, China's military buildup includes new missiles and naval weapons designed to sink U.S. aircraft carriers and deny U.S. forces access to the Asia-Pacific region, a congressional commission official said yesterday.
Daniel Blumenthal, a former Pentagon defense policy-maker and now a member of the U.S.-China Economic Security Review Commission, said China's military is building up forces to “deny the United States the use of the commons — the sea, the air, cyber and space.”
“The Chinese have been quite successful … in the area of sea denial, meaning that if we sent a carrier to or outside the [Taiwan] Strait as we did in 1996, it would be a lot riskier and a lot costlier to the United States,” Mr. Blumenthal said at a conference held at the Heritage Foundation.
The comments followed disclosure last week that a Chinese submarine sailed undetected to within five miles of the aircraft carrier USS Kitty Hawk near Okinawa, Japan, and surfaced close enough to fire wake-homing torpedos or anti-ship cruise missiles, according to U.S. defense officials.
The Navy said in response to the surprise encounter that it is reviewing anti-submarine warfare defenses for the carrier battle group. The carrier was engaged in exercises when the Song-class submarine surfaced Oct. 26.
China's government denied that the submarine encounter took place, but Adm. Gary Roughead, commander of the Navy's Pacific Fleet, said Friday in Beijing that Chinese military leaders he met told him the submarine was in international waters when it was near the carrier.
