Asia-Pacific

Hymn to Hai Kun: The Gap Between Ceremony and Capability

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By Meng Kit Tang

A Myth Before the Launch

In June 2026, the chairman of Taiwan’s China Shipbuilding Corporation’s (CSBC), announced that  the Hai Kun submarine was “on track” for delivery in 2026, but something else he said was even more telling. He added that pressure from the People’s Republic of China “has always existed,” on the program and that even after contracts are signed and parts are built, a shipment of parts can still be stopped at the last minute for political reasons.

That is an unusual thing for a shipbuilder to admit about his own supply chain. It means no deal with the suppliers behind Hai Kun is fully safe from Beijing until the part is delivered and actually installed on the boat.

As of its most recent sea trials in late July, its twentieth in all, the submarine’s delivery date remained officially unset, even as the pace of testing visibly picked up.

The submarine’s name fits this uncertainty better than anyone probably intended. Kun is a giant fish from the ancient Chinese text the Zhuangzi, so large no one can say how far it stretches, and it turns, within the same passage, into a bird whose wings blot out the sky. Taiwan named its first homemade submarine after this creature.

Before the boat ever touched water, before a single piece was welded, it already carried a story about becoming something vast, far more than a 2,500-tonne submarine could realistically live up to. A supply chain Beijing could disrupt at any point was never going to live up to it either.

That gap between the name and the actual submarine is really the whole story of this program. The launch ceremony in September 2023 built a big public celebration on top of a name that already promised too much, and in the three years since, the celebration has moved faster than the shipyard.

Delivery keeps slipping. The president has boarded the boat for photos that were later used against him. The ceremony made a statement about Taiwan’s ability to defend itself, one that the submarine’s uncertain legal status, its thin and shared torpedo supply, and a follow-on fleet that mostly exists on paper have not yet been able to back up.

The Liturgy of Launch

President Tsai Ing-wen led the launch ceremony at CSBC’s shipyard in Kaohsiung on September 28, 2023. A flag was draped over the submarine’s bow. “History will forever remember this day,” she told the crowd. “In the past, a domestically produced submarine was considered a mission impossible. But today, a submarine designed and built by our countrymen is in front of you.”

Two weeks later, in her National Day speech, she went further: building a submarine at home, she said, had been the dream of Taiwanese presidents for three decades, and now Taiwan had done it. The claim had grown between the two speeches.

One boat was now standing in for thirty years of hope.

By January 2026, when the submarine completed its first dive, the crowd watching had changed too. It was no longer just officials. Ordinary people gathered and chanted “Let’s go, Hai Kun” as it went under. A government can organize a ceremony. It cannot make a crowd show up on its own to cheer a test dive. Whatever problems the program has had, public support for it is real, not just something manufactured from the top.

The ceremony is doing two jobs most countries never have to combine. Building a weapon shows what a country’s industry can do. Being recognized as a state usually needs no proof at all. Taiwan does not have that luxury. Every time the Hai Kun appears in public, it has to do both: show the submarine works, and quietly assert that the government building it has the right to build anything at all.

Three years is a long time to keep a single launch day feeling meaningful. The submarine was originally due to the Republic of China Navy in November 2025. That date has slipped again and again, most recently to sometime in the second half of 2026.

In March 2026, Defense Minister Wellington Koo told reporters the ministry would simply stop giving delivery dates. That’s an unusual thing for a government to admit about its own flagship project. The month before, President Lai told the legislature that Taiwan would be in a stronger position today if a submarine bid had passed back in 2005, when he was still a lawmaker.

It is rare for a sitting president to admit that his signature program is not really a new achievement, but two decades of catching up, done in public.

The ceremony’s own photos have since been used against it. When Lai visited the docked submarine in March 2026, the Presidential Office released photos meant to show confidence and progress. Within days, lawmakers pointed out problems visible in those same photos: missing rivets, water stains, a bunk curtain that would not slide properly.

CSBC admitted the flaws were real, blaming “incomplete restoration following work done.” That’s the shipbuilder’s own explanation, not a critic’s, and it gives away something more telling: the boat had been taken apart and put back together in a hurry, or with the assumption that no one would look too closely, and some pieces never quite made it back into place.

None of this affects whether the submarine can actually dive. What it affects is trust. The government’s own photos, meant to reassure, instead gave an already-doubtful legislature something concrete to point at.

One Hull, A Fleet Still Sung

CSBC has said plainly what these boats are for: making it costly for China to blockade Taiwan or land troops there, and pushing back Chinese carrier groups near the strait.

In short, the goal is not to control the strait outright but to make crossing it expensive. Keep that purpose in mind, because most of what follows is about how much of the fleet meant to do this job does not exist yet.

The number eight has carried a lot of weight in this program’s story ever since Taiwan formalized its plan to build eight submarines at home. CSBC’s chairman complicated that number in May. He said a US assessment of Taiwan’s situation puts the real need closer to twelve boats, based on the standard naval rule that a fleet needs about three hulls for everyone it can keep on active duty, since the rest are in training or repair.

Eight was the ceremony’s number. Twelve, according to the builder’s own account of what Washington thinks Taiwan needs, is the working number.

The torpedoes tell a similar story. Taiwan has a confirmed order for 28 Mark 48 Mod 6 torpedoes, 24 for combat and four for training, arriving in batches: four in 2026, fourteen in 2027, and ten in 2028.

These are not just for Hai Kun. They are to be shared with the two older Chien Lung-class submarines Taiwan bought from the Netherlands in the 1980s, which will likely still be in service when the new torpedoes arrive.

So a navy planning for eight modern submarines will, for years, be working with a torpedo supply sized for a much smaller, older fleet. A parallel case shows how wide that gap between paper and hardware can run: the navy has held a signed contract since 2017 to upgrade 168 lightweight MK-46 torpedoes, used by surface ships and patrol aircraft, to the newer MK-54 standard, originally due by 2022.

Audit findings released this year show it slipped to 2025 through 2027, arrived as scattered, undocumented parts the navy could not assemble into a single working torpedo, and sat for nearly three years after Washington flagged a 91 percent failure rate in the components, without the navy procuring replacements or reassessing the schedule.

Two of the seven follow-on submarines already have a signed contract, the first pair in a build sequence of two, three, and two boats, changed in 2024 from an earlier plan of three, two, and two so the navy could adjust later designs based on lessons from the first boat.

But the roughly one billion Taiwan dollars set aside for those two boats stays frozen until the Hai Kun finishes its sea trials and the defense ministry submits a full report to the legislature. The contract exists. The money does not move until the first boat proves itself.

Right now, the next stage of the fleet is a signature on paper, not steel in the yard.

None of this means the program is failing. Prototype submarines often run late and hit technical problems. Hai Kun’s technical setbacks during 2024 sea trials, and its recovery from them, are unremarkable by the standards of building a first-of-its-kind submarine.

What’s worth noticing instead is the gap between how the two sides of this story get told. The ceremony announced a fleet built to deny an enemy the strait. Three years later, the shipyard has one hull, a torpedo stock it shares with older boats, and a signed contract for two more submarines whose funding won’t move until the first one proves itself.

A state whose international standing partly depends on looking self-reliant has every reason to let the ceremony’s promises outpace the shipyard’s progress, because the political payoff comes the moment the cameras catch the launch, while the military payoff is only tested in a crisis nobody wants to see happen.

The Boats With No Liturgy

The contract for the first two follow-on submarines was signed quietly. No flag, no crowd, no presidential speech. That makes sense: there was no boat yet to photograph, and a ceremony needs something physical to celebrate, a hull, a hatch someone can climb through for the cameras.

A signature on a contract and a frozen budget line do not give a ceremony anything to work with, so nothing was held. The state stays loud about the one submarine it has and silent about the seven it has not.

That difference matters. The 2023 ceremony could afford to oversell, because the boat was real and would eventually prove the claims true or false in public, one sea trial at a time. The seven boats still on paper do not get that kind of scrutiny, because nobody is making loud claims about them yet. That sounds safer, but it might not be.

A promise made in public can be checked against reality, slowly and awkwardly, but checked. A promise never made in public can’t be checked at all. The part of the fleet we know least about is also the part we talk about least, and that’s probably not a coincidence.

A Congregation That Cannot Say Its Own Name

The ceremony has a second audience, one the launch event never addressed because it could not.

Components and technical help for Hai Kun came from engineers and firms in seven countries: Australia, Canada, India, Japan, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the United States. In several cases the work had to go through arm’s-length companies, because Beijing has long warned that any country helping Taiwan build a submarine would pay a diplomatic price.

None of these governments has stood at a podium beside Tsai or Lai to say what it contributed, a silence that likely protects each supplier’s relationship with Beijing more than it protects Taiwan’s submarine.

Taiwan can claim an internationally assisted, non-Red supply chain. It cannot name who took part, and those who did are not offering.

After the Music Stops

CSBC, Hai Kun’s builder, lost money on the submarine program because of delays and warranty costs. It returned to profit over the next two quarters, supported by both its commercial shipbuilding business and follow-on submarine contracts.

The two sides of the business help sustain each other.

The 2023 launch ceremony is not disproved simply because the navy has yet to receive the submarine. Ceremonies like this are not judged immediately. They are judged over time, as events either confirm or undermine their promises. But that process cannot continue indefinitely.

Every year the Hai Kun remains undelivered widens the gap between the optimism of the launch and the submarine still sitting in dry dock at Kaohsiung.

Eventually, reality catches up. The Hai Kun enters service, joins the fleet, and validates the ceremony in retrospect. Or the follow-on submarines never materialize, leaving the ceremony remembered more clearly than the capability it promised.

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: President Lai Ching-te inspects the Hai Kun. (Wikimedia Commons photo)

Ocean Governance

What Naval Power Cannot Buy

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By Hervé Auffret

Ships can deter a competitor, compel a rival, and escort a convoy. What they cannot do is build the institutions, relationships, information systems, and rules that keep maritime order running when the guns are silent. China has worked this out. Washington and most of its partners treat governance as an appendage to naval strategy, rather than a domain of competition in its own right.

The Missing Half of Maritime Competition

Counting ships, missiles, bases, and shipyards is how most would measure power at sea.1 But a second measure gets far less attention. A navy can dominate the horizon and still lose the argument over who writes the rules, who trains the officials, and who supplies the systems that decide what happens at sea on an ordinary Tuesday.

China is the proof of concept. Its satellite-navigation system, BeiDou, is quietly becoming the default across African ports and fishing fleets. Across the Pacific, police training, equipment transfers, and shifts in diplomatic recognition have bought Beijing access no carrier strike group could. In the unglamorous rooms where regional fisheries bodies argue over inspection procedures, Chinese delegates show up year after year to do the slow work other great powers often overlook. This does not replace the People’s Liberation Army Navy. It reshapes the political ground on which that navy will someday be used, resisted, or waved through.

A recent episode in the Strait of Hormuz offers another stark illustration. In spring 2026, the United States assembled a naval force to reopen it after Iran closed it to traffic. A month in, Adm. James Stavridis (Ret.) and a chorus of maritime lawyers reached the uncomfortable verdict that American firepower could not decide the outcome. Iran’s cheap drones and mines kept risk and the insurance premiums high enough to strangle traffic regardless of who controlled the water. If naval power cannot restore transit rights mid-war, it is unlikely to do so in peacetime.

So what does maritime governance produce that naval power cannot? I see four recurring effects: institutional access, security cooperation below the threshold of alliance, dependence on information infrastructure, and influence over the rules themselves. None of this makes governance benign or a fleet optional. Naval power acts on capabilities and behavior, directly and visibly. Governance works more slowly, on the institutional, informational, and normative ground beneath them: the ground on which states decide what counts as legitimate, who exercises authority, and where their interests lie.

Naval Power and Governance: A Functional Distinction

“Maritime governance” can be used to mean everything at once: law, coast guards, fisheries management, port security, and regional diplomacy. I use it more narrowly. Maritime governance organizes authority at sea: it builds the rules, institutions, professional networks, and information systems through which that authority is exercised and sustained.2

In contrast, naval power deters, compels, and projects force, performing the coercive and reassuring functions that keep the peace or break it. Governance organizes and sustains authority while naval power protects it, contests it, or imposes outcomes when necessary. A vessel can enforce a rule nobody else will, but it cannot train a prosecutor, build a chain of custody, or talk a government into years of security cooperation. Navies themselves sometimes do the governing. The distinction is not between military and civilian institutions, but between two mechanisms of strategic effect.

Latin American naval doctrine has long separated poder naval, the military instrument, from the wider poder marítimo which includes administration, commerce, fisheries, civilian institutions, and the entire apparatus of a state’s relationship with the sea.3 In states with thin civilian maritime administrations, the navy is often the whole of maritime governance because it is the only institution capable of training officials or running a surveillance network. The moment a navy starts doing those things, it stops relying purely on coercive effect and starts producing the institutional memory and working relationships that outlast any single deployment.

This suggests a more useful distinction than military versus civilian: whether presence is episodic or sustained. Deployments and port calls are visible and consequential, but temporary. A coast guard cutter returning year after year, or a navy training prosecutors because no one else can, has a different effect. Persistence turns presence into relationships and eventually institutions. That returns us to the four recurring effects outlined above. The first, and most basic, is institutional access.

Institutional Access and Socialization

Institutional access is the capacity to shape how a partner understands a threat and gets through an ordinary day. Compared with a carrier deployment, a recurring training course may be small, but it compounds over years into a habit of professional familiarity that decides whom an official calls in a crisis.

China has been building exactly this kind of access across the Pacific through police secondments, riot-control and surveillance equipment, and training programs with Fiji, Papua New Guinea, and the Solomon Islands. Beijing’s language frames this as sovereign states building their own capacity, making the cooperation politically palatable in capitals that might balk at anything resembling a bloc.

A port call signals interest for a week. Institutional socialization survives the ship’s departure. It shapes doctrine, procurement, and information-sharing habits, and, more quietly, opens ministries close to domestic political power.

This does not buy permanent loyalty, as Ghana demonstrates. In April 2025, Ghana’s fisheries authorities suspended the licenses of four locally flagged, Chinese-owned trawlers for a year.4 Chinese commercial influence over Ghana’s trawl sector is extensive. But that did not stop Accra from sanctioning the vessels. Institutional strength, once it takes root locally, does not come with a remote control for the country that helped build it.

Cooperation of this kind creates access and familiarity, not compliance. Access and socialization alone leave the result intangible. There is no basing agreement or formal commitment, only influence that may later be converted into something more concrete.

Security Cooperation Below the Threshold of Alliance

Institutional access matters most when it changes what a government is prepared to negotiate. General familiarity can become a security agreement or an option on future access.

Small and mid-sized states often want assistance and expertise without the domestic backlash of “picking sides.” Police cooperation, coast-guard support, and disaster response all sit between routine diplomacy and a formal defense pact. That space has strategic value in its own right. The China–Solomon Islands security agreement, signed in 2022, shows how.

The Solomon Islands already had a 2017 treaty allowing Australian police, defense, and civilian personnel to deploy by mutual consent. What Beijing negotiated was different. The text has never been released, but a leaked draft described Chinese police deployment, and provisions for ship visits, replenishment, and transit, all with Honiara’s consent.

Beijing did not muscle its way to maritime access with a naval task force. It got there through diplomacy. Honiara switched diplomatic recognition from Taiwan to China in 2019, and three years of deepening economic engagement and police assistance followed. That groundwork made a security agreement and future naval access negotiable. Governance created an opportunity naval power could not.

Chinese diplomacy did its part too, framing the pact as cooperation between sovereign equals, letting both governments call it domestic security cooperation even as Canberra, Wellington, and Washington read it as a geopolitical realignment.

But the arrangement also shows where the mechanism falls short. Regional pushback revived the principle that Pacific security is a “Pacific family” matter first. The Solomon Islands’ own politics caught up with the pact. In 2026 a newly installed prime minister pledged to review it, a reminder that access built on personal relationships can unravel the moment the government that built it falls out of power.5 Cooperation below the threshold of a formal alliance comes at a lower price of entry, not immunity from the ordinary demands of legitimacy and transparency.

Information-Infrastructure Dependence

The third mechanism runs through information itself. Maritime-domain awareness is often discussed in technical terms that focus on satellites and sensors. But the strategic questions sit above the hardware. They include who supplies and maintains the system, whose standards structure the data, and how easily a country can switch providers. Those questions are easy to ignore early on, when equipment is subsidized and switching still appears simple. They grow problematic only later, once training, procurement, and data formats have all been built around a single supplier.

More than thirty African countries now host BeiDou reference stations or run BeiDou-enabled services, often with subsidized equipment and training. The system reaches well beyond maritime security, encompassing navigation, mapping, transport, and fisheries monitoring. The strategic payoff is not a “kill switch” that lets Beijing blind another country’s maritime awareness on command. The real effect is entrenchment. The BeiDou information-infrastructure stack becomes an indispensable foundation. Once officials are trained and maintenance arrangements established, later choices become harder to make independently. Even with multi-constellation receivers, a state can still find its daily administrative routine dependent on Chinese hardware and technical support.

Washington built a similar mechanism inside NATO, where over 1,200 standardization agreements cover everything from rifle calibers to tactical data links, binding an alliance trained for decades on American doctrine and logistically dependent on American resupply. GPS had no serious rival for a generation. GLONASS did not match it until the 2010s, Galileo went live only in 2016, and BeiDou only in 2020. The difference is that Washington never extended its information infrastructure systematically. Outside NATO, this standardization has been improvisational. China, without a NATO-scale alliance of its own, has built something more systematic through BeiDou.

BeiDou does not leave African governments without alternatives. Ghana and Senegal are building monitoring capacity with several partners at once, Ghana through the Copernicus satellite-detection program and Senegal through joint patrols with the Sub-Regional Fisheries Commission, the EU, and the U.S. Coast Guard.6 Informational dependence is rarely absolute, but entrenchment of an information infrastructure shapes technical and bureaucratic decisions for years afterward.

Normative Shaping

The fourth mechanism operates on the rules themselves, shaping the procedures by which maritime conduct is judged. A navy can enforce or contest a rule, but it cannot decide who gets inspection authority, what data must be reported, or how an international body weighs enforcement against a flag state’s consent.

Regional fisheries bodies are a good place to see this in action, since their decisions are technical, cumulative, and consequential. The Western and Central Pacific Fisheries Commission adopted its first high-seas boarding and inspection procedures in 2006 and has spent two decades refining vessel monitoring and reporting requirements. This is the plumbing of ocean governance. China has stayed at the table throughout, most recently through the Commission’s High Seas Boarding and Inspection Intersessional Working Group formed in late 2024, whose guides were adopted in 2025. That work shapes the conditions under which fishing fleets are monitored, inspected, and sanctioned across one of the most economically important fishing grounds in the world.

Normative influence rarely produces a visible Chinese “win.” More often it appears as a qualifying clause or a gradually normalized practice. These gains build slowly, and a naval deployment can do little to reverse them. Governance and coercion also coexist more comfortably than the usual distinction suggests. China participates in maritime institutions while using aggressive coast guard tactics and advancing expansive legal claims elsewhere. Rule-making can moderate competition, but it can also lend the authority of law to advantage a state has already accumulated. Chinese writing on global ocean governance says as much, openly linking institutional participation, the defense of maritime “rights and interests,” and the accumulation of national discursive power.7

For Washington, that ambiguity makes sustained engagement in these bodies more important. Rules favorable to an open maritime order do not write themselves, and reflexively treating every Chinese proposal as illegitimate can be counterproductive. What works is sustained technical presence, credible legal positions, and coalitions that can turn a broad principle into an accepted procedure.

Where the United States Can Compete

This is not a case for copying China’s model or divesting from ships and munitions. It is a case for treating institutions, information systems, and rules as strategic assets worthy of sustained investment. This is not straightforward, and no single framework captures the whole picture. But three priorities stand out.

The first is institutional relationships, where Washington simply needs to keep doing what already works. The Coast Guard is the obvious lead instrument. It is naval power built for persistence rather than pulses, turning presence into governance.8 Its shiprider agreements, now in force with a dozen Pacific Island nations, let American cutters back up partner enforcement without elbowing aside local authority. State Department peacekeeping funding has already paid for coast guard training in Comoros and Gabon. What is missing is continuity. This means extending these arrangements to Atlantic and Indian Ocean partners, and funding legal mentoring, maintenance, and recurring exchanges.

Coast guards, fisheries agencies, and prosecutors are not secondary audiences waiting for a naval visit. They are the institutions through which sovereignty is exercised daily, and the Coast Guard usually has a sharper comparative advantage in working with them than a combatant command does. The relationship persists. A task force does not.

The second priority is to build on the information architecture that already exists. The Illegal, Unreported, and Unregulated (IUU) Fishing Action Alliance, launched with the United Kingdom and Canada in 2022, and its ties to Global Fishing Watch, already give Washington a vehicle for offering partners an alternative to a single proprietary supplier. Forcing anyone to choose between BeiDou and GPS is a battle Washington is unlikely to win. Instead, it should fund interoperability with shared standards and switching costs low enough that a partner can combine sources without replacing its system wholesale.

Finally, norm-setting requires a different kind of persistence. It involves lawyers and scientists seconded into intersessional working groups. These groups matter because this is where concrete work happens. Technical experts draft language, resolve disagreements and build consensus months before any formal vote takes place. By the time the draft proposal reaches a body’s plenary session, the focus is often ratification, not deliberation. A state that only shows up for the plenary vote arrives after the outcome is largely decided.

All three priorities demand a kind of bureaucratic coordination that a recent U.S. government assessment found consistently lacking. U.S. naval strategy, development assistance, law enforcement, and fisheries diplomacy sit in different agencies with different budgets. China does not coordinate every initiative from the center, but these instruments accumulate inside the same bilateral relationships regardless. To compete, an American approach will need to produce the same cumulative effect, while staying more transparent and less coercive.

Governing the Space Navies Secure

None of this makes naval power dispensable. Ships protect access, deter aggression, and keep governance from turning into an empty promise the moment it is tested with force. But building trusted institutions, negotiating access, sustaining an information system, and producing a rule people actually follow are things ships alone have never managed. These come from governance, or they do not come at all.

China has already combined these tools in ways that matter strategically. Police cooperation opens institutions, security agreements make access negotiable, information systems create switching costs, and participation in rule-making shapes the environment in which fleets operate. Not one of these gains is automatic, and none lasts forever. But together, they redraw the strategic map long before any naval crisis arrives.

A state can dominate at sea and still lose influence over the order built around it. The question facing the United States is not whether naval power matters more than maritime governance, but what each one does. Naval power secures access. Governance shapes the order that access is supposed to serve.

Hervé Auffret is an independent specialist in security and maritime sector governance and a retired Captain in the French Navy. He has held numerous leadership positions in security and defense institutions, including at the Geneva Centre for Security Sector Governance (DCAF), the UN Department of Peacekeeping Operations, NATO Allied Transformation Command, the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and the French Secretariat-General for National Defence. His operational and command experience includes deployments in Africa, the Caribbean, and the Middle East. He is a graduate of the French Naval Academy (École navale) and the French War College and holds two Master of Science degrees. The views expressed are those of the author alone.

Endnotes

1. Christian Bueger and Timothy Edmunds, “Beyond Seablindness: A New Agenda for Maritime Security Studies,” International Affairs 93, no. 6 (2017): 1293–1311.

2. Christian Bueger, “What Is Maritime Security?,” Marine Policy 53 (2015): 159–164.

3. Gary Javier González Núñez, “Poder Marítimo y Poder Naval, ¿nueva definición para Colombia?,” Ensayos sobre Estrategia Marítima 2, no. 5 (2017): 31–42; Noé Cuervo Vázquez and Marcos Pablo Moloeznik, “Hacia una medición del poder naval en América Latina,” Anuario Latinoamericano: Ciencias Políticas y Relaciones Internacionales 5 (2017): 291–315.

4. “Ghana Suspends Licenses of Chinese Trawlers over Illegal Fishing,” Africa Defense Forum, May 2025; “Tackling Illegal Fishing: Fisheries Ministry Suspends Licenses of Four Industrial Trawlers,” Business Day Ghana, April 2025; Environmental Justice Foundation, China’s Hidden Fleet in West Africa: A Spotlight on Illegal Practices within Ghana’s Industrial Trawl Sector (London: Environmental Justice Foundation, 2018).

5. Matthew Wale, quoted in “New Prime Minister Says Solomon Islands Will Review Its Secretive Security Treaty with China,” NBC News/Associated Press, June 3, 2026, https://www.nbcnews.com/world/asia/solomon-islands-new-prime-minister-will-review-china-security-deal-rcna348216; “Solomon Islands Won’t Release Security Pact with China Because of Non-Disclosure Clause,” ABC News, June 11, 2026, https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-06-11/solomon-islands-china-security-pact-non-disclosure-clause/106784432.

6. European Maritime Safety Agency, “Copernicus Maritime Surveillance – Fisheries Control,” use case on EFCA-Ghana cooperation, https://www.emsa.europa.eu/; U.S. Naval Forces Africa, on USCGC Spencer deployment and combined maritime law-enforcement operations with Cabo Verde, Senegal, and the Gambia, January 2023, https://www.globalsecurity.org/military/library/news/2023/01/mil-230119-usn02.htm; Food and Agriculture Organization, “Senegal Shows Commitment to Fight IUU Fishing,” June 2023, https://www.fao.org/port-state-measures/news-events/detail/en/c/1641217/.

7. Luo Gang, “中国参与全球海洋治理的战略思维” [China’s Strategic Thinking on Participation in Global Ocean Governance], Institute of International and Strategic Studies, Peking University, Brief no. 67, 2018.

8. Éric Frécon and Benoît de Tréglodé, eds., La diplomatie des garde-côtes en Asie du Sud-Est, Étude de l’IRSEM no. 73 (Paris: Institut de recherche stratégique de l’École militaire, 2020).

Featured image: 1662 Portolan chart of the Aegean Sea and the Sea of Marmara by François Ollive. (Wikimedia Commons)

Fiction Week

Call For Articles: Fiction Week 2026

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Stories Due: November 10, 2026
Week Dates: December 7-11, 2026
Story Length: 1,500-3,000 Words
Submit to: Content@cimsec.org

By Brian Kerg

In annual tradition, CIMSEC will be featuring a series of short stories that explore the nature of conflict and competition through fiction. 

Fiction has long served as a powerful means for exploring hypotheticals and envisioning alternatives. Authors are challenged to explore how potential clashes and warfighting challenges may play out. They are invited to delve into the implications of new technologies and how they will change the character of warfare. They can probe the past and use historical fiction to explore alternative histories. They are encouraged to ply any element of the craft of writing. Their stories may be driven by character, narrative, theme, or any other literary approach.

Authors are invited to craft gripping narratives that illuminate the unforeseen and carve realistic detail into visions of future conflict. Send all submissions to Content@cimsec.org.

For past CIMSEC Fiction Weeks, feel free to view our 2025, 2024, 2023, 2022, 2021, and 2020 fiction lineups.

Brian Kerg is CIMSEC’s Managing Editor.

Featured Image: Art created with Midjourney AI.

Arctic

Review of Polar War: Submarines, Spies, and the Struggle for Power in a Melting Arctic by Kenneth R. Rosen

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by Tatum Delaney

The countdown ticks forward, each second marching the Arctic ice closer to its liquid form. Some see opportunity in what will be left behind: new sea lanes, access to resources, and expanded commercial activity. Others see danger in a region where governance structures and territorial claims are outpaced by national ambitions. Is the United States prepared for the risks of a rapidly changing Arctic? 

Author Kenneth R. Rosen confronts this question through more than two years of investigative reporting with military units, scientific stations, and remote communities in Polar War: Submarines, Spies, and the Struggle for Power in a Melting Arctic. Rosen argues that the United States has fallen behind evolving threats along its northern flank, hampered by decades of inadequate investments. Although his reporting spans multiple Arctic Council states, Rosen’s greatest contribution lies in his pointed vignettes of U.S. preparedness. Through poorly suited infrastructure, broken equipment, inexperienced crews, and isolated service members, Polar War makes the consequences of neglect tangible.

Polar War by Kenneth R. Rosen (image courtesy of Simon & Schuster)

Despite the high stakes, Rosen’s depictions of deficient infrastructure can be unexpectedly comedic. He recounts his experience aboard the USCGC Healy, one of the United States’ few icebreakers, as its crew struggles with a small boat transfer alongside a Norwegian vessel:

They find “the marine off-load release—the device connecting the American small boat to a crane and winch—is stuck, frozen stiff, caked in a thin layer of ice. 

“Looks like you need a mallet,” I say. 

“I am a mallet,” comes the petty officer’s response as he hacks away at the device with a piece of flotsam.” 

The contrast becomes sharper when Rosen describes the Norwegian vessel’s design. Its covered launch wells cradle the small boats, keeping them ice-free and ready for immediate deployment. Polar War is at its strongest in moments like these, using small failures to expose larger institutional problems.

The Healy’s recurring equipment failures and the crew’s improvised solutions create the impression of a vessel struggling with reliability, even under routine conditions. The consequences become more serious when a Russian vessel approaches the Healy and launches a helicopter overhead. Although the Healy is outfitted with aircraft hangars, budget constraints have left them empty. Icy wings delay the arrival of a P-8 Poseidon, allowing the Russian ship to depart before the United States could respond with any meaningful display of airpower. For Rosen, the encounter demonstrates how distance, weather, and limited capabilities can constrain U.S. strategy.

U.S. Coast Guard Cutter Healy (WAGB 20) and Norwegian Coast Guard Vessel Svalbard steam in formation through ice on Sep. 27, 2023 in the Barents Sea. (U.S. Department of Defense photo by Sgt. Carter Acton)

The shortcomings extend well beyond any single vessel. Throughout the book, Rosen documents how budget shortfalls and inadequate winterization affect U.S. military infrastructure across the Arctic. Runways and barracks in Alaska and Greenland suffer from structural problems. Units lack equipment suited to Arctic conditions. The Polar Security Cutter Program faces persistent delays, while Alaska continues to have insufficient deep-water port infrastructure supported by storage and container facilities. Even the basic systems that sustain personnel in the field can be inadequate. Among Rosen’s most striking accounts are nurses resorting to sous vide machines in hardware store buckets to maintain medication temperatures, despite the availability of heated medical chests. Again, Rosen captures how deficient investment leaves personnel improvising when purpose-built solutions already exist.

Rosen situates these failures within a broader pattern of deferred decision-making. The same logic that slowed U.S. investment in climate adaptation, he argues, has long shaped its approach to the Arctic. For decades, the region was treated as an expensive future problem and sidelined in favor of more immediate theaters of conflict. Even with that progress, the consequences of delay may be difficult to overcome quickly. Rosen warns that this lag could yield strategic advantages to an adversary like Russia, which has actively worked to cultivate its Arctic presence.

Still, not every gap Rosen identifies necessarily represents simple neglect. Maintaining infrastructure and specialized capabilities in one of the world’s most remote and expensive operating environments requires difficult resource tradeoffs, and the United States has faced competing priorities elsewhere. Readers may reasonably question whether some shortcomings reflect strategic prioritization rather than institutional indifference. Nevertheless, Rosen convincingly argues that the cumulative effect of these choices has left the United States with a force operating in the Arctic without the infrastructure, equipment, or experience necessary to do so effectively.

“We are an Arctic nation that doesn’t know how to be an Arctic nation,” observes Captain Krautler of the USCGC Stratton. Rosen recalls Krautler’s concern for his crew as they conduct wintertime inspections in the Bering Sea for the first time. The boardings go poorly, with Lieutenant Mike He later describing one as “embarrassing.” As these accounts accumulate, Polar War generates a sense of unease, not because personnel lack commitment or professionalism, but because they are asked to operate in an environment with limited domain-specific preparation.

These challenges are compounded by the constant rotation of personnel through Arctic assignments. At an Army readiness exercise in Alaska, a drone operator suggests that Arctic units should be all-volunteer. “Most people are only here for three years,” he explains. “By the time someone figures out their job, they are gone.” Institutional knowledge drains away just as hard-earned experience begins to accumulate. Rosen contends that addressing this churn requires more than increased recruitment; it demands an institutional culture better suited to Arctic conditions.

The human costs of failing to adapt are perhaps the book’s most sobering dimension. Rosen speaks with Delilah, a mortician in Anchorage, who has become familiar with receiving the bodies of service members from the 11th Airborne Division following suicide. Unlike rotational units that merely train in Alaska, the so-called Arctic Angels live—and sometimes die—there. Rosen’s reporting here shifts Polar War from questions of infrastructure and operational capability toward the sustainability of maintaining a military presence in such an unforgiving environment. Isolation, extreme weather, and the demands of Arctic service can become more than obstacles to readiness; they can fundamentally affect the lives of those asked to endure them.

Some tentative progress emerges through grant-funded initiatives with the Center for Alaska Native Health Research. They draw inspiration from the Qungasvik approach to reducing suicide among Alaska Native youth. The program offers avenues for improving mental health and resilience within Arctic units by fostering community connection, particularly among mid-level enlisted leadership. Targeting interventions at these leaders is intended to instill a sense of unity with and among the combat soldiers they interact with and train on a daily basis. Critically, rather than simply asking personnel to endure Arctic conditions, such efforts attempt to adapt systems of support to the realities of living and operating there.

U.S. Army Soldiers assigned to the 11th Airborne Division training in Alaska on Feb. 22, 2026. (U.S. Department of Defense photo by Spc. Brandon Vasquez)

Taken as a whole, Rosen’s reporting suggests that Russia’s advantage in the Arctic stems not only from technological superiority, but from decades of sustained presence, domain specialization, and familiarity with the region. In contrast, the United States has historically approached the Arctic more episodically, deferring infrastructure investments and rotating personnel through an environment where experience is particularly difficult to acquire and retain.

Yet the value of sustained presence should not be understood as entirely fixed. Rosen gives relatively little attention to how warming temperatures may also complicate the maintenance of Arctic infrastructure built for a different climate. As permafrost thaws, destabilized ground can damage foundations, walls, and floors, potentially turning long-established infrastructure into an increasingly expensive liability. The United States faces these challenges as well, but future investments may offer an opportunity to build with a changing Arctic in mind rather than adapting infrastructure designed for conditions that no longer exist.

Readers seeking a systematic assessment of Arctic force balances or a comprehensive academic treatment of the region’s security environment may find Rosen’s episodic approach less satisfying. The vignette-driven structure can leave readers wondering how representative individual failures are of the broader U.S. posture. For readers who are solution-oriented, the book ends with recommendations for how the United States might move forward. But its greatest strength lies more in diagnosis than prescription. Rosen excels at making strategic problems feel immediate. Taken together, his anecdotes reveal how grand strategy is experienced by the people responsible for carrying it out. In doing so, Rosen connects broad debates about Arctic competition to the realities of operating in the region. Polar War offers readers an accessible and unsettling account of what happens when a nation begins preparing for a theater only after its importance has become clear.

Climate change is wearing away the ice buffer that once insulated the United States from greater northern risks. As sea ice recedes, the margin for error may recede with it. The Arctic is no longer a distant frontier, but an operating environment whose strategic importance is increasingly difficult to defer. Rosen ultimately asks whether the United States will develop the capacity to meet that challenge or arrive too late to act.

Tatum Delaney is a Ph.D. researcher in the Ashley School of Global Development and the Environment at Cornell University. She is a National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate Fellow with the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory in Political, Economic, and Sociocultural Sciences. Her current work primarily focuses on fisheries enforcement and management challenges in Alaska, including Coast Guard operations. 

Featured image: U.S. Coast Guard Cutter Healy (WAGB 20) crew and researchers install equipment on a floe of multi-year ice in the Beaufort Sea, Aug. 9, 2023. (U.S. Coast Guard photo by Petty Officer 3rd Class Briana Carter)

Fostering the Discussion on Securing the Seas.