Inside the U.S. Coast Guard’s Aleutian encounter with China’s military — and what it means

It turned out the Kimball was in hot pursuit of four Chinese ships, including a destroyer and a guided-missile cruiser.

When the Coast Guard cutter intercepted the Chinese vessels, someone onboard called out on Channel 16, the international frequency used for urgent safety and distress messages.

“This is the China Navy Task Group,” they said, according to a Coast Guard account shared with a member of Alaska’s congressional delegation. “I noticed you are close to us; please maintain safe distance to avoid collision.”

The Kimball and an American HC-130 Hercules plane shadowed the Chinese vessels for more than 12 hours as they transited the Aleutians, at one point warning them of “unprofessional” behavior after detecting a “possible drone,” according to the Coast Guard account.

The weekend events, publicly disclosed in a Wednesday press release by the Coast Guard, were the latest in a series of U.S. encounters with Russian and Chinese vessels in the Aleutians and the Bering Sea in the past few years.

Experts say they expect to see more such incidents as nations angle for advantage in the increasingly ice-free Arctic region — and as China and Russia probe U.S. military infrastructure that could figure into a conflict over Taiwan or other areas of the Pacific.

“The tilt to the Pacific is real — and the tilt to the Pacific that affects Alaskans is real,” said Mead Treadwell, a former Alaska lieutenant governor who’s worked in Arctic policy and business for decades. “You can say it’s tensions, or you can say it’s a fact of life.”

The Coast Guard initially released a short statement to Northern Journal saying the agency was aware of the Chinese vessels and that they “operated in accordance with international rules and norms.”

In its subsequent press release, the Coast Guard said the Chinese group was moving through international waters within America’s “exclusive economic zone” — an area that extends 200 miles offshore in which the U.S. maintains sole rights to natural resources like fish.

The vessels’ stated purpose, the release said, was “freedom of navigation operations” — an assertion of navigational rights and freedoms that the U.S. also makes in disputed waters close to China.

“We met presence with presence to ensure there were no disruptions to U.S. interests in the maritime environment around Alaska,” the release quoted Rear Adm. Megan Dean, the Coast Guard’s Alaska district commander, as saying.

While the Coast Guard appeared to downplay the incident, it left some local Aleutian officials unsettled — along with participants in the fishing industry.

“There’s great concern from this community,” said Vince Tutiakoff Sr., mayor of the Aleutian fishing hub of Unalaska, some 200 miles east of where the Chinese vessels were spotted. “We’re going to see more and more of this unless there is a presence. When are they going to get active military, Navy, out here in Unalaska and west to make sure that our fishing fleet is safe?”

Officials with the fishing companies whose factory vessels observed the Chinese ships shared details of the encounter but declined to be identified, citing the event’s political sensitivity. Brent Paine, who leads an industry trade group called United Catcher Boats, described a “pucker factor” for fishing crews that run into foreign military vessels.

Paine recounted a 2020 incident where U.S. fishing boats in the Bering Sea were ordered out of an area by a flotilla of Russian military vessels conducting large-scale drills, with a submarine and dozens of warships and planes.

Last year, 11 Russian and Chinese vessels conducted a joint patrol near the Aleutians, with U.S. destroyers and sub-hunting aircraft trailing them.

“People are nervous,” Paine said. “We just want to know that the U.S. government is very well aware that these ships are there — and it would be nice to know, if they know, why they’re there.”

That question — why Chinese and Russian assets are increasingly traveling through the Aleutians and the Bering Sea — is on the minds of other observers, too, including Treadwell, the former lieutenant governor.

“Are they simply flying the flag here, because we fly the flag there?” Treadwell said, referring to U.S. naval exercises near China. “Are they preparing, learning what our response would be if they came in?”

In a phone interview, Republican U.S. Sen. Dan Sullivan said he thinks the Chinese activity fits into the broader context of the increasing importance of the Arctic “for resources, for fisheries, for transportation routes for energy.”

Last summer, experts said they observed increasing Russian oil cargos being shipped to China through the Bering Strait, a trend they described as a result of the war in Ukraine and increasingly ice-free conditions in Arctic waters.

Sullivan said he’s pushing the military to more quickly share information to the public when foreign assets appear off Alaska and to respond with their own ships and aircraft more swiftly and firmly — in the same way they would if Chinese or Russian vessels showed up off the East Coast.

Dispatching the Kimball and the HC-130 Hercules last weekend, Sullivan added, was a “decent response.” But he also described how he continued to push for a stronger Arctic military presence in a meeting with a top Coast Guard official this week.

“The Arctic is really strategic territory,” he said. “And we need the same assets and responses that you’d get if this were off Boston or New York City.”