Oh, Say Can You Sea: Friend or Foe?

For centuries, the wide oceans have insulated America from harm. But the disturbing truth today is that the famous battle cry is more like “One if by land, twice as likely by sea.” Bay Crossings recently interviewed William Langewiesche by telephone in Paris, en route to assignment in Baghdad. Langewiesche is the author of the recently published The Outlaw Sea, a trenchant account of the perils and possibilities posed by the oceans all around us.

BC: Your book, The Outlaw Sea, details the disturbing security shortcomings that could make our nation’s ports ripe targets for terrorists. Why do you think so little has been done to deal with this problem?

WILLIAM LANGEWIESCHE: First of all, I’d like to say that I don’t want to participate in the sort of exploitation of fear about terrorism, which has been really overdone in the United States. It’s obvious that the sea is one of the main avenues available to people who want to attack us. The U.S. government is very aware of that, and has given the Coast Guard the lead in protecting U.S. shores from terrorist attack from the sea. Quite a few things have been done, both by the Coast Guard and by the Customs Service, and to some extent by the Immigration Service. The Coast Guard is now part of the Department of Homeland Security. They’ve stepped up patrols in the ports and have tried to push the horizon of the oceans further out. They’ve initiated various programs to identify ships which are approaching U.S. shores. The problem is that, according to members of the Coast Guard, what has been done is not going to have any effect. In a sense, we’re building Maginot Lines. Not because we’re stupid or because the Coast Guard is not aware of the nature of the sea or the nature of the threat, but because they lack tools, they’re trying to deal with a non-governmental threat, and they find themselves paralyzed by that disconnect.

I think the solutions for attack from the sea are probably not going to be found at the sea, any more than the solutions for attack by Germany were found on the front lines on the borders of France before World War II. The problems were deep inside Germany and deep inside France. You’ll find public relations statements by the U.S. government about the various initiatives, bravely speaking of channeling the attack or of narrowing the odds, when in fact, because we’re not facing the 100-year storm, but a very intelligent enemy, we have not reduced the odds or channeled the attack in any appreciable or significant way at all. It’s in the nature of the sea that this should be so. It’s also in the nature of this new form of stateless terrorist threat that it should be so.

If one of the main ideas is to identify ships that might pose a threat coming at us, all ships, including bad ships, would have to identify themselves before sailing through the Golden Gate, and they will certainly comply with regulations.

The nature of the ocean today, and the anarchy that exists on the high seas, indicates that you can escape the law by complying with it. It’s not a ship full of pirates who will refuse to identify themselves, or who are going to attack the United States. It’s going to come in the form of the absolute top-level ship with all the I’s dotted, T’s crossed, and all the paperwork done. It doesn’t make an iota of difference whether these reports were required earlier. The United Nations and the International Maritime Organization face a similar problem in terms of trying to control the operation of ships at sea. The bad guys absolutely comply with the law; they don’t run away from it. In fact, al Qaeda complies with the law. When they attack us, they apply for visas first, and then they attack us.

BC: Shippers’ biggest customers are ferocious cost-cutters, like Wal-Mart. Do you think shippers are pressured to put savings ahead of security?

WL: The ocean today is an anarchistic environment-the ultimate expression of free enterprise, competition unfettered. The shipping companies, ship owners, and ship operators are certainly under enormous commercial pressure to cut costs. This means maintaining things to a minimum, paying your crews the minimum, and under man your ships if possible. The relationship between that competitive environment and lack of security in terms of terrorism is not a direct relationship. It would be foolish to expect ship owners and ship operators to protect the United States from terrorist attack.
Shipping companies are not in the business of security. Even if they weren’t so competitive, even if Wal-Mart and the American consumers and world consumers weren’t demanding savings on the products they buy in the stores, even if we were willing to pay a premium, that is a security premium, that really wouldn’t increase our security one bit.

BC: Can the maritime industry cope with the piracy threats you describe in your book, or police itself related to environmental issues that have been raised? Or does the government need to be more involved?

WL: If there was some way to create a less competitive, less anarchic, less free sea, there could be positive effects, both in the environmental impact of substandard ships and, of course, in piracy. The piracy issue would be a simple matter of putting a few more people aboard ships, and in certain dangerous areas, giving them nothing but the job of protecting the ship and watching for pirate attack, especially coming at them from the stern.

On the other hand, how would you achieve that environment? How would you achieve that less-than-anarchic, free market environment on the high seas? Government regulation is not going to do it–that has been tried and has failed abysmally. There’s no lack of regulation on the high seas. The International Maritime Organization, in particular, has issued mountains of regulations about how ships should be operated. It’s very easy for shipping operators and ship owners to sidestep those regulations by complying with them. In other words, by playing with the idea of the nation state, by shopping for your country, the country of your ship, the country in which the company resides that owns the ship, all of the offshore capital aspects, by shopping globally you can both comply with the regulations and yet utterly disregard them.

What can be done is being done, and that is unilateral protection of your own shores, or port state control. For instance, the U.S. Coast Guard has imposed a whole set of stringent standards and policing of those standards on ships coming to the United States. This must be one of the reasons that we have not really seen a major oil spill in the United States since the Exxon Valdez.

BC: You say the Coast Guard is incorruptible, but it is revered for its rescue heroics and is now called upon to play the primary role providing maritime security. Yet, very underpaid Coast Guard regulators are tomorrow’s maritime industry executives. Now there’s a hagiography that surrounds the Coast Guard. Is this entirely deserved?

WL: I don’t know if it is ever entirely deserved. Many of those who leave the Coast Guard actually get involved in setting up flags of convenience; some try to maintain high standards, while others don’t even try. They go into the shipping business. One way or another, the shipping business forces people into flags of convenience. It’s the nature of the business, and the nature of the environment in which they operate. I don’t think you can really blame the Coast Guard for the actions of its officials after they leave the Coast Guard.

BC: Isn’t it difficult for the junior officer who was being mentored until just last week to really be rigorous.

WL: I haven’t seen any evidence of that, and I’ve looked at this very closely. I am not a militarist; I’m actually an anti-militarist. I don’t want to participate in the current surge of American patriotic hysteria, but there’s no real evidence that the Coast Guard is in any way goofing off on this job.

The ship inspectors–those concerned with safety and ship operations–are a certain branch of the Coast Guard who take their job very seriously. The European ship inspectors mock the American Coast Guard inspectors in the way that Europeans mock Americans for being unsophisticated. But if you go and spend time with these inspectors, they take it seriously. They’re not overly rigid; they are perfectly intelligent, flexible, and thorough inspectors.

The proof is in the industry’s reaction to bringing ships to American shores. It’s not absolute because ultimately the Coast Guard can only “detain,” or arrest a ship. They often can’t even find out who owns the ship, let alone arrest the owner of the ship. If it’s a low enough value ship, the owner can choose to walk away from it, or he can fix it up a little bit to whatever standards and sail it on. He might decide not to come back with that ship because it’s expensive to have a ship detained.

The power to punish offenders is extremely limited because the Coast Guard has limited powers. There’s no evidence that the Coast Guard–and I’m talking about ship inspection–is in any way goofing off at this job. I question the long-term deeper significance of that job; the global impact is practically nothing.

BC: Offshoring of jobs is a big political issue in the United States. And America offshored its merchant marine before offshoring was cool. Was this a mistake?

WL: If you ask an American mariner, the answer is definitely yes. If your dream is to go to sea and make a living by sailing big ships around the world, you’d better not be an American; you’d better find some other nationality, and you’d better be willing to live for cheap in some place like the Philippines. From the European and American maritime union point of view, this clearly has been a disaster. From the consumers’ point of view, it’s probably been a good thing.

For the jobs that have been taken away from Americans and Europeans, the high paid jobs have been given to people who otherwise would not have had any jobs at all. In other words, you really can’t draw a correlation between being poor, coming from the Philippines or Indonesia or Pakistan, and not being a good sailor. There are many from the Third World who now crew these ships and do it quite competently.

This may be part of the larger equalization underway. If all men and women are indeed created equal, this may be necessary. Of course it means the exportation of our jobs and ultimately the lowering of American and European living standards, and probably the ultimate raising of Third World living standards. So maybe equality is a good thing on that level.

BC: In Outlaw Sea, you describe the harrowing story of an Estonian ferry sinking, and the hapless investigations that followed. Should a ferry sinking ever happen in the U.S., is there a system to properly investigate it?

WL: The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), the people who investigate airline crashes, also has a marine division which investigates ship crashes. The Coast Guard traditionally has a lead role in ship accidents in the United States. There’s a certain amount of bureaucratic antagonism between the Coast Guard investigators and the NTSB marine investigators. I think both sides have probably screwed up in the past. Overall, the level of investigative competence and the political will necessary to create that is the best in the world.

The Estonia accident is the kind of accident that might occur to a ferry crossing on the San Francisco Bay. The Estonia was essentially a flag of convenience, operating in the cracks between nations. It was built in another nation, and there were a multitude of nations involved in both the building and operation of that ship, and in the investigation that followed. Those nations were, as far as the investigation goes, primarily northern European nations, meaning Swedish, Finnish, and Estonian. They really weren’t used to running an investigation like this. I think the situation would be a very different kind of investigation if a U.S.-flagged ferry, like one of those crossing the Bay, heavily regulated and inspected, went down.

BC: One of the characteristics of ferries these days are that they’re very fast. The skins of the hulls are very thin to keep weight down. Shouldn’t near-misses involving ferries be investigated with the same vigor that airliner new-misses are?

WL: I really don’t know about American maritime accident investigations. What I do know about is American airline accident investigations. The NTSB is not as immune to political pressure as some of its supporters say it is. But compared to other organizations in Washington, it is an apolitical organization run by technocrats.