Drumbeats of War - China Warns United States
China Foreign Ministry spokesperson Qin Gang issued a chilling statement today after the United States announced joint military exercises to begin Friday with South Korea. (Update: will begin Saturday, July 24)
“We express deep concern about the relevant exercises,” he said. “We urge all sides to maintain a cool head and exercise restraint, and not do anything that aggravates regional tensions.”
China is extremely touchy when it comes to military things happening near them. They have chased US ships out of the continually expanding sphere of what they call their territorial waters.
This exercise, named Invincible Spirit, hastily put together since North Korea torpedoed a South Korean warship, was at first going to be held in the Yellow Sea between Korea and China. But this appeared on Qin Gang’s ministry website: “We resolutely oppose foreign military ships and planes coming to the Yellow Sea and other waters near China to engage in activities that affect China’s security interests.”
Apparently cooler heads have prevailed, and it will be held on the other side of the Korean peninsula.
Well, at least a little cooler. But not much. US firepower for the exercise is substantial. Heading the naval drill is the carrier USS George Washington, one of the largest warships in the world, along with the rest of its Carrier Strike Group. RTT NEWS, Global Financial Newswires, reports, “Ten U.S. frigates, eight South Korean vessels, 200 planes and 8,000 service personnel” are also involved in the exercise.
If that were not enough, today South Korea was reported putting a newly developed missile in the field that can reach as far as… China. No mention whether the missile is conventional or if it might be able to accept a nuke borrowed from US inventories.
That’s only a part of the story.
RIMPAC, the largest naval wargames in the world, held every other year and always hosted by the United States, will conclude Tactical exercises Friday (Clarification: Friday, July 30). After the awards ceremonies (July 31, August 1), the ships will be free to transit wherever they are scheduled to go.
It was quite an exercise. The multinational naval forces sunk an American aircraft carrier. An old one, to be sure. But that’s quite a big expenditure of resources, any way you look at it. FYI, the Australians got credit for the final kill of the USS New Orleans, as it rolled over and sank in waters off Hawaii. They were very pleased. Somehow, remembering Katrina, it seems a little too poignant.
But my point is that rarely does one huge wargame overlap another. Wargames of different nations overlap. But not the wargames of the same nation. That is a rara avis, a very unusual sort of bird, and therefore worthy of note.
But that’s not all the story.
On Monday, October 15, 2007, the United States entered into a new realm of naval warfare. I did not know about it until recently. But it is rather significant.
Under the terms of arms limitations treaties, the US had to scrap a certain number of submarines that carried our nuclear deterrent. So we did. Technically. We defanged them of their hulking big Trident ICBMs. But we refurbished them to accept as many as 154 cruise missiles. Plus room for a special forces amphibious landing group, with their own mini-sub. The Tridents were huge.
So are these great submarines. Nearly as big as two football fields, they have about as many cruise missiles as our topline guided missile ship in a Carrier Strike Group. If Wikipedia is to be believed, they are ‘usually conventionally tipped’, but there are also nuclear versions, variable from 5kt to 150kt. That would give each sub the potential power equivalent to 1,540 times the Hiroshima blast.
The first reconfigured SSGN, as they are so designated, launched on that gray October morning in 2007. Three others that we know about launched by the end of the following year. We now have four of these dragons
at sea, and I really do mean at sea.
They are on silent patrol for a year at a time, not returning to home base regularly like most submarines. Crews are flown to meet the boat. That’s not easy. But apparently it is considered worth it.
Now the tie in.
I found out about these things when three of them popped up at the beginning of RIMPAC. One broke surface in Subic Bay in the Philippines, one appeared at our primary supply base in the Indian Ocean, fateful Diego Garcia, which has been mentioned in these posts previously, and one announced its presence in Busan (or Pusan), the largest port city of… South Korea.
The whereabouts of the fourth is unknown.
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July 24th, 2010 at 1:30 pm
The status quo sucks.
July 30th, 2010 at 2:17 pm
To be incredible is to be misunderstood.