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China’s Maritime Militia and Fishing Fleets: A Primer for Operational Staffs and Tactical Leaders, Pt. 1

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This article originally featured in the Military Review and is republished with permission. It will be republished in two parts. Read it in its original form here.

By Shuxian Luo and Jonathan G. Panter

Articles about gray-zone operations—states’ use of nontraditional forces and methods to pursue security objectives without triggering armed conflict—are unavoidable in military professional literature.1 This is particularly true for commentary about Russia and the People’s Republic of China (PRC).2 These states’ embrace of gray-zone operations is unsurprising since such operations are an attractive means for relatively disadvantaged powers to challenge a stronger rival like the United States. Among the most important of China’s gray-zone forces and actors is its maritime militia. In addition, China’s overtly civilian distant-water fishing (DWF) fleets, which are affiliated to varying degrees with Chinese government agencies, have been subject to growing international scrutiny.

Vessels in both groups help China rewrite the rules of freedom of navigation, buttress its maritime claims, secure vital resources, and extend its economic reach across the globe. In the coming years, U.S. Department of Defense civilians and military personnel throughout the joint force will encounter these nontraditional maritime forces engaged in a variety of operations across several geographic combatant commands. Failure to recognize the purpose, capabilities, or limitations of these vessels will impede U.S. forces’ ability to accomplish assigned missions, defend themselves, and avoid unintentional escalation.

China’s maritime actors have drawn growing attention from both scholars and defense professionals. However, the political context provided by academic research may not reach practitioners who rely on shorter, descriptive articles about Chinese capabilities.3 Bridging this gap can support more informed assessments of Chinese vessels’ possible intentions, assisting military staffs and leaders in developing rules of engagement, tactical procedures, and reporting criteria.

The article proceeds in three parts. It begins by analyzing the domestic sources of Chinese grand strategy that influence the PRC’s maritime policies and activities. The next section describes China’s maritime militia and fishing fleets, their strategic purposes, and their strengths and limitations. The final section addresses the challenges these actors pose to U.S. forces, with particular emphasis on the links between force protection and unintended escalation.

China’s Grand Strategy: Misperceptions and Reality

“Grand strategy” is the highest rung of a state’s foreign policy; it is a unifying theme linking a state’s various efforts to secure its own survival and welfare in the international system. As defined by political scientist Richard Betts, it is “a practical plan to use military, economic, and diplomatic means to achieve national interests (or political ends) over time, with the least feasible cost in blood and treasure.”4 The key phrase is “over time,” because what distinguishes “grand strategy” from “strategy” is some consistent thread between a state’s individual policies.

However, as Betts observes, the concept of grand strategy is too often applied retroactively to decisions that were merely ad hoc responses to a problem. Moreover, “[t]he term ‘grand’ conjures up unrealistic images of sweeping and far-seeing purpose, ingenuity, direction, and adroitness.”5 These critiques neatly capture many recurring tropes about China’s grand strategy, including “hide and bide,” “a game of Go,” and invocations of Sun Tzu’s The Art of War (especially “defeating the enemy without fighting”).6 The first refers to China’s late paramount leader (from 1978 until 1989) Deng Xiaoping’s philosophy that China should “hide its strength and bide its time”; the second holds that Western strategists see the world as a chess game (seeking decisive battle), but Chinese strategists see it like the board game “Wei Qi” (encircling the enemy over the long term); and the third suggests that Chinese strategists rely on deception and delay more than their Western counterparts (who, ostensibly, are avid readers of Carl von Clausewitz’s On War).7

These maxims sensationalize Chinese strategic thought as permanent, infinitely patient, devious, and opaque to the Western mind. To be sure, they contain some truth, but the pop version of Chinese grand strategy perpetuates two false assumptions (see the table below). The first is that China is a unitary actor rather than a state with many domestic audiences (interest groups with varying degrees of power). The second is that Chinese policy priorities are fixed over time, despite the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) shifting legitimating narratives for its internal audiences. The implication is serious: If China is incapable of change, what is the point of any U.S. policy but containment or confrontation?8

The PRC’s long-term plans are more nuanced. China has a grand strategy, but one that is rooted in its governance structure and the CCP’s narratives of legitimacy. U.S. defense professionals dealing with gray-zone forces should understand how China’s maritime disputes affect the CCP’s internal calculus about the stability of its governance. Knowing what domestic audiences and CCP narratives are impacted by, say, an at-sea encounter between U.S. warships and Chinese fishing boats, can inform analyses of the risks and benefits of such interactions.

While it remains subject to debate whether Beijing pursues a full-fledged revisionist goal of displacing the United States in the Indo-Pacific region and challenging U.S. dominance internationally, a broader and consistent theme has emerged in China’s official documents and leadership speeches: that of Chinese national “rejuvenation,” or a restoration of its past position of prestige in world affairs.9 In a recent article, political scientist Avery Goldstein argues that rejuvenation has been a consistent grand strategy of the PRC alongside a second strategy: survival of the state with the CCP as its sole ruler. During the Cold War, as the PRC faced existential threats from outside, survival dominated rejuvenation. It remains the regime’s “topmost vital, or ‘core’ interest” today, but China’s greater safety leaves room for it to pursue rejuvenation.10 Since 1992, Goldstein argues, rejuvenation has undergone three phases: “hide and bide” under Deng; “peaceful rise” (reassuring other countries of China’s benign intentions) in the 1990s; and the “China dream” (increased assertiveness) under Xi Xinping. Upon taking power in 2012, Xi considered “hide and bide” and “peaceful rise” anachronistic, preferring an “activist approach” in which the PRC would utilize its power to “more resolutely resist challenges to core interests.”11

Both grand strategies—rejuvenation and regime survival—depend on safeguarding China’s sovereignty and territorial integrity, and maintaining economic development.12 First, the CCP’s domestic legitimacy since its founding has rested heavily on the party’s demonstrative capabilities in defending the country from foreign interference. Its main competitor in the 1930s and 1940s, the Kuomintang, received both U.S. and Union of Soviet Socialist Republics support in World War II. During the ensuing Chinese Civil War, therefore, the CCP sought domestic support by claiming that it was the only side unsullied by foreign influence.13

Table. Misperceptions about China’s Grand Strategy (Table by Jonathan G. Panter) [Click to Expand]
After the CCP triumphed over the Kuomintang in 1949, its claim to be the sole party that could defend China from the machinations of foreign powers remained an enduring part of its foreign policy and domestic legitimacy. This precipitated an intervention in the Korean War in 1950 and a war with India in 1962. Concerns about territorial integrity and sovereignty at times even outweighed ideological alignment. In the 1960s, the PRC supported North Vietnam to counteract both U.S. and Soviet presence in Southeast Asia and used force to contest Soviet encroachments along the PRC’s disputed border.14 In 1974 and 1988, China fought Vietnam to seize land features in the contested Paracels and Spratlys, and to secure a stronger position in the South China Sea.15

A second major component of the CCP’s legitimacy was its economic program of collectivization and central planning. But after the humanitarian disasters and internal turmoil resulting from the Cultural Revolution and the Great Leap Forward, the CCP in the late 1970s began to downplay communism and Maoism. Under the reform-minded Deng Xiaoping and his allies, the CCP emphasized economic growth as the source of the party’s legitimacy and initiated radical economic, but not political, liberalization. But this economic opening, though conceived as a source of legitimacy, also threatened the regime’s support by introducing socioeconomic inequality, changing values, and corruption.16 The 1989 Tian’anmen prodemocracy protests and the demise of the socialist bloc in the early 1990s compounded the problem.

Against this backdrop, the CCP launched a propaganda campaign to shore up the party’s legitimacy and discredit Western-style liberalization, reinforcing the memory of the “century of humiliation” (1839–1949) when foreign powers invaded China, imposed extraterritoriality in treaty ports, restricted indigenous economic regulation, and extracted war indemnities.17 The years of backwardness and suffering at the hands of foreign powers engendered a persistent Chinese yearning for the country’s restoration as a strong, prosperous, and respected power.18 At the same time, new parochial interests and actors emerged outside the traditional Chinese foreign policy establishment during the reform era, forcing the CCP to cope with competition among bureaucrats, business elites, and local governments alongside an explosion in news outlets and internet users.19 Many of these new actors constrain state action on foreign policy issues, including those on territorial integrity and sovereignty that resonate deeply with the Chinese nationalist sentiments.20

In this way, economic growth has reinforced the CCP’s original claims to its right to rule: the “protection” of Chinese territorial independence and sovereignty. The pursuit of marine resources in the three million square kilometers of “maritime national territory” that incorporates the Chinese exclusive economic zone and continental shelf is thus framed in both economic and sovereign terms.21 First, the marine resources in these areas contribute both to China’s domestic food needs and its export economy. China is by far the world’s largest producer of “captured” (nonfarmed) fish, comprising 15 percent of world total, and the largest exporter of captured product. Of the 3.1 million fishing vessels in Asia, China operates 864,000 of them.22 Second, China’s growing reliance on sea lines of communication for trade in energy and other goods has increased Beijing’s resolve to protect strategic waterways within and beyond China’s maritime boundary.23

The growing need to safeguard maritime territories and jurisdictional waters in China’s near seas has incentivized the People’s Liberation Army (PLA)—which has, since the 1990s, focused on preparing for a Taiwan scenario—to share the burden of new missions with nonmilitary state actors. In its defense white paper from the year 2000, China for the first time described its frontier defense as a “joint military-civilian land and sea border management system, headed by the military and with a sharing of responsibilities between the military and the civilian authorities.”24 Since then, China has incrementally moved away from a relatively navy-centric approach toward a multiagent, division-of-labor method for safeguarding its maritime sovereignty and interests. Since 2005, China has preferred to employ the PLA Navy (PLAN) in background roles, relying instead on maritime law enforcement agencies and the maritime militia as its frontline responses to maritime disputes and contingencies.25

South China Sea Claims (Graphic courtesy of Wikimedia Commons) [Click to Expand]
Although the United States takes no position on the ownership of the contested maritime territories, PRC maritime sovereignty and jurisdiction claims challenge U.S. interests in the region in several ways. First, China seeks the right to regulate and restrict the activities of foreign military vessels and aircraft operating within its exclusive economic zone, which is at odds with norms on freedom of navigation and has been the central source of friction between U.S. and Chinese ships and aircraft in the South China Sea.26 Second, it attempts to erode U.S. alliance relationships, especially those with Japan and the Philippines, with whom China has unsettled maritime territorial and boundary disputes.27 Finally, the PRC continues to expand power projection and anti-access/area denial capabilities to cover a growing portion of the western Pacific.28

Soldiers attend a flag conferral ceremony 21 July 2013 during the official launch of Sansha City’s maritime militia. (Photo by Zhou Xiaogang, Xinhua News Agency)

While employing maritime law enforcement and fishing ships in lieu of naval assets may enable China to avoid crossing the threshold of military conflict outright when asserting its maritime claims, it can still complicate crisis management for both the United States and China in the event of a maritime incident. Past major crises between two countries in the contemporary era illustrate the potential dangers. One of the most serious incidents occurred in 1999 when the U.S. Air Force accidentally bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, killing three Chinese journalists. Despite a lack of evidence that the bombing was intentional, the incident triggered violent anti-American mass protests in China.29 The affair highlights the sensitivity of any incident, mistaken or otherwise, resulting in Chinese civilian casualties.

The Hainan Island incident in 2001, in which a Chinese fighter jet collided with a U.S. reconnaissance plane during an attempted interception, highlights a different potential source of crisis escalation: distortion of information within the Chinese political system between local and central authorities. According to former senior U.S. civilian and military officials, the local naval aviation authorities in Hainan may have falsely reported to high-level Chinese leadership that the U.S. plane intentionally crashed into the Chinese fighter (which was technically impossible).30 Crisis management in an incident involving Chinese fishing boats, whether or not registered as maritime militia, entails both types of danger.

China’s Maritime Militia and Fishing Fleets

The PRC defines its militia as “an armed mass organization composed of civilians retaining their regular jobs,” a component of China’s armed forces, and an “auxiliary and reserve force” of the PLA.31 Once conceived as a major component in the concept of “People’s War,” the militia in contemporary Chinese military planning is now tasked with assisting the PLA “by performing security and logistics functions in war.”32 The maritime militia, a separate organization from both the PLAN and China Coast Guard (CCG), consists of citizens working in the marine economy who receive training from the PLA and CCG to perform tasks including but not limited to border patrol, surveillance and reconnaissance, maritime transportation, search and rescue, and auxiliary tasks in support of naval operations in wartime (see figure 1).33

Figure 1. Growth of China’s Maritime Forces since 2000 (Figure from Advantage at Sea: Prevailing with Integrated All-Domain Naval Power, December 2020, by the U.S. Coast Guard, U.S. Marines, and the U.S. Navy) [Click to Expand]
The National Defense Mobilization Commission (NDMC) system, comprised of a national-level NDMC overseen jointly by the Chinese State Council and the PLA’s Central Military Commission and local NDMCs at provincial, municipal, and county levels with a similar dual civilian-military command structure at each level, has traditionally been tasked to manage administration and mobilization of the militia. Following the PLA’s 2016 reorganization, a National Defense Mobilization Department (NDMD) has been established under the Central Military Commission to oversee the provincial-level military districts and take charge of the PLA’s territorial administrative responsibilities including mobilization work. The head of the NDMD is appointed as the secretary general of the national NDMC, in which China’s premier and defense minister serve as the director and deputy director, respectively.34 In addition to the NDMC line, the State Commission of Border and Coastal Defense system—also subject to a dual civilian-military leadership—has its own command structures running from the national to local levels, and it shares responsibility for militia administration, mobilization, and border defense. There is a significant crossover between the lines of authority.35

The militia has played a major role in asserting Chinese maritime claims in the South China Sea. This includes high-profile coercive incidents such as the 2009 harassment of USNS Impeccable, the 2012 Scarborough Shoal standoff, and the 2014 HD-981 clash.36 Xi’s 2013 trip to Hainan—the island province with administrative authority over the South China Sea that has organized local fishing fleets into active maritime militia units—unleashed a nationwide push (see figure 2) to build the militia into a genuine third arm of China’s “PLA-law enforcement-militia joint defense” maritime sovereignty defense strategy.37 Since it is comprised of both civilians and soldiers, according to the Chinese rationale, the militia can be deployed to strengthen control of China’s “maritime territory” while avoiding the political and diplomatic ramifications that might otherwise be associated with military involvement.38

Read Part Two here.

Shuxian Luo is a PhD candidate in international relations at the School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), Johns Hopkins University. Her research examines China’s crisis behavior and decision-making processes, maritime security in the Indo-Pacific, and U.S. relations with Asia. She holds a BA in English from Peking University, an MA in China studies from SAIS, and an MA in political science from Columbia University.

Jonathan G. Panter is a PhD candidate in political science at Columbia University. His research examines the origin of naval command-and-control practices. He previously served as a surface warfare officer in the U.S. Navy, deploying twice in support of Operation Inherent Resolve. He holds a BA in government from Cornell University and an MPhil and MA in political science from Columbia University.

The authors thank Ian Sundstrom and Anand Jantzen for their comments on earlier drafts of this article.

Notes

  1. Lyle J. Morris et al., Gaining Competitive Advantage in the Gray Zone: Response Options for Coercive Aggression Below the Threshold of Major War (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2019), 7–12, accessed 16 November 2020, https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RR2942.html; Alessio Patalano, “When Strategy Is ‘Hybrid’ and Not ‘Grey’: Reviewing Chinese Military and Constabulary Coercion at Sea,” Pacific Review 31, no. 6 (2018): 811–39. Patalano argues that use of the term “gray-zone” operations to describe China’s activities is misleading because it suggests they are unlikely to escalate to war. He argues that these constabulary activities form part of a larger hybrid strategy that does, in fact, raise the risk of armed conflict. Donald Stoker and Craig Whiteside, “Blurred Lines: Gray-Zone Conflict and Hybrid War—Two Failures of American Strategic Thinking,” Naval War College Review 73, no. 1 (Winter 2020): 13–48. Stoker and Whiteside provide a critical perspective on the term “gray zone” that argues it is poorly defined, distorts history, and raises the risk of conflict escalation.
  2. In 2020, the term “gray zone” appeared in nearly every issue of the U.S. Naval Institute’s Proceedings and in every issue of Military Review. See, for example, Charles M. Kelly, “Information on the Twenty-First Century Battlefield: Proposing the Army’s Seventh Warfighting Function,” Military Review 100, no. 1 (January-February 2020): 62–68.
  3. For a concise description of the maritime militia, see Conor M. Kennedy and Andrew S. Erickson, China Maritime Report No. 1: China’s Third Sea Force, The People’s Armed Forces Maritime Militia: Tethered to the PLA (Newport, RI: U.S. Naval War College, China Maritime Studies Institute, 2017), accessed 16 November 2020, https://digital-commons.usnwc.edu/cmsi-maritime-reports/1. For a visual recognition guide, see Office of Naval Intelligence, “China People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN), Coast Guard, and Government Maritime Forces: 2019-2020 Recognition and Identification Guide,” October 2019, accessed 23 November 2020, https://www.oni.navy.mil/Portals/12/Intel%20agencies/China_Media/2020_China_Recce_Poster_UNCLAS.jpg.
  4. Richard K. Betts, “The Grandiosity of Grand Strategy,” Washington Quarterly 42, no. 4 (Winter 2020): 8.
  5. Ibid., 7.
  6. On “Go,” see Henry Kissinger, On China (New York: The Penguin Press, 2011), 2–3, 22–32; Keith Johnson, “What Kind of Game is China Playing,” Wall Street Journal (website), 11 June 2011, accessed 16 November 2020, https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702304259304576374013537436924. On “hide and bide” and Sun Tzu’s counsel about winning without fighting, see articles in the September-October 2020 issue of Military Review.
  7. These two authors are not as opposed to one another on this point as a simplistic reading would suggest. Sun Tzu maintains that strategic defense can win wars. Carl von Clausewitz argues that a purely defensive war is impossible, but tactical defense has advantages over attack. But both agree on the source of defensive advantage: the waiting defender can strengthen their position, and the maneuvering attacker expends energy and resources.
  8. For an example of how this sort of theorizing can influence policy decisions at the highest levels, see Alan Rappeport, “A China Hawk Gains Prominence as Trump Confronts Xi on Trade,” New York Times (website), 3 November 2018, accessed 16 November 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/30/us/politics/trump-china-trade-xi-michael-pillsbury.html.
  9. Oriana Skylar Mastro, “The Stealth Superpower: How China Hid Its Global Ambitions,” Foreign Affairs 98, no. 1 (January-February 2019): 31–39; Michael D. Swaine, “Creating an Unstable Asia: the U.S. Free and Open Indo-Pacific Strategy,” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2 March 2018, accessed 16 November 2020, https://carnegieendowment.org/2018/03/02/creating-unstable-asia-u.s.-free-and-open-indo-pacific-strategy-pub-75720. Mastro argues that China seeks to take the United States’ place as the regional political, economic, and military hegemon in East Asia and to challenge the United States internationally without replacing it as the “leader of a global order.” By contrast, Swaine questions the depiction of China as an “implacable adversary” that seeks to challenge the United States regionally and internationally and argues that treating China this way is a self-fulfilling prophecy.
  10. Avery Goldstein, “China’s Grand Strategy under Xi Jinping,” International Security 45, no. 1 (Summer 2020): 164–201.
  11. Ibid., 172­–79.
  12. Michael D. Swaine, “China’s Assertive Behavior—Part One: On ’Core Interests,’” China Leadership Monitor, no. 34 (Winter 2011); Andrew Scobell et al., China’s Grand Strategy: Trends, Trajectories, and Long-Term Competition (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2020), 11–14, accessed 16 November 2020, https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RR2798.html.
  13. John Garver, Foreign Relations of the People’s Republic of China (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1993), 25–26.
  14. Thomas J. Christensen, Worse than a Monolith: Alliance Politics and Problems of Coercive Diplomacy in Asia (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011), 184–88; M. Taylor Fravel, Strong Borders, Secure Nation: Cooperation and Conflict in China’s Territorial Disputes (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008), 201–9.
  15. Fravel, Strong Borders, Secure Nation, 267–99.
  16. Jinghan Zeng, The Chinese Communist Party’s Capacity to Rule: Ideology, Legitimacy and Party Cohesion (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 47; see also Jonathan D. Spence, The Search for Modern China (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999), 624–46, 692–96.
  17. Jessica Chen Weiss, Powerful Patriots: Nationalist Protest in China’s Foreign Relations (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 9; for a deeper description of the “Century of Humiliation,” see Spence, The Search for Modern China, chaps. 7–11.
  18. Garver, Foreign Relations of the People’s Republic of China, 4–9, 16–18; Orville Schell and John Delury, Wealth and Power: China’s Long March to the Twenty-First Century (New York: Random House, 2013).
  19. Linda Jakobson and Dean Knox, “New Foreign Policy Actors in China” (policy paper, Stockholm: SIPRI, 2010), 24–33, 43–46.
  20. Suisheng Zhao, “Nationalism’s Double Edge,” Wilson Quarterly 29, no. 4 (Autumn 2005): 76–82.
  21. M. Taylor Fravel and Alexander Liebman, “Beyond the Moat: The PLAN’s [People’s Liberation Army Navy] Evolving Interests and Potential Influence,” in The Chinese Navy: Expanding Capabilities, Evolving Roles, ed. Phillip C. Saunders et al. (Washington, DC: National Defense University Press, 2011), 57–59; Daniel M. Hartnett and Frederic Vellucci, “Toward a Maritime Security Strategy: An Analysis of Chinese Views Since the Early 1990s,” in Saunders et al., The Chinese Navy: Expanding Capabilities, Evolving Roles, 98–99.
  22. The State of World Fisheries and Aquaculture 2020: Sustainability in Action (Rome: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, 2020), 10–11, 41–42, https://doi.org/10.4060/ca9229en. In addition, as of the last available estimate in 2017, the western Pacific accounted for the second largest number of landings (catches), and the fastest annual growth of landings.
  23. Ian Storey, “China’s ‘Malacca Dilemma,’” China Brief 6, no. 8 (12 April 2006) accessed 16 November 2020, https://jamestown.org/program/chinas-malacca-dilemma/; David Lai and Roy Kamphausen, introduction to Assessing the People’s Liberation Army in the Hu Jintao Era, ed. Roy Kamphausen, David Lai, and Travis Tanner (Carlisle, PA: U.S. Army War College, 2014), 2–3; Li Nan, “The Evolution of China’s Naval Strategy and Capabilities: From ‘Near Coast’ and ‘Near Seas’ to ‘Far Seas,’” Asian Security 5, no. 2 (2009): 144–69.
  24. “China’s National Defense in 2000” (Beijing: Information Office of the State Council of PRC, October 2000), accessed 18 November 2020, http://www.china-un.ch/eng/bjzl/t176952.htm. This statement was corroborated by a report released in 2013 by the National Institute for Security Studies (NIDS) under Japan’s Defense Ministry, which noted the shift of maritime law enforcement responsibilities from the PLAN to maritime law enforcement agencies began in 2001.
  25. Alexander Chieh-cheng Huang, “The PLA and Near Seas Maritime Sovereignty Disputes,” in The People’s Liberation Army and Contingency Planning in China, ed. Andrew Scobell et al. (Washington, DC: National Defense University Press, 2015), 291. China now commands the largest maritime law enforcement force in the world; for additional information, see Andrew S. Erickson, Joshua Hickey, and Henry Holst, “Surging Second Sea Force: China’s Maritime Law Enforcement Forces, Capabilities, and Future in the Gray Zone and Beyond,” U.S. Naval War College Review 72, no. 2 (Spring 2019): 1–25.
  26. Ronald O’Rourke, Maritime Territorial and Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) Disputes Involving China: Issues for Congress, Congressional Research Service (CRS) Report R42784 (Washington, DC: CRS Report (R42784), 24 May 2018), 8–12.
  27. Andrew D. Taffer, “Threat and Opportunity: Chinese Wedging in the Senkaku/Diaoyu Dispute,” Asian Security (2019).
  28. Mastro, “The Stealth Superpower,” 36–37; for a more detailed assessment of China’s anti-access/area denial (A2/AD) capabilities, see Stephen Biddle and Ivan Oelrich, “Future Warfare in the West Pacific: Chinese Antiaccess/Area Denial, U.S. AirSea Battle, and Command of Commons in East Asia,” International Security 41, no. 1 (Summer 2016): 7–48. Biddle and Oelrich argue that Chinese A2/AD capabilities are more constrained than prevailing analyses acknowledge because the technologies underpinning successful A2/AD face physical limits when applied at great distance and over noncomplex backgrounds such as the ocean; for an assessment of Chinese sea control capabilities, see Ryan D. Martinson, “Counter-Intervention in Chinese Naval Strategy,” Journal of Strategic Studies (2020).
  29. Kurt M. Campbell and Richard Weitz, “The Chinese Embassy Bombing: Evidence of Crisis Management?,” in Managing Sino-American Crises, ed. Michael D. Swaine, Zhang Tuosheng, and Danielle F. S. Cohen (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2006), 327.
  30. Susan Shirk, China: Fragile Superpower (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 235; Dennis C. Blair and David B. Bonfili, “The April 2001 EP-3 Incident: The U.S. Point of View,” in Swaine, Zhang, and Cohen, Managing Sino-American Crises, 380–81.
  31. “Zhonghua renmin gongheguo minbing gongzuo tiaoli” [Decree of the PRC on militia work], Central Military Commission of the People’s Republic of China, December 1990, accessed 20 November 2020, http://www.mod.gov.cn/regulatory/2016-02/12/content_4618055.htm.
  32. Dennis J. Blasko, The Chinese Army Today: Tradition and Transformation for the 21st Century, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2012), 29.
  33. Bernard Cole, The Great Wall at Sea: China’s Navy in the Twenty-First Century (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2010), 79.
  34. Blasko, The Chinese Army Today, 40–41; Morgan Clemens and Michael We ber, “Rights Protection versus Warfighting: Organizing the Maritime Militia for Peace and War,” in China’s Maritime Gray Zone Operations, ed. Andrew S. Erickson and Ryan D. Martinson (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2019), 199–200; “Jungai hou de guofang dongyuanbu” [The National Defense Mobilization Department after the PLA reorganization], China Daily (website), 25 November 2016, accessed 18 November 2020, https://cn.chinadaily.com.cn/2016jungai/2016-11/25/content_27481907.htm.
  35. Andrew S. Erickson and Conor M. Kennedy, “China’s Maritime Militia” (Arlington, VA: CNA Corporation, 7 March 2016), 10, accessed 18 November 2020, https://www.cna.org/cna_files/pdf/chinas-maritime-militia.pdf; Kennedy and Erickson, China Maritime Report No. 1, 7n2.
  36. U.S. Department of Defense, Military and Security Developments Involving the People’s Republic of China 2020: Annual Report to Congress (Washington, DC: Office of the Secretary of Defense, 21 August 2020), 71, accessed 16 November 2020, https://media.defense.gov/2020/Sep/01/2002488689/-1/-1/1/2020-DOD-CHINA-MILITARY-POWER-REPORT-FINAL.PDF.
  37. “Hainansheng tanmen haishang minbinglian jianshe chengji tuchu” [Hainan Tanmen made outstanding accomplishment in maritime militia company construction], National Defense, no. 7 (2013).
  38. He Zhixiang, “Tan haishang minbing jianshe ‘si naru’” [On the four integrations in maritime militia construction], National Defense, no. 4 (2013): 36–37.

Featured Image: Chinese fishing boats (AFP file photo)

Capability Analysis

Armed and Independent: Thinking Outside the Box on Small Carriers

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By Ben DiDonato

There is a long-running debate in the United States Navy over building smaller aircraft carriers. These arguments generally focus on cost and hull count. Rather than dive into these arguments and attempt to argue for what should be done, we will instead explore how we use these arguments to rethink requirements and produce a more robust concept.

A new thought process illustrated here in the context of a small aircraft carrier is applicable to many other complex problems. As such, while a hypothetical design for a small carrier to supplement the current supercarrier fleet will be presented, part of its purpose is to illustrate how this thought process can proceed to unconventional conclusions. The question remains as to whether the merits of this design justify its substantial cost, and follow-on studies and wargaming may be required to explore this concept further.

How Can We Make a Smaller Carrier?

In order to determine the requirements for a small carrier, we must begin with the requirements for a modern supercarrier. Fortunately, the one-sentence mission statement for the Ford-class carriers defined this clearly:

“The critical capability of the aircraft carrier is that the aircraft carrier’s air wing must simultaneously perform surveillance, battlespace dominance, and strike and sustain combat operations forward.”

Form must follow function, and studies repeatedly show ‘bigger is better’ according to this mission statement. If we want to make a smaller carrier viable we must find a way to alter that mission statement without rendering the resulting carrier irrelevant.

This discussion focuses on omitting ‘strike’ from the mission statement. This does not mean the carrier will be completely incapable of performing strike missions, but it does mean any strike capability will be largely incidental and context-dependent. While omitting the strike mission may be jarring to the modern Navy, it has a strong historical precedent in the escort carriers of the Second World War, and was revisited in the  Sea Control Ship concept of the 1970s. Like these historical examples, this ship would primarily be an escort with a focus on protecting convoys, and feature extensive anti-submarine capabilities. However, it could also perform other missions like forward surveillance, chokepoint defense, and troop support.

Sea Control ship concept illustration from 1972 (Wikimedia Commons)

Most critically, the removal of the ‘strike’ objective from its mission statement means that the carrier is no longer expected to divide its limited air wing capacity. This bypasses the otherwise crippling weakness commonly referred to as ‘the small carrier problem,’ where having a small air wing forces a hard choice between offense and defense. By changing goals and expectations in this manner, we can tailor the ship and its air wing for defensive operations and leave major strike operations to the supercarrier fleet. It should also be remembered that this omission does not preclude offensive operations because the ship could be sent forward in certain contexts.

One issue that limited the utility of the Sea Control Ship was the aircraft of the day, especially the Harrier. Unlike the modern F-35B, the Harrier had serious deficiencies in air combat capability, range, and payload. These deficiencies resulted in a relatively inflexible air wing. A modern small carrier would be much more capable thanks to the improvements the F-35 brings to the table. It is fully capable of defending the carrier from air attack, has the range to intercept targets, and the payload to strike targets if the opportunity arises. The F-35’s sensors and networking also let it perform many tasks which previously required a dedicated early warning aircraft, allowing it to replace the helicopters envisioned for this mission on the Sea Control Ship. It may not provide the same degree of situational awareness as a dedicated platform like the E-2D, but it is far more survivable and does not give the enemy a large, easily detected radar signature to point them toward the ship.

The Escort Problem

The other major factor in any discussion of carriers is the cost of escorts. Even if serious savings were reaped in fielding the carrier itself, immense costs are incurred by fielding a major combatant that necessitates additional escorting platforms.

An undesirable solution to this problem is to reduce the number of supercarriers in the fleet to free up escorts for the new ships. This might come from the concentration of even more aircraft into a substantially larger class of future CVNs, generating savings by exploiting the efficiency of very large carriers. However, this option is inherently limited since it would allow the addition of only a handful of smaller carriers. This approach will not be discussed further here, but future fleet composition studies should closely examine the possibility of even larger supercarriers, since that has been largely omitted in recent studies.

Another less conventional solution is to take a page out of the Soviet playbook by adding a heavy weapons and sensor suite to allow the ship to potentially defend itself without escorts. Modern weapon and sensor systems have substantially reduced the design conflicts associated with this concept. This helps address the historical Sea Control Ship’s inability to defend itself against anti-ship missiles, and substantially improves the flexibility of the resulting ship.

Soviet heavy aircraft cruiser Baku, later known as the Admiral Gorhskov. Note the forward-placed anti-ship missiles. (Photo via Wikimedia commons)

A Hypothetical Design

Now that we have established the mission and design goals, we will move into the hypothetical design process starting with the hull.

Since convoy escort is the primary mission, and there is no need to keep up with the supercarriers, a top speed in the 20-to-25 knot range should meet mission requirements. The ship will be some combination of the Arleigh Burke-class destroyer and the historical Sea Control Ship plans, so adding these two vessels’ displacement together for 20,000 to 30,000 tons is a reasonable estimate for this modern escort carrier. The San Antonio-class amphibious transport dock fits into this range, so its base hull and propulsion plant form the basis of this concept, and the superstructure will be completely replaced. This selection would allow a single test ship to be inserted into the existing production line without too much trouble and avoid many of the problems normally associated with unique ships. This enables the construction of an initial prototype to identify and correct any shortcomings prior to serial production.

Author’s concept of a CVE escort carrier (Author graphic)

For weapons and sensors, the Flight III Burke can serve as a template. As the most capable Aegis platform in the fleet, it provides an excellent, full-spectrum capability set. This makes a separate escort more redundant than necessary, and also provides vertically-launched land-attack and anti-ship missiles to provide a degree of strike capability. Naturally, it also offers the same type of logistical and industrial advantages provided by the use of the San Antonio hull.

Author’s concept of a CVE escort carrier detailing the aft superstructure and port side Vertical Launch System cells. (Author graphic)

With these design decisions, the author built a 3D model of the concept ship to improve granularity and assess the layout. Most notably, it is possible to wrap the superstructure around the vertical launch system (VLS) to shield the flight deck from exhaust, or more importantly, foreign object debris, avoiding serious conflict between missile launch and flight operations. This model also demonstrates that it is possible to fit enough hangar capacity for an air wing of 12 F-35Bs, 12 MH-60Rs, 2 MQ-8Cs, and 1 MV-22 to provide persistent air cover, plus a few extra utility aircraft. Furthermore, while the vast majority of the San Antonio’s amphibious capabilities would obviously be eliminated, the model shows that it is possible to leave a reduced-height well deck to support UUV, USV, and small boat operations if desired. These sea launch capabilities are a particularly notable example of the need for prototyping, because testing may show the need to remove the well deck or replace it with another type of launch facility or critical spaces.

Author’s concept of a CVE escort carrier showing possible well-deck configuration. (Author graphic)

The notional armament is 96 Mark 41 vertical launch cells, a Rolling Airframe Missile launcher, two Mark 32 triple torpedo tubes, a laser, a railgun or 5-inch gun, and five Javelin/Browning pintle mounts. Anti-ship missiles are launched from the VLS or embarked aircraft instead of top-side mounted launchers to improve upgradeability. The bridge is also clearly visible on top of the forward end of the superstructure, as is Primary Flight Control at the aft end, which protrudes over the sloping superstructure to provide excellent visibility of the flight deck without interfering with flight operations. Finally, it is possible to retain a small portion of the San Antonio’s infantry capacity for EABO and special operations support.

The larger America-class amphibious assault ships, the commonly discussed example in light carrier concept discussions, are not well-suited to serve as a basis for this concept. Most notably, while they carry more aircraft, the incremental improvement is not enough to provide a major step-change. An America-class hull configured in this manner would likely provide an additional six MH-60Rs and four F-35Bs. The extra anti-submarine helicopters would allow three of these aircraft to be airborne at all times, but this does not provide a dramatic performance improvement because the Sea Control Ship demonstrated that two are adequate to maintain sonobuoy barriers on both sides of a convoy for early warning of submarines. The additional F-35Bs are not enough to increase the standing combat air patrol from two to four, so the additional aircraft would functionally provide a reserve force that could either be held to respond to threats or sent on small strikes without compromising top cover. While that is certainly useful, as are the larger magazines and fuel storage allowed by a larger hull, the America costs an additional $1.5 billion and hundreds of crew, a one third-to-one half increase in cost to $4.5-5.5 billion for limited gains. One final point that applies broadly against a larger hull is that in any environment dangerous enough to require a doubled air wing, carrying it in two smaller hulls with full defensive suites provides a major survivability advantage. 

With all that said, it is still worth examining the cost to rebuild the USS Bonhomme Richards (LHD-6) as a prototype carrier of this type. Since the ship would require a new, much larger superstructure to house the weapons and sensors, the old superstructure and underlying structure would have to be completely replaced regardless, making the extensive damage there irrelevant. That could make the rebuild more affordable since it would be competing with a new-build prototype, and it would allow the Navy to act more quickly on the stated goal of acquiring small carriers without the risks associated with developing a new class of ship.

Costs and Benefits

The next step is to examine this design’s impact on the Navy. The San Antonio and Arleigh Burke each cost around two billion dollars, so it is reasonable to assume that the overall cost of this hypothetical ship will be in the $3-4 billion range after accounting for the savings from eliminating duplication and the extra cost of the aviation equipment. The San Antonio and Burke have about 300-350 crew each, so this ship will probably need about half-again (500 personnel). With the addition of air wing personnel, the crew complement increases to a total of roughly 800. Crew count could likely be reduced from this number with modern automation technology, as was done on the Zumwalt-class destroyer. However, it is difficult to automate aircraft maintenance, so a crew of less than 500 seems unlikely. Finally, it should be noted that this cost represents a complete task force since no separate escort is required. That said, it does omit the optional ground combat element in the crew count and makes no attempt to address logistics requirements due to the complex interactions with the rest of the fleet.

While that cost is substantial, this hypothetical ship does offer plenty of capability which might justify the investment. As an escort, the aerial targeting information from its F-35Bs will make it much more capable than traditional surface combatants against most surface and air threats, while its large helicopter complement offers similar advantages for anti-submarine warfare. Defensive employment would be similarly effective for closing chokepoints to enemy movement, and would be particularly effective against submarines since it could maintain an extensive drone and sonobuoy field. They could also be used to support distributed operations in a variety of ways, such as forming a distant screen to expand overall situational awareness or supporting expeditionary operations with forward air cover and light sealift. 

Alternatively, they could conduct a variety of special operations from a single hull by backing up ground elements with organic airlift, air support, and missile strikes. Finally, the use of common systems means they could easily be incorporated into any conventional task force to provide additional mass, although they are not particularly efficient in this role. In peacetime, these ships would offer flexibility to the fleet because they could fill in for essentially any kind of ship needed, provide a distributed rapid reaction capability, carry the diplomatic prestige of being an aircraft carrier, and free supercarriers from low-end operations. When everything is said and done these benefits may not outweigh the costs, but it should illustrate how rethinking a small carrier’s mission set can lead to interesting alternative solutions.

This concept may also benefit international navies. Since these ships would cost substantially less than a fully escorted carrier, they may appeal to smaller navies that may be unable to afford super carriers and may be willing to sacrifice some capability to reduce cost. For example, Norway might choose to replace the Helge Ingstad with a ship of this type since they already operate the F-35. This would more than fully replace its defensive capabilities while adding unprecedented power projection, giving them much greater capability. Politically, acquiring an aircraft carrier would be a dramatic signal of intent and commitment to defense out of proportion to its cost, and would go a long way toward addressing longstanding tensions with the U.S. over NATO spending.

Finally, it is important to reiterate that this is only one possible outcome. The Sea Control Ship concept would also be a valid application of this reduction in mission scope, and there are plenty of other alterations to explore. Similarly, the concepts presented using a small aircraft carrier are just as applicable in other contexts. The output may be unexpected and may need to be integrated with other platforms or concepts to be truly viable, but it can open up alternative solutions to bypass seemingly impossible problems.

Ben DiDonato is a volunteer member of the NRP-funded LMACC team lead by Dr. Shelley Gallup. He originally created what would become the armament for LMACC’s baseline Shrike variant in collaboration with the Naval Postgraduate School in a prior role as a contract engineer for Lockheed Martin Missiles and Fire Control. He has provided systems and mechanical engineering support to organizations across the defense industry from the U.S. Army Communications-Electronics Research, Development and Engineering Center (CERDEC) to Spirit Aerosystems, working on projects for all branches of the armed forces.

Featured Image: The amphibious transport dock ship USS San Antonio (LPD 17) steams through the Red Sea June 16, 2013. The San Antonio was part of the Kearsarge Amphibious Readiness Group and was underway in the U.S. 5th Fleet area of responsibility supporting maritime security operations and theater security cooperation efforts. (Photo via Wikimedia Commons, by GySgt Michael Kropiewnicki)

Strategy

Implementing National Maritime Strategy With a Shrunken Fleet

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By Robert C. Rubel

Soon the nuclear aircraft carrier USS Dwight D. Eisenhower will depart from Norfolk, Va., on a “double pump” deployment; going back out for another six or seven month cruise just six months after returning from a deployment that set records for the amount of time at sea.  This departure will occur shortly after Ike’s sister ship USS Theodore Roosevelt did the same thing from the West Coast. This will take a toll on both the ships of the two battle groups and the sailors that man them, not to mention their families. The reasons behind the decision to double pump Ike boil down to too much demand from the regional combatant commanders and too few ships available to fill those demands at an operating tempo that allows for adequate ship maintenance and stateside time for sailors.

Although former Secretary of Defense Mark Esper issued a plan for expanding the fleet, its prospects for implementation are unclear at best due to massive government expenditures for COVID-19 relief and vaccines. For its part, the Navy is looking for ways to meet demands within expected budgets, such as fielding unmanned vessels and building smaller ships. But these measures miss seeing the strategic forest for the operational trees. The current U.S. military command and control system of regional combatant commands is tacitly based on having a much larger military force than is available today. In lieu of building the U.S. military, especially the Navy, back up to Cold War levels, a new approach to managing the use of naval forces on a global level is needed.

U.S. maritime strategy, which consists of the way the nation uses the seas to support its overall grand strategy, has been consistent since shortly after the end of World War II. The national grand strategy, adopted by President Roosevelt and his Secretary of State Cordell Hull, was to broker a system of international institutions and rules that would level the international economic playing field and at least work toward a rules-based international order. That grand strategy has been consistent to the current day despite changes in administrations, their differing policies, and massive geopolitical shifts; the U.S. seeks to comprehensively defend the global system of commerce and security. 

The maritime component, as described by the political scientist Samuel Huntington in 1954, is to ring Eurasia with naval power to deter, suppress or defeat instability and aggression that might threaten the system. This maritime strategy is mechanized by the Navy, which is tasked with raising, training and maintaining forces for use by the regional unified combatant commanders. The combatant commanders, for their part, develop both war plans for use in case of military aggression and theater strategies for day-to-day security operations. Both include estimates of forces needed, which can be broken down into surge forces that might be needed for contingencies and steady state forces for day-to-day use, including deterrence, engagement and general constabulary functions. Thus, in the Navy’s case, it not only needs forces to meet the demands of day-to-day operations, but to have in reserve forces to surge in case war breaks out. During the Cold War, especially in the 1980s, the Navy had sufficient forces to support both aspects of force demand. Now it does not.

The strategic paradigm taught in the nation’s war colleges is ends-ways-means. These three elements must be harmonized if strategy is to be successful. Ends and the ways to achieve them must not be based on inadequate means. This implies, in the current instance, that either U.S. ends – a liberal global trading order – must be modified to be less expansive, or the ways, a grand strategy of comprehensive defense and support of that system, must be adjusted. Despite the Trump Administration’s adoption of an “America First” policy, it does not appear that it made any significant move to alter the supporting maritime strategy aspect of the traditional grand strategy, and the Biden Administration is likely to reaffirm U.S. adherence to it.

Given that the means the Navy has at its disposal to support the national maritime strategy are more or less fixed, something has to give. At various points suggestions have been made to shift the Navy to a surge posture, significantly reducing its forward deployments, but this would be out of step with the character of the national grand strategy. Altering fleet design to an architecture of a larger number of smaller and cheaper ships is a possibility, but this will take a decade or more to achieve, even if sufficient institutional and political support for it can be mustered. A way must be found to stretch the available means to accommodate the national maritime strategy in the short term.

One way of viewing the U.S. joint command and control structure is that it is based on strategic sufficiency of means. Whether the overall U.S. military strategy was based on two simultaneous major contingencies or down to one in one theater and a holding strategy in another, the demands for day-to-day forces emanated from all six geographic commands all the time, and a grand strategy of comprehensive system defense required that all of them be honored, even in light of the Navy’s severe difficulty in satisfying those demands. Former Deputy Defense Secretary Robert Work attempted to shift the formula from a demand-based model to one based on supply; the combatant commanders would be placed on a diet of forces that could be sustained by the Navy. He was not able to institute such an approach because starving the combatant commanders of forces across the board was neither consistent with the U.S. grand strategy nor was it politically acceptable to the combatant commanders. Another way of dealing with scarcity must be found.

An answer can be found in U.S. Air Force air power theory. That theory asserts that air power is a scarce but mobile resource. These two characteristics imply that it must be subject to centralized management such that can be applied strategically across the theater. This logic can be scaled up and applied to sea power on a global basis. In other words, the nation’s sea power, at least the allocation of it, should be managed by a staff in Washington that has a global perspective. Sea power, given the reduced size of the fleet, is a scarce asset whose application must be managed strategically.

Former Secretary of Defense James Mattis devised the idea of randomizing naval deployments or at least keeping intended movements of forces under wraps such that potential adversaries would not know when a U.S. task force would show up. In theory this would maintain deterrence with a force too small to conduct a station keeping strategy. While it made for good deterrence theory, it did nothing to address day-to-day combatant commander requirements and, from a global perspective, reduced the availability of U.S. Navy forces for response purposes. In any case, the strategy was never fully implemented; the combatant commander demands for forces just overrode it.

The failure of both the Work and Mattis schemes, even though emanating from the top two Defense Department officials, indicates that a more institutionalized fix is needed. That fix would consist of a new staff within the Pentagon with global command authority, at least for maritime operations. Its authority to allocate maritime resources would echo that of Admiral Ernest King in World War II in his role as Commander-in-Chief U.S. Fleet. He was the only officer that had the “latitude to change the longitude” of Navy ships. However, simply establishing the authority to manage the global distribution of naval forces is not enough, that distribution must be based on a new approach to the nation’s maritime strategy.

The U.S. Navy simply does not have enough ships to provide “full service” of robust deterrence, contingency response capability and engagement capacity in all areas, at least at an acceptable cost in terms of maintenance and personnel tempo. Prioritization on a global basis will be needed, and that is where a global maritime staff with global allocation authority is needed. Such prioritization must be strategic; that is, on the basis of some idea for how forces can be allocated to achieve desired effects or to manage the risk associated with executing the current maritime strategy with fewer forces. The current organizational structure is only able to allocate on the basis of satisficing. Such a staff might also be able to conceive of and implement a new version of the national maritime strategy.

Heretofore the U.S. Navy has, from time to time, issued what have been called maritime strategies, but as a military service constrained by statute to raising, training and equipping forces, it has no formal authority to do so. On the other hand, the Navy does have a global and maritime perspective, which at times has impelled it, notably in the cases of the 1980s Maritime Strategy and the 2007 Cooperative Strategy, to deal with an operational/strategic problem in the maritime domain that needed to be solved but which the joint chain of command either could not or would not address. A maritime staff within the joint chain of command would have such authority. This would require close coordination with most other cabinet departments and the National Security Council, which suggests that it be located in Washington. 

A kind of template for such a staff already exists; each combatant command has a Joint Force Maritime Component Commander (JFMCC) embedded within its C2 structure. The JFMCC possesses the requisite authorities for moving, tasking and supporting naval forces, including not only the needed administrative mechanisms but a maritime operations center (MOC) that provides real-time situational awareness and communications.

A national level version of a JFMCC would be feasible from a mechanical point of view; the challenges to its instantiation would be political. First, it would essentially constitute a new unified command that combined the characteristics of current geographic and functional ones. However, unlike the geographic commands, the new global JFMCC would not directly command naval forces within a theater, it would simply allocate forces. Nonetheless, new legislation would be needed to create it and imbue it with the requisite authorities. Opposition from the Air Force and Army could be expected, as it might be viewed as giving the Navy too much power. However, the command would not have any Title X authority over budgets, although as a joint command, it would have a draw on forces from those Services if it thought necessary; the maritime domain involves the functioning of all types of forces. Moreover, as a joint command, it would be staffed by personnel from all the Services and its commander could wear any uniform. It is the perspective of the command – global – and its function – strategic allocation of forces – that governs the approach of whoever commands it, not the color of their uniform.

The current structure of the Unified Command Plan bakes in an inefficient approach to the execution of the national grand strategy and its maritime component. When the United States enjoyed a robust force structure this inefficiency could be tolerated; in the current environment of resource scarcity it creates more strategic risk than is necessary by limiting the global mobility of naval forces, and to some extent other forces. Strategic allocation vice satisficing must be achieved, and current structures such as the Joint Staff and Office of the Secretary of Defense are not able to accommodate the function. The creation of a new unified command with a global, maritime perspective is a viable and frankly necessary solution.

Robert C. Rubel is a retired Navy captain and professor emeritus of the Naval War College. He served on active duty in the Navy as a light attack/strike fighter aviator. At the Naval War College he served in various positions, including planning and decision-making instructor, joint education adviser, chairman of the Wargaming Department, and dean of the Center for Naval Warfare Studies. He retired in 2014, but on occasion continues to serve as a special adviser to the Chief of Naval Operations. He has published over thirty journal articles and several book chapters.

Featured Image: U.S. Navy ships from the Theodore Roosevelt Carrier Strike Group and the America Expeditionary Strike Group transit the South China Sea March 15, 2020. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 3rd Class Nicholas V. Huynh)

Project Trident

Project Trident Call for Articles: Maritime Infrastructure and Trade

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Submissions Due: April 19, 2021
Week Dates: May 3-7, 2021
Article Length: 1000-3000 words
Submit to: [email protected]

By Jimmy Drennan

CIMSEC is partnering with Maersk Line, Limited to launch the Project Trident call for articles on maritime infrastructure and trade! Maersk Line, Limited provides end-to-end transportation solutions to support the unique requirements of the U.S. government. As the largest owner and operator of U.S. flag vessels trading internationally and the largest participant in the VISA/MSP programs, these network ensures reliable and regular connection to all corners of the globe.

Security and prosperity go hand-in-hand, and as the complexity of the global economy grows, so too does its dependence on the maritime domain. The increasing connectedness of national and regional economies, combined with the COVID-19 pandemic, have highlighted the importance of infrastructure and trade in maritime security.

Last year, shipping carriers rejected U.S. agricultural exports worth hundreds of millions of dollars in favor of returning empty containers to China, which faces a container shortage due to a surge in consumer goods. Government stimulus packages and shifting consumer trends resulting from the pandemic have put a strain on global container capacity, and China is making it more profitable for shippers to bring back empty containers than American agricultural exports. Meanwhile, containers full of American goods stack up in slammed ports like Los Angeles and Long Beach. The growing intricacies of the global supply chain demonstrate the need for a coordinated maritime strategy.

Port capacity and accessibility is rapidly changing as the developing world increasingly becomes more urbanized and developed, thereby increasing their demand of the global maritime commons. The volume of commercial maritime traffic is ever increasing, and the ability of ports to keep pace is in flux. Ports have significant geopolitical value as well, especially as China is securing long-term leases on port infrastructure beyond its borders.

The global shipbuilding industrial base remains heavily concentrated in China, Japan, and South Korea, which account for around 90 percent of all ships launched in recent years. In 2018, the world’s global merchant fleet totaled 50,000 vessels with a combined value of $851 billion, and a total deadweight tonnage of 1 billion. The shipbuilding industrial base in the United States is dominated primarily by military shipbuilding contracts while large-scale commercial shipbuilding capacity has largely gone overseas. The shipbuilding industrial base of China, both commercial and military capacity combined, is overshadowing that of the United States, raising questions about their respective abilities to mobilize industry in a time of conflict.

Often overlooked is the critical, but often opaque world of shipping finance and insurance. For example, China is rapidly becoming the preferred option for ship financing as western banks exit the market space. U.S. Military Sealift Command contracts with foreign tanker companies to charter ships for some overseas operations. These ships are sometimes leased to tanker companies from Chinese banks, with little to no awareness by the U.S. government.

Data is the new lifeblood of global commerce and the shipping industry is in the midst of a digital revolution. The industry is looking to seize opportunities posed by emerging technologies and networks, but must be considerate of the associated cybersecurity concerns and the risks of failing to keep pace with change.

CIMSEC wants your ideas on how infrastructure and trade will impact the future of international maritime security. What could be the maritime security impacts of Sino-American economic interdependence, changing infrastructure capacity, rapid port development, decarbonization, digital revolution, and other trends and facets of global maritime infrastructure?

Authors are invited to answer these questions and more as we consider the future of maritime infrastructure and trade. Send all submissions to [email protected].

Jimmy Drennan is the President of CIMSEC. Contact him at [email protected].

Featured Image: A container terminal (bellergy via Pixabay)