Seabed Warfare is New Domain in CCP’s Quest to Dominate the Indo-Pacific

A nuclear-powered submarine of the People's Liberation Army Navy's North Sea Fleet preparing to dive into the sea on Oct. 29, 2013. AFP/AFP via Getty Images

Seabed warfare is a new kind of hybrid armed conflict that targets ocean-floor infrastructure like under-sea power and telecommunication cables, as well as natural resource extraction and transportation systems. It is emerging as an important component of Chinese operations to win future wars.

“If we hope to get unknown ... underground resources in the deep sea, we must get in and explore the deep sea, as well as master key technologies for the exploration of the deep sea,” Chinese leader Xi Jinping said at the biennial conference on science and technology of China’s top think tanks in Beijing on May 30, 2016.

Since then, China’s capacity to perform undersea operations—and especially its military capabilities—have come a long way, and in particular with respect to Taiwan. According to a recent Reuters report, the situation has propelled the United States to revive a Cold War-era submarine spy program that will involve the biggest revamping of secret undersea surveillance networks since the 1950s.

Taiwan is not the only territory facing the threat of Chinese seabed warfare, and experts have told The Epoch Times that Beijing is using its undersea military operations to further its agenda in the South China Sea—consolidating and expanding its strategic footprint in the Indo-Pacific. The United States and its allies need to come together to build an integrated system to defend against it, they say.

“If there is an advantage (military, commercial, political) to be had in some part of the globe and beyond, China will go after it. The seabed is one more ‘domain’ that China will seek to dominate militarily,” said Grant Newsham, retired U.S. Marine and senior research fellow at the Japan Forum for Strategic Studies, as well as the author of the new book, “When China Attacks: A Warning to America.”

According to Mr. Newsham, the United States is able to operate more effectively on the seabed than any other nation. In fact, seabed warfare is not new, and has an American legacy—it started in the 1960s with the launch of a U.S. Navy operation called Ivy Bells, a joint effort between the Navy, CIA, and NSA to monitor Soviet undersea communication links.

As seabed public infrastructural and military assets have increased in scale and complexity across the globe, with increasing numbers of pipelines, optical fiber lines, and power cables now traversing the oceans, other nations have also worked to expand their seabed warfare capacities. However, experts are urging caution about China’s burgeoning operations given its expansionist agendas.

According to Aki Sakabe-Mori, an Assistant Professor at the University of Tsukuba, China’s deep-sea policy is enunciated by the communist regime’s Five-Year Plan (2016-2020) for scientific innovation, which considers deep-sea technology to be a “strategic high technology that serves national security.”

While addressing an audience at a workshop titled “Maritime Strategies of China in the Indo-Pacific—Exploring Options for Maritime Middle Powers” at New Delhi’s National Maritime Foundation on Sept. 11, Sakabe-Mori said: “Building a real-time ocean surveillance system has been placed as a national project of highest importance in [Beijing’s] national planning documents.”

Mr. Newsham believes that the United States and its allies may not have focused on the Chinese threat as much as they should have. “They perhaps underestimated what the PRC [People’s Republic of China] intended to do and was capable of doing,” he said.

With tensions rising high between India and China—as well as between China and Taiwan, and China and other nations in the South China Sea—experts say that in a time of heightened tensions, seabed warfare could emerge as a crucial theater.

“Chinese ships also are believed to have cut the internet cables linking Matsu and Taiwan this year, and they’ve probably done so in the past too. China pretends it was an accident,” said Mr. Newsham.

A type 094 Jin-class nuclear submarine Long March 15 of the Chinese People's Liberation Army (PLA) Navy participates in a naval parade to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the founding of China's PLA Navy in the sea near Qingdao, in eastern China's Shandong province on April 23, 2019. Mark Schiefelbein/POOL/ AFP/via Getty Images

Three Reasons

The sea bed is important for three reasons, according to experts: submarines can hide close to the seabed or in its topographical features, inter-continental digital cables and pipelines run along the seabed, and the seabed is also an untapped potential source of minerals that are fast becoming more difficult to find on land.

Satoru Nagao, a non-resident fellow at the Hudson Institute, told The Epoch Times in a telephone interview that these factors also form the context for China’s seabed warfare against Taiwan.

“China is trying to isolate Taiwan,” said Mr. Nagao. “If China deploys enough military forces on the Pacific side, the Taiwanese people will be cut off from Japan, the Philippines, and the U.S. Such an isolated situation would test the courage of the Taiwanese people, and could make them more vulnerable to accepting China’s unification offers.”

Mr. Newsham said that by using sea-bed operations, China could potentially blind its enemies by cutting their critical communications infrastructure—as well as their undersea pipelines.

“Chinese ships have been surveilling undersea cables in the Federated States of Micronesia (FSM)—with one of the cables used mostly by the U.S. Government—and Palau in recent times. Both the FSM and Palau governments complained, but couldn’t do much else,” said Newsham, adding that the Chinese have been mapping these cables for several years now—and that these “survey” ships have been operating throughout the Pacific.

Retired Vice Adm. Shekhar Sinha, the former Chief of India’s Integrated Defense Staff, said the ideological identity of the Chinese regime will also play a role in defining its seabed warfare capacities.

“A nation with disruptive technology in an underwater domain can easily harm international activities in a stealthy manner. That is why totalitarians lead in deriving benefits from resources and preventing adversaries from using the same,” Mr. Sinha told The Epoch Times.

Retired Lt. Gen. P.C. Katoch, a former director general of information systems and a special forces veteran in the Indian army, called seabed warfare “a vicious form of hybrid war which is easy for the attacker but extremely difficult to defend” in an article he wrote for the military magazine SP’s Naval Forces.

China has not only been aggressive in its claims and explorations of deep-sea resources, but also recently named 19 sub-surface features—far from the Chinese mainland in the western Indian Ocean—in Mandarin. These include six features between the coast of Oman and the African port of Djibouti, as well as four off the coast of Madagascar.

The deliberately grounded Philippine ship BRP Sierra Madre is shown serving as a Philippine outpost on the Second Thomas Shoal in the South China Sea on March 9, 2023. Jam Sta Rosa/AFP via Getty Images

Alarm Bells in South China Sea

China’s expansionist agenda in the South China Sea has seen its seabed operations increase in the disputed territory, threatening all the nations in the region, according to experts.

Highlighting Japan’s concerns about China’s deep-sea operations in the area, Mr. Nagao quoted former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, who wrote in an article published by Project Syndicate in 2012 that peace and stability are “inseparable” from freedom of navigation in the Pacific Ocean.

“The South China Sea seems set to become a ‘Lake Beijing,’ which analysts say will be to China what the Sea of Okhotsk was to Soviet Russia: a sea deep enough for the People’s Liberation Army’s navy to base their nuclear-powered attack submarines, capable of launching missiles with nuclear warheads,” wrote Mr. Abe.

Mr. Nagao said that Abe had made a very important observation, because when China began to deploy nuclear-armed submarines in the South China Sea, it created a very dangerous situation that threatened to spiral out of control.

“The U.S. president must take great care to avoid the worst-case scenario, because if there is a conflict between the United States and China in the South China Sea, and the U.S. attacks Chinese facilities there, there is a real possibility that it could escalate into a full-blown nuclear war,” said Nagao.

So while experts call for adequate counterbalancing of Chinese deep-sea operations in the South China Sea, they are already worried about what might trigger an already combustible situation to become a fully fledged war.

There have already been sporadic incidents that have caused concern, like the one that happened recently over the disputed Huangyan Island on the Scarborough Shoal—a site in the South China sea that has witnessed years of intermittent flare-ups between China and the Philippines over sovereignty and fishing-rights issues.

China had set up a buoy at the disputed island, but the Philippines cut the cable of the buoy recently in a “special operation.”

“Why this was important is because the Philippines tried to stop China’s construction. But in this case, the seabed is important. The seabed is the place to hide submarines. The seabed is the place of internet cables to connect China’s artificial islands and its sensors to detect enemy submarines,” said Mr. Nagao, adding that if China occupies the seabed, it will affect both Taiwan and the South China Sea.

“In the Indian Ocean, the situation is the same.”

Mr. Nagao said that China’s construction of artificial islands in the South China Sea is, in fact, part of its seabed warfare operations, because it needs those to deploy nuclear-armed submarines there.

“It is not deterrence if American submarines are stationed alongside Chinese submarines and are able to come by and say ‘Hello.’ If China wants to establish a deterrent, it will need to ensure that its submarines are not detectable by any foreign ships, planes, or sensors,” said Mr. Nagao.

This implies that the Chinese navy will try to prevent all foreign vessels that can detect Chinese submarines from entering its area of influence in the South China Sea.

“Indeed, that is precisely what China has been doing. China has been expanding its capabilities one by one. China’s first step is to build artificial islands that serve as bases for submarines,” said Mr. Nagao.

He described communist China’s constructions in the South China Sea as a new kind of “Great Wall,” and said China would likely also attempt to construct similar fortresses in the East China Sea and around Taiwan.

The U.S. Navy destroyer USS Chung-Hoon observes a Chinese navy ship conduct what it called an "unsafe” maneuver in the Taiwan Strait, on June 3, 2023. Andre T. Richard/U.S. Navy via AP

Countering China

Experts said that countries directly impacted by Chinese deep-sea operations need to come together to counter the communist regime’s efforts to control the seabed.

“One thing the Americans and others might usefully do regards seabed mining. Specifically, they might provide sound legal and business advice to countries who are being approached to lease their seabeds for mining—and prevent the target countries from getting fleeced (by the Chinese),” said Mr. Newsham.

The American veteran believes that there is likely also some hope that “mutually assured destruction” might discourage the Chinese from being too aggressive in their deep-sea operations.

Mr. Nagao said that to counter the Chinese deployment of submarines in the Indian ocean, Japan is cooperating with India to lay an undersea internet cable between the Indian mainland and the Indian territories of the Andaman and Nicobar islands in the Indian ocean near the Burmese coast.

“That cable means that the naval base in Andaman and Nicobar islands will get information from India. At the same time, if anti-submarine sensors are lined up along with the cable, it will detect China’s submarines,” said Mr. Nagao.

Similar seabed infrastructure is needed between the U.S. allies and the island nations in the East China Sea and the South Pacific against the Chinese, he said.

“The most serious one is the sea between Taiwan and Japan. U.S. and Japanese submarines will not allow China to cut off Taiwan from them,” said Mr. Nagao.