Beyond Blue Water: Gray Zone Lessons from Small Island Nations
by Ahmed Rasheed, by Thomas A. Crowson
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06.26.2026 at 06:00am
Beyond Blue Water: Gray Zone Lessons from Small Island Nations Image
Abstract
While conventional wisdom suggests small states facing gray zone maritime pressure require external protection or significant force expansion, systematic examination of Seychelles, Mauritius, and the Philippines reveals that resilience depends more on governance, legitimacy, and persistence than firepower. These cases demonstrate six counterintuitive findings: law-enforcement primacy outperforms military responses, littoral waters matter more than distant EEZs, evidence collection functions as operational capability, transparency serves as deterrence, persistence trumps resolution, and partner support must avoid dependency. For U.S. security cooperation, these findings suggest prioritizing institutional capacity building over platform transfers and measuring partner independence rather than equipment delivered, producing more resilient partners at lower cost.
While strategists debate carrier strike groups and hypersonic missiles, the actual gray zone competition is being won or lost in fishing harbors, port inspection offices, and coast guard patrol boats. As great-power competition intensifies across the Indo-Pacific, gray zone tactics, including harassment at sea, maritime militia operations, survey misuse, and illegal fishing, have proliferated as preferred tools of coercion below the threshold of armed conflict. Small island and coastal states find themselves disproportionately vulnerable to these pressures, yet they remain largely absent from strategic literature.
The conventional wisdom holds that small states facing gray-zone pressure need external protection, alignment with larger powers, or significant force expansion to maintain sovereignty. This assumption, while intuitive, may be fundamentally wrong.
Recent systematic examination of Seychelles, Mauritius, and the Philippines, three small island nations facing persistent gray zone pressure, demonstrates that resilience depends more on governance, legitimacy, and persistence than on firepower or force expansion. These cases were selected using ASCOPE filters to ensure comparability with small archipelagic contexts while providing variation in scale and threat intensity.
What emerges are six counterintuitive findings that challenge military conventional wisdom about gray zone competition, with immediate implications for U.S. security cooperation and small-state defense planning.
Finding 1: Governance Over Firepower
https://smallwarsjournal.com/2026/06/26/beyond-blue-water/
