Monday, July 19, 2004

Summer Pulse 04 Misinformation A couple of weeks ago I posted about Summer Pulse 04, the exercise that has put seven aircraft carriers to sea at one time. An article in the Straits Times reported Chinese sources as saying that the exercise is designed to put seven carriers within striking range of China. This "news" has bounced around different forums of the internet (including that of the Kerry campaign). Most recently it was in a column published in the Los Angeles Times. Now, I know that people in the know aren't exactly relying on the Los Angeles Times for their military news (think of their (non) coverage of Paul Bremer's departure speech), but still , I cannot let this slip by. Quietly and with minimal coverage in the U.S. press, the Navy announced that from mid-July through August it would hold exercises dubbed Operation Summer Pulse '04 in waters off the China coast near Taiwan. Quietly, by being on the front cover of the Navy Times, minimum coverage being articles in every newspaper in Navy towns (Norfolk, Jacksonville, San Diego, etc). While part of the Summer Pulse '04 exercise is in the Pacific, that is nowhere near the whole thing. It is going on in all regions, Europe, South America, and the Middle East, in addition to Asia. Nowhere has the Navy said that this exercise is solely about China. Check out the official website yourself. This will be the first time in U.S. naval history that seven of our 12 carrier strike groups deploy in one place at the same time. It will look like the peacetime equivalent of the Normandy landings and may well end in a disaster. The first sentence would be true if that event were to occur. However, as I stated before the plan isn't to have all seven carriers in the same place. They are all over the world. Operation Summer Pulse '04 was almost surely dreamed up at the Pearl Harbor headquarters of the U.S. Pacific Command and its commander, Adm. Thomas B. Fargo, and endorsed by neocons in the Pentagon. It is doubtful that Congress was consulted. This only goes to show that our foreign policy is increasingly made by the Pentagon Actually, the idea for the Fleet Response Plan came straight from the CNO, who charged the Atlantic Fleet commander, ADM Natter to work out the details. If this were a massive build-up around China, I could see where one would want Congress to be notified. But as this is routine business (notable only because this is the first time we've tried it), I don't see anything that would warrant extra special attention. According to Chinese reports, Taiwanese ships will join the seven carriers being assembled in this modern rerun of 19th century gunboat diplomacy. The ostensible reason given by the Navy for this exercise is to demonstrate the ability to concentrate massive forces in an emergency, but the focus on China in a U.S. election year sounds like a last hurrah of the neocons. Yes, when I want solid information about what our military is doing, I immediately turn to the press of Undemocratic Communist China (to use the name given by Klingenfuss). Again, the reason for the exercise isn't to amass forces in one area, it's to show we can have forces in multiple regions at once. (Neocon count=2 now) It goes on to imply that we are looking to start a war with China, with this exercise being the provocation. To see that we aren't amassing our Carriers in one location, one only need to do a bit of research. As a Virginian-Pilot article reports, the Enterprise is playing with the Europeans, and is due back at the end of this month. The Kennedy went out to relieve the George Washington, which is now homeward bound (apparently cleared the STROG today). The Kennedy is now in the North Arabian Gulf. The Ronald Regan left Norfolk in late May to make the swing around South America to arrive in San Diego on July 23. The Truman, like the George Washington, is homeward bound after completing its deployment. The ones that are playing in the Western Pacific are the Kitty Hawk, which got underway today and will be joining the Stennis. To see this for yourself, you can look at Status of the Navy, and the mildly disconcertingly detailed Where Are the Carriers? Using Chinese propaganda to back up paranoid fantasies about neoconservatives is really shoddy. But what do I know? After all Blogging is especially amenable to introducing negative information into the news stream and for circulating rumors as fact. (LA Times) LATER: Submitted to Beltway Traffic Jam. EVEN LATER:  Some linking madness:  - A post entitled Don't Tread On Me with a cool picture of the Truman and Enterprise and other ships sailing together.  - A sampling of the forums I mentioned. -Some saner coverage from Winds of Change and EastSouthWestNorth. Military comment []4:55:42 PM   trackback []