Operationalise Quad through Federated Maritime Operational Intelligence
SWITZERLAND: On 26 and 27 October, India and the United States will conduct the third round of the 2+2 Dialogue where each nation’s Defence and Foreign Ministers will discuss a range of issues of importance to each nation. This meeting is set against the backdrop of an expanding, and increasingly aggressive and violent, People’s Republic of China (PRC), especially as it relates to ensuring freedom of navigation and free access to markets across the high seas.
Especially recently, India and the US haven’t just been talking to each other, they’ve also been acting together. For example, in early October a US Navy P-8 reconnaissance aircraft was seen landing at the airport in Port Blair on the Andaman Islands. This event was not only a signal to Beijing that their submarines would not be invisible to US naval intelligence, but it was a signal of a burgeoning effort to share tactical intelligence between the US and Indian navies.
That combined effort will take a great leap forward if, as expected, this meeting of the India-usa 2+2 sees the signing of two agreements, the Maritime Information Sharing Technical Agreement (MISTA) and the Basic Exchange and Cooperation Agreement (BECA).
Given the PRC’S past twodecades’ effort to build the world’s largest, and potentially the most lethal Navy in the world, the issue of how the United States and India share maritime intelligence may be one of the most important steps to operationalising the Quad alliance and turn it into a credible deterrent against Beijing’s militant expansionism.
Why do I say this? As the former Director of Intelligence and Information Operations
for the US Pacific Fleet I know first-hand the value of being able to track adversary ships and submarines at sea, what we in the US Navy call maritime operational intelligence (OPINTEL).
Maritime OPINTEL was birthed in our Navy after the devastating attack on Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941 and underpinned the dramatic victory at Midway, just six months later. As then Pacific Fleet Commander, Admiral Chester Nimitz stated, the success at Midway was “in large measure, due to the excellent intelligence received” from the combined intelligence and cryptologic teams of the first truly “federated” process for collecting, analysing and disseminating tactically relevant maritime OPINTEL to the Fleet.
It was from these origins that the US Navy developed the Ocean Surveillance Information System (OSIS) during the Cold War that shared world-wide tracking of the Soviet Navy from a network of centres and facilities.
Following the end of the Cold War the US Navy’s OSIS network devolved as the Russian Navy essentially retreated from the world’s oceans and as US national interests shifted to the ground operations of the Middle East.
However, beginning in 2003 it became clear to some of us in the US Navy that the PRC’S strategic trajectory was intent on building a global naval force, one that the US Navy and our allies would need to be able to find, fix, and track.
Despite severe funding shortfalls under the Obama era of sequestration, in 2012 the US Navy ushered in a new era of maritime OPINTEL with the formal establishment of the Pacific Fleet Intelligence Federation (PFIF). The PFIF provided direction for the organisation and collaboration of the Pacific Fleet’s intelligence and cryptlologic resources to support the maritime OPINTEL mission of the Pacific Fleet across the Indo-pacific waters.
What is unique about this “federated” system is the collaboration and coordination across multiple organisations at various echelons, afloat and ashore, working in unison 24 hours a day, seven days a week, providing the most precise maritime OPINTEL to afloat forces. By “federating” the efforts across nodes in Japan, Hawaii, San Diego, and Washington D.C., each node brings its unique capability to build the adversary Common Operational Picture (RED COP), thus increasing our learning and understanding about the pattern of life of the adversary navy.
By dividing tasks functionally and geographically, the “federated” approach increases focus and deepens analysis of maritime threats. The endstate is to more effectively (and efficiently) deliver intelligence to commanders and decision makers at every echelon.
In the years since its creation, and as originally conceptualised, this “fleet intelligence federation” began to expand from being a US only enterprise to one that integrated maritime OPINTEL from allied navies, like Quad members Japan and Australia.
Over the past decade the US Pacific Fleet, the Japanese Maritime Self-defence Force (JSMDF) and the Royal Australian Navy have benefited from this “fleet intelligence federation” whether from sharing open-ocean surveillance information collected by maritime reconnaissance platforms or from sharing and integrating RED COP data.
With the upcoming Indiausa 2+2 talks and the expected signing of the MISTA and BECA protocols, India will be poised to join the existing “fleet intelligence federation” that will allow each nation to achieve information superiority across the vast Indo-pacific Fleet, improve tactical intelligence support to deployed naval forces and thus increase the efficiency and efficacy of the Quad’s mission to deter the PRC’S aggression on the high seas.
As two of the world’s largest democracies, India and the United States by coming together in this fashion are demonstrating to the world that the shared values of freedom and liberty are stronger and more unifying than the tyranny of the PRC. Captain James E. Fanell (Retd) was the Director of Intelligence and Information Operations for the US Pacific Fleet.
Conventional wisdom implies that Beijing wants President Donald Trump to be defeated on 3 November. After all, he has presided over the greatest deterioration in Sino-us relations since diplomatic relations were established in 1979 and the path he has set America on vis-à-vis China will endure well beyond the end of his time in office. As a result of his actions, there is now broadly based consensus in the US Congress that Beijing is a bad actor and that China is America’s greatest adversary.
Part of the reason for this, of course, is that America has not had a real peer since the end of the Second World War. China has now become America’s peer—or near peer—economically, diplomatically, technologically, and militarily. America’s leaders recognise that its decades-long dominance of the global economy and the corridors of global power are under threat. That will not change next year or even in the next decade. Beijing is a force to be reckoned with and America’s leaders finally understand what is at stake.
On that basis, there should be no good reason why Beijing would want another four years of Trump. It was his administration that called a spade a spade and stopped vacillating around what numerous prior US administrations had failed to acknowledge or do something meaningful about. Beijing has been formally put on notice that there are now consequences for its theft of American intellectual property, its unending cyber intrusions and cyber thefts, and its consistent efforts to undermine America and its allies.
That is where an argument can be made for why Beijing doesn’t actually want Joe Biden to become President. The Trump administration has also been responsible for the greatest disintegration of America’s bilateral relationships— particularly among its allies—in its history. Trump has succeeded in alienating virtually every substantial American ally over the course of the past four years, which has worked in Beijing’s favour and has coincided with its own increasingly robust economic and diplomatic rise through the Belt and Road Initiative.
Beijing is strong enough to withstand the negative impacts of the trade war and the ongoing war of words with Washington. However, it is arguable whether it can withstand the resumption of strong bilateral relations between America and its allies. For the past four years, Beijing has had the luxury of watching a fractured, inconsistent, and ununified approach to the West’s relations with China, and has been able to pursue its global agenda with the knowledge that the West was too splintered to strenuously object or take meaningful action to counter Beijing’s various gambits. That is why it was able, over the past decade for example, to expropriate the Spratly and Paracel Islands with little more than a whisper from the West.
Under a Biden administration, that would presumably change. Biden has existing relationships with many of the world’s leaders, but equally importantly, he understands that to counter Beijing, the West and America’s allies need to speak with one voice and be willing to act in unison. That will never happen under a Trump administration and Beijing knows it.
Although many Americans see the forthcoming election as a choice between two unsavoury and undesirable individuals—or even between the lesser of two evils—for Beijing, the stakes are similar. Except that no matter which of them ultimately becomes President, Beijing loses. Either it will have to endure four more years of thrashing under Trump or it is likely to see the West circle its wagons to respond with muscularity against Beijing’s attempt to build an alternative world order that is not governed by Western nations and the institutions they created over the past 70 years, but rather, the Chinese Communist Party’s own vision of itself.
There is one other important reason why Beijing may also prefer Trump: he has been extremely useful in enabling the CCP to whip up nationalism among the Chinese people and tighten its grip on power. With Biden at the helm, America will no longer be so easily portrayed as evil by the Party. The Chinese people would likely come to believe that a more sensible, reasonable person is leading America. Biden’s election would also enable a door toward reconciliation to be cracked open. That ought to be an objective both Beijing and Washington can agree on.
Daniel Wagner is CEO of Country Risk Solutions and author of the new book “The Chinese Vortex”.
With the upcoming India-usa 2+2 talks and the expected signing of the MISTA and BECA protocols, India will be poised to join the existing ‘fleet intelligence federation’.