THE RISING EAST
Pacific Command takes aim at sea assaults
By Richard Halloran
The Pacific Command, responsible for U.S. military operations in Asia, has launched perhaps the most ambitious and complicated venture in the war on terror as it seeks to prevent seaborne terrorist and criminal assaults on nations washed by the Pacific and Indian oceans and adjacent seas.
Jeff Widener • The Honolulu Advertiser
Called the Regional Maritime Security Initiative, it is intended to prevent terrorists from seizing a vessel loaded with liquid natural gas and slamming into a pier and exploding in Singapore, from scuttling a tanker in the Strait of Malacca to close a vital waterway, or from exploding containers full of chemical fertilizer in the busy ports of Pusan, Yokohama, Oakland and Los Angeles.
Adm. Thomas Fargo administers the oath to more than 50 re-enlistees under the big guns of the battleship Missouri on Jan. 29. Fargo hopes to create a partnership of nations willing to identify and intercept "transnational maritime threats under existing international and domestics laws."
The command hopes to prevent terrorists from joining criminals to smuggle illicit drugs, arms and humans being sold into prostitution or landed illegally in North America. It seeks to crack down on piracy in the South China Sea. And it is especially aimed at terrorists plotting an attack with nuclear, chemical or biological weapons of mass destruction.
Adm. Thomas Fargo, who leads the Pacific Command from its headquarters in Hawai'i, told a military audience on May 3 in Victoria, British Columbia, that the goal was to forge a partnership of nations willing to identify and intercept "transnational maritime threats under existing international and domestics laws."
The first hurdle is the immensity of the task. The oceans between the West Coast of the United States and the east coast of Africa occupy 20 times the surface of the United States. Lloyd's Register of Shipping estimates there are 89,000 ships in the world ranging from 100-ton coastal freighters to the 565,000-ton oil tanker Jahre Viking. Presumably, more than half of those ships ply these waters, but no one seems to know for sure.
Getting a grip on where those ships are, where they are headed, and what they carry is Task 1. Fargo told Congress in March that "we need to gain an awareness of the maritime domain to match the picture we have of our international air space."
The International Civil Aviation Organization says: "An airplane takes off or lands every few seconds somewhere on the face of the Earth." The United Nations agency adds: "Every one of these flights is handled in the same uniform manner, whether by air traffic control, airport authorities or pilots at the controls of their aircraft."
The technology — global positioning systems, radar, radio communications, transponders emitting signals to disclose location — exists to do the same with ships. The task is to pull that information together swiftly so that law-enforcement agencies, coast guards or navies could intercept a ship acting suspiciously.
The amount of cargo transported in shipping containers is stunning. Shanghai, reflecting China's billowing economy, handles the equivalent of 10 million 20-foot-container loads a year and Hong Kong another 5.3 million.
Los Angeles moves 6.6 million containers in and out while Oakland transfers 2 million. (Honolulu receives about 300,000 containers each year.)
Law-enforcement officers say that before the 9/11 terrorist attacks on New York City and the Pentagon, only 2 percent or 3 percent of those containers were inspected for illegal or dangerous cargoes. That has changed under a Customs law scheduled to go into effect on July 1 that requires nations shipping to the United States to install counter-terror measures — X-rays, surveillance cameras, patrolling guards.
A failure to comply might cause authorities to forbid a ship to enter an American port. "We're dead serious about this," Rear Adm. Larry Hereth, the Coast Guard's director of port security, told the New York Times. In Japan, Reuters reported, U.S. agents have been working alongside Japanese authorities in Tokyo, Yokohama, Nagoya and Kobe to screen containers.
Fargo has entered several cautions about the maritime security initiative: It does not envision a new alliance nor a new naval force patrolling the Pacific. The intent, he said, is to "empower each nation to take the action it deems necessary to protect itself in its own waters, thereby enhancing our collective security."
The admiral emphasized that the security initiative would not interfere with national sovereignty but would rely on existing laws and forces. That was intended to alleviate fears among Asians who have cast off Western colonialism since the end of World War II. They resent anything that appears to revive Western domination.
How this security initiative will be fashioned, how long it will take and what it will cost are critical unknowns. As Fargo said in Victoria, this concept "is still in its infancy."
Richard Halloran is a former New York Times correspondent in Asia.
