When U.S. Navy ships and Coast Guard cutters go through periodic training and readiness evaluations, weeks of progressively more difficult navigation, seamanship, damage control, and combat drills usually culminate in a mass-conflagration scenario. A “mass conflag” is designed to present the crew with a situation so complex it overwhelms well-rehearsed responses and forces adaptation, creativity, and resilience. Often, key members of the command and experienced on-scene leaders become personnel casualties, forcing junior service members to step up into unfamiliar roles. Vital communication circuits are degraded. Cascading casualties throughout the ship force hard decisions on how best to allocate limited damage-control resources while preserving critical capabilities.
A mass conflag should be front of mind when considering the challenges posed in the American Sea Power Project 2026 U.S.-China contingency scenario.1 In the scenario, there is an absence of detail on how such a conflict could affect the U.S. homeland, and it could be seen as a Department of Defense problem in which the Coast Guard plays only a niche role. Indeed, the warfighting challenges inside and near the first island chain with which many excellent authors have grappled are not, for the most part, Coast Guard mission areas. However, believing the conflict would be contained to a fight “over there” underestimates the havoc China could and almost certainly would unleash to prevail in a protracted war.
As a U.S. homeland-centric corollary to the American Sea Power Project scenario, consider one in which China might directly or indirectly degrade the United States’ ability to sustain the war effort logistically and economically, foment chaos and erode social cohesion, and overwhelm domestic-response capacity. Like the original scenario, this one is neither predictive nor comprehensive. Rather, it highlights another important dimension to consider when evaluating U.S. seapower readiness for a major conflict with China.
A 2026 U.S.-China Homeland Contingency Scenario
The following parallels the Phase III scenario, picking up at “the fighting begins” point in the timeline.2
The Fighting Begins (first 48 hours)
As the first images of the aftermath of China’s preemptive attack on U.S. forces in the Pacific begin streaming across media platforms, U.S. state and federal emergency management personnel are inundated with reports from across the nation.
Among the many domestic U.S. systems targeted with cyberattacks, several U.S. ports suffer near-simultaneous degradations in their operation systems and infrastructure. Notably, Los Angeles/Long Beach and Oakland in California, Port Arthur in Texas, and Seattle and Tacoma in Washington experience malfunctions in their terminal operating and industrial control systems, forcing all loading and unloading to cease until system integrity can be restored. With port operations severely diminished, the U.S. supply chain is thrown into disorder, causing shortages in supplies ranging from food and pharmaceuticals to manufacturing components and commodities.
Dozens of offshore drilling platforms in the Gulf of Mexico issue urgent requests for assistance after industrial control systems and supervisory control and data acquisition systems managing well operations (including drilling speed, operational pressure, and safety-valve activation) cease to respond to user controls. Safety instrumented systems designed to shut down operations in cases of dangerous anomalies are likewise nonresponsive. Initial actions to force manual overrides are successful on some, but not all, platforms. Within hours, explosions occur on four platforms, miles apart, each resembling the 2010 Deepwater Horizon event. The White House authorizes any means necessary to cease all offshore drilling immediately. Initial estimates of the required response effort far exceed those for any previous oil spill.
Although GPS appears to be operational throughout most of the continental United States, many mariners report anomalies in their GPS position compared with visual and radar pictures while navigating channels. A rash of groundings and collisions follow, especially in areas experiencing low-visibility conditions. A collision between an upbound tug pushing anhydrous ammonia barges and a downbound oil tanker on the lower Mississippi river causes a major fire and oil spill, shutting down traffic on the river south of New Orleans. A liquid natural gas carrier inbound to Houston-Galveston runs aground, triggering an emergency evacuation for the surrounding area because of the explosion risk. Service anomalies appear sporadic, causing general mistrust in the system’s continued reliability for navigation.
Current Situation (1 month later)
A month into the conflict, the situation in the homeland has escalated into a nationwide emergency. Several new threats emerge to the already beleaguered U.S. emergency-response enterprise.
The first is a surge in both land and maritime migration at the U.S. southern border. The economic shock caused by the war’s effects on the global supply system fractures already-precarious socioeconomic situations in South and Central American and Caribbean nations, triggering a collapse of government services and causing hundreds of thousands to flee increasingly desperate conditions. Concurrently, the intelligence community identifies a large-scale disinformation campaign underway within many of the most affected nations showing images suggesting abundant opportunity in the United States, accompanied by reports that most U.S. immigration enforcement forces have been redeployed to deal with disaster response. Hundreds and then thousands of overloaded makeshift vessels converge on southern Florida, while vast, multinational caravans of migrants trek toward the United States along well-worn land routes through Mexico.
Next is another outbreak of the coronavirus. Since the outset of the 2020 pandemic, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and World Health Organization have carefully tracked the various mutations as they emerged, noting with concern that some exhibited resistance to the vaccines developed thus far. The most recent strain appears to be especially dangerous, exhibiting signs of both high transmission potential and symptom severity. Arguments for and against implementing another nationwide quarantine further strain already intense political divides.
Dozens of wildfires break out across the Hawaiian Islands and are eventually linked to commercial drones carrying incendiary payloads launched by Chinese maritime militia vessels clustered off Hawaii shortly before the conflict broke out. Once the link between the fires and drones is discovered, the maritime militia vessels are targeted as hostile and quickly dispersed. However, two weeks later, similar attacks from seemingly innocuous commercial vessels off the California coast trigger major wildfires in several high-risk coastal areas. Other vessel-launched drones are reported to be carrying out surveillance activities over naval bases and military outload ports. Accordingly, any suspicious vessels operating near U.S. coasts must be evaluated for potential use as hostile drone motherships.
The National Counterterrorism Center notices a spike in terrorism threats. Hezbollah, which had seen a swell in popularity and recruiting as the Israel-Hamas war escalated, vowed to seize the opportunity posed by the U.S.-China conflict to strike critical blows to the United States at home and its interests abroad. Reportedly, China and Iran agree to provide weapons, intelligence, and logistics. Some intelligence suggests a nightmare scenario involving a waterborne weapon of mass destruction (WMD) attack on a major port city may already be in the late planning phase, possibly involving the use of unmanned surface or underwater vehicles.
Problem Framing and Analysis
Every event mentioned above has a known risk or vulnerability. A U.S.-China war over Taiwan, a global pandemic combined with mass migration wave, a WMD terrorist attack, an escalating Israel-Hamas crisis erupting into a wider Middle East conflict, and a global economic collapse are five of the “7 deadly scenarios” outlined in Andrew Krepinevich’s 2009 book by the same name.3 Any one could be a national-level emergency in its own right, but suppose they were to happen nearly simultaneously? Perhaps, while focused on China’s capabilities abroad, the United States also should consider the danger posed by China’s ability to unleash a Pandora’s box close to home.
Wargames usually employ sophisticated calculations to estimate the result of simulated combat operations. We have the benefit of historical examples to draw on for insights into the effect and required level of response effort for some of the events described above. From those, we can extrapolate the potential effect of grouping several in close succession. Below are some metrics for context:
• The U.S. Maritime Transportation System (MTS) supports $26 trillion of economic activity each year. It is also vital to military sealift and logistics capabilities. The increasingly automated, network-enabled systems that support the flow of commodities through U.S. ports and waterways have critical vulnerabilities that industry regulation has mitigated but not eliminated. Disruptions caused by COVID-19 and labor disputes had major economic impacts and contributed to the spike in U.S. inflation. The estimated cost of disrupting operations at the port of Los Angeles/Long Beach alone could amount to $1 billion per day and cause immediate nationwide shortages.4
• The 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill, caused by a buildup of methane gas bursting through multiple containment features, created an oil slick that covered more than 57,000 square miles in the Gulf of Mexico. The response involved more than 48,000 people at its peak, including 6,500 vessels and dozens of aircraft. The estimated total cost, including fines and settlements, was $65 billion.5 A 2022 Government Accountability Office report posits that similar events could be triggered by cyberattacks if cybersecurity risks are not addressed.6
• In 1994, the Coast Guard faced its largest operation since the Vietnam War when it responded to near-simultaneous mass migration events from Cuba and Haiti. Coast Guard and Department of Defense (DoD) forces interdicted more than 63,000 migrants in Operations Able Manner (Haiti) and Able Vigil (Cuba). At their peak, the operations involved 17 Coast Guard cutters patrolling the coast of Haiti and 38 patrolling the Straits of Florida. During the week of 22 August 1994, 10,190 Cuban migrants were interdicted, more than the total number from the previous decade.7 The United States recently faced another migration crisis from 2022 to 2023, with Cuban and Haitian migration numbers reaching the highest levels in decades. In response, the Coast Guard surged resources to support Operation Vigilant Sentry, a joint air and surface task force to mitigate illegal maritime migration in the Caribbean corridor to the United States. Fortunately, the spike did not escalate into another mass migration event, but a catalyst such as a global economic shock combined with a targeted disinformation campaign would probably be enough to trigger one.
• California has averaged nearly 8,000 wildfires per year over the past five years, with average annual suppression costs approaching $600 million. In 2023, the Dixie fire burned nearly a million acres—the largest single fire in state history.8 The islands of Maui and Hawaii also suffered from wildfires in 2023, devastating the resort town of Lahaina on Maui and causing nearly $6 billion in damage.
Coping with multiple maritime threats and disasters concurrently would quickly exceed capacity, forcing hard decisions in how to allocate scarce resources.
Coast Guard Readiness Imperatives
Responding to the scenario described above would be a whole-of-society effort, involving everything from DoD to ad hoc groups of good Samaritans. But as the lead federal agency for maritime homeland security, the Coast Guard would play a central role in directing and carrying out key elements of the national response. Of the many requirements necessary for coordinating the Coast Guard’s response, three of the most important are:
Command and control (C2). Effective C2 is the foremost requirement for coordinating the unified effort that would be required. Navy Admiral Scott Swift described elements of successful C2 in the combat theater in his January 2024 Proceedings article, “Wartime Command and Control.” In it, he cautions against keeping decision authority centralized, advocating instead for delegating authority at combatant, operational, and tactical levels.9
C2 for homeland operations poses a different challenge. There is little risk of authority being too centralized. Rather, the opposite tends to complicate federal response efforts. Authorities are distributed across the federal, state, local, and tribal levels, requiring coordination between and among them and, increasingly, private industry. There is no domestic equivalent to the roles the Secretary of Defense and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff play in combat operations, and coordinating actions from the President on down requires an effective C2 structure configured for the situation.
The Coast Guard wields authorities for both homeland security and defense, including vast powers to regulate commerce and control access to and security of ports and waterways, and it has extensive experience with major national response efforts. However, the exigencies of wartime threats to the homeland would require advancing existing governance structures to create tighter interagency/private industry partnerships configured for MTS physical and cyber security. For the latter, the Coast Guard would have to work closely with U.S. Cyber Command and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.
Concurrently, the Coast Guard would have to integrate into DoD’s C2 structure for homeland defense. The framework for that integration, which includes the Coast Guard’s area commanders acting as Defense Forces East and West, is tested frequently during wargames and exercises, though rarely at the scale envisioned in this scenario. The Coast Guard would have to be prepared to transfer entirely into the Department of the Navy if directed, something it has not done since World War II.
Targeting and interdicting maritime threats. Securing the maritime domain in and near the homeland requires the ability to detect, identify, assess, and, if needed, interdict any approaching vessel. With more than 95 thousand miles of coastline and 4.3 million square miles of exclusive economic zone to cover, the task is formidable. The Coast Guard, along with DoD and interagency partners, has improved its ability to perform this responsibility since 9/11, but not to the level needed to counter the threat posed by China and others. The service needs to invest more in unmanned air and surface platforms, instill maritime interdiction capabilities across more types of units, and improve counter-drone technology.
The United States needs exquisite maritime domain awareness to monitor the approaches, ports and waterways, and critical offshore infrastructure that China could target. That requires more sensors above, on, and below the surface, AI-driven analytical capability to identify anomalies and threats more quickly, and more efficient information sharing between units and with DoD, the interagency, and international partners. The Coast Guard is working on these initiatives, including prioritizing unmanned systems acquisition, enhancing partnerships with the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, Customs and Border Protection, and others, and investing in AI-sensor data pairing initiatives such as Project Minerva.10
Detecting threats is only part of the equation. The more difficult task is interdicting them, ideally as far from the United States as possible. Coast Guard maritime security and response teams (MSRTs) are the most capable interdiction assets. MSRTs can conduct short-notice opposed boardings by air or waterborne insertion.11 However, they would be in high-demand and their extensive training requirements preclude a rapid surge capacity. Maritime interdiction operations would thus rely heavily on other units—cutters, shore-based law enforcement teams, and interagency partners, with DoD retaining the primary role for interdicting high-end threats.
Finally, detecting and defeating unmanned systems requires many tools, and the current threat outpaces most of the countermeasures currently fielded. This is especially true for underwater drones. Addressing these gaps requires accelerating counter-UxS (unmanned aerial, surface, or underwater systems) capabilities with the same urgency applied in the past to defeating improvised explosive devices.
Generating surge capacity. Coast Guard forces must simultaneously meet requirements to support DoD while maintaining elevated maritime homeland defense and security responsibilities. The service would have to expand quickly to meet drastically increased needs, including shoreside security forces for infrastructure and MTS security. The Reserve and Auxiliary would be critical, but total personnel end strength might conceivably have to scale up at a pace not seen since World War II.12 Meanwhile, the Coast Guard, like many other services, is currently grappling with an historic personnel shortage, operating 10 percent below its authorized strength.13
In addition to personnel, there would be a huge demand for more operational platforms and equipment. However, as noted by many Proceedings authors, the United States lacks the ability to surge manufacturing capacity, especially shipbuilding. By 2026, the Coast Guard will have recapitalized its national security cutter and fast response cutter fleets but will be more than a decade away from replacing aging medium-endurance cutters and heavy icebreakers. With limited U.S. shipyard and skilled workforce capacity (which the Navy also needs), the Coast Guard would require other ways to acquire more cutters quickly.
In a protracted conflict such as that described in the 2026 scenario, resilience will be the deciding factor in victory. The Coast Guard can effectively prevent, respond to, and mitigate some of the devastating domestic effects of the conflict and facilitate unity of effort among government agencies and private industry. Enhancing readiness for that role while balancing steady-state mission demands is the defining challenge of this “decisive decade.”
1. CDR Paul Giarra and CAPTs Bill Hamblet and Gerard Roncolato, USN (Ret.), “The War of 2026: Phase III Scenario,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings 149, no. 12 (December 2023).
2. Giarra, Hamblet, and Roncolato, “The War of 2026: Phase III Scenario.”
3. Andrew Krepinevich Jr., 7 Deadly Scenarios (New York: Bantam Dell, 2009).
4. “Report: Cyber Attack at LA, Long Beach Ports Could Cost $1B Per Day,” KCLA News, 3 July 2013.
5. Richard Pallardy, “Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill—Cleanup Efforts,” Encyclopædia Britannica, 17 June 2024.
6. Government Accountability Office, Offshore Oil and Gas: Strategy Urgently Needed to Address Cybersecurity Risk to Infrastructure (Washington, DC: Government Accountability Office, 26 October 2022).
7. CDR Ivan T. Luke Jr., USCG, “Shooting from the Hip,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings 123, no. 7 (July 1997): 32–35.
8. California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, “Statistics.”
9. ADM Scott Swift, USN (Ret.), “Wartime Command & Control,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings 150, no. 1 (January 2024).
10. Project MINERVA is a Coast Guard initiative to combine people, assets, systems, and data in new ways to deliver improved maritime domain awareness and decision advantage through interconnected, enterprise-wide C5I capabilities.
11. For an excellent overview of MSRT and other deployable specialized forces capabilities, see: LCDR Rafael Shamilov, USCG, “The Case for Coast Guard Deployable Specialized Forces,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings 148, no. 8 (August 2022).
12. For perspective, following the attack on Pearl Harbor, Coast Guard personnel strength grew from approximately 30,000 in 1941 to approximately 172,000 by 1944, more than a 500 percent increase.
13. Government Accountability Office, Coast Guard: Recruitment and Retention Challenges Persist (Washington, DC: Government Accountability Office, 11 May 2023).
