U.S., Allies, Partners enhance cooperative campaign to ensure secure sea passageways

FORUM Staff

The United States and its Allies and Partners continue expanding Combined Joint All-Domain Operations (CJADO) to keep vital waterways free and open worldwide.

Allied and partner navies, air forces and armies are cooperating throughout the nearly two-year campaign to bolster security for sea lines of communication (SLOC) across the Indo-Pacific and beyond, including economically important choke points stretching from the Malacca Strait and Strait of Hormuz to the Horn of Africa and the Panama Canal.

In late 2024, like-minded militaries conducted CJADO activities to counter maritime security threats ranging from potential blockades and aggressive territorial claims to shipping accidents, piracy and sanctions evasion. Those operations included a Maritime Cooperative Activity (MCA) involving aircraft and vessels from Japan, the Philippines and the U.S. within the Philippines’ exclusive economic zone in December.

The CJADO campaign, which began in February 2023, complements long-running exercises, routine transits and other activities that support Allies’ and Partners’ commitments to protect cargo and military transport through strategic waterways and choke points. Sea-lanes in the Indo-Pacific, from the Indian Ocean to the Sea of Japan, carry more than 80% of seaborne global trade.

The U.S. Indo-Pacific Command coordinated its regional CJADO campaign with U.S. Africa Command, U.S. Central Command, U.S. European Command and U.S. Southern Command, as well as Australia, Canada, France, India, Japan, the Philippines, South Korea and the United Kingdom, among other Allies and Partners. Together, they conducted synchronized all-domain operations within and near global choke points to thwart malign actors who would diminish established norms and international law.

In the South China Sea, for example, the U.S. and its Allies and Partners progressed from bilateral and trilateral cooperative activities to multilateral freedom of navigation operations (FONOP). In June 2024, vessels from Australia, Canada, Japan and the Philippines sailed through international waters. In August, Australian, Canadian, Philippine and U.S. air forces and navies conducted an MCA in the sea.

Ahead of their August FONOP, the four participating nations reaffirmed an international tribunal’s 2016 ruling that invalidated the People’s Republic of China’s arbitrary sovereignty claims to most of the South China Sea. The nations called it a “final and legally binding decision on parties to the dispute.”

The U.S. has a long history of supporting the tenets of the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea and of protecting SLOCs to ensure critical waterways remain open for trade and security. U.S. forces operate in the South China Sea daily, as they have for more than a century, in coordination with Allies and Partners committed to a Free and Open Indo-Pacific that promotes stability and prosperity.

Analysts say cooperative activities such as CJADO campaigns and FONOPs will increase in the face of mounting regional tensions.

“With the various existing agreements the Philippines has signed … with these regional parties, including an upcoming one with Canada, these [maritime cooperative] activities look set to continue, even though the timetable for such activities are not likely fixed,” Collin Koh, a senior fellow with the Institute of Defence and Strategic Studies at Singapore’s S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, told the Breaking Defense website in August. “But the general commitment by these regional powers is seen to exist.”

The importance of securing SLOCs has been highlighted by malign activities worldwide, such as attacks on ships in the Gulf of Aden by Yemen-based Houthi rebels.

“This is an international problem that requires an international solution,” then-U.K. Defence Secretary Grant Shapps said after the attacks started in December 2023. Since then, the U.S. and its Allies and Partners have deepened their commitment to countering such threats.