US Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Jonathan Greenert on Monday said that he had talked with Taiwanese military officials about Taiwan building its own diesel submarines.
Speaking at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace think tank in Washington, he made a rare reference to the talks as part of a guarded answer to a direct question on the subject.
After being reminded that Taiwan had been trying for many years to buy submarines from the US, Greenert was asked whether he had any suggestions for his colleagues in Taiwan about independently building submarines.
Photo: CNA
“Yes, I have had conversations with my Taiwan counterparts... but I won’t discuss them here — I can’t. I will leave it at that,” Greenert said.
Asked about the state of US-China military-to-military relations, Greenert said that the recent incident in which a Chinese fighter flew to within meters of a US military plane near Hainan Island should not be used to define the relationship. He said that solutions to such problems would not be found overnight, but that progress was being made.
“The bottom line is that we cannot have miscalculations,” he added.
“It is my job to keep the East China Sea and the South China Sea calm and I think working together is a step in the right direction to do that,” he said.
Following an hour-long presentation on the US’ rebalance toward the Asia-Pacific region, the admiral was asked whether — in view of Chinese missile advances — it would still be relatively safe to send US aircraft carriers into the Taiwan Strait in the case of an emergency.
The question was asked because China has built a ballistic missile that is said to be capable of sinking a moving aircraft carrier, alongside a push to broaden its anti-ship cruise missile capabilities.
“We work very hard on defeating that,” Greenert said.
He told the audience that such a missile had to follow a complicated “kill chain” that would have to start with China detecting a carrier from a significant distance and then tracking it long enough “to be confident to go ahead and launch this ballistic missile.”
The missile had to travel far enough to turn its sensors on, look for and find the carrier, track it and finally strike, he said.
“Any break in that chain means a mission failure,” he said.
“We are confident that we have made terrific headway in this direction and we continue to move forward,” he said.
Greenert said that the US needed to build a constructive relationship with China and that there was great potential for it to prosper alongside China.
“We [each] have a big stake in one another,” Greenert said.
He said the Chinese navy was expanding into the western Pacific and into the Indian Ocean, but that while Beijing wanted a global navy, he had been assured that it did not want “a global posture.”
Greenert said he had “a lot of interaction” with his counterpart, People’s Liberation Army Navy Admiral Wu Shengli (吳勝利), and there had been “pretty frank and candid” conversations.
In Taipei, Ministry of National Defense spokesman Major General David Lo (羅紹和) yesterday reiterated that the military has been pursuing a plan to build submarines on its own, despite technical barriers, while also making continued efforts to buy such vessels from the US.
“There are a number of core technologies in the building of submarines and most of these involve proprietary technologies… Therefore assistance from the US can help Taiwan to overcome the hurdles and make progress on this plan,” Lo told a news conference.
“At the same time, we still look to purchase American submarines to enhance our self-defense capability, which can help safeguard peace and stability in the Asia-Pacific region,” he said.
Additional reporting by Jason Pan
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