Underwater killers: improvised explosive devices: Could they threaten U.S. ports?

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

The U.S. Navy possesses one of the premier mine-hunting forces in the world, but it is ill-prepared to thwart terrorist attacks on U.S. ports and waterways, officials said.

"Underwater improvised explosive devices are a credible threat," said Rear Adm. John Christenson, vice commander of the Naval Mine and Anti-Submarine Warfare Command.

"We consider it an unlikely event, but if it did happen, it would have huge consequences that would be very expensive and difficult to recover from," he told an industry audience at a recent conference.

The Departments of Homeland Security and Defense have begun planning for scenarios of IEDs and mines in U.S. ports. They have conducted wargames that show the consequences such incidents could have on a nation dependent upon the seas for 90 percent of its commerce. For example, a single World War II-style mine in the channels of Houston, Texas, would essentially shut down the entire port, said Rear Adm. Thomas Atkin, commander of the Coast Guard's deployable operations group.

From the Coast Guard's perspective, maritime improvised explosive devices are the number-one terrorist threat, said Ken McDaniel, deputy division chief of the office of counterterrorism and defense operations' maritime counterterrorism division.

"We already know that they've tried to use it with success in various forms," he told the conference.

Scott Truver, executive advisor of national security programs at Gryphon Technologies LC, told National Defense that maritime IEDs, like their earthbound brethren, could come in many variations. From military-grade mines, bombs and artillery shells to homemade explosives in fuel bladders or plastic bags, the IEDs could be emplaced surreptitiously and remotely detonated or automatically activated.

They could be loaded onto small boats or other vessels and navigated into ships, as terrorists did in the 2000 attack on the Navy's USS Cole destroyer. Suicide bombers potentially could board ferries at rush hour or covert swimmers could deploy the devices under bridges or along frequently traveled water routes, he added.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

There have been a few attempts, most recently in April 2004, when bomb squad personnel fished out a suspicious-looking trash bag floating in Lake Ponchartrain, La. It contained an IED composed of several pounds of explosives in plastic pipes set on a timer. The bag was so small that it could have been tossed into the water as the perpetrator passed across a bridge, said Truver.

"That just shows the dimension of the threat. Anything, including a pickup truck, can be a mine layer," he added.

The vessel-bourne IED is more probable than a mining scenario, said Truver, simply because it is easier to drive an explosives laden boat into the side of another ship than it is to go through the preparations to make a mine. But mines are still a viable alternative because more sophisticated variants are becoming easier to attain on the open market, he added.

Sea mines are proliferating and becoming stealthier, said Capt. Bruce Nichols, director of the Navy's mine warfare branch. Sweden is producing a mine that looks like rock. Russia is exporting mines that are difficult to sweep and China is manufacturing mines that move in the water column, which complicates the neutralization part of the equation.

But regardless of the type of explosive, once it finds its way into the water, it becomes difficult to distinguish in the cluttered underwater environment.

"An IED can be just as stealthy as a highly sophisticated fiberglass-sheathed Rockan mine," said Truver. Detecting the mine is only part of the problem. Once the explosive has been identified, forces still have to render it safe. And that could be a challenge because the Navy is experiencing a drawdown in its already-limited counter mine resources.

The sea service last month decommissioned the final four ships of its Osprey-class coastal mine hunters, which Truver said would have been adept at handling threats in the port waterways environment. Because of the lack of funding to repair and upgrade the ships, the Navy opted to take them out of service. It is left with 14 Avenger-class mine countermeasure ships. But eight of them will be deployed overseas, leaving only six ships behind to handle contingencies in the nation's 95,000 miles of coastlines, thousands of miles of inland waterways and 361 ports.

Then there is the question of which agency would take charge in certain events. Under the Maritime Transportation Security Act of 2002, the Coast Guard is designated as the lead federal agency for maritime homeland security. However, the definition of when an event falls under homeland security or homeland defense remains unclear.

"What if it's a garden-variety wacko who decides to throw a weapon in the water? Is that a military threat, or is it a wacko threat?" pointed out Truver.

In January 1980, a scuba diver called authorities to claim he had mined the Sacramento River. The Navy dispatched the USS Gallant, a minesweeper, to hunt for the mines. After four days of searching, the channel was determined to be clear of explosives.

"That cost hundreds of thousands of dollars in commercial vessel laydays alone," said Truver.

Even if the Coast Guard had the lead on a situation, it would rely upon the Navy to respond to the event.

"They have the capability--we don't," said Atkin. While Coast Guard crews are working to integrate their teams with Navy forces, there are no plans to cultivate their own mine countermeasures teams.

"It doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me for the Coast Guard to try to grow that out," he said. "What we need to do is to support the Navy here by growing the capacity to support our waterways."

The two services need to integrate better, he said, and they need to exercise together.

"We're practicing this in war games, and we're going to practice this more and more in the future," agreed Christenson.

Initial war games have exposed some deficiencies.

"We can't always clear a port or approaches within an acceptable timeline," said Christenson. "It takes too long from a business point of view."

With limited numbers of mine countermeasures ships and aircraft, the Navy takes a few days to arrive on scene. But in the event of a mine incident, a dosed port for even a single day costs the country millions of dollars in lost commercial opportunities.

The Navy's 3rd Fleet last month conducted an experiment in the San Diego harbor to see whether industry could respond more quickly to a port mining scenario. Companies were asked to use commercial technologies, such as unmanned underwater vessels.

If industry could get there in 24 hours or less, it would improve the Defense Department's response time dramatically, said Ed Mickley, spokesperson for the Naval Mine and Anti-Submarine Warfare Command.

The two branches are working on improving their response plans and prioritizing which ports would be reopened first if multiple ports were closed in a coordinated terrorist attack.

"If you want to get a port opened quickly, you have to do your homework in advance," Christenson said. "You have to know what's on the bottom before you start."

In that vein, his command is consolidating information on U.S. ports and attempting to survey harbor waters in order to identify objects that already are lying in the bottom of the ocean.

"If we already know where those refrigerators, cars and anchors are in advance, if somebody drops something in, we can do a change detection to see what's new. But that requires investment and effort in advance," said Christenson.

Last year, the service conducted an 11-mile channel survey in San Diego. To sort through the 600 mine-like objects detected on the sea floor required 600 man-hours to accomplish the task.

Conducting such port surveys before a catastrophic event occurs could cut the Navy's response time in half and accelerate the reopening of a port, said Christenson.

"It has all the potential in the world of making the mine countermeasure response to a domestic crisis much more manage able," said Truver.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration conducts such surveys and it has estimated it will take three years and cost $14 million to map the bottoms of the nation's busiest 20 ports.

"That's the insurance policy that you buy so that you don't have $1.9 billion worth of economic impact alone per day, based on what we experienced in the 2002 West Coast strike," he said.

That particular strike by dockworkers began in the ports of Seattle and traveled down the coastline to San Diego to encompass all 29 West Coast ports. The 11-day port shutdown caused $2 billion in direct and indirect economic costs per day, he said.

"How much different will it be when it's a no-notice event, when you haven't been planning for it? What do you do? If you don't anticipate the miner in one way or another, shoot, you're not going to be able to respond quickly," said Truver.

NOAA has limited funds for these surveys, Truver said. He believes the government should deploy contractors or reservists to conduct the port surveys. Doing so would ensure that the data collected would be standardized and stored in a central repository in the Navy.

Various ports authorities have attained homeland security grants to purchase side-scan sonars to survey their harbors independently. Truver said that in the long run, these isolated efforts could end up complicating matters.