Evaluation of maritime operational threat response forces for the Pacific Coast Theater

Abstract

Maritime Intercept Operations in defense of the Pacific Coast Ports are resource intensive. A maritime threat scenario, analytical models, and simulations are used to measure risk to a port given various levels of resource and intelligence. The scenario starts with intelligence that a large commercial ship arriving to a Pacific Coast Port within a 96-hour window poses a security risk. Intelligence further limits the set of threat ships to a subset of all traffic entering a specific port. A limited number of Maritime Operational Threat Response (MOTR) forces are available to detect, classify, and intercept the threat ship before it reaches port. In the first scenario, all ships are boarded before entering port, and impact is measured by delay of ships into port. In the other scenarios, intercept ships are routed to suspect ships and risk measured by the fraction of suspect ships that proceed to port unboarded because of lack of MOTR and surveillance assets. The results show current Coast Guard force structure is not sufficient to protect the Pacific Coast Ports against unspecific security threats without additional assets from the MOTR stakeholders or increased intelligence to limit the target set.