But theory can only go so far when the parties concerned have a different, or even revisionist, interpretation. China, for one, has quashed Kearsley’s idea. The recurring South China Sea incidents are illustrative: no longer are “white hulls” more dovish than their naval counterparts. In some cases, the coast guard can prove to be aggressive while the navy is relatively docile.
Outside Asia, the last notable instance of a coast guard exhibiting unusually aggressive behavior was Iceland’s coast guard, the Landhelgisgæslan, which not only relentlessly chased after foreign trawlers in the North Atlantic, even cutting their fishing nets, but also challenged more heavily armed foreign navies during the infamous Cod Wars. One such notable confrontation took place in June 1973, when the seventy-meter ICGV Ægir rammed into British frigate HMS Scylla, which is 113 meters long and has more than twice the Landhelgisgæslan gunboat’s nearly 1,200-ton displacement, at 2,500 tonnes.
White Hulls in Southeast Asia
The contemporary China Coast Guard (CCG) is perhaps a more aggressive rendition of the Cod War–era Landhelgisgæslan. One major difference is that the CCG and its two predecessor agencies—China Marine Surveillance and Fishery Law Enforcement Command—are dealing with comparatively weaker Southeast Asian rivals in the South China Sea.
Southeast Asian governments have generally devoted limited resources to navies and paid even less attention to “white hulls.” This first changed during the early 2000s, when the region witnessed a scourge of piracy, sea robberies and other transnational maritime crimes, leading to the emergence of new or expanded coast guard–type agencies. The Malaysian Maritime Enforcement Agency (MMEA) was formed in 2005. Indonesia renamed its existing coordinating agency BAKAMLA in 2014. The newly formed Vietnam Fisheries Resource Surveillance joined the Vietnam Coast Guard in 2013.
These coast guard agencies are meant to alleviate navies’ peacetime constabulary burden and facilitate a legal approach in enforcing maritime sovereignty and jurisdictional rights, as granted by the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea. Compared to the 326-vessel CCG (including one hundred offshore-capable assets), these agencies were much smaller in size by the end of 2015, according to the latest Military Balance 2016. Their assets are also mostly ill-equipped inshore and coastal craft, which may suffice against criminals at sea, but are essentially helpless against a larger, better-equipped coast guard adversary in an offshore environment. The recent Sino-Indonesian standoff in waters off the Natuna Islands is just one incident that amply illustrates the severe limitations of Southeast Asian coast guards.
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Read more at National Interest
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