– USNI Proceedings – As China has built its naval power, it has relied on a variety of ideas—old and new, Eastern and Western. For U.S. military leaders seeking to understand China’s naval aspirations, certain images can bring the strategy into focus—like the crumple zones built into a modern automobile, designed to give but not fail.

– National Interest – Chinese naval strategists have watched the development of Russia’s Status-6 large-scale UUV with considerable interest.

– US Naval War College Review – In its official documents, China has defined what it means by the term maritime great power and has laid out how it intends to achieve that status, becoming the world’s “main maritime power” by 2049.

– National Interest – Washington would do well to stop provoking China’s ire on Taiwan, lest it trigger a “Cuban Missile Crisis” in reverse.

– National Interest – The battle for future undersea AI dominance is heating up and China’s ambitions are not small in this domain.

– Defense News – The U.S. Navy sent two destroyers through the Taiwan Strait, the first U.S. warships ships to pass through the strait since 2017.

– War Zone – The People’s Liberation Army Navy will need significantly more jets anyway if it wants to make good use of their new carriers.

– National Interest – Treat Beijing as an enemy, and it is quite certain to emerge as an enemy.

– Breaking Defense – China’s increasingly aggressive rise puts the Pacific theater in play in a way it hasn’t been since 1945. In this essay, Singaporean scholar Ben Ho Wan Beng and retired US Marine Gary Lehmann look at what a critical but overlooked World War II battle has to tell us about the potential strengths — and weaknesses — of the Marine Corps’s new concept for waging the next Pacific war.

– China Military Online – The PLA Navy’s hospital ship Peace Ark (Hull 866) set sail from its homeport in Zhoushan in east China’s Zhejiang Province on Thursday morning to embark on the voyage of “Harmonious Mission 2018”.

– Global Times – Military actions, including those involving aircraft carriers, are always an option if the island of Taiwan continues to “play with fire,” an expert warned Tuesday after the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) Navy conducted real combat exercises around the island involving “Chinese Aegis” class destroyers.

– China Military Online – Opportunity favours only the prepared mind. In 2008, increasingly intensified piracy in waters off Somalia offered opportunity for the Chinese Navy to gain blue water experience.

– CNN – China’s top shipbuilding company is working on an aircraft carrier with an electromagnetic catapult aircraft launch system, something featured exclusively aboard the US Navy’s most expensive carrier ever, the USS Gerald R. Ford.

– War Zone – A U.S. intelligence review offers new details about a Chinese prototype electromagnetic weapon that first appeared in public earlier in 2018.

– CNN – Lasers have been used to target US aerial operations in the Pacific, with 20 incidents recorded since September of last year.

– National Interest – Japan only needed a small-scale triumph over imperial China to fulfill its aims in 1894-1895. It saw no need to overthrow the Qing regime, occupy China or even vanquish the entire Qing navy. Today, likewise, China need not utterly defeat American arms to achieve modest goals. Capability sufficient to Beijing’s purposes may soon fall within the PLA’s grasp. Heck, it may already be within reach.

– Asia Maritime Transparency Initiative – The People’s Liberation Army Air Force (PLAAF) announced on May 18 that it had landed bombers, including the top-of-the-line H-6K, on an outpost in the South China Sea for the first time.

– Washington Free Beacon – China’s military has stepped up militarizing disputed islands in the South China Sea by deploying advanced missile systems on the Spratly islands.

– Reuters – U.S. military officials now say China’s military bases on man-made islands in the disputed South China Sea are virtually complete. Exclusive data and satellite imagery shows the pace of construction on reefs and reclaimed land in the Spratly and Paracel Islands.

– CIMSEC – Great Power competition is back, and such competition brings Russia and China together as political partners, and is echoed in their increasing naval cooperation. Such naval cooperation provides one another with tacit support in their respective areas of geopolitical interest.

– War on the Rocks – The United States needs new ideas to generate regional balancing against Chinese behavior while simultaneously deterring future actions like the consolidation of control at disputed features like Scarborough Shoal.

– Reuters – Shrouded in Chinese military secrecy and hidden from the eyes of journalists, Beijing’s build-up of man-made islands on reefs deep in the maritime heart of Southeast Asia is a vexing story to report.

– CIMSEC – Beijing’s strategic actions and activities are unwisely and dangerously undermining the current global order that it itself has benefited from. Hence, Washington has a moral and global obligation of leadership to further encourage and challenge China to become a more responsible global stakeholder that contributes positively to the international system. Otherwise, Beijing will continue to view U.S. acquiescence and accommodation as tacit acknowledgement and consent to execute its strategic ambitions and strategies unhindered and unchallenged.

– Washington Free Beacon – In response to China’s militarization of disputed islands in the South China Sea, the Pentagon announced Wednesday that China would not be allowed to take part in the large international naval exercise known as Rim of the Pacific, or RIMPAC.

– USNI News – China’s first domestically built carrier has returned from its first set of sea trials last week.