Waging a counterinsurgency campaign in West Philippine Sea
In August 2023, Proceedings published an article I wrote entitled "Maritime COIN Is a Team Sport." There, I described China as a “global insurgent” waging a war against the world and seeking to introduce a Sino-centric international order. It aspires to subvert the global economic order established in Bretton Woods toward the end of the Second World War, as well as the maritime order embodied in the 1982 UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS).
David Galula defined insurgency as “a protracted struggle conducted methodically, step by step, in order to attain specific intermediate objectives leading to the overthrow of the existing order.” He described insurgency as a political struggle in which the center of gravity is the populace rather than territory. His theory of counterinsurgency argues that success depends less on overwhelming military force than on winning legitimacy, securing society, and integrating the political, military, and civil instruments of statecraft.
If we agree with this thesis, then the framework developed by the Armed Forces of the Philippines in waging a counterinsurgency campaign against the CPP-NPA-NDF over the last five decades remains relevant. We can classify the West Philippine Sea (WPS) as a “red area,” where Beijing employs hard power through the PLA Navy, China Coast Guard, and maritime militia to encroach into our exclusive economic zone and harass our fisherfolk. Philippine society, its institutions, and the Filipino-Chinese diaspora constitute the “white area,” where the Chinese Communist Party conducts united front work activities to interfere in domestic politics, influence the populace, and co-opt political leaders.
In the WPS or Red Areas, the doctrinal Clear-Hold-Develop methodology remains relevant.
The clearing phase involves using government vessels to establish a persistent presence while gradually pushing Chinese coast guard and militia vessels away from areas within our territorial and contiguous seas, Bajo de Masinloc, Escoda Shoal, and Recto Bank. These areas are essential to our food and energy security. While easier said than done, it is important to continuously challenge China's presence and avoid surrendering the field through our absence.
Part of the clearing phase involves multinational maritime patrols and maritime cooperative activities with the United States and partner navies and coast guards. These patrols also serve as a signaling tool to demonstrate solidarity among like-minded states that value the rule of law over China's excessive maritime claims and coercive behavior at sea. They should be complemented by protective patrols around clusters of our fisherfolk operating near Bajo de Masinloc and the fishing grounds of the Kalayaan Island Group to ensure they are free from harassment and able to exercise their right to a livelihood.
The holding phase involves persistent patrols in cleared areas, or in parts of the WPS not regularly frequented by Chinese maritime forces. The objective is to prevent a resurgence of Chinese presence in specific areas and ensure that gains made during the clearing phase are not reversed.
The develop phase involves restoring maritime governance in cleared areas to enable us to exercise our sovereign rights within the EEZ without intimidation by Beijing. This includes implementing international rules on fishing and resource exploration, strengthening maritime domain awareness, improving navigational safety, and enhancing search-and-rescue capabilities. These measures will allow legitimate economic activities to resume without fear of intimidation by Beijing. Most of the relevant mechanisms to implement this are already embodied in various ASEAN maritime-related protocols.
In the White Areas, the campaign takes a different form. Here, Beijing has established political influence, propaganda networks, and its own brand of mass organizations. Chinese political warfare, or united front work activities, can take the form of leveraging economic investments to gain political influence, exporting surveillance technologies that promote illiberal governance, using corruption to co-opt political elites, conducting propaganda, cultivating subnational engagements that bypass the national government, and employing psychological and economic coercion.
Government response in the White Areas should include:
Counterintelligence efforts to deal with espionage, identify insider threats operating within government institutions, and map Filipino personalities acting as proxy actors promoting CCP interests, including politicians, academics, media practitioners, and others. These efforts should also cover pseudo-think tanks, Filipino-Chinese friendship or commercial associations, Confucius Institutes, businesses, and investments directed toward creating strategic dependencies in renewable energy and agriculture.
Legal offensive efforts should include the passage of an amended Anti-Espionage Law and a Foreign Interference Law. Pending bills in Congress already address modern espionage and foreign interference and malign influence (FIMI). Appropriate policies, if not laws, are also needed to curb the acquisition of real estate around military camps and strategically situated maritime areas, as well as the proliferation of sister-city and sister-school arrangements nationwide.
Information operations should focus on countering disinformation and Chinese propaganda amplified by local proxy actors, troll farms, Filipino-Chinese media, the Chinese embassy itself, and government and media outfits based in mainland China. Together, these actors form part of the CCP's information manipulation strategy, which seeks to promote a positive image of China while attacking its critics in government and civil society.
Civil-military operations should conduct advocacy and awareness campaigns in schools and local communities for truth-telling and to convey the information that the WPS is ours. It is also intended to blunt the efficacy of sister-city and sister-school arrangements that might have taken root in strategic cities and provinces.
Reverting to old paradigms might be a bit challenging. The initial effort should be to review our counterinsurgency doctrine and find ways to incorporate it with the Department of National Defense's Comprehensive Archipelagic Defense Concept. Despite the trappings of modernity and progress, China is still governed by a communist party that adheres to the teachings of Marx, Lenin, and Mao. This creates a certain level of predictability and structure in its strategic and operational mindset. In the end, we still need a holistic strategy to deal with China's use of hard power at sea and sharp power against Philippine society.
---
RADM Rommel Jude Ong is a non-resident fellow at the Stratbase Institute and professor of Praxis at the Ateneo School of Government. He retired in 2019 as vice commander of the Philippine Navy.
- Latest
