Spotty knowledge of sea movements hurts anti-terror, WMD efforts: admiral

WASHINGTON (AFP) Oct 01, 2003
The US Navy's knowledge of what's moving on ships at sea is spotty, making it difficult to track Islamic extremists in southeast Asia or prevent smuggling of fissile material for nuclear weapons from North Korea, the commander of the US Pacific fleet warned Wednesday.

"We're finding out we don't know a lot, we don't know enough," Admiral Walter Doran told reporters here.

The Pacific fleet is not currently engaged in maritime interdiction operations in the western Pacific, but the United States with Australia last month held the first of a series of multinational exercises to practice stopping and boarding suspect ships on the high seas.

"It's very much right now still trying to get through the rubric of how we would do it, with like-minded nations," Doran said. "We have not been tasked to do it right now, and we are not doing it right now."

Doran said interdicting shipments of fissile material from North Korea at sea "is not easy."

"This is a difficult issue, and the heart of it gets to this issue of situational awareness -- what do we know about what's moving on the ocean, and where these things are," he said.

Though authorities have good visibility of the movement of airlines and air freight, the movement of goods and people by sea is more chaotic and tracking it requires broad collaboration among countries and within governments, he said.

Besides North Korea, US authorities are worried that unmonitored seas are an open avenue for extremist groups like Jemaah Islamiya to move people and equipment through southeast Asia.

The US Pacific Command, which is responsible for the US forces in the Asia-Pacific region, has begun to promote a regional maritime security policy aimed persuading countries to pool information about the movement of ships.

Singapore, which has maritime centers that monitor the flow of traffic through the Straits of Malaccas, and Malaysia, which has an anti-piracy center, could provide key pieces of the network, Doran said.

"Across the board the situational awareness is not very tight as to what is moving on these ships, what's in these containers, the flagging of vessels," Doran said.

"If you could just limit it down till you knew where the gray areas were, it would be very, very helpful. And it would help you to focus your efforts as far as figuring out what's going on," he said.

WAR.WIRE