In mid-June, as Presidents Xi and Obama strived to build bonhomie in the arid desert east of Los Angeles, a US–Japanese armada was purposefully massing off the coast, preparing for a simulated invasion of southern California. The contrast between the Sunnyland summit and Dawn Blitz, an amphibious exercise principally involving the US and Japan, with participation from Canada and New Zealand, was both coincidental and surreal. Yet the point wasn’t lost on the Chinese authorities who demanded, in vain, that the exercise be cancelled.

Participating in Dawn Blitz for the first time, Japan sent three warships, including two amphibious ships with 250 Ground Self Defence Force (GSDF) personnel embarked, including a helicopter detachment of two Apache gunships and two Chinooks. Five Air Self Defence Force (ASDF) staff officers also took part, making this an unprecedented combined arms exercise for the SDF. In another precedent, US Marine tilt-rotor Ospreys landed on the deck of Japan’s helicopter destroyer Hyuga. From a standing start, two years ago, Japan’s defence establishment has moved with unaccustomed speed to the threshold of an operational joint-service amphibious capability. This is consistent with the ‘dynamic defence’ concept outlined in 2010, which reorients the SDF’s posture to defend Japan’s south-western approaches against the growing threat felt from China. Read more

The limited interaction of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) with the outside world has been a major source of concern related to China’s military rise. Of particular worry is the fact that there still isn’t any substantial strategic dialogue between the US and China. Their ‘Strategic and Economic Dialogue’ has been rather superficial and subject to being cancelled on occasion. But recent signs are that both sides see the need to deepen the dialogue.

As PACOM Commander Admiral Samuel Locklear recently pointed out, Sino-US relations will remain competitive and miscommunications could become a serious issue during crisis. Managing crises requires both sides establishing clear lines of strategic communications, ‘rules of the road’, and mutual understanding about each other’s signals. Otherwise, the consequences could be disastrous. While both sides don’t have to love each other, they have to understand each other, including where they differ. It’s therefore encouraging that American and Chinese analysts are engaged in an increasingly open and frank discussion on these issues. A deepening web of 1.5 and 2-track US–China strategic dialogue is emerging. The CSIS Pacific Forum, for example, has organised a 1.5 track dialogue with Chinese counterparts on strategic issues, including military-to-military relations and, for the first time this year, a China–US Dialogue on Space Security. Read more

Future challenges to the US–Australia alliance will revolve around tensions inherent in what Glenn Snyder identifies as ‘the alliance security dilemma’. Modern alliances are characterised by the dual fears of abandonment and entrapment—the client state simultaneously seeks to avoid abandonment by its major power protector and entrapment when it’s pressured into making commitments it would rather avoid. Three challenges will accentuate the alliance dilemma for Australia over the coming decade.

Alliance burden sharing

America’s military spending is projected to be slashed by at least half a trillion dollars in the next ten years. The consequences for US allies could be profound. No state today has the potential to seriously rival the US as a military power, and that’s unlikely to alter for some time. But China will continue to make rapid inroads into US military ascendancy in Asia, despite President Obama’s intriguing reassurance that ‘reductions in US defence spending will not come at the expense of the Asia Pacific’. China’s ability to impose serious costs on the US in littoral zone conflicts is exemplified by Beijing’s major investment in asymmetric warfare technologies designed to deter US intervention in specific scenarios. Of concern to America’s Asian allies must be the fact that China’s area denial and anti-access capabilities have improved during a period when US defence expenditure was not declining. Read more

In his recent summary of his Alliance 21 paper for this blog, ADM Gary Roughead cogently explained why Australia and the United States benefit from high levels of military interoperability. He also suggested several fertile areas where further developing shared approaches would pay dividends, including the establishment of a governance mechanism to move what has been a somewhat ad hoc (but often successful) approach onto a more formal footing. I’ll resist covering the ground again here, other than to say ‘what he said’. In any case, my perspectives on some of those issues can be found in my full length paper.

ADM Roughead’s paper comes with the perspective you’d expect from someone with an impressive career as an operator of military capability. My paper takes a different tack and focuses on acquisition and industry policy, mostly here in Australia but also raises some issues where the United States could helpfully review its approach.

A couple of the recommendations for the development of Australia’s defence industry policy have appeared in my previous ASPI publications on off-the-shelf procurement and naval shipbuilding: Read more

Sam Bateman recently reminded us that both in the South China Sea and East China Sea incidents involving patrol vessels, warships, military aircraft, fishing and research vessels of the littoral countries are now occurring more frequently. Such incidents, if they got out of hand, could lead to actual conflict.

Sam is right that we can’t just sit pat: what’s needed is to put in place some operational maritime confidence building measures for the East China Sea and the South China Sea. Most importantly, as Sam points out, we need a common interpretation of navigational rights and freedoms in offshore zones and measures to prevent and mitigate the risks of an unfortunate incident between maritime forces.

I agree with Sam that INCSEA came about in different circumstances: there was an increasing number of confrontations as the Americans and Soviets ‘tested’ each other at sea and in the air. The provisions of the 1982 UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) on military activities in the EEZ’s of other countries are ambiguous. But the US argues that there are no provisions in UNCLOS prohibiting such activities. The US position is that those activities are within the meaning and the exercise of the freedoms of the sea, particularly the freedoms of navigation and over flight. Read more