Sea Trade and Security: An Assessment of the Post-9/11 Reaction

In his best selling book, The World is Flat, Thomas Friedman describes the interconnected global economy enabled by advances in information and communications technology, and other factors that he terms "flatteners." (1) This compelling tale does not, however, include a description of the 60-year, post-Second World War evolution in sea trade that has made globalization possible. As stated by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), "the world paradigm for global prosperity has been predicated on near-frictionless transport and trade." (2) Although efficient sea trade is a critical component of the world economy, security was not a significant factor in the design or evolution of the global trading system. The attacks of 11 September 2001 made it apparent that revolutionary changes in maritime and port security would be required. This paper outlines the threats against and vulnerabilities of the sea-trade system; describes the international and U.S. response; discusses gaps that have not been adequately addressed and issues that are not yet resolved; and concludes that many security goals cannot be met without relying on others to retro-fit security into the complex systems that are the basis of world economic well-being. Sea trade today bears little resemblance to the postwar trade dominated by U.S. and European general-purpose fleets. A relentless drive to efficiency resulted in the segmentation of maritime trade, ships and port facilities into highly specialized subsystems. (3) Ports have adapted to this segregation of trade by creating uniquely designed facilities for each type of cargo, and the general purpose terminals that marked the waterfronts of all U.S. port cities became restaurants, condominiums and shops. High-value cargo is shipped in containers, and container ships are loaded and unloaded in container facilities designed to efficiently transfer these boxes to other modes of transportation. Next to the invention of the microchip, the most significant step toward a global economy occurred when Malcolm McLean, the trucking entrepreneur, bought a steamship company in 1955 and introduced the concept of shipping cargo-laden truck trailers. (4) The first Sealand container vessel, Ideal-X, carried only 58 containers on deck and did not look revolutionary, but once the trend toward containerization started, it changed sea trade forever. McLean could not have envisioned that, by 2005, "if all the containers in the world were lined up, it would create a container wall of 108,000 kilometers, or 2.7 times the circumference of the world." (5) The trend toward specialization of ships and port facilities did not stop with containerization. Automobiles are shipped on specially designed vehicle carriers and landed at vehicle handling facilities. Petroleum and chemical products are shipped on tankers through liquid bulk facilities. Liquid Natural Gas (LNG) and Liquid Petroleum Gas (LPG) ships and facilities are designed to safely and efficiently move their particular cargo. Cruise ships have evolved and specialized as have cruise-ship terminals. Bulk-cargo carriers transport critical commodities (grain, ores, fertilizers, etc.) through bulk terminals. As a consequence of this segmentation of sea trade, a major port should be viewed as a loosely coupled collection of highly efficient subsystems. The focus on efficiency has, in addition to specialization, resulted in a dramatic increase in the size of all vessel and facility types (e.g., super tankers carrying more than 300,000 tons of oil, container ships with a capacity of more than 10,000 twenty-foot equivalent (TEU) containers, mega-passenger ships carrying 5,000 passengers). It has also resulted in a geographically vulnerable concentration of key shipping trades. The port of Los Angeles/Long Beach transships 42 percent of all container traffic in the United States; the ports of Houston and the lower Mississippi River receive more than 50 percent of our oil imports. …