Quad unveils satellite-based maritime initiative to defend against China
The program was announced a day after Joe Biden announced that the US would use force to protect Taiwan from attack

The US, Japan, Australia and India have launched a satellite-based initiative to help Indo-Pacific countries track down illegal fishing and unconventional naval militias to fight China.
President Joe Biden and the other leaders in the Quad Security Group presented the program in Tokyo at their fourth summit in just over a year.
The summit comes a day after Biden said he would use force to defend Taiwan against a Chinese attack. The statement appeared to reverse decades of US policy of "strategic ambiguity," which does not make clear whether the US would step in to defend the self-governing island.
The White House retracted Biden's comment, saying US policy had not changed. However, it was the third time Biden had made similarly confusing remarks about Taiwan.
The Indo-Pacific Partnership for Maritime Domain Awareness initiative aims to help countries in the Indo-Pacific region improve their maritime capabilities to counter human and arms trafficking, illegal fishing and Chinese naval militias. The militias are said to be engaged in commercial fishing but support the Chinese Coast Guard and Navy.
"This responds to a real need ... across the region, whether it be Southeast Asia, the Pacific or South Asia, which is the need for greater maritime awareness," said a senior US official.
"The ability to know what is happening in countries' territorial waters and in their exclusive economic zones".
Another senior US official told the FT that the Quad will fund collaboration with a commercial satellite positioning service that would provide countries with near real-time maritime information.
The service would monitor radio frequencies and radar signals that would allow countries to track vessels that have turned off their AIS (automatic identification systems) transponders to avoid detection.
The official said the benefit of using a commercial service is that it alleviates concerns about leaking classified information and promotes the development of a multilateral system for sharing information.
She added that the service is also a relatively inexpensive and effective solution. Information would be shared through a network of regional centers - in India, Singapore, Vanuatu and the Solomon Islands - and in some cases directly to countries. Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)
