Russia and North Korea assist China by pressuring US Pacific forces
Tom Rogan
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Beijing secured some assistance from its partners in Russia and North Korea on Friday. Both those nations took actions that force the U.S. military to spread its resources thinner.
North Korean leader Kim Jong Un fired off a ballistic missile into the Sea of Japan, while Russia conducted snap naval exercises with its Pacific fleet. At the margin, these actions complicate the U.S. military’s focus on deterring China and preparing for a possible confrontation with the People’s Liberation Army. That concern is increasingly urgent in view of Chinese President Xi Jinping’s aspiration to subjugate Taiwan before the decade is out.
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The anticipated and now effected North Korean test of a solid-fuel-based Hwasong-18 intercontinental ballistic missile has seen the United States deploy repeated flights of RC-135S Cobra Ball spy planes in recent days. Solid fuel missiles allow for more effective surprise attacks in that they need not be fueled before launch. In turn, the Cobra Ball aircraft are designed to gather intelligence on the performance of ballistic missiles. This allows analysts to establish how advanced North Korea’s missile program has actually become.
But intelligence gathering is only one side of the responsive coin here.
South Korea and the U.S. also launched air combat drills in response to the test. The intent is to deter Kim from any escalated brinkmanship and practice the defeat of his armed forces in war. The need for these immediate response capabilities is obvious in light of Kim’s nuclear brinkmanship, which he again hailed on Friday as serving the “extreme uneasiness and horror” of South Korea, Japan, and the U.S. Still, immediate response capabilities are finite and also the most resource-intensive to maintain. The need to posture them in South Korea drains the U.S. military’s Indo-Pacific Command of capabilities it would ideally wish to hold in reserve for a major conflict with China. Those capabilities are already insufficient in the context of high-end warfighting deployments to Europe.
At the same time, Russia’s Pacific fleet went on full alert status for snap combat exercises on Friday.
Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu said the forces would train to “repel massive missile and air strikes, conduct exercises to search for and destroy submarines, carry out torpedo, artillery fire, and missile launches in the course of destroying naval strike groups and ground targets of a mock enemy.” He added they would train to “prevent the deployment of enemy forces in the operationally important region of the Pacific Ocean — the southern part of the Sea of Okhotsk and repel its landing on the southern Kuril Islands and Sakhalin Island.”
This is a clear nod toward Japan, which is engaged in a long-term dispute with Russia over the sovereignty of four Russian-occupied islands just northeast of its northernmost prefecture, Hokkaido. And while Japan is not going to attempt a military seizure of the islands anytime soon, China benefits from Russia’s escalation in this area. Its submarine and anti-ship missile forces are potent enough to demand the attention of U.S. commanders. China and Russia have stepped up joint naval activities proximate to Japan in recent years.
China is the top line, here.
These incidents, both carried out by very close Chinese partners, exert pressure on the U.S. military disposition in the Western Pacific. Ideally, the U.S. would want to focus its resources in and around Taiwan and the South China Sea. Russia and North Korea are preventing the maximal fulfillment of that aspiration.