I Approve My Tax Dollars to do That: Prevent Another Attack

It is no secret that the illegal drug trafficking persists between Latin America, the Caribbean, South America and the United States. From breast implants to teddy bears, smugglers have concocted creative guises to evade authorities and shuttle drugs across nation borders. Now a new even more covert courier has emerged: a fully submersible submarine.

Described as “the Super Bowl of counternarcotics” by Commander Mark J. Fedor of the Coast Guard in a recent NY Times article, these aquatic crafts have been increasingly detected in the Caribbean within the last year.  Semi-submersible submarines are not rookies in the narcotics game; it is their fully submersible cousins that are now startling and worrying authorities. Only required to surface at night to recharge their batteries off the onboard diesel engine, they can travel underwater and therefore virtually invisible from South America all the way to the United States.

In addition to the challenge posed by their imperceptibility, authorities also face the problem of the submarines’ increased carrying capacity compared to their predecessors. The more commonly employed high-powered fishing and leisure boats can transport approximately one ton of cocaine. The fully submergible vessels, meanwhile, can haul upwards of ten tons, which are then ferried to shore by small boats once in shallow enough water.

Of the potential drug shipments identified by the Joint Interagency Task Force South, the group at the helm of American counternarcotic efforts, only one-fourth is ever intercepted. Manpower, aircrafts, and ships simply cannot respond to every shipment. Increasing the number of shipments seized involves working with local South and Central American authorities to prosecute the drug trafficking networks.

But there’s another unique aspect of these fully submersible submarines weighing on the minds of American authorities: the potential use of these vessels by terrorists to transport attackers or weapons. Though such use of submersibles by militants has yet to be detected, no one though a bomb could be smuggled through airport security in someone’s shoes or in a Gatorade bottle (for fact citations, see NY Times article above). Obviously air travel is a much more popular method of travel by the typical citizen, as 48% of adults in the US having flown for business or leisure in 2009 (http://www.ustravel.org/news/press-kit/travel-facts-and-statistics). But it seems both naïve and careless not to protect our ports and coasts from an attack. The United States has been caught unprepared twice within the last 75 years. I personally do not want to see another terrorist attack in my lifetime.

The $15 billion Obama allocated toward combating the drug war in 2010?  (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/37134751/ns/us_news-security/t/us-drug-war-has-met-none-its-goals/#.UFSiNu0ZdSo). Yes, I approve of my tax dollars going toward that if it means combating these sneaky submarines.