| 16 April 2006 Vulture and Boats The Ancient Mariner has a name, and a rhyme, even if the meter is sometimes as rough as his language. I like the sound of it. I t makes me remember the way the Senior Chief spoke who showed me the ropes out in the Fleet a long time ago. I have coffee with him sometimes, and if the weather is not too unpleasant, we take it out on the plaza at the Navy Memorial. They have benches, and it is nice to sit there looking at the Bronze statue of The Lone Sailor next to his sea bag with his hands buried in his pockets and the collar turned up against the wind. He looks out across a world ocean patterned in the marble and we do too. The Mariner is one of those men you call by his title. “Boats” is what we called the senior Boatswains Mate on the ship, the craft being the man. It is the same with him. Like me, he is retired from the sea, but he likes to keep his hand in. He claims to be "two days older than water and one day older than dirt," but if pressed, he admits that he wasn't born until after World War II. He is as salty as they come, not a bit of the new correct world in him. His language and manner are old school. He was a teen-ager when he joined the Coast Guard and went down to the sea. He was trained by Bos'uns who had fought "the Big One.” They knew the waterfront, and the way they did their training had more in common with the last century than this one. Boats drinks his coffee black, a habit that goes back to when refrigeration was not as reliable as it is today, and the cream was likely to curdle. He claims "ear witness status" on port security operations from the men who did it in a real global war. The Greatest Generation took Port Security seriously. I'm interested in port security. I toyed with it when the Russian merchant ships were following the ballistic missile subs out to sea in the Puget Sound, ducking over to the Canadian side to complicate the tracing problem. When I took a harbor cruise in Boston a few years ago, I looked at the big liquefied natural gas terminal in the middle of the inner harbor and wondered at the destruction that would ensue if someone blew it up. The security gospel according to the Mariner is based on the one devised to protect the homeland when U-Boats lurked off the approaches to our harbors. The fires from the torpedoed ships lit the sky from New York to the Gulf Coast. And the threat was not just at sea. There were saboteurs ashore, and spies who had to be dealt with. Wartime port security was designed around concentric rings of defense. The navy had the Blue Water approaches, with destroyers and convoy escorts, and land-based aircraft. The inner defensive rings belonged to the Coast Guard. Typically, there was a patrol at the outer and inner harbor entrances, a harbor patrol and a pier patrol. These were conducted by armed men in vehicles, afloat and on foot. The same men who kept the harbor under constant surveillance, were authorized the use of deadly force when necessary, and expected to immediately engage the enemy when detected. The manpower needed for this system was massive, but the nation was mobilized. The World War II Coast Guard had 300,000 citizens under arms. When the World Trade Towers toppled, the Coast Guard had shrunk to about 37,000 active duty members, or a force about the size of the New York City Police Department. The response to 9/11 involved no mobilization, and the Draft was not reinstituted to swell the ranks. Instead of launching a fleet of picket boats to defend the nation, the Coast Guard was invited into the "intelligence community," and charged with "maritime domain awareness." The Mariner snorts when he says the words. He does not like the language of homeland security. The mission of the Coast Guard is to “identify all vessel traffic inshore of the exclusive economic zone (EEZ), and to the head of navigation in our inland commercial waters. Instead of picket boats, an alphabet soup of devices would stand as sentinels for this mission: ECDIS (Electronic Chart Display Information Systems), ARPA (Automatic Radar Plotting Aids), AIS (Automatic Information Systems), RADAR, Radio, and TV cameras. These stove-piped sensors keep the maritime geography under surveillance. They feed watch centers that can dispatch the limited, but well trained response when suspicious activity is detected. At the outer rings of the surveillance circles, the Coast Guard has a few legacy sensors from other earlier missions like counter-drug operations and illegal migrant interdiction. Some of these assets floated, some of them flew, and some were ashore. What they had in common was that they wee labeled "Operational" or "Intelligence" assets before 9/11. “The problem is this,” said the Mariner, looking at the traffic on Pennsylvania Avenue. “There is another sensor network that has great information. We could use the Vessel Traffic Service to provide the modern equivalent of the old inner harbor patrols.” “What does VTS do?” I asked. “it is simple, and elegant. Even Squids could understand it, Vulture. VTS provides active monitoring and navigational advice for vessels in confined and busy waterways. There are two types, surveilled and non-surveilled. The active one combines radar, AIS and closed circuit television sites to a central watch center, where operators monitor and manage vessel traffic movement. The non-surveilled systems rely on reporting points where ships are required to report identity, course, speed, and other data to the watch.” “That sounds like great stuff, You should be able to maintain track integrity with national sensors on everything coming in from over the horizon. You would not miss a thing.” “Yeah, but that that is not what it was designed to do. Mostly, VTS is supposed prevent collisions, rammings, and groundings in the harbor. It is not about security, it is about transportation system efficiency. In my mind, it isn't a picket ship, it is a way of moving everything quickly to the shore, regardless of what is on the ship.” The Mariner grimaced. “That is the problem.” “It sounds like a sort of maritime version of FAA flight following. But we cared a lot about the identity of what we tracked.” “We cared about efficiency. There are nine vessel traffic centers in place and the Coast Guard is building another one down in New Orleans. There is even one at the Soo on Lake Superior that could handle all the Great Lakes.” “Those could be the critical fusion centers for maritime domain awareness,” I said, fishing a Camel out of the pack on the bench next to me. “Could be,” he said. “But it's not. VTS comes in a box marked "Waterways Management," and that means "collision avoidance," not intelligence. It is like a fire-wall at the Centers.” “Shoot. Every recommendation from the 9/11 Commission involved better sharing of information between the spooks and the cops. This is exactly part of the problem.” I could see airplanes climbing out over the Potomac from Reagan National, under positive control, and with the cockpit doors firmly locked. “Yeah. You got it, Vulture. What I was trying to do before I retired was to put VTS into the concentric rings of security, like WWII. Only update it, so it could be integrated into the intelligence cycle. All I wanted to do was treat it as another part of a fusion process for operational situational awareness.” He sighed. “Culture and organizations are hard to change, though. And that is why I'm on the beach now, and not doing the mission.” “Me too,” I said, and stubbed out my cigarette. “I heard the guys at the New Orleans VTC were developing a qualification code for the watch standers, so they could tag ships that were Vessels of Particular Interest. That would let them allocate resources to follow the likely bad actors.” “You use the past tense on that. What happened?” The Ancient Mariner leaned back, his hand brushing his breast pocket for the pack of Marlboros he has not carried in years. It is an unconscious habit developed on watches fifty years ago. “Let me put it to you this way. The inner harbor is more vulnerable than the rings inside the EEZ. A potential adversary has a variety of options offshore. Inside the outer ring there are plenty of targets: oil and gas fields deepwater terminals. In the distant approaches we still have the remnants of the old ocean surveillance system, acoustic systems, aircraft and overhead sensors. We can combine the information to have some idea of what is going on.” “But the problem gets hard once the adversary is close in. There is no more target rich environment than the inner harbor, and you can get there without coming from the sea. A terrorist with some maritime sabotage training could slip across our border with nothing more than cash.” He looked at the Lone Sailor, seeming miles away. “Then he could take a taxi to the harbor, buy a ticket on an excursion boat, and be right in the heart of it. He could rent or buy a recreational boat as needed. Not only can the harbor be attacked that way, but it is also the back door into the outer rings where offshore oil and gas production is done. Don't forget, this is not just an inbound problem.” “I might be a dinosaur, but this is hardly rocket science. The concept of concentric rings worked in the Big War. With better technology, we can more effectively leverage what resources we have. “ “How would it work, Boats? I thought about trying to tie the Fleet sensors together with the Coast Guard and the FAA and Law Enforcement in San Diego, but that was before 9/11. I couldn't even get people interested in why the Russians were following our ballistic missile subs out of Puget Sound.” “Let me give you an example. It happened not long before I retired, and it contributed to why I dropped my letter. I was on watch, and I had a radio report from a state pilot on an inbound ship, complying with VTS. He said a small craft had picked him up at the sea buoy and had been trailing close astern for some time. I checked my ECDIS where I located the AIS signal from the next inbound ship. The little boat following didn't have a beacon or report on the radio. I had no idea who he was, or why he was following so closely.” I called back on the VHF radio and got the cell phone number of the pilot aboard the following ship. While a cell phone number is hardly a secure line, it is much preferable to discussing things over the marine VHF radio with the whole harbor listening.” “You could fix that problem cheaply,” I said. “The commercial guys can provide simple encryption.” “We have learned a lot from the druggies,” said the Mariner. “So I called the pilot of the following ship. He had noticed the small boat pick up the inbound ship ahead. I asked him to put his binoculars on the small craft, and he gave me the situation. Fog was coming in, night was falling, and the small boat appeared to have no radar. It appeared to a local fishing boat, with full rig on deck that appeared to be wet.” “The pilot told me it was his assessment that the small boat was simply tailing the ship into the navigation channel in case the fog set in and visibility went to zero. If the small craft broke off at the buoy and made a beeline for the commercial wharves, we could assume they were harmless local fishermen.” “So what happened?” “That is exactly what the small boat did. Now here is the point: I was able to avoid scrambling an armed Coast Guard boat to make a positive ID, and we avoided exposing a crew to boarding operations in a busy channel in the fog, at night.” “So what if the small boat was going to blow up the fishing wharves?” “Wet lines, low probability of threat. Secretary Chertoff said you can't protect everything all the time. If he had made a course for the Liquefied Natural Gas terminal it would have been something different. Unfortunately, that entire investigative sequence was entirely the discretion of the watch supervisor. I have had other watch supervisors tell me that stuff like that is "not our job." “I don't agree with that,” I said. “As a taxpayer, I think we ought to be using everything we paid for.” “Couldn't agree more, Vulture. I say if we have the capability, it ought to be used. Our capability to merge these streams of information together will help husband scarce resources. We ought to be able to leverage that pilot's maritime knowledge to assess the situation. Use him like the picket ships in the old days to get eyes on the target and assess what it is up to.” Boats was getting restless and I knew he needed to get going. “We need tactical intelligence training in VTS,” he said. “And we need a formal mandate to do tactical intelligence and tactical intelligence support. We need to do it as a core mission area, and not just when we are asked. We should be able to help any traffic controller in any sector when they think there is something worth checking out.” The Mariner was getting on a roll. “There is a cultural problem in the institution. Some of the middle-management takes a narrow view of the "Waterways Management" mission as an activity devoted to "collision avoidance.” That is not how it was in the real war, and the last time I check, Osama was supposed to have looked at the maritime environment closely, and even had some ships.” I eyed him curiously. “Are you saying we are missing some key dots to connect?” He snorted. “Hell yes, we are. I am not saying that the Coast Guard is deliberately ignoring a useful stream of information. It is just a cultural thing in the VTS management that we need to shake up like everything else. This time there won't be a 300,000 man Coast Guard to do the surveillance job. We will have to work smarter. “Intelligence can't be left only to full time professionals, especially in daily tactical intelligence. We certainly can't afford to underutilize the powerful capabilities of a VTS in the last defense zone, the inner harbor.” The Ancient Mariner looked at his coffee cup, and stood up. He walked to the low marble wall around the memorial. He looked down at the depiction of the World Ocean and gestured across it. “The problem out there is hard, but the Navy can probably do it. If they put their minds to it and back it up with some resources, that is. The Coast guard is hiring people, but most of them have had no previous experience. They won't think to ask a state harbor pilot whether or not he thinks someone is really a fisherman or a terrorist. It is an all-source problem, and once it is in the inner harbor it might be too late.” He tossed his cup in a trash can. “Well, I need to be getting along. I need to get down to the floating market off Maine Avenue and get some fish. Does it ever amaze you that ocean-going ships can get all the way to the shadow of the US Capitol?” He began to walk away with the rolling gait of a sailor. Then he turned before he got to the entrance to the Metro. “Don't you think it would be nice if we knew for certain who they all were? Copyright 2006 Vic Socotra |