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| Image: Flickr User - Official U.S. Navy Page |
By Ankit Panda
There’s some good news in the South China Sea, despite rising tensions over disputed maritime claims.
U.S. Chief of Naval Operations Admiral John Richardson and his Chinese counterpart Admiral Wu Shengli regularly confer via teleconference to share their views on how the U.S. and Chinese navies are progressing in their military-to-military contacts. Last week, both officials held a two hour conference in which they expressed their satisfaction with a mechanism their two countries established in spring 2014 to prevent miscalculations and unanticipated escalations of encounters at sea. The so-called Code for Unplanned Encounters at Sea (CUES) between the United States and China governs communications protocols for U.S. and Chinese naval crews and is a proving to be a useful mechanism between the two navies–certainly in the South China Sea.
Wu had originally called CUES a “milestone document” when it was concluded, at the end of the biennial Western Pacific Naval Symposium (WPNS) in Qingdao, China in 2014. CUES was unanimously approved by the 25 participating countries in the 2014 WPNS after having been originally proposed in the early 2000s. (China had originally shown some trepidation over the use of the word “code” in the document’s title, suggesting legal force.) As my colleague Shannon Tiezzi explained at the time, CUES “is a non-binding, voluntary agreement to follow certain set procedures for communicating with other military forces encountered at sea or in the air.”
Read the full story at The Diplomat