Wednesday, April 4, 2001

By Naftali Bendavid, Chicago Tribune

WASHINGTON—Just three months ago, a Chinese aircraft came within 20 feet of a U.S. spy plane in roughly the same spot as the recent collision that forced an EP-3E surveillance plane to the ground in China, officials say.

"Our Pacific Command was quite concerned," recalled Derek Mitchell, a China expert in the office of then-Defense Secretary William Cohen. "We protested in Beijing, and we brought in people from their embassy here, and we stated that this could be dangerous. So when I heard about this on Sunday, it was not a complete shock."

That earlier episode illustrates two points military analysts emphasize about the newest incident: U.S. planes routinely engage in games of "chicken" with other aircraft in critical zones all over the world; and the Chinese are relatively inexperienced at this maneuvering, which may help explain why something went terribly wrong this time.

"The Chinese are new at this kind of cat-and-mouse game," said Melvin Goodman, professor of international security at the National War College. "It’s not like the Soviet-American games, where the pilots got to know each other, knew how to go cockpit-to-cockpit to give each other the finger. They got close enough that they could really make faces at each other."

For 40 years, experts say, the United States has sent planes to gather information off the coasts of potentially hostile or volatile nations, from the Soviet Union to Cuba to the Persian Gulf. Military officials, fairly or not, distinguish these from spy missions because they do not intrude on foreign airspace, waters or soil.

The United States launches such reconnaissance flights several times a week, perhaps daily, experts said. "This is a very common tactic," said Bud Cole, a retired Naval captain and an expert on the Chinese military. "It’s trying to paint an electronic picture of a country about which you’re curious. The idea is, if you approach a coast, you want to know what you can expect."

While the most famous cat-and-mouse games occurred between U.S. and Soviet pilots, American flyers have also engaged in such maneuvers with countries like Cuba. If Cuban pilots strayed too close to U.S. airspace, the American military would often dispatch F-14s to escort them away.

Similar incidents have occurred in the Baltics, the Indian Ocean and elsewhere.

The American role as a superpower makes it natural for the U.S. to probe for information about other nations, U.S. officials said. When they can, those nations respond with an airborne greeting party. It has become almost a game, and some say the surprise is that collisions do not occur more often.

To countries such as China, however, these flights are not routine military business, but invasive forays that infringe on their sovereignty. China does not patrol the coasts of the U.S., several observers noted, and has asked the American military to halt the reconnaissance missions.

The dispute did not erupt until recently, however. The United States has been stepping up its flights off the Chinese coast, and the Chinese, with improved aircraft, have been challenging the U.S. flights more aggressively.

That set two of the world’s most powerful nations on something of a collision course. "This is emblematic of the U.S.-Chinese relationship," said Mitchell, now a scholar at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. "You have an established power and a rising power that is aggressive and assertive. How do you manage the intersection of those interests?"

Mitchell and others said Chinese and American pilots have not worked out rules of the game, so pilots would know how much distance to keep, which maneuvers are permissible and what to expect from each other.

"They don’t recognize the rules of the road, that this is what powers do," Mitchell said. "They don’t accept it, the way we and the Soviets seemed to accept it — we nodded and winked and did our thing. We knew the stakes. The Chinese are not quite into that mindset."

Chinese leaders appear to view the surveillance flights as another in a long series of U.S. provocations, from the 1999 bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade to American support for Taiwan. With China beginning to assert itself as a military superpower, commanders on the scene attempting to send a message may have pushed matters too far, several experts theorized.

"The Chinese have been increasingly irritated by these flights," said Robert Hathaway, a China specialist who spent 12 years on the staff of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. "It represents in their view another example of American arrogance, and because of their inability to prevent it, it became a symbol of their second-class status and their military inferiority vis-à-vis the United States. It just rankled."

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