Intelligence in maritime transport
Threat analysis in the maritime domain.
A Two-Way Street: Organizing Intelligence Cooperation for the Maritime Transport Industry
By Hassan M. Eltaher
Threats to the maritime industry include threats to ships/vessels, ports, port facilities, passenger terminals, national and international waterways including their locks and approaches; international straits and multinational rivers; navigation facilities; waterside and landside moorings; human and multi-modal vehicular traffic; seaplane operations, and finally threats to Mobile Offshore Drilling Units (MODUs). To organize a pre-emptive, protective, defensive and problem-solving security network for a country-wide coverage of such expanses surely calls for sophisticated functional and well-tested security and intelligence systems. Some threats are occasional, others are recurrent, accidental or endemic to a particular region, and the reasons behind them are diverse. Planning and reacting to the variety of threats calls for different approaches, a good chunk of which relies on how intelligence is organized, shared and handled in cooperation with other players such as the military, the Department of Transport, the political leadership, and industry stakeholders. In this contribution Hassan M. Eltaher, the author of “Aviation & Maritime Security Intelligence”, provides a few insights into how this process is to be organized.
Transportation security and intelligence: a two-way street
Transportation security, and especially the important intelligence function within it must be treated and managed as a whole, albeit with distinct modules by mode of transportation under one centralized umbrella. In other words, transportation security must be multi-modal, but managed by one team of security and intelligence professionals at the top, and threat information touching any module must be shared by all the modules among themselves. This should ensure proper balancing between operational efficiency requirements, national security but also commercial viability.
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Source: piracy-studies.org
