Experts gather in Helsinki to study Litoral
Navy and maritime experts gather in Helsinki for the Littoral OpTech Baltic Sea workshop. The event will take place on August 30 and 31 at the Naval Academy.
The conference will examine the integration of multi-domain operations – including air, land, surface, undersea, space and cyber – in congested and cluttered coastal waters and adjacent land, and explore technology and operational concepts to successfully address conventional, irregular and criminal threats.
The Baltic Sea has been called an “extreme coastal environment” with varying topography (including thousands of islands), currents, varying depths and bottom types, changing temperatures and salinity, heavy traffic, numerous unexploded mines and other munitions, and undersea infrastructure such as pipelines and telecommunications cables.
The Helsinki symposium is the latest in a series of OpTech workshops that have been held since 2014 in Stockholm, Sweden; Tokyo, Japan; Cartagena, Colombia; Halifax, Canada; and Souda Bay, Greece; additional meetings were held at the US Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California.
The timing of the recent announcement about Finland and Sweden joining NATO and the concern about Russian aggression is coincidental. However, this event was originally supposed to take place two years ago and had to be postponed due to the global pandemic.