Non-Subscriber Extract
Maritime awareness - sea view
30 March 2007
"Fundamentally, we don't have as clear a view of the sea space, the maritime space, as we do of the airspace today," Fargo, then commander of US Pacific Command, said.
By extending the reach of Automatic Identification System transponders on the world's oceans and installing them on more sizes of ships, the US government hopes it will one day be able to know the location and status of any large shipping vessel in the world within a three-minute window. However, the maritime security problem is hardly limited to just the high seas. Even in territorial waters, along shorelines and within ports, the potential for mischief, crime and terrorism is an acknowledged yet stubborn vulnerability for any country involved in maritime trade.
Global maritime domain awareness (MDA) is perhaps the most ambitious part of the US government's aggressive response to the challenge. The 'National Plan to Achieve Maritime Domain Awareness', which appeared in October 2005, described MDA very broadly as gaining knowledge of anything in the "global maritime domain that could impact the security, safety, economy or environment of the US".
To realise the vision to establish near omniscience of the seas, the document called for the development of a "common operational picture" (COP) for the maritime domain that could be shared among at least 16 federal bodies.
The implications of MDA reach far beyond the introduction of a new COP. Simply cultivating the data to feed the all-encompassing surveillance picture will require an upheaval in the international maritime order. Relations between military agencies and law-enforcement agencies in the US must be greatly expanded and in some cases redefined.