Shared Radar: Maritime Supply Chain Visibility in a Weaponized World

[by Mikael Lind, Wolfgang Lehmacher, Mattias Elfström, Sandra Haraldson, Johan Östling]

Not long ago, supply chains were treated as background infrastructure: complex, certainly, but essentially neutral. That world is gone. Today, maritime transport and the logistics networks around it face an intense mix of risks: geopolitical shocks, data breaches, and disruptions that ripple across modes and jurisdictions. Governments have responded by tightening sanctions, building centralized trade and transport data platforms, and seeking ever?greater oversight of flows that are now recognized as instruments of national power. These state?run systems improve compliance and high?level visibility, but they also concentrate power and data in ways that can themselves become sources of geopolitical risk and systemic fragility.

In this weaponized environment, neither proprietary control towers nor centralized state platforms can simultaneously provide confidentiality, sovereignty, and resilience, especially across the peace–crisis–war spectrum. The question is no longer whether maritime and intermodal supply chains need more visibility, but what kind of visibility architecture can sustain interdependence.

The Virtual Watch Tower (VWT) offers one answer. It is an emerging model for global supply chain visibility that treats information as a shared, collective asset rather than a proprietary commodity. Like a lighthouse guiding ships without claiming ownership over their movements, the VWT provides situational awareness without centralizing or monetizing sensitive data. Instead of creating another digital chokepoint, it establishes a federated coordination layer that supports the security of supply by strengthening both commercial continuity and societal resilience.

Why Today’s Visibility Architectures Crack Under Pressure

Most visibility platforms in use today sit in proprietary silos. They are optimized for individual profit, but not necessarily for system?wide resilience. They aggregate large pools of transactional data and typically focus on a single company or ecosystem, rather than on end?to?end flows across companies, modes, and jurisdictions. In practice, they function as “control towers” that create value through centralization and lock?in, not through shared stewardship of flows.

Governments, reacting to the same volatility, have turned to centralized national platforms. Single windows for trade facilitation and similar systems provide oversight, support compliance, and reinforce data sovereignty by capturing information at scale in large central databases. They are operated by public authorities or state?owned enterprises, and their priorities follow political and policy cycles. These platforms can significantly improve transparency for customs and maritime agencies, but their centralized nature also makes them potential political tools and single points of failure.

Closed, defense?only networks address another part of the puzzle: assuring supply and secrecy for armed forces and missions. Controlled by defense ministries and commands, they are designed around security above all else. The result is highly compartmentalized systems with minimal sharing to civilian partners. They deliver resilience within the military perimeter, but links to civilian logistics – where most transport capacity is located – are brittle and opaque.

Each of these approaches solves a real problem. Proprietary control towers support operational optimization and margins. Centralized state platforms support enforcement, safety, and sovereignty. Defence?only networks protect sensitive movements. Yet all three struggle to balance confidentiality, sovereignty, and shared resilience when disruptions cascade across modes or when civil?military coordination is needed at speed.

Across the peace–crisis–war spectrum, the weaknesses are exposed quickly. Corporate platforms tend to favour individual clients over system?wide outcomes. State systems can be slow to adapt and are exposed to geopolitical contestation. Military networks are strong inside the fence but depend on civilian infrastructure that they cannot see in real time. If interdependence is to remain viable in a weaponized world, the architecture of visibility must change.

Treating Situational Awareness as a Public Good

The Virtual Watch Tower starts from a different premise. It is designed within a security?of?supply mindset that recognizes how closely trade, transport, and national resilience are now linked. In an era where interdependence is increasingly weaponized, controlled and trusted data?sharing environments are no longer optional; they are part of critical infrastructure.

Instead of treating visibility as a private asset to be monetized, the VWT treats situational awareness as a public good: a capability that benefits all participants when it is widely and responsibly available. The initiative has been co?created by actors from the global supply chain industry for the worldwide supply chain and logistics sector, through a community?driven process aimed at neutrality, operational relevance, and broad industry acceptance. It operates as a shared, federated infrastructure, governed collaboratively and never monetizing or stockpiling sensitive data.

The digital backbone of VWT, VWTnet, is built on the TWIN (Trade Worldwide Information Network) digital public infrastructure. Digital public infrastructure is conceived as a neutral, federated approach to enabling shared societal capabilities, including secure data exchange. In that spirit, the VWTnet/TWIN model is anchored in public?good and open?standards principles. It does not aim to own data or replace existing systems; instead, it provides a neutral fabric that enables them to interoperate to support the security of supply.

In a landscape dominated by platforms and silos, VWT reframes visibility as shared safety equipment rather than proprietary radar.

A Federated, Shipment?Centric Model

At the core of the VWT is a transport?event?driven sharing model. Only parties directly involved in a shipment access the relevant, pre?agreed data. This balances confidentiality and compliance with the need for trusted situational awareness. Information is tied to individual movements, accessible only to authorized actors in the chain, with no public exposure and no central accumulation of shipment data.

This shipment?specific, privacy?controlled design addresses three key challenges at ecosystem level. Companies retain full control over commercial and operational data. Movements involving defence, energy, or other critical infrastructure remain shielded from unnecessary exposure. Data minimization principles reduce regulatory and privacy risk.

Data in the VWT is organized around shipment itineraries that cover the journey. These itineraries evolve dynamically along the transport chain, from planned times (PTA/PTD) to estimated times (ETA/ETD) and actual times (ATA/ATD). The result is a continuously updated operational view that supports shared situational awareness and proactive management of deviations and disruptions.

Rather than building a single central control tower, the VWT behaves more like a network of digital watchpoints that together form a system-wide view. It delivers a “Recognized Logistics Picture” – a shared reference for decision?making – without centralizing or owning underlying operational data. It is deliberately designed as a federated coordination layer that leaves data with its originators while still creating the situational awareness needed for orchestration.

If traditional platforms are castles, VWT behaves more like a well?lit harbor: many entrances, clear signals, no single owner of the sea.

Overcoming Intermodal Fragmentation

The maritime sector sits at the core of global intermodal transport, yet these flows are defined more by fragmentation than by continuity. Maritime, rail, road, inland waterway, and air each operate in separate structural and informational silos, with different data standards, operating processes, planning horizons, and regulatory regimes. This makes true end?to?end visibility difficult.

These silos complicate coordination at critical handover points. Misaligned schedules, documentation requirements, and system interfaces can quickly lead to port congestion, unplanned dwell time, and additional costs. Shippers and logistics coordinators often see only fragments of the journey – the ocean leg, the rail leg, the last mile – rather than a coherent door?to?door picture.

The Virtual Watch Tower addresses this by tracking shipments rather than modes. It creates a unifying layer above individual carrier systems and transport legs. In this model, actors can see how cross?modal dependencies interact, spot emerging bottlenecks, and coordinate responses to disruption across the full itinerary rather than within a single segment.

Typical situations include maritime-road or maritime-rail handovers constrained by port congestion, sea–air and road–air transfers that depend on tightly synchronized processes and documentation, and complex multimodal routings that are vulnerable to cascading delays when one node fails. By anchoring visibility in the shipment, the VWT turns handovers from blind spots into managed control points.

The result is a shared, continuously updated picture of a shipment’s status and context that all authorized actors work from. This shared picture supports earlier risk detection, faster and more coherent decisions, and a shift from fighting individual fires to managing the performance of the entire end?to?end flow.

A Fourth Paradigm: Public?Good Visibility Infrastructure

Seen from above, the VWT approach represents a fourth visibility paradigm alongside proprietary platforms, state systems, and defence networks.

Proprietary control towers are designed to optimize operations and margins for their users. They rely on centralized data aggregation, focus on their own supply chains, and are governed as commercial platforms, with data leverage and lock?in as core incentives.

Centralized state platforms, such as single windows, support oversight, compliance, and data sovereignty. They are run by public authorities or state?owned enterprises, follow political and policy cycles, and depend on large central databases.

Defence-only networks are run by defence ministries and commands, with security taking precedence over other goals. They are highly compartmentalized and share little with civilian partners. Resilience within the military perimeter is strong, but the broader system’s dependence on civilian logistics, ports, and terminals remains insufficiently addressed.

By contrast, the VWT/TWIN model is built around shared situational awareness across civil and defence actors, multi?stakeholder governance anchored in public?good and open?standards principles, federated sharing without central data accumulation, and a civil–military interface that enables filtered, asymmetric data exchange over a distributed infrastructure. Together, these elements reduce single points of failure and lift resilience at system level.

The VWT does not aim to replace existing commercial platforms, state systems, or defence networks. It overlays them as a neutral, shipment?centric coordination fabric, aligning incentives around security of supply and societal resilience rather than around platform dominance or narrow institutional objectives. In effect, it argues that visibility should behave less like a market and more like infrastructure.

Seldom and Project Transports: Stress?Testing the Model

Seldom or project transports – oversized, high?value, or unique shipments – are a natural stress test for any visibility model. These movements often navigate complex jurisdictions and infrastructure constraints. They require close coordination between diverse actors, rely on limited historical data, and are more exposed to disruption because of their uniqueness.

The VWT supports these operations by creating a shipment?specific digital space containing only the data elements needed for coordination. Internal planning tasks, such as staffing or resource allocation, stay within each actor’s own systems. The shared space is structured around the shipment itinerary and includes planned, estimated, and actual times of arrival and departure; constraints affecting handovers, such as navigational limits, escorts, or restricted windows; and disruption signals with downstream impact.

One example is the transport of a 220?ton generator module from a Nordic factory to Central Europe. The movement involves multiple modes and operators along a complex corridor. Using VWT, all involved actors share itinerary updates, constraints, and relevant disruption information. Early detection of a river draft restriction, for instance, can trigger a rapid switch from barge to rail, avoiding multi-week delays and enabling smooth coordination across terminals and authorities.

For maritime actors, the value is tangible: ports and terminals can anticipate exceptional loads earlier, inland carriers can adjust capacity and routing, and shippers gain confidence that rare, high?stakes shipments will not be derailed by avoidable surprises.

Total Defense Logistics over Civilian Infrastructure

Most transport capacity relevant to total defence is owned and operated by private actors. This is especially true in maritime and intermodal logistics, where commercial tonnage and terminals carry the bulk of flows even in periods of heightened alert. This creates a structural dependence on civilian supply chains optimized for efficiency rather than secrecy or resilience.

The VWT allows secure coordination without exposing sensitive data, making it suitable across the peace–crisis–war spectrum. In total?defence scenarios, the intermediary layer keeps classified military information clearly separated from the civil logistics data shared via the VWT.

Consider a scenario in which a shipment of classified equipment must move across Europe using civilian road carriers, a military airlift, and private last?mile distribution during heightened alert. In a VWT?enabled architecture, each actor receives only the information required to do their part, and nothing more. Civilian carriers see timing windows and handling constraints, but no cargo details. Military actors have the full operational context for the airlift segment. Authorities see flows in real time without access to sensitive movement specifics.

In such contexts, the VWT model envisages a strictly controlled, asymmetrical flow of information between VWT and military logistics systems. A Guard Layer filters what is shared so that only shipment?specific, non?sensitive civil logistics data reaches defence actors. In the other direction, defence actors can feed back selected, declassified, and aggregated information – for example, temporary infrastructure constraints or general risk conditions. This preserves VWT’s civil character while allowing armed forces to strengthen the robustness of surrounding supply chains during heightened readiness, crisis, or wartime.

For maritime stakeholders, this points to a future in which ports, terminals, and carriers are better integrated into total defence planning without being exposed to full visibility of military movements.

Security of Supply, TWIN, and the Path Ahead

VWT’s architecture is built around privacy-by-design, federated data ownership, and standardized event sharing. The TWIN architecture, which underpins VWTnet, is a distributed digital environment that uses distributed ledger technology for access control and authorization and is operated by a public?good international foundation. It combines digital and physical robustness to ensure continuity even when networks are degraded.

These elements align with modern security-of-supply requirements for robust, disruption-tolerant supply networks and make the VWT suitable for both commercial operations and security-sensitive logistics. A snapshot of the current VWTnet footprint shows active lanes and usage statistics across monitored flows, including hundreds of shipments, over a thousand containers, and tens of thousands of shipment events at the time of capture. The model is not just conceptual; it is already working in real?world maritime and intermodal environments.

Modern supply webs depend on deep-tier visibility, event-driven collaboration, distributed decision-making, and the ability to reroute dynamically when disruptions occur. For maritime executives, the difference between firefighting and orchestration is increasingly determined by the quality and governance of visibility rather than by assets alone.

The Virtual Watch Tower architecture aims to reinforce the capabilities needed for this next phase. By creating shared situational awareness across authorized actors, it supports earlier detection and faster mitigation of disruptions, more predictable and reliable flows for both industry and authorities, and more coherent crisis coordination across sectors. It also strengthens resilience to geopolitical pressure, cyber incidents, and physical disruptions affecting critical assets, corridors, and nodes.

Taken together, these features make the Virtual Watch Tower a practical enabler of a new visibility paradigm. It acts as a neutral, federated digital layer that connects existing systems, aligns decisions around shipments, and helps ecosystems move from reactive firefighting to proactive, intelligence-led management of end-to-end flows.

The Virtual Watch Tower thus offers a different model for secure, resilient supply chain visibility. It treats situational awareness as a public good while keeping data ownership and control in the hands of the actors who generate it. Real?world deployment must stay aligned with existing doctrines, classification rules, and national arrangements. Transferring VWT to other sectors or regions will require further comparative work to test its assumptions and impacts.

The direction of travel is clear. By enabling controlled, shipment?specific information sharing over a federated, disruption?tolerant architecture, the VWT strengthens both commercial performance and national security in an era of weaponized interdependence. Its relevance spans routine flows, seldom and project transports, and defence?related logistics, providing continuity across the peace-crisis-war spectrum and helping maritime and logistics ecosystems move from chokepoints to shared radar.

Mikael Lind is the world’s first (adjunct) Professor of Maritime Informatics at Chalmers University of Technology and Research Institutes of Sweden (RISE). He is a widely published expert in international trade press, co-editor of the first two books on Maritime Informatics and Maritime Decarbonization. His work has directly shaped community-based digital collaboration initiatives, including the Virtual Watch Tower (VWT).

Wolfgang Lehmacher is a global supply chain logistics expert. The former director at the World Economic Forum and CEO Emeritus of GeoPost Intercontinental is an advisory board member of The Logistics and Supply Chain Management Society, an ambassador for F&L, and an advisor to Global:SF and RISE. He has also co-initiated the VWT initiative. He contributes to the knowledge base of Maritime Informatics and co-editor of the book Maritime Decarbonization.

Lieutenant Colonel Mattias Elfström is head of development at Swedish Armed Forces Logistics. He has more than four decades of military service and has held senior command and staff positions, supported international operations, and completed advanced education at the Swedish Defence University and the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School, with deep expertise in defense, leadership, and security-sensitive coordination.

Sandra Haraldson is Senior Researcher at Research Institutes of Sweden (RISE) and has driven several initiatives on digital collaboration, multi-business innovation, and sustainable transport hubs, such as the concept of Collaborative Decision Making (e.g. e2eCDM (being the conceptual foundation for VWT), PortCDM, RailwayCDM, RRTCDM) enabling parties in transport ecosystems to become coordinated and synchronized by digital data sharing.

Johan Östling is a Senior Project Manager at RISE with extensive experience leading complex international programs across telecom, industrial, and defense-related sectors. As a former officer in the Swedish Armed Forces (Air Defense) and Major in the Army Reserves, he brings expertise in operations, security-sensitive environments, and large-scale system implementation.

The opinions expressed herein are the author's and not necessarily those of The Maritime Executive.