Floating Drones and the Caribbean’s Insecurities

When a flotilla of three ships blundered into its waters in 1492, the Caribbean was made central to the international security apparatus of our modern world. The legacies of colonial rule persist in formal dependencies lodged inside prisms of ambiguity like Charlotte Amalie in St. Thomas, Christiansted and Frederiksted in St. Croix, island firmaments like Anegada, Virgin Gorda, and Jost Van Dyke, and the luxury coves of Saint Martin and Sint Maarten.

Given the continuation of colonial asymmetries in various formulas, the term neo-colonialism is used to embrace fresh temptations that find great merit in former imperial arrangements. In the Caribbean there have been security interventions in Cuba in 1962, Grenada in 1983, and Haiti in 1994. US and Cuban forces fought each other on Grenadian soil in 1983. The Bahamian HMBS Flamingo was sunk in international waters in 1980, and on 24 February 1996 a Cuban Air Force Mikoyan MiG-29UB, shot down two unarmed Cessna 337 Skymaster aircraft over international waters.

The Caribbean’s insecurities, in the Age of AI, as in centuries past, originate from much more than the confrontations among major powers. The most common cradles of insecurity in the Caribbean basin affect the quotidian experiences of ordinary people. The post-Cold War security environment of the Caribbean calls for a redefinition of what constitutes a threat to sovereignty and security. From buccaneers to drug barons, the persistent question remains – whose security and whose interests are at stake, or, more specifically, what is the connection between national interest and the interests of diverse regional and international constituencies.

Living our lives resenting an imposed inferiority from a past history which has come to dominate our priorities is unfair. It deflects attention from other objectives that we must have reason to value and pursue in the contemporary world. So whether it’s a shadow fleet trafficking illegal supplies, or Non-State Actors engaging in nefarious subsea sabotage of digital infrastructure or oil and gas pipelines, nation-states have started to use floating drones and autonomous underwater vehicles to capture data.

Floating drones see and hear where previously we didn’t have eyes and ears. Floating drones now bolster maritime surveillance amid the growing threat of hybrid attacks that use long-range fixed-wing drones, or Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), and   Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs), that use stealth systems for long-duration missions at sea. Floating drones can be powered by wind and solar. They can remain at sea for over twelve months, but their average deployment is 100 days.

A maximum of twenty floating drones would be needed to provide wide-ranging surveillance to the Black Sea. These drones use onboard AI, to scrape data using arrays of sensors, cameras, and radar to produce a more detailed portrait of maritime activity than satellites can provide. They can conduct extensive data collection missions in the Caribbean Basin, continuously collecting meteorological, security, and oceanographic data above and below the sea surface, and building an unprecedented at-sea image library of millions of regional images. This image bank can become the foundation of indigenous machine learning software, that can unlock new maritime domain awareness capabilities (MDA) in the Caribbean Sea.

These well outfitted floating drones combine automated identification systems (AIS), receivers, radar and infrared cameras for night-time capabilities. The cameras capture visuals almost continuously, and the ML software fuses the data points from all sensors, recognises and identifies targets of interest, and automatically relays alerts to end-users in real time. Floating drones are now instrumental in enhancing the protection of marine areas by facilitating advanced surveillance, ecological monitoring, and response capabilities that customary methods cannot achieve.

They offer a cost-effective and less intrusive way to conduct surveys, gather data on marine wildlife, monitor habitat health, detect illegal activities like poaching and pollution, and even collecting physical samples of water or debris. The integration of AI allows for semi-autonomous operations and data analysis, leading to more informed and strategic conservation efforts.

Image libraries built using these drones can form the foundation of indigenous machine learning software to unlock new MDA capabilities at sea. MDA is the linchpin of maritime safety and security that touches on illegal fishing, drug trafficking, and limiting intrusion into protected marine sanctuaries. The patterns in the collected data set are converted to numbers. The numerical data is then mathematically mapped to create a model which can be trained to recognise objects by leveraging Amazon Web Services (AWS) industrial-strength large-scale cloud-based compute infrastructure.

AWS provides its industrial-strength large-scale cloud-based compute infrastructure through globally distributed data centres that offer a vast array of on-demand services, including virtual servers and serverless compute. This infrastructure, which boasts the largest market share in cloud infrastructure, allows companies to scale their resources, significantly reducing infrastructure costs and increasing operational agility. AWS works with defence agencies to support missions and analytics, particularly through the Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability.