Maritime Domain Awareness at a nexus

Recent piracy activity calls attention to the notion that today’s interdependent global economy depends on the free and uninterrupted use of the sea. Not only is the U.S. Navy well positioned to help other maritime forces and organizations maintain an orderly maritime domain, the enabler of Maritime Domain Awareness is critically positioned at the nexus of the technological and cultural implications of networking; the renewed impetus for data sharing across government and non-governmental organizations; and the general goodwill for building maritime partnerships.

Networking
Networking and social networking, in particular, are the astonishing phenomena of our time. Conventional wisdom is that the value of a network is demonstrated by Metcalfe's Law (a network grows in proportion to the square of the number of users). However, Reed’s Law argues that Metcalfe actually understates the potential value of the network, because the real power of the network is not n² but 2n, which is a number that gets large very fast. Ipso facto if Facebook was a country it would be the 4th largest country in the world.As digital networking brings scale and global reach to all aspects of our lives and activities, established processes will adapt and evolve. Collaboration will replace structural impediments that often exclude valuable contributions. Wikipedia is an example of collaboration - small contributions/comments become a resource for all to use. Clay Shirky who focuses on the rising usefulness of decentralized technologies (and recently cited by ADM Stavridis) argues convincingly, that even though hierarchical organizations are established for the purpose of efficiently allocating resources and achieving goals, they are inherently inefficient and self-limiting. Networks can be an alternative to centralized and institutional structures. Consequently, legacy models of authority based on personal or institutional authority are evolving to what is termed algorithmic authority. This refers to regarding as authoritative the unmanaged process of extracting value from material from multiple sources - sources themselves that are not universally vetted for their trustworthiness. Trust comes from producing good results (Wikipedia), or when people trust others (eBay). A key enabler of Maritime Domain Awareness is a robust network that allows for information to be accessible, usable and sharable.

Info Sharing
Recently, after the attempt to bring down a Detroit-bound flight on December 25, the White House reiterated its information sharing policy. Although the 9/11 commission famously concluded that authorities did not “connect the dots”, the case for more information sharing got more impetus last Christmas. To highlight a new era of open Government, President Obama on his first day in office directed all agencies to adopt a presumption in favor of disclosure .Likewise gaining momentum is the unifying concept of information sharing for maritime security partnerships and for good reason. According to the Naval Studies Board, “A comprehensive MDA system would permit identification of threatening activities and anomalous behavior. Achieving such a system where it does not now exist—and strengthening it where there is already a foundation—must be viewed as a critical step in building regional partnerships.”Some regions already have established MDA information sharing networks, some examples being the Malacca Strait Security Initiative partnering Singapore, Indonesia, and Malaysia; the Gulf of Guinea network; the Joint Interagency Task Force-South that addresses concerns in the Caribbean region and the Virtual Regional Maritime Traffic Center - Americas (VRMTC-A) in Latin America.Good enough, but the diversity and complexity of interests in the maritime domain require an outreach to additional entities: law enforcement agencies, local civil authorities, commercial and nongovernmental actors, like shipping and insurance companies.The downside of collecting all this flood of information (estimated at 1,200 exabytes) is the challenge of analyzing the data to spot patterns and extract useful information.There are policy issues. Critics perceived President Obama's plan for "knowledge discovery," as a revival of the controversial data-sifting program that the Bush administration launched after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. A recent Economist article on the deluge of all this data points out that the potential for good depends on making the right choices about when to restrict the flow of data – and when to share it.
From a technical standpoint, the Navy’s emphasis and investment in Maritime Fusion and Analysis Services recognizes the challenge of finding the needle in the haystack. Using rules derived by crunching through billions of transactions, credit-card companies have led the way in their ability to monitor purchases and identify fraudulent ones with a high degree of accuracy (e.g. stolen credit cards are more likely to be used to buy hard liquor than wine). Similarly, fundamental to maritime anomaly detections are the rule sets that trigger an alert. Developing these rule sets comes under the umbrella of Techniques, Tactics and Procedures and should be a Navy priority.

Building partnerships
The security of any country is improved by improving situational awareness of what is happening in its maritime areas. Therefore any country ought to be willing to share relevant data with those it perceives to have congruent interests. Relationship building and information sharing during normal times is likely to influence the ease and trust with which information or individuals can be accessed in a time of crisis.ADM Roughead has remarked , “You cannot surge trust because trust will underpin everything that we do. Trust does not have a switch: you can't turn it on, you can't turn it off. It is something that takes time to build and must be worked cooperatively to maintain that trust.”The success of the 19th International Seapower Symposium (ISS) at the Naval War College underscored the world's maritime services’ enthusiastic commitment to bridge regional initiatives and build a network of partnerships by linking cooperative efforts beyond and across traditional regional maritime boundaries. "I believe that we maritime service chiefs are on the cutting edge of international partnership, and I do believe that we must challenge ourselves during ISS 19 to think expansively about how our mutual efforts can safeguard international peace and prosperity in the 21stcentury," said ADM Roughead.According to the Naval Studies Board, information sharing can be facilitated through combatant maritime operations centers which develop awareness and relationships with partner nations. Exercises and exchanges build trust.The bottom line is that the pace of networking, info sharing and partnership development is accelerating. Maritime Domain Awareness is on the bow wave.

Maritime Domain Awareness

LT Munson makes some good points in his Proceedings article, namely that reliance on identifying anomalous behavior should not be the critical element in developing actionable MDA. Countering the wide range of threats from traditional adversary militaries to non-traditional threats like terrorism, WMD proliferation, drug smuggling, weapon smuggling, low intensity conflict, and piracy requires a wide range of information. Although this is not a new problem, no one nation has the resources required to go it alone. There are both policy and technical challenges. The first is about trust building, the latter focuses on MDA data fusion and analysis.

Clearly the creation of an interagency and international MDA network composed of analysis centers, operators, information repositories, and sensors that continuously monitor the globe searching for burgeoning maritime threats makes sense. This concept aligns well with the Navy's Strategy for Maritime Security for expanded cooperative relationships with other nations who putatively contribute to the rising tide of maritime security for the benefit of the global maritime common. Although as LT Munson points out the current emphasis is on ship positions, this is more because of the technological advent of AIS and the astonishing success of the Maritime Safety and Security Information System (MSSIS) where participating countries freely share unclassified, near real-time AIS data. A collaborative network of coalition partners that will be eventually be able to monitor vessels, cargo, people, finance, and infrastructure, requires establishing relationships and trust in addition to the creation of a physical network. MSSIS and similar efforts are recognition that trust and cooperation cannot be surged, they must be built over time. Recognition that international and interagency partners require access to and the ability to collaboratively process, analyze, and disseminate information on maritime threats has led to the development of a blueprint for a net-centric information environment in which data from disparate sources and security domains will be discoverable, accessible, understandable, fused, and usable, with appropriate information assurance, to enable user defined and common operational pictures. This blueprint is described in the Maritime Domain Awareness Architecture Management Hub Plan.

The technology challenge is related to the explosive growth in the generation and collection of data associated with vessels, cargo and people which will potentially require a new generation of techniques and tools that can assist in transforming these data into actionable intelligence. These tools include preprocessing large amounts of data, data reduction, mining and fusion. Data fusion is generally defined as the use of techniques that combine data from multiple sources and gather that information in order to achieve inferences, which will be more efficient and potentially more accurate than if they were achieved by means of a single source. The well recognized data fusion model developed by the Joint Directors of Laboratories Data Fusion Group provides a common frame of reference for fusion discussions. The point being that while anomaly detection is a component of Level 3, the objective of fusing the combined activity and capability of vessels, cargo, people, finance, and infrastructure is to infer intentions and assess threats.

The vision for a global network-centric environment where users can access, analyze, and exchange a wide range of maritime information and collaborate on maritime problems with others is absolutely consistent with the argument made by Defense Secretary Robert Gates that "the most important military component in the war on terror is not the fighting we do ourselves, but how well we enable and empower our partners to defend and govern themselves."