China has been accused of being provocative by sending warships into the Tasman Sea, but on the other hand, New Zealand plays its part in US moves that provoke Beijing.
Last year, the New Zealand Defence Force (NZDF) was part of the US-led Valiant Shield exercise that did live firing of experimental systems in strategically important seas south of Japan.
Washington said the aim was to project “precise, lethal and overwhelming multi-axis, multi-domain effects”.
A US Navy chart showing the shipbuilding capacities of the US and China. Photo / US Navy
These joint naval exercises have the express aim, according to the Pentagon, of “deterring China [and] building a more lethal force”.
The joint exercises, with a $2 billion budget, have now been put under the Pentagon’s new $17b Pacific Deterrence Initiative.
New Zealand is also signed up to joint ground exercises.
The deterrence initiative includes a 13-country group set up last year to boost America’s military industrial base around the Indo-Pacific in a “regional sustainment” framework.
US soldiers with a Skydio X2D drone during an exercise. Photo / US Army
New Zealand has joined the group.
Both sides are adding firepower to the fight on many fronts, including the Chinese through a naval shipbuilding industry estimated to have over 200 times more capacity than the US.
A clearly alarmed US is becoming only more intent on bolstering advanced and conventional forces and using the allies to help do this – at least in the Indo-Pacific it has prioritised for several years, underscoring that with last month’s pullback from security in Europe.
The Indo-Pacific moves encompass nascent cyber warfare joint operations New Zealand is linked to through Five Eyes.
The moves extend into emerging technologies the Trump administration is a fan of, such as drones.
On that front, the science-tech wings of the NZDF and its traditional allies are collaborating more and more. This reflects how the US-UK-Australia Aukus axis will affect New Zealand, even if it does not join Aukus Pillar Two, because a top priority is keeping its military technology interoperable with Australia’s.
A US destroyer fires a missile during Valiant Shield 2022. Photo / US Navy
The three Aukus partners have said they would test AI in anti-submarine warfare; this includes using sub-hunting P-8A Poseidon aircraft. Like its allies, New Zealand now has Poseidons.
NZDF observers have gone to US-led exercises that test weaponised drones, such as at Autonomous Warrior, in Australia in late 2023 and the GIDE exercises in the US.
The Pacific Deterrence Initiative is part of a US national defence industrial implementation plan revealed in October.
The plan includes Replicator, a $900m US project sparked by the Ukraine war to prepare fleets of thousands of drones for the Pacific combat theatre.
The US defence industrial implementation plan has six “urgent and cross-cutting” measures, two centred specifically on America’s allies: the Pacific Deterrence Initiative and Allied and Partner Industrial Collaboration, which envisages setting up “allied ... development, production and advanced manufacturing projects”.
New Zealand is not noted as a priority partner for this.
US congressional reports instead talk of “co-development/co-production of priority systems” and “broader industrial engagement with allies and partners (particularly Australia and the Nordic countries)”.
New Zealand did attend the first meeting of the Partnership for Indo-Pacific Industrial Resilience five months ago.
And while the Defence Force told Parliament in December it would have to cut back on engagements with allies to save money, defence led the way – out of all public agencies – on capital spending in the latest Treasury update.
Its investment spending in the three months to October 2024 was $304m, well above second-placed health on $240m and education on $212m. It has a huge backlog of poor housing to deal with that will compete with Budget 2025 funding on combat systems.
On each front of the new Pacific deterrence initiative, the countries involved are bound to run up against China – what the Pentagon calls “its pacing challenge”, meaning No 1 threat, and New Zealand’s largest trading partner.
China hit out over the Rimpac, the world’s biggest naval exercise so far, off Hawaii in June.
“The real purpose of Rimpac is not to keep the Asia-Pacific peaceful and stable, but to coerce other nations to join the US-led clique and serve its geostrategic agenda of suppressing its rivals in the bloc confrontation,” an opinion piece in China Military Online said.
About the same time, NZDF sent 10 personnel to exercise Valiant Shield, as China and Russia were running joint drills in the contested South China Sea.
Valiant Shield tested prototype firing technologies that aimed “to close the kill chain” and involved US Space Command.
“Kill chains” and “kill webs” commonly refer to rapid remote targeting of missiles, drones or other weapons using satellites.
As late as 2016, the US was still inviting China to big naval exercises, in the hope that Beijing “might stop its militarisation of the South China Sea and realise that engaging in great power competition was futile”.
But in 2019, it introduced a law to prohibit China’s participation in Pacific Rim naval exercises of any kind.
