Journal of Indo-Pacific Affairs --
Abstract
China’s militarization of artificial islands in the South China Sea has intensified regional tensions and appeared to shift the strategic balance in its favor. This study argues, however, that it is not too late for the United States to restore that balance. By analyzing the primary function of these islands—securing intelligence rather than projecting firepower—the study contends that the United States can neutralize their value without direct military rollback. Drawing insights from the war in Ukraine, particularly the decisive role of space capabilities in enabling information dominance, the analysis underscores the need for persistent surveillance and rapid decision making. The study advances the Heterogeneous Space Architecture as a scalable platform to achieve regional intelligence superiority. It concludes that institutionalizing, coordinating, and localizing this architecture—despite inherent challenges—offers the most viable path for the United States to regain the cognitive high ground in the Indo-Pacific and reassert a favorable balance of power.
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The South China Sea (SCS), situated at the heart of the Indo-Pacific and roughly one-third larger than the Mediterranean, plays an outsized role in global maritime commerce and regional food security. This sea, teeming with vital sea lanes and strategic chokepoints, has become the crucible of great power rivalry between the United States and the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Beijing, viewing control of the SCS as essential to its economic lifeline and national security, has pursued an increasingly aggressive posture in the region.
As China’s economic ascent has matured into geopolitical ambition, the SCS has emerged as a principal theater of confrontation. For Beijing, securing influence over the SCS is no longer a peripheral aim—it is a core strategic imperative. Unsurprisingly, the PRC’s assertive behavior has triggered alarm in Washington. As the US Department of Defense (DOD) declared, China “remains our most consequential strategic competitor for the coming decades.” Every mile China gains in the SCS diminishes American influence in a region that serves as the geopolitical hinge of the twenty-first century.
Beijing’s claim to nearly the entire SCS, demarcated by its ambiguous and expansionist “Nine-Dash Line,” directly overlaps with the sovereign rights and exclusive economic zones (EEZ) of numerous Southeast Asian nations. In 2016, the Permanent Court of Arbitration (PCA) at The Hague ruled decisively against China’s claims. The ruling, however, did not temper Beijing’s ambitions. Instead, China intensified its coercive campaign—harassing regional fishing vessels with its Coast Guard and maritime militia, and disrupting legitimate resource exploration by its neighbors.
The most audacious component of China’s strategy has been the transformation of seven reefs in the Spratly Islands into militarized outposts since 2013. Among these, Mischief Reef, Fiery Cross Reef, and Subi Reef—fortified since 2018—stand as the PRC’s forward operating bases, complete with runways, aircraft hangars, munitions storage, radar installations, and a persistent military air presence. The remaining outposts—Gaven, Johnson, Cuarteron, and Hughes—remain militarized to a lesser degree but represent latent capabilities ready for escalation.
Washington has not ignored this challenge. The White House condemned China’s militarization of the islands, warning of consequences and reaffirming its commitment to a Free and Open Indo-Pacific. Admiral Philip Davidson, then commander of US Indo-Pacific Command, put it bluntly: “China is now capable of controlling the SCS in all scenarios short of war with the United States.”
American strategic stakes in the region are profound. Southeast Asia, projected to remain one of the world’s fastest-growing regions, represents a critical vector of global economic growth. If Beijing dominates the SCS, regional states may drift into China’s orbit—gravitationally pulled by dependency and coerced by force. Disruption of shipping through the SCS would wreak economic havoc: Taiwan’s economy could shrink by a third, Singapore’s by 22 percent, and the ripple effects would reach American shores.
Furthermore, the SCS is indispensable to US strategic logistics. Without access to the SCS—particularly the use of bases in the Philippines—American efforts to deter or defend against Chinese aggression toward Taiwan would face severe constraints. In short, to cede the SCS to Beijing is to forfeit the Indo-Pacific.
The Question
If the United States must prevent China from dominating the SCS to avoid ceding primacy in Asia—and ultimately the global order—then the pivotal question becomes: What should Washington do about the militarized islands? More precisely, has the window closed on restoring the pre-2013 power equilibrium that existed before Beijing began its island-building blitz?
This study contends with that question and outlines countermeasures to rebalance the regional security architecture. At the core is the hard reality that neither rules nor shared values offer any path forward. The 2016 verdict by the PCA changed nothing on the ground. The so-called “rules-based international order,” a phrase championed by the Biden administration, is dismissed by Beijing as a self-serving construct of Western hegemony. There is no normative consensus, no moral suasion, no diplomatic lever that will compel China’s retreat from its artificial bastions in the sea.
What remains is power—defined, as Susan Strange once put it, as “the ability to affect outcomes in which its preferences take precedence over the preferences of others.” In the SCS, power is the last and only viable tool. And the US–China competition is, at its essence, a contest over who wields more of it.
Most experts, however, answer the central question with a pessimistic “no.” Hal Brands and Zack Cooper, in their 2020 analysis, dismissed rollback and acceptance, favoring a hybrid strategy of containment and offset. The islands, they argued, represent a fait accompli—irreversible facts on the seascape. Likewise, Taylor Fravel and Charles Glaser, both eminent voices in Chinese military and international relations studies, concluded that Washington should aim merely to halt further advances. Attempting to force China into demilitarization, they argued, would be futile and disproportionate given the asymmetry in strategic stakes.
But these arguments share a common flaw. They rest on a faulty assumption: that the islands serve primarily as launchpads for firepower projection. As such, these analyses presume that power must be countered with more power—missile for missile, base for base. This is a tactical misdiagnosis.
Power in the twenty-first century is no longer limited to firepower. It also derives from technology, data, and above all, control over information. The idea that these island outposts are little more than static artillery platforms is an outdated view that ignores China’s doctrinal shift toward intelligentized warfare.
Power in the twenty-first century is no longer confined to missiles and ships. It now resides in data, networks, and the ability to shape decisions before the first shot is fired. This is the essence of what the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) calls intelligentized warfare (智能化战争)—a doctrinal leap that envisions future conflict dominated by artificial intelligence, autonomous systems, big data analytics, and operations in the cognitive domain. Rather than simply enhancing firepower, intelligentized warfare seeks to achieve decision dominance through the fusion of human and machine intelligence, the integration of systems across all domains, and the manipulation of perception and will at both tactical and strategic levels. In this construct, the goal is not merely to outgun the enemy—but to outthink, outpace, and outmaneuver them in every sphere, especially the mind.
To assume that the Spratly outposts are static firebases is to miss their deeper function in China’s evolving theory of warfare. These platforms serve not just as military fortresses, but as sensors, data hubs, and influence nodes in a region where the most decisive battles may be fought in the electromagnetic spectrum and cyberspace—not with missiles, but with algorithms.
This study proceeds from a different premise. It tests three interrelated hypotheses:
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H1: China’s militarization of islands is aimed primarily at achieving information dominance, not firepower superiority.
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H2: The PLA increasingly prioritizes information dominance over traditional kinetic capability.
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H3: Space-based capabilities can enable the United States and its allies to regain information dominance and thus strategic balance.
The study begins with a literature review to assess these claims. It then dissects the evolving concept of information dominance and concludes by proposing how the United States can employ spacepower to rebalance the strategic equation in the SCS.
Analysis: Literature Review to Test the Hypotheses
At first glance, China’s artificial islands in the Spratly archipelago appear to serve an obvious purpose: the projection of firepower. Concrete runways, hardened shelters, and radar installations suggest that Beijing is extending the reach of the PLA southward into the heart of the SCS. This conventional interpretation dominates much of the strategic discourse.
The DOD, while characteristically cautious in its language, notes that the “PRC’s Spratly outposts are capable of supporting military operations, including advanced weapon systems.” Brands and Cooper go further, asserting that the seven Chinese bases in the Spratlys “greatly extend the reach of both its antiaccess forces and its power-projection capabilities.” Japan’s Ministry of Defense, more direct than its American counterpart, has publicly mapped the expanded airpower radius of PLA combat aircraft operating from these fortified outposts. These views—rooted in the optics of militarization—assume the islands’ primary utility lies in their kinetic capabilities.
Yet this assumption fails to withstand deeper strategic scrutiny. Two critical challenges undermine the firepower-centric interpretation of the islands’ purpose.
First, the military contribution of these islands to China’s broader power projection is marginal at best. Former US Navy officer and expert on the PLA Navy (PLAN) Michael Dahm argues that missile systems deployed on the islands “pale in comparison to those of multiple PLAN task groups that may deploy to the SCS.” In short, the islands are not war-winning assets in a conventional campaign; they are, at best, peripheral launch points. RAND Corporation’s Timothy Heath and his colleagues echo this assessment from a different angle. The real threat to US forces and bases, the note, stems not from aircraft operating out of the Spratlys but from China’s massive inventory of long-range precision-strike weapons—particularly ballistic missiles capable of targeting US installations from the second island chain to northern Australia.
Second, the islands are extremely vulnerable in the event of open conflict. Fravel and Glaser, among others, concede that these outposts would likely be destroyed in the early phases of a war with the United States. While Brands and Cooper note that the islands would “complicate the American operations,” and Gregory Poling warns that their neutralization would be “prohibitively costly” in the opening salvos of war, such concerns must be weighed against the reality that even US bases like Guam are exposed to Chinese missile strikes.
This vulnerability is not lost on Beijing. The PLA’s own assessments acknowledge the limitations of fixed forward positions in a precision-strike environment. Indeed, some analysts argue that far from being an asset, these islands are a liability—easy targets in the event of war and thus of limited deterrent value. If the islands are likely to be leveled in the first days of high-end conflict, one must ask: what strategic function do they truly serve? Certainly not one rooted solely in conventional firepower.
This line of questioning challenges the dominant paradigm and strengthens the case for reevaluating the islands’ purpose through the lens of intelligentized warfare—where information, not firepower, delivers decisive advantage.
All evidence considered, the most compelling analysis of China’s militarized islands comes not from firepower theorists, but from Dahm, a former US Navy intelligence officer and one of the foremost analysts of Chinese maritime capabilities. Dahm’s comprehensive SCS Military Capability Series (MILCAP)—an exhaustive survey of the technologies and operational capacity of China’s SCS outposts—offers the most detailed assessment to date of their true strategic function.
Dahm’s conclusion is unequivocal: “the primary purpose of China’s SCS bases is not to generate conventional military power but to facilitate information superiority with substantial command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (C4ISR) and counter-C4ISR capabilities.” In other words, the islands are not the forward edge of firepower—they are platforms for sensing, monitoring, and dominating the informational battlespace.
He issues a pointed critique of the US military for its persistent reliance on an industrial-age paradigm—one that privileges kinetic power and maneuver over informational asymmetry. Consequently, Washington tends to interpret Beijing’s actions through its own firepower-centric lens. In contrast, Dahm reframes the contest: “Imagine entering a dark room. You can neither see nor hear, but your adversary can see and hear everything.” In that analogy, the PLA is not preparing to fight blind—it is preparing to render its adversary blind.
This metaphor echoes an earlier definition by John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt, who characterized information dominance as the condition in which one “knows everything about an adversary while keeping the adversary from knowing much about oneself.” The intellectual resonance between these two conceptions reinforces the argument that China’s strategic intent is not rooted in brute force, but in cognitive and situational control.
Taken together, these insights strongly support the first hypothesis: H1—China’s militarization of islands is aimed primarily at achieving information dominance, not firepower superiority.
What gives Dahm’s thesis additional credibility is that it does not rest solely on satellite imagery or Western assumptions. It is rooted in China’s own doctrinal texts—specifically, the PLA’s theory of informationized warfare as outlined in the Science of Campaigns. Dahm distills the PLA’s approach as follows: “Information power is more prominent than the industrial-age warfare elements of firepower or manpower. The PLA’s overarching focus on achieving battlespace information superiority as a tactical, operational, and strategic requirement cannot be overstated.”
While Dahm does not offer a precise definition of information superiority, his use of the term clearly aligns with what US strategists define as information dominance—the condition in which a force controls the information environment so thoroughly that it can detect, understand, and act faster and more accurately than its adversary, while simultaneously denying that same capacity to others. This entails real-time data integration, electromagnetic spectrum control, cognitive influence, and decision superiority.
Air Force analyst B.A. Friedman confirms this alignment, observing that the PLA’s doctrine of informationization (xìnxīhuà)—the integration of digital networks, sensor fusion, and real-time C4ISR systems across all domains—pursues the same strategic outcome as US information dominance: battlefield and cognitive superiority. Informationization serves as the means; information dominance is the intended effect.
Therefore, for the purposes of this study, information dominance will serve as the working definition of the PLA’s intended strategic outcome in the SCS.
Since 2004, the PLA has systematically pursued the transformation of its force through a process it terms informationization. The PLA’s white papers articulate this evolution as “informationization with Chinese characteristics,” emphasizing the leading role of information, composite force development, indigenous innovation, and strategic transformation. Information, in this construct, is not simply a tool of warfare—it is its fulcrum.
More recently, the PLA has declared data a strategic national resource, placing artificial intelligence (AI) development at the apex of its priorities in cutting-edge science and technology fields. This evolution reflects a conceptual shift from informationization to intelligentization, a doctrine in which AI is no longer an enabling system but the central nervous system of future warfighting. Intelligentization emphasizes autonomous decision making, sensor fusion, predictive analytics, and algorithmic warfare—precisely the kinds of capabilities enhanced by persistent intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) platforms embedded across the SCS.
American defense analysts have taken note. A 2021 report identified intelligence analysis and information warfare as two of the PLA’s highest priorities for AI integration. These systems are not merely tactical enhancements; they are structural pillars of a new form of military power that seeks to dominate the battlespace before the first kinetic exchange.
A growing chorus of experts now echoes Michael Dahm’s thesis. Oriana Mastro, a leading scholar of Chinese military strategy, argues that the militarization of the islands has “greatly expanded China’s maritime awareness and the range of its targeting capabilities.” In a separate interview, she highlights that within the operational domain, radars and sensors are not merely supplementary but serve as the fundamental components of control. To dominate airspace and waterways, Mastro explains, one must first dominate the electromagnetic environment—and that is precisely what these artificial outposts are built to achieve.
Chinese military analysts have said as much. Zhou Chenming, a prominent defense commentator in Beijing, described the reef bases as China’s most advanced and comprehensive ISR platforms, integrating sensors and surveillance capabilities across a SCS system-of-systems. This interpretation has also been echoed in Naval and Merchant Ships, one of the Chinese military’s official publications.
Taken together, these perspectives offer powerful support for H2: The PLA increasingly prioritizes information dominance over traditional kinetic capability.
Skeptics may still ask: Even if the primary function of the islands is informational, are they not still vulnerable? Would they not be among the first targets in a US–China contingency?
Dahm preempts this objection. “Historical knowledge and baseline intelligence cannot be destroyed after the fact,” he writes. The PLA, he argues, benefits not only from what these systems see in real time but from years of accumulated data—on foreign resupply patterns, inter-outpost communications, regional weather patterns, and oceanic currents. The architecture of surveillance outlasts its physical nodes.
This concept is well established. As Arquilla and Ronfeldt emphasized in their foundational work on information warfare, sustaining information dominance in both crisis and war requires proactive development and maintenance of capabilities during peacetime. Like sea and air power, information dominance must be continuously cultivated and operationalized to ensure effectiveness in conflict scenarios. The PLA’s digital footprint—fed by years of persistent ISR and enriched by AI—may well outlive its platforms. As early as 2018, China was publicly promoting the use of AI to enhance its control and extract value from the SCS’s data-rich environment.
This brings us to the final strategic question: Is it too late to neutralize China’s information dominance—possibly already established? To answer this, the next section examines the final hypothesis: H3—Space-based capabilities can enable the United States and its allies to regain information dominance and thus strategic balance.
Space in War: What the War in Ukraine Has Taught
The opening salvos of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 underscored a truth that strategists had long theorized but rarely observed in such clarity: modern war begins in the information domain. On day one, Moscow launched a cyberattack that disabled tens of thousands of user terminals linked to the ViaSat satellite communications network—used extensively by the Ukrainian military. The intent was unmistakable: to plunge Ukrainian forces into an informational blackout, effectively rendering them blind and deaf while their adversary maintained full situational awareness—as Dahm mentioned in his earlier cited analogy.
This opening gambit revealed a foundational principle of modern warfare: victory no longer belongs solely to the side with superior firepower or maneuver—it belongs to the side that can see, decide, and act first. The war in Ukraine has become a case study in the primacy of destroying the enemy’s information architecture while safeguarding one’s own.
Despite being outgunned, Ukraine has maintained its information systems through a mixture of commercial innovation, allied support, and improvisation. Space-based Internet services provided by Starlink—an American commercial entity—helped replace disrupted terrestrial infrastructure. Meanwhile, commercial satellite imagery from firms such as Maxar, BlackSky, Planet, Capella Space, Umbra, Iceye, and others, coordinated in part by the US National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), has enabled Ukrainian situational awareness and strategic messaging. It was through such imagery that the world learned of the atrocities in Bucha and the mass grave outside Mariupol—exposing Russian disinformation and rallying global support for Kyiv.
HawkEye 360’s synthetic-aperture radar detected Russian GPS jammer positions. Russian command-and-control links have failed repeatedly due to inadequate communications infrastructure. A Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) report noted that Russia’s lack of dedicated ISR satellites left its forces unable to assess battle damage, rendering them “highly vulnerable to deception.” Russian guided munitions frequently missed their targets, a direct result of degraded information feeds.
The conflict has also vindicated the use of autonomous systems and precision munitions—both reliant on space. GPS-guided HIMARS rockets helped shift the battlefield momentum in Ukraine’s favor. Precision strikes demand not only guidance but persistent ISR; Ukraine has relied on US GPS, satellite-based communications, and commercial surveillance assets to sustain its kill chain. Importantly, autonomous weapons depend on big data for targeting—and that data flows primarily from orbit. Space systems have elevated battlefield decision making through real-time data aggregation, transmission, and targeting.
These dynamics mirror the PLA’s doctrinal conviction: that information power is not merely equal to but more decisive than firepower and maneuver. Russia’s superior conventional arsenal has not delivered victory because Ukraine has outperformed in the information domain. As the NGA’s director of commercial operations noted, “The power of information is winning.” And it is space that underwrites this power.
Among the most decisive revelations of the Ukraine conflict is the centrality of space in the contest for information dominance. While war has long been waged on land, sea, and in the air, it is increasingly shaped—if not determined—by control over orbital infrastructure. The war reaffirmed that space capabilities are not abstract technological luxuries; they are warfighting essentials. Space assets enable communication; ISR; earth imaging; weather prediction; early warning; and positioning, navigation, and timing (PNT)—the very arteries of modern command and control.
As then–Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall observed, Russia’s invasion highlighted the critical importance of space-based capabilities in modern conflict. In a contest where decisions must be made at machine speed, the side that sees more, communicates faster, and strikes with greater precision prevails. And that capacity depends overwhelmingly on orbital infrastructure.
From this reality, three critical lessons emerge for US strategy in the SCS.
First, space systems are the backbone of the information environment, defined by the DOD as “the aggregate of individuals, organizations, and systems that collect, process, disseminate, or act on information.” These systems are not neutral infrastructure; they shape what each actor perceives, when, and how. Dominating this environment is the prerequisite to dominating the battlespace.
Second, spacepower is not merely a function of satellite quantity. Rather, it is shaped by the scale and sophistication of partnerships. Effective space cooperation—domestically between government and private industry, and internationally among allies—serves as a force multiplier. As demonstrated in Ukraine, even a nation without a robust indigenous space program can achieve remarkable informational dominance through integrated partnerships. In this sense, space is no longer exclusive—it is distributive.
Third, the quality of a state’s communication and information systems determines who wins the race to decision. Space-based assets compress the kill chain, enhance situational awareness, and enable real-time adaptation—attributes that make the difference in any modern high-end fight. These lessons all affirm the third hypothesis: H3—Space-based capabilities can enable the United States and its allies to regain information dominance and thus strategic balance.
China’s latest developments in the SCS suggest it has reached the same conclusion. In May 2025, the PLA commissioned a maritime space support vessel designed with both defensive and offensive counterspace capabilities. According to Andrew Erickson, this ship “might conceivably test or deploy non-kinetic counterspace capabilities—such as laser dazzling or jamming—to confuse, disrupt, or disable spy or early-warning satellites passing overhead.” In other words, the PLA is preparing not only to dominate the electromagnetic spectrum—but to hold US space assets at risk.
This move reflects doctrinal continuity. PLA strategists—drawing from wartime lessons in Ukraine—have long emphasized the value of targeting “reconnaissance, communication, navigation, and early warning satellites” to “blind and deafen the enemy.” In their view, the path to victory lies not in overwhelming force, but in denying adversaries the ability to perceive and respond.
The United States cannot afford to meet this challenge passively. To counterbalance Chinese information dominance in the SCS, Washington must maintain and extend its edge in spacepower. This means hardening satellite systems, expanding commercial-military cooperation, building resilient orbital architectures, and, most of all, ensuring that space remains an enabler of informational—and strategic—superiority.
In a contest increasingly defined by sensors, signals, and systems, it is not the flash of missiles but the clarity of vision that will decide who controls the Indo-Pacific.
Information Dominance to Intelligence Dominance—Conceptual Analysis
If the United States is to catch up with—and ultimately surpass—the PLA in the contest for strategic advantage in the SCS, it must move beyond reflexive calls for information dominance. To craft effective countermeasures, we must first interrogate what that term actually entails—and whether it suffices.
In US military doctrine, information dominance is defined as “the operational advantage gained by the ability to collect, control, exploit, and defend information to optimize decision making and maximize warfighting effects.” This definition is mirrored in both Air Force and Navy guidance and has shaped much of the joint force’s thinking about twenty-first-century warfare. But does improving the ability to collect and control information truly yield optimized decision making? Is this sufficient to prevail in the strategic environment of the Indo-Pacific?
To answer these questions, this analysis introduces two foundational frameworks on decision making: John Boyd’s OODA loop and Thomas Schelling’s theory of strategy.
Boyd’s OODA model—Observe, Orient, Decide, Act—is widely adopted across military planning communities, including by the PLA. In this framework, the Observe phase gathers data; Orient contextualizes that data and renders it meaningful; Decide selects among options; and Act implements the choice. It is Orient, Boyd argues, that plays the pivotal role—it shapes not only how one observes, but how one interprets, decides, and acts. He emphasizes that Orient is enriched by cultural understanding, inherited worldview, and domain-specific experience.
This orientation function aligns closely with the DOD’s formal definition of intelligence—”the result of the collection, processing, integration, evaluation, analysis, and interpretation of available information concerning foreign nations, hostile or potentially hostile forces, or areas of actual or potential operations.” In effect, Orient turns raw data into actionable insight.
Boyd insists that to win in war, one must understand the adversary’s Orient better than the adversary understands one’s own. That is the essence of getting inside the enemy’s OODA loop—and thus of dominating the decision cycle.
Defense expert Richard Deakin echoes this view, arguing in his seminal work Battlespace Technologies that “the only way to defeat an enemy is to really understand how they think, act, and interpret the information around them.” Intelligence, then—not merely data—is the decisive factor in warfare.
This insight dovetails with Thomas Schelling’s concept of strategy, which he defines as “a set of action plans that constrain adversaries by shaping their expectations about the consequences of their actions.” Strategy, in Schelling’s view, is less about destroying enemy capability and more about influencing enemy choices. And that influence depends on knowing the adversary’s preferences, thresholds, and logic—once again, on superior intelligence.
In this light, the US objective should not simply be information dominance—defined narrowly as technical control over the data environment—but something more robust: intelligence dominance.
This study defines intelligence dominance as a state in which one actor understands the thinking, decision making, and perceptual framework of the adversary better than the adversary understands one’s own. It is this asymmetry in understanding that enables superior strategy, more accurate anticipation, and faster decision making. In other words, it is Orient, not merely Observe, that determines strategic success.
The PLA’s doctrinal shift from informationization to intelligentization reflects this very insight. While informationization focuses on collecting and transmitting data, intelligentization integrates AI, machine learning, and cognitive domain warfare to anticipate, interpret, and exploit decision-making patterns. It is a clear signal that Beijing now prioritizes intelligence over raw information.
However, implementing intelligence dominance in practice presents a substantial challenge. Unlike information systems, intelligence capabilities resist easy quantification. There is no universally accepted metric to assess the depth, accuracy, or effectiveness of a state’s intelligence dominance. Technological tools change rapidly, data sources proliferate, and analytic paradigms evolve. As a result, superiority in this domain cannot be measured in discrete terms.
Consequently, intelligence dominance must be treated not as a static benchmark, but as an enduring imperative. It is not a point to be reached—it is a condition to be continually pursued. The goal is not to “match” the PLA, but to outpace it in understanding, prediction, and perception.
For the remainder of this study, the term intelligence dominance—not information dominance—will serve as the conceptual goal for US strategy in the SCS. Just as firepower without precision is wasteful, data without meaning is inert. What the United States needs is not simply more sensors, but sharper minds, better analysts, and faster, more anticipatory decision cycles.
Rebalancing Power in the SCS
The preceding analysis yields five interlocking premises that should shape US strategy in the SCS:
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Artificial islands serve primarily to achieve intelligence dominance, not to project conventional firepower.
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These islands are far more valuable in peacetime, when they enable persistent data collection, than in high-intensity wartime scenarios.
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Space capabilities—military, civil, and commercial—are essential to achieving intelligence dominance.
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Space cooperation, particularly among allies and trusted private-sector partners, can magnify a nation’s spacepower exponentially.
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Intelligence dominance, not raw information control, is what enables faster, more accurate decision making—and thus determines victory.
These premises collectively reframe how the United States should respond to the PLA’s expanding informational footprint in the SCS.
The first premise challenges prevailing strategic frameworks. Where Hal Brands and Zack Cooper propose four options—rollback, containment, offset, or acceptance—the United States must now consider a fifth: functional neutralization. That is, the United States need not physically dismantle China’s outposts to render them strategically irrelevant. If the artificial islands are intelligence hubs, then the United States can outmaneuver them not with firepower, but with superior intelligence architecture—space-based, distributed, and alliance-enabled.
The second premise implies that the PLA may already possess a dominant peacetime intelligence position in the SCS due to years of uninterrupted ISR collection. This accumulated dataset may continue to yield operational value even if the outposts are destroyed in a contingency. Therefore, preemption by kinetic means alone is not enough. The informational advantage must be denied before conflict begins.
The final three premises illuminate a pathway forward. By mobilizing and integrating space capabilities across military, civil, and commercial sectors—both domestically and with key allies—the United States can achieve a quantum leap in regional situational awareness and decision speed. This multi-domain integration would overwhelm China’s ISR infrastructure and, more importantly, displace its cognitive and strategic advantage.
In sum, the path to restoring strategic equilibrium in the SCS does not lie in the size of fleets or the range of missiles alone. It lies in mastering the invisible terrain of data, perception, and decision making. It lies in outthinking the adversary before outgunning them.
If the United States adapts to this new informational battlespace, it can reclaim initiative and “maintain a regional balance of power favorable to the United States and its allies and partners.” The stakes are high—but the strategic tools are within reach
Toward Intelligence Dominance: A Strategic Scheme for the SCS
How can the United States neutralize the core functions of China’s militarized islands and overpower the PLA’s emerging intelligence dominance in the SCS—particularly as Beijing prepares for cognitive, data-driven warfare? Drawing on the five premises established in this study, the answer lies in upgrading space capabilities to strengthen peacetime surveillance (Observe) and contextual analysis (Orient).
As Arquilla argued nearly three decades ago, “information dominance must arise and operate continuously,” especially in peacetime, when the “weather eye” must scan a dynamic array of potential threats. Echoing this requirement, Deakin emphasizes that actionable information must be “available 24/7 in all weather” to enable rapid decision making inside the adversary’s OODA loop. Persistent surveillance is not a luxury—it is the foundation of strategic initiative. As Deakin notes, the objective is to detect “changes to the situational picture as they occur,” ultimately creating a battlespace in which the adversary has “nowhere to hide.”
The PLA has been quietly but methodically constructing just such an environment in the SCS. As Dahm observes, China’s artificial islands serve not merely as launch platforms but as advanced ISR nodes, capable of “collecting every detail of the movements of vessels and aircraft, foreign military activity, foreign outpost communications, resupply patterns, weather conditions, and fishing or other commercial activity in the area.” These observations are not one-off snapshots; they are the raw material for what Dahm terms Pattern of Life (PoL) analysis.
PoL analysis is a sophisticated intelligence methodology designed to map the habitual behaviors and movement patterns of entities—military or civilian—over time. It enables the detection of anomalies, anticipates intent, and provides early warning. Once established, such localized knowledge gives the PLA a persistent Orient advantage, even if the physical platforms on the islands are disabled. In other words, China’s intelligence dominance is rooted not only in sensors and satellites, but in time—specifically, in continuous collection, cognitive framing, and regional familiarity.
To rebalance the strategic environment, the United States must match and exceed this persistence. Washington cannot afford to treat the SCS as a transient theater of operations. Intelligence dominance demands continuous and locally attuned presence. That means space-based assets with enduring regional coverage, coupled with analytical capabilities that can translate raw data into context, meaning, and anticipatory insight.
The PLA has already built this informational ecosystem in the region. If the United States is serious about restoring the balance of power, it must stop measuring dominance in terms of platforms or tonnage. The measure that matters now is informational presence—persistent, adaptive, and oriented toward understanding.
The next section outlines a strategic blueprint for how the United States can build this enduring presence and recover the cognitive high ground.
Heterogeneous Space Architecture
The United States already possesses a foundational scheme capable of enhancing its Observe and Orient functions across the Indo-Pacific. That prototype is the Heterogeneous Space Architecture (HSA), developed through the Micro-Satellite Military Utility Project Agreement (HSA-MSMU-PA). Though underappreciated in public discourse, this coalition-based framework offers a scalable path toward regional intelligence dominance—if properly expanded and institutionalized.
The HSA-MSMU-PA was conceived to build a more robust, resilient, and distributed information architecture that enhances warfighter decision making by integrating both commercial and governmental satellite assets from allied nations. Spearheaded by the United States, the coalition includes eight other nations and is composed of military, civil, and commercial satellites that span the full range of mission areas: missile warning, weather monitoring, ISR, space situational awareness, and communications.
The architecture underwent two operational tests during the 14-day Rim of the Pacific (RIMPAC) exercises in 2018 and 2020. These exercises validated the core concept: synchronized constellations of allied satellites, analytical tools, and ground stations can execute reconnaissance missions successfully across a shared battlespace. By leveraging the advanced technological capabilities of private-sector firms, HSA-MSMU-PA demonstrated its potential to enable faster, more accurate decision making across domains.
Given the urgency of countering PLA informational expansionism in the SCS, this platform offers an immediately usable foundation. It has already been tested in the Indo-Pacific, and it was designed with Observe and Orient functions in mind—functions now central to rebalancing regional intelligence asymmetries.
However, despite its promise, HSA-MSMU-PA remains underdeveloped in three critical areas:
First, while the PLA has methodically and continuously collected multi-domain data over the SCS for years—building a long-term informational advantage—the HSA remains experimental. Its scope has thus far been geographically limited, focused primarily around Hawaii. In effect, Washington has been rehearsing while Beijing has been operationalizing.
Second, the PLA has adopted a holistic approach to intelligence dominance, fusing ISR with cyber, electronic warfare, and local PoL analytics. In contrast, HSA-MSMU-PA remains narrowly focused on enhancing space-based ISR infrastructure, rather than building an integrated intelligence ecosystem.
Third, the PLA operates in its own backyard. Its familiarity with the SCS’s terrain, currents, weather patterns, and indigenous maritime activity gives it an irreplaceable Orient advantage. Chinese maritime militia, commercial fishermen, and port authorities all serve as passive contributors to Beijing’s localized knowledge base. By contrast, HSA-MSMU-PA has no local actors among its participants—no regional intelligence inputs that mirror the PLA’s embedded presence.
To achieve intelligence dominance in the SCS, the United States must transform HSA-MSMU-PA from a testbed into a standing institution. This study recommends three immediate actions:
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Institutionalize HSA-MSMU-PA as a permanent regional intelligence architecture—not a periodic exercise.
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Expand its mission set beyond ISR to include secure communications, joint targeting, electronic intelligence, and maritime domain awareness.
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Embed local knowledge acquisition mechanisms, including collaboration with frontline regional states such as the Philippines, Vietnam, and Taiwan, whose proximity and cultural fluency can significantly enhance the US coalition’s Orient capabilities.
Time favors the actor who builds persistently. If the PLA has constructed a cognitive perimeter around the SCS, then HSA-MSMU-PA must evolve into the platform that dismantles it—one insight, one orbit, and one allied partner at a time.
Institutionalization: Despite its successful demonstrations in 2018 and 2020, the HSA-MSMU-PA has not been tested during recent RIMPAC exercises. According to Mittleman, while the concept of Heterogeneous Space Architecture has gained institutional traction, the specific initiative under HSA-MSMU-PA remains mired in research and development, with no road map for operational institutionalization. This stagnation is no longer tenable.
Geopolitical conditions have changed dramatically since 2020. Chinese coercion in the SCS has escalated, with gray-zone aggression against the Philippines, increased incursions near Taiwan, and rapid advancements in AI and unmanned systems. In this environment, the United States cannot afford to maintain a prototype posture. It must accelerate the transformation of HSA-MSMU-PA into a permanent, operational platform to establish persistent Observe and Orient capabilities in the region.
The opening of the US Space Forces Indo-Pacific Command Center in Hawaii in November 2022 provides an ideal institutional anchor. This command node could serve as the operational headquarters for a standing HSA-MSMU-PA—linking allies, commercial providers, and regional partners in a unified intelligence architecture covering the entire Indo-Pacific.
Coordination with HSA-DIU: Parallel to HSA-MSMU-PA, the DOD has initiated another heterogeneous space project through the Defense Innovation Unit (DIU). This effort, known as the Hybrid Space Architecture (HSA-DIU), is designed to deliver “global, ubiquitous, and secure internet connectivity” and enable “a fully networked battlespace” by leveraging cloud-based analytics and multi-orbit constellations. The HSA-DIU is a joint venture involving DIU, the Air Force Research Laboratory, the Space Warfighting Analysis Center, and the US Space Force.
HSA-DIU complements what HSA-MSMU-PA lacks—namely, a resilient communications backbone. In May 2025, the DIU expanded its commercial partnerships from 12 to 24 firms to accelerate the delivery of real-time warfighting data. While HSA-MSMU-PA focuses on ISR and analytics, HSA-DIU provides the communications infrastructure to deliver that intelligence at speed and scale.
These architectures must not remain stovepiped. If the DOD synchronizes HSA-MSMU-PA and HSA-DIU—integrating ISR, PoL analytics, and resilient communications—it will forge a comprehensive, multi-domain intelligence platform capable of overcoming the PLA’s dominance in the SCS.
Localization: Boyd emphasized that Orient—the most decisive stage of the OODA loop—depends on cultural understanding, inherited context, and lived experience in the operational environment. To detect what is anomalous, one must first understand what is normal. This is especially true in a contested maritime zone like the SCS, where ambiguity is a weapon and “civilian” actors often blur the line between commercial and military operations.
Here, the PLA has the home-field advantage. China has systematically embedded local knowledge into its intelligence infrastructure—through maritime militias, state-affiliated fishermen, and persistent ISR from artificial islands. The United States, by contrast, lacks a similar cultural substrate in the region.
To level the playing field, HSA-MSMU-PA must embed a permanent local team composed of experts from frontline SCS littoral states—including Vietnam, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Taiwan, and the Philippines. These partners bring critical linguistic, cultural, environmental, and navigational expertise necessary to strengthen Orient functions and refine PoL analysis. Their integration would provide early warning, anomaly detection, and richer intelligence synthesis.
Additionally, inviting close US regional allies—Japan, South Korea, and India—to support the architecture would broaden strategic depth, provide redundancy, and promote interoperability across the Indo-Pacific intelligence community.
Limitations of the HSA-MSMU-PA Scheme
No strategic architecture is without its constraints. Activating the HSA-MSMU-PA to counter the PLA’s growing intelligence dominance in the SCS will encounter both structural and political limitations—some of them fundamental.
First, the inherent characteristics of space-based surveillance impose operational constraints. Spaceborne Observe capabilities lack the tactical flexibility and visual immediacy of airborne platforms. They are more expensive to deploy, more difficult to re-task dynamically, and less capable of direct verification. While space delivers persistent, wide-area coverage, it cannot easily replicate the responsiveness or granularity of aerial ISR.
Second, institutionalizing HSA-MSMU-PA—particularly in coordination with HSA-DIU and through the inclusion of additional partner nations—will demand complex multilateral governance. Shared platforms necessitate shared investments and benefits. Yet participating states vary widely in their resource capacity, security priorities, and risk tolerance. Aligning these diverse preferences into a coherent operational framework will not be frictionless.
Third, efforts to localize the architecture will encounter geopolitical hesitation from Southeast Asian states. Many of these nations—despite facing unlawful maritime encroachments by China—are reluctant to openly align with the United States. Their preference for strategic ambiguity over overt alignment could limit their willingness to contribute intelligence or host related infrastructure.
Fourth, integrating commercial space companies into a military-centric intelligence architecture introduces legal, operational, and ethical complications. These firms must be assured that their space assets—including satellites and ground stations—will be protected, indemnified, and not subject to adversarial retaliation. Doing so will require new frameworks for risk-sharing, liability, and public-private coordination in contested environments.
Yet despite these limitations, this study maintains that the HSA-MSMU-PA remains the most viable platform to help the United States counterbalance Chinese intelligence dominance in the SCS. Its technical foundation is sound, its operational concept has been field-tested, and its integration with broader DOD initiatives—especially HSA-DIU—offers a pathway to persistent, resilient regional Observe and Orient capabilities.
To abandon or underutilize this architecture because of complexity would be a strategic miscalculation. The PLA is not waiting for consensus. Neither should we.
Conclusions
China’s militarization of three artificial islands in the SCS has rightly triggered alarm among US defense planners and regional allies. At first glance, these hardened outposts suggest a fait accompli—concrete proof that Beijing has tilted the power balance in its favor. But this study contends otherwise. The islands are not linchpins of firepower projection; they are sensors, data hubs, and cognitive platforms designed to secure intelligence dominance. And that changes everything.
Because their primary function is informational—not kinetic—their value can be neutralized without being physically dismantled. Rather than focus on the impossible task of demilitarization, the United States must pursue functional obsolescence—rendering the islands irrelevant through superior regional Observe and Orient capabilities.
This study draws a critical strategic lesson from the war in Ukraine: space capabilities are no longer peripheral—they are decisive. From ISR to communications to targeting, the side that commands the informational domain dictates the tempo and terms of conflict. The United States must apply that lesson to the Indo-Pacific. Intelligence—not tonnage, not proximity—now determines control.
The tool already exists. The HSA-MSMU-PA, if institutionalized, expanded, and localized, offers a viable path toward regaining informational superiority. It has been tested. It has a coalition foundation. It complements the HSA-DIU effort already underway. Together, they can form a resilient, integrated, multi-domain architecture that outpaces Chinese informational warfare.
Yes, there are challenges. Space-based surveillance has limitations. Multinational intelligence-sharing is inherently complex. Southeast Asian states may hesitate to choose sides. And commercial integration into national security structures brings legal and operational risks. These are real. But they are not insurmountable.
The real question is not one of feasibility—it is one of will.
If the United States is serious about restoring strategic equilibrium in the SCS, it must move now—before China cements its cognitive perimeter. The stakes are not limited to reef outposts or maritime transit. At issue is the entire information architecture of the Indo-Pacific—and with it, the balance of power for decades to come.
The choice is stark: Accept informational inferiority, and watch the region drift into Beijing’s orbit. Or rise to meet the challenge, and seize back the initiative—one satellite, one decision cycle, and one allied partnership at a time.
The islands can be bypassed. The data war cannot.♦
Dr. Fumiko Sasaki
Dr. Fumiko Sasaki is an expert in Indo-Pacific geopolitics, international relations, Chinese space capabilities, and Japanese politics, holding degrees from Johns Hopkins SAIS and Aoyama Gakuin University. She teaches at Columbia University’s SIPA, where she covers international relations theory and East Asian security, and is also a fellow at Johns Hopkins SAIS, focusing on how space capabilities influence Indo-Pacific geopolitics. Her research includes works on China’s space power and the Belt and Road Initiative, alongside earlier quantitative studies.
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