Examination of the Maritime Expanded Gray Zone

The Maritime Gray Zone is defined as the operational and political space between war and peace. In 2024 this space is ever changing in many places around the world. Would be adversaries engage in coercive actions through diplomatic, economic, and strategic security interaction. The ability to “respond” can be challenging.

Internationally the Peoples Republic of China (PRC) is deeply engaged in gray zone actions throughout the maritime global commons, which reinforces the need for significant strategic analysis, foresight, and planning. National military-centric higher learning entities like the Naval Postgraduate School (NPS) in Monterey California are well positioned to lead a multi-discipline study of this complex issue.

On June 11-12, 2024, NPS hosted the Maritime Risk Symposium (MRS2024) co-sponsored by the U.S. Coast Guard (USCG) and National Academy of Sciences (NAS) Transportation Research Board (TRB). More than 200 attendees joined to include senior leaders from across the services, federal and state agencies, academia, and industry, along with NPS faculty, staff, and students. The key takeaways of the diverse panel discussion highlighted three consistent challenges that any future U.S. maritime strategy will need to address.

Retired U.S. Navy Vice Admiral Ann Rondeau, President of NPS, set an urgent tone in her opening remarks. She warned that “gray zone” tactics are just part of the overall hybrid warfare strategy by the PRC to gain control of Taiwan and, if allowed, the entire Indo-Pacific region and rules-based order of global free trade are at stake. She challenged participants to think about what this means for the future of naval conflict and the concrete actions that U.S. public and private stakeholders must take to avoid sleepwalking into the next war. She asked, given the nature of gray zone conflict, might the next war be won by our opponents without firing a shot?

NPS Vice Provost for Warfare Studies Randy Pugh went further in his own comments, adding, "Illegal, coercive, aggressive, and deceptive PRC-led tactics will continue to expand without end unless the combined forces and agencies of all maritime democracies stand firm and increase our coordination and collaboration worldwide - now!"

MRS 2025: Alaska Bound!

To set the context for the MRS, participants took a fresh look at the Tri-Service Maritime Strategy, Advantage at Sea, signed by the U.S. Navy, Coast Guard, and Marine Corps in 2020, specifically through the lens of gray zone operations. While the basic principles of the 2020 strategy were lauded, there was consensus of the participants that any new naval or maritime strategy must be broader in scope and must involve many more maritime stakeholders working collaboratively and collectively to create meaningful change.

One of the key areas of discussion was the issue of a larger and more diverse community of stakeholders in the gray zone conflict. NPS invited the Director of the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)’s Officer Corps, Rear Admiral Nancy Hann (who NOAA announced has been selected for promotion to Vice Admiral and would be nominated to served as NOAA’s Deputy Under Secretary for Operations) and the Maritime Administration (MARAD)’s former Administrator, retired Navy Rear Admiral Mark Buzby, to participate, expanding the conversation to include merchant marine equities and the imperative of environmental intelligence given climate change impacts on sea conditions. This initial panel also included Coast Guard District Eleven Commander, Rear Admiral Andy Sugimoto, retired Navy Vice Admiral T.J. White, and retired Marine Corps Lieutenant General Lori Reynolds.

Throughout the first panel discussion, participants explored what it means for the United States to call itself a “maritime nation,” lauding our country’s very strong maritime culture and historical context, but also detailing the challenges we face with a shrinking maritime industrial base and severe work force shortages. This was noted in stark contrast to rising adversaries who are outpacing U.S. shipbuilding efforts and, in some cases, have surpassed the maritime capacity of the United States.

Panel conversation arrived at a key question -- is the United States still a maritime nation, or is this now more an aspiration? The panel reviewed some concerning realities about the current state of the U.S. ship building and strategic sealift capacity that might be available in the event of the major conflict. No short-term or easy solutions were identified. To help address these shortfalls, panel members noted with appreciation the bipartisan congressional efforts in the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) of 2023 and 2024 directing Departments and Agencies to address these challenges. Specifically, the NDAA directs MARAD to develop a new National Maritime Strategy to set the U.S. on a course that increases the number of available U.S. mariners and reinvigorates the maritime industrial base for all maritime services. Panelists emphasized the imperative that this strategy must be implemented with both the ways and means required to restore U.S. as a maritime nation.

A key takeaway in this discussion is that U.S. Department and Agencies that contract shipbuilding must collaborate with U.S. shipbuilders to end the sinusoidal “boom or bust” cycles created when shipbuilding contracts are not steady. Such cycles are corrosive, leading to frequently alternating periods of hirings and layoffs, disincentivizing U.S. workers from remaining in an unsteady maritime industry during a tight U.S. job market. The panel also discussed the importance of U.S. Agencies using U.S. maritime shipping for logistical needs whenever possible, instead of foreign shipping lines, to help stabilize the peacetime requirements for U.S. flagged ships. This stability is not only imperative for U.S. maritime commerce, using “no shipping, no shopping” as a motto, but it is also imperative to maintain sufficient organic capacity to be able to surge in the event of war.

The first panel concluded that realizing the goals of this new maritime strategic effort might seem complex but are urgently needed if the United States is to regain maritime and naval superiority. In this modern era of competition with autocracies, it will be much easier for a nation like PRC to build and maintain a large ship building capacity as they are not encumbered by disparate leadership views in a democracy, stovepiped bureaucracies, or four-year budgeting builds. The PRC is aggressively building a robust and synchronized Chinese national fleet that includes a navy, coast guard, merchant fleet, maritime militia, and international fishing fleet. As a next step towards meeting these challenges, MARAD hosted a joint and interagency wargame in July run by the Center for Naval Analysis which brought together broad stakeholders to explore the tenants of what would be needed to build a new maritime strategy. This is a clear step in the right direction, however, a campaign of studies and efforts like this one will be needed to identify solutions, and bipartisan support will be needed to fund those solutions.

In a subsequent panel, panelists discussed various facets of gray zone operations, including cyber and intelligence support. All agreed that a wide variety of gray zone tactics are getting more aggressive, more prevalent, and now are even openly embraced by adversarial nation states. A prime example of the devastation created by gray zone operations can be found in the increasing prevalence of Illegal, Unreported, Unregulated (IUU) fishing that not only ravages the world’s oceans of fish through unsustainable fishing practices but has also become a tool to assert sovereignty by establishing foreign presence in other nations’ maritime economic exclusion zones worldwide. IUU activities compete with and (can overwhelm) the local fishery industries and enforcement regimes of other nations. Panelists concluded that without concerted actions of a broad coalition of like-minded states to move all nations to more of a rules-based order at sea, gray zone operations and conflict will only multiply and escalate.

The cyber panel also indicated that the U.S. maritime sector is far behind some other industry sectors in cyber preparedness, and that more qualified personnel and funding will be needed to catch up. A robust public-private partnership is needed to detect, respond, and mitigate attacks especially due to the dual threat of nation states and criminal organizations who have increased cyber capabilities and sophistication in their attacks. As we have already witnessed, a cyber-attack can slow or devastate U.S. maritime commerce in our ports and waterways, the life blood of our nation.

The panel agreed that a clear impediment to advancing in collaborative cyber efforts is that the maritime cyber regulatory environment remains dynamic and ambiguous. Regulations are not enough to remedy this challenge and to push the maritime sector into a sustainable cyber posture, more needs to be done. One consistent concern of the industry is the myriads of agencies that they must now notify after each cyber incident, with no clear hierarchy between the agencies, and no centralized or common reporting method. As the cyber regulatory environment matures and improves, trust will be an essential element for public and private sector cohesion. AI and automation can accelerate cyber processes, however, there still must be shared lessons learned about how to optimally employ both in cyber responses.

In a subsequent panel, intelligence professionals, which included the Director of Naval Intelligence, Rear Admiral Mike Brooks, USN discussed the Maritime Domain Awareness (MDA) challenges that gray zone operations present. They asserted that the community must get away from a traditional controlled, enclaved, proprietary architectures to more of a comprehensive view of MDA being “from seabed to space” with data and insights that are shared more readily with partners, to include interagency partners, allies, nongovernmental organizations, industry, as well as across federal, state, local, and tribal communities, at a variety of classification levels. A continuing quandary for the U.S Intelligence Community in gray zone operations is the challenge of attaining two-way collaboration at the unclassified and releasable level, which is of greatest value of this broad coalition of partners in this mission space. While building shared data lakes is a good start, that is not enough as stakeholders must also be able to send and receive analyzed data in a way that is useful for their needs when they need it. As with cyber, AI tools continue to assist in making this objective obtainable.

There were three consistent takeaways from the panel discussions. First, strategic decision making should always weigh the importance of our allies and ensure a concerted effort towards broader collaborative frameworks to buy down maritime risk. It is a simple fact that when the United States is not inclusive in our approach to gray zone operations, we are less effective collectively. For example, the Tri-service Maritime Strategy, one of the best maritime strategies to date, could have included greater mention of stakeholders including TRANSCOM, NOAA, MARAD, National Sealift Command (NSC), and other key maritime agencies and services. It could have also included Nongovernmental Organizations (NGOs) and industry partners, or more on Allies, foreign partners, or multilateral organizations.

A second major insight from this MRS was that we have come a long way in information sharing in the last few decades as a nation, however, it is still not enough. We must seek to establish the protections, permissions, and protocols to share information more quickly with partner nations, NGOs, and industry while still protecting sources and methods. Declassification and Foreign Disclosure processes remain slow and cumbersome inhibiting the ability to share at the tactical level at the speed of need. We have made progress by creating unclassified sharing platforms such as Sea Vision, however, those sharing systems are limited to partner nations with an information sharing agreement, not with other nations, NGOs, and industry who are key partners in the gray zone. There is not a good way to get the right information to the right entity at the right time, which the panelists cited as clear impediments to cyber and intelligence operations in the gray zone.

A third takeaway from the MRS discussion was that there continues to be challenges with key talent management activities such as recruitment, retention, training, and job satisfaction. All participants agreed that it is imperative for our nation to attract and retain skilled talent, whether it be in the naval and maritime services, maritime industry, maritime intelligence, or maritime cyber career fields. Finding, recruiting, and maintaining the workforce needed to serve at sea, in our ports, in our shipyards, and in our maritime intelligence and cyber security organizations must be a mainstay of any new U.S. maritime strategy.

Fittingly, the last panel of the symposium, led by retired Rear Admiral Matt Bell, the Department of Defense Ted Stevens Center for Arctic Studies Dean of Arctic and Climate Security Studies, explored specific efforts in the Alaskan maritime space to counter gray zone operations. Panelists highlighted the very complex and difficult operating environment in the northern latitudes. On a good day in the Arctic, logistics, communication, at-sea operations, and Maritime Domain Awareness are difficult, and often nearly impossible, even before considering any adverse actions and gray zone operations of our adversaries in and around U.S. Exclusive Economic Zone in the Arctic Region. For that reason, the Arctic will be the focus of the next MRS Symposium to be cohosted by the newly created Ted Stevens Center for Arctic Security Studies in Alaska 13 to 15 May 2025.

More information on Maritime Risk Symposium and MRS2024 can be found at: https://www.maritimerisksymposium.org