WSJ: the Pentagon intends to regularly patrol the South China sea
NEW YORK, September 2. /TASS/. The U.S. Department of defense has established a schedule of regular patrolling of the South China sea in order to develop a more consistent position on the territorial claims of China.
This was reported on Friday on its website the American newspaper the Wall Street Journal, citing its own sources in the Pentagon.
According to them, the Pacific command of the U.S. armed forces (PAK) prepared a plan providing for the conduct in the South China sea patrol operations two to three times in the coming months. This approach allows you to arrange regular patrols in the waters, in fact it can be used by Washington as a counterargument to the accusations of Beijing, alleging destabilization and provocation with each new appearance of American warships.
The sources, however, refused to disclose when and in which square such patrols is expected to begin.
Beijing for several decades, leads the dispute with regional countries over territorial jurisdiction of a number of Islands in the South China sea, offshore of which discovered substantial reserves of hydrocarbons. We are talking primarily about the Xisha archipelago (Paracel Islands), Nansha Islands (Spratly Islands) and Huangyan (Scarborough reef). In an argument in varying degrees, involved Vietnam, Brunei, Malaysia and the Philippines. Since late 2013, Beijing is pursuing in the South China sea large-scale hydraulic engineering and construction work on the construction of artificial Islands as well as the expansion and development of these territories.