Participation in RIMPAC 2016

SUBHEAD: The countries participating in largest naval war exercise reach record number and include NATO.

By Juan Wilson  1 June 2016 for Island Breath  -
(http://www.stripes.com/news/pacific/27-nations-set-to-join-rimpac-exercise-in-hawaii-california-1.412494)


Image above: Teaser poster for "Pacific Rim II" film being produced now and ready for 2018. Mashup by Juan Wilson. Click to embiggen.

Note below the two recent articles  (5/31 and 6/1) in Stars and Stripes and Naval Today respectively that are puff pieces more than actual news stories. They both concern RIMPAC 2016 - the international naval war exercises that will begin toward the end of this month.

Both of these articles seem to have been "crafted" from the same US Navy public relations announcement. They cover the same points with about the same amount of detail in the same order.

The gist of the pieces are:

One: To congratulate the US Navy for convincing four new non-Pacific nations (Brazil, Denmark, Germany and Italy) for joining the Rim of the Pacific nations involved with Pacific Naval warfare. Three out of four of them are allies in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

Two: To dampen criticism, from the likes of Sen John McCain, that the Chinese Navy should be disenvited from participating as observers in RIMPAC 2016 as they were in 2014. Obviously, the US wants China to see what they would face in and conflict in the South China Sea if they continue to build up they Naval presence in the Western Pacific.

Three: The public relations effort  invokes “The Great Green Fleet” using conservation efforts and alternative fuels; and focusing on rescue and disaster relief operations is a screen for deadlier activities that even in "practice" mode are lethal to the life in the ocean..

As to my opinion of these gists:

One:  The US Navy Pacific fleet in including three NATO navies from the Atlantic Ocean under its wing in the Pacific. Always remember that attacking any NATO nation is an attack on all. In my opinion the US Navy wants to make sure that if there is trouble in the Western Pacific that it will be the US Navy and not NATO doing the coordination.

Two: The US Navy wants the Chinese Navy to observe how mighty and dominant it is in command and control on the Pacific Ocean. They also want the Chinese available for public relations purposes. Also The relationship of a panoramic flotilla of 45 RIMPAC ships from 27nations in proportion to a couple of ships from the Chinese Navy in passive obervation makes a great photo opportunity.

Three: No amount of "Green Fleet" bullshit can obscure the deadly impact of high energy sonar, radar, amphibious operations and live ammo exercises on the Pacific Ocean and its denizens - live reefs, fish, birds, ocean mammals and to the the ecosystems that support them.

It should be noted that buried in the second story below is the detail that Japan Maritime Self Defense Force Rear Adm. Koji Manabe was named the vice commander of the RIMPAC 2016 Combined Task Force. This is interesting because his role was only enabled by an adjustment to Japanese law that disallows any military activity other than that needed for self defense - the old rules would not have allowed a leading role in such an activity as RIMPAC.

As the United States pushes militarily forward in Eastern Europe and the Middle East, it expands its already dominant role throughout the Pacific region. To me it looks like we are pushing for World War Three.  And that's a bad idea. As I have said before - the central role of our navy should not be to threaten live throughout the world, but to protect the oceans and those who live in it.

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Twenty 27 countries in RIMPAC 2016

By Wyatt Olsen  31 May 2016 for Stars & Stripes  -
(http://www.stripes.com/news/pacific/27-nations-set-to-join-rimpac-exercise-in-hawaii-california-1.412494)


Image above: Reporters and other visitors gather to inspect the bow of the Haikou, China's flagship destroyer, during the 2014 Rim of the Pacific exercise in Hawaii. From original article.

Four nations will join this summer’s Rim of the Pacific drills in Hawaii, increasing the number of countries participating in the world’s largest international maritime exercise to 27.

Brazil, Denmark, Germany and Italy will take part for the first time in the biennial RIMPAC, which is slated to begin June 30 and end Aug. 4, the Navy said Tuesday. China, which joined the exercise in 2014, will also participate.

This year’s U.S. Pacific Fleet-hosted drills – which will focus on disaster relief, maritime security, sea control and complex warfighting – will include 45 ships, five submarines, more than 200 aircraft and 25,000 personnel.

Participating nations include Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Colombia, France, India, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Peru, South Korea, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, Tonga and the United Kingdom.

Drills will include amphibious operations, gunnery, counter-piracy, mine clearance, explosive ordnance disposal and diving and salvage operations. Defensive training against missiles, submarines and aircraft will also take place.

While most of the exercise is held in Hawaii, amphibious operations will take place in Southern California, featuring a harpoon missile shoot from a Navy littoral combat ship. A submarine rescue is new for this year, the Navy said.

Playing a major role in this year’s RIMPAC is the Navy’s “Great Green Fleet,” a yearlong initiative that uses energy conservation measures and alternative fuels to demonstrate how cutting energy costs can contribute to overall military readiness.

Almost all the vessels participating will use an approved alternate-fuel blend, the Navy said.

Some in Congress have called for China to be disinvited to RIMPAC, citing the country’s expansionist actions in the South China Sea, where it has enlarged small atolls through sand dredging.

The country has built facilities and runways on some, construction the U.S. characterizes as militarization.

Last month, U.S. Rep. Mark Takai, of Hawaii, a member of the House Armed Services Committee, asked Secretary of Defense Ash Carter to reconsider China’s invitation in light of its naval actions over the past two years.

“I guess my question is why then should we reward China for this aggressive behavior by including them in an event meant for allies and partners?” Takai said to Carter during a March hearing. He described China’s behavior as “the polar opposite of U.S. objectives in the region.”

In late April, China told the U.S. it would deny a Hong Kong port visit by the USS John C. Stennis aircraft carrier strike group planned for May 3-8. The denial likely came in response to the strike group’s recent presence near the disputed Spratly Islands close to the Philippines.

U.S. Pacific Fleet commander Adm. Scott Swift has said on numerous occasions he believes the path forward with China is to deepen relationships with military-to-military contact.

In 2014, China sent four ships to RIMPAC, including the destroyer Haikou and hospital ship Peace Ark. It also sent a spy ship, which remained in international waters off Hawaii.

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Record participation in RIMPAC 2016

By Staff 1 June 2016 for Naval Today -
(https://navaltoday.com/2016/06/01/record-number-of-countries-to-take-part-in-rimpac-2016/)

With four new participants, the number of countries taking part in RIMPAC, the world’s largest international maritime exercise, rose to 27.

45 ships, five submarines, more than 200 aircraft and 25,000 personnel will participate in the biennial Rim of the Pacific (RIMPAC) exercise scheduled June 30 to August 4, in and around the Hawaiian Islands and Southern California.

This is the first time that Brazil, Denmark, Germany, and Italy are participating in RIMPAC 2016. Additional firsts will involve flexing the command and control structure for various at sea events and incorporating a submarine rescue exercise.

Other participants will be forces from:

Australia, Brazil, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Denmark, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, People’s Republic of China, Peru, the Republic of Korea, the Republic of the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, Tonga, the United Kingdom and the United States.

This year will see amphibious operations in the Southern California operating area, feature a harpoon missile shoot from a U.S. Navy littoral combat ship and highlight fleet innovation during the Trident Warrior experimentation series.

RIMPAC 2016 is the 25th exercise in the series that began in 1971. Hosted by U.S. Pacific Fleet.
It will be led by U.S. Vice Adm. Nora Tyson, commander of the U.S. 3rd Fleet (C3F), who will serve as the Combined Task Force (CTF) Commander.

Royal Canadian Navy Rear Adm. Scott Bishop will serve as deputy commander of the CTF, and Japan Maritime Self Defense Force Rear Adm. Koji Manabe as the vice commander.

See also:
Ea O Ka Aina: Judgement Against RIMPAC 2016 5/29/16
Ea O Ka Aina: Prepare for RIMPAC War in Hawaii 5/22/16
Ea O Ka Aina: Navy to "take" millions of mammals 5/17/16
Ea O Ka Aina: US court RIMPAC Impact decision 4/3/15
Ea O Ka Aina: RIMPAC 2014 Impact Postmortem 10/22/1
Ea O Ka Aina: RIMPAC 2014 in Full March 7/16/14
Ea O Ka Aina: 21st Century Energy Wars 7/10/14
Ea O Ka Aina: RIMPAC War on the Ocean 7/3/14
Ea O Ka Aina: Voila - World War Three 7/1/14
Ea O Ka Aina: The Pacific Pivot 6/28/14
Ea O Ka Aina: RIMPAC IMPACT 6/8/14
Ea O Ka Aina: RIMPAC Then and Now 5/16/14
Ea O Ka Aina: Earthday TPP Fukushima RIMPAC 4/22/14
Ea O Ka Aina: The Asian Pivot - An ugly dance 12/5/13
Ea O Ka Aina: Help save Mariana Islands 11/13/13
Ea O Ka Aina: End RimPac destruction of Pacific 11/1/13 
Ea O Ka Aina: Moana Nui Confereence 11/1/13
Ea O Ka Aina: Navy to conquer Marianas again  9/3/13
Ea O Ka Aina: Pagan Island beauty threatened 10/26/13
Ea O Ka Aina: Navy license to kill 10/27/12 
Ea O Ka Aina: Sleepwalking through destruction 7/16/12
Ea O Ka Aina: Okinawa breathes easier 4/27/12
Ea O Ka Aina: Navy Next-War-Itis 4/13/12
Ea O Ka Aina: America bullies Koreans 4/13/12
Ea O Ka Aina: Despoiling Jeju island coast begins 3/7/12
Ea O Ka Aina: Jeju Islanders protests Navy Base 2/29/12
Ea O Ka Aina: Hawaii - Start of American Empire 2/26/12
Ea O Ka Aina: Korean Island of Peace 2/26/12   
Ea O Ka Aina: Military schmoozes Guam & Hawaii 3/17/11
Ea O Ka Aina: In Search of Real Security - One 8/31/10
Ea O Ka Aina: Peace for the Blue Continent 8/10/10
Ea O Ka Aina: Shift in Pacific Power Balance 8/5/10
Ea O Ka Aina: RimPac to expand activities 6/29/10
Ea O Ka Aina: RIMPAC War Games here in July 6/20/10
Ea O Ka Aina: Pacific Resistance to U.S. Military 5/24/10

Ea O Ka Aina: De-colonizing the Pacific 5/21/10

Ea O Ka Aina: RIMPAC to Return in 2010 5/2/10
Ea O Ka Aina: Living at the Tip of the Spear 4/5/10

Ea O Ka Aina: Living at the Tip of the Spear 4/15/10

Ea O Ka Aina: Guam Land Grab 11/30/09
Ea O Ka Aina: Guam as a modern Bikini Atoll 12/25/09
Ea O Ka Aina: GUAM - Another Strategic Island 11/8/09
Ea O Ka Aina: Diego Garcia - Another stolen island 11/6/09
Ea O Ka Aina: DARPA & Super-Cavitation on Kauai 3/24/09
Island Breath: RIMPAC 2008 - Navy fired up in Hawaii 7/2/08
Island Breath: RIMPAC 2008 uses destructive sonar 4/22/08
Island Breath: Navy Plans for the Pacific 9/3/07
Island Breath: Judge restricts sonar off California 08/07/07
Island Breath: RIMPAC 2006 sonar compromise 7/9/06
Island Breath: RIMPAC 2006 - Impact on Ocean 5/23/06
Island Breath: RIMPAC 2004 - Whale strandings on Kauai 9/2/04
Island Breath: PMRF Land Grab 3/15/04

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Indonesia is Burning

SUBHEAD: A great tract of Earth is on fire and threatened species are being driven out of their habitats. This is a crime against humanity and nature.

By George Monbiot on 30 October 2015 in the Guardian -
(http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/oct/30/indonesia-fires-disaster-21st-century-world-media)


Image above: Children are being prepared for evacuation in warships already some have choked to death. Species are going up in smoke at an untold rate.’ Photograph by Ulet Ifansasti/Getty Images. From original article.

I’ve often wondered how the media would respond when eco-apocalypse struck. I pictured the news programmes producing brief, sensational reports, while failing to explain why it was happening or how it might be stopped.

Then they would ask their financial correspondents how the disaster affected share prices, before turning to the sport. As you can probably tell, I don’t have an ocean of faith in the industry for which I work. What I did not expect was that they would ignore it.

A great tract of Earth is on fire. It looks as you might imagine hell to be. The air has turned ochre: visibility in some cities has been reduced to 30 metres. Children are being prepared for evacuation in warships; already some have choked to death. Species are going up in smoke at an untold rate. It is almost certainly the greatest environmental disaster of the 21st century – so far.

And the media? It’s talking about the dress the Duchess of Cambridge wore to the James Bond premiere, Donald Trump’s idiocy du jour and who got eliminated from the Halloween episode of Dancing with the Stars. The great debate of the week, dominating the news across much of the world? Sausages: are they really so bad for your health?

What I’m discussing is a barbecue on a different scale. Fire is raging across the 5,000km length of Indonesia. It is surely, on any objective assessment, more important than anything else taking place today. And it shouldn’t require a columnist, writing in the middle of a newspaper, to say so. It should be on everyone’s front page.

It is hard to convey the scale of this inferno, but here’s a comparison that might help: it is currently producing more carbon dioxide than the US economy. And in three weeks the fires have released more CO₂ than the annual emissions of Germany.

But that doesn’t really capture it. This catastrophe cannot be measured only in parts per million. The fires are destroying treasures as precious and irreplaceable as the archaeological remains being levelled by Isis. Orangutans, clouded leopards, sun bears, gibbons, the Sumatran rhinoceros and Sumatran tiger, these are among the threatened species being driven from much of their range by the flames. But there are thousands, perhaps millions, more.

One of the burning provinces is West Papua, a nation that has been illegally occupied by Indonesia since 1963. I spent six months there when I was 24, investigating some of the factors that have led to this disaster. At the time it was a wonderland, rich with endemic species in every swamp and valley. Who knows how many of those have vanished in the past few weeks? This week I have pored and wept over photos of places I loved that have now been reduced to ash.

Nor do the greenhouse gas emissions capture the impact on the people of these lands. After the last great conflagration, in 1997, there was a missing cohort in Indonesia of 15,000 children under the age of three, attributed to air pollution. This, it seems, is worse.

The surgical masks being distributed across the nation will do almost nothing to protect those living in a sunless smog. Members of parliament in Kalimantan (Indonesian Borneo) have had to wear face masks during debates. The chamber is so foggy that they must have difficulty recognising one another.

It’s not just the trees that are burning. It is the land itself. Much of the forest sits on great domes of peat. When the fires penetrate the earth, they smoulder for weeks, sometimes months, releasing clouds of methane, carbon monoxide, ozone and exotic gases such as ammonium cyanide. The plumes extend for hundreds of miles, causing diplomatic conflicts with neighbouring countries.

Why is this happening? Indonesia’s forests have been fragmented for decades by timber and farming companies. Canals have been cut through the peat to drain and dry it. Plantation companies move in to destroy what remains of the forest to plant monocultures of pulpwood, timber and palm oil.

The easiest way to clear the land is to torch it. Every year, this causes disasters. But in an extreme El Niño year like this one, we have a perfect formula for environmental catastrophe.

The president, Joko Widodo, is – or wants to be – a democrat. But he presides over a nation in which fascism and corruption flourish. As Joshua Oppenheimer’s documentary The Act of Killing shows, leaders of the death squads that helped murder a million people during Suharto’s terror in the 1960s, with the approval of the west, have since prospered through other forms of organised crime, including illegal deforestation.

They are supported by a paramilitary organisation with three million members, called Pancasila Youth. With its orange camo-print uniforms, scarlet berets, sentimental gatherings and schmaltzy music, it looks like a fascist militia as imagined by JG Ballard. There has been no truth, no reconciliation; the mass killers are still treated as heroes and feted on television. In some places, especially West Papua, the political murders continue.

Those who commit crimes against humanity don’t hesitate to commit crimes against nature. Though Joko Widodo seems to want to stop the burning, his reach is limited. His government’s policies are contradictory: among them are new subsidies for palm oil production that make further burning almost inevitable.

Some plantation companies, prompted by their customers, have promised to stop destroying the rainforest. Government officials have responded angrily, arguing that such restraint impedes the country’s development. That smoke blotting out the nation, which has already cost it some $30bn? That, apparently, is development.

Our leverage is weak, but there are some things we can do. Some companies using palm oil have made visible efforts to reform their supply chains; but others seem to move more slowly and opaquely. Starbucks, PepsiCo and Kraft Heinz are examples. Don’t buy their products until you see results.

On Monday, Widodo was in Washington, meeting Barack Obama. Obama, the official communiqué recorded, “welcomed President Widodo’s recent policy actions to combat and prevent forest fires”. The eco-apocalypse taking place as they conferred, which makes a mockery of these commitments, wasn’t mentioned.

Governments ignore issues when the media ignores them. And the media ignores them because … well, there’s a question with a thousand answers, many of which involve power.

But one reason is the complete failure of perspective in a de-skilled industry dominated by corporate press releases, photo ops and fashion shoots, where everyone seems to be waiting for everyone else to take a lead. The media makes a collective non-decision to treat this catastrophe as a non-issue, and we all carry on as if it’s not happening.

At the climate summit in Paris in December the media, trapped within the intergovernmental bubble of abstract diplomacy and manufactured drama, will cover the negotiations almost without reference to what is happening elsewhere.

The talks will be removed to a realm with which we have no moral contact. And, when the circus moves on, the silence will resume. Is there any other industry that serves its customers so badly?

A fully linked version of this article can be found at monbiot.com


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