Sea Lanes and Pipelines: Energy Security in Asia by Bernard D. Cole

Author:Bernard D. Cole
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2014-06-01T04:00:00+00:00

NAVAL FORCES IN ASIA

The history of maritime commerce includes the history of navies that have often pioneered and then secured the sea-lanes over which that commerce steams. This is as true today as it was during the great fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth century exploratory voyages of Western and Chinese seamen, as well as the great sea battles that marked the European wars of the seventeenth, eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries.

Asia's commerce continues to be defined by the great sweep of oceans and seas that border its continental mass south and west from the Arctic to the Malacca Strait, and then to the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea. Despite the twentieth-century advent of air power, the conduct of commerce throughout the region is delimited by its sea lines of communication (SLOCs), and the merchant fleets that use them.

Almost all the Asian navies are modernizing, led by the Japanese, Chinese, and Indian programs to deploy naval forces equipped with twenty-first-century technologies and capabilities. As expected, those are among the nations with the largest defense budgets: China, Japan, and India, in that order. All of these pale by comparison with U.S. defense expenditures, of course, but they are making serious efforts to improve their naval capabilities.1

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