U.S. Marine Salvage Assets and Capabilities in a Maritime Disaster (2009)

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27 Mahan Revisited Why Resilient Commercial Seaports Are a National Security Imperative Stephen E. Flynn, Council on Foreign Relations More than a century ago, the great naval strategistAlfred Thayer Mahan in his seminal work, TheInfluence of Sea Power on History, warned his readers that “while it is wise to observe things that are alike, it is also wise to look for things that differ; for when the imagination is carried away by the detection of points of resemblance it is apt to be impatient of any divergence in its new-found parallels, and so may overlook or refuse to recognize such.” In perhaps a rather verbose, 19th cen- tury way, Mahan was making the point that when it comes to issues of national security, it is always essential to question the conventional wisdom about risk and strat- egy. The participants at this workshop are doing just that by examining the risk of disruption to America’s most important commercial seaport and identifying options for dealing with a channel closure. Mahan’s treatise also suggests why the scenario that animates this workshop deserves far more attention than it has been receiving. His thesis was both a simple and a compelling one. The intellectual father of the modern U.S. Navy believed that the pursuit of sea power was funda- mentally about protecting the economic foundation of any great nation by assuring that it had unfettered access to global markets. Ironically given our work today, when Mahan wrote The Influence of Sea Power on History, he set out to challenge his contemporaries’ preoccupation with protecting America’s coasts and ports by building and maintaining harbor fortifications and investing only in a coastal navy. Mahan argued that hardened coastal defenses had the effect of shifting the battleground off- shore. Since harbor forts equipped with land-based arma- ments could fire weapons at longer distances and with greater accuracy than vessel-based cannons, a foreign naval force would find it difficult to directly attack or conduct an effective blockade of a U.S. seaport. However, a nation that invested in a large deepwater navy could overcome coastal defenses by disrupting what Mahan called the “sea-lines of communication” (SLOC) that facilitate “the sea commerce upon (which) the wealth and strength of countries” ultimately lies. This is precisely what happened during World War I and World War II when naval power was used to try and deny access to crit- ical raw materials and to attack convoys. Fast forward to the 21st century and America’s eco- nomic dependency on maritime trade has only grown. However, the situation that Mahan diagnosed is nearly completely reversed. The dominance of today’s U.S. Navy has translated into well-protected SLOCs, so there is little prospect of contemporary warfare involving sus- tained attacks on transoceanic shipping destined for the United States. But now it is our commercial seaports that are our potential Achilles’ heel. The modest port security measures that were still intact after World War II had been largely abandoned by the end of the 20th century. With the exception of the threat posed by intercontinen- tal ballistic missiles, the consensus among defense plan- ners prior to 9/11 was that the territory of the United States was virtually immune from external attacks. By 2000, security in commercial seaports involved little more than a patchwork quilt of minimum-wage private security guards whose mission was to fend off tres- passers, thieves, and vandals from port facilities. Since September 11, 2001, the federal grants and local public and private spending on port security have borne

no relation to their ongoing vulnerability and the conse- quences should a 9/11-scale attack be directed against them. In the case of Los Angeles, the security for 7,500 acres of facilities that run along 49 miles of waterfront is being provided by a small port police force of 175 offi- cers supplemented by private security guards at the marine facilities. In Long Beach only two dozen full-time police officers are assigned to help patrol its 3,000 acres of facilities. The Coast Guard maintains a few small boats and a force of roughly two dozen sailors to patrol the entire harbor. In the seven years since 9/11, the two cities have received less than $100 million in federal grants to improve the port’s physical security measures. That amount is equivalent to what American taxpayers have been spending every 8 hours for five years on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Los Angeles and Long Beach port complex in San Pedro Bay handles nearly one-half of the oil imports for the United States west of the Rocky Mountains. The refineries that ring the port are calibrated to support Cal- ifornia’s unique environmental regulations and barely keep pace with the demand for their output. In the entire Southern California economy there is often as little as two weeks of refined fuels available to serve a popula- tion of 39 million people. This includes the fuels stored at the refineries, being sold at filling stations, and in the car tanks of consumers that are one-half full on average. Further, Southern California is largely isolated from the extensive oil and gas pipeline system east of the Rockies, which accentuates the region’s energy dependence on the smooth operation of the port. Forty percent of all the containerized cargo for the entire nation arrives in the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach. The marine terminals have to quickly load and off-load huge containerships using some of the world’s largest gantry cranes. The colorful boxes each carry up to 30 tons of goods, which find their way into our econ- omy via 2-mile-long trains and thousands of trucks that service the port complex each day. The concentration of intermodal surface transportation links and logistical distribution centers in Los Angeles County translates into it being impossible for another West Coast port complex to serve as an alternative discharge point for the volume of containerized cargo that is shipped to South- ern California. Nowhere in the nation is there as much transportation and logistics infrastructure packed into such a tight geographic space. In short, by any objective strategic analysis, the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach present very seductive targets for an adversary that is intent on disrupting the economy of the United States. America’s growing depen- dency on a small number of large ports as the primary conduits for meeting our energy needs and to support the “just-in-time” supply chains of U.S. manufacturers and retailers only adds to their appeal as asymmetric tar- gets. Yet national security planners have not seen safe- guarding this or other major U.S. commercial seaports as a top strategic priority. This is extraordinary given that the terrorist attacks on 9/11 made clear that the favored battle space for America’s current and future adversaries will be in the economic and civil space. Further, our expe- rience in dealing with the insurgency in Iraq has high- lighted the extent to which civilian energy and transportation infrastructure are valued as targets. Perhaps the one upside to this long-standing oversight of the strategic importance of commercial seaports is that it provides an opportunity to think differently about how best to safeguard them. Specifically, seaports need to be recognized first and foremost as critical nodes for the nation’s energy, transportation, and logistics infra- structure. As such, it is essential that measures be taken to reduce the risk that these nodes will be disrupted. Should these prevention efforts fail, restoring port oper- ations quickly should be the top priority. In short, when it comes to commercial seaports, the overarching imper- ative should be building “resilience.” Building resilience increases security by depriving al- Qaeda and other adversaries of the disruptive dividend they hope to reap by carrying out terrorist attacks on critical infrastructure. Such resilience results from a sus- tained commitment to four factors. First, there is robust- ness, the ability to keep operating or to stay standing in the face of disaster. In some cases, it translates into designing and main- taining structures or systems (such as pipelines and bridges) strong enough to take a foreseeable punch. In others, robustness requires devising substitutable or redundant systems such as communications networks that can be brought to bear should something important break or stop working. Second is resourcefulness, which involves skillfully managing a disaster once it unfolds. It includes identifying options, prioritizing what should be done both to control damage and to begin mitigating it, and communicating decisions to the people who will implement them. Resourcefulness depends primarily on people, not tech- nology. Ensuring that the port community is resourceful means that there is adequate staffing at federal, state, and local levels to support planning, participate in exercises, attend regular stakeholder meetings, and mobilize the nec- essary resources when disasters strike. The third element of resilience is rapid recovery, which is the capacity to get things back to normal as quickly as possible after a disaster. Competent emer- gency operations that ensure that the right people and resources can get to the right places to carry out well- designed contingency plans are crucial. The goal is to ensure that all those who can meaningfully respond to the incident and support the recovery are in a position to pitch in right away. 28 U.S. MARINE SALVAGE ASSETS AND CAPABILITIES IN A MARITIME DISASTER

Finally, resilience means having the means to absorb the new lessons that can be drawn from a catastrophe. It is foolish for a society to go right back to business as usual as soon as the dust clears by, say, failing to resolve communications issues that confound coordination and information sharing among emergency responders. Elected officials and other public- and private-sector leaders must be willing to make pragmatic changes that help to improve their robustness, resourcefulness, and recovery capabilities before the next crisis. Placing a premium on resilience has several important implications for how best to manage the terrorism risk to commercial seaports. First, it makes clear that planning for port recovery deserves equal billing with efforts to protect the port from acts of sabotage. This is because a port that can bounce back quickly in the aftermath of a terrorist attack makes it a far less attractive terrorist target. Carry- ing out a successful 9/11-scale attack requires con siderable planning and the commitment of limited resources. This translates into terrorist organizations wanting to invest their efforts into actions that will achieve the most serious consequences. If an attack is likely to result in a fizzle instead of a big bang, it becomes less worth the effort. In short, there is deterrence value in having well-honed plans and preparations for port recovery. A second implication is that building resilience requires a far more open and inclusive process than those typically associated with security. Security tends to emphasize exclusivity; individuals involved are carefully vetted and information is tightly controlled. As such, security measures can actually work against the resourcefulness and recovery components of resilience by excluding key private-sector contributors who have important expertise and capabilities for assessing, miti- gating, and responding to a terrorist incident. For instance, knowledge on how to stabilize a sunken wreck, contain pollution, handle hazardous shipboard materi- als, or deal with the complex legal issues associated with salvage are likely to come primarily from the maritime industry. Many of the top experts actually live outside the United States. In the case of a major marine accident, these experts are quickly contacted and mobilized. How- ever, in the aftermath of a terrorism event, the height- ened security imposed by law enforcement may end up delaying or actually preventing experts from gaining access to the incident command center and location. When resilience is the priority, law enforcement should always be assigned a support role to the broader mission of getting the port up and running quickly. A third implication of emphasizing resilience is that it highlights the need for identifying and investing in resources in advance of an incident that will help to dra- matically cut down on the recovery time in event of an incident. For instance, should there be a channel closure in Los Angeles and Long Beach as a result of the sinking of a large merchant vessel, there will need to be barges with heavy-lift capability to help clear the wreck. Such capability does not currently exist on the West Coast and would have to be contracted and moved from the East or Gulf Coasts of the United States via the Panama Canal or imported from Asia or Northern Europe. Should the ves- sel’s sinking be caused by an improvised maritime explo- sive device or a sea mine, the harbor will require minesweeping before support vessels will be allowed on scene. These scenarios suggest that funding the pre-posi- tioning of heavy-lift and minesweeping capabilities near Los Angeles and routinely undertaking bottom surveys of San Pedro are prudent measures for improving resilience. A final implication is that there needs to be greater public awareness of the critical role commercial seaports play in our economy and what the direct and indirect consequences would be of disrupting a major port like Los Angeles and Long Beach for a lengthy period of time. Maritime disasters always draw a great deal of media attention. A maritime disaster that arises from an act of terrorism will consume the 24-hour news cycle, particu- larly if it takes place on the doorstep of Los Angeles. One consequence of this is that the public is likely to associ- ate ports with danger, generating substantial political pressure to slow or stop maritime activity. This impulse will only be resisted if the public understands in advance that the risks associated with not quickly restoring port operations will almost certainly be far more consequen- tial than the terrorist incident itself. There is clearly a tension at work in advocating for greater public disclo- sure. The security impulse tends to want to muzzle any discussion of vulnerabilities and consequences out of a concern that this information might be capitalized upon by an adversary. However, this impulse needs to be bal- anced against the realities that (a) this information is already well known to our more capable adversaries and (b) in a democracy, the only way to muster the requisite political commitment for dealing with a threat is for the public to understand that threat and the stakes involved. While arguably at least seven years overdue, the focus of this Maritime Disaster Workshop is spot-on. Each of the breakout groups will explore important issues that affect the ability of the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach to recover from a channel closure. Environmental issues, particularly those associated with oil pollution, are likely to be the most visible manifestations of the ter- rorist attacks after the initial vessel fires and sinkings. They will therefore receive a disproportionate amount of media attention, potentially distracting incident com- manders away from salvage efforts. The legal, insurance, and cabotage issues present a significant challenge for the salvage efforts, as the owners of the targeted vessels have property interest, fiduciary responsibilities, and insurance issues that complicate undertaking salvage. As mentioned earlier, security and forensics issues can end 29WHY RESILIENT COMMERCIAL SEAPORTS ARE A NATIONAL SECURITY IMPERATIVE

up potentially conflicting with the need for a timely inci- dent assessment and the undertaking of emergency actions to stabilize the wrecks. At the same time, there must be adequate security at the incident scene for work- ers to do their jobs without fear that they might be tar- geted by a follow-on attack. Identifying the issues associated with logistics, utilities, and hidden infrastruc- ture is indispensable to assuring that all the right stake- holders are involved in managing the incident from the outset. Clearing the sunken wreck of a large modern merchant vessel raises complicated engineering and dis- posal challenges, particularly in the case of a post-Pana- max containership, which will also require removing thousands of containers, some of which will be carrying hazardous materials. Finally, all of this will have to hap- pen under a glaring political spotlight where the eco- nomic and environmental stakes will be rising each day. Effectively managing the public affairs issues associated with this undertaking will be daunting. My hunch is that this two-day workshop will not pro- vide actionable guidance for all the challenges associated with a terrorist incident that leads to channel closures. Instead, we will end up doing the more preliminary work of identifying and clarifying those challenges. Accord- ingly, let us agree that this should not be a one-time event. The stakes for the region and the nation are sim- ply too high. Instead, let us commit ourselves to sharing the fruits of our collective labors with our colleagues and senior managers and doing all we can to raise the public profile of this critical issue. 30 U.S. MARINE SALVAGE ASSETS AND CAPABILITIES IN A MARITIME DISASTER