Aerial photos taken by the US Navy show just how close a US Navy ship came to colliding with a Chinese warship that had challenged the US vessel's presence in the South China Sea. The guided-missile destroyer USS Decatur was performing a "freedom of navigation" operation on Sunday, sailing close to Chinese-claimed reefs in the Spratly Islands, when it was approached by a Chinese destroyer, the Lanzhou.
The US Navy said in a statement Monday that the two ships came within 45 yards (41 meters) of each other, as the Chinese warship "conducted a series of increasingly aggressive maneuvers accompanied by warnings for the Decatur to depart the area." The two ships could have been seconds away from a collision, said Carl Schuster, a former US Navy captain with 12 years at sea who looked at the photos at the request of CNN.
