January 20th, 2008 | 
Maybe sooner than you think…
I don’t generally do this, but the timing presented itself to piggyback off a post of Peter’s Michael’s. His last post, CIA Coming out..?, he had decided to put on the intelligence hat, as such, this is the path to follow. Reading one of my usual intelligence blogs/sites, The Counterterrorism Blog, I have come upon a posting that has Coast Guard written ALL over it (as I see it): U.S. Navy Official Exaggerated Terrorist Threat to Arctic & Panama Canal Shipping. I, nor the post, are bashing the Navy, it just has that unfortunate title… Anyhow the article got me thinking about the possible new mission area not awhile back for the Coast Guard: the Arctic. In the Counterterrorism (CT) post the question of terrorism in the arctic region is brought to light
‘When you go through the Panama Canal, every terrorist and his brother knows you’re there,’ Barry L Campbell, head of operations at the USN Arctic Submarine Laboratory in San Diego, California, said in a March 2007 navy statement. ‘When you go through the Arctic, no one knows you’re there.’
Though this statement is refuted in the CT post, I’m not looking at it for that reason. I’m more interested in the fact that there ‘could’ be some truth to the fact that we, as a nation, could be left blind of inbound vessels to the East Coast via the future Northern Route, which, in a nutshell, provides a shipping route straight over the top of the world. We have talked about here on CGBlog before, as well as the NYTimes. So you may be asking where I am going with this…
Coast Guard Law Enforcement Mission
Our boss, Adm. Thad W. Allen, has been quoted in the aforementioned NYTimes article as stating
“All we know is we have an operating environment we’re responsible for, and it’s changing.”
Though the first thing on most peoples minds is the Search and Rescue aspect of the ‘change,’ mine is the LE aspect (just the kind of guy I am). With that, in an effort to thwart the threat of a terrorism incident, wouldn’t it make sense to conduct the deep-draft vessel boarding mission aboard U.S. bound vessels while they are transiting the Northern Route? This is/would be whole new territory of the CG- in the realm of us never operating so far north in an LE mindset.
Before you discount my thought of a safer world and “who would want to do that?”- I myself would love to be part of this team. Having an LE team out of Station Barrow could, in the long run, save money on having to have several LE teams within many ports and have one in the Arctic to handle several vessels to differing ports. Though I realize I am way over-simplifying this, I hope you get my drift (no arctic pun intended).
Security in the Arctic… who would have thought it?
Image from Learner.org
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