National Concept of Operations for Maritime Domain Awareness

This document has two purposes. First, it is intended to execute the National Plan to Achieve Maritime Domain Awareness MDA Plan in support of the National Strategy for Maritime security and National Security Presidential Directive-41 Homeland Security Presidential Directive-13 and help create an effective, on-going National MDA Enterprise. Second, it seeks to provide the members and leadership of that enterprise the benefit of understanding gained by inter-departmental work groups over a period of three years. It is intended to be strategic in nature so as to permit flexibility in addressing agency-specific needs. Maritime Domain Awareness MDA is the effective understanding of anything associated with the global maritime domain that could impact the security, safety, economy, or environment of the United States. However, this does not mean that knowing everything everywhere in the maritime domain is a requirement to achieving MDA. This CONOPS develops a framework for describing what needs to be known, as well as where or when that information needs to be available in order to guide the systematic development of requisite capabilities. It establishes a construct for categorizing types of information and prioritizing areas in the world where information must be collected.