Identifying major maritime transport security challenges and Ranking their importance in impacting the defense supply chain

The current research was conducted with the aim of identifying the major challenges of maritime transportation security and evaluating their importance in influencing the country's defense supply chain. This research is based on the purpose of "development-applied" research and in terms of nature is "descriptive-survey" which has a "mixed" approach. The statistical population of the study included 40 experts in the field of maritime security who have more than 20 years of service and a master's degree or higher. In the qualitative part, 10 of them were purposefully selected and in the quantitative part in a total. In order to collect real data, "field studies" were used using the tools of "semi-structured interview" and "closed questionnaire". The interview questions and the questionnaire were confirmed by experts in terms of both visual and content validity. Cronbach's alpha coefficient of the questionnaire was 0.89 and the retest reliability of the interview test was %81, which indicates acceptable reliability. With the "content analysis" of the interviews, 5 major challenges with 40 basic themes were identified, according to which the adjustment questionnaire and the extracted data were analyzed using "descriptive statistics" using SPSS software and in order to rank the importance of each. The themes identified in influencing the defense supply chain have also been exploited by the "Friedman test". According to the obtained results, the challenges of infrastructure threats, cyber-attacks, political-security and military attacks, piracy and piracy were identified as the most important major challenges of maritime security affecting the defense supply chain.