A Line in the Water

China has been busy, busy, busy building island in the contested waters of the South China Sea — islands with military purposes:

Admiral Harry Harris, commander of U.S. Pacific Fleet, sounded the alarm in a speech in Australia on Wednesday, calling the Chinese project “unprecedented” and saying that the construction is part of a larger campaign of provocative actions against smaller Asian states.

“China is creating a ‘Great Wall of Sand’ with dredges and bulldozers over the course of months,” he warned, adding that it raised “serious questions about Chinese intentions.”

For example, satellite photos taken by Airbus Defence and Space and published by Jane’s in February, show that over the past year China has built an 800,000-square-foot island on top of Hughes Reef in the Spratly Islands, where no island existed before. China also began a reclamation and construction project at nearby Gavin’s Reef. Both islands now have helipads and anti-aircraft towers.

As I’ve noted before regarding China’s naval expansion plan, building aircraft carriers is hard. Training up the crews and establishing doctrine is even harder — not to mention expensive in money, material, manpower, and sometimes in lives. It’s worth it of course to have the ability to take airpower out to sea.

But then of course occasionally the ships get sunk by the other side, taking all that money and time and manpower with them. Not to mention the loss of power projection.

Building islands where none were before is also expensive, but it’s not all that difficult — and it’s really, really hard for the other side to sink an island.