The Future Maritime Operating Environment and the Role of Naval Power

ecently noted, “[e]conomic growth taking place in East and Southeast Asia has been one of the
most significant force-shaping changes in the contemporary commercial environment”. 187
In this new constellation of Powers, the challenges facing the oceans as a global commons will be
most pronounced in Asia in coming decades; and because of the shifting balance of power that
means that they will be highly relevant in their potential strategic impact. “[S]tarting in the last
phase of the Cold War,” journalist Robert Kaplan has written, “the demographic, economic, and
military axis of the earth has measurably shifted to the opposite end of Eurasia, where the spaces
between the principal nodes of population are overwhelmingly maritime.” 188 Newly affluent
societies in Asia will demand increased levels of consumer goods and will lead energy dependent
lifestyles. It is expected that urbanisation will take place on a scale never seen before in low- to
medium-income countries throughout the region, and this will need a vast range of materiel for
construction of new city environments. 189 The increased requirement for food, energy, consumer
goods and raw materials to build necessary social infrastructure will result in a growing demand
for commercial shipping, including an expected growth in the number of large container ships
transiting Asian waters. 190 Intra-regional trade, already comprising 53 percent of all Asian trade,
is also likely to intensify, possibly leading to greater levels of political and economic integration,
but certainly putting new strains on existing maritime trade routes. 191 But even more likely and
more unsettling is that national ambitions could become more pronounced as states and societies
become wealthier and have greater resources to pursue new opportunities and objectives.
Longstanding animosities and/or rivalries could dangerously inflate clashing interests among
increasingly affluent and self-confident regional governments.
To comprehend the strategic implications of what is happening, economic developments cannot
be considered in isolation from geography. The most distinguishing geostrategic features are the
predominance of waters and its immense size. Unlike Europe, that was the focus of Great Power
competition for much of the previous two centuries, geography poses a different type of challenge
for South and East Asia for it involves many thousands of miles. More telling still, a principal
player in the region’s strategic affairs, the United States, looking across the Pacific, is located
more than 6,000 miles away from the Asian mainland. Equally important, the chain of islands that
runs from Russia’s Kuriles to the southern tip of New Zealand, act as a barrier to incursion from
the Western Pacific, but also offer a means of controlling (or at the very least effectively
monitoring) access to that ocean. 192 As a consequence, and unlike Europe, with the exception of
187 Rodrigue, The Geography of Transport Systems (3 rd ed), p. 19. The rise of the Asian economies is
mirrored by the relative decline in those of the West. According to a February 2015 report prepared by
Price Waterhouse Coopers, a global business consulting firm, the number of Western countries in a list of
the 10 largest national economies is expected to decline from four (the US, Germany, France and the UK)
in 2014, to three (the US, Germany and the UK) in 2030, to two (the US and Germany) in 2050. Price
Waterhouse Coopers, The World in 2050: Will the shift in global economic power continue? (February
2015), [accessed on 5 March 2015 at http://monitor.icef.com/2015/03/global-economic-power-projectedshift-asia-emerging-economies-2050/]
p. 4.
188 Robert Kaplan, Asia’s Cauldron: The South China Sea and the End of a Stable Pacific (Random House:
New York, 2015).
189 Lloyd’s Register Group et al., Global Marine Trends, 2030, p. 51.
190 Lloyd’s Register Group et al., Global Marine Trends, 2030, p. 26.
191 Jones, “Introduction” in Jones (ed.), A Maritime School of Strategic Thought for Australia, p. 5.
192 Roy Kamphausen, “Asia as a Warfighting Environment”, in Thomas G. Mahnken and Dan Bluemthal (eds.),
Strategy in Asia; The Past, Present and Future of Regional Security (Stanford University Press: 2014), pp. 16–19.
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