Perspectives

Prescient Mariner

Coast Guard Leader Scans a History of Homeland Security and Charts a Future Course

When people think about the U.S. Coast Guard, most focus on its mission of saving lives and assisting mariners in distress. Such a mission might not seem essential to meeting the homeland security demands of the post–9/11 world.

But such a perception of the coast guard is inaccurate, according to Admiral Thad Allen, the service’s 23rd commandant and its highest-ranking member. He told a RAND audience that the “evolving organizational DNA” of the coast guard has made it an important player in improving homeland security. He pointed to three attributes in particular: the dual-purpose origins of the coast guard, the nature of its maritime security mission, and the painful lessons he learned about disaster preparedness and response during Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath in 2005.

A Hybrid History

Allen tracked the birth of the U.S. Coast Guard to 1790, when the new republic created the Revenue Cutter Service, “a fleet of small, shallow draft vessels with swivel guns that were used to interdict British smugglers who were trying to get around paying customs duties that were critical to paying off the national debt.” Ever since, the coast guard has been performing these kinds of overlapping national security and domestic police functions simultaneously.

Hurricane Katrina was a “weapon of mass effect without criminality used against the City of New Orleans. Had it been a terrorist attack, there would have been a senior law enforcement official in charge and no ambiguity about the chain of command and what needed to be done.”

“The coast guard is unique in being a dual-chartered service,” Allen noted. “It is a law enforcement organization with federal law enforcement authority and a member of the armed forces.” Wearing two hats, the coast guard found itself immersed in a spectrum of challenges in its early history, from enforcing the law against exporting strategic materials (in this case, live oak used to make warships) to apprehending and detaining pirates to fighting in the Seminole wars and the Civil War.

During the Cold War, the coast guard was not as relevant to national security, Allen said. But the service began to “accrete duties,” starting with the protection of fisheries, the war on drugs in the late 1970s, and the boatlifts from Cuba and Haiti in the 1980s and 1990s.

“So while the Cold War was going on, the coast guard was becoming operationally, bureaucratically, and organizationally multilingual. Its evolving DNA taught the coast guard to operate within the non–department of defense world and across agencies with facility.”

In its current home within the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, “the coast guard is positioned to be a huge force multiplier,” Allen stressed, “because of its origins as a dual-chartered service.” Those origins have made it “a unique instrument of national security.”

The Last Global Commons

The coast guard, of course, is charged with a maritime security mission. But unlike security on land, where there are clear borders, or security in the air, where there is an air-traffic control system providing persistent surveillance, security at sea is a matter of boundless scope and reach.

“We are dealing with the last global commons,” said Allen. “We have not as a nation come to consensus on what constitutes adequate maritime security in the post–9/11 environment.”

There are no governance structures in place to provide constant awareness and watch over everything that might constitute a maritime threat. Allen gave the example of an Iranian freighter with 300 explosive tons of ammonium nitrate leaving Havana, Cuba, and moving north, off the east coast of the United States, just outside its territorial seas. “The vessel doesn’t need to talk to us if it hasn’t declared its intent to enter the United States.”

Allen also stressed that small boats under 300 gross tons, such as towboats and fishing vessels, are basically unregulated. The terrorist attack on the U.S.S. Cole in Yemen in October 2000 was the result of a suicide attack by one such small craft.

The nation has made progress in maritime security since 9/11, said Allen, by increasing the scrutiny of cargo and crew lists, imposing very strict requirements of advance notice on ships arriving in port, and inspecting cargo containers. But improving port security is not enough, he argued, and the nation cannot address the maritime threat incrementally.

“We need a comprehensive national maritime strategy for safety, security, and stewardship,” he declared. Such a strategy would include updated maritime safety laws, persistent coastal surveillance, and coordinated defense and policing capabilities from the coast guard, the defense department, and state and local governments.

DIANE BALDWIN   Admiral Thad Allen, commandant of the U.S. Coast Guard, points out the similarities between San Francisco in 1906 and New Orleans in 2005.

Lacking Unity of Effort

Recalling his experience as commander of Hurricane Katrina relief efforts, Allen asserted that a lack of unity of effort plagued the nation’s response to both the hurricane and the recovery operations. He defined Katrina as a “weapon of mass effect without criminality used against the City of New Orleans. Had it been a terrorist attack, there would have been a senior law enforcement official in charge and no ambiguity about the chain of command and what needed to be done.”

Under the current approach for dealing with natural disasters, the role of the federal government is to augment the local and state governments with urban search-and-rescue teams and medical assistance. But that model presupposes a continuity of government at the state and local levels — something that was missing in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

The scale and devastation of the hurricane, he argued, showed the limits of how far the country could go without unity of effort at the top and greater interagency collaboration. The organizational disunity, he suggested, led to a breakdown of command and control, a breakdown of the continuity of government, and, ultimately, a breakdown of civil society itself.

And yet these problems are not unique to this time and place. Allen read a 1906 proclamation by the mayor of San Francisco after that city’s devastating earthquake. The proclamation underscored the same breakdowns in order, including the imposition of a curfew to control looting and the authorization to shoot to kill those violating the law. As Allen wryly commented, “One wonders if we’ve advanced anywhere in the 100 years that have followed.”

To achieve unity of effort during future catastrophes, Allen reiterated, the nation needs to cultivate the kind of multilingual capabilities that now characterize the coast guard. To illustrate his point, he described a meeting he attended with his Canadian counterparts. The Canadians needed to have five separate individuals in the room — representing five separate chains of command — to cover the multiple hats he wears as commandant of the U.S. Coast Guard. “There is just no other organization like this in the world,” Allen concluded.