Orbital blind spots: dual-domain gray zone synergy and space-enabled maritime coercion in the Indo-Pacific

On 17 June 2024, eight China Coast Guard vessels rammed Philippine Navy inflatables at Second Thomas Shoal, amid a gray zone campaign that scholarship deems purely maritime. What enables the operational precision? Orbital architecture, this article argues. Through Civil-Military Fusion doctrine, China integrates satellite reconnaissance, GNSS spoofing, AIS manipulation, and communications jamming with maritime operations, producing dual-domain gray zone synergy: mutually enabling space-maritime operations whose aggregate coercion exceeds either domain alone, while cross-domain fragmentation frustrates attribution. Process-tracing these operations (2015 -2025) against Russia’s Baltic operations, this article identifies a five-step mechanism the PLA Strategic Support Force intitutionalized. Findings correct domain parochialism in gray zone theory, extend space power theory to sub-threshold coercion, and identify the governance lacuna China exploits, informing Indo-Pacific maritime resilience and QUAD domain awareness architecture.