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World Policy Journal
Volume XX, No 2, Summer 2003
The Unwatched Ships at Sea The Coast Guard and Homeland Security
H. D. S. Greenway
*
If 19 terrorists could so artfully use America’s air transportation system against the United States, what might they do to take advantage of the country’s infinitely larger and harder to keep track of maritime transportation system? Everybody’s nightmare is a nuclear weapon brought into this country on a container ship. Albert Einstein wrote to Franklin Roosevelt more than 60 years ago, before the dawn of the nuclear age, warning that "a single bomb...carried by boat and exploded in a port might very well destroy the whole port together with some of the surrounding territory."
Every day, some 5 million tons of cargo— more than 95 percent of this country’s non–North American trade—comes in through 361 ports, and less than 2 percent of it is ever inspected. The news that Osama bin Laden owns his own fleet of ships makes the possibilities ever more sinister. But terrorists can come by small boats as well, and a weapon of mass destruction could just as easily arrive on a yacht or a fishing boat.
The task of guarding America’s ports and its 95,000 miles of coastline falls to a heretofore undermanned, under-financed, ill-equipped service of around 35,000 Coast Guard regulars and 8,000 reservists. Yet, in this age of asymmetrical warfare, the Coast Guard has become arguably more important to this nation’s security than the navy. Today, port security has become the Coast Guard’s primary mission, somewhat to the detriment of many of its other missions, with the exception of search and rescue. No foreign fleets threaten us, but the possibility of sea-borne terrorism does. As the former commandant of the Coast Guard, Adm. James Loy, put it: "Growing global trade may also provide the delivery mechanism for a devastating attack."
On September 11, 2001, terror came from the sky, not the sea, but the Coast Guard played its part on that fateful day. Responding to a Coast Guard radio call for "all available boats," scores of tugs, ferries, fire boats, and pleasure craft—even some of the antique boats in the South Street Seaport Museum—spontaneously joined in evacuating three quarters of a million people from lower Manhattan, more than twice the number taken off the beach at Dunkirk in World War II.
The Coast Guard is a hybrid organization, one of five U.S. military services, with its own service academy in New London, Connecticut, but with far more civilian functions and missions than military or law enforcement ones. Besides guarding our coasts, the Coast Guard is responsible for apprehending smugglers—its original function— maintaining navigational aids, engaging in search and rescue operations, ice breaking, apprehending illicit drugs and illegal immigrants, policing oil spills and other environmental hazards, as well as regulating commercial fisheries, civilian boating, and safety at sea.
It is a nomadic service. After having begun life under the Treasury, it moved to the Department of Transportation in 1967, but has always worked in close cooperation with the navy and the Department of Defense. On March 1, it was incorporated into the new Department of Homeland Security, where its budget will be increased. The Coast Guard hopes that the budget cuts that have closed Coast Guard stations up and down the coasts and allowed some of its boats and ships to lapse into obsolescence and decrepitude are now things of the past. Of the 41 navies that have boats similar to those of the Coast Guard, the U.S. Coast Guard fleet ranks thirty-seventh in terms of modernity. Under Homeland Security, however, the Coast Guard is scheduled to receive $1 billion in additional funds and a manpower increase of 5,000.
In a declared war, the Coast Guard would be transferred to the navy, but that hasn’t happened since World War II. Yet the Coast Guard has served overseas in various theaters of war, including Vietnam and the Persian Gulf; and this past January eight 110foot Coast Guard cutters were shipped out to the Persian Gulf, along with 600 Coast Guard regulars and reservists.
The Coast Guard has the part-time services of roughly 37,000 auxiliarists, 20 percent of whom are women. They are integrated into virtually every level of its operations. They donate their time, and often their boats and airplanes, to patrol the coasts, adding necessary eyes and local knowledge to the country’s defenses. Auxiliarists are empowered by the National Coast Guard Act of 1996 to perform every Coast Guard task, including the handling of classified information, but not combat or direct law enforcement. They might, for example, crew the boat that is making an arrest at sea, but they couldn’t make the actual arrest. That is left to the Coast Guard regulars who now routinely carry M60 machine guns aboard their 40foot patrol boats.
Even before 9/11, the Coast Guard was aware that America’s shores were dangerously under-guarded. Thus was the doctrine of Maritime Domain Awareness—a program to increase alertness in harbors, waterways, and in offshore waters—born after 9/11. Its purpose is to insure, in the words of Capt. Robert Ross, that "every arriving, departing, transiting and loitering vessel will be known and subjected to risk assessment be fore the vessel can become a direct threat to the U.S." With Coast Guard regulars and reserves stretched to the limit, the job of watching our coasts and harbors in the new age of terrorism is falling more and more to the auxiliarists. Auxiliarists have the local knowledge necessary to recognize something amiss that a Coast Guard regular from Ohio might not notice. "They bring to the table more mature and experienced people, while our regular crews are getting younger and younger...a wonderful additional layer of judgment," says Rear Adm. Vivien Crea, who is in command of the First Coast Guard District, stretching from the Canadian border to Shark River, New Jersey.
According to Stewart Sutherland, a 61 year-old computer programmer who donates his 82foot boat and his time to auxiliary patrol duty in New York Harbor, the admirals may love the auxiliarists, but the local Coast Guard stations are not as adept as they should be at integrating auxiliary harbor patrol boats into their routine. The hundreds of auxiliary telephone and radio operators, technicians, bookkeepers, administrators, cooks, and crewmen aboard regular Coast Guard cutters, as well as teachers of boating safety, are well integrated into the service, however. "They have really taken up the slack" since 9/11, says Admiral Crea. "In the past, it was just their maritime skills, but now we are taking inventory of their personal skills and talents." The auxiliarists have been able to "back fill us in non-hostile missions.... They free the Coast Guard regulars to pick up their weapons and head out to sea." Nationwide, auxiliarists bring to the Coast Guard the part-time use of 5,000 boats, 240 aircraft, and 3,000 shore radio stations, which they operate. In 2001, they put in almost 4.4 million volunteer hours, which cost the federal government less than $12 million in expenses.
"Useful Sentinels"Providing security for America’s ports became a major mission after the infamous Halifax disaster of 1917. A French ammunition ship blew up in the harbor of Halifax, Nova Scotia, during World War I, nearly leveling the town, with immense loss of life and property. It was an accident; but a chilling harbinger of what might happen today through malice and a single weapon of mass destruction.
In 2000, 211,000 commercial vessels carrying 5.8 million 40foot containers entered American ports, most of them under foreign flags. It takes a team of five inspectors three hours to search thoroughly a single container, according to Stephen Flynn, a former Coast Guard officer and an expert on border security, now with the Council on Foreign Relations. Even if it were possible to search them all at U.S. ports of entry, an overzealous approach could stop trade dead in its tracks and bring this county’s economy to ruin. Moreover, in technical terms, "port of entry" does not mean the seaport in which the cargo is landed, but the final destination. An importer does not have to file a cargo manifest with U.S. customs until the cargo reaches the point where it will be unloaded, which could mean Denver or Kansas City. Thus, al-Qaeda could ship a container full of dirty bombs to a city far inland.
What can be done, and what is being done, is to push this country’s borders overseas to the points of loading. Most shipping follows predictable shipping routes. Were foreign ports to be made responsible, with American help, for guaranteeing the safety of containers and for properly sealing them before they are loaded onto ships bound for the United States, security would be enhanced and commerce would not be unduly slowed. Most of the goods reaching the United States by sea, not including the nearly 1 billion tons of petroleum products that reach our ports every year, pass through the super-ports of Hong Kong, Singapore, Hamburg, Antwerp, and Rotterdam at some point in their journey. As Flynn has pointed out, once these ports agree to a common standard for security, that will quickly become the norm. Another measure being considered is to require all ships that do business in U.S. waters to carry transponders, as airplanes do, in order to keep track of them.
The Container Security Initiative, which allows for U.S. Customs officials to be stationed in foreign ports to inspect cargoes at their port of origin, is already being put in place around the world. The Chinese have promised cooperation, but the European Union has raised objections to the bilateral arrangements the United States has already made with Germany, France, Belgium, and the Netherlands, and is considering legal action against Britain, Spain, and Italy as well. The EU argues that individual member countries are not allowed to make their own security deals with the United States. The U.S. position is that it will be delighted to have a blanket deal with the European Union, but in the meantime it will continue to work with individual countries.
Foreign ships approaching American ports now have to give 96 hours’ warning to the Coast Guard prior to arrival—it was 24 hours before 9/11—listing their cargoes and crews, thus allowing all concerned agencies (the Office of Naval Intelligence, the FBI, The Unwatched Ships at Sea 75.the CIA, and the customs, immigration, and drug enforcement authorities) to focus on the incoming vessel. Then the ship can either be allowed in, turned away, or boarded and searched, if necessary. Eventually, a system will be worked out where reliable shippers who follow proper procedures in cooperating foreign ports will be allowed into U.S. ports without hassle, just as airports are trying to organize security to allow frequent and trusted travelers through quickly and easily.
Since 9/11, the Coast Guard has started to arm its big red helicopters; and coming this summer to selected ports will be the newly formed Maritime Safety and Security Teams, highly trained and armed Coast Guard combat-ready units that will be deployed when and wherever they might be needed. They will, in effect, be waterborne SWAT teams, and will be supplied with special, 25foot boats with twin 225horsepower outboard motors. Yet another arrow in the Coast Guard’s quiver are its Strike Teams, which specialize in toxic hazards. The 150 men and women based at Fort Dix, New Jersey, for example, were involved in the World Trade Center cleanup, and in supervising the decontamination of government buildings suspected of being contaminated during the anthrax scare of 2001. But as the regular Coast Guard girds itself for a bigger security role under the Department of Homeland Security, more responsibility will be passed down to the auxiliarists.
The "New Normalcy" of VigilanceThis "new normalcy" of vigilance resembles more the measures taken during World War II than anything that came after—until, that is, 9/11. Indeed, the Coast Guard Auxiliary itself was the result of the Coast Guard Reserve Act of 1939, which set up the civilian organization to aid and assist the Coast Guard. In November 1941, President Roosevelt transferred the Coast Guard from the Department of Transportation to the navy for the duration of the war.
In the winter of 1942, German submarines began operating off the east coast of the United States, and the navy found itself woefully short of patrol vessels. Not only were allied ships being torpedoed, but eight German saboteurs were landed on Long Island, and others were landed in Maine, with a mission to cause as much destruction as they could. (They were all caught and most of them executed.) Boating was more of a rich man’s sport in those days than now, but boaters of all stripes donated their vessels to the cause. Some of the grandest yachts of the New York Yacht Club were involved, such as Seth Milliken’s 100foot yawl, "Thistle," and future Commodore Chauncey Stillman’s flagship, "Westerly," as well as the more humble craft of coastal fishermen. Deputized to provide eyes and ears to detect enemy activity, these World War II auxiliaries were called "Coastal Pickets," and they patrolled up and down the East Coast in weather fair and foul, winter and summer. One yacht, "Zaida," drifted helpless for 23 days with, according to the club’s history, "sails blown away and engine inoperative" while snow and gales prevented her rescue. Coast watchers were organized ashore, and some auxiliarists rode up and down the beaches on horseback looking for infiltrating spies and would-be saboteurs.
According to Captain Webster, something resembling the Coastal Picket program is now being implemented. Another prototype is the Coastal Beacon Program, which is bringing commercial fishermen and the boating public into the Maritime Domain Awareness program. It involves more than 325 fishermen in Maine and New Hampshire, who know the coast intimately. But "commercial fishermen are an independent group," Webster says, and they may not be enthusiastic about joining the agency that "continues to oversee and regulate their livelihood."
Proponents of involving the general public in Maritime Domain Awareness realize that the blizzard of reports coming in might swamp the system, making it easier for terrorists to slip through. But, according to Webster, a post9/11 maritime early warning system "must be shared with key trusted agents among various waterfront elements, including industry, harbormasters, local law enforcement, waterfront managers, fishermen and ordinary citizens."
Some have suggested that the Coast Guard has too many duties to carry out successfully what have become their two main missions: homeland security and search and rescue. There are obvious overlaps between the Coast Guard as it is presently structured and U.S. Customs, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), the Drug Enforcement Agency, the Department of Transportation, and even more obscure agencies such as the Minerals Management Service, which shares the inspection of offshore oil drilling platforms with the Coast Guard. Some of these overlaps lead to efficiency and some do not. It has been suggested that some activities—such as supervising fisheries, guarding bridges, buoy tending, and the like—might be separated out from the Coast Guard: to be privatized, to remain in the Department of Transportation, or to become separate units within the Department of Homeland Security. Critics have said that the Coast Guard has been too slow and too unimaginative in responding to the new threat, "like a drunk looking for his keys under the street lamp because that’s where the light is," as one writer put it. If the INS is to be broken up into three separate entities, and U.S. Customs into two, why should the Coast Guard remain as one?
A dark joke making the rounds even before 9/11 was that if terrorists wanted to smuggle in weapons of mass destruction all they had to do was hide them in an illicit drug shipment. After 9/11, the new emphasis on port security has meant that counter-narcotics operations are down from 20 percent of the Coast Guard’s time and resources to 5 percent. Enforcing fishing regulations has sunk as well, and the interdiction of illegal immigrants has also fallen nearly off the screen. Some critics say that the new Coast Guard should be stripped of its ancillary missions so that it may concentrate on saving us from sea-borne terror. It is certainly true that after a decade of budgetary neglect the Coast Guard has been rendered less effective than it should be.
But, thanks largely to senators Susan Collins of Maine and Ted Stevens of Alaska, the legislation governing the Coast Guard’s incorporation into the Department of Homeland Security mandates that all its functions be kept intact. The Coast Guard, and the Secret Service, will report directly to Secretary Tom Ridge. As Stephen Flynn puts it: "The Coast Guard will be best able to serve the homeland security mission primarily by doing well what it has always been charged to do.... America has adversaries who want to attack us in order to create profound disruption. Our ports and waterways provide ripe opportunities for them to do so. The only way to get from where we are to where we need to be is to develop a maritime equivalent of community policing. The Coast Guard can help to provide that if we are willing to bolster its collective capacity to do all of its traditional peacetime missions—not strip them away. The one thing that should have been obliterated on September 11 was the view that there is a tidy line between national security and the rest of the work frontline agencies like the Coast Guard do."
The Coast Guard argues that it is precisely those other missions that enable it to be aware of what is going on off our shores. When the Coast Guard is out trying to control oil slicks, or rescuing people in trouble, or interdicting illegal immigrant ships, it is alert to potential danger. As Captain Webster put it, in the age of terrorism, the Coast Guard has to act like the cop on the beat. The object should be greater vigilance, not just greater efficiency. •
*H. D. S. Greenway is a columnist and former editorial page editor of the Boston Globe.