As the U.S. Coast Guard grapples with new homeland-security responsibilities
acquired since September 11, officials are accepting the fact that
"normalcy" is not in the cards in the foreseeable future.
Top Coast Guard officials, however, warned that these new duties
are draining resources from counter-narcotics operations.
"This is hardly the time to back away from U.S. commitments
to the drug war," said Adm. James M. Loy, commandant of the
Coast Guard. The drug profits, he said, are "used to finance
terrorist operations."
In a speech to the National Defense Industrial Association’s
expeditionary warfare conference, Loy urged U.S. leaders in the
campaign against terrorist foes to learn a few lessons from the
so-called war on drugs.
The most important lesson, he said, is to avoid the "sinful
turf wars" that have hampered interagency coordination in counter-narcotics
efforts.
Loy said that homeland-security czar Tom Ridge should "define
counter-narcotics requirements and let the intelligence community
know" what those needs are specifically.
He characterized the U.S. prosecution of the drug war as an utter
failure. "I hated the phrase ‘drug war,’ because
we never won," said Loy. "For less than half of 1 percent
of the U.S. Gross Domestic Product, we allow 52,000 deaths, $120
billion of social destruction."
One bit of good news, he said, is that the United States has half
the number of cocaine users that it had 10 years ago. Nevertheless,
this nation consumes about 300 metric tons of cocaine a year, Loy
said.
Capt. Wayne Buchanan, Coast Guard chief of defense operations,
said that counter-drug operations have been cut back since September
11. "When we aren’t patrolling, drugs are flowing more
freely, [and] terrorist coffers are being filled," he said
at the conference.
The challenge for the Coast Guard, he said, is to "figure
out what normalcy is like."
After September 11, Loy said, "we simply stopped doing those
other missions — fisheries enforcements, alien migration patrols,
etc. — to shift all our resources to port security. We are
finding gradually what the new normalcy is."
The Coast Guard is reviewing its Deepwater modernization program
to make sure it reflects the current situation of heightened security
in the United States, he said. Deepwater is a $12-$15 billion program
that, over the next 20 years, will replace the Coast Guard’s
aging ships and aircraft with a networked fleet of high-tech platforms
and sensors.
The service plans to award a contract next spring or summer, said
Loy. Three industry teams, led by Lockheed Martin, Boeing and Science
Applications International Corp., are competing for the award.
Last month, Loy said he opposed congressional initiatives to merge
the Coast Guard with the Customs Service, the Border Patrol and
the Immigration and Naturalization Service into a National Border
Security Agency headed by Ridge. "In the middle of a crisis
it’s probably about the worst time you can go through a reorganization
and upheaval," he told a conference sponsored by the Institute
of Foreign Policy Analysis.