Pubdate: Sun, 18 Nov 2001
Source: St. Louis Post-Dispatch (MO)
Copyright: 2001 St. Louis Post-Dispatch
Contact:  http://home.post-dispatch.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/418
Author: Bill Lambrecht
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/find?203 (Terrorism)

COAST GUARD ISN'T SHIPSHAPE FOR NEW ANTI-TERROR MISSION

WASHINGTON - It was 2 a.m. on Dec. 29, 1997, when the Coast Guard 
station in Charleston, S.C., received urgent calls on a VHF radio. 
But there was static and no way of knowing the location of the 
distress.

After daybreak, a 34-foot sailboat, Morning Dew, was found wrecked on 
a jetty at the entrance to Charleston's harbor. Three teen-age boys 
were floating in the water, dead. The body of the boat's captain, the 
father of two of the boys, washed up three weeks later.

A National Transportation Safety Board investigation placed part of 
the blame on the Coast Guard's outdated radios, which had no ability 
to instantly replay messages or to fix the position of callers 
needing help. Investigators added this unsettling note: Stations 
around the country could have similar problems as a result of old 
equipment.

The deaths have become a reference point in assessing Coast Guard 
capabilities now that it has been thrust into a challenging new 
mission: homeland security. Like many government agencies since Sept. 
11, the Coast Guard is redefining its purpose in ways that will 
affect the lives of millions of Americans.

But many in the Coast Guard worry that from ship to shore, 
capabilities don't match the urgent new mission of protecting the 
nation's coastlines, waterways and ports from terrorist attack.

Four years after the Charleston incident, only stopgap improvements 
have been made at a handful of stations. A Coast Guard official 
described the upgrades as "getting us into the late 1970s or early 
1980s rather than the 21st century."

The communications shortcomings are part of larger problems: The 
chronically underfunded Coast Guard operates aging, oceangoing ships 
that are embarrassing when stacked up to fleets around the world.

Of the 41 nations that have coast guards or their equivalent, the 
U.S. Coast Guard has the 39th-oldest fleet, some ships a half-century 
old. Only Mexico and the Philippines operate older vessels.

Coast Guard Commandant James Loy met recently with Transportation 
Secretary Norman Mineta to talk about the guard's homeland security 
mission and how to pay for it.

The Coast Guard is part of the Transportation Department, not the 
Department of Defense - which leaves it competing in Congress with 
roads and bridges for money.

"Left-Full Rudder, Guys"

Referring to what the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and 
the Pentagon have meant for the Coast Guard, Loy used this word: 
"pivotal."

On Sept. 11, with the New York disaster still unfolding, Loy dialed 
Mineta to get the go-ahead to call up Coast Guard reservists and 
order a massive shift in operations.

"Minutes after the first plane hit the tower, I said 'left-full 
rudder, guys. Go to port security'," Loy recalled during an interview.

Instantly, the mission of the Coast Guard shifted to the home front 
and away from many of its principal modern duties: tracking 
waterborne drug caches in the Caribbean, preventing aliens from 
reaching U.S. shores and protecting the nation's fishing grounds.

Instead of cocaine and cod, the Coast Guard trained its focus on the 
security of the nation's 361 ports, St. Louis among them.

Rather than hunting for Cubans attempting passage to Florida, the 
Coast Guard has been keeping watch over waterfront nuclear plants and 
vital facilities and keeping a wary eye on arriving ships.

In Boston, a cutter blocked the entry of a tanker full of liquid 
natural gas because of local worries about sabotage. In Florida, 
another vessel escorted a cruise ship to sea after a threat was 
received.

In California, armed sea marshals from the Coast Guard have begun 
boarding ships entering harbors in San Francisco and San Diego, a 
program likely to spread to other harbors.

Foreign vessels now must report to the Coast Guard four days before 
arriving in the United States rather than one day. The added time 
lets the Coast Guard run checks on cargo and crew lists.

Earlier this month, the Coast Guard borrowed five high-performance 
and heavily-armed vessels from the Navy. The 170-foot-long, 
four-propeller boats, which can travel at an uncommon 50 mph on the 
water, are equipped with grenade launchers and even the capacity to 
fire missiles.

Loy remarked that the Coast Guard's new vigilance is extending far 
inland, even to the gambling boats moored along the Mississippi 
River. The 35,000-member guard has bolstered itself by calling up 
2,700 reservists, including 52 from Illinois and 31 from Missouri as 
of early this month. The cost to the Coast Guard of the reserves 
alone is over $1 million a day.

Shortly, the Coast Guard may move to what is being called maritime 
security strike forces - teams deployed on freighters and tankers 
that raise suspicions by their history or origin or for other 
reasons. Coast Guardsmen would board these ships, keeping watch over 
machinery and cargo while yet another team member travels aboard 
pilot boats that accompany the arriving ships.

The Coast Guard's full-throttle shift to port security shows no signs 
of slowing, which is raising questions about duties abandoned. Since 
Sept. 11, the Coast Guard has moved as many as three-fourths of most 
of its anti-drug trafficking cutters out of the Caribbean and back to 
the mainland to protect ports.

The response from Asa Hutchinson, the administrator of the Drug 
Enforcement Administration, illustrates the vexing nature of 
decisions about homeland security pending in Washington.

"I understand the nature of it. We've got to go after terrorism 
because we lost 6,000 lives and the potential of more lives down the 
road. But when drugs take 50,000 lives every year, you've got to go 
after that as well," he said.

Blaming Congress

A year ago, a rogue wave slammed into the 57-year-old Coast Guard 
cutter Sedge in the Bering Sea, pouring water through a vent, 
shorting out the electrical system and starting a fire.

No injuries were reported, but the vessel drifted helplessly for two 
hours in the trough of a storm.

A similar problem had occurred nearby a few weeks before with another 
cutter, the 58-year-old Storis, dumping nine sailors into the sea 
while the cutter chased a vessel that had illegally entered U.S. 
waters.

Neither harrowing incident would have occurred had the Coast Guard 
been operating the modern vessels that it has sought for years. Next 
spring, if all goes well, the Coast Guard intends to award a contract 
to begin building new cutters and phasing out the old ones.

But the pace of replacing the boats and other equipment remains 
uncertain, even with the Coast Guard's new homeland security duties.

Retired Adm. Ed Gilbert, who was the Coast Guard's chief budget 
officer among his other duties, recalled losing out perennially to 
highway projects, Amtrak and airports in the annual battle for 
Transportation Department money. He blames Congress.

"When was the last time a politician didn't get re-elected because 
the Coast Guard didn't get adequately funded?" he asked, alluding to 
the appeal of constituent-friendly road projects.

Another former Coast Guard official observed, "Part of the problem is 
that we have traditionally been too nice to play the games they play 
in Washington. Another part is that there are elements in the Coast 
Guard that insist on doing things like they were done in the 1930s."

For seven of the last 10 years, the Coast Guard has been forced to 
return hat-in-hand to Congress seeking supplemental appropriations to 
its roughly $5 billion budget. This year was shaping up as the same: 
The administration of President George W. Bush requested funding that 
amounted to a 10 percent cut in days at sea by ships, Coast Guard 
officials told Congress.

That shortage may be remedied by a proposed $250 million add-on at 
the insistence of Sens. John Kerry, D-Mass., and Olympia Snowe, 
R-Maine. But anything above $54 million, the present add-on for the 
Coast Guard in the budget resolution, is uncertain.

As is additional money to cover all the new duties of homeland 
security. Kerry and Snowe sent the White House a letter recently 
asking the administration to remember the Coast Guard when splitting 
up the $20 billion approved by Congress for the war on terrorism. But 
the White House hasn't said what it will do.

Meanwhile, the Coast Guard is left to redefine a future that will 
have a lot to do with how closely the United States intends to watch 
its waters and ports. As with many homeland threats, the potential 
for waterborne terrorism is almost limitless.

The United States has 95,000 miles of coastline. Billions of dollars 
of goods enter by water each year - including 11 million shipping 
containers, of which only 1 percent have been examined up to now.

Draconian security conflicts with what the United States has 
championed: global commerce and ever-freer trade. In other words, 
since Sept. 11, the government has tightened borders that it has 
worked aggressively to loosen.

Any major change in philosophy would alter both what the United 
States stands for and how the Coast Guard has operated for much of 
the time since it was established as the Revenue Cutter Service more 
than 200 years ago.

Loy is searching for what he calls "the new normal." Whatever level 
of security that entails and however much new equipment it includes, 
the Coast Guard will operate with a vastly heightened awareness.

"We try to prevent things from happening that are bad, but if they 
do, we deal with the consequences," he said.
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MAP posted-by: Josh