Threats and Impacts
Context
Immediately after the devastating September 11th World Trade Centre attacks in New York, governments around the world scrambled to assess their vulnerability to highly organised terrorist groups willing to sacrifice thousands of lives to achieve their aims. The risk of mega terrorism, once a spy novel fantasy, suddenly became very real, and maritime transport system loomed large in eyes of securities agency worldwide as a prime target and/or vehicle for future attacks.
In EU foreign and internal trading, one of the main special concerns is bulk liquid shipment (ranging from crude oil, distilled oil derivatives and liquefied natural gas to molasses and vegetable oil). While the destructive potential of these cargos is great, terrorist attacks could have strong direct effects on critical transport infrastructures such as shipping lanes, vital energy procurement and thus highly disruptive consequences on EU states business.
Policy makers also frequently cite passenger ferries as attractive to terrorist because such attacks are easy to execute, may kill many people, would likely draw significant media attention, and hence, high public awareness and strong psychological impact.
As an example of potential terrorist actions, these previous dangers highlight the combined potential for a bulk liquid shipment to be used as a weapon in a terrorist attack against a ferry just as jet aircrafts were used in 2001 World Trade Centre attacks. These combinations of targets, then, would cause as much as possible loss of life and at the same time would disrupt worldwide national energy procurements by threatening vulnerable trade routes.
As we face the varied threats of terrorism and other lucrative criminal activities, future and innovative solutions shall be set up to permanently track and monitor critical ships and vulnerable trading lanes in order to early detect abnormal or illicit vessel behaviour. These new generations of maritime surveillance solutions will allow:
- Overall, permanent and all weather coverage of wide maritime areas.
- Continuous collection and fusion of heterogeneous data provided by various types of deployed sensors and external information sources.
- Supervised automatic detection of abnormal vessel behaviours (track and activity).
- Analysis of the nature of suspect event suite of spatial and temporal abnormal behaviours.
No equipment and information system deployments are currently able to answer all these requirements. However, significant technical progress has been made in wide maritime area coverage by different sets of sensors, heterogeneous data processing and fusion, and detection of abnormal behaviours that could be usefully merged together to built an innovative ocean and short shipping routes surveillance solution for efficient security applications in critical transport infrastructure protection.
Impacts
With this dependency on maritime traffic, the European economy is strongly vulnerable to maritime terrorist attack, and sea transport routes should be assessed a high priority as critical transport infrastructures: they are vital to the EU economy, they are currently highly vulnerable and there is (as will be demonstrated below) a very high potential for improvement in their protection.
Acts of maritime terrorism may have many objectives. They may seek to cause human casualties, economic losses, environmental damage, or other negative impacts, alone or in combination, of minor or major consequence.
If human casualties are the principal objectives, passenger vessels such as cruise ships and ferries, which together account for a few percent of the world commercial fleet, may be more attractive terrorist targets than cargo and other vessels. As an example in the Mediterranean Sea, more than 200 ferries transport about 150.000 passengers daily in total and 50 millions of passengers annually. The following figure (Figure 2) provides the main Mediterranean ferry seaways and destinations.
Figure 2: Main Mediterranean ferry seaways and destinations.
If economic loss is the primary objective, terrorists may seek to carry out different type of attacks, with potentially few human casualties but significant impacts to critical transport infrastructure such as important commercial maritime routes (ocean and short sea shipping lanes). The Limburg bombing may have been an attack of this type, threatening to disrupt the global oil trade and causing considerable consternation among tanker operators. Although the bombing killed members of the Limburg’s crew, it caused insurance rates among Yemeni shipper to increase by 300% and reduced Yemeni shipping volumes by 50% during months after the attack.
One ship type that is reputed as a lucrative target of maritime terrorism is liquefied natural gas (LNG) tankers. According to a GAO (U.S Government Accountability Office) study, a LNG tanker can be used not only to affect sea commerce (energy), but also to harm people, other vessels and critical infrastructure more than one mile away from the ship. In other word, a LNG “weaponized” near a port or in intense vessel traffic could become a terribly frightening instrument.
As an example in the Mediterranean Sea, more than 600 tankers (oil, chemical and liquefied gas) travel daily servicing 30% of the world oil and LNG trading, and 20% of the transported chemical substances at sea. The following figure 3 gives the main energy routes in the Mediterranean Sea.
Figure 3: Main energy routes in the Mediterranean Sea
Maritime security analysts have discussed numerous potential tactics for terrorist attack on maritime targets. The following passage from the national Strategy for Maritime Security (Department of Homeland Security and Department Of Defence, USA, September 2005.p.4) summarises many of the tactics most commonly mentioned in maritime security discussion:
Terrorists can also develop effective attack capabilities relatively quickly using explosive-laden suicide boats and light aircraft; merchant and cruise ships as kinetic weapons to ram another vessel, warship, port facility, or offshore platform; commercial vessels as launch platforms for missile attacks; underwater swimmers to infiltrate ports; and unmanned underwater explosive delivery vehicles. Terrorists can also take advantage of a vessel’s legitimate cargo, such as chemical petroleum, or liquefied natural gas, as the explosive component of an attack.
So, an accurate assessment of the current nature and scope of the global maritime terrorist threat should be driven by an assessment of what is probable, rather than merely possible. In consequence, it is apparent that probable scenario attack would be based on different combinations of targets and tactics. Considering the adaptability, ingenuity, tenacity and audacity of terrorist community, it seems a clear priority to develop and apply the relevant maritime tactics, techniques and procedures.
Given the dynamic nature of the terrorist threats, and the myriad of forms that they can take, key considerations to be taken into account in assessing the general likelihood of a maritime attack against states, are:
- Ocean and short sea shipping activities are performed over wide maritime areas.
- Sea surveillance capabilities are far less developed than land surveillance capabilities.
- Current overseas intelligence collection is dramatically poor.
A new generation of systems and procedures concerning maritime passenger, goods and energy transport must therefore be developed, addressing these specificities, in order to improve nation’s maritime security and to fight varied terrorist threats and other criminal activities