NMF WORKSHOP ON COUNTERING CHINA’S MARITIME GREY ZONE OPERATIONS: OPTIONS OFFERED BY CRITICAL AND EMERGING TECHNOLOGIES
CONCEPT NOTE
On 11 September this year, the National Maritime Foundation (NMF) conducted an inaugural workshop that explored the contours of current and future maritime game-moves of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in the Indo-Pacific and attempted to identify what the maritime responses of middle powers such as Japan, the Philippines, India ought to be. Naturally, grey zone operations were repeatedly mentioned in the interactive sessions with our informed audience.
It is obvious that coherent and impactful responses to the People’s Republic of China’s ‘grey zone’ maritime operations require, in the first instance, a clear understanding of what these are, whether and why Beijing finds them to be an indispensable part of its maritime strategy, the geoeconomic and non-geoeconomic goals that this strategy seeks to accomplish, and how widely China’s ongoing and future grey zone maritime operations are likely to expand in terms of intensity, space, and time.
Of great relevance to this set of critically important questions is the possibility of finding answers to some of the issues that bedevil us through the applications that are or could be generated by one or more of the ‘critical and emerging technologies’ that India, Japan, the USA, and other countries are cooperatively and collaboratively pursuing.
These are issues and questions that a follow-on daylong workshop, scheduled to held at the NMF on the 20th of October 2023, will attempt to address and answer, even as nations and their respective principal maritime-security agencies wrestle with a variety of ongoing practical manifestations of the PRC’s grey zone actions at the tactical and operational level.
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