The New York Times Takes Note...

Interest in maritime affairs goes mainstream:

The Obama administration first waded into the treacherous waters of the South China Sea last year when Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton declared, at a tense meeting of Asian countries in Hanoi, that the United States would join Vietnam, the Philippines and other countries in resisting Beijing’s efforts to dominate the sea. China, predictably, was enraged by what it viewed as American meddling.

For all its echoes of the 1800s, not to mention the cold war, the showdown in the South China Sea augurs a new type of maritime conflict — one that is playing out from the Mediterranean Sea to the Arctic Ocean, where fuel-hungry economic powers, newly accessible undersea energy riches and even changes in the earth’s climate are conspiring to create a 21st-century contest for the seas.

China is not alone in its maritime ambitions. Turkey has clashed with Cyprus and stoked tensions with Greece and Israel over natural-gas fields that lie under the eastern Mediterranean. Several powers, including Russia, Canada and the United States, are eagerly circling the Arctic, where melting polar ice is opening up new shipping routes and the tantalizing possibility of vast oil and gas deposits beneath.

The article isn't interesting so much for its content as for its existence; most of the readers of this blog will be familiar with the basic arguments and disputes. However, it's one a relatively few serious peaces in a major mainstream newspaper to tackle maritime affairs. That it comes from the NYT White House correspondent suggests that there may be some policy discussions afoot that someone in the administration wants to shed light on. Indeed, this might represent an initial effort to pushback against some of the Army arguments that Leon Panetta has seemed receptive to.

Like a lot of others, I'm interested to see whether we'll be entering a new era of inter-service conflict. Phil Ewing has a good piece on the public disputes between the Navy and the Air Force in the late 1940s. The services have, in contrast to their British counterparts, managed to avoid serious public confrontation since the 1960s, instead confining conflict to elite levels. It seems, however, that some of the players are at least considering stretching or redefining the rules.