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.
The cancelation this week of President William Lai’s (賴清德) state visit to Eswatini, after the Seychelles, Madagascar and Mauritius revoked overflight permits under Chinese pressure, is one more measure of Taiwan’s shrinking executive diplomatic space. Another channel that deserves attention keeps growing while the first contracts. For several years now, Taipei has been one of Europe’s busiest legislative destinations. Where presidents and foreign ministers cannot land, parliamentarians do — and they do it in rising numbers. The Italian parliament opened the year with its largest bipartisan delegation to Taiwan to date: six Italian deputies and one senator, drawn from six
Recently, Taipei’s streets have been plagued by the bizarre sight of rats running rampant and the city government’s countermeasures have devolved into an anti-intellectual farce. The Taipei Parks and Street Lights Office has attempted to eradicate rats by filling their burrows with polyurethane foam, seeming to believe that rats could not simply dig another path out. Meanwhile, as the nation’s capital slowly deteriorates into a rat hive, the Taipei Department of Environmental Protection has proudly pointed to the increase in the number of poisoned rats reported in February and March as a sign of success. When confronted with public concerns over young
Taiwan and India are important partners, yet this reality is increasingly being overshadowed in current debates. At a time when Taiwan-India relations are at a crossroads, with clear potential for deeper engagement and cooperation, the labor agreement signed in February 2024 has become a source of friction. The proposal to bring in 1,000 migrant workers from India is already facing significant resistance, with a petition calling for its “indefinite suspension” garnering more than 40,000 signatures. What should have been a straightforward and practical step forward has instead become controversial. The agreement had the potential to serve as a milestone in
China has long given assurances that it would not interfere in free access to the global commons. As one Ministry of Defense spokesperson put it in 2024, “the Chinese side always respects the freedom of navigation and overflight entitled to countries under international law.” Although these reassurances have always been disingenuous, China’s recent actions display a blatant disregard for these principles. Countries that care about civilian air safety should take note. In April, President Lai Ching-te (賴清德) canceled a planned trip to Eswatini for the 40th anniversary of King Mswati III’s coronation and the 58th anniversary of bilateral diplomatic
RSS