China Is Giving Back the Stolen US Underwater Drone. What Now?

The US Navy survey ship Bowditch was sailing 50 miles northwest of The Philippines' Subic Bay on December 15. As her crew worked to retrieve a data-gathering drone submarine from the water, a Chinese navy Dalang III-class salvage ship, a little over 100-feet-long and lightly armed, came up alongside the 328-feet-long Bowditch.

The Chinese crew launched a small boat, whose own crew snatched the unarmed drone from the water, and would hold the data-gathering robot for two days before Beijing agreed to return it.

As he is wont to do, US President-elect Donald Trump responded to the incident on Twitter, calling the theft "unpresidented" (sic). The real-estate mogul and reality TV star, who lost the popular vote amid relentless Russian hacking of his opponent Hillary Clinton's campaign, later corrected his spelling.

However you spell it, China's military hijinks in the China Seas are not unprecedented. In fact, the United States and China have been waging a little-known cold war in the region for decades—and it's only getting worse.

The South China Sea conflict pits the US against a rising, upstart China that's eager to undermine American power in the Pacific while boosting its own power. The forces waging this current, open-ocean conflict include some of the world's most heavily-armed warships, high-tech civilian science vessels, and lowly fishing boats operated by Beijing's fiercely-loyal sea militia, known to the US defense establishment as the "little blue men."

With two nuclear-armed states vying for influence in one of the world's most resource-rich regions, the stakes couldn't be higher. Especially as Trump's inexperienced, undisciplined administration assumes US leadership in coming weeks.

"The United States faces growing challenges in the South China Sea," wrote Andrew Erickson, a professor at the US Naval War college and the author of several books about China's maritime strategy. "How Trump handles such pressure will reverberate across the Asia-Pacific and around the world."

Bowditch, one of several Navy science ships that routinely sail the disputed China Seas, had deployed a six-foot-long, yellow-painted, remote-control drone—a "buoyancy glider," in naval parlance—to conduct "routine operations in accordance with international law," US Defense Department spokesman Peter Cook stated the day after the initial incident.

Science vessels such as Bowditch deploy these unarmed gliders, which are also known as "unmanned underwater vehicles," or UUVs, to "optimize ocean feature characterization," according to a Navy fact sheet. The gliders collect salinity and temperature readings, among other data. The Pentagon owns around 150 gliders and deploys them from research ships, warships, and vessels of allied countries.

Cook said Bowditch's crew radioed the Chinese ship to demand the drone's return. "The request was ignored," Cook said. "The UUV is a sovereign immune vessel of the United States. We call upon China to return our UUV immediately, and to comply with all of its obligations under international law."

Chinese military spokesman Yang Yujun insisted the drone posed a threat to ships in the area. The salvage ship's crew seized the glider "in order to prevent the device from harming the navigation safety and personnel safety of the ship," Yang said in a statement.

"There was no threat to safety of navigation," tweeted Bonnie Glaser, an analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, DC. In stealing the drone, China "violated high seas freedoms", Glaser continued, referring to the principle, widely embraced over the world, that waters more than 12 miles beyond a country's shores belong to no one and everyone, equally.

But navigation safety was never really the point.

"The US military has frequently dispatched naval vessels to carry out reconnaissance and military measurements in China's water," spokesman Yang stated. "China resolutely opposes this and urges the US side to stop such activities."

Neither Bowditch nor her glider were in Chinese territorial waters. "China had no right to seize this vehicle," US Senator John McCain, an Arizona Republican, said in a statement. "And the United States must not stand for such outrageous conduct."

But under successive presidential administrations, both Democratic and Republican, the United States has tolerated escalating Chinese aggression. And for good reason: For years, it has been US policy to patiently wait for China's foreign policy to catch up to its swelling economic and military might. In other words, to wait for China to grow up.

Not everyone in the US government agrees with that philosophy, however.

"The current approach has been premised on the idea that China's integration into the prevailing economic and security order not only is in China's interest but also benefits the United States and the whole world," Michèle Flournoy, the undersecretary of defense for policy from 2009 to 2012, and Center for a New American Security analyst Ely Ratner co-wrote in a 2014 Washington Post op-ed. "Unfortunately, that's not what's happening," Flournoy and Ratner said.

At any rate, this isn't the first time Bowditch has found herself involved in the unofficial naval war between China and the US.

In March 2001, the 5,000-ton oceanic research vessel encountered a Chinese navy frigate off the South Korean coast. The frigate sailed menacingly close to Bowditch, forcing the American vessel to retreat.

A few weeks later, Chinese fighter jets intercepted a US Navy EP-3 spy plane flying in international airspace near China's Hainan Island. One of the fighters accidentally clipped the EP-3. The Chinese plane crashed and the pilot died. The American plane made an emergency landing on Hainan.

Chinese authorities held the 24-person US crew for 10 days, releasing the aviators only after the Bush administration apologized for the collision. Beijing kept the top-secret spy plane for three months, apparently dismantling and inspecting it before shipping it back to the United States.

Bowditch again had a run-in with Chinese government ships in 2002. And in 2003, in an apparent preview of things to come, Beijing claimed that a Chinese fishing boat bumped into the American vessel. Six years later, a flotilla of fishing boats intercepted the US Navy surveillance ship Impeccable in international waters in the South China Sea. The boats "shadowed and aggressively maneuvered in dangerously close proximity" to Impeccable, according to a Pentagon statement.

The boats were part of Beijing's maritime militia, an unofficial navy that the government pays to assert—alongside the Chinese navy and coast guard— its influence in the China Seas.

"Increasingly, these forces operate together … to alter the status quo, and employing coercion as necessary, but without resorting to war," Erickson explained. "China's irregular sea force is one of the most important — yet most under-considered — factors affecting US security interests in the South China Sea."

The Obama administration has responded to China's escalating aggression by shifting more of the US Navy's ships to the Pacific and sending those ships on so-called "freedom of navigation" cruises through international waters that China claims.

But President Obama has combined his military push-back with his characteristic rhetorical restraint. His administration has, to a great extent, continued the tradition of being patient with a more and more militaristic China. That approach was evident in last week's drone incident.

"Through direct engagement with Chinese authorities, we have secured an understanding that the Chinese will return the UUV to the United States," Cook, the Pentagon press secretary, announced on December 17.

So the US Navy got its drone back. Which is not to say China won't try again to bully American forces operating legally in waters Beijing seeks to dominate. If trends hold, more confrontations are likely. A commentary published today in the People's Daily, the official mouthpiece of the ruling Communist Party, said the remote-control US glider seized by China's navy is only the "tip of the iceberg in the US military strategy on China."

Trump, for his part, seems fed up with the state of affairs. "We should tell China that we don't want the drone they stole back," he tweeted on December 17. "Let them keep it!"

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