PORTSECURE 2010
Canada needs greater air surveillance capabilities,
conference told
By MARK WILSON
July 5, 2010
There are only four surveillance flights a week over the huge arc of the North Pacific which the Canadian navy keeps watch on out to a 1,000-mile limit, an annual port and maritime security conference was told in Vancouver on May 27.
Capt. Les Falloon, an assistant chief of staff in Esquimalt with Maritime Forces Pacific (MARPAC), told the PortSecure 2010 audience that if he had continuous aerial surveillance he would have a high chance of catching all the bad actors that smuggle drugs or people, pollute the seas or otherwise sin against the laws of Canada.
As it is, each of the four flights a week can be as brief as four hours and no longer than 10 hours and gives only a passing glance, if that, to any one area.
Capt. Falloon said that any additional aerial surveillance he may need to investigate a suspicious vessel has to be ordered from a civilian contractor. Yet such surveillance may be critical to determining whether an alarm should be raised and an interdiction team readied.
In other points, Capt. Falloon said the West Coast has only 40 per cent of Canada’s naval assets and that the entire navy is just 9,000 strong, one quarter the size of the U.S. Coast Guard.
MARPAC’s duties include working alongside the coast guard and air force to deal with the heaviest search and rescue load of any region in Canada, with an average of 2,300 marine callouts a year.
Capt. Falloon stressed the close co-operation MARPAC has with the U.S. Coast Guard and the U.S. navy, with the former, which has its own large air fleet, sharing the results of its surveillance flights when they border Canadian waters.
It is the U.S. Coast Guard that integrates visual inputs from ships, aircraft and satellites with other data for West Coast waters going to a server in Hawaii and then relays it to a MARPAC communications and command centre in Esquimalt.
Capt. Falloon lamented that while MARPAC has high-speed secure communication links with the two seagoing branches of the U.S. military, it lacks network security in its communications with Transport Canada, the Canada Border Services Agency and the RCMP, and he described communications with Ottawa, when very senior approvals are needed, as going up a stovepipe.
Another impediment to the information flow between government agencies is Canada’s Privacy Act. This, for example, debars the inter-agency sharing of information about vessel owners and masters, which may be vital to gauging whether suspicions about a ship are warranted.
Notwithstanding stretched resources and other problems, the navy has used its information resources and common sense to target two vessels in recent months, one carrying 76 Sri Lankan men attempting illegal entry to Canada, and the other, the 15.25-metre, auxiliary-engined Huntress whose two-man crew had dropped 1,001 kilograms of cocaine at a remote location on northern Vancouver Island.
The migrant ship, with the false name of Ocean Lady, raised red flags because it bore an invalid identification number from the International Maritime Organization and didn’t have a transponder to allow remote interrogation by the coast guard’s Automatic Identification System. It was following a straight course across the North Pacific instead of taking a shorter great circle route and was making only eight knots. “It was as conspicuous as a drunk driver going extra slow,” Capt. Falloon said.
After an assessment of available information, Capt. Falloon’s team placed the RCMP on alert and went to the highest state of operational readiness. The frigate HMCS Regina, put to sea to follow the suspect ship, and two U.S. Coast Guard ships took up shadowing positions. When the decision to interdict was given, 36 RCMP and naval personnel boarded the intruder on Oct. 17 and it was taken to a seasonal cruise ship terminal in Victoria.
Several months later, on March 5, the Esquimalt centre again went to full alert when a surveillance flight spotted the two-masted Huntress off Vancouver Island. Its running lights were turned off.
Intelligence checks showed that the Huntress had been at sea for 45 days after departing Panama.
Continued aerial surveillance was ordered and it showed the vessel stopped close to land and repeated trips to shore by a small dinghy. The following morning, the Huntress put into Port Hardy where it was greeted by RCMP officers.
“The people on board must have been laughing to themselves: ‘They can search us but they won’t find anything,’” Capt. Falloon said. “Wrong. The surveillance aircraft had an infra-red camera that had recorded 14 boat trips to shore and the RCMP had been given the latitude and longitude of where they could find the goodies.”
He said a benefit of the intense security exercises that preceded the Winter Olympics in Vancouver is that it has sharpened the ability of the navy, coast guard and RCMP to work closely together.
Exercises are a necessity. Capt. Melissa Bert, who commands the U.S. Coast Guard in the Alaskan panhandle, described a recent multi-agency test of responses to a supposed bomb threat to a large cruise ship alongside at Juneau.
She said getting the officials involved to move beyond a tight focus on their immediate priorities was not easy. The FBI treated the ship as a crime scene while U.S. Border Patrol agents were worried about hundreds of crew members, of various nationalities, wandering the streets of the Alaskan capital. Meanwhile, the vessel’s master had his own concerns for the safety of the ship’s complement and for his command.
“One thing we hadn’t thought through was the timing of when to order the last crew members off the ship, as normally you would need some people to stay,” Capt. Bert said.
As her training was as a military lawyer, she was well placed to adjudicate conflicts in priorities among the participants in the exercise. Asked how she would rate the success of the test, she answered: “We learned some things, which is why you have these exercises.
“And it was done in port, not in some unforgiving spot in the worst possible weather. But all it takes is for some jerk to phone in a bomb threat and you have to get people off as fast as you can, wherever you can.”