Close encounters of the Chinese kind

Now that this admiral has confirmed the story about a close encounter between a Chinese submarine and a US aircraft carrier in the waters off Japan, its time to say something about it.

A U.S. defence chief called for closer military ties with China and for the two powers to shed "Cold War" thinking on Tuesday as he highlighted a recent naval encounter that could have gone wrong.

The chief of U.S. forces in the Pacific, Admiral William J. Fallon, was asked to confirm a U.S. newspaper report of an uncomfortably close encounter between U.S. warships and a Chinese submarine in the Pacific last month.

Confirming the gist of the Washington Times report, Fallon said the submarine had been detected at close quarters by an aircraft carrier and its accompanying warships.

The Washington Times said the submarine had stalked the USS Kitty Hawk and surfaced within range of its torpedoes and missiles in "ocean waters" near the Japanese island of Okinawa.

"The characterisation of stalking an aircraft carrier is rather sensational and I think it's probably not close to being accurate," Fallon told reporters in Malaysia, where he is attending an annual meeting of Asia-Pacific defence chiefs.

He did not give more details but said the encounter showed why he was pushing for better military ties with China.

"The fact that you have military units that would operate in close proximity to each other offers the potential for events that would not be what we would like to see -- the potential for miscalculation," he told a news conference.

"Now it turns out that the aircraft carrier and its escorting ships were out doing some exercises. I am told they were not engaged in anti-submarine exercises, so they were not looking for submarines. But if they had been, and this Chinese submarine happened to come in the middle of this, then this could well have escalated into something that was very unforeseen."

Admiral William J. Fallon is one of those folks people should listen and pay attention to. If he is uneasy about the potential consequences of such an encounter, well, he's the expert. Now its up to the leaders in Washington to do the ground work to prevent such situations in the future.

Disclaimer: I have no idea if that is a photo of the aircraft carrier involved, but its the photo used in the telegraph.co.uk story about the incident.

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