Keeping track of the thousands of vessels, from fishing boats to large container ships, as they sail to and from America is a daunting challenge, but one the Office of the Director of National intelligence (ODNI) is working by coordinating the efforts of the Navy, Coast Guard, and intelligence communities.
At almost any given time there are literally tens of thousands of vessels underway and anyone of them potentially could have a cargo of people dangerous to U.S. interests, Rear Adm. Richard Kelly, director, Global Maritime and Air Intelligence Integration (GMAII), ODNI, told Defense Daily in a recent interview.
One example, Kelly pointed to are the efforts of drug smugglers to get illegal drugs into the United States. Many smugglers are resorting to submersibles to avoid detection on the run from Central and South America to the United States.
“Being able to sift through that vast amount of information, not just of the ship, but of the people onboard, the cargo…there is so much information to sort through with so many different vessels you want to be able to deal with the threat as far away from the U.S. as possible,” Kelly said. “Ideally we want to prevent the bad cargo from ever being loaded on the vessel. My job is to get better information into the hands of decision makers so that we can make better informed more timely decisions.”
Since standing up the office in fall ’06, Kelly noted that one of the bigger challenges has been working with the volume of information and the number of people working on it.
One thing that’s needed are tools to automatically sort and correlate information so that intelligence analysts can spend more time analyzing and less time pulling and putting together that information.
One example, Kelly said, is tracking ships.
“Historically trying to build a ship track…a vessel track…that has been a manual labor intensive process. Pulling information and then manually building a track and continuing to maintain that track over time…by a person…you can build only so many tracks a day by that,” he said.
The National Security Agency (NSA) working with the Navy, Coast Guard, Naval Research Laboratory, Office of Naval Research and the Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center have been working on building automatic track builders, he added.
The system would correlate information gathered from the Automatic Identification System (AIS) and electronic intelligence (ELINT), Kelly said.
“Now the analyst can spend more time on trying to figure out what it means and less time on assembling a vessel track,” he added. “That’s something we were involved [in] because we had some very smart people who were very impassioned about their own particular tool that they were building and they asked us to come in [and help them with it] because everybody thought their tool was the best.”
Kelly said his office spent about a year, working what he called “shuttle diplomacy,” moving back and forth between groups working on different technologies.
“[We] got them to the point where they worked very cooperatively on a comparative basis for testing their tools against one another, sharing their data, sharing their test schedule, and their testing methodologies to come [up] with what they think is the best tool to use to allow this process to move forward,” he added.
Another challenge, Kelly acknowledged, is making sure maritime issues are considered in every decision making process that ODNI is undertaking when it comes to improving integration in the intelligence community. “So that maritime is considered and gets the appropriate priority versus other issues.”
“Everybody within [ODNI] has a piece of the maritime portfolio. I am the one looking at maritime holistically and trying to explain it to everybody else so that people think about it as they are making planning and resourcing decisions and policy and legislation,” Kelly said.
One example Kelly noted was saving the GMAII funding line. “People didn’t know what it was there for and it was going to be taken and used for something else. We were able to go and keep that funding line alive.”
There were also programs for national technical means that were in jeopardy, he added. “We were able to do the prep work and then bring the Navy in to explain to ODNI how important those systems were for tracking vessels.”
Kelly’s office stood up in the fall 2006. “This is really a new start…trying to coordinate across that many (intelligence) entities. We think of the challenge we’ve got under the MDA (maritime domain awareness) plan and the GMAII plan.”
“When you try to figure out what is going on, [all that] information is in the hands of the intelligence community, law enforcement, regulatory [agencies], foreign partners, the private sector, NGO (non governmental organzaitions)…all that information is what you are trying to get a hold of,” Kelly added. “How do you start building up the trust between them that you will actually share information?
Right now, Kelly is focusing more on the federal level, trying to get the various agencies and organizations to work together before necking down to state and local entities.
Most people, Kelly noted, think of maritime domain awareness as nothing more than tracking ships. “They are thinking very much in a Cold War mentality, where tracking the Soviet navy, as difficult a problem as that was, [it was] much simpler than what we are trying to do today.”
The Soviet navy had a relatively small number of high value platforms, Kelly said, with distinct signatures that were relatively distinct from the background noise, and relatively well defined operating areas.
“Now we are dealing with situations where literally at any one point in time, [there are] tens of thousands of vessels underway and any one of them could deliberately or unwillingly be carrying a cargo or person that is harmful to U.S. interests,” he said. “We really can’t do a brute force approach of tracking everything everywhere all the time.”
So what Kelly is trying to do is enable non traditional partners like the law enforcement community, to instead of thinking about this as tracking ships think about it as a supply chain…the movement of good and services from the port on the other side of the ocean to a U.S. port.
Additionally, there not only has to be an understanding of what Kelly said is the white market supply chain, but the gray market and black market supply chain too, and start concentrating on the network of bad guys that are moving things, the facilitators, the shippers, and the money.
“So you start looking at the network of illegal activity, the ships themselves become clues to help you understand what the networks are doing. And then as you start looking at and identifying a network, then you can start concentrating on their particular needs, methods, including their vessels, to try and figure out what’s the end game you are trying to get to,” Kelly said.
“The people we are working with right now, in this first iteration it’s ONI, and the Intelligence Coordination Center in particular, they understand it. Our challenge is how do you better enable them to do this…to get better information in their hands from all of these other partners. That’s kind of the construct we are trying to [get to],” Kelly said.