China has
been doing pretty much what it wanted with those little islands in the South
China Sea, creating land mass from nothing, and putting a runway on it as big
as the one out here in the suburbs at Dulles Airport in Washington D.C.
Nobody has done much of anything to stop them. For the last five
years they have harassed US Navy vessels in the area, warned off any air
traffic that passes through, forced fishing boats out of the waters, and
generally acted like this was their territory even though it is almost 1000
miles from anything Chinese.
Yesterday,
the Defense Minister in Taiwan told us they put surface to air missiles on that
little strip of land. [see Michael
Forsythe’s article today in the New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/17/world/asia/china-is-arming-south-china-sea-island-us-says.html
] These happen to be a medium to long
range interceptor which the Chinese also sold to Turkey [ for more details see http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/china/hq-9.htm
] In case you were wondering, it is not the missile the Turks used to shoot
down the Russian SU 24 flying over Syria;
that was a U.S. missile, the Aim 9.
The Chinese HQ 9 is a capable missile system that could probably shoot
down most of the aircraft that fly through the airspace above it, even though
that probably isn’t why they put it there.
These
Chinese want to escalate with an old idea.
You don’t have to shoot a missile to get its value. You just need to turn on the radar and paint
the target. Civilian aircraft will never
know that happened because they don’t have the capability to detect the lock on
of a missile radar, but military aircraft do.
They will know when that radar turns on and they are acquired by the
missile, after which they have a couple of options. They can jam the radar, lock on a missile of
their own, or stop flying through that airspace. None
of these are going to get the Chinese to remove this weapon from the
islands.
So, we
are going to have military aircraft flying through this airspace and getting a
report of a radar lock-on. There is
always the possibility that the warnings the Chinese have been giving can be
backed up by firing one of those missiles like the Turks did to the
Russians. That is not going to go well
for either side, since the US does not recognize the Chinese claims on these
islands. If the Chinese shoot down one
of our airplanes, they are going to be looking at a much larger contingent of
US forces in that area, something they do not want.
Right
now, the Chinese seem to think that threatening to do that is enough. We know they could. But, this is not going to get anywhere near
the Chinese removing themselves from these islands, and will only make that
part of it worse. They are saying they
can, and will if necessary, use force to keep these islands and the rest of the
world can pound sand.
This is
what happens when we ignore what we have seen in the buildup of the islands,
the building of a runway, and the weapons being introduced. This took place over a long time and was
visible for anyone to see. It isn’t
possible to hide island building from satellites. Now, we are at a point where weapons have
been introduced and the only way to get them off of those islands is by
matching their escalation. At any point
along their buildup it would have been far less dangerous to take a hard
stand. Now we run the risk of having a
real armed conflict because the Chinese want their own way and are not going to
make it easy for anyone to challenge them.
So, are we going to stop flying over those islands? No, now we are moving a fleet of 7 ships into the area. One of them is an aircraft carrier.
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