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)

Shipbuilding

The Surface Navy in an AI World: Rethinking the FFX

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By James J. Wirtz

No one disagrees that the Navy has not had much luck constructing warships this century. It also continues to face significant challenges when building the next small surface combatant, the Future Frigate (FFX). It is becoming increasingly difficult to pack meaningful warfighting capability into a ship that is smaller and cheaper to build and operate than today’s Arleigh Burke-class destroyers. Case in point: the Constellation-class Frigate program was terminated with two vessels under construction as the price per unit began to approximate the cost of a destroyer.1 Making matters worse, the U.S. industrial base and shipyards lack the wherewithal to build more than a few ships at a time, and even then, only at a measured pace. Those imagining, designing, and building the FFX confront a wicked problem: efforts to balance competing missions, construction costs, and time requirements tend to produce a suboptimal outcome that satisfies none of them.

Instead of hoping for different results from the same approach to force design by balancing competing requirements and ship construction, it is time to return to first principles to ask what unique qualities the FFX brings to the Navy in a future increasingly shaped by artificial intelligence (AI). Today’s effort to update well-known design and operational concepts with more advanced and expensive weapons, propulsion systems, and electronic accoutrements will likely produce disappointing results. What is needed is not a better ship based on traditional thinking, but new thinking about how a frigate can contribute to future combat effectiveness and national security. The U.S. Navy must look toward the future by ending the effort to gussy up old ways and rethink the role of the FFX in an AI world. It is time for the U.S. Navy to build its first ship designed intentionally to exploit the synthetic reality created by AI and operate with Large Unmanned Surface Vessels (LUSV), Extra Large Unmanned Undersea Vehicles (XLUUV), and Medium Unmanned Surface Vessels (MUSV), ships that can exceed frigates in terms of endurance and carrying capacities.

 

FFX and the Art and Science of War

Already, AI is having a profound impact on conflict, especially when it comes to the science of war, that is, the domain of war that can be quantified. In maritime affairs, this manifests in growing platform and weapons autonomy. Range, precision, and lethality are increasing, while cost and the need for human direction are decreasing. When it comes to calculating combat power, the importance of relatively inexpensive and increasingly autonomous weapons in theater and magazine depth is superseding the number of platforms available.2 Additionally, AI is creating a new, synthetic reality as it curates and analyzes nearly limitless amounts of data from myriad sensors, while presenting tactically useful information at a pace that would completely overwhelm even the largest staff. Commanders need computer assistance to make sense of the massive amounts of data available to them. Well-implemented AI workflows can provide operators with superhuman situational awareness to identify thousands of targets in real time, allocate available weapons efficiently, and update this synthetic reality faster than opponents can respond.3 The results are staggering: in the first 11 days of the war against Iran, U.S. forces struck more than 5,500 targets, including mobile missiles and drones on land and over 60 ships at sea.4 This stands in stark contrast to the fact that no SCUD missiles or their transporter-erector-launchers were destroyed on the ground by Coalition air attack or special operations during the 1991 war against Iraq.5

By contrast, the impact of AI on the art of war, which involves making decisions that require self-awareness, is a matter of debate. Some fear the emergence of a “Frankenstein’s Monster” that will lead to a creeping loss of control as humans grow too reliant on its advice when making key political or strategic decisions about the initiation, conduct, or termination of hostilities. Any human-in-the-loop, notes Anthony Becker, “may find their intent edited, eroded, or even eclipsed by the operation of the human-machine system, creating an inexorable pull toward deference to the machine.”6 Others envision the emergence of a human-machine team, which is often described as the best way to exploit AI’s ability to analyze and present data and the human ability to act on this synthetic reality.7 From this perspective, the synthetic reality created by the AI-enabled science of war will greatly empower humans as they make decisions that only humans can make (the art of war), that is, judgments made by the self-aware and eyes-on, hands-on actions. This human-machine teaming is already emerging in society: AI is replacing entry-level computer programmers, but not electricians, who are being enabled, but not replaced, by machines.8 All this suggests that the FFX’s most important role in the future is to gather this human-machine team together locally, allowing the humans aboard to bring the art of war to a micro setting. It is the people on board the FFX, not the weapons it will carry, that constitute the new ship’s unique contribution to national security. After all, precision-guided and increasingly autonomous weapons can arrive from all directions, but in situ human judgment and action are not so easily replaced.

The FFX’s primary function, then, is not as a warship but as a locus of American human-machine integration in a local setting. It brings human senses, judgment, “skin in the game,” and the ability to influence situations where a U.S. presence is desirable for tactical, operational, or strategic reasons. Its organic and distributed sensors feed synthetic reality at a local, regional, or theater-wide level, while the people on board integrate synthetic reality with human judgment and action to address immediate tactical situations. The FFX should be deliberately designed as the first ship built with human-machine integration as a priority. It should empower and protect the humans aboard as they interact with synthetic reality and autonomous weapons. In other words, at a minimum, the FFX should be built to operate with a mix of LUSVs, MUSVs, or XLUUVs depending on mission requirements. The autonomous platforms that accompany the FFX can provide the combat power and flexibility the Navy wants from a new frigate, but only if the Navy accommodates a new operational philosophy.

FFX: The Human Node in the Local Network

So, what would the FFX look like? Following a compelling assessment of how the Navy’s recent forays into shipbuilding came a cropper, Kevin Eyer, provided a bottom-line description of the FFX, which is currently based on the Coast Guard’s Legend-Class National Security Cutter: “The FF(X) should essentially function as a ‘horsed-up’ Coast Guard cutter equipped with a 5” gun, RAM point-defense missiles, and even the Naval Strike Missile, but nothing more sophisticated.” Eyer also suggests that the primary purpose behind the FFX would be to stimulate U.S. naval shipbuilding and that the vessel “will never be a pocket Arleigh Burke-class.” For Eyer, the FFX would augment and eventually replace the existing fleet of Littoral Combat ships, while bolstering the U.S. industrial base. Eyer believes that the new frigate would undertake maritime interdiction, mine countermeasures, and presence missions, although there is no reason why a new “drone frigate” could not undertake anti-submarine warfare and surface strike operations too.9

Eyer’s conception of the Future Frigate’s capabilities, missions, and impact on the defense industrial base makes perfect sense; it only requires four minor modifications before his platform can serve as the integrator of the human-machine team. First, one might remove piloted aircraft from the FFX and instead equip it with recoverable reconnaissance and one-way strike unmanned aerial vehicles capable of a mission kill against a similar platform at whatever range is deemed appropriate.

Second, the FFX should incorporate a spiral development philosophy; that is, it should be deliberately built to accommodate future technologies iteratively. Instead of spending months or years waiting for new systems or experimental weapons, FFX designers could settle on an 80-percent solution that would give warfighters access to the ship as quickly as possible for experimentation and training. Nevertheless, ship customers and developers must acknowledge that foundational design choices are generally locked into a minimum viable product – as illustrated by the lasting impact that the Littoral Combat Ship program’s high sprint speed requirement had on so many other elements of the platform. Changing the engine or hull length is not usually possible once a ship is built.10

Third, the ship should be built to accommodate a separate battle staff and significant command, control, and communication capabilities – capabilities not usually found on frigates. Initially, this battle cell might only require a few personnel. It should not be too hard to keep tabs on a couple of MUSVs built for autonomous operations, or to monitor synthetic reality, or to supply higher-level systems with local data. As more and different types of autonomous vessels are added to the ship’s reconnaissance-strike network, the size of the battle staff will probably increase. A division of responsibility would emerge. The ship’s commander and crew would operate the vessel, and its organic weapons, and supply the sailors needed to undertake hands-on, eyes-on activities, while the battle staff would operate the drone network and interact with higher echelons.

Fourth, to accommodate spiral development involving new types of weapons, and the eventual need for additional personnel, the new frigate should incorporate excess capacity, which means ample space, cooling, electricity, and whatever the best guess is about the additional resources that are likely to be required in the future. In other words, while the FFX would be optimized for drone operations, it would have the capacity to accommodate spiral development, especially new types of organic sensors and weapons. This is not the traditional tradeoff between mission-specific and general-purpose weapons procurement.11 Instead, it constitutes a hybrid approach to force design. Put somewhat differently, because it arrives with excess capacity at the outset, the FFX itself would be more of a general-purpose platform with a drone command center optimized to operate autonomous vessels and utilize theater-level synthetic reality.

All this requires a new way of thinking about what a warship is and what a warship does. Its fighting capability is not centered on its organic capabilities, but on its ability to support and capitalize on synthetic reality and organize its autonomous weapons into a local, or maybe a regional, reconnaissance-strike complex. Instead of a weapons platform, it is the human node in an AI-enabled network that can generate significant combat capability, far more capability than can be carried on any frigate. The LUSVs, MUSVs, or XLUUVs that accompany the new FFX would allow it to punch above its weight; it would have capabilities that cannot be packed into a vessel smaller than the Navy’s Arleigh Burke-class destroyer.

FFX: Spiral Development

Although spiral development generally refers to a process of continuous improvement in a platform’s capabilities, it can also occur across the drone network that accompanies the new FFX. Exactly how this network will operate is currently a matter of conjecture and needs to be worked out by designers and operators. The drones themselves should all be equipped with an intermediate force capability to drive off the curious or disable smaller vessels that approach too closely. Some LUSVs or MUSVs, under the appropriate circumstances, can also be equipped with the ability to self-destruct, especially if they can hold at risk a target that arrives in their immediate vicinity.12 In any event, one can imagine how this human-machine integration might be used to achieve several important missions.

Maritime Security and Surveillance

The new FFX should enter service with a complement of intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) MUSVs that would enhance the frigate’s ability to generate situational awareness. Whether or not the ISR drones are made for broad ocean and air surveillance or to respond to queuing provided by synthetic reality, they would solve the Navy’s enduring problem of placing too many eggs in one basket.13 Active sensors would no longer signal the position of the FFX for thousands of miles in all directions, allowing it to approach potential targets in electronic silence. It would be desirable if the ISR drones could serve as decoys, mimicking the electronic and acoustic signature of an FFX, an Arleigh Burke-class destroyer, fishing boats, freighters, etc. The ISR drones would provide the Navy with a way to experiment with non-lethal autonomous systems in a variety of settings, paving the way for more lethal payloads.

Counter-Mine Networks

As recent events in the Strait of Hormuz suggest, even the threat of mined waterways and harbors can curtail commercial shipping and greatly restrict maritime operations. This situation is exacerbated by the fact that the counter-mine mission has been a low priority for the U.S. Navy for decades. MUSVs or XLUUVs equipped for the counter-mine mission might be a logical second capability to add to the ISR drone network. There is a real need to experiment with counter-mine capabilities to protect the approaches to U.S. harbors.

ASW Operations

Future ASW operations in the Navy will have to contend increasingly with crewed and autonomous underwater threats. Although the impulse will be to equip the FFX with organic ASW capabilities, force designers should keep the threat at bay and configure autonomous systems to counterattack submarines and subsurface drones that are themselves hunting for targets. Whether these systems can support Carrier Strike Groups or Surface Action Groups on the move remains to be seen; nevertheless, the combination of decoys and hunters creates interesting ASW possibilities in support of carrier operations. ASW MUSVs and XLUUVs should be more capable of patrolling American and allied littorals, searching for crewed and non-crewed subsurface threats. This capability would immediately help to secure Guam, Pearl Harbor, San Diego, and the approaches to the Panama Canal from subsurface drone and submarine attacks.14

Littoral Strike

While the previous drone networks would immediately enhance the Navy’s tactical capabilities, equipping drones with surface-to-surface strike systems to augment the FFX would bolster a deterrence-by-denial strategy, especially along the First Island Chain archipelago. Placed among coastal traffic and the clutter of the shoreline, the FFX’s reconnaissance-strike complex would provide an immediate sea denial capability to the United States as the remainder of the Joint Force moves toward the area to respond to aggression. Instead of abandoning the area and allies as the long-range battle plays out overhead, the FFX and its drone flotilla can confront the opponent, creating immediate opposition to an attempt at a fait accompli before the Navy can overcome the tyranny of distance and respond accordingly.15 The FFX would also confront the opponent with the harsh reality of war immediately by responding at the point of aggression; Washington would no longer be faced with the onus of horizontal or vertical escalation after a fait accompli, but would instead be able to defeat an opponent at the point and time of attack by responding in kind. Control of the waters surrounding the archipelago would also help protect allied and U.S. land forces operating long-range strike weapons to influence events along the Asian mainland’s littorals.

Air Defense

Today, the Navy operates two types of surface combatants: a large air-defense cruiser (Ticonderoga-class guided-missile cruisers) and a small air-defense cruiser (Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyers) equipped with the highly capable Aegis system that relies on the SPY-1 radar and a family of Standard Missiles. Unfortunately, the Aegis system will not fit on a vessel much smaller than an Arleigh Burke-class destroyer, so the FFX cannot provide high-end air defenses. An FFX could escort and control LUSVs carrying Standard Missiles that might be fired by Aegis-equipped warships in a local reconnaissance-strike complex, but high-capability air and missile defense is not an option for the new frigate. It was the absence of a significant air defense capability that might have led to the cancellation of the Constellation-class Frigate.

LUSVs accompanying the FFX, however, could be configured to provide relatively low-cost and distributed air defenses against drones, cruise missiles, helicopters, and low-flying aircraft. The Marine Air Defense Integrated System (MADIS) might be adapted for LUSVs to detect and destroy low-altitude drones and piloted aircraft using its organic radar, Stinger missiles, 30mm cannon, and 7.62mm miniguns. MADIS can backstop more capable Aegis-equipped warships by supplying an inexpensive way to defeat drones, cruise missiles, and piloted aircraft, saving high-cost Standard Missiles for more demanding ballistic and cruise missile targets.16 The FFX and its MADIS-like autonomous system might be a way to provide the Fleet with a cost-effective air defense against the drone threat.

Search and Rescue

Today, if a major surface combatant is lost, the Navy would be hard-pressed to rescue hundreds, or even thousands, of sailors who might find themselves in the water.17 If assigned to a Carrier Strike Group, the FFX might be equipped with a LUSV “lifeboat” that operates nearby but out of harm’s way. One could place hundreds of inflatable rafts on the vessel so that they can be jettisoned to survivors in the water. It might also be possible to create a system to retrieve sailors in the water and to bring them on board where temporary shelter, food, and medical supplies would be stored. Of course, retrieving injured sailors from the water is easier said than done; nevertheless, necessity is the mother of invention. Warfighters should be realistic about warfare.

Conclusion

Nearly all the drone missions described above are a matter of active consideration or increasingly ambitious experimentation by the Navy. New organizations and personnel designators related to the operation of autonomous platforms are also standing up, providing a way to institutionalize drone operations within the Fleet.18 Nevertheless, amid all this activity, there is a tendency not to see the forest for the trees: more effort is needed to achieve the human-machine teaming demanded by AI to best exploit the potential of synthetic reality and autonomy. There is a tendency to proceed willy-nilly, without a guiding philosophy and an associated concept of operations that is designed to exploit new opportunities. The Navy will have to do things differently before it can use new technology to its full potential. It remains to be seen if Navy culture will foster the requisite change or impede it.

The FFX is a case in point. Instead of going back to the drawing board to pack more high-end warfighting capability into an ever-smaller package, rethinking what a frigate contributes to the human-machine team allows us to see a small surface combatant in a new light. Instead of a platform for employing weapons, it provides a ringside seat for the humans to influence events, especially when mindful, eyes-on, hands-on actions are needed for success. It is a way to use the science of war to empower the art of war. It is a way to demonstrate that the United States is willing to risk involvement in a sticky situation and engage opponents in a meaningful way. The LUSVs, MUSVs, or XLUUVs that could serve as the primary weapons systems for the FFX will help its crew give as good as they get until the Joint Force Arrives. Even in the age of sail, no one could realistically expect a small surface combatant to do more than that.

James. J. Wirtz is a Professor of National Security Affairs at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, CA. He has written extensively about intelligence, strategy, nuclear and conventional deterrence, and maritime affairs. 

Endnotes

1. As Secretary of the Navy John Phelan noted, “the reason Constellation Class frigate was canceled because, candidly, it didn’t make sense anymore to build it. It was 80% of the cost of a destroyer and 60% of the capability.  You might as well build destroyers,” see Ronald O’Rourke, “Navy Constellation (FFG-62) and FF(X) Class Frigate Programs: Background and Issues for Congress,” R44972 Congressional Research Service January 5, 2026, p. 2. https://www.congress.gov/crs_external_products/R/PDF/R44972/R44972.133.pdf

2. Jeffrey E. Kline, “Impacts of the Robotics Age on Naval Force Design, Effectiveness, and Acquisition,” Naval War College Review, Vol 70, No. 3, Summer 2017: 63-78.

3. James J. Wirtz, “Artificial Intelligence, Synthetic Reality, and Future Warfare,” Political Science Quarterly Advance Publication 12 February 2026. https://doi.org/10.1093/psquar/qqaf159

4. Miriam Sela-Eitam, “US destroyed over 5,000 targets across Iran, including 60 warships, CENTCOM chief says,” The Jerusalem Post, March 11, 2026. https://www.jpost.com/middle-east/iran-news/article-889602

5. Mark E. Kipphut, “Crossbow and Gulf War Counter-SCUD Efforts: Lessons from History,” AU/AWC/RWP126/94-96. Air War College, Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama, 1996:52 https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/tr/pdf/ADA393984.pdf

6. Anthony Becker, “War Threatens Control of Military AI,” U.S Naval Institute Proceedings, Vol. 151/6/1,468 June 2025.

7. Robert O. Work and Shawn Brimley, “20YY: Preparing for War in the Robotic Age,” Center for New American Security (January 2014): 30.

8. “Unleashing developer productivity with generative AI,” McKinsey & Company, June 27, 2023. https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/tech-and-ai/our-insights/unleashing-developer-productivity-with-generative-ai; and “AI Automation Could Replace 300 Million Jobs, Skilled Trades Remain Safe,” Business Honor November 6, 2025. https://businesshonor.com/2025/11/ai-jobs-trades-automation-risk

9. Kevin Eyer, “Three Shipbuilding Failures and A Future” USNI Proceedings, Vol 153/4/1,478, April 2006.

10. Austin Gray and James Wirtz, “Spiral Development as a Strategic Asset,” USNI Proceedings Vol. 151/12/1,474 December 2025.

11. Stephen Peter Rosen, Winning the Next War: Innovation and the Modern Military (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991): 243-249; J. Ding and A. Dafoe, “Engines of power: Electricity, AI, and general-purpose, military transformations.” European Journal of International Security. 2023;8(3):377-394. doi:10.1017/eis.2023.1

12. Collin Fox, “Taking Notes from Narcos: Semisubmersible Unmanned Ships for Great Power Competition,” Center for International Maritime Security (CIMSEC), May 1, 2020, https://cimsec.org/taking-notes-from-narcos-semisubmersible-unmanned-ships-for-great-power-competition/.

13. James J. Wirtz, Jeffrey E. Kline, and James A. Russell, “A Maritime Conversation with America,” Orbis Vol. 66. Iss. 2, Spring 2022: 178-180.

14. The Coast Guard should incorporate these counter-mine and ASW capabilities to protect U.S. littorals.

15. Wirtz, Kline, and Russell: 175-178.

16. MADIS Marine Air Defense Integrated System,” Global Defense News, June 5, 2026. https://www.armyrecognition.com/military-products/army/air-defense-systems/air-defense-vehicles/madis-marine-air-defense-integrated-system

17. James J. Wirtz, “Imagining Maritime Conflict in the Indo-Pacific: Can Analogies Substitute for Strategy?” Defense & Security Analysis 38, no. 3 (2022): 349–68, https://doi.org/10.1080/14751798.2022.2093433.

18. Jodesz Gavilan, “US Navy to Deploy First Medium Unmanned Surface Vessels,” The Defense Post, January 19, 2026. https://thedefensepost.com/2026/01/19/us-navy-usvs/

Featured image: Aircraft from the Carl Vinson Carrier Strike Group (VINCSG) and French Carrier Strike Group (CSG) fly in formation over the Philippine Sea with ships from VINCSG, French CSG, the Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force (JMSDF), and U.S. Military Sealift Command (MSC) during Pacific Steller 2025, Feb. 12. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist Seaman Apprentice Pablo Chavez)

Fostering the Discussion on Securing the Seas.