In mid-June, a small maritime drone, no larger than a car, got close enough to a Chinese warship to photograph it operating just 105 kilometres off the coast of the Philippines.
The incident has led to official responses from both governments and has become yet another report of an increasingly aggressive China testing the outer bounds of where it can project power.
But the incident raises a much bigger question about the drone itself. It was produced by a relatively small and new American defence manufacturer called Seasats. The company has some contracts with the US military, but this incident seems to have happened independent of a military command.
Information gathering has always had military consequences. When spy planes flew overhead in the Cold War, their very presence near sensitive military equipment was enough to raise tensions.
Military doctrine has always assumed that hardware – satellites or ships or planes – was sent by a specific state at the order of their political or military leadership. Their appearance in the skies and waters was not an accident but part of a chain of decisions. That assumption appeared settled because only governments had the budget and operational complexity to deploy that kind of technology.
No private firm could afford to operate and fly a spy plane or ship, nor would they have reason to. Both of those things have recently changed.
The trigger for Asia’s next war, privatised | Lowy Institute
(source: Linus Terhorst – Lowy The Interpreter)
The Global Eye is in partnership with SIOI
