Fleet-footed: All eyes are on the fighting capabilities of China's growing naval power.
Leader's Ploy More Than Naval Gazing -- John Garnaut, Sydney Morning Herald
China's Xi Jinping is spoiling for a fight, but with whom?
Every morning at 6am, more than two dozen of the world's leading submarine watchers, aviation experts, government specialists, imagery analysts, cryptanalysts, and linguists gather at the headquarters of the US Pacific Fleet in Hawaii. Their job is to probe the overnight intelligence reports to guide the activities and strategies of the six aircraft carrier groups, 180 ships, and 1500 aircraft that patrol the Pacific and Indian oceans.
The morning meetings are convened by the fleet's top intelligence officer, Captain James Fanell, and are supposed to cover activities emanating ''from Hollywood to Bollywood'', as the head of US Pacific Command, Admiral Samuel Locklear, likes to put it. But the group never takes long before zeroing in on the country driving the military and diplomatic ''pivot'' to Asia which was announced by President Barack Obama in Canberra in November 2011 and which now has support from almost every maritime nation in east and south-east Asia.
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