According to her written testimony, titled “Prevention of Smuggling at U.S. Ports,” to two House committees, Rear Adm. Linda Fagan, deputy of Operations Policy and Capabilities, wrote, in part: “The Coast Guard maintains more than 40 maritime bilateral law enforcement agreements and arrangements with partner nations. These agreements and arrangements facilitate coordination of operations and the forward deployment of boats, cutters, aircraft, and personnel to deter and counter threats as close to their origin as possible, and enable real time communications between Coast Guard and partner nation operations centers.”
“We have bilateral agreements with almost every country in south Central America and the Caribbean,” said Brown. “These agreements allow us to, on a reciprocal basis, board vessels flagged in those countries when they’re on the high seas and suspected of illicit traffic. We can exchange shipriders. We can bring suspects to the U.S. who are violating the laws of our country and another country who have been caught on the high seas with the concurrence of that other country, and then apply the U.S. legal system with its rigorous standards and protections to them to ensure that there are consequences for illicit acts on the high seas.”
In order to protect the nation’s assets and resources and commerce, Zukunft states in the strategy that “the Coast Guard will continue to promote a safe, secure, and resilient Marine Transportation System. Risk management and threat prioritization across our diverse mission space will remain essential to accomplishing our objectives of safety and security.”
Coast Guard Petty Officer 1st Class Anthony Salazar, a machinery technician stationed at Coast Guard Training Center Yorktown in Yorktown,
Virginia, conducts a debrief following a basic engineering casualty control exercise in St. George’s, Grenada, June 11, 2016, during Tradewinds 2016. Tradewinds is an annual joint combined exercise conducted in conjunction with partner nations to enhance the collective abilities of defense forces and constabularies to counter transnational organized crime and to conduct humanitarian/disaster relief operations. U.S. Coast Guard photo by Petty Officer 1st Class Melissa Leake
As two of the service’s 11 missions, Marine Environmental Protection and Marine Safety are key in safeguarding commerce, ensuring “effective incident management in response and recovery operations during events that threaten major commercial activity, the environment, or human life,” the guidebook states.
Cycle of success
In the earlier days of the drug war, the mission was interdiction, and displaying a pile of contraband on a ship or on the pier was considered a big success. Later, the goal was to be more attentive to the needs of the prosecutors so they could get convictions. Today, the focus is on discovering, disrupting, and destroying networks.
In September 2016, the Coast Guard selected Eastern Shipbuilding of Panama City, Florida, to design the OPC and build the first ship, with an option for eight more, beating out Bollinger Shipyards of Lockport, Louisiana, and General Dynamics Bath Iron Works of Bath, Maine, for the $110.3 million contract. The first OPC is expected to be delivered in FY 2021.
The criminal networks create their own partnerships; value decentralized authority; utilize adaptable members and practices; and respect competency above rank. Identifying and understanding them will require extensive leveraging of national, private, and international partnerships and capabilities, as well as creating new ones, particularly with leading nations in the hemisphere. It will also include enhanced Coast Guard capabilities in intelligence-gathering, analysis, sharing, and dissemination.
To defeat criminal enterprises and their networks, the strategy strives to create a “cycle of success,” where information obtained from one encounter can contribute to the next.