Zachary Haver and Dr. Ketian Zhang come aboard to discuss Sansha City’s role in the South China Sea, to include the city’s missions, how it is organized, ongoing habitability initiatives, and its relationship with the Chinese military and maritime law enforcement.
The maritime domain has always played a key role in projecting strategic influence. This includes traditional state-to-state competition as well as addressing non-state threats ranging from piracy, transnational organized crime (including smuggling, drug, arms, and human trafficking), and terrorism. Some of these threats have long histories as piracy has challenged states and empires—notably the Roman Empire in the Mediterranean—since the classic age, while the U.S. Navy and Marines, exemplified by First Lieutenant Presley O’Bannon, forged their early professional legacy containing Barbary pirates and privateers operating in North Africa. Pirates have long challenged Asia’s seas with focal points in the South China Sea and the Indian Ocean/Straits of Malacca.
Add to these traditional threats the global challenges of port security including both physical and cyber attacks, the potential for littoral terrorist operations—such as the maritime insertion of terrorists for the November 2008 Mumbai Attacks—and the potential for unmanned operations including aerial, surface, and underwater drones. These technological challenges will influence both state and non-state actors leading to new potentials for maritime conflict—ranging from ”Ghost Fleet” type World Wars to “Crime Wars.” This situation assessment briefly outlines key considerations for building a naval intelligence capability for these diverse future threats.
Threat Environment
The maritime domain is both vast and complex. The commercial sector dominates the seas, and non-state shipping dwarfs state shipping, particularly those belonging to navies. As we are entering a new period of near-peer competition, this time with China, and dealing with the Chinese military doctrine of Total Warfare, understanding the fully dynamics of potential maritime threats – whether from flagged naval vessels and aircraft, or more surreptitious players – needs to incorporated into our future of naval intelligence.
North Korea uses commercial ships, often from third nations hidden by shell company ownership, to evade international sanctions on selling its coal, along with shipping deadly arms to other nations (e.g., Iran) posing threats against US interests and the international community. In many cases these ships travel “dark,” either turning off their AIS (Automated Identification System) or putting out a deceptive ID to confuse tracking vessel movements. Identifying a vessel carrying illicit contraband becomes a complex exercise is figuring out tracks, comparing actual transit timelines to what is given, analyzing commercial satellite imagery, assessing ownership and flag of vessels, etc. Trade disputes and sanctions complicate the operating picture as Iranian, Venezuelan, and Chinese vessels are subject to scrutiny. Iranian state piracy and Islamic revolution Guards Corps (IGRC) irregular naval warfare yield a range of threats, including tanker seizures. In some cases vessels smuggling contraband oil makes dangerous and environmentally hazardous ship-to-ship transfers at sea, putting both the crews and surrounding sea life in great peril. This is the modern maritime threat environment.
Full Spectrum Threats
Modern maritime threats range from irregular naval warfare, piracy, maritime terrorism, port security, and narcotics smuggling to gray-zone peer competition. Both state and non-state actors, including insurgents, criminal armed groups (CAGs), and proxies, engage in this spectrum of conflict.
Any vessel afloat is a virtual puzzle palace of threat components. There is the flag the vessel operates under, the ownership of the vessel (which is sometimes a myriad of international shell companies), the ship’s officers and crew, the cargo aboard the ship, the ports of departure, etc. All of these are pieces that when connected form a comprehensive threat assessment. In the future, the veracity and internal controls of the carrier will become more important, meaning a new level of public-private interaction across the maritime domain. It also means discerning intent becomes more and more important, as it will drive other technical means of intelligence collection, and that means that naval intelligence must increasingly rely on human intelligence sources, and the complexity of issues that entails.
Further, the threat doesn’t simply float along the surface of the oceans and seas. It flies above it and increasingly travels below. Criminal cartels are increasingly using “narco-submarines” – usually semi-submersibles, but occasionally submersibles – to ship illegal drugs. It is only matter of time when this smuggling relatively successful methodology is expanded to cover other contraband such as weapons and even human beings. Ports are also an area that is very much part of the threat spectrum. As with civil aviation and airports, certain seaports incur an inherently higher risk of threat activity to lax security and/or oversight. As seen with the recent explosion at the Port of Beirut, dangerous materials stored at the port can have the potential of devastating the port and surrounding urban area in ways equaling the force of the worst conventional military strike and bordering on the effects of a small nuclear warhead. Ports are also focal points for transnational organized crime and racketeering. Transnational organized crime groups focus on extracting resource, including illegal fishing. At times, these threats converge as seen in China’s armed fishing militia—the People’s armed Forces Maritime Militia (PAFMM) and maritime enforcement services.
Hot Spots
Although these threats span the globe, they are especially concentrated in specific areas/regions: Caribbean, East & West Africa (including the Niger Delta), and the Indo-Pacific, especially South China Sea. Whereas recent years saw the explosion of piracy stemming from the virtually unpoliced Somali coasts, piracy has also become a growing problem in the Gulf of Guinea near West Africa and Red Sea near Yemen. Virtually every criminal organization is online, and hence integrated into the global economy, financial system and vast information treasure trove that is the modern internet. Further, the relatively low wages of public officials in various parts of the world can make information sharing between nations a risky proposition, particularly as it impacts the maritime domain. International collaboration in chasing down vessels at sea can be compromised in a myriad of ways, and it is not just Hot Spots per se that must be thoroughly vetted and examined but also the surrounding nations where criminal cartels may have penetrated the respective law enforcement, intelligence and maritime security services.
Further, for smuggling, hot spots are growing to include likely areas of transshipment of materials afloat, from ship to ship. Certain areas of the seas are notoriously under-surveilled, and those become likely areas of illicit cargo exchanges. These illicit exchanges threaten the very fabric of international sanctions against nations that refuse to abide by international treaties and norms, such as the development of weapons of mass destruction, especially nuclear arms. By enabling circumvention of sanctions, allowing these nations to continue their wrongful conduct with minimal adverse consequences, it implicitly increases the likelihood that various players may have rely on more direct action at some point in the future, that could include war. Stopping this illegal transfer at sea strengthens the respective sanctions’ regimes and enables influencing the international community to drive policies and activities of these rogue nations away from what could ultimately result in military action.
Flexible & Scalable Responses
Naval intelligence must be able to address full spectrum threats from the land domain, through ports, littoral zone (including the exclusive economic zone – EEZ), through the high seas. Flexibility is required from the blue water through brown water (high seas, littoral, riverine). Scalable sensing for scalable response is required, with an emphasis on the “Urban Littoral” and “Urban Amphibious Operations.”
While the increasing tension with China, particularly in the South China Sea, means that the United States and its allies must increase their ability to engage against threat maritime combatants, there is also the increasing diversity of threats from non-state actors and sub rosa state operations. Having a flexible response that can interdict, mitigate or prevent illicit activities in the maritime domain becomes increasingly important, even as the spectrum of conflict moves from low intensity to high intensity. If a smuggling attempt can be thwarted in a foreign port of departure prior to the ship leaving the dock, that scenario is preferable to a riskier interdiction at sea. That requires a melding of law enforcement and national security related intelligence, and then having vetted network for information sharing leading to enforcement action.
Many years ago, U.S. Customs (now Customs and Border Protection, or CBP) began stationing inspectors overseas at foreign ports of departure specifically to reduce the risk of illicit materials being loaded aboard ships bound for the United States. Obviously, this required a very high degree of collaboration and information sharing with host nation authorities and developed international “muscle movements” ideal for addressing a host of threat activities involving maritime trade and movements. It was a flexible and highly practical response, that has kept goods flowing at a faster, more efficient rate than reliance on what to then had been traditional practices.
Organizations like the Joint Interagency Task Force (JIATF) South in Key West, Florida, are prime examples of a blended intelligence-operations team that is both flexible and adaptable, and able to fuse time-sensitive intelligence with operational assets to effect very precise interdiction efforts throughout Caribbean and Pacific maritime areas. JIATF-South blends intelligence from a myriad of sources and methods, then expertly sanitizes that intelligence for optimal utilization with compromising the aforementioned. The enormous success of JIATF-South in drug interdiction speaks for itself, particularly against the low profile and difficult to detect semi-submersibles.
Partners Matter
Modern naval intelligence should emphasize integrating allies and partners through the Navy, Coast Guard, Marines, and Law Enforcement Agencies, to include police and customs officials. Maritime Fusion Centers can uniquely address the “need” for tactical, operational, and strategic intelligence support. For example, with a large host of international liaison officers on staff, the ability of the JIATF-South to quickly mobilize sea, air and land surveillance and enforcement assets using both traditional naval intelligence capabilities along with law enforcement and non-military intelligence information is a benchmark of civil-military, joint service and coalition success in addressing the full-spectrum of threats in a very busy maritime domain.
Part of the discussion about partners in maritime and naval intelligence are increasingly the reliance on specialized components of law enforcement that would seem removed from naval intelligence, particularly those entities dealing with financial and commercial intelligence. Being able to quickly identify and code suspect ownership schemes of ships and cargoes, not to mention connections to the officers and crew of a vessel, are increasingly relevant to timely decisions to interdict and inspect, and ultimately to detain or impound. To date, many ships have been able to sail the seas despite having nebulous registries, ownerships and crewing. However, as maritime intelligence collaboration improves, so should the capability and capacity for more targeted enforcement actions against suspect vessels. A Customs hold on a vessel in port for month or more can have an enormous impact to the bottom line of a commercial shipping company and is an enormous deterrent to allowing smuggling or other illicit activity involving a vessel. Such targeted enforcement entails a highly integrated “partnership” of law enforcement, commercial and intelligence organizations to be effective.
Some of the key “Naval Intelligence” partners in this more comprehensive domain are:
The traditional “Tri-Service” maritime agencies (Navy, Coast Guard Marines)
Other Military Services (Army, Air Force, Space Force), including the National Guard
Other uniformed services, including National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and United States Public Health Service (USPHS)
National intelligence community agencies (especially geospatial and overhead imagery)
Federal law enforcement, especially Department of Homeland Security (DHS)
State and local law enforcement and public safety (including fish and game/fishery agencies)
Port authorities and port police
Commercial Maritime Industry (e.g., the Merchant Marine)
Oceanic Energy industry (i.e., wind turbine operators, gas and oil platform operators, etc.)
Commercial freight and passenger shipping industry
Foreign allies (European Union, Five Eyes, NATO, Quad, etc.)
FINCEN (Financial Crimes Enforcement Network) and Financial Intelligence Units (FIUs) around the world
United Nations agencies (International Maritime Organization, etc.)
Technology Matters
Sensors, Robotics, and Artificial Intelligence (AI) are all part of the mix. Accurate assessment of the full spectra of threats must incorporate actors, modes/methods of warfare in grey area, Non-International Armed Conflict (NIAC), International Armed Conflict (IAC), situations, also humanitarian response, and support to law enforcement operations. It must anticipate and incorporate understanding of various legal regimes and intersecting threats.
Increasingly drones of all sorts will be relied upon for all aspects of gathering intelligence and inspecting suspect vessels. Unmanned Aerial Systems or UAS, along with seagoing surface (unmanned surface vessels – USV) and subsurface drones (unmanned underwater vehicles – UUV), allow for smaller vessels to launch intelligence collection capabilities that previously would require relatively large naval vessels. Additionally, micro-drones that fly, crawl and walk are able to “interrogate” the interiors of vessels and even the interiors of cargo containers remotely, providing a unique picture of what a vessel is actually carrying or doing compared to what they have declared.
Bringing It All Together
Fusion is much more than just information-sharing: It requires “Co-Production of Intelligence” (all source, full spectrum) for intelligence-operations fusion at all phase of operations (pre-, trans-, post incident). Distributed and connected capabilities for the collection, collation, analysis/synthesis, and targeted dissemination that incorporate cybersecurity and counterintelligence capacity are needed at all phases of the intelligence cycle.
The example of the DHS sponsored fusion centers in the U.S. serves as an example of how not to do this, but the example of JIATF-South is one worth referencing. One of the great failures, first semantic and eventually functional, was the phrase “information sharing” and “information sharing environment.” It implied that agencies sharing information was an adequate substitute for genuine intelligence analysis and program management. The result in the U.S. was best seen by the perceived or actual failure of various information-sharing entities to achieve meaningful operation-intelligence fusion to anticipate and adequately respond to the 6 January 2021 U.S. Capitol assault—or insurrection. The challenge facing maritime intelligence centers is that they too can become waylaid from focusing on the more significant threats to instead focusing on politically hot issues that then lead to critical gaps in coverage and assessment.
In the maritime domain, the new role of naval intelligence will need to construct a program of genuine fusion or fusion centers that are integrated, capable and focused. This is not to simply ‘recreate the wheel’ but take what is already there and vastly improve upon it to integrated effort and management. In the United States, an obvious interface would be to put it all under the U.S. Coast Guard, which is already the closest thing the United States has to gendarmerie. The Coast Guard, with its law enforcement capability and Title 50 status, is able to integrate local, state, federal and military intelligence into comprehensive intelligence products and common operational pictures and do so in a distinctly civil-military domain. In the last two decades, it has stood up an impressive human capital capacity in highly trained intelligence professionals and is uniquely suited for integrating its information into the naval intelligence realm.
Civil-military intelligence assets must be coordinated to provide maximum coverage of the maritime domain, and co-production of intelligence products must be encouraged and regularly exercised. The U.S. Coast Guard maintains intelligence sections in its respective sector operations centers; however they often appear disconnected with other facets of law enforcement that could provide critical information needed to connect the dots on smuggling operations involving seagoing vessels and transoceanic trade.
In other nations, and in multi-lateral applications, a rotating task force head, rotating among the traditional “Tri-Service” maritime agencies or their counterparts may be a viable solution. In all cases, the intelligence fusion effort must be multi-service and embrace multi-lateral connectivity. This must include the police and law enforcement services, the intelligence services—for example consider partnerships among the Tri-Service agencies (especially coast guards) and intelligence services. An example of a maritime security fusion enterprise worth examining is the Indio-Pacific Maritime Law Enforcement Centre.
Conclusion
Building an effective naval intelligence capacity demands strategic, operational, and tactical coordination among a complex network of services and operators. First, there in the traditional “Tri-Service” maritime forces, next there is the need to integrate police and law enforcement (LEAs), customs, border forces, and merchant marine and port security agencies. All of these must integrate with the maritime and port operators, ship owners, labor unions, and the range of maritime security actors.
Future naval intelligence must be multi-service, multi-threat, and multi-lateral. All stakeholders, military, law enforcement, public health (think pandemics and cruise ships), public safety and fire service (think consequence management for an LNG tanker explosion) must be involved. Naval intelligence must integrate all other military and intelligence services and their capabilities—including human intelligence for understanding threat actors and open source intelligence (OSINT). It needs to address a full-spectrum of threats in a range of threat environment. It also needs to include partners ranging from small states to major allies, including NATO and the Quad nations (Australia, India, Japan, and the United States). Finally, future naval intelligence must embrace and anticipate novel and emerging threats from a range of actors ranging from territorial gangs to peer competitors—all able to access emerging technology such as AI and drones, and all able to leverage the complexities of the seas.
Hal Kempfer is a retired Marine Corps Intelligence Officer (LtCol) with a background working with various maritime security agencies and services, along with extensive involvement with various military, civil and civil-military “fusion center” programs. With professional military education up to the War College level, he also has a Masters (e.g. MIM/MBA) from the Thunderbird School of Global Management, and bachelors from Willamette University with majors in Economics and Political Science.
John P. Sullivan is an honorably retired lieutenant with the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department. He is currently an Instructor in the Safe Communities Institute (SCI), University of Southern California. Sullivan received a lifetime achievement award from the National Fusion Center Association in November 2018. He completed the CREATE Executive Program in Counter-Terrorism at the University of Southern California and holds a B.A. in Government from the College of William & Mary, a M.A. in Urban Affairs and Policy Analysis from the New School for Social Research, and a PhD from the Open University of Catalonia. He is a Senior Fellow at Small Wars Journal-El Centro.
Featured Image: The guided-missile frigate Hengyang (Hull 568) and the guided-missile destroyer Wuhan (Hull 169) attached to a destroyer flotilla with the navy under the PLA Southern Theater Command steam alongside with each other during a maritime maneuver operation in waters of the South China Sea on June 18, 2020. (eng.chinnmil.com.cn/Photo by Li Wei)
“Hezbollah has the best missile boats in the world. He has many missiles, but he can’t drown.”—Major General Eli Sharvit, Israeli Navy Commander, January 2018
Navies increasingly must deal with asymmetric naval forces, whether they are terrorist organizations’ naval forces, pirates, or asymmetric naval forces operated by countries as part of a comprehensive and integrated naval strategy. This integration is seen in the Chinese Navy with its maritime militia and missile boat force, as well as the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Navy which operates alongside the regular Iranian Navy.
The characteristics of asymmetric naval warfare, including its force development, civilian integration, and combat doctrine of multidimensional attacks or gray zone operations, poses many challenges to navies. This is especially true for those naval intelligence organizations assigned to understand these asymmetric forces and their methods.
Naval intelligence organizations seeking to understand asymmetrical naval forces must promote a culture of creativity, daring, pluralism, and deep cultural knowledge in order to best understand how the asymmetric adversary behaves and operates. One pertinent example of how naval intelligence was stressed against asymmetric naval forces can be found in the Israeli’s Navy’s experience against Hezbollah in the Second Lebanon War.
The Second Lebanon War at Sea
On July 12, 2006, Hezbollah, the Lebanese terror organization, launched a surprise offensive attack against an Israeli Defense Force (IDF) unit guarding and patrolling Israel’s northern border. The Hezbollah force killed three Israeli soldiers and captured two other soldiers. At the same time, Hezbollah fired rockets toward northern Israeli cities. The IDF decided to respond unexpectedly. And so the Second Lebanon War broke out without warning.
During the war the Israeli Navy was assigned several missions. The missile boat flotilla carried out several essential roles, including intelligence gathering, naval gunfire support, missile attacks against significant targets on the Lebanese coast, and as artillery support to Israeli ground forces. The submarine flotilla carried out special operations, and the 13th flotilla, the Naval Commandos, carried out assault operations from the sea to the Lebanese coast. The Navy’s most important mission was to impose a naval blockade on Lebanese shores and prevent maritime trade.
On Friday, July 14, at 8:42 PM, Hezbollah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah burst onto the air. With a video running in the background, he excitedly recounted that his organization attacked an Israeli Navy missile boat sailing off Beirut’s coast and that the Israeli missile boat was drowning.
A day later, it became clear that the Lebanese terrorist organization’s naval force, with the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Quds Force’s help, fired a C-802 anti-ship missile at Israeli missile boats. One of the missiles hit the crane of the INS Hanit, which the ship managed to survive, return by tow to its homeport, and sail again after about three weeks for operational missions. However, four Israeli crewmembers lost their lives.
The INS Hanit (Photo via Tsahi Ben-Ami /Flash90)
Intelligence details regarding Iranian anti-ship missiles delivered to Hezbollah were being collected by the Israeli intelligence agencies about two years before the ship was hit. However, the assessment of naval intelligence in 2004 was that rockets had reached Hezbollah’s naval force (not missiles), and it estimated that Hezbollah would attempt to detect Israeli Navy ships using an array of coastal radars and fire the rockets at them.
A better understanding of the nature of asymmetric naval warfare and its associated force development could have better prepared the Israeli Navy for this attack. However, naval asymmetric warfare poses unique complexities that can strain the ability of naval intelligence to comprehend it.
Naval Asymmetric Warfare
Naval asymmetric warfare is warfare conducted at sea and from the sea, between two adversaries, one of whom has a significant superiority over the other in quantity, quality, combat doctrine, or technology. Asymmetric naval warfare is usually employed by the weaker side to challenge the maneuvering, warfighting, and command and control capabilities of the stronger side, therefore enabling the weaker side to offset the stronger side’s conventional superiority.
Asymmetric naval warfare is based on several principles:
Passive warfare: A set of complementary efforts and means which do not necessarily include combat or the use of combat systems, that will prevent losses to equipment, damage to infrastructure (civilian and military), and will prevent as much personal injury as possible. Passive warfare can include the use of deception, psychological warfare, and cyber warfare.
Assimilation: Employing nontraditional combatant platforms and means and integrating them into civilian infrastructure (such as civilian fishing boats or innocent civilian fishing ports). This can include embedding combat operatives among the civilian population.
Swarm attack tactics: Swarm attacks are based on attacking a target with numerous attacking vessels from different directions, simultaneously and multidimensionally. The multidimensional attack can feature surface, subsurface, aerial, and shore-based attacks, and be carried out by employing missiles and rockets, naval mines, torpedoes, unmanned aerial vehicles, and more. Swarm attacks attempt to impose a saturation dilemma on the target’s defenses, where the attacked vessel’s ability to defend itself is disrupted in a manner that may be out of proportion to the threat itself, because of how the threat is presented. The asymmetric force secures temporary warfighting advantages by concentrating for swarm attacks and then subsequently disperses to mitigate exposure to counter responses.
The use of maritime topography: Topographical features such as coastal routes, coves, inlets, islands and more can be used to hide, conceal, resupply, insert special operations forces, and generally operate against the opponent.
Expansive target sets: The asymmetric naval force will often operate against both military and civilian infrastructure, such as oil platforms and seaborne economic assets.
Hezbollah’s Asymmetric Warfare
Hezbollah’s naval force was established several years before the Second Lebanon War in 2006, but began to develop significantly after the Israeli Navy ship was hit. Naval force development was further accelerated by an understanding that fighting in the maritime dimension has significant implications for a future battlespace in Lebanon, on Israeli force maneuvering at sea and on land, and the Israeli homefront capability to continue prolonged fighting.
The Iranian Revolutionary Guards Quds Force was the entity who helped set up the Hezbollah naval unit, worked to equip it with quality Iranian naval weapons, and trained the unit in Iranian Revolutionary Guards bases and training camps. An Iranian officer described Hezbollah’s naval unit capabilities and said it has a team of naval commando divers and Chinese-made speedboats trained to attack Israeli navy ships through Iranian swarm attack tactics. Another potential operational mode is the use of high-speed boats to carry out suicide attacks on Israeli vessels.
The Iranian officer added that Hezbollah enlisted Iranian and North Korean experts to build a 25-kilometer-long defensive strip along the Lebanese shore. Underground outposts were constructed, connected by canals, and allowed easy and quick passage from one position to another. This infrastructure enables Hezbollah to operate and execute combined attacks from different directions, to move information and weapons from place to place, all while defending itself by hiding in the folds of the ground and beneath it.
The Revolutionary Guards built warehouses for Hezbollah in the Bekaa area of eastern Lebanon, where rockets, missiles, and ammunition are stored. The warehouses, managed by Revolutionary Guards officers and Hezbollah operatives, enable all Hezbollah units, including the naval force, to have a continuous supply of weapons and access to the logistical and technological backbone.
The force development of the organization’s naval arm is based on insights and lessons learned by Hezbollah with the help of Iran (especially lessons learned from the First Lebanon War (1982), the Second Lebanon War (2006), and the IDF’s military operations in the Gaza Strip. Hezbollah and Iran understood the IDF and Israel’s vulnerabilities, mainly Israel’s strategic infrastructure vulnerabilities (at sea and on the coastline), including gas rigs, ammonia storage facilities, seaports, energy facilities, water desalination plants, and more.
Moreover, the Israeli Navy ship hit during the Second Lebanese War, and the fact that the Israeli Navy subsequently removed its ships from the Lebanese coastal area, was perceived by Hezbollah as a groundbreaking event that disrupted Israeli naval operations and perceptions. Hezbollah understood that if its missiles hit ships (whether naval or merchant ships), this would inhibit seaborne commercial movement to and from Israel. This could create a naval blockade and a state of sea denial which Israel would not be able to tolerate in the long run.
According to those insights, Hezbollah began to strengthen its naval forces, building long-range detection capabilities, coastal missile batteries, and well-developed naval commando forces. The coastal missile batteries, including the 300-km Russian long-range Yakhont missiles, which were apparently transferred from the Syrian Navy (with or without the knowledge of Russia) and the Iranian coastal anti-ship missiles of various models and ranges (such as Noor, Gahder, Ghadir, and C-802 missiles), enable Hezbollah in future armed conflicts to hit Israeli naval ships operating off the coast of Lebanon. More than that, some of these capabilities will enable Hezbollah to hit the ports of Haifa and Ashdod within missile range, and even Israel’s gas infrastructure, therefore moving the campaign into Israeli territory. A naval blockade on its ports would disrupt maritime commerce routes to and from Israel and paralyze its energy supplies.
A maritime barrier constructed north of Gaza to guard against infiltration by Hamas naval commandos. (Footage via Haaretz/Israel Ministry of Defense)
Beyond the naval blockade and sea denial capabilities, the Hezbollah naval unit under Iranian auspices is developing capabilities to carry out seaborne commando raids and sea mine attacks on Israeli ports using Iranian midget submarines and diver transportation vehicles. These can be launched from Hezbollah’s permanent bases along the Lebanese coast or even through merchant ships.
During the 2011 Syrian campaign, Hezbollah’s naval forces, along with Syrian and Iranian Revolutionary Guards naval forces, were stationed in the Syrian city of Ladqiya with fast patrol boats. These could be used if necessary to attack rebel forces and against Israel in case of direct Israeli intervention in the Syrian campaign.
In summary, Hezbollah’s asymmetric naval force is developing in several dimensions:
Coastal launched long-range anti-ship missiles. Some of these missiles can also be used against seaports, coastal infrastructure, and gas rigs.
The development of detection measures and intelligence systems enables the missile operators to build a real-time and accurate maritime operating picture that will be used to identify and mark targets for a missile attack.
Rapid attack capabilities using high-speed boats, enabling the naval unit to carry out commando operations, attack Israeli ships, gather intelligence, and attack strategic infrastructure.
Unmanned surface and undersea vehicles for intelligence collection operations and suicide attacks.
Undersea warfare capabilities, including midget submarines and SDVs (Swimmers Delivery Vehicles).
The Role of Naval Intelligence
The role of naval intelligence is to formulate and present an intelligence picture about rivals and activities in the maritime arena. Naval intelligence provides a strategic and tactical intelligence picture, enabling decision-makers and operational units to make decisions regarding force development, combat doctrine, force allocation, operations, and defining ongoing missions. Naval intelligence is required to present an intelligence picture, based on processes of collection, evaluation, research, and assimilation on several levels.
Opponents’ capabilities and infrastructure: Technological intelligence focuses on the opponent’s combat systems capabilities, performance, parameters, advantages, and vulnerabilities, along with the number of combat systems in the opponent’s possession and its procurement and force development processes. This intelligence also includes information about the opponent’s combat systems’ level of maintenance, readiness, and operational competence. Technological intelligence and the assessment of the opponents’ capabilities influence the strategic processes of force development, procurement, and developing combat doctrines.
The opponent’s intentions: Strategic intelligence can focus on the opponent’s intentions and propensities to launch military campaigns, offensive actions, and proliferate weapons. This intelligence can allow the operating forces to receive an early warning about the opponent’s operational activity and set in motion a preventive or defensive response.
Operations Intelligence: Tactical and operational intelligence can support planning and executing peacetime operations, operations between military campaigns, or during them. Operational naval intelligence is required to support sea operations (at sea and from the sea), including surface operations, submarine operations, unmanned aerial vehicle employment, and special commando operations. This intelligence includes target intelligence, enabling one to identify an opponent’s units’ infrastructure, headquarters, and operations, which may be targeted for attacks.
Exposure Intelligence: Intelligence can help one appreciate the exposure of one’s own forces’ during operational activities, technological capabilities, force development processes, combat doctrine, and other information. Such intelligence is required as a decision-making support tool in carrying out naval operations to minimize force exposure and prevent casualties. It is also used to develop strategic and tactical options for deception operations.
Naval Intelligence Challenges in the Face of Asymmetric Forces
Asymmetrical naval forces impose several significant challenges on naval intelligence. The first challenge is the collection challenge, which includes efforts to gather information about asymmetric naval forces at the strategic and tactical levels.
At the strategic level, an intelligence challenge is to understand force development and procurement. The force development efforts of regular navies are usually visible to an extent to the public and through open-source media. But for asymmetric naval forces, force development is usually covert and clandestine. Weapons are secretively procured, and identifying covert proliferation is a significant challenge, without which it is not possible to build ideal responses and operational plans. Without intelligence on proliferation actions cannot be to thwart and stop deliveries. The entities that deliver these weapons and the related training, whether they be arms traffickers or state-affiliated actors like the Quds Force, often take extensive measures to conceal their deliveries and associations.
A display of weapons and other military equipment confiscated from the MV Karine A vessel, used in an attempt to smuggle weapons to the Gaza strip. (Photo via Wikimedia Commons)
Moreover, technological intelligence regarding the performance and capabilities of combat systems in the hands of the asymmetric opponent requires not only very complex continuous intelligence gathering, but also profound and intimate research, including understanding of the technological limitations of the opponent’s combat systems, especially when software-based combat systems can be modified or upgraded. Technological intelligence makes it possible to examine the capability of electronic warfare systems and hard-kill defense systems to defend against present and future threats that the asymmetric adversary is likely to use.
At the tactical level, the collection challenge concerns the information needed to accurately recognize and identify the naval asymmetrical adversary forces, which can be embedded among civilian infrastructure and an innocent population.
After the collection challenge, the next major hurdle is the assessment challenge, which also concerns two levels that aim to build an accurate picture of the opponent and complete the intelligence puzzle.
At the strategic level, the challenge is to understand the asymmetric opponent’s capabilities, their combat systems’ capabilities and performances, and his operational doctrines. Perhaps the most significant challenge is to recognize his training and operating routines. Knowing the opponent’s routines and operational patterns makes it possible to assess when a change occurs and perceive his attention to shift into an attack or different operating pattern.
The tactical level challenge, which relates to identifying fishing boats, fishers, and merchant ships as a suspicious maritime activity, is very complex. The tactical intelligence challenge requires identifying abnormal signs and distinguishing with a high-level of confidence between innocent civilians and vessels versus naval or terrorist activities. The covert force development processes, assimilation among civilians, and camouflage in civilian infrastructure can make it very challenging to assess intelligence and indicate changes in activity and operational patterns.
The final challenge in this context is the assimilation challenge. This challenge involves intelligence officers’ and organizations’ roles in changing perceptions, combat doctrine, and changing force buildup and procurement processes among decision-makers and the commanding officers. Intelligence assimilation among decision-makers is also required to carry out operations and ongoing operational activities during wartime and peacetime. Fighting against asymmetric naval forces, operating from a civilian population, in coordinated multidimensional swarm attacks, using different combat systems, requires different naval combat concepts than those applied in the classical naval battlefields.
Intelligence officers are required to skip over the “walls” of information security and sources-security, and to produce a clear and open dialogue with the operational levels, without exposing sources and incurring risk.
For example, intelligence officers will almost always choose to present threats or the opponent’s operational activity using probability levels. The operational level or decision-makers will classify a threat as “Yes” or “No,” and at its severity level, for example, whether the suspected boat belongs to an innocent citizen or a terrorist.
Intelligence officers’ role is to overcome this cultural gap and present a precise, up-to-date, and reliable intelligence picture that will influence decision-making to make optimum decisions while saving lives, even if they encounter personal resistance and doubts from the operational level.
Conclusion
Since the attack on the Israeli missile boat, further asymmetrical naval forces have developed in the Middle East and Asia, most of them inspired by Iranian naval doctrine, including Hezbollah, Hamas naval units, and the Houthi rebels in Yemen. It should be noted that Iran and China use asymmetric naval forces, which operate alongside traditional navies.
Asymmetric naval forces pose highly complex intelligence challenges to the navies that may need to comfort them, and require different intelligence gathering, research, and assessment techniques. Yet even in the asymmetric context the purpose of naval intelligence will remain the same: to understand rival navy capabilities, intentions, and operations.
Eyal Pinko served in the Israeli Navy for 23 years in operational, technological, and intelligence duties. He served for almost five more years as the head of the division at the prime minister’s office. He holds Israel’s Security Award, Prime Minister’s Decoration of Excellence, DDR&D Decoration of Excellence, and IDF Commander in Chief Decoration of Excellence. Eyal was a senior consultant at the Israeli National Cyber Directorate. He holds a bachelor’s degree with honor in Electronics Engineering and master’s degrees with honor in International Relationships, Management, and Organizational Development. Eyal holds a Ph.D. degree from Bar-Ilan University (Defense and Security Studies).
Featured Image: Palestinian divers from the al-Qassam Brigades, Hamas’ armed wing, take part in a parade marking the 27th anniversary of the Islamist movement’s creation on December 14, 2014 in Gaza City. (Photo via AFP/ Mahmud Hams)
With a combination of legitimate potential and hype, artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) technologies are often considered the future of naval intelligence. More specifically, AI/ML technologies promise to not only increase the speed of analysis, but also deepen the quality of insights generated from large datasets.1 One can readily imagine numerous applications for AI/ML in naval intelligence at tactical, operational, and strategic levels: threat detection and tipping and cueing from signals intelligence (SIGINT) or electronic intelligence (ELINT), target classification with acoustic intelligence (ACINT) or imagery intelligence, using AI/ML to predict enemy movements for anti-submarine warfare, and many others.
The government, industrial, and academic sectors will continue to work fervently on challenges such as data collection, preprocessing, and storage, the development of better algorithms, and the development of infrastructure for storage and compute resources. However, even the best performing AI/ML technologies are moot if the analyst or downstream decision maker cannot trust the outputs. Given the gravity of decisions driven by naval intelligence, AI/ML outputs must be readily interpretable, and not only provide the what, but the why (i.e. why the answer is what it is) and the how (i.e. how specifically the AI/ML arrived at the answer).
The Challenge: Trust in AI
To illustrate this challenge, consider the following hypothetical scenario: a watch supervisor on an aircraft carrier is doing pre-deployment qualifications off the coast of Virginia. After making a brief head call they come back to find out that one of their junior watchstanders has reported a dangerous, but unlikely, aerial threat to the Tactical Action Officer (TAO). After nearly putting the ship in general quarters, the TAO realized that based on the operating area, the considerable range from the threat, and other intelligence on the threat’s location, it was impossible for that threat to be there. Further inspection shows that the AI/ML in the system was programmed to automatically classify tracks as the most dangerous possible entity that could not be ruled out, but the junior watchstander was unaware of this setting. Unfortunately, the AI/ML did not explain why it classified the track as a high threat contact, nor did it explain what signatures or parameters it considered, nor how it generated a list of possible tracks, so the junior watchstander made a bad call based on an incomplete understanding of the AI system.
The problem is that this is not a purely hypothetical scenario, but is a real event that happened several years ago, as recounted during an ongoing study to investigate the role of trust and AI/ML in intelligence. While one may easily dismiss this and say “no harm, no foul,” that would be myopic. First, if this same scenario happened in contested waters or with a less experienced TAO, there could have been serious ramifications (such as another Vincennes incident, in which an Iranian airliner was shot down by a U.S. Navy cruiser). Second, this “boy who cried wolf” scenario caused the TAO to lose trust in the watchstander, the supervisor, and the entire section. Not only was the watchstander afraid to make decisive calls after the event, but it took nearly half of the deployment making correct calls and answering requests for information to regain the trust of the TAO. This lack of trust might have caused the TAO to hesitate to act on their reports if a real threat were to be identified. These kinds of delays and second guessing can cost lives.
This example highlights another dimension to the challenge facing employment of AI/ML in naval intelligence. The goal is not to simply develop systems that sailors and analysts trust as much as possible. Having too much trust in AI/ML can result in misuse of the system (e.g. immediately accepting its outputs without considering the other available intelligence). Conversely, having too little trust can result in disuse of the system (missing out on genuine benefits of the system). Therefore, the pressing challenge for the future of naval intelligence is to develop AI/ML capabilities that allow operators to rapidly develop and calibrate their trust to appropriate levels in the right contexts and scenarios, the same way they would with their human teammates.
What is Trust? What Affects It?
The experimental psychology community has studied trust for years, defining it as “the attitude that an agent will help achieve an individual’s goals in a situation characterized by uncertainty and vulnerability.”2 In other words, trust is the degree to which one is willing to make oneself vulnerable, or put oneself in the hands of another agent (e.g. a person, or an AI/ML system). It is critical to understand what makes people gain or lose trust, as trust greatly impacts the adoption of new systems, and can make or break the performance in a human-machine team. This is especially challenging in the context of naval intelligence, where uncertainty and vulnerability are always present.
Designing AI/ML systems to engender trust is a complicated affair, due in no small part to what a complex and highly-dimensional phenomenon trust is. There are roughly a dozen factors that affect trust, including the following:3
Reputation: The AI/ML has received endorsement or reviews from others.
Usability: The AI/ML is easy to interact with.
Predictability: The ability to predict the actions of the AI/ML.
Security: The importance of operational safety and data security to the AI/ML.
Utility:The usefulness of the AI/ML in a task.
Goal Congruence: The extent to which the AI/ML’s goals align with the user.
Reliability: The AI/ML is reliable and consistent in functioning over time.
Understandability/Explainability/Feedback: The extent to which one can understand what the AI/ML is doing, why it is doing it, and how it is doing it, either implicitly or explicitly.
Trialability: There is opportunity to interact with the AI/ML prior to accepting or adopting it for operational use.
Job Replacement: There is concern about the AI/ML taking one’s job.
Errors/ False Alarms: Information provided by the AI/ML does not contain errors or false alarms.
A Naturalistic Study of Trust, AI, and Naval Intelligence: Early Findings
We are currently conducting a study to test the factors and better understand how trust is gained or lost in the context of naval intelligence, using a naturalistic decision making approach. Naturalistic decision making is the study of how people use their experiences in naturalistic settings, rather than in a controlled laboratory environment.4 This approach allows us to understand how these factors affect trust and decision making in the chaos of real world operations, complicated by missing information and time pressure.
More specifically, we used the Critical Incident Technique, a structured and repeatable means to collect data on prior incidents to solve practical problems.5 We recruited participants who had experience in intelligence, including planning, collection, analysis, or even military decision making as an active consumer of intelligence. Those in naval intelligence had experience in different intelligence fields, including ACINT, SIGINT, ELINT, GEOINT, and all-source intelligence, although most of their experiences were in tactical intelligence or operations using AI/ML that exploits intelligence.
Participants were asked to identify an AI/ML technology they worked with in the context of intelligence, and then to think of any defining event (or series of events) that made them gain or lose trust in that technology. This resulted in a sample of nine stories about trust in AI/ML in the context of naval intelligence: four about gaining trust, and five about losing trust. These stories were similar to the earlier story about the junior watchstander reporting an impossible threat. A research team coded each story for the presence or absence of each trust factor, allowing insights to be gained from the data. So, what factors affected trust in AI/ML in naval intelligence?
Explainability and Utility are Paramount
Understandability/Explainability/Feedback was the most common factor in gaining or losing trust, which was found in eight of the nine examples. It was present in all five stories about losing trust, where a lack of explainability manifested itself in multiple ways. A lack of understanding how the AI/ML generated results prevented the captain of a ship from knowing if they could safely override navigation recommendations from a GEOINT tool. In another case, it prevented search and rescue planners from even knowing if there were errors or limitations in another GEOINT product: “they put garbage in and got garbage out… but our people didn’t understand the theory behind what the machine was doing, so they couldn’t find [the] errors [in the first place].” In stories about gaining trust, analysts said that understanding the underlying algorithms enabled them to trust the AI/ML, because even when the outputs were wrong, they knew why. This knowledge enabled a SIGINT collector to adapt their workflow based on their understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of their AI/ML system, capitalizing on its strengths (as a tipper) and mitigating its weaknesses (as a classifier), “ultimately I was happy with the system… it gave me good enough advice as a tipper that a human could have missed.”
Utility, or the usefulness of the AI/ML in completing tasks, was the second-most commonly cited factor in gaining or losing trust. It was present in three stories about gaining trust, and three stories about losing trust. Ultimately, if the AI/ML helps someone do their job successfully, then it is trusted, and the inverse is true if it makes success more difficult. As an all-source analyst said of one of their AI/ML tools, “it’s an essential part of my job… if I can’t use this tool it’s a mission failure for me.” Conversely, another all-source analyst lost trust in an AI/ML tool because its capabilities were so limited that it did not help them complete their tasking, “When I first heard of it I thought it was going to be useful… then I learned it was built on bad assumptions… then I saw the answers [it produced]…”
Other Findings and Factors
Reputation, or the endorsement from others was cited in half of the stories about gaining trust, but never as a factor in losing trust. Because of the immense interpersonal trust required in naval intelligence, endorsement from another analyst can carry significant weight, “the team was already using the tool and I trusted the team I was joining… that made me trust the tool a bit before even using it.” Interestingly, predictability of the AI/ML was not cited as a factor in gaining or losing trust. One participant seemed to explain that the operational domain is rife with uncertainty, so one cannot expect predictability in an inherently unpredictable environment, “I’m smart enough to know that the [AI/ML tools] are taking data and making estimates… the nature of submarine warfare is dealing with ambiguous information…”
Finally, errors and false alarms were cited in three of the five stories with a loss of trust in AI/ML, but were never cited as factors for gaining trust. It seems plausible that this may be because a lack of errors may manifest itself as utility or reliability (it functions consistently over time), or it could be because of the previous sentiment: there will always be errors in an inherently uncertain domain such as naval intelligence, so there is no reasonable expectation of error-free AI/ML.
Conclusions
AI/ML tools will become more ubiquitous in naval intelligence across a wide variety of applications. Several factors affect trust in AI/ML, and some naturalistic investigation identified factors, such as explainability and utility, that play a role in gaining or losing trust in these systems. Appropriately calibrated trust, based on an understanding of the capabilities and limitations of AI/ML, is critical. Even in cases where the AI/ML does not produce a correct answer, operators will adapt their workflows and reasoning processes to use it for the limited cases or tasks for which they do trust it.
Unfortunately, AI/ML capabilities are often developed with good intentions, but fall into disuse and fail to provide value if they do not consider the human element of analysis. Analyst reasoning and sensemaking is one such component of the human element,6 but trust is another component that must be considered in the development of these systems, particularly in regard to explainability. Greatly complicating the matter of trust, but not addressed adequately yet, is that AI/ML can be deceived.7 Our potential adversaries are well aware of this weakness, so developing an understanding of how our AI/ML systems can be deceived and ultimately protected from deception is crucial.
If an analyst were asked how they arrived at their findings and their response was simply “.79” the commander would likely not trust their findings enough to make a high-stakes decision from them, so why would that be acceptable output from AI/ML? Developing trustable AI/ML technologies is one of the greatest challenges facing the future of naval intelligence.
Steve Dorton is a Human Factors Scientist and the Director of Sonalysts’ Human-Autonomy Interaction Laboratory. He has spent the last decade conducting RDT&E of complex human-machine systems for the Navy and other sponsors. More recently, his research has focused on human interactions with AI/ML and applying crowdsourcing in the context of intelligence analysis.
Samantha Harper is a Human Factors Engineer in Sonalysts’ Human-Autonomy Interaction Laboratory, who has experience in the design, execution, analysis, and application of user-centered research across various technical domains, including intelligence analysis, natural language processing, undersea warfare, satellite command and control, and others.
Acknowledgments
This work was supported in part by the U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command (DEVCOM) under Contract No.W56KGU-18-C-0045. The views, opinions, and/or findings contained in this report are those of the authors and should not be construed as an official Department of the Army position, policy, or decision unless so designated by other documentation. This document was approved for public release on 10 March 2021, Item No. A143.
Endnotes
[1] McNeese, N. J., Hoffman, R. R., McNeese, M. D., Patterson, E. S., Cooke, N. J., & Klein, G. (2015). The human factors of intelligence analysis. Proceedings of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society 59th Annual Meeting, 59(1), 130-134.
[2] Lee, J. & See, K. (2004). Trust in Automation: Designing for Appropriate Reliance. Human Factors, 46, 50-80. 10.1518/hfes.46.1.50.30392.
[3] Siau, K. & Wang, W. (2018). Building trust in artificial intelligence, machine learning, and robotics. Cutter Business Technology Journal, 31, 2.
Muir, B. M. (1994). Trust in automation: Part I. Theoretical issues in the study of trust and human intervention in automated systems. Ergonomics, 37(11), 1905-1922.
Rempel, J. K., Holmes, J. G., & Zanna, M. P. (1985). Trust in close relationships. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 49(1), 95–112. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.49.1.95.
Balfe, N., Sharples, S., & Wilson, J. R. (2018). Understanding is key: An analysis of factors pertaining to trust in a real-world automation system. Human Factors, 60(4), 477–495.
Hoff, K. A., & Bashir, M. (2015). Trust in automation: Integrating empirical evidence on factors that influence trust. Human Factors, 57(3), 407–434.
[4] Klein, G. (2017). Sources of Power: How People Make Decisions (20th Anniversary Edition). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
[6] Moon, B. M. & Hoffman, R. R. (2005). How might “transformational” technologies and concepts be barriers to sensemaking in intelligence analysis, Proceedings of the Seventh International Naturalistic Decision Making Conference, J. M. C. Schraagen (Ed.), Amsterdam, The Netherlands, June 2005.
[7] Brennan, M. & Greenstadt, R. (2009). Practical attacks against authorship recognition techniques. Proceedings of the Twenty-First Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence Conference, 60-65.
Featured image: Lt. Jon Bielar, and tactical action officer Lt. Paul O’Brien call general quarters from inside the combat information center during the total ship’s survivability exercise aboard the Ticonderoga-class guided-missile cruiser USS Antietam (CG 54). (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 3rd Class Walter M. Wayman/Released)
