Out of Depth: Shortcomings in U.S. Police Assistance and Coordination Warrant a Shift in the Pacific Islands
ABSTRACT
This article highlights the strategic competition between the United States (U.S.) and China in the Pacific Island Countries (PICs), focusing on law enforcement assistance and capacity-building as a proxy for strategic influence and great power competition. This dynamic warrants a restructuring of civilian police coordination alongside U.S. military priorities to better counter PRC efforts and eliminate glaring inefficiencies in current U.S. federal law enforcement engagement in the PICs. Doing so requires optimizing existing security architecture to create a centralized hub for synchronizing and deconflicting U.S. police capacity-building in the Pacific Islands, nesting civilian law enforcement expertise within broader military strategic planning to counter Chinese malign influence and improve regional resilience to transnational organized crime.
A blind spot in U.S. law enforcement cooperation is handing the People’s Republic of China (PRC) a low-cost, high-yield foothold in the Pacific Island Countries (PICs). Set in the geostrategically significant expanse of Oceania, the PICs have emerged as a primary theater for intensifying competition between the United States and the PRC. While this contest traditionally spans diplomatic, economic, and military domains, it is increasingly being waged in the realm of civilian policing. This development demands the recognition of law enforcement security cooperation and capacity-building as an evolving proxy for great power competition and influence in the region. Consequently, U.S. shortcomings in this domain warrant a shift in security cooperation in the PICs to offset growing PRC influence.
Most PICs lack standing militaries, leaving civilian police forces to play the crucial role of maintaining internal and national security. The only game in town, this makes law enforcement programs in the Pacific prime targets for external engagement and strategic influence campaigns. Seizing the terrain, China is leveraging police cooperation as an effective, non-traditional vector to normalize its security presence and export an authoritarian governance model. Beijing’s approach deftly integrates security assistance with economic inducements, leveraging a strategy of security sector capture to target the immediate needs of PIC leaders and poison the well of western influence.
Till now, the United States has made modest strides of its own to bolster regional policing engagement. Currently, the U.S. relies on a mix of federal law enforcement agencies with increasing budget shortfalls to focus on variable aspects of security cooperation in Oceania that are at times ad-hoc, duplicative, or tactically disjointed. Worse still, civilian law enforcement engagement efforts across Oceania are often de-coupled from larger, coordinated security cooperation assistance objectives driven by the Combatant Command, leaving law enforcement agencies to independently initiate capacity building efforts in different island nations. Friends to all, Pacific Island leaders have so far mostly navigated a middle ground that benefits from this competition. As it stands, this arrangement favors the PRC. Perceived as having deeper pockets with fewer bureaucratic restraints, Chinese policing initiatives in the PICs continue to proliferate, rapidly outstripping U.S. law enforcement influence in the Solomon Islands, Vanuatu, Kiribati, Samoa, Fiji, and Tonga.
To effectively counter PRC strategic inroads and achieve its objectives in the Indo-Pacific, the U.S. should bolster and overhaul its approach to law enforcement security engagement in Oceania. To accomplish this, the U.S. must better align and integrate regional police engagements, nesting civilian interagency capacity-building efforts within broader U.S. Indo-Pacific Command’s (USINDOPACOM’s) strategic objectives. This alignment is best achieved by restructuring the scope of Joint Interagency Task Force–West (JIATF-W).
Headquartered at INDOPACOM in Honolulu, HI, JIATF-W is best positioned for this effort and would do well to expand beyond its current counternarcotics scope and authorities to serve as the primary integrator of civilian law enforcement engagement in parallel to military security cooperation efforts in the Pacific. This expanded mandate would move JIATF-W beyond its legacy counternarcotics authorities to address the full range of transnational organized crime, capitalizing on existing security architecture to more effectively synchronize civilian police capacity-building efforts in the PICs alongside the Pentagon’s security cooperation vision.
At the strategic level, nonmilitary security cooperation is on the rise as an important arena where China is able to compete for influence and establish deeper security cooperation with Pacific states. In recent years, China’s security agencies have expanded their presence abroad through law enforcement, counterterrorism, and intelligence partnerships with foreign counterparts in fairly opaque attempts to shape domestic law and order in other countries. In line with this perspective, Beijing views policing cooperation as a vital component of its Global Security Initiative (GSI). Under the GSI umbrella, China is bent on building a global architecture for security cooperation centered on law enforcement and policing as an alternative to Western-led security frameworks.
These efforts are increasingly visible in Oceania, where international policing assistance continues to be important for Pacific police forces. By 2025, Chinese police trainers were active in Kiribati, Vanuatu, Fiji, and Solomon Islands. Beijing funded Samoa’s first dedicated police academy and in May 2025, China pledged more law enforcement support at a foreign ministers’ meeting in Xiamen, Fujian, attended by eleven Pacific Islands Forum member states. In the background, Beijing has also quietly worked to rebuild its standing with Interpol and establish stronger ties with the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), highlighting China’s growing focus on these venues as tools of influence abroad.
In light of this, the U.S. can best combat PRC influence in the security domain by enhancing its own law enforcement collaboration in the region. While Australia and New Zealand also have longstanding skin in the game, with a laudable history of sustained police support and leadership training in the region, the U.S. homeland “is in the Pacific,” reinforcing that the country cannot afford to outsource this effort fully, even in the name of burden sharing. To effectively counter Beijing’s inroads and secure its long-term interests, the United States must lead a more integrated, consistent, and Pacific-centric strategy in the law enforcement realm, lest capacity-building efforts remain fragmented.
U.S. Law Enforcement Shortcomings
Federal law enforcement agencies operate in a federated, decentralized manner, with separate but overlapping jurisdictions and mission sets. This inherent structural fragmentation is a feature, not a bug, of a system rooted in diffused policing power and institutional specialization. It comes, however, with an accompanying challenge to effective coordination, information sharing, and operational deconfliction. Logistically, each federal law enforcement agency independently service their own budget and training agendas, an approach that cultivates separate regional networks and disparate engagement efforts without sufficient obligation or incentive to coordinate with federal counterparts. Organizations use their own case management systems to collect data and are typically reluctant to proactively share sensitive case information, even with fellow law enforcement stakeholders. Compartmentalization, a necessary feature for maintaining operational security, bottlenecks potential deconfliction and more effective unity of effort across the interagency. Furthermore, strict Controlled Unclassified Information (CUI) and Law Enforcement Sensitive (LES) procedures, necessary for protecting critical information, paradoxically function as even more systemic bureaucratic hurdles, further compartmentalizing capacity-building efforts.
Separate affiliations with the Department of Justice, Department of State, Department of War (DOW), or Department of Homeland Security also imbue individual law enforcement bodies and counterdrug bureaus with different cultures and priorities without shared policy or built-in departmental methods for collaboration. This can pit agencies in competition for budget allocations and prestige, often prioritizing independence over collaboration.
Add to this the sheer scale of the U.S. law enforcement community operating worldwide, compounded by the immense challenge of covering the vast Pacific theater. These factors collectively foster a dense, overlapping array of jurisdictions and perceptions of operational turf. This complexity often leads to ambiguity, establishing blurred lines of mandate and authorities that result in a “left hand that is unaware of the right hand.” Unlike China’s authoritarian, unified campaign of influence in the region, these operational blind spots on behalf of the U.S. frequently manifest in opportunities for duplication of effort and overlapping security cooperation engagements. This is evident in the Indo-Pacific, where numerous agencies have claim to valid, intersecting mission sets, many of them requiring collaboration with foreign law enforcement partners. Views differ, however, among the interagency as to who should lead different partner policing engagement given the location, subject matter, or history of collaboration.
In my experience, it is not uncommon for host-nation law enforcement officials in a given country in Oceania to welcome one U.S. federal agency for a week of police training, only to be offered the same manner of training the following month from a separate U.S. provider. Different policing representatives descend on the pacific islands in well-intentioned yet uncoordinated fashion, keen on offering cyber training, maritime and port security awareness, tactics, or courses on crime scene management and forensic science. Consequently, police officials across Oceania encounter a rotating cast of American officials representing multiple organizations, each with unique objectives and aims. This arrangement leaves police officials in the PICs collecting handfuls of government business cards, all the while unclear on which agency has primacy for law enforcement engagement, or in which domain. This results in a potential saturation of security engagement that is grossly inefficient, undermine perceptions of American competence, and poorly serves our friends in the Pacific.
For all the good work done, there is also no consolidated record of what historical U.S. efforts, with whom, have been offered in the region. With no mechanism for cataloguing or deconflicting lines of effort, U.S. police partnerships mostly rely on bilateral channels and ad hoc networks of collaboration that result in critical blind spots. Consequently, organizations effectively retread common ground year over year, tripping over each other without a collective memory or a unified, strategic framework for effective police capacity building in this vital region. Compounded with increasing training and travel budget shortfalls, agencies cannot afford to pursue the same disjointed approach and expect to effectively cover the territorial expanse of isolated island nations without meaningful reform.
A Joint Solution
The interagency would do well to forecast and integrate regional partner engagement as part of a larger, unified enterprise. Collaboration begins with a willingness to synchronize efforts across the U.S. federal law enforcement community, supporting the joint task force model for more effective deconfliction. And although the DoW cannot compel the civilian agencies to participate in a joint venture like this, interagency cooperation with the military in this manner is not unprecedented.
Historically, JIATFs are formed to achieve unity of effort on a number of asymmetric threats. JIATF-West, a regional interagency task force created by the Department of Defense (DOD), responsible for executing counterdrug activities in USINDOPACOM area of responsibility, is the primary venue for this collaboration. Comprised of DoW, DOJ, and Department of Homeland Security (DHS) components, the task force leverages authorities and expertise from across the services and agencies to address illicit drugs. While the military is the ideal stakeholder for chairing a joint venture of this magnitude, given its familiarity with joint operations, it benefits from leaning heavily on the interagency for hard-won law enforcement expertise.
However scattershot, the civilian government agencies have rightfully been at the forefront of policing engagement in the region. Armed with law enforcement authorities, civilian investigators bring experience addressing criminality and training police forces, all of which are in need of professionalization across the PICs. Reliance on this manner of expertise is critical, bringing law enforcement authorities to bear alongside the reach and coordination of the Joint Force. The military can benefit from tapping into existing law enforcement networks and a globalized law enforcement fraternity and “culture of the badge” as an invaluable means of engaging police forces in the PICs and combatting gray zone, asymmetric threats.
These factors have important implications for the proliferation of crime in Oceania and growing PRC police engagement as grey zone threat vectors while statutory limits constrain the military’s reach and authorities alone. Such limitations highlight the advantages brought about by the shared authorities enjoyed by multiple participating organizations, all of which demand de-confliction. The JIATF model provides just that, while leveraging the diverse authorities and capabilities of the respective components that otherwise limit the scope of their individual efforts. It would also manifest in interagency consensus, synchronization, and joint protocols to help offset the fact that currently, there is no central authority for organizing wholesale law enforcement partner capacity building in the policing realm, nor is there a central USG hub for tracking which training and engagement efforts have occurred, and where.
Without sacrificing authorities or the right to pursue distinct law enforcement activities within their jurisdiction, individual agencies might participate in this venture by lending liaison officers to JIATF-W with the intent of integrating engagement and police capacity building campaigns in concert with fellow stakeholders. Organizations would still retain responsibility for planning and executing operations, but would benefit from the deconfliction mechanism brought to bear from a JIATF.
Collaboration at this level is an essential form of proactive defense allowing the U.S. and partners to counter Chinese security force assistance in the PICs as a form of irregular warfare and malign influence that will metastasis unless confronted. And while agencies may also be reluctant to share information out of fear of losing control or concern that sensitive information could be misused, any reluctance to surrender strict operational autonomy is shortsighted and will fail to bring about a meaningful, coherent counter to PRC influence in the policing realm. This dilemma emphasizes unique law enforcement capabilities as part of a vital whole-of-government approach requiring close collaboration with interagency, international, and partner organizations to cultivate a coherent U.S. engagement strategy in Oceania.
Strengthening and modifying an existing JIATF would bring the collective institutional knowledge of the interagency under one roof. It would serve to deconflict and consolidate lines of effort across the interagency and integrate them alongside the combatant command’s security cooperation agenda, helping scale a multiagency approach to a multidimensional problem. The outcome is a JIATF-W that becomes the primary deconfliction and coordination apparatus for law enforcement capacity building in the Pacific. The effectiveness of this enterprise will be hamstrung, however, so long as JIATF-W remains wed to its legacy counternarcotics mission alone.
Expanded Authorities
Serving as a ready-made apparatus for interagency coordination on multi-domain threats in the Indo-Pacific, JIATF-W’s counterdrug-only mission may be a relic of the past. While the JIATF model provides a strong organizational platform, its foundational statutory authority is disproportionally narrow when assessed against the realities of today’s convergent criminal threat spectrum. Relying on the counterdrug legal authority alone places operational limitations on the JIATFs, preventing them from optimally applying their unique, integrated capabilities against the full spectrum of transnational criminal organizations (TCOs). This structural limitation may also limit JIATF-W sponsored partnering engagement with pacific island police forces from working on the full range of criminal threat vectors that are otherwise important to them.
Consequently, JIATF-W would benefit from expanding its mandate to address the full spectrum of transnational organized crime. Doing so maintains the heart of the task force’s mandate for counternarcotics, merely updating its authorities to include the rest of the puzzle in the form of criminality that goes hand-in-hand with drug trafficking. Fueled by an interconnected and increasingly digitized ecosystem enabling global communications and money flows, today’s transnational organized crime (TOC) actors are not confined to single domain forms of crime that fit into easily identifiable silos. Instead, modern TCOs are comprised of multi-domain, adaptive criminal enterprises that blend drug trafficking with human smuggling and weapons trafficking. One is hard pressed to find any illicit drug activity that is not tied to some form of money laundering, cybercrime or illicit finance. Overlooking this dynamic effectively handcuffs the task force from addressing relevant, narcotic-adjacent criminal activity it is uniquely positioned to counter.
These factors render the current scope of JIATF authorities inadequately focused on a narrow band of criminal activity that puts the rest of the criminal world out of reach. The legislative anchoring to a commodity-specific mandate forces the JIATF-model to effectively combat an evolving TCO landscape in the Indo-Pacific with one hand tied behind its back. This limitation comes into further question when taken into consideration against the Trump Administration’s recent designation of international drug cartels as TCOs. This label opens the aperture for a more inclusive recognition of adjacent and complementary threats alongside traditional counterdrug activities.
The chief limitation here is not with organizational inefficiency, but rather a lack of appropriate legal charter dictating the scope of activities warranted to combat this more complex set of threats. Unshackling the interagency task force model from an unnecessarily constrained charter would unlock the full potential of the integrated JIATF architecture, taking advantage of the full scope of authorities and expertise held by the component military services and law enforcement partners.
Better to call a spade a spade and recognize the convergence of criminal and malign activity in the Indo-Pacific. The PRC’s expansion of policing security cooperation assistance does not justify or limit itself to counternarcotics alone. Nor should the U.S. restrict its regional police engagement in the PICs to counterdrugs. Indeed, JIATF is poised to fully leverage its unique structure and the full set of law enforcement capabilities already at its disposal. Doing so amplifies the existing JIATF model beyond its current license, expanding it to a means of leveraging/synchronizing LE expertise in the region that has long been sporadic and ineffective.
Conclusion
To meaningfully confront the real-world challenges in Oceania and sustain critical policing initiatives with partners and allies, an update to the mission scope of JIATF-W is overdue. To shore up gaps in law enforcement engagement, fulfill the mission of Homeland Defense, and maintain positional advantage in the Pacific Islands—the Office of the Secretary of War has an opportunity to restructure the task force. This realignment, built upon a broader, comprehensive understanding of transnational organized crime threat vectors has the capacity to synchronize efforts across the military services and civilian law enforcement community.
This restructuring would better align the JIATF-W with INDOPACOM’s broader efforts to counter Chinese malign influence in the Pacific Islands, allowing it to bring powerful and unique law enforcement networks to bear well beyond the limits of traditional military security cooperation. With a renewed and expanded mission-set, the interagency will be posed for full-scale, synchronized law enforcement cooperation and capacity building the region deserves.
Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, APCSS or the U.S. Government.
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