Establishing a Maritime Domain Awareness Center in Sri Lanka

Abstract

In this paper researcher is interested to formulate a domestic Maritime Domain Awareness (MDA) Centre in Sri Lanka. MDA is situational awareness of the maritime environment. This could be achieved by gathering of real time maritime intelligence and surveillance. Sri Lanka is situated very close to but, away from Indian subcontinent. Therefore sea born nontraditional security issues have arisen in the North and North Western coastal belt of Sri Lanka. The concept of MDA is a broader area in maritime security and Sri Lanka has to develop her own mini MDA system which suit to the context. Hence this is the high time to take initiatives to establish a MDA center with information sharing strategy to counter maritime threats and challenges that affect to Sri Lanka. This center will be the core unit for maritime security coordination and it will collect, analysis and disseminate relevant maritime intelligence and data to conduct maritime operations It also depicts that the inadequacy of existing inter-agency maritime security coordination leads to increase transnational security threats. This issue highlights the significance of establishing a mini MDA center in Sri Lanka. The objective of this paper is to identify the national requirement of establishing a mini MDA center and to identify the requirement of inter-agency synergy to counter sea born non-traditional security threats and challenges. Researcher has selected qualitative research method to collect data from the secondary sources including scholarly articles, books, case studies, journals, etc. This mini MDA center could be a contemporary requirement of the country in order to counter existing maritime security issues. In addition, this will draw a common operational picture about the maritime domain which is relevant to maritime security.