Welcome to Day 3 of the Global Maritime Information Sharing Symposium (GMISS) held at the National Defense University. This is my third and final blog entry from this conference, and I want to use it to wrap up and convey some parting thoughts. Here they are, in no particular order. Some may be familiar to those of you who’ve read Day 1 and Day 2 entries.
• Information Sharing vs. Maritime Domain Awareness. I make this entry because I was somewhat surprised by the scope of discussions at this conference. I had (incorrectly) assumed that what we were here to talk about was information sharing as a way of building Maritime Domain Awareness, and not to talk about ways in which the entire commercial shipping industry and the entire US government can effectively share information. There was some good coverage of MDA here, but there was also an awful lot of kvetching by the maritime industry about onerous regulation by multiple US and other government agencies that has little or nothing to do with Maritime Domain Awareness, defined in NSPD 41 as “the effective understanding of anything associated with the global Maritime Domain that could impact the security, safety, economy, or environment of the United States. It is critical that the United States develop an enhanced capability to identify threats to the Maritime Domain as early and as distant from our shores as possible by integrating intelligence, surveillance, observation, and navigation systems into a common, operating picture accessible throughout the United States.”
• Who’s in Charge? This question has been asked a dozen ways by a dozen different frustrated industry representatives this week. What they want is a “Czar”, someone with the authority to treat with them on a range of issues, only one of which happens to be MDA. While this would be wonderful in many respects, it simply doesn’t reflect the realities of a constitutional democracy. We have cabinet officers and independent regulatory agencies with Congressional mandates to perform certain functions. The production of government policy across multiple stakeholders is complicated work.
o That said, when I asked the inconvenient question of a group of industry folks today, “Who’s in charge of your industry” (as in, who would a government agency go to in order to derive an “industry” position), I got a predictable answer. No one. The interests of US flag ship owners are different than foreign flag ship owners. The interests of port operators are different than those of shipping agents. The interests of the LNG industry are far different from the interests of the container liners. To whom would the Coast Guard go in order to get that “industry” answer? Just as complicated as the reverse. And while I recognize that the burden rightly falls more heavily on the regulatory side of the equation (government) to be monolithic, there is some irony in the “industry” demanding it.
• Emotion. The “industry” is not happy. They believe that government - federal, state and local—is continuing to layer regulation and requirement upon them in an uncoordinated fashion, one that is causing impediments to doing business. The stories I’ve heard this week of nonsensical duplication of information required of ship-owners just doesn’t make sense in the time of the internet and exotic databases. The local guys aren’t happy either. Port operators and local law enforcement reps were vocal in decrying a lack of coordination/collaboration with the feds—again, something difficult to swallow in a time of searchable databases and instantaneous communication.
• The Coast Guard. While there has been a good bit of complaining about the feds this week, you find a great deal of respect evinced by the industry folks when they talk about the Coast Guard. No other federal group was as universally lauded for their professionalism and cooperation.
• Collaboration. I was part of a working group today that tackled the following question—How can we facilitate deeper industry access to the maritime policy formation process? We had a great exchange, but it largely focused on lower level (tactical) complaints from the “industry” about the regulatory environment in which they operate and how to make “the government” smarter about the way it operates and the challenges it faces. We eventually got around to uncovering what was (for me) a pretty important point—and that is, that the “MDA Stakeholders Board” (a high level policy coordinating organ of the US government interagency) does not have “industry” participation. It seems logical to me that if the folks who put this conference on (The Office of Global Maritime Situational Awareness within the USCG—the Director of which is a co-chair of the Stakeholder Board) really want industry input into policy development, it should either have industry reps on it, or it should have regular (semi-annual?) meetings with representatives of the various industry trade associations to raise issues of interest.
Bryan McGrath
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