U.S. Navy analysts are developing “creative” ways to counteract Chinese military technology in the event of a conflict in the South China Sea, according to a top admiral.
“We have a number of answers for these things,” Adm. John Richardson, chief of naval operations, said Monday during a question-and-answer session at the Center for American Progress.
China has been building artificial islands with military installations in a critical and contested area of the South China Sea, one of the world’s major shipping lanes, and has developed anti-ship ballistic missile technology. Those actions have led to fears that the Chinese government aspires to have the power to destroy any U.S. ships that enter the shipping lane.
Those fears are exaggerated, according to Nicholson, because the actual process of controlling an area is very difficult, especially in the face of U.S. resistance.
“While it’s easier detect things at distance, it’s still difficult and if you just think about the whole sequence of events that has to happen at perfect synchrony to execute that mission, there’s ways to sort of deconstruct that chain of events all the way through,” the admiral said. “That’s just the defensive posture. Then there is [the question of] what are you going to do with that access once you gain it? And so we’re looking at creative things to do with that as well.”
Nicholson’s comments came on the same day that China and Russia began an eight-day joint naval drill in the South China Sea, to the frustration of American officials. “There are other places those exercises could have been conducted,” Adm. Scott Swift, U.S. Pacific Fleet commander, said last month.
Nicholson gave a more anodyne response to the exercises. “It is a regional security dynamic and so we’ll just have to be responsive to what emerges,” he said. “And some of that dynamic will be more concerning than others, but we’ll just have to watch it and make sure that we are responsive to what may come.”
