The Jamestown Foundation last week published an article exposing Beijing’s oil rigs and other potential dual-use platforms in waters near Pratas Island (Dongsha Island, 東沙島). China’s activities there resembled what they did in the East China Sea, inside the exclusive economic zones of Japan and South Korea, as well as with other South China Sea claimants.
However, the most surprising element of the report was that the authors’ government contacts and Jamestown’s own evinced little awareness of China’s activities. That Beijing’s testing of Taiwanese (and its allies) situational awareness seemingly went unnoticed strongly suggests the need for more intelligence. Taiwan’s naval and coast guard vessels cannot be everywhere at once, so better cueing from intelligence is a necessity.
The absence of publicity about the platforms unfortunately suggests the lack of awareness. To date, the most effective counter to China’s oil rigs was the combination of presence and publicity. Presence is the deployment of ships and aircraft to monitor Chinese behavior and encourage Beijing to pull back. Publicity includes direct statements about China’s actions, releasing photos and videos, or otherwise drawing attention to Beijing’s “gray zone” activities.
The analysts who wrote the report said these activities go back to at least 2020. If China’s actions went unnoticed, then there are larger implications about Taipei’s ability to observe Beijing’s war preparations. Everyone knows that a Chinese invasion of Taiwan would have large observable preparations, including stockpiling material, and concentrating combat and logistics units. Everyone knows that these activities would be visible months out.
The problem with “everyone knows” is that the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) knows, too, and military officers are not stupid. Taiwan and its partners cannot expect the PLA to follow the obvious playbook. Moreover, the PLA has a history of expending enormous efforts on being able to hide its capabilities, whether it is underground submarine tenders or the extensive network of subterranean tunnels to hide nuclear forces.
Such massive seaport buildings and tunnels deny China’s adversaries insight into the PLA’s patterns and preparations. Unfortunately, similar approaches could also be applied to PLA garrisons and logistics hubs. Beijing continues to invest in new facilities and transportation infrastructure that would make monitoring even harder.
The response to these challenges must be more intelligence collection that provides persistent and repetitive coverage of these areas, and the capability to exploit such coverage in real-time. Hundreds, if not thousands of sites must be monitored.
This is not a human intelligence problem, but a technical one in scale and capacity. Human sources and observers simply cannot cover the hundreds of thousands of square kilometers that Taiwan must monitor in China and surrounding maritime areas.
Signals intelligence (SIGINT), measurement and signature intelligence (MASINT) and geospatial intelligence (GEOINT) are useful for Taiwan’s challenge.
Each of these disciplines has their own challenges. SIGINT generates a huge amount of data for processing. Even the US National Security Agency, with its vaunted computing power, in 2013 said that it only processes 0.025 percent of the data it collects.
MASINT requires unique sensors tailored to collect the byproducts of activity, such as radiation, acoustics, thermal energy and spectral signatures. MASINT collection rarely offers a complete solution to an intelligence challenge, but used creatively, it could be a critical supplement to other intelligence collection.
GEOINT is a combination of these challenges — a lot of data without being a complete solution — but its commercialization means that once highly classified intelligence capabilities available only to superpowers are now widely available, and former (or frustrated) government officials could find ways to continue to contribute.
The enrichment of overhead imagery with other intelligence sources to pinpoint locations of PLA activity makes GEOINT the closest to a turn-key solution for Taiwan’s challenge in monitoring China’s actions. However, the open ocean space around Taiwan means that Taipei would need to invest in its own satellites, not just routinely purchase imagery of generally unmonitored ocean.
Additionally, Taiwan cannot rely entirely on electro-optical imagery, such as photographs, even from aircraft and drones. As the US learned in the lead-up to the Cuban Missile Crisis, routine cloud cover creates problems for systematically collecting images — clouds are normal. Synthetic aperture radar coverage must be incorporated, because it can see through clouds and also through at least some PLA efforts to disguise or hide its military activities and preparations. Even in GEOINT, multiple sensors and multiple data streams would need to be integrated.
Faced with challenges of this scale, intelligence must be seen as having distinct collection, processing and analytic elements. None of these components is sufficient without the others. The technology does not work without well-trained humans. Different departments would have different needs — especially in the processing and analytic components — making a single solution for the government and military unlikely.
The government should think of the collection capability as a national asset, rather than a departmental one, and invest accordingly, so that interagency parochialism does not waste the information.
As intelligence thinker and practitioner Sherman Kent said, there are strong reasons to have centralized intelligence, but it is a supplement to, rather than a replacement of, departmental intelligence units.
GEOINT’s wide availability also makes it very useful for public diplomacy abroad and informing the public at home — both of which Taipei must do to bolster its defense. SIGINT and MASINT work in part, because much of the collection is clandestine and invisible.
Even a small think tank could use imagery to inform its analysis, as Jamestown’s writers did to identify the structures encroaching on Pratas Island. While we could provide a snapshot in time, the Taiwanese government should have the attitude that it knows about every ship, every day that Beijing operates around the country.
Such awareness would help Taipei address several problems.
First, it would improve the efficiency of using maritime assets. Resources are scarce and Taiwan cannot afford to send its ships and drones mindlessly about the ocean.
Second, GEOINT’s shareability establishes a baseline reality that could be shared across agencies to provide a common operating picture.
Third, it would help Taiwanese leaders talk about China’s threats in specific, objective and verifiable ways that lower the political temperature surrounding even national security issues.
A picture could be worth a thousand words, so imagine how many words could be replaced by modern GEOINT.
Peter Mattis is president of the Jamestown Foundation and a former intelligence analyst.
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