Underwater Domain Awareness Framework In The Post Covid 19 Global Order

Arnab Das argues why the maritime commons will be the most important domain going forward and merit attention in the wake of the Corona-invasion

- Arnab Das

The events of the past two months have been unprecedented, to say the least. The COVID-19 outbreak has shaken the entire global order in many ways that we have seen ever before. It has probably thrown every strategist and policy maker out of their thinking suit. The intelligence agencies have been caught off-guard and it has questioned the very premise of their existence.

The four main points that come to our mind, when we analyse what has happened are:

(a) The entire military preparedness that we have been investing on could not counter what came to us in the form of this COVID-19 outbreak. The scale and the nature is totally unprecedented to even make sense of any counteroffensive. The military is only trying to assist the new frontline warriors.

(b) The impact it has shown in terms of magnitude and spread across stakeholders is again of an unimaginable scale. Almost all the stakeholders have been impacted indiscriminately and a collective counter is the only way forward. One can see that even opposition has been subdued in the face of this mammoth impact. The full impact has not yet been estimated and probably may be impossible to even arrive at an accurate assessment.

(c) The level of shock it has been able to deliver has again surprised one and all. Even the biggest of the so called global powers or rather the so called developed world have been hit hardest and their response has been grossly inadequate going by the devastation that they have reported. The smallest of the crack in the system has been exposed to the bare bone level. The domain awareness has been a major fault line that has shown our so called modern systems to be failing in monitoring the developments to even give any early warning of such a massive disaster.