Mineta: Maritime Security a "High Priority"
Balancing the Benefits of Ocean Transport Against the Risk of Terrorist Attacks
By OTTO KREISHER
Otto Kreisher is a reporter for Copley News Service.
The tragic events of 11 September 2001 abruptly awakened the United States to the realization that its system of commercial transportation, although a major contributor to the nation's economic growth and prosperity, also can become the means for the employment of weapons of mass destruction (WMDs).
Responding to the deadly use of hijacked airliners in the 11 September attacks, the federal government and industry acted quickly to improve aviation security. But U.S. officials recognized even then that the nation's maritime transportation system poses the potential for an even greater threat of deadly attacks against the U.S. homeland.
"One key piece of our ongoing transportation security effort entails securing our nation's ports and maritime-transportation system," said Secretary of Transportation Norman Y. Mineta. "With 25,000 miles of navigable channels and over 350 ports, our nation's maritime system presents one of our greatest security challenges." That challenge has become "a very high priority" for the administration, and particularly for his own department, Mineta said at a conference in Cambridge, Mass.
At the same conference, Vice Adm. Thomas H. Collins, nominated by President Bush to be the next Coast Guard commandant, noted the need to balance the economic benefits derived from maritime trade against the security challenges involved. "As a nation that depends so heavily on the oceans and sea lanes as avenues of prosperity," Collins said, "we know that whatever action we take against future acts of terrorism must protect our ports and waterways and the ships that use them."
Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Vern Clark, another speaker at the conference, said that maritime security requires a coordinated defensive arrangement similar to that used by the North American Aerospace Defense Command to protect the nation's air space. The responsibility for maritime security "should rest first and foremost" with the Coast Guard, Clark said. "I am also convinced," he added, "that there is a role for the United States Navy to play ... in support of the Coast Guard." He pledged to "bring our resources to bear wherever they are required."
Porous Ocean Borders
As Mineta noted, the potential terrorist threat from maritime commerce is indicated by the dimensions of that trade. In recent years, the U.S. maritime-transportation system has had to cope with, on average, more than two billion tons of freight, three billion tons of oil, more than seven million vacationers on cruise ships, and more than 134 million passengers on ferries. Approximately 7,500 foreign-flag ships make 51,000 calls annually at U.S. passenger and cargo terminals.
One of the biggest security concerns is the more than seven million cargo containers that flow through U.S. ports each year--carrying goods valued at $480 billion. In the past, nearly all incoming containers were loaded--uninspected--onto railcars and trucks, opening the country to the danger of an attack from overseas.
Although commercial passenger aircraft were used to carry out the 11 September attacks, the U.S. Navy and U.S. Coast Guard realized they had to move quickly to tighten the security of America's ocean borders. Within hours of the attacks against the Pentagon and New York City's World Trade Center, Navy aircraft carriers and surface combatants were at sea off both the U.S. East and West Coasts, Hawaii, and Guam, providing an outer defense ring against additional terrorist strikes. At the same time, said Rear Adm. Kenneth T. Venuto, director of Coast Guard operations, the Coast Guard was "engaged in a massive response effort to protect our ports and marine-transportation system."
That effort included 55 cutters, 42 aircraft, and hundreds of small boats providing near-shore and port security. The service's six specially trained Port Security Units, normally used to protect Navy ships in potentially dangerous foreign ports, were deployed to key U.S. ports.
Coast Guard Commandant Adm. James M. Loy said an immediate concern was controlling the movement of "high-interest" vessels--cruise ships and tankers carrying petroleum, natural gas, chemicals, and hazardous materials. "We must identify, board, and inspect any vessel that could be used as a weapon of mass destruction," Loy said. To carry out that assignment the Coast Guard used "sea marshals"--armed Coast Guard personnel who meet ships at the entrance buoy, validate the cargo and crew, then ride the vessel into port.
The Coast Guard also increased--from 24 hours before arrival to 96 hours--the lead time for a required advance notice from inbound ships. That change gives the service more time to check a ship's registry, crew, and cargo.
"Tell Me What You Need"
Clark said he called Loy early on 11 September and told him that, although it was customary for the Coast Guard to support the Navy in time of war, that precedent would not be used during the war on terrorism. "This is different," Clark told Loy, "Tell me what you need."
The Navy responded by shifting its 13 coastal patrol craft and their crews to Coast Guard control and assigning 300 Sailors to the National Maritime Intelligence Center, which monitors U.S. maritime traffic. The Coast Guard also assessed the "critical infrastructures" of U.S. ports and waterways to help determine what its top security priorities should be, Loy said. Earlier vulnerability assessments were a useful reference in this effort--which was handicapped, however, by the lack of training and equipment needed for detecting chemical, biological, or nuclear materials, and by the inability of numerous government agencies to share the information they received from disparate databases.
Although the Coast Guard was provided the names of thousands of foreign crew members under the new four-day advance-notification requirement, it had trouble matching those names against the names of suspected terrorists and visa violators in the files of other agencies. Many other federal agencies, and industry, did join in the security effort, though, and their contributions were soon facilitated through the cooperative efforts of new interagency working groups.
Since 11 September, for example, the Customs Service's highest priority was described by Assistant Commissioner Bonni Tischler as "... doing everything we reasonably and responsibly can to keep terrorists and terrorist weapons from entering the United States." Richard D. Steinke, president of the American Association of Port Authorities (AAPA), said its 150 members broadened their security efforts from primarily crime prevention "to include the prevention of and response to acts of terrorism."
The AAPA also created a port crime-and-security committee--composed of industry leaders and federal, state, and local law-enforcement officials--to consider ways to improve the security of U.S. ports and the goods that move through them. Several of the improvements recommended by the group "will require funding not heretofore anticipated," Steinke said.
A Hole in Security
Loy said that cargo containers are still the biggest "hole" in the enhanced U.S. maritime-security efforts.
Of the more than seven million containers that arrive in U.S. ports each year, less than 2 percent are inspected. That situation must change, officials declared. Transportation Department and Maritime Administration officials said they are taking the steps needed to increase inspections at the container ports of origin and to ensure that the contents, shippers, and destinations of the containers are declared earlier in the process. But these and other efforts to improve security, the same officials said, must be balanced against the economic need for cargo to continue flowing efficiently through U.S. ports.
The advent of "just-in-time" logistics and inventory control in recent years makes it more important today than in the past to avoid delays and disruptions to intermodal transportation. Industry has been striving for greater efficiency to relieve congestion in many ports but, as Maritime Administrator William G. Schubert pointed out, "efficiency improvements must now be viewed through a security lens."
A Massive Challenge
"What is at issue is not just maritime security, or even the global intermodal transportation system, but the flow of international trade and the world's economic health," said Christopher Koch, president of the World Shipping Council. Government and industry are working on multiple fronts to develop comprehensive long-term solutions to the massive maritime-security challenge.
The Coast Guard and other agencies, Venuto said, must work "to build a new network of protections that transform what has been a rapid response into a sustained effort that recognizes heightened port, waterways, and coastal security as a part of normal operations."
To guide that effort, Congress authorized Mineta to create a new Transportation Security Administration. Running the new office are two officials with extensive security experience. John W. Magaw, the undersecretary of transportation for security, previously served as director of the Secret Service and of the Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms Agency; he also was an antiterrorism advisor to the Federal Emergency Management Agency. His top deputy, retired Coast Guard Rear Adm. Richard E. Bennis, led the Coast Guard's response to the 11 September attack in New York and, previously, planned maritime security for the 1996 Summer Olympics.
The White House has launched a "safe borders initiative," which proposes increased funding for the Customs Service, the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), and the Coast Guard's homeland-security efforts. The Bush administration's proposed fiscal year 2003 budget for the Coast Guard seeks $7.3 billion--a 36 percent increase over last year--and 2,200 additional personnel.
More Funding Needed
The $40 billion emergency supplemental appropriation that Congress already has passed provides significant additional money this year for homeland defense. It also allocates $93.3 million for a grant program that Mineta said "will accelerate the installation of enhanced security measures for passengers and cargo that pass through our vital ports." Steinke said the additional funding "is a good first step," but quickly added that "significantly more money is needed." A survey found that 52 of AAPA's ports plan to apply for a total of $222.8 million in grants.
Congress, meanwhile, is working on legislation that would authorize even more money for maritime security, including the grant program. The Senate passed the Port and Maritime Security Act of 2001, sponsored by Senators Ernest Hollings (D-S.C.) and Bob Graham (D-Fla.), in December. On 20 March, the House Transportation Committee unanimously approved the Maritime Transportation Anti-Terrorism Act of 2002, sponsored by the panel's senior Democrats and Republicans.
"Since 11 September, there have been concerns that the terrorists will find another target of opportunity," said Committee Chairman Don Young (R-Alaska). "It is my hope that this bill will ensure that our ports and harbors will not become that target of opportunity." Both bills require new vulnerability assessments to serve as guidelines in the development of security plans for U.S. seaports; background checks on employees working in sensitive positions at the ports and aboard ships also will be needed.
The House bill would mandate security assessments of foreign ports shipping cargo to the United States and would allow the Transportation Department to deny entry to ships or cargo from any port that does not meet the security standards. The Senate bill would provide more than $200 million for security improvements--$9 million a year to guarantee loans and $26 million a year for grants to the ports. It would extend import duties on cargo to help fund these efforts.
The House bill offers $75 million a year in grants, but does not provide for specific federal security enhancements, or for the cargo fees.
Maritime Domain Awareness
Government and industry also are pursuing a number of programs to tackle the enormous problem of improving security for cargo containers. Officials agree it would be virtually impossible to inspect every container entering a U.S. port. And, they say, that would be too late in the international shipping process.
"Particularly in an age of increasingly available weapons of mass destruction, it must be seen as a dangerous policy to wait for the arrival of a suspicious cargo in an American seaport before ... [the container] is subjected to all necessary scrutiny," said Kim E. Peterson, director of the Maritime Security Council.
The answer, officials believe, lies in a combination of improved intelligence, technology, and international cooperation to move the scrutiny of those containers as far from U.S. shores as possible. Richard M. Larrabee, a retired Coast Guard rear admiral now serving as director of port commerce for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, told Congress: "We believe that efforts must be taken to verify the content of containers before they are even loaded on a ship destined for a U.S. port."
The real key to improving maritime security, though, might well be a concept the Coast Guard calls "maritime-domain awareness." "The core of a maritime-domain awareness program," Mineta said, "is accurate information, intelligence, and surveillance of all vessels, cargo, and people, extending well beyond our traditional maritime boundaries." Enhanced domain awareness provides the key to identifying threats as early and as distant as possible, he said, "then determining the most effective and optimal course of intervention."
The achievement of greater maritime-domain awareness and, through it, enhanced security for U.S. ports and waterways is a far more daunting task than the aviation-security challenge made so obvious by the 9/11 attacks. In the months since those attacks there has been tangible progress in diminishing the still major risk of terrorist attacks against the U.S. homeland from the sea. But senior officials agree that a great deal more remains to be done before that risk is reduced to the lowest level possible.
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