Coast Guard High-Fives Navy

The Coast Guard has opened a new high-tech communications facility in Seattle, the Post-Intelligencer reports:

The fourth such facility built in the United States, the operations centers are required by the Safe Port Act of 2006. The other three are in San Diego, Jacksonville, Fla., and Norfolk, Va. All are staffed around the clock with search and rescue coordinators, a communications unit, and a unit of the Navy. Seattle’s new operations center is meant to vastly improve communications among those agencies most needed for security and emergency response.

Why the Navy? In part because only the Navy or other major military service has the means and authority to sink a ship that might be rigged to blow up in a U.S. port. The Oakland Tribune explains:

*Before Sept. 11, 2001, few in aviation security imagined — and fewer still drilled for — shooting down a hijacked jetliner. Similarly, if a pirated ship with deadly toxic cargo was headed for [a U.S. port], the region’s array of counterterrorism experts have to be ready to sink it in a post-9/11 world. The first line of defense falls to the Coast Guard’s Sea Marshals, who board suspicious and high-interest vessels … Marshals won’t say if there are standing plans to sink a vessel if it becomes a threat, but NORAD has scrambled F-16 air patrols to check out some ships. *

“What if a vessel clearly poses an immediate threat to the United States? That’s where the Navy comes in,” said Lt. Commander Glynn Smith, a spokesman for Coast Guard’s District 11. “We provide homeland maritime security. The Navy’s role is homeland maritime defense.” Smith said the Navy has scrambled jets to watch suspicious ships.