Congress and the Trump administration could do far worse than double or triple the size of the U.S. Coast Guard fleet. (Let’s hear no more about drastic cutbacks.) Last month Military Times reported that the Coast Guard leadership has entered talks with the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command to send a cutter to the region to help “temper” Chinese influence while “building partner capacity” with friendly African navies and coast guards. The troubling thing about the report is the definite article the reporter deploys: the coast guard will dispatch “a” ship if the talks with IndoPaCom bear fruit. A = 1.
And one cutter probably is all the service can spare for distant ventures considering the slate of missions entrusted to it and the slender force structure it has to discharge them. However capable a single ship and skillful its crew, it tempers little bad behavior and builds little capacity by itself. The Coast Guard needs more mass—much more—to grant Washington the range of options the increasingly muscular China Coast Guard affords Beijing. The China Coast Guard is Beijing’s “small stick,” a police service that helps fulfill geopolitical aims as well as enforce the law. China brandishes a small stick; the United States needs one. (Click here for more on “small-stick diplomacy.”)
To conjure up Teddy Roosevelt, a nation’s “big stick” is its Navy and associated joint combat forces. Navies fight for objects in dispute. Deploying the Navy to enforce sovereignty claims tacitly admits that there is a dispute over territory along with some doubt about who will prevail. That’s not a message China’s leadership wants to telegraph. Coast guards, on the other hand, patrol what rightfully belongs to a country. They matter-of-factly enforce domestic law. The small stick—think the constable’s nightstick—is the right tool for that job in contested waters. If rival claimants to islands, atolls, or reefs in the South or East China Sea cannot counter the China Coast Guard, Beijing’s claims to sovereignty over those features and the adjoining waters and skies will stand. They will begin to take on the semblance of sovereignty.
And if the semblance endures for long enough, claims to sovereignty may approach reality. After all, the practice of states—what states do, or don’t do—is a basic source of international law. If no one successfully opposes China’s strategy, inaction will come to look like acquiescence. Seeming acquiescence will become the practice of states in the China seas—lending credence to Beijing’s claims.
The Navy is the United States’ big stick, and it should not be the chief implement for helping allies like the Philippines and Japan or friends like Vietnam reply to China’s challenge. The United States needs its own small stick in the form of Coast Guard cutters and crews used as a geopolitical implement. Deploying U.S. white hulls is good. The U.S. Coast Guard could use far more high-end cutters. But the main purpose is to show China that the United States has “skin in the game” of allied defense. Putting U.S. assets and seafarers’ lives on the line in contested seas would prove that the United States is all in—and give opponents pause.
An imaginative strategy need not break the bank. Just the opposite. For instance, wily U.S. Coast Guard leaders might order cheap flotilla vessels procured in bulk. Even a speedboat flying Old Glory constitutes a token of U.S. purpose and resolve. It shows friends and foes that the weight of U.S. diplomatic and military power lies behind the vessel and its endeavors. Once slathered in red, white, and blue, such diminutive craft could forward-deploy permanently to the region as part of multinational coast guards alongside friendly forces. Like “tripwire” detachments during the Cold War—say, the Berlin Blockade—such a flotilla could deter aggression not through its firepower but by showing that the United States stands by its allies. Allies and friends will take heart while antagonists weep bitter tears.
Swing the small stick.