Falcon Eye helped Nigeria tackle piracy. Its next target is banditry

For years, Nigerian naval ships went to sea with a basic problem: they could patrol, but they did not always know where to look.

A vessel could leave a port, disappear beyond the horizon, and become little more than a guess on a naval commander’s map. Patrol boats and helicopters were available, but without a clear picture of what was happening across Nigeria’s vast waters, the Navy often conducted what officials called “blind patrols.”

Falcon Eye was designed to change that.

The maritime surveillance system, developed by Israeli defence company RTCom Defense, began deployment along Nigeria’s coastline in 2015. By combining coastal radar, cameras, satellite feeds, automatic identification systems and an over-the-horizon radar capable of detecting vessels hundreds of kilometres offshore, it gave the Nigerian Navy something it had lacked: a continuous picture of its waters.

More than a decade after deployment began, Falcon Eye’s architects want to take the same concept inland.  Ido Shalev, Chief Operating Officer, who has worked on Falcon Eye for more than a decade, says the next frontier is not the open ocean but the maze of creeks and waterways in the Niger Delta—and potentially the land itself, where Nigeria is fighting a different kind of security problem: banditry, kidnapping and other forms of organised crime.

“For the past eight years,” Shalev said in an interview with TechCabal in Lagos on Monday, he had been advocating for expanding Falcon Eye into Nigeria’s “backwaters.”

For the past five years, he has also pushed for what he describes as land domain awareness—the ability to build a unified, real-time picture of activity, threats and forces across the ground environment, giving security decision-makers the information needed to understand developments,…