Maritime Security Exercise Hosts 400 Personnel

The 20th annual Southeast Asia Cooperation and Training (SEACAT) exercise has concluded, following 10 days of in-person and at-sea engagements that enhanced collaboration among Indo-Pacific partners and focused on shared maritime security challenges of the region. In all, SEACAT included 10 ships and more than 400 personnel.

SEACAT is a multilateral exercise that brought together 21 partner nations, interagencies, international and non-government organizations, designed to provide mutual support and a common goal to address crises, contingencies, and illegal activities in the maritime domain using standardized tactics, techniques, and procedures. Ashore, the exercise involved a command post exercise at Singapore’s Changi Naval Base that served as a centralized hub for information sharing in the tracking of contracted merchant vessels simulating suspicious vessels of interests (VOIs) in seas throughout Southeast Asia.

By aggregating information through maritime domain awareness (MDA) tools, cueing was provided to participant countries’ operations centers and maritime patrol and reconnaissance aircraft or surface assets. These assets made use of that information across the region to track, find and simulate boarding of the VOIs, with the goal of practicing and advancing a collective ability to enforce international rules, laws, and norms.

The exercise scenarios were designed to encourage countries to share information to enhance understanding of the operational environment, build capacity for humanitarian support missions, and uphold international laws and norms. As Indo-Pacific Command’s executive agent for counter-narcotics, Joint Interagency Task Force West provided intel support to participating countries, demonstrating their shared commitment to the international rules-based approach to address transnational organized crime.

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Signifying the largest iteration to date, 21 nations participated, including Australia, Bangladesh, Brunei, Canada, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, Maldives, New Zealand, Philippines, South Korea, Singapore, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Timor-Leste, United Kingdom, United States, and Vietnam.