Thayer Consultancy Background Briefing:

ABN # 65 648 097 123

Maritime Domain Awareness:
What’s In a Name?
Carlyle A. Thayer
January 25, 2018

Ben Otto, The Wall Street Journal:
Could shed some light on "maritime domain awareness" in the South China Sea that
Mattis is talking about with Indonesia and Vietnam this week. Is that something in
the early stages of discussion, or is something in the works to help develop
monitoring capabilities? And do you have any idea what that monitoring technology
would look like?
ANSWER: First, Maritime Domain Awareness (MDA) is not a new initiative. The U.S.
has long-standing regional defence cooperation programs that touch on maritime
security and MDA. For example, the Cooperation Afloat Readiness and Training
(CARAT) is an annual bilateral naval exercise between the United States and
Bangladesh, Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, the Philippines,
Thailand, and Timor Leste. Not all of its activities are directed at MDA capacity
building. CARAT exercises vary between countries and can include joint training in
anti-submarine and anti-surface warfare, visit board search and seizure activities,
diving and salvage and maritime domain awareness activities.
The U.S. hosted a Shared Maritime Domain Awareness Workshop for Southeast
Asian representatives at the Asia Pacific Center for Security Studies in Honolulu in
May 2015.
Secondly, MDA became a prominent part of U.S. theatre engagement with Southeast
Asia under the U.S. Maritime Security Initiative for Southeast Asia launched in 2016.
MDA is about acquiring information and intelligence about any ship, submarine,
vessel or aircraft operating in a specific maritime area. Usually this means a country’s
12 nautical mile territorial sea and 200 nautical mile Exclusive Economic Zone. The
U.S. Maritime Security Initiative for Southeast Asia focused on four countries:
Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines and Vietnam.
Since the South China Sea is a semi-enclosed sea and various littoral states have
overlapping claims, MDA is aimed at creating a real time Common Operating Picture
for cooperating countries on the operations of ships, submarines, vessels and aircraft
operating over, on or under the South China Sea. The Common Operating Picture
enables national security officials to manage their resources and assets to respond
appropriately (see chart below).
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There is no definitive list of platforms, systems, and technologies that comprise MDA
(see illustration at the end). The major challenge is to link these systems and the
various sources of data they gather, collate the date for operational use and
disseminate it in a timely fashion. In other words, networking all systems so their
sources of data are fused so they provide timely information to national security
decision-makers, ship captains and pilots. This could involve tracking ships through
the Automatic Identification System (AIS), other sensors (bouys), sonar, cameras, as
well as by coastal long range and ship radars, long range Unmanned Aerial Vehicles
(UAV), and satellites.
Under the Obama Administration MDA was funded at U.S. $19.6 million in FY 2015
and U.S. $20.5 million in FY 2016 for the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia and
Vietnam. This initiative was aimed at capacity building in the four countries and
included the following (not an exhaustive list):
The Philippines. The Philippines received the lion’s share of funding. The main
priority was to support the Philippines National Coast Watch System through the
provision of coastal radars. In 2015 the Philippines purchased three EL/M-2288 AD-
STAR air search radars from Israel.
MDA assistance also included building capacity to maintain and service navy and
coast guard ships, joint training, and intelligence assistance to improve the
Philippines’ ability to detect, track, and interdict criminal and terrorist elements
involved in the smuggling of illicit goods.
Indonesia: The U.S. gave priority to three areas to enhance Indonesia’s MDA: (1)
Increasing its’ patrol capacity, (2) improving ISR (Intelligence, Surveillance and
Reconnaissance) integration and (3) upgrading Indonesia’s maintenance capacity.
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Malaysia: U.S. MDA support was mainly in the administrative area to build maritime
law enforcement training capacity and interagency coordination.
Vietnam: The focus for U.S. MDA assistance to Vietnam was to improve its maritime
ISR and Command and Control capabilities across its maritime agencies (Navy, Coast
Guard, Border Guard and Fishery Surveillance Force).

Suggested citation: Carlyle A. Thayer, “Maritime Domain Awareness: What’s In a

Name?,” Thayer Consultancy Background Brief, January 25, 2018. All background
briefs are posted on Scribd.com (search for Thayer). To remove yourself from the
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Thayer Consultancy provides political analysis of current regional security issues and
other research support to selected clients. Thayer Consultancy was officially
registered as a small business in Australia in 2002.