FEATURE ARTICLE

June 2006

Cooperation key to expanding Coast Guard’s reach

By Stew Magnuson

BOSTON — Cmdr. Thomas Miller, chief of the prevention department at the Coast Guard’s Boston sector, sits in a corner office with a view of the city and the port.

To his right is the North End district, where tourists dine in Italian eateries and stop to see the church where lanterns signaled Paul Revere to begin his famous midnight ride.

To his left, container ships and liquefied natural gas tankers ply the harbor. They cruise past skyscrapers and million dollar condominiums that line the water’s edge.

Protecting the nation’s ports from a terrorist attack has been a priority for the Department of Homeland Security since 9/11. The “home” task largely falls to the Coast Guard and Customs and Border Protection, while the Navy handles the “away game.”

“Information flow and interagency cooperation and interoperability are really starting to come together,” Miller says. “It’s not to say that we’re there, but we’re moving down the right path.”

Gathering information on who and what is approaching U.S. waters — also known as maritime domain awareness — is key to the overall goal of protecting the United States, Department of Homeland Security leaders have said. Officials want to know with certainty what ships are coming, and who and what is aboard. DHS has installed more than 670 radiation detection monitors at its ports of entry, but as Boston harbor illustrates, if a weapon of mass destruction enters a densely populated area, it may already be too late.

Boston’s port is the oldest operating continually in the Western Hemisphere. It is home to the Conley Terminal, which handles 1.5 million tons of containerized cargo annually, a fishing fleet, and a growing cruise ship industry, which sees about 100 port calls per year. Logan International Airport, across the channel from the downtown skyline, sits on the water’s edge. Passing by each day within sight of the skyscrapers are container ships and oil and liquefied natural gas tankers.

In Washington, policy makers have two initiatives underway to further expand the gathering of intelligence on ships as they make their way to ports. The national plan to achieve maritime awareness calls for an inter-agency group to write a concept of operations to determine how to best identify threats as early and distant from U.S. shores as possible.

Rear Adm. Joseph Nimmich, Coast Guard assistant commandant for policy and planning, who serves on that group, says that simply finding and tracking vessels is relatively easy.

“It’s really what’s on that vessel [and] who’s on that vessel. The lessons of 9/11 have taught us that the vessel itself may become a weapon depending on who is on board,” he says at a Navy League conference.

The concept of operations should be finished by the end of this summer, Nimmich says. When that is completed, a second group will look at an investment strategy. However, the groups’ work will not come to fruition until the 2009 budget process, when Congress will decide what parts of the investment strategy to fund, Nimmich adds.

In the near term, the Defense Department’s Northern Command and the Coast Guard are organizing a maritime domain awareness “community of interest.”

Northcom has formed several such communities to tackle the long-standing problem of overcoming barriers to network-centric communications, which prevent different agencies or computer systems from sharing information. For ports, the problem may be even more acute. In Boston, the Coast Guard, CBP, along with city, state and port authority police all patrol the harbor.

Navy Rear Adm. Nancy Brown, Northern Command director of architectures and integration, says the community will concentrate on existing technologies to achieve its goals of making Web-based data easily available to all interested parties.

The automatic identification system (AIS) will be the first data collection system to be tested. AIS is a beacon system administered by the Coast Guard that requires all commercial ships 65 feet or longer to broadcast information such as speed, rate of turn, heading, and longitude and latitude every three seconds. It has been described as “air traffic control” for the seas. The vessel’s destination, call number, estimated time of arrival at port and other data are broadcast every six minutes.

AIS was chosen because the system is relatively new, and the data already uniform, Brown says at the conference. AIS began operations Dec. 31, 2004.

“Everybody is collecting information, but how can we post it in a form that anybody who needs it can pull it, can view it and understand it in the same way?” Brown says.

The community of interest hopes to have a Web-based system up and running by September or October. Cargo, crew and passenger data collection will be added later, she says.

The Navy has a “superb capability to track and find vessels,” Nimmich says. But it doesn’t have the authority or capability to know what’s on the boat.

“There are tremendous amounts of open source, self-reported information out there that we all need to have access to,” Nimmich adds.

In Boston, Miller says the traditional barriers to inter-agency communication are coming down.

A local area maritime security committee was formed and meets about four times per year. Its representatives include officials from the Coast Guard, CBP, city and state police, Boston’s homeland security department, and members of the port industry.

Meanwhile, the Coast Guard and CBP are leveraging each other’s unique capabilities, while maintaining their traditional roles, Miller says. The Coast Guard maintains an eye on boat safety and hazardous materials aboard ships to prevent accidents or someone from using chemicals as an improvised weapon of mass destruction. CBP specializes in halting contraband, by analyzing cargo manifests to look for anomalies that may require boarding a vessel before it reaches port. The two agencies tap into each others’ databases, and carry out joint boardings at sea, Miller says.

Commercial vessels are currently required to transmit their manifests, crew lists and other specifications 96 hours prior to arrival. The only exceptions are ships departing from nearby Canadian ports, which must do so 24 hours in advance.

Improving the ability to analyze manifests and gather intelligence on vessels will be key to expanding maritime domain awareness, Coast Guard officials say at the conference.

Miller points to drug interdiction as one threat where intelligence gathering and inter-agency cooperation can make a difference. Smugglers have used powerful magnets to attach contraband underneath ships originating out of South American ports. These so-called “parasitic devices” are presumably employed without the knowledge of the captain. Boats arriving from ports with such a history are red flagged. State police dive teams are called in to inspect the hulls.

While upgraded databases, communication systems and architectures such as AIS expand maritime domain awareness, personal contacts have been one of the most visible improvements since 9/11, Miller says. State, local and federal agencies now know whom to call, and what capabilities their counterparts can provide.

“The relationships here in Boston are very good. And I think you could go to any port in the [United States] and find things moving along that track, with a few exceptions here and there,” Miller says.

Back To Top