Sir, it goes right to the heart of my mission. With my mission, one of my principle day-to-day jobs is to develop domain awareness.
Maritime domain awareness is more than just dots on a chart of the sea of positions of ships or ice. For every ship and every boat, it's an understanding of where that track is heading, who is the owner, agent, insurer, charterer, or broker, who's on that crew list, and what's in those cargoes. Maritime domain awareness is this very deep understanding of the intent of these tracks. Normally, 99.9% of everything is legitimate and legal, but in that very complex environment of shipping, where there are brokers and agents and owners and containers and insurers and product, you can lose a small detail.
Our job is to provide maritime domain awareness to NORAD, which is a client of the awareness. Their worry is that a submarine, cruise missile launching boat, ballistic missile launching ship, or an intelligence-gathering ship, like the one that is currently off the U.S. eastern seaboard, would do something damaging to the North American security enterprise.
Since 9/11, NORAD has adopted this role called “maritime warning”; it's an adjunct to the aerospace defence. We provide them with the information; they turn it into a warning.
It really comes to fruition when we do theatre anti-submarine warfare because cruise missiles launched from submarines are probably the biggest threat.