Report: China Tracking US Navy Ships from Australia

The Australian has an interesting little story out this morning just as President Obama comes into town. Apparently the Australian government made a private deal with China to operate a ground station in Australia as part of China's space program.

A SATELLITE ground station in the West Australian desert is being used by the Chinese military to help locate Australian and US navy warships in the region.

The explosive claim has been made by the nation's foremost expert on space-based espionage, Des Ball, who says the government may have unwittingly acted against the national interest by allowing China to use the ground station at Mingenew to track Beijing's space satellites.

"This ground station would help China's space-based listening devices to more precisely locate the electronic emissions from aircraft carriers, destroyers and other navy ships," Professor Ball told The Australian.

"We're talking serious stuff here . . . why was the construction of this station never announced?"

Professor Ball's claims come as US President Barack Obama today begins a two-day visit to Australia, during which he will unveil plans for closer defence ties in a move that reflects growing concerns about China's military rise in the region.

The government established the satellite ground station at Mingenew, 400km north of Perth, in 2009 and gave approval for China's space agency to use the station to track Chinese satellites.

Canberra maintains all operations undertaken at the ground station, which is operated by the Swedish Space Corporation, are for "commercial and civilian activities", but Professor Ball says China makes no distinction between military and civil satellites.

China's use of the station was not revealed publicly until Hong Kong's English daily the South China Morning Post quoted Xie Jingwen, a deputy chief of the tracking system for China's space program, as saying it had "added Australia to its global network of ground stations".

I'm not convinced this is as big a deal as Des Ball thinks it is, but I could be wrong. Either way, this is yet another example how the lines between civilian and military application get blurred when it comes to China. Des Ball is correct that China makes no distinction between military and civil satellites, and I would take that one further and suggest in many cases China makes no distinction between corporate and government property - as there are several cases where large private "shareholder" corporations operate as if the company is part of a government industrial capacity. Need an example? How about a very public one?

I'm not sure if there is fire here, but this does qualify as smoke. With that said, this would be the easiest ground station on the planet to shut down if hostilities were to break out in SE Asia between China and another state, and it wouldn't have to be taken out by military means.

President Expected to Announce New Marine Base in Australia

Building upon statements by former Secretary Gates back in June, President Obama is expected to make more naval headlines this week by announcing a Marine basing agreement in Darwin, Australia. While there are few specific details announced publicly yet, the articles in the The Sydney Morning Herald and Wall Street Journal both suggest the basing arrangement in Australia will be specific to the Marine Corps. So far there is no indication that there will be any forward deployment of naval vessels, either warships or amphibious ships, but it is also unclear exactly how much of the details for the new basing arrangement have been worked out.

For smart analysis from Australia regarding these unfolding events, I encourage readers to keep an eye on the Lowy Institute for International Policy Interpreter Blog. The first reactions there by Sam Roggeveen, Ross Babbage, and Raoul Heinrichs are all worth checking out, and I suspect we will see more reactions as the official announcement is made. Sam Roggeveen makes a particularly interesting point discussing the comments in The Sydney Morning Herald article (linked above) by Alan Dupont and Hugh White:

It seems to me we could take Dupont's argument to arrive at the opposite conclusion to that reached by White. If the US is indeed moving its forces further away from China in order to buy them some safety from Beijing's increasing military reach, why would China be alarmed by this? If this move is actually accompanied by a reduced US military presence in Northeast Asia (which Dupont implies, though I'm not certain it is true) doesn't it in fact weaken America's ability to contain China?

Hugh White argues (convincingly, in my view) that Washington needs to cede some strategic space in the Asia Pacific to a rising China. If the Darwin basing arrangement is in fact a redistribution of US forces in the Asia Pacific and not a reinforcement, then that's just what the US is doing.

Thanks to transparency in the United States government, we can assume with a high degree of certainty this will be redistribution, because there is no evidence that the Obama administration has substantially increased funding for new naval combatants beyond existing plans that already do not number enough to replace retiring vessels in the coming decade. The US Navy's CG(X) program was cancelled, and while the administration is saying the DDG-51s will last 40 years, that's a bunch of nonsense with surface maintenance always underfunded - not to mention operational tempo's still above normal. While I know the US Navy would absolutely love to base a DESRON in Australia for all the obvious, legitimate reasons, it is hard to imagine any Senator or Congressman is going to allow warships to be reassigned out of their district unless a major west coast naval base in the Continental US is closed. If not from Japan or new construction, where exactly will the new warships come from? Anyone who has watched Mayport, FL politics has seen to the extent ship basing is a hot political issue.

This marks the third new basing arrangement announced this year by the Obama administration, with previous announcements claiming the US Navy will base Littoral Combat Ships in Singapore, and AEGIS BMD destroyers in Rota, Spain. How these round pegs square with the current Obama shipbuilding budget which has to date included no increases for more BMD warships nor any significant increase in ships to offset forward basing is very much unclear. That doesn't even include the CBO’s estimate that the Navy shipbuilding budget is about 7% higher than the Navy’s estimate for the first 10 years of the current Navy shipbuilding plan, about 10% higher than the Navy’s estimate for the second 10 years of that plan, and about 31% higher than the Navy’s estimate for the final 10 years of the current plan.

Unless the Obama administration has big plans for Navy shipbuilding following the current $450 billion defense cuts already proposed - never mind what comes from the super-committee budget discussion - it is hard to see a blueprint that is guiding Obama administration policy choices. Obviously the US has good reasons to develop new places like Spain, Singapore, and Australia where the US Navy can stage force in a forward deployed posture, but is there a budget for that? Are there ships for such a plan? Where are all these BMD ships going to come from for the Rota, Spain base, for example?

At a time the fleet numbers appear to be in long term decline and surface maintenance remains a big problem, the future Navy is being loaned out globally by the same Obama administration that really hasn't addressed any of the long term challenges facing the Navy. Industrial capacity is in decline and the fleet is numerically smaller than any point since WWI, nearly a century ago. I'm all for seeing the Obama administration making bold global security policy plans, but the Obama administration never increased shipbuilding resources for the Navy after placing the burden of the phased, adapted ballistic missile defense plan in 2009 on the Navy. Will these new forward naval bases receive adequate resourcing to meet the administrations foreign policy?

I have doubts the agreement with Australia is going to include any significant increase in forward deployed US forces in Australia. Unfortunately for our allies in the Pacific, at the policy level the Obama administration makes big promises in public that gives a public impression of substantial action, but if this announcement is made absent specific details - I wouldn't expect the final result to be as substantial as the public statement implies.

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.

TV Time

The Quicken Loans Carrier Classic between the University of North Carolina Tar Heels and Michigan State University Spartans that will be played on the deck of the aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson (CVN 70) just looks cool. For those interested in seeing the game, it will play at 7:00pm EST on ESPN.

Big props to whoever in the US Navy set this game up. While the game itself will probably be a blowout, the primetime slot on Friday night will likely be one of the most viewed events on television representing a great opportunity for the Navy to showcase itself to an American audience.

Speaking of television, did anyone else catch Coast Guard Alaska on Wednesday night? I don't watch much TV, but that is good stuff - and was much better than watching a political debate.

Thank you to all Veterans who read this blog.

Enjoy a safe holiday.

Russia's Latest Spacecraft Problem

If you haven't heard this story, I encourage you to read the entire article. It is a news story that I intend to follow, although I may or may not blog on it again - although potentially it may become major news.

A Russian spacecraft on its way to Mars with 12 tons of toxic fuel is stuck circling the wrong planet: ours. And it could come crashing back to Earth in a couple of weeks if engineers can't coax it back on track.

Space experts were hopeful Wednesday that the space probe's silent engines can be fired to send it off to Mars. If not, it will plummet to Earth. But most U.S. space debris experts think the fuel on board would explode harmlessly in the upper atmosphere and never reach the ground.

This was the second failure by the Russian space agency to send a rover to Mars. I do not know what that means for the future of the Russian space program, but given the questionable ballistic missile track record and now repeated failures in space bound rockets, there is clearly evidence of scientific and engineering decline in Russia over the last decade as it relates to rocket and space technology. The increase in commercial aircraft crashes in Russia are also relevant data points.

If the fuel is believed to freeze before reentry, the potential for a hazardous material spill upon reentry is legitimate. I do not claim expertise in the various potential dangers, but the frozen fuel issue was the primary political rationale for shooting down the US-109 satellite a few years ago. As with any space debris, as long as it lands in the Ocean no one cares, but the second it lands in someones back yard the political costs will go up.

It is not outside the realm of possibility that this rocket could be recovered and complete it's mission to Mars. It is also not outside the realm of possibility that this rocket gets shot down.

Like I said, read the article - this is news worth tracking over the next few days-weeks.