Over on the Royal Navy’s website is a striking map, showing where all the navy’s main vessels are currently deployed. It’s striking for two reasons. First, it demonstrates how the current drive towards opening up government data and presenting it in visually illuminating ways is reaching all sorts of unlikely corners of the public sector. Second, twenty-five years ago that sort of openness would have been unthinkable. The security needs the navy has to meet now are very different from those of the Cold War.
Though the map is not perfect, with the data feed being a little dated at the moment, it provides a quick visual story about the country’s current military priorities.
There is a cluster of ships in the Middle East, around the Falklands and in the extremely busy waterways of the Channel. Less obviously, the Mediterranean and the east cost of America are the other concentrations of ships with areas such as the pirate plagued sea lanes off Somalia left to others to worry about. The Pacific is usually completely empty of Royal Naval ships; the days of global military presence echoing previous imperial commitments are long gone.
Not surprisingly, the map does have a little footnote – pointing out that the position of the Trident and other submarines is left off the map. However, if even the Royal Navy can be open about such data, it is a good example to cite when other parts of the public sector still instinctively prefer to avoid providing information and then, reluctantly and eventually, pump it out in obscure and hard to manipulate formats.
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12 Comments
Mark
It’s also useful that it highlights that the RN has a presence in Afghanistan, something that is frequently missed from the media coverage.
It’s worth highlighting that Diligence is in the Horn of Africa area supporting aviation assets, and Fort Victoria is shortly to deploy there with aircraft from 820 Sqn. The EU counter-piracy operation is directed from the command centre at Northwood in North London. I’d also note that piracy has been a very longstanding problem around the world and one of the tasks of the South Atlantic patrol is related to that. South American piracy tends to be more direct theft and killing, rather than kidnap though.
The RN have long published in general terms where operations are taking place, and this is a useful development of that. what is quite powerful now is the ability to track back through the timeline and see where the surges of interest have been, again very recently there were four ships in the HoA.
While an excellent example of open government this map serves mainly to show me how run down the Royal Navy has become, unable to meet its own definition of “presence” that permits the constabulary and diplomatic duties it is supposed to conduct:
“In British naval doctrine, ‘presence’ is defined as the exercise of the use of naval force in support of diplomacy in a general way, involing depployments, port visit, exercising and routine operating in areas of interest. The purpose is to declare interest, reassure friends and allies, and to deter (convince a potential aggressorthat the consequence of coercion or armed conflict would outweigh the potential gains).”
http://jedibeeftrix.wordpress.com/2010/08/23/britain%E2%80%99s-future-strategic-direction-12-%E2%80%93-naval-deterrence-presence/
Alistair: thanks for the extra information about piracy.
Mark
It really just illustrates one of the frustrations that I experienced for a long time. the Navy is not just about ships and submarines. In that sense the prior comment is also valid, it’s about operational effect; the ability to exercise combat power at range.
Broadening out to the more general point about opening up data. The data itself needs context to be meaningful, in this example the fact that we have only one ship in the HoA at the moment doesn’t mean that we’re leaving the operations to others, although there are four different independent task forces engaged in the area. I said a similar thing recently on my own blog about Eric Pickles efforts in publishing spending figures from DCLG, without knowing why the money was spent and what the process was behind the spend there is little point in knowing the figures.
The RN is appalling at PR, things have improved recently but it is very much an ”out of sight, out of mind” situation. The web team have done a huge amount recently, although there is a distance to go.
Agreed, RUSI do more than the RN to inform the public on the navy’s role.
I would have thought the sabre rattling by the Argentinians,concerning the Malvinas, is why such a high number of vessels are in that area.
@Keith
Clyde is permanently based in FI, she’s a long term leases ship to carry out the fisheries and general security patrol.
Portland is Atlantic Patrol Task (South), covering from the West Indies across to west Africa and down to FI. The normal patrol routine involves spending about a third of the patrol in the vicinity of FI.
The other three are Fleet Auxiliaries, fuel and logistic platforms that also act as a deck for aviation assets. Again ones is based in FI all the time, one is attached to APT(S) and the third may be on handover or something similar.
Nothing special
Although to some extent, I think we’ve reached a state of technology where anybody who could possibly cause any harm with this information could already get it (you can’t hide a ship on the surface of the ocean any more), so there’s not much point keeping it secret.
Alistair is correct to point out that more context would go a long way to making this tool far more useful. A lot of the information is already there on the website, either in the news or in individual ship’s pages, but more could be done without compromising any sense of operational security.
@Andrew
Shipping is now required to have an AIS transponder that allows near real time tracking. Some info, and a near real time picture of the UK is at http://www.shipais.com/
Clearly it can be switched off, and you’d be surprised how easy it is to hide a ship once it’s 10-12 miles offshore.
Suppose that we’re only interested in people who can harm a Navy ship at that distance, and then observe that all of those people have real-time satellite and aerial reconnaissance capabilities.
Ships that are close to land are more accessible to people with lesser capabilities, but they’re also easy to locate.
I doubt there is any intersection between “people who couldn’t already get this data” and “people who have the capability to use this data for nefarious purposes”.
Andrew
I agree that the threats to a surface vessel are quite different, although it also varies depending on the tasking and general area of operations. What people are going to want to use information of surface ship movements for will vary, and their ability to determine that isn’t as straightforward as you suggest. The number of people with near real time space-based coverage is very, very small. But commercially available imagery, radar imagery and infra-red imagery would allow one to determine patterns of life, patrol routines and develop indicators and warnings of particular activities, getting enough to be useful would be expensive though. Once one has that information then one can plan around it.
If one has access to air assets with surface search capabilities then that does give one some ability to monitor, but targeting that air asset needs some knowledge of the I&Ws anyway. Israel for example have a pretty well developed Uninhabited Air Vehicle capability but they have a fairly simple security problem to establish a surveillance plan around. Spain on the other hand has a capability but a far more complex problem dealing with refugees, smuggling, people trafficking and of course interfering with trade using Gibraltar.
Once the air asset is in place there is so much surface traffic around that distinguishing what’s what becomes the problem. Which of the various go-fasts heading towards Florida is carrying narcotics, which of the various fishing boats approaching the Spanish coast has refugees, which has trafficked women, men and children, and which is just pushing into the fishing limits?
In the Straits of Hormuz for example, where the adjacent countries are militarily sophisticated and well equipped the ability of one or other state to dominate the choke point is quite clear. Both Oman and Iran have anti-ship missile batteries, both also have the ability to mine the strait and both have small, fast moving vessels that can be used to harass military and civil shipping. It’s not out of the question that some of those vessels may attempt to provoke an escalationary response, equally there could be an attack such as the Cole incident. There is a tension between how close one allows a potential aggressor to get before blowing him out of the water with a mini-gun, conscious that unless it can be shown to be full of explosives one may have just started a war.
What’s going to inform a state sponsoring that kind of activity would be examining patterns of life, patrol routines, perhaps having watchers in known ports that are immediate predecessors of the transit. It’s of limited value knowing where a warship is right now unless has done the groundwork to use that information. The SoH example is pretty trivial as it requires no planning for either adjacent state to get surface capabilities there.
What’s possibly a better example is drug running in the Caribbean. A Counter-Narcotics capability there would mix a surface platform with other assets. Using the Auxiliaries is pretty good as they have a lot of elevation, big flight decks and plenty of space. That gives them the ability to control a sea area about 200nm in diameter. Combine that with other air assets capable of surface search and additional information sources one has a well developed ability to determine the background against which smuggling takes place and attempt to identify the smuggling activity. The interest of drug cartels isn’t combating the ship, it’s in avoiding it. so what they’re going to do is use recognised shipping routes or areas of high traffic.
My own experience of boarding operations in the Northern Persian Gulf was that we spent a lot of time talking to fishermen and commercial skippers, identifying patterns of activity and trying to pick apart what was unusual. Why might a dhow be operating in an area that has poor fishing for example. Might it be smuggling oil, drugs or people or might it have been laying explosive devices? The available imagery, even in near real time, was of limited use to me if I didn’t have the knowledge to ask ”why” something was happening.
So the information that the RN has published for years and is now available on the website in the way that Mark has highlighted is of limited use. The standing tasks are well known, and the major training exercises are well publicised. Tracking ships on AIS, on the other hand, is an extremely powerful information source. Pirate syndicates in Somalia have well established capabilities to do that, and in the context of operations of in the Horn of Africa they’re quite successful in using it.