U.S. Navy Sea Combat Capabilities Development-Maritime Domain Awareness Liu”@Bao-Wen Abstract”G After the 2008 presidential election, our government is leading our co untry to a new direction. On one hand, they have affirmed the determin ation of defending Taiwan; on the other hand, they have to create a wi n-win historical condition for the long-term peace progress of cross-s trait relationship. This situation has certain influence on how the na vy should prepare and arm itself. The Maritime Domain Awareness system developed by USNORTHCOM can automatically monitor the movements over waters and analyze any abnormal activities. In the future, it could al so integrate with other military division awareness system, informatio n combat system and other accessory functions. We should observe the m easures and results of them in order to have a reference for our navy research and training units. I.Preface Since May 20,2008, while our 12 president was officially in office,the new government will lead our country in a new direction. As President Ma has said in his inaugural speech,"we have the determination to def end Taiwan's security, and will provide proper budget for national def ense, and purchase necessary defensive weapons in order to build a sol id national defense strength."On the other hand, our government has to create a win-win historical condition for the long-term peace progres s of cross-strait relationship.[1] Minister Chen Jhao-Min in his repor t to Legislative Yuan has mentioned that the government will"implement the nationalization of the military Forces, and strictly comply with administrative neutrality","promote the recruitment policy","promote c ross-strait military mutual trust system","explore regional military s ecurity cooperation","improve cooperative combat efficiency and integr ated reaction mechanism","strengthen national defense system",[2] Unde r the guidance of such six policies,it would certainly affect the esta blishment and preparation of each armed forces. It is also necessary t o review the current policies. As to U.S. navy's relevant solutions, their reviews are held regularly , and led by each division command. They would analyze the source of t hreat and their own weakness, executing supporting measures and polici es in order to support the adjusted strategies. This article will take USNORTHCOM's development of "Maritime Domain Awareness" for an exampl e, discussing its measures and effects, hoping it would provide our mi litary's research and combat units some references. II.The Ocean Threats to U.S. and Its Current Shipping Situations Looking back to the last twenty years, terrorism and asymmetric warfar e kept expanding. Right now the enemies that U.S.is facing are complet ely different from the past. The global security environment is differ ent from the Cold War period as well. As the technology keeps advancin g and globalization keeps progressing, the uncertainty becomes more se vere. The terrorist organizations had claimed several times that they are able to attack the U.S. soil by various ways. According to many an ti-terrorist experts' research, the U.S. maritime interests becomes th e best target because one effective attack would cause U.S. and the gl obe a major disaster in economy. Speaking of U.S. economy lifeline, shipping and relative trading activ ities are of great importance. The following statistics can serve as r eference [3]: 1.In global international total trade value, ocean trades are 75 perce nt of the total value. 2.U.S. is an ocean state; its coastline stretches to 95,000 miles. It has 361 ports and harbors, and large economic exclusion zone. 3.U.S. has 95 percent of its import/export trade through shipping. 4.U.S. has about 500 shipping companies and over 4,400 container ships . Every year they provide 215,000,000 standard container shipping serv ices. 5.Every year about 11,500,000 containers will be shipped to U.S. The t otal weight of goods is over 24,000,000,000 tons. 6.Every year over 8,000 foreign commercial s ships visit 50 major harb ors in U.S. 7.Every day in average there are 1,200 to 1,500 commercial ships trequ esf entering the us harbors. The ocean trade activities described above within U.S. soil has become the perfect target for the terrorists to attack on because U.S. navy doesn't have effective measures to monitor these incoming business shi ps, container ships, personnel, facilities and relative global supplyi ng chain. III.Current U.S. Ocean Policy Outline After the first time that U.S. navy has joint Marine Corps and coast g uards together in discussion, and in October, 17, 2007, they announced "A Cooperative Strategy for 21 Century Seapower"[4] this new sea stra tegy, in order to integrate the U.S. navy with its allies to secure th e safety of global oceans. The key points in that discourse are follow ing four parts: A.The whole discourse stresses on the using of "Soft Power" to counter the terrorists and continue to provide humanitarian assistance. This means that U.S. has understand that future warfare cannot win by only using military force. It needs to unite the force from humanitarian, e conomy, etc. to cooperate. The U.S. medical ship USNS Mercy has gone t o several medical aiding missions in South Africa and South-East Asia which makes a good example. B.The traditional force of U.S. will be focused on Persian Gulf, India n Ocean, and waters in West Pacific Ocean. This indicates that these r egions are crucial to U.S. navy and its ocean strategy. C.In the future, U.S. will integrate its navy, marine corps, and coast guards, and build a smaller but more flexible task unit. Besides oper ating regular combat missions, it also operates humanitarian assistanc e, counter-terror, counter-weapon distribution, counter-pirates, and m obile training squad, assist rebuild, and counter any other illegal ma ritime activities. D.The direction of U.S. global ocean strategy will focus on "Improve I ntegration and Interoperability","Enhance Awareness", and "Prepare Our People". Considering the part of "enhance awareness", U.S. has summoned the rel ative departments in federal government in 2004 to hold the so-called "Maritime Domain Awareness Summit". The meeting was to discuss the who le measures on how to integrate every department's power in defending the important U.S. ocean properties. Its result is the policies signed and announced by President Bush in December that year. The policies a re "Maritime Security Policies", "National Security President Directiv e 41, NSPD-41", "Homeland Strategy for Maritime Directive 13, HSPD-13" , "National Strategy for Maritime Security, NSMS" [5] and other eight relative plans.[6] In order to improve the abilities of Maritime Domai n Awareness, the National Intelligence Director [7] and National Offic e for Global Maritime Situational Awareness [8] have coordinated each division command to develop specific solutions and build necessary aut omatic intelligence probing and monitoring system. Based on the structure described above, USNORTHCOM was ordered to deve lop the Concept of Operations for Maritime Domain Awareness with U.S. Coast Guards. The relative development and its process will be discuss ed in the later part of this article. IV.U.S.Measures:Take USNORTH- COM for Example To track the ships effectively, monitoring ocean movements and analyzi ng abnormal activities are not easy jobs. As for U.S., the above works are mostly required artificial controls and analysis. It is both time -consuming and limited. Facing the thousands of targets in the global waters, it is hard to achieve the purpose of monitoring water activiti es without an effective automatic system. U.S. Department of Defense i s now using a system called "Common Operational Picture, COP" as basic information format to transmit target data. However, the system is un able to integrate with other data transmitted by different systems on different ships, and has to be keyed in personally. Besides the disadv antage of time-delay, the intelligence (monitoring) personnel have to enquire the suspicious target's relative information by themselves whi ch is extremely inconvenient. In order to overcome such defect, with t he support from ONI and ICC, USNORTHCOM has set up NMIC as its informa tion integration knot of ocean activities. It would include the intell igence of U.S. Navy Command, and coast guards. NORAD later on has part icipated in the project as well. All the information is integrated by NMIC and is opened for all the units to access. Moreover, USNORTHCOM s till has to face the issues of legitimacy (confidentiality), relative measures, cross-department communication, law-enforcement execution an d ally requirements and positions. Afterwards, under the assistance of technical units, NMIC switched to the "User-Defined Operational Picture, UDOP" system. By using the inte rnet to set up "Comprehensive Maritime Awareness, CMA" and "Maritime A utomatic Super Track Enhanced Reporting, MASTER" these two powers, not only can they automatically integrate, analyze target information and provide download access according to clearance level, they can also a ccess the IMO's "Automated Identification System, AIS" data. It is exp ected that after the automation, it will decrease the manpower require ment and "unidentified targets" significantly. Currently, after this p roject is being tested, other theafer command will gradually adopt thi s measure.[9] V.Future Maritime Domain Awareness Development Focus According to U.S. Department of Defense's direction, MDA will make the "Service Oriented Architecture" as its center of enhancements. Beside s providing the user more simple and updated information, they would a lso include the current military aware system, information combat syst em, and other accessory functions. Interestingly enough, since they ha ve gradually integrated all the systems, U.S. army are beginning to co nsider the possibilities of combining relative organizations, for inst ance, combining MHQ-MOC and coast guards' MAGNET. Moreover, speaking o f the MDA system's globalization, there are still certain challenges n eeded to be solved. These issues include [10]: 1.How to expand cross-department cooperation and support MDA system in tegration? 2.How does U.S. Department of Defense coordinate with each department and each level of law-enforcement? 3.The detailed configurations of MDA system. 4.How do allies agree on exchanging ocean intelligence? 5.The integration of policies in national security, national defense, intelligence, law-enforcement, and industry. 6.How to implement Service Oriented Architecture to achieve MDA's goal ? 7.How to manage smaller ships (currently ships under 300 tons are not included in the system)? How to monitor suspicious targets in inland w atercourse? Looking at the development history of MDA system, it is not hard to fi nd out that technology nowadays has no trouble supporting the developm ent of its software and hardware. However, the other issues that invol ved such as international, government departments, budget and database are the crucial elements for success. Otherwise, it would not be effe ctive and even failed to achieve the expected goals. VI.Conclusion To sum up, in the future, how do the two sides promote the military tr ust mechanism [11], and how does navy cooperate with short, middle, an d long term phases to achieve policy directions, will be a time-consum ing yet worthy subject. Right now facing the direct transportation pol icy, the Department of Defense expects that it could compress the awar e and reaction time, and pose great influence to Taiwan's national sec urity. This, they have planned the following four guidelines [12]: A.To coordinate Civil Aviation Authority to set up cross-strait aviati on aware system as soon as possible. Using the principles of set point , set way, and set time to design the routes, and avoid pass through t he strait directly in order to regulate and monitor effectively. B.Review the patrol and training waters and airspace in order to take duty for both sea and air awareness, and scout/patrol missions. Also, reinforce the density of scout aircrafts and ships, and the reaction p rotocol of aircrafts and captains. C.Strictly monitoring the sea, air, radar, interception, and intellige nce, handling all the activities in order to buy more awareness and re action time. D.Enhancing the training of regional combat unit, counter-terrorists u nit in order to handle false hijacking/actual assault these kind of te rrorist attack. At this time, I believe that our navy has done all the preparation and measures. Yet, the development history of U.S. navy in the relative c ase can be our future reference and checkpoint for us to review and ad just. I hope it would allow our navy to prepare more aggressively for the future challenges, and to achieve the task and spirit of facing th e challenges and protecting our territorial seas. ”eµłÄĄ”f 1.Please refer to the PRC 12 president inaugural speech in May, 20, 20 08. 2.Please refer to the military news publisher of the Department of Def ense, and the press releases in June 4, 2008, also, the report that Mi nister Chen Jhao-Min announced in the Legislative Yuan the same day. 3.U.S. Navy Dept., The Cargo Tracking Handbook (Washington, DC: Office of Naval Intelligence, February, 2007), PP.1-7; U.S. Transportation D ept., Pocket Guide to Transportation (Washington DC: Bureau of Transpo rtation Statistics, January 2006), PP. 37-39. 4.U.S. Navy, A Cooperative Strategy for 21 Century Seapower, October 2 007, Access from: http://www.usnavy.mil 5.It was mainly written by U.S. National Security Council, and Preside nt Bush signed and announced it in 2005. 6.The eight plans are: National plan to achieve Maritime Domain Awaren ess (MDA), Global Maritime Intelligence Integration (GMII), Maritime O perational Threat Response (MOTR), International Outreach and Coordina tion Strategy, Maritime Infrastructure Recovery, Maritime Transportati on System Security, Maritime Commerce Security, Domestic Outreach. 7.It is responsible for agile plans. 8.It is constituted of the members in U.S. National Security Council a nd Homeland Security Council and is responsible for non-agile plans. 9.Gen. Victor E. Renuart, Jr., USAF, and Capt. Dane S. Egli, USCG, Clo sing the capability gap, Naval War College Review, Spring 2008 Volume 61, Number 2, PP. 15-24. 10.Secretary of the Navy Memo, ”§Maritime Domain Awareness (MDA) Capab ilities,”Ø 17 May 2007. 11.Please refer to the press release of Department of Defense in June 4th, 2008. 12.Please refer to the press release of Department of Defense in May 1 6th, 2008.