Nebraska U.S. Sen. Pete Ricketts participated in a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing last week, where he discussed his work to combat what he described as the illegal, coercive, aggressive, and deceptive activities of Communist China in the Indo-Pacific.
Ricketts highlighted how Communist China’s maritime militia threatens undersea, critical infrastructure of regional allies.
“Russian research vessels and tankers [are] coincidentally stopping over critical infrastructure right as it fails. The Indo-Pacific has this problem, only it’s magnified,” Ricketts said.
“You’re not just seeing the actions of a few rogue ships, but you’ve got the Chinese maritime militia, which has a fleet of thousands of civilian fishing vessels that are just CCP proxies.”
Ricketts added the dual-use vessels provide Beijing with a perfect screen for their – in his words – illegal, coercive, aggressive, and deceptive operations that target subsea cables and threaten the digital lifeblood of regional countries like Taiwan, Vietnam, the Philippines, and Singapore.
