Sea Control - Sea Control 456 - China's Maritime Gray Zone Tactics and SeaLight with Ray Powell and Gaute Friis

Episode Date: August 24, 2023

Links1. "Gray Zone Tactics Playbook: Bow-Crossing," by Gaute Friis, SeaLight,  July 17, 2023.2. "Gray Zone Tactics Playbook: Blocking," by Gaute Friis, SeaLight,  July 18, 2023.3. "Gray Zone Tactics Playbook: Cable-Cutting," by Gaute Friis, SeaLight,  July 25, 2023.4. "Gray Zone Tactics Playbook: Ramming," by Gaute Friis, SeaLight,  July 30, 2023.5. "Gray Zone Tactics Playbook: Water Cannoning," by Gaute Friis, SeaLight,  August 6, 2023.6. "SeaLight."

Hello and welcome to the Sea Control Podcast. I'm Nathan Miller. Today Jared speaks with Ray Powell and Gauta Fries about China's gray zone tactics in the South China Sea and their work with sea light. Marie Williams edited and produced this episode. Here at Sea Control we are approaching our 300th episode since our relaunch and we would like to have a show dedicated to answering your questions. If you would like to submit a question please email us at seacontrol at simsec.org. I would like to pause here to highlight our local chapters. Whether you are in South Korea, Egypt, Singapore, France, New York, India, or the Caribbean, chances are there's a SimSec local chapter near you. You can find a full listing of local chapters and contact information on our website at simsec.org.

So if you're interested, please reach out. Finally, I want to take the opportunity to recommend our partners in the SimSec podcast network, The Bilge Pumps. You can find Alex, Jamie, Drack, and a pile of Iron Brew bottles wherever you download your podcasts. And with that, Kimber's men. You're listening to Sea Control, posted by the Center for International Maritime Security. Aloha, shipmates, and welcome back aboard Sea Control. My guests today are Ray Powell and Gauta Fries of Stanford Sea Light. And we're going to be discussing an article that Gauta authored.

Actually, we're going to talk about a couple articles you've authored because you just published another one. I think it was today, Gautam, entitled Gray Zone Tactics Playbook Blocking. I forget which was the one that you published today, Gautam. Cable Cutting. Cable Cutting. Okay. And time stamping this for the listeners. This is Wednesday, July 26th.

So I would imagine by the time this publishes a few weeks from now, you will have probably pumped out a couple more of these based on what I've seen you already produce. So if we're not talking about those, it's only because they haven't actually seen the lab day just yet. But gentlemen, welcome to the program. Ray, we're going to start with you. Can you tell the listeners a little bit more about your background, please? Sure. I'm a 35-year Air Force veteran. I joined up in 1986 back when I was busy failing out of college, mostly because I wasn't actually going to college, although my father was paying tuition. And so rather than go home and confess my sins to him, I joined the Air Force and over the years managed to carve out something of a career for myself, doing a little bit of a lot. I became something of a jack of all trades, but through the years ended up largely in the diplomatic space, working as an attache, particularly in Vietnam and Australia, and kept coming back to the South China Sea as an area of interest.

A lot of that goes back to my original days as a Vietnamese cryptologic linguist for the Air Force. Welcome. Gautik, would you mind introducing yourself as well, please? Sure. Happy to be here. So I'm a what's called a Descent Innovation Scholar at the Gordian Knott Center for National Security Innovation at Stanford University, where I primarily do open source maritime geospatial intelligence analysis with Ray. I'm also a student here doing cyber issues of all kinds. Prior to coming to Stanford, I was a counterintelligence officer in Norway, at Norwegian Security Service.

And that's where my interest in kind of Chinese gray zone activities started. So not just, you know, limited to the South China Sea, but in general. Well, thank you both for coming on. As a reminder to listeners, all opinions are our own and not reflective of any institution with which we might be otherwise associated. So, Ray, I'm going to immediately go off script here and touch on something you and I were talking about before we started recording here, which is, so you're an Air Force guy for 35 years. Gauta, you're a counterintelligence type here. Ray, I'm going to ask you, how did you get involved with the maritime stuff?

Yeah, I mean, so for me, it was largely functional and geographical. My long experience with Vietnam issues, of course, brought me into contact with South China Sea issues early. And, of course, the issue has changed quite a bit since the late 80s. Back in the late 80s, we were very focused on individual features and which country occupied which feature and what was the U.S. stance toward each of these. since that time, it has certainly evolved into something that is much more about sea control and power projection. And of course, China's island building campaign last decade really changed the complexion of how various countries look at that issue. And so we now talk much more about exclusive economic zones and the access to resources and things like that than we did

back when I first started. And Gautam, you had mentioned that you originally got interested looking at a lot of gray zone activities, how that transitioned to looking all the way into the South China Sea, what's going on there? Yeah. So as I mentioned, I'm pretty interested in just Chinese covert action and espionage and gray zone activity in general. And you see a lot similar problems i'm sure we'll get more into this afterwards but what china is doing in the south china sea is really novel and innovative in many ways so there's a distinct kind of lack of shared vocabulary for how you should understand these things talk about it and handle it um and it's just kind of the same with all the other issues of chinese covert action be there influence

operations or espionage or technology transfer where they're always kind of operating in these gray zones between dichotomies that we've kind of established our ideas on and so just moving forward then looking at the South China Sea issue which is another great opportunity to to get into that more in detail. And then Ray back to you I'll get us a little bit back on track here what What is C-Lite, how did it originate, and what are you trying to do? So the entire project, I think, goes back just about a year. And post-retirement, I was a fellow at Stanford's Distinguished Careers Institute and came into contact with the entity now known as the Gordian Knott Center for National Security Innovation,

which some people will recognize for its sort of umbrella activity over the hacking for defense enterprise. But really what that is, is it's basically taking an entrepreneurial approach to solving national security problems that are particularly thorny. And so I had come into contact with Packing for Defense and I approached the Gordian Knot Center's management and said, look, I'm not really sure exactly how all this works. But to me, the South China Sea is a big Gordian Knot. and I've been staring at it for three and a half decades and I don't feel like we're winning and I'd like to kind of take a crack at it from a new perspective and so since that time we had a series of well over 100 interviews with various experts from various fields just sort of in the South China Sea but then you know going levels adjacent to that

in order to sort of get a really good understanding of what problem would we like to try to solve. And, you know, we didn't want to solve a problem that lots of other people were trying to solve. We didn't want to solve a problem we barely understood. And we ended up very much in the information space, which is where Sea Light came in, which is, you know, kind of an obvious reference to our little tagline, which is light up the maritime gray zone. So our idea was that we eventually came up with. And again, this very much was focused on what is our problem. And our problem was there's all this activity in the maritime gray zone.

And the reason that gray zone actors act in the gray zone is because the zone is gray. And that's going to sound really, really profound, but they like it gray. They want it to stay gray. They want it to stay sort of just between the people who they want to know about it. And so we thought, well, if we can light that up, if we can make it so that everybody knows what's happening in the gray zone, that can act as a way to build resilience into the countries that are being affected and ultimately to act as a deterrent against the gray zone activities of the People's Republic of China. And Raoul, I'll come back to you to start with this question.

If you want to add anything onto it, feel free. But what sort of resources do you have? Because you're always posting things, screenshots showing different activity, where vessels are, what they're doing. What sort of resources do you have to monitor what's happening? Yeah, so every non-naval ship of any size will broadcast on what you'll recognize as the Automatic Information System, or AIS, as a safety measure. And that information tells us where most of the large shipping traffic is at any given time, and some of the smaller shipping traffic as well, depending on how good the receivers are. And so we rely a lot on AIS returns in order to sort of get a good picture of what's happening in the maritime space at any given time. And

there are commercial providers that will, for a fee, give access out to people who have an interest in such things. And so the thing that we started with is, can we get one of these commercial providers to give us their feed for a reasonable cost? And so we came up with one of those. We do overlay that with some amount of overhead satellite imagery. That's problematic in the maritime space because you really have to get lucky. I mean, you have to get the ship and the satellite in the same place at the same time. And then, you know, hopefully there's no bad weather and all of those kinds of things. But we are actively looking into a number of other possibilities for increasing the number of sensors we have in the maritime space. And we, you know,

there are actually some really exciting things happening now on a variety of fronts that we think, you know, are going to help us to see things much better in the future. The other sort of follow up that I had there was how do you decide what to look at when? Because there are so many conflict spaces to choose from. I know we talked about China here, but I mean, there's six or seven different countries off the top of my head that have conflicting claims all around the South China Sea. how do you choose what you're going to look at on a day-to-day basis what's kind of your revisit rate to go back and see what is going on in a particular place do you have a team that

is doing that with you or is just you guys yeah it's pretty much just us um and for now uh we're pretty new on the block so we're just we're just getting our our legs under us for how we're working a lot of these things together i would say a lot of this comes down to um you know you stare at stuff long enough, you know, what's unusual, you know, what is remarkable. And, you know, over time you begin to sort of tag individual ships that, that are constantly of interest to you. So I'm getting a good group of maritime militia ships that I'm pretty confident are maritime

militia ships. I'm beginning to, to get to know where all of the coast guard ships go and those kinds of things for the various countries. And in terms of the different countries involved, most of the conflicts between countries not called China are fairly low level. For example, you know, the Philippines will find a Vietnamese fishing ship in their exclusive economic zone and they'll kick it out, right? And we don't feel the need to go and search all that out because, you know, That's annoying, but it's not existential. The things that we are mostly concerned about are where China in particular is trying to essentially salami slice its way to total control over other countries' exclusive economic zones.

So that's where we focus a lot of our activity. All right, Gautam, I'm going to expand the following question based on you having published again today. So what are the practices of blocking and cable cutting? Where have you observed those today? Well, so cable cutting, the one we posted today, is a pretty simple tactic. It's simply just cutting off the trailing equipment that are towed after vessels operating somewhere in the South China Sea. And so they've been primarily using it to hinder, especially Vietnamese, kind of offshore oil and gas exploration. So they have seismic equipment towed after commercial vessels, and they'll send in fishermen or other gray zone actors to sabotage that equipment, essentially by cutting the cable, let it sink. what's perhaps like a more interesting case that we highlight in this particular blog post it's a

2009 incident in march where a a u.s naval vessel and an unarmed uh surveillance ship that were conducting kind of sonar operations near near high night island in china that got harassed by a bunch of fishing vessels as well as some some postcard-ish vessels at the time And they tried their best to essentially then cut the cable of the towed sonar array that this ship, the USNS Impeccable, was trailing. So they tried crossing over its way to cut it that way. And essentially they used like a pole with a hook on it to try and grab it. They failed, but they did succeed in eventually forcing the Impeccable

to cancel its mission. And it's an interesting, you know, personal note, like we haven't really seen this tactic much in the last decade nearly. It's fairly old. And us going through the historical record couldn't really find any examples newer than 2012. But it's still a very, I think, indicative tactic anyway. So we wanted to put it out regardless. and it comes with a very interesting picture courtesy of the u.s navy from the incident impeccable where you see a a chinese fisherman on kind of a banged up trawler holding his long stick trying to grab this toad sonar ray from the impeccable um and i know if you haven't seen

pictures of impeccable i recommend you look it up this is a really weird looking ship i believe the u.s navy may only make one of these before they kind of cancel the program but it's essentially like a big block but it looks like a big square more like a floating medieval castle but any kind of sleek naval vessel and so it's just very interesting just watching you know this Sloan Chinese sailor with a long stick attacking this castle thing basically and you know of course you know it's a funny kind of picture but I think it's also very indicative of the kind of asymmetric nature of these Chinese gray zone tactics in which you use fishermen, other kind of seemingly non-state actors to attack or harass or harangue or obstruct these much larger

Navy vessels. Yeah, if I would just quickly jump in on that, just because 2009, the maritime militia was not quite, you know, it certainly was certainly not what it is now. And so this, you know, at the time, you know, we didn't really know what to call this except for a fisherman. I think that today we'd probably call it a maritime militia vessel, but they obviously have matured quite a bit over the last 14 years. And the militia vessels that we encounter now are much larger and much more purpose built and much more well trained. So it'd be interesting to sort of speculate on how that interaction might have gone had it happened in 2023. And Gaute, you're a Northern European, so maybe you have something more to fall back on here.

Have you looked at any of the stuff that occurred over the course of the Cod Wars, as far as what you've seen from tactics that have made their way across the ocean to what's going on in the South China Sea? I have not. That's an interesting parallel to see if the Icelandic units were doing similar stuff. Yeah, no, we have not looked that far into history. So the terminology, and we talked about this beforehand, too, is the terminology captured in doctrine somewhere? And what is kind of the, I mean, you can explain a little bit more about what you envision here for the Maritime Gray Zone Tactics Playbook. We'll start with you, Gaude, but Ray, I know you have some thoughts on this as well. so i don't really know much about doctrine um and you know you you military folk would be better position to answer that um but at least for me as like a new analyst looking at this stuff um certainly a lack of just the vocabulary for the concrete tactics which was you know the main motivation for doing this project in the first place that we couldn't really find concrete

descriptions and good terminology for what precisely these Grayson tactics were. I kept hearing about Grayson tactics or unsafe maneuvers or harassment and stuff, but only rarely would you just get good detailed information of what precisely that entailed. And so this playbook that we're writing, which this cable-cutting blog is just one of many posts describing different tactics, is essentially then hoping to establish some kind of shared vocabulary that could um uh help us talk about this stuff with more precision

i don't know if you have anything to add right yeah i mean interesting um case uh you know study would be our long back channel communication we had over the post called bow crossing because we we sort of tested amongst ourselves and you know we actually do have a couple of sailors on the team who who gave their input as well what should we actually call this this practice where we've seen it over and over again where a ship will be essentially cut off another ship right and so what should we call that there were lots and lots of things thrown about and you know again the professionals say well you know we call these unsafe and unprofessional maneuvers or those kinds of things well like that's a kind of a long a long description seems to describe a lot and and

we really did it was almost comical uh the the way that we went back and forth and actually we had you know published and unpublished and and finally decided on on bow crossing uh which you know i mean i guess works as well as almost anything and i'm sure that somebody will come in along you know afterwards and say actually you should call it this and that's fine i mean ultimately what we're trying to do is just sort of categorize things in a way that we can talk about them. And particularly when we're talking to other countries as well, say, look, what you're seeing here is a well-known Chinese gray zone tactic that we call X. And just by being able to label it, I think it will help sort of do that work of lighting up the maritime gray zone

so that we all have a common vocabulary and understanding. and then a final question for you then what activity gets your attention and how do you hope to develop your work in the future so i don't know who wants to start with this one i have it labeled for you ray so if you got if you have any additional thoughts at the end i'm happy to get those as well yeah i think that i've got kind of a list in my in my head i don't know if i've ever written it down anywhere of things that to me are almost always interesting so for example Almost any time the Philippines goes out to resupply the Sierra Madre, which is this derelict ship sitting on Second Thomas Shoal, which they ran aground in 1999 with the specific intent of countering China's slowly building up Mischief Reef nearby. Of course, today, Mischief Reef is a full-fledged port and airfield, and Second Thomas Shoal is a derelict ship, which China has been blocking access to for quite a while, essentially with a strategy of letting it slide off into the sea someday as it breaks up.

but the Philippines continues to resupply it usually about once a month and they'll bring out fresh troops and the only thing that China will let in will be the small wooden boats you know China has decided that it would not it's not a good look for them to essentially let the sailors out there starve but at the same time they don't want them to actually be able to repair the ship or to replace the ship with another ship so they only let let through the small boats so whenever that happens, it gets my attention and I watch for it. So things like that, that are sort of recurring things, China surveying, doing hydrographic surveys and other countries, exclusive economic zones are interesting because those are illegal unless they have permission.

And of course they never ask permission because they claim the territory. And then any close interactions between Chinese security ships, broadly defined and other countries, security partnerships, I keep an eye out for those. So all of those things and, you know, and then I just sort of have, again, over time, you develop an eye for things that are unusual, and you want to look at more. And we don't always know from, you know, simple things like AIS returns exactly what those things are. And sometimes, I will freely confess in my in my Twitter post that I am speculating you know about and i and i welcome other open source intelligence analysts and there are others who watch the same space to to speculate with me or to illuminate uh where where i'm

speculating because a lot of this is going to sort of uh crowdsourcing intelligence is that essentially is what it is uh and i think that that's actually helpful for increasing maritime transparency is just sort of getting the wisdom of of several analysts together challenging one another on their assumptions and ultimately coming up with something that, that, that makes sense. Can I say anything to add to that? Sure. Yeah. So, you know, one, one factor of what Ray just described about wanting to,

to empower more analysts to work in the OSINT space here is, you know, to take the, the, the, the tactics playbook writing and turning it into more of a unified document That would be helpful as just a teaching tool for up-and-coming analysts, for seasoned veterans who know much about this stuff. A lot of the stuff we're describing is not new or novel to their mind. But for newer analysts like myself, there's quite a steep learning curve to know how to interpret the AIS or satellite inputs and stuff we have. And just a lot of activity that seems kind of weird, like why would a lone fisherman in a bank of trawler think it's a good idea to attack U.S. naval assets with a stick? Why do you see Coast Guard cutters that are larger than most U.S. naval warships?

Why do you see, you know, fishing ships with reinforced steel hulls that would be more appropriate for Arctic icebreakers than for, you know, fishing in tropical waters? why do you see whole fishing fleets tied together lying completely dormant for weeks or months with no discernible commercial benefits and so on and so on so just kind of describing these tactics and making it into kind of a comprehensive source we could go and read up on it hopefully we'll you know ease the lower the barrier of entry and just ease the learning curve for emerging kind of open source maritime geospatial intelligence analysts well i'm looking forward to seeing what else you come up with i'm sorry that's all that we have time for today i'd like to thank my guests ray powell and gauta frieza gauta where can we find

you online and where are the next couple chapters that we can expect to see come out here um well so i'm i'm available on twitter just gauta underscore freeze that's f-r-i-i-s um so the next step is just to keep publishing these posts we have about five posts up now i think out of So far, we have about 18 tactics that we want to describe. It's very much kind of a developing process, though. So I'd like to also encourage if any of your listeners have any kind of input or feedback or criticism, we'd really love to hear it. Any feedback is very welcome. And then, yeah, just create this kind of more unified, comprehensive thing.

Another thing we would like to do with it is to, as we were talking about a bit earlier, like it's hard to know where to start to look for stuff. And essentially, and so what we'd like to do is to be able to create kind of technical detection rules that could be fed into some kind of OSINT intelligence platform to automatically give you notifications or alert when some of these tactics are happening. So you could go check it out in real time. So that's another step we're looking at. And Ray, same final question to you then. Where can we find you and what's your next project? Perfect. So you can find both of us at CLight.live. That's our website. That's where we're publishing our posts. I also send out tweets, usually several times a day, depending on what's going on, at GordianNotRay. That's one word, GordianNotRay. And another sort of on the technical side, another thing that we are trying very hard to do coming up is to improve the canvas on which we paint, as it were, so that when we actually put out information on AIS tracks, they're placed against a more informative background that tells you where features are, where oil and gas activity is, where exclusive economics zones are.

so that's you know we're essentially trying to improve our product uh getting away from the simple screenshot uh method that we've been using so far all right well i know we have several listeners who work in areas that would be uh probably pretty helpful to your project so if you were listening you think like hey that's something that i do uh go ahead and reach out to these guys they're both pretty available on twitter but thank you both again for joining us to listeners. Thanks for tuning in. We'll see you next time. We'll be right back.