Re: China Flanker Thread II
I just don't buy the notion of disruption as opposed to monitor. The purpose of monitoring is to gather intelligence to hopefully able to gather a gambit of information that may be useful. Disruption is self defeating and probably reflects a lack of understanding of military matters to form such an opinion. I have a non military background but disruption is so illogical.
The exercise planners and organisers are not stupid. They will know that others will be monitoring their exercises, so are not going to schedule anything that might give prying eyes much actionable intel.
The nature of the Chinese -Russian exercise would also rule out anything too useful for passive watchers as it's the first time both countries have done something of this scale. So it's more of a diplomatic, PR and trust building exercise rather than one designed to practice and test combat tactics under realistic conditions.
The rationale for purposely intruding and disruption an exercise is to provoke the other side into reacting, this reaction would be unscripted, so likely a much realistic reflection of the target's alert level, readiness state and would also yield potentially useful info on reaction thresholds and response times etc.
However, just as the Sino-Russian drills were more about the PR and diplomatic goals rather than purely military objectives, so was the decision to disrupt it. Since one could gather information on all of the above by doing overflights of a single warship on a routine patrol, and get more accurate and useful intel than gatecrashing the exercise.
The decision to intrude was to send a message and provoke a different kind of response, since the Japanese would know perfectly well the disrespect and offence such an active would cause, and I think that was the entire point - to get the Chinese to do something overtly aggressive so they can score some cheap PR points.
That intent is blatantly obvious by the way they tried to make such a big deal out of a non-incident. No doubt they were hoping to get a much stronger reaction, but the fact they raised the issue at all with so little to complain about is a pretty clear indication that the indignant Japanese press release was planned, if not already drafted before the Chinese ships left port, and the Japanese aircraft were mainly sent out on a mission to generate the clash the press release wants to complain about.
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Edit, sorry Denio, I drafted most of that reply on my phone during a break and only just saw your remark after I finished and posted it, when the page reloaded (I disabled auto-reload as I didn't wasn't to loose what I wrote already).
