Maritime Domain Awareness

With reducing resources on land, the oceans have become the next ‘pit stop’ for humans for fulfilling their needs. Today, the oceans and the seas around us are bristling with activities. These activities range from trade, fishing, offshore gas, offshore wind farms, exploration activities for deep seabed mining, marine scientific research, offshore solar farms, submarine cable lying, and many more activities both benign and offensive. For all these activities to be possible, there exists a need for knowing and mapping of the ocean surface and the ocean floor so that the planned activity at sea can be executed in a manner and to the extent that it is successful and does not cause harm to either humans or equipment. Such knowledge of the Maritime Domain that allows the execution of an activity at sea with ease and finesse may be called as the Maritime Domain Awareness (MDA) and is necessarily not limited to the security construct alone.
Since the oceans cover more than 70 per cent of the Earth’s surface and is ever so dynamic, MDA cannot be achieved by one single entity of a nation or a person. Though nations and organisations have tried it alone, they have realised that a cooperative mechanism provides a better, more accurate and more expansive MDA. It is with this understanding that this article aims to explicate the interlinking of existing systems and the potential interoperability opportunities in the MDA infrastructure prevalent in the Indo-Pacific and the Eastern Mediterranean region from a maritime security perspective that are providing the necessary inputs for a better decision making.

Maritime Domain Awareness (MDA) merupakan pemahaman secara komprehensif mengenai aspek-aspek yang berhubungan dengan maritim dan mempengaruhi keamanan, keselamatan, ekonomi, atau lingkungan, dan juga akan menjadi kunci dalam menyusun kebijakan kelautan di dunia serta menjamin keselamatan perdagangan maritim . Dalam rangka menjamin keamanan maritim, maka diperlukan kekuatan dan kemampuan sebuah negara yang tinggi untuk menangkal segala ancaman yang mengganggu kestabilan keamanan maritim.  Melalui Maritime Domain Awareness (MDA), diharapakan semua kegiatan yang ada di perairan suatu negara dapat diawasi, dikontrol, dan diawasi secara detail dan real time, sehingga aksi-aksi penindakan terhadap dugaan pelanggaran dapat dilaksanakan dengan cepat.

Tackling maritime security is one of the major global challenges today.
Safeguarding international transport by sea; preventing accidents and disasters; fighting transnational organised crimes like piracy and the trafficking of narcotics and weapons; addressing fishery crimes and preventing other environmental crimes are all vital for international security and realising the prospects of the blue economy.
Maritime security is a global task. It requires effective maritime security governance at both national and regional levels, but also external capacity building to assist countries in developing their human and material capacities.
Significant investments have been made in maritime security and a rich experience base has been built over the years regarding how to organise maritime security governance and do capacity building work. This report consolidates this experience and identifies best practices to organise maritime security more efficiently and devise ways in which it can be effectively supported by donors. It provides guidelines for mastering maritime security.
Mastering maritime security requires reflexive capacity building. What reflexivity means in practice is demonstrated in this report by drawing on the experience of the Western Indian Ocean region.
The report is an important toolkit for all practitioners involved in maritime security. It also provides an essential guide for the planning, programming and implementation of capacity building for maritime security.

Information Sharing and Maritime Domain Awareness (MDA) are at the heart of the contemporary maritime security agenda. The goal of MDA is to develop shared understandings of developments and threats at sea which is one of the preconditions for coordination and cooperation between the diverse maritime security agencies. I argue that MDA is not only a technical challenge, but also a social, political and legal one. A study of the organization of MDA in the South East Asian region with a focus on its three major centres is presented. The political and social functions each centre performs in the governance of maritime security in the region is explored. The conclusion outlines what lessons the South East Asian system suggests for the organization of MDA in other regions with a focus on the Western Indian Ocean.

This chapter examines Canadian inclusion into a Quad Plus formulation. Key lines of enquiry revolve around identifying Canadian middle-power interests in a Quad Plus formulation, capabilities that Canada can bring to the Quad Plus, and how to formulate participation. Findings reveal that Canada’s potential Quad Plus inclusion is based on a function over form by “bolting-in” and a capabilities-led approach to Quad Plus engagement. Functional cooperation will be wedded to its middle power identity. Core areas of functional cooperation will include but not be exclusive to enhancing maritime awareness and consensus building of the consultative process through proactive diplomacy.

It has now been over a decade since the Mumbai terrorist attacks of November 2008. Since then, considerable efforts have been made to streamline India’s coastal security. However, recent reports indicate that the coastal security architecture is undergoing a re-appraisal. In the context of the proposed shift of the Indian Coast Guard from under the Ministry of Defence (MoD) to the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA), this Policy Brief examines the issues involved and offers related policy recommendations towards developing an optimal model for India.

In the past decade, collaborative efforts around the world have led to five key, and intersecting, developments that have changed the way governments respond to maritime security challenges: expanded laws; interagency, or whole-of-government coordination within a country; cooperation among nations; maritime situational awareness (MSA); and the establishment of multinational training centers. Collectively, these new approaches form a single unifying thread for action and support a networked response to countering violence and illicit activity at sea. The developments examined in this Article provide key insights to collaboratively confront, with less traditional diplomatic actors, transnational criminal organizations and other security challenges in the future.

In the 4:1 series of the Institute for Foreign Affairs and Trade, four experts give a short answer to the same question concerning international politics and economics. Our aim is to launch scientific debates in and beyond Hungary and promote dialogue among experts. In this issue our topic is "Black Sea Security: How Have Stakeholders Improved on Maritime Domain Awareness?”

The challenges associated with Maritime Domain Awareness (MDA) in archipelagic states are many as island chains by nature are geographically complex.  The scattered layout of islands and cays make resilient, robust internet capabilities difficult as wired solutions are limited and susceptible to failure.  Current wireless standards are unable to transfer large amounts of data at fast speeds, as may be required by today's sensory equipment designed for MDA.  The evolution of wireless communication is now on its fifth-generation (5G), creating the catalyst for other novel technologies like A.I., driverless cars, Machine to Machine (M2M) learning, and Massive Input Massive Output devices.  5G also creates a platform for a total network solution in MDA for archipelagic states.  In light of this potential, to enable ubiquitous MDA, the ethical concerns of privacy, security, health, and credible vendor must be addressed.  Prudent archipelagic countries can develop total network solutions to support MDA initiatives, through 5G enabling platforms, while guarding against the ethical dilemmas that accompany the pervasive technology.

One does not routinely see “diplomacy” in the same sentence as “Maritime Domain Awareness” (MDA).  A common misconception is that diplomacy only takes place in formal meeting rooms, and MDA activities solely occur in intelligence/military settings.  In reality, however, diplomacy and MDA are independent force multipliers that function in a system of international law to advance national security objectives.  This article explores the vital relationship between diplomacy and MDA, and briefly highlights the value of an Office of the Director of National Intelligence sponsored fellowship at the Georgetown University Institute for the Study of Diplomacy was a worthy investment for an intelligence professional.

The article purports to express how, in the course of and subsequent to the proceedings in The Hague, the Peruvian Government has defined the legal nature of its 200 miles of maritime domain, by assuming its compatibility with the maritime zones established by United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UnClos).

In addition to facilitating peaceful trade and economic development, sovereign territory, territorial waters and international waters are being used by various criminal groups that pose threats to governments, businesses and civilian population in Southeast Asia. Non-state criminal maritime activities were not receiving appropriate attention as they were overshadowed by traditional military security challenges. Yet more and more frequently, the non-traditional actors challenge lines of communication, jeopardize access to strategic resources, complicate traditional defence tasks, and harm the environment. Understanding the nature of non-traditional threats, and the ways to combat them, requires international legal, historical and political science analysis within a united problem-oriented approach. A fair critique to pure interest, power and knowledge-based theories of regime formation was developed by E.K. Leonard’s1, who explained the evolution of the international system from the ...