26 Proceedings Fall 2024 International Port Security & Insights Evaluate, Inform, Warn, and Build The role and purpose of the Coast Guard International Port Security Program by LCDR mAson G. B. hAll International Port Security Liaison Officer Activities Europe U.S. Coast Guard T he International Port Security (IPS) Program is the U.S. Coast Guard’s preeminent international engagement program and a key tool of U.S. mari- time security diplomacy. Legislation enshrines the IPS Program’s primary functions with 46 U.S.C. § 70108, § 70109, and § 70110 outlining mandates for foreign port assessments, notification of foreign authorities, sanc- tions, and capacity-building. Drastically simplified, the IPS Program’s core mis- sions are to evaluate, inform, warn, and build. From its inception in 2004 through the present, it has fulfilled these roles by building enduring relationships with more than 150 countries, bolstering foreign maritime secu- rity policies and procedures through assessments and capacity-building, and, ultimately, helping protect the global maritime transportation system. IPS Program offices in Washington, D.C., Virginia, the Netherlands, and Japan host cohorts of experienced civil- ians alongside well-rounded, multilingual officers from a variety of Coast Guard specialties. To address each of its functional duties, the program is broken into organi- zational categories that broadly correlate to location and subfunction. The IPS Program’s organizational leader- ship and desk officers reside in Washington, where they are best situated to communicate with U.S. and interna- tional partners while promoting programmatic equities through interagency collaboration and mission linkages with broader U.S. government strategy. Portsmouth, Virginia, hosts the IPS Program’s opera- tional leadership, assessments division, capacity-build- ing division, and a contingent of liaison officers across the Americas and the Caribbean. Forward-based liai- son officers in the Netherlands cover coastal nations in Africa, the Middle East, and Europe, and those in Japan cover the Indo-Pacific. Liaison officers, regardless of geo- graphic posting, maintain relatively consistent country portfolios to best foster lasting relationships with host nation officials and U.S. Embassy representatives. They frequently serve as the Coast Guard’s primary conduits to host-nation governments. They are sometimes the only Coast Guard presence in a country. Their consistent visits, provision of technical assistance, and responsive- ness help build rapport and maintain the exceptional access for which the IPS Program is known. It is with this workforce and through legislative man- dates that the IPS Program fulfills its four core missions. Each of these is a vital part of a complementary, interde- pendent chain of programmatic functions. Evaluate The bedrock upon which the IPS Program rests is its evaluation role, which requires its teams to objectively assess port security governance and physical port facil- ity security measures. Congress mandated this role after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, which prompted a renewed focus on transportation security and novel attack vectors. The IPS Program fulfills this mandate through a multitiered system of triennial for- mal assessments and annual informal assessments to evaluate conformance with the International Maritime Organization-promulgated International Ship and Port Facility Security (ISPS) Code. Such evaluations also yield reports for the host country appraising port security gov- ernance across a spectrum of administrative and opera- tional levels, from a nation’s regulatory interpretations, code operationalization, and enforcement mechanisms, to facility-level physical security implementation, access control measures, and remote monitoring capabilities. In addition to these qualitative reports, IPS Program teams conducting formal assessments produce com- prehensive port security assessment packets that use standardized metrics to help quantify observations. These feed into a broader system of global port security information through which the Coast Guard tracks per- formance trends. As each nation—and each port facil- ity—is unique and faces distinctive security and policy challenges, the IPS Program’s use of blended qualita- tive and quantitative metrics allow it to capture endemic port security conditions and evaluate conformance for each context.
