The Navy Times reports that the USS John McCain was tracking a PLAN submarine when its towed sonar array collided with the Chinese naval vessel. The Navy Times said,
Two defense officials have confirmed that the crew aboard the destroyer John S. McCain was tracking the submarine that struck its towed sonar array June 10 in the South China Sea off the Philippines. The officials, who are familiar with the incident but were not authorized to speak on the subject, confirmed the array, which trailed up to a mile behind the ship, was hit by a Chinese navy submarine, although it was not sighted on the surface. Days after the incident, Chinese officials acknowledged that the submarine was theirs.
The McCain crew was able to retrieve the sonar array, which was damaged, although it’s not clear whether it was retrieved intact, the defense officials said. A mishap investigation is ongoing. The destroyer, based in Yokosuka, Japan, pulled into port in Sasebo after the incident but soon went back to sea.
The officials would not specify whether the submarine was an attack boat or a ballistic-missile sub, and they were unsure of the time of the incident, which occurred in “international waters” south of Subic Bay. The Associated Press reported that the collision took place 144 miles from Subic Bay, potentially placing it in the Mindoro Strait.
According to STRATFOR (subscription required article), the submarine was probably monitoring the CARAT (Cooperation Afloat Readiness and Training) exercises. CARAT is a series of bilateral exercises between the US, Thailand, Singapore and the Philippines. The Philippines was participating in its 15th CARAT exercise. The significance of the event, according to STRATFOR, is that it highlights the growing US-Chinese naval rivalry in the area. One can speculate that the Chinese were collecting information to update their acoustic and electronic signatures library. Unfortunately for the PLAN, the US was doing the same.
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How embarrassing for the Chinese sub comander. Opps!
This is the same destroyer that is tracking the NK ship and going to see what the cargo is. Funny that they are using a destroyer named the John S McCain.
Conversely,
It is rather apparent that the McCain did not know where the sub was, eh…
That part is not so good news…
“It is rather apparent that the McCain did not know where the sub was, eh…”
No way to tell that from what happened.
It would be amost impossible (and stupid) for a destroyer to try to hit a submarine with a towed array. On the other hand, a submarine attempting to stalk a ship might quite easily run into the towed array (which is almost perfectly silent).
So it could have easily been an accident. Or the Chinese boat may have been trying to snip off a bit of the array for technology.
Georg felis wrote:
“So it could have easily been an accident. Or the Chinese boat may have been trying to snip off a bit of the array for technology.”
That reminds me of the incident with the USNS Impeccable. According to:
http://www.informationdissemination.net/2009/03/observing-incidents-off-chinese-coast.html
“the Chinese trawlers attempted to use a grapple hook in an apparent attempt to snag the SURTASS USNS Impeccable (T-AGOS 23) had deployed.”
The Chinese certainly seem interested in our towed sonar arrays, don’t they?
The world is full of weird coincidences. The Captain of the USS JOHN McCAIN is CDR Jeffrey Kim, born in Seoul, Republic of Korea. There are not that many American naval officers of Korean ancestry.
http://www.mccain.navy.mil/Site%20Pages/co.aspx
Her XO is LCDR Robert F. Ogden II, and he did a tour as an exchange instructor at the Republic of Korea Naval Academy.
And of course, the ship involved is named after the father of the presidential candidate defeated by Buraq Hussein Obama.
This is the kind of thing that historians tend to say has to have been garbled to create a legend. I suspect that one way or another, whether we stop the Nork ship or not that the results will be a historical turning point for this country.
In what is to come, and whether she ends up facing the Chinese, North Koreans, or the idiocy of our own National Command Authority; may the JOHN S. McCAIN [DDG-56], CDR. Kim, and her crew have good luck, good hunting, and may she come home with the broom at her masthead.
Subotai Bahadur
The thing that immediately jumps into the mind of us Clueless Joe Public types (i.e., me) is, “Is this the Chinese saying, ‘Push comes to shove on this nuclear thing, the North Koreans are our friends.’?”
#6 SB
or a smoking gun lashed to her fantail
#8 Herb
Amen
#7 Salt Lick
Everything that the Norks have done in the way of nuclear research, bomb building, missile proliferation, or deliberate provocations has been done not only with the permission, but also with the active aid of the Chinese government. For foreign policy reasons, North Korea is a puppet of Zhongnanhai.
If the Chinese government objected to anything that the collection of damaged chromosomes in short packages that is running North Korea has done, it would be corrected with a single order.
Consider that North Korea is so backward that the plow is high tech for them. They only survive because of the occasional trainload of fuel and food that comes across the railroad bridges over the Yalu. It is not a matter of rail network capacity. The rail network is designed to provide full logistical support for a Chinese field army in wartime conditions and under attempts of interdiction. Adding a couple of trains a week would materially add to the living standards of the Norks. It is a matter of the length of the leash the Norks are being kept on.
They have used the rail links as leverage before. The standard thing is to return the empty trains as soon as they are unloaded. Once, a few years ago, the Norks tried to keep the trains. That was ended immediately by “technical difficulties” on the Chinese side of the bridges.
You don’t find the rather specialized materials and equipment needed to run and maintain nuclear reactors, centrifuges [for their U-235 program which they officially kicked up recently], or missile production lines at the corner kimchee stand. The items have to come from outside. That means through China.
Nor do I find a Chinese fear of being over-run by hordes of North Korean refugees in the event of a Nork collapse to be credible. Chinese do not like Koreans, or in many cases consider them to be human. I know. I am Chinese. One of the things that shocked my parents’ generation [born in the old country] was the tendency of Asians born here to band together ignoring the prejudices of the past. The concept of Chinese, Japanese, Koreans, and Filipinos being friends horrified them at first.
The Yalu River [and the non-river border] are fairly easily defensible against starving civilians. Especially since a) the Chinese government does not have anything like the Democrats’ soft position on the sanctity of national borders, and b) is more than willing to use the military on their own people, let alone Koreans. There is no Chinese Civil Liberties Union or Korean version of La Raza Unida that the CCP is afraid of offending. And yes, we can generally tell Koreans from Chinese, even in Manchuria. If they do make mistakes in targetting, it would be chalked up to needing to break eggs to get omlettes.
This is all being done to a plan. At the best of times, internally stable totalitarian countries can have a more long term and consistent foreign policy than democracies. When you consider that our country is governed by a party and a Pasha that is incapable of acknowledging real world consequences to actions [or inaction], and/or which actively wants this country’s defeat at all points ….. we are being played, and probably being beaten by their third string.
Note, that the American media did not highlight it, but China did state that any attempt to enforce the UN resolutions against North Korea would be met with force. And the North Korean vessel is being sheltered in Chinese waters.
Watch the screws possibly being tightened next week. We are about to try to sell a very large chunk of public debt over the next week [on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday]. China has been selling off US government bonds in the last week or so. If they should not choose to buy as much of our debt as they usually do; the street level relationship between China and Obama will be established publicly. Hint: China is the pimp.
I mentioned the NCA as a possible adversary of the JOHN McCAIN in any possible confrontation. Do not be surprised if she is called back at the last minute.
Subotai Bahadur
Thanks for sharing your knowledge, Subotai.
Yes, this whole thing looks like China running its own little “stress test” on Obama, using North Korea to apply the pressure.
I really gotta wonder how many times the N.Koreans and ChiComs have watched this video clip of Obama.
“Chinese do not like Koreans, or in many cases consider them to be human.”
…INhuman??? Or are the Chinese such a super-race that everyone else is merely human? (In which case, what do they consider Americans to be.)
Heh. Subotai reinforces something I have commented on before, the racial views of the East Asians to include Koreans, Chinese and Japanese. One translation of Nippon (= Japan) I have heard for good or ill, true or not, is ‘Land of the Gods’. Not g-d’s land, etc. Ripe territory for master race thought and thinking. Likewise the experiences of the team fielded a couple of years ago by an American company to startup a factory in North central Japan consisted of Koreans, Americans, Indians, Chinese (Taiwan and other places), Vietnamese and others was really, really enlightening. To the local Japanese hosts, all others were treated as interlopers until bonafides were established by a Japanese sponsor. Long story short = the dance going on for dominance in East Asia currently due to the abdication of American power with the election of The Weakling pResident will have strong racial undercurrents that most Westerners with their ingrained (beaten in) multi-culti sensibilities will not or cannot understand. It’s gonna get interesting.
The book that talks about 4GW practices by the PRC is called “Unrestricted Warfare: China’s Master Plan To Destroy America” by Col. Qiao Liang & Col. Wang Xiangsui of the PLA, translated from the original Chinese documents. Reading this work is strongly recommended for any student of the Pacific theater. It outlines probable current thinking on the part of the PRC.
Subotai, thanks for your very interesting posts!
As for this bump between the Chinese sub and McCain’s array, I’d go with Exhelo’s judgement call, he’s been closer to it than most of us, I’d bet. But even sub-to-sub collisions are not unheard of, for example: The paper analyses the plausible reasons, which lead to a Russian (of “Sierra” class) and a U.S. (“Baton Rouge”) submarines collision incident in February, 1992. The author comes to the conclusion, that most likely, the reason was very short detection range of submarines, because of that both submarines operated covertly and did not use other means of detection except passive acoustics. There are no reliable means available to submarines that would allow them to operate both covertly and safely in such a complex environment as shallow waters.
By the way, a mile away sounds rather close to me. Crappy U.S. WWII vintage torpedeos had a range of almost that, the IJN Long Lance much further.
Anyone know if a mile from the ship – and none too deep, I would assume – is absurdly close by modern ASW standards?
#11 NahnCee
-“Chinese do not like Koreans, or in many cases consider them to be human.”
…INhuman??? Or are the Chinese such a super-race that everyone else is merely human? (In which case, what do they consider Americans to be.)-
You do not understand the half of it. Culturally, for say 10,000+ years [*], the Chinese have been superior to pretty much anyone they ran up against, with the exception of the odd barbarian such as the Hsiung Nu, the Mongols, and the Manchus. Steppe peoples have been kind of a problem. But in the end, they absorbed everybody, and they became Sinicized.
When China encountered the West, just as when they encountered the Mongols, et. al.; China was in a period of dynastic collapse. Aside from engendering more than a passing hatred [that still exists and is kept alive by the CCP] for the West for the humiliations inflicted, the West is thought of as another group of barbarians. Including Americans. [If you look at what each country did, America does not have a clean record at all.]
China developed in, and maintained, an isolation from the world. While in English, we refer to “China” from the Chin dynasty that unified the country; Chinese refer to themselves as the Han people, from the golden age that followed the overthrow of the Chin. China itself is refered to as “Chung Kuo”, the middle kingdom. The implications in the phrase is that it is the center of the world, of civilization, the axis around which all turns. Anything beyong the realm of the Han people is considered barbaric at best, and sub-human at worst. The only proper relationship for barbarians to China, is submission. [One of the major mistakes that George H.W. Bush made after Tiananmen was to allow his envoys Scowcroft and Eagleberger to be received in the Hall of Supreme Harmony in the Forbidden City. The reception was televised throughout China. The Hall of Supreme Harmony was built for, and in Imperial times solely used for the receiving of the submission of foreign barbarians. By appearing there, our envoys gave a stamp of approval to Tiananmen.]
This sense of cultural superiority was enhanced over history because all of the immediate neighbors of China [except Tibet] adopted the Chinese culture and Imperial system. Even the Japanese.
So yes, in the Chinese culture there is an overwhelming sense of superiority. Which needs to be taken into account when dealing with them. There is no lack of ego in the Chinese culture. I’m sure Wretchard would confirm this.
[*] There are groups of settlements going back that far and further that have been excavated and are being studied. Just weeks ago, it was announced that they had found the earliest examples of pottery amongst Neolithic remains that are 18,000 years old.
Subotai Bahadur
There’s a difference between cultural superiority and physical superiority — and where is it writ anyway that China is superior culturally? It always seems to me that the measure of a culture is how many people *choose* to live in it, so given that measure, how many Chinese have relocated to America or Australia or Canada or England, and how many Westerners have relocated to CHina?
I tend to think of Americans standing out in a crowd of furriners (including Chinese) because we’re on an average taller, faster, heavier and, possibly, smarter. It was a small shock for me before the Olympics when China sent their security thugs to accompany the torch and they were actually normal-sized (although they’d still never make it in the NFL).
Must be interesting when culturally superior Chinese meet equally culturally superior Saudi’s.
I am amused by Subotal’s comments on his parents reaction to Asians here. I taught a graduate class a few years ago that had three Koreans (one may not have understood my English – I was born here), one Taiwanese and one Japanese. All graduates students. The Japanese student spoke proper English with a slight accent and only my Ph.D. a Korean woman, of the three knew English.
The Japanese student would always sit near me on my right and the three Koreans would set to my left as far away as they could from Japanese student. The Taiwanese student sat in the middle.
I had learned some years ago how the Koreans hate the Japanese. The reason amazed me. They consider the Japanese to be Koreans who changed their culture over the centuries and they hate then for it but I have no knowledge about how true this conjecture is. The Koreans that told me that were all graduate students mostly from upper income backgrounds in Korea.
I never talked with my mainland Chinese students about their attitudes toward Koreans.
Subotai: “…adopted the Chinese culture and Imperial system. Even the Japanese.”
Heh, the Japanese might argue the point! But once again, they feel they are superior to the surrounding groups. The funny part is that to an outsider the societies, on the surface, seem much the same. Deep down, of course, they are not.
Of course, my racial ancestors paint themselves blue and run around in rough woolen skirts.
I had a slow thought, what if the PRC sub was just sending a message? “Here we are! And, you did not see us!” That is the disturbing part. The US Navy sub service is supposed to be the best in the world, in training and equipment. But here we have a PRC sub that was not detected until they came up to steal, maybe.
I was in the associated Amphibious Ready Group off Korea in March 1984 when a Soviet submarine hit the Kitty Hawk. To say that things got tense would be an understatement. Submarines are always dangerous to be around. The things I remember most about Anti-Submarine Warfare are 1. it is incredibly boring (except I suppose in the event that it becomes way to exciting) and 2. if you do not have the best equipment then you might as well try throwing trash over the side and making even more noise just to annoy them. Neither of my ships was an effective ASW platform.
Regarding the racial opinions among Asians I have learned that if you ever need to end a debate with the Japanese you can point out to them that the Yamato clan, that is to say the Children of Ameratsu who are the Royal family, are undoubtedly Korean. As a conversational tactic however that leaves much to be desired, particularly if you have any interest in a future relationship. BTW I have relatives who are Japanese.
Robohobo,
I would guess that our ship knew the Chinese sub was there, that’s what the towed array is for, but apparently the Chinese didn’t know the array was there, or else they wouldn’t bump into it.
There’s an unbelievable amount of drivel in this thread. Subotai’s paranoia-laced, culturally tone-deaf ascriptions of chauvinism to Chinese cultural self-regard among the most egregious: it’s the equivalent of the assertion that Jews think of themselves as “superior” because of Talmudic rhetoric that Jews are the chosen people.
Feel free to peddle crude racial (and racialist) theories on the racial dynamic in East Asia, but know that you’re completely off the reservation when you do. In that regard, the likes of “Subotai” (assuming he is indeed Chinese; not that that excuses his race-baiting or self-loathing or his presumption to speak “with authority” for us Chinese) are not unlike diaspora Jewish critics of Israel — geographically removed from, culturally alien to, and wantonly clueless about the culture and region they speak of. Yet they imagine they speak with some sort of moral authority “as a Jew” or “as a Chinese” that justifies their indulgence of crude racial tropes.
Risible, and not to be taken seriously.
Shorter Sima = Subotai is not REALLY Chinese.
#21 Sima Qian & #22 Robohobo
1) Despite my Mongol Nom d’ Blog [it came from a reply to a liberal weenie Captain who referred to me as being to the Right of Genghis Khan], yes I am Chinese. Family comes from Kwangtung Province. Or to be more exact, my father came from Kwangtung; alone, 12 years old, not speaking English, in the 1930′s with all that implies about his legal status pre-1943. He later got his citizenship after crossing Europe with Patton’s 3rd Army. Technically, I am called a Jook Sing, or “hollow tube of bamboo” not being fully Chinese because my mother was American of German ancestry. Just to confuse things, by marriage I am now also adopted into the Highland Clan MacPherson. Fortunately, I like single malt and bagpipes, and the MacPhersons fought alongside the Great Montrose. Now that we have settled my ethnic bonafides:
2) I assume that your handle, Sima Qian, is based on the name of the Chinese Han Dynasty historian whose name is also known in the West as Ssu-ma Chien in Wade-Giles romanization. Given that, may I refer you to the historical records, both Chinese and Western. In the annals of the Dynasties, embassies, visitors, or pretty much any contact with anyone who was not Han Chinese involved them being referred to as various forms of barbarians, and at times as sub-human. When the West started trying to deal with China [during the Manchu or Ch'ing Dynasty, but the traditional Chinese culture and imperial system was in force] they were repeatedly dismissed as barbarians. I reference the MacCartney Mission of 1793, where a Lord who was accredited as the representative of the British crown was rejected because he was too much a barbarian to acknowledge the superiority of the Emperor by performing the k’tou [called kowtow in English]. Their commentaries on the relative worth and status of the Brits were more than passing disparaging. Similar opinions were registered about the captain of the first American vessel to visit China, a trading brig re-named the “Empress of China” in a failed attempt to curry favor.
It is not racist stereotype, it is a documented historical fact. Chinese culture is highly ethnocentric, and traditionally has a very high opinion of their own worth relative to anyone else. To further verify this, consider the various terms in Chinese [all dialects] for the various varieties of foreigners, even today. Very far from PC by today’s standards.
Whether that high self opinion is justified is determined by the reality of the time. For most of China’s history, given their position in Asia, there was some justification of their claim of cultural superiority. When they ran into the West, they found that it was not so. But that is only the last two centuries of a 10,000 year cultural history, and that 200 years did not overthrow all that came before. And to be honest, given that the West is now in decline, there may be some justification again in their minds in the old country.
But it is there and has to be taken account of in evaluating their actions and intentions. And, as has been noted by other commenters, the Chinese are far from alone in that feeling, with the Japanese and the Koreans especially being noted in reference to each other.
I don’t think I have crossed any lines in what I have said. Since this is Wretchard’s house, if he indicates that I have, I will take that into account in the future. Barring that, I stand by what I say, and how I say it.
Subotai Bahadur
SB @ 23 Anybody remotely familiar with the Japanese before WWII is aware of their attitude toward the west. I also refer to events in Nanking at the beginning of the war. Having racist attitudes is, I think, a universal human characteristic. Not a good one but one that deserves acknowledgment, not denial.