Campaign Questions in SIRE 2.0: What They Are and How to Prepare

In October 2025, every SIRE 2.0 inspection worldwide started asking the same question, regardless of vessel type, trade route, or operator: could the crew demonstrate the vessel's ship-hardening and access-control procedures? That single, mandatory question is a Campaign Question — and understanding how it works is the difference between a fleet that reacts to OCIMF's priorities and one that's caught off guard by them.

What a Campaign Question Is

A Campaign Question is an existing Rotational question that OCIMF temporarily elevates to mandatory status across every CVIQ for a fixed period. Where a Rotational question might appear once every three or four inspections, a Campaign question appears in all of them — every vessel, every trade route, no exceptions — for as long as the campaign window stays open.

Campaigns exist because OCIMF continuously aggregates data across tens of thousands of inspections. When that data shows a specific risk area trending upward — a type of deficiency, an emerging security concern, a pattern tied to a real incident — OCIMF can respond faster than a full question-library revision would allow, by simply elevating the relevant existing question to campaign status.

It's a similar mechanism to a Port State Control concentrated inspection campaign: a focused, time-limited spotlight on one specific risk area, applied uniformly across the fleet being inspected.

A Real Example: The Ship-Hardening Campaign

OCIMF launched a Focused Inspection Campaign on 1 October 2025, targeting SIRE 2.0 question 7.2.1 — ship hardening and access control. The campaign runs for a minimum of six months, with an interim review completed in February 2026, and applies to every SIRE 2.0 inspection conducted during that window, regardless of where the vessel operates.

The campaign's stated purpose is straightforward: verify that Masters and ship staff genuinely understand and can apply their company's procedures for hardening the vessel in areas of elevated maritime threat, and confirm that the equipment and plans supporting that hardening are effective and properly maintained — not just documented.

This is a useful case study because it shows exactly how a campaign behaves in practice: one question, tested everywhere, for a defined window, closing with a formal review that feeds back into OCIMF's wider guidance.

The Life Cycle of a Campaign Question

OCIMF identifies a trend from aggregated inspection data, elevates the relevant Rotational question, and launches the campaign for a defined minimum period. While it's active, every CVIQ includes that question. An interim review checks how the industry is performing partway through. Once the campaign closes, OCIMF analyses the accumulated findings — and that analysis can lead to updated guidance, a change in how the question is weighted going forward, or new training resources issued to member companies. The question itself then returns to its normal Rotational assignment, unless the findings justify making it permanently Core.

Why Campaigns Change Fleet-Wide Preparation

The single biggest practical implication of a Campaign question is that preparation stops being a per-vessel exercise and becomes a fleet-wide one. Under normal Rotational logic, different vessels in a fleet will naturally encounter different questions at different times. During an active campaign, every vessel faces the same question simultaneously — which means a gap in one crew's readiness is a gap the whole fleet shares.

That has a direct consequence for how operators should communicate internally: a campaign notice should trigger a fleet-wide briefing, not a vessel-by-vessel one, and readiness tracking should be done at the fleet level so gaps are visible before an inspector finds them.

Common Mistakes

• Treating a campaign notice as relevant only to vessels currently due for inspection, rather than the whole fleet.
• Briefing officers on the campaign topic without extending that briefing to ratings, who can be questioned on it just as directly.
• Assuming a campaign question behaves like a one-off audit item, rather than preparing for it to reappear at every inspection until the window closes.
• Not monitoring OCIMF communications closely enough to know when a new campaign has launched or an existing one has closed.

Best Practices, by Role

• Crew and ratings — be ready to demonstrate, not just describe, the current campaign topic; inspectors are testing practical application under realistic conditions.
• Master — treat a campaign notice as a fleet-wide briefing trigger and confirm readiness before the next inspection window, not after an observation flags a gap.
• Chief Officer — keep any campaign-related equipment, plans, or documentation (such as hardening equipment condition) current and ready for direct inspection.
• Chief Engineer — coordinate with the deck department where a campaign topic spans both, such as access control involving engine-room entry points.

Summary

A Campaign Question is a Rotational question OCIMF temporarily elevates to mandatory status across every inspection, in response to a data-driven trend or emerging risk. The current ship-hardening campaign, launched October 2025 and running through at least March 2026, shows the pattern clearly: one question, tested everywhere, for a fixed window, closing with a formal review. Because campaigns apply fleet-wide and simultaneously, the right response is fleet-wide, coordinated preparation — not vessel-by-vessel readiness.

Frequently Asked Questions