Over the past 75 years, the United States and the West have established a geopolitical system that benefits not just the West. It is a system the United States defends with its globally oriented, blue-water Navy. But today, the nation’s friends in China’s neighborhood are trying to stay in the American orbit while China fundamentally rejects that system and threatens to eclipse the United States to become a global hegemon.
Control of the seas is the issue that determines the rise and fall of great powers. When the British surrendered to the Continental Army at Yorktown, the Americans were more than 150 years from surpassing Great Britain as the world’s leading power. But the United States reached escape velocity from the United Kingdom only because Britain lost control of the seas to France. The Royal Navy was unable to come to the aid of General Charles Cornwallis’s forces ashore.1
Since at least the 1970s, China has employed a layered “cabbage strategy,” using the People’s Armed Forces Maritime Militia (PAFMM), China Coast Guard, and, the outermost layer, the People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) to seize sovereign territory from neighboring states in China’s so-called near seas—inside the first island chain, that is-.2 To deny China more fait accompli seizures, the Sea Services should work to take the PAFMM off the game board.
Indonesian operations against boats fishing illegally in its exclusive economic zone (EEZ) suggest one way to do so. In concert with Asian maritime allies of the United States, the U.S. Sea Services should apprehend and destroy PAFMM vessels—fishing boats, mainly—in international waters in China’s near seas. When the boats are flouting international laws and norms, destroying them could act as a forward-denial defense against future territorial seizures. Such targeted aggression could halt further Chinese expansion.3
Denial
Elbridge Colby, who has been nominated to serve as Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, has written in Proceedings and elsewhere about the need for “forward denial” to prevent Chinese predations against Taiwan. He describes such a strategy as active, imaginative, and unorthodox when necessary. A limited goal of the strategy would be simply to prevent China from seizing Taiwan. A more expansive goal would be to prevent Chinese displacement of the United States as global leader. He notes: “Nothing else in the international system is as fundamentally dangerous to U.S. interests as Chinese hegemony over Asia.”4 Thus, the strategy would require provision of “sufficient defense for our allies that they believe it prudent to stand up to China together with us—and thus prevent Chinese domination of Asia.”5
To accomplish this requires denying to the PLAN the critical capabilities of its militia in the near seas through nonlethal coalition naval operations below and above the threshold of violence. To succeed and to deter a larger conflict, the United States and its partners must take advantage of the legitimacy and naval capacity that come from operating together.
Relative Densities
It is fashionable among U.S. military professionals to lament the asymmetry between the United States’ low-density, exquisite, and expensive capabilities and adversaries’ high-density, inexpensive ones. Implicit in this lamentation is an assumption that those adversaries will be able to attrit high-end U.S. capabilities through sheer volume. The anticipated result of this attrition would be the United States quitting the field in the name of cost savings at home and retrenchment abroad.
A salient example of asymmetry comes from comparing the high cost of Israel’s Iron Dome and David’s Sling systems and missiles with the low cost of the unguided munitions from Iranian proxies. But the Israelis refuse to allow proxies to fire rockets into civilian population centers with impunity, responding in part by destroying high-density enemy stockpiles. The consequences for Israel were it to fail to take those capabilities off the board could be existential.
China’s militia—its “fishing” fleet—is a vital enabling capability for the seizure of key maritime terrain, not to mention the sovereign territory and economic rights of U.S. allies. Its operations cannot be allowed to persist. It must be denied by vigorous patrolling, and its assets must be destroyed when necessary. The United States would risk losing its global leadership to a rising China were it to fail to deny this capability. Such a loss is an unacceptable but preventable outcome.
As recently as 2019, the Indonesian Navy has seized and destroyed foreign vessels illegally operating inside Indonesia’s EEZ. This “Indonesian Protocol” is reserved for illegal fishing vessels, which come from multiple offending nations, including Taiwan, Vietnam, and the Philippines. Also among those sunk have been Chinese fishing vessels with ambiguous ties to China’s government. The Indonesian Navy’s method is to board the offending fishing boat, remove all personnel from that vessel, and impound it. Once the offense is adjudicated by Indonesian courts, the Indonesian authorities destroy the apprehended vessel in a public spectacle.6
Consider the following proposed example of nonlethal naval operations applied to the near seas:
A combined U.S. and Philippine-led task force operating in vicinity of Sabina Shoal seizes multiple Chinese militia vessels, removes Chinese sailors, and impounds the vessels to be destroyed later, denying the use of that capability for future PLAN operations asserting Chinese sovereignty at Sabina Shoal.
In response, a China Coast Guard vessel moves into the area armed with water and 76-mm cannons. The task force employs electronic attack capabilities to take key ship systems offline—rendering the cutter dead in the water.
Targeted, effective, violent, and humiliating, the Indonesian Protocol would pose a significant challenge to Chinese expansion in the near seas. But the United States should not act unilaterally against Chinese aggression in the near seas even when defending the rights and resources of partner and allied nations. The operations would need legal permissions from a host nation to cooperate in the defense of that nation’s exclusive economic rights at sea. With coast guard–to–coast guard agreements in place, the U.S. Coast Guard could patrol exclusionary and sovereign waters in concert with the host country. For example, the 2023 Bilateral Defense Guidelines between the United States and the Philippines would permit cooperation to deny Chinese maritime militia operations and illegal fishing in Philippine waters.7
As for task organization, there is a set of teeth for every tiger’s tail. Just beyond line of sight from the PAFMM vessels are up-gunned China Coast Guard vessels, and PLAN gray hulls usually can be found over the horizon. Therefore, U.S. Coast Guard cutters should be task organized with Marine Corps formations and Navy warships.
On the U.S. side of the organizational chart would be a Marine Corps–Navy–Coast Guard integrated naval task force headquarters, led by a Marine Corps or Navy O-6. Subordinate to that headquarters would be one Coast Guard national security cutter; one Navy L-class amphibious ship with both Marine ground and aviation combat elements embarked; and two cruiser/destroyer escorts. The captain of the national security cutter would have direct liaison authority and a coordinating relationship with the host-nation coast guard, the other side of the organizational chart.
This task organization would also include maritime law enforcement detachments led by host-nation security forces and augmented with U.S. Marines, Coast Guardsmen, and sailors. Host-nation security forces would be at the forefront and make the actual arrests. Host-nation white hulls in concert with U.S. Coast Guard cutters should be the most visible maritime enforcement presence for these operations.
Capacity is the better part of valor in naval operations, and no country in Asia has the naval capacity to stand up to China alone. The United States has enough maritime partners and allies in Asia to begin to tip the scale against the PLAN. One of the crucial metrics for measuring naval strength is tonnage. Shipping tonnage, like money, is fungible. Even if a U.S. sailor or Marine never sets foot on a PAFMM vessel, the enhanced U.S. seabasing, manpower, air and surface connectors, and missile defenses would deter many more PLAN militia vessels than might otherwise be possible.
What Could Possibly Go Wrong
An objection of obvious concern is that China could see U.S. participation in operations like those Indonesia pioneered as extremely provocative, leading to military escalation and potentially war. But, while the United States might not quite be at war with China, neither are the two countries at peace. The Indonesian Protocol merely acknowledges this reality and allows the U.S. Sea Services to compete above the threshold of violence but below the threshold of lethality or war.
More precisely: What escalation could lead to worse outcomes than already have occurred? The 2020s are widely understood to be the critical decade for China’s prospective seizure of Taiwan. In preparation for that assault, China has manufactured from the ocean floor militarized islands to control its near seas, undeterred by U.S. freedom of navigation operations. Were PLAN gray hulls to attempt to trade missiles with U.S. Navy warships, the Navy’s surface fleet has the capability to intercept hostile missile salvos, as demonstrated against Iranian proxies in the Red Sea. It is doubtful China would use tactical or strategic nuclear weapons over the loss of some fishing trawlers.
Another possible outcome is that the removal of this gray zone militia would not stop Chinese further extension of control in the near seas. But, since 1974, the PLAN’s seizure of contested islands has featured these not-quite-naval auxiliary vessels of the types China is clearly coopting into service.8 Targeting these auxiliary forces might exacerbate existing rifts between the people and the state. While it is not known what compensation—if any—these Chinese fishermen and sailors received after Indonesia destroyed their vessels, it seems probable it was less than the boats’ actual values.
Violent Spectacle
The best chance for a forward-denial defense would be to remove critical Chinese capabilities from the game board with violence, speed, and arrogance. Just as the French Navy played the spoiler for British hopes in the American Revolution, the United States should play spoiler to the rising Chinese powerhouse. The nation should demonstrate to China’s leaders its willingness to push back, year after year, until China finally reaches the downward slope of its power parabola.
Maybe, with a willingness to fight and an appetite for spectacle, the United States and its friends can keep the world safe from Chinese dominance a while longer, perhaps even through the end of the century.
1. Richmond Weed, “The Battle of the Virginia Capes, 1781,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings 66, no. 4 (April 1940).
2. Toshi Yoshihara and James R. Holmes, Red Star Over the Pacific (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2018), 81. China refers to the Bohai, Yellow, East, and South China Seas as its “near seas.”
3. Cadet Jeffrey W. Jaeger, U.S. Merchant Marine Academy, “One Nation’s Fishing Fleet, Another Nation’s Pirates: Countering China’s Maritime Militia,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings 150, no. 4 (April 2024).
4. Elbridge Colby, “A Strategy of Denial for the Western Pacific,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings 149, no. 3 (March 2023).
5. Colby, “A Strategy of Denial.”
6. Banyan, “Trawling for Trouble,” The Economist, 14 April 2016; and “Indonesia Continues Tough Fight Against Illegal Fishing,” Indo-Pacific Defense Forum, 30 May 2019.
7. “Fact Sheet: U.S.–Philippines Bilateral Defense Guidelines,” U.S. Department of Defense, 3 May 2023.
8. Toshi Yoshihara, “The 1974 Paracels Sea Battle: A Campaign Appraisal,” Naval War College Review 69, no. 2 (Spring 2016).
