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One of our information sources is a daily reading of our E-mails from members of the Naval Intelligence Professionals Association known as "NIP". Recent "NIP mails" have provided us with reprints and hyper links to quite a number of stories about the Dragon's latest escapades in the South China Sea. Many of these are from area English language news papers, or even translations from local area news sources. This information source indicates to us that the situation in the South China sea is very grave, and the Chinese Navy (PLAN) is more active and aggressive than ever and getting worse every day.We simply can't provide all of the coverage this information deserves in our daily blog posts. As we have stated before, we are not a news service but an information service. We do provide a news service in our "special pages". Look at the right hand side of the opening page where you entered the blog and you'll see these pages listed by subject area. The subject areas are in alphabetical order, down among the "Ns" you'll find our news service. Look in our NEWS SERVICE in the future for daily coverage of the PLAN's misdeeds in the South China Sea. The dragon is simply generating too much news for our daily blog posts.
We are not relegating the Dragon to the back pages. He is front page news and we do have a news service. If you haven't visited it lately, you haven't visited it. Like the entire blog it is "under construction"but it is far enough along to serve as your only marine news point as it incorporates not only our headline service, and analysis, but hyper-links to most of the major maritime news organizations on line services. So if your job requires you to be informed about what is going on in the maritime world, check out our news service. Every now and then we will break in here in the blog postings to alert you to unusual events.
Among those unusual events driven by the PLAN and aggressive Chinese government policies we find two alarming developments of recent vintage. First the Chinese have announced that they intend to garrison the South China Sea which includes placing
semi permanent troop emplacements on contested small islands, some we know are frankly in other people's Exclusive Economic Zones. As if this wasn't aggressive enough to fuel regional tensions one Chinese official has called for arming Chinese fishermen. A worse idea we can not imagine.
The idea is bad for international tensions, a danger to fishermen of other nations and a danger to the Chinese fishermen so armed. The world no longer recognises the concept of privateers. More over these civilian Chinese fishermen are being turned loose armed in waters that are contested and in many cases clearly not their own by any reasonable legal measure. If they attempt to "enforce national fishing rights" in these contested areas they legally degenerate into piracy. No matter what kind of weapons they outfit these fishermen with they won't be enough to stand up to the equivalent of a Coast Guard offshore patrol boat or medium endurance cutter, of which even the weaker area nations have a fair number. These over aggressive and dishonest Chinese officials are really planning on serving up Chinese fishermen as cannon fodder in order to generate what the Chinese public will be duped into thinking of as a "provocation".
The rest of the world shouldn't be fooled. The same is true for the planned Chinese garrisons. They may be strong enough in places to ward off attack by the regular military forces of weaker neighbors, or they may be slaughtered as invaders and illegal occupiers, but their commanders will sell their lives as "martyrs".
Whatever the world is doing in the South China Sea it is not enough, China has slipped a cog here and is running off on the wrong track. Because Japan, India, and weaker Chinese neighbors have not met the Dragon with sufficient force a bloodier day of reckoning is still ahead. When the sun sets on that day the Dragon's fleet will be on the bottom. The PLAN is big and it's aggressive but it is alone, and not ready to stand up to coalition naval warfare by experienced and coordinated allies with in depth naval strength.
Keep following the Dragon in our news service page, we doubt you'll get much coverage of this on the six o'clock net work news until the shooting becomes much more wide spread and it appears inevitable that the United States Navy is being pulled into the fray.
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