Vessel tracking: coast guard begins to tackle complex surveillance mission.

Sorting out potential wrongdoers among the millions of vessels that transit the oceans bound for United States has become one of the Coast Guard's biggest challenges, officials say. Multiple initiatives have been set in motion to develop better ship monitoring systems, but the service is encountering financial constraints that could delay or prevent such efforts.

Before 9/11, the nation did not have a mandatory ship-tracking requirement for large commercial vessels. The Coast Guard has since established rules mandating the use of the automated identification system, or AIS, a technology that provides continuous information on the identity, location, speed and course of vessels.

Self-propelled vessels 65 feet or more in length, other than fishing vessels are required to carry trans-ponders that transmit information from ship to ship, and from ship to shore.

That may not be enough, however, says Vice Adm. Terry Cross, vice commandant of the Coast Guard. "Simply knowing that there are people out there is of marginal usefulness. The trick is to know who they are, where they're going, what's on board, who's on board," he told a Navy League conference.

Such deficiencies also exist in most of the country's 361 ports and in waters close to its 95,000 miles of shoreline, he said. The Coast Guard is working with multiple agencies--including the Navy and U.S. Northern Command--to develop a system that will provide the desired intelligence, which is known as "maritime domain awareness."

One effort being planned is a nationwide deployment of AIS sensors to track vessels throughout all U.S. ports, waterways and coastal areas.

One of the limitations of the current system is that it cannot detect ships easily from shore. A long-range AIS--to be developed in the future--will be able to detect watercraft upwards of 2,000 miles off shore, he said.

Though tracking large commercial ships via vessel traffic systems may bolster the safety of U.S. ports, the greater potential threat to port security may reside in the small boats and craft that are not required to carry AIS transponders.

"In our major ports, we may see something not a whole lot different from the air traffic control system, in the sense that if you want to take your 16-foot fast boat and fish down by the nuclear power plant, you may be required to have some sort of transponder on that boat, and you may need to have permission to enter that particular zone," said Cross.

The Navy is working with the Coast Guard to develop a command and control regime up and down the East Coast of the United States, Adm. Robert Willard, vice chief of naval operations, told the conference. He said the Navy is learning how to exploit the AIS system, for example, by deploying surveillance aircraft for over-the-horizon tracking.

The two naval services have signed an agreement to shift tactical control of assets as needed to interdict potential maritime threats. The arrangement "recognizes the urgency of the situation," said Cross. "It recognizes

what field commanders have long recognized, that neither one of us has sufficient assets on either coast to potentially interdict a threat in any particular area."

On the West Coast, for example, the Navy has concentrations of assets in southern California and in the Puget Sound area, in Washington, but hardly any in between, said Cross. The Coast Guard, on the other hand, has a large presence in the San Francisco Bay area.

"We need to get to the point where at the end of the day, we don't care if it's a Coast Guard ship that does the intercept, or a Navy ship that does the intercept. And it should be done by the most efficient means possible," said Cross.

Vice Adm. Thad Allen, who recently was nominated to become the Coast Guard commandant, told a Senate panel that one of the most pressing challenges for the service is "detecting and intercepting small vessels used for migrant and drug smuggling, which can easily be used by terrorists seeking to do us harm."

To keep better track of such ships, the service has launched an initiative called "Command 2010" that aims to transform its command and control capabilities. The goal of the program is to provide additional vessel tracking sensors, and to fuse vessel tracks with historical data, law enforcement information and intelligence.

However, Command 2010 is currently unfunded through the 2007 budget, said Darrell Williams, program manager.

If the initiative receives funding, he said, it would be a "mission critical initiative for Coast Guard Sector Command Centers to deliver fully integrated detection, tracking and surveillance capabilities in the maritime environment." It would provide a mix of sensor coverage intended to gather electronic and visual target data from port and coastal areas in addition to improving information sharing and collaboration within the Coast Guard and other federal, state and local port partners, he added. Several prototypes and test bed efforts are underway.

A Department of Justice pilot project in Charleston, S.C., is bringing port partners together with information sharing capabilities through a Northrop Grumman port-and-coastal surveillance system called "Hawkeye." The system integrates sensors--such as radar, cameras and automatic-identification technologies--into a command and control system to detect, track and analyze vessel traffic around ports and coastal areas.

"We believe lessons learned from the prototype systems will significantly benefit the Command 2010 program," said Williams.

Department of Homeland Security agencies recently participated in a six-week operational demonstration of another command and control system that integrates information from multiple sensors and sources.

Covering 160 miles of southwestern Texas coastline, 120 miles of land border and nine ports of entry, Raytheon's "Project Athena" helped Customs and Border Protection plus 14 other agencies, including the Coast Guard, detect, intercept and deter "transnational threats, drugs and alien smuggling," according to the company.

Athena incorporated a broad range of sensors, including AIS to track larger vessels and radars to detect smaller boats, such as shrimping vessels, said Scott Spence, program director at Raytheon.

The system can fuse together information from hundreds of different sources, ranging from cameras and radars to databases.

"What we try to do is provide additional coverage where required," he said. One of the biggest challenges was figuring out how to get the right information to the right individual at the right time, said Spence.

Another significant hurdle is managing the sheer volume of data. For the Coast Guard to achieve maritime domain awareness, it needs to integrate massive amounts of sensor data with information that comes from private-sector shippers. "That is an unprecedented challenge," said Anoop Prakash, vice president of LexisNexis Government Solutions. One concern is "making sure you are collecting quality data, critical mass of data to conduct analysis," he told National Defense. "There's so many disparate sources of information ... and each port employs different terminology," he noted. "It's hard to fuse the data."

Further complicating the picture is the need to collect background information on non-U.S. citizens who operate vessels. "There is no consistency across different countries. Shipping crews are multinational. So it will be very hard to find background information on these people unless a shipping company makes a voluntary effort to conduct background checks," Prakash said.

--Additional reporting by Sandra I. Erwin