Protecting ports: cooperation key to expanding coast guard's reach.

• Author: Magnuson, Stew
• Position: MARITIME DEFENSE - Cover story

BOSTON--Cmdr. Thomas Miller, chief of the prevention department at the Coast Guard's Boston sector, sits in a corner office with a view of the city and the port.

To his right is the North End district, where tourists dine in Italian eateries and stop to see the church where lanterns signaled Paul Revere to begin his famous midnight ride.

To his left, container ships and liquefied natural gas tankers ply the harbor. They cruise past skyscrapers and million dollar condominiums that line the water's edge.

Protecting the nation's ports from a terrorist attack has been a priority for the Department of Homeland Security since 9/11. The "home" task largely falls to the Coast Guard and Customs and Border Protection, while the Navy handles the "away game."

"Information flow and interagency cooperation and interoperability are really starting to come together," Miller says. "It's not to say that we're there, but we're moving down the right path."

Gathering information on who and what is approaching U.S. waters--also known as maritime domain awareness--is key to the overall goal of protecting the United States, Department of Homeland Security leaders have said. Officials want to know with certainty what ships are coming, and who and what is aboard. DHS has installed more than 670 radiation detection monitors at its ports of entry, but as Boston harbor illustrates, if a weapon of mass destruction enters a densely populated area, it may already be too late.

Boston's port is the oldest operating continually in the Western Hemisphere. It is home to the Conley Terminal, which handles 1.5 million tons of containerized cargo annually, a fishing fleet, and a growing cruise ship industry, which sees about 100 port calls per year. Logan International Airport, across the channel from the downtown skyline, sits on the water's edge. Passing by each day within sight of the skyscrapers are container ships and oil and liquefied natural gas tankers.

In Washington, policy makers have two initiatives underway to further expand the gathering of intelligence on ships as they make their way to ports. The national plan to achieve maritime awareness calls for an inter-agency group to write a concept of operations to determine how to best identify threats as early and distant from U.S. shores as possible.

Rear Adm. Joseph Nimmich, Coast Guard assistant commandant for policy and planning, who serves on that group, says that simply finding and tracking vessels is relatively...