Last week, I found myself in a long conversation with a supervisory intelligence analyst from the FBI about autonomous systems in the maritime environment. We talked about USVs, UUVs, emerging applications, how quickly the technology is evolving, and what some of those changes may mean for maritime security. It was the kind of conversation you would expect two people working in adjacent areas of homeland security to have, but somewhere along the way, the most interesting part of the discussion stopped being autonomous systems altogether.
What struck me was how differently our respective professional communities were talking about the same exact thing. She would share something the intelligence community was seeing or considering, and I would realize that I had not heard it discussed that way within the maritime operational world. I would talk about how state, local, and federal maritime personnel actually train and operate, the challenges faced in building and maintaining capability, or how something that makes perfect sense conceptually can look very different once you put people and boats on the water. In turn, a lot of that was new to her.
Neither of us was disconnected from our field. Quite the opposite, actually. We were both paying close attention, but we were paying attention to different parts of the same problem.
That conversation has stayed with me because I think it illustrates something we do not talk about enough when we discuss readiness and interoperability. We spend a tremendous amount of time trying to make sure organizations can communicate and operate together when something happens, but perhaps not enough time making sure the people responsible for different pieces of the same environment are communicating before it does.
Interoperability Starts Earlier Than We Think
In public safety and homeland security, interoperability usually becomes a discussion about radios, common terminology, equipment compatibility, standardized training, incident command, or the ability of multiple organizations to function effectively during a response. All of those things matter, and anyone who has worked a complex incident knows how quickly a seemingly minor incompatibility can become a significant operational problem.
There is another layer of interoperability, though, and it exists long before anyone launches an asset or establishes command. It is the exchange of information, perspectives, and experience between communities that naturally operate in different lanes.
Those lanes exist for good reasons. Intelligence professionals build deep expertise within intelligence networks. Law enforcement agencies develop relationships around law enforcement problems. Fire and rescue organizations have their own professional communities, as do emergency managers, military organizations, port authorities, technology developers, federal agencies, and private-sector partners. Specialization is necessary because modern operations are far too complicated for everyone to know everything.
The risk comes when specialization becomes isolation.
A great deal of knowledge can exist within each of those communities while important information never moves between them. Everyone may understand their piece of the problem extremely well, yet the larger picture remains incomplete because the conversations taking place in one professional circle are fundamentally different from those occurring in another.
Autonomous maritime systems happen to provide a useful example of what that looks like.
The Same Technology, Viewed Through Different Lenses
A USV or UUV means something different depending on who is sitting at the table. An engineer may be focused on capability, reliability, navigation, communications, or autonomy. An intelligence analyst may be considering emerging threat applications, collection opportunities, adversarial use, or broader trends. Law enforcement may immediately see questions involving authorities, detection, interdiction, evidence, and criminal exploitation, while military organizations may look at surveillance, logistics, force multiplication, or asymmetric capability.
A port or critical infrastructure operator has another perspective entirely. Their concerns may involve vulnerability, access, detection, business continuity, or the protection of facilities and waterways. Meanwhile, the state or local maritime operator who may actually encounter one of these systems on the water has a much more practical set of questions. What am I looking at? What does it mean? Who needs to know about it? What authority do I have? Does this change the way we conduct a search, secure an area, protect an asset, or manage an incident?
None of those perspectives are incorrect, and none of them are complete by themselves.
I think this is where we sometimes misdiagnose capability gaps. Working in training, there is a natural tendency to see a problem and immediately begin thinking about whether people need additional training. Sometimes they absolutely do, but a training course cannot solve a problem that has not yet been adequately understood across the communities responsible for dealing with it.
Sometimes one organization already understands the threat while another understands the technology. Someone else understands the legal authorities, and another organization understands what is realistically achievable in an operational environment where weather, staffing, equipment limitations, competing priorities, communications, and human performance all collide.
The gap, then, is not necessarily that somebody does not know how to do their job. The gap may be that we do not know enough about what everyone else knows.
Search and Rescue Has Been Showing Us This for Years
Search and rescue is probably one of the best examples of why those different perspectives matter. A Coast Guard Search Mission Coordinator sees an incident through a different lens than the local crew physically searching a shoreline or working a difficult section of water. The local agency may understand the geography, traffic patterns, waterways, boating community, and history of an area in ways that cannot be replicated from a command center. Fire and rescue personnel may contribute medical, technical rescue, and incident management expertise, while emergency management brings another layer of coordination and resource awareness.
No single participant has the entire picture, which is precisely why effective SAR depends on a system rather than a collection of individual capabilities. The value comes from bringing those capabilities together, understanding what each can contribute, and creating enough familiarity before the incident that people know how to use the collective expertise available to them.
The same principle increasingly applies across the broader maritime security environment. Autonomous systems are only one example. Critical infrastructure protection, port security, major event security, maritime law enforcement, emerging technology, intelligence, and complex incident response are all becoming more interconnected. The problems are crossing organizational and disciplinary boundaries whether our professional networks do or not.
That should probably make us think differently about what constitutes readiness.
Relationships Are Part of Readiness
We tend to measure readiness through tangible things because tangible things are easier to measure. We can count trained personnel, equipment, assets, credentials, exercises, qualifications, and response capabilities. We can determine whether someone completed training, whether a capability exists in a particular location, or whether personnel have maintained required currency.
Those are essential pieces of readiness, but they are not the entire picture.
There is also value in knowing who to call, understanding what another organization can contribute, and having enough exposure to another discipline to recognize when its expertise matters. Those relationships are difficult to capture on a dashboard, yet they often determine how quickly information moves and how effectively organizations begin working together when circumstances become complicated.
The first time two organizations discover they have important information for one another should probably not be in the middle of an incident.
That is one of the reasons professional gatherings can be more valuable than their agendas suggest. The presentation may bring people into the room, but sometimes the most important exchange happens afterward, when someone from a completely different discipline says something that makes you reconsider the problem you thought you understood.
My conversation last week did not produce a solution to autonomous maritime systems, nor was that the point. What it did was remind me how much knowledge exists just outside our normal professional circles and how easily we can mistake familiarity within our own networks for awareness of the larger environment.
There are undoubtedly hundreds of versions of that same conversation waiting to happen across the maritime community. Intelligence needs to hear more from operations. Operations needs greater exposure to emerging technology. Training organizations need to understand what analysts and operators are seeing. Federal, state, local, military, and private-sector partners all hold different pieces of problems that increasingly overlap.
We spend a great deal of time talking about building capability, and usually that conversation centers on training, equipment, technology, systems, or personnel. All of those investments matter. Before building something new, however, it may be worth spending a little more time finding out what already exists in the minds, experiences, and professional networks of the people working right beside us.
Sometimes the most useful question we can ask is also one of the simplest:
What are you seeing that I’m not?
And we probably need to ask it more often.
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