More Details Emerging on KH Port Incident

NavyTimes is running a story this morning with some details from the Kitty Hawk port incident last Thanksgiving. Is it just me, or is this article written in a way to get people to hype it up?

A Chinese attack submarine and destroyer shadowed U.S. warships in November in the Taiwan Strait, sparking a 28-hour standoff that brought the group to a battle-ready halt in the tense waters, a report in a Taiwan daily said Tuesday.

The confrontation occurred as the Navy aircraft carrier Kitty Hawk and other ships in its battle group were heading back to Japan following China’s sudden cancellation of a long-scheduled holiday port call in Hong Kong, the China Times said, citing U.S. military sources.

The carrier strike group encountered Chinese destroyer Shenzhen and a Song-class sub in the strait on Nov. 23, causing the group to halt and ready for battle, as the Chinese vessels also stopped amid the 28-hour confrontation, the Chinese-language daily reported.

Adm. Timothy Keating is going to be in China later this week, it isn't an accident we are hearing about a previously unreported incident in the Pacific. It is exactly the same pattern of events that led to the disclosure of the Song submarine incident in 2006.

I'm not sure I see this as a big deal, in fact it looks like someone is trying to make it a bigger deal than it is. We have previously noted that China still fumes in their media about the USS Kitty Hawk crossing the Taiwan Strait back in 2000, so it shouldn't surprise us when the Kitty Hawk CSG shows near a major naval exercise, then after getting denied access to port decides to sail through the Taiwan Strait, that China would decide to have their navy observe our ships.

There could be a number of reasons the Chinese stopped, most likely to hide acoustic signatures of their Song submarine. While the US Navy was doing what it believed was prudent at the time, I have a hard time believing we stopped for long and decided to sit off the coast of China. It would appear Adm Keating is still a bit upset about being denied access to port though, because while I'm sure all our Navy leaders think this way, these type of comments reported in the NavyTimes article don't get thrown out in public much because we know how much they annoy China.

He told reporters Tuesday that U.S. warships will cross through the Taiwan Strait whenever they choose to.

“We don’t need China’s permission to go through the Taiwan Strait,” Keating said, stressing that it is international waters. “We will exercise our free right of passage whenever and wherever we choose.”

China has expressed its “grave concern” to the U.S. over the Kitty Hawk’s transit through the Taiwan Strait.

More accurately, China tried to act like a victim of the US because the Navy plotted a course through the Taiwan Strait instead of sailing directly into a storm. The primary issue, being denied access to port, still concerns me than any sort of western style standoff between the Kitty Hawk CSG and a few Chinese ships following that incident. The rhetoric Adm Keating is signaling is intended to send the message the US is still not happy about that incident, and the subject is going to come up.