How ready is the Coast Guard to protect ports and waterways? More ready than before Sept. 11, Crea says, but resources remain limited and the Atlantic Area, like the rest of the Coast Guard, has too few personnel and fleets of cutters, aircraft, and patrol boats nearing obsolescence.

Crea, a career aviator, discusses the challenges with the calm reassurance of a pilot advising passengers to keep seat belts buckled. She assumed command of an area with five of nine Coast Guard districts last July. That same month, two laws took effect that vastly expanded Coast Guard regulatory tasks for securing ports and waterways and neutralizing threats associated with international shipping.

The Maritime Transportation Security Act (MTSA) and the International Ship and Port Facility Security Code (ISPS) direct that ships and port facilities, including passenger terminals, cargo facilities, and waterside industries, protect themselves because the task is too big for government alone. Businesses must identify their own vulnerabilities and prepare, practice, and (if necessary) execute plans to address threats and intruders.

The Coast Guard is responsible for reviewing those security plans—tens of thousands of them—and confirming effectiveness or directing changes. The new duties fall on a uniformed force that only recently climbed back toward 39,000, the size of the New York City Police Department.

Traditional missions, meanwhile, continue to include counter-drug operations, fishery enforcement, merchant vessel inspection, boating safety, environmental protection, aids to navigation, ice breaking, and wartime duties. Several Coast Guard cutters patrol off the coast of Iraq. Activities to protect living marine resources, like fisheries patrols, have been rolled back, though the service strives to close that operational gap by leveraging technology such as electronic monitoring systems.

The Sept. 11 attack, says Crea, caused “a tremendous shift” in Coast Guard mission balance. Resources committed to port security spiked from 2 percent of the service total on Sept. 10, 2001, to 60 percent, and there it remained for months. Since then it has leveled off to a “sustainable 28 percent,” says Crea, but that change in emphasis is permanent.

The law that created the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and transferred the Coast Guard there in 2003 from the Department of Transportation directed the service to maintain all former missions. Lifesaving remains the priority, and after Sept. 11 that means securing 361 major U.S. ports and 95,000 miles of coastline in addition to traditional search and rescue (SAR).

The terrorism threat “took away from everything else we were doing,” says Crea. “But we’ve gotten smarter. We’ve got better processes. We’ve got better intelligence. We have stronger partnerships, not just with federal and state and local agencies but [also] with industry.”

The Atlantic Area has received its share of a 2,000-person increase in uniformed personnel. The current recruit pipeline “is chock-a-block” as the service moves toward a higher authorized strength ceiling of 45,500 active duty members, as that pipeline, and budgets, allow. Crea says her two greatest challenges are allocating what always will be limited resources—platforms and personnel—and gaining the operational intelligence to decide how to do that most effectively.

Coast Guard operations have never been more of a risk-management exercise, sorting real threats from perceived, addressing them aggressively, and doing so without disrupting port operations, says Crea, which “can have some tremendously important unintended consequences.”

Although Crea oversees only a portion of the Coast Guard’s $8 billion budget, she understands the trade-off process. Before her previous assignment as commander of the 1st District, headquartered in Boston, she served as the Coast Guard director of budget programs and later as director of information and technology at its Washington, D.C., headquarters, where she shaped the service’s research and development effort.

Coast Guard procurement budgets, if depicted over the past decade as a continuous graph, would show a “bathtub effect” in spending, Crea says. The prominent trough is neglect of modernizing cutters and aircraft. It is responsible for the inventory of unreliable platforms the service deals with today: old, labor-intensive, and difficult to maintain.

Coast Guard personnel see the result every day. In the past year, in the Atlantic Area, four cutters saw their patrol time reduced sharply by mechanical failures. The 210-foot cutter Confidence, built in 1966, suffered a cracked hull. Bear, a 270-foot ship launched in 1980, lost its rudder, which kept it off patrol for three weeks. Corrosion of pipes and cooling plant aboard the 36-year-old cutter Dependable nearly sank the 210-foot vessel. “So there’s a crew confidence issue as well,” says Crea. Finally, a program to lengthen 110-foot cutters has been slowed by structural concerns. One of the newly lengthened vessels, the Matagorda, suffered a hull fracture, raising questions about the integrity of the redesign. These “unexpected breakages,” Crea says, “really cause a lot of chaos in your ability to respond and to plan.”

Aircraft might be in even rougher shape. The Coast Guard fleet of 84 smaller SAR helicopters, HH-65s, needs replacement engines. In the past year, crews reported “astronomically high numbers of in-flight engine failures,” Crea says. The risk is so high that fuel loads have been cut in half and types of missions curtailed. The DHS inspector general said last fall that HH-65 pilots reported 172 instances of power loss in the 12 months ending Sept. 30, 2004. The current operating restrictions affect the Coast Guard’s effectiveness in SAR, homeland security, and other missions, and the engine replacement program is behind schedule.

“So then you’ve got a ship out there that, instead of getting two hours out of its helicopter, only is going to get an hour of actual search time. So you pay for it in different ways,” Crea says.

Maintaining C-130 long-range surveillance aircraft that have sophisticated sensor packages linking radar to forward-looking infrared systems is another worry. Called CASPER, the sensor packages allow aircrews truly to “see” targets at night, rather than mere blips on radar. But according to Crea, CASPER is suffering a parts shortage.

“Consequently we have great airplanes that now don’t have the ability to use that system package anymore,” Crea says. “It’s just immensely frustrating because so much of the illegal activity takes place at night, and you’re just kind of flying around, back where you were 20 years ago.”

The extra maintenance lengthens already long workweeks for crews, and when systems fail, law enforcement patrols are less effective. In FY 2004, aging equipment forced the Coast Guard to spend 20 percent more than budgeted on maintenance, which squeezed operating dollars. Crea was at Coast Guard headquarters on Sept. 11, 2001, and from her sixth floor office “watched the Pentagon burn for three days,” she says. “I really wanted to be out there to do something.” Crea brings plenty of operational experience from a 31-year career to her current assignment. She commanded air stations in Clearwater, Fla., and Detroit. She piloted the C-130 Hercules turboprop, the HH-65, and the Gulfstream II jet. She earned master’s degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Central Michigan University and a bachelor’s degree from the University of Texas. By the time Crea took command of the 1st District in May 2002, the concentration of cutters, patrol boats, and aircraft focused solely on protecting ports and waterways had begun to ease.

The most effective way to protect ports is to “push borders out,” Crea says. “We don’t want to wait for the enemy [but rather] detect and intervene on the high seas.”

On Sept. 11, terrorists used “our own systems and processes … against us,” Crea says. The Coast Guard challenge is to prevent the same type of thing from happening in U.S. ports whose accessibility, so important to commerce, “presents a tremendous vulnerability.”

As part of DHS, the Coast Guard works more closely with federal partners, from building budgets to integrating efforts and resources, Crea says. For example, the Coast Guard and U.S. Customs Service in Miami now coordinate aircraft patrol schedules. New organizations have been set up to share intelligence.

“At the area level we’ve got Maritime Intelligence Fusion Centers, and at the local level we have Field Intelligence Support Teams,” Crea says, in major ports such as Boston and New York to coordinate security watches, acquire and develop intelligence, and share a single threat matrix to “create actionable intelligence.” Coast Guard-Navy collaboration has led to “extremely successful drug busts,” Crea says. Just five interdictions at sea last fall led to the seizure of more than 37 tons of cocaine. Multiagency intelligence led to two fishing vessel seizures in the eastern Pacific in September carrying 27 tons, among the largest-ever maritime seizures of cocaine.

“That wouldn’t happen,” says Crea, “without our law enforcement detachments on their vessels as a force multiplier [and] leveraging their intelligence and sensor capabilities.”

All this coordination means the Coast Guard no longer is “blindly throwing resources out into the open ocean,” Crea says. “We’re able to target it a lot better.”

Six Coast Guard and two Navy patrol boats operate a combined Persian Gulf squadron. At home, the Navy has given the Coast Guard 170-foot patrol boats. Two already operate in the Atlantic Area, and another is slated for transfer.

In major ports, Coast Guard units run security details daily with local maritime police units, from monitoring arrival and departure of tankers carrying dangerous cargoes to patrolling harbors. Local law enforcement and Coast Guard teams coordinate vessel boarding and inspection. The service had made a “groundbreaking” agreement with Maine to use state resources to enforce federal security zones. New Jersey is close to signing a similar pact.

Some of the most effective Coast Guard partnerships since Sept. 11 are with businesses. The MTSA requires the commercial sector, including individual merchant vessels, to develop and exercise its own security plans. The plans were to be submitted to the Coast Guard in July 2004 and, once approved, must be exercised and not just “a piece of paper stuck in a bookshelf,” Crea says.

The merchant marine industry was worried about the effect on resources and profits, Crea concedes, but much of that fear has eased.

“We don’t want to have them fail” and interrupt trade, Crea says. But the law “does give us the hammer to keep them out if they do not comply.”

From July through October, more than two dozen ships were turned away from Atlantic Area ports, some for failing to notify the Coast Guard 96 hours before arrival, another MTSA requirement. The Coast Guard needs that time to check intelligence and rule out or identify potential threats.

Agreement on the ISPS was a bigger hurdle because “not all international partners share the same motivation,” Crea says. The ISPS allows closer monitoring of foreign shipping and encourages importing nations to examine cargoes at ports of debarkation.

The goal, Crea says, is “layered security,” from tighter business processes and cooperative efforts in intelligence to tighter screening at ports of embarkation and among global industries to make supply chains more secure starting overseas. The Coast Guard, meanwhile, is more aggressively intercepting and boarding vessels well out to sea.

Major holes in the security of U.S. ports and waterways have been plugged and vulnerabilities reduced, Crea says. But she is not ready to proclaim that all shipping and maritime facilities in the Atlantic Area are safe.

“We have to plan, support, and execute assignments very carefully because there is not enough capacity to do everything,” Crea explains.

Taxpayers can’t give the Coast Guard everything it might need to address every potential threat. That kind of “largesse” the nation can’t afford, she says. The key is to balance the risk.

Although the Coast Guard overall is supported well in the FY 2005 budget, money earmarked for new acquisitions again will have to be used, in part, to keep older equipment running for a few more years. For example, money to upgrade sensors aboard Coast Guard aircraft now has to be used to reengineer HH-65 helicopters.

“The old stuff is getting harder and harder to maintain, and the new stuff hasn’t come on line yet,” Crea says. So the cost of sustained operations and more maintenance continues to force the Coast Guard to shift money between accounts.

“It’s a zero-sum game,” Crea says. “It either comes from somewhere else, or you have a decreased capability.”

The rash of hurricanes that hit Florida in 2004 caused $33 million in damage to Coast Guard facilities including boat stations, communication towers, and aids to navigation. The station in Pensacola operated out of trailers for a time, but no Coast Guard station was forced to close.

“It was expensive, it was time-consuming, but it could have been a lot worse,” says Crea. It was another plate to spin in a tough balancing act.

In the Atlantic Area, and throughout the Coast Guard, service leaders are using innovation to make it through a difficult period. That means using buoy tenders to conduct fisheries patrols, or occasionally having an icebreaker escort a liquefied natural gas carrier into port. Intelligence is used aggressively to target assets more effectively.

“We scrape together resource hours and create pulse ops, instead of just sprinkling everything on an inch thick and a mile wide,” says Crea. What truly helps is that Americans are so supportive, Crea adds.

“I mean literally you walk down the street in cities like New York and Boston, as well as more maritime cities like Norfolk, Va., and total strangers come tap you on the back and they say, ‘Thank you for what you’re doing.’

“It’s a phenomenal sense of appreciation,” she says, and it shows in record-high reenlistments of Coast Guard personnel in her districts.

“People are staying in because they know how important what they’re doing is,” Crea says. Despite long hours, “They want to be here, and they are top-notch.”