Rising Tides: Seapower and Regional Security in Northeast Asia

Key Words:

• Maritime System
• Arms Races
• East Asian Security
• Maritime Strategy
• Good Order at Sea

In this issue of The Journal of Strategic Studies, we join the debate over the role that seapower plays in the current re-shaping of security relations in Northeast Asia and we aim to make three contributions to it. First, we argue that seapower matters because East Asia is a maritime region, one in which maritime forces are a primary tool underscoring both cooperative and competitive regional dynamics. Second, we suggest that claims of an emerging naval arms race in East Asia are not supported by the way the different regional countries are debating the pursuit of enhanced capabilities. In the region, there are certainly signs of capabilities procured with neighbouring actors in mind, but these procurement plans are only a fraction of much more complex and articulated policies that have to do with the wider evolving strategic meaning that the sea has for each of the nation states under examination. The third contribution of this issue concerns the realm of methodology. Over the past decade and a half, a number of new source materials emerged in China, Japan, and the Republic of Korea (ROK) that enabled scholars with language expertise to engage in greater depth in the study of defence policy and military modernisation in East Asia. The articles in this issue aim to showcase how different methodologies, ranging from contemporary history to political science, can be applied to articulate nuanced analysis.

Why ‘Northeast Asia’ and not ‘East Asia’, or ‘Asia-Pacific’? For better or worse, it is an undeniable fact that the on-going naval modernisation programmes of the three major northeast Asian state actors, China, Japan and the ROK, stand at the heart of the evolving security landscape of East Asia. As naval power shifts towards the Western Pacific, so are the main capabilities of the United States, a Northeast Asian power by circumstances – with the core of its capabilities distributed in bases in the Japanese archipelago, on the Korean peninsula, and in Guam. Following the guidelines set in the 2006 Quadriennal Defense Review (QDR), the US Navy is adjusting its force posture to provide six operationally available and sustainable carrier battle groups and 60 per cent of its submarine force in the region.¹ In 2012, Admiral Jonathan Greenert, the US Navy Chief of Naval Operations, confirmed that this ‘fundamentally’ maritime region was to be central to the Navy’s activities, and seapower underwrote America’s ‘rebalancing’.² In the newly released 2014 QDR the security of the Asia-Pacific region remained Washington’s top priority and the goal to shift 60 per cent of fleet assets to the region is to be achieved by 2020.³ In this issue, we have not included India – another actor recently included in studies of Asian seapower – because of the evident limits of its operations in, and the geographic distance from, the main Northeast Asian maritime theatres.

Why is the naval reconfiguration of Northeast Asia so important? Historically, navies represented the yardstick against which the international order and the distribution of power were measured. The centrality of the naval armament agreements of the mid-1920s and early 1930s to the evolution of international relations in the interwar period illustrates this point. In the East Asian context, the increase in naval capabilities in its northeast area prompted leading experts and policy-makers worldwide to ponder the nature of this phenomenon. Key questions include: will this process of power reconfiguration affect only the region, or is this a symptom of a mounting Asian challenge to American global supremacy? In the fast evolving Northeast Asian naval balance, will the emergence of Asian powers bring about a new regional arms race? If so, will navies make Asia’s future like Europe’s past? In particular, will the emergence of Chinese seapower bring about conflict with the United States?

In engaging with these questions, policy and military analysts alike have thus far focused on specific issues connected to this East Asian ‘naval emergence’. They prioritised national debates and procurement programmes as a way to assess their potential systemic impact on regional security. Unsurprisingly, Chinese naval modernisation plans and growing capabilities attracted the largest share of international attention – with debates moving well-beyond the realm of academia to include a number of congressional studies, numerous think tank reports, and regular intelligence assessments. Practitioners and academics alike set out to investigate whether, how, and when Chinese evolving naval capabilities will empower governments in Beijing with the option to challenge, or even replace, the United States as the dominant military player in the region and, in the long term, on the global scale.

On a different level, other authors examined Japan’s steady pursuit of enhanced naval combat systems to understand whether these will be used to gain greater military independence, transforming the country in a ‘normal military’ power. In so doing, these studies sought to unveil to what extent and how Japan will employ its naval forces as part of a deterrence strategy to counterbalance Chinese naval ambitions, as a tool to strengthen the security partnership with the United States, or a combination of both. Surprisingly, the important naval developments of the ROK of the past couple of decades have received only limited attention outside the political and academic circles in the country. Nonetheless, the Korean Navy is today playing a central role in the evolving security relations with the United States and is redefining the way political elites look at both China and Japan.

In this respect, the attention given to changes in naval capabilities in China, Japan and, to a lesser extent, the ROK, has led some authors to speak of a naval ‘arms race’ in Northeast Asia. This wider build-up is regarded as a part of an action-reaction dynamic in which the different regional state actors look at each other to shape their naval policies. In this process, they seek to offset the advantages brought about by certain capabilities by procuring similar, or asymmetric capabilities. Geoffrey Till has recently pointed out that while the evidence on the emergence of an arms race is mixed, there are clear symptoms of it in the evolving relationship between China and the United States. China’s arms competition with the United States is encapsulated in Beijing’s attempts to implement ‘counter-intervention’, or what the US military terms an Anti-Access Area Denial strategy (A2AD). The US Air-Sea Battle concept is regarded as a clear response to the A2AD strategy.⁴ A corollary to views on the on-going arms race concerns the symbolic value of these capabilities at the national level. Commentators and political elites alike use them as showcases of an increasing international status against the backdrop of the notion of an ‘Asian Century’ in military affairs. In China, some foreign observers remarked that the Navy is becoming a powerful symbol of national emergence and prowess, a totem of a form of ‘naval nationalism’ expressed in clashes over contested boundaries and territorial ownership of offshore islands in the East and South China Seas.

Understanding Seapower as a National Strategy

Taken altogether, the articles in this issue engage with the above debates by proposing a paradigm shift in the way both practitioners and academics approach the subject. In different ways, they all address three fundamental questions: Why does seapower matter in Northeast Asia? What does the pursuit of seapower by regional actors say about their national security strategies and priorities? How is the procurement of enhanced maritime capabilities going to affect regional security and the international order? The articles ask these questions to investigate security in Northeast Asia from the perspective of its most distinctive structural feature, its geography. They evaluate how main regional state actors have adapted and continue to adapt national polices to take advantage of, or meet the challenges presented by a regional structure where the sea is the primary connecting fabric. In this respect, the articles place the evolution of specific capabilities in the context of the relationship linking geography, national strategy and military power.

Collectively, the first argument emerging from these essays is that maritime forces (including both navies and coast guards) crucially matter to Northeast Asia because this region is a ‘maritime system’. The authors set out to explore whether and in what ways regional security is affected by and/or responds to different strategic considerations when the sea and not land is the primary means connecting regional actors. This is because a maritime system is different from a continental one. The sea cannot be ‘owned’ the same way land is. Mobility and freedom of movement rule at sea. This is true in Northeast Asia, where the sea provides the core lines of communication for regional economic interactions. China, Japan, and the Republic of Korea, all rely on maritime shipping to fuel their economies. Ports in these countries have become neuralgic centres for global trade and energy shipping, holding the top positions in the list of the world’s largest containers handling ports. As such, one fundamental question that has to be addressed in relation to the region’s naval build-up is to what extent it is informed by the increased economic importance of the maritime realm to the different regional state actors. How do maritime security and great power competition inform security policies? Do they both matter? If so, what does this say about the future stability of the region?

For this reason, ‘seapower’ is the key concept employed in the articles. While ‘seapower’ lacks a universally agreed upon definition, there are two main ways to understand it. The first falls within the intellectual tradition established by American strategist and naval educator Rear Admiral Alfred T. Mahan. It focuses on the ‘strategic’ and military dimensions of seapower, investigating the function of navies and naval warfare as a tool of national strength.⁵ The second refers to an ‘historical/cultural’ construction of seapower, first developed by British historians and imperial strategists like George Grote, John Robert Seeley and Sir Julian S. Corbett. In it, the core of the analysis does not focus on the means used to operate at and from the sea. Instead, the emphasis is on the nation’s dependence upon the use of the sea for its economic survival. In this view of seapower, naval forces are a function of a ‘maritime strategy’ that seeks to harmonise strategic geography and military power (both land and naval) for the pursuit of economic benefit. In it, the size and shape of naval forces is functional to the country’s ability to defend territorial integrity and commercial maritime enterprises, putting a premium on deterrence to favour trade and commerce.⁶ In the words of a contemporary strategist, this second approach is about ‘the sea-based capacity of states to shape events both at sea and on land’, it is about the effects and consequences produced by the use of the sea to enhance national security.⁷

From a strategic perspective, the use of the sea offers maritime forces unique mobility and access which in turn empower state actors with a range of military, diplomatic and constabulary uses of these capabilities to guarantee national security and shape regional stability. Recent incidents in the waters off the Korean peninsula and in the East China Sea, the deployments in waters near contested islands, the conduct of large multilateral naval exercises in the Sea of Japan, as well as the holding of international naval reviews in Japanese, Korean and Chinese waters, offer just some examples of the multiple uses of naval forces as tools of statecraft in Northeast Asia. On the other hand, the extent to which a nation state can procure and sustain advanced technology and combat systems and its maritime organisations can integrate them into effective doctrines and command and control functions will crucially affect a government’s ability to define their spectrum of uses to serve a national political agenda. In a maritime system, one where the sea is a primary geographic feature, technology defines the operational reach, limits the political scope, and shapes the strategic uses of seapower.

Our hope is that this proposed shift placing maritime geography at the centre of the debate on the evolution of the international security of East Asia will offer a wider context to examine the relationship linking structural circumstances to security policies and national strategies to material capabilities. Intellectually, our framework draws upon existing theoretical work on the influence of seapower on international politics, making the pursuit of maritime capabilities a function of the role of the sea in national strategies. In so doing, the papers contextualise national narratives and offer a comprehensive interpretation of Northeast Asian regional security dynamics. The different articles trace how seapower is understood in national contexts, how maritime capabilities are considered to contribute to national security, and to what extent maritime strategies inform national security policies and state interactions at the regional level. In turn, the examination of the different national dimensions allows the articles to make specific contributions to existing debates on the different countries.

In the first article, James Manicom offers an assessment of the possession and exercise of American seapower in the context of debates in Washington that see calls for retrenchment persist, even as the Obama administration embarks on its rebalance to the Asia-Pacific region. Manicom takes issue with one of the key arguments of the retrenchment perspective, that the exercise of US seapower in Chinese claimed waters presents an unnecessary and unaffordable risk. The article explores changing Chinese perspectives on American seapower near its coast and argues that, although there is little that can be done about the possession of American seapower in Northeast Asia, it may be possible to reach an accommodation on the exercise of American seapower in waters China finds provocative, without undermining US concerns about preserving the freedom of navigation. Manicom outlines a novel agree to disagree framework rooted squarely within both Washington and Beijing’s foreign policy traditions.

By far the biggest change in the Northeast Asian maritime landscape over the past two decades has been produced by China’s naval development, as well as the maritime law enforcement and land-based forces that support it and increasingly challenge the vessels of potential opponents. To elucidate these important dynamics, Andrew Erickson surveys China’s current naval forces and considers key dynamics and possible Chinese naval futures through 2030, the general limit of public US government projections, and by which time multiple factors will likely slow China’s growth and compete for leadership focus and resources. He finds that the core focus of both China’s naval development and its efforts to target rival maritime forces is likely to remain what Chinese strategists term the ‘Near Seas’ – the Yellow, East, and South China Seas, home to all Beijing’s outstanding island and maritime claims – as well as their immediate approaches to enhance A2/AD capabilities and thereby increase the cost of US and allied intervention in regional disputes. China will continue to develop a secondary layer of lower-intensity capabilities to increase influence and reach into the Indian Ocean, a vital energy and commercial conduit, and safeguard other growing overseas interests, including the security of citizens and resources abroad. It remains uncertain how rapidly and to what extent Beijing will devote the considerable time, resources, and strategic focus necessary to significantly enhance its power projection capabilities in this regard.

In so far as Japan is concerned, Alessio Patalano challenges the assumption that the Japanese lack of a large fleet to meet the ‘rise of maritime China’ is shorthand for a ‘declining’, or a ‘reluctant’ seapower. His article draws upon previously unavailable materials from the Japan Maritime Self-Defence Force (JMSDF) to argue that, throughout the post-Cold War period, the JMSDF was quick in adapting its sea-lanes defence strategy to accommodate complementary capabilities to meet new missions. The article further re-examines the notion of Japan’s ‘militarisation’, a misleading definition that does not capture the essence of this transformation. In light of significant budgetary constraints, the article explores the evolution of doctrines and fleet structure, suggesting the expressions ‘modernisation’ and ‘targeted enhancement’ to qualify the Japanese military build-up. Crucially, the article underlines that rather than ‘power projection’ the Navy pursued enhanced anti-submarine warfare (ASW) and expeditionary capabilities. This tailored enhancement suggests that Japan is not locking itself in a race against a fast-expanding Chinese maritime power. Chinese military expansion is certainly an important factor in the speed underpinning the development of specific capabilities such as those necessary for the conduct of amphibious raids within the context of the periphery of the archipelago. Japanese maritime strategy, however, remains focused on the wider significance that the safety of sea-lanes has for Japan. In this respect, the Japanese debate on seapower places the sea at the centre of national security, and maritime capabilities represent today both the front line of territorial defence in Northeast Asia, and the spearhead projecting Japan’s contribution to the international stability of the maritime commons in East Asia and beyond its confines.

The ROK has often been neglected in the debate regarding naval development and seapower in Northeast Asia. In his article Ian Bowers argues that for the ROK Navy (ROKN), seapower has been and ultimately continues to be grounded in the littorals of the Korean peninsula. By placing ROKN development within the context of the ROK’s democratisation, altering threat perceptions and military transformation, Bowers creates a picture of a force constrained by political and geostrategic realities. With democratisation, economic growth and the pursuit of placing the ROK as a responsible international actor, the 1990s saw the ROKN undertake a wider force development programme. Advanced naval capabilities were pursued focusing on blue-water operations, sea-lanes protection and building a force able to ensure the ROK’s interests in the highly competitive Northeast Asian maritime sphere. Seapower on this level became inherently linked to the ROK’s growing international interests and place as an independent middle power in the region and the world. However, the requirements of maintaining a force to operate in the littorals of the peninsula and in the blue-waters of Northeast Asia placed strain on a tight defence budgets and the ROKN’s limited number of platforms. The North Korean sinking of the ROKN vessel Cheonan brought the dangers faced by the ROK in the seas around the peninsula to the fore and highlighted the difficulties of ensuring deterrence while pursuing blue-water capabilities. For the ROK, the Navy is both a defensive necessity and a symbol of regional interest and comparative strength, however the threat posed by North Korea means that presently the littorals continue to dominate ROK perceptions regarding the utility and importance of seapower.

In light of this proposed intellectual shift, one of the key issue we wish to raise concerns the utility to examine the wider phenomenon of regional maritime empowerment within the lenses of arms races. In the international system of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, navies and naval arms races (as well as attempts to regulate them) were functions of political interactions aimed at the control and reshaping of continental Europe or Mainland China. In today’s Northeast Asia, maritime forces are directly connected to a process that sees the projection of power at sea as a core goal of national security agendas across the region, from Beijing to Tokyo, to Seoul and Washington. Naturally, the modalities on how to project power at sea and to what extent these ambitions should be seen as a zero-sum game are still debated in the different capitals. For this reason, we believe that one of the key implications of this intellectual shift should be to prompt a much stronger debate on the modalities of interactions at sea. Rather than focusing on whether the current naval modernisation in the region resembles an arms race or not, greater attention should be given to the power of normative pressure. In a context where maritime forces are growing in number and capabilities, a stronger effort should be pursued to develop and implement common rules that will offer the opportunity to socialise them with the cooperative uses of the sea. This is particularly true in order to defuse growing suspicion vis-à-vis countries like China whose actions at sea seem to challenge broader assumptions of normative frameworks like the United Nations Conventions on the Law of Sea (UNCLOS). In particular, a more robust engagement on how to maintain good order at sea to favour its wider uses as a means of transport and as a resource will reduce tensions and limit misunderstanding. How and in what ways this type of agenda can and should be implemented should be the topic of further research. Here we are seeking to point a possible direction.

A Brief Consideration on Sources and Methods

One of the key strengths of this issue is that it draws on the expertise of a pool of specialists in maritime issues with language skills in the different countries under examination. The authors employed a variety of methodological tools including comparative case studies, process tracing and discourse analysis. Drawing upon an unprecedented wealth of original language sources from China, Japan, the ROK and – naturally – the United States, the different contributors reconstructed national views of and strategies for the use of the sea with unprecedented access and depth. A clear common agenda favoured a consistent approach in the analysis of naval polices. These were evaluated against expected gains from the use of the maritime realm, whether to defend, manage, assert or project national power. By shifting the attention to narratives addressing the relationship between national strategy and the maritime nature of the regional system, the contributors to this book offer a more nuanced explanation of the evolving security dynamics in Northeast Asia.

This project is based on the papers of a conference panel titled ‘Seapower and Regional Security in East Asia’, presented at the International Studies Association 53rd Annual Convention, 1–4 April 2012, San Diego, California. The opportunity to discuss the papers in this context helped the authors to guarantee both inner consistency and elevated standards, integrating original research with additional feedback and suggestions. As for any international project, suggestions and feedback from a number of scholars were essential to refine and clarify its scope and purpose. Special thanks are due to the discussant on that panel, Dr M. Taylor Fravel of MIT, for his constructive feedback. Among those who took time to read earlier versions of the articles, we would like to thank Professor Peter Dutton from the US Naval War College, Professor Andrew Lambert and Dr Marcus Faulkner from King’s College London. Last but by no means least, we wish to express our gratitude to Professor Thomas Mahnken and Professor Joe Maiolo, editors of The Journal of Strategic Studies, for their enthusiasm and support to this project.

Our sincere hope is that the readership of the journal will enjoy the content of this issue and draw upon it to advance our understanding of this subject.

Notes

¹ US Department of Defense, Quadrennial Defense Review Report (Washington DC, 6 Feb. 2006), 47.

² Jonathan Greenert, ‘Sea Change. The Navy Pivots to Asia’, Foreign Policy, 14 Nov. 2012, <www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2012/11/14/sea_change>, accessed on 25 March 2014.

³ US Department of Defense, Quadrennial Defense Review 2014 (Washington DC, 4 March 2014), 16–17.

⁴ Geoffrey Till, Asia’s Naval Expansion: An Arms Race in the Making? (London: Routledge for IISS 2012), 238–9.

⁵ Mahan’s core ideas are set forth in his best known work, The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1660–1783 (Boston: Little Brown 1890). For a comprehensive introduction to Mahan’s works, cf. Jon T. Sumida, Inventing Grand Strategy and Teaching Command: The Classic Works of Alfred Thayer Mahan (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP 1997).

⁶ Andrew Lambert, ‘Sea Power’, in George Kassimeris and John Buckley (eds), The Ashgate Research Companion to Modern Warfare (Farnham: Ashgate 2010), 73–87. For definitional clarifications on the adjectives ‘naval’ and ‘maritime’, see Ian Speller, ‘Naval Warfare’, in David Jordan, James D. Kiras, David J. Lonsdale, Ian Speller, Christopher Tuck and C. Dale Walton, Understanding Modern Warfare (Cambridge: CUP 2008), 125.

⁷ Geoffrey Till, ‘Introduction: Sea Power and the Rise and Fall of Empires’, in G. Till and Patrick C. Bratton (eds), Sea Power and the Asia-Pacific: The Triumph of Neptune? (Abingdon: Routledge 2011), 2.