Cutlass Express 2024 supports Madagascar in Maritime Partnership

The Portuguese explorer Bartholomeu Dias is generally credited with being the first European to round the southern tip of Africa. However, it was in 1500 when his brother Diogo Dias continued further along his brother’s trek and landed on what is now known as the island of Madagascar.? The location that Dias reached inherited the name Diego-Suarez after the Spanish version of his first name and the last name of a subsequent explorer, Herman Suarez.

The two weeklong exercise known as Cutlass Express 2024 features both an instructor led first week and an operational second week where the maritime staff operators from over seven countries get to practice what they learned during the first week. The scenarios are different for each of the countries participating based upon the level of participation as some feature Visit Boarding, Search and Seizure (VBSS) and small craft handling classes while other focus only on the operational level of war training.

Enter a group of seven trainers from diverse backgrounds featuring the author, a Commander and two Chief Petty Officers, LSC Mark Ford and GMC Jonathan Turcich, two members of the Department of Transportation (DOT) Mario Caputo and Matthew Benson who specialize in SeaVision and non-governmental types in Bill Walsh and Andrew Howe.? The former, Walsh, a former naval intelligence officer provided the training audience with operational training while the latter Howe, a member of the Allen Institute’s Skylight program provided an overview of what the data fusion program can provide both now and in the future for Maritime Operations Centers (MOCs).

The Diego-Suarez name stood for some 475 years until 1875 when it was reclaimed by indigenous people as Antrisanna, or “the place where Salt is produced.” Antrisanna, at the heart of one of the biggest bays in the world has held significance in the maritime world as it was once a French forward operating base as it now hosts the Malagasy Navy and civilian vessels as large as cruise liners. The trainers had a unique opportunity to visit the Malagasy Naval base to develop the operational level of warfare concept.

Harifidy Andrianjaka Alex RALAIARIVONY is the Director of the Regional Maritime Information Fusion Centre (RMIFC) an organization based in Antananarivo that seeks to bring together key regional inter-governmental organizations from Eastern and Southern Africa to enhance maritime security. Together with Mr. Ralaiarivony, the group of trainers were able to teach a comprehensive training program tailored to the needs of not only Madagascar, but to other countries in the region.

Madagascar in general, represents the eastern edge of the Mozambique channel, a 620-mile-wide passageway that carries some 30% of global tanker traffic. The value of the goods passing in this channel easily surpasses $3 Trillion dollars on an annual basis, as the importance of developing the level of maritime domain awareness in the region will continue to gain importance as the landscape of the region changes with growing threats such as Illegal, Unreported and Unregulated (IUU) fishing, and? piracy continue to grow.

As the two-week exercise concluded, the final piece of the operational phase featured a “road to crisis” or a capstone event that tested the knowledge learned by the training audience by having the audience respond to an event with IUU and piracy. LSC Mark Ford served as the chief assessor, evaluating their progress as the training audience responded well providing graded briefs to the delight of the of the trainers. LSC Ford remarked that [training audience] “Did really well coming together with aggregating information in order to paint the landscape and understanding what was going on in terms of maritime domain awareness.”

Cutlass Express 2025 will resume in February of 2025 as a new group of trainers will return to Madagascar and the other nations to build on the skills developed in CE24 and continue to build the partnerships in the region.