SURVEILLANCE AND NETWORKING: THE ESSENCE OF MARITIME SAFETY

- by Admiral Arun Prakash (Retd. - Indian Navy)

The sinking of the SS Titanic - with 1500 passengers and crew in April 1912 on her maiden voyage - was a maritime defining moment because it raised many fundamental questions about the safety standards being followed at sea. As a consequence, in 1914 seafaring nations gathered for the International Convention for Safety of Life at Sea (SOLAS) where  regulations regarding safety of navigation, measures to combat fire & flooding and the carriage of emergency equipment on board were drawn up for the first time.

While SOLAS regulations have been regularly updated by subsequent conventions, the maritime environment has undergone a complete transformation over the past half a century or so. The main reason is the emergence of a host of new threats and challenges to the safety of shipping which require responses of an entirely different nature.

The hijacking of the Italian cruise ship Achille Lauro on 7th October 1985 off Egypt, by a terrorist organization was an episode that marked the beginning of a new trend wherein non-state entities began to view the littoral as a happy hunting ground, and shipping as “fair game” for their nefarious ends. Maritime nations began to face a whole range of common threats at sea; piracy, smuggling of weapons and commodities, drug trading, human trafficking, and lately, manifestations of religious extremism and terrorism.

By virtue of the medium, most seaborne threats are trans-national and therefore require a multilateral response. Early problems of international co-ordination and co-operation are being rapidly overcome, and there is no better example of this than the re-capture of MV Alondra Rainbow in a unique Indian Navy-Coast Guard joint operation in October 1999. A Japanese owned ship flying the Panamian flag, this vessel, carrying a cargo worth US$ 20 million, was hijacked soon after she departed an Indonesian port. The pirates put the ship’s crew in a life raft and headed for the Arabian Sea. On receiving an alert from the Singapore Piracy Reporting Centre, the ship was given chase by Indian warships and finally captured in international waters.

Maritime terrorism has added a completely new dimension to the existing problems of safety and security at sea. As the suicide attacks on USS Cole in harbour, and two years later on MV Limburg at sea showed, this threat is all pervasive and assuming more menacing proportions. Amongst the manifold measures being implemented or contemplated to counter such threats at sea, surveillance and monitoring of maritime traffic assumes critical importance.

Availability of a comprehensive picture of the shipping traffic in harbour-approaches, coastal waters, and ocean areas of interest, has now become a vital requirement of a nation’s maritime security matrix. Knowing “who is where and why” at all times, can provide early warning of threats, and help in rapid decision making. In naval parlance, this factor is termed maritime domain awareness or MDA.

Compilation of such a picture will require inputs from a very wide array of sources: satellites, reconnaissance aircraft, warships on patrol, shore radars, and various types of merchant ship reporting systems. A major problem, however, is encountered at the lower end of the traffic spectrum – where small trawlers and fishing boats in huge numbers can be used as cover for illegal activities. The answer here would be to provide mini-transponders to all such vessels, and to establish coastal radar chains to aid identification and tracking of such vessels. But the heavy expenditure involved, could prove an impediment.

Taken to its logical conclusion, MDA would require that information from many platforms and sources be fused into one ambiguity-free “big picture” which can be made available, in real time, to as many agencies and users as necessary. Ensuring safety and security at sea would ultimately require the seamless integration of many such big pictures; heralding the arrival of networked operations at sea.

 

© Copyright Admiral Arun Prakash and Informa India. All rights reserved.

 

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