With 361 ports to secure, 50,000 foreign cargo vessels entering the United States every year, and millions of small craft plying coastal waters, the Coast Guard needs a better way to track vessels and collect maritime intelligence.
Since the 11 September attacks, the Coast Guard has focused its resources on container security, high-interest vessels, and the use of "Sea Marshalling" to prevent hijackings. As a result, the Coast Guard's approach to maritime domain awareness (MDA) has shifted from trying to determine who and what exists in America's littoral areas to hypothesizing about the myriad apocalyptic scenarios terrorists might dream up. Small boat, migrant, counterdrug, and search-and-rescue issues cannot be pushed aside while the service hemorrhages massive amounts of resources searching for a Trojan horse. The MDA initiative needs an all-inclusive vessel tracking system, a national vessel database, and an offensive, rather than defensive, posture that relies on verification of maritime intelligence over the "Boy Scout's honor" method of vessel self-reporting.
Maritime History Lessons
Throughout history, small boats have been consistently employed with great effect because they are readily available, appear nonthreatening, and provide ample destructive capability when properly armed. During a three-year period in World War II, the Italian Navy's 10th Light Flotilla destroyed more than 30 allied ships in the most impenetrable harbors in the world using small surface vessels and swimmer incursions. In the early morning hours of 26 March 1941, six men in small boats laden with explosives sank the cruiser HMS York, two large tankers, and a cargo ship.1
Fifty-nine years later, on 3 January 2000, the USS The Sullivans (DDG-68) sailed from the port of Aden in Yemen never knowing an al Qaeda small boat filled with explosives had sunk while attempting to attack her. The terrorist cell had established a local base of operations in Aden and rented another house for surveillance of ships passing Steamer Point to better learn the schedules and procedures of U.S. warships.
Nine months later, a small boat packed with more than 500 pounds of explosives met its target, damaging the USS Cole (DDG-67) as she refueled at Aden and killing 17 sailors on board. Three months later, Osama bin Laden boasted, "A destroyer, even the brave might fear. It inspires horror in the harbor and the open sea. She goes into the waves flanked by arrogance, haughtiness, and fake might. To her doom she progresses slowly, clothed in a huge illusion. Awaiting her is a dingy bobbing in the waves."2
Since the attack on the Cole, terrorists have planned similar operations in both Singapore and the Strait of Gibraltar, where the majority of the industrialized world's petroleum must transit. These attacks were aborted when their plans were discovered. Another suicide boat attacked the French tanker Limburg off the coast of Yemen on 6 October 2002, killing one crewmember, disabling the vessel, and spilling of 90,000 barrels of oil.
Most recently, three small dhows laden with explosives disabled the Al-Basra Oil Terminal in Iraq, killing three U.S. servicemen, including one Coast Guardsman, wounding five other Americans, and causing an estimated $28 million in lost exports.3 It is clear terrorists have a refined standard operating procedure for attacking military vessels and merchant ships with small boats.4 Their strategy has shifted from hijackings to simply identifying a target, buying and even registering a small boat, and using this boat as an expeditious and effective weapon. Terrorists do not even need to be professional mariners with blue-water sailing experience to be successful.
Terrorists attack vulnerabilities and repeat what works. To date, they have encountered no effective resistance to their small boat operations and thus will continue to use this attack method where it has proved successful. Guarding against such a maritime Trojan horse is impossible.
Homeland Implications
Stephen Flynn, an expert on container and port security, posed the question, What if an attack such as the one against the Cole took place at the Southern California port of Long Beach? Twenty-five percent of all crude oil consumed by California is offloaded on a single pier in Long Beach. Given that California refineries are operating at full capacity, an interruption in the flow of oil arriving by sea could shut down the state's economy in a matter of days, with unthinkable economic and political consequences.
On the Great Lakes alone there are more than 4 million registered small boats.5 Flynn offered as a solution to identifying threats among an overwhelming number of small boats the concept of anomaly detection—by observing normal operations in a given area, the Coast Guard can detect irregular or suspicious boating activities and then direct assets to investigate.6
Sea marshals currently embark on high-interest vessels to secure the bridge, engine spaces, and auxiliary steering functions from hostile takeover. They also assume responsibility for all ship functions and up to 6,600 unsecured containers.7 But more than 50,000 foreign cargo ships arrive in the United States each year. The Coast Guard never will be able to inspect all of them,8 so to gather information, the United States has relied on a 96-hour "Boy Scout's honor" approach under which captains report their crew, cargo, and other pertinent arrival information.
The sea marshal program relies on vessel selfreported intelligence. Imagine if airport security simply asked each passenger if he or she had any weapons, explosives, or intent to cause harm without screening anyone. Essentially, the Coast Guard is using trust to try to fill the void created by a nonexistent MDA capability. The Container security Initiative is beginning to take effect to screen containers in their ports of origin. However, spot-checking suspicious containers leaves a large margin for error.
An MDA Surveillance System
The Coast Guard has limited resources. Smaller than the New York City police department, it has no choice but to pick and choose which areas of the maritime domain to further investigate. The Maritime Domain Awareness Initiative needs to approach the problem with two interoperable systems. To this end, we propose a new approach, the Maritime Domain Awareness Surveillance System (M-DASS). It includes a cellular-based vessel tracking system and an accessible real-time national vessel database.
* The Cellular Tracking System. The current MDA proposal relies on a tracking system for ships above 300 gross tons that should enable the Coast Guard and other ships equipped with the Automated Identification System (AIS) to see another ship's name, course, speed, destination, and cargo. The drawbacks are that the technology costs $5,000-$10,000 for each ship and no foreign flagged vessels are required to use AIS. In addition, AIS lacks security credibility because it still relies on the crew to input all ship data, can be switched on or off onboard a vessel, and has the potential to be transferred to a decoy vessel.9
Further complicating the issue is that the FCC sold the two VHF frequencies AIS must have to work to MariTEL. Even if the frequencies can be secured, the Coast Guard still lacks the technical capabilities to use the signal produced by the AIS and has only five U.S. ports outfitted with the monitoring technology. The Coast Guard hopes by the end of the year to double that number, but that leaves 97% of America's 361 ports unsecured. We could look to the skies for the answer, but maritime communication satellites already are overtaxed, and the tracking technology costs more than the proposed AIS.10
Focusing exclusively on vessels 300 gross tons and above does not address the likeliest method for a catastrophic attack. History and an assessment of al Qaeda's recent strategies teach us that an attack on critical infrastructure or large vessels would come from a small boat, whether as a bomb itself or as a terrorist delivery platform. Currently, there are no means to screen any water-way filled with recreational traffic under the proposed MDA approach. The variables are too many, the manpower too short, and the technology nonexistent.
One solution to this dilemma is cellular technology. The benefit of cellular technology is that it allows a high volume of user channels at every tower. A typical cell phone can communicate on 1,664 or more different channels with a single tower.11 Each cell tower is capable of an extremely high volume of user traffic, so overloading the system is difficult, unlike VHP-based systems such as AIS that use two critical frequencies.12 Digital cellular technology is capable of rapid, low-power, high-volume transmission.13 The downside is range, which is limited by line of sight for a land-based tower.
For protection of our ports and waterways, which all have major existing cellular infrastructure, boats could be fitted with this type of technology, and each cellular transponder would transmit its own identification signal, even in areas of dense boater traffic. This signal is GPS time stamped, as mandated by the FCC for all cell phones, and would allow the Coast Guard to track vessel positions.14 The proposed transponders would be small, low-power, inexpensive, sealed, electronically unalterable devices that could be built into every marine outboard motor, sailing mast, or vessel electronic suite.
In remote littoral areas, the Global Hawk unmanned surveillance vehicle could handle areas lacking land -based coverage.15 With a capable sensor set, it could "ping" the vessel transponders with an initiator signal. The signal activates the transponder, which replies back with its identifier code. Adding to the Global Hawk's value to M-DASS, its altitude allows for a much greater area of coverage than possible with land-based towers. The Global Hawk is linked to satellite-based communications and is able to transmit what it finds to a national database for an update.
* The Maritime Database. The sister component to the cellular technology is a national vessel database that contains real-time data. Each cellular transponder has an assigned number. This allows that vessel to have the owner's name, address, and other relevant operating information stored in a database at the time of registration, allowing for quick access to information upon "pinging" a vessel under way. The system would be "real time" so a vessel's history of boardings, position, and applicable cargo information could be identified or updated on the water.
The need for such a database is real and growing. Consider that a local police department cruiser has a more readily accessible database—to search driver's license and license plate records, for example—than a high-endurance Coast Guard cutter. In a March 2002 article in the New York Times, Joe Brinkley described the technological and structural barriers preventing the Coast Guard from gathering, analyzing, and sharing information as crippling the service's credibility as a homeland defender. For example, the service's computer system and databases are so antiquated they cannot communicate with their counterparts in the Federal Bureau of Investigation or the Immigration and Customs agencies.16
Conclusions
Serious threats to the United States will persist if we do not achieve a higher level of understanding of who and what ply our coastal waters. Counterdrug operations, migrant interdiction, fisheries enforcement, environmental protection, and search and rescue are core missions that stand to benefit immensely from the M-DASS proposal. There are numerous technological, legal, and political challenges—cellular technology might not have enough transmission range, cellular tower contracts will be expensive, and a national vessel registry database will require a phenomenal support infrastructure—however, inaction and tunnel vision will not accomplish the Coast Guard's assignment as a homeland defender. The current focus on containers and cargo ships is unbalanced risk management without some emphasis on the small boat threat. The Coast Guard cannot afford to fail the American public in the maritime realm; the economic and political consequences would be unimaginable.
1 William Schofield, "Frogmen First Battles," (Boston: Broader Publishing, 1987), pp. 79-81.
2 Peter L Bergman, The Holy War, Inc. (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2002), pp. 171, 188-90, 196.
3 Associated Press, " oil Terminal Attack Costs Iraq $28M" [NY Times Online 25 April 2004] [cited 26 April 2004], available at www.nytimes.com/aponline/interntaionalAP-Iraq-Oil-Attack.html.
4 Raymond J. Brown, "Get the Terrorist Threat Right," U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings, January 2003, p. 112.
5 Cdr. Stephen E. Flynn, USCG, "Homeland security Is a Coast Guard Mission," U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings, October 2001; available from http://www.usni.org/ Proceedings/ArticlesOl/PROflynnlO.htm [cited 2 February 2004].
6 Flynn, "Homeland security Is a Coast Guard Mission."
7 Maersk-Sealand Web site; available from http://www.maersksealand.com/ [cited 25 April 2004].
8 "Protecting America's Seaports and securing Cargo Shipments" [posted 5 February 2004]; available from http://www.whitehouse.gov/homeland/index.html; [cited 1 March 2004].
9 Randall Richard, "Coast Guard's Effort to Protect Ports from Terrorists Encounters Obstacles," The Associated Press, 7 February 2004.
10 Richard, "Coast Guard's Efforts."
11 How Stuff Works Web site; available from http://www.howstuffworks.com/cellphone.htm; [cited 13 April 2004].
12 Richard, "Coast Guard's Effort."
13 Richard, "Coast Guard's Effort."
14 Richard, "Coast Guard's Effort."
15 The Eagle Eye HV-911 vertical takeoff-and-landing unmanned aerial vehicle is also applicable in a similar role.
16 Neil D. Ruenzel, "Searching for Relevance," U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings, October 2002, p. 58
Ensigns Lynch and Corbin graduated from the U.S. Coast Guard Academy on 9 19 May 2004. Ensign Lynch is assigned to the USCGC Spencer (WMEC-905), homeported in Boston, and Ensign Corbin to the USCGC Dependable (WMEC-626), homeported in Cape May, New Jersey.