Sea Control - Sea Control 281 - Here There Be Dragons with Tim Choi and Adam Lajeunesse

Episode Date: October 3, 2021

Links1. "Here there be dragons? Chinese submarine options in the Arctic," by Adam Lajeunesse and Tim Choi, Journal of Strategic Studies, June 23, 2021.

Hey folks, Jared here. Our old friend Tim Choi, the pride of Calgary, returns today alongside his co-author Adam Lajeunesse. They'll be discussing their article, Here There Be Dragons? Chinese Submarine Operations in the Arctic. And if you're wondering, yes, there is a Ron Burgundy question mark in the middle there. Go ahead and read the article and you'll understand why. This episode was edited and produced by our own Ed Salo. We just launched the call for submissions for the SimSec Forum for authors and readers over at the main website. If there was a particular piece that you enjoyed this year, nominate it. If it gets enough votes, you can hear the author present his or her work.

We've also officially put out our call for articles for the end-of-year fiction contest. Go over to SimSec.org for full details. Finally, I want to take the opportunity to recommend our partners in the SimSec Podcast Network, the Bilge Pumps. You can find Alex, Jamie, Drack, and a pile of Iron Brew bottles wherever you download your podcasts. On that note, I'll turn it over to Kimber's men. You're listening to Sea Control, hosted by the Center for International Maritime Security Aloha shimates and welcome back aboard Sea Control Today I'm joined by our old friend Tim Choi and Adam Lajeunesse

And we'll be discussing their recent article, Here There Be Dragons, Chinese Submarine Options in the Arctic Tim, you're familiar to most of our listeners, but would you mind introducing yourself again? Hey, Jared. Great to be on here again. This is Tim Choi. I'm a PhD candidate in the final months of my dissertation at the University of Calgary Center for Military Security and Strategic Studies, and my dissertation looks at the impact of the exclusive economic zone on the force structures and operations of three northern navies, Canada, Norway, and Denmark. Thanks, and Adam, would you please share a bit about your background for the audience? Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for having me on, Jared. Adam Lajeunesse, I'm the Irving Shipbuilding Chair in Canadian Arctic Marine Security at the Brian Mulroney Institute of Government at St. Francis Xavier University out in Nova Scotia, Canada.

Thank you. And as a reminder, all views express our own and not reflective of any institutions with which we might be otherwise associated. So, Adam, I'm going to start with you. What inspired this particular article? well over the last few years we've been seeing a really interesting shift in american thinking and policy towards the arctic i think the u.s was a few years behind the nordics and the canadians and just maybe two three years ago they seemed to wake up to the strategic possibilities and potential dangers lurking in the circumpolar north so you saw almost a zero to 60 acceleration and U.S. interest, where all of a sudden, from almost a standing start, the Army, the Navy, the Air Force, the Coast Guard, DOD, all putting out these Arctic security policies, almost on top of one another. Secretary Pompeo, or former Secretary Pompeo, the U.S. Navy, head of the U.S.

Navy, all of these high-ranking individuals start talking not just about Arctic security, but also the very real possibility in their minds that the Chinese are going to start extending their forces into the North, start projecting maritime power, one sort or another, into the Arctic. And one of the ways they might do that, that we see DOD talking about starting around 2019 is Chinese submarine operations in the Arctic. Following that, you start to see academics talking about the potential strategic realities. So what Tim and I did with this article, we wanted to drill a little bit deeper beyond the strategic possibility to look at the operational realities. How realistic is this really? How serious should we be taking a lot of the noise and the chatter

that's out there. Tim, you started the paper with a brief description of the new U.S. Navy Arctic strategy, pointing out the strategy was, and I quote, a significant break from the Navy's previous Arctic policies framed on cooperation and expectations of low tensions, end quote. What do you believe is driving that change? Right. So the new U.S. Navy Arctic strategy is quite different in that it's almost a copy and paste, or at least it borrows a lens from existing global U.S. Navy attitude towards what the Navy does and that sea control and power projection. And they more or less overlaid that over the Arctic as a whole. And in that sense, you know, it's quite a major change because up until then, there wasn't really that much of a

concern with conducting those traditional naval military missions up in the Arctic space. And I think a lot of this was driven by China's growing Arctic interests, ambitions and capabilities that were laid out as well in their 2018 Arctic White Paper. China's now an observer in the Arctic Council. It has its state-owned enterprises and banks have infested billions into Arctic resource projects, has sent naval task groups to Northern Europe,

and is on track to process one of the world's most capable polar icebreaking fleets with two large icebreakers in service right now and a third possibly nuclear-powered one already designed and being built. And so it's this latter element in particular, the presence of heavy polar icebreakers that has caused significant American concerns due to America's own relative lack of investment in the same capability until incredibly recently.

And so all of this is combined with China's willingness to push the edges of and violate international norms, especially in the disputed waters of the East and South China Seas. And there is the fear that China's actions within that first island chain may be echoed or mirrored in future activities in the Arctic, despite the vast distances involving the incredibly different geographies concerned. And as well, of course, there is the Trump administration itself, quite a size from the Navy, which was still, of course, in power at that time of the, you know, 2020, in the early 2021, when the U.S. Navy Arctic strategy came out. And of course, Trump was most famously known for his interest in trying to buy Greenland in 2019, which resulted

quite a kerfuffle between them and the Danes and the Greenlanders in between. So the U.S. Navy strategy, it reflects both a certain concern with Chinese developments and also that domestic political leadership's own concerns with the issues. Adam, what's the strategic case for Chinese involvement in the Arctic? Well, I think as Tim and I made clear in our piece, We don't really think there is an obvious strategic case. But one of the reasons we wrote this piece was actually as a response to other academics who were making a theoretical strategic case. So I'm happy to lay that out. So the fears, the possibilities that have been raised by other experts and even implicitly by DOD.

Well, there's several. The first is that the possibility that the Chinese may use the Arctic Basin as a launch point for ballistic missiles. So ballistic missile firing submarines could take up station somewhere in the Arctic to bring Europe and North America into easy range and to hide those submarines. It's much harder to find a ballistic missile sub under the ice than in the open waters of the Pacific. Now, there's also the real possibility, some say, that Chinese cruise missile firing subs could use the Arctic as a firing station to take out strategic assets like America's ballistic missile defense facilities in Alaska. then obviously if you're going to see more and more shipping in the north if the polar basin either the northwest passage or the transpolar route becomes a viable shipping route then many experts say look this is going to be a place of seed control where it is of value to china as

a maritime state to have a defensive capability to be able to project power to be able to defend its shipping going through the north or to interdict enemy shipping moving through the north. So broadly speaking, those are the strategic possibilities that government and academic experts have been sort of raising and putting out there. It's a possibility that China may extend its nuclear deterrence into the north, that they may look to, if not necessarily control the Arctic Ocean, then at least try and deny access to allied sea lift or commercial traffic. So those are all of the concerns. Those are the dangers that have been highlighted as potential future prospects for Chinese activity in the north.

Tim, the Chinese submarine fleet is largely conventionally powered, and the conventionally powered submarines don't really have the range or the endurance necessary to operate under the ice for long periods of time. So what is China's SSN, SSBN, that's your nuclear-powered fleet like, and is it suitable for Arctic operations? That's right. So although there has been much ado about the growth of the Chinese submarine fleet, the vast majority of that comes from the conventionally powered fleet, right? Numbering in somewhere around the 60s by now for those SSKs. But in contrast to that, the nuclear-powered fleet that's required to reliably operate under sea ice numbers only around six or seven or so for the attack subs and four to six for the ballistic

missile subs. So in contrast to the rapid growth of the service fleet with its multiple production lines and serial production lines, the nuclear power submarine force has remained essentially static in terms of overall numbers, experiencing only a relatively slow modernization process for the SSNs. And so it seems that unlike the service fleet, the plan is still waiting for that perfect design to mature before going all in into serial production of a SSN. Recently, we've seen satellite imagery of the massive expansion of their nuclear sub-production facilities, so it seems that a mature design may well be just around the corner, and they have it on the books. Now, as for the SSBNs, there's certainly a dramatic increase from the single ancient Xia class to a foursome now

four Jin class SSBNs, with apparently more on the way or already in service, where, you know, They're always shuffling them around, so we're not quite sure how many there actually are. In terms of their Arctic suitability, however, neither are clearly built for operations in ice. Both the SSNs and SSBNs to date continue to have, for example, sail-mounted diving planes, which limit operations in ice compared to the retractable bioplanes that we've seen American subs adopt ever since the 688 improved class submarines. But more importantly than any particular piece of ice-specific technologies is fleet numbers. Right now, the limited halls available makes the rotating presence outside of the first island chain logistically very challenging. The six or so SSNs really challenges the classic three-to-one rule for deployability, where

as we know, you need at least one in maintenance and one in training or transit just to enable one constantly deployed in the area of interest. Obviously, once serial production gets underway, these numbers will expand to a degree that's necessary to support a constant long-distance deployment. But it remains uncertain when that would be or what the actual long-term plans are for the plant's submarine force. So there's still a, you know, at the very foundation of this robust Arctic submarine presence, you actually need the numbers first to make that happen. And we don't see those numbers right now. And we're not quite sure when that will expand to numbers necessary. Tim, you mentioned the potential development of a mature SSN design. What have you been able to piece together about the Type 95, the next iteration of Chinese SSN?

So, of course, it's still quite hush-hush, so one is forced to resort to some leaks and rumors from the Chinese Internet. Individual bits of technology include a shaftless rim-driven propeller, a single rather than double-haul to increase internal volume, and integrated electric propulsion, which will give it much greater silencing. The U.S. intelligence community also labeled it as an SSGN, suggesting expectations of a robust anti-ship and or land attack cruise missile capability. And all of this is to say that there are expectations that the new Type 9-5s will have a greater internal capacity and stealthiness to undertake power projection and sea control operations farther afield. Right now, we're still, of course, waiting for a lot more of this information to come out. So, you know, going to have to keep it to a fairly basic whole suppositions right there. Thanks. Now, we talked about SSBNs operating the Arctic.

What are the difficulties of operating in the Arctic, first accessing it and then operating there for those submarines? Because it wasn't clear to me until I read your paper just how difficult operations in the Arctic are, both from a navigational and a maneuver perspective. That's right. And a big part of this is actually an issue of size. You know, most of us think of most of the things of submarines as, oh, you know, we can just build them bigger and bigger and with no real penalties anywhere. You see this with the Block 5 Virginia classes, which is, you know, longer and longer. And God knows by, you know, Block 10, they're going to be multiple city blocks long. But size, right. So, you know, when we think of submarine operations, they're operations rather than design. There's a tendency to think of all the water below the surface as your plane room, right, with no real bottom.

And depth is often discussed in terms of how much can a submarine dive before it gets crushed, rather than what this ocean floor topography restricts the submarine's depth to. And for the Arctic, there is a further constraint of an actual hard ceiling that's above the submarine in addition to that seafloor. and sea ice restricts where a submarine can surface to receive or send communications, to launch missiles, to collect intelligence, and reaching open air in case of an underwater emergency. And so for Chinese SSBNs in particular, attempting to use the Arctic as a patrol area is made even more challenging due to the need to transit the Bering Strait. Not only is it incredibly shallow, it's also in the marginal ice zone where sea ice meets open water. In such

conditions, especially in Cran, in between the Russian and American landmasses, ice continuously breaks and reforms into incredibly hard ridges and pillars that extend dozens of feet into the water. For a large submarine like an SSBN and current SSNs, which are pretty large as they are, there's often insufficient clearance between the bottom of these so-called ice jungles and the seabed during the winter months. The only option is to wind one's way very slowly and very carefully between the ice ridges plunging down from the surface. Transiting safely through this mass of dangerous ice means pinging away with one's active navigational sonar,

which can then be picked up with relative ease in the narrow confines of the Bering Strait, either by seabed sensors or other submarines nearby. Of course, while the ice will help scatter the exact direction of the sonar signals to prevent an effective firing solution, it will still suffice to cue nearby ASW assets waiting on either end of the strait.

And so it's not really an ideal situation SSBN to be in, right? And definitely not for an SSBN carrying out this secure second strike mission. So there's a massive, you know, environmental geographic, the ice deterrent to operations of an Arctic submarine, especially for Chinese, which can only access the region through the Bering Strait. So has anyone attempted submarine rescue in the Arctic? And does that capability exist where the Chinese or any other nation to run into a problem up there? So I don't think there has been, as far as Arctic waters covered in substantial ice is concerned. Komsomolets sinking in 1989 saw most of the crew escaping on a surface in open water,

though many succumbed to the open weather and the harsh conditions in the open air. There was, of course, the Kursk tragedy as well, which was also in Arctic waters. But again, that was in the summer months where there was open seas without any ice involved. And so for the Russians, their model has been to equip their submarines with massive multi-person escape chambers that are designed to detach and rise to the surface, protecting the crew from the frigid Arctic weather while awaiting rescue. This didn't work very well in the Komsomolets incident, though, with some significant issues in detaching the thing. And by the time it came up, a significant number of the crew on board had died. But nonetheless, that is one thing that we might consider looking for,

should the Chinese consider a serious Arctic submarine capability is that kind of large escape capsule to help their crews survive in frigid weather. But otherwise, I think submarine rescue capability is pretty much limited to what would be available in warmer oceans. In theory, a large icebreaker can lower your typical rescue sub into the sea through the broken ice, but the slow speeds required when breaking through heavy ice to reach the location of the incident means that any response would be even slower than when you're doing that in the southern latitudes. And so really is incredibly risky prospect in case of emergency for any submarine in the Arctic doing ice covered waters. Adam, we're going to shift gears a little bit and go from the

operational back to the strategic level. You discussed significant Chinese investment in maritime infrastructure along the northern sea route. What's the benefit to China of ensuring that route becomes vital? Well, there has been that significant investment. That's coming from the Belt and Road Initiative funds, that's coming from Chinese banks, and that's coming from state owned enterprises. So from multiple vectors, that money is funneling into Russian oil and gas facilities, it's going into Arctic shipping, it's going into shipping infrastructure. Now, that is far more economically focused than strategically. Russia has something China needs, and of course, China has something that Russia needs. After the invasion of the Ukraine, Western sanctions forced Russia to turn to China for this investment. Russia cannot finance northern development by itself. Russia's desired partners are actually

Western companies, but those are now off limits. And so they've turned to the Chinese. And so what China has actually gotten is a pretty good deal on a lot of these northern resources. They've been able to buy in at some very good prices. And Russia finds itself selling off a great deal of its sort of crown jewels, northern hydrocarbon resources, to Chinese state-owned enterprises. So in the future, the situation is going to look a little bit like this. Russia will, of course, maintain strategic control over its own Arctic waters. But the Chinese are going to own a good chunk of the new Arctic megaprojects. Chinese ships are maybe going to carry a lot of that liquid natural gas and oil to and fro. And Chinese banks and infrastructure funds are going to own

good chunks of the offshore loading facilities, ports, and a lot of the infrastructure along the northern sea route. And so this partnership is not one between friends. It is a transactional relationship with both parties having something that the other needs. Now, on the one hand, And this could encourage greater Russian-Chinese strategic cooperation in the North, as the two are forced to work together. Or, on the other hand, there is always that possibility that this increasing Chinese ownership of Russian strategic assets that they consider to be strategic, this will create a certain degree of discomfort amongst the Russian political and military castes. cast. I don't think many in Russia are really comfortable with China operating so heavily in the North, owning so much of the Russian North. And I think it's increasingly unlikely that the

Russians are going to encourage a Chinese military presence to go along with that growing economic presence. So instead of the foundations of a new alliance, what we might also be seeing is this increasing level of friction that's going to drag on and hinder a growing Russian-Chinese partnership. Now, you had mentioned in the article, one of the reasons for China's interest in the Arctic is the possibility of expanding their fishing operations. Is that a viable operation in the Arctic, given the relatively high capacity and capability of the coast guards who patrol those waters, be they the American Coast Guard, the Russian Coast Guard, the Danes, the Norwegians, in comparison to the South China Sea? Yes, I think it certainly is. And as we said,

looking forward, if you're looking at the potential future security threats emerging in the Arctic, I wouldn't point to high-end military capabilities like Chinese submarines moving north. I would point to the possibility of gray zone hybrid threats that we are now seeing in the South China Sea, off South America, Africa, the Galapagos, all those areas where semi-state, quote unquote, civilian Chinese fishing fleets and maritime militia are now operating sort of at the very best on the cusp of international law. In the Arctic right now, that's not a near-term possibility. The Chinese have just signed on to an Arctic fishing moratorium, but it's very clear that China's distant water fishing fleet is looking for better fishing grounds, and we see them expanding all over the world today. In the future, one of the great security threats that the North might face is the steady migration of fish to polar waters. We're already seeing Pacific salmon popping up in the middle of the Northwest Passage. The waters are warming and the fish are moving north and with them will go fishing fleets. And so the real challenge for the North American partners becomes, what do we do when we see the kinds of fishing fleets popping up around the Galapagos and South China Sea? What do we do when we see them popping up on our continental shelf, maybe just on the border of our exclusive economic zone in the Arctic?

And we don't have a significant Coast Guard capability up there right now. Canada has several icebreakers, but those are always busy. They have other jobs. We are building Arctic offshore patrol ships, which will be very useful in that respect. The United States only has maybe one and a half icebreakers operational at any given moment. So over the next few years, we are really going to need to expand our constabulary capabilities. And I think if we're looking at investing resources in the North, I wouldn't talk about

submarines and destroyers. I would talk about constabulary capabilities, Coast Guard assets that are built and designed to interdict and meet that kind of gray zone hybrid threat that we are always seeing at the tip of the Chinese sphere in the South China Sea, off the Philippines, Japan, and even off distant water fishing grounds like South America. Tim, how realistic is using the Arctic as an avenue for military sea lift? That was another topic you mentioned. Yeah, so I'm going to talk about this strict mostly from the Western American Canadian perspective here. And the short answer is the prospects are not great, especially along the North American Arctic sea routes. Up there, we get the worst of the sea ice due to the Beaufort Shire and transpolar drift current, which essentially takes loose ice from the Russian side

and jams them all into all the little nukes and crannies of the Northwest Passages. And so we get more ice, thicker ice, harder ice, and for much longer periods of the year. And that's part of the reason why it's so much easier for the Russians to be active along their Arctic coast than it is for us. Having a robust icebreaker escort capacity,

such as what you guys and we will be building, hopefully sooner rather than later, can certainly help bring that sea lift through to pave the way for them, but the ships that are actually carrying the cargo will still need to be ice strengthened to some extent, because very rarely do you have pure, you know, non-ice strengthened vessels sailing behind an icebreaker, because those little chunks of ice will still do a lot of damage to you, even with the path in front of you is technically open. And so the nature of the polar currents also means that even when summer reduces sea ice there's a lot of heavy ice heavy thick chunks that'll get in your way

and that too requires an ice strengthen haul to proceed safely through the area even in summer and as you know american sea lift is sorry enough as it is without needing to make an ice strengthen capacity and of course even if they do make it through the narrow canadian arctic passages they still have to come out through the bering strait which makes for a nice little choke point for Chinese land-based or air-based or ship-based missiles, and submarines, of course, if there's still a factor at that stage of the conflict. And so in sum, while the Arctic sea routes are certainly seductive as a backup to the Panama Canal or Cape Horn, they won't really be a reliable passage until we get to the point where the planet is in such a disastrous environmental state that

we'll probably have bigger things to worry about than sea lift reinforcements from the east to the West Coast. Adam, the last couple of questions will come to you. I realize I should ask this one before when you were talking about China-Russia relations, but what impact would a Chinese Arctic deployment have on Chinese-Russian relations? I think that depends on the nature of that deployment. Over the last few years, we've actually been seeing Chinese forces taking part in Russian Arctic exercises in the Eastern Arctic, so mostly Chinese naval vessels. That, however, is probably better described as messaging to the West and to one another than an actual attempt to develop Arctic operational capability amongst the Chinese.

So participating with the Russians in those Arctic exercises, you're basically saying that we are working together. The Chinese and the Russians both have other options than cooperating with Western powers. And it's a message that they're increasingly becoming partners. Now, that being said, those operations are Russian. They're taking place on Russian conditions in areas defined by the Russian government. I think it becomes a very different scenario if the Chinese start to unilaterally project power into the North. The Russians recognize, as well as we do, that for Russia, the North is of existential importance to Moscow. For North America, the North is not. North America does not have any vital industries

in the north, the Northwest Passage, the waters off of northern Alaska. These are not vital sea routes, commercial or military sea routes for North American powers. And so for Russia, which does have tens of billions of dollars worth of industry in the north, where so much of their hard currency is earned by northern oil and gas exports, I think it would be very, very unnerving to see a unilateral Chinese deployment into the polar basin. You know, that projection of Chinese power into an area which the Russian policy has said over and over again is of strategic value, you know, very important, national.

It's an area of existential importance to the Russians. So I think more than anything, that kind of Chinese deployment would have significant political and diplomatic ramifications and may in fact alter Russia's perception of China as a potential partner. Your section on the Western response was heavily based on the most recent U.S. Arctic strategy and then commentary from Trump-era officials. Do you have any indication of what a Western response led by the Biden administration would look like? Well, I don't think we know yet what a Western response would have looked like under the Trump administration either. We're still figuring that out. The United States is still

figuring out exactly what the threats are and what a viable response would be. You know, what we don't want to do is over-invest in high-level Arctic capabilities. What we don't want to do is see a Chinese threat, and then stick $50 billion worth of hardware into the Arctic Ocean, which could have better value deployed elsewhere. In fact, you know, Whitney Lachenbauer and Ryan Dean made a good point in a piece, I think last year, where they're saying, you know, this is a potential, a distraction zone for the Chinese. And there's a real threat that a Chinese submarine pokes its head up at the North Pole, the United States overreacts, stuffs a bunch of destroyers and SSNs into the polar basin, invests all of this money developing Arctic defensive

capability in order to defend a region which is not, as I've said, of strategic value, of primary strategic value to the United States. And with that one little action, the Chinese have diverted all of these resources which could have been better spent in the western pacific in the south china sea in defense of japan and american western allies in the pacific so i think the greatest danger is not necessarily a chinese presence in the north but rather the fear of a chinese presence which could lead to us over investing wasting some very scarce resources and as tim and i said in this piece, you know, our response, our short little recommendation for how we respond to Chinese presence is really emphasize, lean on that whole of government Western response, emphasize

constabulary capability, Coast Guard, law enforcement. Don't overinvest in these high level, high end naval assets. Focus on the real Chinese threat, which is probably going to be this gray zone hybrid threat, don't get thrown off your game by the distant and probably unlikely reality of a sustained operational Chinese submarine capability in the North. Thank you. That is all the time that we have for today. I want to thank my guests, Adam Lajeunesse and Tim Choi. Adam, where can we find you online and what are you working on next? Well, you can find most of what I've done at my website, it's adamlajeunesse.com. I can get copies of everything I've written, except for a few of the things that are paywalled copyright.

Working on a lot of stuff these days having to do with Canadian Arctic maritime security, looking at the application, the use of the new Arctic offshore patrol ships, looking at the possibility of northern shipping and the nexus of all of these different safety and security elements into Canada-U.S. relations and Arctic sovereignty. Thanks, Tim. Where can we find you and what's your next project? mostly you can find me on twitter at tim.choy you have spelled the dot out my next project is a chapter on canada as a medium naval power for a volume co-edited by admiral james goldrick from australia which honors the late admiral richard hill who pioneered the concept of maritime strategy

for medium powers in the meanwhile i had to get myself in trouble writing op-eds for canadian newspapers on the necessity of domestic Canadian shipbuilding to sort of echo or rather leverage some of the ongoing discussions in the United States on a similar thing, calling for an expanding, at least American shipping capacity, maybe try to integrate it as a North American capacity. Thanks. And hopefully we're going to be addressing you as Dr. Tim Choi the next time I have you on.

Is that an accurate statement? Fingers crossed, yes. Okay. I got all my fingers crossed for you, man. We're all rooting for you here at the Sea Control Team and in the audience as well. But thank you both for joining us. To the listeners, thanks for tuning in. We'll see you next time.

Thank you. We'll be right back.