Friday, March 23, 2001

By Steve Liewer
Stars and Stripes

With a nod to tradition and fanfare, hundreds of sailors stood at attention Thursday on the USS Kitty Hawk’s flight deck as the ship pulled into Singapore alongside what could well become the ship’s home away from home.

The crews of the Yokosuka-based aircraft carrier and its battle-group partners, the cruisers USS Vincennes and USS Chancellorsville, were to help the Royal Singaporean Navy celebrate the opening of Changi Naval Base, at the eastern tip of the tiny island nation. Adm. Vern Clark, chief of naval operations, was among the high-ranking guests. He was to be joined by his Singaporean counterpart, Rear Adm. Lui Tuck Yew.

After speeches and an exchange of mementos, about 30 VIPs were to tour the Kitty Hawk. A reception and tours of the new pier also were planned for those attending, including the ships’ crews.

The $35 million base features automated robotic arms and driverless vehicles to stack and move stores in its warehouses, fiber-optic cable to connect computer workstations and cisterns to collect rainwater, according to the Singapore daily newspaper Straits Times.

At the water’s edge is a king-size present for the U.S. Navy. It’s a deep-draft pier that will provide a home to Royal Singaporean Navy ships. But Singapore’s leaders built the pier big enough to accommodate even the most massive U.S. aircraft carriers.

Last September, then-U.S. Ambassador to Singapore Steven Green said: "I don’t think there’s another country in the world that welcomes our presence more and makes more assets available to the United States than does Singapore."

Singapore long has been a key stop for ships sailing from the west coast of the United States or Japan to the Persian Gulf. Carriers and other large ships, though, have had to anchor in the harbor.

"Right now, it can be logistically challenging sometimes when our ships are anchored out. We have to ferry supplies and people to them," said Rear Adm. Mark J. Edwards, commander of the Navy’s Singapore-based Logistics Group Western Pacific, in an e-mail message to Stars and Stripes. But the new pier will help with more than logistics.

"Going pierside not only makes it much easier to resupply and maintain the ships, but the costs of doing so will be dramatically reduced — and the sailors get to go on liberty sooner," said L.R. "Joe" Vasey, a retired Navy rear admiral who now is a senior Asia-Pacific security strategist at the Hawaii-based Center for Strategic and International Studies.

It’s not yet clear if the new pier will attract more than the 100 U.S. Navy ships a year that already visit Singapore. U.S. military leaders have avoided making any promises. Edwards estimated the local economic impact of the U.S. military presence at $150 million. About $14 million of that comes from visiting sailors who spend money in bars, restaurants, hotels and stores, he said.

Singapore’s biggest benefit from the pier, though, could be that the move will boost its position as one of America’s staunchest Asian allies.

Located at the tip of the Malayan peninsula, Singapore was a British colony from 1824 until the Japanese overran it in February 1942. After World War II, it was attached uneasily to Malaysia, securing its independence in 1965.

Singapore is a geographical mite, but militarily mighty. About 10 percent of its population serves in the military, either on active duty or in the reserves, according to report compiled by the Federation of American Scientists.

Many agree that few spots in the world are as strategically vital as the country’s location alongside the Straits of Malacca, the most important passage between the Pacific and Indian oceans. One analyst called it a "global choke point for trade flows."

Given Singapore’s geographical vulnerability, it hardly hurts to have a powerful friend like the United States. As relations between the U.S. and the Philippines soured in the early 1990s, Singapore risked the wrath of its neighbors by offering a home to seven small Navy logistical commands — totaling less than 200 people — after the United States was forced to leave the Subic Bay Naval Base.

"It is no secret that Singapore believes that the presence of the U.S. military in this part of the world contributes to the peace and stability of the region," Tony Tan, Singapore’s defense minister and deputy prime minister, told the Straits Times as he toured Changi last week.

Japan and China, for example, both see the United States as a counterbalance to one another’s potential military ambition in East Asia, said Norman Polmar, a policy analyst for the Naval Institute. Australia welcomes the presence of another Western power between itself and the Asian giants. And midlevel powers such as Malaysia and Thailand view the United States as a bulwark against the disintegration of the giant Indonesian state that began with East Timor’s secession in 1999.

But the Navy does face a future political problem in Japan, which opposes the permanent placement of nuclear-powered ships at Yokosuka or Sasebo, the two U.S. naval bases on its soil. The scheduled decommissionings of the USS Constellation in 2003 and the Kitty Hawk in 2008 will leave only one conventionally powered carrier — the USS John F. Kennedy — that could be based in Japan. And the Kennedy, until recently, had been held as a training carrier manned largely by reservists.

Might Singapore, then, look like an attractive location in which to base a battle group?

Michael McDevitt, a retired Navy rear admiral who is now director of the Center for Strategic Studies at the Center for Naval Analyses, said there are huge logistical barriers, even with a deep-draft and a willing host nation.

"Never say never — but the practical aspects are overwhelming," he said. "This is a densely packed island. They don’t have a lot of extra territory, and we have no housing.

"We would swamp the island," he added.

Karniol believes even if the logistics could be solved, Singapore might not wish to risk the wrath of other Southeast Asian nations.

"It might be possible, but it would be pretty tricky, politically," he said. "When the Singaporeans offered basing privileges to the U.S. in ’92, there were all kinds of objections from Singapore’s neighbors."

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