceans, this region has been the historic setting for waves of cross-cultural interaction, involving cooperation and collaboration as well as competition and conflict. In both space and time, the territories and peoples that constitute ‘Southeast Asia’ have found themselves positioned repeatedly between larger forces that projected both ‘soft’ and ‘hard’ power over land and sea. For centuries, the region would be drawn into the trade, politics, religion and culture of the Indian Ocean arena, with its Indo-Islamic inhabitants and, later, its European invaders. It would be shaped also by ‘Sinicizing’ influences sweeping across the South China Sea and, later on, the impact of other Western powers from across the Pacific.1 How did Southeast Asian polities relate to the powers dominating this vast ‘Indo-Pacific’ arena? Was this merely a zone contested by great power rivalries and colonial ambitions, which having churned the waters, ultimately left behind trails of insecurity and suspicion of the outside world? When did seapower first play a critical role in shaping the politics of the region? And given the re-emergence of China and India as regional players, what are the key implications of these changing maritime balances of power for the future of the region?

The discovery of equilibrium From ancient times into the early modern period, the maritime history of Southeast Asia was characterized by long stretches of collaboration leading to the peaceable exchange of commodities and culture, with only the occasional naval conflict directed towards the domination of seaborne trade. The latter included episodic naval rivalries, such as emerged during the eleventh century between the Chola rulers of southern India and the ‘Indianized’ kingdom of Srivijaya in Sumatra; plus the spectacular naval expeditions of Admiral Zheng He (1405–33), which expanded the Chinese maritime sphere of influence westward as far as the shores of Arabia and Africa. Yet there was hardly any maritime balance of power to speak of, whether in terms of associative partnerships or adversarial posturing that revolved either around a Pax Indica or a Pax Sinica.

Southeast Asia and the maritime balance of power 57 Southeast Asia’s pre-colonial polities—ranging from localized units to centralized kingdoms—often knew how to share power and divide sovereignty, thus accommodating ethnic and religious differences, as well as overlapping claims of suzerainty both from within and beyond the region. Most characteristic of the early political history of this region is what is known as the mandala system (Sanskrit, manda = core, la = container), whereby clusters of small settlements (vassals) coalesced around strong rulers (overlords) in a loose geopolitical or economic alliance. With the coming of Islam, there were also negara that functioned as trading emporia or entrepôts. The region witnessed a succession of mainland and maritime states, including Funan, Champa, Srivijaya, Majapahit, Temasek-Singapura, Malacca, Angkor, Pagan, Ayutthaya, Riau-Johor, Aceh and Sulu.2 Naval rivalries arose only episodically out of largely peaceful centuries of ‘Indianization’. During the eleventh century, southern Indian and Sri Lankan dynasties embarked on ambitious overseas naval campaigns, following maritime trade disputes with kingdoms in Bengal, Burma and Sumatra. Between 1025 and 1050, the Hindu kingdom of the Cholas was transformed into a raiding naval power capable of challenging the maritime hegemony of the Buddhist kingdom of Srivijaya, which had dominated seaborne commerce between India and China through its control of the Malacca and Sunda Straits. Although the Chola invasion of Southeast Asia ultimately proved unsuccessful, it dislocated Srivijayan authority and enabled the formation of new Indianized successor states (such as Singhasari and Majapahit) based upon intensive agriculture rather than maritime trade. But probably more critical than the naval campaigns from southern India, what finally decided the fate of Srivijaya was the extra-regional presence of Chinese shipping. From the twelfth century, when the Southern Sung began to ‘look west’ and develop trade with western Asia, the growing incursions of Chinese junks significantly reduced the importance of indigenous shipping and the influence of local rulers upon the flow of maritime trade. The effect was to disperse authority throughout maritime Southeast Asia and raise the profile of local ports with independent access to the Malacca Strait.3 The naval expeditions of Admiral Zheng He, on the other hand, have been characterized as part of a more ambitious extra-regional attempt by Ming China to impose a Pax Sinica over Southeast Asia and the wider Indian Ocean arena. Together with the military expeditions into Yunnan and Vietnam, the maritime expansion ordered by the Yong-le Emperor was calculated to bring more distant regional polities to submission, obtain recognition of suzerainty, and thus dominate East–West commerce. Like the Portuguese voyages a century later in the opposite direction, the Ming voyages sought to control port-cities and trade routes— nodes and networks—as a means of economic exploitation beyond what previous Chinese dynasties had achieved.4 Ming China’s sense of maritime assertiveness is captured by a striking inscription, in which the admiral claims that during his voyages ‘those among the foreigners who were resisting the transforming influence of Chinese culture and were disrespectful, we captured alive, and brigands who indulged in violence and plunder, we exterminated. Consequently the sea-route

58 Emrys Chew was purified and tranquillized and the natives were enabled to pursue their avocations’.5 On balance, however, the seven voyages of Zheng He constituted a fairly benign seaborne ‘proto-colonialism’ since there was no real control over people or land; the Ming treasure fleets provided imperial China with a capacity to merely influence politics and derive short-term economic advantage. The ‘swimming dragons’ of the Ming armadas drew maritime states such as the Malacca Sultanate only momentarily into the protective embrace of imperial China’s tribute system.6 With the last of the voyages in 1433, China retreated into centuries of splendid (and typically land-bound) isolation.7 Crucially, in staving off the impending hegemony of Siam over the Malacca Strait, the Ming voyages prepared the way for Malacca’s ascendancy within a wider fraternity of Muslim port-cities, extending from the Middle East and South Asia to East Africa and Southeast Asia. The elite culture of these Islamic maritime emporia contrasted sharply with the hierarchical Hindu-Buddhist mixture of great agrarian states such as Majapahit in Java, which were soon challenged by the power, wealth and aspirations of the new port-based mercantile communities.8 Indeed, some historians contend that the rise of port-cities such as Malacca or Temasek-Singapura, which more or less assumed Srivijaya’s mantle of maritime leadership, formed an archaic template for the ‘globalized’ maritime states of today.9 Even so, the emergent mercantile culture and configuration of these port-cities scarcely translated into geopolitical alignments based upon maritime balance-of-power considerations, let alone any semblance of regional solidarity. As cosmopolitan nodes positioned strategically along evolving networks of seaborne commerce, they filled an autonomous inter-regional space and performed a vital intermediary role that linked extra-regional forms of capital from China, India, or Europe to intra-regional, local communities. If maritime commerce was at this time handled increasingly by Muslims, transforming the Indian Ocean and its Southeast Asian periphery into something of a ‘Muslim Lake’, this did not represent the imposition of any Pax Islamica. ‘In sum’, writes the maritime historian M. N. Pearson, ‘there is very little evidence of the use of force in the Indian Ocean before 1498. The bottom line is competition. None of these port-cities could afford to be too abusive, for then merchants would go elsewhere. The crucial point is that these Asian port-cities prospered not by compulsion, but by providing facilities for trade freely undertaken by a vast array of merchants. What the rulers provided was really opportunities, fair treatment and an infrastructure within which trade could take place. They ensured low and relatively equitable customs duties, and a certain law and order, but did little else. Officials concerned with trade were instructed to encourage and welcome visitors. In short, visiting merchants wanted a level playing field. If they did not get this, they could retaliate by going elsewhere’.10 In pre-colonial Southeast Asia, the Malacca Sultanate typified par excellence this time-honoured maritime political tradition. Having secured the protection of China while extending special privileges to Hindu and Muslim merchants from India whose activities were vital to long-distance trade in Southeast Asia, Malacca would turn to managing the sea-lanes and their traffic in the immediate vicinity. Just as Srivijaya had done

Southeast Asia and the maritime balance of power 59 previously, Malacca levied tolls on passing ships for the use of its port facilities, providing an effective maritime escort in the form of orang laut (sea-gypsies) plus efficient administrative services, which seemed far preferable to the alternative: risking the depredations of marauders who plied the approach to other ports.11 Neither did the advent of the Europeans and the so-called ‘Vasco da Gama epoch’ after 1498, predicated upon supposed European command of the seas, result in any immediate polarization of maritime power. Here it is important to refute influential yet mistaken arguments outlined in the more deterministic nationalist historiography—notably the views of Indian historian K. M. Panikkar—which still pervade the thinking in certain policy-making circles and continue to gain currency as a justification for naval expansion or force modernization.12 As an apologist for newly independent India and Asia’s emerging post-colonial order, Kavalam Madhava Panikkar espoused the ideas of American naval strategist Alfred Thayer Mahan regarding the influence of seapower on history. He thereby tended to overstate India’s past role in naval and maritime issues, highlighting sea battles in which Indian forces like the Cholas excelled, and assigning seapower an altogether prominent place in India’s destiny.13 In Panikkar’s view, the decline of Indian naval power and the capitulation of Arab-Islamic naval forces at Cochin (1503) and Diu (1509) enabled the Portuguese to construct a ‘naval empire’ and pursue an ‘oceanic policy’ that led to ‘the European mastery of the Eastern Seas which continued for over 400 years’.14 Panikkar called this period of Western domination ‘the Vasco da Gama epoch of Asian history’, in which European nations alone controlled the seas until the emergence of Japan and the United States as major naval powers at the end of the nineteenth century.15 Given that from the 1500s ‘till today the Ocean has dominated India’ and ‘that the economic life of India will be completely at the mercy of the power which controls the seas’, Panikkar advocated the building-up of an adequate navy for independent India.16 Unsurprisingly, these arguments have been invoked by independent nation-states and analysts in other parts of Asia. Regardless of the merits of the nationalist-inspired strategic vision, the weight of evidence does not support notions of an early, decisive ‘swing to the West’ where Asian geopolitics and maritime history are concerned. For once their carracks had reached the fabled ‘Indies’, the Estado da India of Portugal and the East India Companies of the other European powers all experienced varying degrees of success, as well as failure, in dominating commercial networks across the maritime domain. The chain of fortified trading bases established by the Europeans still looks fairly impressive, no doubt, in the historical charts and maps. Following on from the Treaty of Tordesillas (1494), in which the world beyond Europe was divided somewhat arbitrarily by the Catholic authorities between the Iberian powers of Spain and Portugal, the Spanish concentrated on empire-building in the Americas, and their Pacific Ocean colony of the Philippines. The Portuguese focused on the Indian Ocean, establishing trading outposts at Aden, Goa, Sofala, Mombasa and Mozambique (on the western side), and Bantam, Timor, Amboina and Ternate (on the eastern side), buttressing the two great maritime entrepôts that Portugal wrested

60 Emrys Chew from Muslim control: Hormuz and Malacca. The Portuguese settlements were eventually followed by Dutch settlements in coastal Sri Lanka, Malabar, Malacca (wrested from Portuguese control), Makassar and Batavia; English settlements at Madras, Bombay and Calcutta; and French settlements at Pondicherry and later, Mauritius and Réunion.17 Yet, however disruptive they proved to be at times, those early circuits of Western colonial expansion were relatively tentative and limited on the whole. After the initial cross-cultural collision in the sixteenth century, notes Indian historian Ashin Das Gupta, the Portuguese ‘settled within the structure and were, in a way, swallowed by it’.18 K. G. Tregonning, formerly Raffles Professor of History at the University of Singapore, has gone so far as to characterize the Iberian power as ‘a few infidel voyagers in a Muslim sea’.19 Whether adversarial or associative by nature, the net effect of Portuguese imperialism was redistributive rather than transformational: in trade, they issued certificates of safe conduct (cartaze) that local merchants had to buy in order to avoid being attacked, and they skimmed off profits for themselves without radically changing routes, products, or productive techniques; in society and culture, they likewise altered or redirected existing patterns short of actual transformation.20 The Portuguese were ultimately disadvantaged in the maritime sphere by their inability to develop any blue-water strategy comparable to the Dutch and the English, who pioneered high-sea fleets capable of operating at long range from their home bases. Even the Dutch and the English, with their superior ships and seamanship, continued to work within the indigenous structure, becoming ‘one more strand in the weave of the ocean’s trade’: supporting the networks of seaborne commerce, strengthening its carrying capacity and sharpening competition.21 Notionally, of course, the Dutch and the English would make an early yet enduring contribution to the international law of the sea, in which maritime Southeast Asia supplied a principal case study. In Mare Liberum (published 1609), the eminent Dutch jurist Hugo Grotius postulated the principle that the sea was international territory and all nations were free to use it for seaborne commerce; this supplied ideological justification for the Dutch to break up rival trade monopolies through their naval power and thus impose their own monopoly. The eyes of Grotius and the Dutch East India Company, in particular, were fixed on the wealth flowing from a still-profitable spice trade in the East Indies. The English contested the use (or abuse) of the Grotian principle, and claimed sovereignty over the waters adjacent to English terra firma, from the British Isles to British trading interests in the East. In Mare Clausum (published 1635), the English jurist John Selden argued that the sea was, in practice, as capable of appropriation as territory on land. As conflicting claims grew out of the controversy between ‘free seas’ and ‘closed seas’, maritime states came to moderate their demands and base their maritime claims upon the principle that it extended seawards from land.22 For all the bluster, Dutch imperialism achieved only a measure of dominance in parts of the Malay Peninsula and Indonesian Archipelago, where Dutch monopolistic policies were enforced by the draconian hongi-tochten (law-enforcement ships).23 The English, who succeeded the Portuguese as the leading European traders in India during the

Southeast Asia and the maritime balance of power 61 seventeenth century, operated from the confines of a handful of fortified enclaves in coastal areas.24 Neither the Dutch nor the English were able, at this stage, to challenge the land-based power of major indigenous states in ‘monsoon Asia’: the Ottomans, the Safavids and the Mughals. Of the three land empires, only the Ottomans possessed a navy powerful enough to prevent the Portuguese from closing the Red Sea to Turkish, Persian, Arab and Indian trade.25 The Mughals relied much more upon military-fiscal organization, the profitable symbiosis of military power and revenue resources, than the exercise of maritime power per se; Jahangir and Shah Jahan ruled an empire heavily dependent on oceanic connections, served by sizable numbers of merchant and pilgrim ships, but Mughal India lacked a strong navy. This allowed European powers to assert some control over the sea-lanes of the Indian Ocean, although they were as yet incapable of projecting their political and military power further inland. Conflicts at sea were mostly fought out amongst Europeans in mercantilist pursuit of a larger share of maritime trade, while the Mughals themselves remained largely unassailable on land until the upheavals of the eighteenth century.26 Only the comparatively fragmented geography of maritime Southeast Asia—with its smaller, more vulnerable polities—afforded early opportunities for European colonial expansion and unimpeded access to seaborne commerce.

The trauma of disequilibrium Whereas the juridical formulation of the Grotian paradigm had emphasized the freedom of the seas from the seventeenth century onwards, it was largely from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that maritime power played a significant part in tilting the balance in favour of the West. European seaborne commerce and naval power accelerated the gradual disintegration of the indigenous imperial cores and aided the global projection of increasingly competitive, aggressive forms of European imperialism that were, in turn, legitimated by Western notions of transcendent law and unitary sovereignty. Of course, the impact of European influence was felt more keenly from the start in Southeast Asia’s more fragmented archipelagic domain, where the collapse of the Malacca Sultanate soon opened up a dramatic pattern of dislocation and relocation of political authority and maritime trade. The early European coastal presence was allowed to establish disruptive footholds further inland, and European colonial authority was able to exert stronger influence on regional trade and politics as it meshed with the crisis and transformation of indigenous polities. What followed was an irreversible transition from the traditional politics of the mandala to the norms of a ‘Westphalian’ system: the finely balanced, layered concept of sovereignty shared by pre-colonial states located between India and China, which had also opened up various autonomous spaces for the inhabitants of Southeast Asia’s port-cities, was progressively displaced by the Western idea of indivisible, monolithic sovereignty imported under colonial conditions from Europe.

62 Emrys Chew Southeast Asia was divided somewhat arbitrarily into various Western colonial spheres and colonial states. By stages, their borders would harden into the boundaries of future nation-states, where matters of sovereignty and jurisdiction would continue to be contested, especially in the maritime domain. As observed previously, Western colonial expansion in Southeast Asia proved initially sporadic and relatively tentative: from the settlements established by the Portuguese at Malacca (1511) and the Spanish at Manila (1571), to those established by the Dutch at Batavia (1619) and the Indonesian ‘spice islands’, and those later established by the British at Penang (1786) and Singapore (1819). Thereafter, the Anglo-Dutch Treaty of 1824 effectively reduced the region to two main spheres of colonial influence, partitioning maritime Southeast Asia through the Malacca Strait and Strait of Singapore, with the British taking the territories north of the agreed dividing line and the Dutch taking territories to the south. The Straits themselves— a major artery of maritime commerce since pre-colonial times—were steadily transformed into an international waterway of global importance in a new age of imperial rivalries and indigenous state transformation. Even as they expanded their rule across India and their commercial interest in China, the British fought three wars with Burma (1824–6, 1852, 1885), resulting in the pacification of the entire Burmese kingdom and the decapitation of its monarchy. The British further presided over forward movements into the states of the Malay Peninsula (between 1874 and 1914), underpinned by the progressive introduction of a Residential system throughout the Peninsula. British ‘subimperialism’ reared its head, too, in the colorful career of ‘Rajah’ James Brooke: he created his own kingdom from the tangled portion of rainforest and mangrove in Sarawak, which the Sultan of Brunei had awarded him (1841) for maritime and military assistance rendered in the suppression of a Dayak uprising. The British annexed Labuan (1846) and would later place all of North Borneo under the protection of a British chartered company from the 1880s. Meanwhile, the Dutch also started to extend their administrative control over the outer islands of the Indonesian Archipelago, setting up a series of ‘border residencies’ from the 1840s through to the 1870s. Not to be outdone, the French consolidated their Union Indochinoise after establishing protectorates over Cochin China (1858) and Cambodia (1863), and then Annam and Tonkin (1884). Long entrenched in the Philippines yet fearing the expanding activities of their colonial rivals, the Spanish at Manila decided to launch military expeditions against the Sulu islands (1845, 1848). Whereas the pretext had been the annihilation of Sulu’s ‘pirate nests,’ these campaigns were really intended to thwart Dutch and British ambitions in an area that Spain located within its sphere of influence; Spain imposed an unequal treaty on the Sulu Sultanate (1851), with a view to excluding the commerce of other European powers. The Spanish would be driven out altogether, however, when the Americans decided to join the fray; the battleships of the U.S. Navy sank the Spanish fleet in Manila Bay, thereby leading to the ‘liberation’ of the Philippines (1898). Seapower thus played a pivotal role in enabling the landward colonial expansion of the Western great powers during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries,

Southeast Asia and the maritime balance of power 63 transforming Southeast Asia and the maritime balance of power in various ways. Britain’s naval victory over France at the Battle of the Nile (1798) effectively ended French pretensions to a seaborne empire in Asia, marking the beginnings of a ‘British Lake’ in the Indian Ocean and its Southeast Asian periphery. The absence of indigenous naval opposition and the elimination of naval challenges from other Europeans would therefore prove far more significant after 1798 than 1498, even as Britain gained singular command of the sea with strategic flexibility to outmanoeuver and outclass opponents. Britannia had clearly begun to rule the waves by the dawn of the nineteenth century. The elements that sustained British naval mastery would include superior leadership and seamanship; a sound economic and fiscal basis; industrial strength with ample shipbuilding capacity; a supportive mercantile marine capable of backing up naval power in times of conflict; and a transoceanic network of naval stations and maritime bases, located not only at key choke-points but also along critical sea-lanes. The Royal Navy evolved a new command structure during the great maritime struggle against Napoleonic France. It pioneered a powerful intelligence tool in naval charts and maps, and acquired access to massive supplies of timber from Britain’s global empire, including the Southeast Asian hinterland. The Royal Navy’s ability to sail the seas unchallenged paved the way for the expansion of the Merchant Marine as much as Britain’s share of EastWest commerce. Economic power and naval power were mutually reinforcing. Technological innovation—the development of the iron ship, the steam engine, and the electric telegraph—all helped to keep Britain ahead of its competitors, particularly after the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869. Consequently, in 1870, the mercantile tonnage of the British Empire nearly equalled the combined tonnage of all other countries in the world and, in 1880, actually exceeded it. This came close to proving the dictum attributed to the great Elizabethan Sir Walter Raleigh: ‘Whosoever commands the sea commands the trade; whoever commands the trade of the world commands the riches of the world, and consequently the world itself’.27 Still, there would be indigenous resistance to the extra-regional impact of European colonial expansion and the imposition of a Pax Britannica from the sea. Out of the disintegration of the Malay imperium, once centered upon Malacca, arose a new constellation of regional powers and elite groups to contest the profits of the mercantilist system and primacy of the maritime domain. With the development of trading entrepôts such as Singapore and Jolo, the Bugis, the Tausug and other seafaring peoples would interpose themselves as power-broking intermediaries between the old sources of internal authority and the new sources of global authority.28 While the Indian Ocean was being turned into primarily a ‘British Lake’, as South Asian historian Sugata Bose has reflected, the ‘huge asymmetry in economic power relations on a world scale [also] led Indian and Chinese intermediary capitalists to build their own lake in the stretch of ocean from Zanzibar to Singapore’; the combined Indian and Chinese networks of trade and finance would provide a crucial intermediate ‘bazaar nexus’ that linked European capital to diverse indigenous communities.29

64 Emrys Chew In the evolving patterns of maritime trade and production, rising levels of profit and violence would revolve particularly around the movement of arms, slaves, ivory, opium and other exotic local commodities. The disruption of the traditional economy by a growing European monopoly of trade would drive many ‘non-state’ seafaring communities to marauding and trafficking on a large scale, often in conjunction with the raiding and trading activities of regional states. Consequently, such ‘piracy’ often took the form of an annual cycle whose very regularity shows how far such activities were bound up with the socio-economic structures of the region. As had been the case since ancient times, marauding (and its corollary, trafficking) functioned as an integral, legitimate and time-honored means of enlarging and consolidating the power bases of rival chiefs during periods of turbulence.30 Such maritime pursuits were, however, suppressed by European naval power when further increases in trade convinced colonial regimes of the need to provide greater security for commercial shipping. For the first time in Asia’s maritime history, there would be actual legal frameworks for prohibition and protection, patrols to hunt ‘pirates,’ and expeditions to destroy ‘pirate nests.’ Once the ‘sea-robbers,’ their perceived ‘banditry,’ and native institutions of ‘slavery’ had been demonized through the liberal-humanitarian lenses of Western colonial stereotyping, it was only a matter of time before the outlawing of these indigenous maritime groups and the interdiction of contraband would serve to further advance Western conceptions of law and sovereignty in the region.31 In the 1830s and 1840s, the Malacca-Singapore Straits and other parts of maritime Southeast Asia were cleared of marauders and ‘made safe for the intercourse of nations’.32 The Royal Navy served as a crucial tool in securing new markets around the Indian Ocean and beyond the South China Sea—from Zanzibar to Canton—during the great age of ‘gun-boat diplomacy’ when Lord Palmerston was Britain’s Foreign Secretary (1830–41 and 1846–51).33 Even so, there still were limits to what could be achieved by the European colonial navies and their systems of surveillance and interdiction. For example, in order to cope with the acceleration of arms transfers from metropolitan Europe over the decades of ‘high imperialism’ that preceded the outbreak of the First World War (c. 1870–1914), European colonial regimes were compelled somewhat ironically to expand their scope of authority and exercise stricter controls. The European balance of power was again played out across the various colonial frontiers: there were new arms bans; naval blockades along the coastline of notorious gun-running areas; and novel methods of surveillance and disarmament. The efforts of the British and Dutch authorities to delineate their colonial spheres in maritime Southeast Asia were challenged by the smuggling activities of the gun runners, opium traders, currency counterfeiters and human traffickers who enjoyed considerable success—with their prahus and junks—in penetrating newly drawn colonial boundaries. At least on paper, the Anglo-Dutch Treaty of 1824 had reduced the region to two separate spheres of colonial influence, but it would take the better part of a century to stabilize the expanding colonial frontier and enforce colonial authority along porous borders.34

Southeast Asia and the maritime balance of power 65 Finally though, in the changing global balance of maritime power, it would eventually become clear that Britannia could not rule the waves indefinitely. The United States and Japan emerged from the end of the nineteenth century as major naval powers. Conversely, in the years following the firmamental exhaustion of the First World War and preceding the economic wreckage of the Great Depression, Britain’s naval power was pegged back by the terms of the naval armaments treaty at the Washington Conference (1921–2), which fixed future construction of capital ships at a ratio of five British to five American to three Japanese ships. What then ensued was a stunning case of British imperial and naval overstretch. Although construction of a new naval base at Singapore would commence in 1924, the aim of which was to help Britain defend the region, delays meant that the base was not opened until 1938. British defense chiefs already knew that the strategy of sending the main fleet to Singapore at a time of crisis in the East would fail if Britain were simultaneously engaged on another front. When the Pacific War broke out, Britain was fully committed in the Mediterranean and Atlantic; Japan’s sinking of the capital ships H.M.S Repulse and H.M.S Prince of Wales (1941), through a combination of sea and air power, would come to symbolize the very twilight of British naval primacy.35 Following the end of the Second World War in 1945, the setting of the sun on Britain’s Indian empire in 1947, and the emergence of ‘red China’ in 1949, it was just a matter of time before Southeast Asia was drawn progressively into the Cold War geopolitics of non-alignment and bi-polar superpower rivalry.

The quest for a new equilibrium For a number of Southeast Asian nations, the experience of divide-and-rule under Western colonial regimes proved so traumatic that it may have altogether de-legitimized the concept of empire stripped of all its nuances and creative possibilities—even a more benign hegemony, whether American, Chinese or Indian. With the exception of Thailand, which was never formally colonized, most of the nations in the region had to earn their freedom by winning a hardfought struggle for independence—a struggle that turned especially violent in Burma, Indonesia and Indochina. Even as the post-colonial order that emerged after 1945 inherited the legacy of a system of sovereign states with fixed maritime and territorial boundaries, one of the principal reactions to the colonial past has been the instinctive nationalist tendency to prevent or pre-empt any recurrence of extra-regional domination, either on land or at sea, particularly over hard-won issues of sovereignty and jurisdiction. Where a British Leviathan and other Western colonial navies had once ruled the ‘free seas’, the maritime authorities of each nation-state—navy, marine police or coastguard—were now given responsibility for maintaining law and order at sea within their own three-mile territorial water limit.36 This overall sea-change in sovereignty in the Indian Ocean and its Southeast Asian periphery largely explains why the former ‘British Lake’ east of Suez cannot be transformed so easily into an ‘American Lake’ in post-colonial times, despite American attempts during

66 Emrys Chew the Cold War to establish a naval force and naval installations—like the AngloAmerican base on Diego Garcia, or the American bases in the Philippines—to meet perceived Soviet and communist Chinese challenges within an arc of ‘containment’ extending from West and South Asia to Southeast and East Asia. If anything, the superpower confrontation and reconfiguration of geopolitics that occurred over the course of the Cold War period would serve to sharpen intraregional rivalries and competition: from the resurgence of longstanding tribal, ethno-religious or separatist conflicts in Iraq, Turkey and Iran, and across both the northwestern and northeastern flanks of the Indian subcontinent, through to the onset of guerrilla activities or military rule in parts of East Africa, the Middle East, South Asia and Southeast Asia. The ‘evil empire’ of the Soviet Union may have since disintegrated and the United States today exercises some measure of hegemonic dominance, but the sole remaining superpower finds itself operating within the constraints of a multi-polar transoceanic milieu of sovereign regional powers, independent nation-states and autonomous non-state actors. The modern ‘Indo-Pacific maritime space’—encompassing the Indian Ocean, the sea-lanes of Southeast Asia, as well as the South China Sea—has acquired a new strategic complexion in the post-Cold War era and the present epoch of globalization and nuclearization. Evolving dynamics of governance, commerce, demography, knowledge and religion in what has always been a cosmopolitan arena, together with shifting patterns of collaboration and conflict in an increasingly interconnected world, are today compounded by energy security and environmental concerns that dominate any meaningful contemporary analyses of the region. The stakes in the maritime balance of power are being raised continually by the unprecedented volume and value of ‘globalized’ maritime trade transiting strategic choke-points and dense sea-lines of communication. Simultaneously, the region is being troubled by new forms of marauding and contrabanding, a spectrum of asymmetric conflicts and the spectre of maritime terrorism, which range across the fluid frontiers and porous borders of the region’s maritime and littoral domains. The geo-strategic importance of the Indo-Pacific arena and its waterways ensures that nations beyond this region would continue to have a major stake as well as presence in these waters. But echoing anti-colonial sentiment from the days of European naval dominance, there is also underlying suspicion that extra-regional powers would use the threat posed by natural disasters, trafficking in weapons (conventional or nuclear), drugs and humans, as well as piracy and terrorism, to justify their longer-term naval presence in the region. At the operational level, the U.S. Navy’s key role in organizing what became a massive, multinational humanitarian relief effort following the Boxing Day Tsunami of 2004—off the coast of Indonesia’s Aceh province—certainly improved America’s image in Indonesia and across the region. Still, there remains significant unease arising from perceptions of U.S.-dominated Western ‘media imperialism’ facilitating a potential ‘fifth column’ within indigenous society, or non-governmental organizations serving as possible ‘trojan horses.’ In the wake of Cyclone Nargis, which struck coastal Burma in May 2008, neither the U.S. Navy

Southeast Asia and the maritime balance of power 67 nor non-governmental organizations were allowed by Burma’s military regime to intervene, for fear that under the cover of humanitarian relief, the United States had a political agenda that included regime change. In the quest for a new equilibrium based upon mutual understanding and cooperation, the extra-regional maritime activities of the United States, Britain, France, Russia, Australia and Japan would no doubt continue to influence the security environment and balance-of-power equation in the Indo-Pacific milieu. On the other hand, a good deal hinges upon the blue-water ambitions, strategic alliances and economic agendas of a concurrently renascent India and China—an India ‘looking east’ and a China ‘looking west’ once more.37 Poised at the dawn of the twenty-first century, it remains to be seen whether the two major regional powers of the Indo-Pacific are able and willing to transcend their historically conditioned roles as continental powers in order to assume expansive new roles as maritime powers.38 In that respect, it might be interesting to speculate whether their future naval strategies and policies will be shaped by a more accommodating, benign past as Asian powers that have also been great civilizations, or whether they will be driven by the imperatives and dynamics of a more competitive, present ‘Westphalian’ system. For those who are positioned betwixt these rising powers, amid Grotian notions of the oceans and Mahanian visions of seapower, there remains an equally historic challenge: the member states of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations must find fresh ways of averting confrontation and facilitating cooperation that would contribute, in sum, to the rediscovery of equilibrium.39

Notes 1 The term ‘Southeast Asia’ derives from the diplomatic and academic discourse that evolved mostly in the second half of the twentieth century: from its usage in Britain’s wartime South-East Asia Command, followed by the American-led Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO) and then the independent Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), through to its application in late colonial and post-colonial scholarship. See P. Kratoska, R. Raben and H. S. Nordholt, Locating Southeast Asia: Geographies of Knowledge and Politics of Space, Singapore: Singapore University Press, 2005. 2 O. W. Wolters, History, Culture and Region in Southeast Asian Perspectives Revised edition; Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 1999, pp. 27–40, 126–54; Norman G. Owen (ed.), The Emergence of Modern Southeast Asia, Singapore: Singapore University Press, 2005, pp. 52–82. 3 P. M. Munoz, Early Kingdoms of the Indonesian Archipelago and the Malay Peninsula, Singapore: Editions Didier Millet, 2006, pp. 165–67; N. Tarling (ed.), The Cambridge History of Southeast Asia, vol. 1: from Early Times to c. 1800, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992, pp. 174–5. 4 For critical revisionist analysis of the Ming voyages, see G. Wade, ‘The Zheng He Voyages: A Reassessment’, Asia Research Institute Working Paper Series, 31, October 2004. 5 Quoted in H. P. Ray, ‘An Analysis of the Chinese Maritime Voyages into the Indian Ocean during the Early Ming Dynasty and their Raison D’etre’, China Reports, 23 (1987), p. 70.

68 Emrys Chew 6 See G. Wade, ‘Ming China and Southeast Asia in the 15th Century: A Reappraisal’, Asia Research Institute Working Paper Series, 28 (July 2004); and Tarling (ed.), The Cambridge History of Southeast Asia, vol. 1, pp. 216–17. It should be noted that Yuan China’s expansionism also had a passing impact on the region, when Mongol expeditionary forces were despatched to discipline the rulers of Dai Viet, Champa, Bagan and Java during the second half of the thirteenth century. In contrast, the Ming voyages tended to emphasize the traditional practice of heqin, whereby indigenous states were encouraged to send tribute to the Ming court as a symbol of ‘harmonious relations’ between vassal and suzerain. 7 A Eurocentric analysis of the Ming voyages is provided by P. Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000, New York: Random House, 1987, pp. 4–9. More nuanced observation is offered in the writings of distinguished overseas Chinese historian Wang Gungwu: see the chapters on Ming foreign relations in G. Wang, China and the Chinese Overseas, Singapore: Times Academic Press, 1991, pp. 41–78; Community and Nation: China, Southeast Asia and Australia, St Leonards, New South Wales, Asian Studies Association and Allen & Unwin, 1992, pp. 77–130; and The Chinese Way: China’s Position in International Relations, Oslo: Scandinavian University Press, Norwegian Nobel Institute Lecture Series, 1995, pp. 54–69. See also L. Suryadinata (ed.), Admiral Zheng He and Southeast Asia, Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies and International Zheng He Society, 2005. 8 A. Das Gupta and M. N. Pearson (eds), India and the Indian Ocean 1500–1800, Calcutta; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987, p. 246; Tarling (ed.), The Cambridge History of Southeast Asia, vol. 1, pp. 175–6, 215–26; and K. McPherson, The Indian Ocean: A History of People and The Sea, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1993, p. 114. 9 See, for instance, C. G. Kwa, ‘From Temasek to Singapore: Locating a Global City-State in the Cycles of Melaka Straits History’, in J. N. Miksic and C. M. G. Low (eds), Early Singapore 1300s–1819: Evidence in Maps, Text and Artefacts, Singapore: Singapore History Museum, 2004, pp. 124–46. 10 Pearson, The Indian Ocean, pp. 95–9. 11 Tarling (ed.), The Cambridge History of Southeast Asia, vol. 1, pp. 175–6; S. Eklof, Pirates in Paradise: A Modern History of Southeast Asia’s Maritime Marauders, Copenhagen: Nordic Institute of Asian Studies, 2006, pp. 5–6. 12 Das Gupta and Pearson (eds.), India and the Indian Ocean, p. 4. Other pieces of nationalist maritime history include R. K. Mookerji, Indian Shipping: A History of the Sea-borne Trade and Maritime Activity of the Indians from the Earliest Times, Bombay: Orient Longmans, 1957, designed to show the central role of seagoing Indians in the Indian Ocean (and sometimes the wider world); and K. Sridharan, A Maritime History of India, New Delhi: Publications Division, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, 1965, preoccupied with ‘the maritime developments of which we should be justifiably proud, and the study of which makes a person learn the lessons of history and appreciate better the need for the country’s defence by maritime forces’, p. vii. 13 With the gradual eclipse of the European colonial empires and the rise of American seapower, the last decade of the nineteenth century saw the key publications of the American naval strategist Alfred Thayer Mahan: namely, The Influence of Seapower upon History, 1660–1783 (published 1890) and The Influence of Seapower upon the French Revolution and Empire, 1793–1812 (published 1892). Panikkar was consciously following the tradition of Mahan, reflected in the very title of his book; see K. M. Panikkar, India and the Indian Ocean: An Essay on the Influence of Seapower on Indian History, London: Allen & Unwin, 1951. 14 Panikkar, India and the Indian Ocean, pp. 41–3. 15 K. M. Panikkar, Asia and Western Dominance: A Survey of the Vasco da Gama Epoch of Asian History, 1498–1945, London: Allen & Unwin, 1953. Once again, influenced

Southeast Asia and the maritime balance of power 69

16

17 18 19 20 21 22

23

24 25

by the naval strategic thinking of Mahan, Panikkar selected as the starting-point of his periodization the arrival of Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama at Calicut (on the southwestern coast of India) in May 1498. Panikkar, India and the Indian Ocean, pp. 8, 14–16. In K. Vaidya, The Naval Defence of India, Bombay: Thacker, 1949, we find further arguments for Indian blue-water naval expansion: ‘even if we do not rule the waves of all the five oceans of the world, we must at least rule the waves of the Indian Ocean … the Indian Ocean must become an Indian Lake. That is to say, India must become the supreme and undisputed power over the waters of the Indian Ocean … controlling the waves of the vast mass of water making the Indian Ocean and its two main offshoots, the Arabian Sea and the Bay of Bengal’ (pp. 1, 91, 101). Consequently, Vaidya argued for the creation of three self-sufficient and fullyfledged fleets to be stationed at the Andamans in the Bay of Bengal, at Trincomalee in Sri Lanka, and at Mauritius. Like Panikkar, he advocated a ring of Indian Ocean bases for India—from the Cape of Good Hope, Mozambique, Mombasa, Aden, Oman and Muscat (on the western side), through to Trincomalee, Rangoon, Penang and Singapore (on the eastern side), and the Maldives, the Seychelles, Mauritius and Madasgascar (to the south)—which might stand India in good stead to face China as a potential future challenger and rival in the region. McPherson, The Indian Ocean, pp. 167–87. Das Gupta and Pearson (eds), India and the Indian Ocean, p. 28. K. G. Tregonning, A History of Modern Malaysia and Singapore, Singapore: Eastern Universities Press, 1972, p. 29. Das Gupta and Pearson (eds), India and the Indian Ocean, pp. 208–11; cf. S. Subrahmanyam, The Portuguese Empire in Asia, 1500–1700, London: Longman, 1993. Das Gupta and Pearson (eds), India and the Indian Ocean, p. 39. H. Grotius, Mare Liberum, translated with a revision of the Latin text of 1633 by R. Van Deman Magoffin, The Freedom of the Seas, or the Right Which Belongs to the Dutch to Take Part in the East Indian Trade, New York: Oxford University Press, 1916. Also see R. P. Anand, Origins and Development of the Law of the Sea: History of International Law Revisited, The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1982. Another Dutch jurist, Cornelius Bynkershoek, would eventually propound a workable formula in his De Dominio Maris (1702), restricting maritime dominion to the actual distance within which cannon range could effectively protect it. This became universally adopted and evolved into the three-mile limit. P. Borschberg, ‘Hugo Grotius, East India Trade and the King of Johor’, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, 30:2 (1999), pp. 225–48; P. J. Marshall, ‘Western Arms in Maritime Asia in the Early Phases of Expansion’, Modern Asian Studies, 14:1 (1980), p. 20. Dutch imperialism represented an intermediate stage between the earlier, predatory imperialism of Portugal and the later, more productive imperialism of Britain. The commercial and naval operations of the Dutch East India Company were more sophisticated and powerful than those of the Portuguese. Dutch shipping was more numerous and better gunned. By 1626, there were 29 Dutch ships in the Indian Ocean, and by 1635, 76 of them. The hongi-tochten consisted of specialized warships stationed permanently in the East Indies to enforce the Dutch Company’s monopoly of the spice trade, whether by policing offshore areas to prevent smuggling or engaging in slash-and-burn tactics to destroy the clove and nutmeg crops of rival cultivators. S. Bose and A. Jalal, Modern South Asia: History, Culture, Political Economy, second edition; New York; London: Routledge, 2004, pp. 34–5. Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, pp. 10–11; cf. A. C. Hess, ‘The Evolution of the Ottoman Seaborne Empire in the Age of the Oceanic Discoveries, 1453–1525’, American Historical Review, 75:7 (1970), pp. 1892–1919; and F. Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, 3 vols.

70 Emrys Chew

26 27 28

29 30 31

32

33 34

35

36 37

Second revised edition trans. by S. Reynolds, 1972–73, re-issued as special Folio edition; London: Folio Society, 2000, vol. 3, pp. 182–235. In southern European waters, it even took a grand naval coalition backed by an alliance of Catholic powers to check the advance of Ottoman naval forces across the Mediterranean, at the Battle of Lepanto (1571). Bose and Jalal, Modern South Asia, pp. 27–37; McPherson, The Indian Ocean, pp. 174–80. See P. Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of British Naval Mastery, London: A. Lane, 1976; and C. A. Bayly (ed.), Atlas of the British Empire, London: Hamlyn, 1989, pp. 72–3. B. W. Andaya and L. Y. Andaya, A History of Malaysia, London: Macmillan, 1982, pp. 77–113. Also see J. F. Warren, The Sulu Zone 1768–1898: The Dynamics of External Trade, Slavery and Ethnicity in the Transformation of a Southeast Asian Maritime State, Singapore: Singapore University Press, 1981; and J. F. Warren, Iranun and Balangingi: Globalization, Maritime Raiding and the Birth of Ethnicity, Singapore: Singapore University Press, 2002. S. Bose, A Hundred Horizons, pp. 13, 274; cf. R. K. Ray, ‘Asian Capital in the Age of European Expansion: The Rise of the Bazaar, 1800–1914’, Modern Asian Studies, 29:3 (1995). O. Rutter, The Pirate Wind: Tales of the Sea Robbers of Malaya, London, 1930; reprinted Singapore: Oxford University Press, 1986, pp. 26–8. ‘Oriental Pirates’, United Service Magazine and Naval and Military Journal, 2 (1835), pp. 34–42; and J. R. Logan (ed.), ‘The Piracy and Slave Trade of the Indian Archipelago’, Journal of the Indian Archipelago and Eastern Asia, 4 (1850), pp. 619, 626. Again, see Rutter, The Pirate Wind, which illustrates how marauding provoked reprisals from European cruisers and gave occasion for the extension of European ‘protection’ to areas such as Sarawak and Labuan. In the Malay Archipelago, the long-drawn crisis in Kedah and the Malay ‘piratical system’ operating around Penang—‘from whence … they were recruiting their scattered forces and obtaining supplies of arms and ammunition without the possibility of prevention by our police’—prompted Robert Ibbetson, the Resident at Singapore, to propose a new naval blockade in consultation with Governor-General Lord William Bentinck and naval commander Rear-Admiral Sir Edward Owen. [India Office Records, F/4/1331 (53245), Bentinck to Owen, 18 January 1832; Ibbetson to Swinton (Bentinck’s Secretary), 25 April 1832, pp. 45, 93.] Bayly (ed.), Atlas of the British Empire, p. 73. E. M. Chew, ‘Arming the Periphery: The Arms Trade in the Indian Ocean during the Nineteenth Century’, Ph.D. thesis, University of Cambridge, 2001, pp. 105–18, 138–52. Also see E. Tagliacozzo, Secret Trades, Porous Borders: Smuggling and States Along a Southeast Asian Frontier, 1865–1915, New Haven, Connecticut; London: Yale University Press, 2005. Bayly (ed.), Atlas of the British Empire, pp. 183, 222–31; M. Murfett, J. Miksic, B. Farrell and M. S. Chiang, Between Two Oceans: A Military History of Singapore from First Settlement to Final British Withdrawal, Singapore: Oxford University Press, 1999, pp. 145–202. Also see W. D. McIntyre, The Rise and Fall of the Singapore Naval Base, 1919–1942, London: Macmillan, 1979; J. L. Neidpath, The Singapore Naval Base and the Defence of Britain’s Eastern Empire, 1918–1941, Oxford: Clarendon, 1981. ‘Capital ships’ refer to the key warships of a navy, typically battleships and cruisers of more than 10,000 tons, possessing the heaviest firepower and armour. Nowadays, of course, sovereignty and jurisdiction over the territorial sea and contiguous zone may extend up to 12 nautical miles; the Exclusive Economic Zone stretches 200 miles seaward from land. For a comprehensive survey of contemporary issues in the maritime domain, see L. W. Prabhakar, J. H. Ho and S. Bateman (eds), The Evolving Maritime Balance

Southeast Asia and the maritime balance of power 71 of Power in the Asia-Pacific, Singapore: World Scientific, 2006. For a wider angle on the geopolitical landscape, see C. R. Mohan, ‘India and the Balance of Power’, Foreign Affairs, July/August 2006; S. Devare, India and Southeast Asia: Towards Security Convergence, Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2006; C. G. Kwa, ‘ASEAN-China Relations’, RSIS Commentaries, 8/2007, 5 February 2007; and H. G. Gelber, The Dragon and the Foreign Devils: China and the World, 1100 BC to the Present, London: Bloomsbury, 2007. 38 See Prabhakar, Ho and S. Bateman (eds.), The Evolving Maritime Balance of Power in the Asia-Pacific, pp. 12, 71–116; C. J. Pehrson, ‘String of Pearls: Meeting the Challenge of China’s Rising Power Across the Asian Littoral’, SSI Carlisle Papers in Security Strategy (July 2006); A. Kumar, ‘A New Balance of Power Game in the Indian Ocean: India gears up to tackle Chinese influence in the Maldives and Sri Lanka’, IDSA Strategic Comments (24 November 2006); and D. Scott, ‘India’s “Grand Strategy” for the Indian Ocean: Mahanian Visions’, Asia-Pacific Review, 13:2 (2006). In contemplating whether a string of Chinese ‘pearls’ really possesses the ability to encircle or strangulate, even when ‘nuclearized’, it is still useful to recall historical antecedents such as the aberration of the Ming voyages in China’s largely continental mentality or the limitations of the chain of European fortified enclaves. The ‘string of pearls’—a current euphemism for China’s Indian Ocean bases—forms the centrepiece of an interim maritime strategy to guarantee access to energy supplies in the Middle East as well as unimpeded access to trade. Conversely, flying in the face of arguments by advocates of Mahanian strategies based on seapower (such as K. M. Panikkar), it should be remembered that independent India’s traumatic defeat by China in the war of 1962 had once again come over land rather than from the sea. 39 For useful analysis of this central theme, see A. I. Latif, Between Rising Powers: China, Singapore and India, Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2007.

6

Regional maritime security environment A Chinese Perspective Cai Penghong

Introduction China is among the stakeholders in maintaining stable, safe and secure oceans, particularly in East Asian and Southeast Asian seas. With its rapidly growing economy, China’s demand for oil and raw materials, and its increasing trade exchanges lead to debates on China’s rise of sea power and its implications on Southeast Asia and the Indian Ocean. This chapter describes China’s growth arising from Asian dynamism and globalization, discusses the demand for energy and existing problems, and analyses the implications of domestic policy settings on its quest for engaging with Southeast Asian approaches to the cooperative mechanism for the Straits of Malacca and Singapore. Finally, the conclusion covers the author’s principal perspectives on the regional situation, China’s naval development, its dispatchment of a fleet of naval ships to the Gulf of Aden, China and India, South China Sea and the Straits of Malacca and Singapore.

China’s rise along with Asian dynamism Even until about 2005, China’s rise was spoken of as an effort in progress. Now, China’s rise seems a fait accompli, particularly in an economic sense. Its rise is a process triggered only recently and is starting its way to building a moderately prosperous society; but this follows the East Asian miracle. From 1965 to 1990 the twenty-three economies of East Asia grew faster than all other regions of the world, of which only eight were highly performed. China was not among those eight who achieved the miracle.1 China’s economic performance has been noticeable since the early 1990s, particularly the 1997 financial crisis. Its foreign exchange reserve was over USD100 billion in 1997 and reached a plateau at USD1.9 trillion in August 2008.2 China’s gross domestic product (GDP) of the year 2007 was RMB24.7 trillion (around USD3 trillion), which makes China the fourth-largest economy in the world.3 China’s miraculous growth has resulted from trade regionalization. The country’s export and import trade with Asia accounted for USD1.2 trillion in 2007 (exports for USD568.0b and imports for USD619.9b).4 Therefore, China has depended heavily on shipping transportation and has actively built ports.

Regional maritime security environment 73 When Hong Kong is included, China had the largest controlled shipping fleet in the world in 2009 in terms of ship numbers, and the third largest in deadweight tons after Japan and Greece.5 China’s shipyards completed 13.5 million tons of new ships in 2008,6 making it the world’s third-largest ship builder (after South Korea and Japan), and it plans to become the world’s largest before 2020.7 Building containerships of 10,000 TEU capacity has been proposed in the document ‘Outline of the Eleventh Five-year Plan for China’s Shipping and Technology Development’ (2007).8 According to this document, China plans to reach the capability in 2010 of building such a containership based on self-reliance in design and construction. China’s ports handled 103.5 million TEUs in 2007 with an expected handing of 113.3 million TEUs in 2008.9 this figure will surely be over 100 million TEU again in 2008. It is expected that there will be 377 professional ports capable of handling 136 million TEUs by 2010.10 China’s distinctive geographic conformation resulted in a conservative economy and military strategies focusing on the central part of continental China. However, the country’s economic prosperity can no longer depend on its classical notion of regarding itself as a central empire without looking east. The past thirtyyears of development in China seems to reaffirm the axiom of geography and its relation with a nation’s destiny. The fact that the regionalization as well as globalization process links China to its neighboring region and almost all corners throughout the world proves that China has been very much interdependent with East Asia and other regions. The links, at least through trade, cannot be separable from waters, significantly a spatial meaning in a new era.

Energy and security With the Vietnam War and the Cambodian War ending in 1975 and in the early 1990s respectively, the countries in the region from Northeast to Southeast Asia began focusing all effort on economic construction – and energy consumption surged. Energy demand has unusual effects, not only on people’s daily lives and companies’ production, but on a nation’s economic security as well. It is normal that a country with rapid growth would exert more and more demands for oil and gas. Based on the principle that its conduct complies with international laws and respecting the sovereignty and the jurisdictional rights of coastal countries, China utilizes East Asia seas and the Indian Ocean to transport oil and raw materials for internal development. Countries in the region, such as Japan and South Korea, have focused their attention on energy-related maritime security issues. China too has similarly done so. Energy security refers to a concept linking security and access to energy resources. It is therefore closely related with the availability of domestic or local and international resources and cannot be separated from the issue of potential or possible disruption of energy-import supplies. This includes temporary and longer disruptions of transport routes, which would threaten a country on a track of internal development. Basically, there are three maritime lines connecting China and its international trade, including the importing of energy, but the most important maritime routes are those that pass through the

74 Cai Penghong South China Sea, the Straits of Malacca and Singapore, and the Indian Ocean to the Middle East. However, since the middle of the 1990s, almost all those who watch the Indo-Pacific region have obviously connected maritime security with the energy-related SLOCs, and one of the conclusions flowing from this is that the maritime stability is fragile because of increasing piracy and other illegal incidents. On 13 November 2008, a Chinese fishing trawler was attacked in the waters off the Somali coast. Regional maritime insecurity may result from the effect of energy-related SLOCs but it has these features with some problems. The first one is non-traditional threats. As John Bradford put it, maritime challenges have been associated with piracy and hijacking in Southeast Asian waters.11 Most pirate activities occurring along the Indo-Pacific sea region are close to SLOCs. Although the Straits of Malacca and Singapore have been much safer from pirates during the last few years, Northeast Asian countries are still on the alert for pirate and hijacking activities. In addition, among the top rank of the list of non-security threats is terrorist attack. Since the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States, the region has also been warned against attacks possibly spawned by al-Qaeda or one of its affiliates. Fortunately, there has not been such a disaster happening in the Straits of Malacca and Singapore, but the coordinated patrols in the sea lanes, particularly in the Straits should be supported. The patrol is effective in dealing with transnational crimes, although there are also other approaches to eliminate the source of terrorism and illegal activities. The second feature is one of maritime overlapping claims. The energy-related SLOCs pass through some disputed waters, covering some islands, territorial shelves and EEZ areas claimed by coastal countries. Jurisdictional conflicts and overlapping claims over islets, and water areas in the South China Sea have been researched and explored for a smart solution. Hasjim Djalal argues that it is necessary to respect the interpretation of territorial claims by individual countries,12 but there is also the need to respect the historical evidence and is to be aware that the interpretation of international law is not to be disregarded. The third feature is concerned with pollution. The energy-related issue should cover marine environment and pollution in East Asian seas. These pollution issues include oil spills, potential nuclear wastes, acid rains and even sand storms. The media regards the Yellow Sea almost as a ‘dead sea’ because of pollution. This is serious, not only for China, but also for surrounding countries. Some of these issues are related to economic development. One should incorporate ‘sustainable development’ measures with scientific methods into development plans in the early stages of development in order to avoid marine environment and pollution. The issue is also related to SLOC issues, because the marine environment and pollution may interrupt normal transportation, particularly when oil spills occur. The fourth feature is about relations between SLOC issues and security. The connotation of security expands to economic security, to energy security, to and does not rely only on a traditional concept. Since the 1990s, one has to be concerned about economy security because it becomes a part of core national interests. In addition, energy issue seems no longer a term referring to low politics but is among items of high politics. One may argue it could be an issue related to naval

Regional maritime security environment 75 power because the navy has strong capabilities to control the SLOCs. Based on complying with international law and respecting sovereignty of coastal countries, navies should protect their national interests against any attacks in the transport lines routes if they have the capability. One may be optimistic that the status quo can be maintained for a long time. There are some explanations helpful for us to infer why this status quo can be maintained. First, the awareness of common interests might prevent conflict and mitigate rivalries. The common interests are among China and other Asian coastal countries. For China, common interests, mutual benefits and common development, reflect its new diplomacy. China’s peaceful development is seeking an affluent society, a harmonious and happy community for its population. Other neighboring countries such as Japan, India and Southeast Asian countries, might share a sense of common interest and thus have a common awareness of disastrous consequences after a naval war. Maritime stability and security will be beneficial to East Asia as well as to other regions. Second, China is concentrating its effort on economic development internally and seeking a harmonious periphery as a part of its new diplomacy. China’s peaceful development is contributing to East Asian integration, a process for a community inclusive of regional countries. However, the issues of traditional security, whose central contents are to defend state sovereignty, maintain the integrity of its territory and national right of existence, are a major threat China is now confronting. Meanwhile, China is also meeting the threats of non-traditional security, including economic, climate, public health, security, etc. China is in a transition process from a revolutionary profile to a country committed to being responsible and accountable in the international arena, which means China would do its best to comply with international rules and laws for a peaceful region as well as the world. China has demonstrated great restraint in handling such matters as the incident when Japanese activists established a lighthouse in the Diaoyudao islands, its exploration of gas fields on the western side of the middle of the East China Sea, although China’s position should not have allowed any illegal activities by Japanese companies on China’s continental shelves and islands. Third, the United States is a factor in East Asia, playing somewhat the role of ‘balancer’. One would appreciate the American action to protect the SLOCs from terrorist attacks and other countries can take advantage as a free rider to use the sea lanes. China does not reject the presence of the U.S. in East Asia, which can be attributed to history. The issue now is that the U.S. is suspicious of China, mistakenly regarding China as a potential rival threatening American interests in East Asia.13 As a matter of fact, China is not a potential threat to the United States. China’s Navy (PLAN) has its sacred mission to safeguard and maintain the sovereignty of its territorial seas along with its maritime rights and interests. It is normal for PLAN to intensify and improve the capability to fulfill its tasks and it is natural that PLAN is to be a strong navy as China becomes a true power in the near future. China’s increasing capability does not mean it has the intention to wage war against Southeast Asia, but rather to prevent national sovereignty and maritime rights and interests from aggressors and infringements

76 Cai Penghong through the ocean. One understands that aircraft carriers can be applied as offensive tools but Liu Huaqing emphasizes it as a defensive measure.14 To prevent a rising sea power from confronting an existing power, one needs to design a proposal on how to prevent incidents at sea beyond the territorial waters. The central issue is, therefore, how to ensure peaceful co-existence between the Chinese and the United States’ navies on the high seas in the foreseeable future.

China’s strategic thinking for regional maritime security China’s reform policy settings have been a foundation-facilitating openness and pursuing a policy for oil and raw materials. In the 1980s China’s priority was to promote domestic reform, an important step for its economic openness to the Asia Pacific region. At that time, many Asian economies, including South Korea, Malaysia and others were more open. The Chinese strategy is first to realize poverty reduction and then for building a favorable peripheral environment, which can be used to support domestic well-being improvement or economic construction. Improving domestic governance with establishing institutions have been carried out and will continue China’s reform and open-up policy, which is in favor of its thinking strategy for neighboring region. The stability of peripheral environment benefits China, but more important is that the regional and global experience in business can be employed to push forward China’s ‘Go abroad strategy’. As mentioned, seeking overseas supplies such as energy confronts maritime security issues. Although China’s exact strategy for maritime security has not yet been issued by the government and Politburo, its basic strategic thinking can be outlined based on Chinese experts’ discourses and remarks. What are the maritime security issues? The first is the threat to integrity of territory and national sovereignty. In the new century, China’s potential threat is from the east water region. The goals of Mao Zedong’s quest in 1953 for a strong navy, and President Hu Jintao’s remark in 2006 to strengthen and modernize the navy force, is to maintain China’s territorial integrity and safeguard China’s rights and interests of seas. Second, in the post-Cold War period non-traditional security threats are escalating mainly because of the fact that non-military threats such as piracy, hijackings, drug smuggling and human smuggling have been salient in the region. Third, energy and sea transport lane issues have significant effects on internal economic construction. Fourth, natural disasters in the oceans have adverse effects on human beings. China has been concerned about those maritime issues, including the safe and secure Straits of Malacca and Singapore. The Chinese government has been taking a clear, consistent stance on the issue of the security of the Malacca Strait. China supports the leading efforts made by the littoral states – Malaysia, Indonesia and Singapore – in safeguarding the sovereignty and security of the Strait in accordance with the Charter of the United Nations and other generally recognized principles of international laws. On the basis of fully respecting the sovereignty and administration rights of the littoral states, China is ready to participate actively

Regional maritime security environment 77 in the cooperation on the Strait security as advocated by the International Maritime Organization (IMO) and other multilateral mechanism.

Conclusion Like others, China must safeguard its 18,000 km of coastline, over 3 million square km of sea area jurisdiction in terms of UNCLOS. The economic and technological progress will be foundation for China to become a powerful country, at links scientific research and development, continues its opening-up policy, promotes social harmony and makes every effort to build progressively a moderately prosperous society. China, therefore, seeks energy and other materials for internal development and carries out peaceful diplomacy not to challenge the existing international system, including the maritime order. China should have been not only a land power but also a sea power prior to realizing a grand goal of rejuvenating the nation. PLAN has been transforming its strategic thinking from vicinity coastal defense (Jin An Fang Yu) to offshore waters defense (Jin Hai Fang Yu) since the end of the 1980s, although the PLAN has not been one of the principal Chinese armed forces for a long time. But the situation is in changing. President Hu Jintao stressed the PLAN’s important role in protecting national sovereignty and maintaining maritime rights at the end of 2006 and personally inspected China’s significant naval base in Hainan Island in April 2008, calling for a stronger navy. Hu’s inspection and remarks have special implications that Beijing emphasizes PLAN building. A strong navy is a firm foundation to protect China’s coastal region and the country’s strategic interests in the high seas. However, there are some factors limiting China to be a naval power regionally and globally. First, China is still vulnerable, given its physical position confronting the Pacific Ocean and the factor that China’s territory is still divided by the Taiwan Strait. Second, the PLAN is a newly rising force without necessary equipment and sufficient training beyond coastal waters. At the end of 2008, China dispatched a naval fleet to the Gulf of Aden to protect commercial ships from pirate attacks off Somalia’s coast. This is their first overseas military mission since 1949 and the PLAN will certainly obtain special experience to maintain China’s strategic interests beyond its coastal waters, but the structural discrepancy remains between China and other big naval powers. This naval task force, composed of two destroyers and a depot ship, carrying a total of about 800 crew members, is much smaller in size than the fleet of vessels led by Zheng He from the Ming Dynasty six hundred years ago. Zheng commanded a fleet of vessels consisting of nine-masted boats, supply ships, water tankers, patrol boats and more than 27,000 sailors and soldiers. Compared with Zheng He’s seven missions crossing the Indian Ocean to the coast of East Africa, the Chinese naval mission seems not a big one, and a single overseas mission does not demonstrate a navy to be a powerful navy. Hence, there should not be any concern for the deployment. Third, a lack of politically mutual trust among naval powers affects China with a determination to engage with the international cooperation initiated by the U.S.

78 Cai Penghong Beijing’s independent diplomacy has been set up on the principles of preserving its own national rights and maritime interests. Beijing must be cautious about any pitfalls existing in political and security proposals because the American policy over Taiwan has been regarded as a policy at least inclining to separatism. China can only change its multilateralism based on a UN framework, and the U.S. initiative to set up an international naval force will be backed up by China. Therefore, the U.S.-led ally’s group may keep their eyes on China’s maritime activism. This tends to have a ripple effect on some Southeast Asian countries’ conduct, which will take advantage of China in economy but plausibly select the U.S. as guarantor in security. Personally, the author encourages the U.S. to cooperate in security with China sincerely and China is now preoccupied on economic construction with no intention of challenging the dominance of the U.S., let alone designing an ‘anti- access’ operational strategy against the U.S. As mentioned, the naval presence of the U.S. is historical and China does not reject it. Taiwan, however, is of China, not of the U.S. The ‘anti-access’ operational concept allegedly designating China’s strategy has been used by the Pentagon, but just to mobilize its allies to serve the American goal. China has had a very transparent strategy to unify its territory even in case of an emergent incident or war. The U.S. has had an ambivalent policy toward this, arousing doubts as to the American resolve to protect its allies in Asia. Thus, the terminology about ‘antiaccess’ operational strategy is not a representative viewpoint of the American people in general but rather that of some military officers. Fourth, it seems that India mistakenly thinks that China regards India as a major competitor. As a matter of fact, China does not look at India as a naval competitor. Chinese people appreciate that India has a long civilization in history, and it has a deeply cultural influence on China. The major threat in China’s eyes comes from the U.S., not from India. China has never regarded India as a strategic rival or a major competitor. China does not have ability to build a navy capable of regularly patrolling coastal region of India and continues to take advantage of the American navy seemingly as a ‘free rider’ for shipping oil. If possible, China needs to depend on the Indian Navy for safe SLOCs in the Indian Ocean. We believe that India has its own value seeing the U.S. charm diplomacy which has been seeking India to be a member of a four-nation alliance in Asia. Although some Chinese are optimistic that India may keep a distance from the U.S. in security issue, others are still cautious about the American intention which may see India as a counterbalance to China in the region. Chinese official views reject the Cold War mentality in Asia because there is a trend towards building up bilateral military alliances to gain absolute military superiority. This trend undermines efforts to build political mutual trust, cause uncertainty to regional security, and has become a source of concern to people. Obviously, this does not point to India. Regarding regimes for conflict management and resolution, the author would like to focus on the South China Sea (SCS) issue and the Straits of Malacca and Singapore. The SCS should be transformed from a sea of potential conflict to one of peace, stability and friendship. At present, we, on the basis of Declaration of Conduct of Parties in the South China Sea, signed in 2002, need to consider how

Regional maritime security environment 79 to push forward and implement an action plan. Without a realistic action plan, the DoC is only a political document. For any step forward, a regime for conflict management in the South China Sea must be based on the principles of basic international laws, particularly UNCLOS, peaceful settlement of disputes, and prohibition against the use of force or threats of force, the exercise of self-restraint, consultation and transparency. About the stability and security of the Straits of Malacca and Singapore, China respects the sovereignty and administration rights of the littoral states. China would like to make contributions to the maintenance of the Straits under the arrangements of the IMO.

Notes 1 The World Bank, The East Asian Miracle, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993. 2 The People’s Bank of China, ‘Gold & Foreign Exchange Reserves’. Available online at http://www.pbc.gov.cn/diaochatongji/tongjishuju/gofile.asp?file=2008S09.htm. 3 Statistics from the Central Government of the People’s Republic of China. Available online at http://www.gov.cn/test/2005-07/27/content_17464.htm. 4 Comprehensive Department, Ministry of Commerce of PRC: statistics of import and export. Available online at http://zhs2.mofcom.gov.cn/aarticle/ie/statistic/200802/ 20080205372449.html. 5 United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), Review of Maritime Transport 2009. New York: United Nations, 2009, Table 12, p. 53. 6 The Shipbuilders’ Association of Japan, Shipbuilding Statistics, September 2009, Table 2, http://www.sajn.or.jp/e/statistics/Shipbuilding_Statistics_Sep2009.pdf 7 Xu Zuyuan, ‘China becomes a major driver for global ocean transportation’, Xinhua News Agency, July 22, 2008. Available online at http://www.moc.gov. cn/zizhan/zhishujigou/zhuhangju/guanlipindao/gongzuodongtai/200807/t20080722_ 508324.html. 8 Committee on Science, Technology and Industry of National Defence, ‘Outline of the Eleventh Five-year Plan for China’s Shipping and Technology Development (2007)’ “ ” ), August 29, 2007. Available online at http://www. ( costind.gov.cn/n435777/n1146913/n1603290/n1603305/115447.html. 9 UNCTAD, Review of Maritime Transport 2009, Table 37, p. 111. 10 Ibid. 11 Lieutenant John F. Bradford, USN, ‘The growing prospects for maritime security cooperation in Southeast Asia’, Naval War College Review, Summer 2005, Vol. 58, No. 3, pp. 63–86. 12 Hasjim Djalal, ‘Managing Potential Conflicts in the South China’, Conference Paper on Asian Dynamism and Maritime Security, Maritime Forces Pacific and the Canadian Department of National Defence, September 27, 2006, Victoria BC. 13 Office of Naval Intelligence, ‘China’s Navy 2007’. 14 Liu Huaqing, Liu Huaqing’s Memoir, Beijing: People’s Liberation Army Press, 2004, p. 479.

7

Korean perspective on the maritime security environment of the region Park Chang Kwoun

East Asian countries face various potential maritime security challenges. While they clash on territorial disputes over the rights of offshore islets and sea boundaries, they must also seek a means of cooperation to counter new rising threats such as natural disasters, terrorism, piracy, and the proliferation of WMD. Government meetings and dialogues are frequently held to peacefully resolve these problems and demands. Despite signs of hope to resolve these issues through cooperation, fundamental solutions for territorial disputes seem very remote. Naval development of regional powers, such as China, India, and Japan, reflect this unstable security environment. Since South Korea is akin to an island state that is separated from the Asian continent by North Korea, it has great concern for the uncertainty of the future of maritime security. South Korea relies on foreign trade for more than 75 per cent of its economy1 and imports about 97 per cent of its energy resources.2 In particular, South Korea imports about 81 per cent of its oil from the Middle East.3 In this globalized world, South Korea recognizes the importance of maritime security and is developing a new maritime strategy to positively protect its interests. So far, North Korea has been the main security concern for South Korea, consequently constraining its naval activities to the coastal areas. However, South Korea will change this old security paradigm to protect its maritime interests and enhance international contributions.

Major challenges and risks to regional maritime security Island disputes and the drawing of sea boundary lines Island disputes and EEZ issues will be the most important challenge and risk to regional security. The new international maritime law effective since 1994 enhanced the strategic importance of even tiny offshore islets. Many countries declared their EEZs as boundary lines based on these islets and planned to explore the vast areas within the EEZs. As the competition for energy resources becomes more intensive, coastal states look to the sea not only as a traditional highway for international commerce, but also as a new frontier for acquiring natural resources in need. The development of technology which enables exploitation of oil and natural gas in the continental shelves and in the deep seabed is strengthening this trend.

Korean perspective on the maritime security environment of the region 81 Maritime conflicts among regional countries exhibit the following three characteristics. First, China’s friendly approach to the region signals a hope for assuaging political tension in the sea. China and Southeast Asian countries announced in 2002 to peacefully resolve the South China Sea dispute and to respect safe transit in the area.4 In June 2008, China and Japan agreed to cooperatively develop the gas field of the East China Sea that has long been under dispute.5 Heads of both Korea and China at the summit in August 2009 promised to continue diplomatic dialogues to set sea boundaries through announcement.6 Even though the scope of cooperation is still very limited, these efforts may open the way for the creation of a new maritime environment. Second, in order to facilitate favorable conditions, regional countries firmly maintain their territorial claims of the offshore islets in conflict and take political measures to strengthen their maritime rights. They utilize various means, such as public announcements, domestic legal actions, and scholarly activities, not only to show their political resolve but also to garner support from their people as well as the international society. Naval development in particular will deliver a more direct message regarding their will, as well as their capabilities, to the other parties in dispute. Therefore the strengthening of naval arms by regional powers is a warning bell for maritime security. Third, maritime disputes are a major obstacle for the development of security cooperation among regional countries. Asian countries have dramatically enhanced economic and social ties but still maintain a very limited level of security cooperation. As Asia becomes the fastest-growing and the most dynamic region of the world, there is no doubt that the twenty-first century will be Asia’s century. In order not to lose this opportunity, Asian countries are making a great effort to institutionalize mutual cooperation systems such as the Free Trade Association (FTA). But, unlike Europe, existing maritime disputes discourage cooperation for common security, economy, and social objectives. SLOC protection SLOC protection is a key factor for international trade in this globalized world. As in other Northeast Asian countries, South Korea has a vital interest in maintaining the safety of SLOCs, spanning from the South China Sea, the Malacca Strait, the Indian Ocean, to the Middle East. Nowadays, terrorism and pirate attacks cause great concern for the safety of SLOCs. Regarding frequent pirate attacks off the Somali coast, many countries dispatched naval ships to the area under the UN resolution that allows and requests international military action in the coastal areas of Somalia. The United States plays a major role in efforts to construct a maritime security cooperation system in the region. The coordinated patrols of Malacca Strait by the coastal countries greatly contributes to the safety of the South China Sea and the straits.7 Nevertheless, it is not easy to eliminate pirates and terrorists unless we can resolve the root causes of the activities, such as extreme poverty, domestic instability, and political malignancy. Pirates and terrorists can attack ships at port

82 Park Chang Kwoun or in transit using various guerilla-type tactics. Moreover, they can orchestrate a surprise attack with sophisticated equipment such as missiles, high explosives, satellite communication systems, and high-speed boats. Frequent seizure of South Korean ships around Somalia’s coast raises great national concern over piracy. South Korean ships and crew members who were kidnapped by Somali pirates in 2006, 2007, and 2008 were released after a considerable ransom was paid. It is reported that some South Korean shipping companies hire British mercenaries with special devices to protect their safety.8 South Korea had dispatched a naval ship for the participation of ongoing international efforts. Also, war and conflicts in coastal countries, and rivalry of power, can disrupt the safety of SLOCs. During the tanker war in the late 1980s, Iran tried to cut down the transit of the Hormuz Strait through mine placements and missile attacks. Nowadays, in spite of strong U.S. opposition, Iran’s nuclear efforts reignite concerns on the safety of the international strait. Furthermore, if regional conflicts, such as the war in the Taiwan Straits, in which the U.S. and China was involved at the same time occur, the safety of SLOCs can always be threatened. Disasters and humanitarian assistance The 2004 tsunami demonstrated the huge costs and transnational damage of natural disasters. The Cyclone Nargis, that occurred last May, also caused massive humanitarian disasters in Myanmar. Many countries quickly initiated emergency relief efforts, including delivery of food and materials, by dispatching naval ships. Because it is difficult to predict when and how disasters will take place, most countries cannot garner proper capabilities to handle such disasters in advance. Poor and underdeveloped countries in particular, have very limited resources to counter these threats. Naval cooperation can be one of the most feasible means for conducting disaster relief and humanitarian assistance operations. South Korea experienced the largest crude oil leakage on the West Sea in December 2007 following the collision of a tanker with a drifting crane. More than 10,000 tons of crude oil spilled into the sea and the coastal areas. Navy ships were sent to work with other agency vessels to remove the oil slick.9 China and Japan also dispatched experts and delivered some materials. If such an accident occurs in a border area, particularly around North Korea, cooperation will be needed among the related parties. Especially, the vulnerability of the North Korean regime raises concerns on the possible occurrence of a disaster. Proliferation prevention North Korea is perceived as one of the most potential proliferators of WMD materials. It successfully conducted nuclear tests in October 2006 and declared the extraction of roughly 38 kg of weapons-grade plutonium.10 Many countries believe that North Korea may be tempted to sell the highly lucrative materials

Korean perspective on the maritime security environment of the region 83 if their economic situation further deteriorates. In fact, North Korea earns a considerable amount of foreign capital through missile sales. Meanwhile, the United States and many other countries intend to take action to interdict proliferation on the ocean through the Proliferation Security Initiative (PSI). Nevertheless, and regardless of PSI participation, most countries agree that nuclear proliferation should be prevented. South Korea believes that North Korean nuclear development and proliferation could be the most significant threat to its security.

Naval development of regional powers and its implications In the absence of a security mechanism in the region, naval build-up of regional powers increases the uncertainty of maritime security. China’s pursuing to be a world-leading country comparable to the U.S. in the long term thinks that naval strength is very essential to deny and challenge the existing maritime order and systems in which the U.S. maintains and dominates. India, as a new power, wants to play a major role in the Indian Ocean and South East Asia. Japan, as a maritime state, seeks to be a normal state that wields its political power commensurate with its economic status. With new naval arms, these regional powers intend to expand their maritime interests and enhance their influence in the changing new international security order. Their growing naval forces equipped with highly-technological systems would enable them to carry out a variety of missions, including costal operations as well as open-sea operations. In this age of globalization, naval power is the foundation for expanding one’s international influence. In the past, owing to the dominant role of the U.S. and the former Soviet Union, the activities of the other players in the international system were limited. With the turn of the twenty-first century, the rising regional powers want to remold the pre-existing world order and create a new maritime environment favorable to their interests; strong naval forces would be a basic asset in pursuing these objectives. In particular, maritime disputes and competition over securing resources are major driving forces in building new naval fleets. Competition to secure resources is visibly taking place in the world. As was recently made apparent by the high oil prices, it is predicted that the problem of insufficient resources will have an important impact on national security. The sea holds the potential for finding more resources, and thus its security importance as a new frontier is further increasing. In addition, following the advancement of globalization, securing safe international trade is becoming more important to the growing economy of regional countries. Under the security conditions of a lack of mutual trust and credibility, the new security demands can cause regional powers to build stronger naval forces. The increase in the naval strength of East Asian countries displays a kind of security dilemma. In order to resolve this dilemma, a practical cooperation plan must be devised to enhance the transparency of naval strengths and mutual trust. Above all, regional powers should recognize the importance and benefits of maritime cooperation, and then find an area such as disaster relief assistance where they can share mutual interests and easily act together. From such an area, they

84 Park Chang Kwoun can start to construct a cooperative environment where they can draw mutual roles and responsibilities, as well as new norms and codes of conduct. For some time, all of the regional countries need to put aside all disputes that are too difficult to be resolved within the principles of peace. It is important to first promote a foundation for all regional countries to be able to use the sea communally.

South Korea’s policy and strategy for maritime security South Korea maintains security arrangements focused mainly on North Korea. However, it now expands its naval strength as it gradually acknowledges the importance of maritime security. Although South Korea is a maritime nation, it was difficult to be involved in international maritime issues in the past because its economic power was limited. South Korea was merely concerned with defending territorial waters against North Korea’s maritime infiltration. But with the development of the new maritime environment, South Korea will take more interest in maritime affairs. Subsequently, problems such as territorial disputes and piracy have newly underlined the interest and caution that South Korea holds in terms of maritime security. Most countries today are assuming a more aggressive and active policy on its maritime assertions. As stated before, regional powers are rapidly increasing their naval strengths on the basis of new national powers. Because maritime disputes are basically problems between directly related countries, the role and influence of outside powers would be very limited. Hence, the new naval strength of regional powers can be used directly as a key leverage at the negotiation table and a means of actual coercive actions. South Korea is concerned about the rise in naval strengths of regional powers and the impact that conflict between these powers will have on South Korea. Because the Korean peninsula is a strategic bridgehead where land powers and sea powers cross, it cannot avoid being influenced by rivalry between great powers. Although South Korea’s economic status ranks thirteenth in the world, it is small compared to its neighbors. South Korea pursues survival and prosperity in this unstable security structure by maintaining the South Korea–U.S. alliance, while improving relations with regional powers. Nonetheless, because South Korea is not in a position to lead and dominate issues, it is extremely difficult for South Korea to take the initiative to overcome its security weakness and create a stable maritime environment. In South Korea’s perspective, it is important to develop a multilateral security cooperation system in the region. Currently, because political and economic relations between the countries are being increased and the importance of mutual cooperation is being acknowledged, the development of regional security cooperation does not look pessimistic. The six-party talks, created to solve the North Korean nuclear problem, can serve as a good model to the multilateral cooperation system. Because regional powers are also potential global powers, the development of a regional cooperation system will open a new security environment for peace and stability in the world.

Korean perspective on the maritime security environment of the region 85 There is already much cooperation to protect sea trade routes, respond to natural disasters, counter pirates and terrorism, and to prevent the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. Regional countries hold a meeting and continue a dialog to prepare for common threats and to build a cooperative mechanism. Needless to say, responding to natural disasters and pirates is in the common interest, thus, cooperation should be easy. However, there can be differing views on cooperation for protecting sea trade routes and preventing the spread of weapons of mass destruction. Thus, it would be wise to first build trust in the area of identified common interests and to expand its effects to other areas later. South Korea pursues the following policies and strategies for its maritime security. First, it seeks to actively protect and maintain its interest concerning maritime rights. As an underdeveloped state in the past, South Korea had very few opportunities to defend and maintain its national interests. Now, South Korea stands firm to respond to any challenges to its maritime security. However, considering the importance of regional security cooperation, it is making more efforts to improve mutual understanding through diplomatic talks and to resolve disputes peacefully with a long-term perspective. Second, South Korea is willing to participate actively in supporting international activities and cooperation systems for the safety of sea lanes. It is also trying to expand cooperation with coastal states of its major sea lanes. Following the increase of piracy off the Somali coasts, South Korea has dispatched one destroyer to the area. As far as the stability of sea lanes and national interest is concerned, it is important to share responsibilities and roles among concerned countries. Third, South Korea will expand its international peacekeeping activities and humanitarian assistance. Like many other states, South Korea provided relief assistance by dispatching a naval vessel in the 2004 tsunami. Personal security, in addition to traditional national security, is becoming a major issue in the present international order. South Korea is discussing ways to develop a cooperative mechanism with regional countries to properly counter natural disasters, which would be an important step for the enhancement of mutual respect. Also, it plans to build standby peacekeeping forces for the increase of international contribution. To protect its maritime interests and expand its role in the international community, South Korea wants to develop proper naval capabilities, so it is now acquiring new modern types of destroyers including Aegis and multi-purpose transportation ships. Compared with the naval forces of regional powers, South Korean naval forces could be considered weak but it can provide significant capabilities on behalf of its interests in maritime security.

Conclusion Maritime security is becoming more important. Regional disputes regarding offshore islets and the EEZs seem to be the most difficult to resolve. Meanwhile, new problems, including the protection of sea lanes, piracy, disaster relief, and proliferation of WMD, present challenges and opportunities for bilateral and multilateral cooperation. As a maritime state, South Korea will take positive

86 Park Chang Kwoun actions to protect its maritime interests and find a suitable role for maritime security in the international community. With growing national power, regional countries are also pursuing maritime policies more aggressively. The expansion of their naval capabilities in particular causes a challenge to the regional maritime order and raises concerns to the other regional states. South Korea believes that developing a multilateral security cooperation system is very important to peacefully resolve various maritime security issues in the region. Unlike other parts of the world, Northeast Asia has no formal institutional mechanism except the six-party talks to meet regularly and extend mutual understanding for regional security. It is perceived that maritime disputes can be the very point which ignites a breakout of a conflict in the region while maritime common interests can be a catalyst to promote cooperation among regional countries. Therefore, it is important for regional countries to make more effort to exploit and institutionalize maritime cooperative measures.

Notes 1 Korea National Statistical Office, International Statistics Yearbook 2008, Seoul, 2008, p. 380. Available online at http://www.kosis.kr 2 Korea Energy Economics Institute, Yearbook of Energy Statistics 2008, Seoul, 2008, pp. 1–9. Available online at http://www.mke.go.kr/info/Public/PublishList.jsp. 3 Ministry of Knowledge Economy and Korea Energy Economic Institute, Yearbook of Energy Statistics, 2008, Seoul, 2008. Available online at http://www.mke.go.kr/Search/ info/Public/Public_04view.jsp?board_id=p_04_04_01&code=3700&sn=572 4 ASEAN, “Declaration on the Conduct of Parties in the South China Sea.” Available online at http://www.aseansec.org/13163.htm. 5 China, Japan reach principled consensus on East China Sea Issue. Available online at http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2008-06/18/content_8394296.htm. 6 Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade, “Korea-China Joint Statement,” 25 August 2009. Available online at http://www.mofat.go.kr/state/areadiplomacy/asiapacific/index.jsp 7 ICC International Maritime Bureau, Piracy and Armed Robbery Against Ships, Annual Report 2007, January 2008. 8 CS worldwide, “Shipping Companies Employing Mercenary in order to Prevent Piracy,” 23 October 2008. Available online at http://www.csww.co.kr/board/index. pup?boardid=board-notice&mode=view&no=159. 9 South Koreans struggle to clean up “sea of oil,” MSNBC, 8 December 2007. Available online at http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/22140662. 10 “North Korean Report on its Nuclear Program,” JooAng Daily, 26 June 2008. Available online at http://nk.joins.com/news/view.asp?aid=3148772&cont=news_polit

8

Regional maritime security environment The Malaysian perspective Mohd Nizam Basiron and Sumathy Permal

‘Gajah sama gajah bergaduh, pelandok mati ditengah-tengah’ When two elephants fight, the mousedeer in the middle dies. (Old Malay proverb)

The above proverb describes the dilemma, though not necessarily the ultimate fate, of small countries caught in conflict between two powers. How does one balance one’s interest in the face of increasing competition over the control of sea lines of communication (SLOC), changing maritime security scenarios, traditional and non-traditional threats to security, and the demands of the international community for a safe and secure passageway? Such is the conundrum faced by countries such as Malaysia, which borders one of the world’s most important straits used for international navigation, the Malacca Strait, and an equally important SLOC, the South China Sea, which together accounted for a high percentage of world cargo movement. It is a complex situation requiring a careful balancing act of national interests, regional sensitivities and international expectations. It would have been easy enough for a country like Malaysia to hop on the bandwagon of the biggest power around, but national political expediency and regional realities may dictate that countries adopt what some authors have described as the ‘middle position’ in ensuring that their sovereignty is not jeopardised or compromised by cooperating with rather than acquiescing to the demands of the powers. This chapter describes Malaysia’s perspective of the rise of India and China in light of past, current and emerging maritime security issues, and discusses Malaysia’s actions and options in resolving its conundrum over these issues.

Malaysia’s maritime domain Malaysia’s maritime domain comprises four ‘seas,’ with a total area almost twice its landmass – the Malacca Strait, the South China Sea, the Sulu Sea and the Sulawesi Sea, each with its own set of unique problems and issues requiring tailormade rather than one-size-fits-all solutions. The problems in the Malacca Strait have been much discussed and revolved essentially around safety of navigation,

88 Mohd Nizam Basiron and Sumathy Permal environment protection and, to a lesser extent, security issues which came to the fore following the increase in piracy or sea robbery incidence between the years 2000 and 2005.1 In the South China Sea, the issues are more related to overlapping claims by six countries overall or parts of the Spratly islets and the seas around them, and competition over fisheries resources. The dispute has thus far defied solution2 and resulted in much discussed confrontations such as the Mischief Reef incident and the naval clash between China and Vietnam in 1988.3 Malaysia’s problems in the Sulu Sea, on the other hand, relate more to non-traditional maritime security issues involving the cross-boundary movements of the population between Southern Philippines and Sabah, smuggling, and a long-running insurgency with attendant kidnapping and terrorism activities.4 The situation in the Sulawesi Sea is somewhat similar to the Sulu Sea where the human issues are concerned, but is made more complicated by an ongoing maritime boundary dispute between Malaysia and Indonesia over Batuan Unarang.5 This complex picture, however, represents only a part of Malaysia’s maritime security environment perspective. Superimpose on this the interests of the region’s emerging maritime powers and that of the United States, and the picture becomes more convoluted to the point that where Malaysia is concerned, the term ‘maritime domain awareness’ takes on a new meaning as far as its complexity is concerned. This is probably the appropriate time to introduce into the discussion the interests and intentions of India, China and others vis-à-vis Malaysia’s maritime domain and how it affects Malaysia’s maritime security environment.

Caught between India’s ‘Look East Policy’ and China’s ‘String of Pearls’ To be sure, the competition between India and China extends beyond the maritime realm. Indeed India sees China as an emerging twenty-first century competition and threat with common ambitions, not only in terms of economic prowess but also from the perspective of their role on Southeast Asian geopolitics. In fact, there are those in India who questioned why China’s geopolitical ‘role aspirations’ are more acceptable than India’s.6 Both India and China have articulated their vision through a set of policy and strategy: India via its ‘Look East Policy’ and China through its ‘String of Pearls’ strategy. Both approaches envisage certain roles and positions for the two countries in economy and presumably geopolitics, and both met in Southeast Asia, which could be considered as the confluence of India–China strategic interests. India has made a number of policy statements where its relationship with Southeast Asia is concerned. These include a statement by the then Prime Minister of India A.B Vajpayee who described Southeast Asia as one of the ‘focal points of India’s foreign policy, strategic concerns and economic interests’, a point reiterated by the present Prime Minister who noted the challenge of creating and maintaining an environment which would foster and sustain economic growth.7 Recently however, India’s ‘Look East Policy’, though not explicitly expressed, has

The Malaysian perspective 89 taken on a strategic outlook. India’s External Affairs Minister, Pranab Mukherjee, recently noted that India needs to re-establish itself as a maritime power for the sake of the country’s energy security.8 As a collorary to this, an essential component of India’s ’Look East Policy’ could therefore be an arrangement between India and other countries for coordinated patrols of the region. This would be in line with India’s Maritime Doctrine which emphasizes, among others, the vital need to secure its maritime environment, its Exclusive Economic Zone, and to address its geo-strategic imperatives in the Indian Ocean and security of its SLOC that includes the Malacca Strait.9 In fact, at the height of the piracy/maritime robbery crisis, Indian Coast Guard vessels reportedly escorted vessels carrying ‘valuable’ cargo passing through the Malacca Strait,10 much to the consternation of Indonesia and Malaysia. In implementing its maritime doctrine, India has engaged in a number of exercises with countries bordering the Indian Ocean and the Malacca Strait. The Indian Navy has been exercising with its Singaporean counterparts, as well as with the Indonesian Navy and the Thai Navy. It has also established a bilateral agreement with Indonesia called, ‘IndIndon’ that involves patrolling the western approaches of the Malacca Strait. The Indian and Indonesian navies have also conducted a cooperative exercise called IndIndonCorpat (IndoIndonesia Coordinated Patrol). Similarly, India has also been engaged in maritime cooperation with Singapore that includes joint naval exercises, submarine training and bilateral exchanges. China has also been forthright in expressing its intention in this region. For example, President Hu Jintao in 2003 stated that resolving the ‘Malacca-dilemma’ is the key to China’s energy security and that several powers (the United States included) have tried to enlarge the scope of their influence by trying to control navigation in the Strait of Malacca.11 This was echoed by the China Youth Daily newspaper which noted in 2004 that ‘It is no exaggeration to say that whoever controls the Strait of Malacca will also have a stranglehold on the energy route of China’.12 China’s concerns are understandable as it is currently dependent on the Strait of Malacca as well as the Lombok and Makassar Straits for the transportation of 60 per cent of its crude oil imports, a figure which is set to increase to 75 per cent by 2015.13 Where the Strait of Malacca is concerned, China’s position has been clear. In 2004 China stated openly at a conference that China ‘stands ready to cooperate with other countries’ in building an enduring and stable regional maritime security environment in the Straits14 and at subsequent meetings organised under the auspices of the IMO reiterated this position. The Chinese delegate noted that China is unambiguous, explicit and consistent in its support of efforts by the littoral states in safeguarding the sovereignty and security of the Strait. However, China also stressed that such cooperation should be open and transparent. China also made a commitment to undertake the project on replacement of the aids to navigation destroyed by the tsunami disaster and also to participate in the project on cooperation and capacity building on Hazardous and Noxious Substances preparedness and response in the Strait of Malacca and Singapore, as well as

90 Mohd Nizam Basiron and Sumathy Permal the project to set up a tide, current, and wind measurement system for the Strait of Malacca and Singapore.15 China regards the Straits of Malacca as an integral part of its ‘String of Pearls’ which extends from South China Sea to the Persian Gulf and includes, among others, a container shipping facility in Chittagong, Bangladesh, the construction of a naval base in Gwadar, Pakistan, and a deepwater port in Sittwe, Myanmar. China’s activities, however, have caused concern among India’s defence officials who saw it and others, such as China’s proposed upgrading of its communication and helicopter landing facility on Myanmar’s Coco islands, as attempts to ‘encircle its territory’.16 It is clear that India and China appear to have adopted somewhat different approaches in cooperating with the littoral countries of the Malacca Strait. China’s ‘soft-power’ projection by offering assistance to improve safety of navigation in the Strait and building infrastructure elsewhere have not been matched by India, who seems to prefer naval exercises as a means of building confidence between itself and countries in the Malacca Strait area. The difference could be the result of what has been described as China’s more ‘nuanced’ and pragmatic diplomacy but could also be an indication of China’s deeper pockets.17 The different approaches would have different results, although it has to be said that in the Malacca Strait at least offers of cash or technical and material assistance would be more acceptable given the high cost of installing and maintaining aids to navigation. Despite the apparent differences between India’s and China’s policies, both countries share common concerns for their SLOCS and energy security. These countries are emerging as economic powers with insatiable demand for energy. India, like China, is a net petroleum importer and relies on imports to meet 70 per cent of its needs18 ; also, both countries need to reduce their dependence on coal for power generation. Energy security and the fact that both China and India have significant economic interests in the Southeast Asian region, could be common grounds for cooperation.19 Malaysia’s own experience suggests that countries are willing to disregard even territorial disputes in the pursuit of energy security through the joint development of hydrocarbon resources in disputed areas.20

Other players There are other ‘players’ in the regional maritime security equation besides India and China. The two most active ones are Japan and the United States. Like China, Japan has a strategic and economic interest in ensuring the safety of navigation and security in the Strait of Malacca and the South China Sea as most of its oil supply passes through these areas. Japan has long had a presence in the Strait and has contributed financially to maintenance and upkeep of aids to navigation in the Strait of Malacca. More recently the Nippon Foundation contributed USD1.35 million to the Strait of Malacca Aids to Navigation Fund signaling Japan’s continued commitments in this region. At the strategic level, the former Japanese Prime Minister, Mr. Shintaro Abe, in 2007 invited India to join Japan’s proposed ‘Arc of Prosperity and Freedom’21 which is intended to

The Malaysian perspective 91 spearhead Japan’s new diplomatic initiative.22

China is understandably concerned about this proposal and probably sees it as another attempt to curb its influence through the formation of a new alliance.23 The U.S. interest, however, has less to do with its own energy security and more with SLOC security in the Strait of Malacca and the South China Sea, the war on terror, and presumably the need to counter China’s growing maritime influence in the region. As far as the war on terror is concerned, the U.S. overtures have not always been well received by Malaysia. Malaysia’s lack of firm commitment to the Proliferation Security Initiative,24 for example, contrasted with its willingness to participate in the Container Security Initiative.25 The commercial implications of not complying with the latter are probably instrumental in Malaysia’s decision to participate in it as opposed to the former. Malaysia was also concerned with the link made between piracy and terrorism following the increase in piracy incidents in the Strait and in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks. Coming so soon after the September 11 incident, the probability of a nexus between terrorism and piracy in the Strait became the rallying cry for the presence of foreign powers in the Strait with offers to patrol the Strait coming from countries such as India, Japan and the U.S. Caught in a no-win position, the littoral states have had to innovate to counter the real threat of piracy, the purported threat of terrorism, the probability of the nexus between the two, and the not too covert attempts by foreign powers to grab a strategic toe-hold in the Strait. Fortunately none of the dire predictions of terrorist attacks in the Strait of Malacca and Singapore have materialised. Indeed, some of the earlier proponents of such theories have backed-down somewhat, seeing that it may be economically counter-productive to continue to harp on the nexus between piracy and terrorism. In his 2007 article in the Foreign Affairs Journal, Admiral Dennis Blair, the former Commander in Chief of U.S. Pacific Command, wrote that generally speaking, the world’s waterways are safe from terrorist attacks. Even in the congested space of the Strait, terrorists would have a difficult time blocking the waterway and would achieve little more than what pirates would achieve, namely ‘hit-and-run robberies’.26 On August 7, 2006 the Lloyd’s Joint War Risk Committee took the Malacca Strait off its war risk area listing. The dubious distinction was earned by the Strait on June 20, 2005 because of ‘long-standing security threats’ which included pirate attacks and the threat of maritime terrorism. Similarly, the International Maritime Bureau had also noted in its 2006 annual report ‘marked improvement’ in the piracy situation in Indonesia.27 In addition to issues which are more strategic and geopolitical in nature, Malaysia faces environmental security issues. At the top of the environmental security problem is the decline in fisheries resources which in turn is related to food security. While Malaysia’s fish landings are stable over the years, evidence from trawl surveys suggested that actual fish biomass in areas such as the Strait of Malacca may have declined by as much as 90 per cent. This could have severe repercussions on the supply of protein for Malaysians whose per capita seafood consumption is one of the highest in the world. Much of the overfishing is caused by

92 Mohd Nizam Basiron and Sumathy Permal the local fishing industry, but there is also a significant encroachment by foreign vessels in Malaysia’s exclusive economic zone. From 1995 to 2007 more than 2,200 encroachment cases were prosecuted in Malaysian courts and between 2000 and 2007 a total of 725 foreign fishermen were charged in Malaysia’s courts.28 The actual number of encroachments is probably higher, as not all violators are caught and prosecuted.

Balancing act Malaysia, and indeed its neighbours, face an interesting conundrum in trying to balance national interests with long-running superpower rivalries and the emerging influence of regional naval powers, namely India and China. The littoral states of the Strait of Malacca are in many ways ‘victims’ of geography because they sit astride one of the world’s strategic waterways and had historically been colonized because of this. While current international relations preclude the possibility of one country invading another for the control of a strait, national interests are usurped or undermined in other ways. Over time Malaysia has taken different approaches in managing external pressures in the Strait of Malacca and its other seas. This ‘mixed-bag’ approach appeared to have stood Malaysia in good stead but there would be a time when Malaysia would have to choose between the ‘devil-and the-deep-blue-sea’ so to speak. The essence of this is captured by Malaysia’s then Foreign Minister, Syed Hamid Albar who stated that the underlying philosophy of Malaysia’s foreign policy is the ‘fostering of better relations with neighbours and trading partners’ and that Malaysia needs ‘to maintain a neutral and non-partisan foreign policy premised on shifting geopolitical balance of power and landscape of Asia’.29 In September 2005, Malaysia signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) on Bilateral Defence Cooperation with China, the first of its kind between a Southeast Asian country and China. The MoU marks a new dimension in the Malaysia–China bilateral relationship after 31 years of formal engagement. According to Malaysia’s Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Defence, Dato’ Sri Mohd Najib Tun Razak, the MoU provided the framework for initiating bilateral defence activities such as military training, exchange of personnel and visits, exchange of information as well as constant dialogue and understanding each other’s perspectives on regional and security developments. Even though the MoU does not carry much weight in terms of defense cooperation, it is a first step for China to secure such ties with a country that is friendly towards it and that could guarantee the security of its SLOC in the Strait of Malacca. China has also shown interest in contributing to Malaysia’s mega energy projects that including the proposed pipeline from Yan in Kedah to Bachok in Kelantan. This will initially be able to transport two million barrels of oil a day. The pipeline is expected to cut the number of tankers passing through the Strait of Malacca and reduce cost by shortening travel time. The combination of approaches is two of the components of hedging which also includes limited bandwagoning, dominance denial and indirect balancing.30

The Malaysian perspective 93 Malaysia’s relations with the U.S. have always been cordial though at times testy, particularly during the Mahathir era.31 However, U.S. vessels, including nuclear powered aircraft carriers, are regular visitors to Malaysian ports and Malaysia holds annual exercises with the U.S. under the umbrella of the Cooperation and Readiness Afloat exercises (CARAT) and, as mentioned earlier, while Malaysia continues to be ambivalent about programmes such as PSI, it readily participated in the CSI, presumably because of economic reasons. It could be argued that Malaysia does see the U.S. as being an important counter-balance to China’s emerging power, albeit an indirect one. Malaysia also maintains its links with the United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand through the long-running Five Power Defence Arrangements (FPDA) which also includes Singapore. The FPDA, which began in 1971, has a significant maritime component in the form of the STARFISH exercises. In 1997 the maritime and air component of the FPDA were combined in a single exercise called ‘Flying Fish’ and subsequently the Bersatu Lima exercises held since 2004. The increasing complexity of its exercises and its reorientation towards counter-terrorism, humanitarian assistance and disaster relief suggests that the FPDA will remain a feature in Malaysia’s maritime defense engagement and provides countries such as Australia with assurance over its strategic interests in Southeast Asian SLOCs,32 a presence which it has bolstered by the deployment of its special forces in Southern Philippines.33

Concluding remarks From Malaysia’s perspective, its maritime security environment is a complex and convoluted mix of national and bilateral issues layered against geopolitical and strategic interests of the world’s remaining superpower and the regions emerging powers. It makes for an interesting dilemma for a country like Malaysia in terms of the approaches it needs to adopt in reconciling the interests and sometimes demands of the many interested parties. It has been suggested that Malaysia and other countries in the region have adopted the ‘hedging’ approach in their relations, presumably out of political pragmatism and economic expediency. This approach has worked so far for Malaysia in the absence of major conflict between the powers and, like the proverbial mousedeer, which is known for its astuteness and cunning, Malaysia may want to steer away from the two elephants when they fight, geography notwithstanding.

Notes 1 These issues were the subject of a series of meetings organized by the littoral states with support from the International Maritime Organization and resulted in the establishment of the ‘Cooperative Mechanism’ for the Straits of Malacca and Singapore. See also M.N. Basiron and Amir Dastan (eds) (2006). Building a Comprehensive Security Environment in the Straits of Malacca, MIMA, Kuala Lumpur. 2 Guoxing. J. ‘Rough Waters in the South China Sea: Navigation Issues and Confidence Building Measures’, Asia Pacific Issues. No. 53. East-West Centre, Hawaii, 2001.

94 Mohd Nizam Basiron and Sumathy Permal 3 Valencia. M.J., Van Dyke, Jon, M. and Ludwig, Noel A. Sharing the Resources of the South China Sea, University of Hawaii Press, Honolulu, 1999. 4 Ramli, H. Nik, ‘The Sulu-Sulawesi Seas: An Analysis’, Unpublished MIMA Studies Report, 2008. 5 ‘TNI commander: Malaysia still committing territorial violations in Ambalat’. Antara News Agency October 28, 2008; and ‘KL-Jakarta tensions rekindled at Ambalat’, The Straits Times, May 30 2009, p. C10. 6 Hong, Z. ‘India and China: Rivals or Partners in Southeast Asia?’ Contemporary Southeast Asia, Vol. 29, No. 1, April 2007. 7 Acharya, A, ‘India and Southeast Asia in the Age of Terror: Building Partnership for Peace?’ Contemporary Southeast Asia, Vol. 28, No. 2, August 2006. 8 ‘India looks at new maritime policy’, The Sun, June 30, 2007, Kuala Lumpur. 9 Indian Maritime Doctrine, 2004, p. 75. 10 Sakhuja, V., ‘The Straits of Malacca and Challenges Ahead: India’s Perspective’, in M.N. Basiron and Amir Dastan (eds), Building a Comprehensive Security Environment in the Straits of Malacca, MIMA, Kuala Lumpur, 2006. 11 Mokhzani Zubir and Mohd Nizam Basiron, ‘The Straits of Malacca: The Rise of China, America’s Intentions and the Dilemma of the Littoral Straits’, MIMA Online Article, 2005, http://www.mima.gov.my/mima/htmls/papers/pdf/mokhzani/ mz-mnb.pdf. 12 Storey, I., ‘China’s Malacca Dilemma’, China Brief Vol. 6, Issue 8, The Jamestown Foundation, 2006, http://www.jamestown.org/publications_details.php?volume_id= 415&issue_id=3686&article_id=2370974. 13 Ibid. 14 Jianhua, Z., ‘The Straits of Malacca and challenges ahead: China’s Perspective’, in M.N. Basiron and Amir Dastan (eds), Building a Comprehensive Security Environment in the Straits of Malacca, MIMA, Kuala Lumpur, 2006. 15 Statement by People’s Republic of China representative, Kuala Lumpur Meeting on the Strait of Malacca and Singapore, Enhancing Safety, Security and Environmental Protection, Kuala Lumpur September 18–20, 2006. 16 Rahul Bedi., ‘India Fearful of China’s Upgrade Plans for Coco Islands Facilities’, Jane’s Defence Weekly. Vol. 45, Issue No. 34. August 20, 2008. 17 Frost, E.L., Przystup, James J. and Saunders, Phillip C. ‘China’s Rising Influence in Asis: Implications for U.S. Policy’, Strategic Forum. No. 231, April 2008, Institute for Strategic Studies, National Defence University, 2008. 18 Sharma Ashok, ‘India and Energy Security’, Asian Affairs, Vol. 38, No. 2, July 2007. 19 Hong, Z. India and China: Rivals or Partners in Southeast Asia, Contemporary Southeast Asia, Vol. 29, No. 1, April 2007. 20 Buszyinski, L. and Sazlan Iskandar, ‘Maritime Claims and Energy Cooperation in the South China Sea’, Contemporary Southeast Asia, Vol. 29, No. 1, April 2007. 21 Chatterjee, S. Japan Invited China to the ‘Arc of Freedom and Prosperity’. International Business Times India. August 25, 2007. http://in.ibtimes.com/articles/20070825/japanprime-minister-india-visit-helps-boost-bilateral-trade-renew-defense-ties.htm. 22 On the ‘Arc of Freedom and Prosperity’ an Address by H.E. Mr. Taro Aso, Minister for Foreign Affairs on the Occasion of the 20th Anniversary of the Founding of the Japan Forum on International Relations, Inc. http://www.mofa.go.jp/policy/pillar/ address0703.html 23 Richardson, M. ‘Five Power Naval Exercises Gives China the Jitters’. The New Zealand Herald. September 5, 2007. http://www.nzherald.co.nz/world/news/article.cfm?c_id= 2&objectid=10461642. 24 Richardson, M. The Proliferation Security Initiative: An Assessment of its Strengths and Weaknesses with some Proposals for Shaping its Future, Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, Singapore, 2006.

The Malaysian perspective 95 25 Government of Malaysia to Implement Container Security Initiative. Begins Targeting and Pre-Screening Cargo Destined For U.S. http://www.globalsecurity.org/security/ library/news/2004/03/sec-040308-usia01.htm 26 Blair, D. and Lieberthal, K., ‘Smooth Sailing: The World’s Shipping Lanes are Safe’, Foreign Affairs Journal, Vol. 86, No. 3, May/June 2007. 27 International Maritime Bureau Annual Report 2006, International Maritime Bureau, London, 2007. 28 Department of Fisheries Malaysia. Annual Fisheries Statistics. 29 ‘Malaysia’s Foreign Policy Towards 2020 and Beyond’, Speech by Y.B. Dato’ Seri Syed Hamid Albar, Minister of Foreign Affairs Malaysia, November 11, 2007, Kuala Lumpur. 30 Kuik Cheng Chwee, “The Essence of Hedging: Malaysia and Singapore’s Response to a Rising China,” Contemporary Southeast Asia, Vol. 30, No. 2, August 2008, pp. 159–85. 31 Frost, E.L., Przystup, James J. and Saunders, Phillip C. ‘China’s Rising Influence in Asia: Implications for U.S. Policy’, Strategic Forum, No. 231, April 2008, Institute for Strategic Studies, National Defence University. 32 Thayer, C.A., ‘The Five Power Defence Arrangement: The Quiet Achiever’, Security Challenges, Vol. 3, No. 1, February 2007. 33 Sheridan, G. Analysis, ‘Special Forces Wage War by Stealth’, The Australian, October 14, 2006. http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,20867,2057681025377,00.html

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Part II

Contemporary regional maritime security

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9

Regional maritime security Threats and risk assessments Sam Bateman

Regional maritime security The maritime security of Southeast Asia reflects a range of enduring and dynamic factors. Enduring factors are mainly the geography of the region with its complex pattern of archipelagos, islands, bays and gulfs and narrow shipping channels; its heavy dependence on shipping for both domestic and intra-regional trade; and the importance of regional seas and their resources to the well-being of regional peoples. The dynamic factors include sovereignty disputes, the increasing levels and density of shipping traffic in the region, increased exploitation of marine resources, deteriorating fish stocks and marine habitats, growing naval budgets and higher levels of naval activity. The combination and complexity of these enduring and dynamic factors highlight the challenges of promoting maritime security in the region. Meeting these challenges is exacerbated by both the rate of change and the lack of truly effective regional forums in which to develop appropriate cooperative and coordinated measures to deal with them. This chapter reviews the spectrum of threats in the Indo-Pacific region that might have some impact on the maritime security of Southeast Asia. Consideration of the Indo-Pacific region suggests the significance of both the strategic position of Southeast Asia between the Indian and Pacific Oceans and the various shipping routes between these two oceans that pass through the ‘choke points’ constituted by the archipelagos lying between Southeast Asia and northern Australia. In identifying threats in the Indo-Pacific region, the chapter is concerned with those that might arise in the Western Pacific or Eastern Indian Oceans rather than those further afield in the Indian Ocean, in the Middle East or Southwest Asia. Threats in the Western Pacific and Eastern Indian Oceans will often be interlinked by virtue of the strategic centrality of Southeast Asia and the vital sea lines of communication (SLOCs) that pass through the region between these two oceans. In many ways, the Singapore Straits constitute the centre of strategic gravity of both Southeast Asia and the wider Indo-Pacific region. A circle of 1,500 nautical miles radius centered on Singapore takes in all of Southeast Asia except for northern areas of Myanmar, and the easternmost islands and territory of Indonesia. It stretches to Hong Kong in the north; to offshore islands of northern Australia in the southeast; and to Sri Lanka in the west. It includes many strategically

100 Sam Bateman important shipping routes and seas, notably the South China Sea, the Andaman Sea and the Celebes Sea. The area enclosed within the arcs of this circle is defined for the purposes of this paper as the area of direct maritime security concern to Southeast Asia.

Methodology This paper identifies possible threats that could impact on the maritime security of Southeast Asia. These threats include ones that might emerge within the region itself, as well as ones from outside the area of direct maritime security concern that nevertheless would impact on Southeast Asia. The chapter then assesses the risks of these threats in terms of their likelihood and the economic, political and strategic consequences for Southeast Asia. Using a typical risk assessment matrix,1 the likelihood of a particular threat might be assessed at one of the following levels: 1 2 3 4 5

Almost Certain – already occurs regularly. Likely – will probably occur in most circumstances in the foreseeable future. Possible – might occur in current circumstances. Unlikely – not expected to occur unless there is some significant change in current circumstances. Rare – might occur in exceptional circumstances.

To complete the risk assessment, the consequences of a particular threat might then be considered in terms of its political, strategic and economic consequences and the impact on the maritime security of Southeast Asia. The following levels of impact might be used: A B

C

D

E

Negligible – no disruptive effects and ‘business as usual’ with economic activity and regional relations. Minor – regional tension is significant with some breakdown of bilateral relations but no conflict or disruptive effects and the situation is manageable within existing processes. Significant – some closure of ports and particular shipping routes, but any conflict is temporary and generally constrained by regional agreement and UN responses. Major – significant disruption of regional trade and economic activity, and some continuing conflict within the region but generally limited to particular areas. Catastrophic – complete breakdown in regional relations, total disruption of trade and economic activity and wide-ranging warfare within the region itself, including the likely involvement of extra-regional powers.

Using these levels of likelihood and consequence, the chapter produces a matrix showing the risks of various threats that might impact on the maritime security of Southeast Asia. These range from low-level threats with little impact, to the major

Threats and risk assessments 101 and catastrophic ones that would have profound implications for regional stability and prosperity. Generally there is a correlation between the low likelihood of a particular threat and its consequences with the more improbable threats having the greatest impact. The chapter also considers likely developments and trends, as well as any lead-time for the emergence of particular threats.

Minor and negligible threats Marine pollution Coastal states in the region, especially Indonesia and Malaysia, are very concerned about protecting the marine environment, particularly from illegal dumping at sea and ship-sourced marine pollution. Marine pollution is a major threat to the regional fishing industry, coastal tourism and fragile marine habitats. Oil pollution from ships is believed to occur in the Malacca Strait due to tank cleaning and the unlawful discharge of bilge water and sludge. Similar pollution due to operational discharges from ships might also occur in the South China Sea. Factors supporting these reports include the extent of shipping traffic in the region, the lack of effective monitoring and surveillance, and the tendency of some ship masters to pump bilge water or clean ship’s tanks if they think they can get away with it. As was demonstrated by the blow-out of the West Atlas oil rig in the Timor Sea in August–November 2009, an accident on an offshore oil or gas facility also poses a significant risk of marine pollution.2 As shipping traffic increases in the region and the number of offshore oil and gas installations increases, the threat of marine pollution is also growing, but overall the regional consequences will remain negligible. Piracy and armed robbery With the exception of security in some ports and anchorages, the situation with piracy and sea robbery in the region appears to be under control. The total number of incidents reported in the Asian region during 2008 declined compared to those in 2007, with a decrease also in the significance level of the reported incidents.3 However, several attacks occurred during the period on vessels underway in the ‘hot spots’ near the Anambas islands in the South China Sea and in the Sulu Sea. The measures taken by regional countries both at sea and onshore have largely been effective, although security in ports and anchorages in some countries, and policing generally against maritime crime, could still be improved. While incidents of piracy and armed robbery will continue to occur in the region, particularly in ports, anchorages and port approaches, the consequences of the threat remain negligible. Some surge in maritime attacks following the recent deterioration in relations between the Philippine government and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) in the southern Philippines is one possible development that might affect current trends. Onshore violence in this region increased significantly in the latter part of 2008.4

102 Sam Bateman Smuggling at sea Smuggling at sea has a long history in Southeast Asia. It is frequently regarded as an extension of the historic trading arrangements between neighbours that is still conducted through the barter trading system. It is particularly prevalent in the Sulu Sea area and the Malacca Strait. With the depleted fish stocks in the region, many coastal villagers have lost their basic means of livelihood, and are tempted into illegal activity, including smuggling and piracy.5 Smuggling at sea for the purposes of this threat assessment includes illicit trafficking in people, drugs and arms. The illegal movement of people is relatively common in parts of the region and could increase in the future While a significant problem for maritime law enforcement agencies that invariably requires good cooperation between the agencies of bordering countries, overall the consequences of smuggling at sea are negligible. Increased dislocation of people as a consequence, for example, of food shortages or climate change is one development that could disturb this trend. Natural disasters The vulnerability of Southeast Asia to marine natural disasters was demonstrated by the tragic tsunami in the Northeast Indian Ocean on Boxing Day 2004 and the impact of cyclone Nargis in Myanmar in May 2008. Maritime natural hazards that could lead to a natural disaster include climatic hazards (cyclones, tropical storms, floods and sea level changes); geological hazards (earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and tsunamis); and biological hazards (marine pest infestations and pollution). Three factors might be noted with regard to appreciating the risks and consequences of a natural disaster occurring from or through the maritime environment. First, they can be predictable, particularly so in the case of climatic hazards with developments in satellite monitoring, oceanographic research and weather forecasting. Second, they are pervasive in time and space with the Indian Ocean appearing particularly vulnerable. Third, the occurrence of natural disasters appears to be increasing as a result of higher levels of volcanic activity, and changing weather patterns. While the future occurrence of a maritime natural disaster in the region is almost certain, the consequences for regional maritime security are negligible. Cooperative arrangements for dealing with the aftermath of natural disasters are receiving attention in the region. More effective monitoring and warning systems are also being put in place. While much of this cooperation revolves around the use of military forces and their skills and capabilities, the potential sensitivities with the use of these forces must be appreciated, particularly where a political agenda may be evident or suspected. Fisheries incidents Illegal, unregulated and unreported (IUU) fishing has become a serious problem in the region, especially for Indonesia.6 Clashes between different groups of

Threats and risk assessments 103 fishers and alleged illegal fishermen and maritime law enforcement forces occur regularly in the region, including in the South China Sea, parts of the Indonesian archipelago, and in the west off Thailand and Myanmar.7 Generally these incidents have negligible consequences, but they can assume a more serious dimension when they occur in areas of disputed sovereignty where clashes or armed ‘standoffs’ might occur between law enforcement units of neighbouring countries. The risks of fisheries incidents may also increase in the future as regional fish stocks continue to decline and fishermen have to move further afield to obtain worthwhile catches.8 Border clash There are widespread areas of Southeast Asia where maritime boundaries have not been agreed between neighbouring states, most notably in the South China Sea. Other areas include the northern Malacca Strait where there is no exclusive economic zone (EEZ) boundary between Malaysia and Indonesia, the eastern approaches to the Singapore Strait where sovereignty over key features is divided between Malaysia and Singapore,9 and the Ambalat region to the East of Borneo. In early November 2008, Bangladesh and Myanmar naval vessels were at a standoff in an area of the Bay of Bengal claimed by both countries where possible hydrocarbon reserves are believed to exist but no maritime boundaries have been agreed.10 In May 2009, tensions flared again between Malaysia and Indonesia in the Ambalat area with the Indonesian Navy close to firing upon a Malaysian patrol boat that had allegedly intruded into ‘Indonesian maritime territory’.11 While the consequences of these incidents are normally negligible, there is always the risk of misunderstandings that could lead to more serious consequences and the breakdown of bilateral relations. It is important that bilateral agreements and avoidance of incidents at sea arrangements are in place to mitigate the risks of an incident escalating into a more serious situation.

Major and significant threats Climate change Climate change will affect the physical conditions of the oceans and regional seas, including temperature, strength of currents and sea levels, and these impacts are becoming increasingly evident.12 As a result of climate change, ocean temperatures will rise markedly, ocean circulation patterns may change and sea levels will rise. Ocean acidification is a major problem that will have a very serious impact on coral reef systems.13 Changing ocean conditions as a consequence of global warming could have compounding effects on the rate of climate change. The impact of climate change on marine, coastal, estuarine and freshwater ecosystems will likely affect many people directly or indirectly through the loss of fish stocks and marine habitats and the increased prevalence of natural disasters, such as flooding and cyclones.

104 Sam Bateman There is a close link between climate change and food security. Food security is a major threat to regional security. It has two connections with the maritime environment. The first is the direct impact of declining fish stocks and loss of marine habitats on subsistence fishing and access to seafood at a reasonable price. The second is the indirect impact arising from the consequences of food shortages. This could manifest itself in increased migration flows, which would serve to reinforce flows already occurring more directly as a consequence of climate change. All indications are that climate change will occur and that the consequences for the region will be significant. Intruder submarine incident There are potential dangers with the increasing number of submarines working in the relatively confined and potentially dangerous seas of Asia. As well as larger Southeast Asian submarine fleets, the extra-regional navies of Australia, China, India and the United States may also operate submarines into Southeast Asian waters and this activity might increase in the future. In Northeast Asian waters, Japan is showing increased concern over Chinese submarine activity in maritime areas adjacent to Japan.14 Some submarines might be engaged on intelligence and surveillance missions that take them into sensitive waters where they are at risk of being detected by another country’s anti-submarine forces. Regional antisubmarine warfare (ASW) capabilities are also likely to increase in the future, thus increasing the risks of an unfortunate incident. Extensive covert submarine operations involving intelligence collection or training incursions into the territorial sea of another country by the Soviet Union, the United States and other Western countries were a feature of the Cold War years.15 The most infamous incident, the so-called ‘Whisky on the Rocks’ incident, occurred in October 1981, when the Soviet Whisky-class diesel submarine No. 137 was found stranded on the rocks off the Swedish naval base at Karlskrona.16 An ‘intruder’ submarine detected in an area of disputed sovereignty in Southeast Asian waters would be warned off, and in extreme circumstances, might even be attacked. However, anti-submarine weapons are clumsy ones with an ‘all or nothing’ result that could lead to the sinking of the submarine with all her crew. Submarines have a very low reserve of buoyancy and even relative minor damage to a submarine’s watertight integrity can have catastrophic results. Such an incident would have very serious repercussions for regional security. There are many prerequisites of safe submarine operations. At a regional level, arrangements are required for water space management and the prevention of mutual interference (PMI) with submarine operations, including possible ‘no go’ areas for submarines being incorporated into codes of conduct for disputed areas. The concern for submarine safety has been demonstrated by several multinational submarine rescue exercises that have been held around the region mainly under the auspices of the Western Pacific Naval Symposium (WPNS). These confidencebuilding measures beg for greater attention in regional forums.

Threats and risk assessments 105 Maritime terrorism In Southeast Asia, the vulnerability of the maritime sector to attack by terrorists has been of concern due to the economic importance of the sector; the incidence of piracy and sea robbery in the region; and the presence of terrorist groups with either a history of attacking maritime targets or suggestions of an intent to launch such attacks. There are many possible scenarios.17 While a maritime terrorist attack in the region is not inconceivable, the consequences of such an attack would vary greatly according to the nature of the attack. Terrorist attacks have occurred on ferries in the region, and these vessels, as well as potentially cruise liners, continue to be vulnerable to attack. The most notorious ferry attack is that on the Superferry 14, which sank in February 2004 near Manila after a bomb explosion and fire onboard with the loss of 116 people killed or missing. Other attacks on ferries in Southeast Asia include the February 2000 bombing of the Philippine ferry Our Lady Mediatrix, which killed forty people; and the December 2001 bombing of the Indonesian ferry Kailifornia, which killed ten.18 With passenger ships and ferries, it is not so much the bomb that might do the damage, but with so many people in a relatively confined area, rather the fire and panic that can follow an explosion.19 Overall, however, the regional consequences of such an attack would be minor. The more serious maritime terrorist attacks would include attacks on port infrastructure that closed a major port, or an attack or threat of an attack that led to the closure of a major regional waterway. It is physically impossible to block either the Malacca Strait or the Singapore Strait, but some possible threats, such as sea mining or a small-boat suicide attack, could lead to the re-routing of commercial shipping traffic away from these waterways. The more catastrophic scenarios involve possible attacks on liquid natural gas (LNG) or liquid petroleum gas (LPG) tankers, either through the planting of devices onboard or by the use of a tanker as a mobile weapon to strike secondary targets. Such attacks seem improbable due to the technical complexities involved, and the opportunity and expertise required for such an attack. Although such a scenario is unlikely, its potential is given disproportionate focus due to the catastrophic results such an attack might produce. Sovereignty clash in Southeast Asia Temporary stand-offs or clashes between the maritime security forces of countries with conflicting claims to offshore sovereignty in some parts of the region were identified earlier as possible threats with minor consequences for regional maritime security. A more serious clash sustained over a period of time, or involving the forcible seizure of an island or reef by one party, would have major consequences for regional maritime security. This event has occurred in the past in the South China Sea, but is now prescribed as unacceptable under the 2002 Declaration on the Conduct of Parties in the South China Sea.

106 Sam Bateman Conflict in Northeast Asia Several potential causes of conflict exist in Northeast Asia, including on the Korean Peninsular, across the Taiwan Strait, or over disputed territories, such as the Takeshima/Tokdo islands or the Senkaku/Daioyu islands. This conflict might be either bilateral or could involve a coalition of forces. Overall the probability of conflict in one of these areas appears to be diminishing with considerable improvement, for example, in cross-Strait relations between China and Taiwan in 2008.20 North Korea is an obvious exception, with its nuclear tests and missile launchings in May–June 2009 leading to a serious downturn in regional relations. The Takeshima/Tokdo dispute has ongoing potential to affect stability in Northeast Asia;21 Japan feels threatened by North Korea with its ballistic missiles, weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and special forces, and by China with its nuclear capabilities and modernizing military forces; and Russia is emerging again as a potential major military power in the region with an unresolved sovereignty dispute with Japan over the Kuril islands. Barry Desker has speculated on the likelihood of war in Asia with a particular focus on the emergence of a more assertive China rather than a more aggressive China.22 He concludes that war is unlikely due to the emergence of a ‘Beijing Consensus’ founded ‘on the leadership role of the authoritarian party state, a technocratic approach to governance, the significance of social rights and obligations, a reassertion of the principles of national sovereignty and noninterference, coupled with support for freer markets and stronger regional and international institutions’, as well as some adjustment by the West to the norms and values of the East. In the remote possibility of conflict in Northeast Asia, it would likely spill over into Southeast Asia, particularly through any move by one of the opposing parties to attack or blockade the movement of shipping of the other party through SLOCs in Southeast Asia. While Southeast Asian countries may not be directly involved in the conflict, there would be significant economic disruption in Southeast Asia due to the impact on trade between the two regions.

Catastrophic threats WMD incident The proliferation of WMD and their delivery systems is regarded by the international community as one of the greatest threats to international peace and security.23 This focus has been highlighted by recent developments in North Korea. Cruise missiles offer an effective means of delivering all forms of WMD as well as conventional warheads. They may be launched from ships, submarines or aircraft, and their use is proliferating in the region. Nuclear weapons pose the most serious threat, although there are significant obstacles to acquiring the materials

Threats and risk assessments 107 to produce a nuclear weapon. Biological and chemical weapons may be acquired more easily, but they are still difficult to use in a successful attack and their effects may be less lethal. WMD might be developed by either a state in contravention of international rules and norms or by terrorist groups. Following the break-up of the Soviet Union, there have been concerns that nuclear weapons or associated militaries could be exploited by potential proliferators and terrorist groups. With the extensive counter-proliferation regimes now in place, the threat of a WMD attack in the region is unlikely, although the consequences might be catastrophic. Without strong adherence to the regimes, the risks of a WMD incident could increase. Terrorist groups have actively sought a WMD capability,24 and while the development of an effective weapon is well beyond the capability of existing regional groups, this could change in the future, particularly as relevant technologies might become more readily available. As proliferation of WMD and related materials may well occur by sea, adherence in the region to relevant international regimes, particularly the International Convention for the Suppression of Unlawful Acts Against the Safety of Maritime Navigation (SUA Convention) and its 2005 Protocol, is important.25 Conflict between China and India The ‘security dilemma’ involves Country A increasing its defence spending and acquiring particular capabilities in response to Country B’s new defence acquisitions, but then Country B feels it has to respond to what Country A has done, and so defence budgets spiral upwards. While some analysts argue against the ‘security dilemma’, there may be elements of it with India and China. Despite India’s social problems at home and internal security difficulties, India’s justification for increased defence spending, certainly for its naval spending, is based on assessments of China’s larger defence budget and alleged intentions in the Indian Ocean. China’s developments are said to be the most pressing motivation for India seeking greater military power and working hard to close the gap with China by spending heavily on modern weapons.26 The U.S. Director of National Intelligence recently predicted that the world faces a growing risk of conflict over the next 20 to 30 years.27 He referred to the transfer of wealth and power from West to East, the possibility of strategic rivalries revolving around trade, demographics, access to natural resources, investment and technological innovation, and how China and India will be seeking greater strategic influence. How relations between these emerging powers develop in the future will undoubtedly have a major impact on maritime security in Southeast Asia. Similar concerns pervaded the 2009 Australian Defence White Paper that noted how ‘Shows of force by rising powers are likely to become more common as their military capabilities expand’.28 At present, India is concerned about China’s strategic intentions in the Indian Ocean,29 while China is concerned about the risks of its possible strategic containment between India, Japan and the United States. The strategic interests of China and India overlap in Southeast Asia, and this region in the future may be

108 Sam Bateman the focus of strategic competition between the two countries. Latif has described ‘the common security domain’ in Southeast Asia between the straddling influence of China and India in the region, as well as the consideration that ‘the turf war between China and India represents a sobering aspect of Asia’s international relations’.30 The ‘worst case’ scenario of conflict between China and India, if played out in a wide theatre of operations, including warfare at sea, would have a catastrophic impact on Southeast Asia. Trade and economic activity, including shipping traffic through the region, would be disrupted. While still assessed as unlikely, this threat must still be given some finite probability of occurrence. Fortunately the two countries recognize the problem and are pursuing a range of worthwhile confidence-building measures, including naval exercises and the exchange of port visits.31 Conflict between ASEAN and China The possibility of conflict between China and some or all of the ASEAN countries is the last threat to consider. This is at both the lowest end of the probability scale and at the highest end of the consequences scale. However, a possible trigger for such a threat exists in the South China Sea with the unresolved sovereignty disputes and apparently increasing competition for the oil and gas resources that are believed to exist in the area. New troubles have emerged in that regard during 2008 with both Vietnam and the Philippines, together with a fear that China may be becoming more assertive with regard to its claims in the South China Sea.32 Conflict between ASEAN and China would be catastrophic for both parties.

Regional defence spending The trend in the region towards higher defence spending is one development that could increase the probability of some of the threats discussed in this chapter. As shown in Table 9.1, over the five years from 2002 to 2007, China’s defence budget grew by a massive 14.3 per cent in real terms per annum; South Korea’s by 7.9 per cent per annum; India’s by 6.7 per cent; and ASEAN’s by 4.6 per cent.

Table 9.1 Defence budgets and annual growth rates in real terms (2000 US$) 2002–2007

ASEAN China India Japan South Korea

2002 (US$bn)

2007 (US$bn)

Annual growth rate

17.9 19.3 18.8 45.6 13.4

22.4 37.7 26.0 45.7 19.6

4.6 14.3 6.7 0.0 7.9

Source: Defence Economic Trends in the Asia Pacific 2007, Defence Intelligence Organization, Canberra.

Threats and risk assessments 109 In contrast, Japan’s defence spending showed little growth over the five year period. In ASEAN, the Philippines’ defence budget fell during the period and Myanmar’s remained roughly steady. If those two countries are removed from the equation, then the annual growth rate in ASEAN defence spending during the five years was 6.9 per cent with Indonesia leading the way with an annual growth rate of 12.5 per cent in real terms. In arguing against an arms race in Asia, some commentators point out that in many countries, the defence budget as a percentage of Gross Defence Product or government spending is showing little change – or in some cases, even a decrease – and thus there are few grounds for concern about levels of defence spending in the region.33 By way of example, China enjoyed a high rate of economic growth over the five years from 2002 until 2007 – as did its defence budget, albeit at a faster rate. China’s defence spending during the period increased from 1.2 per cent of GDP in 2002 (7.5 per cent of government spending) to 1.5 per cent of GDP in 2007 (11.4 per cent of government spending).34 China is often seen as the trigger for a regional naval arms race.35 There may be grounds for this belief. China’s naval force expansion plans may be an explanation for the acquisition of new missile destroyers in South Korea and Japan.36 Also, as has been noted, China’s submarine basis on Hainan may well have spurred an ‘arms race’ type reaction from India. Increased regional expenditure on defence should be of serious concern. Higher defence spending has adverse consequences for regional security in both direct and indirect terms. In direct terms, it creates an environment of increased military activity that is potentially destabilizing with greater numbers of aircraft, warships, submarines and armoured vehicles. In a speech at the 2009 Shangri-La Dialogue, Singapore’s Deputy Prime Minister and Defence Minister, Teo Chee Hean, highlighted the need for regional countries to have greater transparency with military acquisitions, strategic intent and security concerns.37 The situation in the maritime environment is of particular concern with more ships, submarines and maritime aircraft operating in relatively confined regional waters, some areas of which include sovereignty disputes and unresolved maritime boundaries. Increased military activity at sea increases the risks of an unfortunate incident between naval forces. In indirect terms, defence spending has a high opportunity cost by diverting resources from important programmes for economic development, social improvement and poverty alleviation. The failure to address these programmes adequately can lead to instability both domestically and regionally. In Southeast Asia there are questions about whether recent arms purchases directly serve legitimate military requirements or whether they may be unintentionally increasing the ‘security dilemma’ in the region.38 Malaysia’s Deputy Prime Minister Najib Razak claimed in October 2007 that Malaysia’s build-up of submarines and new fighter aircraft is not part of an arms race ‘but is meant to keep the country from having a “third class” defence force’.39 Similarly, the Indonesian and Malaysian Defence Ministers denied in December 2007 that there was any arms race in the region.40

Rare

Unlikely

Possible

Likely

Almost Certain

3. 1.

2.

1.

Marine Pollution Piracy & Armed Robbery Smuggling Natural Disaster

Negligible

Table 9.2 Risk assessment matrix

1.

1.

1.

Ferry terrorist attack

Border Incident

Fisheries Incident

Minor

1. 2.

Climate Change Intruder SM incident

Significant

1. 2.

1.

Sovereignty Clash in SE Asia Major terrorist attack Conflict in NE Asia

Major

2.

1.

1. 2.

WMD attack Conflict between China and India ASEAN-China conflict Bilateral Conflict in SE Asia

Catastrophic

Threats and risk assessments 111

Conclusions Table 9.2 provides the risk assessment matrix that summarizes the likelihood and consequences of the various events discussed in this chapter. The threats and risks in the top left-hand corner of the matrix are either common or likely, and are generally well covered by existing processes of cooperation and dialogue. They also do not require capabilities such as aircraft carriers, submarines and cruise missiles that are starting to figure more prominently in the acquisition programmes of regional defence forces. Those threats and risks in the bottom right-hand corner are the ones that give most grounds for concern, particularly ones in the ‘unlikely’ row which could occur if there were some significant change in current circumstances. Increased strategic competition between the major Asian powers is one such circumstance. The challenge in dealing with these changes is increased by the dynamic nature of the maritime scene in Asia at present, including the shifting balance of power between West and East, and within Asia itself. The waters of Southeast Asia are likely to see increased numbers of surface warships, submarines and maritime aircraft in the years ahead. While these developments may be in response to a feeling of increased maritime insecurity that seems to justify higher defence spending, the developments themselves also have potential to add to insecurity in the region. This is all part of the well-known security dilemma, and regional forums, such as the ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF) and Shangri-La Dialogue will be challenged in the future to address these spiralling naval force developments. Furthermore, some of the new capabilities, particularly submarines, are not well suited to processes of cooperation and confidence building that might be considered. The mitigation of the risks involved requires more attention to preventive diplomacy and maritime confidence and security building measures, including greater transparency with regard to naval operations and exercises, and possible limitations on the employment and acquisition of particular naval capabilities. Greater research is required into the implications of increased regional defence spending (particularly spending on maritime capabilities), the risks of particular scenarios, and the measures that might be taken to mitigate the risks. At the Track Two level, the Council for Security Cooperation in the Asia Pacific (CSCAP) took the positive step in 2008 of establishing a Study Group to investigate the implications of naval enhancements in the region. However, Track One, particularly the ARF, should also be prepared to address these issues.

Notes 1 Australian Government, Offshore Security Assessments Guidance Paper, Canberra: Department of Transport and Regional Services, Office of Transport Security. 2005. (Available at: https://www.dotars.gov.au/transport/security/maritime/pdf/Offshore_ Security_Assessments_Guidance_Paper.pdf). 2 ‘Indonesia hit by Timor Sea spill’, Channel News Asia, 2 November 2009, http:// www.channelnewsasia.com/stories/afp_asiapacific/print/1015344/1/.html (accessed 12 November 2009).

112 Sam Bateman 3 Regional Cooperation Agreement on Combating Piracy and Armed Robbery against Ships in Asia (ReCAAP) (2009), Annual Report 2008, 1st January – 31st December 2008, Singapore: ReCAAP Information Sharing Centre. 4 Simon, S. ‘U.S.–Southeast Asia Relations: U.S. Responds to Southeast Asia Political Turmoil’, Comparative Connections – A Quarterly E-Journal on East Asian Bilateral Relation, Washington DC: Centre for Strategic and International Studies, 2008, Online. Available http://www.csis.org/component/option,com_csis_pubs/task,view/id,5072/ 5 Young, Adam J., Contemporary Maritime Piracy in Southeast Asia; History, Causes and Remedies, Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, pp. 60–1. 6 Ghosh, N., ‘Trawling the seas for catastrophe’, The Straits Times, 30 May 2009, p. C17). 7 Butcher, J., The Closing of the Frontier: A History of the Marine Fisheries of Southeast Asia c. 1850–2000. Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2004, pp. 229–32. 8 Williams, M.J. and Choo Poh Sze ‘Fish Wars: Science is Shaping a New Peace Agenda’, Maritime Studies 116, January/February 2001, pp. 1–10. 9 On 23 May 2007, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) awarded sovereignty over Pedra Branca/Pulau Batu Puteh to Singapore, and sovereignty over Middle Rocks, lying 0.6 nautical miles to the south of Pedra Branca, to Malaysia. Pedra Branca lies approximately 24 nautical miles east of Singapore, 7.7 nautical miles south of Malaysia and 7.6 nautical miles north of the Indonesia’s Bintan Island. A complete set of maritime boundaries in the area will require the agreement of Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore. 10 ‘Myanmar brings warships to explore Bangladesh waters’, The Daily Star, 3 November 2008, http://www.thedailystar.net/pf_story.php?=61625 (accessed 4 November 2008). 11 ‘KL–Jakarta tensions rekindled at Ambalat’, The Straits Times, 30 May 2009, p. C10. 12 United Nations Oceans and the Law of the Sea – Report of the Secretary-General, UN doc. A/63/63, 10 March, 2008, p. 89 (report available at: http://daccessdds.un.org/doc/ UNDOC/GEN/N08/266/26/PDF/N0826626.pdf?OpenElement. 13 Ghosh, N., ‘Trawling the seas for catastrophe’, The Straits Times, 30 May 2009, p. C16. 14 ‘Japan concerned over Chinese submarines near maritime borders’, NOVOSTI – Russian News & Information Agency, 17 October 2008, http://en.rian.ru/world/ 20081017/117793498-print.html (accessed 24 October 2008). 15 Craven, J.P., The Silent War – The Cold War battle beneath the sea, New York: Touchstone, 2002. 16 Silverstein, S.Y. ‘Why can’t Ivan read’, National Review, 14 June 1985. (http:// findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1282/is_v37/ai_3814318) (Accessed 3 November 2008). 17 Bateman, S. ‘Maritime Terrorism: Issues for the Asia-Pacific’, Security Challenges, 2006, Vol. 2, No. 3, October, pp. 77–92. 18 Bradford, J.F. ‘The Growing Prospects for Maritime Security Cooperation in Southeast Asia’, Naval War College Review, 2005, Summer, Vol. 58, No. 3, pp. 63–86. 19 Bateman, S. ‘Ferry Safety: A Neglected Aspect of Maritime Security?’ IDSS Commentaries 31/2006, Singapore: Institute of Defence and Strategic Studies, 3 May 2006. 20 Glosserman, B. and Glaser, B. ‘Another step toward better cross-Strait ties’, PacNet Newsletter No. 58, Washington DC: Centre for Strategic and International Studies, 4 November 2008, http://www.csis.org/index.php?option=com_csis_pubs& task=view&id=5114 (accessed 12 November 2008). 21 Kim Pil-kyu ‘Dokdo Issue May Affect Stability in Northeast Asia’, Korea Times, 11 August 2008, http://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/news/include/print.asp? newsIdx=29120 (accessed 19 August 2008). 22 Desker, B. ‘Why War in Unlikely in Asia’, RSIS Commentaries No. 71/2008, Singapore: S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, 27 June 2008.

Threats and risk assessments 113 23 Australian Government, Weapons of Mass Destruction – Australia’s Role in Fighting Proliferation – Practical Responses to New Challenges, Canberra: Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, 2005. 24 Ibid. 25 Beckman, R.C. ‘The 1988 SUA Convention and 2005 SUA Protocol: Tools to Combat Piracy, Armed Robbery, and Maritime Terrorism’, in Herbert-Burns, R., Bateman, S. and Lehr, P. (eds), Lloyd’s MIU Handbook of Maritime Security, Boca Raton: Auerbach Publications, 2008, pp. 187–200. 26 Giridharadas, A. ‘India is projecting its military power’, International Herald Tribune, 22 September 2008, http//www.iht.com/bin/printfriendly.php?id=16364183 (accessed 23 September 2008). 27 ‘World faces growing risk of conflict: U.S. intelligence chief’, AFP, 1 November 2008, http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5iaFFPjfOQh91-YIHDaU00cL5ayQ (accessed 4 November 2008). 28 Australian Government, Defending Australia in the Asia-Pacific Century: Force 2030, Defence White Paper, Canberra: Department of Defence, 2009, p. 22. 29 Sakhuja, V.V. ‘Indian Navy: Keeping Pace with Emerging Challenges’, in Lawrence Prabhakar, L., Ho, J. and Bateman, S. (eds), The Evolving Maritime Balance of Power in the Asia-Pacific, Singapore: World Scientific, 2006, pp. 95–116. 30 Latif, A.I. Between Rising Powers: China, Singapore and India, Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies (ISEAS), 2007, pp. 239, 260. 31 Sharma, S. ‘India, China military ties to get new impetus this year’, Kerala News, 29 August 2008, http://newkerala.com/topstory-fullnews-16351.html (accessed 1 September 2008). 32 Sutter, R. and Huang, C-H. ‘China–Southeast Asia Relations: Small Advances, Troubles with Vietnam’, Comparative Connections – A Quarterly E-Journal on East Asian Bilateral Relation, October 2008. Online. Available http://www.csis.org/media/ csis/pubs/0803qchina_seasia.pdf 33 Smith, R.C. ‘Asian Military Modernization’, Perspectives, Lowy Institute, October 2008. 34 Commonwealth of Australia, Defence Economic Trends in the Asia Pacific 2007, Canberra: Defence Intelligence Organisation, p. 33 (available online at: www.defence. gov.au/dio/index.htm). 35 Spencer, R. ‘China’s military ambition fuels Asian arms race’, Telegraph, 13 September 2008, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/china/2827473/ Chinas-military-ambition-fuels-Asian-arms-race.html (accessed 15 September 2008). 36 Burnell, P. and Denwood, A. ‘Perils of a new Pacific arms race’, BBC News, 14 August, http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/pr/fr/-/asia-pacific/6937293.stm (accessed 15 August 2007). 37 Yong, N. ‘Calls for transparency in security’, The Straits Times, 1 June 2009, p. 1 38 Bitzinger, R.A. and Maharani, C. ‘Arms, Money and Security: Southeast Asia’s Growing Importance as an Arms Market’, RSIS Commentaries, No. 43, Singapore: S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, 8 April 2008. 39 ‘Malaysia’s defense build-up not geared toward arms race’, International Herald Tribune, 25 October 2007, http://www.iht.com/bin/printfriendly.php?id=8046788 (accessed 24 February 2008). 40 ‘RI, Malaysian defense ministers do not touch on arms race’, Antara News online, 15 December 2007, http://antara.co.id/en/print/?id=1197655911 (accessed 15 December 2007).

10 Maritime security and the cooperative mechanism for the Straits of Malacca and Singapore∗ Robert Beckman

Introduction This chapter first provides an overview of the Cooperative Mechanism for the Straits of Malacca and Singapore (Straits) which was formally launched in September 2007 to encourage user States and other stakeholders to voluntarily cooperate with Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore (the littoral States) to enhance safety, security and environmental protection in the Straits. It examines the Joint Ministerial Meeting of the three littoral States in 2005 and the three meetings sponsored by the International Maritime Organization (IMO) which led to the establishment of the Cooperative Mechanism. It analyses the interests of the various stakeholders, including the maritime powers, in the Cooperative Mechanism, and speculates as to the reasons why the Cooperation Mechanism has not been utilized to date to enhance maritime security. Finally, it addresses the issue of whether the Cooperative Mechanism can and should be extended to include cooperative arrangements to enhance maritime security in the Straits.

Developments leading to the Cooperative Mechanism Following the events of September 11, 2001, maritime security became a high priority for the IMO, and it undertook a thorough review of measures to combat acts of violence and crime at sea.1 As security in ports and on ships was enhanced under the measures adopted by the IMO in 2002, concern increased about the vulnerability to terrorist attacks of vital sea lanes such as the Straits. At the same time, there was a significant increase in the number of incidents of piracy and armed robbery against ships in the Straits.2 The impetus for specific action to establish the Cooperative Mechanism for the Straits came from the leadership of the Secretary-General of the IMO, Mr. E. E. Mitropolous, with the support of IMO Council. At the IMO Council’s 93rd session in October 2004, the Secretary-General submitted a document that analysed the key issues involved in protecting vital shipping lanes against terrorist attacks.3 The document included a profile of the Straits. The IMO Council agreed that the organization had played and could play a role in the protection of shipping

Maritime security and the cooperative mechanism 115 lanes of strategic importance and significance. As part of his efforts to push forward collaboration on maritime security, the Secretary-General initiated an IMO-sponsored meeting to be hosted by Indonesia in September 2005. The purpose of the meeting was to provide an opportunity for the littoral States, user States and other stakeholders to work to enhance the safety of navigation, environmental protection and overall security in the Straits.4

The 2005 Batam joint ministerial statement In August 2005, one month before the IMO-sponsored meeting in Jakarta, the Foreign Ministers of the three littoral States met in Batam, Indonesia, to discuss matters pertaining to the safety of navigation, environmental protection and maritime security in the Straits. This was the fourth trilateral Ministerial meeting of the three littoral States on matters relating to the Straits of Malacca and Singapore, and the first since 1977. The Batam Joint Ministerial Statement5 (hereafter 2005 Batam Statement) sets out the views of Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore on the respective roles of the littoral States, user States and other stakeholders in enhancing safety, security and environmental protection in the Straits. The Statement reaffirms that the three littoral States have sovereignty and sovereign rights in the Straits and the primary responsibility for the safety of navigation, environmental protection and maritime security in the Straits. At the same time, the Statement acknowledges the interests of user States and relevant international agencies such as the IMO, and the role they could play in respect of the Straits. It also states that any cooperative measures taken in the Straits must be in conformity with international law, including the LOS Convention. With respect to the possible roles of user States and other stakeholders in cooperative arrangements, the 2005 Batam Statement provides that, bearing in mind the responsibility and burden of littoral States and the interests of user States, the Ministers welcome the assistance of the user States, relevant international agencies, and the shipping community in the areas of capacity building, training and technology transfer, and other forms of assistance in accordance with the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (LOS Convention).6 The 2005 Batam Statement recognizes the importance of the tripartite Ministerial meeting in providing the overall framework for cooperation. It was agreed that the Ministers and the senior officials should meet on a more regular basis to address relevant issues in a timely manner, and that such meetings may include, if necessary, representatives of other relevant agencies of the respective littoral States. In summary, the three littoral States agreed amongst themselves in Batam on principles for cooperation in advance of the discussions that were to take place at the IMO-sponsored meeting in Jakarta with the IMO, user States and the international shipping community. The agreed principles for cooperation included: (1) that the littoral States have sovereignty and sovereign rights in the Straits; (2) that the littoral States have primary responsibility over the safety, environmental protection and security of the Straits; and (3) that any measures

116 Robert Beckman adopted or taken on these matters must be in accordance with international law, including the LOS Convention.

IMO-sponsored meetings in Jakarta, Kuala Lumpur and Singapore The IMO-sponsored meeting in Jakarta was held on 7 and 8 September 2005 and was attended by over 30 States as well as international organizations and international non-government organizations. The statement from the meeting, known as the Jakarta Statement,7 identified several points of agreement relating to safety and environmental protection in the Straits. First, it indicated that it was agreed that the work of the Tripartite Technical Experts Group (TTEG)8 on safety of navigation should continue and be supported and encouraged. Second, it was agreed that the three littoral States should establish a mechanism for meetings on a regular basis with user States, the shipping industry and other stakeholders, to discuss the issues of safety, security and environmental protection in the Straits and to facilitate cooperation, including exploring the possible options for burdensharing. Third, it was agreed that efforts should be made by the three littoral States to establish and enhance mechanisms for information exchange within and between States so as to enhance maritime domain awareness and to contribute to the enhancement of cooperative measures. It was agreed that where possible, these mechanisms should build on existing arrangements such as the TTEG mechanism. A follow-up meeting was held from 18 to 20 September 2006 in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. At the Kuala Lumpur Meeting representatives from the three littoral States presented papers and made presentations which outlined the Cooperative Mechanism as consisting of three elements – the Cooperation Forum, the Aids to Navigation Fund and specific Projects. A third and final meeting on Enhancement of Safety, Security and Environmental Protection in the Strait of Malacca was convened by the IMO and the Government of Singapore from 4 to 6 September 2007. The product of the meeting was the Singapore Statement,9 which affirmed that the littoral States have sovereignty, jurisdiction and territorial integrity over the Strait and primary responsibility for safety, security and environmental protection in the Strait. At the same time, the Singapore Statement acknowledges the role of the IMO, the user States, the shipping industry and other stakeholders in cooperating with the littoral States in promoting and enhancing safety of navigation and environmental protection and in ensuring the uninterrupted flow of traffic in the Strait. The Statement invites the IMO to participate in the Cooperative Mechanism, to continue to cooperate with the littoral States, and to provide assistance in attracting sponsors for the projects and contributors to the Aids to Navigation Fund.

Overview of the Cooperative Mechanism The Cooperative Mechanism is intended to implement Article 43 of the LOS Convention which provides that user States and States bordering a strait should

Maritime security and the cooperative mechanism 117 by agreement cooperate with respect to navigational safety and environmental protection. This is the first time that Article 43 has been implemented for a strait used for international navigation. Article 43 reads as follows: User States and States bordering a strait should by agreement cooperate: (a)

(b)

In the establishment and maintenance in a strait of necessary navigational and safety aids or other improvements in aid of international navigation; and For the prevention, reduction and control of pollution from ships.

The Cooperative Mechanism consists of three elements – a Cooperation Forum, an Aids to Navigation Fund, and specific Projects.10 The Cooperation Forum is intended to promote open dialogue and discussions between the littoral States, user States and other interested stakeholders. The Aids to Navigation Fund is intended to enable user States and other stakeholders to make voluntary contributions to enhance navigational safety and environmental protection by maintaining and replacing aids to navigation such as lighthouses and buoys. The three littoral States agreed through the TTEG on six specific projects to enhance safety and environmental protection in the Straits and requested user States to support these projects. The six projects are: (1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6)

The removal of wrecks in the traffic separation scheme (TSS). Cooperation and capacity building in relation to the OPRC-HNS Protocol.11 A demonstration project placing class B automatic identification system (AIS) transponders on small ships. The setting up of tide, current and wind measurement systems. The replacement and maintenance of aids to navigation. The replacement of aids to navigation damaged in the 2004 tsunami.

The three littoral States have since taken steps to implement the Cooperative Mechanism. The first meeting of the Aids to Navigation Fund Committee was held from 16 to 17 April 2008 in Penang, Malaysia. At the meeting the Aids to Navigation Fund (the Fund) was formally launched and the Fund Committee, comprising representatives of the three littoral States and the contributors, formalized the rules of governance and administration for the Fund. The first work activity of the Fund is an initial site survey of the aids to navigation to determine the maintenance and replacement work required. The Nippon Foundation of Japan is contributing approximately US $1.4 million to fund the cost of the site survey. Other contributions to the Fund that have been pledged are US $100,000 each from the Republic of Korea and the United Arab Emirates, and US $1 million from the Middle East Navigation Aids Service (MENAS). Greece will also be contributing approximately US $1 million to the Fund, but its contribution will be made through the IMO trust fund. Finally, China and Japan have also indicated their intention to contribute to the Fund.

118 Robert Beckman The response of user States to the Projects has been very positive. The United States has expressed interest in exploring the possibility of contributing to Project 1 on the removal of wrecks in the traffic separation scheme (TSS). China, the United States and Australia have offered to fund parts of Project 2 on cooperation and capacity building in relation to the OPRC-HNS Protocol. Australia, Japan and Korea have offered assistance for Project 3, the demonstration project to place AIS transponders on small ships. China and the United States have offered assistance on Project 4 on the setting up of tide, current and wind measurement systems. The Nippon Foundation has contributed close to US $1.4 million to the Aids to Navigation Fund for the site survey for Project 5 on the replacement and maintenance of aids to navigation, and the Japanese Government will be providing funds for Project 5 in the region of US $200,000. Finally, China has undertaken to provide all of the funding for Project 6, the replacement of the aids to navigation destroyed in the 2004 tsunami.

Evaluation of Cooperative Mechanism The Cooperative Mechanism devised by the littoral States in consultation with the IMO and user States is indeed an historic breakthrough. The Cooperative Mechanism goes beyond Article 43 in two ways. First, it clarifies that the IMO has a role in the mechanism. Second, it calls for participation by non-State entities, including the shipping industry and other stakeholders. User States and other stakeholders are encouraged to participate in the Cooperation Forum because it will enable them to exchange ideas with the littoral States on how to enhance safety, security and environmental protection in the Straits. The Cooperation Forum will also enable user States and other stakeholders to work together with the littoral States to identify new projects to enhance safety, security and environmental protection in the Straits. User States and other stakeholder who contribute to the Aids to Navigation Fund will have a say in the management and operation of the Fund. These mechanisms will ensure that user States and other stakeholders who cooperate with the littoral States will be given a voice in both the projects and the Fund as well as in the Cooperation Forum. The Cooperative Mechanism is likely to be successful for three reasons. First, the mechanism is initiated and driven by the littoral States, it recognizes the sovereignty and jurisdiction of the littoral States in the Straits, and it is consistent with international law, including the LOS Convention. Second, it recognizes that the IMO, user States and other stakeholders have a role in cooperating with the littoral States and it gives cooperating stakeholders a voice in the management and operation of the mechanisms. Third, because it is inclusive, open and flexible, it will be possible to adapt the Cooperative Mechanism to meet changing circumstances.

Major stakeholders and the Cooperative Mechanism The littoral States are the most important stakeholders in the Straits. They have a common interest in enhancing safety, security and environmental protection in the

Maritime security and the cooperative mechanism 119 Straits and in persuading user States and other stakeholders to share that burden. The littoral States will welcome the participation of major maritime powers and other States who are major beneficiaries of the Straits in the development of more Projects. They will also encourage other user States, non-government organizations and private companies who benefit from safe and secure passage through the Straits to demonstrate their support for the Cooperative Mechanism by making voluntary contributions to the Aids to Navigation Fund. The littoral States are likely to argue that the Straits of Malacca and Singapore are unique straits because of their length and their importance to international commerce, and that the Cooperation Mechanism for the Straits is unique because it is supported by the IMO and major user States. The littoral States have a common interest in ensuring that all activities under the Cooperation Mechanism are consistent with their territorial sovereignty and jurisdiction in the Straits and with the LOS Convention. If they maintain this principled position based on respect for international law, it legitimizes and strengthens their position when discussing cooperation with the major maritime States. Given their concerns about sovereignty, the littoral States can be expected to oppose any suggestions for coordinated patrols or joint patrols with user States in or near the Straits. Their position on burden-sharing with respect to issues of security in the Straits is likely to be that user States should assist littoral States through capacity-building and the provision of necessary facilities and equipment, and that such assistance should be provided on a bilateral basis outside the Cooperative Mechanism.12 In addition, the position of the littoral States is likely to be that maritime security should be addressed in a broad sense and should include combating illegal acts at sea such as illegal fishing and the smuggling of arms, drugs and people, not just acts of violence against international shipping from piracy, armed robbery and terrorism.13 The IMO is also a major stakeholder. It is has an interest in enhancing safety, security and environmental protection in the Straits as such matters are part of its core mission. The IMO can be expected to act as a supporter and facilitator for the Cooperative Mechanism. However, it should be noted that with respect to security, the IMO is primarily interested in preventing violence against ships and ports and protecting ships in vital sea lanes of communication. It will not be as interested in a broader view of maritime security that includes the suppression of all illegal activities at sea, as these matters are generally outside its mandate. Also, the IMO is interested in the success of the Cooperative Mechanism for the Straits so that it can serve as a model for the protection of other vital sea lanes. Therefore, its interests are not completely compatible with the interests of the littoral States. Private companies engaged in commercial shipping and non-governmental organizations who represent ship-owners and ship-operators are also important stakeholders because they are direct beneficiaries of safe and secure passage through the Straits. The Aids to Navigation Fund has been structured so that it can receive voluntary contributions directly from private companies and other nonstate actors with a special interest in shipping. However, to date the contributions to the Aids to Navigation Fund have been from States, from the Nippon Foundation

120 Robert Beckman of Japan, and from the Middle East Navigational Aids Service (MENAS). No private companies have made direct contributions to the Fund. Private companies may be hesitant to make direct voluntary contributions to the Fund because they believe it will establish a precedent for the setting up of similar schemes in other straits used for international navigation. Japan is the only User State which has a long history of making significant contributions to enhance safety, security and environmental protection in the Straits for many years.14 Like China and Korea, Japan depends on safe and secure passage through the Straits for its oil needs and for commercial trade generally. Japan has been concerned for many years with the threat to the security of shipping through the Straits from piracy and armed robbery, and it took the lead in the establishment of the 2004 Regional Cooperation Agreement on Combating Piracy and Armed Robbery against Ships in Asia (ReCAAP).15 Japan has also provided assistance to the littoral States in the area of maritime security through its Coast Guard. Because Japan was the sole source of contributions to maintain and replace aids to navigation in the Straits in the past, one of its major priorities is to ensure that there is sustainable financing to maintain and replace aids to navigation in the Straits. Therefore, it is no surprise that Nippon Foundation and the Government of Japan have made contributions to the Aids to Navigation Fund. Also, the Nippon Foundation and other non-government organizations in Japan continue to work to encourage private companies which benefit from passage through the Straits to recognize that as part of their corporate social responsibility they should make voluntary contributions to the Aids to Navigation Fund.16 The United States has a major interest in safe and secure passage through the Straits. At the Kuala Lumpur meeting in 2006 the United States indicated that it is a fully committed partner in the significant efforts being taken to enhance safety, security and environmental protection in the Straits. It reminded delegates of the IMO Secretary-General’s statement at the 2005 Jakarta meeting that, ‘in today’s world safety, security and environmental protection are intertwined and inseparable’. The following are among the major points made by the United States at the Kuala Lumpur meeting: (1) that it is our collective responsibility to assist local littoral States in their efforts to enhance their capabilities, while fully respecting the sovereignty and sovereign rights of the littoral States; (2) that by bilateral and multilateral actions, the United States would demonstrate our shared responsibility to continuously strengthen cooperation among the littoral and user States; (3) that there was a need for the increased operational presence of littoral States to enhance deterrence, and a need for the sharing of information freely and widely so that potential threats to shipping could be identified; (4) that whatever new measures are considered, they must not have the effect of denying, hampering or impairing the right of transit passage through the Straits; and (5) that it was interested in three of the proposed projects.17 As mentioned earlier, the United States has since confirmed its interest and participation in three of the projects. Therefore, the position of the United States is that it seeks to enhance cooperation with the littoral State inside the Cooperation Mechanism as well as in other bilateral and multilateral forums.

Maritime security and the cooperative mechanism 121 China is a rapidly developing maritime power and it depends upon safe and secure passage through the Straits for its oil and trading needs. China demonstrated its interest in supporting the Cooperative Mechanism by announcing at the 2006 Kuala Lumpur meeting that it was interested in supporting three of the six Projects proposed by the littoral States, including providing all of the funding required for Project 6 on the replacement of aids to navigation in Indonesia that were destroyed in the 2004 tsunami. China also took the opportunity at the Kuala Lumpur meeting to circulate a list of agreements and programmes between China and the littoral States on maintaining security in the Straits.18 This sent a very clear signal to the meeting that China was actively taking cooperative steps at the bilateral and multilateral levels to enhance safety and security in the Straits. Because of the location of the Andaman Islands at the northern mouth of the Malacca Strait, India is considered to be a ‘funnel State’19 leading to the Straits. India made it clear at the 2006 Kuala Lumpur meeting that as a ‘funnel State’ and an important user State it has a major interest in the safety and security of the Straits. India stated that in the efforts to enhance safety and security it should be ensured that the sovereignty and jurisdiction of the littoral States should be recognized and not over-stepped. It also stated that since the efforts of the littoral States may be limited due to lack of resources, etc., coordinated assistance at the regional level may be required. It suggested a lead role for funnel States in supporting any regional initiatives. With respect to regional initiatives, India mentioned that the establishment of a Regional Maritime Training Centre, which was being discussed under the aegis of the ASEAN Regional Forum, may well be a step in the right direction. India also suggested that one of the areas of possible cooperation might be coordinated maritime patrols under a framework acceptable to the littoral States with participation from funnel States.20 India has not come forward to support any of the six projects or to make a voluntary contribution to the Aids to Navigation Fund. Both the 2005 Batam Statement and the 2005 Jakarta Statement expressly recognized the importance of engaging the ‘states bordering the funnels’ leading to the Straits as well as the major users of the Straits. In the 2005 Batam Statement the Ministers further stated that in this regard, they supported continuing discussion on the overall subject of maritime security in the South East Asian region within the framework of ASEAN and the ASEAN Regional Forum. However, there is no mention in either the 2006 Kuala Lumpur Statement or the 2007 Singapore Statement of funnel States. Thailand is also a funnel State that has an interest in the safety and security of passage in the Straits. In September 2008 Thailand became the fourth country to join the Malacca Strait Patrols (MSP). Thailand’s participation was formalized in a signing ceremony on 18 September 2008 for the revised standard operating procedures and terms of reference for the Malacca Strait Patrols Joint Coordinating Committee. The defence chiefs of Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand attended the signing ceremony in Bangkok, Thailand.21 This development was done through the defence ministries outside the Cooperation Mechanism.

122 Robert Beckman Korea is a major beneficiary of the Straits and is also a major stakeholder. As mentioned earlier, it has expressed its support by contributing to the Aids to Navigation Fund. In addition, the Republic of Korea has pledged to participate in the Marine Electronic Highway (MEH) project in the Straits and to contribute US $850,000 to the MEH project, through the IMO, for the procurement of equipment/facilities.22 The MEH project was developed earlier and is not part of the Cooperative Mechanism. Finally, Australia is also a major beneficiary and it has demonstrated its support for the Cooperative Mechanism by offering to participate in two of the projects.

Maritime security and the Cooperative Mechanism The Cooperative Mechanism that has been established for the Straits is thus far limited to measures to enhance safety and environmental protection. It does not include any measures to enhance maritime security in the Straits. However, the IMO commenced the Protection of Vital Shipping Lanes initiative because of the concern for security of the shipping lanes. Also, the major reason that the littoral States took steps to enhance their cooperation on Straits issues in 2005 was because of concerns with maritime security after the September 11 incident and because of the risk to international shipping from piracy and armed robbery against ships in the Straits. The 2005 Batam Statement contains several paragraphs which suggest that the process was intended by the ministers to be used as a framework for cooperation to enhance security in the Straits as well as safety and environmental protection. The 2005 Batam Statement provides that the ministers agreed to establish a TTEG on maritime security. The TTEG on maritime security was mentioned in the 2006 Kuala Lumpur Statement, but there is no mention of it in the 2007 Singapore Statement. Therefore, it seems that the littoral States had second thoughts about the need for including maritime security in the cooperative mechanism, and that they have either deferred or abandoned the idea of establishing a TTEG on maritime security. Instead, they appear to have left cooperative measures to enhance maritime security to the defence forces of the littoral States. The 2007 Singapore Statement commends: … the joint efforts of the armed forces of the three littoral States in contributing to the security of the Straits, through the Malacca Straits Sea Patrols and the “Eyes in the Sky” maritime air patrols, as formalized in the signing of the Malacca Straits Patrols Standard Operating Procedures on 21 April 2006.23 Thus, the new Cooperative Mechanism for the Straits appears to be limited, as least for the time being, to the enhancement of safety and environmental protection in the Straits. Cooperation to enhance maritime security will also continue to be enhanced, but by the defence forces at the operational level and by the foreign affairs and defence ministries in other forums.

Maritime security and the cooperative mechanism 123 One very practical reason for not extending the Cooperation Mechanism to maritime security in 2007 is that the security situation in the Straits greatly improved compared to 2004 and 2005. Figures released by the Information Sharing Centre (ISC) of ReCAAP in July 2007 indicated that there were only two incidents in the Straits from January to through June 2007 and that overall incidents in Asia were only about half of what they were in 2006.24 In its Third Quarterly Report in 2008, the ISC reported only two actual attacks in the Straits of Malacca and Singapore in the first three quarters of 2008, compared to one actual attack during the same period on 2007 and three actual attacks during the same period in 2006. The ISC also noted that there has been an improvement in the armed robbery situation in Indonesia for the period from January through September 2008 compared to the same periods in 2007 and 2006.25

Possible reasons for not including security in the Cooperative Mechanism The primary reason why the littoral States may have been reluctant to use the Cooperative Mechanism to enhance maritime security is that they believe it would be inconsistent with Article 43 of the LOS Convention. Article 43 specifically mentions navigational safety and ship-source pollution but it does not mention security. However, there are several reasons why the failure to include the word ‘security’ or the words ‘maritime security’ in Article 43 should not prevent the Cooperative Mechanism from including measures to enhance the security of shipping in the Straits. First, safety and security are inextricably linked, and the practice of the IMO is to treat maritime security as part of its work on safety. Second, the practice of the IMO and of the littoral States and interested user States with respect to the development of the Cooperative Mechanism has assumed that the Cooperative Mechanism would cover safety, security and environmental protection. Third, even using the exact text of Article 43, it can be argued that cooperative arrangements to enhance the security of shipping in straits used for international navigation would be ‘other improvements in aid of international navigation’ within the meaning of Article 43. Finally, even if one accepts the argument that security is not part of safety and it is not included in Article 43, this only means that there is no obligation on user States and littoral States to cooperate to enhance security in the Straits. It does not prohibit user States and the littoral States from entering into cooperative arrangements to enhance security in the Straits. A second possible reason for not including maritime security cooperation in the Cooperation Mechanism may be a belief that it would be better to address maritime security issues in bilateral discussions, in forums such as the Meeting of the Chiefs of Defence Forces of the three littoral States, and in regional meetings such as the ASEAN Regional Forum. At the 2007 Singapore meeting representatives of the defence forces made presentations to update participants on the measures being taken by the defence forces of the three littoral States to enhance security in the Straits. The measures included the establishment of coordinated sea patrols by the three littoral States, the Eye-in-the Sky air patrols over the

124 Robert Beckman Straits, the establishment of information exchanges between defence forces, and the establishment of better communication links between the operations centres in the three littoral States. A third possible concern of the littoral States may have been that they feared some user States wanted to enhance security of the Straits in a manner that might impinge on or undermine the sovereignty of the littoral States. It should be noted that the entire southern half of the Malacca Strait from Port Klang south to the Singapore Strait lies within the territorial sovereignty of Indonesia and Malaysia, and the entire Singapore Strait lies within the territorial sovereignty of the three littoral States. Indonesia and Malaysia have consistently rebuffed any offers by user States to assist the littoral States in conducting patrols in the Straits. A fourth possible reason why the littoral States may have been reluctant to include maritime security cooperation in the Cooperation Mechanism is that there may have been some suspicions about the motives and agendas of some user States. For example, some of the statements by the United States may have raised concerns that it viewed the Cooperative Mechanism as a possible vehicle to address its concerns about maritime terrorism and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. Given that Indonesia and Malaysia had both expressed some reluctance to join the U.S.-led Proliferation Security Initiative (PSI),26 they may have wanted to avoid any possibility of the Cooperative Mechanism being used to enhance cooperation to implement the PSI.

Enhancing security under the Cooperative Mechanism The fundamental question is whether the Cooperative Mechanism can and should be used to enhance maritime security in the Straits. In other words, can a role be carved out for the Cooperative Mechanism in the area of maritime security which is in the common interests of the littoral States and user States and which addresses the reasons why the littoral States may be reluctant to use it to address issues of maritime security? In my view the Cooperative Mechanism can be extended to include cooperation to enhance security in the Straits if two conditions are followed. The first condition is that any arrangements under the Cooperative Mechanism between littoral States and user States to enhance maritime security must be consistent with the principles set out in the 2005 Batam Statement and the 2007 Singapore Statement. This will ensure that such cooperation does not undermine or infringe the sovereignty and jurisdiction of the littoral States. It will also ensure that any cooperative measures are consistent with international law, including the LOS Convention. The second condition is that such cooperative arrangements should be limited to the issues of maritime security under the purview of the IMO and the national agencies responsible for maritime administration and IMO matters. This will ensure that the Cooperative Mechanism will not intrude into areas under the purview of other ministries or agencies. This will limit the Cooperation Forum to dealing with issues such as ship security and port security through the implementation of the ISPS Code and the other measures adopted by the IMO

Maritime security and the cooperative mechanism 125 in 2002 to enhance maritime security. It will also include cooperative measures to combat piracy and armed robbery against ships as well as offences under the 1988 SUA Convention27 and its 2005 Protocol.28 Matters within the purview of the IMO and the national agencies responsible for maritime administration are of direct interest to user States and other stakeholders such as shipping companies. The users of the Straits should have the opportunity to discuss these issues with the littoral States at the Cooperation Forum should the security situation in the Straits deteriorate. Also, projects can be developed by the littoral States with user States to assist the littoral States in enhancing maritime security. For example, user States could participate in projects to enhance security in ports along the Malacca Strait by providing technical and material assistance on how to implement the ISPS Code. User States could also assist the littoral States in implementing their obligations under other IMO regulations and circulars on maritime security. Projects to enhance maritime security in the Straits would, for the most part, involve technical issues that can be dealt with by the current TTEG. However, if it becomes necessary, the littoral States could establish a separate TTEG on maritime security as mentioned in the 2005 Batam Statement and in the 2005 Jakarta Statement. Alternatively, they could establish a working group on maritime security under the current TTEG. When dealing with certain projects or measures to enhance maritime security in the Straits, such as combating piracy and armed robbery against ships or maritime terrorism, it may be necessary for the littoral States to involve other ministries or agencies in the discussions, and in some cases decisions may have to be taken by senior officials or at ministerial level.

Conclusion The Cooperative Mechanism is an historic breakthrough of great significance because it is the first arrangement that establishes a mechanism to promote cooperation between littoral States and user States in order to implement Article 43 of the 1982 LOS Convention and enhance safety, security and environmental protection in a Strait used for international navigation. The Cooperative Mechanism has received support from the major maritime powers as well as from important non-governmental organizations with a special interest in the safety and security of commercial shipping. Cooperation between the littoral States and the maritime powers under the Cooperative Mechanism is likely to serve as a confidence-building measure which will enhance the possibility of cooperation on maritime security issues in other forums. It is hoped that other user States and the private sector will also come forward to support the Cooperation Mechanism by making voluntary contributions to the Aids to Navigation Fund. This will ensure that more of the major beneficiaries share the burden of enhancing safety, security and environmental protection in the Straits. In its initial stages the Cooperation Mechanism has been focusing only on matters concerning safety and environmental protection in the Straits. This is understandable given that fact that security for shipping in the Straits has greatly

126 Robert Beckman improved since 2005 and given the fact that there is some reluctance in the littoral States to extend the mechanism to issues of maritime security. However, there is scope to extend the Cooperation Mechanism to include issues of maritime security that are within the purview of the IMO and the national agencies responsible for maritime administration and IMO matters.

Notes ∗ Some portions of this chapter were previously published in Robert Beckman, ‘The

1 2 3 4 5 6

7 8

9

10 11

Establishment of a Cooperative Mechanism for the Straits of Malacca and Singapore under Article 43 of UNCLOS’, in The Future of Ocean Regime-building: Essays in Tribute to Douglas M. Johnston (Aldo Chircop, Ted L. McDorman and Susan J. Rolston, editors, Brill Publishers, Leiden, 2008) [in press]. Hartmut Hesse and Nicolaos L. Charalambous, ‘New Security Measures for the International Shipping Community’, WMU Journal of Maritime Affairs, 2004, Vol. 3, No. 2, pp. 123–38. ICC International Maritime Bureau, Piracy and Armed Robbery against Ships, Annual Report, 1 January–31 December 2004. Note by the Secretary General, Protection of Vital Shipping Lanes, IMO Document C93/15, 7 October 2004. Document includes Annex, Profile of the Straits of Malacca and Singapore. E. E. Mitropolous, ‘Regional Co-operation in Maritime Security’, ASEAN Regional Forum Conference, 2 March 2005, available on IMO homepage under Newsroom, Speeches of the Secretary-General, , (accessed 1 November 2008). The Batam Statement of the 4th Tripartite Ministerial Meeting on the Straits of Malacca and Singapore, Batam, Indonesia, 1–2 August 2005, IMO Document IMO/SGP 1/INF.3. United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, Montego Bay, 10 December 1982, UN/Doc. A/CONF.62/122, 7 October 1982. The LOS Convention entered into force on 16 November 1994. As of 25 September 2008 there are 157 parties to the LOS Convention, including the three littoral States. The only major stakeholders in the Straits that are not parties are the United States and Thailand. Jakarta Statement on Enhancement of Safety, Security and Environmental Protection in the Straits of Malacca and Singapore, Jakarta, Indonesia, 8 September 2005, IMO Document IMO/JKT 1/2, 8 September 2005. The TTEG is a group of technical experts from the three littoral States of Indonesia Malaysia and Singapore. The TTEG was established in 1975. It meets regularly to coordinate policies relating to safety of navigation and environmental protection in the Straits. Singapore Statement on Enhancement of Safety, Security and Environmental Protection in the Straits of Malacca and Singapore, Singapore, 6 September 2007, IMO Document IMO/SGP 1/WP.1, 5 September 2007. (hereafter ‘Singapore Statement’) (accessed on 25 November 2007). For a press release on the establishment of the Cooperation Mechanism, together with other documents, see Protocol on Preparedness, Response and Co-operation to Pollution Incidents by Hazardous and Noxious Substances, 2000. The Protocol entered into force on 14 June 2007. As of 31 October 2008, there were 21 parties to the Protocol, including Singapore and Japan.

Maritime security and the cooperative mechanism 127 12 Paragraph 13 of the Batam Statement, Note 5 above, states that: ‘the Ministers welcomed the assistance of the user States, relevant international agencies, and the shipping community in the areas of capacity building, training and technology transfer, and other forms of assistance in accordance with UNCLOS 1982’. 13 Paragraph 11 of the Batam Statement, Note 5 above, states that: ‘The Ministers acknowledged that the littoral States should address the issue of maritime security comprehensively which includes trans-boundary crimes such as piracy, armed robbery and terrorism. The Ministers also recognized the need to address the issue of trafficking in persons, and smuggling of people, weapons and other trans-boundary crimes through appropriate mechanisms’. 14 For a summary of the projects funded by the Japanese, see the brochure of the Nippon Maritime Center at http://www.nmc.com.sg/NMC%20brochure.pdf 15 The Agreement was finalized on 11 November 2004 in Tokyo, and came into force on 4 September 2006. The Agreement is available on the web page of the ReCAAP Information Sharing Centre at http://www.recaap.org/index_home.html 16 For example, the Nippon Foundation and the Round Table of International Shipping Organizations organized an International Symposium on Safety and Protection of the Marine Environment in the Straits of Malacca and Singapore in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia on 24 November 2008. 17 Vice Admiral Charles Wurster, Presentation by the United States, Kuala Lumpur Meeting on the Straits of Malacca and Singapore: Enhancing Safety, Security and Environmental Protection, 18–20 September 2006, IMO/KUL1/INF.19, 18 September 2006. 18 Agreements and Programmes on Co-operation between the People’s Republic of China and the Littoral States on maintaining the security of the Malacca Strait, Submitted by China, Kuala Lumpur Meeting on the Straits of Malacca and Singapore: Enhancing Safety, Security and Environmental Protection, 18–20 September 2006, IMU/KUL 1/3/1, 18 September 2006. 19 India and Thailand have been referred to as ‘funnel States’ because the seas leading south from the Andaman Sea to the Malacca Strait are shaped like a funnel. The Andaman Islands belonging to India are within the funnel, and Thailand borders the funnel. The term ‘funnel State’ is not a term of art and has no legal significance. 20 Inspector General Basra Surinder Pal Singh, Presentation by India, Kuala Lumpur Meeting on the Straits of Malacca and Singapore: Enhancing Safety, Security and Environmental Protection, 18-20 September 2006, IMO/KUL1/INF.33, 19 September 2006. 21 ‘Thailand Joins Malacca Straits Patrols’, MINDEF News, 18 September 2008, available at 22 The Marine Electronic Highway is an IMO-led project to enhance safety in the Straits of Malacca and Singapore through the use of a network of electronic navigational charts (ENC) together with Differential Global Positioning System (DGPS) and Automatic Identification System (AIS) in order to provide vital navigational information to ships, including real-time tide and current readings. 23 Singapore Statement, Note 9 above, page 4. 24 ‘Piracy attacks down in Asia, but tankers targeted more often’, Straits Times, 6 July 2007. For other news reports, see the press releases section of web site of the ReCAAP Information Sharing Centre . 25 ReCAAP Information Sharing Centre, Quarterly Report 1 January 2008–30 September 2008, pages 11–12. 26 For a critical evaluation of the PSI, see Mark J. Valencia, ‘The Proliferation Security Initiative: A Glass Half Full’, Arms Control Today, 1 June 2007,

128 Robert Beckman 27 Convention for the Suppression of Unlawful Acts Against the Safety of Maritime Navigation, 1988; adopted in Rome on 10 March, 1988; entered into force on 1 March, 1992. As of 31 October 2008, 149 States were parties to the Convention, but neither Indonesia nor Malaysia were parties. For text, see Australian Treaty Series 1993 No. 10, http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/other/dfat/treaties/1993/10.html 28 Protocol of 2005 to the Convention for the Suppression of Unlawful Acts Against the Safety of Maritime Navigation; adopted in London, 14 October, 2005. Not yet in force. As of 31 October 2008, only four States had ratified the Protocol. [2005] ATNIF 30, For text, see http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/other/dfat/treaties/notinforce/2005/30.html

11 Shaping naval power Implications of the naval build-up in Asia Norman Friedman

Any paper or chapter on the rise of Asian navies is necessarily an analysis of what makes a navy powerful, particularly in an expeditionary campaign. Historical examples are valuable, but they can be overstated, particularly as relevant technology is changing rapidly. Also, the comparison of military forces means very little without reference to likely scenarios, or at least to likely political issues. The reader is cautioned that this chapter makes such assumptions, which may or may not be realistic. They should in no way be considered reflections of U.S. official views or policies. A navy’s position in an expeditionary campaign will be either offensive or defensive. It is often forgotten that naval operations are radically different from those on land. Unless there is some choke-point leading to an area of interest, there is no such thing as a defensive naval perimeter, or an area of total sea control. Naval warfare is about limited numbers of ships moving freely on broad waters. Much of the content of naval technology and strategy is intended to overcome that freedom of action, on the opponent’s part. For example, until the advent of radio and ocean surveillance virtually all naval battles occurred near points of interest ashore – because the opponents could be sure that the other fleet would be there. Blockades of particular ports, and battles just off blocked ports, were the main case in point. The major unseen element of modern sea power is the attempt to overcome the vastness of the sea by using various means of wide-area surveillance, which may be more or less successful. Another way to say this is that comparisons of numbers to, for example, the length of a coastline are largely irrelevant. Similarly, it is difficult to understand the value of comparisons in terms of numbers of ships or even of total tonnage. Navies fight navies, and it is the integrated naval system which counts. The main lesson of post-1945 development has been that computers and data links integrate a fleet and make up for the gross decline in numbers. Long-range weapons, beginning with carrier-based aircraft, also help change the ratio between ships and space. However – a vital caveat – there are some important roles in which numbers offer inescapable advantages. For many Asian navies they include police action, such as fishery protection and the fight against piracy. Similarly, numbers offer inescapable value in maritime interdiction, as in attempts to limit the mobility of

130 Norman Friedman terrorists (a very important role in the Arabian Sea, for example). To a limited extent shipboard assets such as helicopters and fast boats make up for limited numbers – if they are supported by sufficiently effective surveillance. Another inescapable point is personnel. In the hands of one commander and crew, for example, a submarine may be a devastating weapon. In the hands of others, the same submarine may accomplish nothing at all. This question overshadows nearly all others, but it is almost impossible to resolve. For example, the author has never seen a convincing evaluation of the relative value of different submarine services, yet anyone who has studied them is painfully aware of how wide a range of competence and initiative they represent. For any doubter, think about the two Gulf Wars. In each case, on paper the Iraqi forces were impressive. Before the first Gulf War, there was serious talk to the effect that Coalition forces would face a bloody defeat. A few skeptics pointed out that the Iraqi political system tended to kill officers showing undue initiative, because they were personal threats to Sadaam Hussein. Some of the skeptics also pointed out that the Iraqi forces had been wearied by the nearly endless bloody war against Iran. The effects of Sadaam’s policies, particularly his gross centralization, became obvious once combat began. It would be ludicrous not to expect similar considerations at sea. Warfare, as opposed to simulation, is heavily psychological. On a broader scale, in both World Wars the British Royal Navy benefited enormously from morale and attitude, despite equipment which was often objectively inferior to that of its enemies. It realized how important attitude was. The internal analysis of World War One seems to have stressed the lack of initiative shown by many officers. Between the wars, enormous effort seems to have gone into stressing the need to attack, whatever the odds. Both the German and the Italian navies were much affected and the Royal Navy did far better than the paper balance of forces would have suggested. It can be argued, incidentally, that in the Solomons campaign the U.S. Navy performed more like the World War One Royal Navy, often not rising to the level of performance its equipment should have permitted. Again, the essential factor seems to have been the demand or lack of demand for individual initiative. Peacetime services tend towards a bureaucratic view which does not favor the maverick, and there must be a real question how to maintain sufficient scope for initiative in peacetime. Then there is training, which is too often underestimated. In June 1944 the U.S. Navy destroyed much of the Japanese naval air arm, but it did not sink the Japanese aircraft carriers. U.S. officers mirror-imaged: they assumed that, like their own service, the Japanese turned out pilots by the thousand. Destroying a few hundred aircraft and their pilots could not possibly be decisive. In fact the Japanese never expanded pilot training. Those killed in June 1944 had been painstakingly trained to replace pilots killed in 1942–3 at Midway and in the gruesome Solomons campaign. The aerial victories of June 1944 really were decisive, but they were underrated, and that in turn led to serious errors at Leyte Gulf in October 1944. Probably no other twentieth-century naval campaign so well illustrates the impact of different training techniques, and also the impact of mirror-imaging in understanding what happened.

Shaping naval power 131 However, it is difficult to imagine that personnel and psychological factors can easily or reliably be quantified. It is particularly difficult to separate judgement of human factors from various prejudices – as pre-1941 assessments of the Imperial Japanese Navy by Western naval intelligence arms show. Yet national differences are real and important, including differences due to political systems.

Seapower Exactly what is naval power, and what is its reach? How is it exerted? How can the build-up of navies throughout Asia be judged? The answers are not obvious, not least because much of what creates real naval power is almost invisible. The essence of seapower is a combination of mobility, staying power and the tracklessness of the sea. The first makes it possible for the navy of a distant country to move throughout the world, as long as its ships have the necessary endurance, or as long as they can be replenished at sea. Mobility is the essence of seapower: it is easier to move any heavy weight by sea than over land. That is why seaborne air bases can move at 30 knots, crossing the world; it is why a mass of inter-continental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) can move aboard a submarine. This is a paradoxical value, because it seems that things move so much faster over land. However, the mass of a land force does not move at 50 or 60 knots, but far more slowly. British naval historian J. David Brown used to say that convoy battles during World War Two covered distances comparable to that from London to Warsaw, but involved only about the manpower of a battalion, and perhaps a few dozen aircraft. They might last two weeks. It is inconceivable in land warfare to move a typical land force thousands of miles, against opposition, in weeks, and not even in months. The key point is that the ratio of force to space is so different in naval warfare that the basic facts of naval warfare are entirely unlike those of land warfare. That is why it is so unfortunate to use terms like defensive perimeters in naval warfare. They cannot be maintained. For example, when the Japanese conquered so much territory at the beginning of the Pacific War, they often claimed that they were creating a defensive perimeter. This nonexistent perimeter had no effect whatever on the ability of the U.S. Navy to execute a carrier attack on Tokyo in April 1942. The subsequent Japanese attack on Midway was often described as an attempt to extend the perimeter to the point where no such raid would be possible, but that was a gross mis-statement of Japanese strategy. The goal was really the classic one of gaining sea supremacy by bringing the U.S. Navy to a decisive battle, which the Japanese expected to win. The subtext was a belief that if the U.S. fleet were destroyed, it would be impossible for the United States to replace it before the U.S. population became fatally war-weary. There were two errors: U.S. industrial strength effectively replaced the entire prewar fleet within a year or two, and the U.S. population, once aroused, did not tire of the war until it was nearly over in 1945. Even so, Midway represented classic naval thinking, where the talk of a defensive or other perimeter did not. This is not to deny that geography affects sea power. Ships typically require bases, and denying bases can cripple fleets. For example, in pre-1939 British

132 Norman Friedman thinking, a Far Eastern base was essential if the British fleet were to exert its power (the theory was that Japan would be unable to deal with an effective blockade backed by the Royal Navy). The British view was that sustained fleet operations required a secure base. Singapore was attractive because it seemed to be beyond Japanese reach. The U.S. Navy had exactly the same concerns when it contemplated similar operations against Japan. However, there was no illusion that the U.S. Far Eastern base, in the Philippines, was inherently secure (by 1935 U.S. war plans explicitly assumed that the Japanese would conquer the Philippines). The U.S. Navy therefore developed the ability to move its support facilities with it as it went west, towards Japan. The postwar British account of the Pacific War marveled at the U.S. ability to operate at a distance equivalent to the width of the Atlantic Ocean, thanks to a well-developed Fleet Train and underway replenishment. This ability, incidentally, atrophied as the United States gained access to a global base system after World War Two. It was not inexpensive at the time, and mobile basing became more difficult as naval technology became more complex. Similarly, during the Cold War NATO gained enormously from the fact that any Soviet submarines emerging into the North Atlantic had to pass choke-points, in which NATO forces could exact attrition. Conversely, any successful Soviet land offensive which would have brought the choke-points under Soviet control would have affected events at sea, perhaps catastrophically. There was a reason the U.S. Navy regarded the Norwegian Sea and Norway and Iceland as keys to victory. Mobility means that warships concentrate fire power, because they can carry a lot of it per ship. It does not take many warships to provide a great deal of fighting power. By way of contrast, armies are massive because it takes many individuals and many vehicles to add up to mass firepower. Much of the difference between armies and navies derives from this difference, that armies are mass organizations to an extent that navies are not. Coastal defense navies, with their masses of small missile or torpedo craft, are probably more like armies than they are like oceanic navies. When, like the old Soviet Navy, they try to grow into oceanic forces, their tactical heritage affects their blue-water tactics – and capabilities. The second quality makes sea power unique. Where any other form of military power requires local assistance in the form of base rights, a navy can, at least in theory, operate for a sustained period offshore without any permission. Not needing base rights also dramatically reduces the political implications of naval operations. It is certainly expensive to sustain a naval force at a great distance, but there is no need to gain permission to do so. Similarly, the withdrawal of a naval force does not carry the heavy public implications associated with abandoning army or air force bases. In an important sense, the free use of the sea changes the map, making all states with seacoasts much closer to each other than most might imagine. Then there is tracklessness. Most countries cannot detect, let alone track, warships much beyond the horizon. If they face some sort of assault from the sea, they must make provision for a wide range of possibilities. Tracklessness gives a navy with limited numbers of ships and personnel considerable leverage. It makes

Shaping naval power 133 amphibious assaults worthwhile – as long as the preparation time for such an assault is not lengthy, and the preparations are not too obvious. For example, in the 1991 Gulf War, the existence of a powerful U.S. amphibious force compelled the Iraqis to protect a considerable length of the Gulf coast, tying down large ground forces (which were relatively immobile) merely to ensure that at any point along that vulnerable coast there would be a reasonable ratio of strength. Thus the U.S. amphibious force exerted a disproportionate effect on the Iraqi defense even though it was never used. The Iraqis did mine the coast, and the U.S. judgement was that there was little point in risking losses in the assault. However, the Iraqis could not know what the judgement was, and the U.S. force commander did his best to demonstrate a willingness to mount an assault. In a broader sense, seapower differs dramatically from land power in that it involves far more dispersed forces. Much more effort goes into simply finding an enemy force. Conversely, in land operations, at least at present, the sheer concentration of forces demands that commanders of sub-units behave predictably. Armies live on doctrine. Navies, at least in the West, favor independent decisionmaking. At least in the U.S. Navy, the saying used to be that the Navy expects an officer to do something without violating the rules in the book. The Army (and also the Air Force) expects its officers to do things by the book: the somewhat cynical version is that “there is a right way, a wrong way, and the Army way.” Put another way, command and control for most naval forces is largely a matter of creating a usable tactical picture showing what is happening, preferably beyond the horizon. Officers fight their ships and formations on the basis of that picture. The system may include commands, but picture-keeping is its key function. Fighting on the basis of a shared picture is the essence of what some now call network-centric warfare. Although Admiral Arthur K. Cebrowski, who popularized the term in the United States, hated the idea that it was only a naval picture-keeper (naval tactical data system or NCDS, in his case) “on steriods,” that is exactly what network-centric warfare is. It is a means of distributing the information on which command decisions are based. The picture can become the basis for traditional forms of top-down command, and it can allow senior officers to become much more intrusive, but it is best used for a traditional dispersed supple naval command system. The current U.S. view is that suppleness and speed of operation are potentially decisive virtues. A really fast-moving force can paralyze an enemy that is always reacting to previous events and situations. Many U.S. strategists speak of the observe, orient, decide and act or OODA-loop, meaning the typical cycle in which one Observes the situation, Orients to it (understands it), makes a Decision, Acts, and then returns to Observation. The claim is that both sides in any sort of combat (or even in a pre-combat situation) run their own interacting OODA-loops. If one side’s loop is substantially slower than the other’s, that side’s leadership begins to feel disoriented and then helpless. It suffers a kind of nervous breakdown. On this basis suppleness and speed of decision become absolutely vital. Recent wars provide some cases in point. During the first Gulf War, the Iraqis discovered that the U.S. air attack plan had a 48-hour cycle. When they moved

134 Norman Friedman aircraft around their cities on a roughly 24-hour cycle, those aircraft were never attacked. Conversely, in Afghanistan, it appears that the Taliban government abandoned some key positions in the erroneous belief that they had already been encircled, based on its perception of the speed of advance of its enemies, and on its inability to track them. Given the potential leverage of sea power, many countries have invested in means of overcoming tracklessness – of degrading what many call the sea sanctuary. Some of the sensors are well known: ocean satellite reconnaissance systems; over-the-horizon radars; land-based HF/DF nets; underwater surveillance systems. Long-endurance ocean surveillance UAVs also fit this category. The rise of the Automatic Identification System (AIS) for merchant ships may make it substantially more difficult for warships to hide among the far more numerous merchant ships – but how that works depends in part on local shipping density and on whether merchant ship masters keep their AIS transponders operating. Tracklessness is of course most acute where submarines are concerned. Hence the use of convoy tactics for shipping protection in both world wars. Because convoys must embrace all the ships at threat, they are necessarily expensive. If submarines can be detected at long range, it is infinitely more economical to adopt offensive tactics. Another alternative is attack at (or near) source, often by other submarines. Convoy tactics are of course useless against submarines whose role is either surveillance or land attack. The evaluation problem is that purchases of land-based surveillance systems are rarely public. It is not difficult to say how many navies have Type 209 submarines, for example, or how many have combat direction systems based on the Italian IT-10. Now ask how many have various forms of over-the-horizon radar, or how many have fixed underwater surveillance systems (of which types).

Defending Singapore The defense of Singapore can be taken as an example which clarifies these more or less abstract points. There is no intent here to suggest that Singapore should consider itself threatened by any particular Asian country. However, it is impossible to see how power is balanced unless some concrete example is considered. Discussing the defense of Singapore dramatizes an essential issue, which is how to compare a navy defending a local area to a navy conducting an expeditionary operation, presumably far from home? We can call the defensive effort the home game, fought on a navy’s most familiar ground. The home navy has, moreover, access to whatever fixed command and control and surveillance facilities it has built up over time. It may be that nominally naval assets are supported by local aircraft and also by land-based missiles. We can call the offensive or expeditionary operation the away game. What is the away game like, and how does it differ from the home game? The first question is what sort of away game is involved. What sort of naval pressure is likely to be, or even can be, exerted against a state? Obviously the ultimate pressure would be direct attack aimed to overrunning it. Singapore would

Shaping naval power 135 seem to be a particularly good case of a state affectable by sea power because it is essentially a port. Thus it is possible to imagine pressure exerted indirectly, against the thousands of merchant ships that pass through that port. That raises an interesting point. Those merchant ships are owned by nationals of other countries, and they carry cargoes to other countries. To what extent is such an operation precluded by fear that other countries would almost instantly step in? This is not an entirely theoretical idea. During World War One, the Germans assumed that attacks on merchant ships could have no effect outside their intended target, which was mainly the United Kingdom. It was, however, widely believed after the war that these attacks had helped bring the United States into the war, and thus had contributed heavily to the defeat of Germany. This belief was so widespread that the U.S. Navy explicitly rejected a similar submarine campaign against Japan, for fear that attacks on other countries’ (particularly Britain’s) merchant ships would bring Britain into a war as a Japanese ally. Once Japan had attacked all of the European countries in 1941, such reasoning was no longer valid, and it became easy to decide to use submarines against all merchant ships in the Western Pacific. So any indirect campaign in Asia would be much affected by the wider context: would it be part of a limited war (which would be most likely) or something wider? The action by the U.S. and Royal Navies to deal with Iranian attacks against shipping in the Gulf probably carries much the same lesson. It is also of course possible to imagine more focussed attacks from the sea intended to disable port facilities. Such attacks would not carry such high risks – although it is interesting that the U.S. Government was reluctant to attack the port of Hanoi during the Vietnam War for fear of hitting Soviet merchant ships (later it turned out that this fear was groundless; the Soviets understood that placing their ships in a war zone was inherently dangerous). It seems that ports have become more vulnerable with the rise of container ships, because the means of loading and unloading are now more mechanized, more complex and more expensive – hence fewer in number. A few years ago there was talk of a kind of super-container, weighing tens of thousands of tons, which might be attractive to shippers because it could be taken from a ship in a few hours (shippers pay heavily for time in port). The relevant facility would have cost many times as much as a conventional container gantry, but there would have been few of them in the world. For some of these threats, such as direct attack on facilities, the question is whether the rising navies of Asia are buying the specialized weapons which might be needed. For example, are they buying long-range land attack cruise missiles designed to be fired from submarines or from surface ships? This question was easier to answer before GPS made so many weapons into potential precision landattackers. Thus, at one time anti-ship missiles needed distinctive isolated radar targets. Now many of them exist in versions with GPS guidance, and presumably any such weapon can be sent against virtually any small land target. That would include key port facilities. However, there is also a question of numbers of weapons. Individual anti-ship missiles have relatively small warheads. How many

136 Norman Friedman would it take to disable a port? To keep it disabled? Remember that no surface warship, except for U.S. destroyers and cruisers, carries more than sixteen anti-ship missiles, and that most are limited to eight. These weapons cannot be reloaded at sea. Does it turn out to be the case that the best way to deal with key facilities ashore is some kind of Special Forces attack? In that case a key question may be how well, or whether, submarines can penetrate to within range of harbors. The physical environment obviously matters. Assuming that the home team is sophisticated, it is well aware of the quirks of the local area. At least for sonar, the local environment can have enormous impact, particularly in shallow warm water. Radar functions differently in a warm area with atmospheric layers. The home team can adopt sensors which make particular use of such conditions. That might mean, for example, using ducting radar. A navy designed to operate most effectively elsewhere may be at a disadvantage. Even if it is, in theory, well aware of the potential of ducting, its personnel may not be used to this phenomenon, and they may be unable either to use it or to anticipate its tactical effects. Coastal conditions in general may impose difficulties on the away force. For example, a coast creates multipath conditions which may confuse some types of ESM and thus make it more difficult to maintain situational awareness. The local force can, in effect, create its tactical environment. For example, it can benefit from fixed surveillance systems; any foreign navy has to bring its own, and geography may not favor them. Submarine detection is the obvious case in point. Many long-range systems are effective mainly in deep water, due to multipath problems. The home navy operating in shallower water can resort to numerous linked short-range sensors. The away team can emplace its own sensors, but that operation will probably be visible, and an alert home navy can ruin it, or even deliberately pervert the picture created by the away team’s sensors. These considerations may apply with particular force to minefields. An enemy will probably find minehunting difficult to impossible in waters filled with the usual industrial detritus, because he will be unable to survey them. Although his own mines may be difficult to locate, the home navy will probably enjoy the advantage of having surveyed its own waters before the war. Of course, this assumes that the home navy has the sense (and the ability) to do so.

Naval airpower A second key point is naval airpower. It takes aircraft carriers to maintain air cover over a moving naval force at any distance from a base. Experience shows that long-range maritime strike aircraft based ashore can do devastating damage to enemy ships, but also that land-based fighters cannot reliably cover one’s own fleet (and the further away from home, the less the effective cover). Ships’ defensive weapons can shoot down incoming missiles, and they may be able to drive off the attackers, but the attackers can keep returning unless they are shot down by interceptors. Experience suggests that few attacking aircraft will fall victim to fleet air defense missiles. It is also possible that creative decoying can exhaust the

Shaping naval power 137 fleet’s defensive weapons; it may take a fighter to get close enough to be sure that a target is an enemy bomber. If neutrals are present, it may take a fighter pilot’s eyes to be sure that an aircraft really is a target. The price of mistaken identity may be so high as to abort a campaign – and it carries the same risks as does unrestricted submarine warfare. The U.S. Navy adopted extraordinary measures to avoid exactly this problem when it operated in the Tonkin Gulf during the Vietnam War. The Vincennes incident shows what can happen. The home team has the advantage, at least at the outset, of being able to operate aircraft from its own bases. If those bases are properly designed, it is probably impossible for an enemy force to destroy them with anything short of sustained bombardment – which is difficult at best. Even very powerful forces, such as those the coalition wielded in the first Gulf War, found it remarkably difficult to destroy modern airfields. It may be argued that modern anti-aircraft missiles change this equation, giving all-surface forces something like the carrier air cover of the past. Systems like the principal anti-air missile system (PAAMS) and Aegis are certainly far better than their predecessors. Linking them through the Cooperative Engagement Capability (CEC) combat system or its equivalent makes them even better. Even so, the U.S. view has been that they do not change the equation. Shipboard missiles can deal with the missiles that aircraft or fast attack boats or coastal batteries fire, but they are much less likely to kill the enemy aircraft. Much depends, then, on the number of missiles from which the aircraft can draw. If the enemy has enough missiles, and if he uses decoying cleverly, then he can exhaust the magazines of the ships, going back to base each time to rearm. That is why, during the Cold War, the U.S. view was that it took carriers to engage the Soviet Naval Air Force – that the fighters’ role was to “kill the archer, not the arrows.” In recent years the U.S. Navy has been willing to shift most of its emphasis from fighter air defense to fighter attack because the enemies it has faced have had very limited numbers of anti-ship missiles. Surely that would not always be the case. Aircraft carriers are of course also a means of striking targets afloat and ashore. Because they are close to the target area, they can achieve much higher sortie rates than can distant air bases. Pilots will not suffer the fatigue of long flights before and after action; aircraft which are damaged may survive because they do not have to fly as far. Moreover, because a carrier is so close to the action, she may be able to provide close air support under circumstances in which more distant aircraft cannot react quickly enough to the demands of ground combat. Missiles from surface combatants can provide some of the same virtues, but their numbers are likely to be quite limited. For example, few modern surface combatants carry more than eight surface-to-surface missiles in canister launchers (the U.S. Navy’s multi-purpose vertical launchers are a decided exception). A navy playing the away game has to reach its target area and, generally, remain there for a substantial time. Logistics matters. The obvious requirement is fuel: to what extent does the rising navy invest in oilers? To what extent can it protect them en route to the target area? If the tankers cannot be protected, then the navy has no great combat reach, despite its ambitions.

138 Norman Friedman

Endurance The next question is the endurance of the ships. How well can their crews maintain any edge far from home? This is often a question of size. The Royal Danish Navy found its corvettes far too small for distant operations when it participated in the 1991 Gulf War. That is why it is now reverting to large surface combatants comparable to the destroyers of other fleets. Size was important not only for seakeeping but also for habitability. The toughness of individual crewmen is not enough. A related issue is how well the ships are designed for replenishment, for example of stores, at sea. U.S. ships are often derided for their apparent emptiness, but much of that can be traced to the need to provide paths to bring stores aboard and strike them below (including paths for helicopter – vertical – replenishment). Navies which crowd the decks of their smaller ships with weapons may be unable to sustain operations far from home, despite the nominal cruising endurance of those ships. Weapons must also be replenished at sea. It is rarely appreciated how difficult it is to bring reload missiles aboard surface combatants. At one time the U.S. Navy provided large doors and other facilities for just that, but the unpleasant truth has been that surface combatants bring their weapons on board only with great difficulty, if at all. That is obvious from the way in which U.S. missile cruisers and destroyers operate during missile attacks on, for example, Iraq. Ships exhaust their magazines and then withdraw from the combat area, replenishing alongside piers or else in very calm water. Shells can be replenished at sea, and perhaps guided shells will ultimately replace some kinds of missiles. Until that happens, only aircraft carriers seem to be able to replenish their weapons loads at sea. To the extent that is true, carriers offer a unique capability for sustained combat. A non-carrier navy has much more limited endurance once it begins to shoot. It would seem to follow that there is a step difference between expeditionary navies with and without carriers. That does not mean that possession of a carrier automatically offers combat endurance. Much still depends on what has been bought to support the carrier and her aircraft. It means, rather, that without a carrier a navy lacks an important potential for development. Conversely, if some new development makes carriers unsurvivable, then sustained naval attacks on enemy land targets may become impossible. Effective land attack may reduce to either limited precision strikes or to nuclear attack, with all the latter entails. Obviously not all carriers are equal. The larger the carrier, the more numerous its aircraft, the greater its resilience in combat. Smaller carriers are more prone to operational accidents – in the Falklands, a single collision in fog cost a fifth of the Harrier force the British task force brought with it. The U.S. experience in the 1950s and 1960s, operating carriers in a range of sizes, was that smaller carriers suffered far more crashes, particularly in rough weather. Generally a larger carrier can devote more of her displacement to protection, and she can carry more fuel and ammunition per aircraft. The carrier is least vulnerable when running at high speed, and most vulnerable when replenishing. Anything which extends the

Shaping naval power 139 interval between replenishments will reduce vulnerability. For example, if future carriers operate largely unmanned aircraft, they will expend less fuel when not in combat, because their aircraft will not have to make daily proficiency flights. These ships will not have to take on aircraft fuel as frequently, and that in turn should make them less vulnerable to attack. This is no more than a sketch of the issues. How the carrier operates is important; if she has to use her radars freely, and if the radars are conventional, she may be relatively easy to locate. The carrier may gain synergistically from the use of land-attack missiles. For example, if the missiles, fired, say, from submarines, can knock out an enemy’s long-range air defense system, the carrier aircraft can operate far more freely. How effective aircraft are in general may depend on how well the reconnaissance system serving them can locate targets, so that they can be attacked from a distance (and from high altitude) using navigationallyguided bombs and missiles, such as the current U.S. GPS weapons. There is a vast difference between the same carrier, and much the same aircraft, flying massed attacks using iron bombs in the 1960s, and attacking with precision bombs in the last few years. Which model characterizes the away navy? Remember that it is not just the carrier and the aircraft, but also the reconnaissance and targeting system with which they work, and the air control system the carrier uses. In all of these senses, operating a carrier is only the first step towards truly expeditionary sea power. Without a carrier, a navy can still play a kind of away game, but it will be oriented towards imposing sea denial. For example, a navy consisting largely of submarines can still impose a kind of blockade on a distant enemy, as the Germans did in two World Wars. That blockade may fail, because the submarines may be unable to deal with modern ASW measures, many of which involve aircraft and long-range surveillance; and the submarine campaign in itself may operate so slowly that outside countries may step in to stop it. A surface ship fleet can cause considerable damage, but it will clearly have a limited potential to do so, and the victim can probably survive the experience. In the process the surface fleet itself may be so badly damaged as to be put out of action. Because navies take a long time to build, losing a surface fleet in action against one enemy carries real consequences for a country facing other enemies.

Combat systems These notes suggest the problems inherent in evaluating a navy. The public face of a navy is a combination of ships, aircraft and personnel. For the ships and aircraft, we are generally aware of their weapons and sensors, and sometimes of their onboard command systems and even of their data links (in some cases this information is decidedly not public). In the case of submarines, the rise of medium-range underwater data links may have an important impact on combat power. The first degree of difficulty in judging is that the combat potential of an individual platform depends on how well its command or combat data or combat management system integrates its sensors. The sensors themselves may change dramatically over time. A case in point is the U.S. ARCI (Acoustic Rapid Commercial Off-the-Shelf

140 Norman Friedman [COTS] Insertion) program, which changes data processors to exploit current computer chip technology. The sensor arrays do not change at all. The only physical change is the periodic insertion of new chips and new servers. The new software they run apparently makes huge differences in types of performance such as maximum passive detection range. In many, but not all, navies, ships with computer command systems are coordinated by digital links which enable them to share a common tactical picture. Experience has shown that much depends on the vocabularies of such links, which may or may not properly reflect tactical situations. Vocabulary may be particularly critical for a navy operating in a complex littoral environment. It is not merely that commanders may prefer to avoid attacking the wrong targets. Modern warships have limited magazine capacity, and except for carriers they cannot generally replenish their missiles at sea. Missiles wasted on non-combatants are not available when an enemy appears. For that matter, in an environment rich in non-combatants, a small navy may choose to hide among merchant ships in hopes that they will attract enemy weapons. It may turn out that the great advantage offered by a reasonable degree of stealth is that an enemy may ignore the real targets in favor of the merchant ships. This may seem abstract, but it is not. In 1987 the frigate USS Stark was patrolling the Gulf. Her command system, based on Link 11, had three target categories: friend, foe and unknown (presumed enemy). It had been conceived at the height of the Cold War, and its limits had not been rethought since. An Iraqi Mirage 2000 approached the ship, having previously been detected by a Saudi airborne warning and control system (AWACS). Data linking made it possible for the officer in Stark’s CIC to watch the airplane’s entire flight from Iraq, far beyond the range of his own ship’s radar. The Saudis, who were backing the Iraqis in the Iran-Iraq War then ongoing, naturally classified the airplane as friendly. To a U.S. officer on board Stark, this was not so obvious, but then again it was assumed that the main threat would come from the Iranians. The system aboard the frigate was naturally designed to avoid attacking friendlies. Operators realized that categories could actually be more ambiguous, and there was a way to superimpose a dummy target on a friendly so as to engage it. The more important point was that the officer in charge of the ship’s operation, the tactical action officer (TAO), had been trained, quite properly, to fight his ship on the basis of the picture – including identification – displayed by his ship’s computer system. He could not constantly say “yes, it appears to be friendly, but in fact that is an illusion.” Such thinking would have ruined the fast decision-making absolutely essential in combat. It would have gone against his training. The situation was further complicated by mis-identification of the radar emissions from the airplane, and by the illusion, on the part of the frigate’s commander, that the pilot of the airplane would necessarily know what ship he was approaching – at night, using only his radar. The electronic countermeasures (ECM) operator on board the frigate did recognize that the radar was in a targeting mode, but he imagined that it was from an Iranian F-14 – presumably atmospherics would have transmitted the Iranian’s signal, because it was clear from the computer

Shaping naval power 141 plot in Combat Information Centre (CIC) that no Iranian airplane was present. This mis-identification presaged a much wider problem. The F-14 was probably the first combat airplane to use a computer to create its radar waveforms, hence the first which could operate its radar in multiple modes – including the anti-ship mode similar to that of the less flexible radar on board the Iraqi airplane. One reason the U.S. Navy now prefers Link 16 is that it offers a much richer vocabulary. The vocabularies of some standard links are well known, but many navies use less highly publicized ones. What are their vocabularies like? How are their data presented in ships’ command centers? Some elements of its shore establishment, such as its industrial infrastructure, are also public. However, wide-area surveillance systems and the data fusion centers which process their data are decidedly not public. Nor is the ability to transmit the resulting pictures to ships at sea, let alone the ability to incorporate what they see into a shared wide-area picture. Unfortunately, the surveillance issue is at the heart of evaluating any navy, particularly in the context of long-range operations.

The littoral problem No evaluation of current naval expansion can be complete without special attention to the problem of operating in a littoral area. Littoral areas tend to be shallower, and they tend to be littered with islands and other terrain. One effect of both is to limit the lines of sight, or sound, that a fleet offshore enjoys. The fleet still needs effective surveillance, which is the antidote to surprise attack – and surprise attack is much easier to mount at short ranges, particularly if terrain blocks the view of the offshore fleet. In this sense the home team enjoys striking advantages. What can the offshore fleet do? In the past, the only option for the away team was to multiply its units to the point that short lines of sight were no longer significant. To see what that could mean, consider the sort of fleet the U.S. Navy deployed in the final inshore campaigns of the Pacific War: hundreds of minesweepers and coastal ASW craft working with more conventional ships. Even the conventional fleet needed more ships, because at short ranges the opposition can mount a much more intense attack. The command and control technology of the day could be saturated, so the U.S. Navy learned to split up command and control of its defending aircraft, using numerous picket ships. No modern navy has anything remotely like the numbers the U.S. Navy fielded in 1945; indeed, until about 1944 the U.S. Navy could not have operated on that scale. The question is how a modern navy of more modest means can operate in a littoral area against significant opposition. How can it overcome the problem of limited sensing range? The current U.S. answer, which may become universal, is to use unmanned vehicles to distribute sensors – the unattended sensors in effect replace the vast number of individual ships needed in 1945. They feed into a common picture, and the offshore fleet as a whole exploits that picture. In 1945, far less coordination

142 Norman Friedman was either sought or needed. If the numbers are much smaller, coordination is inescapable. Unmanned vehicles and unattended sensors are individually complicated, but on the whole they cost a lot less than buying hundreds of coastal craft. Moreover, the hundreds of small units would be difficult to transport to a distant objective area, particularly at any substantial speed. In 1945 that was no great problem, because U.S. forces advanced step by step across the Pacific, developing the local bases they needed. It seems doubtful that any version of the away game would offer similar facilities. None of this should be read as excluding the effects of defending submarines. Conventional sensors will probably find detection difficult in shallow warm water. The defending submarines may find it relatively easy to distinguish enemy warships, because nearly all surface combatants they see will by definition be hostile. The current preferred U.S. solution is to emplant multiple unattended bottom sensors, which together can form a viable picture of local submarine activity; but that is beyond the capacity of most other navies. Without such devices, it is not clear how a modern but limited fleet can defend itself against hostile submarines in shallow water. What happens to the away navy if it lacks either the facilities now being developed by the U.S. Navy or the numbers of the past? It probably cannot afford to spend any sustained time in a defended littoral area. That may mean that it cannot execute effective amphibious assaults against even moderately defended beach areas. That may not be fatal, if the away team can find undefended areas. That was, for example, the way that the Allies approached amphibious warfare in European waters before Normandy (problems at Normandy showed just how little they understood how to overcome defenses). In the Pacific, where the objectives were physically small, there was no way to escape the need to deal with defenses. Compared to 1945, the defense is probably stronger rather than weaker, because it can use much more sophisticated mines, and because coastal artillery, in the form of anti-ship missiles, is probably much more effective (although much still depends on the defense’s ability to detect and track targets). At the very least, it seems worthwhile to ask just how much offensive capability various naval build-ups have bought and are buying. Much of what is being bought is relevant more to blue-water combat than to the away game against a small but well-armed target. It cannot always be clear just what fleet the blue-water capability is intended to destroy.

Conclusion So, how can navies be evaluated? The first question is what scenarios, if any, determined their design. If the scenario is limited enough, the odds are that the navy in question will find itself fighting the wrong sort of war (from its point of view), and it may suffer badly. History is full of examples of narrowly-designed navies. The German fleet of World War One was designed to fight a decisive battle off the German coast. British strategy essentially neutralized it. The Japanese Navy of World War Two was designed specifically to fight a decisive battle off

Shaping naval power 143 the Philippines. When that did not materialize, the fleet proved badly adapted to what happened, particularly to the decisive battle which destroyed the Japanese merchant fleet. During the Cold War, many NATO navies optimized themselves to fight an ASW war – which did not happen. With the end of the Cold War, many of them had to scrap existing modern ships which were no longer particularly useful. Question two, which is even more difficult to answer, is what sort of command and control and remote sensing a navy employs. To some extent this is now tied to the design scenario. To an unappreciated degree, a navy depends on wide-area sensing to support it. If it has no such system, then it is far less effective than a navy of similar size and configuration which enjoys wide-area support. It is also possible that a navy derives much of its strength from a wide-area sensing and command system which cannot be moved far from home – the navy looks offensive, but it is really a kind of mobile coastal defense. Again, unfortunately, details of both wide-area sensors and fleet-level command systems tend not to be public matters. It may be that wide-area command and sensing are the crux of the home–away issue. Note that the U.S. approach is very much to take wide-area sensing and command with the fleet. Whatever is not mobile is connected to home facilities via global satellite connections. It is not clear which other navies have anything comparable. A subsidiary question is how aware the putative away navy is of the requirements of the away game. It sometimes seems that many smaller navies buy whatever the major powers are buying (within their resources), without asking why fleets are built the way they are. Moreover, because command and control and wide-area sensing are largely invisible, these same navies may have invested disproportionately less in them, with real but unimagined consequences. If this seems irrational, the reader should note how many navies bought shipboard computers for combat direction without investing in the data links between ships which would greatly have increased their naval effectiveness. Similarly, remarkably few air forces willingly invested in air data links between, say, fighters and air control centers – a lack which became obvious when NATO air forces operated against Serbia in the late 1990s. The least impressive of all naval requirements are the ones connected with underway support. The more visible end of such support is the specialized ships carrying fuel and weapons and other necessities. The less visible end is the way in which an individual combatant ship is designed to take fuel and supplies on board. One reason many U.S. warships seem to lack the masses of weapons that other navies have installed is that they have open decks and clear passageways specially adapted to underway replenishment. How many other navies have made similar provisions? Remember that no navy has made provision to transfer heavy weapons to surface combatants underway. That can only be done either at a base or in very calm water, and it is a relatively laborious process. Aircraft carriers are a different proposition – a point worth keeping in mind. Of course, it still matters whether the appropriate underway replenishment ships exist. Those seeking to guess the balance of sea power tend to look at handbooks of navies, which are actually handbooks of the ships that navies have. Sometimes they

144 Norman Friedman include naval aircraft, but it is not always clear which aircraft will work with a navy – nor is it always at all clear how command and control works to place those aircraft in the right place to strike. In the 1980s the U.S. Air Force placed Harpoon anti-ship missiles on some B-52s, but few in the U.S. Navy regarded those bombers as particularly benign assets. Historically, the number of blue-on-blue incidents should make any advocate of air-sea cooperation blanch. The handbooks give no idea whatever of a navy’s command arrangements, or of its access to wide-area surveillance, or, for that matter, of its state of training. What looks impressive is often much less effective in reality. The modern U.S. Navy was created beginning in the 1880s. By 1906 the United States had the second most powerful fleet in the world, at least in numerical terms. By 1917 many American officers thought theirs the most effective in the world, with the most sophisticated version of what was then the premier naval weapon system, the big gun and its fire control. Then the U.S. Navy encountered the British Royal Navy when the United States entered World War One. It suffered a series of intense shocks, which amounted to an admission that appearance could be grossly deceptive. To a considerable extent it was probably driven by those shocks in its interwar materiel development, although it seems not to have drawn some important lessons about tactics and personnel policy. By 1942 the U.S. Navy really was pre-eminent, at least in most materiel, but it still suffered from unrealistic doctrine and training. Its problems were not really solved until 1943 at the earliest. To what extent could an observer have perceived this reality at the time, even an omniscient one? Another question, not raised above, is how deep a navy’s resources run, in terms of missiles and other expendables. Casual estimates suggest, for example, that many smaller navies never bought more than one or two anti-ship missiles per tube. After all, missiles do not have to be fired in training. They are quite expensive. A navy with few such weapons will have very few officers who have ever seen one fired, and even fewer with a sense of how missile tactics should work. Not firing (and almost never firing against real targets) makes it likely that design defects will go undiscovered. Limited firings also lead officers to exaggerate the supposed lethality of these weapons. U.S. experience has been that large numbers of shots are always needed, and moreover that weapons sometimes deteriorate in storage. Few other countries conduct similar series of shots. In some cases weapons were fired off only when they had passed their guaranteed lifetimes, hence were no longer (in theory) effective. In many ways anti-ship missiles are like the torpedoes of yore – with the vital exception that they cannot be recovered, cleaned up, and reused. In that sense navies used to have a much better idea of how their key weapons worked. They could experiment tactically. Even then, the desire not to expend costly torpedoes drastically limited the number of full end-to-end shots, with embarrassing wartime results (such as the U.S. Navy’s World War Two torpedo scandal). The problem is particularly acute if a navy’s sense of its weapon capabilities is derived almost entirely from the advertising used to sell those weapons in the first place. That is probably a far more common situation than most would imagine.

Shaping naval power 145 Finally, there are the intangibles: personnel, doctrine, training, attitude. It is far too easy to disregard all of them because they are so difficult to evaluate; but they probably overwhelm many of the more quantitative measures of fighting power. Remember always that military forces, including navies, spend most of their time in peace, exerting influence by the way they appear to others – often, for navies, by fleet visits. What counts then is how impressive ships look, which often means how many weapons they carry. Real capability is invisible. It may not really count. If this seems to be an unfair view, remember the navies of the late nineteenth century. They represented enormous investments, made at a time when sea power seemed to be the dominant military force in much of the world. Their officers were certainly sincere in their efforts. However, events early in the twentieth century showed that these fleets were far less impressive in fact than in appearance. For example, their main weapons, their guns, were very poorly controlled, to the point where battle might well be inconclusive (some of the most important damage in the Russo-Japanese War can be attributed to a few lucky hits). The conclusion: in peacetime, what counts is appearance, because appearance brings influence. To that extent, this chapter is misleading, because it is focused on wartime efficiency – and on how difficult it is to ensure wartime efficiency from a peacetime perspective.

12 The future development of the PLA Navy Zhang Junshe

This chapter discusses the future development of the PLA Navy. It represents my personal views, and not those of the PLA Navy. The chapter addresses the direction of future modernization, and the main driving forces for the modernization process of the PLA Navy. It seeks to reassure other countries that the development of the PLA Navy is peaceful and does not pose any threat to others. It also includes suggestions for strengthening security cooperation with navies of other countries.

Future modernization of the PLA Navy In accordance with the state’s overall plan to modernize the economy and the nation more generally, China pursues a three-step development strategy in modernizing its national defense and armed forces. China’s national Defense Policy “includes guarding against and resisting aggression, defending against violation of China’s territorial sea and air space, and borders; opposing and containing the separatist forces for ‘Taiwan independence’ and their activities, taking precautions against and cracking down on terrorism, separatism and extremism in all forms.”1 The first step is to lay a solid foundation by 2010, the second is to make major progress around 2020, and the third is basically to reach the strategic goal of building informationized armed forces and being capable of winning informationized wars by the mid-twenty-first century with a fundamental shift from platform-centric to network-centric warfare. The building of computerized armed forces has entered a new era of all-round development, says a White Paper on China’s national defense in 2008 issued in January 2009.2 All this requires fundamental changes in military doctrine, operations and organization. According to the three-step development strategy in modernizing its national defense and armed forces, the PLA Navy will continue to implement the military strategy of active defense for the future. It’s working to build itself into a modern maritime force of operation consisting of combined arms with both nuclear and conventional means of operations. The PLA Navy aims at gradual extension of the strategic depth for offshore defensive operations and enhancing its capabilities in integrated maritime operations and nuclear counterattacks.

The future development of the PLA Navy 147 The PLA Navy takes technological change as the foundation for its development and the need to be able to conduct informationized operations as the driving force. It promotes the composite development of informationization and technology. These are both important force multipliers for the PLA Navy. Taking informationization as the goal and strategic focus of its modernization drive, the PLA Navy gives high priority to the development of maritime information systems, and new-generation weaponry and equipment. The PLA Navy is endeavoring to build mobile maritime forces capable of conducting operations under conditions of information-based operations, and to strengthen its overall capabilities of operations in offshore waters, joint operations and integrated maritime support. Efforts are being made to improve and reform training programs and methods to intensify training in joint integrated maritime operations. Efforts are also being made to improve maritime battlefield capabilities, with emphasis on the construction of relevant facilities for new equipment and the development of combat support capabilities. The navy is enhancing research into the theory of a naval operations and exploring the strategy and tactics of a maritime people’s war, which is one involving the broad masses of the people and with the navy as the backbone, under modern conditions.

Driving forces of the modernization process The trend of today’s worldwide revolution in military affairs is a major driving force for the development of the PLA Navy. Since the beginning of the twenty-first century, driven by rapid development of hi-tech processes, such as information technology, world military reform has come into a new phase with qualitative changes. As informationization has already become the main feature of the worldwide revolution in military affairs, joint operations have become the core conception of force structure. While navies of most countries around the world have made great efforts in developing informationized weaponry, they have also put in much more effort in reforming and reshaping their military formations, innovating their military theories and improving their organizational systems so as to promote overall military transformation, For the PLA Navy, the in-depth development of the worldwide revolution in military affairs is posing serious challenges, and providing rare opportunities as well. The various programs for the reform and opening-up of the national economy and society constitute another driving force for the development of the PLA Navy. Through the 30-years’ reform and opening-up, China has basically established the socialist market economy with great changes taking place in social structure, social organizational form, distribution methods of social resources and so on. As a special organization in the whole social system, the military can not develop separately from the social environment in which it exists. These links with society mean that conditions of service must be improved for military personnel, including pay, educational opportunities and housing. These improvements are necessary if the military is to attract and retain

148 Zhang Junshe the people necessary to support high-tech capabilities and informationization. Thus, personnel costs are becoming much higher for the PLA Navy and this goes a long way to explaining China’s increased defence budget. As Li Zhaoxing, spokesman for the 11th National People’s Congress, said in March 2009, “increased spending is mainly for better treatment of servicemen, and for the purchase of equipment and construction of facilities to enhance the ability of the military force to defend the country in the age of information.”3 China’s present military policy system and management style in many aspects can be dated back to the warring period when the Chinese people were fighting against the Japanese invaders in the Anti-Japanese War before and during World War Two. They have been formed under the condition of the planned economy. Though adjustments have been made with the on-going process of the nation’s reform and opening-up, a military policy system and management style adapted to the socialist market economy has not been established. This style should include for instance, military human resources distribution, social welfare and security of the servicemen, modern professional military officer system, socialized logistic support, and so on. The in-depth development of China’s reform and openingup has not only put objective demands on the PLA Navy, but also provided the favorable environment for its development. The last driving force to consider is the need to make a realistic assessment of the capabilities required to allow the PLA Navy to fulfill its missions. The new international security environment requires the PLA Navy to improve its capabilities for countering various security threats and accomplishing diversified military tasks, and to ensure that it can not only deter and win wars but also effectively respond to crises and maintain peace. At present, the PLA Navy is still in the phase of mechanization and semi-mechanization, and at the initial stage of informationization. The PLA Navy lags far behind developed countries in many aspects of weaponry and equipment. Even compared to some developing countries, the PLA Navy’s weaponry and equipment is not at a high level in many aspects. The PLA Navy has a long way to go if it intends to better fulfill its sacred mission of maintaining state sovereignty, security and territorial integrity and to realize the overall transformation to informationization.

Peaceful development without any threat to other countries China’s national security strategy of promoting both development and security emphasizes building a harmonious socialist society at home and abroad, and a harmonious world to ensure both China’s overall national security and enduring world peace. China is committed to fostering a cooperative and win-win relationship of mutual benefit with other countries and working with them to promote common security. China’s national defense is subordinated to and serves the national development and security strategies. It necessarily puts fostering a security environment conducive to China’s peaceful development as a priority goal. China pursues a national defense policy which is purely defensive in

The future development of the PLA Navy 149 nature. China will not carry out an arms race with any other nation. It will not conduct outward expansion, and it will not pose offensive military threats to any other country. No matter how the national defense policy is changed, the defensive nature of China’s national defense will remain unchanged. The PLA Navy will continue to implement the military strategy of active defense in the future, and exercise offshore defense. It will give priority to enhancing its overall capabilities of operations in offshore waters under conditions of informationization. The PLA Navy is not a global navy, and its development will not pose threats to other countries. To my understanding, the main missions of PLA Navy are to maintain state sovereignty, security and territorial integrity, to safeguard the national development interests, to respond to various security threats and to keep world peace.

Strengthening maritime security cooperation with other navies The peaceful development of China relies on a good external security environment. With the deepening of economic globalization, not only local wars and armed conflicts will impact on China’s development, but also non-traditional security issues, such as terrorism, multinational crimes, natural disasters and environmental pollution, will pose complex challenges to China. Without a harmonious world, it is difficult for China to build a harmonious socialist society. Based on this, the PLA Navy will play an active role in maintaining world and regional peace and stability, and promoting common development. The PLA Navy will face the world in a more active posture. It will maintain military contacts with navies of other countries on the basis of the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence. These Five Principles are: mutual respect for sovereignty and territorial integrity; mutual non-aggression; non-interference in each other’s internal affairs; equality and mutual benefit, and peaceful coexistence. They were first set forth by Premier Zhou Enlai in his talk to the Indian delegation at the start of the negotiations that took place in Beijing from December 1953 to April 1954 between representatives of the Chinese and Indian governments on relations between the two countries in Tibet.4 Later, the Five Principles were formally written into the preface to the “Agreement Between the People’s Republic of China and the Republic of India on Trade and Intercourse Between the Tibet Region of China and India.”5 Since June 1954, when the Five Principles were included in the joint communique issued by Premier Zhou Enlai and Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, they have been adopted in many other international documents and have become widely accepted as norms for relations between countries. In accordance with the Five Principles, the PLA Navy will take part in international security cooperation and develop cooperative military relations that are non-aligned, non-confrontational and not directed against any third party. It will promote the establishment of just and effective collective security mechanisms

150 Zhang Junshe and military confidence-building mechanisms, and work with navies of other countries to prevent conflicts and wars. So far, the PLA Navy has participated in some international and regional security mechanisms such as ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF), Western Pacific Naval Symposium (WPNS), and the Council for Security Cooperation in the Asia-Pacific (CSCAP). These security conferences and dialogues help lay a good foundation for strengthening security cooperation. Since 2003, the PLA Navy has held bilateral joint maritime exercises separately with navies from Pakistan, India, Republic of Korea, France, UK, Australia, Thailand, U.S. and Russia, as well as others. In November 2003, the PLA Navy held joint search and rescue exercises in the East China Sea near Shanghai with the visiting Indian Navy. In December 2005, a PLA Navy visiting flotilla held joint exercises in the non-traditional security field with its Pakistan, Indian and Thai counterparts respectively. In March 2004, the PLA Navy and French Navy conducted joint search and rescue exercises in the field of non-traditional security in the Yellow Sea near Qingdao, China. This was the first time that the PLA Navy had held this kind of joint exercise with navy from a Western country. In September and November 2006, the PLA Navy and U.S. Navy conducted joint maritime search and rescue exercises in the offshore waters of San Diego and in the South China Sea. In May 2007, for the first time, PLA Navy warships participated in the WPNS multilateral maritime exercises. This multi-level, multifield and multi-approach military security cooperation has helped promote mutual trust and create a good international environment for the peaceful development and economic prosperity in both the region and the world as well. Based on the principle of freewill, equality, mutual trust, mutual benefit and mutual respect, the PLA Navy may cooperate with navies of other countries in the following aspects: 1.

Maritime information sharing. This is a useful way to improve maritime security. There seems to be growing recognition that information sharing among navies is critical in combating transnational crimes and maritime terrorism. The PLA Navy and other navies can share information with each other to deal with threats such as maritime disasters, piracy and terrorist attacks happening in their offshore waters.

2.

Maritime security dialogues. The starting point of any cooperation lies with dialogue. Dialogue is an important process for defining what we can pursue in the maritime security cooperation. The PLA Navy may carry out dialogue and discussions with other navies on such issues as safeguarding maritime navigation, fighting piracy and terrorist activities, marine environmental protection, maritime search and rescue and natural disaster relief.

3.

Setting up maritime military communication channels. In joint search and rescue exercises between the PLA Navy and navies of some other countries, including the U.S. Navy, communication procedures such as the EXTAC 1000 Maritime Maneuvering and Tactical Procedures have

The future development of the PLA Navy 151 been used. In the future, discussions on communication methods in maritime security cooperation may be carried out between the PLA Navy and navies of other countries in order to establish the technological commonality. 4.

Fighting against maritime crimes. Maritime crimes, such as piracy, smuggling, drug trafficking and illegal immigration, have often occurred and pose realistic threats to the maritime and economic security of many countries. Confronted with these common challenges in the field of nontraditional security, the PLA Navy may discuss ways and approaches for collectively preventing and suppressing maritime crimes in order to safeguard normal fishing and shipping with navies of other countries.

5.

Practising maritime joint search and rescue and humanitarian relief. Cooperation in maritime search and rescue and humanitarian relief is in the common interest of all countries. It may reduce the loss of assets and human lives on the high seas.

6.

Holding maritime joint military exercises in the non-traditional fields such as fighting piracy, maritime search and rescue and humanitarian relief. Non-traditional threats such as piracy and natural disasters are of great concern to all nations. The major aim and function of maritime joint military exercises in the non-traditional fields is to strengthen international military exchanges, promote mutual trust and deter multinational crimes.

Conclusion The modernization of the PLA Navy is part of China’s overall development strategy, and is designed to bring the navy fully into the high-tech era of informationization. It is a peaceful process in accordance with the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence that is not aimed at posing a threat to others. However in achieving its objectives, the PLA Navy faces many challenges, especially achieving the necessary conditions of informationization and building a management and policy system adapted to the socialist market economy.

Notes 1 China’s National Defense in 2006, http://english.peopledaily.com.cn/whitepaper/ defense2006/defense2006(2).html 2 China’s National Defense in 2008, http://www.china.org.cn/government/central_ government/2009-01/20/content_17155577.htm 3 “China’s military forces to be trained for informationized warfare,” People’s Daily Online, 5 March 2009, http://english.peopledaily.com.cn/90001/90776/90785/6606504. html 4 Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the People’s Republic of China, “China’s Initiation of the Five Principles of Peaceful Co-Existence,” http://www.fmprc.gov.cn/eng/ziliao/3602/ 3604/t18053.htm 5 Available at: http://www.tpprc.org/documents/agreements/1954.pdf

13 Regional maritime security environment An Indian perspective Devbrat Chakraborty

From the turn of the century onwards, India’s engagement with Southeast Asia has been characterized by consistency and convergence. These strategic developments affect the maritime environment significantly and hence are discussed first before moving on to the regional maritime security imperatives from an Indian perspective.

Converging priorities In the first instance, India does not have any border or boundary dispute with the Southeast Asian states, and it has already delineated its maritime boundary with Indonesia and Thailand. Even perceptions of mutual threat in respect of India vis-à-vis Southeast Asian nations have always been low, if not negligible. At the onset of India’s 1991 economic reforms, engagement with ASEAN was to accelerate the expansion and modernization of Indian infrastructure in the form of communications, roads, ports and power.1 Thankfully, at about the same time, Southeast Asian politics itself witnessed a sea change. The Cambodian issue was no longer contentious and Vietnam was perceived as a potential ally by ASEAN. Contrary to previous perceptions, India was seen as a power that could play a balancing role in the region, once it became obvious that the superpowers would reduce their presence. This led to a new series of broader strategic interactions with several ASEAN nations, not merely in military strategic terms. This is even more evident from the then Indian prime minister Vajpayee’s observation that: ‘ASEAN has always been very close to us in terms of history, geography and cultural association. The Ganga-Mekong Cooperation Programme, India’s dialogue partnership with ASEAN and our ARF (ASEAN Regional Forum) partnership all underlie our linkages. We would like to see these linkages flourish in the future in the interest of our collective security’.2 India’s engagement with the ASEAN states has now assumed an added strategic dimension in the form of the riparian states along the Mekong River.

An Indian perspective 153

Trade relations The one-and-a-half billion people of ASEAN plus India, when taken together, would certainly help increase trade volumes and would form the largest trading bloc in the world. India has Free Trade Agreements with Singapore, Thailand and Sri Lanka, and the one with ASEAN was signed in August 2009. In the context of the India–ASEAN FTA negotiations in goods trade, Federation of Indian Chamber of Commerce and Industry (FICCI) Secretary General Dr Amit Mitra said: ‘With bilateral trade growing at around 25% and reaching nearly $35 billion, the FTA in goods will be vital for expanding the space for economic engagement between our two economies’.3 Southeast Asia accounts for about 12 per cent of India’s total foreign trade and India would like to raise this figure to 25 per cent in the shortest possible time. Recognizing the need for a Regional Trade and Investment Area (RTIA) to progressively liberalize trade in goods, services and investments, ASEAN and India signed a Comprehensive Economic Cooperation Agreement (CECA) in 2003. The India–ASEAN FTA will provide a further fillip to relations. Trade interests are therefore likely to become even more important in the future, with trade between India and ASEAN possibly touching the US $50-billion mark by 2010.4 Though significant on its own, the outlook for trade between ASEAN and India is indeed very small when compared with China: Indo-ASEAN trade is only a seventh of Sino-ASEAN trade. A study by the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FICCI) has shown that while India’s share in ASEAN trade improved marginally from 1 per cent to 1.6 per cent between 1997 and 2006, China’s share went up from 3.7 per cent to 11.4 per cent during the same period.

Economic cooperation In addition to trade relations, India’s renewed interest in its ‘Look East’ policy is also, to a very large measure, due to its desire to accelerate its economic development further through reforms and liberalization. The attractiveness of ASEAN as an export market, because of its geographical proximity and hence shorter delivery schedules and lower freight costs, remains perhaps an opportunity not to be missed. On the other hand, investor perception of India has also changed for the better due the size of the Indian market, its burgeoning middle class, and the availability of plenty of cheap but skilled labour. Support services in areas such as legal, banking, accounting, software financial analysis, management, etc. by way of Indian professionals migrating to Southeast Asia, are also likely to play an influential role in the future. It must also be recalled that India has helped the region recover from internal and external economic shocks. For example, ASEAN’s imports from India declined substantially from US $4.4 billion in 1997 to US $1.7 billion in 1998 in the aftermath of the financial crisis. However, ASEAN exports to India during the same period increased from US $4.5 billion to US $5.2 billion. In April 1998, India offered to allow the use of its EXIM Bank credit for two-way investment

154 Devbrat Chakraborty flows with ASEAN. In the context, the Government, despite pressures, had resisted a competitive devaluation of the rupee. During the crisis, therefore, India pledged solidarity with ASEAN to boost trade and investment flows.

Political and institutional cooperation Largely due to trade and economic considerations, political and institutional cooperation was perhaps inevitable. ‘Looking East’ became one of the central components of not only its foreign policy but even India’s new national strategy in the early 1990s. India was made a full dialogue partner in ASEAN, making it eligible to participate in a wide range of activities, including infrastructure, civil aviation and computer software, as well as in the annual ASEAN-Post Ministerial Conference (ASEAN-PMC). This also opened the way for India’s admission to the ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF) and facilitated India’s participation in the region’s multilateral security activities along with trade and investment links. India concluded a Framework Agreement on Comprehensive Economic Cooperation with ASEAN in 2003, with Singapore in 2005, and subsequently with Thailand. Similar commitments were made under the Bay of Bengal Initiative for Multisectoral Technical and Economic Cooperation (BIMSTEC). Thus, even from a political and institutional perspective, there was a much greater acceptance of India’s potential as a stabilizing and balancing factor in the region.

Security cooperation Increased emphasis on security cooperation and India’s naval diplomacy since the 1990s has also helped it overcome the unfounded suspicions of India’s attempts at regional hegemony. A number of confidence-building measures (CBMs) that India undertook, and greater appreciation of Indian maritime threats by the Southeast Asian countries, has facilitated security cooperation, though largely bilateral. The scope of cooperation soon expanded to more than ten countries of the region and led to many defence cooperation agreements, joint exercises, ship visits and coordinated patrols in the years to follow. Such interactions were then soon expanded into a multilateral biennial exercise, called MILAN, off the Andaman Islands. Hydrographic assistance, coordinated patrols, coastal security, anti-piracy patrols, rescue operations, disaster relief operations, information exchange initiatives, personnel training, etc. have all since been undertaken with a variety of navies and maritime security agencies. On the multilateral front, India is also partner in the ReCAAP initiative, and on the whole it seems that the scope for greater cooperation is indeed more promising in the area of non-traditional security. Finally, given the importance of Southeast Asia, New Delhi’s policy of proactive engagement with Southeast Asia is likely to continue even if there are changes in the political leadership in India. For example, Prime Minister, Dr Manmohan Singh has noted: ‘the abundance of natural resources and significant technological skills in the ASEAN region provides a natural base for the growth of synergies

An Indian perspective 155 and integration between ASEAN and India – both in trade and investment. The challenge, however, is to create and maintain a regional and international environment that enables us to attain and sustain high rates of economic growth’.

India’s maritime security imperatives India is and will remain a maritime nation. Its 7,516 km long coastline, 27 islands of the Lakshadweep chain, and 572 islands of the Andaman and Nicobar chain, close to 200 major and minor ports and a merchant shipping fleet of over 750 ships, make India’s maritime security imperatives compelling. Due to its sheer size and strategic location, some of these imperatives do not merely impinge upon India’s maritime security. The regional security environment is also composed of, and affected by, these imperatives. In the first instance, India is singularly blessed in terms of maritime geography. It has unimpeded access to the Indian Ocean on both coasts besides two island groups, distinct from the mainland deep within the Bay of Bengal and the Arabian Sea. India must thus adopt an oceanic approach to its strategy. On the flip side, this also places much greater demands on maritime security agencies to safeguard its maritime interests. Insofar as Southeast Asia is concerned, India’s geography brings it very close to the regional littorals and waters. Second, the phenomenon of Growing Sea Dependence affects India as much, if not more, than any other littoral state. Among other factors, India’s economic resurgence is directly linked to her overseas trade and energy needs, most of which are transported by sea. Around 20 per cent of India’s overall petroleum demand is met by offshore oil production. Due to the strong growth in the demand for oil, it is expected that by 2010 almost three-quarters of India’s oil and gas needs will be met by imports. Not surprisingly therefore, the Sagar Samriddhi deepwater exploration project of the Oil and Natural Gas Commission (ONGC) involves 47 deepwater wells, up to depths of 3 km on the East coast of India. It aims at 4 billion tonnes of reserves by 2020. Equally significant is that oil and gas finds are already being made in the private sector, particularly on the eastern seaboard and the KG Basin. Even the preliminary gas finds indicate that half or more of India’s natural gas requirements could be met from the output of these fields in the years to come. At the same time, ONGC Videsh has acquired properties in more than a dozen countries targeting 60 million tonnes of oil equivalent by 2025. The vast majority of this will obviously be transported by sea. One of the world’s largest refining hubs is at Jamnagar, and exports of refined products, already over 30 million tonnes per annum, only add to the sea transport requirements and hence the allied interests. The lOR island nations have traditionally been India’s close partners. A majority of these nations, however, do not have adequate maritime resources to effectively monitor their respective areas of maritime interest. The Indian Navy has regularly supported numerous endeavours to ensure ‘good order at sea’. Such assistance, of course, comprises both short-term emergency aid or measures and long-term

156 Devbrat Chakraborty capacity building activities. The same intent and commitment applies to Southeast Asia as well. However, as India has time and again reiterated, India respects all sovereignty and non-interference norms and provides assistance only with host nation consent. Extra-regional maritime forces are currently deployed in the lOR for operations connected with the Global War on Terror, Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF) and Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF). The strategic objectives of a majority of these navies are broadly coincident with India’s own strategic interests. Since most of these states are crucially dependent on oil supplies from the Persian Gulf, India’s role and importance in the regional context is fully understood by such states as well. Terrorism and transnational crime are perhaps the most prominent sources of non-traditional violence and instability in the region. These challenges therefore need to be handled with all means at the disposal of the regional states. Particularly for India, continuing terrorist violence in India itself, South and Southeast Asia and growing crime-terror nexus have significant long-term implications. Periodic terrorist spectaculars have continued ever since. More recently a spate of bombings in major Indian cities has heightened such concerns. Almost all these cases, in India and abroad, have been looked at as a domestic law enforcement problem and left to the initiative of the individual states. Things are, however, far from simple and transnationality brings in many challenges and grey areas that the perpetuators know how to exploit very well. Other areas of transnational concern for India involve issues of transnational organized crime involving illicit drugs, illegal arms, and human trafficking. Another related concern is about the transportation and/or use of weapons of mass destruction by both state and non-state actors. Especially in the context of India’s long coast line, as the deadline for delineation of the extended continental shelf approaches, the effects of this issue on the regional security environment is likely to become more and more important. This is because as more areas of the high seas come within the continental shelf, fresh boundary negotiations will have to be conducted between adjacent coastal states. Insofar as India is concerned, hydrographic assistance and cooperation with regional states has featured very prominently until now and this experience will provide even further opportunities for cooperation. There is also a need to support the Indian diaspora and non-resident Indians in times of need, like the case of the Lebanon evacuation. In the current financial year remittances from Indians employed abroad are likely to total over US $30 billion. This is amongst the highest in the world and is very important to keep India’s balance of payments parameters manageable. Collaboration in times of disaster cannot be overemphasized and therefore a collaborative approach predominates in the Benign Role. Disaster relief to people in Sri Lanka, Maldives and Indonesia in the aftermath of the December 2004 tsunami reiterated this commitment. Cyclones Nargis and Sidr, more recently, were also reminders that such natural calamities are very much a part of the regional environment, and India has both domestic and regional responsibilities in this context.

An Indian perspective 157 Also, a balance must be struck between development and the fragile environment that nature has bestowed, particularly in this region, largely comprising enclosed, if not territorial, waters. In India, as is true of the regional maritime scenario as well, there have been spates of developments that have to do with one or more of the following aspects: • • • • • • • • •

Mangroves in the riverine regions and estuaries. Olive Ridley turtles. Coastal zone developments, like new port construction, etc. Marine pollution from ships, offshore rigs and effluents. Sea level rise as a result of global warming. Over-fishing. Coast line erosion. Offshore oil and gas exploration and production. Ship breaking, etc.

Finally, on the multilateral front, UN Mandated peacekeeping operations will increase in size and scope and India will have to play a greater role in the littorals. Accordingly, the Indian Navy has already operated credibly in Mogadishu, Mozambique and the Maldives.

China and India No discussion on regional security in Southeast Asia, and indeed the Indian Ocean Region, can be complete without considering China. Insofar as the India-China interaction is concerned, some salient aspects are: •

•

•

•

Few, if any, doubt that China’s most likely strategic Asian competitor is India. Within the region, the maritime domain is the only domain where this competition is likely to be dominant simply because China is not a littoral. China is amongst India’s largest trading partners and yet even in early 2009, it reiterated an emphatic public claim to Arunachal Pradesh. In this context it is worth noting that China has settled boundary disputes with 14 out of her 15 neighbours, except with India. Trade obviously is largely seaborne. The much publicized ‘string of pearls’ strategy and its clear connotation of military encirclement, is another source of concern. In this context, Gwadar is the most significant ‘pearl’ and could provide future facilities to the PLA Navy ships and nuclear submarines. Other ports, like Hambantota in Sri Lanka and Chittagong in Bangladesh, add to India’s concerns. Another concern is the Chinese handing over to Pakistan the designs, expertise, and even actual hardware relating to nuclear weapons and a family of ballistic missiles.

Notwithstanding, India and China have, albeit slowly, expanded their defence exchanges, including naval exercises. There are also possibilities that India and

158 Devbrat Chakraborty China will cooperate on issues relating to energy security and trans-border pipelines. The former is already a reality with ONGC and Chinese petroleum companies bidding jointly for oil equity in third countries. The contribution of Chinese workers and technicians in the Indian private sector’s East-West gas pipeline has also been significant. A ‘security dilemma’ is thus already apparent between India and China. Expanded Indian and Chinese maritime profiles in the region are a natural consequence of their growing economic weight, amongst other factors. Yet, what one side considers a genuine search of its own security, energy related or otherwise, tends to be interpreted by the other as a threatening move. However, India and China need not necessarily clash in the near future. The best way forward is to recognize the destabilizing potential of the security dilemma and take steps to intensify mutual security dialogue and cooperation. The U.S.–China engagement, which varies from extensive cooperation to completely different positions in specific areas, such as trade, economics, politics, technology, etc., is particularly demonstrative in this regard.

India’s defence budget Based on the maritime security environment, and indeed the overall security situation, India continues to modernize its defence capabilities, for which resources have been devoted to varying extents, but never more than what India could afford. In the first twelve years after independence, India’s defence expenditure was as low as 1.8 per cent of GDP. After the 1962 conflict with China, it averaged about 3 per cent until 1987. The average has reduced ever since and from 1988 to 2007 it averaged 2.4 per cent. It was even lower, at just below 2 per cent of GDP, in the fiscal year ending March 2009. Thus, in recent years, India’s defence expenditure since 1987 has consistently averaged well below the world’s average military expenditure of 2.6 per cent (see Figure 13.1).

Maritime cooperation: A necessity It is thus obvious that a variety of interests, ranging from food and environment to trade, transport and economics, relate very closely to the sea in Southeast Asia. In this region more than 70 per cent of the population reside in the coastal districts, where they are highly dependent upon the resources of the sea as well as for transportation.5 Also, the absence of habitation and the relatively lower political profile of maritime interests results in low domestic investment in the maritime environment and so cooperative law enforcement against transnational crime and terrorism is least likely to have domestic political fallouts. Therefore, maritime developments and concerns occupy a big part in the regional strategic architecture.6 Commonality of interests bestows a rich source of ideas and initiatives arising from the maritime environment. Correspondingly, most maritime claims are

An Indian perspective 159

4

% of GDP

3.5 Current year (08–09): 1.99% 3

2.5

2

86

–8 87 7 –8 88 8 –8 89 9 –9 90 0 –9 91 1 –9 92 2 –9 93 3 –9 94 4 –9 95 5 –9 96 6 –9 97 7 –9 98 8 –9 99 9 –0 00 0 –0 01 1 –0 02 2 –0 03 3 –0 04 4 –0 05 5 –0 06 6 –0 07 7 –0 08 8 –0 9

1.5

Fiscal year

Figure 13.1 India’s Defence Expenditure (as per cent of GDP). Source: Integrated Headquarters of MoD (Navy), Dew Delhi, 2008.

settled by agreement, not by adjudication or intra-state conflicts. Arbitration courts tend to be very flexible about state practice, while even in the presence of differences, disputing states are happy with the status quo. Amongst all cooperative security measures that can be envisaged in South East Asia, maritime cooperation seems to be the most promising, even if some may not consider it to be the most pressing one. As Admiral Blair said: ‘I can’t conceive of many missions in the 21st Century not undertaken as part of a coalition, from high end to low’.7 The pressures for naval forces to engage in good governance and welfare activities will therefore grow because of requirements to manage issues that arise beyond territorial waters.

Trust and confidence However, when there is no confidence, even the involvement of naval forces in matters as innocent as pollution control can be read as politically weighted by observers abroad. Similarly, ships in government service can be suspected of engaging in strategic intelligence gathering. Confidence building is sometimes described as ‘soft’ arms control, but again, that undervalues its potential. It has been said that ‘nations do not distrust each other because they are armed, they are armed because they distrust each other’.8 In other words, attempting to ensure security by maintaining large and expensive weapons inventories is not the problem – it is

160 Devbrat Chakraborty merely a symptom of the problem. If armament levels are genuinely maintained purely for defence and not for aggression, then the underlying problem, to which arms control is a partial solution, is a lack of mutual trust or confidence.

Inherent commonalities In any case, even CBMs have been more successful at sea, as has been demonstrated by the INCSEAs. This is because of the simple reason that they are ‘sailor-made’.9 The success of sea-based CBMs is also due to the bond of commonality which comes from being professional mariners; the fact that all navies have a diplomatic role as well; a long tradition of international consultation in seagoing matters since maritime economic interests rarely concern one nation in isolation; and, the necessity to operate in the high seas in conjunction with other navies to maintain maritime safety. Maritime forces have important attributes denied to forces on land. They are less constrained by issues of territorial sovereignty than land forces. Maritime units, including maritime patrol aircraft, also offer mobility, versatility and accessibility, to deserted coastal areas for example. Maritime agencies in contact, even in low intensity, benign, or law enforcement operations, are thereby inherently more likely to establish a basic level of cooperation even in the absence of official arrangements. For example, the Republic of Singapore Navy, working with the Police Coast Guard (responsible for patrolling territorial waters) and in close cooperation with Indonesian and Malaysian security authorities, is at the forefront of efforts to clamp down on piracy, or ‘sea robbery’.10

Level of conflict and commitment Finally, the further up the scale of conflict or the higher the level of operations that a navy plans to undertake, individually or collectively, the more complex and costly everything exponentially becomes. Therefore, the first major question that any government will have to address in a regional or unilateral context, is how far up the spectrum is it prepared to go (see Table 13.1).11 The second question relates to a government’s commitment to good order, and international coalition commitments especially, with the high costs associated with even relatively minor operations. How far the government will go in support of good causes is not the same as how far it can go, especially in respect of military capability, affordability and public acceptability. Despite good progress thus far, there are certain areas, like good order at sea, safety of navigation and shipping, as well as anti-terrorism measures, where there is still some work to be done. The need of the hour is according greater political impetus to information sharing, compatibility of laws, interagency coordination, cooperative capacity building and improving interoperability. All sides are working towards this end with a positive frame of mind, and the future, by and large, bodes well.

An Indian perspective 161 Table 13.1 The Conflict Spectrum for Naval Forces Levels of conflict

Threat of force

Normal (peace) conditions

Deterrence Rare Law Law bound enforcement

Low intensity operations

Self-defence

Use of force

Navy missions

Force allocation

•

Optimized with forward requirements

• • • • • •

Sporadic • RoE bound • • •

Higher level

Complete

Liberal RoE

Alliance building Constabulary Presence MDA Intelligence SAR Humanitarian

Case to case Peacemaking Can be Peacekeeping multinational Demo of Rights/ Resolve Support

Full spectrum

Full

Conclusion It is clear from the above that a concerted action to deal with non-traditional threats and challenges in the maritime environment is vital, and a regional response is the only viable option for law enforcement authorities. Effective law enforcement actions may not be possible unilaterally and some form of cost and task sharing is unavoidable not only between states but also between agencies, sometimes from different states. Furthermore, a regional initiative would be more relevant because despite some commonalities with other parts of the world, the problems in the region are unique in many ways and would thereby be better handled regionally. India’s new perceptions of the world at large, its rediscovery of its extended neighbourhood, and its growing national naval capabilities provide it with a unique ability to take the role of a robust partner for peace and stability in East and Southeast Asia. India’s ‘Look East’ policy over the last decade has deepened economic, political and security engagement with the nations of Southeast Asia. While things are still far from perfect, India and Southeast Asia are moving forward in the right direction. The challenge in the coming years, however, lies in better integrating India’s naval capabilities with the maritime security interests of Southeast Asia. Based on the rather robust premise that it is better to promote international security than to react when it has broken down, the flexibility, manoeuvrability and speed of reaction of maritime-based joint forces is the most promising and effective way forward, be it in the regional maritime security context or even in the interest of comprehensive security of the region. Yet there will be challenges, and the

162 Devbrat Chakraborty challenge will not be as to whether Southeast Asia will be the meat in the sandwich but as to whether regional maritime security forces will be able collectively to make mince-meat of non-traditional threats. In other words a vegetarian sandwich, without the meat would perhaps be the perfect recipe for all parties involved.

Notes 1 ‘India and ASEAN – Shared Perspectives’, Speech by Indian Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, Kuala Lumpur, 16 March 2001. 2 Amit Baruah, ‘India to assist Vietnam in nuclear research’, Hindu (India), 9 January 2001. 3 FICCI, Media Division, New Delhi, 28 August 2008. 4 ‘Indo-ASEAN trade may touch US $50 billion’, The Hindu (Chennai), 23 Jan 2008. Available online at http://www.hindu.com/2008/01/23/stories/2008012359871200. htm 5 Tom Naess, ‘Environmental Cooperation around the South China Sea: The Experience of the South China Sea Workshops and UNEP’s Strategic Action Programme’, The Pacific Review, Vol. 14, No. 4, p. 556. 6 Desmond Ball, ‘The Post Cold War Strategic Environment in East Asia’, in Dich Sherwood (ed.), Maritime Power in the China Seas: Capabilities and Rationale, Canberra: Australian Defence Studies Centre, ADF Academy, 1994. 7 Admiral Dennis C. Blair, USCINCPAC, Superintendent’s Guest Lecture, Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, CA, 16 October 2001. Available online at http://www. nps.navy.mil 8 Salvador de Madariaga as cited in David N. Griffiths, ‘Maritime Aspects of Arms Control and Security Improvement in the Middle East’, IGCC Policy Paper 56, 2000, p. 3. Available online at http://www.repositorie.cdlib.org/igcc/pp56. 9 David N. Griffiths, ‘Maritime Aspects of Arms Control and Security Improvement in the Middle East’, IGCC Policy Paper 56, 2000, p. 7. Available online at http://www. repositorie.cdlib.org/igcc/pp56. 10 Richard Scott, ‘Safeguarding the Singapore Straits’, Jane’s Navy International, 1 May 2002. In the article, Colonel Kevin Santa Maria, Commander of the Republic of Singapore Navy’s Coastal Command, discusses regional anti-piracy initiatives with Richard Scott. 11 Adapted from J.R. Hill, ‘Medium Power Strategy Revisited’, Royal Australian Navy Sea Power Centre Working Paper No. 3, March 2000. Available online at http://www. navy.gov.au/w/images/Working_Paper_3.pdf

14 Regional naval developments and deployments A perspective from the United States Michael McDevitt∗

Introduction In October 2007, the U.S. Navy published what has been called a new ‘Maritime Strategy’. It is a document intended to publicly characterize the strategic vision and set the guidelines for the operational employment of the U.S. Navy, the U.S. Marine Corps and the U.S. Coast Guard. Its official title is ‘A Cooperative Strategy for 21st Century Seapower’. For observers of USN strategic thought, publishing some sort of a strategic vision was not a novel event. Since the end of the Cold War, the U.S. Navy has been in the midst of an evolution in its strategic thought as it redefined itself in an environment bereft of a serious challenge at sea. This latest strategic statement represents the sixth such document since the end of the Cold War to promote a strategic vision for the naval services of the United States.1 What made this document more memorable than its predecessors was the very well-publicized 18-month-long development process that involved innumerable conferences, war games and discussions with influential citizens across the United States. Unfortunately, it has been derided by some commentators as nothing more than a glossy marketing brochure, and by others as a more or less pedestrian statement of strategy. It is indeed glossy, but to dismiss it as pedestrian is to miss the fact that it does specifically portray an accurate vision of how the U.S. Navy understands its role in the world, its place in U.S. strategy, and frankly what the American people expect their navy to be able to accomplish. Because its development was so widely publicized, commentators have also focused on what are perceived as ‘new’ concepts, such as adding humanitarian assistance, disaster relief and maritime security cooperation to the list of official naval missions. The decision to add these to the ‘official’ missions is as it should be, since these peacetime operations occupy a large fraction of what the USN has been doing for years, and expects to continue to do day in and day out. In this short chapter, I shall focus on an element of the maritime strategy that is not new, in fact it is very traditional, since it involves the combat related missions of the U.S. Navy. The focus will be on the U.S. Navy’s deterrent, sea control and presence missions. The new strategy clearly recognizes the U.S. Navy’s leading

164 Michael McDevitt role in America’s long-standing strategic principle of depending on American forces deployed forward from the United States in regions of vital importance to the country to preserve stability and advance U.S. national interests, stating: Credible combat power will be continuously postured in the Western Pacific and the Arabian Gulf/Indian Ocean to protect our vital interests, assure our friends and allies of our continued commitment to regional security, and to deter and dissuade potential adversaries and peer competitors. The strategy goes on to say: There are many challenges to our ability to exercise sea control, perhaps none as significant as the growing number of nations operating submarines, both advanced diesel-electric and nuclear propelled. … We will not permit conditions under which our maritime forces would be impeded from freedom of maneuver and freedom of access, nor will we permit an adversary to disrupt the global supply chain by attempting to block vital sea-lines of communication and commerce.2

Executing the strategy today in Asia In the Western Pacific, the U.S. Seventh Fleet has been performing the missions of forward presence and sea control since the Korean War era. The successful execution of these missions has been an important contributor to Asia’s stable and relatively predictable security environment since the end of the Vietnam War. Today, the United States Seventh Fleet has 20 ships and 100 naval aircraft permanently stationed in East Asia. This core capability is routinely enhanced by another 15 warships, 7 attack submarines and another 153 aircraft that are rotationally deployed from United States territory. The Fleet also includes 50 logistic and special purpose ships, such as those that carry afloat propositioned material for the U.S. Marines, the U.S. Air Force and Army.3 The sustained presence of the U.S. Seventh Fleet effectively checks the ability of continental powers to exercise ‘boots on the ground’ military influence beyond where an army can walk or drive. One reason why this three-and-a-half-decade-long period of stability exists is that a real military balance between continental powers and the maritime powers exists. The military capability of each side can prevent any attempt by the other side to intrude in a militarily significant way into their respective domains. The continental powers are safe from invasion, thanks to large armies, vast territories and nuclear weapons. America’s friends and allies are safe from invasion, coercion and maritime blockade thanks to U.S. and allied air and sea power, which is backstopped by the U.S. nuclear arsenal. Specifically, as it has for decades, China dominates the continent while the United States and its island4 and archipelagic allies are, for the time being, militarily predominant in maritime Asia.

Regional naval developments and deployments 165 It is an implied mission of all the U.S. forces in the Pacific area, including of course the Seventh Fleet, to make certain that as China’s power grows it is not able to militarily coerce Asian nations into agreements they would not otherwise have been willing to accept. In other words, to prevent China from brandishing its growing capabilities to settle the Taiwan question or resolve other outstanding maritime claims by force majeure alone.

An emerging challenge to continental-maritime balance The well documented and commented upon growth of the PLA Navy over the past 15 years clearly implies that China’s leaders, military and civilian, who are generally not schooled in things maritime, have found the need to address strategic interests or vulnerabilities in the maritime domain compelling.5 This suggests obvious: China’s leaders believe that the strategic interests of the state can only be secured with a robust naval force, which is a historic departure from the strategic traditions of China. This was publicly announced in the 2004 Chinese Defense White Paper which candidly made clear that the PLA Navy, the PLA Air Force and the PLA ballistic missile force—the Second Artillery—and not the Army, are to receive priority in funding. It explicitly says: While continuing to attach importance to the building of the Army, the PLA gives priority to the building of the Navy, Air Force and Second Artillery force to seek balanced development of the combat force structure, in order to strengthen the capabilities for winning both command of the sea and command of the air, and conducting strategic counter strikes.6

Commanding the sea: Translating the aspiration into a credible military capability The idea of ‘command of the sea’ dates back to the writings of Alfred Thayer Mahan and Julian Corbett. Although a search of their writings will often yield contradictory definitions, the most widely accepted understanding of ‘command of the sea’ means having the ability to prevent an enemy from using some segment of maritime geography for as long as one wishes. In other words, one party can use the sea at its pleasure, while the opponent cannot.7 Chinese planners face choices regarding how best to accomplish the mission of commanding the sea. The geostrategic circumstances facing the former Soviet Union and China are similar in terms of threats from the sea. During the later decades of the Cold War the Soviet Union put in place a defensive strategy that China is in the process of replicating. The defensive Soviet-style anti-access model is less expensive, fits within a ‘continental’ strategic culture and is easier and more quickly implemented than trying to build and train a fully balanced blue-water navy. The Soviet template was straightforward: employ a very effective openocean surveillance system to detect approaching naval forces and then use this information to muster attacks by land-based aircraft and by submarines.

166 Michael McDevitt That is exactly what China is doing. It is knitting together a capability that is composed of a very effective open-ocean surveillance system to locate approaching naval forces so they can be attacked by land-based aircraft armed with cruise missiles, by submarines with both torpedoes and cruise missiles and eventually with conventionally tipped ballistic missiles that are able to hit maneuvering ships. Adopting this template also permits the PLA to capitalize on Soviet-developed technology and operational concepts. The PLA has apparently determined that the area within the so-called ‘first island chain’, or about 200 nautical miles from its mainland, is the sea control area, whereas the region further to sea would be considered the ‘sea denial’ area, a place where one contests for sea control. The PLA has apparently decided to emphasize its submarine force as the most important element in what for all practical purposes is a layered defense. This makes sense, given the inherent difficulty for the USN, or for that matter any navy, has in locating very quiet modern submarines. Between 1995 and 2007, the PLA Navy commissioned 37 new submarines, but so far only 3 are nuclear powered. Because the vast majority of the PLA Navy submarine force is conventionally powered it has one significant operational drawback – limited endurance and speed.8 Nonetheless, today it is an imposing force, and there is every expectation that it will continue to improve and to add more nuclear-powered subs. The PRC has added a new element to the layered defense, one that is uniquely Chinese and uses one of the PLA’s most effective capabilities. This new wrinkle is to use ballistic missiles to attack moving surface warships.9 Traditionally, ballistic missiles were considered a poor weapon to use against ships at sea: ships move, and once the missile is fired, the aim point of a ballistic trajectory, by definition, cannot be altered to account for target motion. What the PLA is apparently trying to do is place seekers in high-explosive missile warheads that will activate as the warhead descends into the target area, and then steer the warhead to the moving ship. This is a difficult technical task and depends on accurate surveillance plus missile warhead maneuvering technology that can slow down the warhead when it reenters the atmosphere so the seekers are not burned up by the heat of reentry.10 Aside from the technical challenge associated with missile warhead design, the command and control problem of determining an accurate location of a warship, getting that information to a missile firing unit in a timely fashion, translating positional information into a fire control solution for the missile, which has to include missile, time of flight before the target ship moves beyond the terminal seekers window, is also an issue. The central point, however, is that these all appear to be solvable problems.

What the United States characterizes as access denial or anti-access In contemporary terminology the Pentagon has elected to characterize China’s approach as an ‘anti-access’ operational concept. In other words, a military

Regional naval developments and deployments 167 concept of operations aimed at keeping an approaching naval force from closing to within striking range of the Chinese mainland and Taiwan Strait. Specifically, China aims to have the ability to deny the U.S. military access to the region so it could not interfere with a PLA use of force to resolve many of its outstanding maritime strategic issues. As a continental power that only recently has come to grips with the need to defending its interests from a serious attack from the sea, China has opted for a strategy that is at once affordable, militarily practical and comprehensive. It is comprehensive in the sense that its combined naval, air force and strategic missile force is well suited to dealing with most of the long list of Beijing’s outstanding strategic issues that are maritime in nature. Not only is this approach to strategy sensible from an operational perspective, it is also on its face inherently defensive, which fits perfectly with Beijing’s grand strategy of ‘Peaceful Development’.

The implications of competing strategic concepts The efficacy of the U.S. strategic position on the rim land of Asia depends upon America’s ability to use the seas to guarantee the security of our East Asian allies, and pursue American national interests; in other words, having guaranteed military access to East Asia. The unhappy reality is that any Chinese maritime strategy that is effective in denying support to Taiwan is almost by definition equally as effective in denying U.S. assistance to Japan and South Korea because of the maritime geography of the Western Pacific. As long as the central element of its wartime strategy is to keep U.S. power as far away from East Asia as possible, China creates a security dilemma for U.S. friends and allies in Northeast Asia. Another implication of trying to keep the United States at arm’s length revolves around the need for both military’s to plan for worst-case contingencies. Specifically, China feels obliged to threaten to use force against Taiwan to prevent independence while the U.S. feels equally obliged to be prepared to intervene to prevent reunification from taking place through the use of force. As a result, both the PLA and the U.S. military are actively planning how best to defeat the other. This war planning dynamic obviously colors the atmosphere between the two militaries, and no matter how superficially collegial militaryto-military engagement becomes, the thought that ‘I may have to fight these people over Taiwan’ is almost certainly on the mind of senior officers from both sides. Until Beijing renounces the use of force in dealing with the issue of reunification with Taiwan, this factor is going to inhibit the development of a truly cordial and trusting military-to-military relationship between China and the United States. A final implication is the need for the United States to ensure that the perception does not arise in East Asia that China has the ability to trump U.S. presence in the region if it chooses to. To avoid the perception that the United States is on the way to becoming a ‘paper tiger’, it is important that America continues to maintain its current operational advantages in the Western Pacific. It is important that U.S. friends and allies never come to the conclusion that their security relationship

168 Michael McDevitt with the United States is a waste of time because, in a real crisis with China, Washington would be powerless to respond militarily.

American responses to the evolving security landscape U.S. policy reactions to this evolving strategic landscape in East Asia have been clear, practical and transparent. There has been no shortage of official statements in the form of Congressional testimony by responsible officials, official documents approved by the White House, such as the March 2006 National Security Strategy, the Defense Department Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR) of 2006, the most recent Department of Defense Annual Reports to Congress on the Military Power of the People’s Republic of China, and a series of Congressional Research Service reports to Congress of China’s Naval Modernization that indicate that U.S. government officials are keeping a close eye on the growth of Chinese military capabilities, especially those that could change the East Asian strategic balance in a way that could disadvantage the United States and its allies. Perhaps the clearest statement that makes this point is found in the 2006 QDR. It says: ‘China has the greatest potential to compete militarily with the United States and field disruptive technologies that could over time offset traditional U.S. military advantages’.11 Preserving the equilibrium of the past decades is what the U.S. has been doing and the U.S. Navy plays a big role in this process. The Defense Department has been quite specific about the importance of maintaining U.S. military presence in East Asia. The 2006 QDR, talks about the rotational deployments of Air Force bombers to Guam, in order to provide, ‘… Pacific Command a continuous bomber presence in the Asia-Pacific region’.12 The QDR also announces that the navy will adjust its force posture so that at least six operationally ready and logistically sustainable carriers are available for deployment in the Pacific. It also indicates that the navy will home port 60 per cent of its active attack submarine force in the Pacific.13 Clearly, as the PLA’s capabilities improve, the Bush Administration decided to keep pace by improving U.S. capabilities in the region. The United States seems intent on maintaining America’s current advantages that allow it to shape and deter.14 While some might characterize this as an arms race, what is actually taking place is a capability competition between the PLA and the U.S. Department of Defense. As the QDR states: ‘The aim is to possess sufficient capability to convince any potential adversary that it cannot prevail in a conflict. …’ Quite simply, that means that the U.S. intends to rise on the same capabilities tide as China in order not to lose any of the strategic leverage that its predominate military presence off the East Asia littoral has provided since 1945. The most recent example of translating this policy objective into action is the September arrival of the USS George Washington (CVN-73) in Japan. As a state of the art nuclear powered aircraft carrier it is a significant improvement in capability when compared to the 1960’s era ship it replaced.

Regional naval developments and deployments 169 For the U.S. Navy, rising on the same tide as the PLA Navy also means placing a great deal more effort into reestablishing its skills in locating and tracking submarines. As indicated by the passage from the new Maritime Strategy, the U.S. Navy is well aware of this problem. When the Cold War ended almost 20 years ago, the U.S. Navy ASW capability was superb. The end of the Cold War removed the huge Soviet submarine force from the threat category, and starting in 1992 the U.S. began removing ASW oriented forces from the active inventory and greatly reduced emphasis on ASW training. This shortfall was recognized early in this century when the growth of the Chinese submarine force became an issue. Since that time the USN has been working to restore to the ASW the primacy it enjoyed in 1989. Similarly, the USN has been working to field capabilities to deal with ballistic missiles. The navy has been increasingly successful in fielding a capability that can successfully engage ballistic missiles and is intent on introducing that capability into as many AEGIS equipped cruisers and destroyers as possible. But it is not depending only on hard-kill approaches to the ballistic missile problem. Every element of a ballistic missile engagement sequence is being examined for vulnerabilities. Just as it did during the 1980s when the Soviet Backfire with longrange cruise missiles posed a serious threat, the U.S. Navy is examining the full range of tactical techniques.

Conclusion China has the potential to alter the Western Pacific’s strategic balance if the United States does nothing. Doing ‘something’ however is more challenging than 20 years ago. United States Naval and Air Forces are 50 to 60 per cent fewer than they were at the end of the Cold War. Without fixed facilities available in Japan, South Korea and Singapore sustaining today’s level of American military capability in East Asia would not be possible. It also means that the United States must rely on its friends and allies in maritime Asia. As a result, exercises and other forms of maritime security cooperation take place on an almost daily basis. On average Seventh Fleet units conduct over 100 exercises annually.15 Since 2003, the Bush Administration has attempted to ‘transform’ the U.S. military posture in the Western Pacific and East Asia to better position the U.S. military for the future. In Japan and Korea, this involves significant redeployment of U.S. ground forces and taking actions to reduce friction associated with the close intermingling of U.S. bases and local populaces. Part of this transformation includes transferring more U.S. forces to the U.S. Territory of Guam. While the U.S. has been ‘transforming’, China is improving its anti-access capabilities for strategically defensive purposes. Left unaddressed, this will have the effect of upsetting the decades-old balance of power that has been so successful in preserving stability in the region. By attempting to achieve security on its maritime frontier, Beijing is creating a dynamic that, as its security situation improves, is making the security environment for many of its neighbors worse because a central element of its strategy in case of conflict is to keep U.S. power

170 Michael McDevitt as far away from East Asia as possible. It is unlikely that Washington will allow its strategic position in Asia, which depends upon the ability to use the seas to guarantee the security of our East Asian allies and pursue American national interests, to be undermined.

Notes ∗ This chapter represents the views of the author and should not be interpreted as

representing an official research product of CNA; nor does it speak for the U.S. Navy. 1 Peter Swartz, ‘U.S. Navy Capstone Strategies, Visions and Concepts 1970–2008’, November 3, 2008. A draft CNA study by the same name, in author’s possession. 2 ‘A Cooperative Strategy for 21st Century Seapower’, Department of the Navy, October 2007, pp. 10–11. Available online at http://www.navy.mil/strategy. 3 Meeting with former Seventh Fleet Commander, October 2008. 4 So long as South Korea is ‘separated’ by North Korea from continental Asia it is, at least conceptually, a de facto island nation. 5 This is not a new issue for China. Weakness along the maritime frontier has historic resonance for Beijing. The so-called ‘Century of Humiliation’ was the result of successful military operations by European powers and then Japan against China that came from the sea. The reality that faces Beijing is that the vast majority of China’s outstanding sovereignty and strategic issues are maritime in nature. Specifically, Taiwan is an island. It is the combination of Taiwan’s air defense and the threat of intervention by the U.S. military (primarily the U.S. Navy) that effectively keeps the Taiwan Strait a moat rather than a highway open to the PLA. While it appears that a compromise solution to territorial disputes with Japan over seabed resources in the East China Sea has been reached, further south, unsettled territorial disputes in the South China Sea over the largely uninhabitable Spratly Islands are a maritime issue of considerable importance because of the associated natural resources within the EEZ of these small islets and terrain features. The South China Sea itself is of importance because the main shipping route to China from the Indian Ocean traverses the South China Sea. While Taiwan is certainly the most important maritime strategic issue for China, arguably of equal strategic significance is the geostrategic reality that China’s economic center of gravity is on its East Coast. As a ‘seaboard’, it is extremely vulnerable to attack from the sea, a military task the United States is uniquely suited to execute. China’s entire national strategy of reform and opening depends largely upon maritime commerce, i.e., trade, and its economic development is increasingly dependent on importing oil and liquefied natural gas (LNG) from abroad, most of which will come to China by sea. As a result, China is concerned about its energy security. Finally, the United States is the world’s foremost naval power and has, over the last 50 odd years, established a significant naval presence in the Western Pacific, which is effectively on China’s doorstep. 6 PRC Defense White Paper, Beijing: Information Office of the State Council of the PRC, December 2004. Available online at http://english.people.com.cn/whitepaper/ defense2004. 7 Colin S. Gray, The Leverage of Sea Power: The Strategic Advantages of Navies in War, New York: Free Press, Macmillan, 1992, pp. 19, 274. 8 Ronald O’Rourke, ‘China Naval Modernization: Implications for U.S. Navy Capabilities—Background and Issues for Congress’, CRS Report for Congress, October 8, 2008. Available online at CRS website, Order Code RL 33153: 8. This is the single best open-source compilation of information on the PLA Navy available to scholars and research specialists. 9 DOD Report to Congress, p. 4. The report says, ‘China is exploring the use of ballistic missiles for anti-access/sea-denial missions’.

Regional naval developments and deployments 171 10 Tan Shoulin and Zhang Daqiao, Second Artillery Engineering College, Xian, China, ‘Determination and Evaluation of Effective Homing Range for Ballistic Missile Attacking Aircraft Carrier’, Information Command and Control System and Simulation Technology, Vol. l28, No. 4, August 2006, pp. 6–9. The authors conclude: ‘Providing terminal guidance to ballistic missiles is critical to the successful launch of a precision attack on a slow moving large target at sea. Based on the results from simulation, missiles with terminal guidance capability can have a relatively large range of maneuverability, which may be as large as 100 kilometers (53nm) … Large surface targets at sea, such as aircraft carriers, are relatively poor in maneuverability. It cannot effectively escape an attack within a short period of time. Therefore, a ballistic missile with terminal guidance capability … is fully capable of effectively attacking this type of target with high precision’. 11 The Report of the 2006 Quadrennial Defense Review (hereinafter QDR), February 6, 2006, p. 29. Available online at http://www.defenselink.mil/pubs/. 12 QDR, photo caption, p. 37. 13 QDR, p. 47. 14 QDR, p. 4. 15 Commander Seventh Fleet web page, http://www.c7f.navy.mil/pages/exercises.html.

15 Japanese civilian cooperation in maritime security since 1999 Takeshi Kohno

Introduction The year 1999 was a watershed year for Japanese anti-piracy efforts, as it was October of that year when a Japanese tanker carrying pure aluminum ingot was seajacked. This sea-jacking prompted Japan to actively pursue anti-piracy cooperation in the Southeast and South Asian regions, with a scope that went beyond Japan, and this cooperation actively continues today. However, piracy and war are two different things. Maritime security concerns more than combating piracy (or sea robbery, ship-jacking, petty theft, or various other terms used to describe an unlawful attack on a civilian ship). Armed forces protect national interests (or national interests within international community interests), but the new globalized politics and economies of today have resulted in global turmoil, which is making our understanding of national interest much more complicated than before. One way to put this in perspective is to divide our inquiry into non-traditional and traditional security issues. Piracy, terrorism and transnational criminal activities are non-traditional security issues, and this is the area in which Japan has been active. War and defense, on the other hand, are traditional security issues, and Japan is very constitutionally-restricted in its efforts to act internationally. One critical aspect in differentiating non-traditional from traditional security issues is that, while deterrence works in defence, it is much less effective in non-traditional security issues. The most difficult non-traditional security issue to tackle with deterrence, because it often fails, is terrorism. This dimension can also be viewed from the perspective of who the enemy is. Japan is constitutionally barred from using weapons in the case of traditional security problems because the enemy, for example, in war, is most often a nationstate. Thus, Japan has more freedom to participate in security actions in nontraditional security problems because the enemy, for example, with piracy, is most often non-state actors. In other words, if Japan faces traditional security problems and the enemy is a nation-state, it is held back. But if Japan faces non-traditional security problems and the enemy is a non-state actor, it is relatively free from constitutional restrictions, and may act.

Japanese civilian cooperation in maritime security since 1999 173 Another critical aspect of dealing with non-traditional security issues is that they have a very complicated social background, which cannot be resolved easily. Piracy, for example, is an unlawful act of human agents who live on land, but the act is carried out at sea. Thus, anti-piracy efforts, ideally, should focus on activities at both sea and on land. The Japanese efforts, as will be described below, are heavily focused only on the activities at sea, and either conceptually or operationally, do not go far enough to take into account the problems of land life, such as poverty, environmental degradation, corruption and dysfunctional governance. Thus, I will focus on Japan’s efforts at sea. As I have mentioned, the sea is one of the stages where nations tackle both non-traditional and traditional issues, and play games in order to protect respective national interests, both perceived and real. Because the island nation of Japan is aware of the importance of the sea as a lifeline in maintaining peace and prosperity, it is increasingly active in pursuing international cooperation. The Japanese cooperation has been, and likely will continue to be, consistent with the code of conduct defined in the 1982 UN Convention on the Law of the Seas (UNCLOS), and this attitude is well reflected in the 2007 Basic Act on Ocean Policy and subsequent action plan (the 2008 Basic Plan), as explained below. This chapter argues that Japanese participation in maritime security comes with a degree of public support to realize the spirit of the preamble of the constitution, while limiting its maritime security participation to non-combatant operations. This position, whether it is civilian or military, is consistent with the interpretation of article nine of the Japanese constitution. The present condition appears conflicting: security maintenance without blood. However conflicting it may be, the condition in which Japan is located has now moved one step forward to a more activist stage, thanks to the fact that the current problem is caused by a non-state actor – pirates.

Four structural factors There are four factors which have made Japan more actively involved in maritime security issues. These factors do not change rapidly, but their influence has had structural effects on Japan’s policy options to secure seas in the region. The first factor is the critical trade route via the Malacca Strait that connects the East China Sea, the South China Sea, the Singapore Strait and the Indian Ocean. The importance of this trade activity is obvious from the amount of goods carried through this sea route. About 80 per cent of Japanese, Taiwanese and South Korean oil and gas imports are shipped through the Malacca Strait. China, 80 per cent of whose oil imports comes from the same strait, shares the same fate if there are any disturbances to the trade route. In addition, about 90,000 ships use the Malacca Strait annually, of which 14,000 sail under the Japanese flag. The trade activities via the Malacca Strait are likely to increase as the regional economy in East Asia continues to grow. Japan and other East Asian countries are increasingly dependent on this key strait. This factor may lose its criticality only if an alternative route,

174 Takeshi Kohno such as a canal cutting across the Malay Peninsula, is built, but the prospect of such a massive construction project is small in decades to come. The second factor is that the South China Sea is still, and will continue to be, the front line where disputes over national interests of claimant nations collide, and Japan is and will be sidelined in any efforts to resolve this dispute. Although Japan shares concern over the sea, Japan is not a claimant nation, nor does it possess enough sea power to exert any kind of influence. At the height of the armed clashes in the late 1980s to early 1990s, Canada had volunteered to be a host to invite the countries of concern for confidence-building process. Later into the process, ASEAN declared (ASEAN Declaration on the South China Sea of July 1992) that they would avoid the use of force in settling disputes in the region, but this declaration remained only as a temporary position statement from ASEAN to China, to last ten years. The acknowledgement of Chinese willingness to put the issue in the international legal regime came in 2002 when China signed the Declaration on the Conduct of Parties in the South China Sea. However, this border dispute continues to gain further importance to greater numbers of nations, because the whole area (not only the Spratly and Paracel islands, but also their surrounding areas) is gaining in both economic and strategic importance. This brings to consideration the third factor, which is that the United States’ sea power is the overwhelming deterrence factor in this region. There is no other nation with a greater capacity of sea power than the United States, even after its transformation program is completed. After its departure from the Philippines, the U.S. Navy still effectively maintained its foothold in Southeast Asia, not diminishing its relative influence in this region. Japan’s status is also shaped by the U.S.–Japan Security Treaty and the 1997 Guidelines, both of which define the codes of conduct of both nations in the case of security problems in Asia (and possibly beyond Asia). And finally, the Japanese Constitution’s Article Nine imposes limitations on Japanese activities overseas. Article Nine requires that the Japanese people ‘renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation’ in the first paragraph, and the second paragraph adds that ‘land, sea and air forces, as well as other war potential, will never be maintained’ (Constitution of Japan). To this, the Japanese administrations thus far have interpreted this to mean that arms can be maintained if they are not for war, but for self-defence purposes. In 2007, Japan spent about $50 billion on its defence, which ranks Japan the fifth largest spender after the United States, United Kingdom, China and France (SPIRI Year Book 2008 Summary, 11). Meanwhile, an often neglected aspect of this constitutional debate lies in the constitution preamble. The preamble is accompanied by a powerful spirit of representative democracy based on sovereign power from the people, and parallel importance goes to international activism in maintaining world peace. The line reads: ‘(W)e desire to occupy an honored place in an international society striving for the preservation of peace, and the banishment of tyranny and slavery, oppression and intolerance for all time from the earth … the Japanese people, pledge our national honor to accomplish these high ideals and purposes with all

Japanese civilian cooperation in maritime security since 1999 175 our resources’. How can Japan ‘occupy an honored place’ using ‘all our resources’ for the preservation of peace? One answer is by sending soldiers to UN-sponsored peace-keeping operations. The use of weapons (not the use of force) is permitted for self-defence purposes. Politically, from the political right to the left in Japan, there is little opposition in sending Japanese soldiers overseas, as long as it is not for the purpose of war, or in a capacity that leads to a bloodbath. Considering these four factors, it is clear that Japan has so far contributed actively to non-traditional security issues, but not to traditional security issues. In the following discussion, I provide key incidents and Japan’s responses in order to assess the key characteristics of Japanese international cooperation in maritime security.

Use of changing public opinion in Japan A democratic regime pays close attention to public opinion, and public opinion surveys thus become a critical ingredient in justifying policy decisions. Japan’s Prime Minister’s Cabinet Secretariat conducts an opinion survey on foreign affairs every year, and according to the result of this survey, there is clear and constant support for Japan’s involvement in peace-making activities, including humanitarian aid in conflict areas in the world. The constant 50 percentage points since 2001 show the strong interest of the Japanese public, who wish to see their country active in contributing to international peace and order. The public survey question asks people to pick foreign policy priorities, one of which is: Japan should ‘contribute to the maintenance of international peace through such efforts as disarmament and nuclear non-proliferation, as well as peaceful intervention in regional conflicts, including humanitarian aid’. As seen in Table 15.1, the jump in 2001 reflects a desire to combat terrorism in the aftermath of the 9-11 terrorist attacks in the United States. A shift of the support rate from peaceful intervention to combat global warming in 2007 and 2008 is a result of both international publicity for the Nobel Prize laureates who warned about global warming, and the Group of Eight Summit in Toyako/Hokkaido, which took up global warming as the main discussion topic. The data in Table 15.1 shows Japan’s willingness to be internationally active in maintaining peace, consistent with the international activism underlined in the preamble of the constitution. However, wanting to do something to eliminate tyranny and slavery in the world as proclaimed in the preamble of the constitution is entirely different from the willingness to see blood and coffins of Japanese people as a result of this international activism. As an illustration, even at the height of the Japanese public support for combating international terrorism after the 9-11 terrorist attacks, the final Japanese bill (called the Anti-Terrorism Special Measures Law) approved in parliament only permitted non-combat logistical support of combat operations (mainly to supply fuel to allied-ships in the Indian ocean) in order to avoid Japanese casualties. Under this bill, the Japanese Self Defence Forces (SDFs) were not only to operate in far removed areas from actual combat, but were even forbidden to supply weapons to allied forces.

176 Takeshi Kohno Table 15.1 Public support for active Japan in peace keeping and international order (in percentage)

1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008

Contribution to peace and international order

Reduce threat of global warming and environment problems

Humanitarian assistance to refugees and displaced persons

33.8 40.0 42.2 41.8 50.3 52.8 51.5 51.9 49.3 44.0 44.6 51.8

43.3 40.2 46.8 40.2 38.2 41.7 39.1 38.4 42.8 45.4 58.0 66.5

26.9 28.8 30.6 28.1 30.9 24.6 25.0 25.0 25.1 26.8 25.6 42.2

Same question is asked ‘Which of the following activities do you support for Japan to play as a member in the international community? Please choose two of the following’. Respondents pick two activities in the answer. This survey is conducted every year in the month of October. Source: http://www8.cao.go.jp/survey/index-gai.html

However, one may not forget that continuing anti-terrorism SDF missions in the Indian Ocean is built upon the success of such large-deployment SDF missions in Cambodia (1992–3) and in East Timor (2002–4), neither of which received serious criticisms from cautious Asian neighbors. The usual Japanese apology for the World War Two atrocities and the Asian neighbors’ criticisms for revival of Japanese imperialism did not stop these United Nations’ sponsored SDF dispatches. In other words, these activities helped build Japan’s credentials, under the U.N. banner, as a responsible international actor in international security maintenance. We shall now move on to analyze Japan’s maritime security cooperation in this process of Japan’s credential building, during which the military (SDFs), and civilian (Japan Coast Guard or JCG) units intersect.

Japanese maritime cooperation On the evening of October 22, 1999, a Panama-registered and Japanese-owned ship, Alondra Rainbow, departed Kuala Tanjung port with more than 7,000 tons of 98 per cent pure aluminum ingot worth $11 million. The destination was Fukuoka. The aluminum ingot was produced from Japan’s most expensive single ODA project (the loan amount was a staggering $2 billion) in eastern Sumatra, and this project was portrayed as a symbol of the Indonesia–Japan friendship by thenPresident Suharto in 1985. About two hours into the trip, a group of ten or more armed men attacked the ship, and quickly took control. The blind-folded, 17 crew members were transferred to an old ship, then to a boat, and then left at sea off

Japanese civilian cooperation in maritime security since 1999 177 the coast of Thailand, until they were accidentally rescued by a Thai fishing boat. Meanwhile, the pirates, apparently part of a well-organized international criminal network, transferred half of the ingots to another ship, which dropped off the ingots at Subic Bay in the Philippines. The other half was carried in the same Alondra Rainbow ship, but the ship had been camouflaged with new paint and a new name, and proceeded on its way to the Middle East. The Indian Coast Guard, warned of this incident, located the camouflaged ship, and three days later, along with three Indian Navy ships and two aircraft, succeeded in overtaking the ship. This sea-jacking incident revealed the most important lesson for Japan: maritime security can only be achieved by international cooperation. The Japanese counterpart in international network building was civilian: the Japan Coast Guard. Several other nations used military in maritime security activities. And nations had dealt with pirates individually, based on their own definitions, and this meant that even definitions had to be sorted out in order to start some kind of international cooperation in combating piracy. The political timing in Japan was helpful. Thanks to the pirates who attacked a high-profile target, as aluminum ingots are Japan’s critical raw material, and the increasing trend of illegal drug imports to Japan,1 the Japanese Government now had enough political legitimacy to put forward the case for Japan’s more active participation in maritime security. Japanese Prime Minister Obuchi quickly called for an international Anti-Piracy meeting in Asia during the ASEANJapan meeting in the same month, and this call was materialized in April 2000 in Tokyo. In November 2000, Prime Minister Mori, during the ASEAN+3 meeting, called for Asia to collectively construct an anti-piracy framework, and Tokyo again hosted the anti-piracy cooperation meeting in October 2001. This Tokyo meeting was attended by representatives from the ASEAN 10, India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Korea, China and Hong Kong, along with specialists from the International Maritime Organization and the International Maritime Bureau. What came from this meeting was a call for a cooperative agreement on anti-piracy activities in Asia. With this call in mind, Prime Minister Koizumi, during the ASEAN+3 meeting, called for a regional agreement on anti-piracy activities. The initial concerned parties for this proposed anti-piracy agreement were the ASEAN-10, China, Korea, India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and Japan. The negotiation sessions started in 2002, and a series of discussions by officials and specialists produced a 22-article draft agreement in 2004. Based on the provisions of the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), the draft document elaborated a clear definition of ‘piracy’, ‘armed robbery against ships’, contracting parties’ obligations at times of piracy and armed robbery, and put heavy emphasis on information sharing among contracting parties, in a hope to establish an information sharing centre. This draft document was agreed upon in November 2004 as the ‘Regional Cooperation Agreement on Combating Piracy and Armed Robbery against Ships in Asia (or ReCAAP)’. Yet, an agreement did not mean a signing. The ReCAAP was agreed on by 16 countries in the 2004

178 Takeshi Kohno meeting floor, and the signing of the agreement was done by all but Malaysia and Indonesia. The absence of Indonesia and Malaysia from this agreement is the most serious flaw in Japan’s efforts. Indonesia and Malaysia are the two giants overseeing the Malacca Strait. As far as frequency of piracy incidents is concerned, these two nations are the most critical players needed to tackle piracy. The Information Sharing Centre (the ISC) was established in Singapore, after a series of disagreements among its neighboring nations regarding the location of the centre, particularly regional rivals Malaysia and Indonesia. This centre gathers information on piracy incidents in Asia although there was criticism that the centre is only duplicating what the IMB has been doing. The official response to this criticism is that the privately-funded IMB’s information is biased toward commercial ships, neglecting incidents against small-scale fishing boats and private ships, and the the ISC would be able to gather official data covering all kinds of piracy and armed robberies. The actual information-gathering capability of this centre so far, in terms of gathering and analysis capabilities, is not equal to the privately-funded IMB, which still excels. This is probably through no fault of the ISC itself, it is simply because there are only 13 people in this office and it is still new.

Japanese Coast Guard assistance to Southeast Asia In addition to the creation of ReCAAP, the Japan Coast Guard, since 2000, has been pursuing bilateral training exercises at least twice a year. Table 15.2 shows the frequency of activities with coast guards of Southeast Asian nations. Bilateral technical assistance projects with Indonesia, the Philippines and Malaysia are currently underway. All projects aim at upgrading the operational capacity of maritime security personnel of the three nations. While the Philippines and Malaysia established an autonomous coast guard, the Indonesian project has been complicated by the fact that there is little political incentive for strengthening a newly-born coast guard in Indonesia. The Indonesian counterpart at present is still a maritime security coordination board (BAKORKAMLA) consisting of 12 government agencies. It is with this body that two Japan Coast Guard specialists (one retired, one active) are working in order to assist in the development of an Table 15.2 Japan Coast Guard’s bilateral exercises 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007

India, Malaysia India, Philippines, Thailand Indonesia, Brunei, India Philippines, India, Singapore Thailand, India India, Brunei Philippines × 2, Indonesia, India Thailand

Source: Ministry of Foreign Affairs Homepage. Available online at http://www. mofa.go.jp/mofaj/gaiko/pirate.index.html (Accessed on 11 September 2008).

Japanese civilian cooperation in maritime security since 1999 179 Indonesian coast guard. However, this coordination board is a product of three major stakeholders of Indonesia, namely the Navy, the Marine police and the Port Authority of Indonesia. If the Navy takes the lead, it would be no problem for countries like the United States to assist, but Japan, with its legal limitations that prohibit military assistance to other nations, would not be allowed to assist the Indonesian Navy directly. Considering Japan’s constraints, the Indonesian Marine Police should be their natural counterpart. However, the actual leadership of BAKORKAMLA is still taken by the Navy.

The Basic Act on Ocean Policy of 2007 and Basic Ocean Plan of 2008 This chapter cannot avoid mentioning a major Japanese law enacted on April 27, 2007. This law is called ‘The Basic Act on Ocean Policy’, which defines the government’s responsibilities in all policy aspects regarding sea, including conservation and environmental protection, the use of exclusive economic zones, maritime security and defense, and international cooperation. This is the first comprehensive, maritime-related law which has enabled other specific laws to be enacted. For example, the Japan Coast Guard is now equipped with a new law to aggressively pursue a suspicious ship with force, which was not at all possible before with the old law.2 Based on this Basic law, the Japanese cabinet in March 2008 approved a fiveyear policy plan called ‘The Basic Ocean Plan (Kaiyo Kihon Keikaku)’. The Basic Plan defines 12 policy areas to be pursued by the government, and this clearly means a substantial increase in the budget. For example, the ocean-related activity budget increased from 1,433 billion yen in the fiscal year 2007 to 1,785 billion yen in the fiscal year 2008. The 12 policy areas mentioned in this Basic Plan are listed in Table 15.3.

Table 15.3 Twelve policy areas according to the Basic Plan 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

Development and Use of Ocean Resources Maintenance of Environment including water quality and global warming issues Development and Use of EEZ including resource and energy extractions Securing Maritime Transportation including increasing international competitiveness of maritime transportation industries Maintenance of Sea Transport and Early Responses to Disasters on Sea Active Research and Development Activities in Ocean Development of Ocean Technologies and Research Institutes Fostering Ocean-related Industries Maintenance and Management of Sea Borders Stimulating Economies in and Maintenance of Remote Islands Increase International Cooperation in Enforcing International Treaties and Regimes Increase Understanding of Japanese Nationals in Ocean

Source: Prime Minister’s Office Homepage. Available online at http://www.kantei.go.jp/jp/singi/ kaiyou/linksyu/key25.html (Accessed on November 1 2008).

180 Takeshi Kohno For the purpose of this chapter, I will only discuss item 11, ‘Increase International Cooperation in Enforcing International Treaties and Regimes’, in the Basic Plan. The section on international cooperation starts with the UNCLOS as a frame of reference, and goes further to a call for the permanent settlement of the territorial dispute among the disputing parties (no doubt referring to South Korea and China), in accordance with international rules. This section also calls on the disputing nations to use the international conflict resolution mechanisms already in place. Although the document does not mention the South China Sea explicitly, it says that the long-range sea lanes can be secured via actively participating in confidence-building mechanisms in such forums as the ASEAN Regional Forum (Basic Ocean Plan, p. 38). The same document also mentions the need for tackling the unlawful transport of biological, chemical and radio-active materials (p. 25). The same section of this document also praises ReCAAP as a new framework in Asia to share information in tackling maritime threats, including piracy, and calls for further upgrading of port facilities and surveillance systems in monitoring sea transport. This document recognizes that the Malacca/Singapore Straits in particular are the critical sea lanes for Japan, and calls for the enhancement of Japan’s assistance.

Between military and coast guard In the Japanese context, Japan has much more room to maneuver constitutionally by tackling non-traditional security threats (in this case, pirates), than tackling traditional threats from states. The rise of Japan’s Maritime Self-Defence Force (MSDF) in maritime security came with the unusual international call to aid with chaotic piracy problems off the coast of Somalia. Two recent actions have caused Japan to intensify its desire to help combat piracy. First, in June 2008, the United Nations Security Council invoked Chapter Seven of the UN Charter to call for international action against piracy off the coast of Somalia (Resolution number 1816). Second, the UN subsequently decided in October 2008 to authorize member states’ military to repress piracy in Somalia (Resolution number 1838, and subsequent resolutions numbers 1846 and 1851). As a result, Japan intensified its search for ways to send its own military to the ocean off the coast of Somalia to combat piracy. The problem, however, was the old one of the constitutional restriction on the military. Meanwhile, India, the United States, France, Canada, Spain, the Netherlands, and even Saudi Arabia, had sent navy ships and/or air support to secure the Somali coast. Due to its concerted actions, the European Union was fast in dispatching navy ships to the Somali coast, because they already had a decade-old security arrangement: the European Security and Defence Policy (ESDP). Under ESDP, Operation Atalanta was launched in December 2008, and this enabled better coordination among European countries. The call for action soon reached Asia. Soon after the launch of Operation Atalanta, China announced that it would send warships to the Somali coast,

Japanese civilian cooperation in maritime security since 1999 181 and in January 2009 three Chinese navy ships were sent. South Korea also announced its plan to send navy ships. Being a late comer, Japan was pressed to send the MSDF to the Somali coast. The first task for Japan was to find a legal basis which would allow the use of force by the MSDF on the Somali coast, which was not in Japanese territory. The second task was to find a legal basis to allow the MSDF to assist other nationals’ ships which came under a piracy threat. From the end of January 2009, the Japanese Government scrambled to hammer out an interpretation from the Self Defence Law (Chapter 6, Article 82), which would allow the MSDF to assist the Japan Coast Guard in case of a threat to Japan. One reading of this article is that the MSDF’s duty is to protect Japanese ships. Yet, although Chapter 6 is a list of the SDF’s duty to protect Japan, Article 82 does not explicitly mention the nationality of ships to be protected because this law was not written for the dispatch of the MSDF 7,000 miles away where the MSDF would encounter non-Japanese ships requesting assistance from pirate attacks. Liberal lawyers and opposition lawmakers argued that this article points to threats to Japanese territory, thus does not apply to proposed MSDF activities against Somali pirates.3 The Japanese Government interpreted that Somali piracy is an international threat as defined by the United Nations, which includes a threat to Japan, justifying the MSDF dispatch beyond seas in Japanese territory. As for the use of force, the largest opposition Democratic Party accepted the government’s position that defensive use of weapon is different from the use of force, which is prohibited by Article Nine of the constitution. However, the Democratic Party still demanded clearer legal guidelines regarding the weapons that would be used by the MSDF against pirates. The second task, which was to find a legal basis for the MSDF support to non-Japanese ships, was answered by Crew Law, which requires a ship captain to rescue any nationals from ocean disasters. The anti-piracy activities by the MSDF are also supported by the majority of the Japanese public. According to the Mainichi, the third largest daily newspaper in Japan, support for sending the MSDF to the coast of Somalia exceeded those who opposed.4 With this public support, the Japanese Government went ahead and ordered the MSDF to dispatch two Japanese warships, and they arrived off the coast of Somalia in March. In this scene, curiously absent was the Japan Coast Guard (JCG). JCG is equipped with policing rights, and is the organization most suited and experienced in combating criminal activities on the ocean. The reason for their absence was simply that the JCG ships were unable to cruise long distances without stopping at refueling bases on the way. Also, the JCG ships would have had to refuel somewhere near Somalia, as well as much more frequently than navy ships. Thus, in this Somalian operation, the JCG was needed to support the MSDF in handling the anti-piracy operational aspect because the MSDF navy crews are not authorized or trained in arresting pirates, while the JCG officers are. This was handled in the MSDF operation in Somalia by allowing JCG officers to accompany the two MSDF ships.

182 Takeshi Kohno Meanwhile, the government submitted a new anti-piracy law to the parliament in April in order to overcome the legal uncertainties. This new draft law defines piracy as an international crime subject to international policing activities, thus allowing the use of weapons in the case where suspected pirates do not obey orders. As this chapter is being written, the governing coalition in the parliament is likely to pass this new law, making it possible for Japan, for the first time, to combat piracy anywhere in the world, and even making it Japan’s duty if the government deems it necessary.

Conclusion This chapter first identified four factors which are shaping Japan’s engagement in maritime security in Asia. Second, it described the Japan Coast Guard’s cooperation activities prompted by the 1999 sea-jacking incident. Third, it introduced the content of the Basic Ocean Plan, the most comprehensive government plan in ocean affairs to date, and which includes maritime security as an important component. And finally, it analyzed the ongoing anti-piracy operations off the coast of Somalia, and how far the government reached to send Japanese navy ships, despite the legal difficulties that are still in place for sending soldiers overseas. On the traditional security issues, the Japanese hands are still tied by Article Nine of the Constitution, and the only promising policy option in border disputes has so far been to bring the issue to the international court. Although Japan has not done so with regard to Korea and China, this option is still on the table. The increasingly integrating U.S.–Japan security alliance adds more weight to Japan being allowed to act in this area, particularly if neighboring nations launch military maneuvers both over and below the sea. On the non-traditional security issues, the Japanese are most eager to build up their regional architecture in maritime security. The ReCAAP took four years to be born, but the achievement of putting together 14 nations is not insignificant. This ReCAAP venture not only succeeded in coordinating 14 coast guards/navies to go to battle together, but it also showed a successful precedent for a regionally integrated Asia to battle non-traditional threats. The latest Somali pirate issue placed the military (the MSDF) on the front lines because the long-cruise distance from Japan to East Africa made the JCG ships almost impossible to use. However, once the anti-piracy law is passed, the venue for the military to participate in anti-piracy operations is legally supported. Should this new law give more power to the MSDF in handling piracy? Should the JCG continue to play a supporting, coast guard role in Asia, or should that role be limited only to Asia? It must be pointed out that the real impact from ReCAAP is yet to be seen, because it is still largely a legal question, and the operational outcome from this legal document is yet to show itself. The Japan Coast Guard, already stretched thin in its resources, is further extending its activities overseas. The Basic Plan may help ease this resource shortage, but it will take time to foster capable personnel in

Japanese civilian cooperation in maritime security since 1999 183 both Japan and other Asian nations to secure the ocean in the face of non-traditional security threats.

Notes 1 A Taiwan-registered ship carrying 565 kilograms of illegal drugs (the largest amount at that time) was captured off the coast of Kagoshima prefecture on October 3, 1999, and a Japanese-registered ship carrying 249 kilograms of illegal drugs was also captured off the coast of Shimane prefecture on February 4, 2000. There were two other ships carrying more than 100 kilograms of illegal drugs captured in 1999. 2 ‘Law regarding foreign vessels around the territory’. 3 See for example, Saitama Lawyers Association statement on February 10, 2009. Available online at http://www.saiben.or.jp/chairman/2009/09021_02.html (Accessed on February 21, 2009). For opposition party statement, see the Democratic Party of Japan statement on January 28, 2009 at http://www.dpj.or.jp/news/?num=15092&mm=print (Accessed on February 25, 2009). 4 This poll was conducted on 21 and 22 February 2009 by the Mainichi newspaper by telephone interview; 47 per cent of the respondents supported the dispatch while 42 per cent opposed. Available online at http://See mainichi.jp/select/seiji/ news/20090225ddm005010094000c.html.

16 The Australian Navy in the Asian century Setting a new course Rory Medcalf

I will sketch briefly the existing capabilities and roles of the Royal Australian Navy (RAN). This appraisal will be offered in the context of changing power balances in Asia, especially the rising naval strength and aspirations of China and India; Australia’s security perceptions and requirements, perennial and changing; and the prospects for Australia to work with other countries, and not only the United States, in regional maritime security. Several options for the development of the RAN will be introduced, varying in likelihood and ambition. The major changes to force structure declared in the 2009 Australian Defence White Paper will be identified and possible explanations offered, some of them grounded in the modernization of other navies in the region, especially China’s. Finally, questions of the prospects for and limitations on Australia’s maritime security engagement with India and China will be considered.

The context: Australia’s defence requirements and debate Australia’s defence requirements derive from the country’s peculiar strategic characteristics and circumstances. Australia is an island continent. It is a nation that is also a continent. It faces no immediate conventional military threat to its territory, nor has it since the Japanese attack in the 1940s, yet anxiety permeates Australian strategic culture. This draws on a historic sense of isolation, and feeds into a corresponding perceived need for a great and powerful friend. This is so even though Australians enjoy a strategic environment which most major powers would gladly endure. Nonetheless, Australia’s interests do extend far beyond its territory, and this is a major rationale for its armed forces. It is acutely dependent on seaborne trade and the security of sea lines of communication. Something like 99 per cent of Australia’s international trade by volume and 75 per cent by value is transported by sea.1 Australia’s present and likely future prosperity rests on a resources boom involving export of Australian iron ore, coal, copper, uranium and other commodities to markets in Asia. Australia is the fifth largest user of shipping

The Australian Navy in the Asian century 185 in the world. With just 0.3 per cent of the world’s population, Australia has taken upon itself varying degrees of responsibility for the security of perhaps 20 per cent of the Earth’s surface,2 taking in territorial waters, exclusive economic zone and the wider areas covered by RAN surveillance and patrolling. Even with the world’s 11th largest defence budget, and the technology and intelligence advantages derived from its alliance with the United States, this is a tall order. No wonder that the main workhorses of the RAN, the ANZAC frigates, have been chosen and developed as much for long-range endurance and versatility as for superiority in high-intensity combat. Australia’s unique strategic circumstances and history have given rise to an apparent polarization in its national defence debate: recurring differences over whether Australia’s limited military resources should be focused on expeditionary operations in partnership with others (primarily the United States) or on the defence of Australia and its maritime approaches. Typically, the Army has played a more central role in expeditionary operations (although relying on other countries for lift and logistics) while the Navy, in particular submarines, and Air Force have been to the fore in the defence of Australia and its northern ‘sea-air gap’. In fact, this dichotomy is somewhat artificial, given that many capabilities might typically serve more than one purpose, that expeditionary operations in Australia’s immediate region might have a defensive purpose, and that many security activities Australia has found itself engaged in within its immediate neighbourhood in recent times, such as peace operations in East Timor or the Solomon Islands, can be categorized neither as national defence nor the distant service of alliance interests. An important point to be aware of here is that while the Army benefited in resources and status under the Howard Government, the Rudd Government has categorically re-emphasized the Navy in Australia’s military priorities. This message was foreshadowed in a speech Prime Minister Kevin Rudd delivered in September 2008.3 He warned Australia against complacency in an era of rising naval powers in Asia, leading media commentators to assume he meant China. He suggested Australia needed to be able to protect its long sea lines of communication, which if taken literally would mean a capacity for sea control that Australia simply cannot unilaterally possess. But the speech certainly implied that sea power was a preoccupation at the highest level of government. This proved very much to be the case when a long-awaited Defence White Paper was issued in May 2009.4 Amid a drumbeat of media coverage highlighting threat perceptions about the rise of China, the White Paper placed a clear priority on naval forces, and announced a plan for a major increase in high-intensity warfighting capability, including a doubling of the submarine fleet. The shape and apparent logic of Canberra’s ‘Force 2030’ (as the White Paper was titled) will be explored later in this chapter. To be fair, though, it is not as if the previous government neglected naval capability. The decisions to acquire the most potent and capable ships yet to be possessed by Australia, three Air Warfare Destroyers (AWDs) with the Aegis combat system and two 27,000 tonne LHDs each capable of carrying

186 Rory Medcalf 1,000 troops plus helicopters, heavy vehicles and landing craft, were taken in the final years of the Howard Government. These ships are due to come into service in the years ahead, the AWDs from 2014–17, and the LHDs beginning in 2012–13. Although the Navy is the senior service in the Australian Defence Force, it has usually been overshadowed by the Army in the Australian public imagination. Yet with the Rudd Government unequivocally returning the Navy to the forefront of Australia’s efforts to protect its interests in a future Asia of rising powers, it is as if Australia’s understanding of its strategic environment and responses to it had come full circle. After all, the origins of the Royal Australian Navy lay in the immediate post-Federation period, when a newly independent Australia looked with some alarm in a region of great and in some cases rising powers, notably Japan, and did not feel fully secure in the embrace of Britain’s Royal Navy. The visit to Sydney of the U.S. Great White Fleet, precisely 100 years ago, served a twofold purpose: it underlined the need for a genuinely capable Australian Navy, and impressed with the qualities on offer from the United States as a potential partner and ally. It was precisely the catalyst seapower advocates, including the then Prime Minister Deakin, needed. By the outbreak of the First World War, Australia could boast light cruisers, destroyers and a battlecruiser, a force which minimized the mischief Germany’s East Asiatic Squadron could inflict.5

Recent role of the RAN Fast forward to the turn of the twenty-first century. In the post-Cold War era, the missions and roles of the Australian Navy have been constabulary and diplomatic far more often than they have been of a warfighting nature. Between 1990 and 2005, the RAN undertook six military operations, 232 constabulary operations and 139 diplomatic operations, although this unclassified summary does not include submarine activities, nor does a narrow calculus of numbers account the fact that military operations tend to involve ‘numerous units for prolonged periods at lengthy distances from Australia’.6 Some examples: • • •

Constabulary: especially the surveillance and interception of ships involved in illegal fishing or illegal immigration. Diplomatic: including evacuations, humanitarian missions such as disaster relief after the 2004 tsunami, and international exercises. Military: including prolonged deployments to the Persian Gulf and the UNmandated operation in East Timor, 1999. In the 2003 Iraq War, the RAN saw direct combat.

Of course, many activities have spanned the military and constabulary (or diplomatic) spectrums, for instance coercive diplomacy and interdiction operations; the RAN has become something of a global specialist in safe interdiction and boarding consistent with international law.

The Australian Navy in the Asian century 187 The foregoing is not intended simply as a description of what the RAN does, but also as a guide to what it is likely to be called on to do in the future. This, in turn, goes to the question of what future capabilities and partnerships might be desirable.

Current capabilities Australia currently has a mid-sized navy designed for a wide variety of roles, across a very large area of ocean, and with an emphasis as much on balance as on weight. Its key combatants comprise frigates and conventional submarines. Some details: Eight ANZAC-class frigates (based on German Meko): long-range escorts, with roles including air defence, anti-submarine warfare, surveillance, reconnaissance and interdiction. Four Adelaide-class frigates (based on U.S. Oliver Hazard Perry): With a recent upgrade, these will serve as the RAN’s primary air defence ships until the introduction of the air warfare destroyers. Six Collins-class submarines: These went through a long and tortuous development process from their first inception in the late 1980s, but now constitute a formidable force, amounting to ‘a wholly new platform based on a Swedish design with a US-supplied combat system’; and widely regarded as the world’s best conventional submarines.7 They will have lost their edge and thus need replacement, however, by the mid-2020s. Other units include fourteen Armidale-class patrol boats, six minehunters, and two LPAs which have seen extensive service in deployments of Australian troops to the so-called ‘Arc of Instability’, including East Timor and the Solomon Islands. Of course, platforms alone are not an accurate measure of capability. Australia is currently less than formidable in area air defence and anti-submarine warfare, but has a surveillance and networking advantage over most regional navies, due both to its alliance relationship with the United States and to some far-sighted national capabilities such as the Jindalee over-the-horizon radar network.

Prospective roles Change is afoot. Australia is in the process of making its largest, most powerful and most expensive naval acquisitions. Decisions taken in Canberra in the past few years and the years ahead, especially those set out in the new Defence White Paper, will determine the shape, impact and purpose of the RAN until mid-century. Indications so far are that there is something approaching a revolution taking place, a move away from the tradition of Australian capability acquisition and development decision-making, in which like was essentially replaced with like.

188 Rory Medcalf Instead, a fundamentally heavier Australian Navy is on the horizon, designed with some of the possible dangers of the Asian century in mind. By way of speculation about the prospective roles and missions of the RAN in the years and decades ahead, the following can safely be assumed: •

•

•

• •

•

Australia will continue to need to fulfill a wide variety of non-combat maritime security tasks, covering a very large area, from the South Pacific to the vicinity of the Persian Gulf. As a U.S. ally, Australia will need to have some capabilities that would be useful to and relatively interoperable within US-led coalitions, including potentially in high-end warfighting. Australia will continue to be active in naval diplomacy, not only in the standard run of ship visits and dialogues but also in contributing to and hosting exercises, bilateral and multilateral. This naval diplomacy can be expected to encompass a wider range of partners, including India and China, although the depth of engagement will vary according to levels of trust and convergence, or divergence, of hard security interests. The defence of Australian territory will remain a core function of the Navy. Even when there are no signs of hostile intent from other powers, concern about rising capabilities of other navies in the wider region will be prominent in Australian defence thinking, in line with a continuing desire to maintain where possible a combat capability edge. All of these imperatives will need to be balanced against a tight budgetary situation, as spending demands from other quarters – including Army, Air Force and domestic welfare and infrastructure needs – remain high or on the rise. The global economic crisis will make this tension even more acute in the near-term.

Capability choices: The Defence White Paper and Force 2030 The May 2009 Defence White Paper outlines an ambitious plan for modernizing the Australian Navy to meet what are claimed to be the challenges of the Asian century. It presents a powerful force structure for Australia to attain by the 2030s, including: •

•

•

A fleet of 12 new-generation submarines, larger, with greater range and longer endurance than the Collins class, with roles ranging from anti-ship and antisubmarine operations to strategic strike, intelligence collection and supporting special forces operations. The three Air Warfare Destroyers, armed with the SM-6 anti-aircraft missile, with the possibility of a fourth AWD depending on changes in the strategic environment. A fleet of eight ‘future frigates’, larger than the ANZAC Class. These will be essentially small destroyers, and will have a large anti-submarine emphasis, being equipped for instance with towed-array sonar.

The Australian Navy in the Asian century 189 •

• • •

The replacement of the patrol boats and other smaller vessels with about 20 new multirole ‘Offshore Combatant Vessels’, potentially combining the capabilities of patrol boats, littoral combat ships and missile corvettes. An increased capacity for Navy vessels to support helicopters and unmanned vehicles, both aerial and underwater. An expanded amphibious capability involving the addition of a 10,000–15,000 tonne strategic sealift ship and six heavy landing craft to the two LHDs. And a greatly increased capability for strategic strike, involving the arming of submarines and major surface combatants with long-range land attack cruise missiles, presumably the 2500 km-range variant of the Tomahawk.8

Although this would all add up to a formidable seagoing force, there are two notable omissions from the White Paper wish-list: missile defenses and an aircraft carrier. The White Paper noted that Australia was opposed to ‘unilateral national missile defence’, in line with the ideological preferences of the ruling Labor party, but would continue to research ‘in-theatre’ missile defence options.9 The longterm possibility thus remains of the AWDs being fitted with the SM-3, given that they will already possess Aegis radar and fire control. On the other hand, there is no indication of serious interest in Australia’s developing its first aircraft carrier since the decommissioning of the HMAS Melbourne in 1982. This is despite media reports of hopes to the contrary in some parts of the Navy, given that the two new LHDs are based on a Spanish strategic projection ship, which Spain uses as a light aircraft carrier, and the conspicuous ski jump is not being removed in the Australian version.10 An Australian aircraft carrier in the next decade or two remains a highly unlikely proposition, including for reasons of sheer cost. Canberra appears to have settled on cruise missiles as its preferred long-range strike option. It would seem, then, that the White Paper has ended the speculation about the future shape of the Australian Navy. Yet some fundamental questions remain. One is that these plans were immediately criticized for the lack of accompanying budgetary information. The Government claimed that this historic expansion of strategic weight could be achieved within essentially the existing defence budget, provided that the Defence Department achieves major long-term efficiencies. Given the inability of the Australian defence establishment to make more than modest progress on this front in recent decades, these claims are widely regarded as implausible. In other words, Canberra will eventually need to expand its defence spending considerably if Force 2030 is ever to become a reality, and there is little evidence so far that the Australian electorate is ready to spend more on defence. Another set of questions go to the strategic rationale for the country’s naval expansion, and to the possible effects such a change in Australian capabilities will have on other countries in the region, their threat perceptions and their own capability choices. Regardless of whether the reason for Canberra’s new naval ambitions is the better to be able to deter a major power, or perhaps to be able to offer more to the U.S. in the event of a China contingency, all maritime nations

190 Rory Medcalf in the region will need to factor a more powerful Australian Navy into their calculations. Canberra is shaping up to be a more capable partner but also a more potent adversary. The diplomatic and security ripple effect of Australia’s declared intent to be the first country in its Southeast Asian neighbourhood to acquire long-range cruise missiles are yet to be seen. In the meantime, more modest developments will proceed: for instance, shortterm efforts are underway to improve Australia’s poor anti-submarine warfare capabilities, with the Chief of Navy, Vice Admiral Russ Crane, recently identifying the provision of active toward arrays and the acquisition of suitable helicopters equipped with dipping sonar as ‘very high priorities’.11

Partners and engagement: India and China Even as it moves to improve its own naval capabilities, Australia will continue to place emphasis on partnership with others in maritime security. Well before the U.S. formally embraced the virtues of maritime security co-operation with its 2007 strategy, Australia saw partnership, and, in the case of the U.S., formal alliance, as its best hope for effective and affordable national security in the maritime domain. The question arises, then: how might Australia seek to engage with Asia’s rising naval powers? Australia has a good track record of utilizing naval diplomacy, not only for broad objectives of confidence-building, but also to form habits of cooperation, communication and common procedures with partners, such as Singapore and Japan, as well as to assist smaller navies in building their capacity.12 One net effect of this is to improve the region’s overall capacity to contribute to regional and indeed global ‘public goods’ in maritime security. Engagement with India, and to some degree with China, is now a priority for the RAN, in line with Australia’s broader positive ties with these giants. In addition, Canberra’s May 2009 decision to dispatch a frigate and an Orion maritime patrol and surveillance aircraft to assist anti-piracy operations in the Gulf of Aden provides a new opportunity for developing day-to-day communication and coordination with India, China and other partners which have assets already deployed for that task. Australia–India naval partnership has multiple strands of underlying strategic logic and convergent interests.13 Both powers are major players in the security of the Indian Ocean sea lines of communication, and have formally recognized each other as forces for stability in that region. In the maritime space, they are virtually neighbours: their island territories are separated by barely more than the length of Sumatra. A Cold War history of mistrust is now well behind them. Their cooperation in the core group for tsunami relief in 2004–5, and their increasing comfort levels in bilateral and multilateral exercises, including the 2007 five-country Malabar exercise, both attest to the ease with which this relationship could well develop further. Formal navy-navy dialogues exist, with an increasingly operational focus. Their combined exercises are not merely lowest-common-denominator search and rescue activities, but extend to warfare serials.

The Australian Navy in the Asian century 191 The fact that both navies have a common British heritage, and are comfortable with diplomatic engagement and the English language, is another innate advantage. At a deeper strategic level, of course, the accelerating partnership and trust levels between India and the United States, Australia’s ally and Japan, Australia’s ally’s ally, and a major security partner, have only added to the incentives for Australia and India to develop their own naval relationship, to forge a key ‘missing link’ in the region’s security architecture. Two challenges present themselves in the further evolution of Australia–India maritime engagement. First, if it moves far or fast, there will be risks to be managed in terms of perceptions by China that Australia–India naval ties are part of some sort of purported containment strategy. This problem has already been felt in the aftermath of Malabar and the short-lived quadrilateral dialogue. But it is primarily a matter of perception, and should be manageable to the extent that both countries simultaneously engage China in naval confidence-building and cooperation, as, in a small way, both are trying to do. Second, for the very reason that both Australia and India are democracies, the pace and development of their defence relationship will be uneven, and this will at times cause frustrations and misunderstandings. The manner of Australia’s publicly distancing itself from the quadrilateral dialogue in early 2008 (with the Australian Foreign Minister making his remarks while standing alongside his Chinese counterpart) caused disquiet in New Delhi. In a much more lowkey way, India’s non-participation in the Australian-hosted Kakadu multilateral naval exercise this year, despite what one might assume was Canberra’s hope for an Indian presence, is an example of the short-term delays that can occur to the building of a durable partnership. India’s reasons may have been to do with fuel austerity measures, or perhaps the Indian Navy was going through a phase of restraint in its external engagements to help assuage the Indian Left during a sensitive time in domestic politics, with the controversy over the India–US nuclear deal. Either way, Australia was quite understanding, although it was a lost opportunity on India’s part; instead, Japan and Pakistan ended up being the largest powers to join Australia with ships in the exercise. In any case, these are mere teething pains. The frankness of Australia–India naval dialogue and India’s inclusion of Australia in its Indian Ocean Naval Symposium, not to mention Australia’s enthusiastic response to that process, are more significant signs of things to come. The question of Australian naval engagement with China is a more complicated one. There is recognition in Canberra that China has a legitimate and understandable aspiration to increase its naval capabilities, broadly speaking. It is inconceivable that a country with the trading economy, energy needs and global interests as large as China’s are projected to become should somehow be content to outsource the entirety of its maritime security needs to others, such as the United States in the Pacific and the United States plus India in the Indian Ocean. Correspondingly, it makes sense for Australia to want to see China contribute more to the ‘public goods’ of regional maritime security, such as disaster relief and the prevention of piracy.14 It is inevitable that China in time will want to do

192 Rory Medcalf this, and China’s historic December 2008 decision to send a task force to the Gulf of Aden is a turning point in this regard. Accordingly, it is better that such activity and capability be developed in partnership with others than unilaterally. Solo attempts by powerful countries to project force for allegedly benign reasons can easily be construed by others as cover for unsettling geopolitical ambitions. The RAN’s status as a trusted host of major international exercises, such as Kakadu, bodes well for its ability to host exercises that might improve communication, coordination and trust among regional navies including China’s.15 Australia is serious in wanting to build a navy-navy relationship with China. Some progress is being made: it is noteworthy that ships’ visits and search-andrescue exercises took place, almost simultaneously, in the vicinities of Sydney and Shanghai in late 2007. At the same time, there should be no pretending that Australia sees the Chinese and Indian navies in the same light. There remains uncertainty in Canberra about the full extent of the purposes of China’s naval modernization, as well as a consciousness that, were a worst-case scenario to present itself, Australia might find itself alongside the U.S. in a confrontation with the Chinese Navy. In summary, the RAN’s forthcoming challenges in an era of growing Chinese and Indian sea power are: •

• •

To develop greater strategic weight while retaining the flexibility required for Australia’s exceptionally diverse security needs, doing so in an affordable and sustainable manner, and without itself contributing to a destabilizing dynamic of capability competition in the region. To build engagement with India without feeding the mythology of a China containment strategy. To help engage China as a genuine contributor of public goods in maritime security, but without compromising either the U.S. alliance or the wider regional interest in ensuring that China’s rising naval strength, while constructively accommodated, does not become destabilizing dominant.

Notes 1 ‘Australia’s need for sea control’, Semaphore, Issue 9, May 2007. 2 Gregor Ferguson, ‘Australia looks north: new White Paper focuses on Asian neighbours’, Defense News, 16 February 2008. Available online at http://www. defensenews.com/osd_story.php?sh=VSDF&i=3377475. 3 Kevin Rudd, ‘Address to the RSL National Conference, Townsville’, 9 September 2008. Available online at http://www.pm.gov.au/media/Speech/2008/ speech_0468.cfm. 4 Australian Government, Defence White Paper 2009: Defending Australia in the Asia Pacific Century: Force 2030, Canberra: 2009. Available online at http://www. defence.gov.au/whitepaper/index/htm. 5 ‘Australia’s Navy: 106 Years Young’, Semaphore, Issue 2, January 2007. 6 Gregory P. Gilbert, ‘The navy as a force for good: a future force structure for the Australian Navy’, Security Challenges, Vol. 4, No. 3 (Spring 2008), p. 63; ‘A first analysis of RAN operations, 1990–2005’, Semaphore, Issue 2, January 2006.

The Australian Navy in the Asian century 193 7 Patrick Walters, ‘Cutting edge: the Collins experience’, Strategic Insights, Australian Strategic Policy Institute, February 2006, pp. 2, 5. 8 2009 Defence White Paper, pp. 70–3. 9 2009 Defence White Paper, pp. 85–6. 10 Ian McPhedran, ‘Aircraft carrier on Navy’s secret $4bn wishlist’, Daily Telegraph, 25 March 2008. Available online at http://www.news.com.au/story/0,23599,23426041421,00.html. 11 Vice Admiral Russ Crane, Speech to the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, 6 November 2008. 12 These objectives are elaborated upon in Andrew Forbes, ‘Australia’s naval contribution to regional maritime security cooperation’, presentation to a Fulbright Symposium, 2006. 13 Rory Medcalf, ‘Hesitating on the brink of partnership’, Asia Pacific Bulletin, No. 13, April 2008, East West Center, Washington D.C. Available online at http://www.eastwestcenter.org/fileadmin/stored/pdfs/apb013.pdf. 14 ‘RAN engagement with China’, Semaphore, Issue 11, September 2008. 15 Rory Medcalf, ‘No more naval gazing as China takes to the sea’, The Age, 5 January 2009, p. 9. Available online at http://www.theage.com.au/opinion/no-more-navalgazing-as-china-takes-to-the-sea-20090104-79t0.html?page=-1.

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Part III

Looking to the future

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17 Maritime cooperation and confidence-building Pradeep Chauhan

This chapter addresses maritime cooperation and confidence-building within the context of India’s ‘geo-strategic maritime-security environment’. This environment is shaped by three major factors: first, the geographical conformation of the Indian Ocean and the Asia-Pacific regions; second, by India’s own national maritime interests; and third, by the interplay of the geo-strategies of other maritime powers with that of India. The huge energy-resources of the Indian Ocean Region are driving particularly strong maritime connectivities between the Indian and the Pacific Oceans, and consequently, it is necessary to paint the picture of maritime cooperation within the maritime-security canvas of the Asia at Pacific littoral as a whole. An important caveat that needs to be borne in mind is that the term ‘Asia-Pacific’ includes both ‘Asia’ and ‘the Pacific’ and that neither word can be either unduly emphasised or unduly downplayed at the cost of the other. Indeed, in both these oceanic spaces, trans-regional geo-strategy, as also geopolitics, are being shaped by the ongoing major – even historic – shift in the overall Asian power structure caused by the near simultaneous rise of, India, China, Japan and ASEAN. Strong winds of change are buffeting the once familiar landmarks of the entire security environment, whether on land or at sea. Perhaps the most significant catalyst of change has been the rise and proliferation of malevolent non-state entities. And yet, the advent of the non-state actor has not removed the stateactor from the geo-strategic stage, nor, indeed, reduced the state to a bit-player in the global and regional geo-political play. In fact, we are increasingly witnessing a coalescing of the state and malevolent non-state entities. This has created a malevolent hybrid that we might describe as the state-sponsored non-state actor. It is this hybrid that lies at the heart of the current security dilemma facing many regional and extra-regional maritime powers within the Asia-Pacific region. Should their ‘preventive’, ‘curative’ and ‘punitive’ security-efforts be directed principally towards the state-sponsor or the malevolent non-state entity? How are the linkages between the two to be laid bare for the world to see, especially in cases where the world may not always be ‘willing-to-see’? It seems increasingly clear that we urgently need to reshape our fundamental approach to ‘security’, shedding the ‘Cold War’ baggage of predominantly ‘competitive’ security-constructs and adopting, instead, multilateral, ‘cooperative’

198 Pradeep Chauhan constructs – such as the Indian Ocean Naval Symposium (IONS) and the Western Pacific Naval Symposium (WPNS) initiatives – that seek to provide ‘comprehensive’ security. These will be dilated-upon, at greater length, later in this paper. In all these strategic considerations, there is the pervasive impact of ‘geography’ that must be taken into account. Indeed, ‘geo-strategy’ has been well defined by the Chinese analyst, Senior Captain Xu Qi of the PLA Navy, in China Military Science, which is one of China’s most prestigious military journals. Xu Qi describes it to essentially be ‘a country’s effort in the world arena to use geographic orientation and principles to pursue and safeguard its national interests’.1 What this means is that each nation engages in geo-strategy with varying degrees of success, based upon its geographical position – which is a fixed factor, and, its demonstrated abilities in terms of ‘geographic orientation’ – which is a variable factor and can also be called the country’s ‘strategic culture’. This ‘strategic culture’ is a direct function of scholarship … a deep study of history and the derivation of lessons drawn from historical experience. … the ability to identify and forecast security interests and threats, etc. As the erstwhile U.S. Secretary of State for Defence, Mr Donald Rumsfeld, pithily remarked in the 2006 edition of the Shangri-la Dialogue, the essence of geo-strategy is that ‘… where one stands on any given security issue depends upon where one sits’! As far as India is concerned, she ‘sits’ at the natural junction of the busy international shipping lanes that criss-cross this ocean and this determines much of our security viewpoint. In terms of shipping density, the sea area around India is one of the busiest waterways of the world, with over one-hundred-thousand ships transiting the international shipping lanes of this region every year, and the Strait of Malacca, alone, accounting for some sixty-thousand ships annually. Of all the cargo that moves along the international shipping lanes of the Indian Ocean, perhaps the most critical is petroleum and petroleum-products. Almost 1,000 million tonnes of oil from West Asia passes close to our shores annually. Some part of this is destined for our own ports, to feed the increasing demand for energy to fuel our current economic growth. A much greater proportion, however, is destined for the oil-intensive economies of the USA and Europe, and, of course China and Japan. We see the Indian Navy and the Indian Coast Guard as major stabilising forces in this great movement of energy across the Indian Ocean, not just for ourselves, but for the world at large. Even while we acknowledge the pervasiveness of ‘change’, the great question of our time is whether the change will be by consent or coercion. Indeed, the real challenge is not merely the ‘changed framework’ that we must contendwith, but rather that we find ourselves living within a ‘framework-of-change’. Consequently, it should come as no surprise that the concept of security, too, has changed steadily over the years. Traditionally, security used to be thought of only in military terms. However, as we begin to incorporate the many facets of ‘human security’, we find ourselves moving away from an earlier and excessivelynarrow definition of ‘security’ within only a military construct. This changed approach to security finds its historical moorings in the famous ‘Common Security’

Maritime cooperationand confidence-building 199 report authored over a quarter of a century ago, by the ‘Independent Commission on Disarmament and Security Issues’ chaired by the late Prime Minister of Sweden, Mr Olof Palme. This report emphatically drew attention to alternative ways of thinking about peace and security by formally acknowledging that common security requires that people live in dignity and peace, that they have enough to eat and are able to find work and live in a world without poverty. As a consequence of this transformation in the manner in which we conceptualise security, new terms such as ‘Non-Traditional Security’ and ‘Human Security’, some drawn from the 1994 Report of the UNDP, have made their way into the Indian Navy’s contemporary security-lexicon and lodged themselves within its collective security-consciousness. India’s thinking about Maritime Security is now firmly established within a new construct that incorporates military, political, economic, societal and environmental dimensions, and recognizes the many linkages between them. ‘Military’ maritime security does, of course, continue to enjoy primacy for the Indian Navy, existing as it does in a world-system defined by Westphalian concepts of national sovereignty. However, our thinking is increasingly influenced by the UNDP list of as many as seven additional components of ‘Human Security’: Economic Security; Food Security; Health Security; Environmental Security; Personal Security; Community Security; and Political Security. Today, there are several significant threats to human security, including wars and international terrorism. Drugs and arms smuggling are very real threats that continue unabated. Demographic shifts – whether caused by migration or by other factors – continue to haunt security organisations. We are only now becoming aware of the extent of environmental degradation and its security overtones. Energy, food and water shortages are all moving up the ladder of security-related threats that are becoming inseparable from military threats. These have led to the formulation of new concepts such as ‘comprehensive security’ and ‘cooperative security’. Cooperative naval constructs such as the IONS and the WPNS are, in fact, founded upon these ‘non-traditional’ security-concepts, involving ‘cooperative’ rather than ‘competitive’ security and ‘comprehensive’ rather than narrowly ‘military’ security. Naturally, security issues within the maritime domain need to be referenced more towards common interests rather than threats. At a regional level, our common interests are, indeed, these very same ‘human security’ issues. It is in our common interest to create and consolidate a region in which the present ostrichsyndrome is rejected, where we jointly face-up to the common challenges that confront us, where the comity of nations is both intrinsic and assured. … where every nation, big or small, is treated as an equal … where multiple options of governance are recognized as being functions of the independent choice of the people of each nation-state … where the people of every state of the region can live in dignity and peace … where poverty stands banished and prosperity sits in its place. … where the state protects the individual and the individual preserves the state in a symbiotic relationship designed to establish and spread stability across

200 Pradeep Chauhan the region. … and where malevolent non-state entities find neither spatial nor temporal room for manoeuvre. It is, therefore, appropriate that within the maritime domain, the concept of ‘maritime security’ is increasingly being described as a condition characterized by freedom from threats arising either ‘in’ or ‘from’ the sea. These threats could arise from natural causes or from man-made ones, or, from the interplay of one with the other, as in the case of global warming or environmental degradation. Take the Maldives for instance. It has a population of a quarter of a million people. If the rise in sea-level as a result of global warming were to continue, the Maldives would disappear and we would suddenly have a quarter of a million ‘boat people’. Where will they go? What contingency-plans have been drawn up to cater for such a scenario? On a more immediate and disturbing level, human traffickers abuse the maritime medium to cruelly exploit economic inequalities and the human yearning for betterment in the quality of life, cramming their hapless human cargo into appalling conditions of deprivation and degradation. In similar fashion, poachers, gunrunners, drug-smugglers and a variety of maritime criminals, including terrorists, abuse the freedom of the seas, bringing into question the very rationale underlying these historical freedoms. Then again, we have the scourge of piracy, which has resurfaced from the pages of regrettably romanticised history and, along with the more enduring spectre of maritime crime, mocks the United Nations’ ‘Law of the Sea’ that we have so painstakingly formulated. For instance, off the troubled coast of Somalia rampant piracy and armed-robbery are maritime manifestations of an increasingly unhappy situation. The ease with which governments can be rendered ineffective is amply illustrated by the many incidents of hijacking that continue to be unaddressed despite express authorisation by Somalia and the UN Security Council to pursue and suppress pirates even within the territorial waters and the land-territory of Somalia. While perusing even what purports to be the latest tabulation of incidents of piracy – from the Gulf of Aden on the western flank of the maritime area under consideration, to the Sulawesi Sea on the eastern flank – it is frightening to realise that the list is very probably already out of date! In contrast, however, the security situation vis-à-vis the Strait of Malacca offers a striking example of the success that can be achieved through cooperative and collective security constructs. Concerted actions by the littoral states have caused incidents of piracy to dwindle very significantly, and in this regard the actions of the littoral states of Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand are deserving of particular praise. And yet, even here, there is clearly much that remains to be done. The Strait remains very vulnerable to terrorist attack. At its narrowest point, the Strait is less than 1.5 nm wide, and a successful attempt to sink a ship in this bottleneck could have a severely-adverse fallout on merchant traffic. Like many of the countries of South East Asia and East Asia, India has a special interest in the safety and security within the Strait of Malacca, particularly at the mouth of the northern funnel of the Strait. The Andaman and Nicobar Islands stretch right across the mouth of the Strait of Malacca, and Car Nicobar is a mere

Maritime cooperationand confidence-building 201 86 nautical miles from the province of Aceh in Indonesia, and security issues in this general area are very likely to generate immediate repercussions in the A & N Islands. In terms of trade, our interest in the Straits of Malacca and Singapore is even more compelling. China (including Hong Kong) is, today, our largest trading partner worldwide – ahead of the USA. As a regional trading-bloc vis-à-vis India, East Asia and South East Asia are way ahead – in terms of ‘volume’ as well as ‘value’ and, consequently, in terms of ‘importance’ – of the EU and the USA. The safety and security of this trade (it must be remembered that merchant ships flying the Indian flag account for only some 13 per cent of our overseas trade), brings great centrality to the Strait of Malacca and beyond. Insofar as the Straits of Malacca and Singapore are concerned, India is thus both a ‘Funnel-State’ as well as a major ‘User-State’ and can hardly be expected to be a disinterested bystander to developments in these Straits. Within the Straits of Malacca and Singapore, there are three fundamental issues that impact upon the security-paradigm of the Asia-Pacific. These three issues might conveniently be considered in two separate ‘groupings’. The first grouping comprises ‘navigational safety’ and ‘environmental protection’ and is a relatively benign area, in which international cooperation has made considerable progress (albeit after a fairly difficult start in the late 1960s and early 1970s). Within this group, ‘policy’ matters are addressed by the ‘Malacca-Singapore Straits Committee’ – a grouping of ‘senior officials’ from Malaysia, Indonesia and Singapore, while ‘technical’ matters are handled by a ‘Tripartite Technical Experts Group’ (TTEG). Over the years, activities relevant to this first ‘group’ have matured significantly and India, in common with the several states of ASEAN, is intimately and constructively involved with the initiative, led by the UN/International Maritime Organization (IMO) known as the ‘Cooperative Mechanism’, which was established in September 2007, after a series of meetings with the IMO, major user states and other stakeholders. A series of six focused projects have been identified and a number of equally well-focused organisations have been set-up to promote regular discussions, to oversee the coordination of implementation of the projects, and to oversee the utilisation of the financial contribution received from various parties. The six ‘projects’ are: (1) Removal of wrecks in the Traffic Separation Scheme; (2) Cooperation and Capacitybuilding for Hazardous and Noxious Substance Preparedness and Responses; (3) Demonstration of ‘Class B’ AIS-transponders on Small Ships; (4) Setting-up of Tide, Current and Wind Measurement Systems; (5) Replacement and Maintenance of Aids to Navigation; and (6) Replacement of Aids to Navigation. India, which had committed itself to ‘Project 1’ and ‘Project 4’, has recently earmarked funding in support of these commitments. The second ‘group’ which has only a single constituent, namely, ‘Security’ has been a more difficult area, where delicacy, tact, patience, and, perhaps most important of all, transparency-of-intent, are all required to be brought to bear. And yet, these two groupings are, in fact, very closely linked. Just how closely was dramatically driven home on 6 Jan 1975, when the MT Showa Maru, a very large crude carrier (VLCC) of 237,000 dead-weight tonnes (DWT), ran aground in Indonesian waters within the Straits and more than

202 Pradeep Chauhan 7,500 tonnes of crude oil were spilt. Each one of the several remedial measures proposed has obvious and overt security facets that can best be addressed through cooperative rather than competitive endeavours. In overall terms, the problems that confront the countries that abut the waters of the Asia-Pacific maritime spaces are not ‘small’ by any standards. As if the challenges identified by the foregoing paragraphs of this chapter were not challenges enough, the Asia-Pacific region is also the locus of over 70 per cent of the world’s natural disasters. The Indian Navy firmly believes that these challenges can be met only through a regionally inclusive process of cooperative security. We continue to view ‘Constructive Engagement’ as the primary means of achieving and assuring mutually beneficial maritime security, stability, safety and consequent collective prosperity amongst all nation-states of the Asia-Pacific littoral. We firmly believe, for instance, that ‘Constructive Engagement’ between navies enables the gaining and sharing of operational and doctrinal expertise – as also transformational experiences – the examining and imbibing of ‘best-practices’ – the generation of inter-operability, and the enhancement of Maritime Domain Awareness through a variety of information-sharing mechanisms. In order to maximise beneficial gains, it is clear that all of us need to engage in both directions along the axis of perceived maritime-capability – not just with navies that we consider to be as advanced or more advanced than our own – but equally with navies for whom our engagement will build capacity2 and enhance capability.3 We believe that it is precisely this patient and step-by-step process of building capacity and enhancing capability, especially amongst the smaller littoral states of the region, that will transform some of the security-related fragility of the Indian Ocean littoral into robustness born of self-confidence and self-sufficiency. Cooperative mechanisms for the speedy, effective and humane application of maritime power for regional Humanitarian Assistance and Disaster Relief operations form an obvious and important aspect of this ‘Constructive Engagement’. Yet it took the tsunami of 2004 to drive this home with telling effect. With the more recent examples of the Yogyakarta earthquake in Indonesia, Cyclone Sidr that struck Bangladesh in November of 2007, and, most recently, the devastation caused by Cyclone Nargis as it tore through the Irrawady delta, causing widespread death and destruction in Myanmar, the criticality of working towards interoperability right from the planning and induction process of new platforms, bears no repetition to this audience. Similarly, the widespread publicity that was accorded to the regionally-inclusive evacuation undertaken in July 2006 when warships of the Indian Navy moved as many as 2,280 nationals of India, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Lebanon and even Greece, to safety from war-ravaged Lebanon, makes it unnecessary for me to expound unduly upon the advantages of having succour and extrication options available to non-combatants and civilians – even in distant lands. We continue to be encouraged by the realisation that we are not alone in these efforts at Constructive Engagement. The efforts of the USNS Mercy, as also those of the USS Pelelieu, for instance, offer a vivid example of the enormous

Maritime cooperationand confidence-building 203 goodwill that can be generated and the succour that can be provided through multinational, maritime ‘Humanitarian Assistance’ missions. Thus, in response to a 2006 request from the U.S. Navy for Indian medical augmentation and support by way of participation on board the hospital ship Mercy during her humanitarian mission to East Asia, a ten-member medical team from the Indian Navy, along with a second team drawn jointly from the Indian Army and the Indian Air Force, undertook a four-month embarkation – from 23 May 2006 to 1 September 2006 – to render medical succour and humanitarian relief to stricken people in the Philippines, Bangladesh, Indonesia and East Timor. In similar fashion, ten Medical, Veterinary and Medical-Engineering specialists from the Indian Armed Forces embarked on the USS Peleliu on that ship’s ‘Pacific Partnership’ mission from June to September 2007, covering the Philippines, Marshall Islands, Vietnam and Papua New Guinea. The contribution of the Indian Armed Forces medical and support personnel was extremely well-appreciated, and in 2008 an eightmember tri-Service team of medical officers, paramedical and medical-support personnel completed yet another embarkation aboard the USNS Mercy (from 15 June to 15 September 2008), having rendered succour to the needy in Vietnam, Timor-Leste, Papua New Guinea and Micronesia. These deployments and embarkations provide ample evidence of the relevance and support that HADR operations enjoy across the Asia-Pacific. The construction, acquisition and induction of large amphibious, helicopter-carrying and hovercraftcapable platforms are very much the flavour of the season amongst a number of navies, and these are becoming increasingly politically acceptable because of their obvious application in HADR situations. This is one of the many lessons that the Tsunami of December 2004 has taught us. This boom in regional naval growth thus offers a unique window of opportunity to all of us within the Asia-Pacific region. Indeed, there are many overlapping bilateral and multilateral security constructs, forums and groupings in the Asia-Pacific Region such as the ASEAN,4 ASEAN+3,5 APEC,6 ARF,7 the 6-Party Talks, the East Asia Summit, etc. At the navy level, the WPNS is clearly the most important multilateral security construct. All these overlapping bilateral and multilateral security constructs are manifestations of the regional drive towards cooperative security through constructive engagement. The Indian Ocean segment of the Asia-Pacific littoral is now beginning to catch up. Although a noble beginning was made over a decade ago, with the launch, in March of 1997, of the ‘Indian Ocean Rim – Association for Regional Cooperation’ (IOR–ARC), this grouping confined itself purely to economic cooperation and specifically abjured security issues. It must, of course, be admitted that in 1997, the notion of security within the collective minds of the countries of the Indian Ocean was still very strongly biased towards military security alone. This lacuna has now been comprehensively addressed thanks to a very robust amount of synergy between the military-maritime establishments and the foreign affairs establishments across the Indian Ocean littoral. As many readers would be aware, in February of 2008, driven by the need to address regional vulnerabilities by

204 Pradeep Chauhan capitalising upon regional strengths, the Chiefs-of-Navy of very nearly all littoral states of the Indian Ocean Region gathered in New Delhi, both in ‘assembly’ and in ‘conclave’, to launch the twenty-first century’s first significant international maritime-security initiative – namely, the Indian Ocean Naval Symposium, or ‘IONS’. That the launch of so important a regional initiative was able to meet with such wide acceptance across the length and breadth of the Indian Ocean was in itself a unique phenomenon – but one representative of a region that has come into its own and is ready to evolve a broad consensus in facing the myriad security challenges within the maritime domain. The acronym ‘IONS’ is particularly fitting, since the etymology of the English word ‘ions’ is drawn from the Greek word ‘ienai’ meaning ’go’ and implying movement, and the fundamental concept of IONS, too, is one of ‘moving’ together – as a region. There are 37 littoral states in the Indian Ocean Region: excluding the landlocked states in East Africa and South Asia, we could geographically group them into four sub-regions, as shown in Table 17.1. It may be seen that ‘IONS’ seeks to provide a regional forum through which the ‘Chiefs-of-Navy’ of all the littoral states of the IOR can periodically meet to constructively engage one another through the creation and promotion of regionally relevant mechanisms, events and activities. This is also very largely the purpose of the WPNS, in which the navies of the ASEAN states figure equally prominently. The inaugural activity of the ‘IONS’ initiative was the ‘IONS Seminar2008’, which was jointly conducted by the Indian Navy and the National Maritime Foundation (NMF) on 14 and 15 February 2008. The theme of the seminar was ‘Contemporary Trans-National Challenges – International Maritime Connectivities’. While the seminar witnessed active participation by a galaxy of national and international luminaries, the formal launch of the ‘IONS’ initiative itself was effected through two sessions of the ‘Conclave-of-Chiefs’ – the first held in New Delhi on 15 February and the second in Goa on 16 February 2008. As had Table 17.1 Littoral and Island States of the Indian Ocean Region West Asian Littoral

East African Littoral

South Asian Littoral

South-East Asian & Australian Littoral

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11.

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13.

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

Bahrain Iran Iraq Israel Jordan Kuwait Oman Qatar Saudi Arabia UAE Yemen

Comoros Djibouti Egypt Eritrea France Kenya Madagascar Mauritius Mozambique Somalia South Africa Sudan Tanzania

Bangladesh India Maldives Pakistan Seychelles Sri Lanka

Australia Indonesia Malaysia Myanmar Singapore Thailand Timor-Leste

Maritime cooperationand confidence-building 205 been the intention, it was at this ‘Conclave-of-Chiefs’, removed from the glare of the media, that the most meaningful progress occurred. Comfortably interacting among their peers, the Chiefs-of-Navy ratified the four principal ‘Objectives’ of the new security-construct, namely: (a)

(b) (c)

(d)

To promote a shared understanding of the maritime issues facing the littoral states of the Indian Ocean and the formulation of a common set of strategies designed to enhance regional maritime security. To strengthen the capability of all littoral nation-states of the Indian Ocean to address present and anticipated challenges to maritime security and stability. To establish and promote a variety of trans-national, maritime, cooperativemechanisms designed to mitigate maritime security concerns within the Indian Ocean. To develop interoperability in terms of doctrines, procedures, organisational and logistic systems and operational processes, so as to promote the development of regional naval capacities for speedy, responsive and effective Humanitarian Assistance and Disaster-Relief (HADR) throughout the region.

Perhaps of even greater significance, the Chiefs agreed to abide by the draft ‘Charter of Business’ even while the document was processed for approval in each navy’s own governmental hierarchy. With just a year having elapsed since that time, it is a matter of very great satisfaction that the Charter-ofBusiness has already been brought into its final shape, with the observations and recommendations of all the Chiefs and their relevant national authorities having been incorporated. Of equal importance is the fact that the Chiefs, while gathered in conclave, agreed to a set of initial activities. Insofar as the period until 2010 is concerned,

Table 17.2 Planned Naval Cooperative Initiatives Activity

Month

Capacity-building and capabilityenhancement activities, especially (though not limited to port-calls and ship-visits) IONS Open Essay Competition 2008

Ongoing

Technical Workshop for Young Officers

Mar 09

IONS Preparatory Workshop IONS Open Essay Competition: 2009

Oct 09 Nov 09

Medical Workshop for Young Officers

Nov 09

Jan 09

Remarks

Conducting Authority: Indian Navy Conducting Authority: Sri Lanka Navy Proposed Host : Kenyan Navy Conducting Authority: South African Navy Proposed Host: Royal Saudi Naval Forces

206 Pradeep Chauhan the planned activities – apart from those functional upon port-calls and capabilityenhancement measures related to ship-visits – can be seen in Table 17.2. Turning to the rotation of the Chairmanship of IONS, it had been agreed, in the course of the inaugural Conclave-of-Chiefs, that the chairmanship should be rotated sequentially through each of the four sub-regions indicated in Table 17.1. This was so that the somewhat different priorities given even to common challenges, and, of course, such maritime-security challenges as are unique to a given sub-region, could all be given the emphasis and attention that they deserve. The next rotation is to the West-Asian littoral and there are strong expressions of interest from the navies of this sub-region. Even as we move IONS up to speed, we are aware that there are also other, important sub-regional cooperative constructs within the Indian Ocean Region, some of which also address the changing security environment. A few of these are indicated in Table 17.3. The table has been organized so that countries that are members of more than one cooperative grouping can be readily discerned lying in the same row. (Observers are indicated by the use of the letter ‘O’). On the Pacific side, the several overlapping structures that exist have already been mentioned. Indeed, the ASEAN states are at the core of many of them and may therefore be seen to be the ‘hinge’ that connects the ‘Asian’ and the ‘Pacific’ segments of the Asia-Pacific maritime expanse. It is important to note here that ASEAN maintains inter-organizational contact with several of the constructs within the ‘Asia’ segment of the ‘Asia-Pacific’ expanse, such as the Gulf Cooperation Council and the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation. Most ASEAN member countries also participate actively in the activities of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC), the Asia-Europe Meeting (ASEM), and the East Asia-Latin America Forum (EALAF). There is a growing recognition that within the maritime domain, initiatives such as the IONS and the WPNS will inevitably be the major components of any pan-Asian security construct. Table 17.4 shows the navies that are members and observers of the WPNS construct, with those navies that are common to both, WPNS and IONS, being indicated in ‘bold italic’. A handshake – in the immediate future – between the WPNS and the IONS is inevitable and will synergize the maritime domain throughout the AsiaPacific. Perhaps we will also see a move towards connectivity with the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation and which might eventually lead to the pan-Asian security construct that the Secretary for Defence of the United States of America, Mr Robert Gates, spoke of during the 2008 edition of the Shangri La Dialogue. This vision, however, lies at a still indeterminate time-to-come. Insofar as the immediate future is concerned, we believe that the IONS and the WPNS movements constitute the keys to addressing the many challenges that face us within the Asia-Pacific maritime domain. By way of conclusion I would like to aver that cooperative maritime strategies within the Asia-Pacific are not limited to the argument of ‘guns-versus-butter’. They are, in fact, predicated upon the somewhat revolutionary premise of ‘guns and butter’.

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26.

Australia Bahrain Bangladesh Comoros Djibouti Egypt Eritrea France India Indonesia Iraq Iran Kenya Kuwait Madagascar Malaysia Maldives Mauritius Mozambique Myanmar Oman Pakistan Qatar Saudi Arabia Seychelles Singapore

IONS

Madagascar Malaysia

Mauritius Mozambique

Oman

Singapore

9 10

11

12

France India Indonesia

O2 3 4

7 8

Egypt

O1

Iran Kenya

Bangladesh

2

5 6

Australia

1

IOR-ARC

9

7 8

6

5

1 2 3 4

Seychelles

Mauritius Mozambique

Madagascar

Kenya

Comoros Djibouti Egypt Eritrea

African Union

Table 17.3 Cooperative Organisations in the Indian Ocean Region

2 3

1 Mauritius Mozambique

Madagascar

SADC

Oman Qatar Saudi Arabia

8 9

Kuwait

Iraq

Comoros Djibouti Egypt

Bahrain

7

6

5

2 3 4

1

Arab League

4 5

3

2

1

Continued

Qatar Saudi Arabia

Oman

Kuwait

Bahrain

GCC

27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35.

Somalia ?? South Africa Sri Lanka Sudan Tanzania Timor Leste Thailand UAE Yemen

IONS

Table 17.3 Continued

South Africa Sri Lanka

Tanzania

Thailand UAE Yemen China UK Japan

13 14

15

16 17 18 O3 O4 O5

IOR-ARC

Algeria Angola Benin Botswana Burkina Burundi Cameroon Cape Verde Central African Republic Chad Congo

Sudan Tanzania

12 13

14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24

Somalia South Africa

10 11

African Union

Angola Botswana

7

Tanzania

South Africa

6

5

4

SADC

UAE Yemen

Jordan Lebanon Palestine Syria Algeria

14 15 16 17 18

Sudan

Somalia

12 13

11

10

Arab League

6

UAE

GCC

Congo, DRC Cote d’Ivorie Equatorial Guinea Ethiopia Gabon The Gambia Ghana Guinea Guinea-Bissau Lesotho Liberia Libya Malawi Mali Mauritania Namibia Niger Nigeria Rwanda Sao Tome & Principe Senegal Sierra Leone Swaziland Togo Tunisia Uganda Zambia Zimbabwe

25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39

40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 Swaziland

Zambia Zimbabwe

12

13 14

Malawi

10

Namibia

Lesotho

9

11

Congo (DRC)

8

22

20 21

19

Tunisia

Mauritania Morocco

Libya

210 Pradeep Chauhan Table 17.4 Western Pacific Naval Symposium – Members and Observers Members 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

Australia Brunei Cambodia China France Indonesia Japan Malaysia New Zealand

Observers 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18

Papua New Guinea Philippines Russia Singapore South Korea Thailand Tonga USA Vietnam

1 2 3 4 5 6

Bangladesh Canada Chile India Mexico Peru

Notes 1 Xu Qi (translated by Andrew S. Erikson and Lyle J. Goldstein), “Maritime Geostrategy and the Development of the Chinese Navy in the Early Twenty-First Century”, Naval War. 2 ‘Capacity-Building’ is most often used in the context of ‘material’ wherewithal (i.e., the provision of hardware – this could include platforms, infrastructure, equipment or spares), which is provided to entities – usually in developing countries – that have a need to develop a certain ‘capacity’ to undertake one or more maritime (or naval) role. 3 ‘Capability Enhancement’ refers to the realization of a potential ‘aptitude’ or ‘ability’. In a naval context, it implies that the potential recipient already has the ‘capacity’ (or some proportion of it) to undertake a naval/maritime role, and our Foreign Cooperation input will now ‘enhance’ his existing capability to exploit the material wherewithal so as to derive better (hopefully optimal) results. Capability-enhancement is most often by way of intangibles and cognitive processes (examples would include ‘training’, ‘domain-awareness’, ‘doctrinal-development’, etc.). For instance, a certain navy may well possess operationally viable sea-going Offshore Patrol-Vessels (OPVs). This would be ‘capacity’. On the other hand, if the crew aboard the OPV in question did not know how to distinguish between, say, a ‘demersal’ trawler (one designed to catch fish that live close to the seabed) and a ‘pelagic’ trawler (one designed to catch fish that swim close to the surface of the sea), it might be unable to establish ‘suspicious behaviour’ as a function of the depth of water in which it is operating. This is lack of ‘capability’. 4 ASEAN = (1) Brunei, (2) Cambodia, (3) Indonesia, (4) Laos, (5) Malaysia, (6) Myanmar, (7) Philippines, (8) Singapore, (9) Thailand and (10) Vietnam. ASEAN Dialogue Partners include (1) Australia, (2) Canada, (3) China, (4) the EU, (5) India, (6) Japan, (7) (8) South Korea, (9) New Zealand, (10) Russia, (11) USA and (12) the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). 5 ASEAN+3 = The ten ASEAN states + China, Japan and South Korea. 6 APEC = (1) Australia, (2) Brunei, (3) Canada, (4) Chile, (5) China, (6) Hong Kong, (7) Indonesia, (8) Japan, (9) South Korea, (10) Malaysia, (11) Mexico, (12) New Zealand, (13) Papua New Guinea, (14) Peru, (15) Philippines, (16) Russia, (17) Singapore, (18) Chinese Taipei, (19) Thailand, (20) USA and (21) Vietnam. 7 ARF = Australia, Brunei, Cambodia, Canada, China, EU, India, Indonesia, Japan, North Korea, South Korea, Laos, Malaysia, Mongolia, Myanmar, New Zealand, Pakistan, Papua New Guinea, Philippines, Russia, Singapore, Thailand, the U.S. and Vietnam.

18 China participates in East Asian maritime cooperation Growing activism and strategic concerns Li Ming jiang The future East Asian international order is likely to be significantly shaped by the maritime strategies and policies of regional states and relevant external powers. China features prominently in this process, given its immense material power, national aspirations, geographical location, and entangling geostrategic and territorial contentions with many other players in the region. In recent years, there has been growing awareness among the Chinese elite that the ocean is becoming more important for Chinese national interests in the long run, e.g. China’s great resurgence and long-term economic prosperity.1 In 2003, the total production value of China’s marine economic sector exceeded RMB 1 trillion for the first time, and in 2005 that figure rose to RMB 1.7 trillion. From 2001 to 2005, China’s oceanic economy increased by 11.1 per cent annually. In 2004, China publicized its national guidelines on marine economic development, which called for the goal of making China a strong maritime power.2 It is therefore necessary and useful to examine China’s policy on maritime affairs and its role in the dynamic development of maritime order in East Asia. To this end, many analysts focus on the growth of China’s naval power to try to understand China’s role in the emerging regional maritime order. The mainstream view is a negative one, predicting that China’s growing naval power will destabilize the region in the future. Some scholars in this school of thought explicitly argue that China’s naval power could more likely lead to conflict in East Asia.3 Examining China’s underwater aspirations and capabilities, Goldstein and Murray conclude that “submarines are emerging as the centerpiece of an evolving Chinese quest to control the East Asian littoral.”4 A minority group of observers believe that China has limited goals. Cole, for instance, argues that a combination of strategic view, budget constraints, foreign relations, and domestic political affairs, places effective constraints on China’s naval build-up. He believes that Beijing’s power projection capability will be significantly hampered in the future.5 Fravel, through examining extensive Chinese sources, concludes that China’s strategic goals are keyed to “the defense of a continental power with growing maritime interests as well as to Taiwan’s unification and are largely conservative, not expansionist.” He notes

212 Li Ming jiang that China is developing internal control, peripheral denial, and limited forceprojection capabilities in response to these objectives.6 A sense of concern and caution notwithstanding, analysts in this school of thought would be much less worried about China’s growing naval power, and a less heavy-handed policy recommendation would be consistent with their observations. While it is important to factor in the development of China’s hard military power, more attention to Chinese intentions and current policy on East Asian maritime issues is warranted to arrive at a more balanced, arguably more accurate, understanding of the trajectory of China’s maritime strategy and policy in the years to come.7 This is exactly what this chapter intends to accomplish. The first part of the chapter will take stock of China’s changing perceptions, attitudes, and behaviors in military and maritime cooperation. These include the People’s Liberation Army’s (PLA’s) growing openness, increased participation in regional multilateral security dialogues, and emerging activism in maritime cooperation in East Asia. In the second part, the chapter describes China’s new policy moves in the South China Sea and East China Sea. The third part addresses some of the major Chinese concerns for further maritime cooperation in East Asia. While a grand cooperative maritime regime is still not possible from a Chinese perspective, China is likely to agree to more extensive and substantive maritime cooperation in many functional areas, most notably in the non-traditional security arena.

China’s growing willingness for military and maritime cooperation Many maritime affairs concern a nation-state’s sovereign claims over territory and resources, and the role of its military or quasi-military in dealing with these issues. It is therefore necessary to place our discussion about China’s policy on maritime cooperation in the larger context of China’s military relations with the outside world. About a decade ago, David Shambaugh, a seasoned China expert, argued that the PLA was primarily preoccupied with a variety of sources of instability, uncertainty, and potential threat. And there was a “prominent sense of angst and ambivalence apparent in the PLA’s views of its national security.”8 This kind of perception has now significantly changed. The change is notable in China’s non-proliferation policy9 and international peacekeeping operations,10 two areas in which China’s positive contribution has been acknowledged. Former deputy chief of general staff, Zhang Qinsheng, noted that the PLA has made notable progress in engaging the militaries of many other countries. These include growing military transparency as evidenced in the five defense White Papers, more active participation in joint exercises, widening bilateral and multilateral defense consultations, participation in international disaster relief activities, and international peace-keeping operations. The PLA conducts defense consultations with its counterparts in various major powers, i.e. the USA, Russia, Japan, Australia, Britain, and France. Now the consultations have expanded to Pakistan, Mongolia, Thailand, Vietnam, the Philippines, South Africa, and Italy.11 This growing military openness and international communication,

China participates in East Asian maritime cooperation 213 especially between the PLA Navy and the naval forces of other countries, have served as a conducive condition for China’s maritime cooperation.

Joint exercises in the seas The increased military contacts with the outside world are notable in joint military exercises. In November 2000, China invited American military visitors to observe a Chinese military exercise for the first time. Since then, China has been regularly inviting foreign militaries to observe exercises in China. In the first years of the new century, China started to participate more actively in joint military exercises, a taboo in the 1990s. The 2002 defense White Paper noted that China would selectively and gradually participate in multilateral military exercises in non-traditional security areas.12 In 2002, China held the first joint counter-terrorism exercise with Kyrgyzstan, the first such joint action with a foreign military power. Since then, China has had joint naval search and rescue operations with a wide range of countries on the seas. China and India held their first naval joint search and rescue operation in 2003 in the East China Sea. The military exchanges between the two powers have been gradually increasing ever since, leading to the second joint search and rescue exercise in the Indian Ocean in December 2005.13 In July 2005, China, South Korea, and Japan held a joint search and rescue exercise in China’s offshore area. In September and November 2006, Chinese and American navies conducted two search and rescue exercise in the U.S. West coast, and in the South China Sea, respectively.14 This was the result of eight years of maritime security consultations between the two countries, and was a major breakthrough of the past 20 years.15 China participated in the first ARF maritime-security shore exercise hosted by Singapore in January 2007. In March 2007, two Chinese missile frigates, together with the naval forces from Bangladesh, France, Italy, Malaysia, Pakistan, Turkey, the United Kingdom and the United States participated in the four-day sea phase of “Peace-07” exercises in the Arabian Sea. In May 2007, a PLAN missile frigate took part in the Western Pacific Naval Symposium (WPNS) exercise that also involved Australia and the United States. Although China joined this forum over 20 years ago as one of its founding members, this was the first time it had got involved in a live exercise.16 Joint search and rescue operations were also conducted with Australia and New Zealand in October 2007.

Non-traditional maritime security cooperation The increased military interactions with the outside world have had a positive impact on China’s participation in maritime cooperation. China is no longer an outsider in East Asian maritime cooperation, particularly in some of the concrete projects, such as joint oceanic research, environmental protection, and many sea-based non-traditional security issues. This section discusses China’s growing activism in maritime cooperation. An important driving factor for China’s engaging attitude has to do with Beijing’s concern relating to energy security.17

214 Li Ming jiang This is clearly reflected in China’s expressed willingness to participate in the security of the Malacca Strait by engaging the littoral states and other user states and providing assistance to littoral states in their capacity building and navigation aids.18 But China’s recent overture in maritime cooperation goes beyond its concern regarding energy security. Maritime cooperation has become an integral part of China’s “good-neighbor” policy, and part of China’s strategy to stabilize its surrounding areas. In Northeast Asia, China helped North Korea train personnel, and provided various types of equipment to North Korea. The two countries also engaged in a few research projects in the Yellow Sea. China and South Korea signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) on joint oceanic research in 1994, and set up a joint research center on marine science the following year. The two sides have been collaborating quite closely on a wide range of issues ever since, e.g. management of offshore areas, marine environmental protection, and information exchange. China and Japan, in the past years, also cooperated in studies of oceanic currents. Japan provided equipment and trained Chinese personnel.19 At the trilateral level among China, Japan, and South Korea, starting from 1999, the three countries launched a ministerial level meeting on the environment, and various concrete proposals on sandstorms and marine environmental protection have been addressed. In 2004, the authorities monitoring earthquakes in the three countries agreed to share seismic information and technology. The immigration authorities of the three countries have also held workshops on countering terrorism, drug trafficking, and human trafficking in Northeast Asia. Successful implementation of these measures among the three countries would require collaboration among their respective departments in charge of oceanic affairs, and even their naval forces. In Southeast Asia, China has agreed to various legal frameworks that would facilitate closer maritime cooperation with its neighboring states in the region, either bilaterally or multilaterally. In 2000, China signed an action plan with ASEAN on countering drug trafficking. In 2002, China and ASEAN signed a joint declaration on cooperation in non-traditional security issues, which, among other things, include drug trafficking, human trafficking, piracy, terrorism, and arms trafficking. In 2004, China signed a MOU with ASEAN on non-traditional security (NTS) cooperation, which further emphasized the need for Sino-ASEAN cooperation on NTS matters.20 Bilaterally, China has attempted to strengthen maritime cooperation with Malaysia, the Philippines, Indonesia, and Thailand. China and Thailand are negotiating a formal agreement to further institutionalize and deepen their cooperation in maritime affairs.21 In 1997, China and the Philippines reached an agreement to conduct a bilateral consultation in the South China Sea that includes three expert groups on fishing cooperation, marine environmental protection, and mutual confidence-building measures. During a visit to the three countries by the former director of China’s State Oceanic Administration, Wang Shuguang, in 2004, China and the three countries reached agreements on cooperation regarding a variety of maritime issues, e.g. marine environmental protection, oceanic resources management, and oceanic science and surveys. China and Indonesia

China participates in East Asian maritime cooperation 215 held the first joint seminar on cooperation in marine science and technology and environmental protection in May 2007. China and Indonesia signed a MOU on maritime cooperation in November 2007 to institutionalize their exchanges and cooperation.22 China wishes to further cooperate with Indonesia in marine science and surveys, forecasting, island and coastal area management, and law enforcement on the seas.23 With Vietnam, discussion and cooperation were conducted through the joint marine experts group. Major areas of cooperation included forecast of waves in the South China Sea, offshore environmental protection, exchange of information, and coastal area management capacity building. To implement the follow-up actions of the Declaration on the Conduct of Parties in the South China Sea (DOC), China intends to engage ASEAN countries in disaster reduction and relief, seminars on oceanic studies, and eco-monitoring training programs in the South China Sea area.24 During Wang Shuguang’s visit, he even proposed that maritime ministers of countries surrounding the South China Sea meet regularly.25 At the broader international level, China participates in the United Nations Environment Programme’s (UNEP’s) Global Meeting of Regional Seas and Global Program of Action for the Protection of the Marine Environment from Land-based Activities. In the East Asian Seas Action Plan, China has participated in the project to curb the environmental degradation in the South China Sea and the Gulf of Thailand, has helped draft the report on East Asian Seas trans-regional diagnosis and analysis, has submitted a country report on its environmental situation and its strategic action plan in the South China Sea, and has taken part in the East Asian Seas Action Plan for the Protection of the Marine Environment from Land-based Activities, and has participated in the East Asia Seas coral monitoring and data collection efforts. In the Partnership in Environmental Management for the Seas of East Asia (PEMSEA), China participated by implementing relevant policies in the Xiamen and Bohai coastal areas; two of the demonstration sites involved in that program.26 In the Northwest Pacific Action Plan (NPAP), China participated in six projects concerning information sharing and marine environmental protection.27 China joined the North Pacific Coast Guard Forum (NPCGF) in 2004, four years after its inception. The forum attempts to provide a platform for international coast guard leaders to interact regularly, and it also initiated at-sea combined exercises that began in 2005. Specific goals of the NPCGF include curbing oceanic pollution, enhancing maritime safety, promoting sustainable and equitable extraction of resources and providing security from threats at sea and in harbors. China now actively participates in its six areas of cooperation: anti-drug trafficking, joint actions, counter-illegal immigration, maritime security, information exchange, and law enforcement on the seas. In 2006, China hosted the seventh experts’ meeting of the NPCGF.28 China’s participation in the NPCGF is particularly significant, since it provides a valuable forum for China and the USA to communicate and exchange views on various maritime issues.29 In the wake of 9/11, the USA proposed the Container Security Initiative (CSI). In July 2003, the customs administrations of China and the USA agreed, in

216 Li Ming jiang principle, to cooperate on this issue. In March 2005, the two sides reached an agreement on specific procedures to implement the CSI. Now this cooperation has been carried out at two Chinese ports, Shanghai and Shenzhen. All these new policy moves and behaviors reflect a slightly changed mindset among Chinese decision-makers. Different from their previous perceptions, some analysts now believe that the USA has common strategic interests with China to maintain peace and stability in East Asia. And in response, China regards military exchanges with the USA as part of its policy to stabilize Sino-US relations. Chinese analysts believe that cooperation with other militaries, including the U.S. military, on various non-traditional security issues, is an inevitable trend as China further integrates itself into the international society.30

Emerging new approach to sensitive territorial disputes South China Sea The growing Chinese military openness and the gradual change of mindset are reflected in China’s new policy in the South China Sea. Abandoning its hitherto rigid position and adamant pursuit of sovereign and territorial interests, Beijing has, in reality, adopted a policy of a balancing act between sovereignty, development, and security in the South China Sea.31 This balancing act is quite different from its assertive moves to establish a presence from the 1970s to the mid-1990s. The new posture is characterized as a strategy of “relative restraint” in the past decade.32 It is important to take note that China has made it quite clear that it no longer claims the whole South China Sea region, but only the archipelagoes and their adjacent waters, although this position is still ambiguous.33 But regarding the consideration of its national interests, China, like other competing claimant states, never explicitly relinquishes its sovereign claims in the region. This can be illustrated in Chinese actions of erecting markers, or other artificial features on some of the reefs in the second part of the 1990s, fishery disputes between China and the Philippines and Vietnam, Beijing’s diplomatic quarrels with Hanoi, and constant Chinese rhetoric of declaring sovereignty in the South China Sea. More recently, in July 2007, Chinese naval patrols clashed with Vietnamese fishing boats, and at the end of the year, a Chinese military exercise near the Paracels, combined with the Chinese decision to set up a county level administration in Hainan to be in charge of jurisdictions of the South China Sea, sparked strong Vietnamese protests.34 But overall, China’s position and posture in the South China Sea (SCS) has significantly changed. These positive changes are evident in the fact that China has been gradually engaging in multilateral negotiations since the late 1990s, and in its stronger eagerness to push for the proposal of “shelving disputes and joint development,” and accepting moral as well as legal restraints on the SCS. The acceptance of restraints are illustrated in China’s signing the Declaration on the Conduct of Parties in the South China Sea (DOC), accession to the

China participates in East Asian maritime cooperation 217 ASEAN Treaty of Amity and Cooperation, and the agreement with the Philippines and Vietnam to jointly explore the prospect of energy resources in the SCS in 2005. Although the DOC is not a treaty in the legal sense, it does serve as a moral restraint on the parties concerned. It demonstrated, to some extent, China’s acceptance of norms to regulate issues concerning the SCS, no matter how primitive and informal the norms are. Signing the DOC was also a step back from its previous firm adherence to exclusive sovereignty over the “lost territories.” Together with the traditional “joint exploitation” proposal, the DOC indicated further compromise of the Chinese sovereignty claim. Also, by joining the ASEAN Treaty of Amity and Cooperation, China has legally committed itself not to use force against members of ASEAN. The two documents are particularly binding for China because of Beijing’s own peace and harmony rhetoric, and because of international scrutiny over the track record of China being a rising responsible power. China’s new posture in the South China Sea resulted from its shrewd calculation of national interests. Beijing has scrupulously treated the South China Sea issue as part of its foreign policy imperatives in Southeast Asia, and thus it has pursued a strategy of calculated moderation to achieve its balanced interests in development, security, and sovereignty. China’s own need for economic development, the collective pressures from ASEAN, and strategic presence of other major powers, particularly the United States, effectively restrained Beijing from assertively pushing for its interests in the South China Sea. The new policy in the South China Sea provided the necessary context for China to engage other claimant states in joint research projects and nontraditional security issues, as noted above. As a further step towards maritime cooperation, China and Vietnam signed an agreement on a joint naval patrol of the Tonkin (Beibu) Gulf in 2005.35 Since then, a few rounds of joint patrols have been conducted. The local coast guards and fishing administrators of the two countries have also carried out joint inspection tours in the Tonkin Gulf region. As another positive step towards more cooperation in the South China Sea, China and Vietnam recently declared that they would engage in various cooperative activities in the South China Sea. During the visit to China of Nguyen Tan Dung, Vietnam’s Prime Minister, from October 20 to 25 2008, the two sides vowed, in their joint statement, to seek a “fundamental and long-term” solution to the South China Sea issue that conforms to the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) and that would be mutually acceptable. Both sides said that they would observe the DOC and refrain from doing anything to complicate or escalate the dispute. In the short-run, China and Vietnam pledged to enhance cooperation in oceanic research, environmental protection, weather forecasting, search and rescue in the sea, port calls, and information exchanges between the two armed forces. The two countries agreed to push for joint exploration and exploitation of oil and gas resources across the demarcation line of the Tonkin Gulf. They agreed to steadily move forward with negotiations regarding

218 Li Ming jiang the demarcation and joint exploration of the oceanic area beyond the mouth of the Tonkin Gulf. In the statement, the two sides agreed to consult on finding a proper area and way for joint petroleum exploration in the South China Sea. The relevant document notes that an agreement of strategic cooperation between China’s National Offshore Oil Corporation (CNOOC) and Vietnam’s PetroVietnam had been signed during Mr. Dung’s visit to China.36 Taken as whole, these initial agreements between China and Vietnam constitute significant development in the South China Sea in the areas of mutual restraint and confidence-building measures.37 They could be the propitious conditions for a larger-scale multilateral joint exploitation in the South China Sea. In the years to come, China is likely to be willing to cooperate with other states in the South China Sea, largely because of the emerging pan-Tonkin Gulf Regional Economic Zone. Starting from early 2006, China’s Guangxi province began to push for a pan-Tonkin Gulf Economic Cooperation Zone to include parts of China’s Southwest and Southeast regions, Vietnam, Thailand, Cambodia, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, the Philippines, and Brunei.38 On the basis of the pan-Tonkin Gulf Zone, Guangxi proposed that China and ASEAN should pursue a physically M-shaped economic cooperation structure: Mekong subregion, Nanning to Singapore corridor (Mainland economic cooperation), and the pan-Tonkin Gulf zone (Maritime economic cooperation). The Pan-Tonkin Gulf cooperation plan, if substantively launched and fully implemented, would be very significant for the security situation in the South China Sea.39 This is so because the envisioned cooperation would turn the South China Sea into some sort of “internal lake” of the international economic zone. For the regional cooperation scheme to be smoothly functional, international security among these countries, particularly those involved in the South China Sea controversy, has to be the prerequisite. More importantly, in the proposed cooperation plan, there are quite a few areas that deal directly with the South China Sea. In February 2008, the plan was officially approved by the Chinese central government. The official plan calls for more international cooperation in marine environmental protection, bio-diversity, the management of coastal areas, and exploration of marine resources, warning and forecasting of oceanic disasters, marine tourism, and networking of ports among countries surrounding the South China Sea.40 East China Sea The same pattern is happening in China’s contention with Japan over the East China Sea. After many rounds of talks between 2004 and 2007, China and Japan eventually reached an agreement on joint oil and gas exploration and extraction in the East China Sea on June 18, 2008.41 Official statements in both countries claimed that this is a major step to make the East China Sea, of which the delimitation between China and Japan is yet to be made, a “sea of peace, cooperation and friendship.” The agreement includes three parts.

China participates in East Asian maritime cooperation 219 First, the two sides agreed they will conduct cooperation in the East China Sea region in the transitional period prior to delimitation without prejudicing their respective legal positions. Second, the two countries agreed to jointly explore and extract oil and gas resources in a 2,700-square-kilometer area straddling the Japanese-drawn median line in the East China Sea. And third, often criticized by many people in China as a major Chinese compromise, the agreement states that Chinese enterprises welcome the participation of Japanese investment in the development of the existing oil and gas field in Chunxiao, in accordance with the relevant laws of China governing cooperation with foreign enterprises in the exploration and exploitation of offshore petroleum resources. The agreement is widely hailed by international opinion leaders as a major step in easing Sino-Japanese tension.42 Japan believes that the deal will contribute to “more stable and deeper bilateral ties” between the two countries.43 The Sino-Japanese deal on the East China Sea is perhaps a good indication that China is indeed sincere about “joint exploitation” in disputed maritime territories. This has significant implications for the South China Sea as well.

What are China’s major concerns? The discussion on maritime cooperation cannot be separated from regional international relations, in particular, from military relations among the major players. The Chinese approach to maritime cooperation, in the same fashion, is deeply influenced by its overall political and security ties with other states in the region. The dearth of Chinese efforts in maritime cooperation before the mid1990s reflected China’s strained relations – very little political and security trust – with many other actors in East Asia. The growing activism in the past decade or so, noted above, was largely a reflection of the significant improvement in China’s international relations in the region. Despite active participation in maritime cooperation in recent years, China’s role in this regard is likely to be restrained by the military and strategic environment in East Asia, China’s own concerns over sovereign territorial claims, Chinese posture on military transparency, and of course, the policies of other states regarding their maritime affairs. The strategic reality in East Asia is still that of the United States serving as the hegemonic stabilizer. Many East Asian states look to the United States for security purposes and attempt to keep the United States in regional military and maritime affairs. It is still difficult to imagine East Asia developing institutionalized maritime cooperation without U.S. participation. In this sense, China’s role and participation in East Asian maritime cooperation will have to be influenced by the U.S. factor and by Sino-US military relations. To a lesser extent, the lack of strategic trust among major powers in the East Asian Seas region is also a restraining factor for China’s more active participation in maritime cooperation. This is so because many projects in maritime cooperation will have to depend on the naval forces, directly or indirectly. Also, in the domestic decision-making process, the military, especially the navy in the case of maritime programs, plays an important role.

220 Li Ming jiang Any grand scheme of maritime cooperation in East Asia will involve the United Sates and its naval power. The volatility of Sino-US military ties does not serve as a good condition for the emergence of such a plan. At the practical level, there are also significant constraints for China-US military cooperation. Part of the Chinese intention in engaging with the American military is to learn from the U.S. military and to take advantage of the occasions to show Chinese resolve and deterrence over the Taiwan issue. This was exactly the case when China allowed Henry H. Shelton, American chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to observe a multi-force exercise organized by the Nanjing Military District in January 2000.44 On the part of the United States, the possibility of China using these exchange programs to upgrade the PLA’s fighting capability had to be forestalled. The U.S. concern is quite clearly demonstrated in the U.S. 2000 Defense Authorization Act. For China, in order not to endanger national security, measures have to be taken and caution has to be exercised to prevent the exposure of China’s military’s weakest links in the exchanges and cooperation with the U.S.45 China is aware of U.S. intention to influence the political and military thinking of the younger generation of Chinese officers. This also partially explains the cautious attitude in China’s military exchanges with the U.S. Despite the growing military exchanges between China and the U.S., there is still a profound lack of strategic trust between the two sides. In the Chinese mainstream understanding, the U.S. intends to establish a strategic encirclement against China. This makes it hard for China to cooperate militarily with the U.S. to deal with various regional maritime issues. According to some Chinese analysts, currently, the biggest obstacle in China-US military exchanges is the “China military threat” thesis proclaimed by the U.S., and the U.S.’s constraining measures against China.46 The lack of mutual strategic trust is also evident in the contention over Chinese military transparency. China claims that its military transparency has increased substantially; for instance, the defense White Papers, inviting foreign military officers to observe Chinese military exercises, inviting American military leaders to Chinese military bases and facilities, resuming registration of conventional weapons with the United Nations in 2007, and more recently, setting up the institution of a military spokesperson. China complains that the U.S.’s request for military transparency is endless and is motivated by other intentions.47 The lack of strategic trust affecting China’s attitude in maritime cooperation is evident in China’s view of the U.S. Proliferation Security Initiative (PSI). China supports the objectives of the PSI, but argues that the PSI includes the possibility of taking interdiction measures on the sea beyond the permission of existing international laws. That is why China decided not to participate in the PSI. In addition, China urges participating countries to seriously consider the Chinese point and act with caution in the implementation of the PSI.48 Chinese analysts believe that the PSI, apparently with the striving for international security and the strengthening of international cooperation as its goals, is initiated and dominated by the U.S. It is a fairly aggressive and coercive collective mechanism. It is a by-product of Bush’s “preemptive strategy” and deeply embedded in American unilateralism.49

China participates in East Asian maritime cooperation 221 Another case is China’s response to the U.S. proposal for a Global Maritime Partnership (GMP or Thousand-Ship Navy). Washington hopes that China can join this grand scheme to deal with all sorts of maritime problems at the global level. It has been argued that the GMP initiative should be a perfect arrangement for more Sino-US maritime cooperation.50 The U.S. Navy has twice requested China to participate in the plan. In response to the U.S. proposal, Li Jie, analyst at the PLA Naval Research Institute, noted that the plan actually indicates the U.S. intention to set up a global naval regime to continue to dominate maritime affairs at the global level. It is part of U.S. strategy to strategically constrain China and Russia.51 Another analyst suggests that although the plan may be good for joint efforts to deal with all sorts of maritime threats, such as counter-terrorism and disaster relief on the seas, a more important part of the U.S. intention is to use this plan to gain access to foreign ports and military bases, and logistical support to serve U.S. global maritime interests.52 At the regional level, there are other Chinese concerns about the strategic intentions of other major powers. There is still insufficient strategic trust between China and other major powers in the East Asian region. For instance, the JapaneseAustralian defense agreement signed in March 2007 was a concern for China. The Chinese military media outlet commented that the agreement symbolizes Japan’s intention to be more closely involved in monitoring and controlling the Malacca Strait, which could be an excuse for Japan to expand its naval power.53 Chinese analysts believe that India regards China as India’s biggest and most long-term threat because of China’s growing leadership in Asia, China’s military modernization, and China’s growing influence in South Asia.54 China is concerned about Indian naval expansion into the South China Sea. The first IndianVietnamese naval exercise in September 2001 was frequently cited as evidence that India intends to make an inroad into the South China Sea.55 Given Chinese perceptions of the strategic environment in the East Asian Seas and the intentions of other major powers, it is no surprise that China has been using maritime cooperation in a very pragmatic way. At the moment it seems that China’s overtures are mainly for defensive purposes. The primary objective for China’s military diplomacy is to ensure a stable international environment, especially in its neighborhood, to allow China to concentrate on its domestic developmental programs in the “important period of strategic opportunity” – the next 20 years. Specifically, China intends to strengthen military cooperation with other countries in Asia to enhance mutual confidence, reduce the “China threat” influence, and prevent “Taiwan independence.”56 China now believes that in recent years, its military diplomacy has helped the international community build trust and reduce misgivings towards China. The success of Chinese military diplomacy has helped China build an image of being a responsible power, thus contributing to the growth of China’s soft power.57 But there is also a certain limit associated with this pragmatic approach. There is a legitimate doubt whether the current “soft power” approach in China’s regional security policy can be sustainable in the long run. At the rhetoric level, China has repeatedly lauded its “peaceful rise” intention and a new security concept

222 Li Ming jiang for regional security arrangements. But in practice there are still many barriers that might make the Chinese visions unfeasible, and China itself has not provided detailed roadmaps to the sort of peaceful regional order that it openly preaches. All these explain why China has no grand vision in maritime cooperation in the East Asian Seas and the fact that China is still cautious in responding to any grand scheme in maritime affairs in the region.

Conclusion In the past few years, China has become increasingly more active in maritime cooperation in East Asia. This growing activism is noticeable in military-tomilitary relations, joint naval exercises, multilateral maritime security discussions, and bilateral and multilateral cooperation in various non-traditional maritime projects. There has been growing awareness among the Chinese foreign policy community that solving many maritime issues is beyond China’s own capability. China has to engage other actors in the region to address these challenges. China’s participation in maritime cooperation in the past years has certainly laid a good foundation for its future role in regional maritime affairs. More profoundly, China’s maritime policy has been an integral part of China’s foreign policy, which can be best characterized as “proactive engagement.” According to senior Chinese officials in charge of maritime affairs, China’s maritime cooperation should serve the nation’s overall foreign policy, the economic development of local government and the management of maritime affairs.58 China still sees the necessity of promoting a peaceful security situation for its domestic development. To achieve this goal, China believes that it still needs to more actively engage foreign militaries, participate in international security cooperation, strive to promote military confidence-building measures, participate in international peace-keeping operations and counter-terrorism and disaster relief activities.59 The intensity of China’s engagement and some of the significant policy moves, e.g. moderation and stronger push for “joint development” in the East China Sea and South China Sea, perhaps reflect China’s strategic calculations. These moves are largely initiated to forestall the possibility of strategic isolation or alienation by other major powers and even smaller states in the East Asian region. This kind of strategic thinking is still quite influential among Chinese strategic analysts. This means that in the foreseeable future, China is likely to continue to maintain its positive posture towards maritime cooperation in East Asian Seas. The need for a stable, regional, and international environment and the strategic imperative of maintaining a strong foothold in the region will continue to put the PLA in a subordinate position vis-à-vis the civilian decision-makers in China’s foreign and security policy-making.60 At the same time, one has to acknowledge the fact that China is still cautious in participating in any grand scheme of maritime cooperation in East Asia, as the discussion on the PSI and Thousand-Ship plan indicates. Participating in grand projects will require a much larger role for the Chinese Navy. This may raise

China participates in East Asian maritime cooperation 223 the ire of Chinese military decision-makers as such participation would require a much higher level of military transparency. But at present, it is doubtful that China is prepared to exhibit the level of transparency expected by other regional players, and by the United States in particular. The 2006 defense White Paper stipulates three major tasks for the PLA Navy, namely, safeguarding national unification (Taiwan), protecting China’s marine interests, and protecting China’s oceanic transport lines.61 Obviously in the mindset of Chinese decision-makers, the navy is not yet prepared to join any large-scale maritime cooperation in the region. But given the current trend in China’s maritime policy, it is imaginable that China will feel comfortable in joining all sorts of non-traditional maritime security cooperative activities with probably two conditions: non-US dominance, and separation from hardcore security matters, such as sovereign territorial claims.

Notes 1 Xu Qi, “Maritime Geostrategy and the Development of the Chinese Navy in the Early Twenty-First Century,” Naval War College Review, Autumn 2006, Vol. 59, No. 4, pp. 47–67. 2 Sun Zhihui, “Jiaqiang guoji haiyang hezuo gong jian ke chixu fazhan de ‘dongya hai’ ” [enhancing international marine cooperation to build sustainable “East Asian seas”], zhongguo haiyang bao [China ocean newspaper], 15 December 2006. 3 Peter Howarth, China’s Rising Sea Power: The PLA Navy’s Submarine Challenge (London and New York: Routledge, 2006); Robyn Lim, The Geopolitics of East Asia: The Search for Equilibrium (New York: Routledge Curzon, 2003); Thomas M. Kane, Chinese Grand Strategy and Maritime Power (Portland, OR: Frank Cass, 2002). 4 Lyle Goldstein and William Murray, “Undersea Dragons: China’s Maturing Submarine Force,” International Security, Vol. 28, No. 4 (Spring 2004), pp. 161–96. 5 Bernard D. Cole, The Great Wall at Sea: China’s Navy Enters the Twenty-First Century (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 2001). 6 M. Taylor Fravel, “China’s Search for Military Power,” The Washington Quarterly 31:3 (Summer 2008), pp. 125–41. 7 There have been very few studies on this subject. 8 David Shambaugh, “China’s Military Views the World: Ambivalent Security,” International Security, Vol. 24, No. 3 (Winter 1999/2000), pp. 52–79). 9 See for instance, Bates Gill and Evan S. Medeiros, “Foreign and Domestic Influences on China’s Arms Control and Nonproliferation Policies,” The China Quarterly, No. 161, (March 2000), pp. 66–94. 10 Philippe Rogers, “China and United Nations Peacekeeping Operations in Africa,” Naval War College Review, Spring 2007, Vol. 60, No. 2. 11 Zhang Qinsheng, “Zhongguo de junshi waijiao” [China’s military diplomacy], xuexi shibao [study times], 14 May 2007. 12 China Defense White Paper 2002. 13 Han Xudong, “Zhong yin junshi guanxi ‘san bu qu’ ” [Sino-Indian military relations: three phases], Liao wang xinwen zhoukan [outlook news weekly], Issue 19, 10 May 2004. 14 Luo Yuan, “Zhong mei junshi guanxi feng xiang he fang” [where is the Sino-US military relationship headed], heping yu fazhan [peace and development], Issue 2, 2008, pp. 9–14. 15 Ren Xiangqun, “Zhong mei junshi jiaoliu zou xiang wushi” [Sino-US military exchanges move towards pragmatism], Liaowang xinwen zhoukan [outlook news weekly], 27 November 2006.

224 Li Ming jiang 16 Eric McVadon, “China and the United States on the High Seas,” China Security, Vol. 3, No. 4 Autumn 2007, pp. 3–28. 17 A few years ago, China conducted an extensive review of its oil transport security, including the China-Kazakhstan oil pipeline, China-Russia pipeline, China-Myanmar pipeline, and the Malacca Strait. The major reason why China is so interested in the China-Myanmar pipeline is to alleviate the “Malacca dilemma” for China’s energy security. See Feng Weili, “Fa gai wei ‘pai cha’ shiyou jinkou tongdao anquan” [The state development and reform commission assesses security of oil import channels], zhongguo huagong bao [China chemical industry newspaper], 15 February 2006. 18 Hu Shixiang, “Wo guo jiang jiji canyu weihu maliujia haixia hangyun anquan hezuo” [China to actively participate in cooperation in maintaining transport safety in the Malacca Strait], zhongguo jiaotong bao [China transport newspaper], 15 June 2005. 19 Xu Heyun, “Wo guo yu dongya guojia de haiyang hezuo buduan jiaqiang” [China strengthens maritime cooperation with East Asian countries], zhongguo haiyang bao [China ocean newspaper], 12 December 2006. 20 To view the text of the MOU, see http://www.gx.xinhuanet.com/dm/200610/30/content_11500059.htm, accessed 12 December 2008. 21 Qian Xiuli, “Zhong tai tuozhan he jiaqiang haiyang lingyu hezuo” [China and Thailand expand and enhance cooperation in the sea], zhongguo haiyang bao [China ocean newspaper], 7 October 2008. 22 Available online at http://id.china-embassy.org/chn/kjjl/t380302.htm. (Accessed on 15 December 2008). 23 Qian Xiuli, “Zhong yinni jiaqiang haiyang lingyu hezuo” [China and Indonesia to strengthen cooperation in maritime affairs], zhongguo haiyang bao [China ocean newspaper], 13 June 2008. 24 Xu Heyun, “Wo guo yu dongya guojia de haiyang hezuo buduan jiaqiang” [China continues to strengthen maritime cooperation with East Asian countries], Zhongguo haiyang bao [China ocean newspaper], 12 December 2006. 25 Yang Yan, “Zhongguo haiyang daibiaotuan fangwen dongnanya san guo” [Chinese marine delegation visits three Southeast Asian countries], zhongguo haiyang bao [China ocean newspaper], 24 December 2004. 26 Yu Jianbin, “Rang ‘dongya hai jiayuan’ geng meihao” [making the East Asian Seas region a more beautiful home], People’s Daily, 12 December 2006. 27 Zhang Peiying, “Wo guo haiyang huanjing baohu guoji hezuo chengxiao xianzhu” [China makes notable achievements in international cooperation in marine environmental protection], zhongguo qiye bao [China enterprise newspaper], 7 June 2004. 28 Xu Wenjun, “Jiaqiang haiyang zhifa guoji hezuo” [enhancing cooperation in maritime law enforcement], renmin gong’an bao [people’s public security newspaper], 31 March 2006. 29 Eric McVadon, “China and the United States on the High Seas,” China Security, Vol. 3, No. 4, Autumn 2007, pp. 3–28. 30 Ren Xiangqun, “Zhong mei junshi jiaoliu zou xiang wushi” [Sino-US military exchanges move towards pragmatism], Liaowang xinwen zhoukan [outlook news weekly], 27 November 2006. 31 Li Mingjiang, “Security in the South China Sea: China’s Balancing Act and New Regional Dynamics,” RSIS Working Paper, No. 149, February 2008. 32 Shee Poon Kim, “The South China Sea in China’s Strategic Thinking,” Contemporary Southeast Asia, March 1998: 19, 4. 33 Carolina G. Hernandez and Ralf Cossa (eds), Security Implications of Conflict in the South China Sea: Perspectives from Asia-Pacific (Institute for Strategic and Development Studies, Philippines, 1997), p. 19.

China participates in East Asian maritime cooperation 225 34 “Viet Nam condemns China’s military exercise in Hoang Sa,” Vietnamese News Agency, 23 November 2007; Greg Torode, “Dispute at sea rocks the boat in Vietnam,” South China Morning Post, 15 December 2007. 35 Tao Ke, “Junshi waijiao yingzao heping fazhan anquan huanjing” [military diplomacy creates an environment of peace, development, and security], PLA Daily, 29 December 2005. 36 The Joint Statement between China and Vietnam, 25 October 2008. Available online at http://world.people.com.cn/GB/8212/135921/135923/8231079.html 37 Michael Richardson, “A Southward Thrust for China’s Energy Diplomacy in the South China Sea,” China Brief, The Jamestown Foundation, Volume VIII, Issue 21, 7 November 2008. 38 Chen Shanzhe, “Fan beibuwan: zhongguo-dongmeng M xing zhanlue gouxiang” (Pan-Tonkin Gulf: the M shape strategic proposal for China and ASEAN), 21st century economic news, 28 July 2006. 39 For more analysis on this point, see Li Mingjiang, “Security in the South China Sea: China’s Balancing Act and New Regional Dynamics,” RSIS Working Paper, No. 149, February 2008. 40 The full text of the document is available online at http://news.xinhuanet.com/ local/2008-02/21/content_7640299_7.htm. (Accessed on 6 November 2008). 41 For the full text of the document, see http://www.fmcoprc.gov.hk/eng/zgwjsw/t448632. htm. (Accessed on 10 October 2008). 42 Frank Ching, “East China Sea deal eases Sino-Japan tension,” The Business Times (Singapore), 2 July 2008. 43 “Sea of cooperation,” The Japan Times, 21 June 2008. 44 Zheng Kai and Ding Donghan, “Zhong mei guanxi zhong de junshi jiaoliu shu ping” [an analytical review of military exchanges in Sino-US relations], guoji guancha [international observation], Issue 6, 2002, pp. 34–9. 45 Ren Xiangqun, “Zhong mei junshi jiaoliu zou xiang wushi” [Sino-US military exchanges move towards pragmatism], Liaowang xinwen zhoukan [outlook news weekly], 27 November 2006. 46 Lin Zhiyuan, “Zhong mei junshi jiaoliu de jiji xinhao” [positive signals in Sino-US military exchanges], People’s Daily, 26 June 2006. Author is a senior military analyst at AMS. 47 Luo Yuan, “Zhong mei junshi guanxi feng xiang he fang” [where is the Sino-US military relationship headed], heping yu fazhan [peace and development], Issue 2, 2008, pp. 9–14. 48 Available online at http://news.xinhuanet.com/video/2005-09/01/content_3429111.htm 49 Gu Guoliang, “Meiguo ‘fang kuosan anquan changyi’ pingxi” [An analysis of American “proliferation security initiative”], meiguo yanjiu [American studies], No. 3, 2004, pp. 30–44. 50 Eric McVadon, “China and the United States on the High Seas,” China Security, Vol. 3, No. 4, Autumn 2007, pp. 3–28. 51 Li’s interview with a Chinese media outlet, available at http://www.cnr.cn/ military/djt/200712/t20071228_504666766.html. (Accessed 4 November 2008). 52 Du Chaoping, “Meiguo ‘qian jian haijun’ jihua yu zhongguo de xuanze,” [U.S. “thousand-ship navy” plan and Chinese choices], Jian zai wuqi [shipborne weapons], December 2007, pp. 23–8. 53 Shi Cunmin, “Ri ao fangwu xieding an chang xuanji” [the hidden intention in the Japan-Australian defense agreement], zhongguo guofang bao [China defense news], 13 February 2007. 54 Han Xudong, “Zhong yin junshi guanxi ‘san bu qu’ ” [Sino-Indian military relations: three phases], Liao wang xinwen zhoukan [outlook news weekly], Issue 19, 10 May 2004.

226 Li Ming jiang 55 Fei Zhaoxun, “Mai xiang ‘yi deng junshi qiangguo’ de yindu yu zhong yin junshi guanxi” [the emerging Indian military power and Sino-Indian military relations], Nan ya yanjiu jikan [South Asian studies quarterly], Issue 3, 2006, pp. 86–96. 56 Wang Haifeng and Wang Qian, “Leng zhan hou zhong mei junshi jiaoliu yu hezuo” [Sino-US military exchanges and cooperation in post-Cold War era], shijie jingji yu zhengzhi luntan [world economics and politics forum], Issue 4, 2006, pp. 87–92; Peng Guangqian, “Zhong mei guanxi de qing yu biao” [the barometer of Sino-US relations], shijie zhishi [world knowledge], No. 3, 2004. 57 He Qisong, “Zhongguo junshi waijiao xilun” [an analysis of Chinese military diplomacy], xiandai guoji guanxi [contemporary international relations], No. 1, 2008, pp. 50–5. 58 Wang Antao, “2008 nian weihu guojia haiyang quanyi yu guoji hezuo gongzuo huiyi zai jing zhaokai” [2008 meeting on protecting national marine interests and international cooperation held in Beijing], zhongguo haiyang bao [China ocean newspaper], 21 March 2008. 59 In recent years, the Chinese military provided emergency assistance to 14 countries that had been hit by natural disasters. See Han Xiandong, et al., “Zhongguo junshi waijiao yu xin anquan guan” [China’s military diplomacy and new security concept], xiandai guoji guanxi [contemporary international relations], No. 2, 2008, pp. 47–54. 60 For the subordinate role of the PLA in China’s foreign policy making, see Robert G. Sutter, “The PLA, Japan’s Defense Posture, and the Outlook for China-Japan Relations,” and Larry M. Wortzel, “China and Southeast Asia: Building Influence, Addressing Fears,” in Andrew Scobell and Larry M. Wortzel (eds), Shaping China’s Security Environment: the Role of the People’s Liberation Army (Strategic Studies Institute, U.S. Army War College, October 2006). 61 Ding Zengyi and Zhang Shun, “Jianchi heping fazhan, cujin anquan hezuo” [adhering to peaceful development, promoting security cooperation], PLA Daily, 31 December 2006.

19 Cooperation and confidence building A Southeast Asian perspective Kwa Chong Guan

The signals and indicators of a naval modernization in the Asia Pacific and the Indian Ocean are clear. The build-up of the Chinese and Indian navies, and their growing presence in Southeast Asian waters (coupled with a continuing American presence), are due to a mixture of military and economic concerns. Traditionally, China’s focus has been on Taiwan and on potential American support for Taiwan, whereas India’s focus has been on Pakistan. More recently, economic reasons have also contributed to the expansion of both navies ostensibly to protect their shipping and the various sea lines of communication (SLOCs). Indeed, some of their factors for naval expansion arguably share common ground (protection of shipping, economic reasons, etc.) and the more pressing maritime issues concerning the region stem from either existing disputes between Southeast Asian countries or between Southeast Asian countries and China. Australia has also announced plans to upgrade its navy. This chapter examines the implications and possible consequences of this naval modernization, and argues that there is a critical need to create robust frameworks – legal and military – either to prevent or to manage potential crises. There may be little immediate danger of a Sino-Indian naval conflict in Southeast Asia. However, there is the reality of competition. Chinese expansion into the Indian Ocean (as well as their support for Pakistan) has arguably provoked an Indian response going by the latter’s deployment and exercises within Southeast Asian navies. There is also a potential danger of exacerbating existing tensions if the Chinese, Indian and omnipresent U.S. navies begin to take sides (by Southeast Asian states creating alliances) in local conflicts. There have been several historical precedents for such incidents. For instance, Vietnamese-Indian cooperation in developing port facilities in Vietnam in contrast with innate Sino-Vietnamese hostility over a variety of issues, including the Spratly Islands;1 or Malaysia siding with China against the Philippines over the Spratly Islands in 1995.2 The prospect of a naval stand-off, or worse, a naval confrontation, is justified through a narrow interpretation of naval military doctrine. The ghost of Alfred Thayer Mahan is discernible in Chinese and Indian justifications for their naval modernization and build-up. Chinese leaders have declared their intentions to develop a blue-water navy to protect their national interests, especially the security of the SLOCs upon which China depends for its increasing energy supplies and

228 Kwa Chong Guan shipment of its exports and imports. India too, has declared its interest in ensuring the security of the SLOCs upon which it is dependent, and its unstated concern about increasing Chinese naval presence in and around the Indian Ocean, which it considers its backyard. The region’s hopes that Europe’s past (1914) will not be Asia’s future are in part pinned on the various multilateral security fora – in particular, the formal Track-1 ASEAN Regional Forum and more informal Track-2 fora, such as the International Institute for Strategic Studies’ annual ‘Shangrila Dialogue’ which brings together Defence Ministers and their senior officials in Singapore, or the meetings of the Council for Security Cooperation in the Asia Pacific – promoting the dialogue, confidence, transparency and, most important, trust in each other’s security, including maritime security. But there is a noticeable gap between the consensus of these dialogues and the actions they promise. The other major effort to building good order at sea to pre-empt naval stand-offs and confrontations is in building various international regimes. But with the exception of the 1982 UNCLOS, most of the other international conventions – Safety of Life at Sea (SOLAS), Prevention of Pollution from Ships (MARPOL), Supression of Unlawful Acts against the Safety of Maritime Navigation (SUA) and its 2005 version, and Transnational Organized Crime (TOC) among others – provide more for maritime safety than maritime security. UNCLOS may have stressed the ‘peaceful use of the sea,’ but unfortunately it failed to specify what constitutes ‘peaceful use of the sea’ and what violates this ‘peaceful use of the sea’. What differentiates (acceptable) maritime scientific research and (unacceptable) hydrographic surveying? The crisis that followed the 1 April 2001 Chinese interception of a U.S. EP-3 surveillance plane is the most spectacular of a recent series of naval confrontations. A week before this EP-3 incident, a Chinese frigate confronted the U.S. Navy’s hydrographic survey vessel Bowditch collecting data within China’s exclusive economic zone (EEZ) and forced it to desist. In March 2001 India also protested the Bowditch’s activities within 30 nautical miles of its Nicobar Island. Earlier in January 2001, India also protested against the surveying activities of HMS Scott 190 nautical miles from Diu and near Porbandnar. Japan has put on display in its maritime museum in Tokyo a North Korean intelligence vessel which its crew scuttled when it was intercepted in December 2001 by the Japanese Coast Guard. More recently, on 8 March 2009, the Chinese intercepted the USNS Impeccable surveillance ship off Hainan Island where China has developed a submarine base. The Chinese have also confronted Vietnamese vessels in the disputed waters around the Paracel Islands. Within ASEAN, Indonesia and Malaysia are attempting to avoid a naval confrontation with their dispute over the Ambalat region off Borneo. Such naval confrontations and stand-offs during an era of rising naval power are not new. In the late 1960s, there were several incidents between forces of the U.S. Navy and the Soviet Navy. These included planes of the two nations passing near one another, ships bumping one another, and both ships and aircraft making threatening movements against those of the other side. In March 1968 the United States proposed talks on preventing such incidents from becoming

Cooperation and confidence building 229 more serious. The Soviet Union accepted the invitation in November 1970, and the talks were conducted in two rounds – 1 October 1971 in Moscow, and 17 May 1972 in Washington, D.C. The Incidents at Sea Agreement (INCSEA) was signed by Secretary of the Navy John Warner and Soviet Admiral Sergei Gorshkov during the Moscow summit meeting in 1972. Specifically, the agreement provides for steps to avoid collision; not interfering in the ‘formations’ of the other party; avoiding manoeuvres in areas of heavy sea traffic; requiring surveillance ships to maintain a safe distance from the object of investigation so as to avoid ‘embarrassing or endangering the ships under surveillance’; using accepted international signals when ships manoeuvre near one another; not simulating attacks at, launching objects toward, or illuminating the bridges of the other party’s ships; informing vessels when submarines are exercising near them; and requiring aircraft commanders to use the greatest caution and prudence in approaching aircraft and ships of the other party, and not permitting simulated attacks against aircraft or ships, performing aerobatics over ships, or dropping hazardous objects near them. The agreement also provides for: (1) notice three to five days in advance, as a rule, of any projected actions that might ‘represent a danger to navigation or to aircraft in flight’; (2) information on incidents to be channelled through naval attaches assigned to the respective capitals; and (3) annual meetings to review the implementation of the Agreement. Like other confidence-building measures, the INCSEA does not directly affect the size, weaponry, or force structure of the parties. Rather, it serves to enhance mutual knowledge and understanding of military activities; to reduce the possibility of conflict by accident, miscalculation, or the failure of communication; and to increase stability in times of both calm and crisis. In 1983, Secretary of the Navy John Lehman cited the accord as ‘a good example of functional navyto-navy process’ and credited this area of Soviet-American relations with ‘getting better rather than worse’. David Griffiths, in an article commemorating 25 years of INCSEA, highlighted the effectiveness of the 1972 agreement in diffusing hot situations during the 1973 Yom Kippur War, the 1979 Soviet-Afghanistan conflict, salvage attempts in the Sea of Japan in 1983, and an incident involving the Minsk in 1984. He noted how the principles of INCSEA – simplicity, direct naval-tonaval dialogue and a non-political focus on safety – came to the fore during the salvage attempts in the Sea of Japan when diplomats were amazed at the frank and open clarifications between U.S. and Soviet naval delegates.3 Is there a case for a legal framework akin to the 1972 INCSEA agreement between the U.S. and the USSR for the Asia Pacific? There are several considerations when creating such a framework. First, there has to be an awareness of the implications of naval stand-offs and confrontations for regional security and stability, and second, some preparedness to trust and cooperate with the other side to avoid a political and security crisis. A preliminary overarching agreement could facilitate and frame not only INCSEA, but also Rules of Engagement (ROE) with other military forces. The Declaration on the Conduct of Parties in the South China Sea (2002) can be such a regional platform for discourse at both the

230 Kwa Chong Guan diplomatic and military level. The declarations – such as all parties undertaking to resolve territorial and jurisdictional disputes by peaceful means and to exercise self-restraint – can help design effective ROE and measures to address or avoid potential incidents which may arise from a congested maritime area. A ROE is here understood as a ‘set of directives given to commanders in the field to guide them on the circumstances and manner in which the force may be used’.4 It basically delineates when, where, against whom, or how force is to be used and is designed to balance two competing requirements: the need to use force effectively to achieve the objective of an offensive or defensive mission, and the desire not to use military force in unnecessary circumstances or in an extremely aggressive manner.5 Sagan makes two observations on ROE in his article. First, there exist tensions between commanders who would normally resent micromanagement and the political objectives of deciding when, where, how and against whom force should be used. Such tensions can be diminished by ensuring ‘two-way education’ of political officials (of military risks and operations) and military commanders (of political objectives) – as seen by prolonged and detailed coordination between the two branches during the Bay of Pigs and Cuban Missile Crisis. Second, and following the first observation, improved communications (i.e. civilian understanding of military objectives and military appreciation of political objectives) may not always turn out for the better. There is also the danger of expecting a perfect set of ROE, as seen in the USS Stark and Vincennes incidents with tragic consequences.6 Even if the ROE are well-drafted and understood by all parties, they can still fail to produce the desired military action in the fog of crisis. The ROE provide only the general guidelines; subsequent actions depend on the context and environment, or how the commanders address issues posed by the immediate situation. While such confidence-building measures have had success elsewhere, there are other issues to consider and resolve before they can be effective in Southeast Asia. Effective enforcement of such agreements will hinge on accepting that much of our maritime boundaries are not as well demarcated as our land boundaries. As J.N. Mak analyses, there are within ASEAN two different realms and consequent different security entities. There is the well-demarcated terrestrial realm and the more fluid maritime realm whose boundaries are not clearly delimited, much less demarcated. A ‘state of nature’ Mak argues, exists in the contested martime zone. The consequence is that despite the signing of the MALINDO INCSEA between Malaysia and Indonesia in 2001 (and the Declaration in 2002), there were several subsequent incidents in 2005 and 2007 in the disputed Ambalat area, off the south-eastern coast of Sabah because of the ambiguous boundaries. Such incidents between supposedly ‘friendly’ navies then threaten the legitimacy of the agreements signed in 2001 as well as the Declaration in 2002. Other unresolved disputes include territorial claims over the Paracels and the Spratly Islands. According to a PRC Chinese news magazine, the 2002 Declaration moreover did not prevent Malaysian, Vietnamese or Filipino incursions or provocative activities on the Spratlys.

Cooperation and confidence building 231 This chapter ends on a pessimistic tone. If dialogue and international regimes, including INCSEA and ROE, to pre-empt naval confrontations and stand-offs in the Asia Pacific and Indian Oceans are not possible, then ASEAN and the wider Asia Pacific may need to be prepared for more crises between competing naval forces in the region

Notes 1 ‘Into the wide blue yonder; Asia’s navies (Who will rule the waves in Asia?)’ Economist, 5 June 2008 http://www.economist.com/world/asia/displaystory.cfm?story_id=11 496828 2 J.N. Mak, ‘Sovereignty in ASEAN and the Problem of Maritime Cooperation in the South China Sea’, RSIS Working Paper No. 156, 23 April 2008, pp. 16–17. 3 David N. Griffiths, ‘Catalyst for Confidence – 25 Years of INCSEA’, The Naval Officers’ Association of Canada Paper, 1998. Available online at http://www.noacnational.ca/article/griffiths/incsea_bydavidngriffiths.html (Accessed on 17 June 2009). 4 Scott Sagan, ‘Rules of Engagement’, in L. George (ed.), Avoiding War: Problems of Crisis Management, Alexander, Westview Press, 1991, p. 441. 5 Ibid., p. 451. 6 Ibid.

Conclusion Do rough seas lie ahead? Sam Bateman

Strategic overview China and India are the rising powers of Asia. However, elements of competition are evident in their strategic intentions, and much of this competition seems likely to be played out in the maritime domain, particularly in Southeast Asian waters. Hitherto China and India have operated in their exclusive spheres of interest – India in the Indian Ocean and China in the East Asian seas – but this will change. China is extending its operations into the Indian Ocean, and India into the East Asian seas. How this overlap of strategic interests will develop is a vital question for the Indo-Pacific region generally, and for Southeast Asia in particular. A possible ‘turf war’ between China and India, played out largely in Southeast Asia, has been described as ‘a sobering aspect of Asia’s international relations’.1 India is attaching importance to its ‘Look East’ policies that include naval cooperation with Southeast Asian countries. The Indian Navy has deployed naval units to the Pacific Ocean in recent years for port visits and exercises with East Asian navies and the USN, but at the same time, India is concerned about the Chinese Navy entering the Indian Ocean. This move is often viewed as a demonstration of China’s so-called ‘String of Pearls’ strategy,2 although there are doubts as to whether this strategy actually exists.3 There is asymmetry in the way that China and India regard each other. A basic feature is that while India clearly sees China as a threat to its strategic interests, particularly in the Indian Ocean, China does not necessarily see India as a strategic rival. Chinese concerns about India only arise when India appears to be acting in concert with Japan and the United States in moves that it considers are possibly directed at its strategic containment. Other questions are apparent about the strategic intentions of the two powers. What are India’s strategic interests in the South China Sea? Are they equivalent to China’s interests in the Indian Ocean? Chinese strategic interests in energy security and the security of its supply lines from the Middle East across the Indian Ocean are to some extent understandable, but India’s interests in the Pacific Ocean are not as clear. They have some historical rectitude, but it also appears that India, aided and abetted by the United States,4 has presumed for itself a stabilizing and balancing role, as a counter to China, in the region. For India to discharge this role,

Conclusion 233 it must move out of its comfort zone in the Indian Ocean and into the Western Pacific.5 There is also the presumption that in the longer term, the influence of the United States in East Asia will decline, and India, in concert with Japan, must provide the balance to burgeoning Chinese influence. While the United States has long underwritten the security of Asia, there are doubts about how long this will continue.6 The expansion of new powers and questions about the future trajectory of the United States and its relationships with these new powers has created uncertainty in the region. In the present and near term, India is developing as a strategic partner of the United States, particularly with growing naval cooperation, but China continues to be identified by American commentators as a potential adversary. China clearly feels threatened by the closer relations between India and the United States. As Bronson Percival has noted in Chapter 3 of this volume, the Sino-U.S. relationship is inherently complex and a challenge for both countries.7 This latter trend is reinforced by increasingly more regular stand-offs between American and Chinese naval assets in the seas of East Asia. Relevant incidents include the clash between the ocean surveillance ship, USNS Impeccable, and Chinese vessels in March 2009,8 and the damage to the sonar array towed by the destroyer USS McCain caused by a Chinese submarine in June 2009.9 The expansion of China’s Navy and maritime influence more generally poses challenges for Southeast Asian countries, as well as for other countries of the Asia-Pacific region. It is difficult to escape a conclusion that China is driving the substantial arms build-up in the region both directly and indirectly; directly by creating a ‘security dilemma’ for some countries, and indirectly by creating an atmosphere of regional insecurity due to uncertainty over China’s intentions. A difficult conundrum would arise for Southeast Asian countries if they were forced to take sides between China on the one hand and India, perhaps in concert with Japan and the United States, on the other. Despite India’s assumed role of balancing China, there is no certainty that Southeast Asian countries desire this, or indeed would be prepared to support India in any dispute with China. As Evelyn Goh has noted in an important article, China’s ‘charm offensive’ has been successful, and ‘East Asian states may be more comfortable with deferring to a strong China than others might think’.10 Either way, the strategic risks of competition between China and India are high and the Southeast Asians would wish to avoid at all costs having to make such a choice. They prefer a broader, multi-dimensional strategy that involves closer economic relations, dialogue, cooperation and military exchanges with all the major regional players, including China and India.11 A major development since the conference in November 2008 has been the rapid improvement of cross-Strait relations between China and Taiwan. The region may soon have to come to terms with the combined maritime strength of China and Taiwan. A resolution of Taiwan’s status within the Chinese political state would constitute ‘a geopolitically momentous tectonic shift in the Western Pacific’12 with a particularly powerful impact in the maritime realm. While Taiwan’s Navy is not particularly strong, Taiwan has a strong Coast Guard and many of the

234 Sam Bateman other attributes of maritime power, notably large shipping and fishing fleets, a heavy involvement in international seaborne trade, great shipbuilding capacity, and broad maritime zones stretching out into the Pacific Ocean. The political merger of China and Taiwan would significantly strengthen China’s position in the South China Sea, particularly because China would then have access to Itu Aba, which is the largest island in the area with an airstrip and currently occupied by Taiwan.

Implications for Southeast Asia China’s and India’s strategic interests overlap in Southeast Asia. Maritime strategic competition, or even conflict in a worst case scenario, between the two countries would take place largely in regional waters, where Southeast Asian countries have vital economic and strategic interests. However, both India and China have claims to being Southeast Asian countries in their own right; India by virtue of the geographic location of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands,13 and China because it is a littoral state to the South China Sea where it has prominent sovereignty claims. Southeast Asia sits astride major shipping routes between the Indian and Pacific Oceans. These routes are vital both economically, particularly to the countries of Northeast Asia who depend upon them for energy supplies from the Middle East, and strategically, particularly for the United States as the sole global super sea power and increasingly for the rapidly growing regional sea powers, China and India. Southeast Asia is the confluence of the strategic interests of China and India. Maritime safety and security in the region are vital interests for both countries, and both will increasingly seek a more active role in their provision. Developments with the Chinese and Indian navies are of particular interest to Southeast Asian countries as both these navies are likely to increase their naval deployments into and through the region in the future. The increased presence of the Chinese and Indian navies in regional waters will add to that of the other extra-regional navies, mainly the United States and Australian navies, which have long had a presence there. At this stage, the Japanese Navy has constitutional restrictions on deploying overseas, and the Korean Navy has shown little interest in operating much beyond its home waters. Myanmar is one Southeast Asia country that is particularly affected by competition between China and India. India regards building a close relationship with Myanmar as having great strategic importance.14 Myanmar is the only Southeast Asian country that has land and maritime boundaries with India. Hence India has concerns about the political regime in Myanmar and China’s strategic moves into the country. The competitive interests of China and India in Myanmar have been evident lately with their increased awareness of the hydrocarbon potential of the waters off Myanmar.15 There is a contrast in the approaches of the two countries to building maritime security relationships with Southeast Asian countries. China tends to use ‘soft power’ and has so far made little use of naval forces in promoting cooperation

Conclusion 235 and dialogue. In responding to developments adverse to Chinese interests in the South China Sea, it has deployed additional coast guard forces rather than naval forces.16 There is increased Chinese preparedness to enter into maritime cooperative activities, including with energy cooperation in disputed areas of the South China Sea.17 India, on the other hand, has shown a preference for ‘hard power’ strongly promoting naval cooperation in the region with the active involvement of Indian Navy units in joint patrols and exercises with Southeast Asian navies. These strategic developments and their implications for Southeast Asia pose more questions than answers. Some of the key questions are: While the strategic interests of China and India overlap in Southeast Asia, will this necessarily lead to tension and conflict? To what extent should Southeast Asian countries be concerned about the rising maritime power of China and India? What are the common interests of these countries, as well as other countries in the region, that might lead to some trust and understanding as the basis for a more stable regional maritime security environment? Does the rise of China and India offer security to Southeast Asia? Can they be security providers and builders of alliances in the same way as the United States has done over the years? Do current regional arrangements and institutions provide an adequate basis for the building of this trust and confidence? The chapters in this book go some way to answering these questions, but with rather less than full confidence about the answers provided. Particular attention needs to be given to naval developments in the region, not just with the Chinese and Indian navies, but also with other regional navies and the navies that deploy assets into the region. Submarine proliferation is a development that exhibits some of the characteristics of a naval arms race. The situation is a very dynamic one, and as has been evident, even in 2009 to date, it can change quite rapidly.

Strategic containment There has been a lot of talk in recent years about strategic containment. India feels that with its territorial disputes with China in its northern land border areas, and its perception of a Chinese ‘String of Pearls’ strategy in the Indian Ocean, that it is being locked in by China. Conversely, China feels that it is itself being strategically contained, particularly in the maritime domain, by the growing links between India, Japan and the United States. Then as Rory Medcalf observes, Australia has risks to be managed in terms of Chinese perceptions that Australia–India naval ties are part of a China containment strategy.18 Several of the Japanese and Indian chapters in this volume add fuel to the concept of India and Japan balancing China’s naval expansion and providing possible strategic containment of China. As Tetsuo Kotani points out, China’s growing maritime ambitions raise grave concerns for Japan’s sea lane security.19 In October 2008, Tokyo and New Delhi made a joint security announcement to further bilateral security cooperation.20 Such a security strategy is regarded by the two countries as counter-balancing the Chinese ‘String of Pearls’ strategy.

236 Sam Bateman Mike McDevitt expresses concern that China is now intruding into a maritime region that has been the preserve of the United States and its allies for many decades and potentially this may be effective in denying U.S. assistance to its friends and allies.21 He believes it was an implied mission of U.S. forces not to let China’s military power coerce Asian nations into agreements that they would not be otherwise have been willing to accept. He is concerned about a developing perception that China was gaining the ability to trump American presence in the region if it chooses to. China aims to have the ability to deny the United States military access to the region so that the United States could not interfere with a PLA use of force to resolve many of its outstanding maritime strategic issues. However, problems will emerge if the United States tries too strenuously to compete with China. In many ways, these conflicting perceptions of containment and the need for balancing are the root cause of strategic uncertainty in the region, and the tension that is most evident between China and India. They are not helped by some lack of transparency in the strategic intentions of the two countries. As the 2009 Australian White Paper points out, there is a developing picture of strategic uncertainty with the primacy of the United States increasingly being tested, changed power relations and the possibility of confrontation in the longer term between major powers of the region – the United States, China, India, Japan and Russia.22 It believes that it would be premature to judge that war among states, including the major powers, has been eliminated as a feature of the international system.23 In noting that shows of force by rising powers could become more common as their military capabilities expand,24 the Australian White Paper could have India in its sights almost as much as China.

Naval developments Much of the additional defence spending in the region has gone towards naval capabilities: ships, submarines and aircraft. It should be of concern to Southeast Asian countries that in the future, there will be more ships, submarines and maritime aircraft operating in relatively confined regional waters, some areas of which include sovereignty disputes and unresolved maritime boundaries. Increased military activity at sea increases the risks of an unfortunate incident between naval forces. The management of these risks requires a fresh look at preventive diplomacy and confidence building in the maritime domain. There is a need for contingency plans for managing a naval crisis, such as the detection of an ‘intruder’ submarine in waters under the sovereignty of a coastal state, or a naval stand-off in an area of disputed sovereignty. However, as Kwa Chong Guan notes, despite the desirability of Avoidance of Incidents at Sea (INCSEA) agreements or similar arrangements, establishing them to cover current circumstances in Southeast Asia will have its problems.25 A key question for the regional naval balance is whether we are seeing the emergence of cooperative or competitive naval strategies. The high level of naval exercising, as well as the efforts by the United States to build naval coalitions of friendly nations primarily to combat the threat of terrorism, would suggest cooperative strategies, but other developments point to a degree of competition.

Conclusion 237 Submarines, in particular, are a non-cooperative and highly competitive weapon system. While most navies, including the Chinese Navy, stress that their capabilities are being developed for defensive purposes, it is very difficult to differentiate offensive from defensive capabilities. Then as Norman Friedman observe, national differences in the way navies are trained and motivated, including differences in political systems, are real and important.26 The trends for the future with naval capabilities will probably be more of the same. We are likely to see growing fleets of major surface combatants and submarines. Anti-ship missile capabilities and maritime patrol aircraft are possible capability ‘gaps’ to be filled in the future. The proliferation of submarines in the region will lead to greater attention being given to anti-submarine warfare (ASW), as well as increased oceanographic surveying to provide data for safe submarine operations and ASW. China China has been increasing its defence budget in recent years by up to 20 per cent per annum,27 and has recently become the second biggest defence spender in the world after the United States.28 In relative terms, the PLA-N has been the main beneficiary of increased defence budget allocations. China is now proceeding to acquire an aircraft carrier capability. This would accord with China’s aspirations to become a major regional blue-water sea power. The naval planners in Beijing justify these developments on the basis of China’s extensive and growing maritime interests, including the lingering problem of Taiwan and the sovereignty claims in the South China Sea, and increasing dependence on energy imports. While global and regional ‘flag waving’ deployments of Chinese naval vessels have increased in recent years, China has so far not used its naval forces in any overt way to promote Chinese naval power and influence in Southeast Asia. The plans to build a nuclear submarine base in Hainan promoted a strong reaction from India, but Southeast Asian countries seem more relaxed about this development. As Li Minjiang notes in his chapter, many analysts who focus on the growth of China’s naval power tend to develop negative views, predicting that its growing naval power will destabilize the region in the future.29 He argues that it was possible to arrive at a more balanced and arguably more accurate understanding of China’s maritime strategy and policy. He notes that some of the biggest obstacles to ChinaU.S. military exchanges include American perceptions of the ‘Chinese military threat’, as well as the Chinese belief that the United States intends to foster the strategic encirclement of China. There remains insufficient strategic trust between China and other major powers in East Asia, particularly Japan and India, although, as has been noted, Southeast Asian countries may be more accommodating. Japan Japan is the one regional maritime power whose actions are not open to criticism with regard to its involvement in the Southeast Asian maritime domain. Its naval vessels occasionally pass through the region en route to the Middle East, but any

238 Sam Bateman deployments to the region itself are by units of the Japan Coast Guard providing capacity-building assistance to regional maritime security agencies.30 Japan’s defence spending has not increased over recent years, and it has also dedicated much effort to cooperate and assist Southeast Asian countries in enhancing the safety and security of sea lines of communication (SLOCs) in the region. India India has long had the most powerful regional navy in the Indian Ocean, but is now seeking to extend its maritime influence eastwards. India’s role in the region has been boosted by the developing strategic relationship with the United States that includes a strong naval dimension. Regular exercises are taking place between the U.S. Navy and the Indian Navy, including in the Western Pacific. India has been very proactive with naval diplomacy in recent years, including with naval ship visits to ports in East Asia, participating with the USN in exercises in the Pacific and in hosting the Indian Ocean Naval Symposium (IONS).31 India also has a large Coast Guard that has primary responsibility for policing in the EEZ. India could follow Japan’s example and use the Coast Guard as an instrument of ‘soft power’ to engage in maritime cooperation in Southeast Asia, but so far has chosen not to. While China and India will both have nuclear submarines and aircraft carriers in the future, they are both currently lacking in capabilities to sustain ‘blue water’ naval power away from their home bases. Norman Friedman in his chapter explains the importance of endurance or sustainability in naval operations.32 Without aircraft carriers or underway support ships, warships cannot be replenished with fuel, ammunition and other stores. Bases in foreign countries are a poor substitute for underway support due to uncertainties of access and difficulties in maintaining adequate supplies of specialized needs, such as spare parts and ammunition. These will all be major problems for China and India as China contemplates operations in the Indian Ocean and India in the Pacific. These deficiencies are appreciated in China with the naval commander-in-chief stating in April 2009 that ‘the navy will greatly strengthen its logistics and support facility system to improve farsea repair, delivery, rescue and replenishment capacities’.33 The Indian Navy currently has three fleet replenishment ships in service while China has about twice that number. A naval arms race in the region? There is increasing debate about whether there is a naval arms race in the region. On the hand, people argue that the growth in regional navies and naval activities is part of a process of modernization and the doctrinal shift from internal security to maritime security. However, in many ways, the naval build-up goes beyond modernization with navies adding significant new capabilities they did not possess previously.34 This change has been in the pipeline over two decades or more ever since regional countries started experiencing strong economic growth, along with

Conclusion 239 increased awareness of the need for capabilities to protect maritime interests, such as offshore sovereignty, resources and shipping routes. On the other hand, there are arguments that a naval arms race is developing in the region with China often being seen as the trigger for the race. China’s naval force expansion plans may be an explanation for the acquisition of new missile destroyers in South Korea and Japan.35 China’s submarine basis on Hainan may well have spurred an ‘arms race’ type reaction from India.36

Cooperation and confidence building Several chapters in this book suggest that the necessary trust and understanding, which would provide a basis for a more stable regional maritime security environment, is currently lacking. As Park Chang Kwoun points out in this chapter, maritime security in the region shows a mixture of cooperation and aggression.37 Parties opposing territorial claims might agree on peaceful settlement of the dispute, including possibly going as far as negotiating some form of joint development, but they firmly maintain and assert their sovereignty over offshore islets. Such maritime disputes remain the greatest barrier to the development of effective maritime security cooperation in the region. The naval build-up in the region increases the uncertainty of maritime security.38 Without trust and transparency, this environment can lead to the classic ‘security dilemma’ with a steady and progressive trend towards stronger naval forces. There is an increasingly urgent need for measures to enhance the transparency of naval plans and build mutual trust. At the Shangri-La Dialogue in 2009, Singapore’s Deputy Prime Minister and Defence Minister Teo Chee Hean called for greater transparency about military armaments to help avoid misunderstandings and to increase trust and confidence in the region, but went on to note that this transparency must go beyond being open about military acquisitions to include declarations of strategic intent and security concerns.39 Vice Admiral Chauhan points out in his chapter that maritime security challenges in the region can only be met through a regionally inclusive process of cooperative security.40 This is the approach of the Indian Navy that views constructive engagement as the primary means of achieving and assuring mutually beneficial maritime security, stability, safety and consequent collective economic prosperity. There is little true maritime security cooperation in the region at present, except in the Malacca and Singapore Straits, but even that has limitations. The bilateral sensitivities between regional navies remain strong. The so-called joint patrols are largely for ‘show’, and are too occasional and limited in nature to be regarded as an effective contribution to regional maritime security, although clearly they do help with confidence and trust building. India–China maritime cooperation is a positive development that may help to dampen down the risks of conflict at sea. Both countries have clear common interests in maritime security, that could support cooperative endeavours, but unfortunately power politics appear to get in the way of genuine cooperation. Mutual trust is very hard to develop.

240 Sam Bateman

Looking to the future While the strategic aspirations of China and India overlap in Southeast Asia, there might be adequate space for both maritime powers to grow simultaneously with sufficient tasks and interests to provide a basis for cooperation and dialogue. This will be assisted by the indications that Southeast Asian countries are prepared to adopt an even-handed approach between the two increasingly more powerful players in the region. Thus, in answer to the first two questions posed by Admiral Arun Prakash in his introduction to this book, it does not have to be a zero sum game in which one country gains advantage to the disadvantage of the other; and despite the overlap in aspirations, it should be possible to prevent the situation from becoming a conflict.41 Nevertheless, in answer to his third question, Southeast Asians still have cause for concern about the potential for their region to become the focus of the overlapping aspirations of China and India. There is much debate in the region at present about regional security architecture that would provide a political framework for addressing the difficult issues raised in this book. However, little progress has been made with reaching agreement. As Raja Mohan observes in his chapter, even the process of institution building is subject to power politics.42 Effective institutions for managing regional maritime security and providing the necessary transparency and dialogue are currently lacking. The Western Pacific Naval Symposium and IONS are useful forums, but they are navy-centric and unlikely to take any initiative that might lead to critical scrutiny of naval budgets, objectives or operations. The ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF) has made a start by establishing an Inter-Sessional Meeting (ISM) on maritime security, but this forum may be similarly restrained and suffer from the same limitations that have inhibited its parent forum.43 There is an evident need for increased regional thinking and research on relevant issues. Increased regional expenditure on defence should be of serious concern. It has a high opportunity cost, particularly for poorer countries, in terms of diverting resources from important programmes for economic development, social improvement and poverty alleviation. There is also the notion that increased defence spending in the region is driven at least in part by the supply side with American, European and Russian defence firms aggressively seeking new customers following the drying up of their domestic markets.44 Increased defence spending creates an environment of increased military activity that is potentially destabilizing with greater numbers of aircraft, warships, submarines and armoured vehicles. The situation in the maritime environment is of particular concern, with more ships, submarines and maritime aircraft operating in relatively confined regional waters, some areas of which include sovereignty disputes and unresolved maritime boundaries. Increased military activity at sea increases the risks of an unfortunate incident between naval forces. More effective arrangements to reduce these risks are a pressing requirement, including water space management and prevention of mutual interference agreements that recognise the risks associated with submarine proliferation in the region.45

Conclusion 241 The establishment of an Asian Peace Research Institute (APRI) might be considered. This would be an independent institution with close links to relevant international agencies such as the UN Institute for Disarmament Research (UNIDIR) and the Stockholm International Peace Research (SIPRI). The 2008 annual report from SIPRI includes a strong call to arms control predicting that the next two years will see a broadening consensus around the world that more serious and effective arms control and disarmament measures are required.46 As we move further into the Asian century, it is essential that Asia participates in this dialogue. An APRI would help develop regional views on key issues, including transparency, preventive diplomacy in potential areas of conflict, and particular confidence and security and building measures. Maritime-related measures would be high on its agenda.

Some Last Thoughts It is difficult to escape from a pessimistic conclusion to this collection of papers. Desirable levels of trust and understanding between the rising maritime powers of Asia, not just China and India, but also Japan, Korea and Russia, are currently lacking, and the present frameworks appear inadequate for developing these qualities. A huge geopolitical change is impending with the rise of China and India, and the implications may not have been fully appreciated as yet. This trend begs for more attention than it is receiving at present, but current institutions and frameworks do not appear up to this task. National and international interests in maritime security in Southeast Asia are diverse and potentially divergent both within the region and between regional countries and the major players outside the region. Several chapters in this work show how finding common interests to promoting cooperation could be very difficult. While there are divergent interests, there are real risks of competitive maritime strategies emerging and potentially fuelling naval arms races. Competition and rivalry between China and India seems likely to continue as sources of instability and insecurity in the region. Inevitably by virtue of geography, Southeast Asia is enmeshed in this dilemma as the spheres of influence of the rising naval powers largely overlap within its geographical limits. The mitigation of the risks requires more attention to preventive diplomacy and maritime confidence and security-building measures, including greater transparency with regard to naval operations and exercises. The Asia-Pacific maritime scene is very active at present. Naval activity levels are high and naval budgets continue to grow, with many regional navies moving into more advanced capabilities and larger warships than they operated previously. The dynamic nature of the regional maritime security environment has been demonstrated in 2009 by the rapid improvement in cross-Strait relations and by the deterioration of the situation with North Korea. The waters of Southeast Asia are likely to see increased numbers of surface warships, submarines and maritime aircraft in the years ahead. While these developments are largely in response to a feeling of increased maritime insecurity,

242 Sam Bateman the developments themselves also have potential to add to insecurity in the region. This is all part of the well-known security dilemma, and regional forums, such as the ARF, will be challenged in the future to address these spiralling naval force developments. Furthermore, some of the new capabilities, particularly submarines, are not well suited to the processes of cooperation and confidence building that might be considered. Initiatives to restore some optimism in the situation might be taken at two levels. First there are the actions that navies might take themselves, including the more active pursuit of confidence-building measures that might reduce the risks of naval clashes getting out of hand. The objective of all parties should be a more stable regional security environment in which countries do not feel compelled to continually expand their naval budgets. However, to the extent that navies engage in confidence building, they might be working themselves out of a job! Second, at the political level, the dangers of the current situation should be given greater attention, but so far realist politics and self-interest have prevented this from occurring. Greater transparency is required, and this might only occur through the work of an independent institute such as that suggested above.

Notes 1 Asad-ul Iqbal Latif, Between Rising Powers: China, Singapore and India, Singapore: ISEAS, 2007, pp. 239 and 260. 2 James R. Holmes and Toshi Yoshihara, ‘China’s Naval Ambitions in the Indian Ocean’, The Journal of Strategic Studies, Vol. 31, June 2008, pp. 367–94. 3 Joshua Ho (ed.), Between Rising Naval Powers: Implications for Southeast Asia of the Rise of Chinese and Indian Naval Power, A Conference Report, Singapore: S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, 2009, p. 21. 4 Bill Emmott, Rivals – How the Power Struggle Between China, India and Japan Will Shape Our Next Decade, London: Penguin Books, 2009, p. 3. 5 Walter C. Ladwig II, ‘Delhi’s Pacific Ambition: Naval Power, “Look East,” and India’s Emerging Influence in the Asia-Pacific’, Asian Security, Volume 5, Issue 2, 2009, pp. 87–113. 6 The recent Australian Defence White Paper, for example, is ambivalent on this issue. Paul Dibb, ‘Is the U.S. Alliance of Declining Importance to Australia?’ Security Challenges, Vol. 5, No. 2, Winter 2009, pp. 37–8. 7 Bronson Percival, ‘Growing Chinese and Indian naval power: U.S. recalibration and coalition building’, Chapter 3 in Sam Bateman and Joshua Ho (eds), Southeast Asia and the Rise of Chinese and Indian Naval Power, London: Routledge, 2009, p. 40. 8 Sam Bateman, ‘Clashes at Sea: When Chinese vessels harass U.S. Ships’, RSIS Commentaries, 27/2009, 13 March 2009. 9 David Carter and Erik Slavin, ‘USS McCain arrives at Sasebo after suffering damage to sonar array’, Stars and Stripes, 17 June 2009, http://www.stripes.com/article.asp? section=104&article=63326 (accessed 27 June 2009). 10 Evelyn Goh, ‘Great Powers and Hierarchical Order in Southeast Asia – Analyzing Regional Security Strategies’, International Security, Vol. 32, No. 3, Winter 2007, pp. 114 and 117. 11 Ibid., p. 121. 12 John J. Tkacik Jr., ‘The Taiwan Conundrum: Maritime Security Capacity Building in East Asia Before a Taiwan Strait Settlement’. Paper presented at Maritime Capacity

Conclusion 243

13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34

Building Conference, at Mississippi State University, 16-17 June 2009, organized by Centre for International and Security Studies, Mississippi State University, p. 1. Rajeev Sawhney, ‘Redefining the Limits of the Straits: A Composite Malacca Straits Security System’, RSIS Commentary 37/2006, Singapore: S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, 18 May 2006. Comments by RADM Ravi Vohra IN (Rtd), Ho, Between Rising Maritime Powers, p. 7. Matt Wade, ‘Asian giants drawn into energy row’, The Sydney Morning Herald, 15–16 November 2008, p. 20. Ian Storey, ‘China, the Impeccable Affair and Renewed Rivalry in the South China Sea,’ The Asia-Pacific Journal, Vol. 22-5-09, June 1, 2009 (http://japanfocu.org/-IanStorey/3162) (accessed 6 June 2009). Leszek Buszynski and Iskandar Sazlan, ‘Maritime Claims and Energy Cooperation in the South China Sea’, Contemporary Southeast Asia, Vol. 29, No. 1, 2007, pp. 143–71. Rory Medcalf, ‘The Australian Navy in the Asian Century: Setting a New Course’, Chapter 16 in Bateman and Joshua Ho (eds), Southeast Asia and the Rise of Chinese and Indian Naval Power, p. 191. Comments by Tetsuo Kotani as noted in Ho, Between Rising Naval Powers, p. 20. D.S. Rajan, ‘Beijing: Suspicions on Japan-India Security Declaration targeting China’, Paper No. 2912, South Asia Analysis Group, 3 November 2008 (http://www. southasiaanalysis.org/%5Cpapers30%5Cpaper2912.html) (accessed 5 July 2009). Mike McDevitt, ‘Regional naval developments and deployments: a perspective from the United States’, Chapter 16 in Sam Bateman and Joshua Ho (eds), Southeast Asia and the Rise of Chinese and Indian Naval Power, p. 167. Australian Government (2009), Defending Australia in the Asia-Pacific Century: Force 2030, Defence White Paper, Canberra: Department of Defence, p. 33. Defence White Paper, p. 22. Ibid., p. 22. Kwa Chong Guan, ‘Cooperation and Confidence Building: A Southeast Asian Perspective’, Chapter 19 in Bateman and Ho, Between Rising Naval Powers, p. 230. Norman Friedman, ‘Shaping Naval Power – Implications of the Naval Buildup in Asia’, Chapter 11 in Sam Bateman and Joshua Ho (eds), Southeast Asia and the Rise of Chinese and Indian Naval Power, p. 131. Josh Kurlantzick, ‘Rearming the World’, Boston Globe, 27 April 2008, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, http://www.carnegieendowment. org/publications/index.cfm?fa=print&id=20080 (accessed 16 May 2008). ‘China second biggest arms spender in world: SIPRI’, The Times of India, 8 June 2009, http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/World/China/China-second-biggestarms-spender-in-world-SIPRI/articleshow/4631953.cms (accessed 7 July 2009). Li Minjiang, ‘China participates in East Asian maritime cooperation – Growing activism and strategic concerns’, Chapter 18, in Bateman and Ho, Southeast Asia and the Rise of Chinese and Indian Naval Power, p. 211. Richard J. Samuels, ‘ “New Fighting Power!” Japan’s Growing Maritime Capabilities and East Asian Security’, International Security, Vol. 32, No. 3 (Winter 2007/08), pp. 84–112. Sam Bateman, ‘The Indian Ocean Naval Symposium – Will the Navies of the Indian Ocean Region unite?’ RSIS Commentaries, No. 35, 17 March 2008. Friedman, ‘Shaping Naval Power’, pp. 138–139. ‘China Plans New Naval Capabilities’, Xinhua, 16 April 2009, http://asiadefence. wordpress.com/2009/04/16/china-plans-new-naval-capabilities/ (accessed 22/6/2009). Richard Bitzinger, ‘A new arms race? The political economy of maritime military modernization in the Asia-Pacific’, The Economics of Peace and Security Journal, Vol. 4, No. 2, 2009, p. 23.

244 Sam Bateman 35 Paul Burnell and Andy Denwood, ‘Perils of a new Pacific arms race’, BBC News, 14 August 2007, http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/pr/fr/-/asia-pacific/6937293.stm (accessed 15 August 2007). 36 Gurpreet S. Khurana, ‘China’s New Submarine Base at Hainan: Analyses of Recent Media Reports’ Strategic Analysis, Volume 32, Issue 5, 2008, pp. 713–19. 37 Park Chang Kwoun, ‘The Korea Perspective’, Chapter 7 in Bateman and Ho, Southeast Asia and the Rise of Chinese and Indian Naval Power, pp. 80–86. 38 Ibid., p. 83. 39 Nicholas Yong, ‘Calls for transparency in security’, The Straits Times, 1 June 2009, p. 1. 40 Vice Admiral Pradeep Chauhan IN, ‘Scope for Maritime Cooperation and Confidence Building’, Chapter 18, in Bateman and Ho, Southeast Asia and the Rise of Chinese and Indian Naval Power, p. 4. 41 Admiral Arun Prakash, ‘Introduction’ to Bateman and Ho, Southeast Asia and the Rise of Chinese and Indian Naval Power, p. 4. 42 C. Raja Mohan, ‘Between Rising Powers – A Broad Strategic Overview’, Chapter 1 in Bateman and Ho, Southeast Asia and the Rise of Chinese and Indian Naval Power, p. 14. 43 The first meeting of this group was held in Surabaya, Indonesia, in March 2009, and the second meeting will be held in Auckland, New Zealand, in March 2010. 44 Bitzinger, ‘A new arms race?’, p. 26. 45 Sam Bateman, ‘Perils of the Deep: The Dangers of Submarine Operations in Asia’, RSIS Commentaries 12/2007, 21 February 2007. 46 Bates Gill, ‘Introduction. A call to arms control’, SIPRI Yearbook 2008, http://www.sipri.org/yearbook/2008/00

Index

abbreviations list xiv–xv “A Cooperative Strategy for 21st Century Seapower” 39–40, 163 active defence strategy 28–31, 149 Adelaide-class frigates 187 Aegis cruisers 32 Aegis-like combat systems 25, 30, 49 Afghanistan 36, 134 Aids to Navigation Fund 54, 90, 117, 118, 119, 121 air and missile defence systems 23, 27–8, 137 aircraft carriers 136–7; Australian plans 189; Chinese plans 28, 30, 49, 76, 237; combat endurance 138–9; factors affecting effectiveness 139; Indian Navy 49; ROK Navy 51; sizes of 138; U.S. Navy deployments 32, 51, 52, 168 air-defence missiles 49, 136–7, 188 air power 136–7; see also aircraft carriers Air Warfare Destroyers (AWDs) 185–6, 188 al-Qaeda 74 amphibious assaults 133, 142, 189 Anambas islands 101 Andaman and Nicobar Islands 121, 154, 155, 200–1, 234 anti-piracy agreement (ReCAAP) 54, 120, 154, 177–8, 180 anti-piracy operations: Australia and 190; Chinese Navy 22, 38, 42, 77, 180–1; Gulf of Aden 31, 77; Japan and 172, 176–7, 180–2; Malacca Strait 40; South Korea and 85 anti-ship missiles: see missiles anti-submarine warfare (ASW) 104, 139, 169, 188 ANZAC-class frigates 185, 187 APEC 210

Arabian Sea 32, 39 Arab-Islamic maritime power 58–9 ‘Arc of Prosperity and Freedom’ 90–1 arms control 159–60, 241 arms race 32, 107, 109, 168, 235, 238–9 ASEAN 53–4, 206, 210; Asian multipolarity and 11–13; changing distribution of power in 13–16; China and 12–14, 53, 54, 214; defence budget 108–9; driver for regional integration 13–15; India and 12–13, 152; Indonesia and 15; maritime boundaries 230; South China Sea and 108, 121; threat of conflict with 108; Treaty of Amity and Cooperation 53–4; see also India-ASEAN relations ASEAN Plus Six 53 ASEAN Plus Three 14, 53, 177, 210 ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF) 32, 53, 111, 150, 210, 228, 240; Indian partnership 152, 154; Japan and 180 Asian multipolarity 9; ASEAN and 11–13; Cold War era international relations 11–12; economic trends 9–11; regional institutions 13–15; Western perceptions 10 Asian triumphalism 11 Asia-Pacific 197, 206; instabilities assessment 241–2; modern Indo-Pacific maritime space 66–7; natural disaster locus 202; regional institutions 15; U.S.-led international security system 32; U.S. military posture 51–2; see also Southeast Asia, regional maritime security issues Asian Peace Research Institute (APRI) 241 Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN): see ASEAN

246 Index Australia: China and 32, 190–2, 235; Cooperative Mechanism support 118; defence budget 189; defence requirements and debate 184–6; exclusion from East Asia Summit 14; ‘Force 2030’ 185; international trade 184–5; Japanese relations 16, 53, 221; naval partnerships 190–2; see also Royal Australian Navy B-52 bombers 144 ballistic missiles 23, 27, 32, 34, 41, 106, 157, 165, 166, 169, 171 Bangladesh 103 ‘Basic Act on Ocean Policy’ 179–80 ‘Basic Ocean Plan’ 179–80 Basiron, Mohd Nizam 87 Bateman, Sam 99, 232 Bay of Bengal 103, 155 Beckman, Robert 114 Borneo 62, 103, 228 Bose, Sugata 63 boundary disputes: see territorial and boundary disputes Bradford, John 74 British imperialism 3, 60–5 British Royal Navy 63, 130, 144 Brooke, James 62 Burma, British imperialism in 61; see also Myanmar Bush administration 16, 33, 36, 38, 40, 44, 53, 168, 169, 220 Cambodia 62, 73, 152, 176, 218 capability enhancement 210 capacity-building 210 Cebrowski, Arthur K. 133 Chakraborty, Devbrat 152 Chauhan, Pradeep 197 Chew, Emrys 56 China, historical influences on 2–3, 12 China, population of 10 China-ASEAN relations 12–13, 54; ASEAN Plus Three 14, 53; see also ASEAN China-Australia relations 32, 190–2, 235 China-India relations 16–18, 42, 50, 78, 157–8, 232; Australia-India naval partnership and 190–1; Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence 149; implications for Southeast Asia 88–9, 107–8, 232, 233, 234–5; India as counterbalance to China 41, 49–50, 78, 232–3, 235; Indian fear of encirclement

18, 19, 90, 157, 235; maritime cooperation 213, 239–40; nuclear technology issues 15–16; Pakistan and 50; rivalry implications for Southeast Asia 18–20, 241; spheres of influence 19; UN Security Council membership 15 China-Japan relations 32, 52; cooperation and confidence building 53–4, 214; gas field development 81; intruder submarine incidents 104; joint East China Sea exploration 218–19; UN Security Council membership 15 China-Malaysia relations 92 China-Pakistan relations 50, 90, 150, 157, 212, 227 China-South Korea relations 81 China-Taiwan relations: see Taiwan China-U.S. relations 36, 40–2, 75–6; capability competition 168; Chinese open SLOC interests and 41; joint maritime exercises 150, 213; Malacca Strait safety 41; maritime cooperation issues 32, 78, 215–16, 219–22; military transparency 37, 41, 220, 223; responses to surveillance/intelligence gathering 40, 41, 228, 233; Southeast Asia and 44; Taiwan 25, 29, 41, 45, 78, 82, 167, 170, 220, 227; U.S. Navy mission and 164–5 China-Vietnam relations 216–18, 227–8 Chinese ‘Century of Humiliation’ 170 Chinese defence budget 48, 52, 107, 109, 148, 165, 237 Chinese economic growth 9–10, 72, 109; military/technological investments and 18; trade regionalization 72–3 Chinese energy security issues 73–4, 90, 170, 213 Chinese marine economic sector 211 Chinese maritime policy 48–9, 76–7, 180–1, 211–12; common interests and new diplomacy 75; implications for Southeast Asia 89–90; Malacca Strait and littoral states 76–7; South China Sea 74, 78–9; South Korean perspectives 84; ‘String of Pearls’ 19, 41–2, 47, 88, 90, 157, 232, 235; U.S. and 75–6 Chinese maritime security cooperation 211–23, 235; ASEAN and 12–14, 53, 54, 214; Australia and 191–2; cooperative military relations 149–51, 191–2; counter-terrorism exercise 213; energy security 73–4; environmental protection 215; Five Principles of

Index 247 Peaceful Coexistence 149; foreign policy and 222; India and 214, 239–40; joint East China Sea resource development 218–19; joint maritime exercises 32, 149, 213; Korea and 81, 214; major concerns 219–22; Malacca Strait and littoral states 79, 89–90, 92, 118, 121, 214; marine science and technology 215; military transparency and 212, 220, 223; non-traditional security cooperation 213–16; pragmatic approach 221–2; proactive engagement 222; South China Sea policy 216–18; U.S. and 32, 78, 91, 215–16, 219–22; see also China-India relations; China-U.S. relations Chinese military transparency 37, 41, 212, 219, 220, 223 Chinese national defence policy 30–1, 146; active defence 28–31, 149; capability competition 168; command of the sea 165–6; Defence White Paper 26, 30, 165, 223; funding priorities 165; offshore defence doctrine 28–9, 41, 77, 165–7; open-ocean surveillance system 165–6; peaceful development 148–9, 167; PLAN modernization 146–8 Chinese navy: see People’s Liberation Army Navy Chinese port capacity 49, 72–3 Chinese sea area jurisdiction 77 Chinese ship-building 73 Chinese strategic containment 107, 191, 220, 232, 235–7 Chinese trade networks 63 Cholas 57 climate change 103–4 coast guard forum 215 Cold War era international relations 11–12, 52, 66, 107 Collins-class submarines 187 combat endurance 138–9, 238 combat systems 139–41 command and control 133, 143; PLAN modernization 147; sensor systems and data links 139–43 command of the sea 165 common interests 75, 199 ‘Common Security’ report 199 confidence-building measures (CBMs) 48, 53–4, 159–60, 198, 236; arms control 159–60, 241; Australia and 190; Incidents at Sea Agreement (INCSEA)

160, 229–31, 236; India and 154, 197–210; Indian Ocean Naval Symposium 191, 198, 204–10, 238, 240; information sharing 150, 173, 202, 215; information sharing mechanisms 202; Rules of Engagement (ROE) 229–30; Western Pacific Naval Symposium 32, 104, 150, 198, 206, 213, 240; see also maritime security cooperation; military transparency; specific institutions constructive engagement 202 Container Security Initiative (CSI) 91, 215–16 convoys 134 Cooperation Afloat Readiness and Training (CARAT) 45, 93 cooperative maritime security relationships: see maritime security cooperation Cooperative Mechanism for the Straits of Malacca and Singapore 54, 114–26, 201; Aids to Navigation Fund 54, 90, 117, 118, 119, 122; Cooperation Forum 117, 118; evaluation of 118; historical origin and development 114–16; LOS Convention and 115–17, 123; major stakeholders 118–22; maritime security issues 122–5; non-littoral state participation and support 118, 120–2; overview of 116–18; projects 118; Singapore Statement (2007) 116, 122 Corbett, Julian 165 Council for Security Cooperation in the Asia Pacific (CSCAP) 111, 150, 228 cruise missiles 23, 27, 41, 52, 106, 135, 166, 189 cyclone disasters 66–7, 82, 102, 156, 202 data links 139–41 Declaration on the Conduct of Parties in the South China Sea (DOC) 215–18, 229–30 defence spending 236, 240; ASEAN 108–9; Australia 189; China 48, 52, 107, 109, 148, 165, 237; India 108, 158; Japan 109, 174; Myanmar 109; Philippines 109; South Korea 108 defensive perimeters 131 Desker, Barry 106 Diego Garcia 66 disaster relief 66–7, 82, 102, 156, 163, 202–3

248 Index Djalal, Hasjim 74 ducting radar 135 Dutch colonialism in Southeast Asia 60–2 earthquakes 202, 214 East Asia Summit (EAS) 14, 53, 203 East China Sea 51, 75, 81, 150, 170, 212, 213, 218–19, 222 economic growth, Chinese 9–10, 72–3, 109 Emmott, Bill 2, 11 endurance 138–9, 238 energy resources 17, 19, 80; cooperative exploration and development 81, 218–19; Indian development 155 energy security issues 73–4, 89, 90, 155, 170, 198, 213 environmental pollution 74, 82, 101, 157, 201–2 European colonialism in Southeast Asia 59–65 European Security and Defence Policy (ESDP) 180 European Union (EU) 12, 180 Exclusive Economic Zones (EEZs) 41, 70, 80, 89, 92, 103 Falkland Islands War 138 ferry attacks 105 financial crisis of 2008 10–11 fisheries 91–2, 102–3, 104 Five Power Defence Arrangement (FPDA) 93 Flying Fish exercises 93 ‘Force 2030’ 185 French imperialism 62 Friedman, Norman 129, 237, 238 Ganga-Mekong Cooperation Programme 152 Gates, Robert 206 geo-strategy 198 Global Maritime Partnership (GMP) 32, 37, 40, 221 global war against terrorism 45 global warming 50, 103, 175, 200 Goh, Evelyn 233 GPS guided missiles 135, 139 Griffiths, David 229 Grotius, Hugo 60, 69 Guam 38, 48, 51, 168, 169 Guan, Kwa Chong 227, 236 Gulf of Aden 31, 77, 190, 192 Gulf War 130, 133–4

‘gun-boat diplomacy’ 64, 70 Gwadar 50, 90 Hainan Island 77, 109, 237, 239 Han-class submarines 23, 25 handbooks of navies 143–4 Harpoon missiles 144 Hean, Teo Chee 109 Hormuz Strait 60, 82 humanitarian assistance 46, 82; China and 151; disaster relief 66–7, 82, 102, 156; India and 202–3; IONS initiative 205; South Korea and 85; U.S. and 40, 46, 66–7, 163 human security issues 199 human trafficking 200 Hussein, Sadaam 130 hydrographic surveying 228 Incidents at Sea Agreement (INCSEA) 160, 229–31, 236 Independent Commission on Disarmament and Security Issues 199 India, exclusion from East Asia Summit 14 India, historical influences on 2–3; Cold War era international relations 12 India, Indian Ocean issues 19 India, population of 10 India as counterbalance to China 41, 49–50, 78, 232–3, 235 India-ASEAN relations 12–13, 152, 153–4; political and institutional cooperation 154; trade relations 153; see also ASEAN India-China maritime cooperation 213, 239–40; see also China-India relations India-Japan relations 32, 47, 49–50, 53; ‘Arc of Prosperity and Freedom’ 90–1; strategic containment of China 235–6 Indian Coast Guard 89, 238 Indian defence budget 108, 158 Indian diaspora 156 Indian economic growth 10; military/technological investments and 18 Indian encirclement by China 18, 19, 90, 157, 235 Indian historical seapower 59 Indianization 57 Indian maritime security issues 89, 152–62, 235, 238; ASEAN engagement 152; Australian naval partnership 190–1; cooperation and confidence-building 89,

Index 249 154–5, 158–60, 197–210, 239; energy 155, 198; geo-strategic environment 197–8; humanitarian assistance 202–3; imperatives 155–7; international trade 201; ‘Look East’ policy 42, 88–9, 153, 161, 232; Malacca Strait 121, 198, 200–1; malevolent non-state entities 197; non-traditional security 199; NRI support 156, 202; Southeast Asia 88–9, 152–62, 227, 241; terrorism and transnational crime 156; trade relations 153; see also China-India relations Indian Navy 49–50, 235, 238; logistics capability 238; Southeast Asian naval cooperation 89 Indian nuclear technology 15–16 Indian Ocean xii, 155; British naval mastery 63; Chinese ‘String of Pearls’ strategy 19, 41–2, 47, 88, 90, 157, 232, 235; natural resource access and 19; new geopolitical equilibrium 65; U.S.-India naval cooperation 43 Indian Ocean Naval Symposium (IONS) 191, 198, 204–10, 238, 240 Indian Ocean Rim-Association for Regional Cooperation (IOR-ARC) 203 Indian trade networks 63 India-Pakistan relations 50, 227; see also Pakistan India-U.S. relations 16, 42–3; navy-to-navy ties 38, 238; responses to surveillance/intelligence gathering 228; strategic partnership 36, 38, 42–3, 232–3 IndIndon 89 Indonesia: ASEAN and 15; Chinese maritime cooperation 214–15; European colonialism 62; Indian relations 89; Japanese Coast Guard assistance 178–9; littoral territorial sovereignty 124; Malaysia boundary agreement 230; ReCAAP anti-piracy agreement and 178; U.S. relations 44, 124; see also littoral states Indonesia, Malacca Strait issues: see Cooperative Mechanism for the Straits of Malacca and Singapore; Malacca Strait information sharing 150, 173, 178, 202, 215 Information Sharing Center 123, 173, 178

informatization, PLAN development 147 international law of the sea 60; see also United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea International Maritime Organization (IMO): China-U.S. cooperation 41; Chinese support for 77; Cooperative Mechanism and 54, 114–16, 119, 201; Protection of Vital Shipping Lanes initiative 122; see also Cooperative Mechanism for the Straits of Malacca and Singapore Iran 82, 130, 135, 140 Iraq 130, 133–4, 140 Islamic maritime power 58–9 island disputes: see territorial and boundary disputes; specific islands Itu Aba 234 Japan-Australia relations 16, 53, 221 Japan-China relations: see China-Japan relations Japan Coast Guard 120, 172, 178–9, 181, 237–8; see also Japanese Maritime Self-Defense Force Japanese Constitution 174–5 Japanese defence budget 109, 174, 238 Japanese historical naval power 65 Japanese maritime security issues 48–54, 170, 237–8; ASEAN Plus Three 14; ‘Basic Ocean Plan’ 179–80; China’s naval build-up and operations 48–9; civilian cooperation 172–83; confidence-building measures 48, 53–4; Cooperative Mechanism support 118, 120; joint East China Sea resource development 218–19; Malacca Strait 90–1, 120, 173, 221; North Korean threat 106; piracy 172; response to maritime environment 52–3; Russian Navy 50; South China Sea 121; traditional and non-traditional issues 172–3; U.S. seapower 51–2, 174 Japanese maritime security participation 172–83; anti-piracy 172–3, 176–7, 180–2; anti-terrorism 175–6; constitutional governance 174–5; public opinion and 175, 181; structural factors 173–5; UN-sponsored peace-keeping 175 Japanese Maritime Self-Defense Force (MSDF) 49, 52, 180–1; confidence-building measures 53–4; Malacca Strait security and 120

250 Index Japanese Self Defence Forces (SDF) 175–6 Japanese WWII strategy 131, 135 Japan-India relations 32, 47, 49–50, 53, 90–1, 235–6; naval cooperation 32 Japan-South Korea relationship 52–3 Japan-U.S. relations 16, 50, 51, 52, 174 Jianghu-class frigates 23 Jiangkai-II-class frigates 25 Jiangwei-class frigates 23 Jin-class ballistic missile submarines 25, 26, 49 Jing, Huang 22 Junshe, Zhang 146 jurisdictional conflicts: see territorial and boundary disputes Kakadu exercises 191 Keating, Timothy 42 Kilo-class submarines 23, 25, 26, 49 Kohno, Takeshi 172 Kotani, Tetsuo 235 Kuril islands 106 Kwoun, Park Chang 80 Kyrgyzstan 213 Lakshadweep islands 155 law of the sea 60; see also United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea Link 16 141 liquid natural gas (LNG) tankers 105 littoral states 114, 200; China and 76–7, 79, 89–90; Cooperative Mechanism stakeholders 118–19; ReCAAP anti-piracy agreement and 178; territorial sovereignty 124; U.S. and 44; victims of geography 92; see also Malacca Strait; specific nations littoral states, Cooperative Mechanism development 114–16; see also Cooperative Mechanism for the Straits of Malacca and Singapore logistics and naval power 138, 140, 143 long-range missiles: see ballistic missiles; cruise missiles ‘Look East’ policy 42, 88–9, 153, 161, 232 Luhu-class DDGs 23 Luyang-class destroyers 22, 24, 25, 49 Luzhou-class DDGs 24 Mahan, Alfred Thayer 59, 68, 165, 227 Mahbubani, Kishore 11, 12 Mak, J. N. 230 Malabar exercises 47, 190 Malacca-Singapore Straits Committee 201

Malacca Strait 1, 19, 87; Aids to Navigation Fund 54, 90, 117, 118, 119, 122; boundary disputes 103; China and 76–7, 79, 89–90, 92, 121, 214; European colonialism 61; India and 121, 198, 200–1; Japan and 90–1, 120, 173, 221; Marine Electronic Highway (MEH) project 122; pollution 101; post-Cooperative Mechanism incidents 123; smuggling 102; territorial sovereignty 124; terrorism vulnerability 105, 200; trade activities via 120; U.S. and 39, 44, 120; U.S.-China relations 41; victim of geography 92; war risk area 91 Malacca Strait, Cooperative Mechanism: see Cooperative Mechanism for the Straits of Malacca and Singapore Malacca Strait Patrols (MSP) 40, 121 Malacca Strait Patrol Standard Operating Procedures 54 Malacca Sultanate 58–9, 61 Malaysia 87–93; China and 89–90, 92; EEZ encroachment 92; environmental security 91–2; Five Power Defence Arrangement 93; India and 88–9; Indonesia boundary agreement 230; Japan and 90–1; littoral territorial sovereignty 124; maritime domain 87–8; military build-up 109; ReCAAP anti-piracy agreement 178; U.S. relations 44, 91, 93, 124; see also littoral states Malaysia, Malacca Strait issues: see Cooperative Mechanism for the Straits of Malacca and Singapore; Malacca Strait Maldives 200 Mapping the Global Future 10 Mare Clausum 60 Mare Liberum 60, 69 Marine Electronic Highway (MEH) project 122 marine science cooperation 215, 228 maritime security concepts 198–200 maritime security cooperation 75, 197–9; Australian naval partnerships 190–2; China-U.S. relations 78; Chinese participation 149–51, 211–23, 235, 239; common interests 75, 199; constructive engagement 202; Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence 149; India and 16, 89, 154–5, 158–60, 197–210, 239; information sharing mechanisms 202;

Index 251 Japanese civilian participation 172–83; maintaining Indian Ocean SLOCs 43; Malaysian participation in exercises 93; ReCAAP anti-piracy agreement 54, 120, 154, 177–8; resource development 81; Southeast Asian perspective 227–31; South Korean perspectives 84–5; U.S. initiatives 32, 37, 40, 83, 91, 124, 221; U.S. naval superiority and 20; see also anti-piracy operations; confidence-building measures; humanitarian assistance; naval exercises; specific countries, institutions maritime security cooperation, Malacca Strait issues: see Cooperative Mechanism for the Straits of Malacca and Singapore; Malacca Strait Maritime Security Programme xii McDevitt, Michael 163, 236 Medcalf, Rory 184, 235 merchant ships, military value of 135 Middle East Navigational Aids Service (MENAS) 120 MILAN 154 military transparency 53, 83, 109, 111; Chinese 37, 41, 212, 219, 220, 223 Ming-class submarines 23 Ming Dynasty naval voyages 22, 56, 57–8, 68 Mingjiang, Li 211 missile defence capabilities 23, 27–8, 137 missiles 23, 25, 27, 34, 106, 135–8, 140, 142, 144, 166, 169, 171, 189, 237; air-defense 49, 136–7; ballistic 23, 27, 32, 34, 41, 106, 157, 165, 166, 169, 171; Chinese supply to Pakistan 157; cruise 23, 27, 41, 52, 106, 135, 166, 189; GPS guidance 135, 139; North Korean 83, 106; replenishment 138, 140; warhead design 157 Mitra, Amit 153 Mitropolous, E. E. 114 Modelski, George 4 Mohan, C. Raja 9 Mongol expansiion 68 morale 130 Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) 101 Mughals 61 Myanmar 42, 44; boundary disputes 103; British rule 62; China and 90; China-India rivalry implications 234; defence budget 109; natural disasters 66–7, 82

National Maritime Foundation (NMF) 1, xii nation-state system 3–4 natural disasters 66–7, 82, 102, 156, 202–3 natural gas resources 155 natural resources 17, 19, 80, 84 naval airpower 136–7 naval arms race 32 naval bases 131–2 naval confrontation mitigation measures 228–30, 236; see also confidence-building measures naval exercises: Australia-India 190–1; Bay of Bengal 50; China and regional powers 32, 149–50, 213; India-Southeast Asia 221; India-U.S.-Japan 16, 43; Tasman Sea 32; U.S. and Southeast Asian nations 45, 93; see also maritime security cooperation naval personnel 130 naval power: combat systems 139–41; command and control 133, 143; command of the sea 165; comparisons of numbers 129–30; endurance 138–9, 238; evaluating navies 142–5; importance of initiative 130; littoral problem 141; mobility and staying power 131–2; seapower 131–4; seapower versus land power 133; Singapore defence example 134–6; tracklessness 132–4; training and personnel differences 130; underway replenishment 138, 140, 143 network-centric warfare 133, 146 New Zealand 14, 32 Nicobar islands 155, 200–1, 228; see also Andaman and Nicobar Islands Nippon Foundation 118 Nishihara, Masashi 48 non-aligned foreign policy 12 Northeast Asian conflict risk 106 North Korea 54, 80, 82–3, 85, 106, 214, 228 North Pacific Coast Guard Forum 215 nuclear power and technology issues 15–16 nuclear-powered submarines 23, 25, 49, 52, 166, 238 nuclear proliferation prevention 82–3 nuclear weapons 54, 106–7 Obama administration 16, 36, 38 offshore defence doctrine 28–9, 41, 77, 165–7 oil pollution 82, 101, 157, 201–2

252 Index Okinawa 51 OODA-loop 133 Operation Atalanta 180 Ottomans 61 outer space missions 18 overfishing 91–2 Pakistan 19, 32, 49, 50, 90, 150, 157, 191, 212, 227 Palme, Olof 199 Panikkar, K. M. 59, 68–9 pan-Tonkin Gulf Economic Cooperation Zone 218 Paracel Islands 54, 174, 216 Partnership in Environmental Management for the Seas of East Asia (PEMSEA) 215 Peace-07 exercises 213 peaceful development strategy 148–9, 167 Penghong, Cai 72 People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) 22–34, 48–9, 150, 223, 233–4, 237; active defence strategy 28–31, 149; Aegis-like combat systems 25, 30, 49; air and missile defence systems 27–8; aircraft carriers 28, 30, 49, 76, 237; anti-access operational concept 78, 166–7, 236; anti-piracy deployment 22, 38, 42, 180–1; Chinese national defence policy 30–1, 149; defence consultations with major powers 212–13; defence modernization (1980–1995) 22–3; developing blue-water capability (1985–2020) 23–5, 239; expansion and arms race reactions 239; free-ride of international security system 32; funding priority 165, 237; future development of 25–8, 146–51, 233; Gulf of Aden deployment 31, 77; informatization 147; Japanese concerns 48–9; joint maritime exercises 32, 149, 213; justification for build-up 227–8; missiles 23, 25, 27, 32, 34, 41, 49, 166, 171; offshore defence doctrine 28–9, 41, 77, 165–7; regional anxieties over build-up 31–2; replenishment capability 238; sacred mission 75–6; submarine force 23, 25, 26, 49, 166, 169, 211; training and personnel improvement 147–8; transparency 212, 220; U.S. maritime integration initiatives and 32; U.S. naval response to expansion 32; vessel inventory 24–5 Percival, Bronson 36 Permal, Sumathy 87

Philippines 101, 214; Chinese maritime cooperation 214; defence budget 109; ferry attacks 105; Moro Islamic Liberation Front 101; Spanish imperialism 62; U.S. naval base 132; U.S. relations 44, 66 piracy 172, 173, 200; China and 22, 38, 74, 77; Cooperative Mechanism and 114; Japan and 172, 176–7; Malacca Strait Patrols 40; 19th century ‘gun-boat diplomacy’ 64, 70; ReCAAP agreement 54, 120, 154, 177–8, 180; Somali coastal anti-piracy operations 22, 38, 42, 81, 85; Southeast Asia 101; South Korea and 82, 85; Western colonialism versus 64; see also anti-piracy operations pollution 74, 82, 101, 157, 201–2 Portuguese imperialism 59–60 port vulnerabilities 135–6 power, Realist school of thought 3–4 Prakash, Arun 1 Proliferation Security Initiative (PSI) 32, 40, 83, 91, 124, 220 Protection of Vital Shipping Lanes initiative 122 Qi, Xu 198 radar 135, 139, 140 Realist school of thought 3–4 Regional Cooperation Agreement on Combating Piracy and Armed Robbery against Ships (ReCAAP) 54, 120, 154, 177–8, 180 Regional Maritime Training Centre 121 Republic of Korea (ROK) Navy 50–1; see also South Korea risk assessment methodology 100–1, 110 Romeo-class submarines 23, 25 Royal Australian Navy (RAN) 184; aircraft carriers 189; Air Warfare Destroyers 185–6, 188; ANZAC-class frigates 185, 187; capabilities 187; defence requirements context 184–6; maritime security cooperation 190–2; modernization and future of 188–90; origins 186; roles and missions 186–8; submarines 185, 187, 188 Rudd, Kevin 15 Rules of Engagement (ROE) 229–30 Rumsfeld, Donald 198 Russian Navy 50

Index 253 saffron revolution 42 Sarawak 62 science cooperation 215, 228 sea-level rise 103, 200 sea lines of communication (SLOCs) xii; Chinese security concerns 73–5, 227–8; Korean perspectives 81–2; U.S.-India cooperation 43; U.S. Navy and Chinese interests 41; U.S. Southeast Asian maritime policy and 44 seapower 131–4; see also naval power security, defining 198–9 Selden, John 60 sensor systems 139–43 Shang-class submarines 25, 26 Shangri-La Dialogue 109, 111, 198, 206, 228, 239 Singapore: British naval base 132; Indian maritime cooperation 89; joint maritime exercises 32; naval defence example 134–6; U.S. relations 38, 44; see also littoral states Singapore, Malacca Strait issues: see Cooperative Mechanism for the Straits of Malacca and Singapore; Malacca Strait Singapore conference 1, xii Singapore Straits 1, 99–100; boundary disputes 103; territorial sovereignty 124; terrorism vulnerability 105 Sino-Indian relations: see China-India relations smuggling 102 Somali coast anti-piracy operations 22, 38, 42, 81, 85, 180–1 Somali coast piracy incidents 74, 82, 200 sonar 135 Song-class submarines 25, 26 South China Sea 74, 78–9, 87–8; ASEAN conflict threat 108; ASEAN use of force policy 121; combined China-Taiwan power 234; Declaration on the Conduct of Parties in 215–18, 229–30; environmental protection cooperation 215; fisheries incidents 103; Japan and 121; joint petroleum exploration 218; maritime boundaries 88, 103, 170; new Chinese policy 216–18; pan-Tonkin Gulf Economic Cooperation Zone 218; piracy and sea crime 101; pollution 101 Southeast Asia, ASEAN: see ASEAN

Southeast Asia, maritime history 56, 67; European colonialism 59–65; Indianization 57; Islam 58; Malacca Sultanate 58–9, 61; mandala system 57; modern Indo-Pacific maritime space 66–7; new geopolitical equilibrium 65–7; piracy and ‘gun-boat diplomacy’ 64, 70; ‘Vasco da Gama epoch’ 59; Zheng He Ming-era naval voyages 22, 56–8 Southeast Asia, regional maritime security issues 99–113, 241–2; ASEAN conflict 108; China-India rivalry implications xii, 18–20, 107–8, 232, 233, 234–5, 241; Chinese maritime cooperation 89–90, 214–18; climate change 103–4; cooperation and confidence-building 227–31; enduring and dynamic factors 99; fisheries incidents 102–3; India 88–9, 152–62, 221; intruder submarines 104; Japanese Coast Guard assistance 178–9; maritime boundaries 103, 105, 230; natural disasters 102; new Chinese policy 216–18; Northeast Asian conflict 106; piracy and sea crime 101; pollution 101; regional defence spending 107–10, 236; resistance to U.S. initiatives 19, 124; risk assessment matrix 100, 110–11; risk assessment methodology 100–1; smuggling 102; sovereignty disputes 105; terrorism 91, 105; trade relations and economic cooperation 153–4; U.S.-China competition 44; U.S. maritime interests and 43–5; U.S. security footprint 38–9; WMD incident 106–7; see also ASEAN; specific nations, regions Southeast Asia Cooperation Against Terrorism (SEACAT) exercises 45 Southeast Asian littoral states: see littoral states; specific nations Southeast Asian regional maritime security forums 111; see also ASEAN; specific institutions South Korea 80–6; ASEAN Plus Three 14; Chinese maritime cooperation 81, 214; defence budget 108; island and sea boundary disputes 80–1; Japanese relationship 52–3; Malacca Strait and 122; maritime security issues 80–4; maritime security policy and strategy 84–5; naval growth and operations 50–1; North Korea security

254 Index issues 54, 80; piracy concerns 82; U.S. alliance 84; U.S. security footprint 38 Soviet maritime defence strategy 165 Soviet-U.S. naval confrontations 228–9 Sovremenny-class destroyers 23, 25, 49 Spanish imperialism 62 Spratly Islands 54, 88, 170, 174, 227, 230 S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS) 1, xii Srivijaya 57 STARFISH exercises 93 Stockholm International Peach Research Institute (SIPRI) 159–60 Strait of Malacca: see Malacca Strait ‘String of Pearls’ strategy 19, 41–2, 47, 88, 90, 157, 232, 235 submarines: Australian fleet 185, 187, 188; blockade tactics 139; Chinese fleet 23, 25, 26, 49, 166, 169, 211; detecting 135; enemy identification 142; Indian Navy 49; intruder incidents 104; nuclear-powered 23, 25; personnel differences 130; proliferation 235, 237; ROK Navy 51; targeting merchant shipping 135; tracklessness 134; U.S. maritime strategy versus 164; U.S. Navy 52 Suez Canal 63 Sulawesi Sea 88 Sulu Sea 88, 101, 102 Sulu Sultanate 62 sustainable development 74 Taiwan 170, 220; Chinese naval build-up 25, 41, 227; Chinese naval contingency strategy 28, 146, 167, 290; Chinese strategic goals 211, 221, 223; Chinese vulnerability 77; Japanese concerns 52; missile crises 1995–96 23, 29; threat of conflict 82, 106; unified Chinese maritime power 233–4; U.S. naval planning 43, 45, 165; U.S. separatist policy 78 Taliban 134 Tasman Sea 32 territorial and boundary disputes 74, 80–1; EEZs 70, 80, 92, 103; South China Sea 88, 103, 170; Southeast Asia 103, 105, 230 terrorism 74, 172; Chinese joint counterterrorism exercise 213; India and 156; Japanese participation in combating 175–6; Malacca Strait vulnerability 105, 200; Malaysian-U.S. cooperation 91;

Proliferation Security Initiative (PSI) 32, 40, 83, 91; Southeast Asia and 91, 105; U.S. “global war against” 45, 91 Thailand 65, 121, 214 Thousand-Ship Navy 32, 40, 221 Thucydides 4 Tibet 17, 149 Tomahawk missiles 52, 189 Tong, Goh Chok 13 Tonkin Gulf region 137, 217–218 training 130, 147 transparency: see military transparency Treaty of Amity and Cooperation (TAC) 53–4 Tripartite Technical Experts Group (TTEG) 116, 122, 201 tsunamis 66, 82, 156, 202 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) 200; Cooperative Mechanism and 115, 116–17, 123; data collection regulation 41; “peaceful use of the sea” 228 United Nations Environment Programme 215 United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research (UNIDIR) 241 United Nations peacekeeping operations 157, 175 United Nations Security Council 15 unmanned vehicles 52, 141 U.S.-China relations: see China-U.S. relations U.S.-India relations: see India-U.S. relations U.S.-Japan relations: see Japan-U.S. relations U.S.-Japan Security Treaty 174 U.S.-Malaysia relations 44, 91, 93 U.S. maritime policy and security issues 36–40, 78, 163–70; “A Cooperative Strategy for 21st Century Seapower” 39–40, 163; China 16, 32, 36, 40–2, 78, 164–9, 219–22; Container Security Initiative 91, 215–16; Cooperative Mechanism support 118, 120, 124; exclusion from East Asia Summit 14; Global Maritime Partnership 32, 37, 40; gradual recalibration 36–7; humanitarian assistance 40, 46, 66, 163; Indian strategic partnership 36, 38, 42–3, 232; Japan-Australia-India democratic quad 16; Proliferation Security Initiative 32, 40, 83, 91, 124, 220; Southeast Asia 19,

Index 255 43–5; submarine threat 164; Taiwan 25, 29, 41, 45, 78, 82, 167, 170; Thousand-Ship Navy 32, 40, 221 U.S. National Intelligence Council report 10 U.S. Navy: anti-ballistic missile capability 169; Asia-Pacific international security system 32; Asia-Pacific operations 51–2; ASW capability 169; Chinese anti-access operational concept 78, 166–7, 236; Chinese open SLOC interests and 41; Chinese power and 164–5; gradual recalibration 45; historical development of 144; historical emergence 65; humanitarian assistance 66; Indian naval cooperation 38, 238; Japanese perspectives 51–2; maritime security cooperation and 20; new ‘Maritime Strategy’ 39–40, 163; response to Chinese expansion 32; Seventh fleet 164; Southeast Asian cooperative operations 44–5 USNS Impeccable 41, 228, 233 U.S. security footprint 38–9 USS George Washington 49, 168 USS McCain 233 U.S.-South Korea alliance 84 U.S.-Soviet naval confrontations 228–9

USS Stark 140, 230 U.S. surveillance and intelligence gathering 40, 41, 228 USS Vincennes 137, 230 ‘Vasco da Gama epoch’ 59 Vietnam 57, 73, 88, 108, 135, 152, 203, 212, 215, 216–18, 221, 227–8 Wanandi, Jusuf 15 weapons of mass destruction (WMD) 82–3; North Korean threat 106; Proliferation Security Initiative (PSI) 32, 40, 83, 91; threats 106–7 Western Pacific Naval Symposium (WPNS) 32, 104, 150, 198, 206, 213, 240 Westphalian system 61, 67, 199 ‘Whisky on the Rocks’ incident 104 Xia-class submarines 23, 25 Xiaoping, Deng 3, 22 Yellow Sea 74 Yuan-class submarines 25, 26, 49 Zheng He naval voyages 22, 56, 57–8, 77