The Philippines has repeatedly tried to sustain a small but symbolically important presence at Second Thomas Shoal, where a deliberately grounded Navy ship, the BRP Sierra Madre, serves as a forward outpost of sovereignty. That logistical effort has become a recurring flashpoint because China treats access to the shoal as tied to its broader nine dash line claim, a claim the 2016 arbitral tribunal rejected as having no legal basis.
Since early 2023 Manila’s routine rotation and reprovisioning missions have encountered an intensifying menu of nonlethal coercive measures. The Philippine Coast Guard reported that a China Coast Guard vessel pointed a military‑grade green laser at a PCG ship supporting a resupply run on February 6, 2023, temporarily blinding bridge personnel and forcing the Philippine vessel to change course. That episode was met with diplomatic protests and public rebuke from Washington and other partners.
Those tactics escalated through the rest of 2023 into close‑quarters maneuvers, blocking and in some cases physical contact. In October 2023 Philippine officials said Chinese vessels rammed or bumped a Philippine coast guard ship and a military‑contracted supply boat during an attempt to reach the Sierra Madre, heightening fears of miscalculation in a constrained maritime environment.
By December 2023 the People’s Republic of China’s coast guard and maritime militia were using water cannon at close range against Philippine supply boats on at least one documented rotation and reprovisioning mission, reportedly damaging engines and forcing one small vessel to be towed back to port. Manila publicly condemned the operations as dangerous and illegal and lodged protests through diplomatic channels.
Viewed together these incidents form a tactical pattern. Beijing has largely avoided open kinetic escalation while frequently deploying law enforcement and militia assets to deny or complicate Philippine administrative activities inside Manila’s exclusive economic zone. The approach is calibrated to impose costs short of war: harassment, temporary interdiction, damage to small civilian vessels, and messaging that seeks to normalize Chinese control on the water. That pattern leverages asymmetric advantages. China can surge numerous coast guard and militia platforms from nearby features it occupies, while the Philippines must rely on smaller coast guard ships and contracted civilian boats for resupply.
The strategic consequences are multiple and durable. First, repeated interdiction of resupply missions chips away at the credibility of a rules‑based maritime order in the region and raises the threshold for when allies and partners feel compelled to respond. Second, it places disproportionate risk on civilian mariners and coast guard crews who perform humanitarian and administrative tasks. Third, it complicates Manila’s policy options: public diplomacy and legal claims are necessary but insufficient to alter operational realities on the sea if coercive denial is persistent. The 2016 arbitral award helps Manila’s legal case but does not change the balance of forces.
Policy responses should be read through a long‑term prism. Diplomatic steps matter: documenting incidents, using multilateral fora to sustain attention, and calibrating protests to preserve space for negotiation. Operationally Manila can mitigate risk by hardening resupply methods and reducing predictability: more robust escorts, professionalized civilian‑military coordination, improved small craft survivability, and when appropriate the use of air delivery to reduce surface exposure. These measures, however, are stopgap if Beijing chooses persistent interdiction as a policy of attrition.
Allied and partner contributions matter but must be politically calibrated. Visible presence by partners through joint exercises, intelligence sharing and freedom of navigation operations can impose reputational and operational costs on coercion without forcing Manila into isolation or escalation. At the same time partners should avoid framing every interdiction as a trigger for military confrontation; doing so risks incentivizing Beijing to push further along the escalatory ladder to test responses. The strategic aim should be to raise the cost and decrease the utility of maritime coercion while preserving avenues for deescalatory diplomacy.
Finally, there is a structural lesson for states contesting maritime claims. When territorial assertions are enforced through law enforcement and militia means rather than declared military operations, they present a protracted governance problem. Sustaining a civilian and administrative presence—delivering food, fuel and basic services—has political weight. Protecting that presence requires a mix of legal clarity, resilient logistics, international solidarity and tailored deterrence. The Second Thomas resupply story is therefore not just a bilateral dispute between Manila and Beijing. It is an early indicator of the strategic logic that will shape many maritime contests in the 21st century: where the battle is over access, not ownership, and where coercion is normatively ambiguous because it sits below the threshold of traditional armed conflict.
Policymakers in Manila and among its partners face a choice. They can accept episodic denial as a manageable cost of geopolitical reality, or they can invest in a coherent blend of capabilities and multilateral pressure that makes such denial more expensive for the coercer. The decision will shape whether maritime rules are preserved or gradually eroded in favour of a practice of resolute denial by the more powerful claimant.