A U.S. Navy destroyer is underway in the Mediterranean, headed eastward to be in position for missile strikes against a recently discovered chemical weapons cache that belongs to a rogue Middle Eastern regime. As the ship makes best speed for its intended sector, however, it comes across a stunning scene: a flimsy and overloaded migrant boat that has capsized, spilling more than 100 people into the sea. Those in the water, including children, have no lifejackets, no lights or emergency position-indicating radio beacons, and little ability or stamina to swim. The Navy ship stops, drops small boats, and recovers as many people as possible, bringing them on board and providing food and aid. The smugglers are detained. Calls are made to local forces, asking them to take the survivors so that the destroyer can return to its mission. But Italy and Malta, the two closest countries, refuse to send ships for fear they will be obliged to take the refugees. To make matters worse, all other European naval ships have pulled back from assisting with migrant operations because of a spat with Italy about bringing them ashore. Meanwhile, the rogue regime in the Middle East, warned about an impending strike, has moved its chemical weapons materiel to a new, secure location.
Now imagine that the destroyer does not stop to assist with the rescue—the stalwart captain has a mission and maintains course and speed toward the assigned objective. The use of these chemical weapons could create a far worse catastrophe than the capsizing of the migrant boat. The ship arrives in position on time, is given the order and carries out the strike, and a massive cache of deadly weapons is destroyed, preventing their potential use on innocent civilians. At the same time, a Greek fisherman comes across the surviving remnant from the capsized vessel, pulls them on board, and takes them back to his home port. Reporters descend on the town over the next few days, and survivors convey their harrowing tale, including how the U.S. Navy refused to stop and help them. The United States says that its now widely-reported strike on the chemical weapons cache was carried out to save innocent civilians, but the story in global news outlets juxtaposes that statement with the Navy’s failure to save the children it saw drowning in its path. The international community is in shock at the callousness, weakening traditional alliances.
This is an extreme scenario, but one that points to a genuine conundrum for the U.S. sea services. Mass migration already has been successfully used as a weapon by one adversary against another. Weaponized migration is a very real tactic, and it is one with which the sea services must contend.
This subject is fraught with political controversy and profound moral implications: Refugees are vulnerable human beings who have experienced great hardships and often are in great peril as they make their transits. Migrants, as individuals, are not “weapons”; however, mass migration—large movements of people into ungoverned spaces or across borders—can be weaponized. Indeed, it is because such migration often characterized by human suffering on a large scale that it involves a moral imperative for state action, which can in turn be criticized or exploited by adversaries.
Migration as a ‘Mask’ for Illicit Actors
The first type of weaponization of migration involves the movement of illicit actors among refugees. This tactic has been used by extremist groups to insert operatives into Europe in recent years: several of the perpetrators of the November 2015 Paris attacks—which killed more than 130 people—entered into Europe with refugee waves. Although this phenomenon has not been seen in migrant flows to the United States, it would be irresponsible not to guard against it.
Luckily, the tactics to address this type of weaponization already are in place. The use of biometrics and other forms of migrant tracking and vetting can substantially decrease the likelihood of bad actors crossing into the country. Interagency cooperation, shared information and databases, international partnerships that bolster the capabilities of allies, forward deployment of U.S. officials to collect information, and the use of international shipriders on U.S. assets (to enhance jurisdiction) are proven methods. As to capacity, the ability for surge forces and officials to appropriately handle, vet, and care for interdicted migrants is and will continue to be critical. This is because mass migrations, as opposed to single crossings, can be and are detected far from the U.S. border, allowing time for response as long as resources are readily recallable. Surge capacity forces within the Department of Homeland Security and the mechanism to call in the Department of Defense should the situation become overwhelming are currently in use and highly effective.
Migration as a Destabilizer
The second, and more challenging, type of weaponization is the use of migrants to destabilize targeted societies by overwhelming their response capabilities, infrastructure, and/or services, creating civil discord through anti-immigrant sentiment among segments of the populace. A recent review found 56 incidents in which this tactic was used or threatened in the past 50 years. In the context of the maritime realm, actual or threatened instigations of mass migrant flows have been employed—as both a negotiating and destabilizing tactic—by Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi, Haiti’s Jean-Bertrand Aristide, and Cuba’s Fidel Castro. More recently, Russia has tailored its intervention in the Syrian civil war to trigger mass migrant flows out of the conflict zone and into Europe. It has been a gruesome and effective strategy: Russian and Syrian actions, including excessive brutality, barrel bombing, and extended sieges on civilian population centers, drive large numbers of people out of Syria. They head toward Europe, often via the Mediterranean Sea, where European maritime forces are overstretched in interdicting the flows, causing resentment and finger-pointing among European Union (EU) member states. Large numbers of migrants arrive in many EU countries, often causing anti-immigrant backlash and raising the popularity of anti-immigration political groups—many of which are Eurosceptics, meaning that their rise weakens the EU.
For the United States, this type of weaponized migration is more difficult to confront. First, U.S. forces are likely to encounter this situation while deployed for other purposes—the vignette at the beginning of this article illustrates just one potential scenario. Beyond creating instability within destination countries, during the time of a large-scale armed conflict an adversary might attempt to create a migrant flow to force the United States and its allies to respond, thereby diminishing the number of surface assets available for combat or other operations directly related to achieving a military victory. It is not unimaginable that a Navy, Coast Guard, or partner nation vessel engaged in forward-deployed military operations may one day have to choose to respond or not to a mass migration case, despite other tasking.
Managing the Weaponization of Mass Migration
To manage the broad challenge of mass migration as a purposeful destabilizer or capacity drainer, the U.S. Sea Services can:
- Provide advisors and subject matter experts to in-region allies to assist with managing and processing migrant flows, as well as conducting effective search-and-rescue (SAR) missions.
- Provide experts to conduct vetting and information gathering with reach-back to U.S. databases and authorities. This will help partners close gaps in detection of illicit actors and allow the U.S. to better understand the operational picture as well as potentially extradite persons of interest as appropriate. Current U.S. efforts at the Mexico-Guatemala border can serve as a model for this type of activity.
- Build and encourage multinational burden-sharing approaches to SAR responses, including areas of responsibility and coordinated patrols. Operationally, the focus of security services should be on reducing loss of life at sea, protecting the vulnerable, and preventing the most hazardous types of transit, including across seas or through dangerous or lightly governed territories.
- Where there is no government capacity, explore contract options, sea-based barges, or incentive-based programs for fishing fleets or other professional mariners to respond to migrant cases.
- Incorporate emergent SAR scenarios into large-scale exercises, not as standalone or isolated events, but as unexpected and overlapping demands during other critical operations.
- Engage in public diplomacy campaigns drawing attention to the causes of the migration flows. This should be done early and often—before conflict breaks out when possible. By exposing the adversary’s tactics the United States can preempt criticism of its response to any mass migration cases.
- Work on predictive capacity for when and where mass migration events will happen. Intelligence can aid in this by tracking smuggling group activities and preparations that indicate an imminent event, identifying flows from the source of the problem, and ideally enabling prediction of when groups will be in position to take to the sea.
- Make a realistic prioritization that places emergent mass SAR cases in their appropriate place in the mission hierarchy. This should be dictated by higher authority, whether that be the combatant commander or at a subordinate command level. Commanding officers need guidance and must know they will be fully supported in their decisions.
Ultimately, the political, military, and diplomatic goal for the United States and its partners is to support and encourage a global situation in which mass migrant movements are not necessary. That is the best of all worlds, but one not likely to be seen any time soon. For now, security forces can continue to capitalize on vetting, biometrics, expanded partnerships, and layered security to prevent threatening actors from using migrant flows to mask their movements. Beyond those measures, some strategic thought needs to be directed at the question of how to prioritize mass SAR responses in theaters of competing priorities for military forces. Planning, exercising, and developing policies with such dynamics in mind are not optional measures. Migration will continue to be weaponized by adversaries, just as saving lives at sea will remain a moral and legal imperative for the Coast Guard and Navy. Now is the time to carefully plan and prepare for how the sea services will reconcile those two facts.