Securing the
Outer Perimeter
3 October 2009 | by Paul Buchanan
The US response to Chinese Expansion in the South-western Pacific
US strategic disinterest in the South Pacific was as much a matter of shifting priorities as it was of benign neglect. With no serious military rival in the region, and with asymmetric threats emerging in the Middle East, Northern Africa and Central Asia, by the mid-1990s the US felt that it could significantly curtail its non-military presence throughout the southwestern Pacific basin while maintaining a reduced marine monitoring force oriented towards Southeast Asia that was complemented by the work of allied naval and land units (particularly those of Australia, France and New Zealand).
It also believed that post-Maoist China was more likely to become a future economic partner rather than military rival, and that promoting commercial ties between the US and China would cement the latter’s place in the global market, thereby opening it to Western influences and diminishing its need for military expansion.
The US did not anticipate that as part of its rise to great power status China would step into this perceived power vacuum as a contender for regional influence, and that China’s increased soft power projection in the South Pacific raises the possibility of a future hard (read military) challenge to US domination in that strategic theater.
With sea lines of communication, resources and diplomatic leverage at stake, the Chinese Pacific challenge is one that the US can no longer ignore. This essay outlines its response.
China’s South Pacific expansion briefly explained
In the space of 15 years China has moved to become the third largest aid donor to the fourteen Pacific Island Forum (PIF) nations, after Australia and Japan. China also wants to influence Pacific Island policies on matters such as fisheries, whaling, off-shore drilling, seabed exploitation and trade regulations, particularly since these states have the same voting rights in international forums as their larger counterparts. “Chequebook diplomacy” using developmental aid and soft loans serves both purposes as well as provide diplomatic counter-leverage to Western endeavours in the region.
Moreover, contrary to the view that Chinese aid policy is a “no-strings attached” proposition, virtually all Chinese developmental aid funding in the Pacific come with provisos that Chinese agents be given preference as contractors, exporters and suppliers of equipment, material, services and technologies related to the funded projects.
What is not attached to the provision of aid are domestic accountability and transparency measures, which is a major point of difference with Western aid programmes that are tied to good governance clauses (e.g. anti-corruption clauses that include transparency in awarding local contracts and indigenous labour requirements).
In parallel, Chinese enterprises pursue investment in resource extraction, with particular focus on mining and logging in Melanesia (it controls the largest nickel mine in Papua New Guinea and its logging interests in Indonesia are held responsible for much of the deforestation in Sumatra). Chinese tuna fleets constitute the majority of those operating out of Fiji, and it has encouraged both tourism and emigration from the mainland as part of establishing a permanent Chinese presence in Oceania.
China is the third largest aid donor and second largest investor in the region. This has seen a tenfold increase in China-PIF trade between 1995-2005, a 32 percent increase in trade in 2006-07, now fronted by 3000 Chinese companies investing over 1.5 billion US dollars over the last decade, coupled with the opening of number of Chinese diplomatic missions and a wave of Chinese migration in the first nine years of the millennium.
Although it still has to compete with Japan and Taiwan in terms of “Asian” influence on regional politics, it is now the dominant member of that troika, and its influence continues to grow. Truth be told, the modernization of much of the South Pacific in the last decade is due to China’s interest rather than the efforts of its traditional Western patrons or their Asian allies.
Many Western analysts see trouble for governance and stability in these developments, particularly the negative influence of Chinese checkbook diplomacy on already corrupt and unstable governmental practices, as well as the penetration of Asian crime syndicates into vulnerable island economies.
In this view the process is one of creeping political control via migration, investment and trade. However, not all views of Chinese expansion in the Pacific are pessimistic or resigned to the inevitability of Chinese regional dominance.
New Zealand based political scientists Yongjin Zhang (now relocated to the UK) and Jian Yang have argued that China’s Pacific presence remains relatively weak on all power dimensions, and that resentment against resident Chinese communities, Chinese unfamiliarity with Pacific mores and the authoritarian nature of the Chinese regime mitigate against it making more than shallow inroads into island life and culture.
For them, Chinese relations with the South Pacific are a long-term and as of yet relatively embryonic project that will be led by economic interest above all other factors, even if larger strategic concerns underpin it.
Similarly, in this issue Fergus Hansen has noted the incoherent and short-term nature of Chinese Pacific aid strategy, which he argues can lead to miscalculation and counter-productive results. For these analysts China has neither the soft or hard power to exercise neo-imperial ambitions, and the threat posed by China in the South Pacific is more illusory than real.
Even so, the expansion of Chinese influence in the South Pacific provides a potential basis for the eventual projection of military power.
Beyond building stadiums, courthouses, parliaments and resorts, infrastructural projects that modernize deepwater harbours, airports and land transport corridors in places like Fiji, Tonga, Samoa, the Solomons, Vanuatu, Papua New Guinea and the Cook Islands have possible dual purposes: that is, they can serve military as well as civilian objectives. All that is needed for this dual role to be achieved is a political agreement with host nations, which becomes more and more feasible in direct proportion to the amount of Chinese money, material and human resources poured into them.
The moment of Chinese military projection into the South Pacific is still a long way off, but it is nevertheless almost inevitable given Chinese strategic planning and the absence of a countervailing military presence. The South Pacific includes major sea lines of communication between North and South America and Australasia, yet US, Australian or other regional forces sparsely patrol it.
Australian naval assets are occupied with patrol duties in the Indian Ocean, Coral Sea and in support of multinational operations further abroad.
New Zealand has limited blue water capability and cannot fully defend its own territorial waters. The French naval presence is limited to Francophone Polynesia. Smaller island states such as Fiji have coastal patrol units a best, and the US and its Latin neighbours have preferred to allocate their naval forces to other duties.
The South Pacific geostrategic environment has consequently been left open to exploitation by a committed actor with great power pretensions and the capacity to fulfill them. That actor is China.
Securing regional land basing rights is a long-term Chinese military objective that is facilitated by its chequebook diplomacy.
The Chinese maintained a missile monitoring station on Kiribati Island in Micronesia from 1996 until 2006, from which they could telemetrically monitor their own space and military missile testing as well as that of the US on Kwajalein in the Marshall Islands (the location of US nuclear tests sites during the Cold War).
With the lease on Kiribati revoked in 2006, the Chinese have a strategic interest in securing another location in which to undertake electronic monitoring and eavesdropping.
China also has an interest in developing military-to-military ties with island countries so as to loosen the traditionally pro-Western orientation of PIF armed forces. China has engaged military-to-military exchanges with Fijian and Tongan armed forces at a time when Australian and New Zealand military exchange programmes have been largely suspended due to strained relations with the authoritarian regimes that govern them.
Beyond that, China has an interest in developing regional intelligence networks on matters of economic, political and military import.
For this it employs human assets located amid recently arrived Chinese regional diasporas as well as land and sea-based electronic means (for example, in diplomatic missions and on oceanic research or fishing vessels).
Of particular interest to the Chinese is the Echelon signal intelligence stations located in Australia and New Zealand as well as US military communications facilities in Micronesia.
Chinese military ambition has been signaled. Amid a major military buildup (with five percent average increases in the military budget now ongoing for ten years), it has deployed 5 nuclear submarines (including 3 ballistic missile subs) in a fleet of 60, with an increase to 85 boats projected by 2010.
It is building its first aircraft carrier, and is modernizing the full range of its naval surface and air patrol assets. In 2008 Chinese submarines conducted 18 confirmed long-range patrols outside of its territorial waters (purportedly to include shadowing Chinese fishing vessels in the South Pacific so as to hide under their acoustic signatures), and it has openly tracked the US Fifth fleet while on exercises in the Western Pacific.
What this implies is that it is moving beyond coastal defense and into blue water interdiction missions. In addition it has introduced and stockpiled new land, air and sea-launched surface-to surface cruise missiles as well as conventional boosters, all of which constitute formidable deterrents in the event that they were to be deployed in the Southwestern Pacific. Given the pace of Chinese military upgrading, this could happen within ten years.
The scenario outlined above is consonant with Chinese naval strategy, which was first enunciated by Admiral Liu Huaqing in 1988 and is encapsulated in the “three island chain” approach. By 2010 China seeks to establish a permanent blue water presence in the first island “chain” arrayed on a Japan-Taiwan-Philippines axis, to include the South China Sea. By 2025 it proposes to establish a permanent blue water presence in the second island “chain” stretching from the Aleutians through the Mariana Islands to the East Coast of Papua New Guinea, and which includes the Malaccan Straits. By 2050 the reach will extend to the third island “chain” starting in the Aleutians and ending in Antarctica, to include waters offshore of New Zealand and Australia.
A measure of the its Pacific strategy is the reported comments by a Chinese admiral during the command visit by the senior officer in the US Pacific Command (PACCOM), Admiral Timothy Keating, to Beijing in 2007.
According to Keating, after admitting that China wanted to build aircraft carriers, his Chinese counterpart said, “You keep your aircraft carriers east of Hawaii. We’ll keep ours west.
You share your information with us; we’ll share our information with you. We’ll save you the time and effort of coming all the way to the Western Pacific.” (http://www.newsweek.com/id/175312).
This approach sits within a long history of Chinese military thought extending from Sun Tsu in The Art of War through Mao’s On Protracted War to the contemporary military planners who authored China’s 2009 Defence White Paper. The basic principles of Chinese warfare are based on patience, deception, misdirection, surprise, infiltration, surreptitious envelopment and focused mass over a protracted time period.
It emphasizes framing the combat environment so as to advantage fluidity and avoid the friction caused by massed clashes of force, particularly in situations of qualitative disadvantage such as what currently exists with the US. It advises long-term planning and the quiet and extended nature of military build-ups, avoidance of direct confrontation until tactical superiority is assured, and an emphasis on maneuver in kinetic operations.
Beyond physical defense of the Chinese mainland the strategic objective is deterrence first, followed by projection of power abroad so as to secure resource and commodity flows, and should conflict occur, denial of victory to adversaries rather than decisive military conquest. Understanding the element of political will in determining military outcomes, when approaching combat operations Chinese strategists emphasize tactics that serve to exhaust the opponent by eroding his will (or that of his population) to continue fighting (in a variation of the “death by a thousand cuts” guerrilla strategy). A naval warfare strategy that engages the US in the South Pacific can do just that.
The expanding Chinese presence in the South Pacific is therefore consonant with these views, and can be seen as a form of preparing the terrain for future military incursions in the region. Whether or not those incursions are realized is a matter for political elites to decide, which is a function of diplomatic interaction and countervailing power.
For Chinese military strategists however, the necessities of futures forecasting and forward planning absolutely require that they consider the military option in gaming out potential scenarios for the South Pacific in light of evolving geopolitical conditions.
The bottom line is that China is reconfiguring its military from a land-based defensive force to a more balanced air-land-sea triad with offensive power projection capabilities. As it moves from the first island chain perimeter to the second island chain it will overlap with the primary US military area of operations in the Pacific and come into direct contact with the Australian and New Zealand sphere of influence.
In the measure that it has previously secured favorable diplomatic and economic relations with Pacific island states, the achievement of the second island chain objective becomes more likely. It is that possibility that commands the attention of US strategic planners.
The American response
Militarily, US attention remained concentrated on the North Pacific as a communications and transport corridor as well as a forward staging area for US power projection into East Asia. The US assumed that traditional allies Australia and New Zealand would take up the slack in developmental and security assistance as well as perform the maritime patrol duties requisite with keeping Southern Pacific sea-lanes open and Western influence predominant. The growing Chinese presence has belatedly altered that view.
In May 2007 the US signaled its attention to re-engage the South Pacific by announcing at the Pacific island Conference of Leaders that year as “The Year of the Pacific.” Although the US response has not yet coalesced into a coherent South Pacific strategy, it has distinctive economic, military and political components involving direct and indirect forms of engagement.
Before exploring these, mention must be made of the broader geo-strategic outlook in which the US response is situated.
Since the end of the Cold War, the US has construed the Western Pacific Rim as a three-tiered outer defense perimeter.
The first line (or arc) extends from the Aleutians, through Okinawa, South Korea, Taiwan, the Philippines, Thailand, Singapore, Indonesia, Australia, New Zealand to the Ross Peninsula in Antarctica.
Each of these locales has US military bases, US military personnel in country as advisors or instructors, or friendly military-to-military relations, and all participate in US intelligence gathering activities in areas of mutual interest.
The relationship with individual countries ebbs and flows—witness Philippine and Japanese refusals to continue lease agreements for US military bases in Subic Bay, Clark Air Field and Okinawa, respectively, and the sometimes strained nature of US-Indonesian relations on human right issues and of US-New Zealand relations on the latter’s non-nuclear stance—but the overall contours of the perimeter have remained largely intact even with the end of the Cold War. What has changed is the nature of the perceived adversary. The US holds a second defensive arc that runs from Hawaii through the Mariana and Marshall Islands, rooted in Guam, extending down to Australia.
Here the US permanently stations military personnel and conducts front-line intelligence gathering, operational deployments, continuous exercises and forward logistical storage.
This is the Pacific equivalent of a US Maginot Wall, where its presence in the Western Pacific geo-strategic space is at its most robust. It also serves as a trip wire for conflict escalation, as (impending) defeat in this battle space will likely entail US resort to tactical nuclear weapons.
The third defensive perimeter is a triangle that runs from the Aleutians to Hawaii to San Diego. It is the last line of defense before the US mainland, and if needed assets of the US Southern Command deployed in Central and South America will be drawn into it in order to reinforce those of the Pacific Command. It is an ultimate “shatter zone” in which the full range of US military power will be brought to bear on aggressors.
Although this is an improbable scenario, the Chinese second island chain objective brings it into direct contact with the US second defensive arc, and Chinese economic and diplomatic ventures are already prospering within it.
This area of overlap is a potential conflict zone between the US and China. Given that reality, the US response to Chinese expansion within the second defensive perimeter is analytically dissected in order of priority, from least to most.
Soft power inititatives: diplomacy
Sixty per cent of the Marshall Islands’ GDP comes from US aid and the direct economic benefits derived from the Reagan Ballistic Missile Test Site on Kwajalein. Via the Compacts of Free Association with the FAS, the US has the responsibility for defending the FAS but also the right, via the “defense veto” and the “right to strategic denial,” which prohibit these states from engaging in activities injurious to US security. That includes establishing diplomatic, commercial, or military ties with potential adversaries.
Otherwise the US maintains a limited diplomatic presence throughout the region, having reduced its consular presence in the 1990s.
After the 2007 PICL meetings the US opened a public diplomacy office in its embassy in Fiji, following the restoration of the Peace Corps regional office in Suva in 2004.
There are currently approximately 350 Peace Corps volunteers serving in seven PIF nations. USAID programs also resumed, in limited fashion, in 2007, although most of the direct US aid outside of the FAS is directed towards disaster relief rather than poverty alleviation or nation-building.
The latter are deemed to be the priority of larger US regional allies, Australia and New Zealand in particular. Beyond that, the US promotes anti-corruption and good governance initiatives on a case basis, often tying specific short-term assistance to transparency requirements.
The Chinese have no such compulsion
In this measure it seeks to strengthen its ties to local authorities while not having to confront them directly with regards to the Chinese presence. The idea is to subtly undercut and counter Chinese moves to realign the PIF in accord with its diplomatic and military interests.
Economic Approach.
Although the South Pacific remains a low priority to US policy makers, they have become aware of growing Chinese influence on PIF development and have begun to revive limited country-to-country aid programmes. Even so, the major concern of the US is with money-laundering, official document sales and the presence of organized crime as a facilitator to terrorist organizations or their front agencies.
It has consequently worked hardest to tighten PIF compliance with international banking regulations and standards restricting “shell” entities from hiding or transferring funds using PIF banks, as well as to increase the sophistication of local Police forces when dealing with the economic activities of foreign crime syndicates.
The Republic of the Marshall Islands (RMI) received US$1 billion in direct US aid from 1987 to 2003, while the Federated States of Micronesia (FSM) received approximately US$1.5 billion.
In 2003 the US signed into law grant assistance packages for the period 2004-2023 totaling US$629 million and US$1.4 billion to the RMI and FSM respectively. Palau received US$450 million in direct economic assistance from 1995 to 2009. Of the total of US$ 887 million in direct foreign aid to Pacific island countries in 2006, the US provided US$140 million, of which US$131 million went to the FAS.
The US also pays the RMI US$15 million per year for leasing the Kwajalein test site (rising to US$18 million/year in 2014).
According to the US Congressional Research Service, as part of the Compacts, the United States agreed to support the FAS economically with the goal of making them self-sufficient.
The FAS are eligible for many U.S. federal programs, while FAS citizens have the right to reside and work in the United States and its territories as lawful non-immigrants or “habitual residents.”
Other major U.S. foreign aid programs in the Pacific Islands region include the Pacific Island Fund ($100,000 in FY2006), supporting small projects developed by U.S. ambassadors in their host countries; South Pacific Fisheries (about $18 million annually); HIV/AIDS programs in Papua New Guinea ($1.5 million per year); and environmental programs (coral reef conservation and environmental research).
Where not specified, the amounts designated for each depend on Congressional budgetary priorities, which mitigate against significant increases. As a result, and even with the purported re-emphasis on the Pacific announced in 2007, the total volume of US aid to the PIF has remained constant and well behind that of Australia, New Zealand, Japan and China. Out of a total PIF world trade volume of US$8.279 billion in 2005, trade between the US and the PIF amounted to US$ 3.93 billion, the majority of which was with Fiji and Papua New Guinea. This puts it behind Australia, the EU, Japan, New Zealand and China in terms of bilateral trade volume. The combined impact of US direct foreign aid and trade with the region outside of the FAS is therefore minimal when compared with that of China and other states.
It would seem that in spite of its rhetorical commitment to reinvigorating its ties to the region, the US has preferred to allow others to take the lead while it concentrates its resources elsewhere.
Hard Power Initiatives: Military Re-focus.
Given the limited amount of US diplomatic attention and economic assistance given to the PIF outside of the FAS, the US response to Chinese overtures in the South and Western Pacific has been driven by military strategic interest. The thrust of the US approach is summarized in the February 2006 Quadrennial Defense Review, which states that “Of the major and emerging powers, China has the greatest potential to compete militarily with the United States and field disruptive military technologies that could over time offset traditional US military advantages”.
As a result, the US is shifting it military-strategic emphasis away from the Atlantic to the Pacific theater of operations. It includes moving submarine assets to Pacific (in a reversal of the 60/40 rule for Atlantic/Pacific submarine deployments). Five of the 11 carrier task forces are now stationed in the Pacific, with an increase to six scheduled for 2010. That includes a carrier home ported at Guam, in a first of its kind.
The shift in strategic emphasis is evident in the US organizational approach. The Pacific Command based in Honolulu (PACCOM) is now the primary government authority in the region, overshadowing the State Department. A Navy-oriented command (unlike the Army-focused Central Command or CENTCOM, now conducting operations in Afghanistan and Iraq), PACCOM controls 300,000 troops, including the US Pacific Fleet (PACFLT) headquartered at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. The world’s largest naval command, PACFLT includes more than 213,000 sailors, marines and civilians, approximately 190 ships, about 1,400 aircraft, and 35 shore installations.
PACCOM is comprised of units from all military service branches, the Coast Guard and dedicated intelligence components. In many areas it is the first point of contact between local authorities and US officials (such as in disaster relief operations in remote locales).
The US is upgrading its military facilities on Guam at an accelerated rate, to include expanding and deepening its port facilities and enlarging Andersen Air Force Base. It includes construction of a Ballistic Missile Defense (BMD) facility, expected to be completed by 2012, that will give the Army the capacity to intercept and shoot down incoming missiles (particularly of the middle range surface to surface variety that the Chinese are emphasizing as part of their conventional arms buildup). 8000 US Marines will move from Okinawa to Guam by 2015 as part of a phased withdrawal negotiated with the Japanese government, which will raise the total number of personnel stationed on Guam to over 50,000.
The strategic importance of Guam cannot be over-estimated. Andersen AFB is 4 hours flight time from China and North Korea, has important bomber and fighter wings as well as forward deployed tactical nuclear weapons, plus a huge conventional armory and fuel dump. No other Air Force base in the Pacific stores as much weaponry as Andersen — some 100,000 bombs and cruise and other missiles at any one time. Andersen stores 66 million gallons of jet fuel, making it the Air Force’s biggest strategic depot in the world.
The United States Navy has turned Guam’s Apra Harbour into a home for Los Angeles-class nuclear-powered attack submarines, whose primary missions are to shadow the Chinese submarine fleet as they move to patrol from the first to the second island chain (it is an open secret that Chinese submarines hide under the acoustic signatures of Chinese fishing fleets). In line with this, both naval air and surface anti-submarine assets have been reinforced, and it is reported that the US has offered to share advanced ASW technologies with its Australian (and perhaps Kiwi) counterparts.
The US is refurbishing wharves at Apra to accommodate aircraft carriers and to transform Guam into a base for its new Littoral Combat Ship (a shallow-draft stealth ship designed to operate close to shore) as well as for reconfigured Trident submarines that now serve as SEAL commando delivery vehicles (removal of bow planes on these ships is one sign of their new shallow water role). The cost of these upgrades and redeployments runs into the trillions of US dollars and demonstrates that the US sees the Western Pacific as the next potential major conflict zone in the medium-range future.
In concert with this military upgrading the US has increased the tempo and scope of its Pacific operations and exercises, reaching a total of 1700 different types of exercise in the last two years. It trains regularly with a host of regional forces, to include Singaporean, Malaysian, Indonesian, Thai, Australian and New Zealand units. It has over 600 Special Operations troops in the Philippines on counter-terrorism duty and quietly deploys military advisors and trainers throughout the PIF. It has increased its military presence in Australia and conducts regular exercises with Australian and New Zealand commandos.
It has close military-to-military links with Thailand (location of one of the infamous CIA “Black” interrogation sites), Singapore, Malaysia, the Philippines and, increasingly, Indonesia.
In the measure that the Chinese are suspected of using their expanded diplomatic presence in the South Pacific as a cover for intelligence-gathering operations, it is reported to have increased its counter-intelligence capability focused on them. The last two roles require Australian, New Zealand and French cooperation within their respective spheres of influence.
Conclusion
It is clear that the US response to the expansion of Chinese influence involves little carrot and a lot of stick. The US expects its regional allies, Australia and New Zealand specifically, to assume primary responsibility and funding for political stabilization and economic development efforts in states now falling under the sway of Chinese “chequebook diplomacy.”
In return the US is deepening its security commitment to keeping the South and Western Pacific as an area of strategic dominance, both as an outer defensive perimeter and buffer for the US mainland as well as a geostrategic area of fast response reinforcement for its regional allies in the event they are physically threatened.
Although the current emphasis is asymmetrical warfare against unconventional adversaries (Islamic extremists in particular), the longer-term strategic perspective is firmly sighted on the looming Chinese presence and the concomitant potential for inter-state conflict. That raises the question of whether such a conflict is imminent or possible.
The answer is, in short, that conflict is not imminent but is possible over the longer term. The second Chinese island chain objective overlaps with the first and second US outer perimeters. These cover the so-called “Arc of Instability” in the Southwestern Pacific, a geopolitical area of poor governance and civil strife that includes Fiji, Tonga, the Solomons and Papua New Guinea.
Competition for resources and influence between the Chinese and the traditional Western patrons in these island states, if left unchecked or unmitigated by greater cooperation under mutually agreed- upon rules and international commitments, can lead to military confrontations at sea or at land when competing national interests come into conflict. With one country on the ascendance and the other seemingly in decline, the stage is set for confrontation. The question is not if the confrontation will occur, but how it will occur: will it be armed or not?
Thus, although the US will maintain its regional military dominance for the foreseeable future, its lack of commitment to a soft power counter-strategy and the inability of Australia and New Zealand to fill the developmental assistance gap mean that China’s soft power expansion will continue to erode the traditional political influence of the West in the South Pacific.
More than anything the West does, the only thing holding China back from developing full-fledged alliances in the region is its continued lack of cultural understanding and nuance when approaching the PIF states.
This is the root cause of indigenous resentment against the Chinese presence in their midst and is what, more than anything else, can thwart China’s best laid plans for eventual regional dominance once its military (Navy in particular) is able to raise the costs to the US of an armed confrontation beyond what the American strategic command and public are willing to bear.
However, should the Chinese improve their public diplomacy and cultural understanding of the South Pacific beyond influence-peddling and naked resource extraction, and should the US and its allies not be able to arrest the shift in PIF political loyalties towards the East, then that time could well come.
Paul G. Buchanan is a Visiting Associate Professor at the National University of Singapore, on leave from the University of Auckland. He specializes in security analysis and strategic thought.