Maritime Security

Restoring America’s Maritime Dominance in the Western Hemisphere

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By Bruce Stubbs

I. Introduction

The United States should designate the U.S. Coast Guard as its lead agency for maritime security in the Western Hemisphere. In military command and control terminology, this would make the Coast Guard the “supported” service with all other armed services and federal agencies as “supporting” services. Such a designation would reverse the customary approach for the Navy to lead at sea, but this reversal is long overdue.

Restoring America’s maritime dominance in the Western Hemisphere aligns with the 2025 National Security Strategy and the 2026 National Defense Strategy.1 The former directs a reconsideration of the U.S. military presence in the Western Hemisphere. It specifically calls for “a more suitable Coast Guard and Navy presence to control sea lanes, to thwart illegal and other unwanted migration, to reduce human and drug trafficking, and to control key transit routes in a crisis.”2 The latter declares that “the U.S. military’s foremost priority is to defend the U.S. Homeland” through securing the U.S. border, countering narco-terrorists, and securing key terrain.3

These two strategic documents frame their guidance for the entire Western Hemisphere to reflect what the strategies describe as a renewed emphasis on limiting external influence in regional affairs. Their specific objectives and tasks, however, are primarily oriented toward operations in U.S. Homeland Seas. This term is used here to refer to the four maritime approaches to the United States, the Arctic, Caribbean, Eastern Pacific, and Western Atlantic. This commentary examines the structural and operational impediments that impair fully achieving these national policies. It also explains why a more suitable maritime presence in the U.S. Homeland Seas must begin with the U.S. Coast Guard.

Of note, presence itself is not a mission. Presence is no more than the geographic location on the globe where the Navy conducts its five core functions. The term, “maritime dominance,” is used to refer to the sustained ability to monitor, control, and enforce law and sovereignty across the U.S. Homeland Seas, vice naval superiority over a peer competitor. The article advances two arguments. First, maritime security in the Western Hemisphere is fundamentally a persistence problem, not a warfighting problem. Second, and more consequentially, the Coast Guard should be the supported service for the mission and lead its command architecture.

II. The Security Challenges of the Western Hemisphere and the U.S. Homeland Seas

Although the two national strategies employ different terminology, both state similar objectives: secure the U.S. maritime approaches, suppress illicit activity, protect U.S. borders, and ensure control of critical sea lanes during a crisis. Notably, these objectives predominantly emphasize maritime security vice military force, except for the control of key transit routes. Threats to these strategies’ objectives fall into two distinct categories that require different operational responses.

The first category consists of external military threats principally posed by China, Russia, and their state-linked actors. In practice, however, these threats manifest only intermittently in the Western Hemisphere. Consider the June 2024 deployment of the Russian Yasen-M-class nuclear-powered attack submarine Kazan (K-561) to the Caribbean. Armed with Zircon hypersonic and Kalibr cruise missiles, it illustrates the operational character of this threat category.4 To address this category of threats, the Navy’s principal mission in the Hemisphere is Homeland Defense including deterrence against external military aggression and strategic coercion.5 Because such adversary activities are episodic rather than persistent, the Navy does not maintain a continuous at-sea operational presence across the U.S. Homeland Seas. Indeed, U.S. Fourth Fleet has no permanently assigned forces and primarily functions as a coordinating headquarters. Its area of responsibility encompasses the Caribbean Sea and the waters surrounding South America.

The second category consists of persistent maritime security threats within the Homeland Seas themselves. These include illegal migration, narcotics trafficking, illegal fishing, transnational criminal activity, and other illicit uses of the maritime domain. These activities undermine U.S. sovereignty, border security, and regional stability. To address this category of threats, the Coast Guard conducts continuous homeland security centered on maritime security activities to deter and defeat non-military threats.6 The Coast Guard is a unique service, both an armed force and a federal law enforcement agency. As the Acting Secretary of the Navy Hung Cao stated before the House Armed Services Committee in May 2026, “Border security is national security.”7 This formulation explicitly links maritime security operations in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific to the defense of the U.S. border and the protection of the American homeland.

Broadly speaking, the Navy employs high-end warfighting assets to deter infrequent military threats, whereas the Coast Guard employs maritime security-oriented forces and legal authorities to counter persistent maritime security threats. This distinction does not mean the Navy never conducts maritime security operations or that the Coast Guard does not contribute to military missions. Rather, it reflects the focus and operational specialization of each service. The Coast Guard’s comparatively affordable platforms, law enforcement authorities, and persistent presence make it the most operationally suitable maritime force for day-to-day security operations throughout the Hemisphere. Consistent with these differing missions, the Navy and Coast Guard maintain separate command-and-control structures for operations at sea.

III. Background: Operation Southern Spear

In August 2025, the Joint Force began Operation Southern Spear to detect, disrupt, and degrade transnational criminal and illicit maritime networks in the Western Hemisphere.8 The operation served purposes beyond counter-narcotics. It provided the coercive maritime presence that shaped conditions for the subsequent capture of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro in January 2026. Southern Spear was complemented by Operation Absolute Resolve, which extended homeland defense and maritime interdiction operations across the Western Hemisphere. That effort reflected the broader operationalization of the Navy’s homeland defense, counter-narcotics, and regional maritime security missions in the approaches to the United States.9 

The administration designated major Latin American drug cartels as Foreign Terrorist Organizations, declared a Non-International Armed Conflict, and authorized military force, including kinetic strikes against narco-terrorist vessels at sea.10 In their September 2025 report, “Going to War with the Cartels: The Military Implications,” Mark Cancian and Chris Park, analysts at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, assessed Southern Spear. They noted that at its peak, the operation concentrated 38 percent of all Navy ships underway in the Caribbean. That force included the USS Gerald R. Ford Carrier Strike Group, the USS Iwo Jima Amphibious Ready Group, multiple guided-missile destroyers and cruisers, and a Littoral Combat Ship.11 MQ-9 Reapers operating from Puerto Rico and AC-130J gunships operating from El Salvador conducted lethal strikes against cartel maritime targets.12 By March 2026, the Defense Department reported a 30 percent reduction in drug vessel movements in the Caribbean and 25 percent reduction in the Eastern Pacific.13

Southern Spear demonstrated both the effectiveness and the limits of the existing architecture. It produced measurable results against cartel maritime networks. It also exposed the strategic costs of relying upon high-end naval combatants and improvised command structures for a mission that never ends.

IV. The Structural and Operational Impediments

Several significant structural and operational impediments exist that inhibit a more suitable U.S. maritime presence in the Western Hemisphere and U.S. Homeland Seas.

Impediment 1: Force Structure, A Navy Mismatch and a Coast Guard Insufficiency

The Navy’s existing force structure is optimized primarily for high-end deterrence and warfighting missions against peer and near-peer adversaries rather than for sustained maritime security operations in the Western Hemisphere. Carrier strike groups, amphibious ready groups, and guided missile destroyers can perform maritime security missions, but they were designed principally for power projection, sea control, and expeditionary warfare. In December 2025, defense analyst Peter Singer estimated that the U.S. forces committed to Southern Spear cost at least seven times the annual revenue of the cartels they were targeting. They cost thousands of times more than the value of the individual speedboats being destroyed.14 Cancian and Park reached a similar conclusion, describing the operation as “swatting flies with golden hammers” but the “long-term military solution is to beef up the Coast Guard” rather than relying upon scarce fleet combatants.15 The Chief of Naval Operations (CNO), Admiral Daryl Caudle, agreed and stated in March 2026, “I don’t need the carrier to do maritime interdiction. I want to reserve the carrier for power projection and deterrence in the theaters that really need that capability.”16

The Coast Guard’s insufficiency crisis is not a separate problem from the persistence argument. It is what a persistent requirement looks like when it is chronically underfunded. Persistence cannot be surged. It must be built, crewed, and sustained years ahead of need, which is precisely what decades of episodic funding failed to do. The Coast Guard has a force structure optimized for maritime security operations. But it has historically lacked sufficient capacity to achieve a decisive operational tipping point against non-military threats. The Coast Guard’s own fleet mix analysis concluded that its planned fleet would provide only 61 percent of the cutters required to fully execute statutory missions.17 Acting Commandant of the U.S. Coast Guard Kevin Lunday stated in April 2025, “When a National Security Cutter pulls into port, we do a controlled parts exchange, which is a fancy term for cannibalizing our readiness. No ship gets underway without stripping another for parts. You can only cannibalize your readiness for so long in that downward death spiral and that’s where we’re at.”18 Three major cutters had been laid up because the service lacked sufficient enlisted personnel to crew them. In the following month, Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem bluntly stated in Force Design 2028 that the service, “can no longer reliably protect the American people and our Homeland,” is “less ready than at any time since the end of World War II,” and is “fragile, in crisis, and on a path to failure without sustained investment.”19

Congress and the President heard the Coast Guard’s distress call. In July 2025 the reconciliation act provided the Coast Guard a one-time appropriation of $24.6 billion.20 This was its largest single investment in the service’s history. This act funded 17 new icebreakers, 21 new cutters, over 40 helicopters, and six C-130J aircraft through fiscal year 2029. Next came the Coast Guard Authorization Act of 2025 which authorized end strength growth to 60,000 personnel by fiscal year 2028.21 These investments were precedent-setting and halted the Coast Guard’s immediate decline. But ships take years to build, and trained, experienced personnel cannot be generated overnight. The Offshore Patrol Cutter program remains years late and billions over budget.22 The capability gap documented in 2025 will not close before the end of this decade, and the command architecture deficiencies that money alone cannot fix will remain unresolved.23

The Coast Guard’s major cutter recapitalization programs illustrate the scale of the problem. The Offshore Patrol Cutter program, the service’s highest acquisition priority, replaces aging 210-foot and 270-foot medium-endurance cutters. It remains years behind schedule and billions over budget following shipyard failures, production delays, and contract restructuring. The Polar Security Cutter program has experienced similar delays. Those delays are slowing the recapitalization of the nation’s aging icebreaker fleet at the very moment Arctic competition within the Homeland Seas is intensifying.24 These acquisition difficulties are not merely procurement problems. They directly constrain the Coast Guard’s ability to generate the persistent maritime presence the National Security Strategy now demands across the U.S. Homeland Seas.

Impediment 2: Command and Control Gap

No single commander owns the Western Hemisphere maritime security mission continuously across the spectrum spanning routine operations, crisis response, deterrence operations, and kinetic escalation. The United States does not possess a unified operational maritime security command architecture for the Western Hemisphere. Instead, maritime security, deterrence, interdiction, homeland defense, detection and monitoring, and kinetic strike operations are divided among multiple commands. Authorities overlap, geographic boundaries are inconsistent, and operational relationships shift as missions escalate. Coast Guard Atlantic Area, Pacific Area, and subordinate regional commands, formerly the district commands, maintain the only continuous maritime security operational presence across the U.S. Homeland Seas. But they are not joint maritime commanders, and their operational boundaries do not align with Navy fleet geography. Navy Second Fleet, Third Fleet, Fourth Fleet, Fleet Forces Command, and Naval Forces Northern Command have homeland defense and deterrence responsibilities, but none maintains continuous responsibility for the full maritime security mission.

As operations escalate, command relationships shift again. Southern Spear exposed the consequences of that fragmentation. The Department of Defense established Joint Task Force Southern Spear as a parallel headquarters to direct kinetic strike operations against cartel maritime targets rather than assigning the mission to an existing command. That decision was an implicit admission. No existing organization possessed the authority, operational scope, or unity of command required to execute the full Western Hemisphere maritime security mission from routine maritime security operations through theater-level deterrence and kinetic action.

Joint Interagency Task Force South (JIATF-S) illustrates both the effectiveness and limits of the current architecture.25 Built principally for detection and monitoring under 10 U.S.C. §124, it integrates intelligence, coordinates surveillance, tracks targets, and cues interdiction opportunities across multiple agencies and partner nations. What it was never designed to do is command permanently assigned maritime forces, conduct sustained maritime operations, or maintain continuous operational responsibility for the broader maritime security mission. Coast Guard cutters conducting counter-drug patrols generally remain under Atlantic Area, Pacific Area, and subordinate district command relationships rather than being assigned under JIATF-S operational control. The problem, therefore, is not JIATF-S itself. The problem is a larger maritime security architecture that relies upon coordination among multiple headquarters rather than continuous operational command accountability.

The Navy’s increasing emphasis on “coordinated deterrence” within the Homeland Seas reflects the operational reality. Maritime security, deterrence, intelligence integration, and interdiction activities are now deeply interconnected across multiple commands and agencies.26 That framing, however, implicitly acknowledges the fragmentation the current architecture produces. Southern Spear demonstrated that coordination mechanisms, however well-intentioned, remain insufficient substitutes for continuous operational command accountability when missions escalate from routine interdiction into theater-level deterrence and kinetic action.

Impediment 3: Coast Guard Kinetic Limitations

The Coast Guard remains highly effective in interdiction, boarding, and law-enforcement operations at sea and the use of disabling fires. But it does not possess the organic capability to conduct independent lethal kinetic strikes against maritime surface targets.27 Its aviation assets are designed for surveillance, pursuit, and disabling fire, not deliberate target destruction. Likewise, major cutters are not configured to integrate within joint kill chains involving MQ-9 Reapers, AC-130J gunships, or other theater strike assets employed for destructive kinetic effects. Southern Spear demonstrated that once operations escalated from maritime interdiction into deliberate lethal strikes against narco-terrorist vessels, the Coast Guard could not independently execute lethal strike operations.

More fundamentally, Coast Guard force structure, training pipelines, legal authorities, and operational culture are oriented toward maritime security, law enforcement, and maritime governance rather than sustained offensive strike operations. This approach allows the Coast Guard to “capture and interrogate cartel members, collect evidence, and prepare case packages for criminal prosecution.”28 When operations require destructive kinetic effects, escalation dominance, or politically sensitive lethal force employment, those capabilities reside within the Department of Defense. The establishment of Joint Task Force Southern Spear under a three-star joint commander to oversee kinetic strike operations against cartel maritime targets reflected the operational and institutional sensitivity surrounding those missions. This is a limitation of the Coast Guard’s design, not a shortfall to be corrected. It is the reason the command architecture must be able to draw Navy strike authority on demand, the requirement taken up in Recommendation 3.

V. Implications

Implication 1: Why a More Suitable Maritime Presence in the Western Hemisphere Starts with the U.S. Coast Guard

Since the end of the Cold War, Russian nuclear-powered submarines have deployed into the Caribbean and off the U.S. East Coast. Combined Chinese-Russian surface action groups have operated near Alaska and within the U.S. Exclusive Economic Zone.29 Chinese naval vessels have repeatedly transited near the Aleutian Islands, while Russian intelligence collection ships have operated near Hawaii and critical U.S. undersea infrastructure.30 These operations are strategically significant and require credible Navy deterrence and response capability. Yet they remain episodic rather than continuous. They appear periodically as demonstrations of military power, strategic signaling, intelligence collection, or geopolitical coercion rather than as a permanent daily maritime presence challenge.

The operational response to many of these incidents also revealed a broader institutional reality. In numerous cases, the first American surface asset to detect, monitor, shadow, or respond to Russian and Chinese naval activity near U.S. waters was not a Navy ship but a Coast Guard cutter. Coast Guard cutters such as Kimball (WMSL-756), Stratton (WMSL-752), and Healy (WAGB-20) routinely encountered and monitored foreign naval vessels. They did so because the Coast Guard already maintains the persistent day-to-day maritime presence across the U.S. Homeland Seas.31 The Navy retains the indispensable role for deterrence, escalation dominance, and high-end warfighting against military threats. But the persistence requirement in the Western Hemisphere is fundamentally different. Beyond episodic Russian and Chinese naval deployments, the United States still confronts constant maritime security threats on a daily basis. These threats involve narcotics trafficking, illegal migration, sanctions evasion, illegal fishing, criminal organizations, and sovereignty enforcement. The Navy responds episodically to military threats. The Coast Guard operates continuously against persistent maritime security threats. That enduring operational reality is why the National Security Strategy’s call for a more suitable maritime presence in the Western Hemisphere must start with the U.S. Coast Guard.

Implication 2: Persistent Maritime Security Is the Wrong Mission for High-End Naval Combatants

As discussed above, the Navy portion for a more suitable presence is episodic rather than persistent. It does not generate a continuous daily warfighting presence requirement across the Homeland Seas. The persistent operational requirement in the Western Hemisphere is maritime security against narcotics trafficking, illegal migration, sanctions evasion, illegal fishing, criminal organizations, and sovereignty violations. That requirement exists every day regardless of whether Russian or Chinese naval forces are operating nearby.

Caudle’s May 2026 posture testimony before the House Armed Services Committee reinforced this distinction. He emphasized the Navy’s contribution through domain awareness, coordinated deterrence, advanced surveillance, and maritime interdiction support.32 The operational activities he described — detection, monitoring, and interdiction augmentation — are enabling and supporting functions appropriate to the Navy’s episodic role. They are not an argument for continuous fleet-centric naval presence across the Homeland Seas. Caudle’s own framing of Homeland Defense operations implicitly recognizes that the Western Hemisphere mission is fundamentally a persistent maritime security campaign requiring selective naval augmentation rather than permanent high-end naval concentration.

The Navy’s force structure is not the economical or sustainable instrument for that persistent maritime security mission. Carrier strike groups, amphibious ready groups, cruisers, and destroyers can conduct maritime security operations effectively, but they were designed principally for deterrence and high-end warfighting against state adversaries. Using them for routine maritime security patrols imposes substantial operational and opportunity cost while degrading readiness for the high-end missions only the Navy can perform. The Ford Carrier Strike Group departed for operations against Iran before the counter-narcotics mission was complete. The maritime security requirement outlasted the availability of the Navy forces assigned to execute it.33 Persistent maritime security is not a surge requirement. It is a standing operational requirement, one that high-end naval combatants are too scarce and too expensive to sustain indefinitely.

The Navy also lacks the legal authorities the mission requires. In a recent year 59 percent of Coast Guard drug interdictions relied on bilateral agreements that Navy crews cannot invoke and Navy ships cannot execute.34 That limitation is one of legal authority, not capability. The power to board, search, seize, and arrest on the high seas belongs to the Coast Guard by statute (14 U.S.C. § 89). The Posse Comitatus Act bars Department of Defense personnel from exercising it. When a Navy warship conducts a counter-narcotics boarding, it does so only because a Coast Guard Law Enforcement Detachment is embarked for that purpose (10 U.S.C. § 279). The boarding proceeds under Coast Guard authority and command. Navy personnel may take part only in support, and only under that command. The arrangement proves rather than refutes the point. The Navy can surveil, track, intercept, and escort, but it cannot independently execute the law-enforcement core of the maritime security mission. To board, search, seize, and arrest, it must embark Coast Guard personnel and operate under Coast Guard authority.

The Navy’s institutional culture and force-structure history reinforce the same conclusion. As Admiral Michael Mullen, the CNO, stated in 2006, “Your Navy remains first and foremost a warfighting, seagoing service.”35 That orientation is correct and necessary, but it is precisely why the persistent maritime security mission should not compete for the Navy’s scarce high-end capacity. Furthermore, that institutional orientation has repeatedly transformed lower-end maritime security platforms into increasingly expensive fleet combatants optimized for warfighting missions. The Littoral Combat Ship proved operationally constrained and insufficiently survivable. The Constellation-class frigate evolved toward a smaller version of a Burke-class destroyer. It steadily lost the affordability and operational simplicity that originally justified the program. Secretary of the Navy John Phelan canceled the Constellation-class frigate and decided to base the Navy’s replacement frigate on the Coast Guard’s Legend-class hull. That choice reflected a broader institutional reality. The Navy will prioritize warfighting capability over persistent maritime security optimization, because warfighting is its core institutional purpose.36 The Western Hemisphere’s enduring maritime security requirement therefore starts with the Coast Guard, while the Navy remains the indispensable but episodic instrument for deterrence and combat operations against military threats.

Cancian and Park in their report concluded that Coast Guard cutters are better suited, much cheaper while “Navy destroyers have systems and capabilities for a great power conflict … are useless for counter-drug operations.”37 They produced Table 1 to compare the Navy’s Arleigh Burke-class destroyer with the Coast Guard’s National Security Cutter and proposed Offshore Patrol Cutter. The table graphically shows this mismatch.

Table 1: Comparison of a Destroyer and Coast Guard Cutters

Used with permission: Mark F. Cancian and Chris H. Park, “Going to War with the Cartels: The Military Implications,” 8 September 2025, Center for Strategic and International Studies.

The comparison shows that the Coast Guard’s cutters deliver greater persistence and lower operating cost while giving up only capabilities unnecessary for most maritime security missions.

Implication 3: Coordination Is Not Command

The Western Hemisphere maritime security mission distributes responsibility across multiple commands, but accountability is not centralized anywhere. No single commander owns the mission continuously across routine maritime security operations, crisis response, deterrence operations, and kinetic escalation. Instead, the United States relies upon a system of overlapping service authorities, interagency coordination mechanisms, shifting operational relationships, and temporary task forces that function adequately during routine interdiction operations but become increasingly fragmented as missions expand in scale, complexity, or violence.

Southern Spear exposed the operational consequences of that architecture. Once operations expanded beyond detection, monitoring, and law enforcement interdiction into theater-level deterrence and kinetic strike operations, existing command relationships proved insufficient. The Department of Defense established Joint Task Force Southern Spear as a parallel headquarters rather than assigning the mission to an existing standing command. That decision revealed three related deficiencies in the current architecture.

The first is assignment. Western Hemisphere maritime security is a continuous responsibility, but no document assigns it continuously to any commander. The Unified Command Plan distributes elements of the mission across geographic and functional commands without making any one commander accountable for the whole. A mission treated as a finite operation will require a new headquarters each time it escalates, and that headquarters will begin its work without the relationships, the authorities, and the practiced habits of a command that has owned the mission all along.

The second is authority. A task force established for a defined operation receives the authorities required for, but limited to, the operation, based on the way the mission is stated. Western Hemisphere maritime security requires statutory law enforcement authority on any given day, and that authority resides in the Coast Guard rather than in a joint task force assembled for a campaign of finite duration.

The third is command relationships. The task organization relied on support relationships among headquarters that retained their own priorities and their own chains of command, an arrangement adequate for coordinating routine interdiction but insufficient for operations that combine law enforcement, deterrence, and kinetic strike. Those operations require tactical control or operational control over assigned forces, exercised by a commander accountable for the outcome.

Together these three deficiencies reveal the requirement for a continuously accountable operational maritime command structure capable of integrating maritime security, deterrence, and kinetic operations across the full spectrum of competition, crisis, and conflict.

Maritime security in the Western Hemisphere is not an episodic contingency mission but a continuous operational requirement spanning all four U.S. Homeland Seas. Those threats evolve from routine law enforcement problems into strategic security challenges with little warning. A command architecture built primarily around coordination rather than continuous operational accountability risks fragmentation precisely when unity of command becomes most important.

VI. Recommendations

Recommendation 1: Sustain the Investment in Coast Guard Maritime Security Capacity

This first recommendation is not a call to spend more. It is a call to fund persistence the way persistence must be funded, as a permanent and predictable commitment rather than a one-time rescue. A persistent mission financed by episodic appropriations will always decay between crises. The $24.6 billion reconciliation appropriation signed in July 2025 and the Coast Guard Authorization Act of 2025 represent the most significant investment in the service’s history. They are a long overdue recognition that decades of chronic underfunding had driven the Coast Guard to the lowest point of readiness since World War II. The investment is substantial and has altered the Coast Guard’s trajectory. But one-time mandatory spending is not a sustained shipbuilding program. Shipyards cannot expand production capacity, train skilled workforces, or invest in facilities on the basis of a single appropriation. The Coast Guard’s Offshore Patrol Cutter program is already years late and billions over budget. That delay reflects the stop-and-start funding history that reconciliation money alone does not correct.

In 2026 the Coast Guard (and the Navy) need a modern version of the famous Vinson-Trammell Act of 1934. That act built the Navy that won the Second World War and accomplished a lot more. The Act was built on three profound shipbuilding policies that would prevent today’s Coast Guard and Navy from lurching from one shipbuilding crisis to another.38 First, the United States must build and maintain a fleet of modern cutters and combatants sustained through a continuous replacement schedule that prevents block obsolescence. Second, sufficient replacement programs must be financed from year to year to maintain continuous force generation and lower costs through repetitive construction. Third, the sequencing establishes maritime security and warfighting requirements first, and affordability is considered only afterward. If the budget does not support the requirements, then the selected means for the mission must change. This does not mean these three policies alone define the Coast Guard and Navy’s force structures. Naval War College professor Anand Toprani has noted that “political and budgetary realities played an equal role as strategic imperatives in shaping the size of the U.S. Navy.”39 In his research, Toprani concluded that “resource constraints are never absent from decisions about the size and composition of the military even in wartime.”40 The intent of these three policies is to ensure in the final analysis that if the budget does not support the strategy, then either the means or the ends must change. The abandonment of these three shipbuilding policies after the Cold War produced the slow-motion crisis whose full consequences Southern Spear made visible. Restoring them requires Congress to treat the Coast Guard and the Navy recapitalization not as a supplemental emergency measure but as a permanent annual commitment embedded in their base budget.

Congress should therefore sustain and expand the Fiscal Year 2027 budget request’s $2.1 billion increase for the Coast Guard as a floor, not a ceiling.41 The Offshore Patrol Cutter program, Polar Security Cutter program, and Arctic Security Cutter program, along with the cutter workforce and aviation fleet, should be funded at levels sufficient to sustain persistent maritime security operations across the U.S. Homeland Seas on a continuous basis. The objective is not merely to address the current crisis through a single appropriation, but to prevent the recurrence of similar readiness and recapitalization failures in the future.

Recommendation 2: Reserve High-End Naval Combatants for Warfighting and Deterrence

Persistent maritime security in the Western Hemisphere should not be sustained primarily with high-end naval combatants optimized for major warfighting against state adversaries. Carrier strike groups, amphibious ready groups, cruisers, and destroyers can execute maritime security missions. But Southern Spear demonstrated the substantial strategic and operational costs of using scarce fleet combatants for a mission that is continuous rather than episodic. Every high-end naval combatant assigned to routine maritime security patrols in the Caribbean or Eastern Pacific is one less asset available for deterrence and warfighting missions elsewhere.

The Navy should therefore remain the force employed episodically for deterrence and combat operations against military threats in the Western Hemisphere, while the Coast Guard provides the persistent maritime security presence against non-military threats. Navy forces should support Coast Guard-led maritime security operations when military capability, escalation management, or destructive kinetic force is required, not substitute routinely for the continuous maritime presence mission itself.

The Navy’s force structure experience over the past two decades reinforces the same lesson. As Implication 2 described, the Navy’s own force-structure history with the Littoral Combat Ship, the Constellation-class frigate, and ultimately a future frigate based on the Coast Guard’s Legend-class hull shows how persistently the service converts affordable presence platforms into expensive combatants.

But Southern Spear demonstrated that no Navy force structure solution should be expected to absorb a mission better matched to the Coast Guard. None of this diminishes the Navy’s role in the Western Hemisphere, but, instead clarifies it. The Navy remains the indispensable instrument for deterrence, escalation dominance, and combat against military threats that no other service can perform. This is an argument about the mission assigned to each service, and the persistent mission is not the Navy’s.

Recommendation 3: Establish Continuous Maritime Command Accountability

The United States requires a standing maritime security command structure with continuous accountability across the U.S. Homeland Seas rather than fragmented coordination among multiple headquarters. The current architecture distributes maritime security, deterrence, interdiction, homeland defense, detection and monitoring, and kinetic strike operations across overlapping commands with shifting authorities and inconsistent geographic boundaries. That structure can coordinate routine operations adequately, but Southern Spear demonstrated that it becomes increasingly fragmented as missions escalate from law enforcement interdiction into theater-level deterrence and kinetic operations.

The future maritime security command and control architecture for the Western Hemisphere should draw upon the relevant lessons demonstrated by the Cold War Maritime Defense Zones and Joint Interagency Task Force South.42 Those lessons show that continuous maritime security operations require enduring joint command relationships operating under unified operational accountability. Joint Interagency Task Force South already integrates intelligence, surveillance, detection and monitoring, interdiction coordination, interagency participation, and multinational cooperation under Coast Guard leadership. Southern Spear demonstrated that the next requirement is to extend those principles beyond detection and monitoring into a standing maritime security command structure. That structure would integrate maritime security operations, deterrence support, and escalation management across the Homeland Seas. The objective is not to create another temporary task force or additional coordinating headquarters. It is to establish continuous operational accountability for a mission that now spans a spectrum of routine maritime security operations, crisis response, deterrence activities, and kinetic escalation.

Several designs could deliver that accountability: a strengthened JIATF-S elevated to a standing operational command; a Western Hemisphere maritime component commander; reestablished Maritime Defense Zones adapted to current geography; or a dual-hatted Navy–Coast Guard commander. This commentary does not prescribe a final structure, but the controlling principle should narrow the field. Because the mission is persistent and law-enforcement-centric for all but episodic intervals, the standing command should be Coast Guard-led, with Navy forces placed under its tactical control or operational control when military capability or escalation management is required. How that command aligns with existing combatant commands, numbered fleets, and Coast Guard Areas is a joint force-management question. But the alignment should follow the persistence of the mission rather than the convenience of existing fleet geography.

This recommendation deliberately reverses a long-standing assumption that U.S. maritime commands in the Western Hemisphere should be Navy-led.  The Coast Guard must lead this command for reasons that already exist in fact rather than aspiration. It alone holds the statutory law enforcement authority that the Western Hemisphere mission requires every day. It already maintains the only continuous operational presence across the Homeland Seas through its Atlantic Area, Pacific Area, and regional commands. It operates the nation’s only icebreakers, which means polar maritime dominance runs through the Coast Guard and no other service. And through the National Fleet Policy, signed in 1998, the Coast Guard and Navy have spent decades deliberately building common command, control, and communications systems. They built those systems precisely so that their forces can integrate when the mission demands it. The supported-supporting relationship recommended here does not invent a new partnership. It merely proposes to formalize one the Coast Guard and Navy have practiced for a generation, and it assigns the lead to the service that already owns the persistent mission, the authorities, and the continuous presence the mission requires.

VII. Conclusion

The 2025 National Security Strategy calls for a more suitable Coast Guard and Navy presence in the Western Hemisphere. The 2026 National Defense Strategy states plainly that the U.S. military’s foremost priority is to defend the homeland. That priority includes defending America’s interests throughout the Western Hemisphere. Together they establish a clear strategic direction to build the maritime forces and command structure capable of executing this mission permanently rather than improvising it episodically.

The Southern Spear campaign tested the existing architecture and found it wanting. The operation disrupted cartel maritime networks and demonstrated the value of integrated maritime, intelligence, and kinetic operations. It also exposed the costs of relying upon high-end naval combatants for missions requiring persistent maritime security presence, law enforcement authorities, regional partnerships, and long-duration operational endurance.

The campaign reinforced a broader institutional reality visible throughout American maritime history. The Navy is optimized for deterrence, warfighting, and preparation for major conflict against state adversaries. The Coast Guard is optimized for persistent maritime presence across the U.S. Homeland Seas. It achieves that presence through a combination of military authority, law enforcement authority, partner engagement, and sustained offshore operations. Southern Spear demonstrated that the mission requires each service to perform the role it was institutionally designed to execute.

When Coast Guard boarding teams enforce sanctions against Russian and Venezuelan oil tankers in the Eastern Atlantic, they are not merely conducting inspections but executing American strategic policy. When Coast Guard icebreakers operate in the Arctic, they are not merely breaking ice but asserting U.S. sovereignty against Russian and Chinese expansion. When Coast Guard cutters enforce fishing laws across the 4.38 million square miles of the U.S. exclusive economic zone, they are not merely protecting fish stocks but defending sovereign American resources against foreign poaching fleets operating inside the Homeland Seas. When Coast Guard cutters conduct naval diplomacy throughout the Caribbean, they are not merely training counterparts but strengthening U.S. influence and regional partnerships in ways no high-end Navy destroyer can replicate. This is what a more suitable maritime presence looks like. This is why it starts with the Coast Guard.

Restoring America’s maritime dominance requires resourcing the Coast Guard as America’s persistent maritime security instrument, preserving the Navy’s high-end warfighting capacity for global deterrence, and organizing both services within a permanent maritime security architecture suited to the operational realities of the Western Hemisphere. Achieving that objective requires removing the structural and operational impediments Southern Spear exposed.

Bruce Stubbs had assignments on the staffs of the secretary of the Navy and the chief of naval operations from 2009 to 2022 as a member of the U.S. Senior Executive Service. He was a former director of Strategy and Strategic Concepts in the N3N5 and N7 directorates. As a career U.S. Coast Guard officer, he had a posting as the assistant commandant for capability in Headquarters, served on the staff of the National Security Council, taught at the Naval War College, commanded a major cutter, and served a combat tour with the U.S. Navy in Vietnam during the 1972 Easter Offensive.

Notes

1. President Donald J. Trump, Executive Order 14269, “Restoring America’s Maritime Dominance,” 9 April 2025.

2. U.S. Department of State, National Security Strategy of the United States of America, White House, 4 December 2025.

3. U.S. Department of Defense, 2026 National Defense Strategy, Washington, D.C., 23 January 2026.

4. Sam LaGrone, “Russian Nuclear Sub, Frigate with Long Range Land Attack Missiles Operating Off East Coast,” USNI News, 11 June 2024.  

5. The definition of homeland defense is: “The military protection of United States sovereignty and territory against external threats and aggression or, as directed by the President, other threats.” Office of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, DoD Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms, The Joint Staff, June 2025, page 78. The definition of deterrence provided by: GEN David H. Berger, USMC; ADM Michael M. Gilday, USN; and ADM Karl L. Schultz, USCG, Naval Doctrine Publication 1: Naval Warfare (NDP-1), April 2020.

6. The definition of homeland security is: “A concerted national effort to prevent terrorist attacks within the United States and to reduce our vulnerability to terrorism, major disasters, and other emergencies.” Office of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, DoD Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms, The Joint Staff, June 2025, page 78. The definition of maritime security provided by: GEN David H. Berger, USMC; ADM Michael M. Gilday, USN; and ADM Karl L. Schultz, USCG, Naval Doctrine Publication 1: Naval Warfare (NDP-1), April 2020.

7. Hung Cao, Acting Secretary of the Navy, Statement on the Department of the Navy Posture Before the House Armed Services Committee, 14 May 2026.

8. Diana Roy, “The U.S. Military Campaign Targeting Venezuela and Nicolás Maduro: What to Know,” Council on Foreign Relations, 3 January 2026.

9. Admiral Daryl L. Caudle, U.S. Navy, Chief of Naval Operations, Statement on the Posture of the United States Navy Before the House Armed Services Committee, 14 May 2026.

10. Diana Roy, “The U.S. Military Campaign Targeting Venezuela and Nicolás Maduro: What to Know,” Council on Foreign Relations, 3 January 2026.

11. Mark F. Cancian and Chris H. Park, “Going to War with the Cartels: The Military Implications,” Critical Questions, Center for Strategic and International Studies, 8 September 2025.

12. Howard Altman, “CV-22B Osprey, MC-130J Commando II Special Ops Aircraft Deploy To Puerto Rico,” The War Zone, 23 December 2025.

13. Heather Mongilio, “U.S. Forces Strike Suspected Narco Boat in the Eastern Pacific,” USNI News, 20 March 2026.

14. Peter W. Singer, “Sinking Speedboats With a Supercarrier: The Lopsided Cost of Operation Southern Spear,” Defense One, 7 December  2025.

15. Cancian and Park, “Going to War with the Cartels: The Military Implications,”8 September 2025.

16. Lee Willett, “CNO: New Surface Ship Classes Reflect US Navy’s New Force Structure and Global Output Needs,” Naval News, 12 March 2026.

17. Heather MacLeod, Director, Homeland Security and Justice, Government Accountability Office, Statement on the Coast Guard: Actions Needed to Address Challenges that Hinder Maritime Security Operations Before the Subcommittee on Transportation and Maritime Security, Committee on Homeland Security, House of Representatives, GAO-26-108901, 3 February 2026.

18. Sam LaGrone, “Reconciliation Bill Calls for $14.6B in Coast Guard Cutters, New Arctic Icebreakers,” USNI News, 29 April 2025. “The supplemental is more than the Fiscal Year 2025 Coast Guard budget request of $13.8 billion and more than 10 times the cutter budget of $1 billion in current budget proposal. The new cutters are part of an overall $22.5 billion supplemental to the Coast Guard’s bottom line that also includes $3 billon for new aircraft and billions more for shoreside infrastructure, according to the bill. If ratified, the Coast Guard has 90 days to submit a proposal with timelines for deliveries.”

19. Kristi Noem, Secretary of Homeland Security, Force Design 2028, Introduction, Executive Report, Department of Homeland Security, Released 28 May 2025.  

20. U.S. Coast Guard Headquarters, Press Release, “U.S. Coast Guard Receives Historic Investment to Rebuild Under President Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill,” 4 July 2025. [Budget Reconciliation Act of 2025 (H.R. 1)].

21. H.R. 4275: 119th Congress: Coast Guard Authorization Act of 2025.

22. Caitlyn Burchett, “Eastern Shipbuilding Halts Work on Coast Guard Cutter Program, Cites Financial Strain and Program Conditions,” USNI News, 18 November 2025. United States Government Accountability Office Report to the Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure, House of Representatives November 2025 Offshore Patrol Cutter Coast Guard Should Gain Key Knowledge Before Buying More Ships GAO-26-107583.

23. United States Government Accountability Office, Report to the Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure, House of Representatives, June 2023, “Coast Guard Acquisitions: Offshore Patrol Cutter Program Needs to Mature Technology and Design,” Revised on August 1, 2023 to reflect shipbuilder’s correct percentage construction completion as of October 2022. Correction is on report page 37. GAO-23-105805

24. Nick Blenkey, “GAO Looks at What’s Gone Wrong With the Coast Guard’s OPC and PSC Programs, MarineLog, 31 July 2023.

25. Joint Interagency Task Force (JIATF) was started on February 22, 1989, under President Ronald Reagan’s administration as part of its anti-drug enforcement policy. Specifically, the U.S. Department of Defense was tasked to establish a joint task force (JTF) to conduct detection and monitoring operations to support law enforcement disruptions of cocaine and marijuana trafficking in the Caribbean, thereby preventing these drugs from reaching the United States. The joint interagency task force model was established in 1994 to strengthen collaborations among federal and international partners. As a result, the task force in Key West – then known as JTF-4 – was renamed JIATF East. JIATF South, which was originally located in Panamá, was merged into JIATF East in Key West in 1999. The name was changed to Joint Interagency Task Force South (JIATF-South) in 2003. Its mission, in conjunction with Partner Nations, leverages all-domain capabilities to target, detect and monitor illicit drug trafficking in the air and maritime domains, within the Joint Operating Area, facilitating interdiction and apprehension to reduce the flow of drugs and degrade & dismantle Transnational Criminal Organizations.

26. Caudle, Statement on the Posture of the United States Navy Before the House Armed Services Committee, 14 May 2026.

27. Stephen Smith, “U.S. Coast Guard Offloads $63 Million of Cocaine After Shootout at Sea Sinks Suspected Drug Smuggling Boat and Crew,” CBS News, 7 June 2024.

28. Cancian and Park, “Going to War with the Cartels: The Military Implications,”8 September 2025.

29. Dzirhan Mahadzir, “Russian, Chinese Warships Operated Near Alaska, Say Senators,” USNI News, 6 August 2023.

30. Nathaniel Herz, “Inside the U.S. Coast Guard’s Aleutian Encounter With China’s military — and What It Means,” Northern Journal, 12 July 2024, and Barbara Starr and Oren Liebermann, “US Coast Guard Monitoring Russian Military Vessel Near Hawaii, CNN, 15 January 2022.

31. “Chinese Warships Spotted off Alaska Coast, US Coast Guard Says,” The Guardian, 11 July 2024. “U.S. Coast Guard Watching Uptick in Russian, Chinese Navy Activity Near Alaska, Reuters, 27 September 2024. Rana Foroohar, “10 Days with the US Coast Guard on the New Arctic Front Lines,” Financial Times Magazine, 8 February 2025.    

32. Caudle, Statement on the Posture of the United States Navy Before the House Armed Services Committee, 14 May 2026.

33. Sam LaGrone, “Carrier Ford’s Extension to the Middle East Could Break Recent Deployment Records, USNI News, 13 February 2026.  

34. United States Government Accountability Office, Report to Congressional Requesters, “Coast Guard Actions Needed to Improve Maritime Interdictions,” GAO-26-107440, January 2026.

35. Michael G. Mullen, Admiral, U.S. Navy, Chief of Naval Operations, Opening Statement, Before Subcommittee of the Committee on Appropriations, U.S. Senate, Department of Defense Appropriations for Fiscal Year 2007, 15 March 2006.

36. Sam LaGrone, “Navy Cancels Constellation-class Frigate Program, Considering New Small Surface Combatants, USNI News, 25 November 2025.

37. Cancian and Park, “Going to War with the Cartels: The Military Implications,”8 September 2025.

38. Charles F. Elliott, “The Genesis of the Modern Navy,” USNI Proceedings, Vol. 92/3/757, March 1966.

39. Anand Toprani, “Was the 600-Ship Navy a Chimera? Budgets, Force Structure, and the Political Realities Behind Reagan-Era Naval Strategy,” Journal of Strategic Studies, June 24, 2024, p. 3.

40. Anand Toprani, “Was the 600-Ship Navy a Chimera? Budgets, Force Structure, and the Political Realities Behind Reagan-Era Naval Strategy,” p. 8.

41. Stew Magnuson, “SEA-AIR-SPACE NEWS: Best of Times, Worst of Times for Coast Guard Budget,” National Defense, 22 April 2026.

42. James R. Boma, “Troubled Waters Off the Land of the Morning Calm: A Job for the Fleet,” Naval War College Review, Vol. 42 No. 2, 1989.

Featured image: Crew members aboard the U.S. Coast Guard Cutter Munro, a 418-foot national security cutter, and its small boat transit the Gulf of Mexico, Feb. 12, 2017. (U.S. Coast Guard photo by Seaman Courtney Fussell)

Drones/Unmanned

The Arsenal of Autonomy: Why Taiwan Must Learn from Ukraine’s Drone Defense Before It’s Too Late

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By Joseph Hanacek and Josh Richards

Building the Airborne Asymmetry

In the predawn hours of June 1, 2025, a revolution in warfighting unfolded across Russia’s western airfields. Nearly 3,000 miles from the Ukrainian frontlines, Kyiv launched Operation Spiderweb, a coordinated strike of hundreds of weaponized drones aimed at five Russian air bases.1 The machines were rudimentary: off-the-shelf frames, improvised explosives, and batteries scavenged from consumer supply chains. But their impact was profound. In a single night, Russia lost more than a third of its nuclear-capable bomber fleet and was forced to reassess its employment of aircraft and air defenses. The cost equation was stunning: a few hundred dollars per drone against losses in the hundreds of millions.2

But beyond economics and impact, the operation revealed something deeper: a new standard of warfare. Airpower is no longer the exclusive preserve of modern combat jets and expensive precision-guided munitions. Cheap, expendable drones can now achieve strategic effects once possible only with state-of-the-art weapons and delivery platforms.3

This lesson is not theoretical for Taiwan. Facing the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) overwhelming numerical, technological, and financial superiority, Taipei must ensure that future conflict will not be decided by who has more missiles, aircraft carriers, or advanced fighter squadrons, but rather by who can field, sustain, and adapt vast numbers of unmanned systems. Taiwan has the geography, the talent, and the industrial base to win this race. Whether they can scale up quickly enough is going to depend on how decisively they can pivot to embracing drones as a core element of their national strategy.

Taiwan’s Awakening

Taiwan recognizes the stakes and, notionally, they are heading in the right direction. The government has pledged to procure almost 50,000 drones over the next three years and to scale up to 180,000 units annually by 2028.4 The ambition is bold, but reality lags. Taiwan currently produces only 8,000–10,000 drones annually, far short of its 2028 goal.5 Moreover, there are important distinctions to be made with regards to the type, size and capacity of the drones being built, and the intended roles in which Taiwan plans to employ them. Whether those drones serve predominantly as supporting tools to more conventional weapons, or more directly as weapons themselves, presents a critical question.

Retired General Lee Hsi-ming, former Chief of the General Staff, has been a persistent critic of this imbalance, saying, “We are still spending too much money on conventional projects,” he told Politico. “What Taiwan needs is a large quantity of low-cost attack drones. If you have enough of them, it would be a big headache to China.”6

Legislator Kuan-ting Chen, who heads Taiwan’s Ukraine Parliamentary Friendship Association, has voiced a similar sentiment: “Spending wisely, like Ukraine has done with cheaper drones to counter the first line of attack, is a lesson Taiwan can learn. We are trying to reverse the situation, that they [China] have the quantity we don’t.”7

Both men capture the essence of Taiwan’s dilemma: the island has the technological sophistication and political awareness to recognize the importance of drones, but its defense establishment remains tethered to legacy platforms and procurement habits that undercut speed, scale, and flexibility.

In order to get drone production on track, Taiwan must establish a drone production industry designed around its unique defensive requirements, drawing on hard-learned lessons from the war in Ukraine and strengthened through partnerships with trusted international partners. To succeed, this effort cannot remain a niche initiative—it must be embraced as a pillar of Taiwan’s national strategy and identity, woven into both its defense doctrine and its broader sense of collective resilience.

Why Drones Matter for Taiwan’s Defense

Taiwan lies in the constant shadow of China’s expansionist ambitions. China’s key advantage is in scale. Its navy is the largest in the world, its missile arsenal vast, and its air force is modernizing at speed. Taiwan cannot match the PLA platform for platform, but drones invert the logic of numbers.8

Imagine a PLA amphibious fleet attempting to cross the Strait. Taiwanese sea drones prowl the shallows, striking troop transports. FPV drones dive onto armored vehicles at staging points. Loitering munitions suppress radars, blinding air defenses. Each system is expendable, but together they impose prohibitive costs and slow momentum. Every day gained allows U.S. and allied forces more time to respond.

This is the essence of asymmetric defense: not parity, but denial. Taiwan cannot outbuild the PRC’s navy, but it can make the Strait a drone battlefield, where every ship, runway, and depot is vulnerable to swarming attacks.9

While China is certainly not unaware of the capacity drones have to thwart their military aims, they are potentially quite limited in their ability to negate them. Electromagnetic and Cyber Warfare offer good opportunities to counter drone employment, but those attack vectors can be mitigated by creative system design and operational employment.

And while China is itself capable of fielding enormous numbers of drones, the tyranny of distance and the nature of offensive and amphibious operations work to its disadvantage. To carry a 10-pound payload across the 100+ mile Taiwan strait would generally require a more expensive gas-powered drone of several hundred pounds, and it would be tasked with finding hidden targets while confronted with a fuel constrained timeline and while. exposed to adversary defenses. Meanwhile, a 10-pound payload launched from a hidden position on Taiwan could be carried by a lightweight lithium battery powered drone, and the target it seeks to find will be in the open and likely ill-equipped to target small, agile drones.

Ukraine’s Lessons: The Drone as Ammunition

Ukraine’s experience provides both inspiration and warning. On the positive side, the war has shown that drones can radically shift the battlefield balance. Small FPV drones have struck tanks, artillery, and command posts far behind frontlines.10 Swarms of loitering munitions have overwhelmed air defenses. Civilian “maker” communities have become integral to military innovation, turning hobbyist know-how into combat capability.11

Two observations are critical.

First, losses in Ukraine of UAVs and loitering munitions are high. But so are the returns in terms of disruption. A $200 FPV drone destroyed dozens of times can still deliver asymmetrical impact against expensive infrastructure. Traditional platforms, by contrast, demand high maintenance, long lead times, and are easier to target once their intelligence and flight path are known.

Second, unmanned systems allow for actions in ambiguous zones: surveillance in peacetime or below war-threshold, small strikes, sabotage, counter-aircraft harassment. They erode distance and amplify risk to forward bases, ports, and airfields. For Taiwan, island geography, proximity, and the nature of cross-Strait clashes mean that drones (air, surface, and underwater) promise a force multiplier in deterrence and defense alike.

Electronic warfare has also proven decisive. Russian jamming and GPS spoofing forced Ukraine to innovate rapidly, developing AI-enabled drones capable of navigating and targeting autonomously.12 Taiwan must assume the PLA will employ similar tactics from the outset of any conflict. Its drones must be hardened against interference, with redundant navigation systems, encrypted communications, and fallback autonomy.

Important as well is the demonstrated psychological power of drones. Soldiers under constant drone surveillance, aware that an FPV strike could arrive at any moment, lose morale.13 This effect is asymmetric: a cheap drone imposes not just physical loss, but causes psychological costs far greater than its price tag.

Perhaps most important to Taiwan however, are the lessons Ukraine has revealed about the costs of delay. The staggering loss rates of thousands of drones each month means drones must be treated less like weapons platforms and more like ammunition.14 Stockpiles, not prototypes, win wars. Procurement must resemble shell production, with drones flowing off assembly lines in industrial quantities.

Production Bottlenecks: Supply Chain and Assembly

The manufacturing supply chain is Taiwan’s most pressing vulnerability endangering their required levels of drone production. While the island dominates global semiconductor manufacturing, it is less self-sufficient in the lower-margin but equally vital components. Thermal imaging units, GPS modules, secure communications chips, and high-performance magnets are often imported; some are still assembled in mainland China, undermining Taipei’s policy of “China-free” systems.15

Defense Minister Wellington Koo has promised stricter controls, but when Taiwan finds alternatives from trusted partners, costs rise sharply and export controls from Washington add friction.16 While critical to ensuring quality in higher end drones, those stricter controls create certification bottlenecks. Each drone must be verified as compliant with “China-free” requirements, a process that is expensive and slow.17 The problem is expounded by export controls of the United States and its allies which, though aimed at denying advanced technologies to Beijing, sometimes ensnare Taiwan as well, complicating Taiwan’s efforts to acquire subsystems or export finished drones.18

If Taipei can solve the supply chain headaches, the next bottleneck comes in the form of scaling production from 10,000 to 180,000 annually, which will require a massive industrial mobilization. Taiwan’s drone industry is fragmented among small firms, many innovative but undercapitalized. Companies like Thunder Tiger and GEOSAT produce capable systems. Yet without major investment in automation and workforce training, scaling will be impossible.19 New factories must be built, automation introduced, and a workforce trained at scale. The government has allocated $125 million to seed this effort, but the magnitude of the challenge far exceeds the initial outlay.20

Breaking the Supply Bottleneck: Selectivity and Innovative Partnerships

Getting the right components into the hands of Taiwan’s workers will require narrowing production to the most critical drone types and forging innovative partnerships. The first step in overcoming supply bottlenecks is ensuring that the parts being sourced are those most urgently needed. While Taiwan is currently investing in a wide array of drone systems to prepare for near-term conflict, not all of these platforms will deliver equal value on the battlefield. Larger UAVs with longer flight times and greater payload capacity are helpful in peacetime, during grey-zone operations, and in earliest stages of conflict, but their larger logistical and operating footprints make them unlikely to survive against Chinese air force and rocket force attacks. Meanwhile, FPV drones and other similar smaller platforms that Ukraine has been using to great effect for the past several years are far more survivable and materials to build them can be far more easily resourced.

By focusing on producing innovative FPV and other small and easily dispersible drones, Taiwan can reduce the administrative and logistical challenges currently hampering drone production while also ensuring that their main efforts are spent building the drones that will make the largest difference in a fight and thus carry the highest deterrent value against future conflict.

This focused effort also opens the door to closer partnerships with two critical countries. First, the United States, which is already heavily invested in Taiwan’s security and whose credibility in Asia depends on helping partners defend themselves affordably, not just through the deployment of billion-dollar jets and destroyers.21 The United States, which through its Replicator program is in the process of scaling up its own ability to produce large numbers of a wide variety of drones, should focus on partnering with Taiwan in three areas:

Investment and Co-Production. U.S. firms should invest directly in Taiwanese factories, ensuring secure “China-free” supply chains.

Technology Transfer and Training. Sharing software, swarm algorithms, and secure comms protocols.

Procurement Integration. Allowing Taiwan’s drone makers to access U.S. defense supply chains, driving down unit costs through volume.

These areas each constitute a massive degree of coordination, and to achieve it across the entire spectrum of drone system development is nearly impossible. Partnerships focused on micro drones and other niche drone platforms best suited for the defense of Taiwan presents an opportunity to focus U.S. collaboration on where it is most needed. The process of establishing this relationship will then set the groundwork for future collaboration on larger drones more optimized for gray zone operations.

The next key partnership for Taiwan is with Ukraine. Ukraine’s military has pioneered FPV tactics, swarm operations, and decentralized production under fire. Taiwan, by contrast, brings industrial sophistication and financial resources. Together, they could define the next generation of drone warfare.22

A formal partnership, including joint training, doctrinal exchanges, co-development projects, and establishing redundant common supply chains, would accelerate Taiwan’s learning curve while strengthening its political alignment with Europe’s frontline state.23 Symbolically, it would link two democracies facing existential threats from authoritarian giants. Practically, it would provide Taiwan with battle-tested innovations before they are needed.24

Breaking the Capacity Bottleneck: The Cultural Challenge

Scaling up production requires a whole-of-society approach. Taiwan must mobilize its formidable electronics sector, its universities, its active duty and reserve military forces, and even its maker communities. It must treat drones not as boutique projects for ambitious tech startups, but as national industrial essentials every bit as critical as semiconductors.

The most difficult transformation may not be industrial but cultural. Taiwan’s military establishment remains attached to legacy platforms: frigates, submarines, and fighter jets.25 These are not irrelevant, but they are not survivable in a full-fledged war against China and cannot substitute for drones’ deterrent value.

As General Lee insists, Taiwan must rebalance procurement: a small number of advanced drones, complemented by massed, low-cost strike systems. This will require political courage to redirect budgets, military openness to doctrinal change, and societal engagement to harness private innovation.

Taiwanese Active Duty and Reserve forces should be put to work learning to build, program, deploy, and operate new drone systems. Such employment would pay dividends to ensure not only production targets are met, but also that the military forces are familiar with maintaining and employing their equipment in the event they are called up to use it. It would also help ensure that new weapons being developed are compatible with the way that operational units intended to use them.

Civil society should be mobilized, just as it has been in Ukraine. Taiwan’s universities, tech firms, and maker communities can contribute to prototyping, piloting, cottage industry production, and maintenance. Doing so would embed resilience across society, ensuring that even if factories are struck, innovation and production continue. More importantly, success in scaling up via a whole of society approach would send a clear message to China and the world that Taiwan is willing and able to make the sacrifices necessary to defend their freedom.

Conclusion: The Clock Is Ticking

Operation Spiderweb should haunt Taiwan’s strategic imagination. It demonstrated that cheap, expendable drones can neutralize assets once considered untouchable. For Taipei, the message is urgent: the future battlespace will be saturated by unmanned systems, and deterrence will depend on numbers, resilience, and adaptability.

But ambition without follow-through is a liability. Taiwan must move from speeches and declarations toward mass production, component autonomy, doctrinal change, and tightly integrated partnerships, especially with the United States and with Ukraine.

As Defense Ministry spokesman Sun Li-fang put it: “Responding to the present enemy threat … the defense ministry is speeding up research and development and production of various drones. ”26  The question is whether Taiwan can move fast enough, before it is too late.

Joseph Hanacek is a Surface Warfare Officer in the United States Navy. He serves as a Warfare Tactics Instructor at the Surface Advanced Warfighting School detachment of the Naval Surface and Mine Warfighting Development Center in San Diego, CA. The views and opinions presented herein are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of the Department of War, the Department of the Navy, or its components.

Josh Richards is the Chief Commercial Officer of Pacific Peering. He serves on UN’s Joint Task Force on SMART Cables as a member of the Steering Committee, and chairs the Business Development Committee. He is a Security Fellow with the Truman National Security Project, a Tech Policy Fellow with the Aspen Institute, and a Senior Fellow with AI2030.

References

1. Kateryna Bondar, “How Ukraine’s Operation ‘Spider’s Web’ Redefines Asymmetric Warfare,” Center for Strategic and International Studies, June 2, 202 https://www.csis.org/analysis/how-ukraines-spider-web-operation-redefines-asymmetric-warfare

2. The War Zone, Thomas Newdick, “What Ukraine’s Unprecedented Drone Attack Means For Russia’s Bomber Force,” June 2, 2025, https://www.twz.com/air/what-ukraines-unprecedented-drone-attack-means-for-russian-bomber-force

3. Al Jazeera, “In China’s shadow, Taiwan is building a drone army to repel an invasion,” July 31, 2025, https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/7/31/in-chinas-shadow-taiwan-is-building-a-drone-army-to-repel-an-invasion

4. Justin Ling, “Taiwan Is Rushing to Make Its Own Drones Before It’s Too Late,” Wired, June 23, 2025, https://www.wired.com/story/taiwans-rush-to-make-its-own-drones-before-its-too-late/

5. “Drones for Democracy: U.S.-Taiwan Cooperation in Building a Resilient and China-Free UAV Supply Chain,” Research Institute for Democracy, Society, and Emerging Technology (DSET), 2025, https://dset.tw/en/publication-en/36416/

6. Jonathan Eyal and Mark Thompson, interview with Gen. Lee Hsi-ming, Politico, 2025; see also “Taiwan is too slow learning from Ukraine war, ex-top commander says,” Politico Europe, June 2025, https://www.politico.eu/article/taiwan-ukraine-china-leehsi-ming-ex-top-commander-says/

7. Kuan-ting Chen, public remarks at Taiwan-Ukraine Parliamentary Friendship events, 2025; coverage in Euronews and local Taiwan press. See: “Why lessons from drone warfare in Ukraine could be key to defending Taiwan against China,” Euronews, June 2025, https://www.euronews.com/next/2025/06/06/why-lessons-from-drone-warfare-in-ukraine-could-be-key-to-defending-taiwan-against-china

8. On sea drones and littoral denial, see: Marcus Weisgerber, “Unmanned Surface Vessels and Littoral Warfare,” Defense One, 2024–25; and RSIS analyses on Taiwan’s littoral approaches.

9. Policy speeches and parliamentary testimony by Kuan-ting Chen, 2025 public record; see local press coverage: Focus Taiwan, Taipei Times.

10. Stijn Mitzer and Jakub Janovsky, “FPV and Loitering Munitions in Ukraine: Tactics and Effects,” The Soufan Center / IntelBrief, June 2025, https://thesoufancenter.org/intelbrief-2025-june-11/

11. Kateryna Bondar, “How Ukraine Rebuilt Its Military Acquisition System Around Commercial Technology,” CSIS, January 13, 2025 https://www.csis.org/analysis/how-ukraine-rebuilt-its-military-acquisition-system-around-commercial-technology

12. Colin Demarest, “Electronic Warfare in Ukraine Has Lessons for US Weapons, Navigation,” C4ISRNET, May 6, 2024 https://www.c4isrnet.com/electronic-warfare/2024/05/06/electronic-warfare-in-ukraine-has-lessons-for-us-weapons-navigation/

13. The Economist, “The economic lessons from Ukraine’s spectacular drone success,” June 2025. https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2025/06/12/the-economic-lessons-from-ukraines-spectacular-drone-success

14. South China Morning Post, “Treat drones like bullets: Taiwan seeks 50,000 UAVs over two years,” 2025 reporting on procurement plans, https://www.scmp.com/news/china/military/article/3322406/treat-drones-bullets-taiwan-seeks-50000-new-uavs-over-two-years-boost-defences

15. Chris Buckley and Amy Chang Chien, “Taiwan and U.S. Work to Counter China’s Drone Dominance,” New York Times, September 25, 2024 https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/25/world/asia/us-taiwan-drones-china.html

16. Congressional Research Service, “AUKUS Pillar 2: Background and Issues for Congress,” June 20, 2023 https://www.everycrsreport.com/reports/R47599.html

17. Soumaya Keynes and Chris Miller, “Transcript: Who Is Winning the Chip Wars? With Chris Miller,” Financial Times, August 26, 2024 https://www.ft.com/content/42bde830-ad35-4b3a-b13b-03390aceee25?syn-25a6b1a6=1

18. Justin Ling, “Taiwan Is Rushing to Make Its Own Drones Before It’s Too Late,” Wired, June 23, 2025 https://www.wired.com/story/taiwans-rush-to-make-its-own-drones-before-its-too-late/

19. Peter Dickinson, “Outgunned Ukraine Bets on Drones as Russian Invasion Enters Third Year,” Atlantic Council, February 21, 2024 https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/ukrainealert/outgunned-ukraine-bets-on-drones-as-russian-invasion-enters-third-year/

20. DSET, “Drones for Democracy: U.S.-Taiwan Cooperation in Building a Resilient and China-Free UAV Supply Chain,” June 16, 2025 https://dset.tw/en/research/drones-for-democracy-the-strategic-imperative-for-u-s-taiwan-uav-cooperation/

21. James M. Acton, “Optimal Deterrence,” Council on Foreign Relations, June 17, 2025 https://www.cfr.org/reports/optimal-deterrence

22. Congressional Research Service, “AUKUS Pillar 2: Background and Issues for Congress,” June 20, 2023 https://www.everycrsreport.com/reports/R47599.html

23. DSET source: “Drones for Democracy,” June 16, 2025 https://dset.tw/en/research/drones-for-democracy-the-strategic-imperative-for-u-s-taiwan-uav-cooperation/

24. Kevin Pollpeter, Tsun-Kai Tsai, and April Herlevi, “Taiwan Lessons Learned from the Russia-Ukraine War,” CNA, November 2024 https://www.cna.org/reports/2024/12/Taiwan-Lessons-Learned-from-the-Russia-Ukraine-War.pdf

25. Budgetary discussions and constraints: Taiwan’s defense budget reporting, Ministry of Finance and MOFA releases, 2024–25.

26. Taiwan to Accelerate Military Drone Development, Taking Into Account Lessons from Ukraine War.” The Japan Times, February 7, 2023 https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2023/02/07/asia-pacific/taiwan-drone-development-ukraine-war/

Featured image: A display at the Taiwan Excellence Drone International Business Opportunities Alliance (TEDIBOA) in Taichung on 9 June 2026. (Wikimedia Commons)

Asia-Pacific

The Insurance Trigger: Sovereign Guarantees and Commercial Lawfare as Deterrence Against a Chinese Quarantine of Taiwan

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By Meng Kit Tang

Markets Close Before Missiles Fire

Tanker traffic in the Persian Gulf fell from 138 transits to fewer than eight within days of insurers withdrawing war-risk coverage in 2026. No ships were seized nor missiles were fired. Rather, the market closed the water before any navy could. That episode clarifies the problem in the Taiwan Strait more starkly than any fleet comparison. A quarantine there need not begin with interdiction. It can begin with paperwork of how a change in risk is priced and who is willing to bear it.

The strategic implication is precise. The People’s Republic of China (PRC) does not need to win command of the sea to interrupt Taiwan’s trade. It needs to make insurers hesitate. Once coverage is restricted or withdrawn, charter parties and loan covenants do the rest. Ships divert on their own.

The same mechanism that emptied the Gulf offers Beijing a fast, low-visibility path to sever Taiwan’s maritime lifelines. It also points to where deterrence must be constructed, not in missile silos or carrier decks alone, but in the ledgers and liability clauses that determine whether merchant vessels are willing to sail at all.

The Insurance Trigger: Commercial Lawfare and the Risk Cascade

A quarantine of Taiwan need not begin with gunfire. Instead, it begins with patrol patterns and the careful cultivation of doubt. The model Beijing has rehearsed relies on the appearance of lawful control rather than the application of overt force.

China Coast Guard cutters conduct “routine” inspections. Maritime militia vessels loiter in numbers that feel less like presence than occupation. The People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) remains just over the horizon, visible enough to anchor the scene but distant enough to preserve deniability. Legal ambiguity does the work that coercion would otherwise require.

From that posture, the mechanism unfolds with quiet efficiency. An inspection regime is announced under the language of safety or customs enforcement. The Joint War Committee in London, attuned to risk rather than intent, considers the Strait a Listed Area. After which, protection and indemnity clubs begin to narrow coverage, first with higher premiums, then with exclusions that matter. Charter parties and mortgage covenants, written to avoid precisely this kind of exposure, take over. Shipowners do not need to be ordered away. They withdraw because their contracts demand it, their insurers insist on it, and their lenders will not tolerate the alternative.

Traffic thins before any vessel is seized. The decisive fact is not damage sustained at sea, but risk reclassified on paper. This sequence does not require unanimity among insurers to take hold. Partial restrictions are enough. As such, a handful of major clubs tightening terms can reprice the entire route.

Shipping is a conservative business with narrow margins and strict compliance cultures. Faced with ambiguity in coverage, operators choose certainty elsewhere. Diversion becomes the rational default, not the exceptional case. The cascade is therefore less a switch than a ratchet, with each incremental tightening reinforces the next. The market reacts and moves as if a line has been crossed even when no single decision appears decisive.

Taiwan’s exposure to this dynamic is acute. Its energy system depends on a steady rhythm of liquefied natural gas (LNG) deliveries, with storage measured in days rather than months. A simple interruption to this rhythm and the problem is not only scarcity but unpredictability. Grid operators cannot plan around shipments that may or may not arrive. Industrial output and household consumption compete for a shrinking and unreliable supply. The waters around the island simultaneously carry approximately $2.45 trillion in annual commerce through surrounding sea lanes.

When confidence falters, the consequences propagate outward as quickly as they accumulate at home. Wargames suggest commercial diversion accelerates within seventy-two hours of a notional crisis, with merchant losses rising sharply before major combat and power generation falling to a fraction of normal capacity as fuel deliveries slip out of sequence.

The pattern mirrors what Chinese exercises have rehearsed without concealment. During the “Justice Mission” drills, coast guard and militia elements practiced the administrative choreography of control by issuing notices, establishing inspection routines, and shaping the legal narrative that would accompany any future operation. The rehearsal was less about fighting than about governing the terms under which others decide whether to sail.

That window between the moment risk is redefined on paper and the moment ships stop sailing is where the contest will be decided, and where preparation must already be in place.

Hormuz and Taiwan: Lessons and Limits

The record from the Iran-Iraq Tanker War offers the clearest precedent for what sovereign commitment can accomplish when insurance markets retreat. Under Operation Earnest Will, the United States did more than escort tankers. It absorbed the upper layers of risk through reflagging and sovereign backing.

By some accounts, war-risk premiums fell by more than half, and traffic returned even as Iranian attacks continued. The lesson was not about warships alone. It lay in Washington’s willingness to stand behind commercial exposure when private insurers stepped back. That willingness allowed underwriters to recalculate rather than retreat, and ships to sail that would otherwise have stayed in port.

However, tactical success at sea did not automatically restore confidence. The United States damaged Iranian assets and secured individual transits, yet broader commerce recovered only when financial risk became manageable.

The gap between naval action and commercial effect proved stubborn. This is a warning that any Taiwan scenario relying on convoy operations without addressing the insurance dimension risks repeating that failure, with escorts protecting ships that no longer wish to sail.

It should be noted that the analogy begins to fray once geography and actors come into view. The Strait of Hormuz narrows to roughly thirty-three kilometers, it is a confinement that amplifies mines, fast craft, and shore-based weapons. The Taiwan Strait spans closer to one hundred thirty kilometers at its narrowest point. That distance dilutes the immediacy of physical harassment without diluting the speed with which perceived risk propagates through insurance markets.

In the Taiwan case, diversion is likely to hinge even more purely on financial calculation than on proximity to danger, making the insurance mechanism the primary instrument, not a secondary effect.

The actors differ as well. Iranian forces and their proxies operated with limited conventional reach. The China Coast Guard functions within a system backed by a nuclear-armed state and supported by the world’s largest navy in hull count. Legal claims, domestic statutes, and coordinated messaging accompany every operational move. The stakes are categorically higher and the room for misinterpretation narrower.

The Gulf experience confirms that insurance can close a sea lane and sovereign guarantees reopen it. It does not offer a template for sailing convoys under the shadow of a major power. Any application in the Taiwan context demands more deliberate legal framing and more restrained operational posture. The mirror reflects the mechanism clearly. It distorts the setting in which that mechanism must be managed.

Taiwan’s Role: Pre-Crisis Coordination

Taiwan’s role in this problem is neither symbolic nor auxiliary. A sovereign backstop offered by Washington carries greater political weight if Taiwan is seen to bear part of the burden of keeping its own sea lanes open. That visibility need not take the form of public declarations or new institutions. Commercial shipping does not wait for governments to clarify their positions. Within days of perceived risk, vessels divert, contracts are voided, and schedules unravel. If coverage is to hold, the groundwork must already exist before the first announcement is made.

What Taiwan can do is practical and, if handled carefully, conducted without public announcement.

The first task is cultivating understandings with the insurance market itself. Discussions with Lloyd’s syndicates and the major protection and indemnity clubs can establish thresholds at which coverage tightens and the conditions under which it can be sustained. These need not be formal agreements, but a shared expectation about triggers and tolerances can slow the reflex toward withdrawal.

Alongside this, port authorities can maintain standing open-port declarations that are legally sound and routinely exercised. Shipping firms take their cues from clarity. If access conditions are known and stable, the argument that waters are unsafe becomes harder to sustain.

Closer to shore, Taiwan’s Coast Guard carries a distinct responsibility. Final-approach escorts into port can be handled by a civilian maritime service as it signals control without inviting the confrontation associated with naval deployments. This reduces the exposure of foreign naval forces in confined waters while preserving visible protection for inbound traffic.

Beyond Taiwan’s immediate approaches, pre-arranged diversion protocols with ports in Japan and the Philippines would give shipping companies alternatives that are more than theoretical. These include contracts, berth rights, and customs procedures settled in advance, when time is still available to resolve them carefully.

Taiwan cannot openly designate war-risk zones or advertise convoy frameworks without risking a response that accelerates the scenario it seeks to avoid. It is not to abandon sufficient preparation but to conduct it carefully in a register that does not provoke. Agreements can be specific, rehearsed, and ready to activate  yet remain outside public view until the moment they are needed.

Beijing’s Escalation Calculus

Beijing’s approach to a Taiwan quarantine is best understood through two escalation thresholds that define both its options and its constraints.

The first sits below the threshold of force. Public moves would draw a response that is legal, diplomatic, and informational rather than kinetic. Chinese authorities would issue counter-declarations, challenge the measures under UNCLOS, and frame them as external interference in a domestic matter. State media would amplify that framing while diplomats pressed insurers and flag registries to distance themselves. The Coast Guard would likely increase patrol tempo to signal resolve without direct confrontation.

Pre-announced sovereign guarantees are, perhaps unexpectedly, less provocative than reactive interventions during a crisis. They set clear expectations, signaling to the markets that political risk has already been accounted for and absorbed, thus eliminating the ambiguity that Beijing might seek to exploit.

The second threshold is crossed when naval escorts begin to transit the Strait, at which point Beijing’s stance becomes more rigid. Escort operations, under Chinese domestic law, can be framed as violations of sovereignty, even in international waters. The PLAN shifts from passive observation to active shadowing, probing for weaknesses while avoiding direct engagement. The Coast Guard takes on a more prominent role, with boarding attempts against escorted vessels serving as a means to test rules of engagement without escalating to a confrontation between major surface combatants.

Each encounter becomes a contest of both legal and operational authority. When a vessel halts and submits to a Coast Guard inspection under duress, it may not technically be seized, but it still challenges the integrity of the convoy framework. Doctrine must address this scenario directly, as what escorts do when a merchant captain complies under pressure is just as operationally significant as their response when force is employed.

Across both thresholds, legal warfare provides the connective tissue. The doctrine of the three warfares: legal, media, and psychological ensures operational actions are paired with arguments and sustained pressure campaigns. Beijing would contest the legitimacy of sovereign guarantees, question their compatibility with maritime law, and seek to isolate participating insurers through diplomatic channels.

The contest extends beyond the seas, unfolding in international maritime legal forums and through the flag state administrations. Washington and Taipei must therefore prepare their legal arguments in advance, grounded in the precedents of Earnest Will and the Red Sea convoy, and communicate them to governments whose neutrality will influence insurer behavior before PRC counter-narratives can take hold.

Time compresses all these choices. China’s own dependence on Taiwanese semiconductors and the exposure of regional supply chains limits how long a quarantine can be sustained before incurring costs at home. That constraint favors a rapid shock to commercial confidence rather than a drawn-out campaign. If sovereign guarantees are in place before a crisis, the mechanism Beijing seeks to exploit may never take hold.

The Sovereign Guarantee Framework

The architecture of sovereign guarantees in the Taiwan Strait is designed to preserve commercial confidence and deter coercion. Central to this system is the integration of doctrine, escort strategies, and allied logistics, ensuring that the framework operates effectively under pressure.

Doctrine: Institutionalizing Insurance-Backed Deterrence

Deterrence in the Taiwan Strait hinges on maintaining commercial confidence under pressure, making insurance a core element of operational strategy. At the heart of the system is a U.S.-led reinsurance mechanism, which pre-negotiates war-risk coverage for vessels operating under American guarantees. Commercial insurers continue to provide standard coverage, while the sovereign layer activates only when risk surpasses the private market’s capacity, preserving the current system without triggering collapse.

Vessels operating under the guarantee are publicly designated and sail within energy and humanitarian corridors, allowing insurers to reassess exposure and commanders to clarify rules of engagement. These corridors signal a deterrent by reducing perceived risks, providing legal clarity, and affirming U.S. credibility in maintaining commercial flow.

For effective deployment, this structure must be embedded in doctrine. The U.S. Seventh Fleet would establish standing procedures for insurance-backed convoy operations, including activation protocols and coordination with Lloyd’s and P&I clubs. Annual tabletop exercises at Fleet Activities Yokosuka would ensure synchronized timelines between insurance activation and operational decision-making, closing the gap between tactical escort actions and commercial confidence.

Escorts: Calibrated Presence and the Problem of Coerced Compliance

At sea, escort operations must strike a balance between visibility and restraint. An Arleigh Burke-class destroyer would provide command and defense capabilities, signaling commitment, while unmanned systems would ensure surveillance and documentation without escalating tensions. These assets shadow Coast Guard vessels, recording interactions without unnecessarily heightening the stakes.

Rules of engagement must be graduated: initial contact prompts bridge-to-bridge communication and warnings, followed by interposition and unmanned asset deployment if boarding is attempted, and defensive measures only in response to overt force.

More complex cases require equal consideration: a merchant captain who submits to a CCG boarding request under implicit pressure rather than explicit force. No shots are fired, and no legal seizure takes place, yet the integrity of the convoy is quietly and completely undermined.

This situation lies outside the scope of current rules of engagement, which address the use of force but not voluntary compliance. Doctrine must clarify the authority of escorts to intervene before compliance occurs and define the legal justification for such intervention within the corridor designation framework.

A captain who yields to subtle intimidation rather than overt coercion presents a challenge that cannot be addressed by warships or written rules of engagement alone. Failing to address this gap leaves the most critical flaw in the structure unaddressed.

Equally, de-escalation triggers matter as much as escalation authorities. A commander who knows precisely when to hold course and when to yield tactical ground without conceding strategic credibility is as operationally valuable as one who knows when to act.

Allied Integration: Logistics, Access, and Shared Credibility

Allied logistics provide the depth that makes the system credible over time. Japan offers the backbone through pre-negotiated port access and substantial throughput capacity, enabling rerouting if direct Strait transit falters. The Philippines extends reach into the southern approaches with forward sites for replenishment and support.

Shared tracking and communication protocols across U.S., Japanese, and Philippine forces reduce friction during compressed decision timelines. Taiwan’s coast guard manages final approach into port, maintaining presence without raising the profile of foreign naval forces in sensitive inner waters.

Limits of the Sovereign Guarantee Architecture

While sovereign guarantees stabilize markets, they do not eliminate the coercive capabilities of Chinese maritime forces, and pressure from these forces will persist. The value of the system lies in deterrence rather than resolution. By denying China its fastest, least costly options, the framework forces Beijing to resort to more overt measures, where costs increase, ambiguity narrows, and interference becomes harder to disguise as routine enforcement. This recalculates the escalation burden, shifting it onto the side that can least afford to bear it publicly.

Pre-Empting the Insurance Weapon

A PRC quarantine of Taiwan would not require forceful military action through the Strait to succeed. The decisive impact would come earlier, through contracts, premiums, and the subtle recalibration of risk. Once insurers withdraw, shipping follows, and the island loses access without a single exchange of fire at sea. In this scenario, the key factor is not naval vessels or missiles but confidence in coverage. This shift in focus makes the threat hard to deter through traditional naval presence alone.

The sovereign guarantee architecture directly addresses this. By absorbing risk upstream, it prevents hesitation from turning into withdrawal. Once credible backstops are in place, the insurance trigger loses its power, as the expected economic disruption no longer materializes. The mechanism fails before it activates, and Beijing’s window for rapid, decisive commercial disruption never opens.

For naval commanders and policymakers, this means preparation must start before the legal and financial framework of a quarantine becomes visible, not after commercial shipping has already made its calculations. In the Taiwan Strait, control over movement may depend less on patrol patterns than on who first convinces underwriters that uncertainty has already been priced and contained. That is the real contest… and it has already begun.

Tang Meng Kit is a Singaporean freelance analyst and commentator who works as an aerospace engineer. He graduated from the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS), NTU, Singapore in 2025.

Featured image: Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen reviews Taiwan Coast Guardsmen, September 2021. (Wikimedia Commons)

Future Tech

What a Destroyer XO Should Demand from Onboard AI in 2027

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By John Babick

The Pentagon’s artificial intelligence strategy documents promise decision advantage at scale. Defense contractors pitch predictive logistics and machine-speed targeting. The narrative is seductive… and largely irrelevant to a destroyer executive officer (XO) at sea.

At the deckplate level, the questions are fundamentally different. To the degree that an XO has time to think, the question is not “How transformative is AI?” but, “Will it work when the satellite link drops? Will my sailors trust it enough to use it, but not so much that they stop thinking for themselves? Will its absence during a high-end fight create a liability I haven’t trained for?”

These are practical, even deadly realities that determine whether a technology earns its place aboard a warship or becomes dead weight in a server rack. If artificial intelligence is to earn a place aboard surface combatants, it must be evaluated against operational reality, not against a PowerPoint brief delivered in a climate-controlled conference room. By 2027, the destroyer XO should expect onboard AI that is bounded, transparent, and resilient. They should be equally prepared for the moments when it is not.

The Environment AI Must Survive

A destroyer is a paradox. It is an austere and unforgiving operating environment that continuously produces more data than practically any other platform. Engineering systems generate continuous data streams across propulsion, electrical, and auxiliary plants, which go mostly ignored today. Combat systems fuse inputs from multiple sensors simultaneously, each with its own refresh rate, classification level, and failure modes. Administrative demands, from supply chain management to personnel qualification tracking, compete with operational demands for the crew’s every available hour. Within this data-rich environment, watch standers work under sustained fatigue, often standing six-on, six-off rotations for weeks on end.

The intuitive response is off-platform connectivity, but connectivity cannot be assumed. Even during routine steaming, communications bandwidth is finite and intermittent at best. Emissions control requirements, satellite geometry, adversary interference, and occasional equipment failure can all degrade or eliminate communications without warning. In a contested maritime environment, the very scenario the United States Navy should and is preparing to fight in, network access may be deliberately denied by the adversary for extended periods, making AI capability that depends on persistent cloud reach-back operationally irrelevant. Even without deliberate electronic interference, transmitting can be a beacon for enemy targeting. Cloud-based AI is a peacetime tool wearing a warfighting costume.

The baseline requirement is therefore unambiguous. Onboard AI must run locally, on ship-approved hardware, without external dependencies. If a system fails when the network drops, it has no place at sea. This is not some abstract aspirational standard. It is the minimum threshold for credibility in combat environments.

What Onboard AI Should Actually Do

A destroyer XO is responsible for, among other things, the standardized training of every division across the ship. By 2027, a destroyer XO should expect AI to assist the trained warfighter in all aspects of naval warfare, not as a replacement for judgment, but as a force multiplier. The most promising applications reduce friction for existing processes, freeing the crew’s cognitive bandwidth for the decisions that actually require human expertise. Applications with immediate value fall into several broad categories.

Maintenance triage. Engineering departments manage a continuous flow of discrepancies, preventive maintenance actions, and corrective work orders across complex, interdependent systems. A gas turbine engine does not fail in isolation. Rather, its degradation cascades through reduction gears, lube oil systems, and electrical generation in patterns that are difficult to track manually across thousands of maintenance entries. A mature onboard AI tool should analyze historical maintenance logs, identify recurring fault patterns before they escalate, and recommend actions based on the ship’s own operational history, not a generic baseline developed from fleet averages that may not reflect a ship’s specific material condition.

This does not displace the engineering team’s expertise. It structures information that already exists but is nearly impossible to synthesize under time pressure. The ship already has the data. AI makes the data useful. The difference between a well-maintained warship and a materially degraded one is often not a lack of information but a lack of time to process it. Critically, the tool must be transparent about its reasoning. When it flags a discrepancy as high-priority, watch standers need to understand why. They need to understand the historical pattern that drove the recommendation and how confident the model is. This is what makes an maintenance AI agent question is not a diagnostic tool. It is a black box wearing a maintenance hat.

Log and report synthesis. Warships generate an enormous quantity of written records. This includes deck logs, engineering logs, operational reports, casualty reports, and administrative correspondence, all of which accumulates daily. An effective AI assistant should compress and synthesize that data, summarize logs into concise operational briefs, flag negative trends, and cross-reference issues across departments that would otherwise remain siloed. When the combat systems officer’s maintenance trends correlate with the chief engineer’s power generation anomalies, the XO needs to see that connection without manually reading two hundred pages of logs. The value is not novelty. It is time recovery. Hours currently spent reviewing administrative records become minutes, and those recovered hours translate directly into training time, rest, or tactical planning. The caveat, as with maintenance AI, is transparency and the consequent trust: a synthesis tool that obscures the source data behind its conclusions cannot be trusted, because the XO has no way to assess whether the summary has missed something operationally significant.

Procedural recall under stress. When a flooding boundary is expanding, smoke is filling a space, or the repair locker team needs to know the location of the nearest fire main valve, cognitive load is at its highest and error tolerance is at its lowest. An AI system should rapidly surface relevant instructions and present structured guidance tied to approved technical documents. It should not generate novel doctrine on the fly. Instead, it should organize what already exists and make it accessible under pressure. The caveat here is critical: the system must draw exclusively from verified, configuration-controlled source documents. A tool that synthesizes procedures from multiple sources, or worse, generates plausible-sounding guidance from training data rather than authoritative technical manuals, introduces risk precisely when the stakes are highest. The value of procedural AI is speed and clarity, not creativity.

Distributed training support. Training time is scarce and constantly competed against by maintenance demands, watch rotations, and administrative requirements. AI can assist by generating scenario-based prompts, tracking qualification progress across divisions, and reinforcing procedural understanding between formal evolutions. A junior officer preparing for a professional knowledge board, or a damage controlman reviewing casualty procedures between drills, benefits from on-demand support that does not require pulling a senior sailor off watch. The limitation worth acknowledging is that AI-assisted training is a supplement, not a substitute, for the mentorship and direct observation that develop genuine competence. Scenario prompts can reinforce knowledge. They cannot replicate the judgment that comes from working alongside experienced petty officers over time.

The Dependency Trap

The more subtle risk of onboard AI is that sailors stop performing without it.

If the Combat Information Center (CIC) watch relies on AI-generated track correlation, if the engineering watch relies on AI-prioritized maintenance queues, if the quarterdeck watch relies on AI-drafted reports, then their absence during combat operations will create friction at exactly the wrong moment. This is not a hypothetical. It is the predictable consequence of any capability that integrates faster than the training culture adapts. Every augmentation is an amputation. History offers ample precedent. GPS navigation degraded celestial navigation skills across the fleet within a generation, and the Navy is still working to recover that competency. AI presents the same risk at greater scale and speed.

A destroyer XO must treat onboard AI as an augmentation layer, not as infrastructure. The distinction is critical. An augmentation layer improves performance when present but does not create a capability gap when absent. Infrastructure, by contrast, is load-bearing. Its removal causes structural failure. Before fielding any AI tool, the XO should ask three questions: “What manual processes exist if the system fails?”,  “Are watchstanders trained to operate independently of AI assistance?”, and “Does institutional knowledge live in the crew, or has it migrated into the tool?”

Redundancy in mechanical systems is standard practice at sea. The same logic must apply to cognitive systems. If AI becomes a silent dependency, its failure will produce operational surprise, and operational surprise is the one thing a warship cannot afford in a contested environment.

When AI Gets It Wrong

Probabilistic models generate confident outputs. They also generate confident wrong outputs. Even mission-specific, locally deployed AI systems can misinterpret data, surface misleading correlations, or fail silently in ways that are not immediately apparent. A maintenance prediction model trained on peacetime steaming patterns may produce dangerously inaccurate recommendations during high-tempo combat operations where equipment is driven well beyond normal parameters. The architecture of modern machine learning does not provide natural safeguards against this, though deliberate architectures can mitigate some risks. The real safeguard, however, is the human in the loop.

An XO should expect any onboard AI system to offer transparent reasoning pathways, traceability to source data, and clear articulation of uncertainty. A system that presents conclusions without exposing its basis is a liability, not an asset. The correct operational posture is disciplined skepticism, neither blind acceptance of AI output nor reflexive dismissal of AI insights. Watch standers should be trained not only to use AI tools, but to interrogate them. What data drove this recommendation? What is the confidence interval? What was excluded from the analysis?

That training is not optional. It is the difference between AI as a capability and AI as a vulnerability. The fleet has always understood that a tool is only as good as the sailor operating it. AI does not change that principle. It raises the stakes.

Command Authority Does Not Transfer

Artificial intelligence should compress cognitive load. It cannot compress accountability. Onboard AI must remain subordinate to command authority at every layer. It can assist with pattern recognition and information synthesis. It cannot bear responsibility for the decisions that follow. Final authority must always rest with the accountable officers.

The Navy’s culture of command responsibility did not emerge arbitrarily. It reflects hard-earned understanding, often paid for in lives, of what happens when accountability diffuses. AI does not change that calculus. If anything, the introduction of capable AI tools makes the deliberate preservation of command culture more important, not less. When a machine recommends a course of action and a commanding officer accepts it, the responsibility for the outcome belongs entirely to the officer. Technology should reinforce that culture, not erode it by degrees through the gradual normalization of deference to algorithmic output.

The Standard

Artificial intelligence aboard a warship should not look like a revolution. It should look like a well-trained petty officer who never sleeps, never tires, and never lets a maintenance log fall through the cracks.

By 2027, a destroyer XO should demand AI that operates fully offline without degradation, exposes transparent and traceable reasoning, integrates without destabilizing shipboard networks, reduces administrative and cognitive burden measurably, and fails gracefully, loudly enough that watch standers notice before the gap becomes a hazard.

If a system meets those criteria, it earns a place aboard. If it promises transformation while depending on perfect conditions, it is not yet ready for sea. The Navy does not field systems that only function in permissive environments. Neither should it field AI that does.

The decisive variable in AI adoption is not model sophistication. It is operational fit, and operational fit is proven at sea, not in a vendor demonstration. The fleet’s standard has always been simple: perform when conditions are imperfect, and give commanders the tools to succeed. That standard does not change because the technology is new.

John Babick is a retired naval officer and defense technology professional with experience in edge AI deployment for maritime operations. He currently works for EdgeRunner. The views expressed are his own and do not represent the views of the Department of Defense or the United States Navy.

Featured image: Jim Blesse, standing, from the Office of Naval Research, explains project BlueShark to Lt. Col. John Moore from the Marine Corps Warfighting Laboratory. Project BlueShark is an ONR effort to create a high-tech, futuristic environment to demonstrate what operational work environments might look like and what emerging innovative technologies might provide in the next decade. (U.S. Navy photo by John F. Williams) 

Fostering the Discussion on Securing the Seas.