China seizes US underwater drone
China’s Defense Ministry said on Saturday it had been in talks with the US about returning an underwater drone taken by a Chinese naval vessel in the South China Sea, but the US was not helping by “hyping up” the issue.
The drone was taken on Thursday, the first seizure of its kind in recent memory, about 50 nautical miles northwest of Subic Bay off the Philippines, just as the United States Naval Ship Bowditch was about to retrieve the unmanned underwater vehicle, officials said.
“The UUV was lawfully conducting a military survey in the waters of the South China Sea,” a US official said, speaking on condition of anonymity. “It’s a sovereign immune vessel, clearly marked in English not to be removed from the water, that it was US property.”
China’s Defense Ministry said it “decided to return it to the US side in an appropriate manner, and China and the US have all along been in communication about it.”
The Pentagon confirmed the incident at a news briefing and said the drone used commercially available technology and sold for about $150,000.
Still, the Pentagon viewed China’s seizure seriously, since it had effectively taken US military property.
“It is ours, and it is clearly marked as ours, and we would like it back. And we would like this not to happen again,” Pentagon spokesman Jeff Davis said.
Sen. Ben Cardin of Maryland, the top Democrat on the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee, called the seizure “a remarkably brazen violation of international law.”
US Navy Secretary Ray Mabus cited a “growing China” as one of the reasons that the Navy needed to expand its fleet to 355 ships, including 12 carriers, 104 large surface combatants, 38 amphibious ships and 66 submarines.
The seizure will add to concerns about China’s increased military presence and aggressive posture in the disputed South China Sea, including its militarization of maritime outposts.
It coincided with saber rattling from Chinese state media and some in its military establishment, after US President-elect Donald Trump cast doubt on whether Washington would stick to its nearly four-decades-old policy of recognizing that Taiwan is part of “one China.”
President Barack Obama said on Friday it was appropriate for Trump to take a fresh look at US policy toward Taiwan, but he cautioned the idea that Taiwan is part of one China is central to China’s view of itself as a nation.
“If you are going to upend this understanding, you have to have thought through whatever the consequences are,” Obama told a news conference, noting Beijing’s reaction could be “very significant.”
A US research group this week said new satellite imagery indicated China has installed weapons, including anti-aircraft and anti-missile systems, on all seven artificial islands it has built in the South China Sea.
Mira Rapp-Hooper, a senior fellow in the Asia-Pacific Security Program at the Center for a New American Security, said China would have a hard time explaining its actions.
“This move, if accurately reported, is highly escalatory, and it is hard to see how Beijing will justify it legally,” she said.
The drone was part of an unclassified program to collect oceanographic data, including salinity, temperature and clarity of the water, the US official added. The data can help inform US military sonar data since such factors affect sound.
The USNS Bowditch, a US Navy ship crewed by civilians that carries out oceanographic work, had already retrieved one of two of its drones, known as ocean gliders, when a Chinese Navy Dalang-3 class vessel took the second one.