 Hello, Naval War College colleagues and welcome to this lecture of opportunity about maritime security in the maritime security index. My name is Commander Andrea Cameron, and I coordinate the Climate and Human Security Studies Group at the Naval War College. For those who don't know about the group, it is composed of faculty, staff and students interested in engaging on nontraditional and transnational security threats. In addition to climate security issues, we also look at human security topics like food insecurity, water scarcity, health insecurity, economic development, migration and the resultant humanitarian crises. If you'd like to join the listserv, please put your email address in the chat or you can email me directly at andrea.camron at usnwc.edu. Now to give you a heads up, we will be hosting a Human Security in the Maritime Environment virtual conference on October 28 and 29. This conference explores the intersecting strategic implications of human insecurity within the maritime domain and the interconnections between navies. We will be talking about IUU fishing, illicit trafficking and modern slavery, mixed migration, piracy and armed robbery, cultural heritage protection, and how all these interconnect with lives and livelihoods of the people at sea and ashore. We'll explore the issue itself, how it affects the maritime strategic environment, and what that means for navies around the world. Registration information will be out soon. And today's lecture of opportunity introduces the college to the range of talks that will be discussed during this upcoming event by one of our panelists, giving Dr. Curtis Bell the chance to exhibit his work as Director of Stable Seas with the Maritime Security Index. We are honored to bring his expertise now as faculty as he has joined the Naval War College. I'll introduce our speaker for today. Dr. Curtis Bell is an Associate Professor of Maritime Security and Governance in the International Programs Department at the US Naval War College. He is also the founder of Stable Seas, a non-governmental research program that specializes in multilateral cooperation at sea and the maritime activities of terrorists and other violent extremists. He has consulted and supported the International Maritime Organization, United Nations on Drugs and Crime, and International Maritime Law Enforcement Agencies. His work has appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, the Economist, and academic journals like the International Studies Quarterly, and Journal of Conflict Resolution. He earned a Doctorate in Political Science from the University of Colorado and has previously taught there and at the University of Tennessee. We are honored to have Curtis join us today, bringing his incredible work from Stable Seas on the Maritime Security Index to our audience. For those watching, the presentation will be recorded, but we will stop the recording at the end and open the floor for questions from the audience. Curtis, thank you so much for joining us today. I invite you to share your screen and begin your presentation. Here we go. Good morning everyone, and thank you to Andrea and the other organizers. I try to catch these lectures as often as I can. I understand that the opportunities to give a lecture are very scarce resource and I appreciate being squeezed into the schedule. And thank you to you all who have joined. I understand how busy Mondays can be. Thanks for sharing lunch with me, at least here on the East Coast, it's lunchtime. And I'd like to talk to you about human security and propose the Maritime Security Index and the approach to quantifying some aspects of human security as a way to advance our agendas. So as Andrea said, I wear two hats. I am here at the Naval War College, but I am also the founder and now one of the directors of a nonprofit organization that provides maritime security research that focuses largely on these kinds of human topics called Stable Seas. And for several years now we've worked with governments and regional security organizations around the world on broadening maritime security strategies to think about security problems that see more holistically. We've really tried to focus on advancing some of these more holistic strategies that are out there. So I've learned a lot by doing this, some things to do and some lessons learned the hard way things not to do. And I'd like to speak candidly about some of that today. But let me start with the standard disclaimer that the views that I'm going to share today are my personal views gained through research and experience working on these topics, mostly in Africa, but also in the Middle East, Southeast Asia and Latin America. Not the views of the US government nor of the Naval War College. So let me start by taking us back about 10 or 15 years here. So, as we were returning the last decade, we were in the midst of a massive maritime security crisis in the Western Indian Ocean and this of course was the rise of piracy off the coast of Somalia. What began as a small problem closer to the coast quickly radiated out hundreds of miles out to sea, and developed into a significant security threat to the oil tankers container ships and other other trans oceanic commerce it was active in the region. It's an interesting place to start this talk because it quickly mobilized a large response, not only from militaries, but also from private actors, and the NGO and civil society community. This was the first NGO of the European naval forces which authorized Operation Atlanta to combat this problem, and through this work and some measures put in place by shipping companies and many other actors. We saw the problem, pretty successfully eliminated or at least substantially reduced from the levels that it was over a decade ago. In meetings about this problem that I've seen in the time since then. There's been a rift. On the one side, we've seen some parties to this be very concerned about piracy and armed robbery specifically. They've sought to solve this problem at sea. Well, discounting some of the links to other problems onshore, and by discounting I don't mean that they're not aware of coastal insecurity in Somalia, or problems like illegal fishing and poor fisheries enforcement across much of the western Indian ocean. I don't think they're blind to environmental damage, and the, the foreign fishing fleets that come through the area, often not permitted and operating illegally. But the response was largely focused on counter piracy operation specifically. There was also a camp that said yes there's a problem here but responses to this problem need to focus more broadly not only on counter piracy operations, but also on some of the root drivers. We need to think about maritime security as a system that acknowledges some of these other human security topics that drive acute problems like piracy. Folks in this camp would raise problems like illegal fishing, the absence of a blue economy, or good opportunities on the coast for men especially in legal sectors. And because of that, we didn't necessarily see eye to eye and and come to good agreement right away there have been some disagreements over what the response has been. I like to bring data to the table that's going to be clear in this talk. So I went through the original 2008 resolution to authorize the EU operation at Atlanta just to illustrate this. Now, at the time many maritime problems were acknowledged in the western Indian Ocean you see these lined up on the horizontal axis across the bottom, not only piracy and armed robbery, but also trafficking and drugs charcoal, which was a major enemy maker for all Shabaab at the time, IUU fishing weapons terror, anything illicit transnational organized crime, and what the bars represent our word counts in that 2008 document authorizing operation at Atlanta, what we see here is piracy and armed robbery mentioned more than a dozen times each without any mention of the other problems. Now, on the opposite coast of Africa, starting a bit later than the surge in piracy off the coast of Somalia, we saw a troubling and continued trend of piracy and armed robbery in the Gulf of Guinea, and especially in the waters near the Niger River Delta. Some aspects of the problem were similar multinational companies saw a pretty consistent threat of piracy and armed robbery from groups operating off the coast. There was similar disagreement about the root causes and the kinds of solutions needed. There was a response that involved governments, international organizations, private sector in civil society, both in the region and outside of the region and in fact outside of Africa. And in ongoing discussions about what ought to be done about piracy and armed robbery in the Gulf of Guinea. The meetings today largely illustrate a very similar rift. And again, this is not to exaggerate. It is not as if there are two distinct camps, but there are certainly two perspectives that we see present in these meetings and in the comments. On the one hand, we see solutions proposed coming from this camp on the left that think piracy is the real problem. And yes, while it is driven by some of these larger human security threats both at sea and on the coast. There are ways to address piracy without addressing some of these other problems. There can be a military solution. By some estimates there are as few as 1200 people involved in pirate gangs operating out of the Niger River Delta in West Africa right now. The total area that is at risk in the Gulf of Guinea is around 20% of the area at risk in the Western Indian Ocean at the height of the problem off the coast of Somalia. That calls for a certain kind of solution. But on the other side, there are very valid arguments about the drivers of this, the pollution, corruption, the absence of a strong blue economy, the poverty of coastal populations, specifically in areas that also have a lot of revenue from the offshore oil industry. And a solution may also involve addressing some of those root causes if it is to be sustainable. There we go. So what we saw in response to these two problems, I apologize for the ugly Matt but I think it gets the point across as we saw codes of conduct focused on the suppression of piracy and armed robbery at sea on both coasts of Africa. In East Africa, this red, you see African members of an agreement that emerged in 2009, called the Djibouti code of conduct. And this also involved most of the countries of the Arabian Peninsula, and it focused narrowly on the suppression of piracy in the Gulf of Aden, and in the Western Indian Ocean. And two years later in 2013, the green states, through the organizations that they were party to, mainly Echo was and ECIS these are the regional economic associations in Western Central Africa, respectively. They created the young day code of conduct, which sought to suppress piracy but also address many of these larger goals. I think it's fair to say that in their original versions. In East Africa code, largely reflected this camp and the white, and the young day code largely reflected this this camp in the blue, a broader lens, looking at some of the other human security problems. Now, the geographies of these two regions are very different and I would argue that that is why these agreements emerged differently, to some extent, in East Africa. In many states, but African representation overall was, you know, not overshadowed but definitely matched by some of the more capable navies and partners on the Arabian Peninsula, especially Saudi Arabia. And in the Gulf of Guinea, you largely had this emerging from states there in the region, and some of the larger navies were also some of the states most affected by this there are diversity of interests there. There are very different kinds of agreements. What ended up happening, though, is that by 2017, the Djibouti code on the East Coast started to match, and in some cases word for word match the more human security approach that was documented in West Africa and the young day code. So this Jeddah amendment to the Djibouti code started to open this up and think, let's not only address piracy. It started to name other topics, IUU fishing, trafficking in arms, drugs and wildlife, human trafficking and smuggling, environmental crime and especially toxic waste dumping, which was a major concern among the African representatives at many of these meetings and negotiations. The opening annex to the new agreement also focused on all kinds of solutions that reach beyond a military solution, and more into a whole of government or whole of society approaches, regional cooperation, legal solutions, poverty alleviation, information sharing, not only across governments but also between non government actors and private companies and governments that could create a more complete picture of what's happening at sea. Documents supporting these efforts also started to broaden. So a few moments ago I showed you the 2008 European Union document that authorized Operation Atlanta and how it focused narrowly on piracy and armed robbery. The red bars are the 2020 reauthorization of Operation Atlanta, and you can see that here the EU focus was broadened to also combat many of these other problems. And you would expect that because the threats at sea have changed, but I think it is also a nod to the approach that's becoming more common to zoom out from the acute crisis and think more broadly of maritime security as a holistic, inner, inner woven set of threats and economic drivers that needs to be addressed more comprehensively. Similar efforts to broaden approaches to solving maritime security are seen in Latin America and the Treaty of San Jose, and elsewhere in other documents Now, there are great benefits, I think I have an interest in this to broadening the perspective to think about the drivers of piracy, the economic impacts, the good governance inputs into the system that drives piracy, but there are also some challenges that come from this. What can we do how do we start to make progress. If now everyone is responding to eight or nine different problems, instead of focusing their resources and their efforts on driving down piracy and armed robbery. How can we keep an eye on the ball, as they say, and make progress and within these agreements create common goals so that so that steady progress can be made. One model for doing this is the sustainable development goals which come from the United Nations, if you're not familiar with these. These are some of the most ambitious goals ever made. So here within one framework, we have goals that range all the way from SDG one, just ending poverty to SDG eight, which is economic growth, kind of related but very different more focused on labor rights. We have an affordable energy in SDG seven, you have environmental protection on land and at sea and SDGs 15 and 14 gender equality, and it goes on and on. Now the way the UN has sought to drive progress and benchmark by creating quantitative indicators so that we could have regular assessments, based in fact, rather than in narrative or anecdote. On which goals are being met, which ones are falling behind, and some are doing doing statistical analysis to understand what kinds of links exist between these goals. You know by resolving or making progress toward goal number eight, do we start to solve goal number one these kinds of questions. So my team and I thought is, let's adapt this and think about how we can support some of these widely broadened maritime security strategies in a similar way by thinking up, working with partners to create a similar kind of quantitative benchmarking tool, so that we can start to bring some tracking and accountability to these human security topics that are very difficult to assess in this kind of way. So what we did here is we came up with a nine issue framework that I'll show you in a moment that we call the stable seas maritime security index, it's very similar to this kind of approach with the SDGs, very different I think from what other NGOs have done with various indices. For the following reason, we intentionally did not start with what kind of information is available that we could bring in. We started with a deep review of all of the regional maritime security strategies that we thought could benefit from a tool like this, reading them line by line, we tried to draw and represent the topics that were already of interest to our audience. Regardless of whether there was good data available, we tried to stay true to the cause of building a tool to support these specific agreements, rather than building a tool based on what we could readily find, and then hoping that somebody might pick that up. This has also been through rounds of revision after meeting with people involved in these agreements. And in that sense, I hope that it is a bit more of a dialogue, rather than a monologue when we go to these meetings and we try to talk about using this as a way to benchmark some of these agreements. So these nine issues break down into three groups of three, basically, where we have three pretty active maritime security threats on the left, piracy and armed robbery, illicit trades, and what we call maritime mixed migration, which is a confluence of smuggling trafficking and slavery at sea. We have three economic drivers along the bottom, which is the health of fisheries, the blue economy, more generally, and the welfare of coastal populations in terms of both their economic and physical security. And then the remaining three and the upper right are international cooperation, the rule of law and maritime enforcement capabilities. So what we've done if you go to stable seas.org the website has changed a bit as we've transitioned between funders, but what you'll find is a series of scores for each of these nine categories that we believe are pretty central to human security in which reflect the priorities expressed in documents, like I've shown you like the amended Djibouti code of conduct we're doing our best to try to reflect those. To date, because of community interest and the level of funding we've had, we have coded three versions of this, we're up to 70 countries across the Indo Pacific, and around the coast of Africa. And we now reach all the way from the Southern Mediterranean to the Pacific, and we have hopes to add partners to round off especially Latin America and the Caribbean, and the smaller Pacific Island nations those are high priority areas and something I'd love to talk about offline if there's any interest in contributing to an expanded index. In each of these issue areas, we also provide regional briefs that couple the data with some narrative and some highlights of some of the things the states have done to improve. I think it's always really important to lay out models for improvement rather than only showing the data, because if this is to be used to set benchmarks and goals. We also provide some examples from these regions of ways the states have have improved their scores or strive to do so. We also have country specific briefs that very briefly compare countries to the rest of the region and highlight some of the successes and some of the pressing challenges we hope that that can be a useful resource as well. What I'd like to do with my remaining time and then we'll go to questions is talk through how we code these different things what we see and where we've seen change since we started doing this in about 2017. The first piracy and armed robbery is honestly one of the simplest because unlike so many topics on human security you see, we have a pretty clear legal definition. Sorry, we have reporting agencies. Since I'm doing my screen share I can't pull up my thing to hang that up. There we go. Okay, are we back now. Okay, all good. All good. Thank you. Sorry about that. We have a new computer and the phone rings through it and it drives me nuts. I don't know how to turn that off yet. So anyways with piracy, this is more straightforward because we have good definitions we have many agencies around the world that report piracy numbers and even internally at stable seas. So the cost of piracy report that goes back about 10 years and compares and parses out the differences between these reporting agencies so that we have our best set of numbers available. We see that we have two main hotspots remaining as of 2020. This score is largely based on the number of incidents and the proximity to the exclusive economic zones of the littoral countries that you see mapped here. And the thing that this hides is that these are two very different types of threats, and that's something that maybe we try to improve in the future with more armed robbery in Southeast Asia for vessels that are stopped or moving very slowly, and not as many underway, and the Gulf of Guinea, of course we have, you know, by some estimates 95% of the victims of kidnapping for ransom at sea. Okay, illicit trades is a section that I'm quite proud of because the easy thing to do would be to look for seizures of the kinds of products that we're interested in, which are small arms and light weapons, wildlife products, and four kinds of illicit drugs. We have cannabis, cocaine, opiates and then synthetic drugs like methamphetamines and fentanyl. So it would be to look for seizures but then you're punishing the countries that are doing more to stop the problem. So instead what we did is we designed a survey that we sent to naval and maritime law enforcement officers to NGO experts, academics and regional and international organizations around the world to try to get their sense of the extent of the problems, and the extent to which these items move by sea rather than overland or by air. So what we have here is a really interesting mix of illicit trades involving origin points, including on the east coast of Africa, transit points, which are also on the east coast of Africa but then some of the ones across the Indian Ocean, South Africa is a large transit point, and then destination markets, which are, you know, in East Asia for some kinds of goods, especially like wildlife products. If you get on the website we also break it down by each of these specific trades so that you see a different map like this for cocaine for cannabis for opiates and small arms, light weapons, etc. This is a crowd sourced tool that we hope to update every couple of years, so that we can start to see how these enforcement efforts are paying dividends at least in the minds of the experts that represent these regions. Maritime mixed migration is language that is borrowed from the international labor organization. I think it is important in human security at sea conversations to say mixed migration and not human trafficking or smuggling. The knowledge is that the same person might leave a coastline smuggled voluntarily paying someone to take them to another place across the sea. But as soon as they're out of distance, out of swimming distance of land, they can then be trafficked which is being moved against their will to some other place, or sold into sexual slavery or slavery in the fishing industry, or some human trafficking so we use the term mixed migration to acknowledge that complexity. These are data that represent UNHCR numbers on refugees on people seeking asylum. It looks at laws, both domestic and international conventions related to the protection of people. There is a clause on another NGO tool called the Global Slavery Index, which has a really interesting way of getting to the vulnerability of people to being trafficked, looking at domestic laws, education, women's equality, rights of children and some of these other factors that you would predict would affect the likelihood that somebody could fall into forced labor or sex trafficking. Proud of this score because we generate eight different estimates of the prevalence of trafficking. We look at labor trafficking and sex trafficking, and we gender disaggregate and age disaggregate as well. So you can find a different score for men, boys, women and girls. And that allows us to see some interesting patterns in the data as well. The economic drivers of this fisheries health looks not at only the business of fisheries but also what this is doing to the environment, the health of the fish stocks, it includes not only fisheries biology data, which is developed by a great fisheries team called Secure Fisheries out in Colorado. It also looks at governance of fisheries and other topics like pollution. Here we see as we might expect that South Africa, Australia, some of these British Indian Ocean territories are doing better while some of the countries that have less domestic regulation and therefore more exploitation by foreign fleets are suffering lower scores. One of the things that we try to do is analysis to understand how this might be driving maritime crimes and that's still an area of working development. It looks more generally at the health of ocean and coastal economies, so it looks more at the economic contribution of fisheries, but then also at offshore oil and gas at coastal tourism at port development, and and the development of a shipping industry for all these countries and here is probably the starkest divide between Asia and Africa, a country like Malaysia or Thailand has very diversified blue economies, where we have some of the most productive ports in the world, great tourism and successful fishing fleets as well as offshore oil and gas all coexisting. None of that exists in most of Africa right now, but it provides a nice model where even even where some of the security threats are the same. We see paths to blue economy development and there's a real opportunity for for cross regional sharing there. The final one looks at coastal welfare and unlike other kinds of resources like a failed states index or tools that look at levels of conflict or economic development across countries. We look specifically at conditions in a coastal buffer that is usually within 50 kilometers of the coast. How many violent protests riots battles terrorist attacks. Have there been. How does the economic development of the people living along the coast compare to the economic development of areas inland. How does that relate to coastal grievances which can drive black markets and maritime crime, or inadequate state presence where you might not have enough law enforcement because an area is autonomous or is under a state of insurgent control and some of these cases and we get a map that looks like this where we see no distinct regional patterns but we we see pockets that are worrisome around the world in the southern Philippines the the coast of Myanmar Somalia and Yemen Niger and increasingly northern Mozambique which I think is one of the fastest changing areas in our region of study for now. And how this is linked to some of these other problems that we see at sea like piracy and armed robbery. And now quickly moving to the three governance solutions and then I'd like to open it for questions and we can come back to any of this. Our rule of law score looks at things that are likely to affect how well solutions that are legislated are then implemented. So this investigates corruption. The integrity of judicial systems. These are things that are measured by other NGOs that have people on the ground or have massive surveys that get at these kinds of questions. We also have a few maritime specific inputs, including things related to corruption specifically in ports. The World Bank claims and I think they're probably right that the longer ships stay in port and the more red tape that they have to cut to move containers into and out of a country. Very strongly correlated with the likelihood of corruption or bribery within that port and the World Bank collects data on this every year. So we can look at how much it costs to move something into a country. How long these vessels stay in port. How many different agencies have to approve something moving and we can start to get at that as well. We also have things like property rights broken down by gender by religion socioeconomic group by region so that we can better understand whether there might be sub populations within a country that are going to be more driven toward black markets because engaging in the legal market is that much harder. We get results that look like that. Okay, maritime enforcement is basically a division problem. What kinds of assets, do you have in terms of vessels maritime domain awareness, and what is the scope of the challenge. And here we look at the size of an easy the number of maritime neighbors, whether your maritime boundaries are established with your neighbors or disputed, which might make it harder to enforce. And then the length and the complexity of a country's coastline as well which is especially important for smaller smuggled goods. One of the interesting things we find here and I'll return to this at the end is that some of the countries with the most enforcement capability. For example, Nigeria has more vessels operating at sea than the rest of its region combined also have some of the more pressing maritime security threats. It's not an easy solution to the problems but it is part of a solution and that's something that these kinds of data allow us to illustrate without relying too heavily on specific cases to make the point like Nigeria. And then finally is international cooperation. And for me. We have a glass half empty glass half full kind of map it is the bluest map and I should have said before if it wasn't clear bluer scores are scores are countries that are performing better on these on these scores and the yellow and the orange and the red are countries that have lower scores in this area. One of the things that we notice is that many scores are many countries are participating in many of the most important international laws and treaties and agreements that govern this kind of activity at sea. Most countries are parties to unclass, they have signed a solace and sewer conventions and some of the drug trafficking and human trafficking conventions that are not specific to maritime activity that are important nonetheless. The other side of that is that there appears to be very little relation between whether a country has signed these things and whether problems have been successfully addressed. Okay, so how do we get from evaluation and benchmarking to starting to make progress as someone with a background in data science. This is what I get really excited about. So we have two main issues. We've now collected data for three years, some of it for 70 countries. So now we can start to look at some of the relationships statistically across these scores and try to understand how they're connected to each other without just relying on isolated stories. So what we did is we ran this data, looking for strong positive correlations, meaning that one set of scores tends to trend with another set, a reduction in one problem leads to a reduction in another problem. And then negative relationships, which I'll show you in red as well, meaning that not only are they not related, one problem might get worse as another gets better, there might be a trade off to consider here. So when we do that. Oh, there we go. When we do that this is what we find you can tell I'm not a graphic designer here on this slide. For the most part, we do see evidence of that camp I showed at the very beginning of holistic systems, where some of these maritime security threats really should be viewed as human security problems that need to be solved holistically both at sea and onshore, both in capitals and in small coastal communities, especially where there's relative economic and security deprivation relative to the rest of the country. The rule of law, for example, is a major driver of everything from the strength of blue economy. And I'm sorry not strength of blue economy from coastal welfare to the health of fisheries to maritime enforcement capability. And this makes sense if governments are able to implement the laws that they are passing. We would expect problems to go away faster than in places where there's little relation between legislation that's being passed and how it's implemented because of corruption, or low government presence in coastal areas or judicial bribery or some of these other things. Maritime enforcement capacity here in the in the top middle. It doesn't solve many problems, but it does seem to be linked to better success against mixed migration and strengthening the blue economy. I think this makes a lot of sense when we look at areas like Mozambique, or we look at the disputed zone between Kenya and Somalia, where some of this offshore development that could be very beneficial to the rest of the country is thwarted in a large part because there is not enough enforcement capacity at sea to allow oil blocks to be explored for coastal tourism to really take shape and draw foreign money and all this. We also see some things that we might predict like here there's a link between piracy and illicit trades. And what's interesting is this link is is especially strong with the kinds of illicit trades that can be smuggled on smaller vessels. I think that's one of the reasons we don't see a strong link between illicit trades and maritime enforcement capacity. For example, this is a it's a diverse bucket, looking at things that are coming in large containers, and also goods that are very high value like fentanyl that are being smuggled on small fishing vessels and freezers. There's more of a link for these small vessel crimes and small vessel crimes and there is between piracy and then things that need to be smuggled in containers that's going to be more closely linked to port governance rule of law inspections and that kind of thing. One of the ones I want to point out that I think is really interesting is this red line linking piracy to the strength of a country's blue economy. What this is actually showing you is that the stronger the blue economy, the greater the worse the problem with piracy. So solving piracy does not mean developing the blue economy and this will magically happen, because in fact some of the countries that have the strongest blue economies at least by the way we're measuring it also have some of the most severe piracy problems. There's an interesting intervening variable where if you think about countries like Nigeria or the Philippines, they might have very strong well developed blue economies where they have productive fisheries, their areas of the country that are amenable to coastal tourism, they have offshore oil and gas, but if those goods are not if the wealth is not distributed among coastal communities, if it might be affecting them adversely, which is certainly the case in the Niger River Delta, then the combination of wealth in close proximity to deprived communities could be a main driver of piracy and that seems to be something that we see around the world so that rings true. I'll stop there with explanation of this but we can come back to it in the Q&A if that's of interest. So, if you are not a data person I apologize for the talk. But let me tell you that through the generous support of some donors including the United Nations Office on drugs and crime and partners across the regions where we operate. We've been able to do book length reports on five different regions that have chapters on each of these nine issues. We've also done our best to translate these into the languages that are common in in the regions. So we have reports on the Sulu and syllabus seas in the southern Philippines and Malaysia Indonesia, the Bay of Bengal. We have a Latin America and the Caribbean report. We have a Gulf of Guinea report that launched last year, and we are just now coming out with a Western Indian Ocean report as well. And for each of those you'll see a book length deeper dive into these issues and how they connect with each other. You'll also see handouts like this that try to summarize this on a page or so. All of that material and much more is available on our website, which is stable seas.org. And I encourage you to visit it get in touch with me or anyone else on the team. If you're interested in this work, or if we can support you in some way. So with that, I'll stop my formal presentation and tell you that I appreciate your time and look forward to your questions. Thank you. Thank you so much, Curtis. Before closing the presentation, I'd like to ask you one final question. These students are our future leaders. Do you have any advice you would give them about how they could think about maritime security and their future positions? Yeah, one thing that I've learned is that many times I'm just going to back all the way up to this. Many times we share maritime security goals. But we look at the problem through a different lens, we may see a different facet of it. So my advice to students is even if your top priority or your Navy's top priority or your agency's top priority is one aspect of a complex problem, be well studied and think about the links to other problems because that is what is going to allow you to engage across different kinds of agencies with different kinds of priorities. There is a lot of commonality between counter piracy operations and fishing enforcement. But if you don't think about complex problems, if you don't think about this problem like a giant not, and if I pull on this, how's that going to affect your end of it? You really limit the number of relationships you can build and your creativity in coming to solutions. So I just encourage everyone to think about the holistic human security picture because it's going to allow for more creativity, more partnerships and hopefully more progress, which is most important. Excellent. Thank you so much. On behalf of all of us in the Naval War College community, of which you're a part, but I'm so glad we could bring you in and share your expertise from stable seas while you're here. I want to thank Dr. Curtis Bell so much for sharing his expertise with us today. This concludes the recorded portion of the lecture.