Greater operational transparency in the South China Sea has become a strategic imperative, and the United States needs to treat it as such by investing greater resources and political capital toward increasing the shared maritime awareness of Southeast Asian states. It simply will not happen without U.S. leadership.

The opaque, low-information nature of the South China Sea creates a permissive environment for many sources of conflict. When national governments lack real-time awareness of who is doing what and where in the maritime domain, opportunistic actors like China have the ability to exploit it—through contentious land reclamation, illegal fishing and the bullying of commercial ships from other nations. But even among states that aren't tempted to exploit information asymmetries, a lack of situational awareness increases the prospect of misunderstandings, miscalculations and accidents among nations with overlapping Exclusive Economic Zones.