Maritime War Risk: A Thai Exporter's Playbook

On 25 December 2025 the Thai Maritime Enforcement Command Center (ThaiMECC) declared a 12,500 km² Navigation Avoidance Area in the Gulf of Thailand, and within 72 hours Thai exporters started seeing “war risk” line items show up on freight invoices for lanes that had nothing to do with the affected waters. Two days later the Joint Border Committee signed a formal ceasefire. Lloyd’s Joint War Committee (JWC) — the body whose published Listed Areas actually govern war-risk pricing — never added the Gulf of Thailand to its list at any point during the incident.

For our clients on the Thailand–Middle East corridor, the episode was a stress test of war-risk mechanics and a textbook case of surcharge opportunism. We want to walk through what the advisory actually required, what it did not, and how we helped clients push back on charges the published rates never justified.

Key numbers from the 2025 advisory

• 12,500 km² — size of the Navigation Avoidance Area declared by ThaiMECC on 25 December 2025, covering waters from Trat province through Koh Kood toward the Vietnam–Cambodia maritime boundary
• Four coordinates defined the zone: 12°01.7′N 102°45.3′E, 11°33.5′N 102°35.6′E, 9°52.7′N 102°49.4′E, and 10°24.5′N 103°48.7′E
• 1981 — the year of the Border Goods Control Act (พ.ร.ก.ควบคุมสินค้าตามแนวชายแดน 2524) the Thai cabinet invoked to impose the oil-export ban on Cambodia
• 27 December 2025 — the date the General Border Committee (GBC) signed the formal ceasefire between the two defence ministries
• No JWC listing — Lloyd’s Joint War Committee did not add the Gulf of Thailand to its Listed Areas of enhanced risk at any point during the incident

That last figure is the one we kept returning to in client conversations. The JWC listing is the market’s default reference for war-risk pricing, and its absence meant the Gulf of Thailand never warranted a mandatory premium uplift.

How Lloyd’s JWC Listed Areas actually drive war-risk pricing

The Joint War Committee is a London-based body of underwriters from Lloyd’s and the International Underwriting Association. Roughly every quarter — and on demand during crises — it publishes a Listed Areas bulletin naming waters where hull, machinery, and war insurance carry meaningful added exposure. The list is not legally binding, but almost every war-risk policy written in the global marine market defers to it.

In practice the mechanics run like this:

1. A region is added to the Listed Areas after JWC assessment
2. Underwriters apply a stated Additional Premium as a percentage of hull value, usually per seven-day call
3. Shippers see the cost passed through as a War Risk Surcharge (WRS) or similar line item on freight invoices

The Gulf of Thailand never entered that pipeline during the 2025 incident. The clashes were confined to a short stretch of land border; the escalation ceiling was a narrow maritime avoidance zone, not a Red Sea-style transit disruption. Yet the Strait of Hormuz crisis has conditioned the market to expect war-risk uplifts whenever a headline breaks, and that expectation is what opportunistic operators exploit.

The war-risk premium trap

TNSC’s bulletin warned exporters in explicit terms to watch for “war risk” charges that are either invented or grossly inflated during headline-driven windows. The mechanism is simple: a forwarder or carrier adds a line item to the rate sheet citing “war risk”, prices it without reference to any published JWC rate, and counts on the shipper not questioning a charge that looks technical.

We run three checks on every crisis-period surcharge our clients see, and those checks catch almost all of them:

• Ask which listing the charge references. A legitimate war-risk surcharge cites either JWC Listed Areas or the vessel’s own P&I club guidance. No reference, no charge.
• Check effective dates against the advisory window. Surcharges that persist after a ceasefire or after an area is delisted are evidence of rate-hoarding, not active risk.
• Compare against published tariffs on unaffected routes. If a Bangkok–Dubai lane quote has jumped alongside a Gulf of Thailand event that never triggered a JWC listing, the charge is unrelated to actual risk.

The same principle applies to base freight. Bunker adjustment factors and capacity surcharges can legitimately move during regional disruption, but the direction should track the underlying bunker fuel cost movement — not the news cycle.

GPS spoofing and jamming — the quiet operational risk

Beyond the commercial layer, the ThaiMECC advisory flagged a technical risk that rarely shows up on exporters’ radar: deliberate interference with Global Positioning System signals in and around the avoidance area. Two patterns were described:

• Spoofing — transmitting false GPS signals that cause receivers to report an incorrect position, potentially steering vessels off the intended track
• Jamming — broadcasting high-power noise on GPS frequencies so receivers lose fix altogether

Both practices are already documented around active conflict zones in the Black Sea, Eastern Mediterranean, and Persian Gulf. For Gulf of Thailand traffic, the operational response is the same: maintain terrestrial navigation backups, cross-check position with radar and AIS from multiple receivers, and flag any unexplained position jumps to the bridge and shoreside operations. When we book space for our clients, we ask carriers for their non-GPS navigation protocol. A carrier that cannot demonstrate one is a carrier whose transit times will slip the moment electronic navigation becomes unreliable.

What this means for the Thailand–Middle East corridor

For freight moving from Thai origins to Gulf destinations, the 2025 advisory did not change the underlying economics. The disrupted waters sat east of the main outbound shipping lanes; vessels calling at Laem Chabang or Map Ta Phut bound for Jebel Ali, Sohar, or Hormuz continued to sail their standard great-circle tracks across the South China Sea, Malacca Strait, and Indian Ocean.

Where the episode did register was in consolidated LCL pricing on the Bangkok–Dubai lane. A handful of NVOCCs attempted to add war-risk line items to Middle East–bound LCL quotes citing “regional tension” without naming the actual listed area. When our clients asked for the JWC reference, those charges were dropped on re-quote within 48 hours. The durable takeaway is that every maritime disruption sends a ripple of surcharge attempts far beyond the affected zone. The defence is not silence or overpayment — it is the discipline to ask, every time, what published rate the charge references.

How Polaris Line is responding

From our Bangkok headquarters and our Dubai partnership with Polaris Shipping Agencies LLC, we are actively managing war-risk exposure and surcharge discipline for clients shipping on the Thailand–Middle East corridor:

• JWC-referenced surcharge review — Every crisis-period war-risk line item on a client invoice is checked against the current Lloyd’s JWC Listed Areas bulletin. If the underlying waters are not listed, we challenge the charge in writing with the carrier on our client’s behalf.
• Multi-carrier booking diversification — We maintain active space agreements with Maersk, Evergreen, Hapag-Lloyd, MSC, and CMA CGM so that when one carrier’s war-risk programme raises costs on a given lane, we can quote an alternative before the surcharge sticks.
• Surcharge transparency clauses in quotes — Our standard freight quote to clients names the specific tariff any crisis-period surcharge references, and builds in automatic fall-off when the listing is removed. No ambiguous “war risk” line items.
• Route reliability monitoring — We track JWC bulletins, IMO circulars, ThaiMECC advisories, and carrier GRI notices in one dashboard so our operations team sees a listing change the same day it is published, not when an invoice lands.
• Consolidated LCL scheduling — For clients whose volumes do not fill a full container, our Bangkok–Jebel Ali LCL consolidation smooths carrier-level surcharge spikes by spreading the cargo across the most favourably priced departures each week.

What Thai exporters should do this month

1. Audit the last 90 days of freight invoices for war-risk surcharges and request the JWC or P&I reference for each one. Charges without a reference are good candidates for credit notes.
2. Insist on surcharge-transparency clauses in every new freight quote for lanes crossing or bordering currently listed areas. The clause should name the reference tariff and specify automatic removal on delisting.
3. Diversify carrier relationships before the next disruption, not during one. Splitting volume across two carriers with different underwriting pools is cheap discipline; rushing it during a crisis is not.
4. Re-route at the zone level, not the country level. The 2025 avoidance zone covered a small fraction of Thai maritime trade geography. Lanes through Laem Chabang, Map Ta Phut, and Songkhla continued to move — shippers who treated “Gulf of Thailand” as a country-wide stop paid for the confusion.
5. Ask your carriers for their non-GPS navigation protocol. A carrier that cannot describe it is one whose schedules will slip when spoofing or jamming becomes a live risk.

What to ask before you pay a surcharge

War-risk pricing is not mysterious, but it rewards shippers who know where to look. The 2025 Gulf of Thailand advisory never triggered a JWC listing, which means no legitimate war-risk surcharge should have followed. Where one did appear, it was opportunism — and the clients we represented who asked the right three questions avoided paying for it.

The next disruption will look different in detail and identical in mechanics. Our playbook is the same: read the advisory, check the listing, challenge the surcharge, and keep the cargo moving on the lanes that were never at risk.

Contact our team to discuss how maritime war-risk pricing affects your Thailand–Middle East shipping schedule, or to request an audit of recent freight invoices for unjustified surcharges.