Later next year, the Navy will launch the first spiral of its planned maritime domain awareness (MDA) effort that will initially link together the service, federal agencies and allies to provide a more robust picture of the maritime domain.

The first spiral is dedicated to wiring together a variety of nodes, Deputy Under Secretary of Navy Marshall Billingslea recently told sister publication Defense Daily.

Those nodes stretch from the Central Command (CENTCOM) area of responsibility (AOR) to Hawaii, Australia, and the West Coast of the United States, he said.

The Navy will also include the port of San Diego in the initial spiral to better understand what information a port operator wants to see about merchant vessels coming to San Diego and what the information needs to be on the network to help the Coast Guard and other federal agencies, Billingslea said.

In Hawaii, the network won’t just be limited to the Navy, Billingslea noted. The Coast Guard’s Joint Interagency Task Force (JIATF)-West will be included in the effort as will JIATF-South in the Caribbean.

The Navy is also looking to include the Drug Enforcement Agency’s El Paso Intel Center (EPIC), he added.

The effort to develop a comprehensive maritime domain awareness arose from President Bush’s September 2005, National Strategy for Maritime Security. Among the initiatives proposed was the national plan to achieve domain awareness.

“Domain awareness enables the early identification of potential threats and enhances appropriate responses, including interdiction at an optimal distance with capable prevention forces,” Bush said in 2005.

“The Secretary of the Navy (Donald Winter) decided that someone had to lead, and lead on behalf of the entire federal government, and needed to get going on fashioning a network that would serve the requirements that the president has elaborated,” Billingslea said. “So that’s what the Navy’s MDA program is. It’s not an MDA program for the Navy, it’s an MDA program for the nation, and it is meant to be as inclusive of the Coast Guard requirements, for example, as it is for the gray hull Navy requirements.”

In fact, the Navy’s MDA is more than a national effort. It was designed to be a system that is inherently open and accessible to friendly nations, Billingslea added.

“Our concept then is to seize upon a lot of the good work that has been done in the NATO and European context, where they have created, in effect, an unclassified Internet- based, web-based, picture that uses a lot of the normal signals that commercial vessels have to radiate because of the regulations by the IMO (International Maritime Organization),” he said. “The idea of a unclassified, non-classified, open system, is very much at the heart of this effort.”

One of those IMO regulations requires that ships in excess of 300 metric tons must be equipped with the Automatic Identification System (AIS). AIS provides a variety of basic information about a ship including location and final destination. Currently, in the United States, that tracking is being done from Navy vessels as well as Coast Guard ships.

Billingslea noted there are newer, longer-range systems coming online that will enable identification of ships from shore-based sites.

In May 2006, Winter gave the final decision to move forward on the MDA initiative, he said.

Winter has systematically reallocated quite a substantial amount of funding toward MDA-related expenditures that were already happening, Billingslea said.

“There is a fair amount of money, probably on the order of $150 million a year being spent already on things MDA,” he said. “In the decision to actually operationalize the system…to field an enduring operational capability, we decided to put another $150 million in this fiscal year (FY).”

Approximately $300 million will be spent to move the existing technology to the field by August 2008. In the next FY, spiral two will be in full throttle, Billingslea said.

Billingslea expected a comparable amount of funding will be made for the spiral two effort, after which funding should taper off.

However, at that point, the Navy will need to take a step back and make some targeted investments into filing the gaps that the service might see as the effort progresses, he added.

Once spiral one is underway, Billingslea said someone visiting one of the nodes would likely see operators at computer terminals viewing a fused picture with dots (each dot representing a ship) that move. Operators at their computers would be able to call up information that shows everything the federal government and allies know about that particular vessel, he added.

“And you should be able to do that at the unclassified web level, and you should be able to see that at a secret level,” Billingslea said.

Additionally, the system will be integrated onto a select number of Navy frigates and destroyers, as well as Coast Guard cutters, he said. The Navy is still working out the details of which of its ships will get spiral one, Billingslea added.

Other technology concepts include providing wireless connectivity to a boarding team deployed from a rigid inflatable boat (RIB), he said.

“There is no reason we can’t equip RIBs that do maritime boardings with a wireless bridge back to a frigate,” Billingslea said. “We are going to do that. It gives our guys something more to work with than a stubby number two pencil when they climb on that vessel to see who is doing what.”

The effort will also require data fusion so that all the information garnered can be digested by sailors, law enforcement personnel, anyone involved in MDA, Billingslea said.

Fusing the data is not as challenging as it seems, he noted. The effort is not much different from the way the Internet operates today.

“We are not doing something terribly different from that. What’s important is that we have learned from previous missteps,” Billingslea said. “We have spent a lot of time designing the architecture to ensure that it is a service oriented, or open, architecture, which is to say you can easily imagine many non-traditional forms of data needing to come in to round out our understanding of where cargo comes from, and whether, for instance, there be cocaine or explosives packed into it.”

Equally important is all the work being done across the federal government as well as efforts underway by allies, Billingslea said.

“There have been quite a lot of very clever investments over a fairly sustained period of time, over the past five to six years, that have resulted in fascinating abilities to fuse information, process it, look for anomalies etc., etc.,” he said. “Some of the most interesting stuff is coming out of the Office of Naval Research (ONR). Likewise, we found fascinating stuff that the Coast Guard had that the Navy didn’t.”

Those technologies include a software program called TAAD-M (Track Assessment Anomaly Detection-Maritime), developed by ONR, and another called MAGNet (Maritime Awareness Global Network), developed by the Coast Guard, Billingslea said.

“We have Coast Guard processing and collaboration tools that we’re just enamored with, and in turn we have been able to give them some of the stuff our ONI (Office of Naval Intelligence) folks have that has really, I think, greatly helped them with their situational awareness,” he said.