Week 4 project part 1

Maritime Proposal

A Proposal for Investigating U.S. Maritime Security

Following the events of September 11th, 2001, in which hijackers crashed commercial airliners into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and a field in Shanksville, PA, the United States became keenly aware of its previously unrecognized vulnerabilities. The security breaches which allowed for this devastating attack would highlight the need for massive modernization, bureaucratic refinement and technological improvement in a host of America's transportation systems. As the research proposal here denotes, America's maritime security concerns would emerge as substantial in the wake of these attacks. As the research will also demonstrate, there are few areas of America's national transportation infrastructure that remains as vulnerable to security breach.

Indeed, available findings suggest that the incredible wealth of resources which move through America's ports and shipping lanes on a daily basis, in combination with poorly managed screening processes and outdated facilities that remain in place there, are conspiring to make traveling ships and their docking ports extremely attractive and susceptible to attack. According to Graffagnini (2004), "most of the scholarly analyses on the issue of maritime security have focused on two issues: (1) liability in the event of maritime terrorism; and (2) possible scenarios for maritime terrorism. In today's environment, '[c]onventional maritime law just does NOT suffice' and new angles fresh with maritime industry perspective will be needed.'" (Graffagnini, 1)

This perspective implies at the root of the vulnerabilities demonstrated by our maritime channels is the demand for improved regulatory control over and oversight of both shipping activities and ports. This is because, at present, any ship which is bound for the United States and traversing international waters, is highly vulnerable to piracy. Piracy, in turn, connects closely with the criminal underworld practices of global terror cells. The result is both the ability and the will not just to hijack critical shipping resources, but to repurposes these resources into weaponry much the same way as did the airline hijackers of 9/11.

As our research warns, piracy is today a mode for undermining industrial shipping nations such as the U.S. and, as a result, connects closely with the political imperatives for undermining U.S. foreign policies that drive many terrorist groups. And as we find in our readings, piracy and terrorism have increasingly worked to common ends. Indeed, "despite the romantic image of pirates, the violent seizure of merchantmen on the high seas is a growing problem; in 2001, 335 incidents occurred, a figure that rose the following year to 370. In the first six months of 2003, 234 attacks against merchantmen were recorded, with the waters of the Indonesian archipelago being regarded as the most dangerous." (Daly, 1) the danger of this pattern is reinforced by the events which actually preceded and served as portent to September 11th. When terrorists bombed the U.S.S. Cole, a battleship at port in Yemen, they demonstrated in no uncertain terms that the United States naval resources were highly porous and susceptible to attack.