As we noted Wednesday, given the weather data publicly available and noting some rather unhappy Chinese media reporting on the Kitty Hawk, we had speculated that the 2 minesweepers and the Kitty Hawk CSG crossed the Taiwan Strait following both port incidents. This weekend the media confirmed this indeed did happen.
A spat over China's denial of port calls to U.S. naval vessels has led the Pentagon to deploy an increasing number of large ships to transit the Taiwan Strait in some of the most sensitive waters in East Asia.
While the U.S. Navy has explained the passage of at least seven ships through the Strait in the past nine days as the result of bad weather, it also conveys U.S. displeasure to China over its refusal to let Navy vessels dock in Hong Kong.
Displeasure sounds so nice. China complains like a whining baby in their press when our Navy takes the Formosa Strait route, so whether it was weather related or not, and it almost certainly was weather related, expect China to bring this incident up in future press reporting when taking an opportunity to discuss the dangers of the US Navy.
Our observation is the transit was the right thing to do. You can bet very few people have looked up the publicly available sea state and weather information of that region during that week of November, but if you do check you'll clearly see the Kitty Hawk obviously took the short cut to avoid the storm.
Keep in mind that it isn't a good idea to take warships into a storm when the storm can be avoided, because consider this. Had China denied access to Hong Kong, and the Kitty Hawk CSG were to take the long route back to Japan through the storm resulting in either ship damage, or worse the loss of life to American sailors over the Thanksgiving holiday, we would be stuck in an international incident. Better to piss of the Chinese over their poor judgment than to compound a dispute by creating a disaster.
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