Vice Admiral Harvey E. Johnson Jr. Commander, Coast Guard Pacific Area U.S. Maritime Defense Zone Pacific Regional Emergency Transportation Coordinator

CHIPS, April-June, 2005

As the third aspect, we focus not only on new vessels and capabilities, but also on the many current capabilities of our stations, air stations, patrol boats, aids to navigation teams, buoy tenders, large cutters and all of the other Coast Guard forces that continuously stand ready in a prevention and response posture to perform whatever mission may come their way. For example, while many Americans have seen a significant increase in Coast Guard presence in our ports and coastal approaches, a significant element of our National Homeland Security Strategy is to press the borders out to engage threats as far from our shores as possible.

The Coast Guard does this every day with our cutter fleet and longrange aircraft. Our young Coasties man 38-year-old cutters from the Bearing Sea in Alaska to the Eastern Pacific off the coast of Colombia, throughout the Atlantic and into the Caribbean Sea and even to the Persian Gulf. They detect, deter, interdict and defeat threats posed by those who would like to exploit the maritime domain for illegal purposes. This challenge will be made easier over the next couple of decades as our Deepwater project begins to replace aging and obsolescent platforms with new and more capable assets. But the point is, all of the Coast Guard, new and old is keenly intent on meeting the nation's maritime challenges.

CHIPS: Can you talk about Coast Guard interoperability with the other services and federal, local and state agencies?

Vice Adm. Johnson: I was hoping you would get to that issue. Interoperability is so very important to ensuring that we have a coordinated and effective presence of all maritime capabilities in the threat environment. I'll mention two aspects. First, interoperability presumes we know whom we need to work with, so we're talking about identifying key partnerships with agencies across the federal, state and local spectrum as well as those in the maritime community and with the public.

One of the primary vehicles for this is the Area Maritime Security Committees that have been established in each of our major ports as required by the Maritime Transportation Security Act of 2002. These committees have been formed under the leadership of our Captains of the Port acting in their new roles as the Federal Maritime Security Coordinators. Each committee has prepared an Area Maritime Security Plan that has been approved, and we are now in the process of beginning to exercise those plans. Of course, the action to write and execute a plan is an excellent process to wring out any areas of non-interoperability and fix them.

The second issue is to address the elements of interoperability with our partners and resolve any gaps. That is sometimes harder to do because it requires resources to adapt communications systems, integrate databases and bring into alignment differing processes of planning and execution. There are a number of excellent initiatives that are helping to eliminate gaps. The most significant is the recent DHS requirement that all agencies begin to use the National Incident Management System (NIMS) as a process for organizing and conducting incident response. We are working with other agencies on a range of other command and control capabilities to increase the degree of interoperability across the board.