Seabed warfare is new domain in CCP’s quest to dominate the Indo-Pacific

Editor’s Note: This piece by Venus Upadhayaya features quotes from CSP Senior Fellow, Grant Newsham.

Seabed warfare is a new kind of hybrid armed conflict that targets ocean-floor infrastructure like under-sea power and telecommunication cables, as well as natural resource extraction and transportation systems. It is emerging as an important component of Chinese operations to win future wars.

“If we hope to get unknown … underground resources in the deep sea, we must get in and explore the deep sea, as well as master key technologies for the exploration of the deep sea,” Chinese leader Xi Jinping said at the biennial conference on science and technology of China’s top think tanks in Beijing on May 30, 2016.

Since then, China’s capacity to perform undersea operations—and especially its military capabilities—have come a long way, and in particular with respect to Taiwan. According to a recent Reuters report, the situation has propelled the United States to revive a Cold War-era submarine spy program that will involve the biggest revamping of secret undersea surveillance networks since the 1950s.

Taiwan is not the only territory facing the threat of Chinese seabed warfare, and experts have told The Epoch Times that Beijing is using its undersea military operations to further its agenda in the South China Sea—consolidating and expanding its strategic footprint in the Indo-Pacific. The United States and its allies need to come together to build an integrated system to defend against it, they say.

“If there is an advantage (military, commercial, political) to be had in some part of the globe and beyond, China will go after it. The seabed is one more ‘domain’ that China will seek to dominate militarily,” said Grant Newsham, retired U.S. Marine and senior research fellow at the Japan Forum for Strategic Studies, as well as the author of the new book, “When China Attacks: A Warning to America.”

According to Mr. Newsham, the United States is able to operate more effectively on the seabed than any other nation. In fact, seabed warfare is not new, and has an American legacy—it started in the 1960s with the launch of a U.S. Navy operation called Ivy Bells, a joint effort between the Navy, CIA, and NSA to monitor Soviet undersea communication links.

As seabed public infrastructural and military assets have increased in scale and complexity across the globe, with increasing numbers of pipelines, optical fiber lines, and power cables now traversing the oceans, other nations have also worked to expand their seabed warfare capacities. However, experts are urging caution about China’s burgeoning operations given its expansionist agendas.

According to Aki Sakabe-Mori, an Assistant Professor at the University of Tsukuba, China’s deep-sea policy is enunciated by the communist regime’s Five-Year Plan (2016-2020) for scientific innovation, which considers deep-sea technology to be a “strategic high technology that serves national security.”

While addressing an audience at a workshop titled “Maritime Strategies of China in the Indo-Pacific—Exploring Options for Maritime Middle Powers” at New Delhi’s National Maritime Foundation on Sept. 11, Sakabe-Mori said: “Building a real-time ocean surveillance system has been placed as a national project of highest importance in [Beijing’s] national planning documents.”

Mr. Newsham believes that the United States and its allies may not have focused on the Chinese threat as much as they should have. “They perhaps underestimated what the PRC [People’s Republic of China] intended to do and was capable of doing,” he said.

With tensions rising high between India and China—as well as between China and Taiwan, and China and other nations in the South China Sea—experts say that in a time of heightened tensions, seabed warfare could emerge as a crucial theater.

“Chinese ships also are believed to have cut the internet cables linking Matsu and Taiwan this year, and they’ve probably done so in the past too. China pretends it was an accident,” said Mr. Newsham.

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