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Making the case for international cooperation at sea

In Depth

What the Admiral said: Making the case for international cooperation at sea

VAdm Maddison, Commander Royal Canadian Navy, addressed the International Seapower Symposium in October 2011 at the U.S. Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island. This prestigious biennial event is the only forum in the world that brings together heads of navies from more than 100 nations to enhance maritime security and collaborative operations.

Admiral Greenert, distinguished colleagues and friends,

Let me begin by stating how much I, like all of you, have been energized by our efforts here to address the shared challenges we face on the world’s oceans, in what the great naval strategist Alfred Thayer Mahan, writing from a desk only a few hundred metres from where we are gathered today, described as “a wide common, over which men may pass in all directions.”

I wish as well to acknowledge Adm Greenert’s leadership in bringing us together to build upon the strategic trust between us all, that I believe is fundamental to addressing our challenges.

I have been asked to address the issue of interagency cooperation in maritime security and defence. Ultimately, what I propose to lay out for you is a strategic imperative for cooperation at sea. But first, let me review some observations regarding Canada’s evolving efforts to “close the seams.”

The world’s oceans, in my view, defy simple organization charts of federal agency responsibilities. Oceans are inherently multi-jurisdictional for coastal states, requiring integrated action across a whole range of activities, from defence and security on the one hand, to resource stewardship and the protection of ocean ecosystems on the other.

The sheer size of Canada’s home waters had already been driving federal agencies towards strategic cooperation in our ocean approaches well before 9/11 lent to those efforts an abiding defence and security imperative. Canada’s 2004 National Security Policy sought to enhance this framework of federal cooperation through unity of maritime effort, rather than unity of command, and focussed on breaking down barriers to effective information sharing and collaborative planning, rather than by driving large-scale organizational change across government. This approach respected each federal agency’s mandates, while also preserving the essential legal protections of a free and open society.

There is no elegant way to make any of the processes we have evolved look pretty on a PowerPoint slide. But in the real world, we have made it work in Canada because of leadership, personal relationships, and the high degrees of confidence and trust that are built by bringing different organizations together to work in common purpose. For example, our progress in advancing an integrated approach to continental maritime security has been due, in no small way, to the strong relationships that have always existed between the U.S. and Canadian defence establishments, and especially between the Royal Canadian Navy, the United States Navy and the United States Coast Guard.

Since 2006, Canada’s three marine security operations centres or MSOCs have been instrumental in improving our unity of maritime effort. These centres, located on our east and west coasts, and on the Great Lakes, bring together National Defence, Canadian border services, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, Transport Canada, the Department of Fisheries and Oceans, and the Canadian Coast Guard, represented here today by my good friend Deputy Commissioner Jody Thomas.

Canada’s MSOCs are all about horizontal information and intelligence sharing, to enable effective collaborative planning and the formulation of whole-of-government responses to maritime security events, based on the concept of rallying around and enabling the lead agency that has maritime jurisdiction over the issue. The key for the MSOC partners is to identify the anomaly among all of the legitimate activities occurring at sea as early as possible, and to do that through policies and technologies that enable actionable data to be both exposed and discovered through shared user entitlements.

I don’t wish to understate some of the challenges that we have encountered. But more often than not we have found the key difficulties to be associated with differences in culture and the ways in which the federal partners approach risk, rather than in legal or technical impediments. This is why I believe it is strategic trust between partners that is essential to closing the seams at the national level.

Canada’s evolving approach to inter-agency maritime security is a reflection of our geography, history and national governance, but the issue of strategic trust and strategic cooperation is relevant to all of us here today—to all of you, because our solutions at the national level shape the manner in which we drive towards achieving consensus regionally, and internationally. Permit me then to lay out this strategic imperative for cooperation—an imperative that is tagged by a sense of urgency due I believe to the fact that we may very well be on the cusp of historic and momentous change in the global maritime domain.

Today’s rules-based maritime order sits upon a delicate balance between two central and essentially competing ideas that have existed in a state of constructive tension for some five hundred years, since they were first disputed by the English and the Dutch in the 17th century:

The first—mare liberum—the idea that the seas cannot be made sovereign and hence are free for all to use; and
The second—mare clausum—the idea that the seas can be made sovereign to the limits of effective state control.

This delicate balance was achieved not in bloodshed, but rather through an unprecedented degree of international consultation and collaboration in the closing decades of the 20th century. The result was a unique global convergence of maritime interests that was codified within the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea.

The Convention was forged out of a compelling need to reconcile the economic and national interests of the world’s coastal states with the traditional defence and security interests of the great maritime powers. That makes the 1982 Convention among the crowning achievements of international law, but what made it possible was the fact that both the maritime powers and the coastal states risked suffering equally from the perpetuation of an unregulated, disputed and unstable maritime order.

Whether or not that international consensus will continue to hold in the face of building pressures on coastal states both large and small is one of the abiding strategic issues of this 21st century.

To understand why, we need only look to the Arctic, where we are likely to see more change in the coming three decades than has occurred since Europeans first arrived in Greenland. That change is being driven by three main factors:

First—the steadily increasing global demands for strategic resources, including food, minerals and energy, and rapid improvements in the technologies needed to bring previously inaccessible seabed resources to market,
Second—the desire, indeed the need for the developed economies to secure assured access to those resources, and
Third—the role of climate change, which is serving as a catalyst for accelerating change, especially in the world’s littorals, whether as a consequence of its physical environmental effects, or because of the profound social implications of migrating fish-stocks upon the coastal populations dependent on fish protein to sustain their families.

The High North will be opened as a commercially viable sea route for the first time in recorded history, much sooner than many thought possible even a few years ago. In all likelihood, that route will emerge across the arctic basin well before the fabled Northwest Passage, becoming potentially the preferred option for transoceanic passage between Europe and Asia. Shipping patterns world-wide are likely to be altered significantly as a result.

This is why the five arctic coastal states—Canada, Denmark, Norway, Russia and the United States—are working to establish their claims to the vast energy and mineral reserves that have already been discovered, or are believed to lie, in the arctic basin and its periphery. These resources are likely to become commercially exploitable in the near future, bringing with them a host of economic opportunities, but also vastly increased levels of human activity that will have to be effectively regulated.

In short, a range of factors have emerged to deepen the economic, political and legal stakes at issue in the arctic, creating the potential for increased strategic competition in the coming decades. However, as the maritime boundary delineation agreement reached in 2010 by Russia and Norway attests, the intensification of ocean politics in the arctic has been moderated thus far by strategic cooperation.

It is reasonable then to contend that the region’s existing disputes will continue to be reconciled through law and diplomacy. Although the arctic states, including Canada, hold to different interpretations regarding the various provisions of UNCLOS, none appear to be incompatible with the logic that underpins the Convention itself.

From the geopolitical perspective, strategic cooperation should be a core long-term national interest for each of the arctic states, as it reinforces the 1982 Convention from which they each stand so much to gain.

It is in this spirit of strategic cooperation that the Canadian Forces, for example, has invited the Danish and American navies, as well as the United States Coast Guard, to participate in the annual Nanook series of exercises in the Canadian arctic archipelago, as we build upon our abilities to operate at very high latitudes for sustained periods during the navigable season and provide, with our other federal partners, the same ability to regulate our Arctic waters as we currently achieve in our Atlantic and Pacific approaches.

Elsewhere in the world, intensifying ocean politics have been met by significant increases in inter-state tension and confrontation. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the Asia-Pacific.

The South China Sea in particular, much like the Arctic basin, is a region rich in seabed resources. Unlike the Arctic, its importance to global commerce is real today rather than emergent tomorrow.

From a legal perspective, the region is overlaid with multiple over-lapping territorial claims, especially by the states that enclose the South China Sea, a factor that has for the most part defied diplomatic efforts at resolution, although the recent discussions between china and Vietnam are a positive indicator. Still, China has identified its maritime claims in the South China Sea as a core national interest, at a time when ocean policy has become increasingly central to the Sino-American relationship in two crucial respects: first, in relation to the united states as an Asia-Pacific power that is vested deeply in regional stability and security; and second, in relation to the role played by the united states as the world’s pre-eminent maritime power. In both instances, how China and the United States approach their differences will be crucial to the trajectory of the 21st century.

Of fundamental significance to this trajectory is the expansive interpretation of its rights as a coastal state that China advocates—an interpretation that would provide aspects of sovereign authority well beyond what the 1982 Convention permits.

But China is not alone in making such claims. That it does so may simply indicate the need for a new legal balance between coastal states’ needs for regulation and stewardship of their ocean approaches and the international community’s rights of free movement and access.

That alone would be a development of cardinal importance to the global system. However, it might also foreshadow something even more profound. It could lead to an unravelling of the international consensus through which the 1982 Convention was derived, and an erosion of the stability in ocean politics that the Convention achieved. Shifts in the balance of global power have led before to fundamental changes in the legal framework that underpins the global system, and they may very well do so again.

The consequences of such an unravelling would be enormous and would potentially lead to a far darker world than the one we now inhabit. This is not a future to which I believe any of us would want to aspire, but rather one in which we, energized by the strategic trust built through gatherings such as this, should be prepared to stand against, for the common vital interest of our nations, and for the greater good of all.

We have been speaking over the past couple of days of matters of common interest. This is where strategic trust begins: through frank discussions of our challenges, but with a firm commitment to seeing past those issues that may divide us as the instruments of national policy our navies will always be, to work towards what I firmly believe is among the greatest public goods of this globalized era—a regulated ocean commons.

There are areas where our navies are already working towards that greater good. In the Caribbean basin and the pacific approaches to central and South America, a range of nations from the Americas and Europe are cooperating effectively to stem the flow of narcotics at sea through the auspices of the joint interagency task force south. Off the Horn of Africa, we have witnessed since 2008 a largely spontaneous but nonetheless remarkable assembly of naval power to suppress piracy, while the international community continues to seek more enduring solutions.

In other words, navies are not only a means of military action, employed in pursuit of national interests as states interpret them. They are also the principal guarantor of good order in that wide common upon which men may pass in all directions, as Mahan described it. Every admiral here, as first and foremost a professional mariner, understands that our oceans remain crucial to sustaining life on this planet. Each one of us understands that the ocean’s riches are crucial to the future of all coastal states, many of which are struggling to secure a better life for their citizens. Each one us understands how a regulated ocean commons underpins the global economy, upon which our prosperity and indeed our very way of life, depends.

What I speak of here is not starry-eyed idealism, but rather that point at which national self-interest and common global interest converge fully. I am speaking of strategic choices that ours to make, that will require strategic trust to be established and sustained among pragmatic, determined men and women of action—such as are gathered here in this great hall of higher learning. I believe it to be within our collective grasp to realize its great purpose. Indeed there may be no higher purpose. All we need to do is resolve ourselves to achieve it.

Thank you.

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