Six Essential Takeaways for Maritime Leaders from America’s New National Security Strategy

At a Glance

• The 2025 U.S. National Security Strategy (NSS) defines maritime security chokepoint access as a core national interest tied directly to economic stability.
• Illicit networks, gray-zone behaviors, and foreign influence in ports and logistics are now classified as national security concerns.
• The NSS calls for “real-time discovery, attribution, and response” and recognizes that traditional intelligence models cannot meet modern maritime threat tempo.
• The Western Hemisphere and Indo-Pacific emerge as priority regions for enforcement, deterrence, and supply chain protection.
• Supply chain integrity, sanctions enforcement, and transparency across maritime networks are elevated into the national security framework.
• Windward provides the persistent visibility, behavioral context, and multi-sensor intelligence the NSS identifies as essential, enabling earlier anomaly detection, clearer networked-risk mapping, and better insight into deceptive activity so organizations can align daily operations with the strategy’s call for real-time awareness and stronger maritime resilience.

A New Maritime Lens in America’s National Security Strategy

The 2025 National Security Strategy (NSS) marks a decisive shift in how the United States defines and protects its national interests. Maritime activity now sits at the center of how the U.S. approaches competition, resilience, and strategic advantage. The NSS frames the maritime domain as a primary arena where influence is exercised, vulnerabilities are exposed, and national power is tested.

This repositioning reflects two realities: geopolitical competition increasingly plays out through shipping lanes, chokepoints, ports, and critical maritime infrastructure; and disruptions across these networks reveal how essential they are to economic stability and national preparedness. 

The National Security Strategy outlines how the U.S. intends to navigate these challenges, protect key maritime corridors, and counter behaviors that undermine freedom of navigation, supply chain integrity, and regional stability.

What follows is a focused breakdown of the NSS for the maritime community, highlighting the core implications that matter most for maritime operators, intelligence teams, and commercial decision-makers.

Six Things Maritime Leaders Need to Know from the 2025 National Security Strategy

1. The Maritime Domain Moves to the Center of U.S. National Security

The 2025 NSS elevates maritime security more explicitly than previous strategies. It identifies freedom of navigation, secure chokepoints, and resilient supply chains as core U.S. interests across the Indo-Pacific, Middle East, and Western Hemisphere. The Indo-Pacific is described as a decisive economic arena, with the strategy noting that roughly one-third of global shipping moving through the South China Sea is directly tied to U.S. economic stability.

The document also highlights growing concerns that competitors could gain leverage over global trade by influencing chokepoints or imposing informal “toll systems” on maritime traffic.

What this means for maritime leaders: Sea lines of communication and their surrounding infrastructure will sit at the heart of future U.S. policy, monitoring, and enforcement activity.

2. Illicit and Gray-Zone Maritime Activity Is Now a National-Security Threat

The National Security Strategy brings a wide spectrum of illicit and gray-zone maritime activity under the umbrella of national security. The strategy explicitly names drug trafficking, human trafficking, and illicit migration as priority threats. It also highlights foreign subversion, espionage, and manipulation of shipping networks through supply chains and offshore influence. In the Western Hemisphere, the strategy warns of state-backed control of critical ports and infrastructure.

Dark fleets, false flags, closely held ownership structures, covert financing routes, and unregistered port influence now intersect with state-linked activity. Rather than treating these as discrete compliance challenges, the NSS signals that Washington views them as strategic vectors that erode sovereignty, destabilize markets, and weaken alliances.

What this means for maritime leaders: Illicit and ambiguous behavior at sea will increasingly be monitored, interpreted, and acted upon through a national-security lens, not just a regulatory one.

3. The National Security Strategy Calls for Predictive, Persistent Intelligence at Scale

While the National Security Strategy does not prescribe specific intelligence technologies, it repeatedly emphasizes the need for earlier detection of threats, more reliable attribution, and stronger protection of critical networks and infrastructure. It frames these requirements within the broader goal of safeguarding supply chains, chokepoints, and access to critical materials.

The strategy also underscores the importance of working across commercial networks, where many of these threats originate or transit, and highlights the role of non-governmental partners in strengthening national resilience. 

What this means for maritime leaders: Continuous monitoring, faster contextual analysis, and integrated public-private information flows become essential, not because the NSS mandates a particular architecture, but because the nature of modern risk requires it.

4. The Western Hemisphere Becomes a High-Priority Maritime Enforcement Theater

While the National Security Strategy covers global challenges, it places a focus on the Western Hemisphere. The strategy introduces what it calls a “Trump Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine,” which seeks to prevent non-hemispheric competitors from positioning military or strategic assets in the region.

To support this posture, the NSS calls for increased Coast Guard and Navy presence to maintain control of key sea lanes. It emphasizes more aggressive action against drug cartels and transnational criminal organizations, as well as hardened migration and smuggling routes at sea.

What this means for maritime leaders: These waters will face growing surveillance, more frequent at-sea enforcement, and heightened scrutiny of vessel behavior, ownership links, and cargo flows.

5. Indo-Pacific Deterrence Depends on Advanced Maritime Domain Awareness

Although the strategy spans multiple regions, its Indo-Pacific emphasis is particularly clear. The National Security Strategy identifies the Indo-Pacific as a region of heightened strategic competition, emphasizing that the sea lanes around Taiwan, the First Island Chain, and the South China Sea carry a substantial share of global shipping and are critical to U.S. economic stability. It stresses the need to prevent competitors from controlling or coercively shaping these waters.

The NSS highlights port access, maritime partnerships, and deeper situational awareness with regional allies as essential components of this approach. 

What this means for maritime leaders: Increased coordination, greater transparency requirements, and stricter expectations around vessel behavior, routing decisions, and data integrity.

6. Sanctions, Supply Chains, and Economic Security Remain Firmly in the National Security Framework

The National Security Strategy connects economic resilience directly to national security in ways that carry major implications for maritime trade. It highlights U.S. intentions to counter predatory or illicit foreign practices, including supply chain manipulation, through oversight, industrial strategy, and targeted enforcement.

The document also emphasizes maintaining U.S. dollar dominance, a goal that naturally extends oversight to shipping companies, financial intermediaries, and logistics networks involved in cross-border trade.

What this means for maritime leaders: Compliance expectations will shift from vessel-level checks to network-level assessments: ownership, operators, brokers, registries, ports, and logistics corridors. Transparency and behavior, not just documentation, will matter more as economic security becomes a strategic priority rather than a regulatory one.

What to Expect and How to Prepare

Leaders across shipping, energy, compliance, and government will need to:

• Expand visibility beyond AIS and declared behavior, incorporating multi-sensor confirmation, behavioral context, and independent verification.
• Reassess risk models to account for gray-zone behavior, networked illicit activity, and strategically ambiguous operations that fall between clear legal categories.
• Prepare for tighter regulatory scrutiny across documentation, ownership structures, routing decisions, and exposure to chokepoints or politically contested infrastructure.
• Engage in earlier, more intelligence-driven decision-making, especially in regions identified as priority theaters: the Indo-Pacific and Western Hemisphere.
• Strengthen partnerships, since the NSS emphasizes that maritime awareness and security depend on shared intelligence and interoperable tools.