The Daily Background

Coyote Mercury discusses an angle to the ports security issue which is often overlooked. The angle? The Coast Guard’s role in all of this.

Over the course of helping my students with their research during that debate season, I developed an increased appreciation for the Coast Guard and its ability to, as its unofficial motto states, “do more with less.”

Since the Coast Guard holds primary responsibility for port security, it seems that we should be ensuring that it has everything it needs to protect our ports, much less stay afloat. At the time (2003-2004 school year) the USCG was still badly underfunded. So I decided to see if much had changed. While researching my last post, I found a claim that the USCG apparently ranks 38th oldest among the world’s 40 largest navies. I wondered if that was true and if so what is being done to change that. It seems that funding has gone up, but there is still quite a bit of work to be done.

Involving or not involving the Coast Guard is an interesting point, and James brings up some issues of poor USCG funding.

Go check out his thoughts here.

Filed under: Port Security, Z-TDB Blog