FOR COAST GUARD, PRIORITIES SHIFTED ON SEPTEMBER 11

Focus Is on Defense Against Terrorism

Early in the morning, on Sept. 11, the U.S. Coast Guard was set to
fulfill its various missions. That meant that 16 of its high- and
medium-endurance cutters -- the largest and highest-performance ships
in its fleet -- were stationed off the coast of Florida or prowling
the Caribbean Sea, ready to intercept vessels suspected of smuggling
drugs, while keeping watch for illegal immigrants headed for the U.S.
coast.

Four cutters, also primarily assigned to drug interdiction duties,
were off the west coast of Mexico. Other Coast Guard cutters and
aircraft patrolled near major fishing areas. Protecting the nation's
ports from attack was not a high priority.

Like so much else, all of that changed on that September morning.

Within hours of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in
New York and the Pentagon, the Coast Guard implemented what one
officer called "the biggest port security operation since World War
II." Since then, Coast Guard vessels have been patrolling virtually
every major port in the country, escorting ships as they arrive and
leave, sometimes boarding ships for an inspection.

The rapid redeployment was directed by Adm. James M. Loy, 59, the
Coast Guard commandant and a 37-year veteran of the service. With
little public notice, as attention remained focused on the dramas
then unfolding in New York and at the Pentagon, the Coast Guard on
Sept. 11 and 12 dispatched about 50 cutters, 40 to 50 aircraft and
hundreds of small boats to port security duty, Loy said in a recent
interview.

The Coast Guard completely closed about 12 ports -- including Los
Angeles-Long Beach, Boston, New York, Miami, San Diego and San
Francisco -- before gradually reopening them to commercial and
recreational boat traffic. In New York harbor, where, according to
Loy, normal passenger traffic to and from Manhattan is about 186,000
people a day, the Coast Guard on Sept. 11 directed the evacuation by
boat of more than 1 million people. The island was in virtual
lockdown immediately after hijackers flew two airliners into the
World Trade Center's towers.

According to Loy, this is how the Coast Guard has always operated:
rushing all available resources to the scene of danger, whether
responding to a ship in distress on the high seas or to a threat to
the nation's home ports.

"Our ethos as an organization comes from our search-and-rescue
roots," he said. "So our inclination is to send it all and then peel
back to the level you really need to sustain that activity over time."

In the immediate aftermath of Sept. 11, Loy said he tried to
translate the airborne attacks against the World Trade Center and the
Pentagon into similar threats posed from the sea. "If they can do
that in aviation, what's the parallel in the maritime domain?" Loy
asked himself.

This led the Coast Guard to pay special attention to "tankers
carrying nasty stuff," especially petroleum products such as the huge
quantities of liquid natural gas that are delivered to a terminal
near Boston, Loy said.

"It was all about rogue ships," he said. "How do we deal with the
potential of a rogue ship?"

Loy called the New York evacuation "a magnificent performance by the
maritime community at large." But that was only the beginning of the
new missions that had suddenly fallen to the Coast Guard.

While public attention since Sept. 11 has been focused on airport
security, Loy has his own inventory of security worries: the Golden
Gate Bridge at the entrance to the San Francisco Bay, the Verrazano
Narrows Bridge and the Statue of Liberty in New York Bay, and the
passenger-laden cruise ships that sail daily from Miami and other
ports. "All of a sudden, those are high-interest vessels," he said.

The Coast Guard is not responsible for protecting the nation's
nuclear power plants, but 68 of them are located along navigable U.S.
waterways, which come under the Coast Guard's jurisdiction. And then
there is the commerce that comes into the country by ship.

"Seventeen million containers come to this country every year," Loy
said. "We're inspecting somewhat less than 2 percent of those. That
includes the container that shows up in the Port of Los Angeles-Long
Beach and is trucked across the country to New Jersey, where for the
first time the box is opened. So the potential for mischief along the
way is enormous."

The Coast Guard's larger problem is that the events of Sept. 11 have
forced it into essentially a defensive posture, with many of its
resources concentrated in and around the ports. Loy estimated that
the Coast Guard's drug enforcement efforts are at about 25 percent of
what they were before Sept. 11. He said fisheries enforcement had
dropped even more.

After Sept. 11, most of the Coast Guard's top performing cutters --
including three in Hawaii, two in Alaska, six along the West Coast,
four in the Gulf of Mexico and 18 along the East Coast -- were
assigned to port security duties.

But clustering so many ships around the ports is not the best
long-term solution to preventing a terrorist attack by sea, Loy said.
Since Sept. 11, the Coast Guard has changed some of its procedures to
improve its position. Now, for example, the Coast Guard requires
commercial ships to give 96 hours -- rather than 24 hours -- advance
notice of their arrival in a U.S. port, to give the Coast Guard more
time to examine the ship's crew and cargo manifests and detect
anything suspicious.

But in the longer term, Loy said, "our challenge is to push our
borders as far off shore as we can. . . . I mean to push this thing
to where that ship [headed for the U.S.] is leaving from."

Loy, a combat veteran who commanded a Coast Guard patrol boat in
Vietnam, has been thinking about such problems for some time. A
native of Pennsylvania, he made a quick trip to Harrisburg to share
some of his ideas with then-Gov. Tom Ridge shortly after President
Bush named Ridge to be the country's first director of homeland
security.

Loy said more of the burden of port security should be shifted to
those who operate the ports and cargo terminals, where goods from
overseas enter the country.

"We can't do it all ourselves, nor should we be expecting the
American taxpayer to pick up the tab for it all," he said.

Much more effort and resources should also be devoted to prevention,
he said. Loy said government agencies, including the military
services, are too often confronted with the task of "consequence
management" after an event such as the terrorist attacks. They need
to raise their level of awareness of where the dangers lurk, he said,
so that there are fewer consequences to manage.

"We could do quantum better if we concentrated on awareness and
prevention," Loy said.