The trigger for Asia’s next war, privatised

In mid-June, a small maritime drone, no larger than a car, got close enough to a Chinese warship to photograph it (Opens in new window) operating just 105 kilometres off the coast of the Philippines.

The incident has led to official responses from both governments and has become yet another report of an increasingly aggressive China testing the outer bounds of where it can project power.

But the incident raises a much bigger question about the drone itself. It was produced by a relatively small and new American defence manufacturer called Seasats. The company has some contracts with the US military, but this incident seems to have happened independent of a military command.

Information gathering has always had military consequences. When spy planes flew overhead in the Cold War, their very presence near sensitive military equipment was enough to raise tensions.

Military doctrine has always assumed that hardware – satellites or ships or planes – was sent by a specific state at the order of their political or military leadership. Their appearance in the skies and waters was not an accident but part of a chain of decisions. That assumption appeared settled because only governments had the budget and operational complexity to deploy that kind of technology.

No private firm could afford to operate and fly a spy plane or ship, nor would they have reason to. Both of those things have recently changed.

The cost of military hardware has dropped considerably as the entire defence sector re-engineers toward cheaper and more autonomous systems. Weapons being developed now are smaller, more easily replaced, and operated in swarms by a single operator from afar. Fully autonomous systems are being developed that remove even that last vestige of the need for trained operators.

Hardware can now be operated by private companies, given that their incentives are right. As new defence contractors fight for both commercial and government contracts, they are looking for ways to differentiate themselves and prove their mettle. Air drone companies often claim that their systems have been battle tested in Ukraine – though that often means that they have merely been flown in a field near the front line.

Seasats has said that this is the third time one of their drones has photographed a Chinese vessel in a contentious place: first near Guam (Opens in new window), then near Taiwan (Opens in new window), now near the Philippines. These interactions are part of their pitch to investors and potential customers, creating an incentive for further run-ins.

Private companies now have both the means and motive to involve themselves directly in volatile situations.

In locations like the South China Sea, where tensions are already running high, military strategists have assumed that the only way that a war could start would be one country would make either a strategic decision or a catastrophic error that would lead to war.

But that failed to imagine that a Chinese vessel might be confronted by a private company out to set up the next pitch deck to a venture capital firm.

It is easy to imagine a scenario in which the Chinese warship assumed that such a drone – inching closer to a billion-dollar warship – had explosive capacity and then chose to interpret that as a deadly threat instigated by the governments of the Philippines or, more dangerously, the United States.

In response to this incident, Beijing already warned (Opens in new window) that close approaches to its navy would risk an escalation at sea.

Every existing framework, including laws and doctrines, assumes that conflicts will be between entirely states or at least organisations trying to act in some way like states. None of it anticipates a private company meandering in, one that now has the military capacity of a traditional state but the accountability of a Silicon Valley startup.

This incident is the third time that just this one company has had a piece of equipment in place that could destabilise an already tense part of the world. There is no reason for this to be the last such time, and every reason for this pattern to continue and proliferate. The funding cycles and need for investor attention that drive this new industry of defence tech demand more and more of these moments, each moving closer to the edge.

Maritime drones in particular pose an ambiguous challenge if they appear in these places. Seasats has a larger vessel (Opens in new window) in testing that can carry air drones and eventually munitions. This time, the drone in question only carried a camera.

But a car-sized hull barrelling toward a warship will look the same regardless of its payload. It will not matter that no government authorised its presence or that the founders of the company did not intend for it to spark a conflict. It will only matter that it did.