The maritime domain is defined as all areas and things of, on, under, relating to, adjacent to, or bordering on a sea, ocean, or other navigable waterway, including all maritime-related activities, infrastructure, people, cargo, and vessels and other conveyances.
[3] Countries have always gathered information about the maritime environment, in order to generate intelligence necessary for various missions or finding enemy navies.
There is a military requirement, but also a need to monitor undersea geophysical activity which can provide vital clues to minimize the impact of devastating natural disasters.
The Danish straits connect the Baltic Sea to the open ocean, with a total number of approximately 70.000 ships transiting the Great Belt and the Oeresund every year.
The National Maritime Operations Center also acts as national Joint Rescue Coordination Center and operates the Maritime Assistance Service, which is connected to the EU-based SafeSeaNe.t[17] In the Faroe Islands and Greenland, MDA is achieved mainly by Joint Arctic Command of the Danish Defence.
Surveillance is achieved by the Royal Danish Navy THETIS-class and KNUD RASMUSSEN-class OPVs as well as Royal Danish Air Force MH60R Sea Hawk helicopters and Challenger aircraft,[18][19] and information is fused and analyzed by the Joint Rescue Coordination Center of the Joint Arctic Command.
The purpose is to give the navy better capabilities to support the civil society in SAR missions, environment surveillance, fishery control, research etc.
[24] In light of the deteriorating security situation following Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, the Mette Frederiksen Government has announced a further increase in defense spending towards 2% of GDP[25] in 2033.
The National Maritime Domain Awareness (NMDA) Project of India, an integrated intelligence grid to detect and tackle threats emanating from the sea in real-time has been established to generate a common operational picture of activities at sea through an institutionalised mechanism for collecting, fusing and analysing information from technical and other sources like coastal surveillance network radars, space-based automatic identification systems, vessel traffic management systems, fishing vessel registration and fishermen biometric identity databases.
[30] In the Philippines, the National Coast Watch System (NCWS) was originally designed to improve maritime domain awareness in the Sulu and Celebes Seas, but has been extended over the entire island country's territory.
[33] For private ports, The Mariner Group's CommandBridge platform is the market leader in Maritime Domain Awareness Systems[citation needed].