As US sea power faces new rivals, a regional naval arms race is the new reality for Australia.
Unusually blunt language from Defence Minister Kevin Andrews – directed at Australia’s largest trading partner – raised eyebrows at a regional security conference in May.It showed just how worrying the rising tensions in our region have become.
“We remain concerned by any developments in the South and East China Sea which raise tensions in the region,” Mr Andrews said.
“Australia has made clear its opposition to any coercive or unilateral actions to change the status quo in the South and East China Sea,” he said. “This includes any large scale land reclamation activity by claimants in the South China Sea.”
“We are particularly concerned at the prospect of militarisation of artificial structures.”
Such undiplomatic language directed at China reflects a changed situation in a vast continent. The enrichment and empowerment of many Asian states is driving growing rivalries.
Geography explains a lot: Asia is divided into two separate strategic realms by an almost unbroken chain of mountains, from the Bosporus to the South China Sea. South of this, along Asia’s southern strategic tier, an arms racing is brewing.
In a conflict, coasts are potential long front lines, offering multiple avenues of attack, beyond any state’s capacity to comprehensively defend them. Even in peacetime, heavily armed navies are at sea, visiting foreign ports, patrolling trade routes and gathering intelligence.
Two interlinked trends keep security planners in Asia awake at night. The first is that maritime weapons systems tend to offer rising powers greater potential bang for buck.
The second trend concerns naval strategy. There has been a steady shift among the world’s navies from deploying power at sea towards deploying power from the sea.
Major powers are moving towards the capacity to project coercive force from the sea onto the land, whether in the form of sea-based air power, ship- or submarine-launched cruise missiles, or the landing of amphibious forces.
Asia’s weapons acquisition statistics show a sustained build-up. In 2012, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute reported that the volume of arms transfers into Southeast Asia had grown by 200 per cent.
This volume of imports was the highest since the end of the Vietnam War. Naval weapons formed the bulk of both the purchases and intentions to acquire. Asia has become a great arms bazaar, its states making the most of competition among weapons producers.
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