Eleventh Annual South China Sea Conference: Session Three

welcome to csis online the way we bring you events is changing but we'll still present live analysis and award-winning digital media from our drakopolis ideas lab all on your time live or on demand this is csis online for those who don't know my name's greg poland i direct the southeast asia program and the asian maritime transparency initiative here at csis and this is the third of four panels for this year's south china sea conference the eleventh annual csi south tennessee conference uh like everything else because of cobit we've had to move this thing virtual normally this would be a one day big shindig here in dc instead we're doing it over the course of several months so the last one will be next month uh as a reminder everything that you hear and see today is going to be on the record all these speakers are presenting on their personal behalf not for any organizations we will have the whole thing up on youtube and csis.org in a day or so after the event so if you missed any of it you can check it out there we'll also be live tweeting it over on the nti and southeast asia program twitter handles and the event today is made possible by generous support from the foundation for ec studies at the different academy of vietnam the embassy of new zealand the mc of japan and the embassy of australia here in washington dc as well as general support to csis i think that's all of my housekeeping for today and so next i'm going to go ahead and introduce our excellent panel of speakers we're going to hear from three today on the general topic of the military balance at the moment in the south china sea so first up we're going to hear from michael dom mike is a senior national security researcher at john hopkins university's applied physics laboratory he was previously a career naval intelligence officer and served as assistant naval attache in china at the senior naval intelligence officer for china at the office of naval intelligence then we'll turn to big tron vic is a phd scholar at the university of antwerp a fellow ed for research and most importantly a non-resident adjunct fellow here at the southeast asia program at csis and she was previously a business research fellow at the global affairs research center at the east west center and at richard macon center for asia pacific studies in japan and then finally we will hear from blake herzinger blake is a pacific forum non-resident wsd honda fellow uh at pacific forum and the u.s navy reserve office blake spent 13 years uh in the navy as an intelligence officer with experience across the pacific and the middle east and his research focuses on indo-pacific security broadly so with that let me shut up and turn the floor over to our first speaker mike dom mike okay thank you very much greg i'm very pleased to be here and thankful to csis for providing me with the opportunity to contribute to the discussion today on military power in the south china sea go ahead and share my screen here if i don't hear otherwise i am going to assume that you can see me or see my slides rather okay i'm obligated to say at the outset that the analysis and opinions i'm providing today are my own and do not necessarily reflect those at the johns hopkins university applied physics laboratory or its sponsors so if you visit apl's website and click through to the publications you can find my south china sea military capabilities studies it's a series of 10 publications organized into different technology areas it's largely based on high high resolution commercial satellite imagery and chinese language sources and this series focuses on china's bases in the spratlys and outlines many of the military capabilities i'll be discussing here today so i assume this audience is familiar with the geography of the region but the spratly islands are in the southern reaches of the south china sea about 1300 kilometers or 700 nautical miles south of the chinese mainland there in spratly seven reefs occupied by china are interspersed with dozens of other features that are occupied by vietnam the philippines malaysia and taiwan the red dash line you see here is called the nine dash line with within which china has claimed indisputable sovereignty you know the problem being that everyone else with claims in the south china sea disputes china's indisputable sovereignty so in 2013 the people's liberation army or pla began building artificial islands which i'm going to be calling island reefs on top of the features that they occupied those island reefs were developed into military bases that were substantially complete in 2018. these bases provide an interesting and unique case study on the types of military capabilities that the pla values on the mainland chinese military capabilities that might be associated with pla base could be scattered across many square miles of chinese countryside but in the south china sea many of those systems and capabilities are concentrated on these island reefs so as a researcher on a budget i could purchase just a few high-resolution commercial satellite images in order to study how the pla brings together different military capabilities in the south china sea and greg i know that you've emphasized this over the years but you really do have to appreciate just how big china's artificial islands are if you overlay the island reefs over washington dc the lagoon of mischief reef would encompass arlington national cemetery the pentagon downtown dc national stadium fiery cross reef is about the same size as the reagan national airport complex i recently spoke at the air university at maxwell air force base and i used their base as an example for a size comparison with the chinese base at subi reef the bottom line is that the major chinese outposts are large enough to support virtually any weapon system or aircraft in the pla inventory but while we often focus on weapon systems and ranges i think we sometimes lose sight of what is at the center of the pla's informationized warfare strategy namely information or battle space information control the island reefs create a dense network of communication surveillance and reconnaissance capabilities the island reefs have been wired with undersea fiber optic cable several different types of satellite communications high frequency broadband troposcatter communications a variety of line-of-sight communications the list goes on and on what this means for pla ships and military aircraft operating in the south china sea is that they may be able to operate in relative silence with communications and radars turned off making them difficult to detect and difficult to target while the island reefs quietly generate and then broadcast battle space awareness and in a very simple example of how the island reefs provide reconnaissance communications and command and control we can look at an example from this past spring the one at whitson reef you may recall the reports of chinese fishing boats allegedly part of the pla navy's maritime militia occupying whitson reef and forcing out foreign fishing vessels this satellite image shows the fishing vessels spread out at the union banks whitson reef is in the upper right and uh in the lower left you can see hughes reef one of china's smaller artificial island outposts so hughes reef provided the chinese with significant information overmatch compared to the philippine vessels that were being harassed and muscled out by the chinese fishing boats china's south china sea bases gave the gave the chinese military an outstanding information baseline on foreign activity of whitson reef what you might call pattern of life so that they could select the time and place where they wanted to intervene in that conflict as you can see here hughes provided the pla with radar and communications coverage giving them superior situational awareness and the ability to easily communicate with and control their militia forces at whitson but instead of focusing on the essence of chinese the chinese military informationized warfare strategy we instead tend to focus on weapons and hard power things that go kaboom and you know who doesn't like things that go boom for example we've there have been media reports that china has deployed long-range surface-to-air missiles or sands on the island reefs and while no one has seen these missiles in commercial satellite imagery or other open source images if they are there they're most likely housed in these garages that you see in these images there are eight garages on each major chinese island reef which is enough for the eight launchers that would make up a typical chinese surface-to-air missile battalion similarly similarly the media has reported that there are surface-to-surface missiles specifically the very scary yj-12 anti-ship cruise missile deployed to the island reef the yj-12 is a long-range supersonic anti-ship cruise missile that's shown there in the upper left-hand photo so again no one has spotted these missile launchers in commercial satellite imagery but if these missile systems are deployed to the island reefs they are likely housed in garages that look like these on subi reef so while it sounds provocative to say that china is militarizing the island reefs with weapons i wouldn't oversell the idea that china is going to use those weapons for power projection in point of fact as you can see here the instantaneous striking power of the island reefs does not equal the striking power of just three pla navy ships in this case a cruiser a destroyer and a frigate but this is just a comparison with three ships if the pla navy were to deploy 10 or 20 ships in the south china sea which is not unrealistic you start to get the idea that the missiles on the island reefs may just be there for defensive purposes deployed pla navy ships and submarines could bring over 1 000 surface-to-air or surface-to-surface missiles into a conflict in the south china sea the real value of the island wreath supposed both in terms of combat power and battle and battle space awareness is both the isr and the communications that are generated by the island and as you can see here air power what china's south china sea airfields really provide to the pla is range that's pretty obvious they're 700 nautical miles south of the chinese mainland but that additional range translates into greater on station time greater time in the air for aircraft doing their mission especially special mission aircraft and uavs that are providing communications and reconnaissance again information being at the core of china's informationized warfare strategy so the pla could certainly fly a line type aircraft like the kj 500 airborne early warning and control aircraft or the kq-200 anti-submarine warfare aircraft all the way down to the strait of malacca in the vicinity of singapore from the chinese mainland but at that range even those long-range aircraft would have to turn around for a return flight within about an hour basing these command and control and reconnaissance aircraft on the island on the artificial islands means that they can operate for an extended period of time all the way out to the gulf of thailand or the celibacy in fact flying from the spratlys a y-9 isr aircraft could circumnavigate the island of borneo to surveil activity in the java sea and while we expect that fighter aircraft and possibly even bombers will be deployed to these island reef bases eventually what we're seeing right now is the deployment of special mission aircraft and helicopters in june of 2020 we saw kj 500 radar aircraft and kq-200 anti-submarine warfare aircraft deployed to fiery cross reef airfield those surveillance and reconnaissance aircrafts are still apparently operating from fiery cross but in june and july of this year in 2021 uh this airbus i apologize this airbus uh commercial satellite imagery spotted special emission aircraft in helicopters also operating from subi reef and mischief reef indicating that those airfields are now fully operational there was an article in chinese press indicating that a y20 large transport aircraft rotated troops off at least one of the island reefs at the end of last week so i expect we're going to be hearing more about chinese military aircraft deployments to the south china sea in the coming year so this has been a very very quick introduction to chinese military power in the south china sea you could talk about this for hours but the bottom line is that whatever military capabilities are deployed to the south china sea by the chinese how far and how accurately chinese weapons can shoot is going to be determined by how far the pla can see and hear the island reefs are key nodes in a south china sea system of systems that creates networked communications and reconnaissance extending strike and power projection capabilities well beyond the island reefs themselves and shifting to the to the north for one final note while lots of folks me included have focused on chinese activities in the spratly islands we should probably be looking more closely at recent activities and forced deployments on hainan island in the past 18 months or so the pla rocket force has completed the construction of a missile base on hainan island there is significant construction and ongoing at a small airfield in sanya that hosts pla navy helicopters and unmanned aerial vehicles or ua beats they've effectively tripled the amount of hangar space just at that one airfield construction at lengshui airfield appears to be complete hangers there have been construction for what is probably an aircraft carrier fighter squadron and many more special mission aircraft have been deployed to that airfield according to commercial satellite imagery there was a parking area built at uh chiang hai boau airport on the east side of hainan island in 2017 but just looking at google earth you can now see that a large number of kq-200 anti-submarine warfare aircraft are based there in the spratlys the paracel islands in the spratly islands the paracel islands and on hinon island the military infrastructure has been significantly improved to support chinese military capabilities in the south china sea so i think what we're going to start seeing in the near future is the pla putting that infrastructure to use and beginning to actively exercise military capabilities in the south china sea and those conclude my remarks so i will turn it back over to greg thanks mike uh i think this is the part where i'm contractually obligated to plug the new power projection map that amti rolled out last week which shows how uh the isr capabilities on the island can facilitate chinese naval and particularly carrier operations as far as south and south tennessee reiterating your point that the islands are not the end of the story and we've i think amti included been far too focused on what's been built just on on the big three and spratly's but let me turn the mic over now to victron you're on music thanks greg and thanks csis for inviting me to join this conference um so in the late 1980s vietnam already felt an urgent need to modernize its militaries after china used force to see several features from it in the battle of spratly islands in the 1988 that led to the death of 64 vietnamese soldiers however not until 2001 that hanu decided to invest in equipping the military with modern technologies emphasizing on a foreign policy of independence and self-reliance vietnam met 17 orders of major conventional weapons between 2001 and 2005. in the next five years vietnam doubled its defense spending with 27 arms orders mostly from russia among those the most prominent transaction was a two billion dollars contract in 2009 to buy six russian mid kilo class submarines the first one was delivered in december 2013 and the last one was handed over to vietnam people's navy in january 2017. the submarines can conduct anti-submarine anti-ship and patrol missions vietnam also equipped them with russian supersonic cruise missiles with the commission of the last submarines vietnam is said to have the most modern submarine fleet in south asia since then naval power has been vietnam's priority in its military military modernization programs during the 11th national congress of the communist party of vietnam in 2011 the leaders promised to ensure armed forces are gradually equipped with modern technologies first of all for the navy from 2011 to 2015 vietnam placed about 19 orders of major weapons and this period also marked a turbulent terms in the south china sea and china has conducted large-scale reclamation and militarization of contested features since 2014 is also deployed a wide range of missiles on those artificial structures which could be used to deny other countries access to maritime and air domains in the south china sea furthermore in may 2020 2014 china deployed a state-owned oil rig into vietnam's exclusive economic zone sparking anti-china protests across the country during the 12th national congress in 2016 vietnamese leader made it clear that it was necessary to increase resources for defence and security to protect the country is in the new situation vietnam's military spending increased almost seven times between 2003 and 2018 however it has stayed around two percent of the country's gdp uh so you know despite vietnam's modernization efforts it defense budget is only a fraction of china's for example beijing spent 200 252 billion dollars on military in 2018 which was 45 times higher than of hanoi at 5.5 billions so i got this you know this uh data from uh cpr um and you know like i wrote an article about a year ago but back then those data were not not available so i used different sources so the number was a slightly higher difference but the point is that beijing is spending a lot more on military than vietnam but after the oil incident in 2014 there was a shift in vietnam strategy in addition to self-help efforts vietnam has intensifies defense cooperation with other countries with long experience in operating russian class submarines in the mid 1980s india has helped vietnam train hundreds of vietnamese sellers in comprehensive underwater combat operations since 2013. in addition india has offered vietnam a total of 600 million dollars for defense purchases japan has helped vietnam improve its maritime law enforcement capabilities with seven used votes in 2014 an official development assistant loan for six brand new vessels in 2017 and a loan from the japan international corporation agency to buy six coast guard vessels in 2020 south korea transferred a program-class covert to vietnam in 2018 it is equipped to perform anti-submarine internship and anti-aircraft affair warfare operations the united states has provided security assistance to vietnam through the maritime security initiative the cooperative threat production program and foreign military financing the u.s coast guard has transferred two hamilton class cutters worth 51 million dollars in total to vietnam called gas in 2017 and 2020. the two vessels was transferred to vietnam under the u.s access defense articles program that offers surplus military equipment to u.s allies and partners using funds from u.s foreign military financing since 2017 the united states also provided a vietnam with 18 metro partial boats for law enforcement nations against smuggling trafficking piracy and illegal fishing fishing so security assistance from these countries has improved vietnam maritime law enforcement capabilities so i went here and i look forward to the questions thank you thank you vic all right uh let's turn to our uh cleanup hitter blake kurtzinger mike all right thanks very much greg and thank you to ci csis and uh to your outstanding support staff as well danielle and mary in particular helped me square away everything i've done wrong over the last week um thanks mike and uh and bic have really enjoyed your comments so i'm going to share my screen here and i'm going to talk a bit about u.s capacity building in maritime southeast asia so as big mentioned actual actually um cutter 8020 is one of the cutters that the united states has provided to vietnam through the access defense articles program so if you look at american security cooperation and capacity building in southeast asia over the past 20 years it really has roots in transnational terrorism uh very much based on this you know the traumatic event that we've just uh passed the anniversary of on september 11th we're very focused on countering proliferation and impeding non-state actors and terrorists from conducting other attacks the the drum beat was very much uh avoiding another 911 and helping our partners do the same and so somewhere during the obama presidency um you could see a slow turn towards what we would now call you know strategic competition or some might call great power competition um i think it's still to be debated what exactly that that is and how it how it really takes shape but one of the main priorities in the united states right now is increasing reliance on actually a lot of non-military organizations to achieve objectives because as i'm going to talk about here shortly a number of the issues that our partners and allies face and they need support in are not what the united states traditionally holds as defense issues um and and to be honest the beginning was rough uh it was it was not great uh we led off with something called the regional maritime security initiative in 2004. um that was focused on on supporting maritime domain awareness in the malacca and singapore straits it was meant to have a decision-making mechanism as well as like a standing standby maritime force and as it turns out southeast asia was not in the market for that and no one wanted it so our msi went away i actually still have one of the little tri-fold brochures it's hidden away in the desk drawer just like the rmsi um shortly after that our global train and equip program which was under then section 1206 in 2000 fiscal year 2006 uh we had a lot of projects where we found a lot of money and we put it into security cooperation capacity building projects that um subsequent reports have shown to be ineffective uh the planning wasn't good the strategy was poor um and then there was no plan to support them long term so they sort of rotted on the vine things rusted things broke there weren't spare parts so our early years of trying to do this were fairly dismal and then kind of we enter into what i would call our best our best years really in the region with the maritime security initiative now it was initially released as a south china sea maritime security initiative it was announced here in singapore the shangri-la dialogue in 2015. uh it later became the southeast asia maritime security initiative and would now be called the indo-pacific maritime security initiative some of these shifts have been name only and some have actually added countries to the initiative so it began with five south china sea countries and now spreads into the indian ocean includes partners like sri lanka bangladesh india and the big pivot that you see here that's been effective is that the united states has moved away from high technology very complicated very expensive exquisite systems essentially that were difficult to maintain and that weren't prepared to be absorbed by by our partners so we've emphasized things like training and education information sharing uh secure communications networks and particularly maritime domain awareness and there have been under msi and some other initiatives things like uh aerial surveillance maritime patrol aircraft uh the uh the coast guard cutters that vic mentioned smaller patrol craft uh also actually vic you gave a lot of my best points we should be doing this together the the metal shark boats that's been that's been a kind of a common thread throughout the msi so that's been great but um the future is a bit nebulous on msi right now um it's a large commitment the initial five-year commitment was 425 million dollars when that period ran out in 2020 the program was extended to 2025 but without another authorization for funding and it has since been subsumed into other funding processes that i'll talk about here in a second uh so a lot of what we do for capacity building has routes and exercises which also lead us back to that early counter-terrorism mindset so we had the cooperation of float readiness uh and training exercise and the southeast uh southeast asia cooperation and training the t in those exercises used to be again against terrorism so now we're talking about training 15 years ago we were talking about terrorism and then more recently for observers you would have seen the asean u.s maritime exercises held in 2019 that was one of the very rare opportunities you know the united states has to actually interact with all asean partners is a bit uh controversial even then probably more so now um but you know the us navy rarely gets to do an event with cambodia or myanmar at this point and so that was uh that was something very different and preceding that was a similar activity that asean and china had conducted so there was a bit of comparison um there and somehow kind of tried to make the case that the u.s was chasing what china was doing and you draw your own conclusion there one of the big capacity building focus areas has been institution building as i mentioned a lot of those early projects were very hardware intensive and there just weren't institutions ready to kind of absorb them and integrate them into operations so the defense security cooperation agency uh now has a lot of focus on that things like the defense institution reform initiative and the institute for security governance in hawaii of the asia pacific center for security studies and these these organizations are more on the human side more focused on human human capital development which arguably is a lot more successful than a high technology capacity building so there's still a big imbalance you know uh there's a lot of a lot of rhetoric around the united states priority theater being the indo-pacific but that's really not borne out in the the funding allotment for security cooperation to be honest uh obviously for years major wars in the middle east uh put centcom well well ahead of all the other geographic combatant commands europe had several very large security cooperation capacity building initiatives by the european uh deterrence initiative uh which saw you know billions in overseas contingency operations funding being poured into the middle east and europe while pacific indo-pacific lag behind so it is sort of evening out now but it's still um if you were looking at the numbers uh you would not see a priority theater in the numbers so what are we going to see in the future um i think i think it's hard to say i think that msi was very very successful and it's in its first round of five years and its second round of five years still similar programs but i think that the bureaucracy is getting more difficult um capacity building as i mentioned doesn't really reflect the priority theater piece yet hopefully with the drawdown um and the the exit from afghanistan we see a change there but that's yet to be seen there is a very interesting transparency issue if you look into the documentation from the dod comptroller you'll see that the maritime security initiative which used to be a freestanding authorization is now uh encapsulated within the international security cooperation programs account so that makes it very difficult to say how much money msi is going to get um and it makes it hard for our capacity building professionals to plan ahead that that was a change that happened during the trump administration went to the national defense strategy implementation ndsi account and now uh for fy 22 it is this iscp account uh the pacific deterrence initiative this is actually something that i had the opportunity to ask admiral harry harris about years ago when he was at indo pacom and i think his answer then actually four or five years later is now uh to be very true he saw that very much as a us capabilities only he wanted to buy missiles with it um not a partner you know building partner capacity type of fund and i think that's what we've seen come out of washington this year it's not tied to meaningful capacity building it will not have the overseas contingency operating funds which gave things like the edi the book you know tens of billions of dollars to put into europe over the course of a number of years so it's not going to be the same um so i think it's very much to be decided um we'll see what the biden administration decides to do and that's it from me thank you all for your patience great thank you blake and thank you to all three of the panelists we'll move into q a now uh since we're on zoom as always i'd ask you to use the q a function go ahead and type your question in if you could please identify yourself and your institution that's always helpful the speakers know who they're responding to or defending themselves against and uh i think i'm gonna start off with with a quick question abusing the prerogative of of the chair blake just following up on your presentation so mike's prep dave i think pretty clearly showed that china has a pretty solid operating picture over the south china sea the explicit goal as i recall of the south china sea maritime security initiative as written was to develop a common operating picture over the south china sea among all u.s allies and partners how do we do it depends what metric you want to use greg and i know you've written a a great piece on on south china sea mda for the navy war college so i will say at the beginning there was a big idea that it should be a very high-tech very secure dedicated cop a common operating picture um similar to something that the u.s navy would use but then we would share that with our partners and and it turns out you know as with a lot of uh projects that there wasn't interest we didn't have the trust to develop classified networks with partners the system didn't exist that we were ready to to field um so we lost some time to be honest trying to figure that out um centrix um a secure communications network that's been used in a number of other regions has been introduced in the indo-pacific a number of partners are now using that um and that does have a cop feature but i would say the greatest success that the u.s has had is in a a platform called c vision which was developed as you know by the department of transportation and it rides on the back of the maritime uh maritime security safety and security information system mssis and it's an unclassified mda platform that our partners can use and it's it's been very very effective i would say and that team has contributed a lot of time to enriching it and they're now at the point where they're pulling in a lot of subscription data which leverages you know that excellent public public-private partnership that we should be getting into with uh the low-cost data like a lot of the stuff that that mike used that stuff is out there for governments to use that don't have their own satellite networks um so i would say now we're in a better place but it's taken a while to get here great thank you all right let's let's turn to the audience cue starting to fill up so the first question comes from andrew k gilliam uh i think this one's just uh headed to mike first it's uh andrew asks what about china's underwater military assets in the south china sea uh does china now have a predominant comprehensive denial capability so i wouldn't describe it as a comprehensive denial capability uh i i don't think it's a huge secret to say that china is still challenged in the underwater domain the united states and the soviet union played cat and mouse for decades during the cold war and the united states you know still has that kind of undersea dominance uh in the in the indo-pacific region and china's well aware of that but for all their shortcomings in the underwater domain they're starting to do things in the air domain and the surface domain uh specifically with things like the kq 200 anti-submarine warfare warfare aircraft that i mentioned the type 56 a light frigate that has an asw that has an asw capability and has been produced in large numbers so you have to imagine again this networked system of systems where if china starts any conflict whether it's with the united states with vietnam or with another regional player that has an undersea warfare capability china starts the conflict with air and surface dominance which is to say it's going to be hard for anyone to get in there with their with their aircraft or their surface ships even if their submarines can and those anti-submarine warfare aircraft and surface ships are going to be hunting for those for those uh for those foreign submarines in the south china sea and you know even a stopped clock is right twice a day so if they can just keep making tracks back and forth searching for submarines they're probably going to run across something eventually and and again it's that networked system of systems that i keep emphasizing that is going to cause real challenges in the undersea domain going forward you know even even until china establishes an underwater asw capability on their own thanks mike uh it won't surprise anybody that we have a whole bunch of questions about august about the australia uk u.s uh new security arrangement and i'm gonna try to bundle these maybe just go down the line to all three of you so two of the the questioners um one being dominic scriven and the other being anonymous attendee simply asked please comment on august and the third uh our former intern karen lee here at css specifically asked vic we haven't heard any comment yet from vietnam about august do you have any sense of how hanoi is responding so maybe i'll start with bick and then i'll ask blake and mike for their general thoughts on what role august plays here yeah thanks so uh yet you write that i i haven't heard any official statement from vietnam either so it's difficult to guess but you know based on what happened you know hanoi has said about four knobs then since 2016 hanoi has had issues like multiple statements supporting for knobs so i'm not sure you know where the you know this time with the you know the nude pack you know people say that it's more serious and maybe vietnam will be more cautious in this issue than for now so that's what i think thank you thanks uh blake thoughts on august i think it's great um no i think i think it's unfortunate that um there may have been some mismanagement of expectations uh obviously there are some ruffled feathers in paris um i think some of that is a bit theatrical to be honest i think a bit of it has been overblown particularly among you know pundits and people who track the issue particularly continental europe i think have kind of blown it out of proportion um uh in terms of the u.s uk australia relationship i think it's i think it makes a lot of sense you know the uk is very well thought of in terms of uh what they do in in the region i think it gives them you know more of an opportunity to continue their tilt towards the indo-pacific uh to you know leverage the uh the opvs that they're sending out and uh and i think the submarines themselves that have kind of been at the focus of this this tripartite arrangement i think they make a lot of sense um it may be maybe quite expensive for the ran they uh royal australian navy will see how they manage that you know it's not an enormous navy but it is very capable um they're one of the only operators of a major flat top in the region so i i think the the grouping makes sense i think it's a positive partnership i think there's a lot of potential there but um maybe right now a lot of people are making more out of it than than we can see thanks blake mike you have any thoughts um i just would say you know in my opinion more alliances are better uh the united states has done a good job of managing networks of alliances against different uh regional threats and i think this is just another example of that whether it's you know august or the quad or the existing alliances that we have with japan you know the philippines partnership relationships with vietnam but but again i come back to uh something that was talked about in the last in the last question i guess it maybe was the first question uh in this session which was about that sort of info-sharing capability i think the real strength of something like augus uh is not just you know providing us australia with technology to build their own nuclear submarines but it's about creating alliances that that promote interoperability so you can share information so that those platforms uh that are part you know from those countries that are part of those partnerships and alliances can operate together and interoperate so so you can call upon them in a unified collective manner uh when facing down a conflict against an actor like china thanks mike and remember uh all of our french viewers can direct all comments and concerns to blake herzinger uh not this not the made csis uh big let me come back to you we had a related question from avinash kumar um about august versus aquat he asked which is going to be more effective and and i'd be curious how you think hanoi might be viewing them differently because vietnam's been pretty positive on the quad i'm pretty quiet about august yeah so i'm not sure what you mean by effective but you know of course they they are different and with the you know with orcas i think it's more formal a lot more formal and you know you know and it's also concentrated and emphasized a lot more on you know like militaries than you know traditional security issues so um i think it depends on what areas of cooperation that you're talking about then you can adjust the effectiveness of the two organization groups yep so we lit meta and like clear aggression so i just stopped i understand uh mike we've got two questions uh from stanley cover and quinn marshall both asking how climate change is going to affect the military utility of the islands and you know there's there's been a lot of talk in chinese journals that have leaked about sea water inundation and and on the long-term viability of the outpost so i have gotten that question before and the short answer is i'm really not sure i think the chinese probably built the artificial islands with sea level rise in mind they are very substantial very robust they're often described as sand castles or just piles of sand on top of a reef and they are a lot more than that if you take the time to look at it and some of the research and and writing that went into uh the design of those islands it's worth pointing out that china while they have had missteps in land reclamation going too fast uh buildings kind of leaning over in certain developments on on the mainland i don't see any indications that that's the case with the construction that happened uh in the spratly islands um they they appear to be quite substantial and i think they will uh they've been built to withstand typhoons should they come through the area and i expect that they will be able to handle you know several feet of sea level rise but i am not a climate change expert i don't know what the projections are for sea level rise in south china sea uh i just don't think the chinese are are i mean they are very experienced with these types of construction projects uh in in the civil sector and i expect that that is translated into the uh what we've seen in the south china sea thanks mike yeah i mean i i just said amti has monitored significant damage from storm surge to both fire cross and mr freeze as well as up in the paracels in the early stages of construction but beijing seems to have been pretty good about preventing that lately we haven't seen any serious damage over the last four or five years and while it's true that the underlying reefs are dead now unlike all the other reefs so they won't naturally rise the sea level like all the rest of spratly's that doesn't mean china can't keep building sea walls higher and higher and higher and i mean it's already spent who knows how many tens of billions or hundreds of billions of dollars i see no evidence that it can't keep up that expensive engineering marvel if it wants to let's um let's go to a question from elijah kilmer we've talked a lot about u.s partnerships in the region how they're building what do china's partnerships look like who are they pairing up with the region how are they operating like you want to start us off on this ebay greg um so the majority of chinese maritime partnership really comes in the form of commercial sales of uh or grants partial grants of military equipment there are a number of customers even in southeast asia that are very ready to acquire uh chinese ships chinese equipment of many types uh but but in terms of alliances and partnerships uh china famously has has none really saved maybe north korea if you wanted to count it um the partnership with pakistan outside of southeast asia certainly but still in the indo-pacific um is maybe somewhere between the two there is still the military commercial relationship there but uh you know i wouldn't call that an alliance it was in the same type of way that the us would use the word alliance there's a lot of military development you know submarines have been a hot topic uh selling them wherever they can a number of frigates those types of things but to date china has not approached partnerships and alliances in the same way that the united states does thanks uh could i also ask for your thoughts on this i mean in particular uh any uh path you see to china vietnam mill mill cooperation and how that may impact uh hanoi's strategy in the south china sea so i think that china vietnam's defense corporation mostly focused on high level contract you know exchange talks between leaders and then also focused on like for example joint patrols on the border areas so i don't know much about the corporation in the south china sea so if you know anything please share thank you all right greg if i could i i mean i think we have to mention the china's relationship with cambodia i recall seeing something recently about you know china have china according to the chinese foreign ministry a rock-solid relationship with cambodia and we have heard tell of a chinese base uh either a navy base or an airfield or both being built in cambodia and that really gives china and the chinese military in particular better access to the gulf of thailand to balance out the u.s relationship with the ties in that alliance structure that's a really good point mike and again contractually obligated to point our body to amtr's work on the rio naval base and there's the core air base um but yeah i think particularly the air assets and the potential for over the horizon sensing capabilities at ram are pretty significant for the gulf of thailand potentially for the the eastern indian ocean um let's go to a question from my colleague murray hebert is a non-resident senior associate here at csis yes mike uh china has all this hardware intel capability focused on the south china sea what do you think its long-term goals are is it just to rough up foreign fishers and stop hydrocarbon exploration i would actually take the position that you know hydrocarbon exploration and roughing up fishermen notwithstanding um the south china sea bases are really part of a defense in-depth strategy the the south china sea bases really extend china's southern frontier 700 miles south of the chinese mainland it allows them to operate aircraft carriers farther into the south china sea and and then through the strait of malacca as a gateway into the indian ocean um but but fundamentally china is still trying to protect china with the south china sea outposts people will talk about how well we could hit them with missiles and wipe everything off of the island in a matter of days but those islands are going to take a lot of missiles to handle the types of capabilities and the types of infrastructure that's already been built there and that is the thing that you are going to have to get through to get to things like strategic bases on hainan island missile bases the submarine piers the submarine ballistic missile pens on hainan island you now have to get through the south china sea islands to get to mainland china and i think it's part of a defense in depth strategy certainly there are issues with china's claims to territory china's claims of sovereignty over the south china sea and they would absolutely have application in seizing or in seizing other claimants outposts or or islands in the south china sea um or to again lay claim to fishing or hydrocarbon claims in the south china sea so we're gonna have to see how that plays out but uh it you know the the south china sea islands are not there for one purpose they are there for many purposes and we can't lose sight of that thanks i think you also touched on a question we had from gordon holden about how vulnerable the the bases are to attack uh and as you said they take a lot of missiles um if you have any other thoughts there well and again it's it's this you're not just attacking a sprig of sand with a with a missile battery on it um that would be far too simplistic in in and when you look at the concentric rings of reconnaissance and the concentric rings of firepower and then you combine those with ships and you combine those with aircraft and you can imagine this you know a conflict in the south china sea really having a layered defense where you don't just get to reach out with a missile and touch the south china sea outpost you have to get through layers and layers of defenses to get in a position to conduct your attack and even when your missiles get there in terms of survivability we have to again keep in mind how big these island reefs are that the uh there's lots there's lots of room to move things around so once again we come back to this idea of information control do you have enough real-time intelligence surveillance and reconnaissance to see where the missile launchers are moving around the island so that your missile doesn't just fall onto sand but actually hits what it's aiming at thanks mike uh next question comes from a friend of the show renato de castro uh at de la style university uh i'm gonna ask blake and vic to weigh in uh renato wants to talk about what other u.s allies are doing on capacity building south east asia he calls out tokyo soul and camber in particular blake do you want to start us off absolutely i think this ties in well also with the earlier mention of the quad um this is an area where i i hope the quad leverages some of this synergy between four partners because they are four major components of capacity building in the region and you're right to include korea as well uh to an extent but uh of those um i think japan has really been the quiet hero of capacity building in southeast asia over over decades really and they've done it very quietly and they've done it in a way that's politically acceptable and uh and partners are very eager to work with japan um and also a lot of the hiccups that i mentioned with the us not knowing exactly where to plug in and being maybe more defense focused uh japan was very wise in approaching it from a um you know civilian law enforcement perspective leveraging their coast guard and civilian elements of their government to prop up and to and to support partners across the region i think they're very active in that the australians have a very successful patrol boat program it's focused a lot on their periphery pacific offering uh patrol craft to uh to partner nations so they can better enforce their own uh domestic law and their exclusive economic zones uh earn their territories and patrol their economic zones um so yeah that's that's an ecosystem that i think all four countries will find if we want to say korea and include india need to ensure that they are aligned because it can be very easy to do good but be at cross purposes or even just out of alignment with a partner and you're both maybe teaching the same subject but teaching it two different ways or you're offering the same capability from two different directions and that becomes uh that quickly kind of overloads a partner who doesn't have the capacity to do three different radar programs right maybe we're installing one set of of coastal radars and we work together to make sure that our partners are trained and that the radars are maintained and these are areas where where all five of those partners can work together to achieve a lot more together thanks vic do you have any thoughts on on the role of past building from other allies and partners yes so in my presentation i mentioned that south korea donated corvette to vietnam in 2018 and i know that uh korea also gave us a vessel in the same class to the philippines and of course like japan has been very active in uh you know supporting vietnam and the philippines with you know patrols and also like beside the the three countries that he mentioned i see that india also is helping vietnam um but i'm not you know i haven't had a chance to look into detail about how australia has helped vietnam and other countries in the region thanks big uh blake let me come back to you with a question from charlie brown who i'm sure you know charlie asked what kind of review of security assistance and security cooperation funding levels and processes we can expect from the congress after the withdrawal from afghanistan will there be an afghanistan dividend benefiting indo-pacific partners well what i can tell you is that charlie brown probably knows more about security cooperation in southeast asia than well he's probably forgotten more about it than i will ever know um but we can all certainly hope that uh you know with the exit from afghanistan that we do find a way to re-prioritize the funds that we have been spending there and and put them towards um these initiatives in our priority theater because you know for two decades we haven't been able to do that and we have um you know we've really ran a lot of pots of money dry and and kind of run a force ragged supporting supporting a war um that is of course now over um so we can certainly hope so um but i think it remains to be seen i don't think that's clear i don't think that's been clearly communicated from the biden administration that that is their plan to necessarily reprioritize those funds for another defense purpose i think with some of the domestic priorities of the administration we might see them spent at home so i i guess we'll all find out thanks blake so we've got four minutes we've got 12 questions we're not going to get through them um i'm not even going to try instead i think i want to give each of you a chance for for final words and and maybe something a little forward-looking you know mike what do we do um about a chinese ifr dominance blake what do we do to get capacity building moving and bic what should vietnam be doing given as you pointed out the you know huge deficit uh it has with china in military spending mike why don't i well i think uh you know i've been thinking for a while that we tend to fight stuff with stuff instead of fighting strategy with strategy and um in this case i'm talking about sort of operational level strategy where you're taking you know tactics and capabilities and and and uh linking those to strategic outcomes um so at the operational level if you're trying to go up against an information-centric strategy and china believes that it needs this information superiority whether it's going to go after the philippines vietnam a u.s intervention or an alliance intervention you have to take that information away you have to to make china doubt whether or not they can achieve that information superiority either because china's opponent has greater information superiority or china cannot rely on its own ability to generate information superiority so i think you know the types of things that we talked about again at the outset i mentioned this already once in this q a session but the maritime security initiative efforts to integrate communications protect networks and create maritime domain awareness among allies and partners is one of the things that could be done that could have a significant impact uh on china's on china's confidence and its ability to gain and maintain information superiority in the south china sea thanks blake if i could do two things king for day i would fund the coast guard to do more capacity building in southeast asia i think they're a better fit for most partners i think they do an incredible job on a very tight budget and i would bring more you know cutters out as a part of that and second i would fundamentally change the department of defense to be able to work in the unclassified domain and away from the exquisite network of sensors that we prize for ourselves and think more about subscription-based services cloud-based services uh commercial satellite and be able to respond quickly to partners who have information needs um because right now i think we're very uncomfortable working in that domain and we're slow i think in general you know the twitter mda community is faster than the us government in terms of sharing information on mda on the coasties and uh make dod more like amti i like both of them uh vic yeah so and you know i think vietnam will never match the level of military spending at china and you know especially with the coffee dynamics effects on the economy i think that vietnam's military defense the spending will decrease uh but vietnam's main you know objective is to prevent conflict from happening not to you know deal with it uh so i think it will you know focus more on you know maritime domain awareness and especially in you know 2017 united states and vietnam agreed to you know uh increase you know intelligence sharing but i haven't heard anything from that so that may be what the two countries can focus on in the future thank you vic it's 10 o'clock on the dot it's time to call it uh thank you all very much mike blake for your time all of you for tuning in as a reminder this is the third of four so please look to your inboxes and social media for the date and registration link for our fourth and final panel which will happen sometime in october and everybody please have a great day great evening stay safe thank you thanks greg thank you thank you [Music] you

Channel: Center for Strategic & International Studies

Views: 2,371

Rating: 4.8095236 out of 5

Keywords: Center for Strategic and International Studies, CSIS, bipartisan, policy, foreign relations, national security, think tank, politics, south china sea

Id: lmmDNACLTZY

Length: 60min 39sec (3639 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 23 2021

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[u/dingjima]

2:44 to 14:05 provides a good overview of China's equipment in the Spratly islands and artificial reefs.

The .pdf form of Dahm's talk can be found here: https://www.jhuapl.edu/Content/documents/IntroductiontoSCSMILCAPStudies.pdf