Alfred Thayer Mahan died a century ago, but his “decisive engagement” mindset now constrains U.S. naval strategists as they anticipate a major conventional engagement against a rising and revanchist China. As a result, the U.S. Navy requests more money for large ships crewed by more men and women. For what?
Bulking up the Navy to counter China ship for ship is an admirable goal, but its inherent assumption is dangerous.1 It compels the Sea Services to think deploying more U.S. forces more often can resolve more conflicts and to design platforms under the guise of ensuring a “free and open Indo-Pacific” without ever specifying the nature, scale, or scope of the threat posed to the region’s freedom or openness.
Such an outlook is particularly alarming because Beijing already has advanced its revisionist aims in the South China Sea. For a decade, China has used seemingly benign, but lethal, paranaval vessels to secure its domination of the South China Sea, disregarding the law of the sea. These gray-zone forces assert illegal claims and rights over disputed features, coerce neighbors into accepting them, and protect Chinese military outposts on these features—all with little international blowback.
To stop this destabilization, the United States must reckon with a new generation of warfare that lacks an “on/off” button. Victory is not achieved by preparing for the decisive battle that may never come, but by incrementally countering China’s existing revisionism in the gray zone—and the United States is currently losing that contest.
But all is not lost. The United States should heed the adage less is more when devising a strategy to thwart China’s maritime campaign in the South China Sea—and beyond. Enabling a strategic victory requires grasping—not exaggerating—the Chinese threat, developing a strategy that exploits Chinese vulnerabilities, and leveraging lessons from previous maritime ages.
Chinese Might and Maritime Rights
Under President Xi Jinping, China has embraced the “China Dream,” the nation’s century-long pursuit to “restore China to its historic glory,” replace the United States as the Indo-Pacific hegemon, and rework the international order in its favor.2 However, becoming a great power requires great sea power.
In 2009, China began expanding its presence in the South China Sea by disregarding the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) and submitting to the United Nations a nine-dash-line map, which claimed “indisputable sovereignty” over nine-tenths of the South China Sea.3 Despite international legal backlash and adverse tribunal rulings, China remains undeterred in its claims. Its actions have aggravated three distinct disputes:4
1. Overlapping sovereignty claims over the South China Sea’s islands, reefs, and other features.
2. Overlapping claims and rights for 200-nm exclusive economic zones (EEZs) guaranteed under UNCLOS that complicate seabed and waterway jurisdiction.
3. Lack of consensus over the regulation of foreign military activities in an EEZ.5
Wielding unrivaled control over these critical waters would allow China to: 1) restrict foreign resource exploitation and exploration; 2) control chokepoints and trade to coerce neighboring governments into accepting its geopolitical aims; 3) create a maritime security buffer to protect its developed eastern coast; and 4) “reclaim” disputed South China Sea features for artificial-islands-cum-military-bases that facilitate Chinese military power projection within the first island chain.
China’s Grayish Gunboat Diplomacy
Chinese maritime forces act as a “small stick,” patrolling disputed waters, enforcing territorial and sovereignty claims, and daring any South China Sea claimant to contest this burgeoning Sinocentric order.6 When the claimants cannot, China’s dubious claims become reality.
But it is hard for these South China Sea–bordering countries to determine what, when, or how to respond. China advances in the South China Sea through an erosive “salami-slicing” strategy. Its forces secure control in ways that avoid both a clash with Washington and backlash from Asian neighbors.7 With every gradual Chinese advance, its adversaries become “worn down and slowly pushed back,” but lack a clear impetus to use force.8
Beijing’s gray zone campaign to turn the South China Sea into a “Chinese lake” primarily succeeds because it asserts control over disputed islands through a “cabbage” operational concept.9 Concentric layers of vessels surround a disputed area to “squeez[e]” an adversary into capitulating to Chinese demands. The China Coast Guard (CCG) and People’s Armed Forces Maritime Militia (PAFMM) make up the inner layer while People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) warships loom in the outer layer waiting for an escalation. As three PLAN officers explained in Naval Studies, the cabbage strategy “send[s] civilians first, and follow[s] them with the military” while “concealing the military among civilians.”10
China prefers deploying civilian law enforcement and fishing vessels over warships on the South China Sea’s frontlines because the former appear less militaristic. Swarming fishing vessels pack the same coercive punch as one PLAN warship, but they avoid the escalation or international conflict that typically accompanies warship maneuvers.
This enables the CCG and PAFMM to execute four missions: 1) conduct sovereignty patrols to uphold Chinese maritime interests; 2) harass and expel foreign military or commercial vessels by boarding and ramming ships or cutting towed devices; 3) collect intelligence on foreign entities in Chinese-claimed waters; and 4) escort Chinese commercial vessels that operate near disputed features.11 Of the 45 South China Sea incidents between 2010 and 2016, 71 percent involved at least one CCG, PAFMM, or Chinese law enforcement vessel.12
U.S. navalists have underrated the threat China poses in the South China Sea. In Proceedings, Hunter Stires designated China’s aggressive gray zone campaign a “maritime insurgency.”13 Not quite. Insurgency means “the violent struggle of a group of people who refuse to accept their government’s power.”14 Insurgencies seek political change within a state, not a continent. Nor is China “a group of people.”
Instead, Beijing deploys its “small stick” vessels as a coercive tool reinforced by China’s big stick—a preponderant, lethal PLAN force. That is not an insurgency. That is textbook gunboat diplomacy with shades of gray. James Cable’s seminal treatise, Gunboat Diplomacy, describes his concept as:
The use or threat of limited naval force, otherwise known as an act of war . . . to secure advantage or to avert loss, either in furtherance of an international dispute or else against foreign nationals within the[ir] territory.15
China’s frontline paranaval vessels “gray-ify” its gunboat diplomacy because they do not instill fear like warships, but they enable a coercive approach.
Preventing a ‘Chinese Lake’
The U.S. government has slowly recognized that China’s systematic abrogation of maritime freedom via gunboat diplomacy warrants a response. However, Washington prefers only to criticize Chinese coercion on the margins while pivoting its military forces to the Pacific for more freedom of navigation operations (FONOPs) and security cooperation. Blame U.S. strategic thinking that anticipates a conventional war with China in the 2030s.16 To best engage, the United States should craft a strategy that exploits holes in China’s maritime armor. Mainly:
• Beijing wants to avoid a war with the United States.17
• Slowing economic growth and a declining population will hamstring the PLAN’s future manpower and costly platform overhauls.18
• The South China Sea’s size inhibits Beijing’s aim to assert all its claims and establish sea control, especially as its paranaval forces are already overworked with their primary duties (fishing and law enforcement).
• The PAFMM’s value as a deniable, decentralized force makes it hard to integrate it with interservice operations, let alone institute effective command-and-control.19
Beijing is neither invincible nor immune to deterrence. Accordingly, Washington should avoid strategic extremes (e.g., rolling back Chinese gains in the South China Sea or accommodating Chinese primacy) and pursue a grand strategy that counters Chinese coercion and contains its ambition. Once China finds its costly gunboat diplomacy thwarted, it may restrain its aggression and resolve South China Sea disputes diplomatically.
A U.S. ‘Fleet-in-Action’
When Washington has occasionally drawn a clear, enforceable redline in the South China Sea, Beijing does not cross it.20 Containment can transform these occasions into constants only if Washington demonstrates the capability to dissuade China from further militarizing disputed South China Sea features, seizing disputed features, declaring an air-defense identification zone in the South China Sea, harassing foreign commercial and military vessels, and violating UNCLOS’s “freedom of the seas” and EEZ interpretations.
Dissuading China depends on an active and attritional “fleet-in-action” naval strategy that provides a double-layered deterrent grounded in historical successes:
Strategic and Operational Deterrence by Denial
A fleet-in-action will seek to obtain partial command of the sea by avoiding faits accomplis until developments redress the balance of power and enable a U.S. and allied shift to sea control. This “fleet,” however, cannot cower, avoid, or acquiesce to China’s gunboat diplomacy campaign. The U.S. Sea Services must restore that “balance of strength” by harassing, confronting, and contesting Chinese forces to deny them unrestricted use of the sea.21 To quote Mahan, U.S. forces must become a “perpetual menace” to the enemy’s interests.22 Incessant frustration, according to British Rear Admiral Richard Kempenfelt, prevents the enemy from “attempting anything but at risk and hazard . . . and oblige[s] them to think of nothing but being on their guard against your attack.”23
Days after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, U.S. Navy Admiral Ernest King opted for a strategy against Japan that defended the Hawaiian Islands through fast carrier raids against less-defended Japanese outposts, attacked Japanese sea lanes with submarines, and established South Pacific bases as strong points to safeguard allied communications. King’s strategy was simple: “Hold what you’ve got and hit them when you can.” By spring 1942, the repeated raids skirted a fait accompli while exhausting an increasingly reactive Japanese fleet.24 U.S. aggressive mobility ultimately redressed the strength imbalance, permitting a decisive blow to the Japanese at Midway.
Today’s U.S. Navy can emulate its own World War II strategy and “aggressive mobility” on multiple gray zone fronts in five ways:
1. Resurrect First Fleet and task it with thwarting China’s gunboat diplomacy campaign and upholding the status quo in the South China Sea.25 Operating primarily as a command system and incorporating elements of Seventh and Third Fleets, First Fleet could develop a maritime domain awareness security network with willing Association of Southeast Asian Nation (ASEAN) nations that encourages information sharing and cooperation across nations.26
2. Build a 500-ship battle fleet by 2040 that allows the Pacific Fleet to field a mobile and flexible force of unmanned vessels and lighter warships.
3. Incorporate a U.S. Coast Guard command into Seventh and First Fleets that provides maritime law enforcement training to South China Sea nations creating maritime militias or improving coordination between coast guards and navies.27
4. Fully implement the Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement with the Philippines and extend similar access arrangement proposals to South China Sea nations that prioritize flexibility and operational reach to challenge China throughout the South China Sea.
5. Expose China’s paranaval forces’ links to the Chinese government and document their destabilizing adventurism.
Tactical Deterrence by Punishment
Overwhelming and frustrating China’s strategic ambitions in the South China Sea will wear down its forces and perhaps prompt overcompensation. Thus, the Sea Services can notch steady strategic gains with minor tactical victories that “engage the attention of the enemy and inflict losses upon them” at their most vulnerable and aggressive, convincing China to doubt the safety of their maritime forces.28
The Sri Lankan Navy (SLN) destroyed the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) terrorist group’s maritime wing (the Sea Tigers) in 2008 through a maritime interdiction strategy designed to “out guerilla the guerilla.” Starting in 1984, the Sea Tigers used small boat and suicide bomber vessel swarm tactics to sink 29 SLN patrol boats. Adopting the “small boat concept,” SLN squadrons conducted intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) missions within LTTE-held territory and relayed that information to rapid action boat squadrons of 25 to 30 vessels, out-swarming Sea Tiger squadrons and ultimately destroying them.29
Like the SLN’s “small boat concept,” deterring China by punishment must recognize that turnabout is fair play in strategic competition. Here are three recommendations:
1. Strengthen the antiaccess/area-denial capabilities of Southeast Asian allies by hardening island facilities, developing early warning facilities, and training elite patrol squadrons to infiltrate and conduct ISR within Chinese-controlled areas.
2. Establish a multinational patrol force with allies, modeled after the Africa Maritime Law Enforcement Partnership program, that teaches visit, board, search, and seizure techniques; provides command-and-control resources; and establishes a network for local fishermen to report suspicious or unusual activity.
3. Develop a code of conduct for the South China Sea. Swiftly and proportionately respond when Chinese actions violate this code.
Risk and Responsibility
Containment through an aggressive strategy is not failproof. Doubts abound whether South China Sea claimants can unite while leveraging the resources and willpower to counter China. Worse, the Pentagon’s preference to prepare for conventional wars and procure expensive platforms over cost-effective and mission-centric capabilities limits the resources needed to resist Chinese aggression.
The good news is that the most effective way to deter Beijing in the future is to counter it by thinking small in the South China Sea today. To win, the Sea Services must contest Chinese gunboat diplomacy for however long it takes to deter Beijing from using military might to dictate its maritime claims. In doing so, Washington must accept greater risk and responsibility to “hold the line” against further Chinese aggression.
1. Megan Eckstein, “Lawmakers Are Worried About the U.S. Navy’s Spending Plan and a Near-Term China Threat,” Defense News, 15 June 2021; and Brent D. Sadler, “U.S. Navy Punts on Building a Fleet to Compete with China,” Defense One, 15 June 2021.
2. Liu Mingfu, The China Dream: Great Power Thinking and Strategic Posture in the Post-American Era (Beijing: CN Times, 2015) quoted in Clive Hamilton, Silent Invasion: China’s Influence in Australia (Melbourne: Hardie Grant, 2018), 17; and Michael Pillsbury, The Hundred-Year Marathon (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2015), 10–15.
3. An estimated $3.4 trillion of trade passes through the South China Sea annually; Hal Brands and Zack Cooper, “Getting Serious About Strategy in the South China Sea,” Naval War College Review 71, no. 1 (Winter 2018): 15.
4. Stephen Burgess, “Confronting China’s Maritime Expansion in the South China Sea: A Collective Action Problem,” Journal of Indo-Pacific Affairs 3, no. 3 (Fall 2020).
5. China and some South China Sea claimants believe UNCLOS grants the authority to regulate the activities of foreign military vessels and aircraft within an EEZ, while the United States (and most South China Sea claimants) disagree.
6. Coined by Toshi Yoshihara and James R. Holmes, Red Star Over the Pacific (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2018), 169.
7. Robert Haddick, “Salami Slicing in the South China Sea,” Foreign Policy, 3 August 2012.
8. Gregory Poling quoted in Dan De Luce, “China Tries to Wear Down Its Neighbors with Pressure Tactics,” NBC News, 10 April 2021.
9. Lyle Morris, “The Era of Coast Guards in the Asia Pacific Is Upon Us,” RAND Corporation, 8 March 2017; Yoshihara and Holmes, Red Star Over the Pacific, 176–77.
10. Ryan Martinson and Katsuya Yamamoto, “Three PLAN Officers May Have Just Revealed What China Wants in the South China Sea,” The National Interest, 9 July 2017.
11. Andrew S. Erickson and Ryan D. Martinson, eds., China’s Maritime Gray Zone Operations (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2019), 180.
12. Derek Grossman, “Military Build-Up in the South China Sea” in The South China Sea: From a Regional Maritime Dispute to a Geostrategic Competition, Leszek Buszynski and Do Thanh Hai, eds. (New York: Routledge Taylor & Francis Group, 2019). The Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) also recently revealed that the Chinese government funds the PAFMM to improve its size, training, personnel, and vessels. See Gregory B. Poling et al., “Pulling Back the Curtain on China’s Maritime Militia,” Center for Strategic and International Studies, November 2021.
13. Hunter Stires, “The South China Sea Needs a ‘COIN’ Toss,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings 145, no. 5 (May 2019).
14. “Insurgency,” Cambridge English Dictionary.
15. James Cable, Gunboat Diplomacy, 1919–1991 (London: Macmillan, 1994), 14.
16. John Vrolyk, “Insurgency, Not War, Is China’s Most Likely Course of Action,” War on the Rocks, 19 December 2019.
17. Ryan D. Martinson and Andrew S. Erickson, “Re-Orienting American Seapower for the China Challenge,” War on the Rocks, 10 May 2018.
18. Andrew S. Erickson, “Make China Great Again: Xi’s Truly Grand Strategy,” War on the Rocks, 30 October 2019.
19. David Knoll et al, “China’s Irregular Approach to War: The Myth of a Purely Conventional Future,” Modern War Institute, 27 April 2021.
20. Brands and Cooper, “Getting Serious,” 21. Chinese actions in the 2021 Whitsun Reef incident and 2020 West Capella standoff are two valid case studies.
21. Julian S. Corbett, Some Principles of Maritime Strategy (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, Inc., 2004), 211–14.
22. Alfred Thayer Mahan, Mahan on Naval Warfare, ed. Allan Westcott (Boston, MA: Little, Brown, and Company, 1918), 243.
23. Quoted in Corbett, Some Principles of Maritime Strategy, 223–24.
24. Clark G. Reynolds, “The U.S. Fleet-in-Being Strategy of 1942,” The Journal of Military History 58, no. 1 (January 1994): 111–15.
25. Megan Eckstein, “SECNAV Braithwaite Calls for New U.S. 1st Fleet Near Indian, Pacific Oceans,” USNI News, 19 November 2020.
26. The network should build on existing institutions such as Singapore’s Information Fusion Center, the Five Eyes intelligence alliance, and Joint Interagency Task Force West.
27. The U.S. Coast Guard’s participation in Patrol Forces Southwest Asia and Operation Aiga offers two success stories for leveraging USCG training, platforms, and expertise. See Stanley P. Fields, “Maritime Great-Power Competition: Coast Guards in the Indo-Pacific,” Journal of Indo-Pacific Affairs (Summer 2021).
28. Milan Vego, Maritime Strategy and Sea Denial (London: Taylor and Francis, 2018), 60.
29. Alex Carter and Damian Fernando, “The Rise of the Small Boats,” Daniel K. Inouye Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies, March 2018; and Andrew Thomas White, “Counterinsurgency Afloat: The Historical Importance and Future Potential of Maritime Counterinsurgency,” The RUSI Journal 166, no. 1 (January 2021): 60–67.