U.S. allies and partners have a problem in the East and South China Seas. On one hand, the post–Cold War, rules-based order yielded enormous improvements in the prosperity of Indo-Pacific nations. On the other, China has leveraged its identity as a major power to redefine norms to its own—and often exclusive—benefit. The Chinese engage in frequent provocative actions, such as seizing territory or recklessly maneuvering ships and planes to pressure foreign craft out of contentious areas. This behavior has been belligerent enough to be described by some as a maritime insurgency.
Recently acquired People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) capabilities are concentrated in small, risk-worthy, missile-laden ships, as well as land-based radar, airfields, and missiles strategically positioned on rocks and shores throughout the East and South China Seas.1 Each of the latter is part of an asymmetric cost-imposition strategy to deter U.S. interference. Expeditionary advanced base operations (EABO) aim to challenge this by rapidly establishing similar shore-based capabilities within range of their hostile counterparts. These bases are intended to be deterrents, regularly exercised in peace, and specifically unveiled as geopolitical tensions rise. Should hostilities open, they would be key sources of advantage. However, the most critical requirement for EABO effectiveness, particularly if EABO is to be used for deterrence, is not military but diplomatic in nature.
Yet this fact has received almost no public acknowledgement, much less solicitation for solutions, despite the significant amount of institutional energy currently being invested in making EABO viable. Nations within a given area of operations must be willing to allow U.S. forces to establish EABs in their territory knowing that, unlike themselves, the United States is not existentially threatened by an Indo-Pacific war.
Given that many of EABO’s requirements are non-military in nature and China is perhaps strongest in non-military elements of power, more should be done in peace to prepare for future advantage in war. To that end, the Marine Corps should use EABO to engage in sustained theater security cooperation to address the concerns of strategically located nations. Doing so will both deter potential adversaries and build the foundations of cooperation and goodwill.
Effective Diplomacy
The most basic requirement for EABO is effective diplomacy, which is time consuming and complex. Unfortunately, the Marine Corps’ EABO Handbook limits discussion on the matter to “diplomatic actions can facilitate future EABO. . .” Focusing solely on the military capabilities and requirements for EABO significantly underplays the concept’s critical dependence on diplomacy. While the United States has maintained advanced bases in Japan, Australia, the Republic of Korea, and the Philippines, EABO seeks to augment them with smaller, temporary, and stealthier packages. As with more permanent forward bases, an EAB’s viability depends on U.S. access to a nation’s territorial sea, defined as the area from the low-water mark to 12 nautical miles seaward. This access enables U.S. forces to maneuver around the many thousands of islands that make up the Indo-Pacific region, or the littorals of any other geographic feature.
Next, U.S. forces must have access to a feature of land suitable for some or all the following: operating and maintaining aircraft, firing artillery, staging Marines and resources, and operating various radar and other sensors. While expeditionary sea basing is a viable concept that enables littoral operation from ships in international waters, it alone does not offer the full range of benefits inherent to EABs on land. This access to land does not have to be an island, nor does the location have to be austere. In some cases, it may be advantageous to establish an advanced base near a partner nation’s city to use its infrastructure and logistical support. Regardless of the location, the United States will require either access to a sovereign nation’s territory or the resolve to appropriate such territory against its government’s will.
Optimally, the United States would receive direct support from partner nations. This could include shipping and storing U.S. fuel, food, and repair parts, as well as providing power and water for troops deployed nearby. In the most ideal circumstance, it would also include host nation security and intelligence support that would enable U.S. forces to reduce the number of personnel and equipment deployed to the EAB’s location. Whether by permission or seizure, access to suitable land and maritime territory is a EABO critical requirement. Beyond access, support from a host nation improves EABO’s effectiveness through economy of force and by leveraging resident expertise in the region.
The United States should not assume that such access will be granted in a moment of need, even from long-time partners. China’s substantial economic power in the Indo-Pacific region and the relative lack of U.S.-led means to counteract it are significant disincentives for potential partners. The most acute example is China’s position as every Asian state’s primary trade partner while the United States is relegated to the top five.2 Complementing trade-based economic influence, the Chinese pioneered the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) as an alternative to the Japanese-influenced Asian Development Bank’s regional financial architecture.3 Related but distinct from AIIB, the CCP’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) investments in Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) countries totaled $641.19B as of 2018. While more liberal nations offer alternatives to the BRI’s often-exploitative terms, 2019 saw a significant uptick in new BRI contracts. China has shown willingness to use these and other economic levers to coerce countries who offend it.
Conversely, the United States lacks a multilateral framework for partnership within the region that might offset Chinese economic influence. The United States withdrew from the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) in the first hours of the Trump administration, before it could be considered by the legislature. The United States still maintains bilateral agreements with numerous countries in the Indo-Pacific region, but almost all leave the United States second to China in the partner nation’s overall trade volume. Alternatively, the ASEAN-initiated Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) collectively accounts for almost 30 percent of the world’s GDP. Now the world’s largest trading bloc, RCEP not only includes China and all U.S. collective defense partners in the region, but also those nations whose territory is most strategically advantageous for EABO, such as the Philippines, Indonesia, Singapore, Vietnam, and Malaysia. The TPP and RCEP are not exclusive blocs, nor was the TPP intended to contain China. However, if the United States remains an outsider to both agreements, it will likely be limited in its ability to garner support for competition with China from nations whose economies are increasingly linked to China. Although China’s significant economic and diplomatic power is not a Department of Defense (DoD) problem to solve, both are major barriers to the Marine Corps’ vision for EABO.
How EABO Can Help
As the U.S. government’s diplomatic and economic agencies grapple with their respective portions of the China challenge outlined above, the Marine Corps can use EABO to build relationships and contribute to a solution. Although the United States often treats geopolitical issues as existential threats, great power competition is not a direct concern of Indo-Pacific governments aside from the economic fallout it produces. Rather, the primary challenges for the Indo-Pacific region are related to the environment, law enforcement, health, education, and terrorism. Of these, maritime law enforcement and counterterrorism represent the most promising opportunities for proving the nascent EABO concept.
The Indo-Pacific region heavily depends on natural resource exploration and harvesting. One of the most significant challenges in this area is the problem of illegal, unreported, and undocumented (IUU) fishing. In total, IUU fishing is estimated to cost between $20-45 billion every year. Such losses are particularly costly to developing nations such as Vietnam, where fishing makes up 21 percent of GDP. Piracy and other violent crime on the South China Sea is an additional concern, particularly as their commission has risen 26 percent year-to-year over the past four years, exceeding 100 incidents of piracy and 50 incidents of kidnapping annually. These problems call for interagency cooperation (the DoD being mentioned by name) to improve intelligence coordination, enforcement, security partnerships, surveillance, and monitoring in support of combatting global illegal maritime activity. This could be a valuable avenue for the Marine Corps to develop, exercise, and showcase the capabilities of EABO. EABs could be regularly established to help surveil and monitor suspicious vessels, feeding intelligence into international networks designed to track and combat IUU fishing. Such employment would provide every warfighting function experience against a real and elusive “enemy,” support most training objectives, and further the development of the EABO concept.
In addition to economic threats, combatting violent extremist organizations (VEOs), such as the Abu Sayyaf group, Jamaah Ansharut Daulah, militant communist groups, and the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria in East Asia (ISIS-EA), is a focus of effort for ASEAN. These extremist groups have been involved in piracy, terror attacks, and even open fighting over cities throughout the region. While many Indo-Pacific nations are implementing soft-power approaches to de-radicalize segments of their populations, there is still demand for hard-power counterterrorism and intelligence support to promote peace and stability. Operating from EABs, Marines could support counterterror operations with non-kinetic support such as intelligence gathering, electronic warfare, and operations in the information environment.
Such support is not new. Operation Pacific Eagle is a long-term effort in partnership with the Philippine government to combat ISIS-EA. Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines regularly conduct coordinated patrols in the Sulu and Sulawesi Seas to prevent VEO piracy and transit. These and other examples offer many opportunities to practice EABO against an actual hostile force, gain critical insights to further refine the EABO concept, and develop critical interoperability with partner militaries.
The Marine Corps offers many capabilities that address the challenges and confront the threats outlined in the 2018 National Defense Strategy. Unfortunately, most of the attention on EABO seems entirely focused on military requirements such as operational concepts, training, and procurement. While these are important, EABO may not be viable for deterrence, much less conflict, unless fundamental diplomatic requirements are sufficiently considered and invested in today. While the Marine Corps cannot itself forge relationships with and secure access to foreign nations, it can support the Department of State’s perpetual efforts to improve local perception of the United States, support the rule of law, and develop invaluable cooperative relationships. To this end, EABO should be used to address partners’ primary security concerns and focus less on the concepts for high-end employment featured in nearly every infographic and informational paper produced on the topic to date. Without the tacit or direct support of international partners, EABO offers little advantage not already provided by allied nations.
1. Department of Defense, Military and Security Developments Involving the People’s Republic of China (Washington, D.C.: Office of the Secretary of Defense, 2020), V-X.
2. Michael R. Auslin, Asia’s New Geopolitics (Hoover Institution; Stanford, 2020), 140–41.
3. Auslin, Asia’s New Geopolitics, 132–33.
