Experts to Gather in Helsinki to Examine Littoral Operations in Baltic Sea

Naval and maritime experts will be convening in Helsinki, Finland, for the Littoral OpTech Baltic Sea workshop. The event will take place August 30 and 31 at the Finnish Naval Academy.

The conference will examine the integration of multi-domain operations – to include air, land, surface, undersea, space and cyber—in the crowded and cluttered coastal waters and adjacent land, and will investigate the technology and operational concepts to successfully deal with conventional, irregular and criminal threats.

The Baltic Sea has been referred to as an “extreme littoral environment” because of the varied topography (including thousands of islands), currents, varying depths and bottom types, changing temperatures and salinity, busy traffic, numerous unexploded mines and other ordnance, and undersea infrastructure such as pipelines and communications cables.

The Helsinki symposium is the latest in the series of OpTech workshops, which have been held since 2014 in Stockholm, Sweden; Tokyo, Japan; Cartagena, Columbia; Halifax, Canada; and Souda Bay, Greece; with additional meetings held at the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif.

With the recent announcement about Finland and Sweden joining the NATO alliance, and concern about Russian aggression, the timing is fortuitous. However, this event was originally scheduled for two years ago, and had to be postponed due to the global pandemic.