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Statement
of
Stephen E. Flynn, Ph.D.
Senior Fellow, National Security Studies
Council on Foreign Relations
sflynn@cfr.org
(212) 434-9676
on
“Bolstering
the Maritime Weak Link”
presented before the
United States Senate
Committee on Governmental Affairs
Room 342, Dirksen Senate Office Building
Washington, D.C.
Hearing on
“Weak Links: Assessing the Vulnerability of U.S. Ports and
Whether the Government is Adequately Structured to Safeguard
Them”
9:30 a.m.
Thursday, December 6, 2001
Good morning, Mr. Chairman.
My name is Stephen Flynn. I am a Senior Fellow with the
National Security Studies Program at the Council on Foreign
Relations where I am directing a multi-year project on
“Safeguarding the Homeland: Rethinking the Role of Border
Controls.”
It is privilege for me to be here today to testify on the
vital issue of assessing the vulnerability of U.S. ports and
how our government is structured to safeguard them in the wake
of the tragic events of September 11.
Over the past 2 ½ years, I have been conducting
research that has been examining in large part the security
weaknesses associated with the system of intermodal
transportation that is so indispensable to support global
trade and travel. That project has afforded me the opportunity to conduct field
visits along the U.S.-Mexican, and U.S.-Canadian borders,
within major seaports throughout the United States, in
Montreal, Rotterdam, Hong Kong, and Kingston, Jamaica.
My research question has essentially been this: Given the cascading tide of peoples and goods moving through
our seaports, and across our borders on trucks and trains, how
do regulatory and enforcement agents accomplish their public
mandates of filtering the bad from the good; and the dangerous
from the benign?
The answer I have arrived at is that the U.S. government and
the international community has no credible way to reliably
detect and intercept illegal and dangerous people and goods
that infiltrate our maritime and surface transport networks.
The tools and protocols for conducting inspections,
collecting and mining data, and sharing information have
simply not kept pace with the size, speed, and complexity of
the international networks that transport people and goods.
In addition the staffing, training, and resource levels
of front line agencies operating in seaports and at land
border crossings are completely out of alignment with their
mounting task of managing the growing threats of criminals and
terrorists.
This conclusion is an extremely sobering one, particularly in
light of what I argue are three unpleasant “facts of life”
we must accept in the wake of the events of September 11.
First, there will continue to be anti-American
terrorists with global reach for the foreseeable future.
Second, these terrorists will have access to the
means—including chemical and biological weapons—to carry
out catastrophic attacks on U.S. soil.
And third, the economic and societal disruption created
by the September 11 attacks and the subsequent anthrax
mailings has opened a Pandora’s box. Future terrorists bent on challenging U.S. power will draw
inspiration from the seeming ease with which the United States
can be attacked, and they will be encouraged by the mounting
costs to the U.S. economy and the public psyche exacted by the
hasty, ham-handed efforts to restore security.
Along with other national security experts, I belief that what
we witnessed on September 11 is how warfare will be conducted
in the 21st Century.
What this means is that, at the end of the day if all
goes well with the current fight in Afghanistan, only the
terrorists of the moment will have been defeated. The United States may be unrivaled in terms of its
global military, economic, and cultural reach, but there are
still real limits to its power.
There will always be anarchical corners of the world,
for terrorists to hide, whether in the unpoliceable areas of
third world mega-cites or in the rural hideaways within failed
or failing states. Even
if the war on terrorism extends for a decade or more, new
adversaries will arise to fill the shoes of those who have
perished. Indeed,
a likely consequence of the prosecution of that war will be to
motivate new recruits into the ranks of terrorism.
As with the drug war, “going to the source” is
seductive in principle, but likely to prove illusive in
practice.
Therefore, the United States and the international community
face the stark reality that there will continue to be
adversaries who will use catastrophic terrorism as a means of
warfare. We also
must be mindful of the fact that the goal of these attacks is
not simply to kill people, but to create economic and societal
disruption that weakens the victim and generates pressures for
it to change its policies.
Ultimately, therefore, a war on terrorism should be
about reducing the vulnerability of the systems of transport,
energy, information, finance, and labor from being exploited
or targeted by terrorists.
The best way to illustrate the limits of our current security
measures within seaports and the intermodal transportation
networks is to consider the security challenge represented by
commercial containers—the 20’ and 40’ boxes that are
carried on ships, trains, and 18-wheelers which accounted for
80 percent of the overseas general cargo that arrived in
United States in 1999—that number continues to rise and is
expected to account for 100 percent of general cargo by 2010.
Consider this scenario that I posited in an article I wrote
for Foreign Affairs a little over a year ago.
Terrorists tied to Osama bin Laden might purchase a
company in Karachi, Pakistan that has been in the business of
sending ceramics to a New York-based importer for more than a
decade. In one of
the shipments they could load a chemical agent into a
container ultimately destined for Newark, New Jersey, with
virtually no risk that it would be intercepted. The container
would likely be sent via Singapore or Hong Kong to mingle with
the over one million containers that are handled by each of
these ports every month. It could well be loaded aboard a 6600
TEU container ship like the Regina Maersk, bound for
Long Beach, California which receives almost one-quarter a
million containers each month. It would likely travel in-bond which means that it would not
be inspected at its port of arrival.
The U.S. Customs Service inspection system is built
around clearing cargo at its final destination (confusingly
known as the “port of entry,” referring to the point at
which goods enter the U.S. economy).
Furthermore, the importer has up to 30 days to
transport cargo from its arrival port to its port of entry.
The container could be diverted or the weapon activated
anywhere en route, long before its contents were subject to
examination.
Now let’s contemplate what the fallout might be the first
time a container is used as a weapon.
The American people would want to know where and how
they can be assured that other containers do not pose a
threat. When they
learn how the maritime container trade operates, they are
unlikely to be reassured.
These containers can be loaded by upwards of 500,000
non-vessel operators (NVOCCs) and 40,000 freight forwarders
from around the planet. After
placing a numbered plastic seal on the latch of the container
doors, these boxes are allowed to move into seaport terminals,
aboard container ships, and on to trains and truck, with only
the scantiest of information about their contents.
On the infrequent occasion where U.S. authorities
examine a container—about 1 and 100 get a cursory look and
roughly 1 and 500 are subjected to a comprehensive physical
inspection—this is done in the port of entry.
But suppose there was a chemical weapon loaded in one of these
containers which is triggered by opening its door.
If this happened in the port of Newark, the effects
would not be limited just to the maritime terminals within the
East Coast’s largest container port.
The plume from a chemical weapon could readily
contaminate the adjacent railroad tracks that link the
northeast to the continental rail system, the New Jersey
Turnpike, and the Newark International Airport—all of which
are located within one mile of the container terminal.
Presented with the prospect of such a calamity,
government authorities might decide that no containers be
allowed in the port at all.
The economic consequences of cutting off the flow of
cargo to a market of over 40 million consumers within a
200-mile radius are almost too-painful to contemplate, but
would certainly represent an important victory for an
anti-American terrorists.
I pose this dark scenario to help highlight the new security
challenges associated with the post-September 11 world, and
what I think represents a national and international
imperative to address the issue of security within our
maritime transport network.
What is at stake is not just the opportunity this
network presents for a terrorist who wants to exploit it so as
to launch another catastrophic terrorist attack on U.S. soil.
But, to a considerable extent, the fate of global trade
also rests in the balance.
This situation is considerably more daunting that the
recent anthrax attacks. Faced
with the risk of contaminated mail, we could shift to e-mail,
faxes, and Fed-Ex. However,
if U.S authorities find themselves having to turn off the
maritime container trade spigot, we will have effectively
self-imposed a blockade on our own economy.
This is because there is no alternative to a container
for moving general cargo between North America and Europe,
Asia, Africa, and Australia.
What I have outlined above has three very important
implications for the subject of today’s hearing on the
vulnerability of U.S. seaports and how the government is
structured to the safeguard them:
(1) Seaports cannot be separated from the international
transport system to which they belong.
Ports are in essence nodes in a network where cargo is
loaded on or unloaded from one mode—a ship—to or from
other modes—trucks, trains, and, on occasion, planes.
Therefore, seaport security must always be pursued
against the context of transportation security. In other
words, efforts to improve security within the port requires
that parallel security efforts be undertaken in the rest of
the transportation and logistics network.
If security improvements are limited to the ports, the
result will be to generate the “balloon effect”; i.e.,
pushing illicit activities horizontally or vertically into the
transportation and logistics systems where there is a reduced
chance of detection or interdiction.
(2) Port security initiatives must be harmonized within a
regional and international context.
Unilateral efforts to tighten security within U.S.
ports without commensurate efforts to improve security in the
ports of our neighbors will lead shipping companies and
importers to “port-shop”; i.e., to move their business to
other market-entry points where their goods are cleared more
quickly. Thus the
result of unilateral, stepped-up security within U.S. ports
could well be to erode the competitive position of important
America ports while the locus of the security risk simply
shifts outside of our reach to Canada, Mexico, or the
Caribbean to ports such as Halifax, Montreal, Vancouver, and
Freeport.
(3) Since U.S. ports are among America’s most critical
infrastructure, they should not be viewed as a primary line of
defense in an effort to protect the U.S. homeland.
The last place we should be looking to intercept a ship
or container that has been co-opted by terrorists is in a
busy, congested, and commercially vital seaport.
The fact that seaport security must be considered within a
broader transportation and logistics context that includes
ports outside U.S. jurisdiction has obvious implications for
how the U.S. government is organized to safeguard them.
Consider these important structural impediments:
(1) Agencies with responsibility for a specific transportation
mode rarely communicate with their counterparts in other
modes. In fact, there is a pervasive culture of competition among
the modes, often reinforced by their congressional advocates,
which leads to a zero-sum approach to parceling out resources.
An illustration of this phenomenon is the recent
decision by the House to bankroll additional airport security,
in part, by diverting $60 million in supplemental monies
promised to the U.S. Coast Guard to pay for its stepped-up
port security mission.
(2) The security challenge associated with seaports is not
just the one posed by conveyances—ships—but the operators,
passengers, and cargo on those ships—and the shoreside
infrastructure where those people and goods are loaded and
offloaded. The
federal agencies with primary oversight responsibility for the
people, cargo, and conveyances are sprawled across a number of
federal departments; e.g., (1) People:
Consulate Affairs in the State Department and INS; (2)
Goods: U.S. Customs, USDA, and FDA; and (3) Ships and the
non-landside of the ports: the U.S. Coast Guard. Responsibility for landside security lies within a
smorgasbord of local, state, and private entities that often
differs from port to port.
The thousands of trucks and their drivers that move in
and out of the ports each day are perhaps the most poorly
monitored and regulated of all.
(3) Since the jurisdiction of most of these agencies runs out
at the water’s edge, they tend to approach their regulatory
and enforcement mission within a domestic framework as opposed
to an international one.
This state of affairs should have been seen as unacceptable
before September 11. Now
there is particular urgency to taking a comprehensive approach
to redressing these issues.
Since, seaports are the main arteries that feed global
markets by moving commodities, cargo, business travelers, and
tourists, protecting that circulatory system from being
compromised by terrorists is an important imperative unto
itself. Enhancing transport security, therefore, is one part, about
preventing terrorists from exploiting the networks to cause
catastrophic harm, and the other part about sustaining the
continued viability of international commerce.
This task can only be accomplished by moving away from
ad hoc controls at the seaports that lie within U.S.
jurisdiction, and toward
point of origin controls, supported by a concentric
series of checks built into the system at points of
transshipment (transfer of cargo from one conveyance to
another) and at points of arrival.
Moving upstream is not as difficult or futuristic of a task as
it might appear at first brush.
As a start, the United States and its allies should
capitalize on the enormous leverage over global maritime
transportation networks that a few key jurisdictions can
exercise. At some
point during their journey, nearly all the ships that carry
general cargo must steam into or out of just a handful of
global mega-ports such as Long Beach and Los Angeles, Hong
Kong, Singapore, Hamburg, Antwerp, and Rotterdam. If the port authorities and their governments of just these
seven ports could agree to common standards for security,
reporting, and information-sharing for operators, conveyances,
and cargo moving within or through those ports, those
standards would become virtually universal overnight.
Anyone who chose to not play by these rules would find
themselves effectively frozen out of competitive access to the
world’s major markets.
Megaports could require, for example, that anyone who wants to
ship a container through their ports, must have that container
loaded in an approved sanitized facility.
These facilities would have loading docks secured from
unauthorized entry and the loading process monitored by
camera. In
high-risk areas, the use of cargo and vehicle scanners might
be required with the images stored so that they can be
cross-checked with images taken by inspectors at a
transshipment or arrival destination.
After loading, containers would have to be fitted with a
theft-resistant mechanical seal.
The drivers of the trucks that deliver goods to the
port would be subjected to mandatory background checks.
For instance, the routes of trucks into ports could be
monitored and even controlled by available technology.
A microcomputer connected to a transponder and global
positioning system (GPS) could be attached to the motor
control system of the trucks involved, so that if they strayed
out of licensed routes, the engines of the trucks would shut
down and the authorities would be automatically notified. The
transponder, like those used for the “E-Z-pass”
toll-payment system across the northeastern United States,
would give authorities the ability to monitor and control
would result in an automatic alert to the police.
GPS transponders and electronic tags could also be placed on
shipping container so that they could be tracked.
A light or temperature sensor installed in the interior
of the container could be programmed to set off an alarm if
the container were opened illegally at some point during
transit. Importers
and shippers would be required to make this tracking
information available upon request to regulatory or
enforcement authorities within the jurisdictions through which
it would be destined.
Manufacturers, importers, shipping companies, and commercial
carriers, finally, could agree to provide to the authorities
with advance notice of the details about their shipments,
operators, and conveyances. This early notice would give inspectors the time to assess
the validity of the data, to check it against any watch lists
they may be maintaining, and provide timely support to a field
inspector deciding what should be targeted for examination.
As with many safety or universal quality control standards,
private trade associations could hold much of the
responsibility for monitoring compliance with these security
measures. As a
condition of joining and maintaining membership within an
association, a company would be subjected to a preliminary
review of their security measures and would agree to submit to
periodic and random spot checks.
Without membership, access to ships servicing the
mega-ports, in turn, would be denied.
This system which advances near-real time transparency of
trade and travel flows would serve two purposes.
First, to reduce the risk of shipments being
compromised in transit. Second,
to enhance the ability for enforcement officials to quickly
act on intelligence of a compromise when they receive it by
allowing them to pinpoint the suspected freight.
The importance of achieving this second objective
cannot be overstated. The
sheer number of travelers and volume of trade along with the
possibility of internal conspiracy even among companies and
transporters who are deemed low-risk makes critical the
ongoing collection of good intelligence about potential
breeches in security. But,
that intelligence is practically useless if it helps only to
perform a post-attack autopsy.
Mandating “in-transit accountability and
visibility” would provide authorities with the means to
detect, track, and intercept threats once they receive an
intelligence alert.
Mandating that data be provided is one thing; effectively
managing and mining it so as to make a credible determination
of risk is another. Front-line
agencies must be brought out of their 19th century
stove-piped, record-keeping worlds.
To reduce the potential for overload, some existing
data collection requirements could be eliminated,
consolidated, or accomplished by other methods such as
statistical sampling. The
goal should be to create within each national jurisdiction one
clearing-house for receiving data about people, cargo, and
conveyances. All
government users of the data could then collect and analyze
what they needed from that pool.
Inspectors and investigators assigned to front line regulatory
and enforcement agencies will continue to play a critical role
in the timely detection and interception of anomalies.
To be effective, however, a serious effort must be made
to improve their pay, staffing numbers, and training, and to
push them beyond the border itself into common bilateral or
multilateral international inspection zones.
Mega-ports and regional transshipment ports should play
host to these zones and allow agents from a number of
countries to work side-by-side.
Such an approach would take better advantage of
information collected by law enforcement officials at the
point of departure, allow transport-related intelligence to
get into the security system sooner, and reduce the congestion
caused by concentrating all inspections at the final
destination. The
bilateral inspection zones set up by French and British
officials at both ends of the English Channel tunnel could
serve as a model.
Enlisting mega-ports, focusing on point of origin security
measures, and embracing the use of new technologies all
support the homeland security mission be enhancing the ability
of front line agencies to detect and intercept global
terrorist activity before it can arrive on U.S. soil. This approach also precludes the need to impose draconian
security measure within seaports that has the effect of
imposing a self-embargo on the American economy.
It will require providing meaningful incentives to
companies and travelers to win over their support.
It mandates a serious infusion of resources to train
and equip front-line agencies like Customs, INS, and Coast
Guard to operate and collaborate in this more complex trade
and security environment.
And it involves mobilizing U.S. allies and trade
partners to harmonize these processes throughout the global
transportation networks.
Conclusion:
Building a credible system for detecting and intercepting
terrorists who seek to exploit or target international
transport networks would go a long way towards containing the
disruption potential of a catastrophic terrorist act.
A credible system would not necessarily have to be
perfect, but it would need to be good enough so that when an
attack does occur, the public deems it to be as a result of a
correctible fault in security rather than an absence of
security.
Ultimately getting seaport security right must not be about
fortifying our nation at the water’s edge to fend off
terrorists. Instead, its aim must be to identify and take the
necessary steps to preserve the flow of trade and travel that
allows the United States to remain the open, prosperous, free,
and globally-engaged societies that rightly inspires so many
in this shrinking and dangerous world.
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