Sea Control - Sea Control 341 - A Chinese-Australian Lasing Incident with Dr. Euan Graham

Episode Date: May 1, 2022

Links1. "Laser incident near Australia paints China in a bad light," by Dr. Euan Graham, IISS, February 25, 2022.2. "US Department of Defense: Guam Laser Incident 'Unprofessional,' Violates 2014 Code," by Ankit Panda, The Diplomat, March 9, 2020.3. "US Navy: Chinese Destroyer Targeted P-8A Aircraft With Laser," by Franz-Stefan Gady, The Diplomat, February 29, 2020. 

Hey folks, it's Jared. This week I'm joined by Dr. Ewan Graham, and we'll be discussing an incident where the Chinese Navy lays an Australian Maritime Patrol aircraft. This episode was edited and produced by David Sahida. We are still looking for additional audio editors, and we're happy to provide you some basic training materials and instruction in a low-stress environment. So if you're interested in finding a way to contribute to SimSec and add to your resume and personal skill set, send us an email to seacontrol at simsec.org. 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 Apollo of Iron Brew Bottles wherever you download your podcasts. And on that note, I'll turn it over to Kimber's men. You're listening to Sea Control, hosted by the Center for International and Maritime Security.

Aloha, shipmates, and welcome back aboard Sea Control. My guest today is Dr. Ewan Graham, and we'll be discussing a post he wrote for the International Institute for Strategic Studies on February 25th, entitled, Laser Incident Near Australia Paints China in a Bad Light. So, Ewan, welcome. Thank you for joining us. Could you tell the listeners a little bit more about your background, please? Sure.

It's a pleasure to be with you, Jared. I'm a senior fellow at the International Institute for Strategic Studies here in Singapore. I cover Southeast Asia and Northeast Asia on a broad geopolitical waterfront. I'm British, but I've spent a lot of time in Australia and have been tracking the Australia-China relationship in close detail. Well, thank you. And as a reminder to the listeners, all opinions are our own and not reflective of any institution with which we might be otherwise associated. So the first question is, what is lazing? What does that mean? well a laser is obviously a concentrated beam of light and to my understanding lasing really can talk generally about the use of of a laser to illuminate any object in a military sense

it's most usually associated with target acquisition devices so that's something a good deal more involved. It carries a much more dangerous context for obvious reasons, but civilian pilots have also reported the use of handheld lasers. That's also happened in the South China Sea, where small fishing vessels have used handheld laser devices to point at ships and helicopters. I was involved in one such incident on board an Australian warship a couple of years ago, but this latest incident is a very different kind of lasing because there's no ambiguity about the fact that it occurred from a Chinese warship and that puts it into a very different category. Yeah, so when I'm thinking about lasers, I'm typically thinking about one

of two things one is that what you described for sort of the target acquisition piece which those are normally high powered and can actually cause damage to your eyes uh and then the other one that i always think of is a laser dazzler and it sounds like what you may have experienced was a dazzler is that right yes i don't know the details to that degree but it was from small fishing vessels So I think that was, you know, it was a handheld device, not to any kind of military spec. But according to the statement that was released by the Australian DOD, which was in considerable detail, they said that this occurred at a distance of nearly eight kilometers to an Australian P-8 surveillance aircraft. So that obviously is a high powered laser we're talking about.

OK. And then what happened in the incident that you wrote about? well it happened in the arafura sea quite close to australia so within its exclusive economic zone the arafura sea it separates australia from the the western half of the island of new guinea it adjoins to the torres street straight which opens into the the coral sea so that puts it on the map in terms of the incident itself the australians say that the p8 aircraft was on a routine surveillance flight, and that it encountered two Chinese surface vessels that were transiting east towards the Torres Strait through the Arafura Sea. One of those ships, most likely the destroyer, the other one illuminated the P-8 at a distance of maybe

eight kilometers with an onboard laser acquisition device. And that occurred local time at 1.35 p.m so it was some we're talking about uh daylight obviously you mentioned this happened the hour for us is it normal for uh chinese naval forces to be operating there because that seems it's not terribly far away from uh their home waters but it is kind of an odd spot between those between papua new guinea and the australian continent well it's not the first time for Chinese warships to operate close to Australia. For several years, when relations were better, Chinese warships were regularly doing port calls to Sydney and Perth. But it is a long way from China and a long way even from the South China Sea. You have to get through the whole of

the Indonesian archipelago to get to the Arafura Sea. And it points to the increased capability of the PLAN that they are operating more regularly further afield. And we also know that the two ships in question then went on to the Coral Sea, and that puts them in the South Pacific. So that's another benchmark in force projection for the PLAN, because at the same time,

There was also a similar group in the island of Tonga responding to a disaster relief situation there. We do see the Chinese Navy operating generally further afield into the Indian Ocean and into the beyond the first island chain and into the second island chain. this would take them into the second island chain but coming so close to the Australian landmass is obviously that's what I think partly got the attention of this incident there was a similar incident that we've heard about

occurred 330 miles west of Guam two years ago, we can talk a little bit more about that later You mentioned this was the Arafura Sea is near to the Torres Strait. What's the importance of the Torres Strait as far as economic or logistical artery? It's not a very well used commercial sea lane, but it is a straight used for international navigation. It's the only way to get between the Pacific and the Indian ocean in that part of the world. So Australia is obviously a continental landmass. Otherwise,

you'd have to go all the way around Australia and do it south about. So that means it's of importance in navigational terms. It's also a difficult waterway to transit. I understand the currents are difficult. It's very shallow. And the Australians actually insist on a compulsory pilotage scheme for merchant vessels that pass through there. What's the potential impact of lazing an aircraft in flight? Well, it's obviously a highly dangerous and unprofessional practice. It endangers the safety of the crew on board. Even if it's occurring in daylight and it's not visible to the naked eye, it can still cause retinal damage, potentially.

As I understand it, there are protection measures available to the crews of the P-8s, but in simple common sense terms, it doesn't make sense to flash a laser at a moving aircraft for obvious reasons. and civilian pilots have had near disastrous situations with that in the past. But on top of that, the implications between a military aircraft and a naval warship are significantly more grave because it gets back to the role of the lazing used in target acquisition. So if this is linked, for example, to the gun on board the Chinese vessel, then that could be interpreted as a precursor to engagement of that weapons system. That obviously is not professional, and that's what's prompted such a strong response from the Australian government, which said that it actually launched a diplomatic protest through formal channels to the Chinese foreign ministry and also to the Chinese defense ministry. You mentioned the Australian aircraft dropped sonobuoys after it was lazed. What could that indicate? The principal job of the P-8 is to hunt submarines.

It also acts as a surveillance aircraft for anything in airspace and on the surface. But the use of solar buoys is a very strong indicator that the crew were prosecuting a submerged target. And that would be most likely to be a suspected submarine. It could be something else, but it would be something pretty high value in order to use sonar buoys, I would guess. Now, I'm second guessing this as a civilian. I don't know what the SOP is for use of sonar buoys. But given that this was occurring in very close proximity to Chinese surface vessels, the implication is that there may have been a suspected submarine out ahead. What does this interaction tell us about the state of Chinese-Australian interactions at sea? I think it tells us more broadly that it's an unwelcome development because there have been

quite strong bilateral tensions between Australia and China in the past couple of years. There's been a diplomatic freeze on high-level contacts imposed by the Chinese side. And last year, there was an economic punishment campaign imposed by China, some trade tariffs and other non-formal measures against Australian exports to China. So the political relationship is in a bad spot. The military-to-military relationship has not been particularly tense, as far as I'm aware.

So this is a new sort of ratcheting up to the military level. And the fact that it occurred very close to Australian territory will obviously have got attention at a much higher level in Australia than might otherwise have been the case. More broadly, this is where the parallel to the previous incident becomes interesting. We do know that two years ago, the US had a P-8 flying west of Guam, a very similar incident involving a Chinese destroyer. there was a formal protest that was made by the american government and for the same reason that this was unsafe unprofessional and it obviously sets a very bad precedent and it's risky not just for the u.s crews but obviously for the the chinese vessel too because if this is going to continue then rules of engagement may need to be adapted to send a clearer warning that this is not

acceptable behavior because in the worst case this could obviously escalate to something worse have you seen anything similar between uh the australian surface ships and chinese surface ships or is this pretty much confined to the one p8 incident this is the only incident i'm aware of that involved an onboard system for a chinese surface vessel a couple of years ago i was lucky enough to be embedded with an Australian amphibious ship in the South China Sea. And it was reported then that it was much lower grade harassment using sort of dazzling handheld lasers, which was not attributable to any kind of warship. It may have been connected to the so-called maritime militia in the South China Sea who

are known to use fishing vessels, but that's still speculative. But it's a rare enough incident that I think it still deserves attention. It's come in the context of events in Ukraine, which have tended to take attention away. So I'm grateful for you to picking it up and running the podcast, because I think it is important to remember that there are things going on in this part of the world. But I think the sort of broader takeaway is that the Chinese Navy is operating much closer to Australia. Similar incidents are quite likely to happen in future. And there is, of course, this big question about what the subtext to this was, literally the submerged subtext to this. If there was a submarine also involved, then that raises up the ante considerably, because if submarines are going to be operating in Australian waters, then that is going to be a tense situation in the future.

Not one that leads to conflict, necessarily. I mean, all through the Cold War, this happened. There are ways of handling it professionally between navies. But this needs high level attention, in my view, on the Chinese side, so that if this happens in future, There isn't a recourse to unsafe and unprofessional conduct, which could, in the worst case scenario, lead to an exchange between the two armed forces, which would take relations into a much deeper spiral. I think there's no conceivable excuse for this kind of behavior, in my view. It's obviously occurred deliberately. The Chinese also put out their own statement saying that this, they said that their vessels maintained normative, safe and acceptable behavior throughout.

The Australian response was basically to sort of flat out deny that. They provided a lot more detail, which was the basis for me being able to write in length on this incident. well as long as i've got you i'm going to ask you about the the subtext and is that do you think this is part of a broader messaging campaign that we'll see more of this this is always the difficulty in in such incidents you don't know down to what level that decision happened whether it was done on the initiative of the commanding officer of the of the chinese ship that's why the guam incident is a useful precedent to have because it was very similar. Now, this is just my conjecture. It could be that if the surface vessel was escorting

a submarine, then the SOP might be, if they feel that that submarine is about to be prosecuted by a P-8, then they are given the discretion to use whatever means to distract it short of actually engaging it. And a laser device is one obvious way to do that. It seems more than a coincidence that the same thing happened in very similar circumstances, but at an interval of two years. As I understand it, the interactions in the South China Sea and closer in between the US Navy and the Chinese Navy have been on a fairly even keel since the Dekatur incident. But obviously, whether it's so-called loose cannon, a breakdown of command and control at lower level, or if it is actually officially condoned in the chain of command, both outcomes are unacceptable and really need to be addressed. And what it points to is the importance of having regular high level mill to mill contact between China and the countries that it's interacting with, both U.S. allies in the United States itself.

Unfortunately, that's not happening at the moment. And in the absence of that communication, these incidents are going to be much more dangerous. well ewan thank you so much for joining us today uh where can we find you online and what other projects are you working on well thanks jared as i said i'm i'm at the iiss so um you can just find me there under the staff page i'm finalizing a book on australia china relations in which this incident will be briefly mentioned and i hope that will be published in a few months time so look out for that. Otherwise, I'll regularly publish blogs and podcasts. I would encourage you also to look at those of my colleagues at the IISS as we cover other important strategic issues, including the Russia-Ukraine conflict. Well, thanks once again for joining us.

To the listeners, thank you for tuning in. We'll see you next time. It's been a pleasure. Thank you. There I met with Greasy Annie Put it on the shimbo now So help me, Boban, put it in the alley Way, hey, put it in the alley Help me, Boban, put it in the alley Put it on the shimbo now

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