With more than 4,000 ships moving across its surface every day, the Baltic Sea is one of the world’s busiest shipping routes. This abundance of trade makes it an attractive target to pirates and other criminals seeking to enrich themselves. Sophisticated solutions are needed to keep them at bay.
In these episodes
The Baltic Sea has been a popular maritime trade route for centuries, thanks to its location linking northern Europe to the continent’s heart. Today, it continues to be a hive of maritime activity, with some 15 percent of the world’s cargo traffic being transported across its surface. Both the number of vessels travelling on the Baltic Sea and overall vessel size has increased in recent years. In addition to merchant vessels, the Baltic is used by thousands of pleasure craft as well as naval vessels.
The vulnerability of ships on the Baltic Sea was highlighted in the summer of 2009 when pirates seized control of the cargo ship MV Arctic Sea while it was travelling off the coast of Sweden. A ransom demand was sent to an insurance company demanding EUR 1.5 million or the vessel would be sunk and the crew killed. Thankfully, the MV Arctic Sea was later located off the coast of Cape Verde, where the crew was rescued and the hijackers were arrested. Another threat lies in vessels involved in illicit activities disguising themselves as fishing or merchant vessels and remaining hidden by turning off their a IS automatic identification systems.
If money and resources were no object, every merchant vessel would have its own military escort as it crossed the Baltic Sea. In place of that, radar and sensor surveillance provide a highly effective means to monitor and track shipping traffic and to identify potential threats to vessels. For complete coverage, systems located in multiple domains are needed, as well technology that is capable of managing the complex environment found on the Baltic Sea. This surveillance technology needs to be supported by navies with the strike power needed to take action when situations escalate and threats need to be neutralised.
A lucrative target
Countless millions of dollars in goods cross the Baltic Sea on any given day, making merchant vessels a potential target for criminals and enemy states. High-quality surveillance is needed to protect these assets.
In these episodes of Shielding the Baltic Sea, Patrik Gardesten, Deputy Chief of the Swedish Navy, explains both that Sweden and its opponents are benefitting from technological progress in the maritime domain. “In order to match them, we need to keep up and have access to today’s new modern technologies. One technology area that's important for us is radar technology,” he says.
Johan Hägg, Naval Product Manager at Saab, says the Baltic Sea's complex mix of sea and land masses has long created challenges for radar systems. “With earlier systems, you were forced to choose between looking for big things or small things or if you wanted to see objects far away or close by. But with the new systems we can do all of those at once.”
Angelica Persson, Business Development Analyst at Saab, says modern radar systems also offer far greater flexibility. “There's been a technological leap between older systems and the current systems which are to the greatest extent software based. That means that you can carry out upgrades much more flexibly than you could previously,” she says. “This gives you far greater possibilities to upgrade and meet new types of threat.”
“There's been a technological leap between older systems and the current systems which are to the greatest extent software based. That means that you can carry out upgrades much more flexibly than you could previously,”