Report from the Rising Sun Ensuring a Free and Open Indo-Pacific: Allies and Partners at Home and Abroad By LT Rob “OG” Swain, USN
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atta atta ne ( ), Naval Helicopter Association, on behalf of the "Report from the Rising Sun!" If current events have highlighted anything to the global audience over the past several weeks, it is how the human advantage, maximized through selfless leadership, can command respect and garner worldwide support in the face of wanton aggression. The conflict in EUCOM has validated to all Combatant Commands not only the resilience of the human spirit, but the force-multiplying effect of support-based relationships. In short, human virtue inspires partner and ally trust and optimizes the human advantage. I believe the human advantage’s capacity to increase readiness and lethality in order to deter adversarial aggression directly correlates to how well leaders can collaborate to foster effective teamwork and pursue aligned objectives. In accordance with President Biden’s IndoPacific Strategy, the human advantage is leveraged in INDOPACOM through strong, respectful relationships with our regional allies and partners. To better understand the existential crisis facing a free and open Indo-Pacific, and how the Navy’s allies on the home front will prove critical to controlling the region’s ongoing narrative, we’ll begin with a story.
9-Dash Line: “Joining the Dashes,” The Economist, Oct 4 2014
In 1947, 30-year-old Chinese geographer, Yang Huairen, worked on a map designed for the National Kuomintang (Chinese Nationalist Party). The map introduced a line with eleven dashes encompassing 286 rock outcroppings in the South China Sea (SCS). Each dash represented the median line between the “islands” in the SCS and the large landmasses encompassing the area’s littorals. Yang contributed to naming each annotated rock and reef (almost entirely uninhabited and in some cases completely submerged), and labeled the area the “South China Sea Islands.” In 1949, when Mao Zedong and the Chinese communist revolutionaries overtook the Chinese Nationalist Party, most of the Kuomintang fled to Taiwan. Yang, however, stayed on mainland China, ostracized as an “anti-revolutionary authority.” Though Yang himself was persecuted by the new government, his eleven-dash line endured. The asserted territory remained on People’s Republic of China (PRC) maps until Mao relinquished the PRC’s claim to the Gulf of Tonkin to Vietnam as a token of communist solidarity in 1952. The eleven-dashes were reduced to nine, and PRC leadership scarcely referenced the nine-dash etching for the next sixty years. In 2009, the PRC submitted modernized Chinese maps to the United Nations during a territorial dispute with Vietnam. These 2009 maps averred the ninedash line as Chinese territorial waters, however, the boundaries had drifted further toward the coasts of other Southeast Asian nations. By 2013, a tenth line appeared; formally connected to the nine-dash line. The tenth line “symbolically subsume[d] Taiwan’s territorial claims” and ran close abeam Japan’s westernmost islands in the Ryuku chain. This contentious and expansive claim to the waterway caused outrage throughout the region. In 2016, an international tribunal in The Hague (the permanent home of the United Nations’ International Court of Justice) determined the nine-dash line lacked legal basis and violated both international law and the United Nations Convention of the Law of the Sea
Bilateral Helicopter 2: Japan Ministry of Defense “Japan-U.S. Bilateral Exercise,” April 21, 2021
Rotor Review #156 Spring '22
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