Footsteps heard at sea
As Indians and Pakistanis cross Kashmir's 'peace bridge', US and Chinese admirals take note
For the first time in decades
Thursday, Kashmiris from India and Pakistani-controlled Kashmir took steps towards each other across a
220-foot-long bridge rebuilt in the last two weeks. The bridge, now called the Peace Bridge, was destroyed 50 years ago in a battle during the first of three wars fought between these rivals on the Asian subcontinent.
History will record that American and Chinese admirals took special note of those footsteps.
Normalized bus service, albeit involving a mere 59 passengers, signals a highly symbolic "warming trend between Delhi and Islamabad," reports
The Christian Science Monitor.
For military planners around the globe, the significance of any long-term easing of tensions between Pakistan and India lies in allowing India to shift a greater proportion of its defense budget to the pursuit of a more
assertive maritime strategy, says
Express India.
Considering that India is half-circled by the Bay of Bengal and the Indian Ocean that is a virtual gateway for all trade between the East and West, the policy shift may well herald a muscle-flexing exercise vis-���-vis other nations. Given that Chinese and American fleets have begun seriously
taking the measure of each other as the
The New York Times notes, it is little wonder that signs of an increased Indian naval presence on the
seas surrounding Asia, echoed from the Straits of Formosa, to the Sea of Japan, all the way to Pearl Harbor.
Naval buildups don't happen overnight. They take decades. Nations marshal industrial, military and political might.
Currently, by any standard of engagement the US rules the world oceans. Its carriers and nuclear submarines can, as
Alfred Thayer Mahan counselled President Theodore Roosevelt more than a century ago, drive any foreign navy, like a "fugitive" from the seas. But, like ocean tides, naval strength constantly rises and falls. Such is the case with China according to the
Times.
While the American military is consumed with wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, global terrorism, and the threat of nuclear proliferation in North Korea and Iran, China is presenting a new and strategically different security concern to America in the western Pacific, as well as to Japan and Taiwan, Pentagon and military officials say.
A decade ago, American military planners dismissed the threat of a Chinese attack against Taiwan as a 100-mile infantry swim. The Pentagon now believes that China has purchased or built enough amphibious assault ships, submarines, fighter jets and short-range missiles to pose an immediate threat to Taiwan and to any American force that might come to Taiwan's aid.
In the worst case in a Taiwan crisis, Pentagon officials say that any delay in American aircraft carriers reaching the island would mean that the United States would initially depend on fighter jets and bombers based on Guam and Okinawa, while Chinese forces could use their amphibious ships to go back and forth across the narrow Taiwan Strait.
The history of western civilization and the clash of navies intertwine. Naval strength and victory at sea proved pivotal factors in the advancement of Europe and America.
A quick summary of five major sea battles bears this out.
•When Rome destroyed its archrival, Carthage, it did so first at sea before finishing the job on land. Roman supremacy on the Mediterranean meant the great Carthagian army under the command of Hannibal became isolated in France, then Gaul.
Hannibal, his troops and his elephants, would starve if not resupplied from sea. Forced to take his elephants and cross the alps in 218 BCE in a desperate strike at Rome, Hannibal was defeated. The end of Carthage as a sea power in the Mediterranean ultimately lead to its
total destruction in the the Third Punic war, in 149 BCE.
•The Greek and Persian fleets fought at
Salamis, in the coastal waters of Greece, in 480 BCE. The victorious Greeks defeated the invading Persians. Having saved their independence, the Athenian fleet set the stage for the ensuing Golden Age of Greece which allowed for the eventual emergence of individual liberties in a democratic polity, one of the greatest legacies of the West.
•
Lepanto was a great naval battle pitting the Papal States, Venice, and Spain against the Ottomans. It was fought at the mouth of the Gulf of Patras, off Lepanto, Greece. It was decisive in the sense that the Christian victory denied the Ottoman Empire its goal of supremacy in the Mediterranean like the Romans before them had held over Carthage.
•In 1805 it seemed that Napoleon would invade England, the foe that had stood in the way of his complete domination of Europe. Napoleon thought the French and Spanish fleets, if united, would destroy any ships the English could put to sea in opposition. The British Admiral Lord Nelson, concentrated his ships at the point of attack off
Trafalgar, Spain. In the shadow of Gibraltar and at the mouth of the Mediterrean, Nelson crushed Napoleon's intent to invade England, saved his nation from invasion, and Europe from the loss of representative democracy.
•The
Battle of Midway, fought over and near the tiny US mid-Pacific base at the Midway atoll occurred at the high water mark of Japan's Pacific Ocean war. After Pearl Harbor, Japan held general naval superiority in the Pacific. It could choose where and when to attack. After Midway, and the destruction of four Japanese aircraft carriers the two opposing fleets were essentially equal. In time, the greater US industrial might could put to sea a fleet that would destroy the Japanese navy.
Which kind of
navy India develops is still an open book, writes Thomas P.M. Barnett of the US Naval War College.
But clearly, for India to achieve a world-class navy, its leaders have to move beyond viewing the fleet as a supplemental tool in New Delhi's long-standing rivalries with its neighbors, toward an expansive security vision that takes into account the nation's global economic status as an emerging information-technology superpower In the meantime, not only admirals will keep listening for footsteps on the Peace Bridge spanning Pakistani and Indian-controlled Kashmir.
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Jim Bencivenga
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