Northern Command not directing enough attention to maritime defense.

• Author: Tiron, Roxana
• Position: Up Front

The Defense Department is lagging behind with its plans and allocation of resources to defend the U.S. waterways, according to a top Pentagon official.

"I do not believe that we have yet developed a mature concept of operations for the effective execution of a maritime mission within the Northern Command area of operation," said Paul McHale, assistant secretary of defense for homeland defense.

NORTHCOM is responsible for the defense of the continental United States, Alaska and Hawaii.

McHale has called consistently for strengthening maritime security since he took office in early 2003. While the Defense Department has been focusing on developing strategy and concepts of operation for maritime security, the U.S. government has not "begun to resource or provide the operational capabilities that will turn that strategic mission into an operational reality," McHale said at a recent National Defense Industrial Association conference.

"It seems to me that it is in the maritime domain that we have the greatest potential to substantially improve our homeland defense," he added.

One of the nation's biggest threats at this point--weapons of mass destruction--will most likely be acquired overseas, and components may be transported to the United States through the nation's maritime domain, which is NORTHCOM's territory, said McHale.

A concept that McHale has been pushing, with Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's support, is a layered defense similar to that which the North American Aerospace Defense Command, or NORAD, provides for U.S. skies.

This concept anticipates that forward-deployed naval forces will network with other assets of the Navy, the Coast Guard and intelligence agencies to identify, track and intercept threats long before they reach the United States.

"The goal of such a maritime NORAD is to extend the security of the United States far seaward, taking advantage of time and space purchased by forward-deployed assets," he said.

The first layer of that defense would be "huge intelligence," said McHale. The Coast Guard already co-sponsored an initiative to develop a maritime domain awareness concept, McHale noted. "We have discreet collection systems from human to space-based assets that have not yet been brought into a common operating picture of the maritime field," he contended.

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