Segment 2 Of 2 Previous Hearing Segment(1)
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OVERVIEW OF THE U.S. COAST GUARD'S DRUG INTERDICTION STRATEGY
TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 29, 1998
U.S. House of Representatives,
Subcommittee on Coast Guard and Maritime Transportation,
Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure,
Washington, DC.
The subcommittee met, pursuant to call, at 10:20 a.m., in Room 2253, Rayburn House Office Building, Hon. Wayne Gilchrest (Chairman of the subcommittee) presiding.
Mr. GILCHREST. The committee will come to order.
I apologize for being late. Construction on Route 50 never ends. I think it was legislated in Congress in 1918.
But, anyway, we are here this morning to talk a little bit about a program that many of us came into of being exposed to it by the Coast Guard over the past couple of years on how to revise a plan to interdict drugs and even, to some extent, migrants from coming into the United States; and, Admiral, we really look forward to your testimony this morning.
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I think from some of the information I learned from the Coast Guard over the last couple of years, whether it be how not to get seasick and still get seasick in the Caribbean or Alaska, I think the most calm ride I have had on a Coast Guard cutter was the Polar Star. I guess that is because when you are in the ice, it doesn't move back and forth very much.
Admiral LOY. You are in pretty good shape there, sir.
Mr. GILCHREST. That was fine, then. But, at any rate, it just seems to me, after learning about the kinds of expertise that the Coast Guard had established through its training and technology and fine young people which they employ on these cutters or planes or shoreside duties, that it is possible to really make a human impact on the drugs that are transported across the sea into the United States because the coastal areas of the United States and where we border Mexico and Canada are finite. They are not infinite.
And I have a strong feeling that if we employ all the assets that are reasonably at our disposal and we understand the nature of where these drugs come from, whether they be cocaine or heroin or marijuana or whatever other illegal contraband that comes into this country, that with the direction of the Coast Guard, cooperation with a myriad of other agencies and services, if we put our will together, our cooperative efforts, our technology, our equipment and our willpower that we will be able to obtain a goal which I, in fact, have heard before from Coast Guard personnel, that in less than 10 years we can interdict about 80 percent of the drugs coming into the United States, which I think would have a very, very positive impact.
But what we need, as members of Congress, is to understand the tools that are necessary to implement that process. So we know we are not going to do it all in one hearing, do it all in one bill.
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Over the course of the next decade, we on this committee, Mr. Clement and
myself and the rest of the members, would like to work with the Coast Guard along with the other services and agencies to make finally a really drastic, major impact on preventing narcotics from coming into this country.
And I do appreciate you coming, Admiral Loy; and the members that I know probably have traveled some distance to get here, we look forward to your testimony. And I would like to recognize my good friend, Mr. Clement.
Mr. CLEMENT. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
I just will submit my statement for the record as if read, and I am going—
Mr. GILCHREST. No objection.
Mr. CLEMENT. I look forward to hearing the views of Admiral Loy, the administration's interdiction coordinator, on the views on our future long-term strategy to stop the flow of drugs by water into this country, into our communities, and into our schools, because it——
You know, when I was going to school—I graduated from the University of Tennessee, just like Admiral Loy's son graduated from the University of Tennessee and now serving ably in the Coast Guard. And I do know that, you know, a lot of people thought years back, I know when I was in college, that drugs was just a fad. It is not going to be part of our society. Thank God, I missed that; and thank God I did; and I am pleased that I did. I might have seen a few people drinking beer, but I never did—was around them taking drugs, thank God.
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But it has become such a part of our society, and it has destroyed so many people's lives. A lot of people, when they get on those controlled substances, just how do you get off? A lot of things, a lot of crimes have been committed, and I know a lot of these people never would have committed those crimes if they hadn't taken drugs.
And we have got to fight drugs in a lot of different ways, whether it pertains to interdiction or enforcement or education, rehabilitation. But we all want to do our part, and I know the Coast Guard wants to do everything they can to eradicate this terrible blight on our society. Thank you.
Mr. GILCHREST. Thank you, Mr. Clement.
[The prepared statements of Mr. Gilchrest and Mr. Shuster follow:]
[Insert here.]
Mr. GILCHREST. Welcome, Admiral Loy. We look forward to your testimony.
TESTIMONY OF ADMIRAL JAMES M. LOY, U.S. COAST GUARD
Admiral LOY. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. If I may, I will submit my written statement for the record as well. I will just make some opening comments.
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Mr. GILCHREST. Without objection.
Admiral LOY. There were a couple of thoughts that I jotted down while both you and Mr. Clement were making your opening comments that I would just highlight, first of all.
Number one, you indicated that it was a decade-long kind of challenge, and I think that is a very good thing for all of us to understand. General McCaffrey has certainly noted that with respect to the issuance of the National Drug Control Strategy. He has gotten away from this idea that in some kind of an overnight way we will find a silver bullet and this terrible thing is going to go away.
His strategy is key to a 10-year process, and it is supported by a 5-year—rolling 5-year, now current year plus 4— budget process that is oriented precisely, to take note of your comments, sir, that it is truly a long-term, perhaps decade, perhaps generation-long challenge that we have facing us.
The second comment that I heard both of you make was the requirement for us as a nation to generate the national will to do what it is that we need to do. I too, agree, that over the course of my 20 or 25 years of experience in this counterdrug business in one role or another, the harsh reality is that there needs to be an understanding that this particular national security threat is killing 14,000 Americans on an annual basis. If there were 14,000 Americans being killed by almost any other national security threat to the United States, I would think we would have a much more apparent national will reflected in terms of what we were potentially doing about it.
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And, lastly, the multidimensional nature that both of you cited is not something that the Coast Guard can solve. We are responsible for noncommercial maritime traffic in the air and over the sea associated with the interdiction, and the supply side of, the overall counterdrug equation. You can almost put it in a funnel-like kind of process where the Coast Guard piece has to be complemented by many of the other Federal agencies, and these international partnerships that we are generating with respect to dealing with this.
I would also thank you very much, sir, for inviting some of our young leaders from the field to the hearing this morning. These young people in the Coast Guard are doing absolutely magical things on a daily basis. And I have cited to both of you on a personal level, if you really want to find out what the Coast Guard is all about, you have to get out to where our ships and planes and small boats and Marine Safety Offices are doing things daily. These young people will be able, I think, to look you in the eye and tell you straight what their experiences have been and what their needs might be in terms of doing a better job, which is exactly what we want to do. So I thank you for having them in this morning.
As I mentioned earlier, sir, I have been in this business a long time. I have been a boarding officer at sea. I have been a commanding officer at sea. I have tried to negotiate policy here in the Washington area. I have dealt as a strategic field commander in New York, as an Area Commander looking over the whole array of assets that we had to deploy and now, of course, as the Commandant and as the U.S. Interdiction Coordinator.
I have in those years, sir, found two things that work and work routinely with respect to interdiction of the supply side of the drug war.
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The first thing that I have seen work is taking a geographic area away from the bad guys by an adequate investment of resources. Perhaps the best example of that is the Operation Bahamas and Turks and Caicos. For over a decade now, the Bahamian archipelago until just recently, perhaps in the last 6 months or so, was almost off limits to the bad guy based on the fact that we had an adequate presence there that had taken that AOR away from the bad guy.
And the second thing that I have seen work and work well, sir, over those years has been surprise surge operations, operations with an adequate amount of operational security that catches the bad guy not knowing where the resources are going to be. Perhaps the best example of that in the recent 2 years is Operation FRONTIER SHIELD where, without any fanfare, we mounted on the sea Operation FRONTIER SHIELD and the Customs Service mounted Operation Gateway on the beach in Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands. It was an enormously successful surge operation.
Of course, the bad guy will take the path of least resistance and go to wherever you have just demonstrated you are no longer present. So we watched him shift—and we have a couple of charts we can show you, if that is of value—but we watched him shift to the west when we took away that particular channel of his activity.
Those two things, sir, are very basic. They are very simple, but those are the things that I have watched work and work well.
The challenge with understanding both of those is, how do we mount a case that adequately deals with the entire Transit Zone and Source Zone to deal with taking advantage of those two things, taking a geographic area away and/or dealing more constructively with surprise operations? And the Coast Guard's operation that deals with that is Campaign STEEL WEB.
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Consistent with the Drug Czar's National Drug Control Strategy, we have developed STEEL WEB as a 10-year thought process. It has a 5-year budget piece associated with it which, on an annual basis, I submit to the Drug Czar to represent what ought to be the Coast Guard's contribution to meet the goals and objectives in his National Drug Control Strategy and now, thankfully, for the last 2 years with some sense of quantification to it.
In other words, we can demonstrate through two different ways quantitative sort of operations, research ways that we have come to have some faith in because we now have some empirical evidence on the table that they work. But those two ways are to deal with seizure rates and work towards the resource base that would be necessary to meet that end and/or the Rockwell study, which is a study of a deterrence model that allows us to understand that if we have a 40 percent contact rate, we can expect an 80 percent deterrence rate to the smuggler associated with those numbers.
Interestingly, if you take either of those paths, you get to essentially the same resource laydown package that we think is appropriate for the Coast Guard to meet its obligations to the National Drug Control Strategy. And, as I have indicated, that has played out in a 5-year budget package that we have submitted and have had certified by General McCaffrey as the right way to go in that regard.
Those goals that are stipulated there are to reduce the source of drugs in the country by 25 percent by 2002 and by 50 percent by 2007. They differ from the goals that I see in H.R. 4300 wherein the stipulated goal is to reduce by 80 percent in 3 years the supply of drugs coming into the country; and I, frankly, find that to be very, very difficult to think as being possible. I just believe that that particular aspect of H.R. 4300 is one that I just don't know that we can get to; and, in my review, I would offer that it is a bit unrealistic.
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The next point that I would make, Mr. Chairman, is to cite that interdiction, in fact, works and when adequately resourced, works well. FRONTIER SHIELD is the empirical evidence that we have on the table for that; and one of the slides that I have shown here just gives you a feeling for the effort expended and the results that came from that particular operation. It is the right-hand slide.
To see what these young people are going through, just trace, if you will, left to right. In the occasion that is from the beginning of the operation through the 30th of June 1998, there have been over 43,000 sightings in that particular corner of the world. Four thousand of them proved to be targets of interest, of which 2,600 were boarded, yielding the results package that you see there, significant results when an adequately resourced operation was laid on in the window of Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands. So they do work.
As you know, I serve both the President and General McCaffrey as the U.S. Interdiction Coordinator and, just having taken over that role, I recently returned from a spin through all the command and control nodes in the Caribbean and in South America with a view towards trying to rebaseline or get a personal feel for what I ought to be telling General McCaffrey we ought to be doing in the war on drugs from the Interdiction Coordinator's perspective. I have made recommendations to him about policy, I have made recommendations to him about resources, and I would be glad to talk about those things in the Q and A portion of the hearing if you would like to hear more about that.
But I will point out that the most important thing that I saw us failing in in the war on drugs was endgame capability. We have a pretty sophisticated system now run by contributions from DOD as well as many other agencies that is able to detect, monitor, and track aircraft outbound from the source countries in South America to wherever they are going. Our challenge is when they drop it to waiting go-fast boats, that we have not mounted the surface endgame capability to effect the seizures and the arrests at the other end of the day. And I think that is the most challenging, immediate goal that I have as the Interdiction Coordinator and as the Coast Guard Commandant, to raise our capability in that regard.
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One of the last things that I would like to talk about, sir, based on our conversation on the phone just the other day, is to point out that in 1997 and 1998 the Coast Guard, because of its multimission nature as a service, has been able to deflect programmed intentions from fisheries and migrant operations towards the drug war in rather considerable numbers in both 1997 and 1998.
In 1997, we were able to divert a little over $130 million worth of capability towards the drug war that had originally been programmed for fisheries and predominantly the AMIO mission. As you know, sir, that is pretty much a demand mission. When the migrants are coming like they did in the summer and fall of 1994, we have no choice but to go and do that as the principal national priority on the table. But when they are not, when they are coming in the numbers that have existed in 1997 and 1998, that program capability can be diverted because it is the same ships and aircraft that would be dealing with AMIO that would be diverted to the drug war.
In 1998 we feel that number is going to be somewhere around an $80 million shift of base capability because we are a multimission service that will have been devoted to the drug war, as opposed to fisheries, AMIO, and national defense readiness, and other missions that normally would be served by those assets.
But I would offer, sir, that that is the beauty of a multimission service. We are out there as the law enforcer for the United States of America, and we can make the judgments based on what we know to be congressional and administrative priorities to use those assets in the right direction.
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I don't think, however, it is wise for us to have our multimission capability earmarked in advance to cripple one mission in order to do another, and I would offer that is just about what is about to happen if, in fact, the House bill passed on the appropriations cycle for 1999 would actually end up being enacted with that language in it. We would be crippling the Polar Operations mission; and to some degree we would be crippling the fisheries enforcement mission which, as I have just indicated with empirical evidence on the table, I am already making those good value judgments because you offered me that challenge as a multimission service commander.
And, lastly, sir, just a moment about readiness. As we spoke on the phone the other day, I appreciate the opportunity for you to let me make a couple of comments about that and answer questions if you have them. As we speak, my counterparts, the service chiefs in the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marine Corps are testifying in front of the Senate Armed Services Committee about the concerns that all five of us have in terms of two dimensions of our readiness to serve the Nation. The two dimensions are people and modernization.
On the people side of things, all five services are suffering very difficult challenges with respect to recruiting, and we think there are perhaps some short-term solutions and long-term solutions, and I am ready to talk to you about those things if you would like this morning.
As it relates to modernization, the other services are very concerned that they need to be more in the business of offloading infrastructure, and I would suggest that we have some minor things about that that we could get accomplished.
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But perhaps more importantly, the idea of investing now to save forever—not 'invest now but save later' but 'invest now to save forever'—is a theme that I would like to pick on with you and talk a little bit more about with respect to readiness this morning.
So with those opening remarks, sir—and thank you again for your terrific personal support, both you and Mr. Clement, over the years—I would be glad to answer any questions.
Mr. GILCHREST. Thank you very much, Admiral.
I think before we proceed, if you could—I understand the gentlemen with you this morning will not offer testimony but will be able to answer questions; is that true?
Admiral LOY. I am not exactly sure how the second panel has been structured, sir. I think they may make brief remarks and then answer whatever questions you have, sir.
Mr. GILCHREST. Hope we can have some sea stories during those brief remarks.
Admiral LOY. You brought the right crew if that is what you are after.
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Mr. GILCHREST. I was going to have you introduce them now, but if they will come to the table when you are done.
Admiral LOY. I will.
Mr. GILCHREST. I do have a few questions, Admiral. Your budget documents, as I understand them, call for a reduced interdiction effort in fiscal year 1998 of about 80,000 cutter hours and 14,000 aircraft patrol hours. As the fiscal year comes to a close, could you give us some revised estimate of cutter and aircraft patrol hours for fiscal year 1998? And what are your year to date statistics for cocaine and marijuana seized?
Admiral LOY. Yes, sir. I think we actually have a chart on the seizures.
Let me just say that, as I mentioned in my opening remarks, sir, we as a multimission service have an opportunity to focus on what is the national highest priority; and clearly from the testimony given by Admiral Kramek over the last 2 years and the Q and A exchange that has taken place, the drug war is priority number one. And in so recognizing, we have for 1998 about an $80 million shift in terms of cutter days and aircraft hours that total a major shift in the operating hours that we have invested toward the drug war.
Let's put that other one up, if you would, please, which is a direct answer to the Chairman's question. These two charts, slides, I think, go to your question, Mr. Chairman.
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First of all, to note simply the investment of effort in 1996/1997, those are actual numbers at the end of the two fiscal years. You can see that in 1996, our total OE value, which is summed across the utilization of those cutter and aircraft hours, was about a $309 million effort on the part of the Coast Guard for the drug war in fiscal year 1996. In fiscal year 1997, the intended programmed numbers upfront were radically less than the actual numbers—our program intent was about $330 million.
In 1997, we stood up FRONTIER SHIELD to demonstrate that interdiction worked. It was proof of concept operation, if you will, and it, in fact, worked very well, keyed to the results that you see in the chart before. But that demonstrates that in a multimission organization programmed to do maritime law enforcement for the Nation, we can take from category A and put it in category B thoughtfully by just understanding what the most egregious priority is.
In 1998, sir, which was your specific question, you can see that we have programmed hours out at about 79,000 cutter hours and 14,000 aircraft hours, yielding a programmed intent of about $366 million. But in reality, and these are speculative, if you will, based on the first three-quarters actuals and extending them to the end of the year, we will be in the vicinity of very close to what we did in 1997 and, again, pushing towards about an $80 million differential between programmed intent and what actually played out in the drug war because it was clear to us that that was priority number one.
Further, it was clear because the demand wasn't there for the AMIO mission that the cutter days and aircraft hours that would have been devoted to migrant operations were available to be shifted to the drug war, and that is exactly what we have done with the results that you see on the slide to the left. Those again are actuals and even the 1998 figure, sir, I believe is as late as, as the little note says, the very end of the fiscal year.
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Mr. GILCHREST. Do the increased hours over projected and now that have actually—the cutter hours that have actually been employed, is that part of Frontier Lance?
Admiral LOY. It includes FRONTIER LANCE, yes, sir.
Mr. GILCHREST. Does Frontier Lance help bump the number of cutter hours up?
Admiral LOY. Yes. It was a designed proof of concept operation where we wanted to be able to demonstrate that, in this instance, the key difference was that operation was run from the south coast of the Dominican Republic, as you well know, in a little port called Barahona. It was there so as to be able to prove that we could, in fact, mount such an operation from a foreign port and from a deployed, if you will, base of operations.
Now, FRONTIER LANCE was not exclusively Coast Guard. In fact, both operations, especially FRONTIER LANCE, had terrific support from DOD, from the Customs Service, and from the international community, as well.
Mr. GILCHREST. Just so I get some chronological—
Admiral LOY. Yes, sir.
Mr. GILCHREST. The first OPBAT that came before Frontier Shield.
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Admiral LOY. OPBAT has been in place for a decade, sir. Principally an aviation-oriented operation, a set of H-60s out of multiple sites in the Bahamas and the Turks and Caicos that offer response capability to acute intelligence.
Mr. GILCHREST. Did Frontier Shield grow out of, to some degree, of that operation?
Admiral LOY. FRONTIER SHIELD certainly understood what OPBAT was in the background, but it was principally, sir, an operation with a different theater in mind: Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands as opposed to the Bahamian archipelago.
Mr. GILCHREST. Then you wanted to employ some of what you learned in the Bahamas, Turks, Caicos, Puerto Rico and extend that further to—
Admiral LOY. Absolutely. STEEL WEB calls for a sequential array of tactical operations mounted by my field commander, FRONTIER LANCE is one of them, as are FRONTIER SHIELD, GULF SHIELD, BORDER SHIELD, CAPER FOCUS.
If you put that first slide up again, Charlie, STEEL WEB is the Coast Guard wide campaign name for what we are doing in counternarcotics. Any of these named operations are subsets, operational manifestations, if you will, of what our intentions are with respect to STEEL WEB.
Mr. GILCHREST. So as interdiction coordinator, I would assume that what you did up in the Bahamas was also a coordinated effort.
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Admiral LOY. Absolutely.
Mr. GILCHREST. It was that way with Frontier Shield and—
Admiral LOY. Every item on that list, sir.
Mr. GILCHREST. So Frontier Lance used that concept in mind.
Admiral LOY. Yes, sir.
Mr. GILCHREST. But Frontier Lance ran into some budgetary problems?
Admiral LOY. Let me give you two answers, sir. I will hold the budgetary question for a moment.
The two things we wanted to prove with FRONTIER LANCE was that we could deploy this from a foreign operating base; and, secondly, there were some tactical things, including deployable pursuit boats, which goes back to my concern with dealing with the go-fast threat. It was the first time we brought in, for example, LCU-200s, Army support vessels, that allowed us to deploy those deployable pursuit boats and have a mother ship, if you will, that they could live from and the Army provided them.
Now to the budgeting question. It was 1 March to the end of May, 1998, that we ran FRONTIER LANCE, sir; and it was designed with the intent of proving the capability that that operation had, and we had no additional funds to continue with the operation. It was designed and run as a three-month operation.
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Mr. GILCHREST. You talked about over the next 10 years reducing interdiction by 50 percent.
Admiral LOY. Yes, sir. Actually, it is reducing the supply of drugs in the United States, which is not exclusively interdiction. There is a Coast Guard contribution to that which would be a seizure rate increase that would allow the Coast Guard's contribution regarding our challenge, the noncommercial maritime sector, to be a 10 percent reduction by 2002, 20 by 2007, the balance to be made up by additional successful, productive operations in source countries for the total of 25 and 50.
Mr. GILCHREST. So you are saying within the next 8, 9, 10 years the Coast Guard contribution to interdicting drugs could be 20 to 25 percent.
Admiral LOY. Yes, sir.
Mr. GILCHREST. Without, let's say, this supplemental bill that just passed the House, I know you have some problems with, do you foresee receiving the type of funding absent that supplemental to achieve that goal of 20, 25 percent?
Admiral LOY. Sir, I can't speculate on what either the Administration will propose or the Congress will approve in the appropriations process, my answer to that is that I think I understand what I need to do to produce the Coast Guard's portion of that supply reduction, and I have articulated that in my 10-year strategy called STEEL WEB and in the supporting 5-year drug budget that was submitted.
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Mr. GILCHREST. You also make recommendations as the chief interdicting coordinator.
Admiral LOY. I do, sir.
Mr. GILCHREST. You have a special understanding of what Customs needs to do, the Navy, and so on.
Admiral LOY. Absolutely. And as a result of my trip through the command and control nodes and in talking to my field commanders, I put together a report for General McCaffrey and submitted it to him. That is available to him at this point to be part of his consideration process as he certifies budgets that are submitted over the course of the next 5 years. I can tell you that the Coast Guard's portion of that is absolutely identical to my 5-year strategy within STEEL WEB.
One of the things that I think is absolutely imperative is that we hold agencies to constancy in terms of what it is that they need to do the job. This ought not be a shopping spree at Wal-Mart. We all should be bound into what we have analytically determined to be the resources necessary to fufill our responsibility. And I am very proud to be able to tell you that, sir, very straightforwardly, the 5-year drug budget that I submitted both through the course of the normal budget bill in the Administration and as well for certification with General McCaffrey, is absolutely consistent.
Mr. GILCHREST. I understand some of your concerns about the bill that just passed the House, especially in the area of earmarking. But you also said, and I would agree with you, that to cut drug interdiction by 80 percent by the year 2003 might be a little bit—I don't want to use the word naive but may not actually happen, although I think if we wanted it to happen as a Nation, it would happen.
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But looking—the Coast Guard's contribution to this, and I know we want to have a multiagency approach to this to cut the drugs by the year 2007 by 50 percent, is it—and I am going to use this percentage 80 percent, Admiral, because I have heard this—I got this 80 percent from the Coast Guard.
Admiral LOY. Yes, sir, I think the 80 percent you got from this is this—
Mr. GILCHREST. My question is, in your mind, is it reasonable or unreasonable to assume that if we put forth a national effort to interdict drugs coming into the United States, whether through Mexico, Caribbean, the Gulf, the Atlantic, the Pacific, do we have the technology, the manpower, if the will is there to achieve an 80 percent reduction? Is it reasonable or unreasonable to assume that we can do that?
Admiral LOY. I think that is an unreasonable presumption. I think it is unreasonable to assume that we can reduce the supply through the Transit Zone by 80 percent, sir. What I think is reasonable is the national—
Mr. GILCHREST. Why would you say it is unreasonable? Because the resources aren't there?
Admiral LOY. I think severalfold. First of all, the nature of this enemy is too easily underestimated. The cartels and their ability to—you know, with a no overhead limit kind of approach to their task, they have demonstrated, as we all are experiencing, an enormous capability to, if you will, outflank what we have been able to mount as a national effort to date. I have that same feeling not only from the perspective of the U.S. citizenry but for all the little nations in the Caribbean.
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For example, one of the things in STEEL WEB is that we want very much to be able to leverage international assistance in this business so there is some indigenous capability built in the Caribbean so that they can contribute, fending for themselves to some degree.
Every time I spoke with a defense minister, with a chief of service, with the prime minister on any of those island nations, they were absolutely overwhelmed with the idea of narcotrafficking overwhelming, literally, the GNP of their little island nations and thus their willingness, if you will, to participate with us as part of this international effort. They have given up sovereignty, I would offer, sir, in terms of their territorial sea and air space, by agreements that we have negotiated with them to take those as safe havens away from the bad guy.
But to go back to your original question—I don't want to take this off on a tangent. To go back to your original question, sir, I think it is very hard to focus in on any number, the 80 percent. We are in a window of variance such that I think it is hard for us to focus in on any number.
But I can tell you that, given the analytical capability that we have at the moment from two different dimensions associated with increasing our seizure rate, as is spelled out in the objectives of the National Drug Control Strategy and in adopting this deterrence model from the Rockwell study, we come to just about the same place in terms of the resource package necessary for the Coast Guard to make its contribution as called for in the National Drug Control Strategy. That I am very confident in, sir.
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Those numbers are, in fact, clearly reflected in lists that are all over this town, as you well know, at this point, whether it is a list for the House bill, a list for the Senate bill, a list for General McCaffrey from me as the U.S. Interdiction Coordinator, a list from the Coast Guard in the budget building process in the Administration.
What I can tell you is that, from the Coast Guard's perspective, those are all the same lists; and I feel confident in that list because of the analytical approach we are now finally able to take to trace what we think are expected results from the investment of assets.
Mr. GILCHREST. Thank you very much, Admiral Loy.
Mr. Clement.
Mr. CLEMENT. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Admiral Loy, I know you mentioned about the end game capability, and I wanted to ask questions concerning that. Is the Coast Guard changing its strategy concerning use of weapons by aircraft to stop go-fast boats? If so, what are the rules of engagement going to be?
Admiral LOY. Yes, sir. As I returned from my trip and it became so evident to me that the go-fast threat was where we were bogging down right now in the Transit Zone, I directed my staff to explore the change of doctrine that you just highlighted. I have watched success in the Colombian area with respect to use of force from aircraft and even from Panama in terms of use of force from aircraft. So I have asked my staff to explore the doctrine, making certain that they address the force protection issues, the tactics issues, and other related issues, so that in about 4 to 6 months I will have a handle on whether or not I want to make the change you just described. My orientation is to do it, and I am looking for ways for us to do it, because I think that is the deliverable in terms of the speed factor we need to bring the go-fast to a stop.
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The second piece of end game capability, Mr. Clement, would be to make certain, once the aircraft was able to bring it to a stop, we had the wherewithal to deliver arrest capability to the scene. That may very well be in terms of a deployable pursuit boat kind of very fast surface asset that gets there or it may be that we work very hard over the course of the next short while with people like the SEALS and others to literally make that delivery from the helicopter.
We have these young people and others in the aviation business that jump out of perfectly good airplanes to do magic things in search and rescue scenarios. I don't know that it is too far of a stretch for us to be thinking about the same kind of delivery of endgame capability in the law enforcement scenario as well.
So we are exploring the number one thing on my list, sir, is to find endgame capability and introduce it into the Transit Zone.
Mr. CLEMENT. Admiral Loy, is the Coast Guard or other Federal agencies developing non-lethal methods of stopping go-fast boats and, if so, what is the state of the development of this technology?
Admiral LOY. Sir, the Department of Defense has pretty much cornered the market on the R&D efforts associated with non-lethal technologies. There are several and, to some degree, that are classified. I will be happy to talk with you, sir, in private session about that.
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But the Department of Defense has gained, properly, I believe, has gained the focus of doing the R&D necessary to do a number of different things. There are a number of different ways one can go about doing that, one of the most simple, which is not classified, is sort of an ignition interrupt system which all of a sudden brings the engine of the go-fast to a stop and just sort of makes it dead in the water. And there are other means, from grappling devices to nets, that might be deliverable to the scene and accomplish the same goal.
Those questions, sir, are best answered in a behind-closed-doors process and/or with the Department of Defense.
Mr. CLEMENT. I would like to know more about that at the proper time.
Admiral Loy, if Coast Guard aircraft begin trying to stop go-fast boats, will the Coast Guard need to begin acquiring armored aircraft?
Admiral LOY. That is part, sir,of what I have asked my staff to explore very carefully. If you will, the force protection end of putting my people in harm's way is of great concern to me; and if that particular facet of the review is not completed to my satisfaction, I would not be anticipating that we would begin this change of policy.
Mr. CLEMENT. Because I—if I was a member of the Coast Guard and I was out there trying to do my job, it would be rather frustrating to me watching these people just come and go and not having the capability of being able to stop them.
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Admiral LOY. Yes, sir. The young lieutenant from our OPBAT staff that is flying H-60s in the Bahamas for us virtually on a daily basis will be able to answer those questions for you, sir, when he is up here.
Mr. CLEMENT. Admiral Loy, what percentage of the drugs smuggled into the U.S. each year cross our borders on aircraft?
Admiral LOY. The latest estimates that I have seen, sir, in terms of direct introduction to the United States, to the lower 48, if you will, from source countries is somewhere around 10 percent. The vast majority goes either up the corridor associated with—if you see the word Carib Shield, sir, and Gulf Shield, that—there is almost a set of arrows that you can describe that take Eastern Pacific and the Western Caribbean together. The most recent numbers from those who understand the cocaine movement best in the intelligence communities, about 57 percent of what is generated in the South American source countries coming in that conduit and about 33 percent in the Eastern Caribbean channel, if you will, and about 10 percent direct to the U.S. You can see that number in black right on the continental U.S. Most of that is by either aircraft and/or commercial containers.
Mr. CLEMENT. Now, that Gulf Shield, are you saying they go from the Carib Shield directly to the Gulf Shield, New Orleans, Panama City?
Admiral LOY. Absolutely.
Mr. CLEMENT. Pensacola?
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Admiral LOY. Absolutely. The vast majority, though, remains, sir, across the southwest border, and that is appropriately where General McCaffrey is putting an enormous amount of attention to deal with it.
Our challenge in the interdiction zone is to reason out the pathways between source country and Mexico. Mexico remains the least common denominator, border-wise, with the U.S.; upwards of 75, 80 percent of whatever finds its way into the U.S. crosses the southwest border.
Mr. CLEMENT. But that is a long way where you have that marked Carib Shield to the Gulf Shield. What would that be? 1,500 miles or what?
Admiral LOY. It is a couple million square miles of turf. This thing called the Transit Zone is an enormous undertaking, yes, sir. I would go to the intelligence end of the operation being extremely important to make the difference up between—at least in the Atlantic, sir, as you can see the natural geography, we have choke points associated with getting from point A to point B.
If you are going from the source countries in South America to the continental United States, you have got to find your way through the Mona Passage, the Yucatan Channel, the Windward Passage. Yucatan is between the tip of Cuba and Mexico, the Windward Passage between the eastern tip of Cuba and Hispaniola, and the Mona Passage between Hispaniola and Puerto Rico. Those are natural—and there are even others to the east. Those are natural choke points that you can deploy assets tactically to deal with the channels that the bad guy has to go through.
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Look at the eastern Pacific, sir, if you want a tactical challenge which amplifies the reasoning behind our investment in intelligence-driven activity. Of the busts that we encountered last year, sir, about 70 percent had an intelligence-driven background to them that allowed us to be smart enough to be at the right place at the right time and take those guys down.
So the investment in intelligence, which again General McCaffrey is making a concerted effort to synthesize well, there was a recent—over the course of the last, oh, 9 months to a year, I guess—I am not sure of the time frame—a White House task force that was put together to check on whether we were optimizing the two main sources of intelligence to translate them into both strategic deliverables for our field commanders and then tactically actionable deliverables for our field commanders, the difference being the strategy is where you are going to put that ship generally. A tactical example/: you have a guy leaving Colombia tomorrow at 8:00 in the morning and if you happen to be here you can nail him. This is the difference between tactical and strategic.
The national security dimension of intelligence and the law enforcement dimension of intelligence need to be better married in terms of producing those strategic and tactical deliverables, and General McCaffrey is working very hard on this.
Mr. CLEMENT. That is my last question to you. What needs to be done to better coordinate our drug intelligence among Federal agents?
Admiral LOY. Yes, sir. I think that is essentially the answer. I think you can go back to 1989. The 1989 authorization act for DOD that brought them into the game did so for three reasons, one of which was to fuse the intelligence efforts of the Nation as a whole to make those strategic and tactical deliverables available to field commanders. And over the course of 10 years, they have worked very, very hard to do that. I think there are still challenges to be met there; and, again, this last effort of the White House task force for General McCaffrey was to do exactly that.
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Mr. CLEMENT. Thank you, Admiral.
Mr. GILCHREST. Just to follow up on that question. Was much learned about fusing that intelligence among the myriad of services and agencies acquired through some of the earlier exercises—Lance, Frontier Shield, the area around the Bahamas?
Admiral LOY. All of those operations, when you debrief them at the other end of the day, lend patterns and information of intent on the part of the bad guys. Interestingly, sir, the whole Rockwell deterrence model is, to some degree, based on asking criminals when they are captured what would have influenced their behavior to do something different.
Iif you think you are going to get shot from aircraft, you are probably not going to fly the aircraft anymore. If you think there is no law enforcement there, that is the channel you are going to take. I mean, those are the two opposite ends of the spectrum, if you will.
The deterrence model was an effort to try to get into the bad guys' minds to a degree and understand what would cause him or her to change their behavior and get out of the business and then back that into an asset laydown that would drive them in exactly that direction.
But the White House task force just finished, sir, has a long list of recommendations that General McCaffrey is trying to make happen within the total itelligence community as a whole, and I think we are going to be far better off for having done it.
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Mr. GILCHREST. General McCaffrey is smoothing the way for better communications for intelligence between the FBI, DIA, Navy, Coast Guard, Customs and all those things.
Admiral LOY. Exactly. All of those things on the law enforcement side and including CIA and all the big boys, if you will, who really understand and have the asset capability to make a contribution. They have all been in the game over the course of the last 8 or 10 years, but it was an enormously new challenge for them, as you might imagine, sir, the shift from Cold War, infrastructure-based intelligence systems to one that is facing the array of national security threats that we have today.
Mr. GILCHREST. How far away are we from that transition, would you say?
Admiral LOY. It is under way, sir.
Mr. GILCHREST. Is it leadership that is vitally important? Are there personalities in the various agencies that need to be overcome?
Admiral LOY. I think there always are little challenges like that along the way but, in this instance, it is my understanding that the reason it was centered as a White House task force was to gain consensus from the players at the top. That has been reached.
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Mr. GILCHREST. How much influence do you have toward this transition from the Cold War to this type of activity given your position as interdiction coordinator and how much influence do you have with developing the strategy for interdicting drugs?
Admiral LOY. Internal to the report that I have given to General McCaffrey, there were an array of policy pieces and an array of resource suggestions that I had. On the policy side, several of my recommendations went directly to the heart of what you just asked—first of all, the fusion of intelligence products at the strategic and tactical level; secondly, to encourage my field commanders not to whine about not getting tactically actionable products if they haven't asked the intelligence community for them.
Mr. GILCHREST. Do the enlisted men have the ability to whine?
Admiral LOY. I am talking about generals and admirals, sir.
I am talking about field commanders of significant grade level that need to articulate specifically what they need. The intelligence community is amazingly capable to respond if they know what the challenge is. So that is part of it.
So, yes, sir, I have an opportunity to reinforce for General McCaffrey, I would say at this point, that his track about intelligence is right on target.
Mr. GILCHREST. Two more very quick questions. One is that we have a 5-year transit zone asset requirement study.
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Admiral LOY. Yes, sir.
Mr. GILCHREST. Pending that delivery, can you give us a quick overview of that at this point?
Admiral LOY. Yes, sir. What it was was a translation into ship days and aircraft hours and intelligence capability, elements, if you will, of the counternarcotics war, the difference between what we have and what we think we need in the Transit Zone to accomplish, again, the National Drug Control Strategy.
Mr. GILCHREST. Which would be 20, 25 percent by 2007?
Admiral LOY. That is correct, sir, and we itemized the simple differential there and said to General McCaffrey, from the Transit Zone and from the source country—we did one for the Transit Zone, we did one for source country, and then we married them, as you know, which was a very interesting process. Because the yield there suggested that the total package could be less than the sum of the two parts.
Let me give you an example for that. One of them was a shortfall in maritime patrol aircraft hours, the ability to literally have aircraft in the air, patrolling the maritime region to identify and track targets of interest as they emerge from the Colombian airspace and head north. There were a number of choices that one could use in terms of which kind of an airplane do you want to put in that business.
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I favor, as the U.S. Interdiction Coordinator, P-3s from the Customs Service, because they are also very much in the business. It is a combination of both trackers and AEW platforms, which have already been put to terrific test by the Customs Service and proven their mettle.
Thirdly, they represent swing assets. If you go back to PDD-14, the whole idea was to shift assets towards the source country to eventually get the big bang solution out of making a big dent in the ability of the source countries to produce and deliver cocaine as a product north of the South American northern boundary. Having said that, I am confident in PDD-14 as long as there is end game capability in the source countries.
My concern at the moment is with Colombia, despite the protestations of President Pastrana—and we certainly hope that he is enormously successful in what he wants to do. The least common denominator country in the Source Zone today is Colombia, and it is in anarchy at the moment.
And so my challenge then to the General is, listen, boss, if we cannot employ P-3s effectively over the source countries because there is no endgame capability there, we want an asset that can swing to the Transit Zone and be impacting there until such endgame capability can be developed in Colombia and you can return to the thrust that PDD-14 represents.
So that swing capability of being flexible to be effective in both the transit and the source country to me spelled P-3 as the right answer for that, and I credit the authors of H.R. 4300 and those on the Senate side for recognizing that as well.
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Mr. GILCHREST. Is there a chance that the committee could get that study?
Admiral LOY. I would certainly take that up with General McCaffrey, sir. It is his product. I cannot imagine why that would be a problem.
I understand clearly the intent of the Congress, especially for interdiction. Senator DeWine was very articulate with me a week or so ago when I testified before him, that there was perceived by the Congress to be an imbalance in the total package of things and interdiction was short at the moment. We understand where he is going with that thought process.
Mr. GILCHREST. I will call General McCaffrey.
Admiral LOY. Yes, sir, I think that would be the right thing to do.
Mr. GILCHREST. We will take that burden away from you, Admiral.
And I will just make the last comment. I would hope that there continues to be an open mind for all of us to understand the nature of the difficulty of this effort to interdict drugs and to reduce the number of American deaths and to improve the quality of life for people.
And as we pursue this, I think that if we have the kind of mind frame and spirit, that we would be able to come close to eliminating the transit of illicit substances to the United States, whether it be 50 percent or 95 percent. I think the creative genius of our democratic process and the fact that it creates an inherent sense of initiative on the part of its people—and certainly all of us collectively can be advocates, responsible advocates for what we believe to be true—
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Admiral LOY. Yes, sir.
Mr. GILCHREST. —I think we can go a long way into working together as a team to solving this problem.
But, Admiral, I greatly respect your opinions and your career and your service to your country, and I hope it is years ahead before you decide to retire and run for Congress.
Anyway, Bob, do you have any more questions?
Mr. CLEMENT. No.
Mr. GILCHREST. Admiral, thank you very much.
Admiral LOY. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.
Now we will hear the rest of the story. We have Commander Steve Ratti, Lieutenant Commander Joe Hester, Lieutenant David Bullock, Boatswain's Mate First Class Robert Hoglund.
Admiral LOY. As I get out of the way, Mr. Chairman, if I may, if there is value to a trip to our Intelligence Coordination Center for either yourself or Mr. Clement, I would be honored to make that arrangement to give you a sort of personal feel for that intelligence piece that we talked about.
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Mr. GILCHREST. I think both of us would like to go at some point.
Gentlemen, we hope that you have some brief remarks for us this morning on some of your experiences in the Coast Guard.
We would hope that you would relax and just tell us what is on your mind. I think each of you outranks me when I was in the service. So I was just an E-5 and I think everybody out there is above an E-5, plus you have the experience, the expertise, the wherewithal, and so we are here trying to understand the nature of this business and how we can improve it for the Nation and give you the tools to make your job safer and more effective.
So, Mr. Hoglund, I guess we can start with you, sir.
Commander RATTI. Mr. Chairman, we talked about it earlier.
Mr. GILCHREST. All right. Well—
BM1 HOGLUND. Senior to junior.
Mr. GILCHREST. See, as an old enlisted man, I figured we would do the enlisted man first. But this way, Mr. Hoglund, you can see what everybody else says and make some corrections or deletions.
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TESTIMONY OF COMMANDER STEVE RATTI, U.S. COAST GUARD; LIEUTENANT COMMANDER JOE HESTER, U.S. COAST GUARD; LIEUTENANT DAVID BULLOCK, U.S. COAST GUARD; AND BOATSWAIN'S MATE FIRST CLASS ROBERT HOGLUND, U.S. COAST GUARD
Mr. GILCHREST. Commander, would you like to go first?
Commander RATTI. Yes, sir, we always save the best for last.
I am Commander Steve Ratti, and I recently relocated to the Washington, D.C., area from Key West, Florida. For the last 2 years in Key West, I was Commander of the Coast Guard cutter THETIS, home ported in Key West. The cutter THETIS is one of 13 270-foot cutters that the Coast Guard operates. We have a crew of about a hundred people that generally sail on deployments of about 5 to 8 weeks in length, primarily in the Caribbean operation area, as Admiral Loy was talking about.
On our ships, we face numerous challenges. And those of us who go down to the sea in ships, as the saying goes—and I have done that for over half of my 20 years of commissioned service—know the challenges that await us in the people that we are meeting and the jobs that we have to do. Each patrol brings something new.
Now, there are more than enough jobs for our ships to do, and so the Coast Guard has to prioritize what we spend our time doing. This means that we maintain an extremely challenging operational tempo and schedule. This translates into about 185 days a year being away from home port for our major cutters. That is what I have done for actually the last 4 years on two different ships. Between us, we have literally hundreds of stories that we could tell you and could spend the better part of a few days here, but we each have 5 to 10 minutes and of a couple of points that we want to illustrate.
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I was patrolling one time in the central Caribbean on my ship, and we got word of an impending departure from Colombia. And this was some intelligence that said there is a go-fast that should depart from the Guajira Peninsula, which is in Colombia, and make a delivery of cocaine to the south coast of Haiti. And if there is one thing I have learned over the years it is when you have some intelligence, somebody says something is liable to happen, you act on it.
I placed the ship about 25 miles offshore off the south coast of Haiti and picked a spot where, if the vessel was indeed transiting from the Guajira Peninsula up to Haiti, which is almost due north, we went back and forth in a small area so as to be in position to try to intercept the vessel. So we stayed about 25 miles off shore, and then at night moved into about 10 miles offshore, because the geography of Hispaniola is such that the commercial maritime traffic transits about 30 miles offshore and we wanted to make sure that we avoided all those people and didn't have someone call us on the radio and give away our position. And at night, without any running lights, we could maintain our secrecy and nobody would know that we were there, essentially.
We brought aboard—as the Admiral mentioned, in order to exercise the bilateral agreements that our country has with Haiti— the chief of the Haitian Coast Guard and another Haitian Coast Guard officer. The Haitian Coast Guard is part of the Haitian National Police. This bilateral agreement and having those people on board gave us the authority to exercise law enforcement actions inside Haitian territorial seas.
So if we came across any type of vessel in the Haitian territorial seas, we had complete law enforcement authority. If we encountered somebody on the high seas, if they are a U.S. vessel, as you know, we have complete authority over them. If it is some other country, we may have to go through a complicated process to get on board the vessel. So if we operated within the Haitian territorial seas we had complete law enforcement authority. So we brought two Haitian Coast Guard officers aboard because of this intelligence that we had.
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Now, we patroled for a few days, and the intelligence kept saying, well, it looks like they should be leaving today, they are going to leave tonight, they are going to leave tomorrow, and we got that for several days, and it looked like it was not going to go anywhere. The intelligence had discussed a 35- to 40-foot go-fast, which is an open boat, pretty much like a big bass boat, with a pretty flat bottom, and three or four large outboard engines on the stern, usually 200, 225 horsepower so they can just fly and they can make that transit. That is about 350 miles in about 12 to 18 hours depending upon the vessel.
So we knew that once we got the word that the vessel had departed, it wouldn't be long for us to respond. So we stayed in that very small part of the ocean so if he went by us we would be sure to see him.
Sure enough, about midnight one night I got a call from the Officer of the Deck on the bridge, and he said, Captain, we have a small northwest-bound contact that is to the southeast of us, and we think he is heading up towards Haiti. And I said great, and went to the bridge and took a look at it.
We did not have him on our normal navigational radar. He was about 9 miles away from us. But we have a gunfire control system radar that we use primarily to fire our gun, but it is so good that we use it to detect other vessels all the time, and we were using it in this capacity. And we picked up a very small boat, got a track on him, and said, yes, he is definitely heading to Haiti. He is 15, 16 miles off shore. Let's get ready and wait until he is inside Haitian territorial seas.
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We maneuvered to maintain radar coverage of him. Put our small boat in the water. We have a 6-meter-long, rigid-hull inflatable into which we put both a team to operate the boat and a boarding team outfitted in body armor, weapons, and all the other standard law enforcement equipment.
We put all of them in the boat, and in a very short period of time in complete darkness and from the back of the ship, because we didn't want the other boat to see us, we launched them. We maneuvered to get the small boat out in front of them in case they ran fast, and then we maneuvered to come in behind them to cut off any escape they might have attempted.
Keep in mind, Mr. Chairman, that we did not know what we were up against. All we knew was that we had a radar contact. We didn't know if it was a heavily armed vessel or a fishing boat or what it was.
So the plan was coming together. Things were looking pretty good. I looked at the radar and saw what looks like a little bit of light rain on it. Not a big problem, even though our small boat that we had those 9 people in did not have any radar or anything like that and it is a very open boat. I said, well, they will be fine.
Well, sure enough, at about that time a rain squall came through, a pretty serious one, and visibility came down to near zero. We couldn't see where we were going. We lost radar contact with our small boat. We lost radar contact with the vessel that we were in pursuit of.
So we operated for nearly 2 hours by what seamen call dead reckoning, which is basically taking a pretty educated guess. We drew some lines on the charts and said, this is where we think he is going. This is his probable course. Here is where we are. Here is where the small boat is. And we told the small boat what magnetic course to steer and about what speed to go, and we steered off in different directions. We did this for about 2 hours.
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The pouring rain finally came to a halt. We got a contact back on our radar and said, great, we have somebody. The small boat called us and, actually, we took a radio direction, finding a line of bearing when we talked to the small boat over our secure radio communications, and they were pretty close to the same bearing, so there was some speculation that maybe we were only tracking our small boat and, in fact, not tracking the vessel that we were looking for.
But as we started closing in on that vessel at high speed, we saw some divergence so we said, okay, we definitely have the contact vessel we are looking for, and we have our small boat. We vectored them in. We got in close.
As soon as we got in real close, my crew in the small boat said, hey, we can hear an engine. There is something else out here. And these poor guys have been out for now 2 and a half hours. They were soaking wet, wearing body armor, their weapons, radios. They are soaked and ready to go home at this point. All of a sudden, we hear on the radio, we hear an engine. There is somebody out here. And we could just feel the adrenaline up on the bridge that they had in the small boat.
I said, all right, as soon as we get in a little bit closer we are going to light them up. He was showing no navigational lights. My small boat was in darkness, and we were completely dark, and the squall line had just gone through, and it was still extremely dark out. Luckily, we had good radar contact.
When we got within 500 yards, which at sea is pretty darned close, we lit up two of our main spotlights and the small boat lit up their spotlight and shined the bright lights on them and, as far as he could see, it was coming from all directions. We got on the radio at the same time and said, this is the United States Coast Guard, stop your boat, et cetera.
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He zigged one way, zagged another way, and then finally came to a stop. And when he stopped, my boarding team in the small boat was there and hopped on board and that was within 30 seconds of us lighting him up. Luckily, the vessel construction was such that my team could get on board rapidly. And they got on board, Spanish speaker first, then the boarding officer, and then the rest of the people. And just as people from down below on the vessel starting coming above decks, for officer safety they put handcuffs on everybody right away. They got the situation under control and then started looking around to see what they had.
When they looked around, they found that they were on a 50-foot vessel, and that the whole forward portion of it was covered with a tarp, a blue tarp, which by day would blend in with the sea, and it was essentially level, and the boat was very low and long and wide. And we later found out, after we arrested the people on board, we brought it to Port au Prince, Haiti, and off-loaded all of the narcotics, and there were 9,660 pounds of marijuana and 34 kilograms of cocaine on board, and five Colombians that we arrested.
We off-loaded this in front of a Haitian magistrate who witnessed it. They took some small samples. Then we took all the drugs back and took them out to sea and destroyed them and turned the five Colombians over to the Haitian justice system. And my knowledge is they were planning on doing the prosecution there in Haiti.
I tell you that story, sir, to tell you the type of thing that men and women in the Coast Guard go through every day. And, sir, you see these figures of the number of sightings, targets, boardings, pounds, vessels seized. This is but one seizure and only 34 kilograms of cocaine and 9,660 pounds of marijuana. This type of thing is happening every day in the Coast Guard. And, in effect, we have young men and women that are going over the gunwhale that are risking their lives on a daily basis to stop the narcotics, stop the contraband from coming into our country.
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Right before this seizure was made, when those guys had been in the small boat for 2 hours, they were calling back on the radio, going I don't think anything is out here. Can we come back? And as soon as they got on board, I could not get those guys off. I tried to send over relief, get some other people. Nope, we are fine; we will stay here. And they were running on their adrenaline until afternoon the next day, and they had been up all night long.
The whole crew gets so excited when there is a chance to make a difference and a chance to make a seizure—that means a lot to them.
Another point to my story, sir: we went back and looked at it, and this vessel, 50 feet long with all of the contraband they had on board and five people, I had an embarked helicopter and had flown my helicopter as much as I could every day for the last 3 days and I found that the area that they must have transited through my helicopter had searched at dinner time that evening. Because of the sensors that our aircraft have, they were unable to see them because, in fact, it was not a go-fast vessel, it was a go-slow. They only had one diesel inboard, and it was an old wooden boat. But it looked very much like a go-fast vessel, even though it was a go-slow. They made the voyage from Colombia to Haiti at about 8 to 9 knots the whole way, and nobody ever detected them; we just happened to be in a spot guarding against a go-fast that, in fact, did not sail for another week.
So I want to echo Admiral Loy's point that interdiction works. We just happened to be in a particular place looking for someone, somebody else came along, and we were there and could make the seizure and make the arrest and keep the drugs off the streets of the U.S.
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Mr. GILCHREST. Thank you, Commander.
Commander Hester?
Commander HESTER. Good morning, sir. Good morning to the Committee.
Until recently, I was the Commanding Officer of the Coast Guard cutter ATTU, an 110-foot patrol boat stationed in San Juan, Puerto Rico, and I took part in operations FRONTIER SHIELD and FRONTIER LANCE as well. I did numerous search and rescue cases, compiled over 400 boardings during my 2 years there, and was part of enforcing numerous bilateral agreements with several countries down the island chain all the way down to Trinidad-Tobago.
We had several busts. The typical busts for cocaine during my tour were aircraft, usually Customs aircraft or Coast Guard aircraft, sighting cocaine go-fast boats and then calling in the cavalry, the 110-foot patrol boats, and we would race out and make the bust.
But what I would like to talk to you about today is a different operation that I think, although it was a kill, it was a soft kill, and it does apply to some of the things that I would like to tell you, sir.
We got an initial intelligence report during the latter part of my patrol. By the way, the 110-foot patrol boat that I was on, like the other ones in Puerto Rico, is running a 2,400-hour annual schedule. What that roughly equates to is 2 weeks per month I am out on patrol, and then we come in and have 2 weeks, 2 and a half weeks to do our maintenance, get our training done and, hopefully, get a little time with our families.
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It is a pretty steep schedule. When you throw in all the things that we are required to do, it gets pretty hectic. That is about 600 hours more or 33 percent more than the Coast Guard budgeted average of 1,800. We have done that in the Coast Guard just so that the boats down there, where the most drug activity is taking place, are running harder and trying to do more to stop drugs.
Back to my story. We got this intelligence report that a coastal freighter had left the Colombian/Venezuelan coast and had been out at sea doing some things they shouldn't have been, and we were given a position to go down to and rendezvous with another Coast Guard cutter that was already responding.
I raced down to St. Lucia from Puerto Rico, and once I arrived near St. Lucia, I relieved the Coast Guard cutter DALLAS of this coastal freighter. It was about 120-feet long. He claimed he had been on a voyage that should have taken him only about 2 days. He had actually been out on that trip for more than 30 days. So, quickly, his story didn't begin to add up.
The DALLAS, fortunately, had on board a machine called an IONSCAN. I don't know if you are familiar with this, sir, but basically it is equipment that comes in three suitcase size boxes, along with pieces of paper sort of like a Kleenex tissue. With a rubber glove on, you take that tissue and wipe it on a surface that you want to test and you wipe that tissue on the surface and stick it in the machine and the sensor will tell you whether that surface has been in contact with cocaine. A very high reading will show that the cocaine actually touched it. A lower reading might indicate that somebody had carried the cocaine and then touched it with their dirty cocaine hand. You can also use it to determine if people have been handling cocaine.
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I could come up and rub your hands with it and see if you had been involved with cocaine. And individuals that said, oh, no, I have never done anything, we have proven in court, well, yes, you did and you definitely did handle cocaine.
Fortunately, DALLAS had one of these machines on board, and they had done extensive tests over the boat and didn't have time to analyze the results but gave us all the results on the sheet. We relieved them of the boarding and began to escort this coastal freighter back north to St. Croix, and DALLAS continued on to another operation.
When we arrived in St. Croix, the U.S. Attorney met us on the pier. This is by now a big event. We had a couple of DEA representatives and Customs representatives there, and the local police had brought their dogs, all trying to find the cocaine that intelligence said was on this vessel.
We continued searching through the boat, but our biggest obstacle was 22 tons of brick, decorative garden brick in his hold, which pretty much filled this 120-foot ship. My ship is only 110 feet long. This fellow is bigger than I am, and he has more crew, and my guys have been out on a 2-week patrol and are exhausted and ready are to go home. But you are pretty excited when you think you have got the big one here, and we began off-loading this brick. Well, there was nobody there to help us, and they had no heavy lift equipment and the brick had been so jumbled around by 30 days at sea that the first couple of tons we had to off-load by hand.
Mr. GILCHREST. What were you doing with the brick? Throwing it overboard?
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Commander HESTER. No, sir, we discussed doing that at sea, but, one, if we didn't find anything, we would be liable; two, it would be unsafe to put a crew in a load of loose brick and start passing it around. So we waited until we got alongside the pier, used the Customs pier to off-load just so there was space. And we began off-loading the brick by hand. Got a few tons off, and were able to get some machinery in there and continue unloading.
In the meanwhile, I have crews in the engine room, and I am using the small boat and circling the water line and calling in divers to see if we can look at the underside of the boat. And we rolled out the IONSCAN readings, and we said, let's really look at this, and we realized that we had a story in the IONSCAN readings when we noticed that the highest readings were in the mess deck where the crew ate. The galley and mess deck areas had extremely high readings on the tabletops. And then the next readings were on the ladder, the stairs that led down from the mess deck to the captain's cabin, and the captain's cabin is the only thing at the bottom of that ladder.
And we started digging around in the captain's cabin; and, looking underneath, we found some paint brushes and paint cans and welding rods and welding materials. And this was all pretty suspicious, when they claimed they had not been doing any work down there. We bring this to the attention of the district attorney, and he says, go ahead with a more destructive search, a more intrusive search.
We look at the most suspect bulkhead in the captain's cabin and rip that down, and behind that we find a bulkhead that has been cut up and rewelded and repainted. We ripped that bulkhead open, and we find a hidden compartment large enough that your entire committee present and all of us could have fit inside easily.
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There was actually no cocaine inside, which is sort of the downside to our story. We did find, however, a whole wallet full of cash, several thousand dollars in cash, both U.S. and Colombian currency. And the master couldn't account for why he had all of this cash around. He couldn't account for why he had this hidden compartment in his own stateroom, his bedroom, and why his bedroom wall was fake. He couldn't explain any of that.
When we put all of this information together and the definitive fact that, yes, sir, Mr. District Attorney, they have definitely had cocaine on this boat here and here and here and down this ladder, he made the decision at that point to seize the boat, to arrest the boat and to arrest the master and all of the crew.
The master and the whole crew were sent back to Honduras where they were prosecuted. The vessel stayed in U.S. custody and was eventually sold, and the money went into the U.S. Treasury, and we continued on our trip. Fortunately, we didn't have to reload the brick.
The rest of the story: At this point, we had our seizure. We had a 120-foot drug smuggling vessel taken off the market so the next time that captain tries to run coke, first he has to get out of the Honduran jail and find himself a new ship to run it in. We know his name. We have got further intelligence on all of them. So a ''soft kill,'' if you will.
Meanwhile, back on the ATTU, one exhausted crew. We get them back on the boat, and I take the watch and bring us home to San Juan, and we had a day off before we had to begin our 2 weeks of getting the boat ready for the next trip. At that point in San Juan, we had FRONTIER SHIELD running, which meant increased operational hours. But we didn't yet have the support teams that are now coming into effect. So the fellows that are running the engines underway are the only wrench turners I had when we got back in port. So a pretty busy group of people, sir.
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Mr. GILCHREST. Thank you very much.
Lieutenant Bullock.
Lieutenant BULLOCK. Mr. Chairman, Lieutenant David Bullock. I am stationed in Clearwater, Florida. I am part of the OPBAT program there. That was briefly discussed by Admiral Loy as the Operation Bahamas, Turks and Caicos. Our job over there is to unify with the Bahamians, the DEA, the U.S. Army and the U.S. Coast Guard to do a counternarcotic operation.
I have been in 19 years. I, too, was enlisted. I went—I thought working on helicopters was very rewarding, but I think driving them is doubly rewarding. So I have a lot to offer the aviation community as far as drug enforcement.
I have been in OPBAT for about 4 years. We deploy about 100 days a year per crewmen. We go to two sites and split the sites up in essentially two sections that operate on alert status 24 hours a day and alternate every other day.
During our alert status, we fly two 3-hour patrols, patrolling all the Bahama Islands, as many as we can get to, and mainly looking at the civilian and commercial boat traffic and the airport runways to see if there is any traffic in and out of those. We fly with a Bahamian drug enforcement agent, a DEA agent and also a Turks and Caicos drug enforcement agent when we are in the Turks and Caicos area.
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The story I am about to tell and the mission we were on can be mimicked and mirrored by many of my comrades that fly in the OPBAT theater. This has happened more than just this one time.
We got a call from the OPBAT command center that a ROTHR track had been picked up. That is radar that is over the horizon and it comes from two remote sites, one in the northeast and one in the southwest U.S. They had picked up a track that had come up off the Colombian coast. The reason they can pick these tracks is because they take the aircraft that are flying at the time and see if any of them are filing an international flight plan. And if they haven't, they are automatically a targeted suspect.
They normally dispatch a fixed-wing aircraft. E-2 and P-3, as Admiral Loy talked about, are the aircraft of choice, but they do not stand on any kind of ready alert status, so it is kind of catch as catch can if we can get one of those. They had a C-130 that actually was sent out of Clearwater to come down and help us with this.
As they got on the scene, it was described that the aircraft that was coming up was going to go through Cuban airspace and also the north side of Cuba, so we directed all of our assets to head toward the north side of Cuba, minding that we have to stay outside of Cuban territorial waters. The C-130 stayed outside of the territorial waters. It is a four-engine turboprop fixed-wing aircraft that can remain aloft for what seems like an eternity.
They actually saw the two vessels inside that zone. They have pretty sophisticated radar, and they radioed us that, hey, we have two boats—can't tell if they are go-fast or what they are—sitting inside the zone.
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Anyway, so they radioed up that they noticed an aircraft that flew very low and slow over the top of these two vessels and was depositing materials in the water. And, of course, we all jumped to the conclusion that they are dropping contraband. The C-130, of course, cannot follow the aircraft back home.
Mr. GILCHREST. You were visually seeing this?
Lieutenant BULLOCK. The C-130 was visually seeing this from an altitude of 10,000 feet. We in the helicopters are still 30 minutes out, still flying down. We have two Coast Guard and one Army helicopter that are enroute, all of them carrying their agents.
The aircraft departed south back towards Cuba, and the two vessels started making their way north, one northwest and one northeast. The northwest island would be Bimini. That is where they were heading. So, me being out of the Nassau site, I chose to go toward Bimini. That puts me closer to home.
The C-130 kept a track on them pretty close until the helicopters could engage them, and we saw them visually at seven miles away come up from behind. And as we started flying up the stern we started noticing that it was definitely the go-fast type vessel, with three 250 horsepower outboards, and making about 45 to 50 miles an hour across the top of the water.
We come up from behind, and soon as we identified it, we told them there were four people on board, and they were Bahamian. We could not see contraband, but there was a forward hold, and we were kind of sure that is where they keep it. Intelligence has it that the Bahamian strike force men that I had in the back and the DEA guy actually knew who was on the boat and they actually knew the driver. So I thought this was quite rewarding, because we actually know where he is going and what he is going to do with it.
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In the meantime, I am asking, can I have a surface asset? The only surface asset we have is a 110-foot cutter and, with nighttime approaching shortly, the cutter was not going to be dispatched due to the fact that they cannot keep up with that speed in that shallow water, 10 to 15 feet deep, which can get treacherous at nighttime. The draft on these go-fast boats is probably 3 or 4 feet, and they can zip along on top of it.
In the meantime, I am asking, can I have some kind of a relief on scene? Because we are starting to get a low fuel status, which we call' bingo'. I gave them a bingo time of about 2 hours before I had to return for fuel. And bingo time means exactly that: I am out of gas and I have to go somewhere for fuel. They said they were going to try to give me another asset.
The C-130 had to depart because it was nighttime and they were losing sight of the vessel. All they had was the eyeball and their APS-137 radar. We dropped our night vision goggles, which are a great tool for nighttime operations. They use ambient light such as moon, stars, sometimes other sources of light. You can actually use aircraft lighting if you have to. And it brings all the light in and projects an image approximately 1/2 inch in front of your eyes. It is a very useful tool.
Of course, on our night, to make everything else go well, the moon is not up yet. The stars—we had kind of overcast sky. Not too bad but enough to kill a lot of star lighting. And we had chosen to run a darkened ship, and all the navigation lights were off, and we were trying to run as covertly as possible. The only thing I am following is the wake of a vessel going through the water, and I am off the stern half a mile, and every now again I catch a glimpse from his dashboard lighting.
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Mr. GILCHREST. At this point, does he know you are there?
Lieutenant BULLOCK. Yes, sir, he knew we were there. We came up from behind and got overhead, took some video of him, and they wouldn't look at us at first. That is the standard. They don't look. But we also had gone in front of him to make our presence known; and yes, sir, that is when they started taunting and tantalizing us and making gestures. So, yes, they knew we were there.
The aircraft that was coming out to relieve us was a HU-25' Falcon', a business-type jet that we have converted for law enforcement operations. It is home based out of Miami and was completing a search and rescue case. They had to go in for fuel, reoutfit the aircraft, and fix one of the maintenance discrepancies they had before they could release it. Also, the air crew were closing in on their flight time limitations. So we were told that it would be approximately an hour and a half for this Falcon to show up for our relief. Well, we were 1 hour to bingo fuel, so we were going to have a half-hour overlay of nobody.
As it is getting dark, the standard procedure for the go-fast boats is that now they can no longer see you they reduce their throttles and go dead in the water. There are two reasons for that. They like to go quiet so that they can hear to see if you are there; and, also, it gives them no signature on the water whatsoever, so they are very hard to find.
My wake is now gone, so I have no way to chase this boat. So I knew they were going to try to listen to our signature. So we got into an orbit pattern outside the vessel, and there are ways that you can mask the sound of a helicopter even though we don't have a whisper mode like everyone thinks we do. We were trying to mask our sound as best we could, so you have to stay outside at half a mile to a mile so they cannot hear you. On goggles, that makes it very, very difficult. We lost the boat three different times, and the last time I had to give away my position because we had to light him up with aircraft lights to make sure that is what we were looking at. Once we lighted him up, he knew we were having a hard time finding him, too. He continued to stay dead in the water.
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We told the command center that we have to go. We are bingo fuel. Where is the Falcon? And they said, it is going to be another 30 minutes. Can you please wait? And we said, no, that was not an option. We need to come home.
So we departed the scene, and we discussed it with the crew that the best thing to do was to broadcast that we were leaving. We turned on all our lights to broadcast that we were leaving, and, hopefully, they would get back underway again and that would give the Falcon at least a fighting chance to find his wake when they got on scene and could chase the vessel.
Well, we broadcasted it and, as we broadcasted it, the vessel did get underway and away they went. The Falcon never reacquired the target, and without our ground troops we had no way of getting the vessel.
And the vessel did eventually go to Bimini. It ran aground, and they said the contraband was in the forward hull just like we described. They could tell by the packaging material that was left on the beach. And the Bahamians blended into the local populace, which made it very hard to find them.
My final pitch on all of this, sir, is, I mean aviation, as mystique as it is and as neat as it is and the pilots run around with somewhat of an ego, and we understand that, as we proved in Desert Storm that you can go in with an air combat and pretty much do anything you want to do. You can take over the skies and use all the intelligence, and you can have all the neat little gadgets and gizmos to find what you are looking for. But without the ground troops, you pretty much own the sky and that is about all you own.
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I think with a new FLIR system installed, the Falcon, could have reacquired it. If the C-130 could have stayed on the scene, and had he had the new FLIR design that we have, I think it could have come out differently.
Mr. GILCHREST. Thank you very much, Mr. Bullock.
Mr. Hoglund.
BM1 HOGLUND. Good morning, Mr. Chairman, Mr. Clement. My name is Petty Officer First Class Bob Hoglund. I am stationed at the District 7 Tactical Law Enforcement Team in Miami.
The Tactical Law Enforcement team of Miami has a myriad of jobs, including law enforcement training for boarding officers and boarding team members throughout the 7th district and Puerto Rico. I am also a deployable pursuit boat operator, which I heard discussed a little bit earlier.
The story I want to talk about is more of a surface boarding that I did while working in conjunction with the United States Customs Service. I work with them quite frequently in Miami, as well as other Coast Guard units in the Miami area.
On this particular very sunny south Florida day about 2 o'clock in the afternoon I was operating with one of the Customs Service go-fast boats, a 42-foot Fountain boat with an approximate speed of 60 to 65 miles per hour. There were four of us on board, two Customs and two Coast Guard officers, and we were working an area of roughly 20 to 25 miles off shore of Miami. The Coast Guard presence on the Customs vessel allowed us to extend our range out beyond where Customs would normally end their authority, and we could get concurrent jurisdiction where we were working.
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On this particular afternoon, we were 22 miles off of Miami, and we came across, at about a mile away, a 33-foot open, go-fast style boat that was just sitting dead in the water. It was about a mile ahead of us, and we saw it wasn't moving, and it didn't meet the pattern of why a boat would be sitting out there for no reason. We initially thought it might be broken down. Any number of things were going through our minds why this boat was sitting there.
As we approached,— we got a half a mile away— the boat all of a sudden took off at full speed and continued to run westward towards Miami. Well, we saw this. And, initially, we started looking at this boat leaving and said, why would it, when it sees our presence, take off and go, as opposed to a normal boater who might stay and say, hi, how are you doing? It piqued our interest, initially.
We came alongside the boat at 100 yards at first, made our presence known, who we are. We energized our blue light, and the two occupants of the fast boat gave absolutely no indication of even knowing that we were there. As the lieutenant was talking about, if they do not see you, you are not there. And they continued to stare straight ahead, which required us to maneuver into a position much closer, probably 25 to 30 feet, doing about 55 to 60 miles per hour. We actually had to get to a position where we were actually forward of their vessel, where they would absolutely have to see our presence and have to respond to our orders to stop.
We ran for possibly about two or three minutes at this speed without them ever making eye contact with us or actually acknowledging that we were there. And then, totally out of the blue, the boat all of a sudden turned a hard left and turned and started running back towards Bimini again. We initially knew that now the situation is potentially going to get dangerous. He has shown us erratic operation, refusal to understand our presence there, and refused our orders to stop.
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So we turned with them. Came up at a very high rate of speed. Came alongside the vessel and initially using our boat as—I don't want to say a shouldering-type technique, we basically got to where they couldn't run straight ahead without some sort of resistance from us. And after a few minutes of this the boat did come to a stop.
We got the boat stopped, and when we initially came on board, of course the first thing we wanted to do is account for everybody on the boat. We saw two people. We just wanted to ensure there were no other persons on board. Once we ensured that these were the only two, there was one area of the forward cabin that we needed to look into to make certain there were no persons hiding in that area. This is an initial safety inspection to ensure for our safety that there is no one else on that boat. We opened up this forward compartment, and it is was just stuffed to the gills with cocaine.
Approximately 900 kilos of cocaine were located in the forward half of this vessel. As we started talking to the operator and the passenger on the boat, it was established that one person was a Colombian, the other person was a U.S. citizen. Their intentions were to take this cocaine into Miami, distribute it, and make a great deal of money. And, fortunately, we interrupted that particular operation, for these two guys anyway.
The big thing I would like to say about this whole operation is that it allowed us to both work with the U.S. Customs Service; we have worked with these other agencies a lot, and we have learned a lot from that cooperation with them. Our deployable pursuit boats are almost a mirror of the Customs boats that they are using now. And, in fact, it was the Customs Service that helped us outfit them with electronics, motors, engines, and training when we went to the pursuit boats that we have now. It showed that we were able to work together and actually get to the point where we are using the same or similar vessels that the bad guys are using, and they cannot get away from us. If we have them outtrained and outperformed, they cannot get away.
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Mr. GILCHREST. Thank you very much, Mr. Hoglund.
These were extraordinary tales, gentlemen, that we really appreciate; and they will be very helpful as we continue to pursue our efforts to provide you with the kind of equipment that is vital to your security and your safety and to continue to be able to interdict the drugs, even if you run out of gas.
Mr. Clement has to leave, so he can ask the questions first.
Mr. CLEMENT. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
This was excellent testimony and thank you all. You really make it come alive by the various experiences you have had.
Commander, good to have your father back here, too. Admiral, we are glad to have you here today; and you are still remembered around here, I assure you.
One of the questions that I wanted to ask you all is, when you are out on patrol, what do you find to be the most frustrating part of the operation? Any of you can answer.
Commander HESTER. I think for me, personally, the most frustrating is that there is an awful lot of ocean, and I have only 110 feet of boat. When you look at the sensors that we have on the ship right now, we have an older radar which they are in the process of upgrading. But with my radar I could probably see the go-fasts, the small fast boats that we are talking about. I can probably only see those about 2 miles away. So I am driving a ring about 2 miles around that I can see with. During a good day, when it is calm, I can see probably 6 or 7 miles, so my chance of intercepting them is pretty good.
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But their boat is a lot smaller than mine, and they are at least as well equipped as we are. And their night vision goggles are brand-new, best ones on the market; and mine are what the government can afford to give me. So they are going to see me a lot sooner than I am going to see them, and they can do exactly what the Lieutenant told you. They will just stop and wait until I cruise by and do the run again. So there is a lot of ocean and not a lot of me.
Mr. CLEMENT. Any other different responses?
Lieutenant BULLOCK. The end game, by far. Nothing is more frustrating than to actually find them, see them doing it and be witnessing everything in front of you, and there is not a thing you can do to stop it. I have no end game.
With the pursuit boats, hopefully, this will change their tactics, and we will probably go back into a strictly nighttime operation. And if we go into a strictly nighttime operation, then FLIR and NVG is the only way to succeed as far as keeping them tracked.
BM1 HOGLUND. For myself, mainly running the deployable pursuit boat part of the end game, whichis in its infancy. It is something we are learning how to work every day. But the biggest frustration we have is getting the amount of people we need to operate these boats on a full-time basis.
Currently, as we speak, we are bringing people from other Coast Guard stations in for temporary duty that we have trained to operate these vessels. Well, now we are kind of at the beck and call of their unit commanders, because they also have a job to do. If they are not allowed to let this person get away to come to us for a week or 3 days or 2 weeks or 5 weeks, then we are in a crunch of people who are fully qualified to run the vessels without having to go to a temporary duty-type status.
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Commander RATTI. Sir, I would echo what the other members of the panel said, and I would stress that it is a big ocean. It is a big area, and we are looking for very small contacts. And the sensors that we have— airborne, surface, whatever— and the units they are deployed from, we need more of them if we want to really effectively cover that area.
And the other thing, as Admiral Loy testified to, was having intelligence that you can cue to. If you have some intelligence, we have people on the beach that say, hey, here is a boat; we know the people; we know they are loading; we have talked to some of their guys; they are going to this place; okay, they left.
If there is an intelligence structure that can put all of that stuff together and adequately get it out to the field so that someone calls me and says, hey, you are in this area; start getting ready to go to this area; okay, now be there; all right, these guys left. If we have that and we have adequate sensors, we have a much better opportunity to stop the stuff from coming into the United States.
Mr. CLEMENT. Well, I will combine these two then: Why are some patrol boats more successful than others at interdicting drug smugglers? That is one part of the question. And then, if you had the opportunity to change one thing in our drug interdiction operations, what would that be?
Commander RATTI. I think, as far as the patrol boats go—and I know I have several years' experience on patrol boats—part of it is luck, part of it is location, and part of it is being at the right place at the right time. I think you will find very few people, very few of our ships that are not out there doing their best all the time. And they are putting forth 100 percent effort. And some ships in some locations are more successful. Some ships deploy to different areas and are in a different place in the Transit Zone and are more successful.
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That would be the best answer I could come up with, sir.
Mr. CLEMENT. And the second part, if you had the opportunity to change one thing in our drug interdiction operations, what would that be?
Commander RATTI. I think what I previously stated, sir. I think that the number of assets and the sensors that we have—
Commander HESTER. Having just come off a patrol boat, sir, I spent many, many hours thinking about what makes one patrol boat more successful than another. And although it is a friendly competition, it is a competition, and everybody wants the next bust. I mean, there is nothing like that adrenaline high.
And so I pushed my boat real hard. I got 400 boardings done, and I went into places that other cutters thought, well, maybe that is a little crazy, or did things that pushed real hard. But the bottom line is, my two big drug busts were the same as anybody else's. I had Coast Guard aircraft in one case, a Customs aircraft in the other that, on a night search, found a vessel in the wrong place acting strange, lights out at night, and called me up, and I was listening to the radios and was able to run over and respond real quickly.
You can imagine my frustration being assigned down in Puerto Rico without my first bust yet as a captain when my classmate comes down from Texas and on his third day of patrol gets a huge bust in just that manner. So why is it that some boats get more than others? It is luck, sir.
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Lieutenant BULLOCK. As far as the aviation side of it, sir, Admiral Loy hit it on the head. The P-3 and the E-2 by far. It is that overhead surveillance you get from those. The E-2 is the AWACS aircraft that the Navy uses for defense of the fleet. They can track multiple air targets and surface targets simultaneously.
When we go in the theater and have an E-2 present, they are tracking seven targets. That is absolutely elementary to them. That is easy. There is nothing to it. P-3s are the same way.
We would like to take the scenario as a high-bird, mid-bird, low-bird pouncers, and with the low bird being the C-130 or the Falcon aircraft equipped with the FLIR or APS-137 radar. They can track it and actually get a visual on it. They are watching it on a TV monitor and can look at all the things that are taking place. The E-2 is continuously vectoring people and telling them where to go to make the end game work. The pouncer is the helicopter; and, once the helicopter gets on scene and stays with it, then your boats come in and, hopefully, arrest them.
Every bust I have been on, an E-2 or P-3 has been present. We have either foiled it, deterred it, or arrested people, but an E-2 or P-3 was present.
Mr. CLEMENT. I want to thank the panel. You all were excellent to give your testimony again. And Commander Bernard, good to see you always. Thank you very much.
Mr. GILCHREST. Thank you, Bob. I just have a few more questions, gentlemen.
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Has any of you ever been shot at by drug smugglers?
Commander RATTI. No, sir.
Commander HESTER. No, sir.
Lieutenant BULLOCK. No, sir.
BM1 HOGLUND. No, sir.
Mr. GILCHREST. Is it fairly—do you know of anyone that has been shot at by drug smugglers?
Commander RATTI. No, sir.
Commander HESTER. No, sir.
Lieutenant BULLOCK. No, sir.
BM1 HOGLUND. No, sir.
Mr. GILCHREST. Do you think there is a reason for that?
Commander RATTI. Yes, sir. I think the main reason is probably most of the places where we come up against these smugglers, we are essentially an overwhelming force. At least it appears to them, as Lieutenant Commander Hester mentioned, when they come up alongside a vessel that has four guys in it, you are on a 110-foot cutter that has 16 people on it and a big superstructure, has mounted weapons on it, and you have a guy on the bridge with an M-16, that is overwhelming force.
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A 270-foot cutter is a big ship, compared to most of the vessels that we board, and they see it as overwhelming force. And that is why I think we all stress the officer presence. When you are doing a boarding somewhere, if your ship is near them, everybody top-side is in the proper uniform, looking sharp, looking like they know what they are doing, and there is an intimidation factor there, and we are prepared. We are at our highest state of readiness when we are conducting our boardings.
Mr. GILCHREST. Each of you told a specific story. And some of you were successful, and some of you weren't. I am sure that is pretty much the pattern on a day-to-day basis, a weekly basis, a monthly basis, a yearly basis. I know there is a lot of competition. That is inherent in the human psyche, I guess; and it is good that that is there.
During the last year to year and a half, we have tried to understand the assets that will help improve the interdiction program. And all of you, I am sure, see out there that you have a Falcon maybe that doesn't have a FLIR. You may have not had enough helicopters to replace the ones that are running out of gas.
You talked about the IONSCAN and things like that and a number of fast boats that you have joint operations with the Customs. Do any of you have any notion as to how the interdiction program, whether it be Frontier Shield or the larger Steel Web concept, would be effective if th Federal government had a larger number of E-2s, P-3s, helicopters, sensors, aircraft with FLIRs, and go-fast boats? Do you ever think in those terms while you are out there on that operation?
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And I ask the question because I am sort of a—I don't think of these—normally don't think in these terms, but I was pretty proud to be an enlisted man in the Marine Corps. I was proud to serve my country in Vietnam. While we were over there in the ditch or the river or the jungle, we would talk about what more we needed. And we really knew what more we needed. We not only knew what more we needed sitting there in that brown river, we knew the strategy because we were engaged in it.
So what I—and I know we are not going to get into a detailed discussion, but if you can give me a general overview of the kinds of things that you feel—as somebody that was on the ground, on the surface, engaged in the battle, what would you recommend?
Commander RATTI. Mr. Chairman, I have been out there as a task unit commander having another medium endurance cutter, another one of our 270-foot or 210-foot cutters working for me and several patrol boats including, at one point, Lieutenant Commander Hester, who had worked for me and had aircraft at our disposal. And I think if you look at the threat area that you want to attack and say here is the area where we want to get the highest level of interdiction, it would be easy for any of us to say, well, here is the asset mix we would want.
We would want a couple of big ships, a couple of smaller ships. The big ships should be helicopter ready. We should have them embark with us. And for as much of the time as possible, we want to have a sensor in the sky. And to ship drivers, I think the God in the sky is an E-2. Every major operation I have been in, we have had turnbacks that had to go back to Colombia, and we had a lot of things going on. An E-2 shows up on scene, and they take control.
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Mr. GILCHREST. How often do E-2s show up on the scene?
Lieutenant BULLOCK. Only when you get ahold of them. They don't stand a readiness posture anywhere where you can say go, that I know of. It is always, if one is deployed in a local area, they will say, hey, can you use us?
Mr. GILCHREST. How many E-2s are available, let's say, in the Caribbean?
Lieutenant BULLOCK. I don't know sir.
Commander HESTER. Can't answer that.
Commander RATTI. But I think—
Mr. GILCHREST. I think one of the reasons we have asked this question not only to you but certainly to other people in the Coast Guard is that we know that the budget here is tight. We know the world situation. We know the downsizing that has occurred in the military services. But what we non-professionals are trying to visualize is maybe what Franklin Delano Roosevelt said to the Joint Chiefs of Staff December 8, 1941: What do we need? And then it began to happen.
So we know that it is difficult to come up with the hardware, the assets, the coordination with the downsized Navy or Air Force because of whatever else is going on in the rest of the world, but we need what it is that you think would do the job a hundred percent—not 50 percent, a hundred percent. Then that gives us some framework to begin adjusting what we do here.
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And I know you don't have a 5-year plan you have come to present us with, but some sense—now, E-2s is an important consideration that we can think about.
Commander RATTI. Yes, sir. Something that has that capability. I know from working with E-2s that they have the best capability. There are other sensors, P-3s, other aviation units, even our Coast Guard C-130s and our HU-25 Falcons and our HH-60s and our other aircraft. They have some sensor packages which, depending upon the mission, are very useful, but—
I don't want to say, well, an E-2 overhead and two of them in the Caribbean 24 hours a day would be the answer. If we had surface assets to respond to every vessel, there is a mix there, that you would be able to increase the amount of interdiction based on having appropriate sensors, aircraft, and based on having an appropriate number of surface assets. I can't give you a number, Mr. Chairman, and tell you here is how many ships we need and here is what we need to have devoted to accomplish that mission.
Mr. GILCHREST. Lieutenant Commander Hester?
Commander HESTER. Yes, sir. I would say the drug war is sort of like trying to squeeze Silly Putty really tight, and if you squeeze the center of Silly Putty it is just going to shoot out of your hand. The Commandant's got some charts here that show you, well, we squeezed in Puerto Rico and pretty much shut off Puerto Rico during the beginning part of FRONTIER SHIELD and where did the drugs go? Well, they went west to Hispaniola. And so we put FRONTIER LANCE up there, and we squeezed hard on FRONTIER LANCE, and, sure enough, we got our first air drops in months back in Puerto Rico. So it is a very flexible threat.
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And I think it is not so much that we need more stuff. It is just that we need better capabilities on our assets. 'We need better sensors' would probably be the big group heading I would put on it. We need better things to see and detect with, and we need flexibility for our units so the units we have have more ability to do the job that they are told to do.
When my guys come back in and there is a trade show where I can take them in and show them the boats we are up against or take them down to the Customs seizure lot and say, okay, guys here are five boats that were found abandoned on the beach. Look at the threat. Here is the problem.
But I can't afford to take those guys away because my boarding team is my engineer, and he is strapped to the engine because we have to get it overhauled next week to get back underway. And my people are doing as much as they can. There is a lot to do. So we need the shore support to free our guys up for the training they need and to do the things that need to get done.
Right now, we are pushing our people real hard is my sense, and if they were freed up at the beach to do the training they really need, then you probably would have a little more effective resource out there. So, I would say better capabilities and the support we need so that my fellow, instead of typing up forms, can be out there getting the training he needs.
Mr. GILCHREST. So increase recruitment?
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Commander HESTER. Recruitment is part of it, yes, sir. We are short of people, so we have more senior people yielding paintbrushes when it used to be a seaman. Because I was at, you know, the classic tip of the spear, the ATTU was fully staffed all the time.
And probably Commander Ratti could talk to you a lot more about numbers, because the big boats have so many of them that you can't fill all of the boxes all of the time. I sailed pretty close to my needs, but I doubt that is the case for Commander Ratti.
Mr. GILCHREST. Lieutenant Bullock?
Lieutenant BULLOCK. Yes, sir, if I can send an aviation asset out, a C-130 which has been outfitted with a new type of FLIR and radar system. And, essentially, like I said, the radar will spot the target. The FLIR will slew in and overlay it. Now you get a visual representation of what is on the water as far as the TV image. The systems can be scaled down. They could go on a helicopter. They could go on a Falcon jet.
But also, at the same time, our helicopter and our Falcon jets and our C-130s are doing search and rescue, too, so they can't be out there hauling around all this law enforcement sensor gear plus doing search and rescue. Because in the Bahama theater, if we have a search and rescue case, we have to go land and rip out all the sensory equipment so we can actually put people in the back that we are rescuing, and that gets quite complicated at times.
Though that doesn't happen every day, it does happen; and that Falcon that I was relating to, that was his problem. The sensor aircraft that they wanted was broken for lack of parts. Engines are failing and whatnot, and the Falcon community is having a real hard time keeping airplanes flying. So they have sensor-type aircraft, and they also have search and rescue-type aircraft. So they had to send a search and rescue-type aircraft out to do what should have been a sensor mission. That can hinder you.
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Mr. GILCHREST. What would you have—what alternatives did you have that night that bingo came around and you had to leave and the Falcon wasn't there and the Falcon wasn't equipped with FLIRs? Was there any other kind of alternative you had?
Lieutenant BULLOCK. No, sir. We discussed a million things what we could have done. We even came up with a discussion, let's go to Bimini and land and wait for them. But, in the past, Army helicopters and Coast Guard helicopters have been stormed by the Bimini populous, so hauling a crew of only five people, being stormed by 150 people, you are outnumbered really quick, so that wasn't an option anymore.
Mr. GILCHREST. You couldn't say, we are from the U.S. Government and they would have left you alone?
Lieutenant BULLOCK. No, sir. Doesn't work in the Bahamas, sir.
Mr. GILCHREST. Mr. Hoglund, what kind of vessel do you—were you on with Customs agents?
BM1 HOGLUND. It was a 42-foot Fountain Lightning boat, which is essentially the same hull as what we ended up adapting for our pursuit boats.
Mr. GILCHREST. That is a Customs boat?
BM1 HOGLUND. It is a Customs vessel, yes, sir.
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Mr. GILCHREST. Is that anything that would be useful for the Coast Guard to have in their inventory?
BM1 HOGLUND. Yes, sir. We have actually got two of them right now, and these are the deployable pursuit boats, the DPBs. It has a 42-foot Fountain hull with a different power plant in it so it is faster than the Customs counterpart. It is crewed by four Coast Guardsmen. Typically, depending on where we are operating, if we are operating in the outback Bahamas area, we will operate with three Coast Guardsmen and then a ship rider, either from the Bahamian Police Department or RBDF or a separate DEA agent out of OPBAT that will ride with us.
We operate them in tandem, two boats at a time. The problem that I see with these boats right now is that there are only two of them. The endgame requires if our threat is a go-fast, which I think is a pretty reasonable statement to make, we have to have boats that go faster and can stop these boats and overwhelm in force and make the boats realize they have nowhere to go and stop.
Mr. GILCHREST. Are any of the go-fast boats that you confiscate kept by the Coast Guard and then used by the Coast Guard?
BM1 HOGLUND. No, sir. I don't even know what the actual policy is, but I know that we don't keep our seized vessels, no.
Mr. GILCHREST. I guess they are sold, and the money goes into balancing the budget. Maybe we should just keep that for the Coast Guard.
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Commander RATTI. Mr. Chairman, I think part of the problem with that is taking vessels into inventory and maintaining them. I know—I was Chief of the Maritime Law Enforcement School at our training center in Yorktown, and we surveyed the area to get seized vessels that we could bring to Yorktown to essentially plant in the ground and conduct training— mock boardings—on them. And so I had some of my people survey all of Southeast Florida and most of the East Coast to determine what was out there. And for the majority of the vessels that we saw, it would be a maintenance nightmare to try and keep them running.
Lieutenant BULLOCK. The concept is great, sir. I would like to beat them at their own game with their own toys. But, exactly as he said, the ones we are getting are pretty rough, and the maintaining of them would be astronomical.
Mr. GILCHREST. Does it look like much of the—can you break it down in percentage, the number of boats that cross the Gulf of Mexico or the Caribbean or even the Pacific, for that matter, during daytime or nighttime hours? I guess the go-fast boats could pretty much do it over the course of one night. And so the—then what is really—I understand that the Coast Guard does a lot more than just drug interdiction. There is fishing out there. There are migrants out there. There is search and rescue out there. There is pollution out there. There is all kinds of things out there. But in this specific area of drug interdiction, a big help would be increased technology or increased sensors.
How is the IONSCAN? Are there enough of those things out there?
Commander HESTER. No, sir, there aren't. Right now, in Puerto Rico at this point, there are two IONSCANs. Now, each of the high endurance and medium endurance cutters have their own. When Commander Ratti brought his cutter down, they had one on board, but for all of the patrol boats in Puerto Rico, there are only two. So you very quickly run out of them.
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To give you some kind of feeling for how often I did have an IONSCAN, in my 2 years in Puerto Rico, I had it on board for 2 days, and that is because I planned an operation well in advance and said I wanted the IONSCAN for these 2 days.
Mr. GILCHREST. How often could you have used an IONSCAN in that 2-year time frame?
Commander HESTER. Well, sir, every boarding you do, if you think there might be drugs involved or you even have the slightest suspicion, you can swipe the boat and run the test. And if you get a positive IONSCAN, well, hey, this person isn't the grandfather or grandmother they appear to be. There is a little more there than meets the eye. Maybe we should check underneath grandma's bed or something.
Mr. GILCHREST. Do you have a number in mind, a size boat in mind that would routinely carry an IONSCAN?
Commander HESTER. Well, sir, they are really expensive; and that, of course, is the problem.
Mr. GILCHREST. You have some idea of the cost?
Commander HESTER. Yes, sir, about 60,000 is the round figure I have heard talked about, $60,000 per.
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BM1 HOGLUND. They are a little less than that now. About $45,000.
Mr. GILCHREST. $45,000 for an IONSCAN. I would hate to tell you how much it is going to cost to dredge the New York harbor, which is probably unnecessary. $1.9 billion to dredge the Port of New York. And then it still won't take the bigger ships so we have got to redirect some of our Federal tax dollars in the right place.
Now, you were about to say if you had two more IONSCANs.
Commander HESTER. I think if you had about two more in Puerto Rico, then you would have more to always have a deployed boat with one on them and if it broke down, which it occasionally does, you would have a spare to be able to keep the deployed boats with an operational IONSCAN, and that can be very helpful.
The problem is, though, sir, you are not just talking about one piece of gear. You have to train guys to use it and not only just to use it but to speak eloquently as to why it works so that when you get a bust with the IONSCAN you can pull in somebody who knows how to use it and can say to the court, yes, sir, most definitively, and I know from my week's training that this is, you know, proof, that sort of thing. So there is some tale to that.
Mr. GILCHREST. These are not insurmountable objects that can't be crossed.
Commander RATTI. Mr. Chairman, if I may, I think that the Coast Guard's Office of Law Enforcement has a plan of priorities; and their plan is, as funds become available, here is where we would target them. So I think the Coast Guard could provide you with that answer, what the optimal number would be.
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Mr. GILCHREST. I am sure they can. This place here, Congress, works in a fascinating way. So if I can go to someone else because I need their vote or an appropriations chairman and I can say that Commander Ratti or Commander Hester or Lieutenant Bullock or Mr. Hoglund told me of this specific story, then you really talk about IONSCANs. You get inside the neurons of their brains and it stays and it sticks. So this testimony is very, very—not only is it important, but I think it is vital, not that Admiral Loy doesn't serve the Coast Guard, and he is the one who talks with us on a very regular basis. But I think your testimony adds a lot of color to what we are trying to do here.
It is basically an exchange of information with 435 people. We have some sense of tolerance for somebody else's opinion, some more than others, and then we vote. So the more information that we can get, the better we will be able to serve the country and help what you are doing.
I have one last question about your operations with the Navy. How vital is the U.S. Navy to this, let's say, Steel Web or this kind of concept, this interagency cooperation? How vital is the Navy? How useful have they been up to this point? What is the difference between boarding a vessel from a Navy ship, boarding a vessel from a Coast Guard ship? Anybody?
Commander RATTI. Mr. Chairman, I would say the Navy and their involvement is an integral part of what we do, it depends upon what part of the Transit Zone you are in. And if you look at the Transit Zone in the Caribbean, the Transit Zone in the Pacific, we couldn't do a big part of the job without the Navy there helping us.
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In the detection and monitoring portion of the mission, where they are usually working for one of the joint interagency task forces, they are the eyes and the ears for a large portion of the area. And then when we come across vessels, we have Coast Guard law enforcement detachments on board those Navy units that are able to go aboard the vessels and exercise law enforcement authority which the Navy wouldn't otherwise have. So the Navy is an integral part.
And I have worked with lots of different ships, lots of different aircraft, and the majority of them that I have worked with, they want to be down there. They want to do the mission. They want to get a bust.
Mr. GILCHREST. Gentlemen, thank you very much.
I will say, Commander, that maybe your father can write a letter to the Speaker of the House and encourage him to bring back the Merchant Marine and Fisheries Committee, which some of us here sorely miss.
But, gentlemen, we certainly wish you well in your journey and in your career, and be safe out there. Thank you.
Subcommittee is adjourned.
[Whereupon, at 12:32 p.m., the subcommittee was adjourned.]
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