Global Maritime Information Sharing Symposium (GMISS) Day 2

Greetings from the National Defense University, site of the Global Maritime Information Sharing Symposium (GMISS). This is Day 2 of a three day conference devoted to bridging the gap between the private sector and government on the critical issue of sharing maritime information.

The morning began with a discussion of the Navy role in Maritime Domain Awareness (MDA), a role spelled out for it in various Executive Branch documents and then owned up to in its Maritime Strategy of 2007. A relevant distinction was made about the quality of information needed for national security needs (a.k.a what the Navy needs) and the quality of information law enforcement needs (a.k.a what you need to convict someone). This is just one of the issues with which MDA architects must deal.

I was a bit concerned by a speaker’s statement that the uniformed Navy MDA locus of effort is shifting from N3/N5 (Strategy, Policy and Information) to the new N2/N6 (I’m not sure what it is called). My angst is born of a fear that MDA will come to be seen as a technology problem to be solved, rather than a policy and procedure challenge. But I remain hopeful.

The morning looked to perhaps then segue into a discussion of piracy (on the menu for the afternoon breakout session), but conference officials were on the ball and kept that from happening. Piracy arguments can get pretty emotional, and since the conference isn’t about piracy per se, I think the move was a good one. Maritime Security—or good order and discipline at sea—is a critical consumer of MDA, but not the only one. Maritime Domain Awareness is an enabler of a number of important national security and economic ends.

In the afternoon, I attended a breakout session on piracy which included an in-depth description of a ship seizure last year and a fascinating discussion of the legal ramifications of arming civilian crews to combat piracy. It was a thoroughly enjoyable panel, but pretty light on “MDA”.

An update to yesterday’s entry in which I relayed the view of an industry insider that there wasn’t a quick and easy way for ship captains to input suspicious information into a useful database. Today, a helpful representative from the Coast Guard informed me of “America’s Waterway Watch”, a USCG hotline to report suspicious activity on US Waterways - 1-877-24WATCH.

On a light note—I mentioned yesterday the presence of a lot of non-Americans at the conference. The Brits are fantastic…I enjoy listening to them. It doesn’t seem to matter what they say, it just sounds smart. And they dress better than we do.

Bryan McGrath