Manoj Ambat's Blog dealing with Defence, Foreign Affairs, Strategic Affairs and Politics

Chinese carrier Liaoning ( Image credits- Wikimedia Commons) Source- The National Interest Author- Zachary Keck China has all but confirmed that it is building an indigenous aircraft carrier, and that it may even be a nuclear-powered one. On Thursday, huanqiu.com, the Chinese-language version of the state-run Global Times, published an internal document of the China Shipbuilding Industry Corporation, one of China’s two largest shipbuilding companies. CSIC is a state-owned company. The report lists building nuclear submarines and an aircraft carrier as the company’s “priority missions.” It also states that progress on these projects has been smooth. "The priority missions of building the aircraft carrier and nuclear-submarines have been carried out smoothly and with outstanding achievements," the document states, according to a translation provided by Taiwanese media outlets. The same Taiwanese reports go on to say that the document suggests that Chin

Image Credits- Reuters / Shizuo Kambayashi Source- The Diplomat  Author- Samuel Ramani Last week, Japanese government officials announced that Prime Minister Shinzo Abe would visit five Central Asian countries in October. Abe’s trip aims to strengthen economic links with the energy-rich region. This announcement is the latest step in a trend that is seeing Japan pay more attention to Central Asia. Indicators of deepening ties between Japan and Central Asia have ranged from the declaration of the need for economic cooperation with Uzbekistan to increased investment in Turkmenistan’s natural gas industry and Caspian Sea port construction project. Japan’s expanded diplomatic overtures can be explained in two main ways. First, they could be seen as a means of balancing against China. If true, this would effectively be a form of unwitting indirect assistance to Russia, whose own traditional hegemony in Eurasia is being seriously challenged by China’s growing trade ties and

PLAN Warships ( Image credits- Wikimedia Commons) Source- The Diplomat  Author- Prashanth Parameswaran Much has been written about China’s ongoing efforts to become what President Xi Jinping called a “great maritime power” and how the United States should respond. In light of this, it is useful to think about the future trajectory of the of the increasingly modern and powerful People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN), which has been charged with both defending China’s sovereignty in ‘near seas’ (eg. Taiwan) and protecting Chinese interests in the ‘far seas’. Rear Admiral Michael McDevitt, now a senior fellow at the Center for Naval Analyses (CNA), has attempted to do exactly that. In a recent paper delivered at a two-day CNA conference on Chinese maritime power, seen by The Diplomat, McDevitt projects what China’s ‘far seas’ navy will look like in 2020 and how it would rank alongside the United States and other players – Britain, France, Japan, India and Russia. Getting a

INS Jalashwa underway ( Image credits- Indian Navy) Source- The National Interest Author- Palmo Tenzin While everyone’s anxiously watching and analyzing the events unraveling in the South China Sea, there’s another resource conflict involving China that also deserves attention. In the Himalayas, China and India are competing for valuable hydropower and water resources on the Yarlung Tsangpo–Brahmaputra River. The dispute offers some important lessons for regional cooperation (on more than just water), and highlights what’s at stake if China and India mismanage their resource conflict. The Yarlung Tsangpo–Brahmaputra River is a 2,880km transboundary river that originates in Tibet, China as the Yarlung Tsangpo, before flowing through northeast India as the Brahmaputra River and Bangladesh as the Jamuna River. The resource conflict began on June 11, 2000, after a natural dam-burst in Tibet caused a flash flood that resulted in 30 deaths and serious damage to infrastr

Image credits- USNI Source- The Diplomat Author- Prashanth Parameswaran China is developing a widening network of strategic ‘bases’ that further heightens the challenge it poses to the United States, a former U.S. naval chief told a conference Tuesday. Beijing has already sought to secure access and rights in strategic countries to boost its influence and support its naval forces as it deploys them further out for patrols in the Indian Ocean or anti-piracy operations in the Horn of Africa. These include ports in Oman, Pakistan and Djibouti. But Admiral Gary Roughead, the former Chief of Naval Operations, told a two-day conference at the Center for Naval Analyses that Beijing may be looking to expand its network of distributed, critical outposts across regions for various functions including projecting power, establishing necessary supporting infrastructure and gathering intelligence. New nodes, Roughead said, may include Greece to establish a foothold in the energ