Sailors onboard the Royal Australian Navy ship HMAS Arunta looking at the People's Liberation Army-Navy (PLA-N) Fuchi-class replenishment vessel and Weishanhu Jiangkai-class frigate Hengyang in the Tasman Sea. Photo: AFP / Australian Defence Force
Analysis: 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.
And this country has signed up to do even more.
China's ships did live firing in the Tasman Sea last week.
Last year, the 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".
The New Zealand Navy also sent a ship to the huge RIMPAC exercise in June, that China called an allied "bloc confrontation".
The 29 nations took part in sinking a big old US navy ship off Hawaii using experimental weapons.
These various 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 $17 billion '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.
The various moves pre-date Donald Trump taking office, and he has not laid any playbook for the Indo-Pacific.
Both sides are adding fire power ... New Zealand has joined.
Both sides are adding firepower to the fight on many fronts, including the Chinese through a naval ship-building industry estimated to have over 200 times more capacity than the US.
The US navy chart shows the ship-building capacity of the US and China. Photo: Supplied/US Navy
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 cyberwarfare 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, since a top priority is keeping its military technology interoperable with Australia's.
The three AUKUS partners have said they would test AI in anti-submarine warfare, this includes using sub-hunting P-8A Poseidons. Like its allies, New Zealand now has Poseidons.
NZDF observers have begun going 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 last 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.
US soldiers with the Skydio X2D war drone during an exercise. Photo: US Army/Thomas Dixon
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, which 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 number one threat, and New Zealand's largest trading partner.
China hit out over the RIMPAC, the world's biggest ever naval exercise, off Hawaii last 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.
A US destroyer fires a missile during Valiant Shield 2022. Photo: Supplied/US Navy
Around the same time NZDF sent 10 personnel along 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.
The New York Times at the weekend reported: "China is flexing its military muscle in the region to show that it will not wait for the Trump administration to decide how hard it wants to counter Beijing."
Earlier, an Australian spy boss had said the Chinese task force in the Tasman Sea appeared "designed to be provocative".
China, while responding that its navy posed no threat, also said we can expect more to steam down this way in future.
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