Order at Sea: Southeast Asia's Maritime Security

However you define good order at sea, it’s hard not to feel rather pessimistic about its future. A host of accounts and reports from popular writers including Ian Urbina or environmental organisations such as Greenpeace and UNESCO suggest plenty of reasons to support the notion that the seas are in a state of crisis and that humanity is running very short of time in which to rectify it.

Operationally, the number and effectiveness of the assets available to police the seas and oceans of the world are clearly insufficient. In Southeast Asia, archipelagic countries such as the Philippines and Indonesia face particular challenges in this regard, but it’s common throughout the region. There also exists insufficient domestic legislation to deal with the various types of maritime crime that complicate the task of apprehending and successfully prosecuting offenders of “blue crimes”.

Ships from the US and Japan Coast Guards conduct exercises near the Ogasawara Islands of Japan, operating alongside response boats to practice interdicting foreign vessels operating illegally inside Japanese waters, 21 February 2021 (US Coast Guard/Flickr)

Good order at sea off Southeast Asia is framed by this rather gloomy set of observations. So against this background, what is the state of play in the region? How successful is the campaign to avert “bad order at sea”? There are undoubtedly some hopeful signs. In the first place, there is much higher awareness of the problem with a corresponding desire to do something constructive about it. For evidence I would point to things such as the establishment in Singapore of the Information Fusion Centre, its operational success in facilitating the identification and interception of suspect shipping, and its international growth in terms of liaison officers and links with other such centres around the word. Across the region, we see the establishment of coastguards and maritime law enforcement agencies (MLEAs) such as the relatively recent version in Malaysia, and BAKAMLA (Indonesian Maritime Security Agency) in Indonesia. There’s also growing recognition of the need for collective action in response to collective problems, as manifested by the family of arrangements centred on the Malacca Straits Patrol and the coordinated tripartite system operating in the Sulu Sea.

Everywhere you look for insights into how maritime security problems are being handled collectively, the issue of competing priorities appears. The mere business of getting together to discuss such issues is of value in its own right, and especially if it helps identify the way ahead. In this case, the journey might be more important than the destination. There is surely something to be said for the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) attempting something of this sort.

External states can assist in capacity-building efforts. Southeast Asian coastguards and MLEAs appear to welcome the provision of assets, platforms, sensors and the modest weaponry that the task of ensuring good order at sea requires. Such assets need to be up to the demands of the task and, most importantly, realistically maintainable. The economic consequences of Covid-19 and the temptation to switch resources to war-fighting capability because of international tensions might well worsen any resource problems. 

External states can also contribute to maritime domain awareness. It’s hard to exaggerate its importance: knowing what is going on is essential for assessing and managing maritime activities. Getting the necessary information in an age of “dark fleets” and turning it into actionable intelligence is difficult and demands global cooperation.

All of this becomes a lot more credible if there is some persistence in the presence of constructive external naval personnel and assets. Thus the permanent stationing of two Royal Navy patrol boats, HMS Tamar and HMS Spey, and an enhanced US and Japanese Coast Guard role in the area are steps in the right direction. The same goes for Australian and New Zealand efforts in the South Pacific, especially their regional patrol boat program. This does, though, raise the issue of the extent to which the external players should coordinate their capacity-building offers of help. On the one hand, close coordination should limit the prospects of gaps and wasteful duplication; on the other, it might reduce the prospects of choice and agency for the locals.

Taken together, these external contributions to the local maintenance of good order at sea should certainly help, should be conducted even if only for showing recognition of the fact that we are all in the same boat, and confirm that it would be dangerous for all of us just to assume that it won’t sink.

This article is a part of a series examining regional perspectives on maritime security. This project is led by La Trobe Asia, Kings College London and Griffith Asia Institute with the support of the UK High Commission in Canberra.

Geoffrey Till is Emeritus Professor of Maritime Studies at King’s College London and Director of the Corbett Centre for Maritime Policy Studies. He is an adviser at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, Singapore. He has previously been a Visiting Research Fellow at the National Institute for South China Sea Studies, Hainan, China. His Understanding Victory: Naval Operations from Trafalgar to the Falklands was published in 2014 and his fourth edition of Seapower: A Guide for the Twenty-First Century was published in 2018.

This article appeared originally at Lowy Institute's the interpreter.