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, respond to threats and protect national sovereignty.
From blind patrols to a picture of the sea
Falcon Eye over-the-horizon radar. Image source: RTCOM Defense
Falcon Eye was built around a simple proposition: naval forces are more effective when intelligence tells them where to go.
The system’s sensors stretch along Nigeria’s coastline, with command centres in Lagos, Yenagoa and Calabar feeding information into a main control centre at Naval Headquarters in Abuja. Its over-the-horizon radar can detect vessels as far as 200 nautical miles offshore, or about 370.4 kilometres, while electro-optical cameras and other sensors help operators identify targets.
That changes the Navy’s job. Instead of sending ships out to search large areas of ocean, Falcon Eye can identify unusual movements and direct naval assets toward them. Shalev described the difference as a shift from “blind patrols” to mission-oriented operations.
One of the clearest examples came on May 14–15, 2020, when pirates hijacked a Chinese vessel, the Hailufeng II, off Côte d’Ivoire and sailed it toward Nigeria. The pirates had destroyed the vessel’s tracking equipment, but Falcon Eye’s over-the-horizon radar detected it before it entered Nigerian waters. The Navy intercepted the vessel and arrested 10 pirates.
Nigeria subsequently recorded a sharp decline in piracy, culminating in its removal from the International Maritime Bureau’s list of piracy-prone waters in March 2022. According to Shalev, insurance premiums on vessels operating in Nigerian waters fell by about 80% after the country was removed from the high-risk list, saving an estimated $700 million to $800 million annually. The expensive security anchorage in Lagos, where ships had previously paid about $2,000 a day to wait safely, was also no longer needed.
RTCom estimates that Falcon Eye has helped save Nigeria about $4 billion since 2015, taking into account reduced insurance costs, oil-theft prevention and the disruption of smuggling and other maritime crimes. That figure is the company’s estimate, rather than an independently verified government calculation.
The sea is not the Niger Delta
The system’s success at sea, however, highlights one of Falcon Eye’s key limitations. It was designed primarily to monitor Nigeria’s Exclusive Economic Zone—the offshore area where the country has rights to explore, exploit and manage natural resources—and other open waters. The Niger Delta presents a very different surveillance challenge, with its dense network of creeks, mangroves and inland waterways.
Dense mangrove forests, narrow waterways and countless creeks obstruct lines of sight and create thousands of potential hiding places. A radar that can see across a large stretch of open ocean cannot simply be moved inland and expected to provide the same coverage.
“We have to monitor many, many more sites that are more short range,” Shalev said.
That means expanding Falcon Eye into the backwaters would require a denser network of sensors, positioned around waterways, chokepoints and other strategic locations.
The challenge is particularly significant because many of Nigeria’s persistent security and economic problems are concentrated in these difficult-to-monitor areas. Oil theft and illegal refining, for example, often take place deep inside the Niger Delta rather than in the open sea.
A similar problem exists with the proposed expansion into land surveillance.
From pirates to bandits
Banditry presents a fundamentally different surveillance challenge. A ship is a large, moving object operating within a relatively predictable environment. A group of bandits can disappear into a forest, move between communities, abandon vehicles, or operate among civilians.
Falcon Eye’s maritime model depends heavily on detecting movement across a defined domain. Applying the same philosophy to land would require a considerably more complex network of sensors and intelligence sources.
Shalev nevertheless believes Nigeria needs such a system.
He argues that the answer to insecurity is not simply buying more military hardware. Nigeria already has soldiers, vehicles, aircraft and weapons. The problem is knowing where to deploy them.
“Security needs to be not by buying more cars or buying more tanks,” he said. “You have to get intelligence, you have to get real-time domain awareness to know where to send those assets.”
It is a lesson Falcon Eye was designed to demonstrate at sea. The Navy had ships before the system arrived. It will have ships after it. What changed, Shalev argues, was the intelligence guiding those ships.
The same principle, in theory, could apply to the army and other security agencies: instead of sending units into large areas in search of armed groups, give commanders a continuously updated picture of where threats are moving and concentrate forces accordingly.
The problem is not only technology
Falcon Eye’s experience shows that sophisticated surveillance does not automatically produce security. The system can detect a target; it cannot intercept one. If a radar identifies a suspicious vessel, the Navy still needs a patrol boat, helicopter or other asset close enough to respond. Fuel shortages, maintenance problems, logistics and deployment delays can create a gap between detection and interception.
And Falcon Eye itself needs constant maintenance. Shalev said the system’s hardware generally needs renewal every five to seven years. Components can become obsolete, replacement parts can become difficult to find, and delayed government payments can slow procurement. Sensors, generators, satellite communications equipment and large electro-optical cameras all require ongoing investment.
That matters because surveillance is a moving contest. As the technology improves, criminals adapt. Ships can turn off their identification systems or attempt to manipulate their locations. The system therefore has to keep evolving to distinguish legitimate activity from deception.
The same would almost certainly be true on land. For now, the expansion remains an ambition rather than a completed national surveillance network.
Shalev says RTCom has repeatedly proposed extending Falcon Eye into the Niger Delta’s backwaters, but that such a project requires funding and political will. A previous attempt to establish a separate backwater surveillance project was awarded to another contractor but never became operational, he said.
Nigeria has repeatedly invested in security technology without always ensuring that systems are integrated, maintained and used to their full potential. The difficult part may not be buying another surveillance platform. It may be building the institutions capable of turning information into action.
Shalev nevertheless believes the next phase is approaching. He expects the government eventually to pursue either the backwater expansion or a broader land-domain-awareness programme, arguing that real-time intelligence would allow Nigeria to deploy its existing security assets more effectively.
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