Includes supplemental material / Hostile acts of maritime piracy and terrorism have increased worldwide in recent years, and the global impacts of a successful attack on commercial shipping in the Straits of Malacca make it one of the most tempting target locations for maritime terrorism. In an attempt to develop a system of systems to defeat and prevent terrorism in the Straits of Malacca, this study developed three significant commercial shipping attack scenarios (Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) shipment, Ship As a Weapon (SAW), and Small Boat Attack (SBA)), and used a Systems Engineering Design Process (SEDP) to design alternative architectures that offered promising ways to defeat these attacks. Maritime Domain Protection (MDP) architecture alternatives combined five separate systems: a Land Inspection System, a Sensor System, a Command and Control, Communications, and Intelligence (C3I) System, a Response Force System, and a Sea Inspection System. Individual models for each system were developed and combined into overarching integrated architecture models to evaluate overall performance. The study results showed that solutions tended to be threat-specific, and current capabilities were mixed. While solutions were found to effectively reduce risk in all threat scenarios, these sometimes came at great expense. Alternatively, cost-effective solutions were also found for each scenario, but these sometimes gave limited performance.

Approved for public release; distribution in unlimited. / In Littoral Warfare (LW), naval operations face a whole new range of missions and types of threats. In such situations, Electronic Warfare (EW) systems are extremely important, yet constantly challenged to perform faster and more accurate detection and recognition of potential threats. However, meteorological and oceanographic (METOC) factors can severely modify the effectiveness of EW systems, particularly against low detectable targets in warm waters. Therefore, this thesis analyzes the effects of tropical littoral environments in the expected performance of generic RF and IR systems when used under these scenarios. It analyzes the outputs of propagation models included in the software suites AREPS and TAWS when using actual data from different sources in the Yucatan Channel. The results of this study demonstrated how radically the environmental conditions can change, clearly modifying the efficiency of surveillance and detection systems in shipborne platforms. Further, several issues related to the need of valuable data and additional research are addressed, while providing useful insights to operational commanders and decision makers for the use of EW systems and available Tactical Decision Aids (TDAs) at the typical scenarios of Littoral Warfare in tropical waters. / Lieutenant Commander, Mexican Navy

Approved for public release, distribution is unlimited / This study evaluated the sensitivity of TAWS detection range calculations to the spatial resolution of scenario backgrounds. Sixteen independent sites were analyzed to determine TAWS background. Multispectral satellite data were processed to different spatial resolutions from 1m to 8km. The resultant imagery was further processed to determine TAWS background type. The TAWS background type was refined to include soil moisture characteristics. Soil moisture analyses were obtained using in situ measurements, the Air Force's Agricultural-Meteorological (AGRMET) model and the Army's Fast All-seasons Soil Strength (FASST) model. The analyzed imagery was compared to the current default 1o latitude by 1o of longitude database in TAWS. The use of the current default TAWS background database was shown to result in TAWS ranges differing from the 1m standard range by 18-23%. The uncertainty was reduced to 5% when background resolution was improved to 8km in rural areas. By contrast, in urban regions the uncertainty was reduced to 14% when spatial resolution was reduced to 30m. These results suggest that the rural and urban designations are important to the definition of a background database. / First Lieutenant, United States Air Force