Dr. Margaret Stanley:

Despite all of the recruitment and retention challenges being faced by the Defence Forces, the Naval Service has a 24-7 eye on what is happening in the maritime area. It is hugely important to understand what vessels are in the seas around us. It is aided in that by the work of the Air Corps, which provides very sophisticated monitoring of our seas. This is a hugely important aspect of the maritime security strategy to improve maritime situational awareness of what is going on in our waters. A way of dealing with hybrid threats is to understand who is there in order to deny them the ability to pretend nothing is happening. With hybrid activity, it is really important to know what is going on.

It is also important to have a very whole-of-government response to hybrid threats. Another thing my Department is leading on is co-ordinating whole-of-government exercises to potential hybrid attacks or situations, including with maritime or cyber elements. We are being aided in this work by the Helsinki Hybrid Centre of Excellence, which has helped my Department and other Departments create realistic scenarios of the potential things that could happen in our waters. It is really important to continue these types of exercises and to develop them and make them more realistic and sophisticated to better gauge how we can deal with this real and growing hybrid threat we see all around us.