Mines Are Coming To The South China Sea

Mine Warfare in the South China Sea is inevitable.

Look at the players. On one side, we have China, a country boasting an enormous, sophisticated arsenal of mines with a resurgent Navy holding a set of offensive Mine Warfare doctrines that are simply begging to be tested.

On the other, we have Vietnam, the Philippines and the rest of the region who are desperately “looking for a win” against the big, expansion-minded regional powerhouse. These tiny regional navies are casting about for any cost-effective means to level a playing field dominated by large numbers of aggressive Chinese combatants and encroachment by grand-scale commercial equipment–rigs, dredges and other craft.

For all parties, mines offer a pretty painless way to tactically advance their various agendas.

Now, if the South China Sea was an isolated corner of ocean, a little intramural dalliance with mine warfare might pass relatively uneventfully, but the South China Sea is one of the busiest transit-routes for Asian commercial trade, making nearby mine warfare a regional–even a global–economic threat. And believe me, when mine warfare starts in the South China Sea, it’ll make the old Iranian efforts in the Strait of Hormuz look like child’s play.

Am I being alarmist? No. As somebody who has tracked at-sea violence in this region for almost a decade, this region tolerates a far higher level of violence than the West is used to seeing. Cold War-era “fishing wars” off of Iceland–where an occasional trawler got “bumped” by a patrol boat–would provoke banner headlines on the New York Times. Until recently, whole Vietnamese fishing boats could disappear in a hail of gunfire with little-to-no notice in the American press. Folks play for keeps in China’s near seas–it’s where “dignified” western norms of behavior don’t apply.

But that regional apatite for confrontation means things could get out of hand very, very quickly.

Mark my words.

Mine Warfare will make an appearance in the South China Sea–unless the key users of this ocean–Japan, Singapore, South Korea, etc.–start taking the threat of South China Sea escalation into mine warfare seriously. Key users need to model out the consequences of mine warfare (military, economic, environmental, political, etc.), start regularly flowing mine-clearing assets into the region and begin to demand, right now–TODAY–that key commercial transit lanes be kept clear and that freedom of navigation be maintained.

But, for these regional players who are struggling for territory, the temptation to use mines is going to grow.

China will be increasingly eager to restrict outside access to areas full of sea features and “starve out” the small, pesky garrisons that pepper the region. Rather than take the confrontational route of chasing down and halting (or sinking) small resupply boats, China can simply declare a small area “closed”, throw mines down, offer one-way flights out to the garrisons and then sit back and watch as the Philippines and Vietnam struggle to decide how to cross into the mined areas.

There’s also a real temptation to experiment. Some in the PLA(N) will likely see the South China Sea as an unparalleled “real-world” incubator for tactical innovation or as a testbed for larger mine warfare operations against future threats like Taiwan, Japan or Korea.

As an added benefit, any threat of mine warfare would be enough to temporarily usher large U.S., Japanese and other “interested” combatants/observers out of the area–so if China wanted to do something more dramatic (say, seize an island or two) without the fear of intervention/interruption by outsiders, the threat of mine warfare will be the way it’ll all start.

On the other hand, the small, hard-pressed navies of Vietnam and the Philippines would like nothing better than to force China’s large fleet to “back off” and to make Chinese agents of commercial encroachment think twice before sending large capital investments into the South China Sea (economically speaking, using a $100,000 dollar mine to disable a billion-dollar exploration rig isn’t a bad tradeoff at all). Mines are cheap, can be distributed easily, and might make China think twice about committing their new and shiny Navy to a gritty IED-ridden area.

On a larger scale, the smaller countries might gamble with the innate “plausible deniability” of mine warfare, distribute mines freely, and hope that China, if it suffered a loss, would over-react and suffer disproportionate economic and political impact from that over-reaction. Internationalization of the conflict benefits the little guys–and mines are an easy–and maybe the only–way to escalate without suffering a loss.

It’s all an awfully risky game.

And America certainly isn’t ready. The mine-hunting Littoral Combat Ship program has been thrown under the bus, and the larger mine warfare community has been so regularly sacrificed at the “Blue Water Church of Missile Defense and Aircraft Carriers”, there’s simply nothing left (Seriously–go to the local library, pull out an old ’60s–even a ’70s!!–era Janes’ and look at how many mine warfare ships and craft were in the inventory). The mine losses of the Iraq war have been ignored, and the U.S. Navy has forgotten the very real and very hard lessons learned off the coast of Korea in the ’50s. America is just not serious about mine warfare.

Now, what would be very interesting is if some of the big regional players–who both depend on free passage of the South China Sea AND are more prepared for mine warfare than the U.S.–declared that South China Sea mine warfare was an existential threat and moved unilaterally (or as a coalition) to make sure that such a step won’t happen. We’ll see.

Like it or not, mine warfare is coming to the South China Sea. And we all had better be ready, because, when it does happen, it’ll be a complex geo-political challenge that could easily cascade into a global crisis.