Drones/Unmanned

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

Leave a comment

By Joseph Hanacek and Josh Richards

Building the Airborne Asymmetry

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

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

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

Taiwan’s Awakening

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

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

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

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

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

Why Drones Matter for Taiwan’s Defense

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

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

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

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

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

Ukraine’s Lessons: The Drone as Ammunition

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

Two observations are critical.

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

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

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

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

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

Production Bottlenecks: Supply Chain and Assembly

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

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

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

Breaking the Supply Bottleneck: Selectivity and Innovative Partnerships

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Breaking the Capacity Bottleneck: The Cultural Challenge

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusion: The Clock Is Ticking

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

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

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

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

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

References

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Asia-Pacific

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

Leave a comment

By Meng Kit Tang

Markets Close Before Missiles Fire

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

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

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

The Insurance Trigger: Commercial Lawfare and the Risk Cascade

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hormuz and Taiwan: Lessons and Limits

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Taiwan’s Role: Pre-Crisis Coordination

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Beijing’s Escalation Calculus

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Sovereign Guarantee Framework

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

Doctrine: Institutionalizing Insurance-Backed Deterrence

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

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

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

Escorts: Calibrated Presence and the Problem of Coerced Compliance

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

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

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

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

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

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

Allied Integration: Logistics, Access, and Shared Credibility

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

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

Limits of the Sovereign Guarantee Architecture

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

Pre-Empting the Insurance Weapon

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

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

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

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

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

Future Tech

What a Destroyer XO Should Demand from Onboard AI in 2027

3 Comments

By John Babick

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

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

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

The Environment AI Must Survive

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

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

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

What Onboard AI Should Actually Do

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Dependency Trap

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

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

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

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

When AI Gets It Wrong

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

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

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

Command Authority Does Not Transfer

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

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

The Standard

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ocean Governance

Vanished Lobsters, Devastated Reefs: The Question of Chemical Fishing in the Caribbean

Leave a comment

By Dr. David Soud and Dr. Ian Ralby

Law enforcement officials are accustomed to interdicting shipments of precursor chemicals used in drug production. The chemicals used for illegal fishing, however, tend to go unchecked. This is partly because those substances, from bleach to cyanide to fertilizers, have no immediately obvious links to fishing. Yet maritime authorities need to attend more closely to the dangers posed by chemical fishing. The practice is extremely hard to detect, and it inflicts lasting damage on marine environments, both to specific species and to coral reefs. To understand this dynamic, one might begin with the lobster.

The spiny lobster, also known in various places as the rock lobster, Florida lobster, langosta or langostino, sea crayfish, or crawfish, is one of the premier high-value seafood catches in the Caribbean. In the Bahamas alone, the spiny lobster industry is worth nearly USD 100 million, providing employment for thousands of fishers.1 Extrapolate that across the region, and the incentives for illegal, unreported or unregulated (IUU) lobstering become obvious.

Though there have been efforts at conservation and management, numerous indicators suggest that pervasive overfishing of Caribbean spiny lobsters occurs throughout the region. One recent study identified the spiny lobster as “fully exploited in The Bahamas, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Antigua and Barbuda, Belize and Anguilla…[and] overexploited in Grenada, Haiti, Jamaica, and Saint Lucia.”2 Another found that in Jamaica, gaps in reporting and enforcement had led to overfishing.3 And a 2019 OPESCA/CRFM/COPACO report concluded that “IUU fishing is one of the major factors contributing to unsustainable fishing of spiny lobster. However, IUU fishing has not been systematically and reliably quantified in the region.”4

Within this larger issue, a particular form of lobstering merits heightened vigilance: using noxious chemicals to subdue lobsters or force them from hiding and make them easier to collect. While other chemicals have been identified, including a blend of household detergent and gasoline, the most common chemical used in illegal lobstering by far is bleach.5 If one can use chemicals to stun lobsters or force them into the open, one’s catch rate, and hence profits, will grow. Prolonged dipping of lobsters in bleach solution is also used to remove eggs from illegally harvested female lobsters.6 The practice of using chemicals to increase yield appears to have been found nearly everywhere lobsters are harvested and is not limited to the Caribbean. In 2022, the governor of North Carolina issued a proclamation banning the practice, but given the uncertain health of lobster fisheries in the Caribbean, the practice poses a particular challenge in that region.7

Although this technique has been used by poachers for quite some time, the range and scale of bleach lobstering in the Caribbean is impossible to calculate from available data. Certainly, this issue has been deemed significant enough to warrant specific legal measures since the 1980s, as with the Bahamas’ 1986 Fisheries Resources Regulations.8 A 2003 study pronounced the use of bleach and detergent to harvest lobsters in Turks and Caicos as “widespread” but offered no granular data.9 Unfortunately, the activity itself is extremely hard to detect, as only small quantities of bleach or other chemicals, often deposited from small plastic bottles into reef crevices where lobsters den,  are sufficient to force the crustaceans into the open or stun them for easier capture.10 Cases in recent years include the 2021 arrest of three Haitian fishers caught using bleach in Turks and Caicos waters. They were fortuitously caught in the act by Fisheries officers who were taking the Minister of Tourism, Environment, Heritage, Maritime, Gaming and Disaster Management for a tour of the country’s lobster fisheries.11 Social media, however, provide sometimes alarming anecdotal accounts, such as a 2019 Facebook group post by a Florida boater who claimed to have seen bleaching activity in the waters around Bimini: “Another year, another 50 bottles of bleach floating around the ocean during lobster season….we saw about 5 mother ships and dozens of small boats all over Bimini and no BDF (Bahamas Defense Force) to enforce the laws. All our usual spots cleaned out before the season started.”12 Though uncorroborated, anecdotal accounts such as this paint a concerning picture of unchecked illegal lobstering.

Bleach lobstering has negative impacts beyond the detrimental effects it causes on lobster populations and the ability of Caribbean nations to regulate lobster harvest. While bleach has been used fraudulently to conceal spoilage in seafood, placing consumers at risk of potentially deadly bacterial infections, the residual amounts of the active ingredient in liquid bleach, sodium hypochlorite, in a lobster caught using bleach are below that threshold, and well below the levels required for human toxicity.13 Far more problematic is the effect of even modest amounts of bleach on marine environments.

Bleach is devastating to the coral reefs that form the main Caribbean habitat of spiny lobsters. It kills coral and other crucial organisms in reef systems, leading to takeover by algae in what is called a coral-algal phase shift.14 The vibrant, colorful life of a flourishing coral reef gives way to suffocating algae blooms. Worse yet, the effects tend to be long-lasting. One fisheries officer in the Bahamas said that, in 18 years of work with marine ecosystems, he had never seen a reef recover from being chemically bleached.15

It is for this reason that some Caribbean nations have taken steps to dissuade the practice. For example, the Bahamas and the Turks and Caicos Islands (TCI), the two Caribbean jurisdictions where bleaching lobsters has historically been most pervasive, have instituted identical, and steep, penalties for the practice: a fine of USD 50,000 and/or one year in prison, or both. In the Bahamas, Fisheries Act 2020 categorizes bleach as a “noxious substance” that requires written permission from authorities to even possess aboard a boat, while in TCI the possession of bleach while in a fishery, with any intent to use it for capturing marine life, is expressly illegal. Given that lobsters can be field-tested for bleach quickly and reliably, fishers using bleach in particular can be caught after the fact rather than in the act.16 Yet bleaching still occurs.

Despite the efforts of the Bahamas and TCI to address this unlawful practice, these are merely two jurisdictions among many throughout the Caribbean region. Spiny lobsters inhabit the entire Caribbean. The question therefore becomes whether using bleach, a technique known to generate a higher success rate, is limited to only these fisheries where it has gained some attention, when it could be practiced in any area in the region. Jurisdictions such as Venezuela, which far outranks any other state in Latin America and the Caribbean in the IUU Fishing Index and has reportedly hosted rapacious fishing of protected marine species, largely remain opaque.17  Heightened vigilance for instances of bleach lobstering is therefore warranted. But indicators and evidence of this practice can be challenging to discern.

The reality that coral reefs in the Caribbean are succumbing to a different sort of bleaching due to rising seawater temperatures is one such challenge.  Thus, global warming can serve to conceal the traces of chemical fishing. Another challenge is that the ingredients for this practice are ubiquitous. Tracing supply chains of bleach or gasoline will uncover nothing; nor is a bottle of bleach on a boat likely to draw unwanted attention when relatively few authorities think in terms of its possible use on lobsters. After all, boats need cleaning and disinfecting, too. As a result, the use of bleach, detergent, or gasoline is distinct from other forms of destructive chemical fishing, such as the use of cyanide to stun tropical fish for capture, which kills not only fish but coral, or of phosphates and nitrates to make explosives for “blast fishing,” which kills marine life indiscriminately.18 The latter two are also practiced in the Caribbean, but cannot be easily concealed.

In an ideal scenario, there would be no bleaching of lobsters in the Caribbean. The next best option would see the practice of bleaching limited to one or two fisheries, where competent authorities are aware of the practice and trained to identify and stop it. That appears to be the consensus on the current status of the practice. But given the poor state of monitoring and data collection throughout Caribbean lobster fisheries, the potential profits involved for fishers facing depleted stocks, and the difficulty of catching perpetrators, we cannot truly be sure of the extent of bleach lobstering, any more than we can be certain of the extent to which other forms of illegal chemical fishing are devastating marine ecosystems throughout the Caribbean. Stakeholders in monitoring, enforcement, and conservation across the region should keep this type of destructive fishing activity on their radar screens, and, in consultation with those jurisdictions whose fisheries have already suffered from bleach lobstering, develop effective measures to track and counter its practice.

Dr. David Soud is Head of Resource Responsibility at Auxilium Worldwide, a charitable nonprofit focused on good and just governance, sustainable development, resource stewardship, and human security. He is a leading expert in the criminal exploitation of natural resources, with special expertise in countering illicit activities linked with extractives and fisheries.

Dr. Ian Ralby is President of Auxilium Worldwide and head of its Ocean Governance arm.  He is a globally recognized expert in maritime law and security with particular expertise in identifying and countering threats at sea.

References

1. Marine Stewardship Council. 2025. “The Bahamas Spiny Lobster Fishery.” https://fisheries.msc.org/en/fisheries/the-bahamas-spiny-lobster-fishery/

2. FAO. 2019. Western Central Atlantic Fishery Commission/FAO Comisión Central de Pesca para el Atlántico Centro-Occidental. 2019. Report of the second meeting of the OSPESCA/WECAFC/CRFM/CFMC Working Group on Caribbean Spiny Lobster, Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, 21–23 March 2018/Informe de la segunda reunión del Grupo de Trabajo de OSPESCA/COPACO/CRFM/CFMC sobre la Langosta Espinosa del Caribe, Santo Domingo, República Dominicana, 21-23 de marzo 2018. FAO Fisheries and Aquaculture Report/Informe de Pesca y Acuicultura. No. 1264. Bridgetown. 68 pp. Licence: CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 IGO.

3. Sharon Hutchinson and Alexander Girvan, ‘Jamaica Caribbean Spiny Lobster Value Chain Analysis Report’, CANARI, 2021,  https://canari.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/Jamaica-CbeanSpinyLobsterVCA_StewardFish_Final.pdf

4. Joint Report on Ecosystem Approach to Fisheries for the Caribbean Spiny Lobster, June 2019, https://www.fao.org/fi/static-media/MeetingDocuments/WECAFC/WECAFC2019/17/Ref.35e.pdf

5. Wilson, David T., et al. 2006, “A Preliminary Assessment of the Efficacy of a Chlorine Bleach Detection Method for use in Spiny Lobster (Panulirus argus) Fisheries,” 57th Gulf and Caribbean Fisheries Institute, https://proceedings.gcfi.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/gcfi_57-61.pdf

6. Ibid.

7. North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality, Proclamation Re: Spiny Lobster – Commercial and Recreational, April 1, 2022, https://www.deq.nc.gov/marine-fisheries/fisheries-management-proclamations/2022/spiny-lobster-commercial-and-recreational/open  

8. Government of the Bahamas, Fisheries Resources (Jurisdiction and Conservation) Regulations, Section 19, 1986, https://laws.bahamas.gov.bs/cms/images/LEGISLATION/SUBORDINATE/1986/1986-0010/1986-0010.pdf

9. Rudd, Murray A. “Fisheries Landings and Trade of the Turks and Caicos Islands,” Fisheries Centre Research Reports (2003), https://www.seaaroundus.org/doc/CatchReconstruction/EEZ/TurksCaicos-Rudd-2003.pdf

10. Wilson et al.

11. Hamilton, Deandrea, “Three local fishermen caught bleaching coral reef by Minister & Deputy Premier,” Magnetic Media, August 9, 2021, https://magneticmediatv.com/2021/08/three-local-fishermen-caught-bleaching-coral-reef-by-minister-deputy-premier/

12. Bahamas, Land and Sea, “Ocean pollution during lobster season in Bimini,” Facebook, August 5, 2019, https://www.facebook.com/groups/bahamlandsea/posts/1349017365280115/

13. Chung et al., “Health effects of sodium hypochlorite: review of published case reports,” Environmental Analysis Health and Toxicology 2022; 37(1): March 2022, https://eaht.org/journal/view.php?doi=10.5620/eaht.2022006

14. Ibid.

15. Hamilton.

16. Wilson et al.

17. IUU Fishing Risk Index, “2025 Results,” n.d., https://iuufishingindex.net/ranking; Byrd, Nicole, et al. Operation STELLA MARIS: Investigating Shark Fin Trafficking Networks in Latin America and East Asia Through the Lens of Environmental Crime Convergence, Investigative Report, Earth League International, 2024, https://earthleagueinternational.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/ELI-Operation-STELLA-MARIS-Investigative-Report-22-April-2024-1.pdf

18. Waddell, J, and A. Clarke, The State of Coral Reef Ecosystems of the United States and Pacific Freely Associated States: 2008, 2008, NOAA/NCCOS Center for Coastal Monitoring and Assessment, https://coastalscience.noaa.gov/data_reports/the-state-of-coral-reef-ecosystems-of-the-united-states-and-pacific-freely-associated-states-2008/

Featured image: A Caribbean spiny lobster. (NOAA Fisheries)

Fostering the Discussion on Securing the Seas.