the Navy mission is not necessarily just in the United
States and the service often is more focused on the
“away game.”
“NOAA would be required to follow the technical
specs that have been drafted by the Navy in order to do
their surveys; and then, based on what Navy knows
about sedimentation rates, have a refresh rate established, where they would go back and systematically
update the baseline, and keep it current enough that,
in the event that an incident happens at a port, we
don’t go in from scratch,” Barnum said.
In his article, “Mines and Underwater IEDs In U.S.
Ports and Waterways: Context, Threats, Challenges and
Solutions,” in the Winter 2008 issue of the U.S. Naval
War College Review, Scott Truver, national security adviser at Gryphon Technologies and principal author of the
1992 U.S. Navy Mine Warfare Plan and subsequent
reports, provided a broad examination of the mine threat
issue today. Focusing on the mine and M/UWIED challenge and the daunting task of covering millions of
square miles of the nation’s territorial sea, he underscored the possible need for an added role for NOAA:
“Exacerbating the [M/UWIED] challenge for federal,
state and local actors is the fact that no two ports are
alike. Each differs in geography, channel layout, bathymetry, wind, tide, current, bottom sediment, turbidity, climate and critical infrastructure — piers and wharves,
moorings, navigation markers, cables, pipelines and
more, with most bottom infrastructure unchartered or its
location long forgotten.”
A funding estimate for NOAA to survey 50 dual-use
ports is about $38 million over five years. The budget
estimate was outlined in a November letter from Vice
Adm. Conrad Lautenbacher, NOAA director and undersecretary of commerce for oceans and atmosphere, to
Adm. Patrick Walsh, vice chief of naval operations.
NOAA’s overall budget request to Congress for 2009
was $4.1 billion. The agency’s budget for 2008 is $3.9
billion.
Alluding to NOAA’s estimates in his Naval War
College Review article, Truver writes that the collection
of MCM data “for even a handful of ports and keeping
it up to date will not be inexpensive.”
