READ MORE HERE: China Has Militarized Seafarers Says US Navy Report

US Navy war college report in .pdf format: China Maritime Report No. 21: Civilian Shipping and Maritime Militia: The Logistics Backbone of a Taiwan Invasion

by Captain John Konrad (gCaptain) Over the many years of reporting maritime news, the idea that China could militarize its commercial maritime fleet has been dismissed by most of the shipping community, but a new report published by the US Naval War College shows that this is not only a possibility but has already been accomplished. This report comes weeks after a CSIS report detailed how China militarized its commercial shipyards.

The report – Civilian Shipping and Maritime Militia: The Logistics Backbone of a Taiwan Invasion – by Lonnie Henley, a former Rhodes Scholar and senior Army intelligence officer, looks at the integration of commercial shipping and China’s seafarers with the People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN), along with the use of Chinese seafarers – aboard both China flagged ships and Non-Chinese flagged ships – during a planned invasion of Taiwan.

In 2019 we spelled out the importance of training and integration between the US Navy and US Merchant Marine and how broken the current United States commercial shipping system is. Despite receiving high-level attention, little was done to remedy the problem. China however, has taken these lessons to heart.

Read: Editorial: Admiral, I Am NOT Ready For War

“Civilian shipping is the central feature of the PLAN approach to an invasion of Taiwan,” says Henley. “The PLA has spent over two decades developing the bureaucratic apparatus, laws, and regulations to organize, train, and manage this force (of civilian seafarers). This seems to be how Chinese leaders, civilian and military, think the PLA should function, leveraging the enormous resources of China’s civilian economy to support military operations.”

The report does mention some weaknesses of the Chinese system to leverage commercial shipping but overall paints a picture in stark contrast to how American and Western merchant mariners are integrated with Naval command.

China’s Merchant Marine Training The report states that unlike the U.S. Merchant Marine model, where government officers and crews take control of leased ships, regular crews of civilian ships are inducted as militiamen and required to attend military training under the direction of the China’s National Transportation War Preparedness Office. Training includes the following topics:

marshaling, assembly, and sailing in formation; use of military communications equipment and procedures; self-defense and mutual defense; rescue and first aid; military loading and unloading techniques; basic knowledge of the operating environment from a military perspective; operation of equipment particular to their assigned support tasks; knowledge about their supported unit and their role in that unit’s mission; knowledge about enemy threats they will face; and topics such as “dockless unloading” This is the type of training that has not been provided to US Merchant Mariners since the US Maritime Administration closed down the Global Maritime and Transportation School in 2012.