Sina Delenda Est

Seizure of U.S. drone shines spotlight on China’s nuclear submarine strategy
BY JESSE JOHNSON
This illustration depicts the underwater mapping capability of the U.S. Navy's USNS Bowditch and other ships of her class. 

With its controversial seizure and return of a U.S. underwater drone, Beijing may have inadvertently thrust into the spotlight one of the main motivations behind its ramped-up moves in the South China Sea: the quest to create a safe-haven for its sea-based nuclear deterrent.
Submarines, in particular ballistic missile subs, have long figured prominently in China’s desire to match the capabilities and prestige of other major nuclear powers. 

Slowly but surely, experts say, Beijing has made progress on this front, building a formidable program that began very early in the ruling Communist Party’s history.
But securing the credibility of its overall nuclear deterrent has been a challenge.
“In particular, experts worry that growing U.S. missile defense, conventional precision strike, and space-based surveillance capability together allow for sophisticated preemptive attacks that pose a significant threat to China’s land-based nuclear forces,” Tong Zhao, a fellow at the Carnegie-Tsinghua Center for Global Policy, wrote in a June report on China’s sea-based nuclear deterrent.
Prompted by these concerns, China has looked to its nuclear missile submarine program — and all that is associated with it — amid an intensifying rivalry with the United States, pulling out all stops in a bid to establish credible nuclear retaliation capabilities.
The battleground for this competition? 

Beneath the waves in the South China Sea.
In recent years, the strategic waterway has been lumped in with other Chinese “core interests,” a set of critical issues on which there is very little room, if any, for negotiation.
Observers say Chinese strategists are interested in an open ocean patrol strategy, and many reportedly believe that to be the ultimate goal of China’s nuclear missile fleet. 

First, however, it must secure the South China Sea as a sort of staging ground or bastion for extended operations.
“Given the noise level of the existing Chinese SSBNs (nuclear ballistic missile submarines), the bastion strategy seems to offer a better near-term solution,” Zhao wrote in his report, noting that known Chinese subs remain far noisier than their American counterparts.
According to Zhao, the South China Sea appears to be the best bet for China’s subs, given its depth and other environmental factors.
Even though a large southern portion of the South China Sea is rather shallow — under 100 meters (328 feet) in depth — in much of the area roughly inside China’s “nine-dash line” territorial claim, the continental shelf drops to a deep basin of around 4,000 meters, offering better cover for submarines.
Such a submarine bastion could be a first step toward giving Beijing the ability to break out into the Western Pacific and beyond, putting its subs — and their nuclear missiles — within range of the continental United States.
“Given the fact that the current Chinese submarine-launched ballistic missile — the JL-2 — does not have a range long enough to reach the continental United States from China’s coastal waters, Chinese SSBNs have incentives to practice breaking through the ‘first island chain’ and into the West Pacific,” Zhao told The Japan Times in an interview. 

The first island chain refers to a line stretching from Japan and Taiwan that China says has been used by the United States to contain it since the Cold War.
But Beijing faces huge obstacles if it seeks to dominate the South China Sea, part of what some analysts have termed a long-term project to create a virtual “Chinese lake.”
China has reclaimed 3,200 acres (1,280 hectares) of land on seven features it occupies in the disputed waters, giving it what the Pentagon says are long-term “civil-military” outposts from which it can project power.
While Zhao disagrees that Beijing is seeking to turn the South China Sea into its own “lake,” he said that China does — for the purpose of enhancing the survivability of its sea-based nuclear deterrent — have interests in strengthening its capability to detect and monitor enemy anti-submarine warfare platforms in the region.
“Some of the China-controlled islands may be helpful for providing logistical support and protection for Chinese SSBNs patrolling in nearby waters. In other words, helping protect Chinese SSBNs may be part of Chinese motivations behind the land reclamation projects,” Zhao said, adding that the projects were primarily driven by China’s desire to reinforce its territorial claims in the South China Sea.
Regardless, perhaps the biggest obstacle for Beijing is trade and location: The strategic waterway is home to some of the busiest international commercial shipping lanes in the world and is surrounded by other nations, including fellow claimants to the waters, making encounters with numerous navies inevitable.
For China, though, the U.S. Navy’s presence in the waterway — and its surveillance activities there — have been perhaps the most implacable threat to control of the waters, de facto or otherwise.
These concerns were highlighted Thursday, when the Chinese Navy seized a U.S. unmanned underwater vehicle (UUV) in international waters in the South China Sea, prompting a formal diplomatic protest and a demand for its return. 

The UUV was returned Tuesday.
“The U.S. cannot hide its real agenda by downplaying recent events,” the state-run People’s Daily newspaper said in an editorial Monday written by Hua Yiwen, who it described as an international affairs expert. 

“The unmanned drone was just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to U.S. military actions against China. The U.S. has been developing UUVs for a long time, treating them as a ‘power enhancer’ for its military and a crucial part of its weapons system.”
While Thursday’s seizure was rare in that it was made public, both China and the U.S. have been busy bolstering their surveillance operations in the area in recent years, including the use of UUVs.
“This is not the first time that we seized a U.S. underwater drone in the South China Sea, but the one we seized on Thursday is new and more advanced than before and might carry valuable information just gathered in the South China Sea,” the state-run Global Times newspaper quoted Li Jie, a Beijing-based naval expert, as saying Sunday.
“This is why the U.S. was so nervous and tried to use the media to hype it up this time while it had remained silent before,” the paper quoted Li as saying. 

“The U.S. was aware that such spying activity is inappropriate.”
The United States “has shown considerable interest in using new technologies like unmanned underwater drones to track and trail Chinese SSBNs,” the Carnegie-Tsinghua Center’s Zhao said in his report, noting U.S. government-sponsored studies about how to deploy such drones near Chinese submarine bases to detect the vessels as they leave and return to port.
In April, U.S. Defense Secretary Ash Carter announced that Washington would invest more than $8 billion just next year in undersea capabilities “to ensure ours is the most lethal and most advanced undersea and anti-submarine force in the world.”
“That includes new undersea drones — in multiple sizes and diverse payloads — that can, importantly, operate in shallow waters where manned submarines can’t,” Carter said.
China, for its part, has reportedly hustled to match the U.S. technological prowess under the waves.
In an example of this, top Chinese researchers gathered Saturday — just two days after the U.S. drone’s seizure — for what was billed as the nation’s first underwater drone symposium.
This came after Chinese researchers carried out the first test of an underwater glider drone that could challenge the record for the deepest dive, a mark held by a vessel now in use by the U.S. Navy, the South China Morning Post reported in September.
The tests of the Haiyi-7000 underwater glider drone have reportedly piqued the interest of the Chinese military, the paper said.
The Pentagon has said the seized drone, reportedly a Teledyne-Webb Slocum G2 glider with significant military applications, used commercially available technology that sold for about $150,000.

A Teledyne-Webb Slocum G2 glider

Experts, however, have painted a more nuanced picture.
According to Malcolm Davis, a senior analyst at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute in Canberra, the type of drone that was taken, which resembles an aircraft that flies underwater, is used for oceanographic research to map the underwater terrain and conditions such as temperature, acoustic activity and salinity.
“That’s very useful for the U.S. to sort of map the underwater battle space that China would be deploying submarines into,” Davis said.
But while understanding how the glider concept works is accessible, he added, “it is complex in its execution.”
“In terms of the concept, if you put wings on a drone, you can use the current to glide,” he said. 

“But exactly how you do that and the technology within that drone, in terms of sensors and guidance, is complex and quite classified.”
While it remains unknown precisely how crucial a part underwater drones currently play in the waters of the South China Sea, the rapid pace of technological breakthroughs means continued deployments are unlikely to abate anytime soon.
“Drones already are and will continue to play a more important role in underwater ‘cat-and-mouse’ games,” Zhao told The Japan Times. 

“This trend will only increase as autonomous technologies improve. U.S. military doctrines have openly called for prioritizing the deployment of unmanned underwater vessels in the Asia-Pacific region, presumably to counter threat from China.”
And while the drone seized last week was likely only used for collecting hydrological data that is useful for anti-submarine operations, “U.S. intentions to use underwater drones in the future to actively track and trail Chinese submarines are no secret,” Zhao added.
“Under these conditions, China will for sure develop similar technologies of its own,” Zhao said.  

Act of Piracy, Act of War

China Throws Out South China Sea Rule Book
By ANDREW BROWNE

SHANGHAI—In a tweet, Donald Trump called it stealing.
Many Western legal experts agree with him: The interception and capture of a U.S. Navy drone by the crew of a Chinese warship, they say, was tantamount to an act of piracy on the high seas. 

The Pentagon labeled the seizure “unlawful.”
On Tuesday, China handed back the craft, a day after a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman insisted that the sailors were simply gathering unattended property, as one might “pick something up from the street.”
That explanation beggars belief. 

China has crossed a new threshold. 

It once found it necessary to justify its assertive actions in the South China Sea within a broad framework of legality—however flimsy, contrived or contested its formulation of law appeared to the U.S. and its allies.
This, along with its efforts to win over the region with pocketbook diplomacy—free-trade deals, infrastructure investment, low-cost loans and aid packages—distinguished China from Russia, which has openly flouted international norms by invading Georgia and partially dismantling Ukraine.
The finned metal tube was clearly marked. 

Equally obvious, it was under the control of the nearby USNS Bowditch. 

If China can grab a submersible drone, why not interfere with the passage of a ship? 

In these matters, international maritime law does not distinguish between vessel types or sizes.
China has again called into question its own repeated proclamations that it won’t restrict freedom of navigation in the South China Sea.
Step by step, China is walking away from its assurances that it wants a “peaceful rise.” 

Just last year, Xi Jinping pledged not to militarize the seven massive islands China has dredged in the South China Sea, but lately it has positioned antiaircraft weapons on them, according to a report by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank.
Perhaps this episode was intended as a Chinese riposte to Mr. Trump. 

In Beijing’s view, he has challenged the underpinnings of the U.S.-China relationship by taking a phone call from Taiwan’s president and questioning its cherished “one-China” principle from his Twitter account. 

And now China is breaking a taboo.
Scooping a submersible drone out of the waves, of course, is not comparable to Vladimir Putin’s naked aggression.
But it’s another move in a dangerous direction. 

In 2001, when a Chinese fighter collided with a U.S. spy plane off Hainan Island and forced it to land, Beijing complained that the plane was conducting illegal close-in surveillance, applying its own minority interpretation of international law.

China returned a U.S. ocean glider similar to one pictured here that it had seized in the South China sea last week. 

This time it hardly bothered with a legal rationale. 

The People’s Daily’s overseas edition claimed the drone was in China’s “jurisdictional waters,” even though the spot falls outside its already extravagant claims to almost the entire South China Sea demarcated by its “nine-dash line.” 

The foreign and defense ministries were vaguer, saying it was in “waters facing China.”
The Foreign Ministry spokeswoman on Tuesday blamed U.S. close-in reconnaissance activities near Chinese territory.
Either way, the entire area is now militarized.
Some Chinese scholars suggest the interception sent a message that China won’t tolerate the increasing use of American drones to snoop on its submarine activity at any distance from its shores.
Adm. Harry Harris, the U.S. Pacific Fleet commander, sent a blunt message to Beijing as he announced deployments of F-22 Raptor jets to Australia last week. 

“We will cooperate when we can, but we will be ready to confront when we must,” he said.
China interprets such rhetoric as bluster. 

The nationalist-leaning Global Times, reacting to Mr. Trump’s tweets, warned that if he keeps up his provocations as president, “China will not exercise restraint.”
During the Cold War, rules of the road, diligently adhered to, prevented accidents that might have brought the U.S. and the Soviet Union to war. 

China and the U.S. have been working on similar protocols. 

Last week’s apparently calculated act of lawlessness, though, changes the game.
Between Mr. Trump’s courageous approach to China’s sacred cows, and China’s new disdain for legal niceties, expect regular eruptions. 

China is clearly testing U.S. resolve.
A shift in strategy assumes of course that the decision to snatch the drone came from the top rather than a rogue commander.
Xi’s administration has declared “maintaining stability” to be its top task for 2017 as the economy sputters. 

Xi’s navy has just literally and figuratively rocked the boat.

"Son of a Whore"

Beijing Commits Act of War, Obama Does Nothing

By GORDON G. CHANG

Saturday, China’s Defense Ministry said it would hand back to the U.S. Navy an underwater drone one of its boats had seized Thursday in the South China Sea. 

The return, it said, would be made “in an appropriate manner.”
The release of the drone, whenever it occurs, should not be the end of the saga. 

Washington must impose costs on Beijing for what constituted an act of piracy—and an act of war.
Chinese spokesman Yang Yujun said, in the words of the official Xinhua News Agency, that one of its navy’s lifeboats “located an unidentified device” and retrieved it “to prevent the device from causing harm to the safety of navigation and personnel of passing vessels.” 

The Chinese claimed to have “examined the device in a professional and responsible manner.”
In fact, China’s ships had long tailed the USNS Bowditch, an unarmed reconnaissance vessel. 

The crew of the Bowditch, who at the time were trying to retrieve the drone, repeatedly hailed by radio the Chinese sailors, who ignored their calls and, within 500 yards of the American craft, went into the water in a small boat to seize the drone, called a Littoral Battlespace Sensing glider. 

The Chinese by radio told the Bowditch they were keeping the drone.
The intentional taking of what the Defense Department later termed a “sovereign immune vessel” of the United States was an act of war. 

The size of the object for this purpose is not relevant. 

Whether drone or aircraft carrier, the principle is the same.
The seizure is only the latest act in a course of belligerent conduct spanning this century. 

The most notorious incident involved the clipping of the wing of a U.S. Navy EP-3 over the South China Sea on April 1, 2001 by a reckless Chinese pilot. 

After the stricken American plane landed on the Chinese island of Hainan, Beijing imprisoned the crew for 11 days and stripped the plane of its sensitive electronic equipment. 

Chinese leaders, for no apparent reason, required the craft to be chopped up so that it could not be flown away.
In September 2002, China’s media claimed a Chinese fishing boat intentionally rammed the Bowditch in the Yellow Sea to disable its sonar. 

The incident—there may have been no ramming but there was dangerous harassment of the Bowditch—occurred in international water.
In March 2009, Chinese craft tried to sever the towed sonar array from the USNS Impeccable in international water in the South China Sea. 

The Victorious, Impeccable’s sister ship, was subject to extreme harassment in March and May 2009.
There have been numerous Chinese intercepts of U.S. Navy and U.S. Air Force planes and vessels since then, including a near collision in December 2013 involving the USS Cowpens, a missile cruiser, in the South China Sea.
This conduct continues because the U.S. does not exact costs on China. 

Worse, American administrations have rewarded Beijing for unjustifiable actions.
The Bush White House, for instance, essentially apologized to China and, on top of that, paid what was effectively a ransom to free the aviators of the EP-3. 

The amount was characterized as a payment for room and board, but the agreement to compensate China, regardless of terminology, was one of the lowest points in America’s history.
The Obama administration, unfortunately, adopted the Bush playbook. 

One month after the Impeccable and Victorious incidents in March 2009, the White House sent the chief of naval operations and a missile destroyer, the Fitzgerald, to China to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the founding of the Chinese navy. 

One month after that gesture of friendship to Beijing, the Chinese harassed the Victorious again.
Today, Obama cannot even talk about Chinese aggression. 

He did not, for example, mention it in his opening statement at his press conference Friday and did not address it when answering Mark Landler of the New York Times, who raised the drone seizure in his question.
Many, most notably Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut, have ridiculed Donald Trump for the misspelling in his Saturday morning tweet on the subject—the president-elect meant “unprecedented” but instead created the word “unpresidented”—but at least he is addressing critical issues. 

That’s important, even if at times Trump misfires, as he did in his Saturday evening tweet suggesting the Chinese could keep the drone.
Trump, even when making mistakes, understands one thing. 

It is wrong for American leaders to pursue policies that ensure Beijing will put America’s men and women in harm’s way in China’s peripheral waters.
And those incidents will get worse. 

The site of Thursday’s drone seizure, about 50 nautical miles northwest of Subic Bay, is critical.
Beijing maintains it has sovereignty over 85 percent of the South China Sea with its infamous “nine-dash line” claim, which was rejected by a July 12 arbitral ruling in The Hague, and it has continued to complain of American surveillance activity inside that now-invalidated perimeter.
Yet the drone incident took place so close to the Philippine shore that it was beyond China’s claimed area. 

In short, there was absolutely no justification for the Chinese navy to grab the drone.
This brazen act suggests two things. 

First, China has become completely lawless. 

That means Washington’s efforts of more than four decades to “enmesh” that country into the international system’s network of treaties, laws, rules, and conventions has completely failed.
Second, Beijing now thinks it can, with impunity, do whatever it wants wherever it wants. 

If it had the power, China would undoubtedly interfere with American shipping as it now does with American military vessels and aircraft.
The goal of Washington policy, therefore, should be to prevent China from ever obtaining that power. And the first step to doing that is start imposing severe diplomatic and economic costs on Beijing for, among other things, interfering with America’s right to sail and fly through the global commons.
Aggressors always urge calm after taking provocative actions, as China is now trying to do. 

This time, Washington should keep the temperature up.

China Tests U.S. Resolve

A new challenge to freedom of the seas as the Trump era nears.
The Wall Street Journal

Crew members aboard the VOS Raasay recover U.S. and British Royal Navy ocean gliders taking part in the Unmanned Warrior exercise off the northwest coast of Scotland on Oct. 8. A similar unmanned underwater vehicle was seized by the Chinese navy in international waters off the coast of the Philippines on Dec. 15. 

China’s theft of a U.S. Navy underwater drone in full view of the USNS Bowditch on Thursday is a telling episode. 

While Beijing agreed to return the drone over the weekend, along with bluster that the U.S. had “hyped” the heist, the Chinese navy’s actions were a deliberate provocation. 

China is testing U.S. resolve to maintain freedom of navigation in international waters that Beijing illegally claims as its own.
Some think the theft is a response to Donald Trump’s decision to take a congratulatory call from Taiwan’s President. 

But the People’s Liberation Army has pulled these stunts before. 

In April 2001, a PLA pilot tried a dangerous intercept with a U.S. spy plane in international airspace. He misjudged the distance, losing his own life and causing the U.S. plane to make an emergency landing in China. 

Beijing released the crew and plane after a 10-day standoff.
In March 2009, the PLA began a harassment campaign against the USNS Impeccable in international waters. 

After several days of dangerous maneuvers by five Chinese ships and one plane, the Chinese maritime militia tried to steal a towed sonar array from the ship. 

Whether China today is responding to Mr. Trump or offering a final insult to Obama is beside the point because the drone theft is part of a larger Chinese pattern.
China’s behavior shows its intention to intimidate its neighbors and establish hegemony in East Asia. 

In recent weeks the PLA air force has flown practice bombing missions, with fighter escorts, near the Japanese island of Okinawa and around Taiwan. 

The Japanese air force scrambled to intercept Chinese planes 571 times last year, up from 96 in 2010. Recently China has deployed military forces on disputed shoals in the South China Sea, contradicting Xi Jinping’s promise to Mr. Obama.
China objects to U.S. Navy and Air Force transits through and near these bases. 

The Obama Administration promised to carry out such missions regularly but then restricted the Pentagon to a handful. 

That sent a message that the U.S. can be intimidated from exercising its rights.
The drone theft may be a Chinese warning that the U.S. Navy will face harassment if a Trump Administration steps up such patrols. 

China is also rapidly expanding its submarine fleet, as an asymmetric response to U.S. surface dominance, and undersea drones map the ocean floor and test currents and sonar for submarine passage and detection.
The Chinese interception occurred about 50 nautical miles from the U.S. base at Subic Bay in the Philippines. 

The recent anti-American rants by Rodrigo Duterte may also have encouraged China to hope that an episode at sea could drive a larger rift between Manila and Washington. 

The Navy will have to expect more such interference.
All of this is occurring as Mr. Trump is signalling his intention to take a tougher line with China, at least initially, as he renegotiates the bilateral economic and strategic relationship. 

Mr. Trump’s precise goals aren’t clear, but one promise he’s likely to fulfill is rebuilding the U.S. Navy to reinforce America’s Pacific presence.
Chinese leaders may think these shows of force will intimidate the Trump Administration the way they did Obama. 

But they are likely to have the opposite effect. 

Mr. Trump doesn’t separate economic from security issues, and the Chinese are playing with fire.

Casus Belli

Trump rips China for seizing Navy drone
BY ELLIOT SMILOWITZ AND KRISTINA WONG

President Donald Trump on Saturday morning slammed China for seizing U.S. Navy underwater drone earlier this week.
“China steals United States Navy research drone in international waters -- rips it out of water and takes it to China in unpresidented act,” Trump wrote on Twitter.
The Pentagon on Friday demanded that China return the unmanned underwater vehicle it took in the South China Sea.
The department said in a statement it is using "appropriate government-to-government channels" to call upon China to return the drone "immediately."
The incident occurred Thursday around noon local time in international waters off the coast of the Philippines, according to a defense official.
The USNS Bowditch, an oceanographic survey ship, was preparing to retrieve its unmanned drone out of the water, as part of their typical mission to collect data on the ocean and weather patterns, the official said. 

The drone had surfaced and sent out a signal as to its location per normal operations.
A Chinese ship that had been shadowing the Bowditch then dropped its own small boat in the water and swooped in to grab the drone, the official said.
The Bowditch crew then called over via radio to the Chinese ship to ask for their equipment back. The Chinese crew confirmed receipt of the message, but began sailing away, leaving with the drone.
Around noon local time on Friday, the U.S. State Department filed an official demarche with China. The official said the matter is now in the State Department's hands.
China's seizure of the drone is likely a signal to President Donald Trump that it won't take his phone call with Taiwan lightly, an expert said on Friday.
"Knowing Chinese military officials for many years and how orders are communicated from the highest power centers in Beijing down to commanders on the ground or water, this was a highly planned and escalatory move to show China will not take matters lightly when it comes to President Trump’s phone call and comments on Taiwan, or Chinese actions overall," said Harry Kazianis, director of defense studies at the Center for the National Interest.
Trump took a phone call from Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen congratulating him on his presidential win, breaking decades of diplomatic protocol. 

No U.S. president had spoken with a leader of Taiwan since the U.S. normalized relations with China in 1979.

GOP senators call for 'firm response' to Chinese seizure of Navy drone

BY KRISTINA WONG

Republican senators are calling for a "firm response" to China's seizure of a Navy drone, including recalling the U.S. ambassador to China until the drone is returned.
"This brazenly hostile act is outrageous and must be met with a firm response. The U.S. Navy was operating in international waters conducting a standard exercise, and China should return the underwater vehicle immediately,” said Sen. Cory Gardner (R-Colo.).
Gardner is the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee's Subcommittee on East Asia, the Pacific, and International Cybersecurity Policy.
Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), chairman of the Armed Services Committee, said in a statement, "The United States must not stand for such outrageous conduct.
“The Chinese Navy’s seizure of a U.S. unmanned oceanographic vessel in international waters is a flagrant violation of the freedom of the seas. China had no right to seize this vehicle," he added.
The incident occurred Thursday around noon local time in international waters off the coast of the Philippines, according to a defense official.
The USNS Bowditch, an oceanographic survey ship, was preparing to retrieve its unmanned drone out of the water as part of its typical mission to collect data on the ocean and weather patterns, the official said. 

The drone had surfaced and sent out a signal as to its location per normal operations.
A Chinese ship that had been shadowing the Bowditch then dropped its own small boat in the water and swooped in to grab the drone, the official said.
The Bowditch crew called over radio to the Chinese ship to ask for the equipment back. 

The Chinese crew confirmed receipt of the message, but began sailing away, leaving with the drone.
Around noon local time on Friday, the U.S. State Department filed an official demarche with China. The official said the matter is now in the State Department's hands.
Gardner urged the Obama administration to recall the U.S. ambassador to China until the drone is returned and a formal apology is issued.
"The United States must send a message to China, unilaterally and through the United Nations, that if its hostile behavior in the South China Sea continues, there will be repercussions," he said.
McCain added: "We are not witnessing a China committed to a ‘peaceful rise.’ Instead, we are confronting an assertive China that has demonstrated its willingness to use intimidation and coercion to disrupt the rules-based order that has been the foundation of security and prosperity in the Asia-Pacific region for seven decades.
"As I have said repeatedly, we must adapt U.S. policy and strategy to reflect this reality and ensure we have the necessary military forces, capabilities, and posture in the region to deter, and if necessary, defeat aggression.”

U.S. Demands Return of Survey Drone Taken by Chinese in South China Sea

Seizure is latest Chinese aggression in contested sea territory
By PAUL SONNE and GORDON LUBOLD

U.S. oceanographic survey ship USNS Bowditch, shown in 2002, which deployed an underwater survey drone seized by a Chinese Navy vessel in the South China Sea, according to a U.S. defense official. 

WASHINGTON—The U.S. on Friday demanded the return of a underwater survey drone snatched by a Chinese navy vessel shadowing a U.S. oceanographic survey ship in the South China Sea.
“It’s ours, it was clearly marked, we want it back, and we don’t want this to happen again,” said Capt. Jeff Davis, a Pentagon spokesman.
It was the first time the government in Beijing has seized a piece of U.S. military gear since the Chinese took a Navy surveillance plane on Hainan Island following a midair collision in April 2001. Unlike that incident, the underwater drone was on an unclassified mission and isn’t considered a particularly valuable intelligence asset.
The drone, known as an “underwater glider” and valued at approximately $150,000, wasn’t on a classified surveillance mission but was collecting bathymetric data from the sea, along with data on the water’s salinity, temperature and current flow, the Pentagon said.
The State Department lodged a formal diplomatic protest over the incident overnight and said it was addressing the issue through diplomatic channels.
The Chinese embassy in Washington didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. 

There was no mention of the incident on the website of the Chinese Defense Ministry, and calls to an after-hour duty office phone there weren’t answered.
The seizure of the drone marks the latest and perhaps sharpest point of tension between U.S. and Chinese military forces in and around the South China Sea, a critical trade waterway where China has built artificial islands and laid claim to a vast swath of maritime territory, to the dismay of neighbors and U.S. officials.
A Washington-based think tank reported on Thursday that over the last several months, the Chinese have emplaced small weaponry on seven of the reclaimed islands in the South China Sea.
The incident on Thursday occurred as the U.S. Naval Ship Bowditch, which has a civilian commander, was conducting survey work along the sea floor in the South China Sea using at least two of the underwater drones about 50 nautical miles northwest of Subic Bay in the Philippines. 

It was being shadowed by a Chinese ship, a Dalang 3, a typical occurrence when U.S. ships navigate through those waters, according to Navy and defense officials.
The Chinese ship placed a smaller boat in the water to retrieve the American drone and the U.S. ship established “bridge-to-bridge” communications with the Chinese vessel, about 500 yards away, the Pentagon said, adding that efforts by the American crew to get the Chinese ship to leave the drone in the water were unsuccessful.
The drone, which uses GPS technology, wasn’t easily rerouted away from the Chinese ship, Capt. Davis said. 

The last communication from the Chinese ship as it departed the area with the drone was: “We are returning to normal operations,” he said.

China steals US underwater drone in South China Sea

By Lucas Tomlinson

USNS Bowditch

A Chinese Navy ship stole an American underwater research drone in a South China Sea area contested by the Chinese and the Philippines, two U.S. defense officials told Fox News Friday morning.
The incident occurred around noon Thursday local time approximately 40 miles west of the Philippines and about 150 miles from Scarborough Shoal. 

For days, the Chinese ship had been shadowing the American ship USNS Bowditch, which deployed the drone, a Slocum Glider.
The research ship is owned by the U.S. Navy but operated by Military Sealift Command, with a crew of contracted civilian mariners and scientists.
The Chinese have been regularly shadowing U.S. Navy vessels in the South China Sea for months, Fox News was told. 

The Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank, reported Wednesday that China set up anti-aircraft guns and close-in weapons systems designed to guard against missile attacks on all seven of its man-made islands in the strategically vital area.
Fox News was told the underwater drone was used to map the sea floor and gather other oceanographic data, and contained no classified material.
According to the USNS Bowditch's website, the ship is used to "support worldwide oceanography programs, including performing acoustical, biological, physical and geophysical surveys."
The drone was worth roughly $150,000.
After the Chinese vessel plucked the drone out of the water, the American research ship's crew tried to call the Chinese ship over bridge-to-bridge radio, but to no avail.
The State Department lodged a formal protest known as a demarche, which the U.S. ambassador in Beijing delivered to the Chinese government Friday, Fox News was told.
The department did not immediately respond when Fox News reached out for comment.