Pentagon Wants Web Apps to Stop Piracy, for Some Reason

The U.S.S. Farragut after disabling a pirate skiff in the Indian Ocean, 2009. The Navy now wants Web apps to cut down on piracy. Photo: U.S. Navy

Updated 9:09 a.m., May 15

The Navy's far-out research wing thinks it's found a way to cut down on the scourge of maritime piracy: apps. Commence the face-palming.

The Navy announced on Monday that it's awarding $1 million in grants to develop a suite of web applications to 'analyze data and other information to combat pirates, drug smugglers, arms traffickers, illegal fishermen and other nefarious groups.' Aboard the future ships of the U.S. Navy and its allies, the so-called International Collaborative Development for Enhanced Maritime Domain Awareness will, the researchers hope, run software that 'improve[s] automation, small-target detection and intent detection.'

In other words, the hoped-for apps will help sailors figure out if the unfamiliar trawler approaching that U.S. destroyer is carrying fish, fishscale, or a crew of pirates intent on taking a shipping vessel for ransom. Engineers at Chile's Technical University of Federico Santa Maria got the contract to start designing the apps; partnered with the Office of Naval Research, the Navy's locus for next-generation technology, they'll get going in the fall.

If you thought the U.S. already had a slew of intelligence assets to help make such determinations, you'd be correct. The unmanned Fire Scout helicopter has already been used to hunt drug smugglers (although the things are in the shop at the moment). The Navy is also flying modified Global Hawk surveillance drones to spy on big swaths of saltwater. What will a suite of apps add to the mix?

It's not obvious. For one thing, bandwidth aboard Navy ships is a precious commodity. Satellite links for voice, text and data fight for space on deck, a challenge for ships built, in some cases, decades before the widely available internet. It's not clear if the app suite will operate over an unclassified web ' slow as dial-up aboard Navy ships ' but it'll definitely have to work with ships from multiple navies, within 'a coalition-accessible Web portal,' according to Navy engineer John Stastny in a prepared statement. In addition to the frustrations of slow connection speeds, that's going to set up a headache for access, since navies within the anti-piracy coalition run the gamut from allies like South Korea to frenemies like Pakistan.

Then there's the challenge of actually pinging the different ships with the relevant data. Satellite connections keep the Navy's navigation systems communicating around the globe. But as the U.S. Marines have learned to their frustration, pushing data out over the Navy's pipes is a challenge from distances greater than 100 nautical miles. Add to that the aforementioned problem of linking coalition navies together to share data ' what the military likes to call 'interoperability' ' and the apps may be stressed to load updated data from disparate ships, raising relevance issues.

Also, to be clear, these are web apps (perhaps optimized for the archaic versions of Internet Explorer aboard Navy ships). Don't even think about pushing these apps to smartphones ' you're not getting 4G LTE connectivity in the middle of the vast blue oceans.

Maybe the Chilean team can design apps that crunch data into teeny-tiny packets that minimize bandwidth. (The Navy's putting the open source code for the program up here, in case you'd like to play along at home.) Even then, the challenges of working with partner navies and redundancy with existing or developing intelligence systems will remain. The Navy might learn that there isn't always an app for that.

Update, 9:09 a.m., May 15: This piece initially said the Office of Naval Research (ONR) awarded the $1 million grant. While ONR announced the award and will aid the Chilean engineers in designing the app suite, the actual cash comes from elsewhere in the Navy and Pentagon bureaucracies.