The Coast Guard shortly will be releasing its own version of a Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR) to help guide its future needs and it will also issue a cyber security strategy for the service and the maritime transportation system, Coast Guard Commandant Adm. Paul Zukunft said at the Surface Navy Association on Jan. 15.
Zukunft said his service’s equivalent of the QDR will be released in a month-and-a-half and will look out five years at things like what should the Coast Guard’s end strength be given the “external threat environment that we find ourselves in today.” The QDR will also look at what “we need to resource, operate and remain a vital tool to national security in the 21st Century,” he said, adding that “It’s not just platforms. It’s also our people.”
The Pentagon issues a QDR every four years that is focused on the Defense Department’s strategy and priorities.
The Coast Guard is putting the “horse in front of the cart and that horse is a strategy driven budget,” Zukunft said. The service has already released strategies for the Arctic and the Western Hemisphere, he said.
The Navy, which helps patrol the eastern Pacific Ocean for anti-drug and other missions, has priorities elsewhere. Zukunft said the Navy has begun final deployment of a Perry-class frigate in the drug transit zone in the eastern Pacific. Now the Coast Guard is in the process of increasing its presence in the Western Hemisphere by 35 percent with plans to “sustain that over a period of time,” he said.
However, Zukunft said, boosting the Coast Guard’s presence in the Western Hemisphere will be a challenge given the need to manage risks elsewhere in the world.
As a member of the intelligence community, the Coast Guard gets good intelligence on 80 percent of the illegal flows of drugs in the eastern and western Caribbean and in the eastern Pacific, Zukunft said. When the there is a plane above and a Navy ship with a Coast Guard law enforcement detachment or Coast Guard ship able to divert to interdict a target, “our success rate is 100 percent,” he said. “Unfortunately, I have enough ISR and platforms to go after 20 percent of that 80 percent (so) 60 percent gets a free pass.”
The cyber security strategy is due out in the coming weeks, Zukunft said. The Coast Guard was to host a meeting Jan. 22 to discuss cyber security standards for the maritime industry in an effort to get “out in front of that,” he said, adding that industry standards will “become a component of our cyber strategy as well.”
The Coast Guard wants to know what the international standards are, what industry sees as its vulnerabilities, and how standards can be enforced, Zukunft said. He added that industry is “reluctant to be regulated.”
Zukunft mentioned a new liquid natural gas terminal in Louisiana that will soon be a hub for exports to Asia, an important market for Russia’s oil and gas exports. Russia has advanced cyber capabilities and is it “going to watch its GDP fold or are they going to launch zeroes and ones at this facility and cause a disruption in their ability to compete in the marketplace?” Zukunft asked.
A computer attack against the maritime transportation system “would be felt immediately” in this “just-in-time” environment, Zukunft said.