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the blame on the Coast Guard's outdated radios, which had no ability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.