The Future Maritime Operating Environment and the Role of Naval Power

Some countries have begun to take harsh counter-measures that could further inflame regional
affairs. In applying its new maritime doctrine (2014), Indonesia has seized and scuttled
Vietnamese and Thai vessels, and seized a number of Chinese fishing boats. 82 Should economic
and political pressures lead to attempts to exploit the waters of the Arctic and Antarctic,
“fishing’s final frontiers” 83 , international tensions would likely ensue.
Perhaps even more ominous in the long-term is the possibility that the oceans might experience
the fate commonly known as the tragedy of the commons. 84 Application of this concept, that
originally offered insight into the history of feudal England, argues more generally that in the
absence of effective governance environmental decay and ruin is inevitable. Alongside
overfishing, where the relevance of the commons analogy is most readily apparent, the emergence
of dead zones in the ocean coastal zones would seem analogous. While there is research to
support a conclusion that dead zones are a naturally occurring phenomenon and are affected by
climate change, the fact that some are found near major population centres has led some scientists
to posit that human activity is implicated. In some cases, intense agricultural and industrial
activity has spilled nutrients (e.g., nitrogen) into the water and led to the depletion of oxygen such
that no marine life can be sustained (a process termed eutrophication). 85 The number of such
zones has doubled every decade since the 1960s and some forecasts indicate that they could
increase in the tropical oceans by more than 50 percent in coming decades. 86 Should this happen,
serious consequences will follow in some of the most productive fishing grounds, with cascading
economic and political fallout similar to that flowing from depletion of fish stocks. 87
The implications for the international community of failing to make progress on these issues are
obvious. However, the drafting and implementation of international agreements to address
pressing dangers facing the oceans commons, such as overfishing, aquaculture and dead zones,
that by their nature require that immediate national interests be set aside to preserve a long-term
public good, will be extremely difficult. And yet failure to do will most probably generate
international tensions that, when combined with other maritime security considerations, will be
difficult for governments to manage.
82 Mervyn Piesse, The Indonesian Maritime Doctrine: Realising the Potential of the Ocean (Future
Directions International: Dalkeith, Australia: 22 January 2015), pp. 5–6.
83 Lieutenant-Commander Ray Snook (RCN), “The Future Fight for Fish”, Canadian Naval Review, Vol. 7,
No. 2, Summer 2011, p. 11.
84 The idea of the “tragedy of the commons”, in which unregulated use of a common good results in its
depletion was explored in Garrett Hardin, “The Tragedy of the Commons”, Science, Vol. 162, December
1968, pp. 1243–1248. In this article, he described the concept as “[e]ach man is locked into a system that
compels him to increase his [benefit] without limit – in a world that is limited. Ruin is the destination
toward which all men rush, each pursuing his own best interest in a society that believes in the freedom of
the commons. Freedom in a commons brings ruin to all.”
85 Roddy Scheer and Doug Moss, “What Causes Ocean ‘Dead Zones’?”, Scientific American (online),
25 September 2012, Cheryl Lyn Dybas, “Dead Zones Spreading in World Oceans”, Bioscience, Vol. 55,
No. 7, 2005, pp. 552–557, and Stephen R. Carpenter, “Phosphorus control is critical to mitigating
eutrophication”, Proceedings of the National Academy of the Sciences, Vol. 105, No. 32, 2008,
pp. 11039–11040.
86 Robert J. Diaz and Rutger Rosenberg, “Spreading Dead Zones and Consequences for Marine
Ecosystems”, Science, Vol. 321, 15 August 2008, pp. 926–928.
87 Quirin Schmeier, “Marine dead zones set to expand rapidly”, Nature, 14 November 2008.
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