By Robbin Laird
A recent essay in the Center for International Maritime Security, Hervé Auffret’s “What Naval Power Cannot Buy,” makes an argument that should unsettle anyone still planning maritime strategy around hull counts and missile inventories. Ships, he writes, can deter a competitor, compel a rival, and escort a convoy. What they cannot do is build the institutions, relationships, information systems, and rules that keep maritime order functioning when the guns are silent. China, in his telling, has worked this out. Washington and most of its partners still treat governance as an appendage to naval strategy rather than a domain of competition in its own right.
Read against my own recent work on maritime domain awareness, and against a conversation I had with Windward CEO Ami Daniel, Auffret’s argument turns out to be only half the picture. He is right that naval power cannot buy institutional access, security cooperation below the threshold of alliance, information-infrastructure dependence, or influence over the rules themselves.
But there is a fifth thing naval power cannot buy that his article does not name directly, even though it runs underneath every one of his four mechanisms: the capacity to actually see what is happening across a maritime domain that has outgrown any single navy’s sensors. Governance without awareness is blind rule-making. And the transformation of maritime domain awareness that I have been tracking, most recently through Windward’s evolution from AIS-based analytics into what Daniel calls “the intelligence authority of the oceans,” is the connective tissue between Auffret’s governance argument and the operational reality of a chaotic maritime environment.
In effect, the shift is from Maritime Domain Awareness to Maritime Domain Awareness Enabled action.
Two Diagnoses of the Same Failure
Auffret’s core claim is that the United States and its partners keep trying to solve a governance problem with a naval-platform toolkit. Counting ships, missiles, bases, and shipyards, he argues, is how most people measure power at sea, but a second measure, who writes the rules, who trains the officials, who supplies the systems that decide what happens at sea on an ordinary Tuesday, gets far less attention. China has built quiet, compounding advantage in exactly that second category: BeiDou reference stations across African ports, police training and equipment transfers across the Pacific, sustained technical presence in the unglamorous rooms where regional fisheries bodies write inspection procedures.
My own argument about maritime domain awareness starts from a parallel diagnosis, but on the sensor and data side rather than the institutional side. The concept of MDA has not changed much on paper — the IMO still defines it as the effective understanding of anything associated with the maritime domain that could affect the security, safety, economy, or environment of a state or region. What has changed is everything beneath that definition. Global seaborne trade has roughly tripled since 1990. The container fleet alone grew from 4.5 million TEU of capacity in 2000 to over 33 million TEU by 2025, with vessel counts rising from roughly 2,600 to nearly 7,500. No navy, however well-resourced, can maintain a comprehensive picture of a domain that size using organic sensors alone. A frigate occupies one piece of ocean at a time. A maritime patrol aircraft sweeps a corridor for a few hours and returns to base. Neither scales to a global merchant fleet numbering in the tens of thousands of hulls.
The deeper point, which I think connects directly to Auffret’s argument, is that MDA has shifted from solely a sensor-coverage problem to a data-fusion and behavioral-analysis problem. Identity and location became technically knowable with the advent of AIS in the early 2000s and then technically fakeable at scale once bad actors realized what a global tracking layer meant for their exposure. Going dark is not proof of illicit conduct, but it is a cue that has to be investigated with more than a single data source.
That is precisely the kind of problem that institutions built for Cold War platform-counting are poorly suited to solve, and it is precisely the kind of problem Auffret’s essay gestures toward without naming: you cannot govern a maritime commons you cannot see clearly, and the tools that gave the old model its adequacy, organic national sensors, classified collection, platform-centric acquisition, are structurally mismatched to a domain where 40 percent of seaborne trade, by Daniel’s estimate, encompasses areas deemed so high-risk that vessels are going dark for safety and security reasons. only half a percent of ships went dark when Windward was founded”.
Intelligence Architecture as the Missing Fifth Mechanism
Auffret identifies four recurring effects that maritime governance produces and naval power cannot: institutional access and socialization, security cooperation below the threshold of alliance, information-infrastructure dependence, and normative shaping of the rules themselves. His third mechanism is the one that maps most directly onto my conversation with Daniel, and it is worth pulling apart carefully, because I think Windward’s model is doing something structurally similar to what Auffret describes China doing with BeiDou, aimed at a different outcome.
Auffret’s argument about information infrastructure is that the strategic questions sit above the hardware. They are about who supplies and maintains the system, whose standards structure the data, and how easily a country can switch providers. More than thirty African countries now host BeiDou reference stations or run BeiDou-enabled services, often with subsidized equipment and training reaching into navigation, mapping, transport, and fisheries monitoring. The payoff for Beijing is not a kill switch. It is entrenchment, the quiet way that trained officials and established maintenance arrangements make later choices harder to make independently, even for states that retain multi-constellation receivers on paper.
Now set that against what Daniel told me about Windward’s own strategic self-understanding. When the company was founded in 2011, Daniel and his co-founder Matan Peled were watching the first satellite AIS feeds and the first radar-rate satellites emerge, and they bet that maritime transparency was about to become a global commercial capability rather than a classified national one. Daniel was fifteen years ahead of the curve. Windward’s current architecture, AIS as a starting point, layered with port lineups and reports, electro-optical imagery, radio-frequency analysis, synthetic aperture radar, and corporate ownership and registry data, is explicitly built to be shareable in a way that classified collection is not.
Daniel’s own phrase for the constraint that classified intelligence imposes is memorable: everything that comes from a cleared source is just not shareable, and if you sign up to the logic of a bifurcated world where no single navy enforces the rules everywhere at once, you need to create common ground to build a new rule-based order.
That is Auffret’s information-infrastructure mechanism but is a fundamentally different model from BeiDou. Where China wins entrenchment through subsidized receivers and training that bind partners into a Chinese-controlled data ecosystem, Windward is trying to win entrenchment through a commercially derived, unclassified intelligence layer that partners who are neither full U.S. allies nor adversaries, Daniel’s own examples are countries like Malaysia and Indonesia, can adopt without picking a geopolitical side. The company’s recent ownership transformation, taking the firm private under U.S. private equity, its facility clearance, and its recruitment of retired Vice Admiral Bob Sharp, former Director of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency and Commander of the Office of Naval Intelligence, as Chief Maritime Intelligence Officer, are all moves that position Windward at the intersection Auffret’s essay implicitly calls for: commercially flexible enough to be shareable, credible enough to be government-relevant.
This is worth stating plainly because Auffret’s essay, for all its analytical value, treats information-infrastructure competition as essentially a story about GNSS constellations. Windward’s evolution suggests the competition is broader than satellite navigation. It extends to the entire intelligence-fusion layer that sits on top of positioning data, the layer that turns “there are ships in the Gulf” into “where are the IRGC fast boats, where are the dark tankers, where is the first undeclared LPG cargo going out,” to use Daniel’s own framing of the difference between data and intelligence. A partner nation that depends on a single classified ally for that fusion layer is arguably as entrenched, and as constrained in a crisis, as one that depends on a single GNSS provider for positioning. Windward’s bet is that the same shareability logic Auffret prescribes for institutional relationships and normative engagement applies to intelligence architecture as well, and that this is a lever the United States has been slower to grasp than it should be.
Hormuz as the Test Case for Both Arguments
The clearest place where Auffret’s governance argument and my own MDA and Windward reporting converge is the Strait of Hormuz, and it is worth walking through carefully because the two pieces are describing the same crisis from opposite ends of the causal chain.
Auffret cites the spring 2026 episode in which the United States assembled a naval force to reopen the strait after Iran closed it to traffic. A month into that deployment, Admiral James Stavridis and a chorus of maritime lawyers reached what Auffret calls the uncomfortable verdict that American firepower could not decide the outcome. Iran’s cheap drones and mines kept risk, and insurance premiums, high enough to strangle traffic regardless of who controlled the water. Auffret’s conclusion is that if naval power cannot restore transit rights mid-war, it is unlikely to do so in peacetime, and that governance — institutions, rules, information systems — has to do work that coercion alone cannot.
Daniel, describing the same crisis from the intelligence side, told me he was receiving roughly a hundred phone calls a day asking what was happening to oil transits through the strait. AIS, he estimated, was providing perhaps fifty percent of the true operational picture over the preceding sixty days. The other fifty percent required exactly the kind of multi-source fusion Windward has spent fifteen years building. That gap is not an abstract analytical inconvenience. Strategic petroleum reserves are finite and have already been drawn down substantially, which means the cumulative effect of sustained uncertainty about what is moving through the strait is not indefinitely deferrable for governments, energy companies, or anyone exposed to global supply-chain risk.
Put these two accounts together and a more complete picture of the Hormuz crisis emerges than either piece offers alone. Auffret shows the ceiling on coercive naval power: firepower could surge into the strait, and Iranian asymmetric capability still made the water too risky to insure at scale. What my reporting on Windward adds is that even the actors trying to manage the crisis below that ceiling, insurers, energy companies, allied governments deciding how to respond, were working with roughly half the operational picture, because the governing intelligence architecture is still built around classified, unshareable collection rather than the multi-source commercial fusion that could close that gap.
Neither coercion nor institution-building matters much if the actors involved cannot see clearly enough to act. Seeing clearly, in a strait crowded with dark tankers, shadow-fleet oil movements, and IRGC fast boats operating below the AIS layer entirely, increasingly runs through architectures like Windward’s rather than through exquisite, classified sensors that cannot be shared with the partners who most need the picture.
This is also where my own long-standing distinction between crisis management and chaos management becomes directly relevant to Auffret’s argument, more directly than his essay itself draws out. In a discrete crisis, a specific naval confrontation with Iran, a particular sanctions-evasion episode, the intelligence requirement is for precise, timely, actionable information about specific actors, and that is roughly what classified collection is built to deliver.
But the Hormuz situation, like the broader shadow-fleet phenomenon Daniel described, is not really a crisis in that bounded sense. It is chronic, persistent, multi-directional disorder, which requires a different kind of intelligence architecture altogether: a sustained, comprehensive, shared picture of what normal looks like, so that deviations can be detected reliably and attributed accurately over time, not just during an acute episode.
That is a chaos-management requirement, and chaos management, by definition, cannot be met by intelligence that only a handful of cleared partners are allowed to see. Auffret’s own argument about governance surviving beyond a single deployment, about institutional socialization compounding over years in a way that a port call cannot, is describing the same distinction from the governance side that I have been describing from the intelligence side. Both arguments are really about the difference between episodic presence and sustained architecture.
Where the Two Arguments Still Diverge
It would be too neat to claim these are simply two halves of one seamless argument, and it is worth being honest about where they pull apart. Auffret’s governance mechanisms operate on a slow institutional clock, police secondments in the Pacific, standardization agreements inside NATO, intersessional working groups drafting language for a fisheries commission months before a plenary vote. These are relationships and norms that compound over years and, as his Solomon Islands example shows, can also unravel when a government changes and a new prime minister decides to review a security pact negotiated by a predecessor.
That is a genuinely different timescale and a genuinely different fragility than a commercial intelligence architecture, which can in principle be stood up, licensed, and shared far faster than a bilateral security relationship can be built or a working group’s guidance can be adopted by consensus.
That difference in timescale is, I would argue, the strongest reason to treat commercial maritime intelligence fusion as the more immediately tractable lever available to Washington, even as the slower governance work Auffret describes proceeds in parallel and remains necessary. The United States is not going to out-negotiate China’s accumulated institutional access in the Pacific or its normative presence inside regional fisheries bodies on a short timeline. That ground was ceded gradually and will have to be regained gradually, through exactly the sustained technical presence and coastguard ship rider continuity that Auffret recommends.
But the intelligence-architecture bias Daniel describes, toward exquisite and classified collection and away from shared and actionable intelligence, is a policy choice, not a decades-long relationship debt. It could be corrected faster than the institutional deficits Auffret catalogs and doing so would give the governance side something it currently lacks: a common operational picture that allied navies, coast guards, port authorities, and shipping companies can see together, rather than a picture fragmented across classification boundaries. Everything that comes from a cleared source is just not shareable, and a maritime commons that can only be secured by sharing intelligence that cannot be shared is not a viable one.
Auffret is right that naval power cannot buy the institutions, relationships, and rules that keep maritime order functioning. What his essay leaves implicit, and what my own work on MDA and Windward makes explicit, is that naval power cannot buy the underlying awareness either and that the same structural logic he applies to BeiDou and NATO standardization agreements applies with equal force to the architecture of maritime intelligence itself.
The old model, built for a bounded, state-centric ocean and a finite set of adversary platforms, is mismatched to a domain crowded with tens of thousands of vessels a navy will never own a sensor pointed at. Governance and awareness are not separate competitions running on parallel tracks. They are the same competition, and the United States is currently underinvesting in both halves of it for the same underlying reason: an institutional habit of treating exclusivity, whether classified or platform-centric, as a source of strength in a domain where exclusivity has become the primary liability.