Even as most Americans were just learning of the terrorist attacks on the Pentagon and World Trade Center, the men and women of the U.S. Coast Guard already were springing into action, conducting rescue operations and protecting our ports and waterways infrastructure from further attack.
The public has grown accustomed to the Coast Guard's responsiveness and heroism—perhaps even taking such qualities for granted—but the breadth of the service's response highlights the Coast Guard's importance to the nation and its enduring relevance in homeland security.
Coast Guard Actions
On 10 September, the Coast Guard went about its normally busy day, saving lives, interdicting narcotics, stopping undocumented migrants, enforcing fisheries, setting and maintaining navigation aids, and generally promoting safety and facilitating commerce through our busy ports, nationwide. Early on 11 September, all of those missions became secondary to homeland security. Despite the lack of a national homeland security strategy, the Coast Guard sprang into action, doing whatever needed to be done.
Initial Response. Immediately, Coast Guard Air Stations at Cape Cod and Atlantic City launched four helicopters to support local officials with medical evacuations. Additional helicopters and fixed-wing aircraft were placed on immediate standby. The Coast Guard dispatched a mobile command, control, and communication van to the New York area from Elizabeth City, North Carolina, and cutters as large as the 270-foot Tahoma (WMEC-908) and as small as 110-foot Island-class patrol boats sped toward the scene to defend New York harbor and facilitate communications.
Other cutters and aircraft were diverted to provide a greater presence in coastal waters—to deter, detect, and defend against offshore maritime threats. The Coast Guard Captain of the Port for New Jersey/New York closed the waterways to all commercial and recreational vessel traffic and coordinated the orderly evacuation of citizens from Manhattan. Near Washington, D.C., additional craft patrolled in the Potomac River and Chesapeake Bay. Force protection for U.S. Navy ships and bases was of special concern. The Coast Guard exercised its legal authority to establish and enforce naval protection zones (security zones) around such potential terrorist targets.
Sustained Operations. Recognizing that other ports around the nation were vulnerable to terrorist attack, the Coast Guard quickly moved to protect them, thereby preventing further damage to the U.S. economy. More than 90% of our noncontiguous international trade is conducted by water, and our seaports are vital to the deployment of military forces for defense and for retaliatory strikes as well. Coast Guard port security units (PSUs), recently used for force protection of naval assets overseas, were pressed into action in U.S. ports. In fact, four of the Coast Guard's six PSUs presently safeguard New York, Boston, Seattle, and Los Angeles/Long Beach.
The Coast Guard further tightened port security by boarding inbound vessels. As of this writing, more than 2,300 ships have been boarded since 11 September. In some cases, the Coast Guard had to deny entry for vessels, such as liquefied natural gas tankers, whose presence in a harbor might invite terrorist action. Because cruise ships present another potential terrorist target, the Coast Guard has been escorting these huge ships into and out of port. Often, armed Coast Guard boarding team members provide security on the bridge and in engine spaces, and a 100-yard security zone is enforced as the ships transit U.S. harbors. Similarly, large oil tankers are escorted into and out of Valdez, Alaska. Overall, this has been the largest port security operation since World War II.
Regulatory steps also have been taken. New regulations quickly were put into effect requiring inbound ships to provide 96-hour advance notice (the old requirement was 24-hours). In October, the Coast Guard will activate its new National Vessel Movement Center, which will streamline the notification process and give the Coast Guard and other U.S. law enforcement agencies more time to review crew, passenger, and cargo manifests to identify vessels of high interest.
Coast Guard operations have not been limited to traditional activities. In fact, highly trained agents from the Coast Guard's Investigative Service deployed as sky marshals to support the FAA. Similarly, Coast Guard sea marshals boarded and rode inbound-commercial ships to enhance their safety and security during transits of San Francisco Bay. More than 2,700 Coast Guard reservists have been called into action to further support maritime security operations and to augment Coast Guard station personnel to minimize the impact on other critical missions, such as search and rescue.
Coast Guard Role in Homeland Security
With the establishment of the Office of Homeland Security, under Tom Ridge, comes an expectation of a national strategy for homeland security. That strategy undoubtedly will examine vulnerabilities and seek to protect the American people and all critical U.S. infrastructure, including the nation's transportation systems, from future attack.
Our maritime transportation infrastructure is essential to both our economic well-being and our ability to defend ourselves or strike back at aggressors—and it is vulnerable to attack. Maritime homeland security (MHLS), then, must be a central element of the national strategy, and the Coast Guard should play a prominent role in it. In fact, the Coast Guard is ideally positioned to take the lead role in maritime homeland security, in large part because of its status as both a military service and a civil law enforcement agency.
Maritime Domain Awareness. Perhaps one of the most vexing challenges for the new Office of Homeland Security is the great range of involved civil and military agencies, and the need to share and use information effectively among them—to allow agencies to put intelligence pieces together for timely analysis to get a more comprehensive awareness of the larger puzzle.
The Coast Guard has access to both military and law enforcement intelligence databases and to other maritime data (e.g., sensor data). That data can be integrated, fused, analyzed, and disseminated to create maritime domain awareness, which would provide an all-source operational picture of everything we collectively know about the vessels, cargo, and people headed for our shores. In fact, the Coast Guard had taken steps to increase our awareness even before the September attacks. Through its Coast Watch program, the Coast Guard's Intelligence Coordination Center worked closely with the Office of Naval Intelligence to provide some tracking and monitoring capability for specific vessels of high interest. In the wake of the recent attacks, a national maritime intelligence fusion center may be needed; an expanded, interagency version of the existing Coast Guard center would be a natural fit.
Resources and Law Enforcement Authority. The Coast Guard also has the appropriate (albeit insufficient) resources—ships, boats, aircraft, shore stations, and command-and-control infrastructure—for dealing with a maritime threat. The associated capabilities complement those of the Navy, which also plays a key role in maritime homeland security. Coupled with threat awareness and the Coast Guard's broad law enforcement authority, which extends well beyond our territorial seas, such Coast Guard and Navy capabilities enable interdiction of threats far out at sea, where we prefer interdictions take place.
Interagency Relationships. Owing largely to its peacetime missions, the Coast Guard already has established cooperative working relationships with most homeland security agencies, such as U.S. Customs Service, Immigration and Naturalization Service and the Border Patrol, FBI, Federal Emergency Management Agency, DoD (especially the Navy), and various federal, state, and local port authorities, as well as the Departments of State, Justice, Commerce, and Transportation. In some cases, there are existing memoranda of agreement; in other cases, interagency command centers, such as Joint Interagency Task Force East and West, facilitate interagency cooperation. Where necessary, real time interagency coordination is achieved via conference calls. These established relationships and procedures for real-time interagency coordination facilitated the Coast Guard's timely response on 11 September.
Semper Paratus and the New Normalcy
The Coast Guard always has taken great pride in its motto, Semper Paratus, "Always Ready." On 11 September, the nation's smallest armed service proved itself ready even for the unexpected and unthinkable.
Such responsiveness and agility come at a cost, however. Coast Guard ships, aircraft, and personnel now focused on maritime homeland security were diverted from other important missions, including drug and migrant interdiction, which are themselves critical to national security. In fact, ignoring the drug and migrant threats would disregard the fact that coalitions often exist between terrorists and insurgencies and criminal organizations. The Coast Guard eventually must return to pre-September levels of maritime law enforcement operations.
Consequently, the Coast Guard now is working hard to define what Coast Guard Commandant Admiral James Loy calls "the New Normalcy"—the new normal state of affairs for the Coast Guard and maritime security. For an agency with so many diverse missions and so few resources, it will be a challenge to determine the correct level of effort for each activity. Long overdue, the nation's smallest armed service must realize some organizational growth will be necessary.
Captain Conroy retired from the Coast Guard after 27 years of service. He is currently technical director at Anteon Corporation in Arlington, Virginia.