The Quad Should Work Together on Maritime Surveillance To Counter China

The Quad is not keeping pace with security needs in the Indo-Pacific. Its members—Australia, India, Japan and the United States—should step up cooperation to keep an eye on what’s going on at sea. They have the tools for this.

But Chinese naval activity in the Indo-Pacific is intensifying. This calls for more systematic operational coordination among the four partners, particularly by coordinating operations of and sharing information from maritime patrol aircraft, especially Boeing P-8s. The Indian Ocean is the ideal venue for this cooperation, because Chinese maritime activity is expanding there and violent disputes, such as those in the South China Sea, are absent.

Gone are the days when Indo-Pacific states needed to worry only about illegal fishing fleets. In just the past three months, China deployed a naval task group in a long-range show of force around Australia, sent a dual-use research vessel to loiter off Western Australia, and announced a new capability to cut undersea internet cables. More broadly, China maintains a high tempo of military-affiliated survey ship deployments in the Indian Ocean, signalling its intention for a greater regional military presence.

Quad members have a tool at the ready to help meet this challenge. Australia, India and the US operate P-8s, which are especially effective tools for maritime domain awareness, boasting a wide variety of sensors and long range and endurance. These aircraft are especially valuable as a platform for the hardest maritime surveillance mission: detecting and tracking submarines. (They are equipped for attacking submarines, too.) Japan has a functionally similar type, the Kawasaki Heavy Industries P-1.

Although satellites can detect the presence of ships, surveillance aircraft can watch them in more detail. They can better observe ships’ features and better monitor their activities.

Cooperation between Quad members in surveilling the oceans varies. Operational coordination does occur, but on an infrequent and ad hoc basis. Sharing the data is also uneven—Australia and India, for example, share data occasionally, but the sharing is not routine, let alone automatic. Ideally, close partners would cooperate closely enough that they could reliably pass surveillance duty of high-interest vessels, such as Chinese navy ships, between each other.

In case of a prolonged Chinese navy patrol in the Indian Ocean, for example, Australian and Indian aircraft could operate in shifts to maintain persistent surveillance over the target. They each operate significant but finite P-8 fleets; sustaining a high operational tempo is difficult for any individual country. Coordination between partners, therefore, could help them sustain a high tempo of operations, or operations against multiple targets simultaneously, without sacrificing readiness across the fleet.

This type of integrated maritime surveillance could be a natural extension of the Quad’s existing IPMDA. The idea behind IPMDA is to shine a light on hidden and potentially risky activity, regardless of the actors involved. Now that Quad members and regional states are alert to the growth of different types of risks, they need closer cooperative arrangements to manage them. If Quad members deepened maritime patrol aircraft coordination, they could provide a sanitised cut of the resulting data to regional states affected by Chinese navy activity, such as Singapore, Indonesia and the Philippines.

Such an extended IPMDA would fit perfectly within the Quad’s existing program of activities. IPMDA has already been expanded by pledges to provide increased training to regional states. Sharing data from military platforms such as P-8s would represent only an incremental further evolution. More broadly, bringing maritime surveillance operations under the Quad’s banner would make them a nationally sanctioned ongoing activity, not requiring onerous bureaucratic approvals at each instance.

A program for integrated maritime surveillance would also help to breathe new life into the Quad. The grouping faces particular uncertainty this year, in large part because US President Donald Trump appears to have diminishing patience for expending US resources on global security unless there is a clear dividend for the US. A program for integrated maritime surveillance would go some way to addressing the interests of all states challenged by China’s naval expansion. It would show that security and public goods are not in tension, but are often the very same thing.

Arzan Tarapore is a research scholar at the Center for International Security and Cooperation, Stanford University.

This article appeared originally at The Strategist (ASPI).