Former PACFLEET Commander: FONOPs Should Be Consistent, Not Unique to China

WASHINGTON —
The previous commander of the U.S. Pacific Fleet said the United States should
conduct more freedom-of-navigation operations (FONOPs) and not limit them to
Chinese claims but include sailings through the disputed claims of other
nations as well.

“Specific to
the South China Sea, I think the United Sates should conduct FONOPS no less
than every four weeks and not sooner than four weeks of the last FONOPS and not
longer than six seeks of the previous one,” said retired Navy Adm. Scott Swift,
former commander of U.S. Pacific Fleet, the keynote speaker July 24 at the 9th
Annual South China Sea Conference sponsored by the Center for Strategic and
International Studies, a Washington think tank.

“Consistency
is important,” Swift said. “Right now, [the Defense Department] keeps track of
all the FONOPs. They’re passed over to the State Department, and the State
Department publishes once a year what we do globally. We need to publish those
FONOPs every three months.”

“I don’t
think that we should ever do a FONOP that is unique to the South China Sea,
that’s unique to China,” he said. “We should always include other countries to
point out that — I think it’s very important to maintain the position — that we
don’t take positions with respect to claims.”

Swift said
the United States “should be conducting more than 200 FONOPS a year globally.
We should stop saying that these challenges are unique to China. This is a
common issue: adherence to the rule-based order. If people disagree with the
positions being highlighted by the U.S. conducting freedom-of-navigation
operations, they are really done in the service of the State Department. It’s
up to the State Department through the ambassador to take the reasoning why we
did a FONOP to the country that’s being considered.”

He
highlighted the importance of each country making its own decision about how it
wants to highlight deviation from the international rules-based order.

“There are good friends of
the United States that are very concerned about the term ‘freedom of navigation
operations,’ he said. “They have another conceptual way to think about it and
we encourage it. There’s pressure that we bring on other countries that they
should be following our template. That’s not useful. We should be talking about
the rules-based order and asking amongst ourselves the view of common nations
and common concerns about how we can work together to highlight where actions
are deviating from those norms.”