South China Sea: Malaysia And Indonesia Beat China At Its Own Game

By Panos Mourdoukoutas

Malaysia has joined Indonesia to beat China at its own game in the South China Sea (SCS): The use of lawfare to settle disputes.
That's according to Dr. Namrata Goswami, the Senior Analyst, and Author.
Goswami is referring to Malaysia's decision last December to extend its continental shelf by submitting a petition to the United Nations Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf (CLCS).
"I believe Malaysia took China by strategic surprise when it submitted a legal petition to the United Nations Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf, aimed primarily at staking its sovereign claims to the northern portions of the disputed SCS water," she says.
"Malaysia, at present occupies about five of the Spratly (islands) and lays claim to 12. Any claim on the SCS and its islands is challenged by China as per its unilaterally imposed nine-dash line, that stretches nearly 2, 000 km from its shores, close to the 200 nautical miles territorial waters of Malaysia, Vietnam and the Philippines."
Why has Malaysia appealed to the UN for an extension of its CLCS?
Because that's an area where China lays its claims.
The entire Spratly Islands area, including Luconia Shoals and James Shoal, are underwater and part of Malaysia's continental shelf, she explains.

PROMOTED
This isn't the first time Malaysia appealed to the UN to protect its territories.
Back in 2009, it joined Vietnam to submit for an extension of CLCS beyond 200 nautical miles (nm) in 2009, a year after, had submitted its petition for an extension of CLCS beyond 200 nm in the northwest area of Sumatra Island on June 16, 2008.
"This move is a departure from earlier protests notes issued by Malaysia on China's activities including the presence of its coast guards near Malaysian territorial waters," adds Goswami.
"Protests notes were never made public though. Therefore, to submit to the UN on its continental shelf claim is strategic escalation, and beating China on its own game; the use of lawfare to settle disputes."
For years, China has made a reputation for using UN lawfare to advance its South China Sea agenda. Now Malaysia and its neighbors have "turned the tables" on Beijing.
They, too, have been using the UN to advance their own South China Sea agenda.
Malaysia's recent UN petition could change the game altogether in the region, according to Goswami. It will make it difficult for China to settle disputes bilaterally, as it has been doing with the Philippines.
"Malaysia's legal submission included an acknowledgment of other claimants, namely Indonesia, Vietnam, Philippines, Brunei, Taiwan,” she says.
"This only means the other claimants will now resort to legal means as well. Malaysia's move is a continuation of such legal moves, first brought about by Indonesia in 2008, about its continental shelf extension vis-a-vis China's SCS claims."
But Malaysia's move signifies the limitation of China's BRI, according to Goswami.
"Over the last several years, China has pumped in billions of dollars' worth of BRI investment into Malaysia, hoping this would influence Malaysia's posture on SCS. That BRI strategy does not appear to have worked," she says.
And validates "the International Tribunal in the Hague decision in 2016 in favor of Philippines submission that China's nine-dash line claim is illegal." 

Gen. Mattis says China's crackdown on Hong Kong protesters is a sign of China's dangerous ambitions

• Former Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis warned that China's treatment of pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong shows what the totalitarian regime is capable of.
• "Watching what's going on in Hong Kong right now, their authoritarian mode against their own people... it would take a real stretch of imagination to say they would treat foreigners better than they treat their own people at home, if that's their world view," Mattis said, while also calling out China's actions in the Spratly Islands and Sri Lanka.

By Ellen Ioanes

Retired Gen. Jim Mattis, whose resignation sent shockwaves through the US military and its allies last year, opted to answer questions about political leaders like President Trump obliquely at a Tuesday think tank event. 

But he wasn't so tightlipped on another topic: China.
Mattis called out Beijing's treatment of Hong Kong pro-democracy protesters as a signal of what China is capable of.
"Watching what's going on in Hong Kong right now, their authoritarian mode against their own people...it would take a real stretch of imagination to say they would treat foreigners better than they treat their own people at home, if that's their world view," Mattis said at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York.
The Pentagon increasingly views China as the US's number one rival. 

Mattis recalled some of China's recent aggressions, namely its 2018 move to place weapons on the disputed Spratly Islands, despite Xi Jinping's promises to the contrary, and China's seizure of a Sri Lankan port the previous year to repay the loans China gave Sri Lanka to finance the port through its Belt and Road initiative.
"In the national defense strategy we'd call them a competitor," he said. 

"And what we're trying for is not great power deterrence, we're trying for great power peace."

"We can find a way to work with China, but we're going to have to confront China where they are interrupting the universal... the order of the world."
He saved his strongest criticism for China's actions in Hong Kong during the semi-autonomous territory's three-month-long pro-democracy protests.
"There are ways that China is working right now that we can no longer be deluded by our own desires, we are going to have to accept China as it is," Mattis said.
The Chinese People's Liberation Army has sent troops to Shenzhen, a city bordering Hong Kong, as a way to threaten the island with military intervention if protests continue, and recently drove military transport vehicles onto the island.
While the protests initially concerned a bill that proposed to send Hong Kongers charged with major crimes to the mainland for trial, they soon spiraled into broader demands for democratic reforms. 

As protests have continued, they have gotten increasingly violent, with Hong Kong police brandishing guns at protesters. 

China has also detained a Hong Kong resident on the mainland and waged a massive propaganda campaign against the protesters.
"So we're going to have to recognize it, cooperate where we can, collaborate where we can, and also confront where we must," Mattis concluded, without going into specifics about what that might look like militarily.
Mattis is the author of "Call Sign Chaos: Learning to Lead," a memoir of his four decades in the Marine Corps.
At the talk, Mattis' greatest concerns were about the state of America; he previously expressed dismay at the politically divided nature of the country. 

In concluding Tuesday's discussion, Mattis said, "I'm not convinced that we're turning [the US] over in as good a shape or better to the younger generation ... and that worries me."

Stop the Beijing Bully in the South China Sea

Destroyer USS Wayne E. Meyer Sails Past Fiery Cross, Mischief Reefs in Latest FONOPS
By Megan Eckstein

Sailors man the rails aboard the Arleigh Burke-class guided missile destroyer USS Wayne E. Meyer (DDG 108) as the ship transits along the coast of Valparaiso, Chile during a parade of ships on Nov. 19, 2018. 

A U.S. destroyer conducted a freedom of navigation operation in the Spratly Islands today.
Arleigh Burke-class destroyer USS Wayne E. Meyer (DDG-108) sailed within 12 nautical miles of both Fiery Cross Reef and Mischief Reef today to challenge excessive maritime claims in the South China Sea, U.S. 7th Fleet spokeswoman Cmdr. Reann Mommsen told USNI News.
“U.S. Forces operate in the Indo-Pacific region on a daily basis, including in the South China Sea. All operations are designed in accordance with international law and demonstrate that the United States will fly, sail and operate wherever international law allows,” she said.
Ships operating the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command have conducted several FONOPS this year, with officials saying they wanted FONOPS to be viewed as more routine operations. 

In late May, USS Preble (DDG-88) sailed near the Scarborough Shoal, and earlier that month Preble and USS Chung-Hoon (DDG-93) steamed within 12 nautical miles of the Gaven and Johnson Reefs.
In February, Preble and USS Spruance (DDG-111) steamed within 12 nautical miles of Mischief Reef, an artificial island China built up in the Spratly Islands chain. 

In January, USS McCampbell (DDG-85) steamed past the Paracel Islands.

Ens. Christian Meyer practices visit, board, search and seizure (VBSS) techniques aboard the Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer USS Wayne E. Meyer (DDG 108) on Aug. 22, 2019. Wayne E. Meyer is deployed to the U.S. 7th Fleet area of operations in support of security and stability in the Indo-Pacific region. 

The South China Sea continues to be a key location where U.S. warships promote freedom of navigation and open international waterways, and also where China has taken a stand this summer. 

A group of Chinese warships, including aircraft carrier Liaoning, sailed through the South China Sea earlier this summer, operating in territorial waters of the Philippines and near Japan.
When Wayne E. Meyer conducted its FONOP today, other ships were in the vicinity, but all interactions were considered routine, a source told USNI News.
Today’s operation comes just after China denied a U.S. Navy request to send a warship to the eastern port city of Qingdao, Reuters first reported. 

The U.S. and China are locked in a growing trade war, and while U.S. Navy ships have made port visits in Chinese cities previously, the rejection of the request may reflect those growing tensions between the two economic powers. 

China also denied two warships access to Hong Kong, the semi-autonomous islands where protests against the government in Beijing are ongoing.
The full statement from U.S. 7th Fleet:
“The guided-missile destroyer USS Wayne E. Meyer (DDG 108) conducted a Freedom of Navigation Operation (FONOP) in the South China Sea, Aug. 28 (local time). Wayne E. Meyer sailed within 12 nautical miles of Fiery Cross and Mischief Reefs in order to challenge excessive maritime claims and preserve access to the waterways as governed by international law. U.S. Forces operate in the Indo-Pacific region on a daily basis, including in the South China Sea. All operations are designed in accordance with international law and demonstrate that the United States will fly, sail and operate wherever international law allows. That is true in the South China Sea as in other places around the globe. We conduct routine and regular Freedom of Navigation Operations (FONOPS) as we have done in the past and will continue to in the future. FONOPs are not about any one country, nor are they about making political statements.”

Chinese ship inches closer to Vietnam coastline amid South China Sea tensions

By Khanh Vu

HANOI -- A Chinese survey vessel on Saturday extended its activities to an area closer to Vietnam’s coastline, ship tracking data showed, after the United States and Australia expressed concern about China’s actions in the disputed waterways.
The Haiyang Dizhi 8 vessel first entered Vietnam’s exclusive economic zone (EEZ) early last month where it began a weeks-long seismic survey, triggering a tense standoff between military and coastguard vessels from Vietnam and China.
The Chinese vessel continued to survey Vietnam’s EEZ on Saturday under escort from at least four ships and was around 102 kilometers (63 miles) southeast of Vietnam’s Phu Quy island and 185 kilometers (115 miles) from the beaches of the southern city of Phan Thiet, according to data from Marine Traffic, a website that tracks vessel movements.
The Chinese vessel group was followed by at least two Vietnamese naval vessels, according to the data.
Vietnam’s foreign ministry did not immediately respond to a request from Reuters for comment.
A country’s EEZ typically extends up to 200 nautical miles (370 kilometers or 230 miles) from its coastline, according to an international UN treaty. 

That country has sovereign rights to exploit any natural resources within that area, according to the agreement.
Vietnam and China have for years been embroiled in a dispute over the potentially energy-rich stretch of waters and a busy shipping lane in the South China Sea.
China’s unilaterally declared “nine-dash line” marks a vast, U-shaped, expanse of the South China Sea that it claims, including large swathes of Vietnam’s continental shelf where it has awarded oil concessions.
On Friday, Vietnamese Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc and his Australian counterpart expressed their concern about China’s activities in the South China Sea, known in Vietnam as the East Sea.
Earlier in the week, the United States said it was deeply concerned about China’s interference in oil and gas activities in waters claimed by Vietnam, and that the deployment of the vessels was “an escalation by Beijing in its efforts to intimidate other claimants out of developing resources in the South China Sea”

The Necessary War

SAYING CHINA IS BLOCKING TRILLIONS IN OIL AND GAS, U.S. WILL SEND NAVY FOR ASIA DRILLS
BY TOM O'CONNOR 

The United States has accused China of preventing Southeast Asian countries from accessing trillions of dollars worth of untapped oil and gas reserves in the South China Sea as the Pentagon planned to hold its first exercise with regional powers near the strategic region.
In a press statement, State Department spokesperson Morgan Ortagus said Thursday that the "United States is deeply concerned that China is continuing its interference with Vietnam's longstanding oil and gas activities in Vietnam's Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) claim" following recent incursions there by Chinese survey ship Haiyang Dizhi 8 and an armed escort. 

Beijing has laid vast claims to the South China Sea and does not recognize boundaries established there by a number of Southeast Asian nations who are supported by the U.S. 

The most recent incident occurred last week near Vanguard Bank, a Vietnam-administered outpost in the Spratly Islands, and Ortagus attributed the move to China "pressuring Vietnam over its work with a Russian energy firm and other international partners."
"China's actions undermine regional peace and security, impose economic costs on Southeast Asian states by blocking their access to an estimated $2.5 trillion in unexploited hydrocarbon resources, and demonstrate China's disregard for the rights of countries to undertake economic activities in their EEZs, under the 1982 Law of the Sea Convention, which China ratified in 1996," Ortagus said.
Chinese survey vessel Haiyang Dizhi 8 conducts research on behalf of the Guangzhou Marine Geological Survey in this photo shared July 25, 2018. The ship once again entered what Vietnam's exclusive economic zone near Vanguard Bank of South China Sea's Spratly Islands on August 13 of this year.
Washington has signed, but not ratified the 1982 Law of the Sea Convention, though it justified sending warships through Beijing-claimed waters in the South China Sea by citing "freedom of navigation" operations outlined in the deal. 

China has responded by scrambling military ships and aircraft to intercept the U.S. vessels in the resource-rich region.
While China may have backed Vietnam's communist revolutionaries in their victory over U.S. and allied local forces decades ago, Beijing and Hanoi quickly became rivals and engaged in deadly border clashes, including near the Spratly Island, lasting up until the 1990s. 

In 1995, Vietnam and the U.S. normalized their relations, putting pressure on China as the region's geopolitical dynamics shifted.
As the U.S. began to increasingly assert its own presence in the South China Sea, it has sought to push back on China there, exploiting territorial tensions between Beijing and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), a 10-nation grouping of which Vietnam was a part. 

Washington sided with Hanoi in 2014 when China moved its Hai Yang Shi You 981 oil rig near the disputed Paracel Islands and sank a Vietnamese fishing vessel amid a standoff there.
Last year, the U.S. sent a historic message to China by sending Nimitz-class supercarrier USS Carl Vinson to dock in Vietnam in March. 

In May, the U.S. disinvited China from the Rim of the Pacific (RIMPAC) exercise involving Vietnam and several other ASEAN states over Beijing's increased militarization of the Spratly Islands.
The U.S. also began planning joint drills with ASEAN, but it was China that secured an exercise alongside the regional collective months later in October. 

That same month, then-Defense Secretary James Mattis confirmed that a U.S.-ASEAN exercise was still in the works and on both The Bangkok Post and Nikkei Asian Review reported Thursday that the maneuvers were set to begin early next month in Thailand.

A map created July 30, 2012 details the multinational, overlapping territorial disputes involving Brunei, China, Malaysia, the Philippines, Taiwan and Vietnam in the South China Sea. Many of these countries, especially China, have expanded their presence on contested land masses known as the Spratly Islands and an incident on August 13 of this year took place on the westernmost stretch of reefs.

Tensions in the South China Sea add to an array of issues already putting a major strain on ties between the world's top two economies. 

President Donald Trump and Chinese Xi Jinping are embroiled in a multibillion-dollar trade war of tit-for-tat tariffs with Vietnam finding itself right in the middle of the feuding powerhouses.
Beijing has also repeatedly accused Washington of interfering in its internal affairs, both in the ongoing protests that U.S. officials and politicians have expressed support for in the semi-autonomous city of Hong Kong and in a recent $8 billion arms sale involving F-16V fighters jets to Taiwan, an independent island nation also claimed by Beijing.

China’s South China Sea Militarization Has Peaked

Artificial islands are becoming more trouble than they’re worth.
BY STEVEN STASHWICK
Activists burn Chinese flags and display anti-China placards during a protest at a park in Manila on June 18, 2019. 

Following years of Russian noncompliance, the United States officially withdrew from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty on Aug. 2. 

The Cold War-era arms control agreement had banned land-based missiles with ranges between 500 and 5,500 kilometers, and the next day the new U.S. defense secretary, Mark Esper, told reporters that he wanted to counter China’s massive missile inventory “sooner rather than later.” 

China responded furiously.
Ironically, the threat comes as the most conspicuous flash point between the two countries, China’s military buildup on its artificial islands in the South China Sea, appears to be reaching a peak. 

In part, this is because of limits on the bases’ military usefulness in future conflict, but the key reason is that the backlash and counterbalancing its militarization encourages from the United States and other countries threaten the islands’ usefulness as a political signal at home, something that the Communist Party may value far more than their actual military potency.
Since 2013, China has constructed more than 3,000 dredged-up acres across seven features that are now studded with long-range sensor arrays, port facilities, runways, and reinforced bunkers for fuel and weapons. 

That’s a huge military footprint, despite Chinese dictator Xi Jinping’s nominal 2015 pledge not to militarize the islands and the Foreign Ministry’s claims that these “necessary defense facilities” are provided primarily for maritime safety and natural disaster support.
But as conspicuous as the bases’ capacity to project China’s offensive power is how little of that might Beijing has actually deployed there. 

The Pentagon’s latest report on China’s military notes that no new militarization has been observed since China placed air defense and anti-ship missiles in the Spratlys last year. 

Gen. Joseph Dunford, the chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, recently remarked that if China’s militarization of the islands had plateaued, it was because they had achieved the military capability China required of them. 

If that’s true, then China requires much less of those bases militarily than their apparent potential to deliver.
Despite the islands’ scale, China’s maximalist regional claims, and its aggressive coercion of regional rivals, tension between China’s political and military incentives suggest it has little more to gain from expanding its buildup in the Spratly Islands and it could even have quite a bit to lose. 

Additional overt militarization doesn’t help China exert control over the South China Sea in peacetime and may not be decisive in wartime. 

It also encourages a greater and more public U.S. military presence, undermining the islands’ political symbolism. 

It also reduces China’s room for diplomacy and de-escalation in a crisis, increasing the potential for an uncertain and potentially embarrassing clash that would risk further undermining the party’s legitimacy.
The United States can leverage those incentives to its advantage as it debates how to implement the Pentagon’s National Defense Strategy, but if it pushes back too hard, the Communist Party may feel it has to escalate to preserve its legitimacy.
China is hardly reticent in asserting its maximalist claims over the South China Sea. 

Its law enforcement and paramilitary maritime militia vessels, often operating out of those same bases in the Spratly Islands, keep up a strong campaign of harassment and coercion against coastal states with competing claims and in contravention of provisions in the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea and a 2016 international arbitration ruling that nullified most of China’s claims.
But compared with the expanding shadow of China’s gray-zone activity, the military presence on its Spratly bases is anemic. 

In early 2016, U.S. intelligence assessed that those bases would be capable of hosting significant force projection capabilities by the end of that year. 

Three years on from that assessment, China has yet to deploy warplanes or other long-range strike weapons that can hit land targets to the islands, though they appear more than capable of accommodating them.
One explanation is that the region’s climate simply isn’t hospitable to China’s most advanced military systems. 

Chinese state media reported in 2017 on special measures required to protect a short deployment of J-11 fighter jets to the Paracel Islands from the island’s heat and humidity. 

More recent reports claim that China’s environmental problems in the Spratlys are even more serious, with heat and humidity causing structures to crumble, mechanical equipment to fail, and even some weapon systems to break down. 

This is on top of persistent concerns about the artificial islands’ ability to withstand a major Pacific weather event—and a poor record of equipment and infrastructure maintenance in general in an often corruption-riddled People’s Liberation Army (PLA).

Peacetime assets but wartime liabilities
The islands are useful during peacetime to monitor rivals’ air and sea movements and as a base for coast guard and maritime militia operations against those countries’ fishermen and hydrocarbon exploitation. 

But increasing its overt military capability on the islands neither increases China’s practical civil control over waters crowded with rival fishermen and law enforcement vessels nor deters the presence of U.S. and other foreign warships and planes. 

And in wartime, that additional militarization may not translate to a decisive advantage over the United States anyway.

China’s Hidden Navy

Chinese "fishing boats" around contested islands are part of an extensive maritime militia.

BY GREGORY POLING

The Chinese People's Liberation Army (PLA) Navy aircraft carrier Liaoning participates in a naval parade near Qingdao in eastern China's Shandong province, on April 23, 2019. 

The Spratly Islands, occupied by five different claimants, are the most hotly contested part of the South China Sea. 

Thanks to the harbors and supporting infrastructure Beijing constructed on its outposts there over the last five years, most vessels operating around the Spratlys are Chinese. 

And most of those are at least part-time members of China’s official maritime militia, an organization whose role Beijing frequently downplays but that is playing an increasingly visible role in its assertion of maritime claims.

Writers affiliated with Chinese institutions and state media seek to present an alternate version of reality by artfully cropping satellite imagery, cherry-picking data, or simply ignoring the facts and attacking the motives of those presenting evidence of militia activities.
This is unsurprising—the purpose of employing a maritime militia is to keep aggression below the level of military force and complicate the responses of other parties, in this case chiefly the other claimants (Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia, and Taiwan) as well as the United States, by hiding behind a civilian facade. 

Without deniability, the militia loses much of its value. 

That gives China a strong incentive to dissemble and deny evidence of its actions. 

But that evidence speaks for itself.
The People’s Armed Forces Maritime Militia is not a secret. 

Article 36 of the China Military Service Law of 1984, revised in 1998, calls for the militia “to undertake the duties related to preparations against war, defend the frontiers and maintain public order; and be always ready to join the armed forces to take part in war, resist aggression and defend the motherland.” 

China’s 2013 defense white paper enhanced the maritime militia’s role in asserting sovereignty and backing up military operations. 

This is the naval analogue to China’s larger and better-known land-based militia forces, which operate in all Chinese theater commands, supporting and under the command of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA).
In 2013, Chinese dictator Xi Jinping visited the maritime militia in Tanmen township on Hainan, China’s southernmost province, and labeled it a model for others to follow. 

Andrew Erickson, Conor Kennedy, and Ryan Martinson at the China Maritime Studies Institute at the U.S. Naval War College have spent years documenting the activities of the maritime militia, including extensive acknowledgment by Chinese authorities and many instances in which militia members have publicly discussed their activities.
A review of available remote sensing data by the Center for Strategic and International Studies and Vulcan Inc.’s Skylight Maritime Initiative, including infrared imaging, synthetic aperture radar, and high-resolution satellite imagery, shows that the largest number of vessels operating in the Spratly Islands belongs to the Chinese fishing fleet, which frequently numbers between 200 and 300 boats at Subi and Mischief Reefs alone. 

This is not by itself peculiar: China maintains the world’s largest fishing fleet, and its distant water vessels operate around the globe due to overfishing and pollution of Chinese coastal waters. 

But the vessels operating in the Spratlys are not part of that distant water fleet—those boats are larger and head farther afield in the hunt for high-value migratory species. 

And at 800 nautical miles (about 920 miles) from the mainland, the Spratlys are too far for small and medium-sized Chinese fishing vessels to operate productively without being heavily subsidized.
But even China’s two-decade-old policy of subsidizing fishing as an assertion of sovereignty can’t explain the behavior of most Chinese vessels in the Spratlys in recent years.

Chinese fishing boats in the islands average more than 500 tons, well over the size legally required for boats undertaking international voyages to use Automatic Identification System (AIS) transceivers, which broadcast identifying information, headings, and other data about oceangoing vessels. 

But fewer than 5 percent of them actually broadcast AIS signals at any given time. 

This suggests a fleet intent on hiding its numbers and actions.
These large, modern vessels represent a stunning level of sunk capital costs but do not engage in much commercial activity. 

Frequent satellite imagery shows that the vessels spend nearly all of their time anchored, often in large clusters. 

This is true whether they are inside the lagoons at Subi and Mischief Reefs or loitering elsewhere in the Spratlys. 

Operating in such close quarters is highly unusual and certainly not the way commercial fishing vessels usually operate.
Light falling net vessels, which account for the largest number of Chinese fishing boats in satellite imagery of the Spratlys, very rarely have their fishing gear deployed. 

China’s trawlers, meanwhile, almost never actually trawl; instead, satellite imagery and the AIS signals of those few trawlers regularly broadcasting both show that they spend most of their time at anchor. 

These unusual, and highly unprofitable, behaviors suggest that most of these supposed fishing boats are not making a living from fish.
When Chinese fishing vessels are not at Subi or Mischief Reefs, they are most often seen in satellite imagery anchored near Philippine- and Vietnamese-held outposts in the Spratlys. 

This is corroborated by the small number of AIS signals detected from Chinese ships. 

The most spectacular example of this behavior was the swarm of vessels from Subi Reef that dropped anchor between 2 and 5 nautical miles from Philippines-held Thitu Island as soon as Manila began modest upgrade work on that feature in December 2018. 

The number of vessels seen in satellite imagery peaked at 95 on Dec. 20, 2018, before dropping to 42 by Jan. 26. 

That presence continued into early June, when reports suggested that China had begun to pull back the vessels. 

The exact number of ships fluctuated from day to day, but almost none broadcast AIS or deployed fishing gear, and they operated in much closer quarters than any commercial fishing vessels would.
The Armed Forces of the Philippines confirmed that it had monitored 275 individual Chinese vessels swarming near Thitu between January and March, and Manila filed protests with Beijing over their presence. 

Meanwhile satellite imagery from March to April showed another cluster of Chinese vessels displaying the same puzzling behavior around two other Philippine-held features: Loaita Cay and Loaita Island. 

In that case, some dropped anchor just half a nautical mile from the isolated Philippine facility on Loaita Cay.
The only explanation that can make sense of all of these behaviors is that most of these vessels engage in the work of China’s maritime militia. 

The job of that militia force has been well documented by sources as diverse as the U.S. Naval War College, reports from the Philippine military, and China’s own official documents outlining the militia’s role. 

On a day-to-day basis it serves as a logistics and surveillance arm of the PLA, ferrying supplies to Chinese outposts, monitoring and reporting on the activities of other claimants, and engaging in joint training exercises with the military and law enforcement. 

But they also move into more direct harassment of other nations’ vessels when called up—maneuvering dangerously close to foreign naval, law enforcement, and civilian vessels, sometimes shouldering and ramming them, and in general making it unsafe for other parties to operate in areas contested by Beijing, all while the PLA and China Coast Guard are kept in reserve as an implicit threat with a level of deniability.
Some analysts have offered alternative explanations for the curious, unproductive behavior of these ships. 

But none of the theories stand up well to scrutiny.
One suggestion is that these vessels never have gear in the water because they are actually reef fishers engaged in harvesting high-value species such as sea cucumbers and giant clams. 

Relatedly, theorists posit that they don’t broadcast AIS because they are too small, or too old, or because they know that harvesting endangered species is illegal under Chinese law and they want to hide their activities. 

Some have even argued that the flood of vessels around Thitu was due to a surge in demand for seafood ahead of China’s Spring Festival.
But these explanations make little sense. 

The sizes and types of vessels are easily determined from satellite imagery. 

These fleets consist of large (over 160-foot) modern trawlers and falling net vessels, not the smaller (80- to 115-foot) motherships that accompany Chinese reef fishers around the Spratlys and other disputed features such as the Paracels and Scarborough Shoal, and certainly not the reef fishing boats themselves. 

And while reef fishing vessels average just 15 feet, they can be seen in satellite imagery; it would be immediately obvious if hundreds were operating around Thitu Island. 

There is plenty of sea cucumber harvesting in the Paracels—at Antelope Reef, for instance—and giant clam poaching has been well documented across the South China Sea. 

This is not that.
Another theory is that these vessels don’t appear to be fishing because they are involved in transshipment, serving in a support role by purchasing catch from and providing supplies to other fishing boats in the area. 

That might fit if it was just some small percentage of the Chinese fleet involved. 

But the opposite is true: Most Chinese ships observed in the Spratlys don’t appear to be commercially fishing. 

They can’t all be support vessels; what would they be supporting?
A third hypothesis is that some of these vessels are simply passing through the Spratlys to fraudulently collect the fuel subsidies China offers for ships that operate in the contested waters. After securing their subsidy, the theory goes, these boats likely head for more productive fishing grounds beyond the region. 

This could be true for some small number of ships; it would be impossible to prove either way. 

But this cannot explain the long-term presence of hundreds of vessels anchored around Thitu and other features. 

And while only a small percentage of Chinese ships broadcast AIS in the Spratlys, those that do tend to spend months at a time there, mostly anchored.
The evidence that China is using hundreds of fishing vessels under the aegis of its publicly acknowledged maritime militia to assert claims and harass its neighbors in the Spratlys is considerable. 

By contrast, the alternative theories are severely lacking. 

No other convincing explanation has been offered for why so many fishing vessels are engaged for months at a time in activities that make little or no commercial sense, or why they are so intent on hiding their actions.
The maritime militia is the vanguard of China’s assertion of claims to the waters of the South China Sea. 

It is the largest fleet operating in the area and is the most frequent aggressor toward both China’s neighbors and outside parties like the United States when asserting international rights in waters claimed by Beijing. 

It operates as a nonuniformed, unprofessional force without proper training and outside of the frameworks of international maritime law, the military rules of engagement, or the multilateral mechanisms set up to prevent unsafe incidents at sea. 

The next violent incident to take place in the South China Sea is far more likely to involve the Chinese militia than the PLA or China Coast Guard, and it will lack the mechanisms for communication and de-escalation that exist between those professional services and their counterparts in other nations.
The only way to avoid an eventual crisis triggered by these paramilitary vessels is to convince Beijing to take them off the board. 

And the first step is to pull back the curtain of deniability, acknowledge that the evidence for their numbers and activities is overwhelming, and insist that the Chinese government be held accountable for their bad behavior.

Would China's South China Sea Bases Be Wiped Out In A War?

A top naval expert gives us his take.

by Robert Farley

The islands of the SCS have some military relevance, but are more important as a political claim to waterways and undersea resources. 

Militarily, they represent a thin crust on China’s A2/AD system. 

Under certain conditions this crust could disrupt U.S. freedom of action, but it won’t be hard for the United States’ Air Force and Navy to punch through.
China has built some islands in the South China Sea. 

Can it protect them?
During World War II Japan found that control of islands offered some strategic advantages, but not enough to force the United States to reduce each island individually. 

Moreover, over time the islands became a strategic liability, as Japan struggled to keep them supplied with food, fuel and equipment. 

The islands of the SCS are conveniently located for China, but do they really represent an asset to China’s military? 

The answer is yes, but in an actual conflict the value would dwindle quickly.

The Installations
China has established numerous military installations in the South China Sea, primarily in the Spratly and Paracel Islands. 

In the Spratlys, China has built airfields at Subi, Mischief and Fiery Cross, along with potential missile, radar and helicopter infrastructure at several smaller formations. 

In the Paracels, China has established a significant military installation at Woody Island, as well as radar and helicopter facilities in several other areas. 

China continues construction across the region, meaning that it may expand its military presence in the future. 

The larger bases (Subi, Mischief, Fiery Cross and Woody Island) have infrastructure necessary for the management of military aircraft, including fighters and large patrol craft. 

These missiles, radars and aircraft extend the lethal reach of China’s military across the breadth of the South China Sea.

Missiles
Several of the islands serve as bases for SAM systems (including the HQ-9, with a range of 125 miles, and perhaps eventually the Russian S-400) and ground-launched cruise missiles (GLCMs). These missiles serve to make the South China Sea lethal for U.S. ships and aircraft that do not have stealth capabilities, or that do not enjoy a layered air-defense system. 

The SAM installations, buoyed by networks of radars, can effectively limit the ability of enemy aircraft to enter their lethal zone without significant electronic-warfare assistance. 

The GLCMs can add another set of launchers to China’s A2/AD network, although not necessarily with any greater effectiveness than missiles launched from subs, ships or aircraft.
But it is an open question how survivable the missile installations would be in a conflict. 

Land-based missiles survive air attack because they can hide among hills, forests and other natural cover. 

There is no effective natural cover on the islands that China has created, and even man-made defensive installations may not survive concerted attack. 

Moreover, missile launchers depend upon an at least somewhat robust logistical network for fuel, power and munitions, which China may not be able to reliably provide during a shooting war.

Airfields
The four largest military installations in the SCS have extensive facilities for the operation of military aircraft. 

This includes advanced fighters, but more importantly patrol, electronic-warfare and advanced early-warning aircraft. 

The ability to use these airfields effectively extends the reach of China’s A2/AD bubble, enabling the transmission of targeting data to missile launchers at sea and in mainland China. 

The fighter aircraft themselves serve to make the skies over the SCS even more lethal than they otherwise would be, as well as threaten U.S. ships at a distance with cruise missiles.
But in conflict, the durability of an airfield depends on the availability of materials and equipment to execute repairs after an attack. 

It is not obvious that the islands China has created in the South China Sea will be robust enough to continue in operation after U.S. missile and bomb attacks. 

Although the larger islands have aircraft shelters, it is an open question whether these shelters could long survive a concerted U.S. attack.

Radars
SAMs, GLCMs and combat aircraft depend on accurate targeting data for effectiveness. 

The most important contribution that the SCS islands may offer to the Chinese military is through the radar installations that China has established on many of the islands. 

These installations, while individually vulnerable, help to provide a much fuller picture of the battle space than China would otherwise enjoy. 

Together, they significantly enhance the lethality of China’s defensive networks.
That said, the radars themselves are vulnerable to a wide array of U.S. attacks. 

These include kinetic methods such as missiles (launched from submarines, stealth aircraft or other platforms), electronic warfare, cyberattacks and even special-forces raids. 

In a conflict, China could quickly lose access to the radar network that it has established. 

Still, the network offers a relatively low-cost way of complicating the job that the U.S. military faces in penetrating the SCS.

Logistics
All the military capabilities of China’s SCS islands depend upon secure communications with mainland China. 

Most of the islands constructed by China cannot support extensive logistics stockpiles, or keep those stockpiles safe from attack. 

In a shooting war, the need to keep the islands supplied with fuel, equipment and munitions would quickly become a liability for presumably hard-stretched Chinese transport assets. 

Assuming that the PLAN and PLAAF would have little interest in pursuing risky, expensive efforts at resupplying islands under fire, the military value of the islands of the SCS would be a wasting asset during a conflict. 

Unfortunately for China, the very nature of island warfare, and the nature of the specific formations that China has determined to support, make it difficult to keep installations in service in anything but the very short term.

Ships vs. Forts
As Lord Horatio Nelson may have quipped, “a ship’s a fool to fight a fort.” 

But there are situations in which ships have a major advantage over forts. 

China’s islands in the SCS are not mobile, and are not large enough to hide much in the way of military equipment and material. 

The United States will be able to meticulously map the military installations on each of the islands in the SCS, and will probably be able to track shipments of military equipment to the islands. 

This will make the islands extremely vulnerable to attack from ships, subs and aircraft, as missiles will not require real-time targeting data.
One positive step for the United States would be to reverse the decision to “retire in place” the Advanced Gun System on the Zumwalt-class destroyer. 

Making available a munition for this gun would enable the Zumwalts to strike Chinese island installations at range, potentially causing serious, practically irreparable damage at a relatively low cost. 

Otherwise, the islands will suck up cruise missiles that might effectively be used on more juicy targets.
The islands of the SCS have some military relevance, but are more important as a political claim to waterways and undersea resources. 

Militarily, they represent a thin crust on China’s A2/AD system. 

Under certain conditions this crust could disrupt U.S. freedom of action, but it won’t be hard for the United States’ Air Force and Navy to punch through.

FONOPs

Two U.S. warships sail in disputed South China Sea

By Idrees Ali

WASHINGTON -- The U.S. military said two of its warships sailed near islands claimed by China in the South China Sea on Monday, a move that angered Beijing at a time of tense ties between the world’s two biggest economies.
The busy waterway is one of a growing number of flashpoints in the U.S.-China relationship, which also include a trade war, U.S. sanctions and Taiwan.
President Donald Trump dramatically increased pressure on China to reach a trade deal by threatening to hike U.S. tariffs on $200 billion worth of Chinese goods this week and soon target hundreds of billions more.
The U.S. guided-missile destroyers Preble and Chung Hoon traveled within 12 nautical miles of Gaven and Johnson Reefs in the Spratly Islands, a U.S. military spokesman told Reuters.
Commander Clay Doss, a spokesman for the Seventh Fleet, said the “innocent passage” aimed “to challenge excessive maritime claims and preserve access to the waterways as governed by international law”.
The operation was first reported by Reuters.

The U.S. military has a long-standing position that its operations are carried out throughout the world, including areas claimed by allies, and that they are separate from political considerations.
The operation was the latest attempt to counter what Washington sees as Beijing’s efforts to limit freedom of navigation in the strategic waters, where Chinese, Japanese and some Southeast Asian navies operate.
China claims almost all of the strategic South China Sea and frequently lambasts the United States and its allies over naval operations near Chinese-occupied islands.
Brunei, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Taiwan and Vietnam have competing claims in the region.
China and the United States have repeatedly traded barbs in the past over what Washington says is Beijing’s militarization of the South China Sea by building military installations on artificial islands and reefs.
China defends its construction as necessary for self-defense and says the United States is responsible for ratcheting up tension in the region by sending warships and military planes close to islands Beijing claims.
The freedom of navigation operation comes weeks after a major naval parade marking 70 years since the founding of the Chinese navy. 

The United States sent only a low-level delegation to the Chinese navy anniversary events.

China Military Is Expanding Reach Into Arctic Region

• Chinese icebreakers, research stations support military deployment
• Pentagon annual report also highlights Chinese influence operations

By Anthony Capaccio

The Chinese icebreaker Xuelong, or Snow Dragon, leaves Shanghai port for an Arctic expedition, July 2018. 

China is accelerating activities in the Arctic as part of its “Polar Silk Road” and trying to promote itself as a “near-Arctic state,” the U.S. Defense Department said.
A growing fleet of icebreakers and civilian research stations in Iceland and Norway could support a strengthened People’s Liberation Army presence in the polar region, the Pentagon said Thursday in its annual report on China’s military. 

The department cited the potential deployment of nuclear-armed China submarines to the region as one area of U.S. concern.
The report described a Chinese military that was rapidly expanding its reach and capabilities as part of Xi Jinping’s push to complete a modernization drive by 2035 and build a “world-class” force 2049. 

That included efforts to establish an aircraft carrier fleet, with the country’s first domestically built vessel expected to join the PLA Navy this year, and the successful test of a hypersonic glide vehicle in August.
China continued to improve its ability to conduct complex joint operations to counter what its leaders view as an increasingly confrontational approach by the U.S., the report said. 

Beijing focused efforts to acquire sensitive, U.S. dual-use, or military grade equipment including dynamic-random-access memory, aviation technologies and antisubmarine warfare technologies.

Spratly Missiles
China placed anti-ship cruise missiles and long-range surface-to-air missiles on the disputed Spratly Islands in South China Sea, the report said, despite Xi’s 2015 statement saying the country “does not intend to pursue militarization” of the vital sea lane. 

The U.S. withdrew China’s invitation to large-scale international naval exercises in response to the deployment last year.

Fiery Cross Reef in the South China Sea.
Arms sales supporting China’s broader foreign policy goals continued to increase, including sales of armed-unmanned-aerial vehicles and precision-strike weapons, the report said. 

Cai Hong series drones have been sold to “Burma, Iraq, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates” because China “faces little competition for these sales,” it said.
Still, wary of provoking the U.S., its allies or regional governments, Chinese leaders “employ tactics short of armed conflict to pursue China’s strategic objectives through activities calculated to fall below the threshold of providing armed conflict,” the report said. Beijing continues to use “persuasion and coercion” to limit the growth of pro-independence sentiment on self-rule island of Taiwan, the report said.
Meanwhile, the Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post reported Friday that the U.S. Navy has conducted 92 transits through the strategic Taiwan Strait since 2007 to assert free-navigation rights. There have been four such operations so far this year, suggesting the Navy was on pace to exceed its annual average of about seven transits.

Chinese Satellite

Vietnam’s Communist Party Ousts Historian Who Criticized Its China Policy

By Mike Ives

The historian Tran Duc Anh Son said that Vietnam has irrefutable claims to islands in the South China Sea that China claims as its own.

A prominent Vietnamese historian who criticized his government for not doing more to challenge Beijing’s territorial claims in the South China Sea has been ousted from Vietnam’s ruling Communist Party over comments he made on Facebook.
The political purge of Tran Duc Anh Son, an expert on Vietnam’s claims in the South China Sea, is a rare window into how the party handles dissent among its rank-and-file members.
It may also underline the sensitivities around Vietnam’s handling of its relationship with China, its largest trading partner and former imperial occupier.
Vietnam’s state-run news media reported last week that Dr. Son, who is in his early 50s and worked for years at a state-run research institute in the central city of Danang, was expelled for posting "false" information and violating a code that governs party members’ behavior.
“I knew this day would come,” Dr. Son said in an interview over a messaging service.
He closed his Facebook account this week, saying he needed more time to work on book projects and transition to a new job as the director of a publishing house.
Dr. Son said the Facebook comment that got him in the most trouble was a short question he posed last September under a cartoon that obliquely criticized the government.
A character in the cartoon said: “Seventy-three years ago they corralled people to a rally to listen to the Declaration of Independence. Seventy-three years later they forbid people to gather to celebrate Independence Day.”
That was an apparent reference to a famous 1945 speech by Ho Chi Minh in which the Vietnamese dictator declared his country’s independence from France, and an oblique criticism of the Communist Party’s current leaders, who have escalated repression of political dissidents.
Dr. Son said the question he wrote underneath the cartoon — “Is this true?” — prompted a monthslong investigation by Danang’s Communist Party Central Committee.
He said he was also investigated for a Facebook comment — “How have things become this bad?” — that he left under a post featuring two articles in the state-run news media about the country’s education minister.
Even though many Vietnamese have low opinions of the Communist Party, its members generally avoid criticizing it for fear of repercussions that would affect their livelihoods, said Mai Thanh Son, a senior researcher at the state-affiliated Institute of Social Sciences in central Vietnam.
“The expulsion of Tran Duc Anh Son is a thoughtless decision,” he said.
“It’s like releasing a tiger into the forest, and it contributes to stripping away the cowardly face of the ruling apparatus that the party represents.”
In January, a cybersecurity law took effect in Vietnam that requires technology companies with users there to set up offices and store data in the country, and disclose user data to the authorities without a court order.
Vietnam’s new cybersecurity law was meant to let the government better surveil its critics on Facebook, the country’s most popular social media platform.
Facebook declined to comment on the record about Dr. Son’s account.
The Foreign Ministry did not respond to emailed questions about Dr. Son’s expulsion from the party, including whether his criticism of Vietnam’s South China Sea policies had played a role.
Vietnam has clashed repeatedly at sea with China, which claims most of the waterway as its own. Notably, in 2014 a state-owned Chinese oil company towed an oil rig to waters near Danang, provoking a tense maritime standoff and anti-Chinese riots at several Vietnamese industrial parks. The Communist Party fears a repeat of such anti-China-fueled Vietnamese nationalism, because critics question why the government does not take a harder line against Beijing.
Chinese officials and scholars seek to justify Beijing’s claim to sovereignty over South China Sea waters that encircle the disputed Paracel and Spratly archipelagos by citing maps and other evidence from the 1940s and ’50s.
But Dr. Son and other Vietnamese historians argue that the Nguyen dynasty, which ruled present-day Vietnam from 1802 to 1945, wielded clear administrative control over the Paracels, decades before post-revolutionary China showed any interest in them.
Dr. Son is a former director of a fine arts museum in Hue, Vietnam’s imperial capital, and a specialist in Nguyen-era porcelain.
He developed an interest in Vietnam’s territorial claims as a student poking around archives of old maps and documents.
In 2009, officials in Danang asked him to pursue his research on Vietnam’s maritime claims on the government’s behalf.
He subsequently spent years traveling the world in search of material, including as a Fulbright scholar at Yale University.
Dr. Son has said the historical evidence of Vietnam’s maritime claims is so irrefutable that the government should mount a legal challenge to China’s activities in waters around some of the sea’s disputed islands, as the Philippines successfully did in a case that ended in 2016.
“I’m always against the Chinese,” he told The New York Times during an interview in 2017.
But he said at the time that Vietnam’s top leaders were “slaves” to Beijing who preferred to keep the old maps and other documents hidden.
“They always say to me, ‘Mr. Son, please keep calm,’” he said.
“‘Don’t talk badly about China.’”
The city of Danang, where Dr. Son lives and works, once had a reputation for its powerful, family-based networks that were willing to ignore dictates from the central government, said Bill Hayton, an author of books about Vietnam and the South China Sea and an associate fellow at Chatham House, a research institute based in London.
But Mr. Hayton noted that Vietnam’s current leadership, led by the Communist Party’s general secretary, Nguyen Phu Trong, has lately disciplined some key Danang political figures, including firing Nguyen Xuan Anh, the head of the city’s Communist Party Central Committee.
Even though Danang officials presumably supported and financed Dr. Son’s research, he added, “the current Vietnamese leadership does not want to rock the boat with Beijing and seems determined to keep a lid on criticism of China’s actions in the South China Sea.”

Chinese Aggressions

US warship sails by contested island chain in South China Sea in message to Beijing
By Lucas Tomlinson

A U.S. warship sailed Sunday near two contested Chinese man-made islands in the South China Sea, the location where Beijing has built up military fortifications despite a pledge not to do so, a U.S. defense official told Fox News.
The “guided-missile destroyer USS Decatur (DDG 73) conducted a freedom of navigation operation in the South China Sea to uphold the rights and freedoms of all states under international law. Decatur sailed within 12 nautical miles of Gaven and Johnson Reefs in the Spratly Islands,” the U.S. official, who declined to be identified, said in a statement.
It’s not immediately clear how Beijing will respond. 

Normally, American warships have been shadowed by Chinese spy ships during similar operations in the past in addition to fighter jets.
The latest military operation -- which the Pentagon calls “routine” freedom of navigation maneuvers -- comes days after a series of actions between global powers.
The U.S. military last sailed a warship within 12 nautical miles of a contested Chinese island in May, the internationally recognized territorial boundary. 

By sailing a warship inside that boundary, the U.S. rejects the claim, a view shared by most of the international community. 

The news of the action was also reported by The Wall Street Journal.

The U.S. military last sailed a warship within 12 nautical miles of a contested Chinese island in May, the internationally recognized territorial boundary. 

The transit by the American destroyer Sunday follows a series of diplomatic standoffs between world powers.
Last week, China announced it would not allow a large U.S. warship to visit Hong Kong next month. On Wednesday, the U.S. Air Force flew nuclear-capable bombers near China in the East China Sea, which Beijing called “provocative” despite flying in international airspace. 

China also yanked its top admiral from Newport, R.I., last week days before he was set to meet his American counterpart.
Recent tensions come as the Trump administration has slapped additional sanctions on $200 billion in Chinese goods in recent days and taken the additional steps to sanction China over its purchase of Russian fighter jets and advanced surface-to-air missiles.
Last week, U.S. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis played down the recent disputes with China.
“It's international waters, folks. It's international waters,” Mattis said about the B-52 bomber flight and other recent “freedom of navigation operations” by other U.S. warships.

“If it was 20 years ago and they had not militarized those features there, it would've just been another bomber on its way to Diego Garcia or whatever, Mattis added. 

 “There's nothing out of the ordinary about it.”
In the Rose Garden outside the White House in 2015, Chinese dictator Xi Jinping pledged his country would not militarize the man-made islands Beijing had built atop former reefs. 

Since then, China has deployed surface-to-air missiles to some of the islands, a move which U.S. officials concede could one day affect U.S. military flight plans.
At the United Nations last week, President Trump accused China of meddling in the upcoming midterm elections in November.
“They do not want me or us to win because I am the first president ever to challenge China on trade. We are winning on trade. We are winning at every level,” Trump said at a U.N. Security Council meeting with Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi seated nearby.

China's new unnamed home-built aircraft carrier leaves Dalian in northeast China's Liaoning Province for sea trials Sunday, May 13, 2018. 

In his annual address to the U.N. General Assembly, President Trump said China's trade policies "cannot be tolerated" anymore.
“We have racked up $13 trillion in trade deficits over the last two decades, but those days are over. We will no longer tolerate such abuse, we will not allow our workers to be victimized, our companies to be cheated and our wealth to be plundered and transferred.”
Two years ago, the U.S. military accused their Chinese counterparts of stealing two American underwater drones in the South China Sea as the U.S. Navy operated them from a short distance away. 

The Chinese returned the drones weeks later in boxes.

Chinese Peril

China’s Sea Control Is a Done Deal, ‘Short of War With the U.S.’

By Hannah Beech

An American crew monitored China’s buildup in the South China Sea this month from a Navy P-8A Poseidon reconnaissance plane.

NEAR MISCHIEF REEF, South China Sea — As the United States Navy reconnaissance plane banked low near Mischief Reef in the South China Sea early this month, a Chinese warning crackled on the radio.
“U.S. military aircraft,” came the challenge, delivered in English in a harsh staccato.
“You have violated our China sovereignty and infringed on our security and our rights. You need to leave immediately and keep far out.”
Aboard the P-8A Poseidon maritime patrol aircraft, flying in what is widely considered to be international airspace, Lt. Dyanna Coughlin scanned a live camera feed showing the dramatic evolution of Mischief Reef.
Five years ago, this was mostly an arc of underwater atoll populated by tropical fish and turtles.
Now Mischief Reef, which is off the Philippine coast but controlled by China, has been filled out and turned into a Chinese military base, complete with radar domes, shelters for surface-to-air missiles and a runway long enough for fighter jets.
Six other nearby shoals have been similarly transformed by Chinese dredging.
“I mean, this is insane,” Lieutenant Coughlin said.
“Look at all that crazy construction.”
A rare visit on board a United States Navy surveillance flight over the South China Sea pointed out how profoundly China has reshaped the security landscape across the region.
The country’s aggressive territorial claims and island militarization have put neighboring countries and the United States on the defensive, even as President Trump’s administration is stepping up efforts to highlight China’s controversial island-building campaign.
In congressional testimony before assuming his new post as head of the United States Indo-Pacific Command in May, Adm. Philip S. Davidson sounded a stark warning about Beijing’s power play in a sea through which roughly one-third of global maritime trade flows.
“In short, China is now capable of controlling the South China Sea in all scenarios short of war with the United States,” Admiral Davidson said, an assessment that caused some consternation in the Pentagon.

A view of Subi Reef and the array of vessels there.

How Beijing relates to its neighbors in the South China Sea could be a harbinger of its interactions elsewhere in the world.
Xi Jinping has held up the island-building effort as a prime example of “China moving closer to center stage” and standing “tall and firm in the East.”
In a June meeting with Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, Xi vowed that China “cannot lose even one inch of the territory” in the South China Sea, even though an international tribunal has dismissed Beijing’s expansive claims to the waterway.
The reality is that governments with overlapping territorial claims — representing Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia and Brunei — lack the firepower to challenge China.
The United States has long fashioned itself as a keeper of peace in the Western Pacific.
But it’s a risky proposition to provoke conflict over a scattering of rocks in the South China Sea, analysts say.
“As China’s military power grows relative to the United States, and it will, questions will also grow regarding America’s ability to deter Beijing’s use of force in settling its unresolved territorial issues,” said Rear Adm. Michael McDevitt, who is now a senior fellow in strategic studies at the Center for Naval Analyses.
An unexpected encounter in the South China Sea could also set off an international incident.
A 1.4-million-square-mile sea presents a kaleidoscope of shifting variables: hundreds of disputed shoals, thousands of fishing boats, coast guard vessels and warships and, increasingly, a collection of Chinese fortresses.
In late August, one of the Philippines’ largest warships, a cast-off cutter from the United States Coast Guard, ran aground on Half Moon Shoal, an unoccupied maritime feature not far from Mischief Reef.
The Chinese, who also claim the shoal, sent vessels from nearby artificial islands, but the Philippines refused any help.
After all, in 2012, the Chinese Coast Guard had muscled the Philippines off of Scarborough Shoal, a reef just 120 nautical miles from the main Philippine island of Luzon.
Another incident in 1995 brought a Chinese flag to Mischief Reef, also well within what international maritime law considers a zone where the Philippines has sovereign rights.
Could somewhere like Half Moon Shoal be the next flash point in the South China Sea?
“A crisis at Half Moon was averted, but it has always been the risk with the South China Sea that a small incident in remote waters escalates into a much larger crisis through miscommunication or mishandling,” said Ian Storey, a senior fellow at the ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute in Singapore. “That’s why this is all so dangerous. It’s not just a pile of rocks that can be ignored.”
Monitoring feeds from a camera controlled by an observer, front left, on the naval reconnaissance mission early this month.

‘Leave immediately!’
On the scratchy radio channel, the Chinese challenges kept on coming.
Eight separate times during the mission this month, Chinese dispatchers queried the P-8A Poseidon. Twice, the Chinese accused the American military aircraft not just of veering close to what Beijing considered its airspace but also of violating its sovereignty.
“Leave immediately!” the Chinese warned over and over.
Cmdr. Chris Purcell, the American squadron commander, said such challenges have been routine during the four months he has flown missions over the South China Sea.
“What they want is for us to leave, and then they can say that we left because this is their sovereign territory,” he said.
“It’s kind of their way to try to legitimize their claims, but we are clear that we are operating in international airspace and are not doing anything different from what we’ve done for decades.”
In 2015, Xi Jinping stood in the Rose Garden at the White House and promised that “there is no intention to militarize” a collection of disputed reefs in the South China Sea known as the Spratlys.
But since then, Chinese dredgers have poured mountains of sand onto Mischief Reef and six other Chinese-controlled features in the Spratlys.
China has added at least 3,200 acres of new land in the area, according to the Asia Maritime Transparency Initiative run by the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
Descending as low as 5,000 feet, the surveillance flight this month gave a bird’s-eye view of the Chinese construction.
On Subi Reef, a construction crane swung into action next to a shelter designed for surface-to-air missiles.
There were barracks, bunkers and open hangars.
At least 70 vessels, some warships, surrounded the island.
On Fiery Cross Reef, a complex of buildings with Chinese eaves was arrayed at the center of the reclaimed island, including an exhibition-style hall with an undulating roof.
It looked like a typical newly built town in interior China — except for the radar domes that protruded like giant golf balls across the reef.
A military-grade runway ran the length of the island, and army vehicles trundled across the tarmac. Antenna farms bristled.
“It’s impressive to see the Chinese building, given that this is the middle of the South China Sea and far away from anywhere, but the idea that this isn’t militarized, that’s clearly not the case,” Commander Purcell said.
“It’s not hidden or anything. The intention, it’s there plain to see.”
In other spots, reclamation could also be seen on Vietnamese-controlled features, such as West London Reef, where workers dragged equipment past piles of sand.
But dredging by Southeast Asian nations is scant compared with the Chinese effort.
In April, China for the first time deployed antiship and antiaircraft missiles on Mischief, Subi and Fiery Cross, American military officials said.
The following month, a long-range bomber landed on Woody Island, another contested South China Sea islet.
A Pentagon report released in August said that with forward operating bases on artificial islands in the South China Sea, the People’s Liberation Army was honing its “capability to strike U.S. and allied forces and military bases in the western Pacific Ocean, including Guam.”
In response to the intensifying militarization of the South China Sea, the United States in May disinvited China from joining the biannual Rim of the Pacific naval exercise, the world’s largest maritime warfare training, involving more than 20 navies.
“We are prepared to support China’s choices, if they promote long-term peace and prosperity,” Mr. Mattis said, explaining the snub.
“Yet China’s policy in the South China Sea stands in stark contrast to the openness of our strategy.”

Radar towers, hangars and five-story buildings seen on Fiery Cross Reef.

Projecting Power
For its part, Beijing claims the United States is the one militarizing the South China Sea.
In addition to the routine surveillance flyovers, President Trump has sent American warships more frequently to waters near China’s man-made islands.
These freedom of navigation patrols, which occur worldwide, are meant to show the United States’ commitment to maritime free passage, Pentagon officials say.
The last such operation by the United States was in May, when two American warships sailed near the Paracels, another contested South China Sea archipelago.
Beijing was irate.
The United States says that it does not take any side in territorial disputes in the South China Sea.
On its maps, China uses a so-called nine-dash line to scoop out most of the waterway’s turf as its own.
But international legal precedent is not on China’s side when it comes to the dashed demarcation, a version of which was first used in the 1940s.
In 2016, an international tribunal dismissed Beijing’s nine-dash claim, judging that China has no historical rights to the South China Sea. 
The case was brought by the Philippines after Scarborough Shoal was commandeered by China in 2012, following a tense blockade.
The landmark ruling, however, has had no practical effect.
That’s in large part because Rodrigo Duterte, who became president of the Philippines less than a month before the tribunal reached its decision, chose not to press the matter with Beijing.
He declared China his new best friend and dismissed the United States as a has-been power.
But last month, Mr. Duterte took Beijing to task when a recording aired on the BBC from another P-8A Poseidon mission over the South China Sea demonstrated that Chinese dispatchers were taking a far more aggressive tone with Philippine aircraft than with American ones.
“I hope China would temper its behavior,” Mr. Duterte said.
“You cannot create an island and say the air above it is yours.”

The crew disembarking on Okinawa, Japan, after their mission over the South China Sea.

Missed Opportunities
Perceptions of power — and Chinese reactions to these projections — have led analysts to criticize Barack Obama as having been too timid in countering China over what Adm. Harry B. Harris Jr., the former head of the United States Pacific Command, memorably called a “great wall of sand” in the South China Sea.
Critics, for instance, have faulted the previous administration for not conducting more frequent freedom of navigation patrols.
“China’s militarization of the South China Sea has been a gradual process, with several phases where alternative actions by the U.S., as well as other countries, could have changed the course of history,” said Alexander Vuving, a professor at the Daniel K. Inouye Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies in Honolulu.
Chief among these moments, Mr. Vuving said, was China’s takeover of Scarborough Shoal.
The United States declined to back up the Philippines, a defense treaty ally, by sending Coast Guard vessels or warships to an area that international law has designated as within the Philippines’ exclusive economic zone.
“Seeing U.S. commitment to its ally, Beijing might not have been as confident as it was with its island-building program,” Mr. Vuving said.
“The U.S. failure to support its ally in the Scarborough standoff also demonstrated to people like Duterte that he had no other option than to kowtow to China.”
With most of the Spratly military bases nearing completion by the end of the year, according to Pentagon assessments, the next question is whether — or more likely when — China will begin building on Scarborough.
A Chinese base there would put the People’s Liberation Army in easy striking distance of the Philippine capital, Manila.
From the American reconnaissance plane, Scarborough looked like a perfect diving retreat, a lazy triangle of reef sheltering turquoise waters.
But Chinese Coast Guard vessels could be seen circling the shoal, and Philippine fishermen have complained about being prevented from accessing their traditional waters.
“Do you see any construction vessels around there?” Lieutenant Coughlin asked.
“Negative, ma’am,” replied Lt. Joshua Grant, as he used a control stick to position the plane’s camera over Scarborough Shoal.
“We’ll see if it changes next time.”

Sina Delenda Est

Royal Navy warship confronted by Chinese military in South China Sea
By Chris Graham

HMS Albion passed by the Paracel Islands in recent days to challenge Beijing's excessive claims

A Royal Navy warship has sailed close to islands claimed by Beijing in the South China Sea, a move denounced by China as a "provocation".
In a sign of Britain increasingly flexing its military muscle in the region, HMS Albion last week passed by the Paracel Islands, where it was confronted by the Chinese military.
The Albion, a 22,000 ton amphibious warship carrying a contingent of Royal Marines, was on its way to Saigon, where it docked on Monday after a deployment in and around Japan.
Beijing dispatched a frigate and two helicopters to challenge the British vessel, but both sides remained calm during the encounter, a source told Reuters.
China said Britain was engaged in "provocation" and that it had lodged a strong complaint. 

In a statement to Reuters, the Foreign Ministry said the ship had entered Chinese territorial waters around the Paracel Islands on August 31 without permission, and the Chinese navy had warned them to leave.
A source told Reuters that the Albion did not enter the territorial seas around any features in the hotly disputed region but demonstrated that Britain does not recognise excessive maritime claims around the Paracel Islands. 

Twelve nautical miles is an internationally recognised territorial limit.
The Paracels are occupied entirely by China but also claimed by Vietnam.
A spokesman for the Royal Navy said: “HMS Albion exercised her rights for freedom of navigation in full compliance with international law and norms.”
Dr Euan Graham, a Senior Fellow at the Lowy Institute in Australia, said the move followed an earlier passage by a Royal Navy ship through the Spratly Islands.
He said it was a clear indication of Britain's support for the US, which has said it would like to see more international participation in such actions.
"Also, the fact that Albion was coming from Japan and on her way to Vietnam gives the signal a sharper edge to China," he told The Telegraph.
The Albion is one of three Royal Navy ships deployed to Asia this year, along with HMS Argyll and HMS Sutherland.
"The UK has impressively deployed three Royal Navy surface ships to Asian waters this year, after a long gap between ship visits, to this part of the world," he added. 

Military vehicles are seen in the loading dock of the HMS Albion, the British Royal Navy flagship amphibious assault ship, after the ship's arrival at Harumi Pier in Tokyo.

Gavin Williamson, the Defence Secretary, said in June that deployment of the three ships was intended to send the “strongest of signals” on the importance of freedom of navigation.
Dr Graham said "the bigger test of UK commitment to regional security in the Indo-Pacific is about the consistency of its military presence into the future".
"The Royal Navy is making encouraging noises about sending assets to participate in FPDA (the Five Power Defence Arrangement) exercises as well as forward basing in future."
The FPDA is a regional security institution between Australia, Malaysia, New Zealand, Singapore and the United Kingdom.
China’s claims in the South China Sea, through which some $3 trillion of shipborne trade passes each year, are contested by Brunei, Malaysia, the Philippines and Vietnam.
Both Britain and the United States say they conduct FONOP operations throughout the world, including in areas claimed by allies.
The British Navy has previously sailed close to the disputed Spratly Islands, further south in the South China Sea, several times in recent years but not within the 12 nautical mile limit, regional diplomatic sources have said.
FONOPs, which are largely symbolic, have so far not persuaded Beijing to curtail its South China Sea activities, which have included extensive reclamation of reefs and islands and the construction of runways, hangars and missile systems.

Foreign aircraft and vessels in the region are routinely challenged by Chinese naval ships and monitoring stations on the fortified islands, sources have said previously.
In April, warships from Australia -- which like Britain is a close US ally -- had what Canberra described as a close "encounter" with Chinese naval vessels in the contested sea.