MARITIME DRUG INTERDICTION: A "FORCE MULTIPLIER'

BY CRAIG COLLINS

In mid-September 2018, at the conclusion of a deployment that had taken it from maritime domain awareness patrols off the Alaska North Slope to counterdrug operations off the coasts of South and Central America, the CGC Stratton, a 418-foot Legendclass national security cutter (NSC), stopped in San Diego to offload more than 11 tons of cocaine. The drugs had been seized in less than a month, in joint interdictions performed with international partners and the Coast Guard cutters Seneca and Active.

“We were in vector for less than 30 days,” said Capt. Craig Wieschhorster, the Stratton’s commanding officer, “and saw seven cases down there.”

The 2016 fiscal year was a record-setting year for illicit drug seizures in the Transit Zone, the northward maritime approaches to Central and North America; the Coast Guard and its partners seized about 450,000 pounds of cocaine, worth nearly $6 billion. In June 2018, when the Stratton left its homeport at Coast Guard Island in Alameda, California, the service was on pace to break that record, seizing cocaine shipments at a rate of nearly a ton a day. The increase in seizures mirrors record increases in production; in September 2018, the United Nation’s Office on Drugs and Crime reported Colombia’s coca production to be at an all-time high, and increasing at a rate of 45 percent annually.

“We’ve gotten better at it [counterdrug operations] over the past two decades,” said Cmdr. Jason Brennell, deputy chief of the Coast Guard’s Office of Maritime Law Enforcement. “But at the same time, I’d say over the past several years there’s been a lot more cocaine on the water.”

The Coast Guard wants to do better than keep pace with this increase; it wants to take a bigger bite of those illegal shipments overall. It confronts several significant challenges, both strategic and tactical, but in recent years, the service and its partners have joined forces to overcome those challenges in innovative and often surprising ways.

THE STRATEGY

The adversaries in the Transit Zone aren’t mere drug dealers: They are deep-pocketed and well-connected criminal organizations with tentacles that extend deeply into Latin American and Caribbean societies. The illegal drug trade is just one way these groups finance their activities; the same networks are used to move money, contraband, weapons, and people. In Latin American and Caribbean nations, this transnational web of crime undermines economic development, human rights, and the rule of law through violence and corruption; in the United States, these organizations threaten public health and national security.

Because of this, the effort to disrupt their influence begins at the highest levels of government and involves partners throughout the Western Hemisphere. The Coast Guard and the U.S. Department of State work together to plan and conduct regular engagements with counterparts from other nations. These multilateral summits include the semi-annual Multilateral Maritime Counter Drug Summit, which focuses on the Central and South American regions, and the annual Multilateral Maritime Interdiction and Prosecution Summit, which focuses on the Caribbean region. The summits support key elements of U.S. policy, including last year’s Presidential Executive Order on Enforcing Federal Law with Respect to Transnational Criminal Organizations and Preventing International Trafficking, the State Department’s Central America Regional Security Initiative (CARSI) and Caribbean Basin Security Initiative (CBSI), and the Coast Guard’s Western Hemisphere Strategy.

Lt. Cmdr. Paul Windt, from the Coast Guard Office of Law Enforcement Policy, describes these meetings as “free exchanges of information about how we and our partner nations can combat transnational criminal organizations in the maritime domain.” The summits are operationally focused and involve close coordination among naval and coast guard forces from partner nations.

The overarching difficulty the Coast Guard and its partners face in the transit zone is its size: 7 million square miles of ocean, an expanse about twice the size of the continental United States. The vastness of this area has compelled the lead U.S. counterdrug organization in the region – U.S. Southern Command’s (SOUTHCOM) Joint Interagency Task Force South (JIATF-South) – to join forces not only with other federal agencies, such as the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), and Customs and Border Protection (CBP), but also with naval and coast guard partners in the Western Hemisphere and Europe. In 2012, these 15 international partners began Operation Martillo, a program of joint maritime patrols and interdictions aimed at fighting drug trafficking, enhancing regional security, and promoting stability and prosperity throughout Central and South America.

Despite their considerable reach, JIATF-South and its enforcement partners can’t be everywhere in the Transit Zone, and they exert little or no influence over production, one of the most important factors driving the increase in illegal drug shipments. The Coast Guard and its counterparts often form more narrowly focused bilateral or multilateral operational partnerships with the goal of building the capacity of partner nations to help address these problems. In spring 2018, the service launched joint operations with the naval forces of Mexico and Colombia, aimed at improving information sharing and coordination of patrols through welltraveled smuggling routes, with leadership from senior Mexican and Colombian officials. The first such operation, a 30-day joint patrol named Operation Betelgeuse, resulted in 16 interdictions, during which about 21,000 pounds of drugs were seized and 55 traffickers apprehended.

That’s a great haul for a 30-day operation, but according to Brennell, perhaps the most promising outcome of Operation Betelgeuse was the degree to which Mexican and Colombian officials took charge in planning and executing operations. “Our partner nations’ institutions are able to handle more,” he said. “Costa Rica and Panama are great examples, busting up corruption and getting real results. Partner nation interdictions are up as well.” In 2018, for example, the Colombian navy intercepted 14 of the difficult-totrack smuggling vessels known as “narco-subs,” semisubmersible craft built to avoid detection – more than triple the number it seized last year.

TACTICAL CHALLENGES

A strategic thrust of Operation Martillo has been to push illicit shipments farther out to sea, but the success of this push has created new challenges, particularly in detecting these shipments. The mainstays of maritime surveillance, the Coast Guard’s HC-130 and CBP’s Orion P-3 airplanes, despite their ranges of up to 4,900 nautical miles, often don’t have the legs to detect vessels that often, to avoid detection, swing out west of the Galapagos Islands.

But according to Wieschhorster, the service’s new national security cutters offer a far better suite of tactical capabilities for counterdrug operations than older surface platforms. “The capability difference between our legacy fleet and these new national security cutters is completely night and day,” he said. “It’s like going from a horse and carriage to a spacecraft.” With a state-of-the-art sensor package, the ability to launch both short- and long-range pursuit boats from its stern, and a flight deck that can dispatch an armed Helicopter Interdiction Tactical Squadron (HITRON), the NSC extends both the range and speed of the Coast Guard’s interdiction capabilities.

“We have the ability to see things that our legacy cutters just can’t,” said Wieschhorster – and that ability was recently boosted by a medium-range unmanned aircraft system (UAS), the fixed-wing ScanEagle, that can be launched from the deck of the NSC and observe traffickers from a distance. “Not only can we tell what these guys are doing right away and rule out whether they’re a target or not,” said Wieschhorster, “but we can also record whether they are meeting up with certain vessels ... It allows us to keep eyes on these guys and be virtually undetectable. We can get everything we need in terms of the authority to go board that vessel.”

Some of the Stratton’s recent interdictions occurred southwest of the Galapagos, and three involved a new kind of vessel that hybridizes the capabilities of semisubmersibles and the “go-fast” boats built to outrun pursuers. Known as “very slender vessels,” or VSVs, they ride nearly level with the ocean surface, and can move quickly, making them difficult to both detect and intercept.

Wieschhorster reads the appearance of a new kind of smuggling craft as a positive sign. “We’re seeing more of these low-profile go-fast vessels,” he said, “and when these traffickers switch tactics like that, it means we’ve been very successful in shutting down another mode of conveyance for them.”

THE OUTCOMES

When a cutter such as the Stratton returns to port after a counterdrug operation, media reports of the patrol are usually accompanied by photos of the haul: bales of cocaine and cash, piled on deck or dockside. This is when members of the public often stop paying attention, but according to Assistant U.S. Attorney Joseph Ruddy, chief of the transnational organized crime section for the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Middle District of Florida, a maritime drug interdiction is “the first domino” to fall in an investigative process that may lead to the upper echelons of a criminal organization. “I call it the investigative point of entry into the smuggling organization,” said Ruddy.

Ruddy is lead prosecutor for the Panama Express Strike Force, a group comprised of agents and analysts from the Coast Guard, the DEA, the FBI, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the U.S. Navy, and other parts of JIATF-South. A maritime interdiction has important short-term outcomes, Ruddy said: “One, you’ve prevented the drugs from reaching the United States. That’s huge. Two, when it’s seized out on the water, that is a direct loss to the cocaine owner.” In this way, he said, the seizures act as “force multipliers,” disrupting the upward movement of transport organizers within the organization.

But the goal of Ruddy and of everyone involved inmaritime drug interdiction is not to merely seize drugs and cost criminals money – it’s to erase these criminal organizations entirely, and to weaken their sweeping influence on societies throughout the Americas. After the drugs are taken off the water, they’re not particularly useful to investigators for these purposes.

However, drug-smuggling mariners – whom Ruddy calls “subcontractors for the cocaine owners” – detained by Coast Guard law enforcement teams can lead investigators up the organizational hierarchy: obtaining evidence against members of the transportation organization and then leveraging transporters’ legal jeopardy to encourage cooperation in identifying and incriminating organizational leaders. “It works, and it helps us to dismantle these organizations before they get too entrenched into those countries, before they’ve established influence politically, economically, or with the police or military,” said Ruddy.

These far-reaching effects of maritime drug interdiction may not be as easily photographed as a huge stash of cocaine, but they’re not lost on anyone in the Coast Guard. “When these drugs get into Central and South America, they get broken down into smaller loads,” said Wieschhorster. “They’re hard to detect. And they’re trafficked with such violence that it subverts the rule of law there, and that drives the pressure of migration toward the U.S. southern border. So the more effective we are, the more we help stabilize the Central and South America region and ease pressure on the border. That’s why this mission is so important.”