China deploys submarine to Gulf of Aden

Chinese Song-class (Type 039) submarine. (Image via ChineseDefence.com)

New post up at Liberty Unyielding.  Enjoy!

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Obama’s ‘marine protected area’ expansion: On a collision course with national security?

 

Standing athwart China’s naval gateway to the Pacific, yelling “Save the planet!” (Bathymetric map of the Pacific Ocean. Author annotation)

New post up at Liberty Unyielding.  Enjoy!

Great news: Russia, China to hold joint naval exercise in the Med

Russia Today reports that China and Russia agreed this past weekend to hold a joint naval exercise in the Mediterranean Sea.

Since they’re both there and all.  It will be interesting to see where they hold the exercise.  Presumably they will steer clear of any area in which they would excite the territorial-claims concern of Greece and Turkey.  That may or may not eliminate the waters between Cyprus and Syria.  I suspect the Russians would avoid that area; it would be an “in your face!” gesture at Turkey to have the exercise there: the use of a card Russia doesn’t need to play just yet.

Chinese warship arrives off Syria

 

Chinese frigate Yancheng, thrilling the ladies in Cyprus. (Reuters photo.)

How many warships does it take to remove chemical weapons from Syria?  One more this week than it took last week, apparently.  If you’re a big, important country with a big, important navy, you want to be involved in the good-citizenship exercise in Syria.

A 31 December deadline for getting some of the chemical stockpile to waiting ships in Latakia was missed, as readers will remember.  But it looks like

China: Ignoring UNCLOS, ordering a U.S. Navy cruiser to stop

If you were wondering whether it’s bad that the Chinese navy maneuvered aggressively near a U.S. Navy ship last week, ordering the ship to stop and then driving a Chinese ship right in front of it, dangerously close, the answer is yes.  It’s bad – bad from two standpoints: naval professionalism, and China’s posture in the South China Sea.  We’ll look at both here.

Briefly, the backstory is that China’s new aircraft carrier, the former-Soviet carrier refitted by China and named the Liaoning, transited in November from a northern port to the South China Sea for her first operations in southerly waters.  In late November, Liaoning got underway with an escort of two destroyers and two frigates to conduct operations in the South China Sea.

These are Liaoning’s first naval activities outside of the Yellow Sea and East China Sea,