The explosion and sinking of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig in April 2010 tragically underscored the need for comprehensive maritime domain awareness (MDA), what presidential directives state is the “effective understanding or anything associated with the global maritime domain that could impact the security, safety, economy, or environment of the United States.”1 By the time BP stopped the flow, some 4.9 million barrels of oil had spewed into the Gulf of Mexico, generating serious threats to more than 400 species of wildlife, vital coastal marshlands and the economies of four states––with indirect impacts felt throughout the United States and overseas as well. Of growing concern from the spring through fall of that year was the latent threat from massive underwater oil plumes—one on the order of 20 miles long and 3,000 feet below the surface of the Gulf—that scientists found difficult to track.2
These and other developments have articulated a need for real-time environmental/ecological information gathering and sharing—“GEO INT”—to support the long-term Gulf of Mexico restoration plan. “Green” MDA has turned out to be critical for that plan’s success.
Other Sensitive Areas
So it will be elsewhere. For example, the U.S. government designated more than 335,000 square miles of the Pacific Ocean as national monuments. From American Samoa to the northeast Hawaiian archipelago—including 140,000 square miles for the Papahanaumokuakea Marine National Monument in Hawaii and several smaller designations—the protected status of the expansive areas means they will be closed to commercial and most recreational fishing, mineral exploration, waste dumping, undersea mining, oil drilling, and other development and exploitation activities. But the sanctuaries will allow for research, free passage, and recreation. Understanding what is going on in these national maritime monuments will thus be critical to their continued sanctity.
In June 2009, President Barack Obama established an Interagency Ocean Policy Task Force led by the White House Council on Environmental Quality. The task force was charged with developing a recommendation for a national policy that ensures protection, maintenance, and restoration of oceans, U.S. coasts, and the Great Lakes. It reported out in July 2010.
“The ocean, our coasts, and the Great Lakes provide jobs, food, energy resources, ecological services, recreation, and tourism opportunities, and play critical roles in our Nation’s transportation, economy, and trade, as well as the global mobility of our Armed Forces and the maintenance of international peace and security,” the President wrote in a 19 July 2010 Executive Order.3 The task force called for a framework for improved stewardship and effective coastal and marine spatial planning for the nation’s ocean territories and Great Lakes, and also recognized the importance and unique nature of the Arctic region and growing need for governance and management––a coordinated implementation of the U.S. Arctic Region Policy.4 Importantly, the National Oceans Policy recognizes that America’s stewardship of the oceans, coasts, and Great Lakes is intrinsically and intimately linked to environmental sustainability, human health and well-being, national prosperity, adaptation to climate and other environmental change, foreign policy, and homeland security.
MDA Goes Green
MDA is usually thought of in terms of national-security activities to enhance the capabilities of all five armed services—including the U.S. Coast Guard in the Department of Homeland Security—to defeat traditional military as well as irregular challenges and threats to U.S. security, such as pirates and terrorists operating from the sea.5 For example, many of the non-traditional maritime threats start within or take advantage of the anonymity afforded by maritime domain; even those that originate inland, far from coastlines, can present maritime dangers. Understanding the nature of these and myriad other challenges and putting in place the means to respond to them thus are critical to U.S. national—not just maritime and naval—security. As Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano made clear in a 2011 white paper:
First, the security of the United States is tied to and dependent upon our continued global engagement. Second, while the Nation is surrounded, for the most part, by stable, friendly nations that follow well-established norms of international cooperation, we continue to face evolving threats. Even with the death of Usama bin Laden, terrorists are still determined to attack our homeland and our interests, and international criminal organizations continually seek to expand their control of illicit movements of people, goods, and weapons. Third, our Nation’s economic health is dependent on freedom of the seas, and overseas shipment will continue to be the primary source of trade and commerce. Fourth, the ports and waterways of the United States will remain vulnerable to natural disasters and other threats. Finally, the Nation’s Arctic interests will grow as the region becomes more commercially viable for energy exploration, resource extraction, and tourism.6
As the United States looks to protect all interests in the maritime domain, decision-makers across the government increasingly know that a requirement for “green” MDA—the means for continuous and real-time surveillance of U.S.-protected or fragile ocean space for non-defense, environmental security—must be addressed as well.
One collateral benefit of Department of Defense situational-awareness efforts is that many of the marine sanctuaries and sensitive areas can be monitored for illegal and unauthorized activities at no marginal cost to the DOD or the interagency community. For example, DOD capabilities are already providing situational awareness that overlaps, coincides, or is congruent with marine sanctuaries and increasingly, the Arctic.7 The DOD could provide real-time data on vessel activity to the appropriate authorities—such as the Coast Guard’s ocean stewardship mandates and the Department of Commerce and its subordinate National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration and the National Marine Fisheries Service—in a passive, not-to-interfere operational basis that the non-Defense interagency community should welcome.
One such initiative is the U.S. Navy/DOD SEALINK Advanced Analysis (S2A) tool that provides situational awareness by supplying multiple-source data and fusion services automatically to generate and maintain worldwide vessel tracks. S2A takes advantage of several years’ efforts on two predecessor capabilities––the Comprehensive Maritime Surveillance and the Maritime Automatic Super Track Enhanced Reporting technology demonstrations––that focused on providing leading-edge information-fusion tools to aid in vessel tracking, data fusion, anomaly detection, and maritime information-sharing at classified levels of access. S2A specifically addresses gaps in the U.S. capability to identify, prioritize, characterize, automatically alert, and share data and information about maritime threats quickly across multiple security levels and between interagency partners—perhaps to include information sharing of unclassified data and information.
High-Tech Tools of the Trade
Developed by the Department of Transportation’s Volpe Center, the Maritime Safety and Security Information System is a multilateral, non-classified system that enhances MDA for the United States as well as some 70 international partners through the sharing of data from the Automatic Information System (AIS). Ships and Vessel Traffic Services use AIS principally for identifying and locating vessels (ship identification, position, course, speed) greater than 300 gross tons. It works by integrating a standard VHF transceiver with an electronic navigation system. One challenge to expanding this is to address surveillance, detection, identification, and tracking of “dark” vessels and smaller craft—e.g., U.S.-flag fishing vessels and some 20 million pleasure boats in the United States alone—not equipped with AIS transponders. In this regard, the Coast Guard has been a proponent with the International Maritime Organization to get AIS on ships of 100 gross tons or greater, with others arguing for expanding AIS to all boats 65 feet in length or more.
The U.S. response to the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami disaster illustrates what can be done. With much of the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant destroyed, the U.S. Coast Guard immediately coordinated port evacuations along Japan’s west coast, and the service’s Maritime Intelligence Fusion Center Pacific linked with the national intelligence community to track vessels that may have been exposed to radiation fallout. As these vessels arrived in U.S. ports, this intelligence enabled the Coast Guard to respond with port partners to minimize the disruption of commerce and allay public concerns.
While focused on detection and tracking of vessels of interest, these and other initiatives and programs are aimed at improving maritime, air, and land domain awareness, overcoming legacy cross-government organizational seams and gaps, facilitating national and international information sharing, and making possible decisive action against emerging threats to U.S. security—not solely naval or defense—interests. They also seek to improve common operational frameworks, plans and concepts of operations, and tactics, techniques, and procedures to deal with traditional and non-traditional challenges. And they should be extended to cover the “irregular ‘green’ challenges” of protecting sensitive ocean space that goes beyond simply vessels, but also detecting and tracking oil and other hazardous materials via commercial satellites and airborne and surface-born sensors.
Presidential Direction
“President Obama recognized that our uses of the ocean are expanding at a rate that challenges our ability to manage significant and often competing demands,” Nancy Sutley, chair of the White House Council on Environmental Quality, noted.8 “With a growing number of recreational, scientific, energy, and security activities, we need a national policy that sets the United States on a new path for the conservation and sustainable use of these critical natural resources.”
Clearly, declaring immense ocean space as protected areas and responding to long-standing and emerging maritime domain awareness needs in the Arctic drive monitoring capabilities not generally available outside the DOD. Nevertheless, there is no need to reinvent the wheel for non-military/non-defense MDA needs, as DOD efforts provide multidimensional contributions to protecting all interests in the oceans, including those that transcend traditional notions of national security and defense.
Indeed, a “green” MDA looks to be a cost-effective element in a coordinated approach to safeguarding protected and sensitive ocean space—whether in the Gulf of Mexico, off Hawaii and American Samoa, or in the Arctic. The challenge now is to get on with it.
1. National Security Presidential Directive NSPD-14/Homeland Security Presidential Directive HSPD-13, 21 December 2004, www.fas.org/irp/offdocs/nspd/nspd41.pdf. In mid-2012, the White House reportedly approved a new Maritime Security Presidential Policy Directive (PPD-18). While it replaces NSPD-41/HSPD-13, PPD-18 endorses the National Strategy for Maritime Security (NSMS) of 2005 and calls for greater focus on the Arctic and U.S. ratification of the 1982 Convention on the Law of the Sea. The interagency community is also readdressing and consolidating the National Plan to Achieve MDA (NPAMDA) and Global Maritime Intelligence Integration Plan (GMII) into one plan as directed by PPD-18.
2. “WHOI Scientists Map and Confirm Origin of Large, Underwater Hydrocarbon Plume in Gulf,” Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution Media Relations, 19 August 2010, www.whoi.edu/page.do?pid=7545&tid=282&cid=79926&ct=162.
3. Executive Order, “Stewardship of the Ocean, Our Coasts, and the Great Lakes,” 19 July 2010, www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/executive-order-stewardship-ocean-our-coasts-and-great-lakes.
4. The White House Council on Environmental Quality, Final Recommendations of the Interagency Ocean Policy Task Force (Washington, DC: Office of the President of the United States, 19 July 2010), 2–4ff.
5. ADM Gary Roughead, The U.S. Navy’s Vision for Confronting Irregular Challenges (Washington, DC: Office of the Chief of Naval Operations, U.S. Navy, January 2010).
6. Foreword by the Secretary of Homeland Security, Safety, Security and Stewardship: 2011 DHS White Paper on the U.S. Coast Guard (Washington, DC: DHS/USCG HQ, Director of Strategic Management and Doctrine, 2011), iii.
7. Report to Congress on Arctic Operations and the Northwest Passage (Washington, DC: OUSD (Policy), Department of Defense, May 2012.)
8. Executive Order, “Stewardship.”