By Carlo Munoz
The Coast Guard has unveiled a new four-pronged strategy to prevent the use of small vessels, such as yachts, speedboats or commerical fishing boats, from smuggling everything from illicit narcotics to weapons of mass destruction, service officials said last week.
The plan, developed by the Coast Guard and Customs And Border Protection under the Department of Homeland Security, looks to meld advanced tracking and detection technologies with a more fluid system of shifting that information across interagency lines.
“It is finding a middle ground” between technological applications and more basic methods of detecting potential maritime threats, Thomas Winkowski, assistant commissioner for field operations for Customs and Border Protection, said during a March 11 briefing in Arlington, Va. The ultimate goal, he added, was to find a “unified way forward” in addressing a continually evolving threat.
That threat has evolved into DHS’s “biggest areas of vulnerability,” Rear Adm. Paul Zukunft, assistant commandant for Marine Safety, Security, and Stewardship for the Coast Guard, said at the same briefing.
With miles and miles of shoreline to cover, along with the vast expanses of U.S. territorial waters to patrol, the use of small vessels as conduits for transporting all types of illicit and dangerous cargo has exposed “inherent vulnerabilities” in the service’s ability to ensure those ships do not make it to U.S. shores, he added.
Out of that growing concern, DHS launched the small vessel defense plan, Zukunft said.
On the technical side, the Coast Guard and CPB are looking to implement a “a layered, state-of-the-art approach” to detection and mitigation of small vessels attemping to smuggle contraband into the United States. That layered strategy will include development of next-generation “technical detection, active mitigation, tracking and information sharing” on potential threats, the plan states.
Those steps include fielding a more “robust surface rader coverage” system in areas not currently tracked by legacy radar systems. Also, the plan calls for an assessment on the expansion of Naval Vessel Protection Zones for Navy ships and submarines deployed in and around the continential United States.
The expansion of these vessel protection zones is inherently important, Zukunft said, as terrorist groups look increasingly toward attacking large military or commercial vessels, such as the 2000 bombing of the USS Cole (DDG-57) in Yemen.
In addition, the plan also calls for an increased investment in technical applications that “enhance the ability to detect, determine intent and…interdict small vessels,” according to the DHS report.
To reach that goal, Coast Guard and CBP officials want to funnel more federal dollars into developing “low-cost, nonintrusive, small vessel idenification systems. Those systems could take the form of radio frequency idenification tags, miniature transponders or “cell-phone based recognition systems,” the report states.
To streamline information sharing among U.S. government agencies, the plan proposes a slate of initiaives to both “improve coordinated small vessel interdiction capabilities” and “leverage the capabilities of [U.S.] partners and foreign governments,” it says.
Through the expansion of joint field operations with those different entities, operating along the madates of interational bilateral agreements and interagency concepts of operations, the full brunt of the technological advances called for in the plan can be brought to bear.