A satellite image of Fiery Cross Reef in
Spratly island chain in the South China Sea, annotated by the source to
show areas where China has conducted construction work above ground
during 2017. New satellite imagery shows China has built infrastructure
covering 72 acres in the Spratly and Paracel islands during 2017 to
equip its larger outposts to be air and naval bases.(CSIS Asia Maritime
Transparency Initiative/DigitalGlobe via AP)
A maritime counterinsurgency strategy would seek to win the battle of
legal regimes in the decisive domain, namely, in the adherence and
behavior of civilian mariners. And like counterinsurgency efforts on
land, it would require the use of U.S. and allied power across a
spectrum of military and non-military realms. Under maritime
counterinsurgency, protective escort operations at sea would be coupled
with simultaneous lines of effort to politically harden Southeast Asian
governments and economies against malign Chinese influence, along with
the development and deployment of high-end warfighting forces to deter large-scale kinetic Chinese aggression against U.S. allies along the first island chain.
The key objective of maritime counterinsurgency is to render Chinese
forces in the South China Sea irrelevant in circumstances short of war,
just as China has made U.S. forces irrelevant over the past several
years. Provided that the United States and its allies can successfully
balance between maintaining deterrence at the high end of the conflict
spectrum while executing maritime counterinsurgency at the low end,
China’s expensive new instruments of coercion would be outmaneuvered and
reduced to impotence if civilians under U.S. and allied protection were
made to feel confident enough to pay no heed to Chinese admonitions and
their menacing threats of harm.
The challenge in Washington and allied capitals, is to mobilize the
vibrant community of knowledge in this space to determine how maritime
counterinsurgency can best be made operationally viable and
cost-sustainable over the long term. If history is any guide, this will
be a campaign that must be continued for however long it takes the
Chinese leadership to recognize the inability of its maritime insurgency
to overturn the rule of prevailing international law by sub-kinetic
coercion, as well as the very real benefits to China of accepting and
abiding by the existing system based on the Freedom of the Sea. Once the
outstanding operational questions are successfully answered by the
strategic communities in the United States and its partners, maritime
counterinsurgency has the potential to win a decisive and much-needed
victory for U.S. and allied arms and the rules-based liberal
international order they defend.
Hunter Stires is a fellow with the John B. Hattendorf Center
for Maritime Historical Research at the U.S. Naval War College and is a
freelance contributor to the National Interest. He is the 1st Prize Winner of the U.S. Naval Institute’s 2018 General Prize Essay Contest, with his winning entry published as “The South China Sea Needs a ‘COIN’ Toss” in the May 2019 issue of Proceedings. Mr. Stires is recently the author of “’They Were Playing Chicken:’ The U.S. Asiatic Fleet’s Gray-Zone Deterrence Campaign against Japan, 1937-40,” featured in the Summer 2019 issue of the Naval War College Review.
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