BURDENED U.S. MILITARY CUTS ROLE IN DRUG WAR

Air And Sea Patrolling Is Slashed On Southern Smuggling Routes

WASHINGTON -­ Stretched thin from fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan,
the U.S. military has sharply reduced its role in the war on drugs,
leaving significant gaps in the nation's narcotics interdiction efforts.

Since 1989, Congress has directed the Pentagon to be the lead federal
agency in detecting and monitoring illegal narcotics shipments headed
to the United States by air and sea and in supporting Coast Guard
efforts to intercept them. In the early 1990s, at the height of the
drug war, U.S. military planes and boats filled the southern skies
and waters in search of cocaine-laden vessels coming from Colombia
and elsewhere in South America.

But since 2002, the military has withdrawn many of those resources,
according to more than a dozen current and former counter-narcotics
officials, as well as a review of congressional, military and
Homeland Security documents.

Internal records show that in the last four years the Pentagon has
reduced by more than 62% its surveillance flight-hours over Caribbean
and Pacific Ocean routes that are used to smuggle cocaine, marijuana
and, increasingly, Colombian-produced heroin. At the same time, the
Navy is deploying one-third fewer patrol boats in search of smugglers.

The Defense Department also plans to withdraw as many as 10 Black
Hawk helicopters that have been used by a multi-agency task force to
move quickly to make drug seizures and arrests in the Caribbean, a
major hub for drugs heading to the United States.

And the military has deactivated many of the high-tech surveillance
"aerostats," or radar balloons, that once guarded the entire southern
border, saying it lacks the funds to restore and maintain them.

The Department of Defense defended its policy shift in a budget
document sent to Congress in October: "The DOD position is that
detecting drug trafficking is a lower priority than supporting our
service members on ongoing combat missions."

Members of Congress and drug-control officials have said the
Pentagon's cuts and redeployments have hamstrung the U.S. drug
interdiction effort at a time when an estimated 1,000 metric tons of
inexpensive, high-quality cocaine is entering the country each year.

It's hard to gauge the precise effect of the pullback because
authorities say they only know the amount of narcotics they are
seizing, not how much is getting through ­ especially with fewer
surveillance planes and boats to gather intelligence.

In the budget report to Congress, the Pentagon estimated recently
that it detected only 22% of the "actionable maritime events" in
fiscal 2006 because it "lacks the optimal number of assets."

Even when they did detect suspected smuggling vessels, U.S.
authorities had to let one in every five go because they lacked the
resources to chase them, Pentagon officials conceded in their report.

"We have not stopped trying to fix that gap. We're very much
concerned about it, and working very hard to try and fix these
problems," Edward Frothingham III, acting deputy assistant Defense
secretary for counter-narcotics, said in an interview. "DOD is in no
way lessening our support" for the war on drugs, he said. "But in the
post-9/11 world, some of these assets are needed elsewhere."

With Pentagon support dropping, the Coast Guard and other Homeland
Security agencies such as U.S. Customs and Border Protection are
trying to play a greater role in the interdiction effort. But current
and former officials within those agencies say they do not have the
resources to do the job because they, too, have had to dramatically
redistribute resources since the sweeping post-Sept. 11
reorganization that made Homeland Security the front line in keeping
terrorists out of the United States.

"I can't stand here and tell you drugs aren't coming into the U.S. by
sea. It happens," said Cmdr. Jeff Carter, a Coast Guard spokesman.
"There are huge challenges, but we are making a dent."

(The Justice Department, through the FBI and Drug Enforcement
Administration, also has a central role in the drug war, but it is
more focused on arresting narcotics traffickers in the U.S. than on
interdiction.)

The cutbacks continue at a time when the Pentagon has officially
reclassified the drug interdiction effort as part of the broader war
on terrorism, citing intelligence showing growing ties among
terrorists, drug dealers and organized-crime syndicates.

"In the post-9/11 world, where both securing and detecting threats to
our nation's borders have become critical national security
objectives, we cannot continue to neglect the fact that
narco-traffickers are breaching our borders on a daily basis,"
according to a report that was quietly issued last month by the House
Subcommittee on Criminal Justice, Drug Policy and Human Resources.

At a November 2005 hearing before another House subcommittee, Rep.
Dan Burton (R-Ind.) said the lack of available military assets and
the amount of drugs getting through "just boggled my mind."

"The spike in narcotics shipments via Central America we ignore at
our own peril," said Burton, who at the time was chairman of the
international relations subcommittee on the Western Hemisphere. "They
could be carrying weapons, terrorists and other things that could
destroy not only the youth of America, but American cities."

The weakening of the U.S. drug interdiction effort comes just as U.S.
authorities have had some major successes in the drug war, led by the
Pentagon's Joint Interagency Task Force-South, based on Key West,
Fla. Authorities have seized increasing amounts of cocaine since
2001, including a record 300,000 pounds in 2005, although records
show that seizures dropped off sharply in 2006, to 230,000 pounds.

Counter-narcotics officials, including some in the Pentagon,
acknowledge that the large recent seizures are only masking more
fundamental problems caused by the sharp decline in drug interdiction assets.

The recent successes were due in part to improved interagency
cooperation and U.S. efforts to bolster the Colombian government's
counter-narcotics program. They were also aided by a windfall of
intelligence gained from a program known as Operation Panama Express,
which allowed authorities to pinpoint major shipments of drugs,
documents show. That intelligence has largely dried up as Colombian
drug lords have tightened their operational security, making the
Pentagon's detection and monitoring assets in the so-called transit
zones ever more crucial, according to U.S. documents and officials.

"What you've had is a significant downsizing of the counter-narcotics
effort in the transit zones, and that has very direct national
security implications," said Robert B. Charles, assistant secretary
of State for international narcotics and law enforcement affairs from
2003 to 2005. He said the loss of resources threatened to "consign
future generations of young Americans to a deluge of cocaine and heroin."

Perhaps the most important link in the drug interdiction chain is the
Pentagon's aerial patrols. Without them, a U.S. military ship can
detect only about one out of every 10 suspected drug vessels (one out
of five if the ship has a helicopter on board), according to
statistics from the Joint Interagency Task Force-South. With the
planes, whose radars can cover hundreds of miles, the military's odds
improve to seven out of 10.

Department of Defense aerial patrol-hours in the transit zones
declined from 6,062 hours in fiscal 2002 to a low of 1,432 in 2005.
They rose to 2,296 in the most recent fiscal year, which ended in
October, but since then, the Pentagon has grounded much of its fleet
of P-3s for long stretches because of a lack of pilots, money for
flying time or maintenance issues, documents show.

Military officials say the aerial surveillance situation is dire, and
likely to get much worse. That's because most of the Pentagon's drug
planes are Vietnam-era P-3s that were mothballed for years before
being brought back into service for the drug war. Many of them have
been redeployed to war zones or for use in counter-terrorism
operations, Frothingham said. Those remaining have such severe wing
corrosion that they're in the shop much of the time, U.S. documents
and officials say. Many of them have no working radar. But their
replacements won't be ready until at least 2012.

The Pentagon has also redirected other planes used to spot smugglers
­ including fighter jets and high-flying reconnaissance planes ­
toward other missions, and turned down requests to use unmanned
drones in the drug war.

Things aren't much better at sea, where there is a continuing lack of
Navy resources to intercept drug runners who are using "go fast"
multi-engine boats that are often 40 feet long, travel at up to 40
knots, and can carry several tons of cocaine.

In the Eastern Pacific transit area, four U.S. ships are dedicated to
patrolling an area larger than the continental United States.

Two years ago, U.S. authorities discovered that smugglers were easily
avoiding military boats by navigating far into the eastern Pacific
Ocean with the help of at-sea refueling vessels. In comparison, for
every four days of patrol, U.S. military ships spend an average of
eight days traveling to and from the transit zone to refuel, said
Rear Adm. Jeffrey J. Hathaway, director of the JIATF-South.

Frothingham's tiny counter-narcotics office at the Pentagon is still
looking for a solution because the department's leadership won't
commit military tankers for the task. A senior Pentagon budget
official said the British government recently pledged to provide a
tanker in the Pacific, but only temporarily.

Homeland Security agencies, the Coast Guard in particular, have moved
boats and planes to the region to intercept smugglers, but documents
show that in most cases, the U.S. presence remains far below what it
was before Sept. 11, 2001.

In May, the Pentagon decided to withdraw its Caribbean-based Black
Hawk helicopters for use elsewhere.

The Justice Department protested, calling the helicopters a linchpin
in the U.S. counter-drug effort because they ferried law enforcement
agents among the thousands of islands that cocaine traffickers use as
transshipment points.

That opposition has pushed back the withdrawal of the Black Hawks
until October, but counter-narcotics officials say the larger problem
is that no other agency has received funding to keep them operating.

As the U.S. fortifies its border with Mexico, counter-narcotics
officials warn that smugglers could simply move east and penetrate
the vast Gulf Coast.

In response to such threats, various U.S. agencies had for years been
using radar-equipped tethered aerostats to provide continuous and
long-range monitoring of smugglers by land, air and sea.

The Pentagon took over the Tethered Aerostat Radar System, or TARS,
in 1992 and shut down three of the balloons in the Bahamas in 1994.

Then, in 2001 and 2002, it shut down three others in Texas, Louisiana
and Florida, leaving virtually the entire Gulf Coast uncovered ­ from
Florida to east Texas, and part of the Caribbean as well.

The Pentagon won't put the radar balloons back up because it believes
the money is better spent elsewhere, Frothingham said.

In November 2005, the Government Accountability Office raised serious
concerns about the shortcomings in the interdiction effort, and said
it was particularly troubled by the lack of strategic planning by the
Pentagon and Homeland Security to deal with a major redeployment of
drug war assets that it believed would only get worse, not better.

The GAO, the independent investigative arm of Congress, requested
that the Pentagon and Homeland Security Department devise
comprehensive plans on how to maintain the drug interdiction effort
with dramatically fewer resources.

More than a year later, the GAO's Jess T. Ford said in an interview
that he had seen few signs of progress.

"If that trend continues," he said, "it just means we are going to
miss more and more opportunities."