McDevitt then explores the PLA Navy’s role in the South China Sea and the Indian Ocean. The more than 10 years of anti-piracy patrols in the far reaches of the Indian Ocean has acted as a learning curve accelerator to “blue water” status. McDevitt dubs this China’s “sea lane anxiety” and traces how this has required the PLA Navy to evolve from a “near seas”-focused navy to one that has global reach a “blue water navy.” He details how quickly this transformation has taken place, thanks to a patient step-by-step approach and abundant funding. In turn this has created concerns within the senior levels of China’s military about the vulnerability of its overseas interests and maritime life-lines. China’s reliance on foreign trade and overseas interests such as China’s Belt and Road strategy. Jones reveals the three great geopolitical struggles of our time-for military power, for economic dominance, and over our changing climate-are playing out atop, within, and below the world’s oceans.īeginning with an exploration of why China is seeking to become such a major maritime power, author Michael McDevitt first explores the strategic rationale behind Xi’s two objectives. Along the way, the book illustrates how global commerce works, that we are amidst a global naval arms race, and why the oceans are so crucial to America’s standing going forward. Bruce Jones conducts us on a voyage through the great modern ports and naval bases-from the vast container ports of Hong Kong and Shanghai to the vital naval base of the American Seventh Fleet in Hawaii to the sophisticated security arrangements in the Port of New York. All that has changed, as nine-tenths of global commerce and the bulk of energy trade is today linked to sea-based flows.
But in the nuclear age, air power and missile systems dominated our worries about security, and for the United States, the economy was largely driven by domestic production, with trucking and railways that crisscrossed the continent serving as the primary modes of commercial transit. For centuries, oceans were the chessboard on which empires battled for supremacy.
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