Sea Control - Sea Control 493 - “Assertive Transparency” in the Gray Zone with Ray Powell

Episode Date: February 8, 2024

“Game Changer: The Philippines’ Assertive Transparency Campaign: How the Philippines Rewrote the Counter Gray Zone Playbook in 2023”, by Col. Raymond Powell US Air Force (Ret) and Benjamin Goirigolzarri Ph. D., Stratbase ADRi, January 12, 2024Sea Control 456 - China’s Maritime Gray Zone Tactics and SeaLight with Ray Powell and Gaute Friis, by Jared Samuelson, Sea Control Podcast, August, 24, 2023

Hello and welcome to the Sea Control Podcast. I'm Nathan Miller. Today I speak with Ray Powell about his recent paper, Game Changer, the Philippines' Assertive Transparency Campaign, How the Philippines Rewrote the Counter-Gray Zone Playbook in 2023. Here at SimSec, we aim to further international maritime peace and security through an exchange of ideas and the rigor of critical thought and writing. If you haven't already, please check out SimSec.org for new articles on the most important maritime topics. If you would like to contribute to the discussion, check out the Write for SimSec tab to learn how you can submit articles for publication. Finally, I highly 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. hello and welcome aboard sea control my guest today is colonel raymond powell u.s air force retired he's the founder and director of sea light we're discussing his recent work game changer the philippines assertive transparency campaign how the philippines rewrote the counter gray zone playbook in 2023 ray welcome aboard and welcome back you were just on the show with jared in 456, and you discussed Chinese gray zone tactics. So this is a beautiful continuation of that discussion. But could you please start by reminding the listeners a little bit about

your background, please? Yeah, thanks, Nate. It's great to be on with you guys again. Really had a good time last time, and I enjoy this format. Yeah, so I joined the Air Force when I was 19 years old. I was failing out of college and did not want to admit to my father that I was failing out of college. So I thought that I would play the patriotic duty card and so enlisted. A few years later, I managed to get my commission. But my career was very eclectic. I sort of bounced around a lot of different career fields. One of the common threads, though, was I began as a Vietnamese cryptolinguist. So even though I'm not a natural linguist, I was forced to learn Vietnamese. And it gave me kind of a fascination with Southeast Asia. I ended up, my very first

assignment was to the Philippines. And I kept sort of coming back to the region over and over again until finally, about a decade ago, I got an assignment as the U.S. Air Attaché in Vietnam. And so, of course, that sort of tightly focused me on Vietnam for a bit. And then finally, probably my penultimate assignment as defense attache in Australia, even though it was further south, there was still lots and lots of discussion about the South China Sea and Southeast Asia as Australia had many security concerns to the north. Oh, and I'm sorry, I should mention that since I retired in 2021, I came back to Northern California where I have a lot of family connections. I did a short little fellowship at Stanford and then got involved in this volunteer transparency

initiative that has sort of consumed my life. And as a reminder to the listeners, all opinions expressed here are strictly our own and not reflective of any of the institutions with which we might be otherwise associated. And also to timestamp this conversation, we are speaking January 30, 2024. Listeners, if you haven't, please go back and listen to episode 456. For those who won't or could use a little bit of a memory jog, could you please help us with some of the dynamics and some of the players in the South China Sea and kind of give us a brief overview of what PRC is doing in the gray zone? Sure. Yeah. In fact, when I first started looking at the South China Sea as a young person in the Air Force, most of the South China Sea discussion was about who had control of which feature.

We call features, we call reefs or shoals or whatever they are, islands. Anything was just called a feature because it was so hard to classify what everything was. I mean, it's something that's a few meters above water, below water, high tide or low tide. And so there was, since really the early 70s, there's been kind of a push to gain control of more features to be able to stake a greater claim. And specifically because there was a lot of belief that there were hydrocarbons, there were oil and gas beneath the surface. And so that was the discussion in those early days. And there was occasional bloodshed over who would get to have which feature. That has changed a lot really in the last, say, 15 years, where especially as, you know, during the island building campaign of, you know, sort of about a decade ago, China began to set up island bases.

Now, these are not real islands. They're what we call artificial islands, right? They're built on top of reefs, but they are bases. They have airfields, they have ports, and they have quite the ability to allow China to project power all the way across the South China Sea, which is a really new and, I mean, it was their own game changer, frankly. And it took a lot of us, it really took the world kind of by surprise. And, you know, this is maybe one of the most effective gray zone tactics that we've seen, because nobody was quite sure what to do about it when they saw the dredgers and all of the ships sort of descending on these reefs. And all of a sudden we see the reefs begin to change. And of course, there were lots of protests. But in the end, nobody was really able to stop it. And so, you know, at the end, now China is claiming increasing control, not just over the feature itself, but around all the water of the South China Sea. And we've begun to hear much more about this old Chinese idea of a nine dash line claim all the way around the edges of the South China Sea and increasing willingness by China to enforce that claim by beginning to try to regulate and control the activities of the coastal states and especially the Philippines. And the reason for that, we kind of maybe pick two. One is because the Philippines has been more of a problem, if you will. They've been more assertive in trying to defend their rights. But really, I mean, a lot of it is geographical. The specific features that have been most contentious have been in the Philippines' exclusive economic zone, the Scarborough Shoal, which China seized in 2012, and is a very important Philippine fishing ground. And of course, the very much in the news Second Thomas Shoal, where China has effectively set up a blockade of the Philippines ship, a World War II era ship that's now a rusting hulk that serves as the Philippines outpost at that location. So how is assertive transparency changing Manila's previous efforts? And frankly, what are their goals with assertive transparency?

Right. So in, you know, up until about 2016, the Philippines had been very assertive. And of course, they had they filed what we called the arbitral tribunal case at the Hague in 2013 after the seizure of Scarborough Shoal. And so they were trying to use, in that sense, lawfare to make their case that this seizure was illegal and that China's actions, other actions in what they call the West Philippine Sea were illegal. But in 2016, they elected a president, Rodrigo Duterte, who had a very, very different view on the world. And he was very interested in trying to move from a U.S.-centric foreign policy to a China-centric foreign policy. And in conjunction with that, over his six-year term, he actively downplayed any interactions between the Philippine Maritime Security Forces and China's in the West Philippine

Sea. And so there was just sort of a dearth of information. Nobody knew what was happening in the West Philippine Sea. To the extent there were confrontations, they were just these quiet confrontations. And of course, 2022, President Bongbong Marcos took over as the next president. And for the first six months or so, the foreign policy was largely the same. But in January of this year, he made a radical decision in a lot of ways. It centered around an incident in which a China Coast Guard ship pointed what they called a military grade laser or what's known in law enforcement as a dazzler at a Philippine Coast Guard vessel in February of last year. And the Philippine government took about a week to consider what it wanted to do because it had the evidence. It had pictures. It had video. And there was a lot of internal discontent in the government about this previous six years where nothing was said.

And a lot of people really wanted to be able to speak out. And something that had happened the month prior in January of last year was that President Marcos had replaced his national security team with sort of people who maybe had a different view on the world. And that new national security team, in the end, together with President Marcos, decided to go ahead and release the evidence. And almost immediately after that, became very assertive in not just releasing reactively the evidence of harassment and coercion and those kinds of things, but proactively, assertively going out and finding more evidence. And so suddenly we began to see Philippine Coast Guard aircraft and ships and the Navy going out and allowing pictures to be taken and release the public of vessel swarms in various near various Philippine claimed features or, you know, more of these harassment incidents. And all of that began to make it into the Philippine and international media. And what ended up happening because of that was there was a lot of, of course, national outcry that, hey, this is going on. But there was also a lot of international outcry, and the Philippines found that it was getting a lot of support. And so I think that this probably encouraged them to continue this very assertive transparency approach. And assertive transparency was a term that we coined, but it seems to encapsulate what the Philippines was doing by essentially adopting as a counter-grey zone tactic the use of visual information. And I think it really has been, as we put in our piece, a game changer. speaking of your piece you outlined i think it was three different conditions

uh for success that that you kind of identified our minimalist goals uh what were those yeah and i and i kind of hinted at them just a minute ago right so the first is the that assertive transparency enables the building of national resilience and that is essentially the idea that under normal circumstances most uh people in any country are internally focused you know you're concerned about the economy. You want to know how much your groceries cost and, you know, where do my kids go to school? And you're not really interested in sort of foreign policy, except as it affects you. But assertive transparency kind of brings the effects home to the average person so that the nation begin. And this is very, of course, important in a democracy.

The nation allows the government room to address these kinds of issues. So we've just seen, you know, President Marcos has put out a new budget for the military and maritime forces generally, and we're seeing increases in the budget. We're seeing more attention paid toward countering disinformation coming from foreign sources in the Philippines. So those kinds of things happen because the nation gets behind the government and says, yes, we want something done. We're seeing these pictures. They're very disturbing to us. And we don't want to just sit back and let it happen. So that's the building national resilience condition that we talk about, condition to success. The second is, as I said before, the building of international support. And since the beginning of the year, we've seen repeated, for example, reaffirmations of U.S. treaty commitments to the Philippines. We've seen the commitment by the government of Canada to provide dark vessel detection capabilities to the Philippines.

We've seen an offer of additional radar systems from Japan to the Philippines. We've seen all of these different, you know, and also just moral support. We saw India, which is famously non-aligned, come out after a bilateral engagement with the Philippines and affirm their agreement with the 2016 arbitral tribunal case, which the Philippines won over China. So all of these things are, of course, very encouraging to the government and a second condition for success. And then the final condition that we talk about is the imposition of reputational costs on the perpetrator, in this case, China, so that whenever these things happen, it's very clear across the world what China is doing. And this costs China something. They are forced to surrender some of the moral high ground that they attempt to build through other means. For example, they have a rhetoric that says we're all about the win-win in all of our relationships or we're the champion of the global south. Well, I mean, you're not exactly the champion of the global south when you're pushing around a developing country. And so these three conditions, resilience, international support, reputational costs, you know, kind of, as you call the three pillars, because that's the way we put it in our picture, but three conditions for ultimately deterring or defeating gray zone activities. And so, you know, we thought it was helpful to kind of paint that picture so that in the Philippines and elsewhere, people can take a look at what the Philippines are doing and put it in some kind of context, because ultimately the question comes up, why are we doing all this?

You know, why are we picking a fight with a big power? One thing that I wanted to ask you about, because I found particularly enlightening, was a vignette that you put in the piece about a journalist that had embedded on a Bureau of Fisheries and Aquatic Resources vessel. Could you, I guess, explain that for the listeners? Because it really kind of put rubber to the road for me as far as being able to see what the strategy looks like. So this was a very exciting weekend in the Philippines. And actually, there were three different things happening almost simultaneously. There was a second Thomas Scholl resupply mission that was going on. There was, following that, there was going to be this, they called it a Christmas convoy,

where a little flotilla of mostly civilian ships went out to the West Philippine Sea, the Philippines, West Philippine Sea outposts, and brought gifts essentially for Christmas. But right before any of this started, these three, we call it BFAR, fisheries boats, went out. And they're not very big boats, they're 30-meter boats, went out to bring essentially oil subsidies and food to the fishermen, the Filipino fishermen out at Scarborough Shoal. So Scarborough Shoal, of course, was seized by China and they only allow in small boats. So even larger indigenous fishing boats have to sort of stop at a certain point and they can they can push out a smaller boat to go and do any sort of low level fishing. And that's all that China will allow in Scarborough Shoal.

And so, you know, in order to be out there, you have to if you want to stay out there for longer and catch more fish, because this is a very inefficient way to catch fish. we're having to go back and forth with this little boat. So BFAR decides to bring out these subsidies. And when they arrive, they are confronted by China Coast Guard vessels, which open up on them with water cannons. And on this particular occasion, as part of this assertive transparency campaign, the BFAR had embarked some embedded journalists. And so in near real time, these These journalists are on their phones with the cameras and all these things documenting all of these water cannons being deployed against these smaller BFAR vessels by these 100-meter China Coast Guard ships. And it was really a stark scene because, of course, fishery ships are civilian ships. They're unarmed.

They were bringing food and oil subsidies. So it was essentially a humanitarian mission that was being met with water cannons. And it was probably one of the most vivid examples of how assertive transparency can impose direct reputational costs. I mean, of course, you know, Philippine citizens got up and armed. There was widespread outrage, but then it led into the rest of this weekend, where, of course, it was another very contentious resupply mission at Second Thomas Shoal. And then the Christmas convoy essentially was turned around by the the opposition of another China Coast Guard vessel and some Chinese Navy vessels. So, you know, the entire weekend was kind of a crescendo really in December for this year long story. But, you know, the fisheries vessels were maybe one of the most really stark and vivid examples of, one, bullying, and second, the effect of assertive transparency as the counter tactic.

Obviously, events are still unfolding. You know, this is a very dynamic space. But from your perspective, and obviously you call this a game changer, but where do you see this going? I mean, how do you see this affecting the dynamics? And frankly, is Manila succeeding? I think that Manila is unquestionably succeeding in the first two pillars. Right. And even in the third pillar. So, I mean, there are real reputational reputational costs being imposed. The question is, does all of this ultimately lead to the desired outcome, which is the deterrence or the defeat of China's gray zone strategy? And I think a lot of this comes down to, one, how long will the Philippines be able to sort of maintain this posture?

Because there are tremendous pressures in every country to accommodate Chinese demands. And this is, you know, these generally will come from all places, not just the Chinese embassy or Beijing. These come from business people who are trying to do business with China. And, of course, they get messages that say your government is making it very difficult. You know, there will be threats of embargoes or, you know, I saw this for three years down in Australia where, well, I don't know that, you know, because Australia is talking about this counter interference campaign. I don't know if Chinese students feel safe anymore in Australian universities. Maybe they won't come anymore. Or maybe your imports of maybe the imports of Australian coal and wine might have problems and we might not be able to bring them in right now.

So all kinds of China has a big toolbox of coercive actions and, of course, you know, can come out with a carrot from time to time and say, you know, if this all went away, we might be able to work something out. And so, you know, these kinds of pressures are on the Philippines, first and foremost. And so the question now, as we turn from 2023 into 2024, is how long will the Philippines be able to sustain this posture? And that's where, you know, obviously the level of international support and the amount of resilience built up and those kinds of things will play a crucial role in sort of giving the Marcos administration room to maneuver. It would be important for the Marcus administration to, obviously, you have to continue to talk to China. And, you know, if they do offer you inducements to change tactics, I'm not the leader of the country. I'm no one to tell them what to do. But I would certainly advise not to sell it for a bag of magic beans. Make sure you get something tangible and long-term in exchange, not just sort of a promise that maybe things will be better if you'd stop. The other real question is, will the Philippines be alone in this? And I've had a number of conversations since we published our piece by people in the U.S. space and the international space. You're just sort of thinking, hey, what are the lessons for the rest of the world?

Can we find other places, other domains, whether it be the financial domain or the air domain or other places where assertive transparency by other countries, not just the Philippines, could be successful in ultimately maybe forcing China to tone down its gray zone strategies? because that's really what we're that would really be what success looks like is essentially China no longer having a free hand in the in the gray zone where things are opaque and deniable because nothing is opaque and deniable anymore so for as long as it's just the Philippines I think the pressure on the Philippine government will be intense but if it begins to be other places and in other domains, I think that maybe we can, you know, really see our way forward to a deterrent and ultimately a defeat of gray zone tactics. Well, I'm certainly going to keep an eye out for that. But is there anything else that you would

like to add for the listeners? Anything that I've missed? Well, I think, you know, we're looking ahead to 2024. And, you know, the Marcos administration has called for a paradigm shift in the West Philippine Sea. And we're all sort of watching to see what that might look like. And so will it look like more assertion or less assertion, you know, or maybe more assertion or less public assertion? So I think watching the Philippines to see, you know, what is the future of embedded journalists on those ships? Will there be more or less of them or will they keep that static? Will they actually go ahead with some of their discussed tactics of just going out to improve their West Philippine Sea outpost? And ultimately, the real sort of the pain point,

the rub point of Second Thomas Shoal, what happens to the Sierra Madre? What happens to that old rusty ship where every month, month and a half or so, there's some kind of resupply that is generally opposed, and we see all of these images come back, will that ship be able to sustain? Could a large storm wash it away? And will there be a Chinese move against it? Or will the Philippines move to reinforce it? And how long will the world be sort of not quite outraged over the fact that a large country is effectively blockading a smaller country's outpost? And somehow we all kind of grew comfortable with it over a long period of time. And, you know, this past year has reminded us that that really is kind of an outrage. You shouldn't be allowed

to do that. So I think those, you know, the Sierra Madre is probably, if there's one point, it's second time a shoal. And that situation is probably the one that has probably the most obvious potential for becoming a flashpoint. Well, thank you very much for coming on the show. where can we find you online and what are you working on next the site is sea light dot live and we have we keep an active blog uh where we talk about things that that are current we we have a resources page that if you're researching south china sea issues i think you'll find very helpful because we have direct links to a lot of good resources that you can take a look at i'm also pretty active on uh twitter or x uh which surprises me because this was never something i

did while I was in the military. But I have an account. It's at Gordian Knot Ray, because I work with the Gordian Knot Center here at Stanford. So at Gordian Knot Ray. And oftentimes, if I don't have time to blog about it, I'll just put screenshots of South China Sea gray zone activities on that. We are turning into a number of different areas. One that we're looking at very hard is can we somehow document and assist in the documentation of environmental destruction in the South China Sea? And there are two real sources of this. One is island building, of course, but the other that goes kind of under the radar is giant clam harvesting, which has actually destroyed a huge number of reefs. Mostly this happens because of Chinese destructive fishing

tactics or techniques in the South China Sea? And is there a way to document that, to bring that to light? And by the way, I have to, you know, give a hat tip to the Asian Maritime Transparency Initiative from CSIS, who's done a fantastic recent article called Deep Blue Scars, that talks about the progress of this reef damage, much of it, which is almost certainly irreversible, and destroying not just the ecosystem, but a lot of indigenous fishing all across the region. So we're looking very hard at how to look at that from both a legal perspective and a sort of public relations perspective. Well, thank you again for coming on the show and to the listeners. Thank you for tuning in. We'll see you next time. © transcript Emily Beynon

© transcript Emily Beynon