Irregular Warfare Podcast - Little Blue Men in the South China Sea: Unmasking China’s Maritime Militia

Episode Date: May 6, 2022

Since completing its terraforming and island reclamation projects in the Spratly Islands in 2016, the People’s Republic of China has shifted its emphasis to asserting dominance over the South China Sea. A key component of this pivot has been the expansion of China’s maritime militia—a force of vessels ostensibly engaged in commercial activity, but which in fact conducts operations in concert with Chinese law enforcement and military institutions to help the party-state achieve its military and political aims in the South China Sea’s disputed waters. Gregory B. Poling and Colonel Sean Berg join this episode to discuss China’s gray zone strategy in littoral Asia, and the role that the maritime militia plays in advancing China’s illegal sovereignty claims. Intro music: "Unsilenced" by Ketsa Outro music: "Launch" by Ketsa CC BY-NC-ND 4.0

When we say maritime militia in China's context, at the top, I want to be clear, we're not using loose figurative language here. We are talking about a very clearly defined entity within the Chinese system, state-sanctioned and used for state purposes. and use for state purposes. You have to recognize that the maritime militia all the way up through those gray holes and the PLA, that is the party's army. That is the party's force, not a reflection of the people. The military is there in order to preserve and gain political power for the Chinese Communist Party. Welcome to episode 52 of the Irregular Warfare

podcast. I am Ben Jebb, and I'll be your host today along with Laura Jones. Today's episode looks at maritime irregular warfare in the Indo-Pacific. We discuss how China's use of its shadowy maritime militia and other gray zone tactics is being used to push its sovereign claims in the Western Pacific. Since the mid-2010s, the PRC has been expanding its maritime militia, a force of vessels ostensibly engaged in commercial fishing, but which in fact operates in tandem with Chinese law enforcement and military institutions to help China achieve its military and political aims in the South China Sea. Our guests today both have experience with China's irregular methods.

One is a leading thinker, author, and researcher on maritime security in Asia, and the other is a seasoned practitioner with years of experience working alongside American partners and allies in the Indo-Pacific. Together they tell the fascinating story of how China is using an obscure network of militia vessels to shift the balance of military power in China's favor within the South China Sea. The recount is of critical importance to policymakers and practitioners today. Colonel Sean Berg currently serves as the Deputy Commander of Special Operations Command Pacific. Over his 27-year-long career, Colonel Berg has commanded special operations forces at multiple levels and has led U.S. soldiers in various combat theaters around the globe.

Gregory B. Poling directs the Southeast Asia Program and Asia Maritime Transparency Initiative at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, where he is also a senior fellow. In November of 2021, Mr. Poling helped publish the report, Pulling Back the Curtain on China's Maritime Militia, which serves as the framework for today's conversation. You are listening to the Irregular Warfare Podcast, a joint production of the Princeton Empirical Studies of Conflict Project and the Modern War Institute at West Point, dedicated to bridging the gap between scholars and practitioners

to support the community of irregular warfare professionals. Here's our conversation with Greg Poling and Colonel Sean Berg. Greg Poling, Colonel Sean Berg, great to have you on the show and welcome to the Irregular Warfare podcast. Hey, thanks for having me. It's great to be here. Hey, Greg, great to see you. Aloha from Oahu. Looking forward to digging in today. Gentlemen, we brought you on today to discuss China's maritime militia and the role it plays in helping the PRC achieve its political and military objectives in the South China Sea. Greg, you and your team produced a report in November of 2021 about this irregular force. So maybe you could start and briefly describe the importance of the South China Sea

in general. So the South China Sea is the world's most contested waterway. And for the U.S., what matters is the dispute over maritime space. There is this overlapping dispute over islands themselves, island sovereignty. It really doesn't involve the United States. U.S. interests for more than a century have been just focused on two issues. One, that freedom of the seas and international law of the day be observed in the South China Sea. And two, that nobody is forced to resolve the issue because the U.S. has credibility commitments. For many decades, it was to multiple allies, and today it's just to the Philippines. The worrying thing about China's activity over the last decade really has been that its gray zone activity, its reliance on non-military coercion,

has been eating away at both of those in ways that make it extremely difficult for the U.S. and allies and partners to respond. Absolutely. So, Greg, the work you produce is phenomenal, super in-depth, and I'll speak a bit more generally because the South China Sea as a piece of the much larger Chinese Communist Party strategy, which goes really back to 2003, and then the purposeful use of infrastructure and military development with gray zone activity, which you can tie to some of their Park City methodology, which I'll we do and what we did going all the way back to Desert Storm and recognizing the buildup and where our red lines are, the ability to expand out territorial claims from contested features that were not features until they built them out is all part of their larger strategy to gain and change and reshape the region from a international maritime or international relations multilateral organization to a bilateral vassal state where they are the dominant feature.

And I would agree with Greg that it is the central piece of their strategy and each bit that they are able to influence or that they are able to establish a sovereign claim and then slowly really manipulate that inside of their lawfare technique. And so, Greg, you know, I think it'd be good if you can dig in to some of the history of where some of this started. I mean, just the whole idea of the nine-dash line in the first place is this antiquated map with like crayon drawings on it practically. Right. So the problem with China's claims are that they tend to evolve to fit the political expediency of the day. So if you go back to the start of Chinese claims in the South China Sea, it was these tit-for-tat claims in response to Japanese and French occupations pre-World War II. And after the war, you had French and Chinese scrambles to go reoccupy these islands and rocks and the Spratlys and the Paracels that, particularly in the case of the Spratlys, no Chinese official stepped foot on the Spratly Islands until 1946.

They went back and tried to find ex post facto justifications for those claims. And one of the things that they landed on was this map that was produced in 1936 as a result of an effort by Chiang Kai-shek's cartographers to come up with what the boundaries of modern China should be. And they had decided at that time, or at least floated the idea of claiming all the islands in the South China Sea. Problem is, China had never been to these islands, at least Chinese officials hadn't. So they didn't really know where they were. So what they did was they took a bunch of old Royal Navy sailing charts and they put a line around them and said, eh, any islands you can find in here belong to China. That's the origin of the Nine-Dash Line. It was meant to be a very vague claim to the islands within it. And that's what it was for decades

until the 1990s. In the 1990s, suddenly you had China looking at a desire to claim economic and legal rights over the seabed, the airspace, and the waters of the South China Sea. And that eventually led to the first use of the term historic rights in China's law on the exclusive economic zone in 1998. That's the first time that China ever claimed that the nine-dash line was a boundary of some sort, that it included the waters and seabed and airspace and not just the islands. That's also why around 1995, as this was coming down the pipe, you had for the first time the U.S. State Department declare that it was concerned about Chinese claims and that freedom of navigation was a key U.S. concern. Up until then, the U.S.'s only concern in the South China Sea really had been to make sure that nobody shot at U.S. allies.

And then all of a sudden in the 90s, it becomes more than just alliance credibility. It becomes about the rules. This idea that if China is suddenly claiming rights 1,000 miles from its shore, five times farther than any other country in the world, that has pretty terrible knock-on effects. You can't have a rules-based order in which the second largest country doesn't follow any of the rules. Yeah, that's exactly right. And so I don't know if you're familiar with Maxar. follow any of the rules. Yeah, that's exactly right. And so I don't know if you're familiar with Maxar. They do a great job on class and open source available to pull imagery over time. And

they've got some pretty great analytics that they apply where you can see and they show and they produce for both business and government, these graphics that show the buildup of the features, not just in the islands and the Spratlys, but also on the ports and terrestrial portions of Southeast Asia where they're just creating land, right? And so this whole idea of, can you find these islands? Well, I'm going to guess they couldn't find some of them, so they decided to make them, right? And we, from a US perspective, mildly noticed. And then I think we had some Chamberlain-esque promises of, hey, we're not going to militarize them. And two years later, they've got surface to air capability and over the horizon radar capability. So to your point, you're not allowing

them to shoot. Well, now they've created that capability. Now we've re-identified or elevated to the pacing competition is the PRC, but they're that many years ahead of it. And they go to the, hey, this is just the way it has been, right? And pretend that it's gone that way, and they've got a historic right to it. And there's this part of the challenge with UNCLOS is that while we respect it, we follow it, and we ostensibly enforce it, we are not signatories to it, right? And that gets rolled back and jammed up with us in the international space. But we recognize that that is international law, and I think you characterized it correctly as the U.S. national interest is the adherence to and respect for standing international law. And that changes over time, right? But you have these overlapping EEZs, and then there's discussions about where the continental

shelves end and begin. And while the most belligerent and flagrant violations of sovereignty happen from the PRC and the PLAN, Several of our friends, partners, and or allies have involvement in illegal, unregulated, or overfishing as well, some of their own waters, and then some in those contested waters. I would postulate that the PRC is the one that is furthest extended, the most egregious, and the most pursuant of at least regional hegemony there. So we've mentioned the United States, we've mentioned China, and now we've mentioned a couple other actors. Can you mention maybe who are the major players? Is it just the United States and the PRC and everybody takes a back seat? Or are there other major players that need to be considered

in the South China Sea? And also, how does the United States manage those relationships and those conflicting motivations? Yeah, Greg, you lay that out pretty well in your paper. I'll let you take that one. Well, I'm happy to. I think it's very important that the United States not fall into China's rhetorical trap of framing the South China Sea as a bilateral issue. This is not a US-China issue. It never has been. So at the level of the territorial disputes, it's an issue between China and its neighbors. You have China, Vietnam, and Taiwan claiming the Paracel Islands. You have China, Taiwan, Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia, and Brunei claiming parts, at least, of the Spratly Islands. And you also have Indonesia claiming part of the seabed and airspace that China claims. Those overlapping claims are for those claimants to resolve.

It's not for the U.S. to dictate. And frankly, the U.S. doesn't care as long as the claims are made within the bounds of existing international law. That's what makes China's claims so problematic. And that's what makes it not a U.S.-China issue, but a China versus international community issue. The reason that on the eve of its arbitration victory against China in 2016, the Philippines was able to rally 56 countries to say that they were going to support the ruling and condemn China's claims was because this is an issue that strikes at the heart of the rules-based order. China cannot claim 1,000 miles of water when international law says that every country only gets 200. And so while there is this web of overlapping claims to waters and seabed and

airspace, and yes, we can argue that the Philippines might be right on one part or Malaysia might be right on one part. All of that is the way it's supposed to work. The system lays out these claims. You are allowed to make them, and then you are allowed to negotiate or arbitrate them. It is only China that ignores the system altogether, whose claims happen entirely outside of the system, which is why the US only really objects to China's claims. We don't care if the Philippines or Malaysia have the better claim to a specific reef, or Vietnam or Malaysia get a specific oil and gas block. We care that they make those claims within the bounds of international law that they help negotiate. And China was at the table and had as much say in these rules as anybody. It was only in the 1990s that China decided the rules don't apply to Beijing anymore. I mean, that's the exact portion of the three warfares, which is the lawfare,

right? Which is the manipulation of international order in order for it to take on Chinese characteristics, because they don't look to supplant it, they look to subvert it, keep that structure in place, and then modify people's and nation's behavior internal to that international order. So that is beneficial to the autocratic CCP system, exactly how you laid out there, which is why instead of putting PLA big gray holes down there, they've gone to putting and building out this massive People's Armed Forces, maritime militia, and then this aggregated or ramped up capability that goes through Coast Guard and all the way up through the PLA, which you also lay out in your paper really well. That's exactly right. I think we should be cognizant that what Beijing hopes to

see, at least in its neighborhood, is that international law works the way that domestic law works in China, which is as a tool of power, never constrained upon it. So Chinese lawyers who are arguing about the validity of China's nine-d dash line don't really care if they're making a coherent argument. That's not the point. The rules are supposed to adapt to what China wants to do. China is not going to adapt what it does to fit the rules. Navy. It had no Coast Guard to speak of. It had really hardly ever been to the Spratly Islands. The rules worked for China. As naval modernization over the course of the 80s and 90s led China to become a larger blue water Navy with now the world's largest shipbuilding industry, largest offshore oil and gas industry, largest ocean graphic survey fleet. Now the rules don't work for China anymore. Now the rules feel constraining, so the rules should change. And at the very least, what we can expect, and I think what we see across the board, not just in the maritime domain, is that Beijing wants one set of rules to apply globally, because that still

kind of works for Beijing, but a different set to apply within Asia. Within Asia, China sets the rules. Yeah, and there, I think it's 2015 National Security White Paper, they fundamentally changed the rules for their own PLAN, where they go from an internal doctrine of offshore security only, and change the mission to open seas and far seas protection. capability or that extended capability as they're still trying to get in the functional aircraft carrier business, but also recognizing that putting those kind of gray holes out there was going to go across the international order and the red lines that they had witnessed from us, starting again, going back to Desert Storm, and then up through the buildups in our conflicts in the Middle East, and staying below the level of armed conflict with a capability that they purposely dilute and obfuscate ownership and tying back to the exact origin of these vessels that started out largely, they were just regular fishing vessels, but they were not complex and they were not mature.

To now where you see the ability, just even this last year, to coalesce 200 PATHOM vessels with reinforced holes and water cannons and the bumpers already installed on them. And it's a clearly orchestrated military operation, which 10 years ago was nowhere near that mature. Sean, that's a good pivot point. We've been talking a lot about how China has been able to stay under the threshold of awareness, particularly with their gray zone activities in the Pacific. What I'd like to do now is to get a feel for the actual force at sea. Greg, could you give us a quick primer and some background context on the PRC's maritime militia? So when we say maritime militia in China's context, at the top, I want to be clear, we're

not using loose figurative language here. We are talking about a very clearly defined entity within the Chinese system, state-sanctioned and used for state purposes. entity within the Chinese system, state-sanctioned and used for state purposes. These are not just fishermen who occasionally do some weekend warrior business running supplies down the Spratlys. These are a part of the Chinese civil-military structure. If you go back to 1974, the Battle of the Paracels, the Chinese didn't have a navy that could operate in the Paracels. In fact, they were outgunned by the Arvin, the South Vietnamese navy at the time. What they did was that they used a militia force based in Hainan,

mostly commercial fishermen, to ferry their marines down to the islands, get the jump on the Vietnamese, and win the battle that way. In the 1980s, China started explicitly subsidizing these fisher folk to go operate down in the Spratly Islands and over at Scarborough Shoal, two places that there is no evidence of Chinese commercial fishing post-World War II until the Chinese government started paying them to do that. And you also had these paramilitaries who were still mostly commercial fishermen, but they now at that point had a decade plus of history operating alongside the PLAN and the precursors to the China Coast Guard when necessary. They were particularly important in a handful of key ports, townships in Hainan. Tonmen probably being the best known example. The Tonmen fishermen became famous for being the ones who took care of business at Scarborough Shoal. That continued to evolve slowly over the course of the next 20 years, 30 years really. And then we had a real sea change with Xi Jinping's

elevation to power. So Xi Jinping was vice president during the Scarborough Shoal standoff of 2012, in which the Tanmen militia played an important role, provoking that standoff, which ended with China seizing effective administrative control over the shul that had been under Philippine uncontested administration for decades. Xi Jinping that summer makes his big speech about the China dream or the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation. And China's emergence as a maritime power is made a core component of the China dream. Xi Jinping suddenly elevates how important the militia is for everybody in China to see. And two, Xi says that maritime power is now key to the China dream, which is core to his political ideology and his claim to political legitimacy. That unlocks vast resources. You have this huge modernization of the militia starting from 2013 to today. And it's pretty easy now in retrospect to draw a straight

line from those speeches by Xi to where we are today. Today, you have probably on the order of about a thousand boats who serve as professional militia in the South China Sea. Now, there are a much larger component of people who could be called up, but these are the guys who don't fish anymore. You have a professional maritime militia, which is a successor to those old fishing villages in Hainan that have been operating since the 70s and 80s. They've now been brought under control of a state-owned company called the Sancha Fisheries Development Company, based in Sancha City, which Sean referenced earlier, in the Paracels. registered in Sansha City. They get their salaries paid by the government. They have their boats built by the government. They wear uniforms. They train with the PLAN and the CCG. They are an arm of the state. Then you have this larger fleet of less professional, what are now called the

Spratly Backbone Fishing Fleet. Those are the entirely new fleet, mostly based out of Guangdong. These are not directly state-owned, for the most part. They're owned by small and medium-sized enterprises in a handful of ports along the Chinese coast, and they get an enormous subsidy to operate as part of the militia down the Spratly. They get paid about $4,000 a day if they operate in the Spratly Islands for a minimum of 280 days out of every year. And so as a result, most of them don't fish. They put a skeleton crew, seven or eight guys on a boat. They go down to the Spratlys, they drop anchor, and they sit there for 280 days and collect their check, which is where you get these massive fleets of 200, 250 boats tying up at reefs,

not doing anything except spying on the Filipinos and Vietnamese and relaying the information back to the PLAN. Now that we've kind of delved into what the maritime militia is, can you talk about how that's integrated into this wider new strategy, this outward-looking strategy that the PRC is using, and then take that into how the lines have blurred between conventional units, special operations units, and these state-sponsored commercial entities. Yeah, thanks, LJ. So, Greg, you threw out a phrase there that I'll come off of, which is great, because you mentioned PATHOM or the Maritime Militia being an arm of the state. Most Western observers fail to recognize the relationship between the pla plan and the state because they look through a western lens where you have to recognize that the maritime militia

all the way up through those gray holes and the pla that is the party's army that is the party's force not a reflection of the people the military is there in order to preserve and gain political power for the Chinese Communist Party. And that is an inverted relationship when you recognize they are there to create political power and sustain political power. Now, Greg's explanation makes a great amount of sense. And so he mentioned Sansha City there. This is a strategy called the Port Park City Strategy that they tested on their own in Sancho. The methodology that they practiced there first was first going in and secure a port, and that's sea, air, or land. This one happened to be sea. Build the port, and then on the backside of that, they build a very

large industrial park because, of course, you need that to support the port. Oh, by the way, built all by Chinese citizens who are imported, usually. Now you have this large diaspora living in that is in this industrial park, and you need places for them to live. Now you have this large diaspora living in that is in this industrial park and you need places for them to live. So you build the apartment complexes and the condos and you have a small city behind there. And if it's on a piece of land that didn't exist before, meaning you built it out in a feature out in the South Tennessee or on the coast of say Malaysia in the Malacca port area. So it doesn't have the same kind of domestic, you took our land because you simply created it, but now you created a city behind this park.

You now have thousands to tens of thousands of Chinese citizens around this industrial area that then, before anybody in a uniform ever shows up, China now says, oh, by the way, they've also made sure they have an exclusive economic zone around that entire area. So the sovereignty that those partners are able to exert over that is already undermined. And then now it is, hey, we have such a national security interest or a national interest in both our citizens there and the economic activity that happens there. Well, now we have a military interest. And so the very last step of any of this is for someone in a uniform or any kind of military force to come and say, hey, we owe security to this economic exclusion zone or the special economic zone and the infrastructure that is

usually under a coerced 99-year lease with really bad language on about page 17 or 18 that says, when you default on this loan, this becomes sovereign PRC territory. That's part of the lawfare, part of the psychological and public opinion manipulation. So I think what Sean's highlighting for us here is you've got, particularly under Xi Jinping's leadership, two really exemplary components of what he calls the China dream, both of which rest in part on this idea of civil-military fusion, and both of which make our accurate reporting, responses, rules of engagement very difficult. So one is the Belt and Road Initiative. This emergence, re-emergence, as China would see it, of itself as a major maritime, commercial, and economic power around the world,

which particularly in the early 2015-2016 days was driven by a lot of bad, some would say predatory debt, resulted in at least one case, Djibouti, with Chinese overseas base and several others like Guadalajara, Hamantota, re-enable base, probably with at the very least logistic and resupply hub for the PLAN down the line, but all of which was driven by state-owned banks lending at the behest of Beijing on loans they wouldn't have otherwise given to Chinese SOEs who otherwise wouldn't be there in order to pursue strategic, not entirely commercial Chinese interests. The second is the much more vocal, much more revisionist character of China's claims in the South China Sea primarily, but also

Taiwan Strait, the East China Sea, and on the border with India, where again, you're relying on a high degree of civil military fusion, the China Coast Guard, Chinese maritime militia, but also Chinese state-owned oil and gas companies, Chinese state-owned telecom companies, Chinese state-owned ocean graphic companies doing the surveys, all of whom are eating away at the rights and claims of U.S. partners and allies below the level of military conflict in ways that we don't have a ready toolkit for. How do we respond to a seemingly commercial fisherman who's actually working for the state, a seemingly commercial oceanographic ship who's actually working for the state,

who don't give the U.S. or our allies a casus belli to intervene militarily, but who nonetheless make it impossible for our partners and allies to exercise their own rights. This is a huge conundrum for the U.S., and I think we have not realized just how dire the situation has gotten. U.S. power projection in the region, U.S. ability to contest Chinese hegemony in the region rests upon the access given to the United States by our partners and allies. And those partners and allies do it because they see the U.S. as a guarantor of regional stability and a provider of public goods. If they look around and say, over the last 20 years, I suddenly lost all of my fishing grounds, all of my oil and gas resources, all of my legal rights. And in the meantime, I was hosting, you know, in the case of the Philippines, basically a US Navy vessel every single day. What did those US Navy vessels do for me?

That's how if you undermine the US alliance network without firing a shot. So gentlemen, building off that point of building access and presence within the South China Sea, do these maritime militia vessels act as a means of extending presence and acting where these larger overt warships cannot act? Or are they a force multiplier in terms of they exist in this space to free up those naval vessels to operate elsewhere? So the militia serves two main purposes. The militia overall serves as a visible affirmation of China's claims, right? Anywhere you go within the nine dash line now, you are likely to bump into a Chinese vessel, most likely a Chinese militia vessel. And yes, the PLA Navy is now the largest in the region.

The Chinese Coast Guard is largest in the world. The South China Sea is still a big body of water. You can't have a Chinese Navy ship everywhere all the time. You can have one of these militia pretty much everywhere all the time. So they do that to the professional portion, what's called in Chinese professional maritime militia vessels, the ones registered to Sancho operating in uniform. They're the ones who run point on escort missions for Chinese survey vessels in the waters of Malaysia and the Philippines. They're the ones who go up against the Vietnamese militia. They're the ones who harass foreign

oil and gas activity because they complicate rules of engagement. If you had a PLAN vessel harassing an offshore rig, that's extremely escalatory. If you got a handful of hopped up on nationalism fishermen doing it, how do you respond if you're the Malaysian Coast Guard? You're going to go out and shoot a bunch of Chinese fishermen and then encourage the Chinese to come in and intervene? It puts the escalation risk on the other side. Anything you do to respond to them, the Chinese get the point and say, you're the ones who just use force against civilians. And the result is, for the most part, nobody responds. Nobody does anything. This is the strength of an authoritarian regime that can implement a singular policy. Ultimately, it can be its Achilles heel. But if you take the first of the three law fairs, which is media and public opinion, they, the PRC and the CCP, have built a massive information warfare and information operations capability. And when you look at the comparison,

so how do we deal with that? So while you correctly identify, we don't have a tool that goes up against hopped up nationalist fishermen. How do you respond to that either from the US or Malaysia side? So they're using that because they studied how it is and where we will respond, and they continue to learn, and they're a fast learning organization of how far they can push and when and how we will respond. They have built a significant capability. So if you look in their information space, you know, we on the US side have about 30,000 folks between uniformed and civilians that do information operations on behalf of our national security. There are roughly about a million. We put about 10 million entries into the information space

between a tweet or a acknowledged op-ed in a paper. We put about 10 million in there. They are just shy of a billion a year. And they're about 30 times the expenditure. So this was all aggregated. This was all OSINT data, open source stuff that we inside of our command looked at because this is a space that we operate in

and are partially part of the solution for, which is simply the ability to highlight truthful, malign activities, which that entire network is designed to suppress. So when those maritime militia do ram or sink a Vietnamese fishing boat, not only is Vietnam in the predicament of how do I respond to them, any responses that happen are now on the backside of a massive AI bot and 50 cent army, which is the folks that are paid a little to spend a lot of time online and seek out anti PRC and anti CCP narratives and put them to the bottom of that thread. And then either actually just simply suppress it or get that link to break. It's amazing how often if folks like what we're talking about here and you start going into research,

Sanchez City and Port Park City, which there are many good open source articles out there. It's amazing how many of the links are broken. I do not have data that actually tells me that that's been done purposefully. I only know from aggregating over years and watching it that it doesn't surprise me. Sean, you've mentioned how China is competing by utilizing different elements of statecraft to essentially coerce and bully other climate states. And Greg, you've also discussed China's civil military fusion tactics with respect to the maritime militia. So I guess my question is, given these considerations, what is the actual legal status of China's militia force? It sounds like they've got both uniformed and not uniformed

personnel actively patrolling the South China Sea. Some fishing companies and boats receive subsidies, some do not. So how does the US and the international community legally classify a force like this? Yeah, this is a very complicated question. And that's the way China likes it. So you have different bodies of law, none of which perfectly match up here. Specific activities that Chinese fisher folk and militia and others are doing in the South China Sea, you can judge legal or illegal based on the UN Convention of the Law of the Sea, and all the customary maritime law that undergirds that. So you can say that fishing in the Philippine EZ is illegal. Drilling for oil and gas in the Indonesian EZ or on their continental shelf is illegal.

Is it illegal for a Chinese fisherman to go into the Philippine EZ and ride at anchor for 240 days? Not under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, because nobody considered the idea that a fishing flotilla was going to go 800 miles from its home and ride an anchor for 10 months out of the year. But that's what we have. You can try to apply the law of war, and then you ask yourself, well, are some of these considered armed combatants under the Geneva Conventions? Well, yes, some of them probably are, particularly the professional maritime militia operating from Sancho City.

You can prove that they wear uniforms. They carry arms. They are identifiable and self-identified based on their uniforms and their vessels. They are directly under the chain of command of the South Sea Fleet and China Coast Guard units. So those are clearly armed combatants. And the U.S. would be well within its right in a conflict to treat them as such. The larger number of less professional militia, that's much harder to say for sure, which is kind of the point of a paramilitary force. I mean, a paramilitary force that identifies

itself as such isn't really paramilitary anymore. It's military. The bottom line is, I think you are safest trying to judge these guys by what they do, not what they are. So you say the way that they behave, the way that they intentionally try to cause risk of collision to foreign vessels is illegal. It's illegal under coal regs. It violates cues. The Convention on Unplanned Encounters of the Sea, which China helped negotiate at the 2014 Western Pacific Naval Symposium, we should call them out for their bad behavior. If they want to sit out in the middle of the ocean burning gas and running B for no reason, and they don't bother anybody, I guess we could live with it. But they are bothering people. And they are intentionally

creating risks for Filipino and Vietnamese and Malaysian operators in a way that convinces them to abandon their rights, which is the whole point. Yeah, exactly, Greg. I mean, because you mentioned that before. And that's, you know, how do you respond? And at the outset, you talked about, I mean, frankly, it's not a U.S. national security interest whether or not one of those Southeast Asian claimants does or does not have hydrocarbon resources there or fishing rights. It's just that it gets settled properly under international law and that everybody else respects that judgment. Because they know that they will be able to manipulate that partner there. And as long

as they can get the international law to bend to their will, I think for everyone to self-regulate and then to not make the claim against them, I think is where they are going ultimately. And we don't have a great answer for that. So it just seems that the PRC was kind of a little bit more creative in addressing constraints against them and addressing the international rules-based order. So how is the United States getting creative to address that? So Greg, to your last point, and going off of that, LJ, is it the United States' responsibility or should we be the ones doing it? Or more to the point, are we the most effective ones to do it? Ultimately, it's, I think, our assistance to allies and partners in them having the wherewithal to do the self-identification

because, and oh, by the way, it's a volume problem. We're not going to put enough small vessels out there. It's not as if there are US small fishing fleets out there that see and would be already in the position and, you know, in the software realm where we would call access and placement, they're already there. And so how is it that we support and or embolden a partner to be able to do what I said before, which is simply highlight the truthful malign activity that is out there. And then do we have an infrastructure that can overcome the information dominance that they share inside of both the terrestrial and international media. I don't know what you think about that, Greg, but I think it comes down to how do we enable and embolden partners then to have this ubiquitous capability that is already sitting out there. So

are there commercial off-the-shelf applications that they can apply to their GPS, to their phones, to capture, to aggregate that then gets picked up and we help them in the information space. But ultimately, I don't think it's the US doing that. I think it is our support to our partners there, which, oh, by the way, is part of the PRC's fear anyway. Anything multinational is a threat to them. The South China Sea has no short-term solutions and certainly no military solutions that wouldn't cost us more than we gained and wouldn't cost China more than China gains. The only way that I see that you can combat this Chinese gray zone strategy and ultimately bend Beijing toward a compromise solution that both its neighbors can live with and the international

community can live with is by combining reestablishment in the short term of U.S. deterrence, which means working with allies and partners, most especially the Philippines. Philippines is the only one we have a legal obligation to. I would also argue that we have a historical and moral obligation to the Philippines. If they ask for help, we give it. If they don't ask, that's up to them. And they didn't ask for much of the Duterte presidency. And we can talk about what maybe how the U.S. should scope its ultimate interest in the South China Sea in the case that

the Filipinos decide to lay down for China. But as long as the Filipinos are willing to stand up, we have an obligation to stand behind them. That can buy the time that the Philippines and Vietnam and the international community needs to impose long term diplomatic and economic costs on Beijing. If you treat China the way you do other malign actors, Iran, Russia, North Korea, then it becomes very clear to Beijing that it can either be a bully in its own neighborhood, or it can be a world leader, but we will not let it be both at the same time. If it wants to break international law in the South China Sea, we're not going to pretend that it gets to sit at the table in Geneva or in New York and make other international law.

It's going to be treated as a rogue state. And so far, we've been very loath to impose that kind of cost over the long term. We were almost there in the end of 2015 and early 2016 when we had a really unique moment where the Aquino government in the Philippines asked for and received support from both the Abe government and the Obama government in the U.S. and Japan to rally international support. And all of that came crashing down with Duterte's inauguration in the Philippines, and then Trump's inauguration in the U.S., where basically for four years, neither Manila nor Washington talked about the South China Sea in the way we needed to. Now we need to rebuild that coalition. And it's much harder because China's much stronger than it was in 2016, and much better placed in the South China Sea than it was six years ago if we

had just followed through on the plan we had in place. Yeah, absolutely. And I know I keep bringing it to this a larger strategy, but it's important to recognize that even though there, as you said correctly, Greg, there's not actually a near term or it's certainly not a military solution for the South China Sea. I agree with both of you that supporting our allies in Asia is critical to addressing this problem. But I also think this is an issue of awareness. I personally had never heard of the militia until recently, despite the long lineage of operating in Asia. But Greg, I know you and your team kind of pioneered the playbook for identifying and tracking China's maritime militia at sea. Could you just talk about the work you did at AMTI and how your team ended up spreading awareness of this militia force? Yeah, I'm always happy to talk about the work you did at AMTI and how your team ended up spreading awareness of this militia force?

Yeah, I'm always happy to talk about the work. I think there's two parts of this answer. One is the technology. How do you improve maritime domain awareness and ISR capabilities in the region to monitor and detect Chinese bad behavior? And the second is the PR piece. How do you message it? How do you get it out there in ways that it actually imposes reputational and ultimately economic cost on Beijing in order to change its behavior?

Because AMTI and my team, we're not in this to document the deaths of the South China Sea. We got our start in the end of 2014. And AMTI really started hitting the news in mid-2015 when we started publishing high-resolution satellite imagery of the Chinese island building, so from 2015 to 2016, any image you saw of a Chinese island base in the Spratlys that wasn't classified was coming from our shop. The mission got harder around mid-2016 because by that point, China was done building. The islands were finished by mid-2016. All the major military infrastructure was finished by the end of 2017. Most of the major

deployments were done by late 2018. And then people lost interest because it's a lot harder to track what China's doing with the islands than it was to track the buildup. So we had to move from relying on Maxar to take really nice 30 centimeter images of Chinese, you know, hangers going up to relying on automatic identification system, AIS tracking, SAR, synthetic aperture radar, lower resolution planet imagery that has much wider aperture. So you could get these very grainy photos of all the boats moving around the South China Sea and actually see what the islands were doing. And one of the things that immediately became clear is the most important things the islands have done is not improve potential Chinese warfighting, although they've done that. But what they've really done in the

short, medium term is they've allowed China to forward base its Coast Guard and its militia boats 800 miles from shore. So if you were a Malaysian oil and gas operator, you used to have to put up with the China Coast Guard once every few months when they came by, blared the horn, threw a sovereignty marker over the side and had some silly ceremony and then went home. They're not based in Hainan anymore. They're based in the Spratly Islands. In most cases, they're closer to Filipino-Malaysian waters than the Filipino-Malaysian Navy are. So they're able to maintain a 24-7 presence. So part of it is now using the same kinds of commercial remote sensing technologies that we've been using to monitor that activity, putting it in the hands of regional partners, the US and others, Australia, Japan have been

doing a lot of good work on this front, particularly through the Maritime Security Initiative. It's also a cultural change. We've got to recognize that for the most part, everything that we can do within government to monitor the maritime militia, somebody can do in the commercial space. And they're probably doing it cheaper. And they're doing it in low Earth orbit with a much larger constellation. And in fact, most of what we're classifying is coming from those same companies. The reason Maxar exists is because NGA pays for all of Maxar's imagery. That's where most of what you see in the classified realm when the US government is coming from is commercial satellite images that the USG buys and then sticks a classified stamp on. I can buy the exact same

photo the next day and it's unclassified. So we've got to have that cultural change. And I do think that the revolution in low Earth orbit and the lower price point on a lot of these technologies, SAR, commercial radio frequency detection, et cetera, is getting us to a place where in the next decade, you're not going to be able to hide on the oceans. I mean, any vessel made of metal over, say, 10 meters is going to be visible all the time. The question then is, how do you message it? And that's where no amount of technology is going to matter. We've got to work with our partners and find the political will to actually take this information and use it, bring it up in multilateral fora, use it to name and shame the Chinese government, use it to impose costs, treat China the way you would any other bad actor, just because they're

bigger and have a bigger economy doesn't mean you don't treat them the way you would any other country who did this. Sean, based on our conversation today, what are some implications for both academics and policymakers who are interested in the South China Sea and the Indo-Pacific region as a whole. So I'll do what my favorite thing is, which is use the words of folks smarter than me and go back to what Greg was just talking about, which is we have not come up with a policy plan or we have not figured out what the government response to those kind of below the level of armed conflict and how do you invest in that capability where right now it largely only exists both in the physical infrastructure and the technical infrastructure, so all of the IT that the DoD owns, and we're not necessarily the proper

government agency or agency that may not be government because so much of this is in the commercial sector. So the policy implications back for resourcers and for legislators is just because an organization doesn't exist and tied to our national security infrastructure doesn't mean it can't, right? So that's a big, hairy, audacious goal. For the large part, the narrative is now, hey, I do not just simply look at this as a benign actor simply trying to promote their own internal sovereignty and security, but rather a malign actor. However, they have inculcated and are so integral to a global economy, a very large part of the US one as well. So the policy

implications come back to non-DOD things largely, which is how are we going to build resilience inside of our own production industry, which we have farmed out a lot over there. And that's discussed a fair amount, but you haven't seen a large resource shift. And then what is going to be the relationship between the commercial capability that we want to have leveraged on behalf of national security? And if there's not legislation for that, then how do you write the proper oversight that is the right kind of relationship that respects a free market-based economy with a representative government that we say is the best way to run the world and not go down the

authoritarian realm? Because those laws don't necessarily exist. And by definition, the reason they're doing it, the way they're doing it, is because we don't have law and capability to do it. That's why they're working in that space, as Greg articulated, elegantly and eloquently there. It's unfortunate or a challenge as a many decades A-type that wants to solve a lot of problems and a DOD bias for applying our infrastructure against the problem set. There's not a military solution, as Greg said, to the South China Sea. And the competition and the sustenance of remaining in competition and never going to crisis or conflict is a whole of society, not just whole of government solution. That is what we are up against. And Greg, if I could flip it on you as well,

can you give us the implications for practitioners then and how irregular warfare professionals deal with this space? The South China Sea is not the last front in this long-term strategic confrontation with China. It is, however, a pretty significant battle in that fight, that ideational fight for how the world's going to work in the 21st century. And it's one that I would argue means at least as much as any other we have on the table right now for U.S. national security interests, the ability of the force to operate in the region. And it's one that we're about to lose. Over the last six years, we have sat back. And I mean, we in the sense of the U.S. and our own partners have sat back and watched China run away with an open field. Beijing is remarkably

close, more than we recognize, to securing de facto control over all peacetime activity in the South China Sea. And if we get to a point where the U.S. Navy is basically the only one sailing the South China Sea, then China will have already won this battle. Because our allies and partners are going to look around and say, what the heck did decades of support for your forward presence get me at the end of the day? And the answer is going to be very little. The most important thing for the U.S. to do in the short term is work with the Philippines to make up for lost time. We must reestablish deterrence. We have a whole lot of fancy plans in the work for how we are going to continue to project power within the first island chain and compete in China's backyard. And the thing that we don't talk about explicitly in those plans is that they all rest in the Philippines. You know, if we want to go to the Pacific deterrence initiative, it rests on

access to territory, allied territory in the southern half of the first island chain. And we only have one ally in the southern half of the first island chain. If we want to go ask the Marines where their stand in force is supposed to stand in, they're supposed to stand in the southern half of the first island chain. If we want to go ask the Marines where their stand-in force is supposed to stand in, they're supposed to stand in the Philippines. Where are you supposed to have expeditionary advanced base operations? In the Philippines. There is nowhere else in the region in the next 20 years that's going to give you access. And the only way you're going to get it is if you can make it work for both sides, which means we have to be able to help secure the maritime rights of our oldest ally in the region.

We need to implement the Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement yesterday. We need to get U.S. ground-based fires into those Philippine bases, training with Filipinos on their own ground-based fires, holding Chinese ships at risk in places like Scarborough Shoal, Reed Bank, and Second Thomas. And then we need to make sure that the Philippines can continue to monitor and access its own waters, even in the face of this overwhelming Chinese advantage. Get that short-term plan in place, and maybe we've

got the 10 or 15 years it'll take for the diplomatic game to work. Otherwise, China's going to win this thing in the next Philippine presidency. If we don't get it right in the next five years, we're not going to. Well, Colonel Sean Burt, Greg Poling, unfortunately, we're out of time. We really appreciate you joining us for today. And it has been a great conversation on irregular warfare in the Indo-Pacific. Great to be here. I appreciate you having on.

Super passionate about doing work that matters in a place that matters. So it's great to have a teammate like Greg on part of this. Thanks again for joining us for episode 52 of the Irregular Warfare podcast. We release a new episode every two weeks. In our next episode, Abigail and I will discuss cyber policy with Trey Hare. After that, Kyle and Ben will host General Alberto Jose Mija, who served as commander of the Colombian National Army, and David Spencer to discuss the security implications of Plan Colombia. Please be sure to subscribe to the Irregular Warfare podcast so you don't miss an episode. You can also follow and engage with us on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn.

One last note. What you hear in this episode are the views of the participants and do not represent those of West Point, the Department of Defense, or any other agency of the U.S. government. Thanks again, and we'll see you next time.