Launching F-18s off 900-foot long aircraft carriers at night in rolling, pitching waters shows more than U.S. naval preparedness.
Multiple strike group exercises conducted in the South China Sea over the last several weeks were a sign of force to China, but they were also meant to assure regional partners, the commander of U.S. Indo-Pacific Command told the Washington Examiner.
“The United States routinely operates in the South China Sea, and we have for centuries,” INDOPACOM’s Adm. Phil Davidson told the Washington Examiner on a recent press call.
“We’ve been operating going back in the South China Sea to the founding of the country, and we’ll continue doing that going forward to help assure our allies and partners in the region,” he said. “But for our own needs as well, to demonstrate that that waterway is open to commerce and operations of all navies.”
Multiple dual-carrier exercises with the USS Nimitz and USS Ronald Reagan may have been planned weeks or months in advance, but they come in the wake of aggressive Chinese maritime activities against its neighbors and an attempt to take advantage of the coronavirus pandemic to flex its muscle in the region.
“What we are basically saying is, ‘Look, understand we’re keeping an eye on you and your behavior. We don’t accept this,’” said the Heritage Foundation’s Dean Cheng, a China expert who formerly worked at the Center for Naval Analysis.
Cheng told the Washington Examiner that a powerful show of force is a strong deterrent to China and may appeal to countries in the region that have been bullied both militarily and economically.
The U.S. also recently issued an emboldened South China Sea policy that rejects nearly all of China’s maritime territorial claims around the disputed Spratly and Parcel islands and Scarborough Shoal.
“What we are doing benefits from the fact that at this moment in time, the Chinese are probably less trusted than they were five years ago,” he explained, noting that the U.S. recognition of Malaysian, Vietnamese, and Thai maritime claims strengthen the country’s efforts to build stronger military alliances in the Pacific.
“This is a triple whammy: We do a two-carrier operation, which we haven’t done in the South China Sea in some time, we issue a statement, then we go out and do it again, which is to say, ‘And we can keep doing this,’” he added.
“Really powerful maritime capability”
Combined, the Nimitz and Reagan carrier strike groups brought to the theater several guided-missile cruisers and destroyers and 12,000 sailors and Marines.
Their Air Wings included dozens of F-18 Super Hornets fighters, EA-18G Growlers for electronic warfare, C-2 Greyhounds for transport, advance warning aircraft such as the E-2D Advanced Hawkeye, and Seahawk helicopters.
“Do you need carriers to show freedom of the seas?” posed Cheng. “You need really powerful maritime capability, and to a large extent, it has to be visible.”
While dual-carrier strike groups have operated continuously in recent years, the recent exercises in the South China Sea are the first since 2014.
Both Defense Secretary Mark Esper and Davidson have stressed freedom of navigation of late as the rationale for movements through the area, but Cheng said the carrier strike groups are doing more than passing through waters claimed by China.
“Multicarrier operations are also an enormous ballet,” he said, noting the need to practice complex coordination to confront modern threats.
“You are defending against Chinese anti-ship missiles from land, including ballistic missiles, anti-ship missiles from ships, anti-ship missiles from submarines, torpedoes, submarine attacks, fast attack craft — the Chinese have a lot of catamaran missile boats,” he said. “All these are things that you’ll need to be practicing how to do, and you may need to do it without doing any radio.”
Davidson confirmed this week that China was watching the exercises.
“We see them, and they see us,” he said Tuesday.
In a July 4 Twitter statement made through the Global Times, the mouthpiece for the People’s Liberation Army, China insinuated that it was allowing the American exercises to happen: “Any US #aircraftcarrier movement in the region is at the pleasure of the PLA.”
In addition to China’s powerful anti-ship ballistic missiles, featured in the tweet, both China and Russia are ahead of the U.S. in the integration of hypersonic weapons into their arsenals.
In part for these reasons, military strategists consider aircraft carriers’ future to be limited.
Cheng says the dual-carrier presence in the disputed waters was more than a military show of strength.
“It was political symbolism,” he said. “This is also saying, ‘This is just a fraction of the firepower that I as a nation can bring.’”
Esper dismissed the Chinese statement this week and emphasized that the American presence has to do with freedom of navigation and reassuring allies.
“I don’t know what the Chinese meant by that hollow statement about American carriers being there by the pleasure of the PLA,” Esper said at an International Institute of Strategic Studies discussion Tuesday.
“We’re going to sail, fly, and operate anywhere international law allows,” he said. “We do that, again, to assert international law and rights, to back up the sovereignty of our friends and partners, and to reassure them that we will be there.”
