Italy hosts the most important European gathering of navies every two years. The 14th Transregional Seapower Symposium took place in Venice last week. 🚢
🌍 67 navies and over 50 heads of navies from across the globe attended and were joined by representatives from industry, academia and international organizations.
📅 The symposium started in 1996 as a meeting for the Mediterranean but soon assumed its current global profile and has been growing into a major global dialogue and agenda setting event.
🌊 This year’s iteration, which I had the pleasure to attend, was focused on the seabed as a new strategic frontier. For a number of years, and specifically since the 2022 attacks on the Nord Stream pipelines in the Baltic Sea, Italy and its navy has been spearheading much of the discussion of how to respond to the new uncertainties at sea.
📺 The recording of the events is available on Youtube.
Maritime Security depends on effective national capacities for law enforcement and surveillance as well as regional networks. Different approaches are used to help states to develop capacities and networks, including short term training courses and exercises.
This week I had the opportunity to participate in a seminar of an Australian capacity building initiative – the ASEAN Maritime Security Research Program.
✎ This program works with senior officials and allows them to conduct a 3 months research stay at the Australian centers for Sea Power and Air and Space Power. Participants develop a supervised research project on maritime security, participate in military interrelationship activities, such as base visits, and attend Australian multi national military gatherings. Many of the results of the research projects are published.
✎ Announced in 2018 at the Australia-ASEAN summit, 38 military officials from 8 ASEAN nations have participated in the program. Its main objectives are to develop national maritime security expertise, but also build trust, open channels of communication, share best practice and learn lessons, identify innovative solutions, and form a robust network of maritime security experts.
💡The program is noteworthy in the way that it emphasizes longevity and sustainable networks, but also for its focus on developing analytical and research skills, which is often undervalued in capacity building.
Enhancing maritime domain awareness (MDA) is one of the corner stones of maritime security. Yet, it only works if countries develop a culture of sharing and collaboration across agencies and regional seas.
Practicing MDA through multi-national exercises is a key component of developing such a culture. As part of my ongoing research on the international practice of exercises, last week I had the opportunity to get some first hand experience of how the U.S. navy aims at advancing regional MDA . I participated in the exercise SEACAT 2024.
SEACAT is one of the oldest MDA exercises. Starting as a counter-terrorism exercise in 2002, it was focused on MDA through the 2016 Maritime Security Initiative, and was broadened to the Indo-Pacific in 2019. Over that history it has grown in size, with 2024 seeing more than 200 participants, including many from outside Southeast Asia. What happens at such exercises? What can be learned from them?
The Information Fusion Center (IFC) of the Republic of Singapore Navy has been a pioneer in regional maritime domain awareness. It’s information products and fact sheets influence regional responses, it’s information sharing system connects agencies of the region, and the its international liaison officer system provides an important way of making sense of incoming incident data and triggering responses. With this architecture the IFC provides an important standard for how regions can advance their maritime surveillance, information sharing and maritime security cooperation.
Participants at the 2024 RMPP, Changi Naval Base, Singapore.Continue reading →
Shetland Islands is the proto-type of an energy island and at the heart of the green energy transition in the North Sea. Moving from oil and gas to renewable energy production is at the heart of the islands transformation. From the 19th to 22nd of May, I conducted a field visit together with Professor Andrew Neal from the University of Edinburgh to discuss with local experts the transition and explore the multitude of infrastructures on the islands, how they are entangled and how they are protected.
The visit was part of the Copenhagen Edinburgh partnership project on ‘Securing the Green Transition in the North Sea.’ A field report is in the making.
The First Sea Lord’s Seapower Conference is the Royal Navy’s annual flagship event, and I had the pleasure to attend and speak at this years iteration.
The 2024 edition was titled “Future navy: Maritime in the 2040s” and the debate firmly focused on the question of what mid-term challenges the Royal Navy faces and through what posture it could address them.
The event was co-organized with the Council on Geostrategy. The Council, founded in 2001, is a relatively young think tanks — if compared to the traditional British intellectual power houses, such as RUSI or Chatham House. The Council’s mission is “to strengthen Britain and re-assert [its] leadership” and it wants to “promote robust ideas” to boost the countries “discursive, diplomatic and military power”.
During my recent visit to Seychelles, I participated in an event jointly organized by the University of Seychelles and Khalifa University (UAE). The symposium focused on the strategic consequences of Indo-Pacific thinking and geostrategic rivalries for small island states.
Drawing on my earlier research on small states in the Indo-Pacific, how islands face a militarization dilemma, and how they are able to expand their action space through creole foreign policy, I argued during my talk that Seychelles needs to highly alert to geopolitical dynamics and the new vulnerabilities it causes, and indeed needs to rethink its repertoire of foreign policy tools.
Panelists of the Symposium on the Indo Pacific, University of Seychelles, 7.3.2024
As a champion of the blue economy, and its high profile in counter-piracy, Seychelles has navigated such troubled waters extremely well in the past. However, it is now also time for new ideas.
What such new ideas might be, and how Seychelles could utilize its presidency of the Indian Ocean Commission to shape the global agenda, was one of the core issues of my discussion with representatives from the ministry of foreign affairs. Global ocean politics clearly can benefit from leadership of small states, such as Seychelles.
The recording of my recent talk at the MILAN exercises of the Indian Navy is now available on Youtube. In the presentation I revisit the shifts in global ocean politics that navies will have to address in their strategy, and show how critical maritime infrastructure protection is an important point of strategic convergence and global naval cooperation.
In December 2023 I had the pleasure to participate in the 8th Indian Ocean Naval Symposium organized by the Thai Navy.
The Indian Ocean Naval Symposium (IONS) is one of the most important maritime security arrangement in the region. It is the only format that brings security actors from south east Asia, the bay of Bengal and the western Indian Ocean together to discuss security at sea. It also includes important maritime states, including China, Germany, Italy, Japan and Russia as observers.
The seabed is rapidly becoming a new space of concern in security politics. In Europe, largely triggered by the 2022 sabotage of he Nord Stream pipelines, but also investments by Russia in subsea capabilities, NATO countries are reevaluating their dependency on subsea infrastructures such as pipelines and data and electricity cables.
As part of their EU presidency, the Spanish Navy hosted a Forum focused on the issue on November, 16th at naval headquarters in Madrid. Titled the “Seabed, a new area of interest and dispute”, 150 participants, including high level representatives from all major European navies, discussed the importance of the seabed, and different responses.
The first panel focused on the strategic picture, deep seabed mining and subsea data cables. In the second panels, the navies of Spain, Italy and France provided an overview of the defense and coordination projects they are currently developing. The French representative showed how the navy is implementing its dedicated seabed strategy, while Italy discussed how their response is structured by technological innovation, maritime stakeholder communities, a legal review and the creation of a new coordination center.
In my contribution to panel 1, I firstly argued for the need to think maritime security in dimensional terms. I then demonstrated how substantively our dependency on the seabed has been accelerating in the past two decades, a trend that will continue with the green energy transition is unfolding. Two make that point, I provided a review of how the seabed has been used throughout history. I then investigated the hypothetical landscape of threats based on our recent article on the issue. I ended in an evaluation of current European responses and its challenges.
The main responses are led by NATO and the EU. NATO has developed a coordination cell in its headquarters which organizes a stakeholder network described as ‘community of trust’. At NATO Maritime Command a center for critical infrastructure protection is being developed which will operate in a similar way as the NATO Shipping Center to enhance information sharing and coordination with industry.
The EU is currently evaluating the vulnerability of subsea infrastructures, and has recently launched its EU Maritime Security Strategy that entails significant plans for infrastructure protection. A key actor driving the agenda is the European Defense Agency.
More efforts will be needed, however, in improving maritime domain awareness and subsea awareness, reliable information sharing and standards for the self-protection by the industry.
