subscribe  |    email  |    print  |    continue the debate

It’s an innocuous shipping container, no different than thousands of others moving every day across the globe. Traveling on a Taiwanese container ship across the Pacific, the box — designed as part of a global, commercial intermodal system and transported on ships, railroad cars and 18-wheel trucks — carries documentation saying it’s filled with medical supplies from Indonesia. It might be loaded and unloaded onto several ships before it winds up on a dock in Baltimore, where an inspector looks over the documentation and sees nothing suspicious. The container becomes the load for a truck bound for Cincinnati, where it’s delivered to a supply company that’s a front for a terrorist organization.

In Ohio, a laboratory-grown sample of the smallpox virus is removed from the legitimate medical samples in the shipping container. The terrorists infect themselves and fan out across the U.S., traveling on airliners and walking around shopping malls, movie theaters and grocery stores, infecting thousands of people with a potentially fatal virus that won’t be detectable for nearly two weeks.

Stopping this threat and other forms of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) from making their way across the world’s oceans is a challenge for the U.S. Navy and Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Mike Mullen. Mullen acknowledges that inspecting each container entering the U.S. is not practical and is seeking the cooperation of friendly navies, international organizations and even shipping companies to garner the kind of intelligence that would allow a WMD-laden container to be identified and intercepted long before it hits the country’s shores. One of the mechanisms for making that happen is the “Thousand-Ship Navy” (TSN), a metaphorical term for combining efforts on an international scale to halt or divert the movement of threats on the high seas.

The dangers were laid out this summer in a briefing by Vice Adm. John Morgan, deputy chief of naval operations for information, plans and strategy. Along with WMD menaces such as nuclear, chemical and biological terrorism, Morgan identified such significant threats as the proliferation of ballistic missiles, the creation of regional instability, threats to the global economy and “the rise of evil genius.” New threats, Morgan said in his brief, will be “market-driven and decentralized,” meaning they will likely be aimed at targets of significance with the threat materializing from a diffuse origin.

“Only global coalition-sharing intelligence and information can forestall nuclear terrorism,” Morgan said in his brief, and the Navy is applying that solution to other threats, as well.

A THOUSAND SHIPS DEFINED

Mullen summed up the Thousand-Ship Navy concept in an opinion piece published Oct. 29 in The Honolulu Advertiser newspaper: “[The fleet is] a global maritime partnership that unites maritime forces, port operators, commercial shippers, and international, governmental and nongovernmental agencies to address mutual concerns.

“Membership in this ‘navy’ is purely voluntary and would have no legal or encumbering ties. It would be a free-form, self-organizing network of maritime partners — good neighbors interested in using the power of the sea to unite, rather than to divide. The barriers for entry are low. Respect for sovereignty is high.”

The name itself captures the scope of the effort. It’s not actually about having 1,000 international ships at sea. It’s more about capabilities. Everyone brings what they can, when they can, for as long they can.

The Thousand-Ship Navy is one of three overlapping strategy initiatives now in development. In 2006, Mullen called for the Navy to develop a new Global Maritime Strategy to guide its concepts of naval operations and proposed a concept called Global Fleet Stations to build relationships and support forward presence in countries around the globe. Taken together, the efforts are aimed at positioning the Navy to operate against a range of concentrated or diffuse threats ranging from major international competitors to individual terrorists.

In putting out these ideas, Mullen has stressed that they are operating concepts — not acquisition programs. The idea is to change on an international scale how people do business and operate with one another, not to add to the Navy’s already stretched budget. Mullen has been tireless over the past year in preaching the virtues of global maritime cooperation and urging the formulation of the TSN. Examples of the concept in action that he frequently cites include:

• Humanitarian assistance operations after the December 2004 tsunami in the Indian Ocean, the August 2005 Hurricane Katrina disaster along the Gulf Coast of the U.S. and the October 2005 earthquake in northern Pakistan.

• International rescue efforts to save the crew of a trapped Russian minisub off Petropavlovsk in August 2005.

• Maritime evacuation operations in Lebanon in July after the Israeli invasion of that country.

In those operations, navies “self-organized — in free-form style — with no treaty or alliance, and seamlessly accomplished a vital mission,” Mullen said in recent addresses.

In day-to-day operations to counter “ideologues, pirates, proliferators, criminals and terrorists,” Mullen points to recent initiatives such as:

• Implementation of automatic identification systems (AIS) on ships at sea, allowing ships to automatically communicate information about their position, course and identity to other vessels or authorities on shore.

• Creation of the Virtual Regional Maritime Traffic Center, an Italian-led effort to create a communications network allowing navies in the Mediterranean and Black Sea region to track merchant ship traffic.

• Coordinated operations by Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore to counter piracy and terrorist movements around the Strait of Malacca — “clearly a model maritime network,” Mullen said.

Navy officials have pointed to the Strait of Malacca situation as an example where the intended goal was accomplished without the direct participation of the U.S. “We don’t have to do it ourselves,” one Navy official said.

Mullen has pointed out that “technology and information technology, in particular,” may very well be the single largest contributor to our maritime security.”

“Not long ago,” he told an international naval audience Oct. 31 at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, “security at sea depended upon one’s ability to remain unseen. In the future, that security will depend on the network, on being seen and identified.”

To flesh out these Maritime Domain Awareness strategies and concepts, Mullen started a series of discussions around the country to examine the issues and raise and address concerns. Few argue with the scenarios described by Mullen or with the need for a Thousand-Ship Navy. But participants from U.S. and foreign military services and governments, think tanks and industry openly brought up specific problems with implementing the plans.

• Mistrust among nations. “Everyone wants to see the common operating picture, but they aren’t necessarily willing to contribute to it,” said one former senior naval officer who attended two TSN conferences. “The guy next door might be watching, and we don’t want him to see what we’re doing. Those local issues of suspicion are probably going to translate into problems.”

• Mistrust from leadership. Several nations in South America now are led by people who at one time were imprisoned or hurt by the military, pointed out one group at a discussion. “Having military things just doesn’t strike them as a cool thing,” the former senior naval officer said. And in many countries where the U.S. seeks cooperation, he noted, significant differences exist between the officer corps and enlisted troops, who also see many officers benefiting from illegal profiteering. “Those local issues of suspicion are probably going to translate into problems,” he said.

• Communications. “We might want to send some digital burst stream up in the air and these guys are sitting there with only a VHF set that does only voice communications,” the former officer said. “There are also language difficulties,” he noted, and cultural differences among naval, military and civilian groups that make proper translation even more difficult.

• Incentivizing participating nations. Navies with meager financial resources often look at the U.S. as a source for funds or equipment, some discussion participants pointed out. Addressing the “what’s-in-it-for-me” factor is key to making the concept work, participants said.

Underwriting the entire discussion of the Thousand-Ship Navy concept, said one former military officer, is the need to disassociate it from being a purely U.S. idea and appeal to international needs. “If TSN is perceived as an American thing, it is dead in the water,” he said. “For it to work, explicit and implicit references to U.S. security concerns have to go.”

Among the positive ideas emerging at the conferences has been the suggestion that international shipping companies be enlisted in the information-gathering and awareness effort.

Maersk Line, a Danish concern, which with more than 500 ships and 1,400,000 containers is one of the world’s largest shipping companies, has held talks with the U.S. Navy on how it could participate. The company notes that its ships travel across the globe and can gather significant amounts of information.

“They know all the stuff that’s going down. Who the drug guys are. Who’s slipping people into containers,” the former naval officer said. “Not to mention the ships and what they see.”

In response, the former officer said, Maersk might expect breaks on AIS costs or getting a pass on having its ships stopped multiple times at sea for inspection. “If their ship has to stop three times for inspections, it’s interference,” the former naval officer said. “But if you can vector your limited security resources to other guys, he makes more money.”

A key to making the TSN concept a success, the former military officer pointed out, is the Navy’s ability to succinctly explain the idea to potential participants. “TSN,” he said after an August conference, “could be stillborn unless the concepts are better understood, packaged and presented.”

Mullen, by constantly promoting the idea, is working to do just that. But the CNO also is anxious to begin seeing more action rather than discussion. Mullen briefed President Bush on the Thousand-Ship Navy idea during a presidential visit to the Pentagon on Aug. 24. According to a Navy source, “The admiral hit a home run” with the president.

“It was very well-received,” the source said. That the briefing occured so soon after the idea was initially conceived indicates it has widespread support from the administration, another observer said.

The bottom line, Mullen points out, is that a nation’s security rests on international cooperation. “We must act quickly. None of us can do this on our own,” he told the Pearl Harbor audience. “We need each other.”