According to a recent Navy Times article, at a National Security Council meeting on 18 March, National Security Advisor Susan Rice ‘imposed a gag order on military leaders over the disputed South China Sea’. Its alleged aim was to “give Presidents Obama and Xi Jinping ‘maximum political maneuvering space’…during the Global Nuclear Summit,” held earlier this month. Yet, the White House’s broader reason for muzzling its top brass — which Navy Times sources claim has happened before — was apparently to ‘tamp down on rhetoric from [Admiral Harry] Harris and other military leaders,’ which the administration believes has at times ‘crossed the line into baiting the Chinese into hard-line positions’.

Whether an actual gag order was issued is a moot point. Still, the incident is symptomatic of divergent policy preferences on the South China Sea that have been brewing between the White House and US Pacific Command since early 2015. The two sides favour opposing, if equally understandable, approaches to dealing with China’s creeping strategic expansion. At its core, their debate turns on how muscular and public America’s military, strategic, and diplomatic push-back should be. Both sides arguably have some merit and their approaches may be usefully combined to deter militarisation.

http://www.lowyinterpreter.org/post/2016/04/18/South-China-Sea-Reconciling-Washingtons-policy-debate-with-effective-responses.aspx