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Telegraph
18-07-2025
- Business
- Telegraph
China's ‘tank boats' and a Royal Navy carrier in the Pacific: Keys to UK security
There is a perpetual battle being fought across Whitehall between those for whom foreign policy stops at Dover and those who understand the global nature of trade and alliances and the requirement to secure them. Not surprisingly, most naval officers are in the latter group. We tend to think that the UK should be able to project power far away for many reasons. To begin with, foreign trade in goods and services represents more than 60 per cent of our GDP. Nearly all those goods move by ship or seabed connections, and nearly all those services are nowadays dependent on undersea connections too. Without maritime power, most of our economy is hostage to fortune – it can only function with the consent of others. Then there is the matter of alliances. It's best, of course, to deter enemies and not have wars. Strong alliances make for strong deterrence: but this means that allies must be able to defend each other, not just themselves. The ability to take action away from home is necessary here. And we belong to other alliances than just Nato: we have just signed a new defence treaty with Australia, for example. There are others in the Indo-Pacific who should be able to rely on our assistance, as we have been able to rely on theirs. We should not forget Michael Joseph Savage, New Zealand's prime minister in 1939, who made this statement when Britain declared war on Germany: 'Both with gratitude for the past and confidence in the future, we range ourselves without fear beside Britain. Where she goes, we go. Where she stands, we stand.' Friends like that are worth defending when it's their turn to be in trouble. Australia and New Zealand are also both part of the 'Five Eyes' intelligence alliance along with us, the US and Canada. If you don't think the Five Eyes alliance is important to the UK's security, I can only put it like this: you are wrong. But still, even today's world of daily cyber-attacks on the UK and weekly attacks on undersea infrastructure in UK waters and in the Baltic has yet to convince many people of our need to be able to take action at a distance. Even the war in Europe and the movements of dark fleet shipping through seas near and far to fund it does not seem to have registered: most of the party in government think that welfare payments are more important. Showing that interest is inversely proportional to distance, contested sea lanes in the Black and Red Seas, the High North and most recently, the Strait of Hormuz attract even less interest. By the time you get to the Indo-Pacific, studied indifference has often been replaced by a more vocal 'nothing to do with us'. But there's a lot going on out there. Chinese People's Liberation Army 'tank boats' have just been conducting high-speed amphibious beach landings and live-fire drills across the strait from Taiwan. These appear to be ZTD-05 amphibious light tanks which can be launched from a variety of vessels out at sea and then drive up the beach. As watercraft their low freeboard and top weight would both give me sleepless nights, and as tanks they are probably not that great either. You would only have them if they were essential to some mission you wanted to carry out: and there is really only one mission for China's ZTD-05s. There are those who say that China will never invade Taiwan, but it's hard to believe this given the sheer amount of military equipment they are making which can have no other purpose. And Taiwan does matter to us, in fact. We still (just) remain among the top ten manufacturing nations in the world. One reason for this is companies like Arm of Cambridge, which expects its chips to account for more than 50 per cent of the entire world's data centre CPU market this year. Almost all mobile phones include at least one Arm chip. But Arm is a 'fabless' chip designer: its chips are actually made by other companies, an awful lot of them in Taiwan. At roughly the same time as the tank boat exercises, Taiwan was conducting the 41 st annual Han Kuang wargames designed specifically to strengthen defences against invasion from the mainland. In the longest and largest version yet, 22,000 reservists were mobilised. Initially the drills were focused on how to counter the actions of the Chinese Coast Guard and maritime militia whose harassment of ships across the region continues to get worse: this past week has just seen a People's Liberation Army Navy Type 815G electronic surveillance ship, escorted by a China Coast Guard cutter Zhaojun-class 4203, intercepted in Philippine waters. The Taiwanese exercise then simulated escalation, finishing with a full scale anti-landing operation. The PLA practising this exact operation at the same time just across the way presumably acted as a useful motivational training aid. Meanwhile the 2025 version of the biennial Exercise Talisman Sabre is underway. Some 35,000 soldiers, sailors and airmen from 19 countries, among them our very own Carrier Strike Group, are involved. Our carrier capability has its flaws and failings, but HMS Prince of Wales is still home right now to the largest carrier-borne group of fifth generation jets in the world. The exercise will include the usual array of anti-submarine, surface and air drills, live firings, amphibious landings and air combat operations. Lieutenant General Joel B Vowell, Deputy Commanding General, US Army Pacific, summarised it thus: 'It's effectively a deterrent mechanism, because our ultimate goal, part two here, is no war.' This is alliance in action. So in fact Operation Highmast – our deployment of our Carrier Strike Group to the far side of the world – is very important to our economy and our security here in Britain. Sending up to 4,500 of our service people and all their kit across the world comes with a bill, of course. Much of that cost will only appear after the deployment ends as hard worked ships, aircraft and personnel all need recuperation. If you don't get the importance of the Indo-Pacific, of Taiwan and Australia and New Zealand and so on to the UK, despite the things above I've outlined – and the thousands that I haven't – then that cost is all you will see. The point of this article is to show how interwoven the world's oceans and nations are. A Royal Navy which can (or does) only operate in the North Atlantic or the Channel is not doing the job this nation needs it to. The Houthis have successfully forced much of the world's trade out of the Red Sea onto the much longer route around Africa: that includes a lot of our trade. Even just talk of the Strait of Hormuz closing affects world oil and liquefied gas prices – and that includes a lot of gas that we (and our friends) need to replace Russian pipeline supplies. The ability of Western navies to project power not just into the Taiwan Strait but the Malacca Strait figures large in strategic thinking in Beijing: more than half of China's imports, including the great bulk of its seaborne oil, come through Malacca. This is why China is building a powerful blue-water navy: they know that such a navy is a vital part of their national security. We need to re-learn the same lesson.
South China Morning Post
06-07-2025
- Entertainment
- South China Morning Post
‘Cool' officers on Chinese aircraft carrier impress Hong Kong visitors
Naval officers on China's first domestically built aircraft carrier, the Shandong, were popular photo subjects for Hong Kong residents enjoying a rare opportunity to sing and dance with them on the second and final day of the warship's public opening on Sunday. Advertisement Visitors queued up to capture on camera the sheer scale of the 70,000-tonne carrier, with its distinctive 'ski jump' ramp, fighter jets, likely to be J-15s, and helicopters, and to seize the chance to meet and interact with officers. 'The deck was absolutely buzzing with excitement. There was a massive singalong and you could even dance with the naval officers,' said Dong Xiaoyang, a user of the Chinese social media platform RedNote. 'You got a full, close-up view of both the J-15 and J-15T jets – I heard you can't even get this close at air shows. 'And the naval officers on board were incredibly cool. They were all happy to take photos with us, which was such a rare opportunity. I seriously made sure to get a picture with almost every one of them.' A fighter jet is the backdrop for a visitor's photo with a crew member. Photo: Xinhua Another RedNote user, Da Bonjour, took photos with several crew members and expressed gratitude for their efforts in sweltering temperatures over the past few days.
