This research paper is a product of the research collaboration between the Maritime Policy and Strategy Research Center, Haifa University (HMS), Israel, and the National Maritime Foundation, New Delhi, with the aim of providing policy recommendations to the respective governments of India and Israel.

With reducing resources on land, the oceans have become the next ‘pit stop’ for humans for fulfilling their needs. Today, the oceans and the seas around us are bristling with activities. These activities range from trade, fishing, offshore gas, offshore wind farms, exploration activities for deep seabed mining, marine scientific research, offshore solar farms, submarine cable lying, and many more activities both benign and offensive. For all these activities to be possible, there exists a need for knowing and mapping of the ocean surface and the ocean floor so that the planned activity at sea can be executed in a manner and to the extent that it is successful and does not cause harm to either humans or equipment. Such knowledge of the Maritime Domain that allows the execution of an activity at sea with ease and finesse may be called as the Maritime Domain Awareness (MDA) and is necessarily not limited to the security construct alone. Since the oceans cover more than 70 per cent of the Earth’s surface and is ever so dynamic, MDA cannot be achieved by one single entity of a nation or a person. Though nations and organisations have tried it alone, they have realised that a cooperative mechanism provides a better, more accurate and more expansive MDA. It is with this understanding that this article aims to explicate the interlinking of existing systems and the potential interoperability opportunities in the MDA infrastructure prevalent in the Indo-Pacific and the Eastern Mediterranean region from a maritime security perspective that are providing the necessary inputs for a better decision making.