Force Structure

The Armyfication of the Navy

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By Eric Lies

The United States Navy has set a course that will see it morph into an army on the sea. The differentiating factors between the sea services and its landbound compatriots are fast eroding, diminishing the value of the fleet as its capabilities are more constrained. Traditionally, the utility and strength of the U.S. Navy revolved around the supreme maneuverability of the fleet and its ability to pass without a trace, skills the U.S. Army could only dream of. Now, however, fleets have never been more visible or more movement constrained, exposing them to the same strategic limitations an army on campaign faces. Adding to these challenges is the development of a set-piece mentality within the force over the previous decades as the U.S. Navy acted as mobile strike assets for ground wars. Redressing this army-fication, however, will be key to ensuring the continued success of the sea services and ultimately the safety of the United States.

This article will unfortunately be short on answers but long on questions and identifying the fundamental problems the Navy and Marine Corps team faces. Correctly identifying these issues now will save immense amounts of misplaced effort and, more importantly, lives should war break out. Therefore, this piece is written more as an opening statement in the discussion as opposed to a neat, simple solution, if such a thing can even exist in this instance.

Hiding in a Fishbowl

Armies are traditionally easier to track than navies. They operate in the same domain that people live in and the opportunities to observe their movements are frequent. This is the case even when their direct movements aren’t recorded by opposing forces. Civilians may watch and then talk carelessly, spreading the information. Physical evidence such as disturbed fields or damaged roads are also left behind for the keen observer. The pieces are there to pick up.

In ages past, once a fleet left harbor there was practically no way of knowing where it was operating. Barring a lucky sighting or maintaining a visual track, difficult in the best of circumstances, the surest way of locating a fleet was to correctly identify where it was going and lie in wait. The ability to disappear upon setting sail largely holds when there’s a large capability gap, such as when the combatants are the United States and minor powers or terrorist organizations. This would not be the case if the United States were to engage a peer or near peer competitor.

Much like how armies leave behind evidence when travelling, modern navies do too. The combination of long-range radar/sonar, satellite surveillance, drones, and signals intelligence gives modern commanders unprecedented ability to locate and track fleets. Permanent sensors, such as fixed array sonar systems, provide real time monitoring of vital transit lanes and vast swaths of the ocean without sending out ships or aircraft. Current radar technology routinely allows for identification and tracking of vessels hundreds of kilometers away, a range that will only increase as AI and algorithmic improvements are made. With a dense enough satellite constellation, consistent satellite imagery will also make fleet transits readily trackable via image analysis. This says nothing of accidental leaks of position by sailors using various apps or devices.

The development of autonomous systems allows for the surveillance and identification zones to be pushed out even further. With low to no risk to manned assets, forces can deploy additional sensors that loiter nearly indefinitely, turning on only when needed, acting as relays for each other, and casting a wide detection net. These technologies will only become more readily available and cheaper with time, exacerbating commander’s struggle to operate unobserved.

Highways on the Seas

This is not to say that there are no countermeasures to being observed, but competent captains and admirals must operate under the assumption that it’s not a question of if they’re found at sea, but when. While the risk of detection is relatively low while out on the high seas, the chances of detection increase exponentially the closer the fleet comes to shore.  This vastly narrows the geographic scope of operations that are readily hidden or obfuscated. Layering the various detection methods and their ranges on a map and then adding weapon engagement ranges creates a vastly different operating picture than fleets have encountered in the past.

A reading of the major military thinkers quickly impresses upon students of war the importance of geography and the field of battle. Sun Tzu’s work dedicates 30 percent entirely to the topic and is identified as a core pillar of strategy. Clausewitz, while he doesn’t examine geography or the terrain in discrete chapters, does lace it throughout his writing and thinking, identifying it as one of the key “modifiers” a strategist must consider. Corbett even identifies the difference between an army and a navy, discussing how armies must follow roads or traversable terrain while “the sea knows no roads to limit or indicate our own lines of operation.”

The maps of today, and especially tomorrow, resemble “roads” and “safe passages” around and through identification and engagement zones that fleets will have to navigate within. Leaving these bounds exposes them to swift identification and possibly an engagement with shore-based forces or unmanned vessels. These constraints on fleet movements complicate attempts at maintaining a true “fleet in being” that is at once both dispersed as well as ready to combine and pounce on weak or isolated elements of an enemy’s forces. As seen within the land domain, the massing of forces exposes attackers to extreme risk when mass and near real time surveillance are combined.

Modern technology allows a capable force to restrict where opposing fleets are likely to operate and therefore prepare the battlefield in ways unprecedented for naval warfare. This can create opportunities to more consistently develop kill boxes, ambushes, and direct the fighting to areas of strength for the forces operating near their shorelines, and thus within range of supporting missile and drone units.

The Anchored Fleet

Naval strategy revolves around the concepts of isolation and convergence. The isolated elements of a fleet can be converged upon and destroyed, leading to the ultimate destruction of the fleet and its fighting strength. At the core of this concept is the understanding that a fleet is never stationary but shifts and flows where it can best be utilized. Balancing the freedom of movement underpinning fleet operations is the fact that a fleet could simply be “removed from the board” by pulling into port under the protective watch of shore-based batteries. The force could defend itself via movement or via fortifications that forced attackers to risk their fighting force against shore troops that neutralize the advantages of mobility.

This concept faded from prominence with the close of the Cold War and the U.S. Navy’s dominance of the maritime domain. Modern navy doctrine then shifted to force projection as the ultimate raison d’etre, a natural metamorphosis in support of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Commanders began utilizing “op-boxes” and deliberately restricted maneuvering schemes to minimize risk while supporting the ground fight. The maximum ranges and on-station times of airframes began dictating where a carrier could steam and, naturally, where the escort ships must station to provide cover or support. It didn’t matter that a fleet could show up anywhere along the coast, it mattered that the fleet was as close to the specific coast that allowed safe and direct flights inland.

This prioritization, combined with forward operating bases that are now within range of shore-based fires, creates a situation akin to army forts staring across a field at the enemy lines. Complicating matters, unlike in the past, pulling a fleet into port doesn’t ensure the safety of the ships, but could unintentionally increase the risk to the force. Ports are well imaged and mapped via satellite imagery, and as such represent easily precleared and evaluated targets. There is a growing push to harden bases and to disperse forces throughout potential operational areas, thereby increasing resilience and survivability. This doesn’t change the fact that this only increases the number of potential targets, even if it does decrease the payoff for successful strikes.

Modern commanders are thus stuck with a dilemma. To effectively employ the weapons and doctrine developed over the last three and a half decades they cannot freely move their ships. In order to replenish and repair, they must return to easily targeted ports. They therefore cannot leverage the fundamental strength of a fleet: its ability to change the location of its operations, to disperse itself and to converge when enemy forces are isolated. “Stay in the op-box,” “This is our circuit for flight ops, we can’t change it.” Phrases such as these make fleet operations sound more and more analogous to ground operations where forces need to “Take the hill” or “secure this rail depot.” It is this decades-long doctrinal development that could represent the biggest risk to mitigating the increased visibility and expanded engagement zones.

Charting the Course

Resolving the current transformation of the sea services will require bold thinking and innovative synthesis of emerging technologies and revised doctrine. While not exhaustive, the following few ideas can serve as a launch point for further discussion and to begin charting the course for a renewed and revitalized fleet.

First, developing a better understanding of how peer competitors are thinking of possible engagements, such as how the People’s Liberation Army Rocket Force (PLARF) is deployed and the doctrine they adhere to, will be vital to gleaning lessons learned and offsetting their advantages. The days where the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps could make nearly unilateral decisions about force structure, armaments, and employment is far gone. Any peer or near peer has an equal say in what kind of conflict they will engage in, and it is foolish not to study their thinking as much, if not more, than current U.S. doctrine.

Second, the Navy should consider fleet composition and organization. This has naturally occurred in tandem with developments in naval and military technology, but taking a deliberate and methodical approach that seriously evaluates how fleets are structured and operate will help mitigate unnecessary losses. Some fits and starts have been made on this front, normally under the guise of “lethality,” such as the hunter killer surface action groups or  modular lethality. The current approach of clamoring for more of the same ships and submarines fails to address the issue at hand in a viable manner, while redesigning the fleet could make a substantial difference.

Third, examining how joint operations in the littoral and just into blue water are conducted could bear fruit in the shorter term. It naturally takes some time to redesign fleets and to construct the newly required vessels. Finding avenues to better leverage current inventories of weapons and vessels across the military services can help offset the time delay that such a redesign and build out requires. The emphasis should be on novel combinations and employment of existing kit, better cross service planning and coordination, and seamless operational control that counters the strengthened position of shores-based fires.

 It is worth noting that some of the work on each of these topics has already been done. Notably, in 2016, a trio of Navy future fleet architecture reviews were conducted, and responded to, that sought to rigorously identify how the Navy should structure its forces to fight and win in 2030. Across all three reviews, the need to shift from the assumption of sea control, and even dominance, to a contested maritime domain while engaged in high intensity fighting with a peer/near peer was central. The CSBA report, for example, outlined a fleet structure organized around region/threat specific deterrent forces supported by maneuver forces, addressing elements of the first two suggestions made above. MITRE identified the need for better integration of air-based assets into missile defense structures.  The Navy team discussed distributed fleets and the use of non-kinetic offensive and defensive weaponry as being integral to modern warfare. Aspects from all three are visible in the current force, and the sea services were strengthened from their adoption. Where these reviews fell short was in their limited scope and their failure to address critical assumptions underpinning their analysis, however. The process of evaluation and adapting to new technology and adversary developments is never ending, and the gaps identified in this article must be addressed if the Navy and Marine Corps are to remain a viable fighting force.

The army is worthy of emulation in many respects, but to have the Navy and Marine Corps become nothing more than an army at sea would be an unmitigated disaster. The challenges facing the sea services are great even without factoring in the challenges within the defense industrial complex supporting them. No amount of enhanced lethality or iterative innovation can save a force sailing in the wrong direction. But there is still time to shift the rudder and steady on a course of relevance and enhanced capabilities. This piece merely begins the conversation by diagnosing the primary impediments to an effective naval force and outlining briefly a few initial steps to move in the right direction. The army-fication of the Navy can and must be reversed.

Eric Lies is a Non-Resident Fellow at The Alliance Futures Initiative and an expert in alliance systems, security strategy, and military affairs.

Featured image: Albert Bierstadt, Beached Ship, 1859. (Wikimedia Commons)

Asia-Pacific

The Human Element of Sea Power: Ports, People, and Presence in the South China Sea

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By Eleanor Gaudion and Michael Posey

American maritime strategy in the South China Sea often starts by counting ships. Planners must keep enough hulls forward to contest Beijing’s constant pressure and its excessive maritime claims. The number of ships matters because a Navy that is too small, too strained, or too delayed in maintenance cannot meet the demands of a global maritime power. Still, ship counts, or a fleet’s volume of tonnage, can pull the conversation in the wrong direction. In 2005, Admiral Michael Mullen, then the Chief of Naval Operations, argued for a 1,000-ship navy. However, the basis of his call was not “more hulls.” Instead, he envisioned a multinational “fleet-in-being” that leveraged international cooperation to achieve maritime domain awareness, mobility, and access.

Strategists often reduce Alfred Thayer Mahan to the apostle of fleets, commerce, bases, and command of the sea. His framework also emphasized the human element. In The Influence of Sea Power upon History, Mahan lists six principal conditions affecting sea power. The list includes geographical position, coastline accessibility, extent of territory, and population size, as well as the “character of the people” and the “character of the government.” Sea power cannot be pigeonholed as simply hulls and military strength afloat. It also depends on national habits, political will, maritime culture, institutions, and the human systems that allow ships to achieve strategic effects.

Mahan’s principles remain relevant in the South China Sea. The number of ships the United States has must be considered alongside where those ships can go, how long they can remain forward, and whether partners want them there. Access drives that problem. Access constitutes a range of possibilities, from overflight rights to permanent garrisons. It also includes the permissions and practical support that allow forces to enter, operate, replenish, repair, and work with partners. While basing gives a navy staying power, access enables presence.

The U.S. Navy does not need to match the People’s Liberation Army Navy’s local presence ship for ship in the South China Sea. Instead, the U.S. Navy needs access that links lawful operations at sea to port visits, exercises, repair arrangements, and partner relationships ashore. The human element of sea power, built on trust, access, and routine cooperation, turns ship presence into influence. The decisive factor in the South China Sea is not ship numbers or capabilities alone, but the human infrastructure of access, repair, and partner trust that allows ships to operate with purpose and endurance.

Port visits, recurring exercises, maintenance agreements, professional exchanges, or staff talks at a partner-nation headquarters may seem modest compared with carrier strike group operations or a shipbuilding plan. Yet routine interactions hold quiet, practical meaning, such as helping port authorities learn what a U.S. ship needs, helping commanders from different navies understand one another, and making a partner government more comfortable agreeing to future American requests. Though day-to-day formalities may seem insignificant, they can shape possibilities in the South China Sea in crisis or in conflict.

Naval campaigning blends hard and soft power, but the better frame for the South China Sea is the human element of sea power. Joseph Nye defines soft power as the ability to get desired outcomes through attraction and persuasion rather than coercion or payment. Smart power, an integrated strategy and toolkit that draws on both hard and soft power, aids planners in framing naval campaigning most effectively. While the concept helps, it should not distract from the practical maritime point: naval power works best when ships, ports, repair facilities, embassy teams, and partner navies reinforce one another through cultivated and sustained relationships.

The South China Sea Problem and Freedom of Navigation Operations

The South China Sea links the Pacific and Indian Oceans through vital trade routes. Roughly one-third of global shipping passes through it. China uses excessive legal claims, coast guard operations, maritime militia pressure, and the militarization of South China Sea features to routinize its presence and justify its claims. Although the 2016 arbitral tribunal rejected China’s expansive maritime claims, Beijing continues to press its position, as reflected in the Department of Defense’s 2024 China Military Power Report and CSIS reporting on Chinese coercive tactics at Second Thomas Shoal.

In the South China Sea, the United States does not need to chase every Chinese patrol. It needs to appear often enough, with enough purpose and enough partners, to render Chinese coercion ineffective. Freedom of navigation operations (FONOPs) remain necessary. These operations challenge excessive maritime claims, preserve legal positions, demonstrate operational access, and reassure partners that the United States will not treat coercive claims as settled facts. FONOPs matter for strategy and alliance politics, as they are lawful and legitimate, resting on treaty law, customary international law, and long-standing U.S. legal positions.

A recent example shows how they support the narrative of a “Free and Open Indo-Pacific.” In August 2025, USS Higgins conducted a freedom of navigation operation near Scarborough Shoal. Beijing claimed it had expelled the destroyer; the U.S. 7th Fleet rejected that claim and said Higgins operated in accordance with international law before continuing normal operations. USNI News, Reuters, and the Associated Press captured the ambiguity: a U.S. warship asserted navigational rights, while China sought to recast the same event as a sovereignty narrative.

Freedom of navigation operations do not build partner capacity on their own. They cannot repair ships or make access automatic. They work best when they are not one-off events. A legal challenge at sea should connect to the next port visit, the next exercise, the next repair arrangement, and the next conversation with a partner navy. When port partnerships are grounded in the human element of sea power, the logistics, operations, and wartime readiness of both navies stand to benefit.

Port Visits Are Strategic Acts

When new sailors visit a port, their leaders remind them that they are ambassadors. Some may hear that as a warning to behave ashore. Most understand that port visits also build relationships and continue service in another form. With timeless ceremony, liberty, public affairs, and diplomatic theater, port visits remind hosts that U.S. naval power arrives with people, expectations, and presence, not only steel. A 1921 Proceedings article described foreign port visits and official calls as routine duties involving courtesy, ceremony, and relations with foreign officials. Likewise, a warship entering port by invitation shows that the host government has chosen to cooperate with the United States.

A port visit alone, even to a country with close ties to Beijing, will not deter China. Port visits, however, can make deterrence more politically sustainable. A ship in port gives visible proof that the United States is welcomed and able to operate with partners. Port visits also create human contact that a communique cannot replicate. Commanders meet their counterparts. Supply officers and port authorities learn requirements and test procedures. Defense relationships become personal.

Vietnam and Malaysia show how cautious partners can still create room for maritime cooperation. The USS Carl Vinson’s 2018 visit to Da Nang marked the first U.S. aircraft carrier visit to Vietnam in more than forty years, and the USS Ronald Reagan Carrier Strike Group visited Vietnam in 2023. The USS Abraham Lincoln’s 2024 port call at Port Klang was the first U.S. carrier visit to Malaysia in 12 years. These visits did not transform Vietnam or Malaysia into U.S. allies. Their contribution is more modest, and more useful: they make cooperation visible and routine without forcing partners into a binary choice.

Port visits to the Philippines convey a different message. As a U.S. treaty ally directly exposed to Chinese pressure, the Philippines is increasingly vital to the U.S. posture in the South China Sea. The U.S.-Philippines Bilateral Defense Guidelines describe the importance of alliance coordination, including access to agreed locations under the Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement. Even in the Philippines, U.S. Navy access depends on domestic politics, public trust, alliance management, and a shared sense that American presence contributes to Philippine security rather than simply serving American requirements.

The Philippines also illustrates why access must be handled carefully. After a port call and fuel stop in Subic, USS Guardian ran aground on Tubbataha Reef in 2013, damaging a protected site and forcing the Navy to dismantle the ship in place. The United States later paid the Philippines nearly $2 million for damage to the reef. Access is a privilege sustained by discipline, local awareness, and strategic empathy for the host nation.

Relationships Become Access

Access, basing, and overflight do not appear automatically when a crisis begins. They are built over time through trust, repeated contact, legal arrangements, mutual benefit, and political confidence. Security cooperation helps build trust conditions that contribute to access, basing, and overflight outcomes. Military access to allies and partners in the Indo-Pacific could shape the outcome of a conflict, and lower-level peacetime access, such as overflight and logistics, can matter even if combat access remains politically sensitive.

In a crisis, governments rarely grant access to strangers. They are more likely to grant it to people and institutions they already know, and to forces they trust will act with discipline. That trust is built through exercises, exchanges, port calls, staff talks, coast guard engagements, logistics planning, and professional military relationships. The relationships built now shape which access decisions are politically possible in a time of crisis.

This is where the human element of sea power matters most. The United States should not treat naval operations, diplomacy, economic cooperation, and sustainment as work done in separate rooms by separate people. A port visit can open the door for a multinational or bilateral exercise. Exercises can reveal logistics requirements and test assumptions. A logistics agreement can facilitate future access for repairs. Repair cooperation can generate economic benefits. Political support can create access during a crisis.

The Indo-Pacific will not follow a NATO template anytime soon. Instead, each relationship must be nuanced and bilateral to deliver the best outcomes for both countries. Vietnam and Malaysia may offer political access and maritime diplomacy. The Philippines may provide operational access, geography, and alliance-enabled logistics. Meanwhile, Japan, Singapore, South Korea, and Australia are stronger candidates for maintenance, repair, replenishment, and industrial support. The United States must continue to work with each partner on what they can actually support.

Japan’s value to this network could extend even further. In a Foreign Affairs interview, Oriana Skylar Mastro argued that Japan fighting alongside the United States in a regional conflict from the start rather than shifting to a later supporting role could strengthen deterrence. Japan’s geographically forward-positioned ports enable a much shorter response timeline. The speed advantage would not be a function of hull numbers, but instead a function of years of exercises, staff talks, and routine interactions that have facilitated Japan’s response rather than requiring negotiation in a time of crisis. Routine human interaction leads to familiarity, which leads to fast, credible ally responses.

Maintenance Enables Maritime Influence

Presence breaks down when ships cannot be repaired, replenished, or politically sustained. A ship that can be repaired forward returns to operations faster. A ship that must transit long distances for maintenance pays a tax in time, fuel, and availability. A fleet tied to a few fixed facilities becomes easily targetable and narrows its own options. Delayed maintenance imposes real readiness costs.

The Navy already relies on forward repair in several places. Naval Sea Systems Command describes the Ship Repair Facility and Japan Regional Maintenance Center as keeping the Seventh Fleet mission-ready from Yokosuka and Sasebo. At the same time, its Singapore detachment supports repair work across the region. Australia is developing the Henderson Defense Precinct to support naval shipbuilding and sustainment. In South Korea, the Navy reported that USNS Wally Schirra completed major maintenance in 2025.

Forward sustainment already exists in pieces. The Navy already thinks in terms of refuel, rearm, resupply, repair, and revive, and it already uses forward repair facilities, allied shipyards, and partner access. But the Western Pacific demands a more integrated approach to logistics, resupply, and sustainment than the current system provides.

History reinforces the point. Mahan is sometimes reduced to a “more ships” (or bigger fleet) thinker. Still, The Influence of Sea Power Upon History was also about commerce, bases, maritime infrastructure, and national systems that enable fleets to operate over long distances. World War II offers an even more practical example. In the early 1940s, Service Squadron Ten performed many functions of an advanced naval base in the Pacific, supporting voyage repairs and helping return ships to service without sending every damaged vessel back across the ocean. But that access did not appear by magic. At Ulithi, survey work, pontoon piers, repair ships, floating dry docks, tenders, welders, carpenters, electricians, shipfitters, and command and control arrangements turned a lagoon into a functioning forward base. Although the contemporary Indo-Pacific differs, the lesson still holds: maritime power depends on forward sustainment, and forward sustainment depends on relationships, access, skilled people, and political preparation.

Economic Cooperation Makes Presence Less Extractive

Partners cannot see themselves as being taken advantage of, as it neither serves them nor American interests. Ship repair, port infrastructure, workforce development, technical training, logistics contracts, maritime domain awareness support, and industrial partnerships can help partners build capacity while improving American endurance.

The Indo-Pacific Maritime Security Initiative supports partner maritime security and human capital development. In the Philippines, the U.S. Embassy’s transfer of mobile energy systems to Palawan demonstrates how partner-capacity efforts can connect infrastructure, resilience, and maritime access in a contested area. Allied participation in maintenance, repair, overhaul, and shipbuilding cooperation offers one path for strengthening endurance. Japanese shipyards could serve as forward maintenance hubs, improving readiness and creating stable demand for Japanese industry. These initiatives enable shared maritime endurance: more repair options for the United States, more work and capacity for partners, and fewer single points of failure for everyone.

The Human Infrastructure of Maritime Power

The United States should think of relationships as maritime infrastructure. Ports, drydocks, logistics hubs, legal agreements, and maintenance facilities matter. Behind each of them are people: port officials, shipyard workers, diplomats, logisticians, naval officers, coast guards, local political leaders, embassy teams, and sailors who have interacted with one another before a crisis. This kind of infrastructure is easy to miss because it does not appear to be a source of combat power and does not appear in fleet-size comparisons or shipbuilding plans. However, in a crisis, it may determine whether ships can enter port, whether repairs can be made, whether logistics can flow, whether partners accept political risk, and whether American presence is seen as legitimate.

Some of the great strategic thinkers can help us understand the importance of the human element of sea power. Clausewitz reminds us that military action remains connected to political intercourse, not divorced from it. Mahan reminds us that sea power depends on commerce, bases, national systems, and the ashore infrastructure that allows fleets to operate across distance. Corbett reminds us that maritime strategy is about communications and movement, not simply occupying ocean space. James Cable’s theory of naval diplomacy reminds us that navies are political instruments below the threshold of war, using limited naval power to secure advantage or avert loss. In sum, maritime presence is not created by hulls alone. It is created by relationships, permissions, habits, and support networks that allow hulls to have political effects.

China’s advantage in the South China Sea is proximity and persistence. The United States draws its advantage from a network of allies and partners, global mobility, operational experience, and legitimacy when it acts in defense of lawful maritime use. The U.S. advantage must be cultivated as the competition for the South China Sea remains a contest over whose presence is more legitimate, sustainable, and politically useful.

China understands the logic of employing the human element of sea power. In Cambodia, Beijing has financed the expansion of the Ream Naval Base, rotating Chinese ships through its pier, and framing the arrangement as a mutual-benefit partnership rather than a foreign outpost. This comparison is instructive rather than reassuring. Cambodia’s government insists that Ream remains open to any friendly navy, yet years of opacity about the terms of access open a door to Beijing and Phnom Penh familiarity that could prove impactful in wartime. That uncertainty, or strategic ambiguity, can be useful to China, yet also points to an opportunity for the U.S. While China’s version of relationship building runs through dependency and quiet leverage, the American version depends on a wider set of partners who retain the standing and political space to say no. The United States does not win the human element of the sea by default. It wins by ensuring its access is transparent, consensual, and reciprocal in ways that Beijing’s arrangements are not.

While these behaviors reflect diplomacy and logistics, they also constitute sea power. Ships cannot exercise influence where they cannot enter, repair, or remain. The U.S. Navy does not lack port visits, exercises, or repair arrangements, but sometimes these activities are treated as separate events rather than as parts of the same maritime campaign.

Implications for Maritime Planners

Navy and joint planners should plan port visits as campaign events rather than courtesy calls. The Navy sets a theater by increasing its access to key terrain, such as ports near a chokepoint. Therefore, a port visit should do more than put sailors ashore and generate photos. It should test access, build relationships, support public diplomacy, reveal logistics friction, and set conditions for the next engagement. It should create relationships across ranks and functions to encourage a port-wide familiarity that can be called upon in times of uncertainty.

Planners should also map access by function. Some locations may support port visits and replenishment. Others may support exercises, crew rest, voyage repair, emergent maintenance, drydock work, or contracted sustainment. Not every partner is a base. Not every port is a repair hub. Nevertheless, many can still contribute to the overall campaign.

Finally, planners should integrate operations, diplomacy, economics, and sustainment into a single maritime campaign. Freedom of navigation operations, exercises, port visits, repair agreements, senior-leader engagements, and partner-capacity efforts should build on one another rather than stand alone.

Conclusion: Ships Need People

The United States needs a ready fleet, a stronger maritime industrial base, and enough ships to meet global commitments. Shipbuilding, maintenance reform, and industrial revitalization still anchor U.S. maritime power, as the Department of Defense’s National Defense Industrial Strategy also makes clear. Ships alone, however, will not secure American influence in the South China Sea.

The future of U.S. maritime presence will depend on where ships can go, how long they can stay, whether partners welcome them, and whether they can be repaired and sustained forward. Those conditions are built through people. Port visits, exercises, maintenance cooperation, and professional exchanges may seem ordinary, but they build trust, test assumptions, and enable future operations.

Mahan’s “character of the people” was not a decorative phrase. It points to the habits, confidence, discipline, and political will that allow maritime power to endure. In the South China Sea, that character will not be measured only by the number of ships the United States builds. It will also be measured by whether the United States can build the trust and access that allow those ships to matter.

The United States cannot match China’s proximity-driven presence ship-for-ship in the South China Sea. It does not need to. The better task is to show up consistently, operate lawfully, sustain forward, and do so alongside partners who see American presence as legitimate and useful. The human element of sea power begins with a simple recognition: ships need ports, ports need trust, and trust begins with people.

Eleanor Gaudion is a graduate of the University of Virginia with a B.A. in Foreign Affairs with a focus in intelligence and military relations. She previously served as an intern at the U.S. Army War College, revising national security wargaming scenarios for students.

Michael Posey is an active-duty Naval Flight Officer. He holds business degrees from Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Florida. He is a doctoral candidate in education at Pennsylvania State University. Currently, he serves as an assistant professor and the Admiral William F. Halsey Chair of Naval Studies at the U.S. Army War College.

The views expressed in this article are those of the authors alone and do not necessarily reflect those of the U.S. Army War College, the U.S. Army, the U.S. Navy, or the Department of War.

Featured image: Rear Adm. Eric Anduze, commander, Task Force 70 and Carrier Strike Group 5, shakes hands with a member of the Vietnamese military during Nimitz-class aircraft carrier USS George Washington’s (CVN 73) regularly scheduled port visit in Da Nang, Vietnam, July 30, 2026. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist Seaman Anthony Vilardi) 

Warfighting

Contesting the Littoral Terrain: The Iran War and the Military Solution to Chokepoint Warfare

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By Major General (Dr.) Rambir Singh Mann (Retired), Indian Army

The U.S.-Iran war has provided an operational test of American maritime power. Despite assembling a formidable naval force, conducting extensive strike campaigns and achieving consistent tactical success, the United States failed to control the Strait of Hormuz or sustain freedom of movement in the Red Sea. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Navy (IRGCN), employing distributed fast attack craft, shore-based anti-ship missiles, maritime mines, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and loitering munitions, along with the Houthis, effectively contest both waterways. In addition to restricting operations of U.S. Carrier Strike Groups, commercial shipping remains disrupted, generating global economic consequences, energy price spikes, supply chain delays and domestic inflation that continues to accumulate political pressure on the American war effort disproportionate to the military situation.

The core failure leading to this dilemma was one of strategic understanding. The United States applied a conventional maritime power-projection model built for adversaries with limited cost-tolerance and permissive maritime approaches, against an adversary fighting what it understood to be an existential conflict in its own littoral territory. Iran did and does not not need to defeat the U.S. Navy. It needs only to make the contest so long and costly that the United States will eventually choose to quit. Compounding this, the attempt to suppress Iran’s denial capability at its source failed structurally; the absence of a genuine alliance architecture from the outset removed the mechanism by which American cost-tolerance could have been collectively sustained. Below, this article discusses the  central lessons of the war.

The Cost-Tolerance Asymmetry and Why Conventional Responses Failed

When the decisive variable in a maritime contest is not firepower but the relative willingness of each party to absorb cost, conventional military responses will underperform regardless of their tactical effectiveness. This is the Iran war’s foundational lesson. The IRGCN’s asymmetric instruments –  cheap, dispersed, and rapidly reconstituting – were effective because they were difficult to destroy individually and because the aggregate cost of contesting them exceeded what the system, simultaneously absorbing the economic blowback of a contested strait, was prepared to sustain indefinitely. Iran, fighting existentially, had no equivalent constraint. This cost-exchange compounded the problem. Every Standard Missile which intercepted a cheap Iranian drone represented an exchange ratio that, sustained over months of operations, depleted American precision munitions stockpiles faster than industrial production can replenish. Every manned strike sortie against a dispersed fast boat concentration costed orders of magnitude more than the target it neutralized. The mathematics of attrition in asymmetric chokepoint warfare are designed deliberately, to favour the defender over time. A military solution to contested chokepoint warfare cannot be built on this exchange model but must seek to invert it.

The most direct military response to a distributed denial force is to destroy it at the source by striking command nodes, logistics networks, manufacturing facilities and supply chains. The United States and Israel attempted this comprehensively but did not achieve desired outcomes. Iran had spent four decades dispersing, hardening and building redundancy into its critical military infrastructure in anticipation of exactly this campaign. This was not adequately appreciated. The mobile launcher problem that frustrated Scud-hunting in the Gulf War was applied at institutional scale by the IRGCN: dispersed, mobile, and rapidly reconstituting systems are structurally resistant to suppression by strike, regardless of the precision or volume of fires applied.

Alliance Architecture – a Military Necessity

The United States entered the maritime contest without the alliance architecture that sustained chokepoint operations require. By committing to conflict without prior consultation with the allies most affected by the Hormuz Strait’s disruption, the United States created economic grievances among the partners whose naval capacity, basing access and political support were essential to sustaining the campaign. The operational consequence was an American force bearing the overwhelming majority of cost. The naval forces of allies, properly integrated under combined command with shared rules of engagement and equitable distribution of operational cost, would have materially changed the cost-tolerance equation. Alliance-building is therefore a military precondition for sustained chokepoint operations.

The Military Solution: Neutralising the Terrain

If suppression of the source fails and conventional power projection into the contested space is cost-unsustainable, the military solution must operate on a different logic entirely. The answer the Iran war points toward is the active neutralization of the geographic and asymmetric advantages the adversary has built within the contested terrain – contesting the chokepoint itself with instruments that impose on the adversary the same cost-exchange problem it has imposed. Iran achieved its strategic effects by positioning distributed, low-signature denial forces within and adjacent to the strait, making every American attempt to operate there expensive. The military solution is to do the same thing in reverse: make the adversary’s use of the terrain as costly.

Inverting the Cost Exchange: Directed Energy and Attritable Systems

The current exchange model of combat fiscally favours the adversary over any prolonged contest. Two complementary capabilities invert this ratio. Directed energy weapons, shipborne and shore-based laser systems and high-powered microwave emitters intercept drones and fast boat concentrations at a marginal cost once fielded, with no magazine depth constraint. Against the high-volume, low-cost threat that characterized IRGCN operations, directed energy offers the first cost-exchange model that structurally favours the contesting force rather than the denial force. Though these systems are still fledgling, the Iran war provides the operational urgency to field these systems at scale across the fleet and at shore-based positions adjacent to contested waterways.

Attritable unmanned surface vessels (USVs) and UAVs, deployed in large numbers as the primary friction-absorbers within the threat envelope, complete the inversion. When the platforms absorbing adversary fires are unmanned and genuinely expendable, costing a fraction of a destroyer or a manned aircraft, the adversary’s cost-exchange advantage disappears. At sufficient scale and combined with allied production-sharing, this model exhausts adversary precision munitions inventories faster than they can be replenished, reversing the attrition dynamic that has run against the United States throughout the conflict.

The Undersea Domain: Where Geography Cannot Canalize

The undersea domain is the one environment in which the littoral defender’s geographic advantage is most effectively neutralized. Attack submarines operating in the strait and its approaches can conduct surveillance, deliver precision strike and lay minefields without presenting the surface signature that activates adversary anti-access systems. Iran used maritime mines as a cheap denial instrument that imposed uncertainty and economic disruption across the entire commercial shipping community. The United States can apply the same instrument at greater scale and sophistication through submarine-delivered minefields contesting Iranian naval approach routes, complicating IRGCN fast boat operations, and imposing on Iran the same cost of uncertainty it has imposed on others. Unmanned underwater vehicles (UUVs) extend this capability further, operating in the shallowest and most geographically confined sections of the strait where manned submarines cannot easily go.

The undersea domain should be the primary domain of sea control operations in contested chokepoint environments. This is because submarines and UUVs present no viable target to the asymmetric denial systems that have proven most effective, and because the cost of undersea operations does not replicate the devastating exchange ratios that surface and air operations produce. Expanding submarine production capacity is the most direct and durable military response to the chokepoint problem this war has posed. It is a response whose value compounds as adversary Anti-Access/Area Denial (A2/AD) systems become more sophisticated.

Contesting the Terrain: Land-Based Positioned Forces

The most structurally important military solution is also the one most directly derived from Iran’s own operational example. The relevance of small, low-signature Marine and special operations forces, positioned on islands and coastal terrain within or adjacent to contested chokepoints armed with long-range anti-ship missiles, drone swarms, electronic warfare systems and coastal surveillance networks is evident. These will impose a persistent, reconstituting threat on the adversary that cannot be suppressed without costly operations. Such forces positioned ashore within range of Iranian naval routes would cause the IRGCN to expend resources on suppression rather than on denial operations. Drone swarms launched from coastal positions degrade adversary surveillance and force dispersal rather than concentration. Electronic warfare embedded in the terrain contaminates the targeting networks on which adversary precision fires depend.

This concept does not replicate Operational Manoeuvre from the Sea (OMFTS) as it is not about projecting power onto inland objectives from a permissive maritime approach. Nor is it the Stand-in Forces (SIF) concept in its original Indo-Pacific framing. It is terrain contestation using the same geographic logic that Iran has exploited so effectively –  presence within the chokepoint, short supply lines, distributed and reconstitutable positioning, but as an offensive denial tool rather than a defensive one. The adversary that has made maritime terrain a weapon must find that terrain has become a shared burden rather than a private advantage.

Together, these three elements constitute an integrated military approach to chokepoint warfare that does not depend on suppressing the source, does not require forward-deploying irreplaceable capital ships into the highest-threat zones, and generates a cost-exchange ratio that can sustain even against an adversary with existential stakes.

Force Structure Implications

The Carrier Strike Group (CSG) remains the most capable maritime task force ever assembled and carrier aviation retains decisive value in permissive and semi-permissive environments. The Iran war does not invalidate that value but it clarifies its limits. In contested chokepoints, the CSG is the wrong primary instrument: too detectable, too valuable to risk and too dependent on approach conditions that asymmetric adversaries are specifically organized to prevent. The CSG should be held in depth, committed only after terrain-contesting and undersea forces have imposed sufficient cost on the adversary’s denial capability to open a corridor of reduced-threat access. CSG employment follows conditions; it does not create them.

Naval force structure for littoral or choke point combat should therefore be rebalanced accordingly around the three priorities brought out above, that this war has validated as operationally decisive. These three capabilities, operating in combination with genuinely integrated allied naval contributions, constitute a cost-exchange model that can be sustained. The Sea Lines of Communication (SLOC) security mission that has organized American naval strategy for generations must be restructured around this model with a tiered approach that prioritizes SLOCs directly serving American economic interests, while building genuine allied burden-sharing for the broader global maritime commons whose security no single navy can now afford to guarantee alone.

The Taiwan Parallel: China’s Existential Calculus

The operational lessons of the Iran war carry their most consequential implications not in the Persian Gulf but in the Western Pacific. Beijing has observed this conflict with the same analytical intensity that military historians apply to transformative wars. The Taiwan question presents a structural parallel for China: a great power attempting maritime force projection against a regional adversary for whom the conflict is existential.

However, the reverse is also true. Taiwan is central to the legitimacy of the Chinese Communist Party’s historical narrative, to the political identity of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) and to the domestic political standing of the leadership in Beijing. A Chinese leadership that fails to act on Taiwan under sufficient provocation would face an internal political crisis of the first order. This means that in any serious confrontation over Taiwan, China’s cost-tolerance would be structurally elevated and the cost-exchange dynamics of the Iran war would repeat at enormously greater scale.

China’s anti-access and area-denial (A2/AD) architecture in the Western Pacific vastly exceeds the IRGCN’s capabilities in scale, sophistication and depth. The anti-ship ballistic missiles, with ranges exceeding 1,000 nautical miles, hold CSGs at risk well beyond the first island chain. The PLA Navy’s (PLAN) submarine force, land-based aviation massed on the Fujian coast, and an integrated maritime surveillance network combining space, cyber and undersea sensors, create a threat environment that makes the Strait of Hormuz look manageable by comparison. And crucially, as the Iran war has demonstrated, striking the source of this capability will not reliably degrade it. Chinese A2/AD infrastructure is distributed, hardened and redundant in ways that reflect decades of preparation for exactly the kind of suppression campaign would be attempted.

The strategic prescription that flows from the Iran war applies directly: the United States and its allies must prepare for a Taiwan contingency on the basis that CSG-forward operations inside the first island chain represent an unacceptable risk to irreplaceable assets. The only option that does not accept catastrophic risk but maintains credible deterrence requires the following elements: the distributed deterrence model with forward-positioned land-based anti-ship missiles with Japan, the Philippines and Australia; expanded undersea presence within the first island chain; attritable unmanned systems at scale; and Taiwan’s own asymmetric denial capability developed explicitly on the Iranian model.

Taiwan’s investment in land-based anti-ship missiles, coastal defense systems, sea mines and drone swarms – the precise instruments that gave Iran disproportionate leverage in the strait – raises China’s cost of coercion without requiring capital ships to enter the most prepared kill zones on Earth. The Iran war has demonstrated what a determined littoral defender with the right asymmetric instruments can impose on a conventionally superior adversary. The alliance architecture supporting Taiwan’s defense must be built before any confrontation begins, not assembled in its aftermath.

Conclusion: Reading the War Honestly

The Iran war was a failure of strategic understanding of the dynamics of asymmetric cost-tolerance in existential littoral conflict compounded by the absence of an alliance architecture that should have been the precondition for military action.

The military solution that emerges from honest analysis is specific and actionable. Directed energy and attritable unmanned systems invert the cost-exchange ratio that has run against the United States throughout the conflict. Submarine and UUV forces operating in the undersea domain can effectively contest the chokepoint as undersea geography provides no canalization advantage to the defender. Land-based positioned forces within the contested terrain flip the asymmetric logic, making the adversary’s geographic advantage a shared burden rather than a private weapon. And genuine alliance architecture, built before conflict rather than during it, distributes cost-tolerance across the coalition to a level that an existential adversary’s threshold cannot easily exceed.

These prescriptions apply with even greater urgency to the Taiwan contingency, where China’s nationalist cost-tolerance, vastly superior A2/AD architecture and decades of preparation for allied suppression campaigns create conditions that will replicate and exceed the Iran war’s dynamics. The time to build the distributed deterrence model, develop allied land-based strike networks, expand undersea capacity and ensure Taiwan’s own asymmetric denial is the time before the confrontation. The Iran war has provided the template, the warning and the operational data.The question now is its implementation.

Major General (Dr.) Rambir Singh Mann (Retired) is a decorated Indian Army officer with over 37 years of distinguished service. His operational experience included amphibious and littoral warfare in the subcontinent. He has held pivotal operational, strategic and advisory roles in India’s defense establishment and continues to shape discourse in homeland and international security. He is a graduate of premier military education institutions in India and abroad, including the Institute of Advanced Studies in National Defence (IHDEDN) in Paris. Gen. Mann is a Ph.D. from Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, where he researched defense industrial policy, defense offsets and their role in national security.

Featured image: Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer USS Frank E. Petersen Jr. (DDG 121) fires a Tomahawk Land Attack Missile during operations in support of Operation Epic Fury, Feb. 28, 2026. (U.S. Navy Photo)

Economics and Trade

Asymmetric Spending: Taiwan’s Opportunities to Defend Against Economic Warfare

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By Joseph Hanacek and Josh Richards

Recent events in the Strait of Hormuz offer a timely reminder that economic warfare at sea rarely resembles the clean, declared naval cordons of the past. Blocking commercial shipping from transiting through one of the world’s most critical energy arteries has not required mass sinkings or a total closure. Instead, a combination of selective strikes, vessel harassment, insurance volatility, and uncertainty has been sufficient to disrupt traffic, reroute ships, and impose real economic costs. In many cases, ships do not need to be sunk to be stopped; owners, insurers, or crews need only to decide that continuing forward is no longer worth the risk.

This emerging pattern reflects a broader shift in how maritime coercion is exercised, and is directly relevant to Taiwan, where Beijing is developing a range of coercive options: from incremental pressure on commercial shipping to high-intensity operations designed to rapidly sever Taiwan’s external lifelines. This was made abundantly clear in late December 2025, when the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) of China staged its most geographically expansive and strategically audacious military exercises around Taiwan in years.1 Over two days, the PLA mobilized warships, fighter jets, bombers, missile units, unmanned aerial vehicles, and coast guard elements across multiple designated zones in the Taiwan Strait and adjacent waters, focusing in particular on the island’s major ports, including Keelung in the north and Kaohsiung in the south. Chinese authorities framed the exercises as “Justice Mission 2025,” and mark the latest iteration of a series of Taiwan focused exercises aimed to practice joint operations, port blockades, sea-air control, and deterring external intervention while disrupting maritime and air traffic in ways that would impede Taiwan’s ability to sustain normal commerce under crisis conditions.

Importantly, Chinese writings on a “Joint Blockade Campaign” do not present this concept as part of a gradual economic warfare campaign that can increasingly take on military characteristics as the situation escalates. PLA sources describe a campaign that may open with large-scale missile strikes on ports and infrastructure, mining operations, and rapid efforts to establish sea and air control while staving off any outside attempts to interfere. In this framing, a blockade is a direct component of kinetic conflict, rather than an alternative. Even so, it is worth considering how investments in the ability to conduct a blockade during a direct conflict widen the range of options for China as they navigate the road from competition to crisis and conflict. Preparing their military for direct action such as a Joint Blockade Campaign paired with a lightening style assault marks a straightforward path to reunification, but it also enables forms of economic warfare that form complimentary parallel paths to the same end. Channeling Sun Tsu’s maxim that the supreme art of war is to defeat your enemy without fighting, China will recognize that there may be a path to victory through imposing economic asphyxiation. If Taiwan is going to resist China’s reunification efforts, they must prepare for the widely discussed decisive and overwhelming lightening campaign, but they must be ready to face the subtler threat of economic warfare as well.

Why economic warfare is so likely

China’s desire to unify Taiwan with the mainland is about far more than merely re-acquiring lost territory, blotting out a symbol of democratic resilience, or achieving a longstanding goal to reinforce the CCPs legitimacy. In a single stroke it is an opportunity to seize a structural pillar of the global economy, corner an immensely important maritime and information exchange route, and secure its ability to project power and maintain access to markets around the globe. While China’s massive military buildup includes enormous investments in amphibious warfare and air assault capabilities, an all-out attack to rapidly regain Taiwan risks a prolonged land battle that might destroy much of the island’s inherent value. By contrast, economic warfare can be an effective means by which China can avoid direct action against Taiwan and preserve much of the value already accrued by decades of global investment in Taiwanese critical technologies and trade infrastructure.

Economic warfare is also extremely flexible and scalable, presenting China with a set of options that can be adapted to fit the strategic and operational realities existing at the time of the attempted reunification, with opportunities to make adjustments as the situation evolves. This flexibility and scalability is best illustrated by categorizing economic warfare into four escalating tiers: trade embargo, police actions, quarantine, and blockade. Understanding these tiers and their intended goals is a critical first step in building resistance against them.2

The lowest tier, trade embargo, is already largely in place. Every day, China uses its massive economic and military influence to deter nations and corporations around the globe from establishing relationships with Taiwan, denying them access to modern military and economic technology that might help them resist Chinese influence. Having been in place for decades, this approach has blunted Taiwan’s economic development and contributed to significant social friction within a Taiwanese population that remembers the economic dynamism and the feeling of opportunity that resided in past generations of Taiwan’s citizenry. What China has yet to do but certainly could is present foreign companies ranging from McDonald’s to Disney to Boeing with a choice – if you do business with Taiwan, you cannot do business on the mainland. While such a move would hurt Beijing economically, the possibility of the PRC taking this route cannot be ruled out especially since in the past multi-national corporations have buckled under Beijing’s threats. Chinese leaders may calculate that profit driven corporations will bend to their demands if forced to do so.

The second tier of economic warfare is the “lawfare” approach, which is the declaration of an internal police action to seize or block critical supplies en route to Taiwan. This approach  is also already in practice, as China’s Taiwan Affairs Office declared in 2024 that, despite widespread recognition by the international community for decades, there is no such thing as Taiwan “prohibited” or “restricted” waters around the Taiwanese outlying islands of Kinmen and Matsu.3 The Chinese coast guard then issued orders granting the authority for CCG ships to board foreign vessels suspected of “illegally entering waters on Chinese jurisdiction” around these islands, and to detain foreign nationals for up to 60 days without trial if they are suspected of “endangering national security.”

While the detention of only a limited number of merchant vessels inbound to Taiwan might not seem impactful, Taiwan’s enormous reliance on imported Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) to power its electric grid is such that these selective boardings have the potential to bring economic activity on the island nearly to a stop. Taiwan typically receives one to two LNG tanker arrivals per day, and LNG storage can sustain electricity consumption for only 10–14 days under crisis conditions, so stopping inbound LNG ships for several weeks would cause Taiwan to quickly burn through stockpiles. As LNG provides approximately 50% of the total energy produced for the electric grid, and roughly 40% of the island’s energy is earmarked for residential and service sector consumption, Taiwan’s industrial sector would bear the brunt of the shortages. Even if significant war-time austerity measures and energy rationing were put in place, semiconductor manufacturing requires nearly uninterrupted power, and it is highly unlikely Taiwan could continue in its role at the center of global microchip manufacturing under these conditions.

The third tier of escalating economic warfare options is best described as quarantine, and it exists in both de jure and de facto forms. In its formal and legal sense, a quarantine is a peace-time enforcement measure that typically requires a UN Security Council resolution to stop the transport of materials to or from a place, but which can be declared without such a resolution if the nation justifies the action as a measure of self-defense. The clearest historical precedent for such an action is the U.S. quarantine of Cuba during the 1960’s Cuban Missile Crisis, an attempt to keep Russian ships from moving nuclear weapons to the island. While China might pursue this course, declaring that the movement of certain classes of cargo to and from the island of Taiwan is contrary to their national security, they could likely achieve the same or similar ends through a hybrid legal and economic approach. This could begin with China declaring inspection zones or “maritime safety advisories” in the Taiwan Strait, discouraging shipping firms from entering, and using diplomatic and economic leverage to reinforce them.4 During the 2022 live fire drills, during which China first conducted missile tests that flew over Taiwan, insurers such as Lloyd’s of London temporarily raised war-risk premiums for accessing Taiwanese waters.5 As Taiwan relies almost entirely on commercial shipping instead of a nationally flagged and crewed merchant marine, these increased insurance premiums would largely freeze commercial shipments to and from the island until new insurance coverages could be negotiated.

The fourth and final category would be China’s use of blockade to threaten and potentially destroy traffic to and from Taiwan. This is an act of war that requires formal declaration to the international community, and would also likely coincide with military actions taken against portions or the entirety of the Taiwanese Navy and Air Force. The unique strategic distinction of blockade over quarantine is that there is no rule that a blockade is unlawful if it disproportionately impacts the civilian population, so long as some military advantage is also being gained. As such, food, medicine, energy, and other critical resource transportation can be shut off. 6 By some estimates, Taiwan would face critical shortages of energy and food within 14 to 21 days if its ports were closed.7 Shutting down the manufacturing sector and significant national food and energy rationing could buy Taiwan several additional months of resistance, but conditions would be severe. The United States and partners could attempt to resupply Taiwan’s food and medical stores by air, an approach China might be less likely to challenge, but airlift capacity is orders of magnitude too small to replace port throughput when it comes to serving energy needs.8

For Beijing, embargo, lawfare, quarantine, and blockade all represent potentially decisive options that can also be downplayed as shows of restraint when considered next to the outright invasion of Taiwan that it has been preparing for. For Taipei, while Taiwan’s defenses have long been oriented toward stopping amphibious assault across the western beaches, the equal if not more likely threat of maritime asphyxiation has been largely neglected.

To negate a strategy of economic warfare, Taiwan must play the lead role in defending its own autonomy. Modern technologies and good government policy offer new opportunities to create a more resilient society in the face of increasing maritime pressure. Some of these opportunities focus on military investments, but to build resilience against economic warfare, many of the most important decisions Taiwan needs to make are tied to purely civil issues. By focusing on these opportunities, Taiwan has an opportunity to peacefully and asymmetrically prevent China from checkmating them economically before western nations could come to their aid.

Building resilience

To defeat the overwhelming logic driving China to pursue victory through economic warfare, Taiwan must look inwards and eastward. Inward, towards resilience through renewable energy investments, fossil fuel stockpiles, and a renewed merchant marine, and eastward, toward its pacific coastline and under-developed ports there. Long neglected in defense planning, these investments may be among Taiwan’s most important untapped strategic assets.

The most direct route Taiwan has to build resilience has to do with overhauling the national energy production by reducing investments that create overreliance on LNG and heavily subsidizing other sources of energy. As a benchmark, Taiwan should aim to ensure that at least 75% of its current energy demand is available via means other than natural gas, thereby achieving energy independence for residential use, general commercial and government services, and limited industrial production.

Achieving this 75% benchmark requires an increase in non-LNG sources by approximately 11GW of daily production. Taiwan is already well on its way towards achieving these goals, with renewable and battery storage targets exceeding 11GW by 2030, but these increases do not take into account reductions in coal powered energy production over the same time period. With the threat of energy interdiction looming large, Taiwan should make every effort to increase these renewable energy targets, expedite their completion, and ensure that investments remain on track.

Industrial growth led by increased chip production and data center construction will challenge Taiwan’s political leadership’s attempts to prioritize renewable energy investments, as rapid growth in energy consumption from these sectors is being met today with plans to increase Taiwan’s LNG capacity. Taiwan should consider tethering any increase in LNG production capacity on the island to matching increases in renewables, coal, and fuel oils. In the renewables sector, prioritizing investments in rooftop solar and small-scale battery storage are particularly critical, as they represent the most resilient forms of energy Taiwan will have in the face of the more advanced stages of blockade. With regards to coal and fuel oils, rapid investments should be made in topping off and expanding stockpiles, and coal plants decommissioned as a part of Taiwan’s larger environmental efforts must be subsidized to be capable of being rapidly brought back online.

Taiwan’s internal investments in its merchant marine are the next major hurdle in achieving resilience in the face of economic warfare. Taiwanese companies own an enormous share of the world’s shipping vessels, but fewer than 30% of the crews that sail them are Taiwanese. Foreign flagging has drastically reduced operating costs and kept Taiwanese companies profitable and competitive but has resulted in a dramatic decline in Taiwan’s maritime workforce. In executing an economic warfare campaign, Beijing would likely exert diplomatic and economic pressure on foreign registries, insurers, ports operators, and labor pools in an effort to disrupt commercial shipping to the island. Taiwan and partner nations should therefore develop contingency frameworks for sustaining critical shipping operations, including the rapid re-crewing of essential vessels with Taiwanese or partner-nation personnel willing to operate in contested conditions.

The main case for investment in coastal infrastructure on the east side of Taiwan is that it asymmetrically increases the military difficulties China faces when creating a cordon around Taiwan. A deep-water port at Hualien and Taitung, hardened and connected by tunnel and rail through the mountains, would give Taiwan a second strategic coastline for energy imports. In the event of a non-firing blockade, these ports would force China to commit a much larger portion of its maritime forces to patrolling and boarding duties in the Philippine Sea, driving up the logistics footprint and reducing their availability for other tasking. Existing infrastructure already provides a foundation: Hualien hosts an active Air Force base and is connected to Taipei and Taichung via the Central Cross-Island Highway and North-Link Railway, both of which include tunnels through bedrock.9 In 2018, Taiwan’s CPC Corporation conducted feasibility studies for building an LNG terminal at Hualien to diversify energy imports away from Kaohsiung.10 The Japanese Ministry of Defense has also assessed Hualien and Su’ao as potential logistics nodes in a Taiwan contingency.11

The undersea and information dimensions are equally critical. Taiwan is connected to the world by 15 submarine internet cables, most of which currently land on its western coast.12 In 2023, two cables connecting Taiwan’s Matsu Islands to the main island were cut, likely by Chinese fishing vessels, disrupting communications for weeks.13 While increasing use of space based internet providers offers some increased resiliency, bandwidth projections over the next several years suggest that these services will only be able to handle approximately 10% of Taiwan’s peacetime levels of internet traffic.14 To ensure access to higher levels of bandwidth, US Naval Postgraduate School researchers have warned that ports should be integrated with maritime domain awareness (MDA) networks, seabed sonar arrays, and AUV patrol routes to monitor and defend vital seabed infrastructure.15 If deep-water eastern ports were built with adjacent cable landing stations and hardened underground control rooms, they could serve as both logistics hubs and digital fortresses.

Building eastern ports is a strategic reorientation that forces China to contest both the Strait and the Pacific approaches simultaneously.

Risks of Failing to Act

If Taiwan remains dependent on its western ports and shallow coastal infrastructure, the island could be cut off from the world long before an invasion fleet appears over the horizon. China will have re-ordered the global balance of power without firing a shot.

The first and most visible consequence would be a Chinese monopoly over the world’s most advanced chips. Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) controls about 92 percent of global production of leading-edge chips under 7 nanometers, according to the Semiconductor Industry Association and Boston Consulting Group, and 100% of chips under 2 nanometers.16 If Beijing asserted control, whether through occupation, coercion, or forced “reunification”, it would hold the world’s digital future in its hands. Even if Taiwan’s engineers sabotaged fabrication plants, simply removing Taiwan from global chip supply chains would cost the global economy up to $1 trillion within a year.17

The second consequence would be a dramatic shift in the military geography of Asia. With Taiwan under its control, China would be able to break through the First Island Chain and project power into the central Pacific.18 The People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) could position aircraft, anti-ship missiles, and submarines on Taiwan’s eastern shoreline, directly overlooking the Miyako Strait and Bashi Channel, the two maritime gateways used by U.S. and Japanese forces to move between the East China Sea and Philippine Sea.19 From Taiwan, China could threaten Japan’s southern Ryukyu Islands, monitor U.S. submarines departing Guam, and exert pressure on the Philippines’ Batanes Islands at the northern tip of Luzon.20 It is no exaggeration to say that if Taiwan falls, the South China Sea becomes a Chinese lake, and the Western Pacific becomes contested water.

Finally, the fall or isolation of Taiwan would shatter confidence in U.S. security commitments across the Indo-Pacific. Tokyo, Seoul, Manila, Canberra, and European partners are watching not only what China does, but whether the United States allows it. In think tank simulations and classified defense discussions, Japanese and South Korean officials have privately warned that if Washington fails to defend Taiwan, their governments will consider acquiring nuclear weapons or making accommodations with Beijing.21

In short, the cost of inaction is not merely Taiwanese democracy. It is global technological stability, the military balance in the Indo-Pacific, and the credibility of U.S. led relationships that underpin peace.

Policy Recommendations

As the damage that an attempted Chinese reunification with Taiwan would cause to the global economy is assessed to exceed $1 Trillion USD within a year, solutions oriented around averting that outcome should be of a magnitude befitting of that danger, and should be a burden shared by the global community. A significant portion of those solutions should be oriented around deterrence, including investments by the United States, European, and Asian nations in military forces able to intervene in such a reunification attempt, but a maritime crisis in the Taiwan Strait will not be solved by deterrence alone. Geography cannot be negotiated, and Taiwan’s geography dictates that its survival depends on eastward connectivity, to the Pacific, to allied logistics, and to a hardened industrial and energy base. A forward-looking strategy must therefore treat energy investments, port construction, undersea infrastructure, and logistics resilience as the new frontier of deterrence. The following actions can anchor that strategy for Taiwan, the United States, and key allies.

For Taiwan

  • Increase renewable and battery storage capacity by at least 11GW as soon as possible and no later than 2030.
  • Ensure Taiwan retains the excess energy-generating capacity of all coal power plants brought offline by investing in programs to keep them maintained and staffed in a reserve capacity.
  • Require that all LNG electricity production increases are paired with renewable energy investments of equal scale.
  • Work with shipping companies to develop a plan to rapidly re-crew critical merchant ships with Taiwanese crew.
  • Construct deep-water, dual-use ports on the eastern coast, at Hualien, Taitung, or Su’ao, with at least 18–20 meters of draft, hardened breakwaters, underground fuel storage, and tunnel-linked rail and highway networks through the Central Mountain Range.22
  • Integrate ports with military infrastructure, including coastal anti-ship missile batteries, rapid runway repair units, and underground command centers resistant to missile strikes.
  • Establish maritime domain awareness (MDA) and seabed defense capabilities tied to port development: fixed sonar arrays, autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs), and secured landing points for undersea cables and fuel pipelines.23

For the United States

  • Fund a Taiwan East Coast Resilience Initiative under the Pacific Deterrence Initiative (PDI) or Foreign Military Financing (FMF) to support port deepening, fuel infrastructure, seabed surveillance, and logistics 24
  • Conduct joint logistics and sealift exercises using Taiwan’s east coast ports between the U.S. and Taiwanese forces, including roll-on/roll-off ship operations and distributed maritime sustainment exercises.
  • Integrate Taiwan into the U.S. Indo-Pacific undersea surveillance network, linking sonar systems, unmanned underwater sensors, and cable monitoring platforms from Japan to Guam.
  • Pre-position fuel, medical supplies, and emergency power generators in Japanese ports such as Yonaguni, Ishigaki, and Okinawa for rapid deployment via the Bashi Channel.

For Japan, Australia, and Allied Partners

  • Form a trilateral U.S.–Japan–Australia infrastructure group to co-finance Taiwan’s east coast port construction, modeled after their 2022 Pacific Islands cable funding mechanism.25
  • Link Taiwan’s eastern ports with Japanese bases in Yonaguni and Okinawa to create a logistics corridor stretching from Kyushu to Hualien.
  • Deploy multinational maritime patrols to deter cable cutting and seabed sabotage, using technologies already tested by NATO in the North Sea after the Nord Stream explosions.26
  • Encourage selective participation from European partners with Indo-Pacific interests, particularly in port hardening, cable-laying, and underwater repair capabilities.

Be opportunistic in quietly reminding partner nations that long term acquiescence to China comes with a price. These measures are not simply about infrastructure; they are about time. Building Taiwan’s eastern ports, hardening its seabed cables, and securing its fuel lines will take years, but deterrence is measured in the credibility of what is already underway. The window to act is narrowing, and each year of delay leaves the island and the global economy more exposed to the whims of the strait.

Conclusion: The Eastward Imperative

Every strategy is ultimately shaped by geography, and no geography in the Indo-Pacific is more decisive than Taiwan’s location between the Strait and the Pacific. For decades, Taiwan, its partners, and even its adversaries have assumed that the island’s fate will be decided westward, across the Taiwan Strait. But the Strait is no longer a protective moat; it is a narrowing corridor easily sealed by missiles, naval patrols, and even insurance premiums. The waters that once carried Taiwan to prosperity now form the most vulnerable seam in its defenses. Taiwan’s endurance depends on building resilience at home and reorienting its future growth eastward.

This is not only a question for Taiwan. The entire global economy hinges on Taiwan’s autonomy, as the effects of reunification with China would be global: supply chains fractured, energy routes reoriented, and the balance of power in Asia permanently altered. But that future is not inevitable. Taiwan, the United States, Japan, and like-minded partners have the resources and time, though not unlimited time, to act. The construction of eastern ports is not merely an engineering problem; it is a strategic decision. It is the difference between a Taiwan that must be rescued and a Taiwan that can endure.

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 the 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. He received his MBA from National Chiao Tung University in Taiwan, spending a year in Hsinchu, headquarters to TSMC.

References

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2. Biggs, Adam; Xu, Dan; Roaf, Joshua; and Olson, Tatana (2021) “Theories of Naval Blockades and Their Application in the Twenty-First Century,” Naval War College Review: Vol. 74 : No. 1 , Article 9. https://digital-commons.usnwc.edu/nwc-review/vol74/iss1/9/

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26. McNamara, E. M. “Reinforcing resilience: NATO’s role in enhanced security for critical undersea infrastructure.” NATO Review 28 (2024) https://www.dvidshub.net/audio/82211/nato-review-reinforcing-resilience-natos-role-enhanced-security-critical-undersea-infrastructure

Featured image: The Taiwan Innotech Expo Innovation Economy Pavilion, 2025. (Wikimedia Commons)

Fostering the Discussion on Securing the Seas.