The Navy’s nascent Maritime Domain Awareness (MDA) effort reached a key milestone recently and is now able to track hundreds of thousands of vessels as part of the push to thwart nefarious activity on the world’s waterways, a senior service official said yesterday.
The MDA initiative–which grew out of President Bush’s 2005 National Strategy for Maritime Security–links the Navy, federal agencies, and allies together through computer systems allowing them to monitor sundry vessels’ activity.
The Navy achieved Initial Operating Capability (IOC) for the MDA program on Aug. 28, after “a year and a half of work and a major level of investment,” Deputy Under Secretary of the Navy Marshall Billingslea told an international gathering of military and defense-industry officials at the ComDef 2008 conference in Washington, D.C.
“We’ve surged in the past year from being able to maintain a few hundred vessel tracks in real time–with very limited ability to fuse information about those vessels and to run anomaly-detection kinds of software programs–to now the ability to maintain tracks on hundreds of thousands of vessels with data fusion, with processing for anomalies,” Billingslea said.
This ability “then allows us to apportion a response from our Navy, from our Coast Guard, from our law enforcement, or (from) our intelligence colleagues,” he said. “That system is up and running.”
He said this MDA system is “in use” in U.S. Central Command; in U.S. Pacific Command (PACOM); by the Office of Naval Intelligence; by the Coast Guard; and by the Joint Interagency Task Force (JIAF)-West, which is an international and interagency group that reports to the PACOM commander.
Starting this month, the MDA setup will be deployed to the Navy’s recently reestablished 4th Fleet in the Caribbean, and will be used in JIAF-South in that region, where multiple nations have counter-narcotics initiatives. The MDA effort will expand to other areas including the Atlantic Ocean and Europe, and be used by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and U.S. Special Operations Command, he said.
“Our focus on MDA is driven by our recognition that all future conflicts will be fought in an information-ized environment where knowledge is king, where speed of decision- making is crucial, and where precision target of fleeting targets is mandatory,” Billingslea said.
Bush in 2004 directed the secretaries of the Department of Defense (DoD) and Department of Homeland Security to help create a comprehensive National Strategy for Maritime Security that combines existing maritime security programs and involves both government and private entities. A National Plan to Achieve Maritime Domain Awareness is one of eight parts of the strategy, and a concept of operations for MDA emerged in the summer of 2007.
The Navy is the executive agent for the current MDA effort.
The DoD last week issued a directive on MDA dated Aug. 27. The document says it incorporates and cancels an August 2007 memo on “Implementation of Maritime Domain Awareness.” The new directive states: “The Department of Defense and its partners will persistently monitor the maritime domain to identify potential and actual maritime threats in a timely manner, and fuse, analyze, and disseminate information in near real-time, to enhance operational decision-making processes and support of operational plans, including the ‘Maritime Operational Threat Response Plan.'”
“The Department of Defense will determine its resource priorities; the awareness levels needed to monitor maritime vessels, people, cargo, and infrastructure; and the architecture required to persistently monitor the maritime domain,” the directive says.