Previous IFPA-Fletcher Conferences

National Security Strategy and Policy:
Planning for and Responding to Threats to the U.S. Homeland

October 28-29, 2004
Ronald Reagan Building
and International Trade Center
Washington, D.C.

Vice Admiral Terry Cross, USCG
Vice Commandant, U.S. Coast Guard

Introduction By: Dr. Robert L. Pfaltzgraff, Jr.

Vice Admiral Terry Cross: That’s pretty good, he just held up a sign that said I was out of time. Well, let me begin by thanking Dr. Pfaltzgraff and the Institute for Foreign Policy for including the Coast Guard in this forum. Just about everything in our world changed on 9/11, and one of the things that changed is the fact that there’s a Coast Guard member on this panel. Four years ago, that probably wouldn’t have been the case. Of course, the Coast Guard changed dramatically on 9/11 as well; not because we have any new missions, like some people seem to think, because port and waterway security’s been a mission for the Coast Guard for over 200 years, but because that mission went from being a low priority mission because we perceived the threat to be low, to being an absolute highest priority mission. And that’s where we are today.

I want to also comment on General Inge’s remarks about interservice and interagency equal operation. I can say unequivocally that I couldn’t agree more with General Inge. I've experienced what I think has been the absolute, utmost in interservice and interagency cooperation. There are still, I think, some places in government that need to be improved, but it’s never been anything remotely like what I see today.

Earlier, General Blum, General Inge and I were talking, and we knew we’d met somewhere, and then we figured out it was at NORTHCOM. I knew I'd been at NORTHCOM often enough one day when I was out running the morning and somebody stopped me and asked directions and I could actually tell them how to get where they were going. So this idea that some people have that there isn’t enough cooperation, or that cooperation is bad is simply incorrect.

I also kind of like the yellow lines that General Blum had on one of his slides there, about he couldn’t go across those yellow lines. One of the neat things about being in the Coast Guard is we live across those yellow lines. We’re a military service in a civilian department. We are simultaneously a military service, a federal law enforcement agency and a federal regulatory agency. And I think that makes a pretty powerful combination and one of the reasons that our role in government has changed pretty dramatically over the course of the last three years.

By the way, one of the other things that changed about our Coast Guard post-9/11 was the spotlight was put on some pretty glaring equipment deficiencies, the result of years of what we thought were underfunding, but I'm pleased to say that with the support of the Administration and the Congress, a lot of that’s changing now; it’s going in the right direction.

I was asked to talk a little bit today about layered defenses and the importance, and I got out some of my old textbooks from the War College, and you can go back as far as Sun Tzu, and he’s talking about layered defenses, the use of pickets and skirmishers is as old as warfare itself, I think. When we sit down on Saturday or Sunday to watch a football game, you're going to see layered defenses, you're going to see linemen, you're going to see linebackers and defensive backs. So there’s nothing new about that idea.

However, the challenge that we face in the maritime arena is more complex, and I think more challenging than conventional warfare or even NFL football. What we have facing us is essentially, in the simplest terms, a huge sorting problem. And that problem involves finding the enemy in the midst of hundreds or thousands of legitimate vessels, and they all look alike. They all look alike.

Oh, by the way, while we’re going about that business, we have to be mindful of the requirement not to impede the flow of legitimate commerce, because the economy of our country, and indeed of the world, is dependent on that commerce. I have a long list of numbers I could share with you, but in the interest of time Ill just tell you that 95% of the imports and exports to this country, from other than Canada and Mexico, come by sea.

Oh, by the way, not only do we have to facilitate the free flow of commerce, but we have to respect the civil liberties of the people involved in that commerce.

So our challenge, in a nutshell, is to make our waterways secure without disrupting the flow of commerce and without depriving law-abiding citizens of their civil liberties. By the way, it’s even harder -- I'm going to add another layer of difficulty here -- because we know it’s entirely possible that a weapon of mass destruction could be placed on a legitimate ship with a legitimate captain, legitimate crew, and we also know that a ship could be hijacked and used as a weapon of mass destruction itself. So very, very difficult sorting problem that we have.

I think the good news is that we have some experience with sorting problems. If you boil it all down, it’s not necessarily a whole lot different from work that we’ve been doing for a long time in counternarcotics and illegal migrant interdiction. Now, some people are going to suggest that’s not a good comparison because of what I think some people perceive as a poor record in terms of counternarcotics interdiction. I think that would be the wrong conclusion to draw. The reality is, given the resources that we’ve applied to that mission, we’ve done pretty well. And, oh, by the way, we’re doing much better now than we used to do.

This year, the Coast Guard, with a lot of great help from the United States Navy and other interagency partners down at the Joint Interagency Taskforce South, we set a record for cocaine interdiction at 240,000 pounds; the best, by far, than we’ve ever done. And one of the reasons we’re doing it so much better now, we’ve learned some lessons over time. Maybe the most important lesson that we’ve learned is the value of interagency and international cooperation. It’s the key to the good work we’re doing now.

We’ve learned the value and learned how to get acute intelligence. And lastly we’ve learned that sorting problems are easier to solve in a low density environment. So it’s not a coincidence for us that three-quarters of that cocaine that was seized this year was seized in the eastern Pacific, most of it thousands of miles from US coastline, some of it as far away as 400-500 miles south and west of the Galapagos Islands.

The hardest place to solve a sorting problem, to interdict terrorists or illegal drugs is in what we call the arrival zone, the closer you get to the ports, because the traffic density increases and the problem becomes very, very difficult to manage. Similarly, the last place in the world that we want to find a weapon of mass destruction is in a US port. By the time that weapon gets to a US port, we’ve got a serious problem.

You can go back to the football analogy; trying to find all your terrorists inside the port would be about the same as allowing the opposing football team to line up on your ten-yard line every time they got the ball. You aren't going to win that way.

What this slide depicts up here is just a picture representation of the Coast Guard’s Maritime Homeland Security Strategy. Just to explain it to you a little bit, the goals are to reduce risk by becoming more aware of possible threats, preventing terrorist events, protecting critical infrastructure, and having the ability to respond rapidly to a terrorist event or to respond in aid and recovery operations, if needed.

We developed the required functionality in the yellow boxes by acquiring new authorities, expanded capabilities, adequate capacity and key partnerships. Viewed this way, our strategy lays out a defense that is layered in two ways -- it’s layered geographic defense in depth to intercept the enemy as far offshore as possible, but it also employs multiple security regimes, each of which reduces risk.

This slide identifies those authorities, capabilities, partnerships that we’ve acquired or in the process of acquiring to implement our strategy, and let me just talk about a few. The first and probably the most important is enhancing maritime domain awareness. It’s the key to defense in depth, and it requires a long list of tools, some of which are still undefined, others are listed under the MDA column that you see in the slide up there. At the end of the day, what we need to do is have knowledge about every vessel that’s inbound to the US or operating in US waters, including the cargo on board, the crews on board, and the passengers on board. Admiral Clark, Chief Naval Operations, once called this the need for a maritime NORAD, and I think that’s a pretty reasonable characterization.

First and foremost, it requires improved intelligence. I'm going to talk about the Coast Guard here, but when I say improved intelligence, what I'm really talking about is improved intelligence across the board and improved intelligence and information sharing across the board. But some of the things that we’ve done, it was mentioned that we’ve become formal members of the Intelligence Community. We’ve stood up to Maritime Intelligence Fusion Centers, one on each Coast, and we’ve more than tripled the number of Coast Guard people involved in information collection and analysis. So we’re making a big investment in intelligence.

Second is the build out of an MDA surveillance system. I'm happy to tell you that this is the result-- not the result, but an ongoing effort, joint effort between the Department of Defense and the Department of Homeland Security, chaired by Assistant Secretary McHale, who I understand you heard this morning, and Admiral Loy, Deputy Secretary, Department of Homeland Security, who, if you're hear tonight, you’ll hear Admiral Loy tonight. We’re well on our way to developing a plan and an architecture that’s going to provide us that awareness that we need. And, oh, by the way, I know there are similar efforts ongoing in NORTHCOM, and we’re linked at the hip with those efforts.

Some MDA efforts already exist, some elements of MDA. An early one and an easy one was what we call a 96-hour advance notice of arrival. Previously, every foreign vessel coming to a US port had to tell us 24 hours in advance; post-9/11 we increased that to 96 hours to give us the time to run those crew lists, passenger lists and cargo lists through various databases so that we could prioritize ships for boarding or interdiction.

Vessel traffic systems are available and are being expanded in 11 of our largest ports. Right along, we’ve been getting information from aircraft and ship sighting reports.

This is still part of MDA, but I talked a little bit about problems with equipment, ships and airplanes. Part of this is the implementation of new-- can we back up here?

Another part is the implementation of new technology such as automatic information systems. This is a requirement for all ships, or will be a requirement for all ships coming to the US and involved in international trade over 300 gross tons. It’s an expansion of an existing vessel monitoring system employed to track fishing vessels as well, so vessels can be identified and tracked.

Now, one problem with this system as it currently exists is that it’s a fairly short-range system. We were able to get this system up and running within international agreements, and w were able to do it quickly, because we simply accelerated a requirement that was supposed to come on line in ’08, but the requirement as it then existed was for a relatively short-range system. We’re now pressing for what we call a long-range system which would essentially give us the ability to track vessels worldwide.

This slide is a little bit of an advertisement for our Deep Water project. I mentioned earlier about the inadequacies in terms of equipment and ships and aircraft, but it also shows functions that are required to sort and respond to an unidentified contact in much the same way we interdict illegal drug smugglers and NORAD response to unidentified aircraft.

Now in this slide you can see some of the capabilities planned for our new Deep Water cutters and aircraft that will allow us to accomplish those tasks much more efficiently and much more effectively.

Now, another way to reduce risk or to add to security layers is to implement domestic and international security regimes. This increases our confidence that a vessel could unknowingly transport a weapon of mass destruction or the vessel itself could be used as a weapon of mass destruction. Let me just give you some examples of things ongoing within the Coast Guard and the Department of Homeland Security.

First of all, Customs Container Security Initiative will help ensure that what’s actually loaded into containers overseas will be what the manifest says. The implementation of the International Ship and Port Facility Security Code requires all ships and overseas port facilities to have security plans. It requires them to have security officers and crews and operators to be trained, and it requires them to exercise. Coast Guard security teams, as I speak, are involved in the assessment of the security of overseas ports to ensure they meet the standards.

Now, the Maritime Transportation Security Act of 2002 is the domestic equivalent and has similar requirements for all US vessels and ports. Additionally, it requires the development of area security plans and the stand up of area and port security committees so that it’s not just the Coast Guard looking at what’s required and what’s needed, but it’s also private industry, state and local governments and port authorities doing this work jointly and together.

Lastly, or finally, operational presence increases our MDA capability. If you don’t have ships and aircraft in various locations on station, then you lack an ability to respond to a target once you find an illegitimate target that you want to intercept. So it’s all part of the mix.

Other new capabilities for the Coast Guard, we mentioned we have new maritime safety and security teams. These are teams that are available seven by 24, 13 teams stood up now, to be dispatched for boarding either by boat or by helicopter to vessels of interest to the Coast Guard. These teams are equipped with state-of-the-art sensors. They also have K9 explosive detection dogs and an underwater capability.

We’re now using use of force from helicopters for homeland security. This is a capability we developed for counternarcotics. We now have clearance and have used this capability for homeland security operations.

We have ship riders that board high interest ships at the sea buoy to do initial inspections and to ensure the ship is under the control of the people who are supposed to be controlling it, and that the vessel is not interdicted or hijacked on the way to port.

We also employ a complex boarding matrix, which helps us identify those ships which are the highest priority for boarding.

And maybe one of the most important aspects of our strategy, this filling out, is just to increase the capacity of the Coast Guard. We’ve increased the size of our force by about 12% over the last three years, added hundreds of boats and new capabilities.

I'm getting the hook sign here, so why don’t I stop here and leave some time for questions. Thanks. [Applause]

Questions and Answers

JIM DOWNEY: Jim Downey, Army War College. I guess, General Obering, you're going to get a lot of the questions. I have one regarding missile defense as well, and I guess, Admiral Cross, you might want to jump in. Given the amount of money we've spent over the years for missile defense, and recognizing both the limitations that it has and some thought about the risk and threat that we might face with regard to that, especially in comparison to threats that may come in from sea-based containers, et cetera, I wonder if we’re having a proper balance in our spending in a constrained environment.

PETER LARKINS: My name is Peter Larkins, and I guess my question is for Admiral Cross. When we talk about system-of-system interoperability when it comes to being part of common networks or even non-common networks, how mature is that interoperability, system-of-system interoperability, how mature is that, I guess, within the area of maritime defense?

ADMIRAL CROSS: The person who asked the question gave me an opening to talk a little bit about the funding. What struck me when you asked the question was, it doesn’t really matter what any of us up here think, because it’s decided way above our pay grade, and I thought General Obering did a nice job of defending his program.

I think the real issue here, what we’re talking about are delivery methods. I think most of the arguments that he used could be used for a WMD brought into the country via maritime means or across land borders, for that matter. So the real issue is to decide what delivery method poses the greatest threat. I guess one could probably argue with some effect now that the people who we’re at war with don’t currently have that capability, unless you want to count Iran perhaps.

So why don’t I just leave it there? I think those kind of arguments are made in different venues, and we all defend our programs as best we can. I might argue that the current distribution of funds isn't exactly what I'd like to see, and that we could do a whole lot of really neat things in the Coast Guard for some rounding errors in the missile defense program. [Laughter] But I won’t. [Laughter]

Peter Larkin asked a question about how mature is the system-of-systems in the maritime. I don’t really feel qualified to talk about the Navy, so let me talk about the Coast Guard and the relationship between the Navy and the Coast Guard. Our Deep Water program that I talked about just briefly is our system-of-systems. So for the most part, it’s either under construction, on the drawing board, or will be on the drawing board some time in the future. So it’s not very mature.

That said, our ability, our communications capabilities and our interoperability with the Navy i s probably better than it’s ever been, at least since World War II when neither one of us were all that capable compared to today. So I think the answer, if you're going to give us a grade from A to F in terms of system-of-systems capabilities, we’re probably C-/ D+ somewhere. We’re not where we want to be or where we need to be.

Lou Holtz said that once, his first year at Notre Dame. Somebody asked him why they weren't in the top ten yet and his response to that was, “Well, we’re not where we want to be, we’re not where we’re supposed to be, but thank God we’re not where we used to be.” And maybe that’s how I would answer your question.