Geospatial key to Boost Regional Defense Cooperation

“National security goes beyond armed forces, involving many important stakeholders. We are looking at partnerships and collaborations to join all the information together through geospatial and meet our security requirements”, says Colonel Norazlin Pamuji, Deputy Director, Defence Geospatial, Department of Survey and Mapping, Government of Malaysia.

Please tell us about the work done by your department?

I work at Department of Survey and Mapping in Malaysia, which handles all the geospatial products for the Malaysian armed forces.

My role is to serve the armed forces on geospatial projects, national security, and disaster management. We are a hub for any national requirement on security and defense.

The division connects all the divisions that are working towards geospatial application, technology, or research to the other divisions.

Geo intelligence has been crucial for national security and boosting ties with other countries. How do you see this progressing in the near future?

While talking about national security requirements, we need the capacity to see the bigger picture for every domain, so that we can pinpoint exactly what’s needed where.

For example, in case of mission-making process, the information dispatch requirement must be through integrated platforms. This basically means that we have a common platform to take care of data integrity and single source of information distribution so that any miscommunication can be nullified.

National security goes beyond armed forces, involving many important stakeholders. We are looking at partnerships and collaborations to join all the information together through geospatial and meet our security requirements.

Recently, the Malaysian defense Minister committed to enhancing defense capabilities of the countries while emphasizing that a defense and security blueprint is under work. What role do you think geospatial will play in this?

Currently, my division is developing a program on defense geospatial information management. We are developing a platform through the concept of mapping and computing that can serve all the requirement of security and defense, enabling geospatial data sharing with everyone.

Another of our core task is to put all the mapping requirements of other agencies. This ensures that everybody is using the same source of information, so that there’s no misunderstanding, and navigation, location, and targeting is accurate enough. It also allows us to keep our our defense capabilities up-to-date and comprehensive.

Last year, Hindustan Aeronautics Limited (HAL), opened its office in Kuala Lumpur, signing an MoU for bolstering defense ties with Malaysian government. How the Indo-Malaysian collaboration would mutually benefit the space, defense and geospatial sector of both the countries? In my division, we are looking on defense lines of development. In this, we listed a few segments like training, doctrine, technology, etc.

When we look at this, we understand that maybe these defence lines of development are crucial for sharing with other countries since they might have a different perspective on security.

Of course, we need to share domain expertise among countries and increase shared knowledge by doing so.

We also create opportunities to make sure our defensive lines are upto date in terms of technology and advancement and also to track if any sensitive information is not leaking on our part as well as for the other country.

We have the bilateral and multilateral exercises with many countries. In lieu of this, we are not focusing on the operational setting and instead on the technology, people, and knowledge. We are also sharing the best practices when it comes to defense and security.

In some use-cases, countries provide us with case studies where they have built a good output model by customizing their defense modules. Similarly, with that medium we can share what is better for development of our as well as other countries.

Malaysia is among the founding members of ASEAN and has played a leading role in multilateral organizations and forums. What role can geospatial intelligence play today in boosting regional cooperation and convergence in Asia?

As discussed before, geospatial intelligence can actually strengthen our country’s talent and skill. Previously, we were not focusing on deep-cut technologies such as PNT, Precise Location etc., but now people have started to look towards them.

Of course, when the requirement of such technology increases, it'll also improve the talent, capacity, and skill to produce products that will be very beneficial for the application of geospatial technologies for us and the ASEAN countries.

Additionally, we can see that different countries are using different hardware or software. This is where our initiative for innovation of technologies come in play. Through this, we will see the development of our economy if we share and collaborate with our neighboring countries for geospatial equipment.

We can also foster innovation on digital transformation, which is among the key technology trends for years now. We believe that we can build capacity for enhancing subject matter experts in geospatial information, analysis, and data collection.

AI and ML along with geospatial, will play a key role to make sure regional cooperation and convergence stays solid in the ASEAN countries.

Strait of Malacca is among the busiest waterways in the world with estimated 25% of global ships passing through it every year. What role does geospatial play in safeguarding transit through this strategic shipping lane and strengthening maritime domain awareness?

I believe maritime is similar to land and space. However, many times maritime finds itself at the core of business generation. It plays a big role in economies worldwide and thus becomes very sensitive arrangement.

Geospatial plays a big role in securing these maritime ships, vessels, and cargos by various methods. For example, we have Automatic Identification Systems (AIS) which help in tracking and mapping the voyage of big ships. Then we have S-AIS where Satellite comes into play.

This makes real-time live data accessible for better monitoring and management of these maritime ships.

We also have Terrestrial Automatic Identification System (T-AIS). When we look at these different methods of tracking, monitoring, and managing cargo vessels with live data and inputs embedded in one platform, we see how maritime domain awareness and geospatial data helps.

This also gives us confidence to take actions against illegal economic activities, piracy, smuggling, and other such illicit activities.

While talking about defense, we can get stricter with our boundaries in the ocean. We can specifically monitor ships or vessels that may enter the zones that we have predefined to be a hotspot for smuggling and other such activities.

Geospatial data is actually very important in all of our activities, especially in defence. Geospatial is one of the sources to make sure that everything is in order; from defence and economics to societal changes.

Interviewed by: Sachin Awana