Editor’s Note: This article was submitted as part of the Irregular Warfare Initiative’s 2025 Writing Contest, in which authors were invited to explore how the United States and its partners can use irregular warfare to strengthen security cooperation, build trust, and enhance resilience among Indo-Pacific nations. This article stood out for its innovative approach to integrating community-based observation with formal intelligence networks, demonstrating how a multilateral, distributed maritime awareness system could enhance situational understanding, accelerate partner response, and mitigate gray zone threats. By emphasizing practical, politically sustainable mechanisms for real-time intelligence sharing, the piece offers a concrete roadmap for combining irregular and conventional tools to improve regional security and resilience.
Gray zone coercion thrives where visibility is partial, attribution is uncertain, and response timelines are slow. Nowhere is this more evident than in the Indo-Pacific’s contested maritime spaces, where civilian mariners live inside the operating environment while national-level intelligence systems observe it episodically from above. When China intensified coercive pressure around Second Thomas Shoal in 2024, Indo-Pacific partners possessed frontline awareness but lacked the distributed channels to convert that awareness into shared, actionable clarity fast enough to shape escalation dynamics.
Traditional intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) remains indispensable, but in the gray zone it is rarely sufficient. Competitive advantage no longer comes from collecting the most data, but from connecting the right observers early enough to shape decision cycles. The strategic opportunity lies in converting everyday maritime awareness into networked intelligence that denies adversaries the ambiguity gray zone operations depend on.
One solution lies in civilian-linked, socially legitimate reporting mechanisms that fuse local observation with existing analytic hubs, leveraging community insight rather than requiring new infrastructure or militarized presence. “Civilian-linked” refers to reporting systems that connect non-military maritime observers—fishermen, harbor masters, coastal enforcement—to formal intelligence networks without requiring them to become formal intelligence assets or compromise their local legitimacy. The goal is simple: turn community insight into regional deterrence by accelerating clarity faster than coercion can unfold.
A Proven Base, Expanded with Irregular Inputs
Benchmarks already exist for both the organizational capacity and technological connectivity required for enhanced maritime intelligence sharing. For instance, the Pacific Fusion Centre (PFC), a regional intelligence-sharing hub in Port Vila, Vanuatu, has trained thirty-five analysts from fourteen nations since 2018, producing strategic assessments on transnational crime and environmental threats. It delivers value by “provid[ing] regional leaders with information to support their responses to security challenges” without triggering political backlash or sovereignty concerns—the typical resistance to foreign intelligence presence or data collection on sovereign territory.
Similarly, Australia’s Coral Sea Cable—a A$200 million, 4,700-kilometer high-speed fiber link—has catalyzed regional connectivity that makes real-time maritime intelligence sharing technically feasible. The cable’s high-speed, low-latency infrastructure enables coastal communities to transmit observations instantly to regional analysis centers, transforming isolated coastal sensors into an integrated early-warning architecture.
These platforms provide a technical backbone and institutional precedent. However, what’s missing is both infrastructure and institutional legitimacy: a socially-accepted framework that connects civilian maritime observers to formal intelligence institutions like the PFC through platforms like the Coral Sea Cable. Doing so requires more than technical capability; it demands real-time alert systems from fishing communities, harbor masters, and coastal law enforcement—those closest to gray zone incursions but farther removed from formal reporting chains.
Strategic assessments offer context, but they rarely arrive fast enough to cue partner action during a live gray zone incident. Tactical coordination is the missing layer. Without a way to fuse real-time local inputs with ISR feeds and immediately share actionable insights across partners, detections stall. This gap is where a middle layer like the Pacific Maritime Tactical Intelligence Cell fits, helping accelerate analysis and response while aligning community awareness with regional readiness.
How Awareness Becomes Action
Clarity delivered at decision-relevant speed changes behavior in ways that awareness alone cannot. In gray zone competition, time—not firepower—is often the decisive commodity. Civilian-linked reporting networks matter not because they reveal more, but because they reveal earlier, enabling three critical shifts.
First, scattered observations become shared pattern recognition. When coastal communities report anomalies into a common channel, individual signals become collective evidence that weakens plausible deniability. Second, episodic reporting transforms into decision-relevant cueing. Community alerts can target formal ISR assets, directing scarce collection toward real indicators rather than broad speculation. Third, reactive crisis management shifts to anticipatory posture. Once regional actors can validate intent early, they can shape escalation pathways rather than merely respond to them.
In a domain where competitors depend on incremental pressure, the ability to collapse ambiguity faster than an adversary can escalate becomes a form of deterrence in itself.
This creates an asymmetric advantage. Gray zone actors depend on temporal gaps—the space between incident and attribution, between detection and response. Civilian-linked networks compress these gaps faster than adversaries can adapt their operational security, fundamentally altering the cost-benefit calculus of incremental coercion.
Implementing a Pacific Maritime Tactical Intelligence Cell
The following phased approach builds upon the Pacific Fusion Centre’s existing foundation and the Coral Sea Cable’s connectivity infrastructure to develop a Pacific Maritime Tactical Intelligence Cell. Each phase is distinct and sequential: early phases establish community trust and voluntary participation before introducing formal intelligence integration, building analytical capacity once community networks prove reliable, and adding technical systems only after partners demonstrate operational readiness. Later phases expand the network through multilateral partnerships once initial phases prove sustainable. This graduated, three-phase approach creates multiple exit points, allowing partners to participate at levels commensurate with risk tolerance while building comprehensive regional coverage.
Phase 1: Community-Linked Alert Channels
The foundation is not hardware but trust-based communication between frontline mariners and regional analytic centers. Low-bandwidth alert platforms—SMS, radio, or app-based—allow fishermen, harbor officials, and coastal enforcement to report anomalies without becoming extensions of state intelligence. This maintains local legitimacy, preserves sovereignty optics, and creates an always-on human sensor layer that formal ISR cannot replicate.
Phase 2: A Tactical Analysis Cell in Existing Fusion Hubs
Rather than creating new institutions, regional partners can strengthen existing analysis centers by adding a tactical layer capable of turning frontline observations into standardized, decision-relevant products. This cell blends commercial maritime data, open-source indicators, and civilian reports to identify, classify, and share anomalies using agreed attribution and data-protection norms.
Phase 3: Expansion Through Opt-In Partnerships
Once the approach demonstrates value locally, it can grow horizontally, not hierarchically. Partners with experience become mentors; participation levels remain voluntary and ownership remains local at every stage. This reduces single-point dependency, complicates adversary pressure, and creates a distributed deterrence posture that is difficult to target politically or economically.
Case Study: How Early Warning Changes Escalation
Dynamics
Had such a network existed during the 2024 Second Thomas Shoal escalation, the sequence of events might have unfolded differently. Community-linked alerts from surrounding coastal routes could have flagged unusual vessel movement patterns before the blockade materialized. These signals, rapidly fused by a tactical analysis cell, could have cued formal ISR assets to verify intent sooner, enabling Manila and its partners to issue coordinated diplomatic warnings before coercion crossed into physical obstruction. Visibility would not have prevented confrontation outright, but it could have forced earlier attribution, narrowed China’s narrative options, and raised the political cost of escalation. In the gray zone, that shift alone can change outcomes.
More importantly, documented attribution would have enabled coordinated partner responses such as joint coast guard transits, synchronized diplomatic protests, or shared intelligence products—the very outcomes China attempts to prevent by sustaining ambiguity and isolating partners.
Anticipated Challenges and Strategic Opportunities
Sensing that the Pacific Maritime Tactical Intelligence Cell outlined above threatens China’s narrative dominance, Beijing is likely to deploy familiar narratives, portraying such an initiative as “neo-colonial surveillance,” “militarized aid,” or “Western interference.” This tactic has proven effective before—during the 2021 Honiara riots, Chinese disinformation effectively reduced negative online sentiment toward China by 18 percent, shifting blame to foreign actors like the United States and Australia. Beijing might characterize even basic radar and communications equipment as “foreign surveillance systems,” creating political vulnerabilities for host governments. At the same time, China could respond with economic pressure campaigns, accelerating port construction and communications infrastructure to create alternative networks.
As such, any approach to narrative dominance in the region must embrace the unavoidable: that attempts to expose or counter China’s actions will be politicized. Transparency, modular opt-in, and local control can reduce potential vulnerabilities. Community alert channels are remarkably resilient. Framed as maritime safety tools, they are hard to discredit and nearly impossible to suppress because they provide immediate, tangible value to local communities while creating minimal dependency on foreign systems. The multilateral approach with allies and partners provides multiple cooperation options, reducing vulnerability to Chinese economic pressure on any single relationship while focusing on capabilities China cannot easily replicate: real-time tactical intelligence analysis and rapid crisis coordination.
Metrics and Sustainability
This network improves awareness and coordination but does not deliver hard deterrence. That must come through separate capacity-building efforts. Success for this initiative should be measured not only by participation, but by performance under pressure of the following capabilities:
- Alert-to-action cycle time reduction
- Partner financial ownership progression
- Network retention post-transition to local control
These metrics matter strategically because they measure resilience rather than dependency. Fast cycle times indicate the network can operate inside adversary decision loops. Financial ownership progression ensures political sustainability beyond donor timelines. Post-transition retention demonstrates that partners value the capability enough to sustain it independently, which is the ultimate test of whether civilian-linked intelligence creates a lasting deterrent effect rather than temporary foreign assistance.
Conclusion
Gray zone competition is often described as a contest without thresholds, but it is more accurately a contest over who controls the interpretation of events before thresholds are crossed. The actors who can surface intent earliest, and do so with shared credibility, gain leverage without escalation. In that environment, the most important asset is not the sophistication of one’s sensors, but the speed at which dispersed observations become validated, collective insight.
A civilian-linked reporting architecture does not replace traditional ISR, deterrence posture, or alliance commitments. It anchors them. It creates the connective tissue that turns warning into coordination, ambiguity into attribution, and isolated signals into strategic narrative advantage. When communities, analysts, and decision-makers can see the same behavior at nearly the same time, an adversary loses the temporal and informational margins they depend on to make coercion look like coincidence.
This approach centers on recognizing that awareness is distributed while clarity must be shared, making legitimacy, rather than infrastructure, the decisive terrain. In the gray zone, deterrence emerges from the certainty of revelation and the collective action that transparency enables.
Erika Lafrennie is the founder of Cypher Strategies and author of Xinanigans, a field-grade brief on China’s strategic behavior. She has experience as a U.S. intelligence analyst and irregular warfare practitioner, supporting special operations, shaping doctrine, and designing architectures for real-time, cross-border intelligence flow. Her work bridges psychological statecraft, irregular conflict, and systems-level foresight.
Main Image generated by ChatGPT (OpenAI), October 2025.
The views expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the United States Air Force, the Irregular Warfare Initiative, Princeton University’s Empirical Studies of Conflict Project, the Modern War Institute at West Point, or the United States Government.
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