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Future Tech

For America and Japan, Peace and Security Through Technology, Pt. 2

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By Capt. Tuan N. Pham, USN

Part one of this two-part series calls for a bilateral technology roadmap to field and sustain a lethal, resilient, and rapidly adapting technology-enabled Joint Force (Multi-Domain Defense Force) that can seamlessly conduct high-end maritime operations in the Indo-Pacific.

Part two underscores the imperatives to do so, and provides geostrategic context by framing the growing technology competition within the region through the lens of Great Power Competition (GPC) in the 21st century. China, Russia, America, and Japan are intertwined in GPC, with all four nations fully committed to national security innovation for competitive advantages.

China – Seeking Global Technological Dominance (Technological Revisionism)

China has embarked on a whole-of-nation effort to achieve civil-military development and integration of emerging technologies, seeking to become a Science and Technology (S&T) superpower with a strong economy, a powerful military, and a harmonious society – able to fight and win global conflicts across every domain of strategic competition (economic, political, ideological, and military). Using national tools – government, industry, and academia – to promote domestic technological innovation and access foreign technology, Beijing hopes to leapfrog the United States and the other industrialized nations in technological prowess en route to global preeminence and the Chinese Dream of national rejuvenation. China invests heavily in advanced dual-use technologies, hoping that they will improve the People’s Liberation Army’s (PLA) capabilities and increase its capacities to achieve battlefield dominance across contested and interconnected warfighting domains.

The Military-Civil Fusion (MCF) strategy’s ultimate goal is the “gradual build-up of China’s unified military-civil system of strategies and strategic capabilities.” The strategy is not an addition to China’s other national strategic priorities, but rather a “supporting strategy whose parts integrate into China’s system of national strategies to form a broad national strategic system” that advances the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) overarching security and development goals and realizes its strategic aspirations (Chinese Dream). General Secretary of the CCP Xi Jinping described the MCF strategy as a “major policy decision designed to balance security and development, and is a major measure in response to complex security threats and a means of gaining strategic advantages.”

As the name suggests, the strategy seeks to synchronize and integrate civil and military operations, activities, and investments. The civil aspects encompass the economic and social systems that relate to national security as well as the contested domains and competitive technologies such as maritime, space, cyberspace, autonomy, and artificial intelligence (AI) that are intricately linked to the development and sustainment of “New Type Combat Capabilities.” The military aspects cover every aspect of national security to include the PLA and enabling national defense technologies and infrastructures. The MCF strategy gives the PLA unfettered access into civil entities developing and acquiring advanced technologies, to include state-owned and private firms, universities, and research programs such as the Thousand Talents Program. All in all, the strategy’s core goals are the optimization of national resource allocation, generation of combat readiness, and manifestation of economic prosperity.

The drive for technological dominance is not a new policy. The fixation with advanced technology dates back to the founding of the country and the founder Mao Zedong. Mao envisioned the “socialist world’s overwhelming superiority in S&T and came to see technological strength as central to economic, ideological, and geopolitical power for China” – a view that CCP leaders still hold today. Xi characterized the national pursuit of technology as “ganchao” (catch up and surpass). The strategic objective is one of the CCP’s most defining and enduring goals, and provides an essential policy framework to understand “China’s ambition to become a technological superpower, bringing together the legacies of Marxism, Maoism, and the relentless drive toward modernization [realization of the Chinese Dream] by the CCP.”    

Xi embraced “ganchao” and made it his own. In January of 2013, shortly after assuming power, Xi laid out his vision for China’s future through the lens of national rejuvenation and reinvigorated national efforts to “catch up and surpass,” reinforcing the legacy linkage of technological advancements to the ideology and identity of the CCP. Four years later, at the 19th National Congress of the CCP, Xi reaffirmed the strategic roadmap for the Chinese Dream. Xi moved China forward from Mao’s revolutionary legacy and Deng’s iconic policy dictum – “observe calmly, secure our position, cope with affairs calmly, hide our capacities and bide our time, be good at maintaining a low profile, and never claim leadership” – and heralded a new era in Chinese national development. To Xi, technological innovation, by all means, is necessary to surpass the West, and technological dominance is the path to realize global preeminence by 2049.             

Beijing’s Made in China 2025 and Internet Plus policies are two key components of China’s strategic plan to achieve technological dominance by the end of the decade and global preeminence by 2049. The former aims to push the economy towards higher value-added manufacturing and services through digital technology and automation. It is a blueprint to upgrade the manufacturing capabilities of Chinese industries into a more technology-intensive dynamo. The latter aims to capitalize on China’s massive online consumer market by building up the country’s domestic mobile Internet, cloud computing, big data, and Internet of Things (IoT) sectors. It is a roadmap to integrate information technology with the key industries of manufacturing, commerce, banking, and agriculture. Both policies have been characterized as an innovation mercantilism that leverages the power of the state to “alter competitive dynamics in global markets from industries core to economic competitiveness.” 

In the maritime domain, Xi called for accelerating innovation in marine technologies to increase capacity and improve naval development capability, fostering the development of domestic marine industries in support of both PLA modernization and reform efforts and national civilian projects like the Made in China 2025 and Digital Belt and Road Initiative. He promoted marine connectivity and practical collaboration to develop “blue partnerships” among like-minded maritime nations under the One Belt and One Road framework at last year’s China Marine Economy Expo.

Russia – Rebuilding Technology Base for National Greatness (Technological Revanchism)

In 2017, Russian President Vladimir Putin presciently declared that “whoever becomes the leader in this sphere [explicitly AI and implicitly technology at large] will become the ruler of the world.” The bold statement summarizes the purpose and intent behind the 2017 Strategy for the Development of an Information Society for 2017–2030, one of Putin’s key policy initiatives to restore Russia to its former glory. The strategy prioritizes areas deemed essential for the successful development of Russian information and communication technologies, specifically:

  • New generation of electronic networks
  • Processing of large volumes of data
  • AI
  • Electronic identification and authentication
  • Cloud computing
  • Post-industrial Internet
  • Robotics
  • Biotechnologies Information security

The strategy also devotes considerable attention to “ideological concerns, including the prioritization of Russian traditional spiritual and cultural values, popularization of Russian culture and science abroad, and proliferation of steady cultural and educational contacts with Russian compatriots living abroad.” The intent relates to the “Russian World” concept that aims to propagate Russian soft power abroad.

The 2017 Strategy for the Development of an Information Society supplements and complements the greater 2015 National Security Strategy (NSS) that codifies Russia’s strategic interests and national priorities. The strategic document identifies Russian national interests as “strengthening the country’s defense, ensuring political and social stability, raising the living standard, preserving and developing culture, improving the economy, and enhancing Russia’s status as a leading world power.” The strategy reflects a Russia more confident in its ability to defend its sovereignty, resist Western pressure and influence, and realize its great power aspirations.

The Russian military remains essential to Putin’s ambitious and expansive strategic plan to restore Russia to its former Soviet greatness. The incremental modernization of Russia’s military depends on the future viability and sustainability of the Russian defense industry. Moscow funds or subsidizes its defense industry primarily through four state-supported investment approaches that provide insights into current defense priorities and future defense developments: “In certain areas, the Kremlin invested significant resources in recapitalizing key defense corporations indicating its prioritization of the systems they produce and the technologies they develop. In other areas, Russia engaged in enduring support of critical defense corporations demonstrating its long-term commitment to key technologies. Another approach reflects the incorporation of its defense corporations into state-owned enterprises. The last approach is speculative investment in dual-use technologies through means such as venture capital.”

America – Maintaining Global Technology Leadership (Technological Superiority)

The 2017 NSS charges the National Security Enterprise to promote American prosperity by leading in research, technology, invention, and innovation to sustain and expand competitive advantages in today’s strategic environment of GPC. The tasked priority actions include understanding worldwide S&T trends, attracting and retaining inventors and innovators, leveraging private capital and expertise to build and innovate, and rapidly fielding inventions and innovations. The NSS also charges the Department of Defense (DOD) to preserve the peace through strength by renewing military capabilities to retain military overmatch for competitive advantages. Overmatch strengthens diplomacy and shapes the international environment to protect and advance U.S. national interests. To maintain military overmatch, the United States must restore the ability to build innovative defense capabilities, force readiness for major conflict and strategic competition, and size of the force so that it is capable of operating at a sufficient scale and for a duration to win across a range of contingencies and interconnected domains. Lastly, the NSS calls on key allies and partners to modernize, acquire the necessary joint warfighting capabilities, improve force readiness, expand the size of their forces, and affirm the political will to compete and win.     

Within the DOD, the 2018 National Defense Strategy, 2018 National Military Strategy, and Defense Planning Guidance collectively highlight the need for competitive technological innovation in national security to sustain and expand the U.S. military competitive advantages, and direct greater partnerships between the DOD and commercial enterprises to out-innovate global competitors. Nowhere is the need for commercial technological innovation more compelling than in the DOD. The 2019 Digital Modernization Strategy states that “technological innovation is a key element of future readiness and essential to preserving and expanding U.S. military competitive advantage in the face of near-peer competition and asymmetric threats.” The strategy calls for the ability, flexibility, and agility to innovatively and rapidly field technology-enabled warfighting capability to the warfighter faster than potential adversaries. The guiding principles for DOD’s acquisition of commercial technology capabilities underscore that “preserving and expanding our military advantage depends on our ability to deliver technology faster than our adversaries and the agility of our enterprise to adapt our way of fighting to the potential advantages of innovative technology.”   

Within the Department of Navy, Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Michael Gilday emphasizes the role of allies and partners in enforcing international maritime norms and operating together as a technology-enabled Joint Force. He declared his intention to bring key U.S. allies and partners along with the U.S. Navy (USN) as it moves into high-end maritime operations at last year’s 12th Regional Sea Power Symposium. He told his contemporaries from more than 30 foreign navies that “today, the very nature of our operating environment requires shared common values and a collective approach to maritime security…and that makes steady, enduring Navy-to-Navy relationships more important than ever”. He concluded his remarks by addressing the fluid technological environment and how emerging disruptive technologies affect the character of naval operations and warfare (warfighting). He underscored tactical cloud computing, AI, and machine learning as technological drivers of change for the USN and by extension allied and partnered navies. 

Admiral Gilday expounded on these points when he promulgated his initial guidance to the Fleet a few months later. The directive, in the form of a fragmentary order (FRAGO), simplified, prioritized, and built on the foundation of “A Design for Maintaining Maritime Superiority 2.0” issued by his predecessor. The FRAGO directs dedicated efforts across three critical areas – warfighting, warfighters, and the future Navy – and focuses on building alliances and partnerships to broaden and strengthen global maritime awareness, access, capabilities, and capacities. 

The FRAGO aligns well with the Secretary of Navy’s (SECNAV) guidance to mitigate the unpredictability of the future by building and maintaining a “robust constellation of partners and allies to work with us to solve common security challenges which are beyond our ability to predict, or defeat alone.” The SECNAV underscored two key initiatives. First, cooperative international agreements jointly produce, procure, and sustain naval armaments to reduce U.S. and partner costs, improve bilateral interoperability, and forge closer ties between U.S. and partner nation operating forces and acquisition and logistics communities. Second, S&T and data exchange agreements facilitate Research and Development (R&D) and information exchanges with allied or friendly nations, and marshal the technological capabilities of the United States and our key allies and partners to accelerate R&D and fielding of equipment for the common defense.  

The FRAGO also aligns well with the newly released Tri-Service Maritime Strategy (Advantage at Sea, Prevailing with All-Domain Naval Power). The joint strategy focuses on China and Russia and guides the Naval Service (USN, U.S. Marine Corps, and U.S. Coast Guard) for the next decade to prevail across the continuum of competition. The strategy has two main components. First, it articulates the employment of integrated all-domain naval power across the competition continuum. Second, it guides the development of an integrated all-domain naval force.

Japan – Advancing Toward Society 5.0 (Technological Evolution)

Japan takes a broader societal perspective of the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR). In 2017, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe unveiled Society 5.0, a future society that leverages technology in the key pillars of infrastructure, finance technology, healthcare, logistics, and AI to achieve economic advancement and solve societal problems. The super-smart society (Society 5.0) is the fifth step in the evolution of human development. It follows the information society (Society 4.0), industrial society (Society 3.0), agricultural society (Society 2.0), and hunting and gathering society (Society 1.0). The vision is to liberate people from routine tasks and to meet the needs of every person while not surrendering all control to technology. Society 5.0 boldly creates a social contract and economic model by fully integrating the technological innovations of the 4IR throughout every facet of Japanese society. The dual-use nature of these developing civil technologies also has national security applications and implications. 

Like in the United States, GPC influences Japan’s national security perspectives as outlined in its NSS. The NSS shapes Japanese defense priorities through the lens of enduring regional threats like China, North Korea, and Russia; emerging contested and interconnected domains of space, cyberspace, and the electromagnetic spectrum (EMS); the U.S.-Japan Alliance; and the Free and Open Indo-Pacific. Within the Ministry of Defense (MOD), the National Defense Planning Guidelines for FY2019 and Beyond, Mid-Term Defense Program FY2019-2023, and 2019 R&D Vision call for the development of a Multi-Domain Defense Force (Joint Force) that can conduct seamless and integrated cross-domain operations to preserve the security, prosperity, and independence of Japan. These operations fuse the new domains of space, cyberspace, and the EMS with the traditional domains of maritime, air, and land. The challenge for the MOD is how best to leverage the pervasive technological innovation happenings in the government, private industry, and academia within Japan and collaborate with the U.S. DOD on technological innovation.

Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force (JMSDF), in coordination with the other services, continues to make prudent targeted investments to develop a Multi-Domain Defense Force, strengthen the U.S.-Japan Alliance, take better care of its personnel, and hedge for the future. The FY2019,  FY2020, and FY2021 defense budgets (JMSDF allocation) focus on building capabilities and increasing capacities in command, control, communications, computers, ISR, and targeting (C4ISRT), information warfare, cyberspace network operations and defense, space warfare, undersea warfare, and ballistic missile defense. The JMSDF also makes investments in four enabling organizational areas. Firstly, enhance function in all phases through continuous enhancement of necessary capabilities. Secondly, better develop concepts necessary for defending the country by utilizing the JMSDF capabilities to their full potential. Thirdly, further strengthen cooperation through deepening relationships with other navies with the U.S.-Japan Alliance as its core, and through making full use of joint and comprehensive relationships with various partners. Lastly, improve personnel programs, the foundation of the JMSDF, both in quality and in quantity.

Technology Competition

GPC is alive and well in the Indo-Pacific, particularly in the contested technology domain. Russia, China, America, and Japan are entangled in a competitive technology race for economic prosperity and national security. Although allied Washington and Tokyo are fully committed to national security technological innovation as evidenced by their respective national defense strategies and mutual pursuit of a technology-enabled Joint Force (Multi-Domain Defense Force), the broader DOD (USN) and MOD (JMSDF) must better leverage emerging technologies and developing concomitant warfare concepts (doctrines) to adapt to the new way of fighting. Otherwise, the United States and Japan risk ceding the technology domain and consequently military superiority in the Indo-Pacific to revisionist China and revanchist Russia.

CAPT Pham is a maritime strategist, strategic planner, naval researcher, and China Hand with 20 years of experience in the Indo-Pacific. He completed a research paper with the Office of Naval Research (ONR) at the U.S. Naval War College (USNWC) in 2020. The articles are derived from the aforesaid paper. The views expressed here are personal and do not reflect the positions of the U.S. Government, USN, ONR or USNWC.

Featured Image: SAN DIEGO (Feb. 23, 2017) Cmdr. Mark Stefanik, commanding officer of the littoral combat ship USS Montgomery (LCS 8), discusses the ship’s engineering capabilities with Japan Maritime Self Defense Force Director of Ships and Weapons Division, Capt. Shinichi Imayoshi. (U.S. Navy photo by Fire Controlman 1st Class Nathaniel J. Wells/Released)

Current Operations

Mapping Gray Maritime Networks for Hybrid Warfare

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By Chris Callaghan, Rob Schroeder, and Dr. Wayne Porter

Introduction 

In light of the current National Security Strategy and the 2018 National Defense Guidance, the impact of hybrid warfare and ‘gray-zone’1 maritime activity in support of great power competition among nations has become an increasing area of concern. This includes the need for an increased focus on the identification and tracking of vessels of interest (VOI) and their associated owners, operators, and activities. Traditionally, maritime domain awareness (MDA) has consisted of intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance of activities at sea with limited cross-domain link analysis2 of events, carriers, and sponsors (Wallace & Mesko, 2013). While this methodology enables analysts and operators to sift and structure vast data from increasingly complex systems, it fails to consider how ties between similar entities create gray (non-transparent) shipping networks capable of supporting state-directed hybrid warfare. 

This is not to say that a network perspective has been absent from the maritime domain. Researchers from diverse analytic disciplines have conceptualized various constructs as networks, such as historic trade routes (Rivers, Evans, & Knappett, 2016; Wang, Notteboom, & Yang, 2016), global shipping patterns (Ducruet, Rozenblat, & Zaidi, 2010), cruise ship itineraries (Rodrigue & Notteboom, 2014), and logistics involved in global shipping (Ducruet & Lugo, 2013). Yet, much of the focus behind this work has been on understanding transparent (licit) networks.3 For their part, network researchers leveraged social network analysis to gain an understanding of dark networks – that is, covert and/or illicit organizations (Raab & Milward, 2003). This has included, for example, the study of terrorist groups (Krebs, 2002; Roberts & Everton, 2011), narcotic distribution networks (Morselli & Petit, 2007), street gangs (Papachristos, Hureau, & Braga, 2013), and cyber criminals on the dark web (Dupont, 2014) to name a few. 

We drew on network analysis (NA) to examine gray maritime networks (alternately operating licitly and illicitly) in relationship to two NATO-led exercises in 2018: BALTOPS and Exercise Trident Juncture. As previously demonstrated through research focused on mapping gray maritime networks in the South China Sea (Porter, et al., 2019), NA methods can be leveraged to develop longitudinal network depictions of vessels loitering in sensitive or disputed areas. Here, we leverage commercially available geo-temporal data, open-source databases, and home range detection algorithms to generate depictions of the subgroups of owners and operators associated with gray activities.

Although methodology driven, this research was not intended to provide solely an academic contribution but also to demonstrate how NA can improve real-time awareness and tracking for operational purposes. The methods and analysis presented here should enable a rich discussion of current and future methods for enhanced MDA. As such, we begin with a description of our data collection and methods then proceed to discuss findings and practical implications for MDA. Finally, we conclude with a series of recommendations for further research. 

Generating Networks: Data and Methods 

We use commercially available ship tracking data as the cornerstone of our analysis; specifically, in the process of identifying and tracking VOIs. Our team collected the feeds from commercial automatic identification system (AIS) transceivers from 13 March 2018 through 7 January 2019.4 These data points are particularly salient as AIS transmitters are required as navigation and anti-collision systems for all vessels exceeding 300 gross tonnage operating internationally, any vessels exceeding 500 gross tonnage not conducting international voyages, and all passenger ships regardless of size. To narrow the scope of our data set, we geofenced our data to include the Baltic Sea and the North Atlantic Ocean. The resulting daily AIS tracking logs provided both spatial and temporal variables relevant to our analysis; namely, a VOI’s date and time of transmission, maritime mobile service identity (MMSI) number, speed over ground, longitude, and latitude.  

Once the data was decoded and filtered, we proceeded to explore traffic patterns using the Time Local Convex Hull (T-LoCoH) method originally developed for the study of movement patterns in GPS-tracked ranging animals. T-LoCoH integrates time with space into the construction of local hulls (geometric shapes containing a location distribution within a home range) while accounting for an individual animal’s speed, which facilitates the use of metrics for revisitation and loitering duration (Lyons, Turner, & Getz, 2013). In our work, the AIS data that tracks vessel traffic over time and space is analogous to the GPS data used to analyze ranging animals. As such, we leveraged the application of this method to identify spatio-temporal patterns of ships loitering in areas proximal to NATO-led military exercises.  

To reduce traffic noise, we only included AIS transmissions for non-NATO nation commercial vessels transponding with a speed over ground less than or equal to two knots. We then generated spatial loitering polygons which may represent ports, anchorages, or other areas where a VOI loitered during the window of research (see Figure 1). As expected, areas exhibited differing loitering densities with some being dense (depicted as yellow on Figure 1) and others less dense (depicted in red). These loitering polygons served as the basis for developing a list of VOIs using their MMSI identification numbers as unique identifiers.

Figure 1. Loitering isopleths during BALTOPS (click to expand)

Matching loitering isopleths with the original AIS transmissions used to generate them yielded a ship-to-loitering location table (see Table 1) with a ship’s unique identifier, the AIS message date and time, and the loitering polygon identity. 

MMSI  Date-time  Polygon 
123456789  T=1  Polygon A 
987654321  T=1  Polygon A 
123456789  T=2  Polygon B 
123456789  T=3  Polygon C 

Table 1. Sample ship-to-loitering location table

From this table, we extracted a location-to-location network where loitering areas were interconnected if a VOI traveled from one location to the other location. Next, to examine the underlying organizations linked to the VOIs, the team gathered open-source information on the companies who own and/or operate these ships using the Lexis Nexis Advance Research Database. This corporate information was then joined to the ship data. The corporate information was used to create connections between companies if they were tied to the same ship, one was a subsidiary of the other, one had a major financial stake in the other, shared the same physical address, or had members of their boards of directors in common. The findings and analysis of these data follow in the subsequent section.

Analysis: Shedding Light on Gray Maritime Networks

From the AIS data on ship movements we extracted two networks for further analysis: the location-to-location network composed of loitering areas observed during BALTOPS (31 May 2018 through 16 June 2018) and loitering areas observed during Operation Trident Juncture (22 October 2018 through 25 November 2018).  Most of the VOI activity was concentrated within the Baltic Sea (see Figure 2). These findings are to be expected considering the geographic range of operations. While most VOIs in the sample set remained in the Baltic Sea, a few were also observed loitering off the coast of Norway during NATO exercise Trident Juncture.

Figure 2. Location-to-location networks during BALTOPS (left) and Operation Trident Juncture (right) (click to expand)

Upon closer examination, the VOIs active off the coast of Norway during Trident Juncture appear to have loitered near sensitive military locations and displayed abnormal movement patterns. For instance, Figure 3 illustrates the movements of two VOIs with abnormal tracking patterns. The first is an oil tanker owned by the Russian government and operated by a registered shipping company in that country. The second is a commercial chemical products tanker registered in the Marshall Islands, a country often used as a flag of convenience, shown loitering north of Norway.

Figure 3. Abnormal shipping patterns off the coast of northern Norway during Operation Trident Juncture, a Russian owned oil tanker (left) and chemical products tanker registered to the Marshall Islands (right) (click to expand)

Finally, Figure 4 is a network representation of connections between the companies associated with identified VOIs. In this graph, we see that many of the companies are related to each other, with the three largest components colored in blue, green, and orange. For instance, the large blue cluster on the right-hand side of the sociogram contains many small companies, all operating from the same address in northern Russia, each with connections to at most a few ships. The large orange component on the bottom left contains clusters of VOI-associated companies interconnected by sharing some of the same board members. In the green component, shipping companies associated with VOIs are connected by sharing parent, subsidiary, or holding companies. Companies occupying an apparent position of structural brokerage are depicted by larger nodes. One such shipping company (highlighted with an arrow), for instance, was connected to the broader family of like-companies, while also being linked to a large multinational oil company through partial ownership ties (Schelle, 2018).

Figure 4. Company-to-company network. The three largest components are colored and nodes are sized by brokerage potential.

Conclusions and recommendations for further research 

This analysis highlights the value of NA in real-time awareness and tracking of stakeholders associated with suspected gray maritime activities in a strategic era of great power competition. Using commercially available geospatial data, our team identified 56 VOIs loitering in areas proximal to NATO-led exercises in the Baltic Sea and North Atlantic. These vessels were then linked to over 196 state-owned and private companies/entities. Analysis such as this provides insight into a network of stakeholders that may support hybrid warfare, or so-called grey-zone activities, not directly attributable to a specific nation.

The use of the network analysis methodologies discussed here and the tools developed at the Naval Postgraduate School to identify, map, and track gray maritime networks can be applied to any number of threats. While our earlier research into Chinese reef enhancement activity in the South China Sea has already been cited, Maritime Operations Center (MOC) operators and MDA analysts could adapt this toolset to track and assess maritime and terrestrial networks associated with narcotics trafficking, terrorism, Illegal and Unregulated Fishing (IIU), arms and human trafficking, and other security concerns. Integrating these tools into existing MDA systems would also provide for enhanced awareness of how these networks overlap in multiple geographic areas and in malign activities. Further, and perhaps most significantly, they could provide operators timely and actionable information.   

Our research is not without room for improvement. Future iterations of this work should include a richer dataset of state/corporate linkages. This should include a deeper dive into state-sponsored (and military supported) parent-subsidiary company relationships and board memberships, or proximal geographic associations among companies, offices, and ships. Further research is also being considered through the application of system dynamics modeling, wargaming, campaign analysis, and discrete events modeling. 

Acknowledgment  

The authors would like to acknowledge that this research benefited immensely from the partnership between the Common Operational Research Environment (CORE) Lab and Littoral Operations Center at the Naval Postgraduate School, with the Norwegian Defense Research Establishment (Forsvarets Forskningsinstitutt, FFI). This research builds on a joint effort to integrate network analysis methodologies into the maritime domain, which won the 2019 NCI Agency’s Defense Innovation Challenge aimed at accelerating technological solutions in support of NATO C4ISR and cyber capabilities.

With more research and interest, these methods can help us better understand the non-linear relationships and feedback mechanisms that contribute to the complexity of great power competition and its manifestations in the maritime domain.

Chris Callaghan is a Research Associate in the Defense Analysis Department’s CORE Lab at the NPS. His work leverages open-source data analytics for understanding and modeling a variety of national and homeland security problems. 

Rob Schroeder is a Faculty Associate for Research in the CORE Lab within the Defense Analysis Department and a PhD Student in the Information Sciences Department at the Naval Postgraduate School (NPS). He is currently researching how to use open-source information gathered largely from social media in order to understand and map the changing dynamics in conflict areas and exploring the use of network analysis to analyze maritime traffic patterns. He has presented some of this research at conferences (INFORMS and INSNA).

Dr. Wayne Porter, CAPT, USN (ret.) is a Senior Lecturer in the Defense Analysis and Systems Engineering Departments of the Naval Postgraduate School, where he also serves as Co- Director of the CORE Lab and Director of the Littoral Operations Center.  He holds a Ph.D in Information Sciences and two Masters of Science degrees – in Computer Science and Joint C4I Systems Technology – from the Naval Postgraduate School.  Military duty included Japan, England, Italy, the Balkans, Bahrain (COMFIFTHFLT ACOS Intelligence and MOC Deputy of Operations in the Persian Gulf/East Africa), and three tours on the personal staff of ADM Mike Mullen, including Special Assistant for Strategy to both the Chief of Naval Operations (N00Z) and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs.  He subsequently served as Chair, Systemic Strategy and Complexity at Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California and retired from the Navy in July 2014 after 28 years of active service.  Dr. Porter has contributed to a number of DoD and USN Strategy projects, including serving as systems analyst for the SECNAV’s Strategic Readiness Review.

The views expressed in this paper are those of the authors and do not reflect the official position or policies of the United States Navy or the Department of Defense.

Endnotes

1. The opaque area in which illicit of malign activity co-exist with licit activity.

2. An analytical method for interactively curating and querying relational databases (Cunningham, Everton, & Murphy, 2016). In a link diagram, different types of entities (e.g., ports, events, ships, operators, and personnel to name a few) are tied to each other explicitly with the goal of describing the environment.

3. Those operating overtly and legally.

4. All collected AIS logs were encoded in AIVDM (data received from other vessels)/AIVDO (own vessel information) sentences and required decoding for further analysis.

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Featured Image: OSLO, Norway (Nov. 13, 2018) Sailors and Marines man the rails as the Wasp-class amphibious assault ship USS Iwo Jima (LHD 7) arrives in Oslo, Norway, for a scheduled port visit Nov. 13, 2018. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 3rd Class Daniel C. Coxwest/Released)

Asia-Pacific

Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’s Trap?

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Graham Allison, Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’s Trap? Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017, $18.30/hardcover, 384 pp.

By David Edgar

The “Thucydides Trap” refers to the line in Thucydides’s History of the Peloponnesian War which states “it was the rise of Athens, and the fear that this inspired in Sparta, that made war inevitable,” and the application of this insight, that rising powers can easily come into conflict with established powers, to present-day relations between the United States and China. Graham Allison’s book, Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’s Trap, is instructive about the nature of this challenge for policymakers and strategists and lays out what options are available to avoid conflict. But value of the book’s contribution to advancing the discussion reflects the challenging nature of the subject it covers and leaves the reader still in search of answers.

The Thucydides Trap is at the same time one of the most-discussed and the most not-discussed-enough topics among scholars, journalists, and practitioners of international relations. On the one hand, new developments in South China Sea territorial disputes consistently make headlines around the world, with the Obama Administration’s “pivot to Asia” often discussed and critiqued in the same settings. Comparisons between the contemporary United States-China relationship and historical relations between, for example, pre-WWI Great Britain and Germany are hard to miss in magazines and books that examine issues of national security. Allison did much to further this discussion with his 2015 Atlantic article on the Thucydides Trap. On the other hand, some argue that the United States’ reaction to China’s rise lacks a clear direction and that regional tensions in the Middle East and Eastern Europe are taking policymakers’ attention away from East Asia.

Destined for War restates much of the previous discussion about China, the United States, and the dynamics of relative power that led potential rivals to go to war in the past. As such, it is a good overview of the current state of discussion, and one that is remarkably in-depth without being daunting to a reader who is not already familiar with the subject matter. Allison presents an impeccably well-researched history of the lead-up to WWI as well as the Thucydidean relationship between the United States and Great Britain at the beginning of the Twentieth Century. Furthermore, Allison ably depicts the current relationship between the United States and China, with particular attention to statistics showing that China has already surpassed the United States in many meaningful measures of economic power. The strength of the book, alongside Allison’s painstaking research, is its presentation of the historical record and economic statistics in a readable way.

But while the book is an excellent introduction for those who are not already up-to-speed on the present and potential state of relations between the United States and China, it will likely leave the reader wanting more. He does not firmly answer the question of what can be done about it. Allison himself admits that the Thucydides Trap is too monumental to have an easy solution, that proposing such a solution “would demonstrate only one thing: failure to understand the essence of the dilemma that this book has identified.” He calls for a “multiyear, multiminded effort. It will be no less ambitious than the four-year debate that ran from Kennan’s Long Telegram to Nitze’s NSC-68 to shape what ultimately became America’s Cold War strategy.”

In Allison’s defense, he provides a series of “hints for peace” drawn from previous “Thucydides Trap” international relationships and gives several approaches that the United States can take to either confront or accommodate China’s rise. This shows the potential of Destined for War – had these lessons from history and potential avenues for future discussion been the focus of the book, it would surely have been a strong start to the discussion that Allison calls for.

Instead, despite ably presenting the current state of discussion about the Thucydides Trap, Destined for War does little to further that discussion. The book’s “Big Idea,” Allison says, is “in a phrase, Thucydides’s Trap. When a rising power threatens to displace a ruling power, alarm bells should sound: danger ahead.” This is neither groundbreaking nor controversial. History is replete with examples of such conflicts, and political scientists account for them in their theories of why wars happen. Indeed, Destined for War is by no means the first book to introduce this idea, and Allison himself stated it much more concisely in the Atlantic article.

Allison is right – America needs a sustained, honest, and focused discussion about how to react to the fact that China is rising and will rival the United States for hegemony in East Asia sooner rather than later. It is disappointing that Destined for War was a yet another call for such discussion, rather than a start to it.

David Hervey is a senior at Emory University, studying Political Science and Economics. He is writing his senior thesis on The History of the Peloponnesian War.

Featured Image: President Donald Trump meets with Chinese President Xi Jinping at the G20 Summit, Saturday, July 8, 2017, in Hamburg, Germany. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)