China’s Naval Power: An Offensive Realist Approach
Yves-Heng Lim. Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing, 2014. 165 pp. Notes. References. Index. $113.95.
Reviewed by Captain Carl Otis Schuster, USN (Retired)
China’s increasing naval power has drawn a lot of interest and inspired a plethora of naval literature. Most has focused on the country’s expanding naval order of battle and recent operations.
However, few have tried to apply naval theory to define China’s present and future naval direction. Yves-Heng Lim’s China’s Naval Power: An Offensive Realist Approach marks an impressive and pioneering effort to fill that gap. In doing so, the author introduces readers to the principles and writings of the past’s great naval minds of Julian Corbett and Alfred Thayer Mahan, more recent thinkers like John Mearsheimer, and of course, Chinese naval authors. He then blends these theorists’ principles into those emanating from the realist and neorealist schools of international relations to define what he believes is China’s purpose behind and potential uses for its naval power: to establish hegemony over the Asia-Pacific region. He notes that Chinese leaders think the international system is weighed against its interests, and he uses China’s modern historical interest in naval power dating back to Mao Zedong and its more recent behavior on the international scene to make his point.
For example, Lim incorporates China’s relations with India into his discussions of China’s naval requirements and responses. He discusses the barriers both India and China face in applying their naval power in the other’s “backyard,” and adds the nuclear dimension to justify his conclusion that China’s vision of hegemony is limited and regional. Gaining and sustaining that hegemony is much easier and fits China’s traditional and recent security concerns than a more expansive model. It also explains China’s anti-access strategy that is directed primarily at the United States—the distant hegemon China ultimately wants to deter from entering its sphere of influence. Within that context, Taiwan is not only a critical domestic political issue inside China but one on which the Communist Party largely has staked its prestige and legitimacy. Reunification removes a geographic barrier to China applying its naval power out to the Second Island Chain (the line of islands and territories stretching from the Northern Marianas down through Guam and Micronesia to Papua New Guinea). That vast ocean area provides an essential buffer to American naval power.
Having established the naval and international-power considerations driving China’s naval policy, Lim then introduces China’s pursuit of naval power and its naval construction program. What emerges is a patient, long-term effort to build the industrial, technological, doctrinal, and operational foundations for a fleet that can support China’s strategic political goals by 2030. The evolution of the People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) from a coastal defense force to a blue-water force was neither driven by a sudden impulse nor shaped by an inflexible numerical order-of-battle formula. Rather, it is one shaped by operational and strategic requirements. The weapons acquisition and development program is centered on providing technological capabilities. Where domestic efforts have fallen short, foreign sources have been adopted and studied. Like the other components of the PLA, the navy has taken a similar approach to perfecting its doctrine, operations, procedures, and tactics. The PLAN deployment to the Indian Ocean not only represents an expansion of China’s global role and fulfillment of a traditional naval mission of shipping protection, it has also provided invaluable lessons on the challenges of distant naval deployments far from home.
Yves-Heng Lim has written a pioneering, informative, and valuable addition to modern naval literature that takes the reader far beyond order of battle and technological descriptions of China’s expanding navy. The tables on China’s naval construction and military spending provide valuable context to the discussion of China’s expanding naval force. One minor fault in the book is its lack of maps. Including them to depict the geographic relationships and factors involved would have facilitated the discussion. Like other components of military power, navies are tools that national governments can apply to meet national-security needs.
Understanding the geostrategic factors, including political theories, that explain a nation’s potential use of its naval power, in this case China’s, can facilitate analysts’ and scholars’ understanding of, and perhaps their ability to predict, the PLAN’s future structure, employments, and role in China’s application of its growing power. However, this is not a book for casual readers. Although tightly written, the first 60 pages make for heavy, almost ponderous reading as the author introduces the reader to a vast array of international relations, military, and naval theorists, and their key points and conclusions. That is much information to assimilate in very few pages, and most readers will not be familiar with many quoted or their theories. Once past it though, the text flows and the reader will walk away with a unique and perhaps new understanding of not only how China may apply its naval power but other countries as well.
The South China Sea: The Struggle for Power in Asia
Bill Hayton. New Haven and London, Yale Press, 2014. 298 pp. Index. Maps. $35.
Reviewed by Lieutenant Commander Jeff W. Benson, U.S. Navy
“Mysterious cultures have risen and fallen around its shores,” author Bill Hayton, a career reporter for the British Broadcasting Corporation specializing in contemporary Asia, notes. “Invaders have come and gone, winds of trade and war have directly connected the Sea to the fates of faraway empires for centuries.” Hayton could be describing the Caribbean in the 18th century, or the Mediterranean in the 19th century. Rather, he paints a lucid picture of what he contends will be the most contested waterway on the globe in the 21st century: the South China Sea.
Hayton previously has written a book on Vietnam, which occupies more maritime features in the Spratly Islands than any other claimant country. His journalism background lends to a well-researched book that strikes a balance of sifting through relevant economic statistics about claimant countries, summarizing academics’ and subject-matter experts’ opinions, interviewing key individuals in foreign governments and private sector entities, and capturing events from prehistory to the present day about the development of the South China Sea.
More so than many other articles and books written about the South China Sea, Hayton succinctly articulates the impact of Europeans’ influence on the various islands, reefs, and rocks—the center of today’s debate about maritime territorial claims. His research offers that there’s “no archeological evidence that any Chinese ships made trading voyages across the South China Sea until the tenth century CE.” He also writes that European successes and failures led to the naming of specific maritime areas used in older charts. For example, Scarborough Shoal, which remains contested between China and the Philippines, first appeared on a chart after the British ship Scarborough ran aground on the reef in 1748.
The Chinese routinely have made the argument that the South China Sea is “China’s historical territory since ancient times.” However, as Hayton skillfully points out, most of the maritime features were established and named by Europeans then later translated by the Chinese. Also, China in 1996 signed and ratified the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) treaty, which has no mention of “historic rights” except in relation within territorial waters of an archipelagic state. Thus, China has signed away any argument centered on historic times unless they advocate for a form of international law prior to UNCLOS.
Hayton’s book covers the gamut of issues facing foreign governments and businesses alike, from countries with surprising interests like Canada to those with territorial claims like Malaysia. One of the more contentious of these issues is in oil and gas exploration, which for the most part remains under-reported. Through keen investigative research, Hayton explains the political and economic outcomes of several foreign oil companies’ initiatives. His level of detail indicating where specific oil-exploration blocks have occurred and the associated international politics are useful insights. He concludes that almost all of these companies have encountered setbacks and were forced to make decisions between operating in China or the waters claimed by one of the other claimant countries.
Tackling the numerous issues facing the South China Sea in a single book is daunting, but Hayton has done a fine job in a fairly short read, explaining the overall historical context and the events leading up to the present day. While the details of European influence and the creation of sea charts is powerful, the book could have benefited from reproducing some of those older charts. In addition, there are several references to oil and gas drilling locations, but there are no maps, leaving the reader to guess or search on his own. Regardless, this book is a must-read for those in the national-security community, whether one is operating on board a ship in the Asia-Pacific or developing foreign policy in our nation’s capital.
Today, and in the foreseeable future, a power struggle for political and economic gain in the South China Sea will continue to unfold among Southeast Asian countries and between China and the United States. The author has taken the vast complexities surrounding the South China Sea and written a work for both the novice and expert to gain a better grasp of the underlying issues. He has also done a superb job telling a story and leaving the reader wondering what will happen in the “next chapter” as this fascinating geopolitics unfolds in the 21st century.
Fives and Twenty-Fives
Michael Pitre. New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2014. 416 pp. $27.
Reviewed by Brandon Willitts
Many post-9/11 veterans are only now beginning to mine their combat experience to produce this generation’s canon of wartime novels, and Michael Pitre’s debut novel, Fives and Twenty-Fives, joins a growing list of essential literature to come out of more than 13 years of war.
Following the example of other talented veteran writers—namely Brian Castner, Phil Klay, Matt Gallagher, and Kevin Powers—Pitre’s novel pays particular attention to what happens to these men and women after they return from multiple combat deployments. Told from the perspective of three different first-person narrators—a Marine combat engineer officer, a Navy corpsman, and an Iraqi translator—the novel spends almost equal time in Iraq’s Anbar Province in 2006 as it does in New Orleans, Louisiana, a few years later.
The novel opens from the perspective of Lieutenant Peter Donovan, an unassuming officer who, despite his jam-band college past, rises to the challenge of leading Marines in combat. He eventually leaves the Marine Corps to enroll at an MBA program in New Orleans, because, as he says, “[t]he G.I. Bill is too good to pass up.” Once there, Donovan is somewhat surprised by his nation’s obliviousness to his service and sacrifice.
The reader is then introduced to Lester Pleasant, a once squared-away Navy corpsman who turns to morphine after the death of a close comrade. After getting kicked out of the Navy, he goes back to the job he worked in high school. At home Pleasant struggles to find the same meaning and purpose he had saving the lives of Marines in combat.
Though different in scope, neither character truly fit in while they served—Donovan, a reticent leader who struggled at officer candidate school, and Pleasant, a corpsman who was too Navy to be a Marine but too much a Marine to be Navy. Unsurprisingly, like many veterans Donovan and Pleasant both find it difficult to adjust to civilian life, yet Pitre’s characterization of their post-military challenges is one of the weaker aspects of the novel. The disconnected veteran paths that Pitre puts before them are well-worn enough territory that they feel far too familiar for any close reader of war fiction.
In Iraq, Donovan and his engineers (accompanied by a Navy corpsman and Iraqi translator) have been tasked with filling potholes, recently cleared of improvised explosive devices, along the Iraqi highways. Every time Donovan’s team leaves the wire, Pitre’s taut and clean prose builds an authentic tension. His voice is especially strong when describing Marines preforming their fives-and-twenty-fives scans, a well-choreographed search for roadside bombs that could potentially be five or twenty-five meters away from their position.
Despite relying too heavily on familiar archetypes to tell his stateside veteran story, Pitre’s prose in the Iraq sections of the novel is especially well done, as when he describes the smell of the Iraq air after a particularly tense moment in the story: “It smelled like Alabama in September.” Pitre also manages to capture the genuine love and affection that service members feel for one another. He even has a natural humor when describing the shenanigans of idle enlisted men, like moments when they pass off-color jokes back and forth on the convoy’s radio frequency.
The most poignant sections of the entire novel, though, are those told from the perspective of Kateb, a young Iraqi interpreter, who is nicknamed “Dodge” by the Americans. Before the war, Dodge was an English student enrolled at a university in Baghdad. Throughout the novel, he carries a worn copy of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn that he is trying to study in order to finish his thesis.
Dodge’s love of American music and literature is especially insightful because it gives him immediate access to the culture and language of the Americans for whom he translates. At the same time, Dodge’s dialogue is often the most revealing of all characters because English is not his native tongue. He tends to speak without irony, and in one such moment when Donovan and Dodge discuss having friends in Iraq, Dodge says to Donovan: “To have friends in this place is quite problematic.”
In Dodge, Pitre has crafted one of the few Iraqi characters in contemporary war literature who can stand alone as an honest portrayal of the millions of people who have also suffered because of this war. Dodge provides the reader with a lens through which we can view not only the Iraqi people but also ourselves.
The beauty of Pitre’s novel is that it superbly captures the danger and exhaustion of the work itself. Donovan’s combat engineers found and filled more than 150 holes. The heat from the midday Iraqi sun resonates off the page and the work appears absolutely futile and incomprehensibly dangerous.
If there is brilliance in the novel that transcends the war fiction genre it is in character of Dodge and the everyday heroics of Donovan’s men. “The dangers out there are sort of like the ocean,” a Marine Corps major tells Donovan before a mission. “You’d never swim if you knew how many sharks there really were.” This war was fought in cities and along highways. The men and women who fought this war—Americans and Iraqis—did so everyday despite the dangers, or, more often than not, did so because of those dangers.