IT WAS NO coincidence that the leak came just a week before Defense Secretary Ashton Carter set forth in April on a high-profile trip to Asia, which would include a helicopter flight to a U.S. aircraft carrier sailing through disputed waters in the South China Sea. According to a detailed account in the Navy Times, the U.S. Pacific Command’s chief, headquartered in Honolulu, has become increasingly agitated not just by China’s boldness in installing military facilities on islands it has constructed in the South China Sea—in waters claimed by other countries—but also at what the commander perceives to be a wholly inadequate U.S. response to Beijing’s behavior.
ISLAND GRAB: The Chinese consulate in Manila got an earful from protesters angry about Beijing building an island off the coast of the Phillipines.
NOEL CELIS/AFP/GETTY
According to the piece—not denied by anyone subsequently—the commander, Admiral Harry Harris, has proposed “more aggressive, frequent and close patrols” within 12 miles of islands that Beijing has constructed far from its borders— what Harris has called “the Great Wall of Sand.” According to the article, Harris wants to do this before Beijing builds another island just 140 miles off the coast of the Philippines, an atoll known as the Scarborough Shoal that is well within the Philippines’s 200-mile economic exclusion zone.