Welcome to Day 1 coverage of the three-day Global Maritime Information Sharing Symposium (GMISS). As I said yesterday, my interest in Maritime Domain Awareness—and the critical role it plays in Maritime Security and Homeland Defense—increased during the time I worked on the Maritime Strategy. Now that I’m a consultant and sometimes get to spend time doing things I want to do, I figured it would be important to find a way to attend this symposium. I’m glad I did.
Chatham House rules bind attendees from citing names or affiliations, a policy to which I will of course, adhere. I will however, use very broad categories of identification in order to provide context. This isn’t going to be blow-by-blow coverage; rather, I’ll talk about things I find interesting and hope you’ll agree.
Maritime Domain Awareness is a tough concept to pin down, and to some extent, what you think it means is a function of where you are in the MDA food chain. Even the subtitle of this symposium (Industry and Government Perspectives on the State of Global Maritime Awareness ) points in this direction. What MDA is to industry is not necessarily what MDA is to government. Still more frustrating is that neither government nor industry is a monolith; so MDA to a Ship-owner could be vastly different than MDA to a defense communications outfit. Additionally, there exists a chasm of understanding between what the federal government sees as MDA and what state and local governments understand it to be. To put a nice ribbon on it all, even within the Federal government, there are differences of opinion.
One of the questions raised several times today is “who is in charge”? This one is terribly frustrating for the community of interest, which is looking for simplicity and central authority in a vast, complex interweaving of local, state, federal and international organizations. The problem is, our government doesn’t work that way in very many instances, especially one where so many organizations have equity. Absent a palpable, discernible threat to the Republic, such “Czar-like” powers are unlikely to devolve to any one person or group. In the meantime, MDA policy (and operations) is going to be carried out in the slow grind of interagency or “whole of government” processes. It can and should get better, but it won’t be a model of efficiency.
Add to this milieu the “trust” factor. My admittedly dimming memory of my active duty time suggests that foreign governments and shipping companies were hesitant to get involved in ANYTHING MDA oriented that looked like a US led effort to create a vast intelligence gathering apparatus. There are reportedly representatives of nearly 20 foreign countries at this symposium, which has afforded a place of great honor to---the National Maritime INTELLIGENCE Center! I’m not sure that this is the right message to send. That the US might take information gleaned from a voluntary, low-barriers to entry, self or nearly self-synchronizing scheme of sharing important information and mine it for intelligence should not be dismissed or denied. That is our right, and that is our business. But “intelligence” is one level of abstraction away from what MDA is all about, which is information.
One area that I’m learning more about here is the disconnect between Washington-based expectations of information sharing with state and local authorities, and the reality of what goes on at the business end of this relationship. There is a very articulate law-enforcement official from a medium sized American city here who is doing a great job in getting federal speakers to think anew about the successes they are claiming vis-à-vis this interaction.
Additionally, an industry attendee claimed—and I have not yet been able to prove him wrong—that if one if his ship Captains noticed something amiss while out and about, there was not a standardized process for his operations center to input that information into the mix. I figured it would take an HTML guy about an afternoon to gin up a web-based, password protected form that his ops center could use to alert proper authorities to suspicious behavior, but no one here could confirm such a tool existed. If it does and this crowd doesn’t know of it, then that’s almost as scandalous.
More tomorrow.
Bryan McGrath
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