Sea Control - Sea Control 588: Outsourcing Security at Sea with Pieter Zhao

Episode Date: October 21, 2025

1. "Outsourcing Security at Sea—The Return of Private Maritime-Security Companies and Their Role in Twenty-First-Century Maritime Security," by Pieter Zhao, Naval War College Review, Winter 2024.2. Irregular Warfare Initiative.3. Pieter Zhao LinkedIn.4. Pieter Zhao BlueSky.5. Pieter Zhao Contact Page.

All right, welcome to Sea Control, Sea Control fans. This is Jay. My guest today is Peter Zhao, and we're going to talk about his recent Naval War College review article called Outsourcing Security at Sea, the Return of Private Maritime Security companies and their role in 21st century maritime security. That sounds like a really fun topic, so looking forward to getting into that. First off, Peter, would you mind telling us a little bit about yourself? Yes, thank you so much, Jay.

Thank you for having me. I'm honored to be on the podcast. So my name is Peter. I'm a PhD candidate at the Erasmus University in Rotterdam, which is the second city in the Netherlands, for those who are not too familiar. it's quite an important city because we have a big port so we're the biggest port outside Asia so it's a city with a strong maritime character and I think that character also influenced me academically so my PhD is on the delegation of defense and security capabilities at sea

specifically to non-state and irregular actors which are traditionally considered state or military terrain. And that's also very much related to this paper that we'll be discussing during this episode. And yeah, before starting my PhD, I did history. I did my bachelor's and master's in history here at the Erasmus University. And then I did a second master's in international security studies at the Paris School of International Affairs, which is at Sciences Po in Paris. And I did part of that degree at the Johns Hopkins University's School of advanced international studies, so I managed to spend some time in the U.S. as well. So that was good, and I was focused on the maritime domain within these studies, quite a lot of different

topics within the maritime domain. So yeah. Yeah, cool. Very cool. As a reminder, listeners, the opinions here are our own and not representative of any institution which we might be otherwise associated. Before I get into just stuff particularly in the article, Well, do you have a, I guess what inspired you, I was going to ask you about what inspired you to write the article, but what inspired you to get involved in maritime issues, aside from living in Rotterdam? Yeah, no, good question. Yeah, when I studied history, I always focused on the history of international relations. In our program here, that was one of the kind of specializations you could do. And, yeah, when looking into the history of international relations, you kind of need to specialize in something.

And I always was very interested in the kind of role of the maritime domain in international relations, which is sometimes a bit of an understudied domain. Also, in the history of conflict and war, it's often very land centered. And I was very interested in the maritime domain in all those discussions. And I think in international relations literature, they often like to use the term sea blindness. um so yeah partly just an interest for myself but i guess it's also good academically to focus on something uh and this uh this really sparked my interest and i never really um yeah i never really went and let go of it so um yeah i stayed with the maritime well good we're glad we're glad you stayed welcome aboard keep sailing yeah um was there any particular for this article in

particular was there any um recent event that inspired you writing this piece and it's it it covers a lot of historical background um for those and we'll put a show link up here it's an open source article from a u.s naval war college review so easy everybody can check it out but um anything in particular that inspired you to write this uh right on this particular topic yeah so uh i wrote the piece about two years ago it got published this year because we did some changes to it but But, yeah, back when I was kind of finishing my graduate studies here in the Netherlands, there was a lot of discussion about the, well, legalization of private maritime security companies. Because at that time, most flag states had already, well, either legalized or facilitated the use of private maritime security companies for counter-piracy transits in the former high-risk area. And in the Netherlands, this was a long discussion because the Netherlands initially had a very principled stance that, well, the monopoly on the legal use of forces with states.

So they were not going to allow the use of private maritime security companies. And they held on to this stance for a long time. So in order to provide commercial shipping with protection, they set up these vessel protection detachments, which were provided by the Dutch Marine Corps, that ships could request when they were transiting the high-risk area. But yeah, this was often considered not ideal by the shipping community in the Netherlands because it was relatively expensive. there was a lot of bureaucratic um well obstacles that um that came up when ships wanted to request such a vessel protection detachment so therefore there was a big influence a big lobby by the shipping industry to the dutch government and parliament to legalize the use of private maritime security companies like at that time most other european flag states and of course non-european

flag states had already done and eventually this um law was passed in 2022 so quite recent um and that's about around the time that um that i wrote that i wrote the article but of course i didn't really focus just on the netherlands i kind of focused on the broader development uh because i was also quite interested in kind of more the historical perspective but i think the discussion in the netherlands kind of inspired me to write this piece um and uh yeah it's still yeah it's it's not as much of an ongoing discussion anymore here in the netherlands um since 2022 there are three private maritime security companies that are licensed to provide protection but of course in um in we in recent years with the um in with the uh with the with the attacks in the red sea

a lot of transits have been rerouted so um yeah it's been kind of an issue that has gone to the background a little bit uh but yeah um since related to that you wrote the maritime security business i'm even going back to where we before we would call it that like the british east india company navy um it's ebbed and flowed or oscillated um with its most recent high water mark maybe around 2011 with the somalia off the coast of east africa um since you began writing the article and got published there do you believe the use of um private maritime security companies is on another upswing even though it may be of of not a big deal in the netherlands isn't necessarily as much it was do you think that's you know is it a growth industry yeah well um that's a good question

and there's a lot of discussion about this and kind of social media channels of people kind of dealing with these issues because um yeah with the with the last the last two years um in november 2023 there was a a kind of an upsurge in somali piracy incidents which kind of corresponded with the houthi uh attacks so there were some discussions whether this was connected maybe um there was some communication or it was just opportunistic behavior um by somali pirates because of course the naval um the naval um missions in the in the area kind of um switched there uh kind of started moving to the uh started looking at the houthi threat so their guards were down um as to the somali piracy uh problem so therefore there were some discussions whether

this was connected to each other um uh could be but at the same time there was also an up search in demand for private maritime security companies um but yeah of course uh a private maritime security company is not really going to help you against the threats coming from the Houthi threat. Well, maybe you could use private maritime security companies to avoid hijacking, but that hasn't really been the main kind of modus operandi by the Houthis. So against ballistic or cruise missiles, that's not going to work. Although there has been some discussion that maybe it would be helpful against USV threats,

the unmanned surface vessels there have been some videos that um have rotated that have kind of been around on the internet in which you saw a private um a private security detail kind of shooting a usv and uh and destroying it before it could reach the ship but of course that's not really a responsible way of dealing with this threat because most of the ships just you know rerouted um and did not transit the red sea anymore um so therefore yeah there has been a bit of an upsurge uh in the market uh because of the um partly because of the resurgence of somali piracy in november 2023 over um 2024 um in over the entire year but then at the same time because the number of transits has declined um a lot of private maritime security companies are

also facing a market where um there's less demand because the transits are just not going through so yeah it's hard to say it's also hard to get um any reliable data on this so yeah i get most of my data from talking to to people in the industry um but um yeah it's uh it's interesting to look out for and i think um in the coming years now that the boothies have stopped um or at least it was only last week that they announced to to halt attacks in the red sea and in any case if shipping companies decide to return to the red sea you know that'll take a long time because these contracts go up to six months so yeah it's hard to say what will happen in the coming months but before the Houthi threat and before also before that you had COVID which also declined

transits um in global shipping in general um the estimates are that 80 percent of ships transit in the former high-risk area had some form of private arm protection or arm protection so in that sense you could say that the market has more or less consolidated and that this is now a just a mainstream practice for ships transiting the region are you aware from your uh research or just asking around are there are there um are they getting used in other certain high-risk areas the malacca straits places like that are you aware of just side note yeah um yeah that's a good question um well in the historical literature on the literature on private maritime security companies um first uh kind of mentions of them is often in relation to the malacca straits

which of course has in the global piracy hot spots has always been on the radar um but the um the market really consolidated due to the somali piracy um um threat because of the specific form of piracy there so it was really hijacking of entire ships which caused the uh yeah well shipping industry too much to to ignore while in the malacca straits it's often also more hit and run um um so theft uh and therefore shipping companies might not consider that worth hiring a complete security team for because uh it's too expensive um so uh yeah there is there is currently as far as i'm aware not as much uh private maritime security companies active in the malacca straits as there used to be maybe in the early 2000s um and of course

another privacy hotspot is uh the gulf of guinea um west africa um but there the uh it's also quite a difficult uh a different threat because it often happens within territorial waters or um or at least within the eez and coastal states are not a huge fan of course of ships having on board armed guards so um often the private maritime security companies operating in the gulf of guinea which definitely are um they definitely operate there um they provide um escort vessels which are often crewed by either Coast Guard or local naval personnel, and then often with maybe a liaison from the private maritime security company. So you also see the development there, although I have to admit that I haven't really looked

into that region as much. So I'm not an expert on that at all. But the form is very different. But yeah, you can, at least it shows that these private maritime security companies are also trying to see new markets and see other potential threats or uses that they could jump on. So I've also, in discussions with representatives from the industry, I've also heard people talk about patrols for illegal fishing, for example,

which is also a big issue in a lot of countries that can't deal with the illegal fishing issue, but also I've heard discussions, recent discussions, this is very recent, so I have not been able to find much more on this, but in the Netherlands with the undersea infrastructure threat, which of course has been in the news recently,

there have been calls by the Dutch Navy that they are unable to patrol, well the dutch eez at all times so therefore they are considering partnering up with commercial commercial parties as well and i wouldn't be surprised if these were the same companies that have been approached for the counter piracy threat as well but that is very recent so but yeah opportunities are out there and you know with these kinds of developments historically You can often see that once an actor like a private maritime security company becomes consolidated in the maritime security environment, they will try and find other avenues, of course, to offer their services. I'll go back a little ways.

This article goes into a lot of history there, which is really cool. um uh when you said private maritime security companies some you know they want to keep themselves in business even when their main perhaps line goes away um could you talk a little bit about that historically i think most folks on simsec uh who are listening are you know a little familiar with the pirate privateer difference and a little bit of the history of that but anything you want to go into um for those folks who aren't or or that you probably know more than most of us about that so difference between private and privateer how that you know issues with that how that can one can evolve into the other yeah good question um yeah there's of course a big

literature on the history of piracy and privateering and maybe to give some more information about the article itself because the interest in the topic came a little bit from this literature that exists on the historical cases of privateering, because when reading about the discussions in the Netherlands about private maritime security companies, I started reading more about private maritime security companies in general, and then most of the literature about this topic often sees it in line with the discussion on private military companies on land, for example um but i often feel like it's often treated as if it's a new phenomenon but of course the historical record of maritime warfare and security includes a lot of um non-state actor

or non-state and irregular actors maybe a term that we would use today um so yeah i was i was kind of interested in this historical aspect and kind of seeing it as a long line of non-state and irregular actors in maritime warfare and security in which these private maritime security companies are kind of a new form, but they kind of fit into this longer line. So the article basically tries to look at the history of other non-state or irregular actors in the history of maritime warfare and security, and specifically the characteristics or dynamics that underpin their use and their mobilization in the historical context. And then it finds that, well, these characteristics or dynamics are quite similar to the contemporary

dynamics underpinning the use of private maritime security companies, because, of course, states are dealing with um limited capabilities i mean that's always the case um it's always about kind of maximizing your resources um and especially in the historical sense states often have limited economic um at least states often have limited naval capabilities so therefore privateering was considered a cost-effective way of um dealing with the all the different kind of maritime security threats that they had to balance so that's quite similar as you see today in the discussions on private maritime security companies um like i mentioned in the netherlands it was all about cost effectiveness so that was one kind of uh pillar an economic pillar you could

say you could say that underpins both dynamics um then the second pillar you could say is about political will um because specifically later in the um in the 18th and late 16th 17th century um for example the french case study shows that the french state at some point invested heavily into its navy but at some point decided that it was more um it it wanted to focus more on they get the course strategy as as is a very famous um famous word in naval literature so they start um promoting the private they start encouraging privateering more as opposed to their standing navy which is more of a political choice it wasn't really a as much of an of course it was also an economic consideration but it was very much a political choice as well because

they kind of decided to defend the the standing navy so in a sense it's a political will um issue as well so especially of course just that's that's attacking merchant shipping primarily right yeah so it's about commerce rating uh it's about commerce rating um uh over over uh yeah it's a kind of a preference for commerce rating with privateering vessels as opposed to the british which focused more on the battlefield battle fleet and the royal navy so you can see a clear divergence there and there's a very good paper on this by Brian Mabee

I think in 2010 or 2009 and there's some good literature on this topic so yeah economic political and of course also military because a development that you very clearly see in the historical and the

contemporary is that militaries often feel like the protection of commerce is not necessarily a core task for the navy that's something that you could very clearly see in the contemporary discussion about private maritime security companies so in the dutch case at some point the marine corps which at first considered this an important task when they were when these vessel protection detachments were first established at some point started thinking well this is very much a low intensity task and kind of

of something that shouldn't really be assigned to a well elite trained unit like the Marine Corps so that is that really the core task for the Navy and it takes away capabilities that could be used for other core tasks especially in an age of returned kind of peer-to-peer competition or at least preparation for peer-to-peer competition so I felt like these kind of economic political military pillars are you can recognize them in most of the historical case studies and in the contemporary case studies and that was kind of the motivation to write the paper and yeah I'm kind of building on that idea for my PhD as well in which I tried to zoom out from the private maritime security companies because of course this delegation of defense

and security capabilities which are traditionally state or military terrain are also visible in other developments if you talk about the South China Sea for example the boots on the ground or in the water as it were

are not really navies that are kind of being assertive but it's coast guards or more often fishing vessels which are maritime militia and the potential attacks in the baltics on the cables that's not like a a foreign you know a naval vessel correct those are those

are also private entities so yeah yeah exactly or public private in which the blur the it's kind of a blurry line um so i think yeah this whole discussion about hybrid warfare at sea uh also kind of fits into this discussion um and um yeah i think it's interesting as well to see maybe to come back to your previous question that um the historical record it's also not as simple as just saying non-state or state or public or private because the lines are often very blurred um in the privateering literature um there's a lot of discussion about whether you could really consider this a non-state venture because of course it's very much related to the state as well and often the public and private ownership was very much blurred sometimes privateers would

be commissioned on a naval ship for example so it's not as easy to make that distinction I think that's definitely something you see today as well and therefore it's also interesting to see that it's not a simple delegation by the state to a non-state actor or by the public to private sometimes it's also the private kind of uh taking the step and then public kind of following along so yeah i think it's interesting to look into the blurred this kind of blurred character um so yeah all right yeah it seems like every few years or more often someone published an article in maybe naval war college review or proceedings in the u.s about bringing back bringing back privateers as the as the u.s navy at least struggles and most other navies struggle

with getting their fleet up to size that they want it that that rear someone comes up with hey you know here's how we used to we used to solve this problem uh so yeah but this i really like go ahead sorry yeah and in the article i also mentioned that in the the 1856 declaration of paris uh which is when privateering is officially outlawed um of course it's not a sudden stop uh but of course the united states it's often mentioned is not one of the signatories and they never ratified this declaration so in a sense as you point out we were a dinky the u.s was a dinky navy at the time basically it was not a it was not really world class so we needed to help yeah yeah yeah because it's very much of course also related to the um discussion about

privateering being a weapon of the weaker power um and then kind of this discussion about asymmetric asymmetric warfare um so which is also again a term that is used a lot today so these parallels are visible but of course uh that may be in another um form i mean privateering is quite an historical i'm also in the article specifically saying that it's not um it's you know these simple um historical parallels often serve as nice uh headlines uh for for for an article you know the return of the privateer um that um yeah i'm arguing that you shouldn't really look at the specifically at the actors but more at the dynamics that kind of underpin their use and then you can see that these um kind of overlapping characteristics for dynamics

are uh are out there and it's interesting to analyze them because that of course can tell us a little bit about potential effects and consequences today as well yeah agreed yeah Again, article is very in-depth, really well-researched. I started looking up some of your references for that just to nerd out a bit. So I encourage folks to do that. I guess last big question here. From all that research, do you see there's uses that nations, non-state actors, NGOs might have for private maritime security companies that they currently aren't discussed or underused, not used at all? It seems like there could be a lot to do with this.

Yeah. Well, I think it's a good question. Of course, I'm also a little bit the historian, so I feel like I'm not sure if I should be the one to tell to tell the world's Navy that they should be privatizing more. But, yeah, I think it's an interesting question. I think it's interesting to see what the future holds for these private maritime security companies as they are searching for new kind of markets or threats that they could work on. In recent conversations I've had, I've also heard talk of, for example, besides the maritime domain awareness patrols, kind of the lower intensity tasks, but also I've heard counter mining, for example. i've also heard discussions about that so yeah i definitely think there are a lot of people thinking about different um uses there could be for these private maritime security companies um so yeah it's interesting to keep an eye out for for those developments uh and like i said as well it's also interesting to take it a bit broader and look at what is being what is done in other kind of

non-state with other non-state actors in the maritime domain so um yeah for example the maritime militias but also i've heard discussions uh for the us case about the merchant marine that should maybe be reinstated to offset uh certain certain um capabilities for for the navies so yeah i feel like it's a it's a it's a very dynamic topic that might show a lot of changes in the coming in the coming in the coming years um maybe in the coming century so yeah but as an historian i try to stay clear of predicting the future that's probably wise but you do have a lot of great historical examples in the article there so i think that i think there are people go like oh yeah i didn't think about that so anyway encourage folks to look at that um so i'll just

close off what's working we find you online and where are you looking at what are you working on next besides your phd anything else yeah thank you um well i'll primarily be focusing on my phd um i uh i'm very much in the early stages of the research so yeah primarily looking at this same kind of topic from a broader perspective so i'm delegating defense and security capabilities which are traditionally exclusively state or military terrain array away from these actors to the non-state and irregular actors or non-military actors so that's what i'm mainly looking at and i also recently joined the irregular warfare initiative as a fellow so um yeah i'll also be working with uh with the other fellows and the other people at the irregular warfare initiative

to further expand this topic and look at irregular warfare as a concept in the maritime domain specifically and where i can be found um well my my email will be down in the show notes i'm sure you can find my people page from the university and besides that i um i you can find me on linkedin where i try to uh share my my publications and my research and any comments i recently joined blue sky as well i haven't really posted on it yet but i'm also going to try to keep that up so those are um my uh my social media handles and i'm excited to exchange thoughts with anyone who thinks uh he or she might have any additions or insights that might be relevant to my research as well fantastic thanks so much and shout out to the iwi folks too they're doing they're doing

good work over there people aren't familiar i'll put a we'll put several links up on the show notes here so well thanks again look forward to speaking with you whenever you uh when your next article i'm sure whatever it's going to be you get out there it's going to be fascinating so we look forward to talking about that and for all the listeners thanks again for listening and we will see you next time © BF-WATCH TV 2021 Oh, help me, oh, I'm bullying the addicts, why, I'm bullying the addicts, help me, oh, I'm bullying the addicts, bullying the addicts, oh, no.