The Specter of China at RIMPAC

After participating in the 2014 and 2016 Rim of the Pacific exercises (RIMPAC), a huge multinational military exercise held biennially in Hawaii, the United States rescinded China’s invitation to this summer’s exercise in response to its continued militarization in the South China Sea. There had always been an awkward tension around China’s earlier presence in the exercise rooted in the unspoken implication that China was itself the notional threat that many of the most advanced capabilities on display were designed to combat. This year’s exercise was no different. Even if China was not there officially (it sent an uninvited intelligence-gathering ship to monitor the exercise), it likely took away at least one unmistakable message: The United States, its partners, and allies continue to refine an array of capabilities that could blunt Chinese forces in a potential Western Pacific conflict.

RIMPAC is touted as the largest international military exercise in the world. According to the U.S. military, this year’s RIMPAC, which ran from the end of June until the beginning of August, included 25 countries, 46 surface ships, five submarines, 17 land forces, over 200 aircraft, and more than 25,000 personnel. Israel, Sri Lanka, and Vietnam participated in the exercise for the first time.

In May, following the reports that China had deployed long-range anti-ship missiles, air defense missiles, and electronic jamming equipment to its artificial island bases in the Spratlys, the Pentagon rescinded China’s RIMPAC invitation. A spokesman said that China’s actions in the South China Sea were inconsistent with the principles and purposes of the exercise, that Beijing had raised tensions, and that its construction and deployments in the Spratlys violated President Xi Jinping’s 2015 statement at a White House summit that China did not intend to militarize the islands.

China’s absence highlighted Sri Lanka and Vietnam’s presence as new participants, and its competition with the United States for partners and influence in the Indo-Pacific.

Sri Lanka’s contingent of 25 Marines at the exercise was comparatively modest but its presence held unmistakable diplomatic significance. Late last year, Sri Lanka was forced to give up control of its port at Hambantota in return for relief from its Chinese creditors, who financed massive, and ultimately unaffordable, infrastructure improvements. While the port facilities are not specifically configured as a naval base, there is concern that the port may eventually give the People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) a foothold in the heart of the Indian Ocean.

Vietnam has long tried to balance its economic dependence on China with hedging against economic and military coercion from its vastly more powerful neighbor to the north. China’s increasing belligerence has motivated more cooperation with Hanoi’s one-time foe, the United States. Last March, the USS Carl Vinson called at the port of Da Nang, the first visit to Vietnam by a U.S. aircraft carrier since the end of the Vietnam war in 1975. Vietnam’s participation in RIMPAC was slight, just eight naval officers, but signaled strengthening ties for a country that is committedly nonaligned and avoids entanglement in formal treaties.

Perhaps the demonstration with the most strategic significance was the U.S Army and Japan Ground Self Defense Force’s participation in a ship-sinking exercise for the first time. The two land forces struck a target ship with anti-ship missiles and artillery rockets fired from mobile land-based launchers. The ability to project a sea-control envelope around land is especially relevant in the South China Sea and Western Pacific, where ground units armed with mobile anti-ship missile batteries could theoretically turn the regions’ archipelagoes into walls against the passage of adversary warships.

When Admiral Harry Harris, the former head of U.S. Pacific Command, announced the demonstration in a speech last year, he said that the capability was designed to address “archipelagic defense scenarios” that the United States and Japan face in the Western Pacific. While China went conspicuously unmentioned, virtually the only archipelagic defense scenario that involves the United States and Japan acting in concert would be a containment of Chinese naval and air forces behind the Ryukyu islands that stretch between Japan’s home islands and Taiwan.

In addition to fire from shore, the target ship was also struck by a Harpoon anti-ship cruise missile launched from a submerged U.S. submarine, the first such launch in more than 20 years, and a signal that the U.S Navy is looking to add a long-range ship-killing capability to its submarines beyond the torpedoes they currently carry.

Some demonstrations were less grand, but proved concepts that would be critical to supporting operations in major Pacific conflict scenarios, like U.S. Army and Marine Corps experiments in transforming commercially procured fuel into military-grade jet fuel in the field. Both services are experimenting with remote, expeditionary basing concepts that could be applied to the archipelagic geography in the South China Sea and Western Pacific. This fuel capability would allow U.S. Army and Marine aviation units to “live off the land” by utilizing local fuel sources rather than relying exclusively on U.S. military logistics and supply chains that may be threatened or cut-off in a conflict.

Other major multinational events at RIMPAC featured the coordination submarines and special operations forces, integrated air patrol and surveillance, amphibious landings of marines, and a complex mine clearance exercise.

In the present geopolitical environment, with top-level U.S. strategy documents prioritizing plans for great power competition against China and Russia, most of these exercises and capabilities appear to support scenarios where China is the target, rather than a partner, raising the question of why the United States invited Beijing to participate in the first place.

Former U.S. Deputy Secretary of Defense Robert Work was a principal architect of the Pentagon’s “Third Offset” initiatives during the Obama administration, a constellation of technologies and concepts intended to provide the United States with an “overmatch” advantage against the increasingly advanced conventional military capabilities of Russia and China. Many of these concepts are on increasing public display at successive RIMPAC iterations.

Work often explained to audiences that the United States would selectively reveal significant military capabilities to deter potential adversaries from contemplating military action, but would always conceal other decisive capabilities to preserve its warfighting advantage. This suggests that whatever capabilities it may be concealing, even though the United States did not want China to participate in RIMPAC this year, it probably hoped they were paying close attention.