[House Hearing, 114 Congress] [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office] WESTERN HEMISPHERE DRUG INTERDICTION EFFORTS ======================================================================= (114-21) HEARING BEFORE THE SUBCOMMITTEE ON COAST GUARD AND MARITIME TRANSPORTATION OF THE COMMITTEE ON TRANSPORTATION AND INFRASTRUCTURE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES ONE HUNDRED FOURTEENTH CONGRESS FIRST SESSION __________ JUNE 16, 2015 __________ Printed for the use of the Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure [GRAPHIC(S) NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT] Available online at: http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/browse/ committee.action?chamber=house&committee=transportation ______ U.S. GOVERNMENT PUBLISHING OFFICE 95-072 PDF WASHINGTON : 2015 ----------------------------------------------------------------------- For sale by the Superintendent of Documents, U.S. Government Publishing Office Internet: bookstore.gpo.gov Phone: toll free (866) 512-1800; DC area (202) 512-1800 Fax: (202) 512-2104 Mail: Stop IDCC, Washington, DC 20402-0001 COMMITTEE ON TRANSPORTATION AND INFRASTRUCTURE BILL SHUSTER, Pennsylvania, Chairman DON YOUNG, Alaska PETER A. DeFAZIO, Oregon JOHN J. DUNCAN, Jr., Tennessee, ELEANOR HOLMES NORTON, District of Vice Chair Columbia JOHN L. MICA, Florida JERROLD NADLER, New York FRANK A. LoBIONDO, New Jersey CORRINE BROWN, Florida SAM GRAVES, Missouri EDDIE BERNICE JOHNSON, Texas CANDICE S. MILLER, Michigan ELIJAH E. CUMMINGS, Maryland DUNCAN HUNTER, California RICK LARSEN, Washington ERIC A. ``RICK'' CRAWFORD, Arkansas MICHAEL E. CAPUANO, Massachusetts LOU BARLETTA, Pennsylvania GRACE F. NAPOLITANO, California BLAKE FARENTHOLD, Texas DANIEL LIPINSKI, Illinois BOB GIBBS, Ohio STEVE COHEN, Tennessee RICHARD L. HANNA, New York ALBIO SIRES, New Jersey DANIEL WEBSTER, Florida DONNA F. EDWARDS, Maryland JEFF DENHAM, California JOHN GARAMENDI, California REID J. RIBBLE, Wisconsin ANDRE CARSON, Indiana THOMAS MASSIE, Kentucky JANICE HAHN, California TOM RICE, South Carolina RICHARD M. NOLAN, Minnesota MARK MEADOWS, North Carolina ANN KIRKPATRICK, Arizona SCOTT PERRY, Pennsylvania DINA TITUS, Nevada RODNEY DAVIS, Illinois SEAN PATRICK MALONEY, New York MARK SANFORD, South Carolina ELIZABETH H. ESTY, Connecticut ROB WOODALL, Georgia LOIS FRANKEL, Florida TODD ROKITA, Indiana CHERI BUSTOS, Illinois JOHN KATKO, New York JARED HUFFMAN, California BRIAN BABIN, Texas JULIA BROWNLEY, California CRESENT HARDY, Nevada RYAN A. COSTELLO, Pennsylvania GARRET GRAVES, Louisiana MIMI WALTERS, California BARBARA COMSTOCK, Virginia CARLOS CURBELO, Florida DAVID ROUZER, North Carolina LEE M. ZELDIN, New York ------ 7 Subcommittee on Coast Guard and Maritime Transportation DUNCAN HUNTER, California, Chairman DON YOUNG, Alaska JOHN GARAMENDI, California FRANK A. LoBIONDO, New Jersey ELIJAH E. CUMMINGS, Maryland BOB GIBBS, Ohio CORRINE BROWN, Florida MARK SANFORD, South Carolina JANICE HAHN, California GARRET GRAVES, Louisiana LOIS FRANKEL, Florida CARLOS CURBELO, Florida JULIA BROWNLEY, California DAVID ROUZER, North Carolina PETER A. DeFAZIO, Oregon (Ex LEE M. ZELDIN, New York Officio) BILL SHUSTER, Pennsylvania (Ex Officio) CONTENTS Page Summary of Subject Matter........................................ iv WITNESSES Vice Admiral Charles D. Michel, Deputy Commandant for Operations, U.S. Coast Guard: Testimony.................................................... 3 Prepared statement........................................... 30 Rear Admiral Karl L. Schultz, Director of Operations, U.S. Southern Command: Testimony.................................................... 3 Prepared statement........................................... 36 SUBMISSIONS FOR THE RECORD Written statement of Michael P. Botticelli, Director, Office of National Drug Control Policy................................... 76 [GRAPHIC(S) NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT] WESTERN HEMISPHERE DRUG INTERDICTION EFFORTS ---------- TUESDAY, JUNE 16, 2015 House of Representatives, Subcommittee on Coast Guard and Maritime Transportation, Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure, Washington, DC. The subcommittee met, pursuant to call, at 2:15 p.m., in room 2253, Rayburn House Office Building, Hon. Duncan Hunter (Chairman of the subcommittee) presiding. Mr. Hunter. This subcommittee will come to order. Welcome everybody. The subcommittee is meeting today to review the Federal Government's efforts to confront transnational drug smuggling and stem the flow of illegal drugs to the United States. Let me start by saying I had a great trip down in Florida with you, Admiral Schultz, great, great time with JIATF [Joint Interagency Task Force] and General Kelly, and I got to see firsthand the problems that our Nation faces in stemming the flow of illegal drugs to our shores. My visit to the Coast Guard units as well as JIATF South was insightful. I was able to witness the impact limited resources and deteriorating assets is having on the Coast Guard's ability to effectively carry out its drug interdiction mission. The flow of illegal drugs to the United States continues to be a problem. Illegal drugs placed a strain on our Nation's healthcare and criminal justice systems. Their smuggling routes and methods are easily translated into transport routes for other illicit goods that pose significant safety and security concerns to U.S. citizens. Some of the most notorious and violent criminals, cartels, and narcoterrorists are directly responsible for drug violence, crime, and corruption that are destabilizing foreign nations and endangering the lives of American citizens here and abroad. Representing southern California, I am very aware of the harm violent drug traffickers inflict on our communities. In recent years, violence stemming from the drug trade has spilled over the Mexican border and has led to the kidnappings and murders of American citizens and U.S. law enforcement officers. It was only a few years ago that a Coast Guard servicemember lost his life during counterdrug operations near Santa Cruz Island, California. Coast Guard Senior Chief Petty Officer Terrell Horne was leading a boarding team when he was critically injured interdicting and apprehending illegal drug smugglers. The Coast Guard recently announced it will honor Senior Chief Horne's sacrifice by naming a Fast Response Cutter after him. The Coast Guard, U.S. Navy, and allied partner nations continue their efforts to stop boat drug shipments at sea. Interdicting shipments of drugs at sea before they are broken down into smaller packages is the most effective and efficient way to stop the flow of illegal drugs across our borders. The Coast Guard is the lead agency in maritime interdiction because it has unique military and law enforcement authorities which enable it to seamlessly disable a drug smuggling vessel, seize the drugs, and arrest the crew. But that only works when the Coast Guard, SOUTHCOM [U.S. Southern Command], and partner agencies and nations have the resources and assets to act on intelligence targets. Unfortunately, however, cuts to the military's budget, sequestration, and aging and rapidly failing Coast Guard assets are undermining mission success. In recent years, SOUTHCOM and the Coast Guard were only able to interdict slightly more than 20 percent of the cocaine bound for the United States. That is roughly half the national target for 2015. In addition, the Coast Guard has been consistently unable meet its internal performance goal for drug removal in the transit zone. In fact, since 2009, the Coast Guard has only achieved its cocaine interdiction target once. I hope today's hearing will help clarify the direction we need to take in the future to ensure our men and women in uniform have the resources and assets that they need to carry out this and other critical missions. With that, I yield to Ranking Member Garamendi. Mr. Garamendi. I thank you very much, Mr. Chairman, and thank you for holding the hearing and for the witnesses. It is good to see you once again and look forward to your testimony. This hearing is very, very important. We need to understand our efforts and the effort of our international partners to interdict the flow of illegal drugs into the United States from points all across the Western Hemisphere. At the hearing convened last April, I stressed that the current age of budgetary austerity, it remains essential for Congress to scrutinize every drug interdiction program to ensure that the various Federal agencies involved are best coordinating and utilizing their resources to the greatest effect in the transit zone. That sentiment is just as valid today as we take up this matter again. Additionally, I also voice concern about the imminent operational gap that the Coast Guard will have to contend with its aging legacy fleet of High and Medium Endurance Cutters as they are decommissioned or laid up more frequently for emergency repairs and maintenance. If anything, the recent hearing last month on the Coast Guard acquisition activities further corroborate my belief that the Coast Guard is going to be extremely hard pressed to maintain its existing capabilities, much less increase the tempo of their operations, and as you suggest, Mr. Chairman, make their bogey, that is, to get the number of drugs that they intend to. This raises the fundamental question, if the Coast Guard operational readiness and capability is likely to be degraded, at least until we begin to see the delivery of the new Offshore Patrol Cutters, where can we turn now to find the assets and resources necessary to plug the hole? Unfortunately, it would appear that the Navy is not where we will go. They are scaling back the number of frigates and other assets it deploys through SOUTHCOM to support the JIATF operations. Moreover, despite the fact that the transit zone across the Western Hemisphere is roughly twice the size of the continental mass of the United States, other bureaus within the Department of Homeland Security continue to disproportionately allocate resources to reinforce the southern border, notwithstanding the data demonstrating that the maritime routes are becoming the preferred option for international criminal syndicates, and if supplemental resources are not going to be forthcoming soon, this leads us back to another fundamental question. How can we reasonably expect the Coast Guard and other Federal agencies, for that matter, to accomplish their vital missions? As I stated at the last hearing: If we want to succeed in our efforts to prevent illegal drugs from entering our country, we can no longer ignore the fact that inadequate Coast Guard budgets have left the Service out on the precipice, and until we have resolved the issue of this reality in full, we are far more likely to see more illicit drugs, more illegal migrants and other harmful contraband crossing our shores. Mr. Chairman, I yield back. Mr. Hunter. OK. I thank the gentleman. And before we introduce our witnesses today, I would like to introduce some gentlemen that just came in, World War II merchant mariner veterans. I just want to say thanks for being here, gentlemen. Appreciate it. In fact, we are trying to get ahold of Ms. Janice Hahn, who has been carrying your legislation, our legislation now for quite awhile, and I just want to let you know that we are working on it, so thanks for being here. Appreciate it. Our first witness today is Vice Admiral Charles D. Michel, the Coast Guard's Deputy Commandant for Operations. Vice Admiral, you are now recognized. TESTIMONY OF VICE ADMIRAL CHARLES D. MICHEL, DEPUTY COMMANDANT FOR OPERATIONS, U.S. COAST GUARD; AND REAR ADMIRAL KARL L. SCHULTZ, DIRECTOR OF OPERATIONS, U.S. SOUTHERN COMMAND Admiral Michel. Sir, before I start my statement, with the committee's permission, if I could just take a couple of minutes to talk about a breaking news item. Mr. Hunter. Absolutely. Admiral Michel. Sir, this is a picture of a semisubmersible that the U.S. Coast Guard interdicted this morning in the eastern Pacific. It was interdicted at first light by one of our Coast Guard units, and our Coast Guard units are on board. They have control of the vessel. They also have four detainees on board, and it is estimated 3,000 kilos of cocaine, or 3 metric tons of cocaine are on board this vessel. We will have to pull it off to actually count it, but that is what the initial estimates are. As you can see--and I will pass around the picture of this vessel. This is a classic semisubmersible. It is about 50 feet in length. You can see the water-cooled exhaust that they put in place here to keep heat sensor detection down. You can see that it is painted to match the color of the ocean. It is almost undetectable. I will pass this around. I can't answer any specific details in the open forum here, but after the hearing, I am happy to talk to you about the details of this interdiction, but this is what we are facing today, sir, and this was taken down this morning. Mr. Hunter. Way to go. Mr. Garamendi. Congratulations. Admiral Michel. Well, sir, congratulations to the Nation, and this is really a whole of Government team, including JIATF South that was engaged in this. It was the Coast Guard that took it down, but there is a lot more going on there than just the Coast Guard. So with your permission, I would begin my statement. Mr. Hunter. Please. Admiral Michel. Chairman Hunter, Ranking Member Garamendi, members of the subcommittee, thank you for the opportunity to testify today on Coast Guard drug interdiction operations. My complete statement has been provided to the subcommittee, and I ask that it be entered into the record and that I be allowed to summarize my remarks. Mr. Chairman, we continue to face a significant threat from transnational criminal organizations in the Western Hemisphere that use drug transit routes to the southern approaches of the United States. These illicit networks are advancing their deadly trades with coercion, intimidation, violence, and near impunity in our closest neighbors and in our border regions. Transnational criminal networks destabilize our neighbors, exploit our citizens, endanger public health, and threaten regional stability, and national security. Last summer's influx of over 50,000 unaccompanied children was a tragic symptom of the region's instability and violence. Parents by the tens of thousands decided that it was better to turn their children over to human traffickers, who we call coyotes, for a chance of life in the United States rather than to live in countries wracked by some of the world's highest homicide rates resulting from transnational organized crime. In September of 2014, Admiral Zukunft signed the Coast Guard's Western Hemisphere strategy that calls out three strategic priorities: combatting networks, securing borders, and safeguarding commerce. This strategy recognizes that the Coast Guard is uniquely positioned to attack a key center of gravity of transnational criminal networks. The unmatched capability of maritime interdiction allows for the interdiction of concentrated, often multiton loads of expert quality drugs at sea before they can reach land and be broken down into small quantities that not only become extremely difficult to police but also cause death and devastation as they make their way to North American markets. The cocaine trade, in particular, is uniquely vulnerable as the existence of the Darien Gap means that virtually all cocaine exported from South America must at some point during its journey travel by air or maritime means. This movement exposes conveyances to sensors and interdiction. In addition, maritime interdiction often allows for the assertion of U.S. jurisdiction over the witnesses and evidence vital to identifying and attacking transnational criminal organizations closest to the head of the snake. Maritime interdiction against mostly go-fast boats, however, typically require sophisticated detection monitoring techniques in vast ocean spaces and an endgame carried out by flight deck-equipped cutters with embarked day/night airborne-use-of-force helicopters. Coast Guard ships are the Nation's and our neighbors' defense forward against the transnational criminal threat beyond our land borders, beyond Mexico, and beyond Central America. When we detect a suspect vessel, our cutters, helicopters, and highly trained pursuit boat crews have a nearly 90-percent interdiction success rate. Over the years, our operations have become extremely lean and efficient with the vast majority of interdictions happening as a result of intelligence cueing. In the last month alone, the Coast Guard has been involved in 22 counterdrug cases that have resulted in the arrest of more than 50 suspects, the removal of more than 12 metric tons of pure uncut cocaine on the sea, and that does not include this interdiction that I showed you this morning, sir. And denial to criminal networks of more than $400 million wholesale in drug proceeds. While we have made substantial improvements in our tactics, techniques, and procedures, resource constraints leave us able to target only 37 percent of the high-confidence intelligence cases, almost always due to a lack of surface vessels. To close this gap, the Coast Guard has undertaken four specific initiatives. We have increased our offshore presence to interdict drugs at sea, the initial results of which are encouraging. We have continued to build upon the 43 international maritime law enforcement bilateral agreements and work closely with the Department of State and our international partners in these interdiction efforts. We are fully integrated in in Secretary Johnson's vision for unity of effort and the DHS [Department of Homeland Security] task forces to secure America's southern border and approaches, and we continue to move forward with the acquisition of the affordable Offshore Patrol Cutter. Recapitalizing the medium endurance cutter fleet with the OPC [Offshore Patrol Cutter] is the Coast Guard's number-one investment priority and is critical to our offshore presence and core missions. By the time we begin laying the keel for the first OPC, some of the legacy cutters they are scheduled to be replace will be more than 55 years old, well beyond their intended service life. The time to recapitalize the fleet is now, and we are on schedule to award OPC detailed design in fiscal year 2016. In summary, the Coast Guard continues to exploit the unique benefits of maritime interdiction to combat transnational criminal networks. This forward defense of the Nation and the region applied at a critical center of gravity for transnational criminal networks requires highly specialized maritime assets and crews that are capable of countering a well-equipped, adaptable, and ruthless adversary. Thank you for the opportunity to testify before you today and for all you do for the men and women of the United States Coast Guard. I look forward to hearing your concerns and questions. Thank you. Mr. Hunter. Thanks, Admiral. Our next witness today is Rear Admiral Karl Schultz, the Director of Operations for U.S. Southern Command. You are recognized, Admiral. Admiral Schultz. Chairman Hunter, Ranking Member Garamendi, members of the committee, thank you for the opportunity to appear before you today on behalf of General John Kelly, commander, U.S. Southern Command. I look forward to discussing how the U.S. Southern Command works with the Coast Guard to defend the southern approaches to the United States. Every day, our southern approaches are under direct assault by sophisticated criminal networks whose smuggling operations reach across Latin America and deep into the United States. These groups exploit every land, sea, and air border to traffic drugs, people, and weapons throughout the Western Hemisphere and beyond. Their corrosive activities pose a direct threat to our national security and the stability of our partner nations in the region. Mr. Chairman, it will take a network to defeat a network, which is exactly what SOUTHCOM, the Coast Guard, our interagency, and international partners are building through multinational counterdrug operations, and capacity-building efforts in Central America, South America, and the Caribbean Basin. As you know, the Department of Defense has a congressionally mandated statutory responsibility for the detection and monitoring of illicit drugs in the air and maritime domains. Our Joint Interagency Task Force South executes this responsibility working with agencies from the Department of Homeland Security, the Justice Department, the Department of State, and partner nation defense and security forces to disrupt illicit trafficking and dismantle criminal organizations. JIATF South has long been the gold standard in leading and orchestrating successful interdiction operations. Last year, the JIATF South team supported the disruption of 158 metric tons of cocaine. That is 76 percent of the total amount of cocaine seized by all U.S. Government agencies. JIATF South's continued success, however, could be in jeopardy. Due to other global defense priorities, limited Department of Defense resources are available to source the counterdrug mission, and we have been forced to rely heavily on Coast Guard support, including their personnel, aircraft, and cutters. Come this September, the U.S. Navy will have a minimal presence in the SOUTHCOM area of responsibility. Mr. Chairman, for all intents and purposes, the Coast Guard is U.S. Southern Command's Navy, which is why we share and echo the Coast Guard Commandant's concern over the Coast Guard's ability to sustain its aging fleet while recapitalizing its fleet of Fast Response, Offshore, and National Security Cutters. As an economy-of-force geographic combatant command, we at U.S. Southern Command are concerned by the limited availability of Department of Defense assets, including U.S. Navy frigates, airborne ISR [intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance], and national technical means to support our missions. For both the Department of Defense and the Coast Guard, asset shortfalls and potential asset failures are the greatest threats to our ability to defend the United States against the relentless onslaught of transnational criminal activity and illicit drugs. Finally, I will close by noting that the possible return of sequestration would be disastrous for the counterdrug mission. It will undermine our ability to remain engaged with our partners, undermine our awareness of threats in the region, and undermine our ability to stop them before they reach our shores. I look forward to discussing these and the other issues with you. Thank you. Mr. Hunter. Thank you, Admirals. I am going to start by recognizing myself, and then the other Members for questions. I guess my first question is, if you take the Department of Justice, and you take the Department of Homeland Security, and you basically take everything else that is under that umbrella, including the DEA [Drug Enforcement Administration], the FBI [Federal Bureau of Investigation], local police forces for everything, you can probably guess, do you have a number for how much they spend on drug interdiction to get to that 24 percent of the total annual amount? So if you take--if you interdict 76 percent, it leaves them with 24 percent, I am just curious about the money spent for each one--each bang for the buck there. Admiral Michel. Those figures are available. I don't have them, but I can provide them on the record. There is a question for the record. Mr. Hunter. Could somebody on the committee just Google that maybe while we are doing this? Let's just find out what the number is. If you can get all the other--I am just curious. Admiral Schultz. What I can tell you, Mr. Chairman, from a DOD [Department of Defense] perspective, about $25 billion goes into the drug budget, writ large. About $5 billion of that is allocated; about $3.7 billion across for interdiction efforts; I think $1.2 billion or $1.3 billion for international efforts; about 20 percent of that drug budget goes towards what I call the JIATF South world to work there. JIATF South consumes about 1.5 percent of that $25 billion budget, to give you a sense. I can't speak to the other agencies to your specific question but---- Mr. Hunter. That is just DOD? Admiral Schultz. Well, the JIATF South piece of DOD of the $25 billion total drug budget is sort of how those numbers shake out. Mr. Hunter. But the DOD total drug budget is about $25 billion. Admiral Schultz. That is the U.S. Government---- Mr. Hunter. Oh, that is the entire. That is the whole effort. Admiral Schultz. Entire drug budget, across the U.S. Government, writ large, yes, sir. Mr. Hunter. All right. Makes sense. Let's go really quick to interdiction performance because I--we talked about this the last hearing we had. We got into how the standard gets raised or lowered kind of based on every year going forward, and the baseline can get moved as well, which makes it hard for us to figure out where the real baseline was or is and where you really come from where you were, right. I do know that you said JIATF South, they increased their hits last year, right, meaning your average take was--you were hitting 20 percent. Now it is more towards 30 percent? Admiral Schultz. Sir, JIATF South is currently targeting about 36, 37 percent of the known activities. You know, if you get down to the success metrics, that is a different set of numbers, but we are targeting about---- Mr. Hunter. But you are up over last year. Admiral Schultz. Up over last year, and then when you look at--after you target them, the next step would be how do you go about detecting and monitoring them. We detect and monitor about 70 percent of what we target, so start with a number say 1,250, you look at about one-third of that, and then within that, about 70 percent of those, you are actually putting detection and monitoring assets against. When we go out there and fly a Maritime Patrol Aircraft against a target, we are successful--a very high preponderance of an endgame--almost 90 percent of those that we target and then detect, we actually get a disruption or a seizure at the end of the day. Mr. Hunter. So it is not possible, though, for the--for JIATF South's interdiction percentage to go up and the Coast Guard's, their numbers, or their goals met to go down, is it? Admiral Schultz. Sir, our numbers at SOUTHCOM and JIATF South are inextricably linked to the Coast Guard's numbers. I mean, come this fall, the Coast Guard essentially is the only U.S. Government ship-providing game in the business here. We will have some PC-179 patrol craft from the Navy, but it is a Coast Guard game. As I mentioned in my opening statement, the Coast Guard is SOUTHCOM's Navy moving forward. Mr. Hunter. OK. So then my last question then is, so tie those together. How could the Coast Guard reduce performance target for cocaine, let me see, from 18.5 to 13.8 percent in fiscal year 2015, so how can yours go down then as SOUTHCOM's go up? Admiral Michel. I am not sure exactly. Mr. Hunter. Or am I missing---- Admiral Michel. Well, there is--it is a little more complicated than that. So JIATF South supports disruption of cocaine not only by the Coast Guard but also by other U.S. Government agencies as well as foreign partners, so they may assist the Government of Colombia or the Government of Canada or the U.K. or the Dutch or the French who contribute ships to this effort as well as the Central American partners, so they have got a broader scope than the Coast Guard. The Coast Guard itself is supported by JIATF South, and our numbers have been pretty consistent, and it looks like ours is just a matter of ship effort. So we have already--last year we interdicted 91 metric tons of cocaine. That is what the Coast Guard was actually able to interdict. So far this year, just to date in this fiscal year, we are at 83 metric tons, not including the 3 that were on this semisubmersible, and we have still got 3 months of the year left to go. So we are going to up our numbers, if I were guessing on trajectory here, probably up to 110, 115 metric tons when we get done here. Mr. Hunter. And again, this is your--your performance targets are a percentage of the whole that you know about? What is it a percentage of? Admiral Michel. So the removal rate is based on--the numerator is the amount of known cocaine removed from the system, and the denominator is the U.S. Government's best estimate on the amount of flow that moves through the Western Hemisphere Transit Zone, and their confidence factors that go in there. It is based on production estimates, so you know, over the imaginary of cocoa fields and things likes that, plus known interdicted events with a certain degree of confidence, and then the Coast Guard is accountable for a portion of that. Last year was 13.9 percent of that Western Hemisphere Transit Zone that the U.S. Coast Guard was accountable to get, and we got about 9 percent. And the long pole in the tent there is just simply numbers of ships. There was more actionable intelligence that would have allowed us to meet the goal down there, but we didn't have the ships to be able to do it. It is a pretty simple story. Mr. Hunter. OK. And to be clear again then, that is a percentage of the known flow, not the number of ships you are able to send out to interdict, right? Admiral Michel. That is correct. The removal rate is based on the known flow, and the USG [U.S. Government] target, writ large, USG was 36 percent of that flow was the entire USG target of which the Coast Guard is responsible for 13.9 percent of that. Mr. Hunter. OK. Thank you, Admiral. I yield to the ranking member. Mr. Garamendi. I thank you, Mr. Chairman. Actually three sets of questions. Now the first is on assets, the availability of the Coast Guard, how do you intend to bridge the gap if the Navy is pulling out and the Offshore Patrol Cutters are not, for another 2 years, assuming that they are actually going to wind up in that area, how do you intend to bridge the gap? That is one question. Let us deal with them one at a time, and then you won't have to write notes about the questions. So Admiral Michel. Admiral Michel. Well, sir, that is the rub, ultimately, and our Commandant made an affirmative decision to increase our number of ships that we commit to the JIATF South effort in the Western Hemisphere Transit Zone by over 50 percent, and he did that by taking risk in additional Coast Guard mission sets. I don't want to talk too much about that in this forum because some of that involves LE, law enforcement presence in other vectors, but the Commandant took a calculated risk because he felt the need to commit resources to that area to provide for regional stability and national security because those countries down there are really in a fight in addition to all the impacts that they have here. So the way that we are bridging that gap is we are providing the best quality ships we can provide down there, which is our National Security Cutters, which have the best sensor capabilities, the best day/night AUF [airborne-use-of- force] capability, which the Commandant has also plussed that up on our commitment of the airborne-use-of-force capability, which is critical to stop the go-fast boats, which is about 80 percent of the traffic moves on go-fast boats. The other part is to continue to develop our intelligence mechanisms that will allow us to get at that other 30 percent that Admiral Schultz talked about there that we target but we can't detect because of lack of wide area surveillance or other type of intelligence capabilities, the ability to buy that down, and then trying to use every type of TTP [tactics, techniques, and procedures] and asset that we have, whether it is from a helicopter or pursuit boat to ensure that when we get those detected assets, that we are actually able to interdict then. And then we are waiting for the new assets the come online, sir. Mr. Garamendi. So we have got about a 2-year, maybe a 3- year period of time here in which it is going to be touch and go. What are the role of the other countries in the area? You mentioned Colombia, the Coast Guard, Colombia's Coast Guard, Panama, and so forth. Would you speak for a few moments about that? Admiral Michel. Yes, sir. Well, a number of countries down there have some good capabilities. Mexico, for example, has really good capabilities, and Colombia has good capabilities as well. Most of the other partners have very dedicated people but very small boats and essentially no detection and monitoring capability. When I was JIATF South Director, for the majority of the Central American partners, we had to actually commit an aircraft to walk a go-fast boat onto their small craft because they had no radar, they had no detection capability at all, and probably won't have any for a long time. So they are committed forces and well-trained people, but they are not very well- equipped. There are other partners down there that do have good equipment, the French, the Dutch, the Canadians, the U.K. have had ships in the area and continue to work in the area, and those are obviously high-end quality ships, and we try to use those as much as possible. So you have got kind of a mixed bag on the local partners. I will say this about most of the local partners. They also have no real prosecution back end. So one of the critical parts about getting U.S. jurisdiction is the ability to exploit those cases for intelligence value to allow you to identify the networks and feed the intelligence cycle, and some of the partner nations, the people go in there, and we are not sure exactly sort of what happens to them, but we are not able to get intelligence value from them, sir. Mr. Garamendi. Let's continue on with the other countries. There has been talk of a billion-dollar foreign aid program for the triangle countries in Central America, and that is part of this puzzle, it would seem to me. And also, how do you interact in the training programs that apparently are going to be diminished? Admiral Michel. I will talk about mine, and then SOUTHCOM also has a large piece in this. Yes, there is a billion-dollar piece, and a chunk of that, about one-third of it is for security-related pieces. The Coast Guard actually plays in all the different areas, security, governance, and prosperity because of our port security work, our work with the legal teams that we send down there to make sure that they have got adequate laws and things like that to take care of maritime trafficking. But we have mobile training teams that we put into place down there who work on them on outboard motor maintenance or working on their communications capability, try to train them to maintain their equipment and how to do law enforcement. We have also stood up for the first time our support to interdiction and prosecution teams which are composed of a Coast Guard investigative service agent as well as some of our maritime law enforcement experts who work with the Central American countries to try to ensure that they can take that interdiction that we help them with and they can bring it into their court system and provide the witnesses and evidence to actually gain prosecutions as well as gain the intelligence value from the cases. Mr. Garamendi. You have been doing about 2,000 students a year. Are you going to be able to maintain that, given the budget cuts? Admiral Michel. Sir, my understanding is that the training money for the foreign nationals is on track, and part of that money comes from the Department of Defense and State Department. The Coast Guard has no organic foreign affairs authority. Most of the work that we do with foreign nations is done at somebody else's request, so it is funded through either State Department or DOD, typically under their programs. Mr. Garamendi. And finally, if I might, Mr. Chairman, the issue of unmanned vehicles both on the water or under the water and in the air. What efforts are you making to work with the military or others and your own efforts on these unmanned vehicles? Admiral Michel. So from a Coast Guard perspective, we have fielded right now the small unmanned aerial systems, the ScanEagles, and they are on a number of our cutters, including our National Security Cutters, and we operate those now. We are also a partner with CBP, Customs and Border Protection, in their Guardian unmanned aerial system program, which is essentially Predator B, a marinized Predator B, and we have worked with them, and they have actually deployed the Guardian down there into JIATFS AOR [Area of Responsibility], both in the Dominican Republic and also out of Comalapa, which is a cooperative security location in El Salvador. The Coast Guard is actually making its determination now as to where we want to place our investments in this very dynamic unmanned aerial system, you know, whether we would want to go with a shipped-based system, which has some attractiveness but you got to be able to recover it, or whether we use a long- dwell, land-based system, and what type of sensor capabilities and back-end processing piece would we need in order to do that. But we work hand in hand with the Department of Defense, and that is one of the great advantages the Coast Guard brings to the table is we have got all the connections with DOD to try to learn the lessons before we sort of make the big jump on unmanned aerial systems. Mr. Garamendi. I for one, and I suspect the rest of my committee colleagues here, would like to be kept abreast of your plans with regard to these vehicles; also, how you will be collecting and analyzing the data. Admiral Schultz. Congressman, just on the UAS [unmanned aerial system] piece from a DOD perspective, to echo Admiral Michel, absolutely. We continue to use the Predator when it is available. You know, I would say the maritime solution for the UAS, as sophisticated it is in the land domain, what we have seen in the Middle East area. We are not quite there over the water, and there is some limitations in terms of where you can operate that, in terms of it is almost essentially a tether to it. You have to have a ground-based radar or shipboard radar, but we are very interested in how do you advance that, how do you bring those capabilities into the theater. We do use a Global Hawk for some ISR responsibilities, capabilities, capacity in our AOR. We get that on a couple-of- mission-a-month basis, but we are employing them as well. Not specifically in the maritime domain but in the SOUTHCOM equities. If there is a second, sir, to go back to just the country team participation, the question you asked there. From U.S. Southern Command's perspective, you know, we have almost 6,000 to 8,000 soldiers, sailors, airmen, coastguardsmen in the SOUTHCOM AOR on a day-to-day basis. I would say the bulk of their effort down there is along supporting the transnational organized crime, combatting that mission set. So in Guatemala, we have the interagency task force at the Mexican-Guatemalan border. There is one in the--that they are working on on the Honduras side. There is one down in the southern part of Guatemala. The plan is to build out a couple more of those task forces. We have got about $15-$17 million invested towards that. That is to help the Central American countries establish some border security within their own domain. Between us and INL [Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs], we are putting a lot of--while some of the countries that Admiral Michel mentioned don't have a lot of big ship capability, there is some patrol boat capability, and then there is--we, with INL, are both buying interceptor- type boats, so while we may not have a ship--and again, there is no replacement for a Navy ship, no replacement for a Coast Guard cutter, but what we do do is bring some endgame capability. If an aircraft can traffic a vessel in, we have some pretty sophisticated interceptors, Boston whalers, we have them in the Dominican Republic, we have them in the Central American countries. Some countries prefer that we retake some refurbished former seized boats, eduardonos, which is a local domestic boat down there. And then we have got a special purpose Marine Air- Ground Task Force operating with 250 Marines in Honduras in the sort of ungoverned spaces in the northeast coast right now. So we have got a lot of building partnership capacity stuff going on, and your question was Central America focused, so I kind of constrained myself there, but on a day-to-day basis, we are training, we are equipping things like night-vision goggles, just essentially helping them bring governance to regions where there are very little of that today, and that really props up the security part of the equation. Mr. Garamendi. Thank you. I yield back, Mr. Chairman. Thank you for the extra time. Mr. Hunter. I thank the gentleman. The gentleman from South Carolina is recognized. Mr. Sanford. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I guess what I would like to do for one second is go up 30,000 feet, and so this is not a commentary on how hard your men and women are working, the quality of their efforts, the hardiness of their pursuit, but really a macro question, because I remember being in hearings like this the last time I was in Congress. I remember going down to Howard Air Force Base, and I remember at that time there wasn't enough money in drug ops to send up an AWACS [airborne warning and control system] every day of the week, and so they would send one up once a week, once every 2 weeks. And then the smart drug runners, they simply paid for a spotter, when the plane goes up that has the big dish, let us know, and then like the really stupid guys, the uninformed guys, they would still send a boat running north, and you would look at these films out of an F-16 in pursuit of the boat, they are throwing the drugs out of the boat, and once the boat is emptied, they would turn around, you burned a bit of jet fuel, you got a good video, but that was about it, and it was sort of catch-and-release. In contrast, I remember at that time, as part of our payments to Peru in the drug ops war, they had a shoot-down policy, and I remember watching videos of planes actually being shot down in Peru. And so it just seems to me that in war, it is either war or it is not. And what we have had for a long while in this country is sort of a middle ground when indeed you and the Navy and others do their duty. But in terms of actual result, really there isn't that much in the way of result. I mean, any time you look at equation wherein 75 percent of what you are trying to stop is going through, then about 25 percent you are stopping, I mean, you have to question the validity of spending, you know, $25 billion, 6,000 folks, as you just mentioned, in this effort, in terms of result. And you look at how scarce dollars are in the American system, how much scarcer they are going to get going forward. I mean, Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles, their point was the most predictable financial crisis in the history of man is coming our way, given the squeeze financially that we are going to be in as a country. And therefore we have, I think a requirement, whether in this committee or any other committee, to fund those things that actually work. And so this is not about, again, the validity of your effort, you guys are working hard, but at the end of the day, the end results, I found wanting, and in contrast, one more data point. I remember being down on a drug ops trip, again, last time I was here, and there had been like 4,000 judges killed in the country of Colombia. I mean, it was all out war down there, and so I--you know, I just really begin to question, are we doing anything? What is your thought on that? Admiral Michel. Well, let me just take a quick stab. So when I first started in the Coast Guard in the mid-1980s, I was actually assigned on a patrol boat out of Fort Lauderdale, Florida, and I would chase go-fast boats laden with cocaine right there into Miami Harbor, and those were the days of the Cocaine Cowboys where Miami was really on the brink. Those were the days of the shootout of the Dadeland Mall and all those things, and I can tell you, sir, we are a long ways from those days. We have chased those guys back down through the Caribbean. They are still there but not in the numbers that they were back in those days, and now they are in Central America. There is a huge amount of progress that has been made. We interdicted---- Mr. Sanford. No, we just moved the border. I mean, you say the Bahamas, you couldn't take a trip in the Bahamas without worrying about pirating in the Bahamas. You don't have to worry about pirating these days. Admiral Michel. And the reason that is, sir, is because of the efforts that we put in place here. It is the same reason that the country of Colombia is actually a productive and advancing country when it almost was a basket case at one point. So we have made tremendous progress. Is there a lot more work to do? Yes, sir, there absolutely is a lot more work to do, but for anybody to say we have not made measurable progress on this, I think, is misinformed. Mr. Sanford. Well, in terms of volume of drugs coming into this country, we haven't really moved the needle there. Admiral Michel. Well, sir, we continue to have that because we continue to want to trade with the world. If we decided to completely shut down our borders to all trade, we probably could stop this trade, but we try to balance that out---- Mr. Sanford. And I would reverse it. Admiral Michel [continuing]. With our law enforcement efforts with other society desires. Mr. Sanford. What I would respectfully submit is that when in the history of man has supply not met demand? Admiral Schultz. Congressman, I would just offer, I think if General Kelly were sitting here, he would tell you our country's insatiable appetite or demand for drugs has sort of put the region, what we call the transit zone, the Central American countries as sort of the meat in the sandwich between the Indian Ridge and producers. I think we have an obligation to aid and probably be part of the solution set here. I would make an analogy to speeders on the highway. I have teenage drivers. I know there's a lot of speeders on the highway. I know there's not a lot of police officers out there, but I go to sleep at night knowing there's some police officers that keep some semblance of order out there, and I would say in the drug war, the transnational crime combatting efforts is sort of, you keep the lid on it. What we are here telling you with more effort---- Mr. Sanford. Or does it do the reverse? Admiral Schultz [continuing]. You stop more. Mr. Sanford. Does it raise the profit margin? Admiral Schultz. Sir, I would say if you look at domestic cocaine use in this country, it is at a low that it's been in recent years, prices are fairly high. I think the efforts that the men and women that are fighting this fight, both from U.S. Government forces, from international partners, from partner nations, are having an impact there. Again---- Mr. Sanford. Some people say it is based on demographics, the fact that our country is aging, and the fact that somebody in their 50s may not be wanting to do what they were doing in their 30s or their 20s. Admiral Schultz. Yes, sir. I think we have got kind of an emerging epidemic with heroin use right now, and you know, I think with 8,500 deaths in this country here in the last year alone from heroin use, I think folks are seeing folks in places like New Hampshire where you didn't think you had drug problems before, and parts of Kentucky where that is cropping up. And I think how we get our arms around that, I guess you could say you stop going after that or maybe we need to look at the fact that 45 percent of that heroin comes out of Mexico, 45 percent- plus is coming out of South America. Almost all of it now is coming out of this hemisphere through the same networks that the cocaine is coming up from, sir. So I don't disagree with you, but there is a lot of ways at looking at this, this challenge. Mr. Sanford. Understood. Understood. And again, I am not belittling in any way your efforts. I am just struggling with the overall aggregate in terms of numbers and the way in which this war--I remember seeing the statistics, the body bag counts, if you will, back when I was in high school, and us walking through those same body bag counts in terms of this much cocaine procured, this much marijuana stopped, but at the end of the day in a lot of small towns across America, somebody being able to buy whatever they want in some, you know, corner of town, and which says to me, obviously, we still have a problem. I see I burnt through my time, though. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Mr. Hunter. I refuse to be yielded to until the--is the gentleman suggesting that we do what? Mr. Sanford. That is the $94 question, and I really appreciate the chairman putting me on the spot like that. But I guess what I am struggling with, in watching this for a long number of years is do you spend more money and more time in affecting demand as opposed to trying to curtail supply. I mean, I think that is the big economic question out there, and that is ultimately not one that you all will resolve. You are doing your duty, you are doing your part, that which you are charged, so I admire your work, but I think that is the $94 question we got to ask as a society is do we do something more. And again, a lot of this ties into stuff that is well beyond any of our pay grade, straight to the notion of family formation, a lot of other things that impact demand, poverty, you go down the list, but I think at the end of the day, the societal question we got to get our arms around is supply always equals demand. I remember reading in National Review, James Buckley, who is by no means a liberal, saying the war is lost. That was the front page of the National Review way back when, and he made the case, in that case for liberalization and for legalization and zombie farms out West. You would have some number of people lost in either equation, and do you look at it a different way. I don't know what the answer is, but I think that is the question we got to answer that ultimately is beyond your pay grade, and I suspect it comes down to the pay grade of the Americans--you know, and civilian population decide how do we address this problem. Admiral Schultz. Congressman, I think both of us would tell you, we have sort of run our careers in parallel tracks over more than 6 years together. There is a balanced approach, you probably need both, but interdiction, I think, is clearly part of that equation. Mr. Sanford. I am less and less certain of that than I was 20 years ago. Mr. Hunter. I thank the gentleman. And I would add, too, it is as much about drugs as it is--because you can get anything through the drug route that you can get drugs through, whether it is a weapon of mass destruction, whether it is weapons, whether it is some kind of chemical agent, the exact same routes that the drug smugglers take, the other bad guys who want to come in here take, too. Mr. Sanford. My take, Mr. Chairman, is if you lined up a couple of Marines on the border, it would take care of the problem. Mr. Hunter. Probably true. I would agree with that. The gentlelady from Florida is recognized. Ms. Frankel. Thank you. Interesting discussion. I am going to follow up on that, but just first, quick question is, it sounds like what you are saying here today is that you need more assets to do a more effective job. Are the new assets, is it new technology or is it more of the assets that you have and you just need more of them? Admiral Michel. It is a combination of both, ma'am. There is a certain quantity that is necessary to get the work done. On average, a major ship from either the Coast Guard or the Navy working for a year gets 20 metric tons of cocaine, which is a huge quantity of cocaine per ship, but each one of those ships can become more effective if you have more advanced sensor capabilities which allow them to find things like the semisubmersible. I know you didn't see the picture of it, but we actually interdicted one of those this morning. I am sure they will share the picture of that with you and how difficult that is, and also the techniques for actually interdicting. So the airborne use of force which allows us to take on the go-fast boats. So it is a combination of both quantity, the number of ships that limit our ability to target, and then the better quality of the ship that allows it to have a better chance of detecting and interdicting that capability. It is a combination of both, ma'am. Ms. Frankel. Thank you. I now want to just follow up on Mr. Sanford's. I thought it was interesting questions you had. I will just say it in a commentary. I think we spend $310 million a month in Iraq and Syria, and I think that a lot of people are questioning that. But I would like you, if you could, in that context, I would like to hear you make the argument as to the national security argument. That's what I would like you to have a little more detail on, why you feel your mission is so important, how it affects our national security? Admiral Schultz. Congresswoman, I would say, and I think Chairman Hunter sort of opened up this dialogue. You know, General Kelly's first and foremost duty as a combatant commander for U.S. Southern Command is protecting the southern approaches to the United States for the security of this Nation. These same networks that allow drugs, you know, to the tune of--there's about 1,050 tons of cocaine that come out of the Indian Ridge, the sole cocaine producing region of the world on an annual basis, about 60 percent--660 tons comes to the United States. It is the same networks that move those drugs, that move, you know, trafficking and women to the tune of 18,000 or so, moving cash both ways, weapons, illegal migrants, special interest aliens, we saw upwards of 500,000 illegals last summer, a subset of 50,000-plus children, those are very sophisticated networks. These organizations are well financed, they are highly adaptive, and it doesn't take a lot of imagination to think the same network that could move cocaine could move, you know, a component to a weapon of mass destruction or something else. They can move an Ebola patient. You name it. The networks are sophisticated. You know, my boss sometimes makes analogies. It is like a FedEx operation. So when you think about the maritime interdiction of drugs and cocaine is what we are specifically talking about here, you know, we can get the bulk loads of 3,000 kilos, you know, upwards of 7,000 pounds in one seizure at sea, when that ship offloads that to a couple of fast boats off of Guatemala or Mexico and it gets into the land border and gets broken down into small loads and coming across the border in the grille of a car in a 50-kilo load, our ability to stop that is very, very low at that point. When you interdict it at sea, there is no violence associated with that removal of 7,000 pounds of cocaine. When that cocaine hits the landmass, there is a lot of violence associated with that. There is a lot of graft and corruption associated with that, so the effectiveness is exponentially greater when we can push that border out and take that, you know, law enforcement endgame into the maritime domain. Admiral Michel. Let me just add one other little piece here. So I think you are probably aware, but in Mexico and Central America, a number of the countries down there have declared various states of emergency, and they have actioned their militaries to actually counter this, which is the number- one threat that they face down there. They don't really have a nation state on nation state war problem, but they have a transnational criminal organization network. It should concern every American that the Mexican armed forces are having to be on the streets of Mexico taking on the cartels because their law enforcement has been completely outstripped by these criminal organizations. When you look at El Chapo Guzman, Los Cano Los Cano from the Zetas cartel, or Trevino Morales from the Zetas cartel, they were not taken down by Mexican local police or even Mexican Federal police. They were taken down by Mexican marines who were there trying to defend their country against these transnational criminal organizations who basically rot the state from the inside out through intimidation, corruption, all the different things that they do, and this is one of our closest neighbors. And Mexico is a serious country. And to have a situation caused, at least in part, because of what American citizens are putting up their noses, to create that type of a national security situation in one of our closest neighbors should be a concern to every American beyond the public health problems that it creates in this country. Ms. Frankel. OK. Thank you very much. Mr. Hunter. I thank the gentlelady. The gentleman from Louisiana is recognized. Mr. Graves of Louisiana. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I appreciate it. Admiral, thank you very much. It is nice to see you. You clean up well. Your old commander threads till today, good to see you. First of all, there was a hearing that the chairman had worked out with the HASC [House Armed Services Committee] that we had back in March where, Admiral Michel, you were there. And the topic was different but the theme was exactly the same in that it was talking all about the total maritime force package and the role that the Coast Guard plays in that. We talked at length about the fact that the--that you are only as strong as your weakest link and that the Coast Guard plays a critical role in that overall maritime total force strategy or total force package. And so we are sitting here talking about your capabilities. And we are talking about your ability to actually perform the mission that you are tasked with, whether it is drug interdiction, alien interdiction, and many of the other missions that the Coast Guard has had heaped upon it over the last several years. One of the things that we talked about a little bit in the past, I am going to bring it up again, the OPC. Can you talk a little bit about its role in you carrying out your duties, whether it is under the Cooperative Strategy for 21st-Century Seapower or it is your drug and alien interdiction mission? Admiral Michel. Well, it is absolutely critical, sir, in that the OPC is the replacement for the Medium Endurance Cutter which is the bulk and real workhorse of the Coast Guard's fleet, and we have got about 25 in the program of record of the OPC. The OPC is a sea state 5---- Mr. Graves of Louisiana. And I want to be clear, your MECs [Medium Endurance Cutters] are all aging out. Admiral Michel. The average age even if everything goes on schedule--average age for a 270-foot cutter when it comes off the line is 35, average age for a 210-foot cutter is 55. Mr. Graves of Louisiana. OK. So we are beyond service life. Admiral Michel. Yes, sir. Mr. Graves of Louisiana. You need the OPC. It is going to give you better capabilities. I don't want to put words in your mouth, if you could agree or disagree with that. Could you agree or disagree that the OPC is going to give you better capabilities? Admiral Michel. It does provide better capabilities. It is a modern system and it is a sea state 5 capable ship. Mr. Graves of Louisiana. And it does help you--and again, I am not trying to put words in your mouth. I am asking for confirmation. It does help you to achieve your objectives within the overall maritime mission that you are tasked with. Admiral Michel. No question. Mr. Graves of Louisiana. OK. So then we get to the budget request, and in the budget request, as we have just spoken about in the past, you have some very confusing language about no funding in there, but you are going to transfer funding, but you haven't identified the source, and I am not saying you, you understand, my friends at OMB, perhaps. Can you talk a little bit about, about how these things actually line up? I mean, how is it that you are going to be able to achieve your mission in working together with the Navy and the other armed forces, how is it that you are going to be able to carry out your mission with regard to drug and alien interdiction and other missions the Coast Guard is tasked with whenever you are dealing with equipment that is well beyond its projected service life and there are not funds in the budget for you to achieve--for you to acquire new resources? Admiral Michel. Yes, sir. I mean, that is the quandary in the world that I live in, and I will just give you an example. So on our 210-foot fleet, which is the older one, right now we lose about 20 percent of our scheduled time due to unscheduled maintenance, so these are, you know, major whole failures and other things that happen on that class of ship, and that situation only gets worse with time, so we need to replace that. And the OPC, you hit the nail on the head. The current plan is that there will be an internal transfer within DHS of the roughly $69 million we need to do to proceed with detailed design work. Mr. Graves of Louisiana. But we don't know which couch to flip it over to find that? Admiral Michel. I don't want to phrase it that way. Right now, the best that I have is I have assurances that that money transfer is going to take place and that the OPC is on schedule. Mr. Graves of Louisiana. One of the other things I am going to--I changed gears a little bit, but certainly the OPC's capabilities in regard to source and transit zones makes sense, but just quickly, Mr. Chairman, if it is OK. I am curious, could you talk a little bit about its capabilities and in terms of the Arctic and ops up there? Admiral Michel. Right. So part of the reason it needs to be a sea state 5 capable ship is because this is not a one-for-one replacement with the Medium Endurance Cutter fleet. As a matter of fact, the 210-foot and 270-foot cutters, basically we tried to work those up in Alaska, and that is just too much weather. The distances are too great, and the weather is just horrendous. So those ships really do not work, the 210-, 270-foot cutters up in the Bering. But because we are not a one-for-one replacement, we have got to have more flexibility with the-- where we can assign those ships, and with a sea state 5 capable ship, that OPC can actually operate on a seasonal basis up there in that Alaskan area where we need it. It is not going to be an ice capable ship or anything like that, but if you can understand that point, that is why we need sea state 5 capability because it is not a one-for-one replacement program. Mr. Graves of Louisiana. Sure. And it will work complementary to your new ice breakers that we will be acquiring sometime soon, correct? Admiral Michel. Well, I hope so, sir. I know they are kind of a twinkle in somebody's eye, and we should probably have some discussion about that, but yes, sir, they are all designed to work together as a system. Mr. Graves of Louisiana. Sure. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Mr. Hunter. I thank the gentleman. The gentleman from Florida is recognized. Mr. Curbelo. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman, for this hearing, and I thank Rear Admiral Schultz and Vice Admiral Michel for their presence here today. As the Representative from Florida's southernmost district, I have a very special appreciation for the Coast Guard and its mission. Thank you for keeping our people safe and secure. I am hoping you can address generally this phenomenon we are seeing of drug transit routes shifting to the Caribbean. Have you seen a spike in the past several years and what impact has this had on your budget? Admiral Schultz. Good afternoon, Congressman, and so good to see you, and thanks for your support of the men and women in JIATF South. I know you were down there as recently as April here. Mr. Curbelo. Yeah that is right. Admiral Schultz. I would say in terms of the shift to the Caribbean, we have seen a shift in recent years here. I think, A, that shift is attributable to some of the successes we have had along the Central American corridor. Writ large, about 80 percent of the cocaine that comes out of the Indian Ridge destined towards the United States comes through the central corridor, Central American corridor, some in the Pacific, some in the western Caribbean, but as we have had successes there, as we partnered with the Hondurans, their maritime shield, I think it is the balloon effect. You know, the squeeze of the balloon in that region has pushed some more activity to the eastern Caribbean route there, so we are aware of that. I think at the end of the day when you are dealing with a finite number of ships, and you know, the Coast Guard currently in this fiscal year had 6 ships--6.2 ships committed to the whole JIATF mission set here, that is across the EASTPAC [eastern Pacific] and the Caribbean. The Navy has had one ship. So you are taking seven ships on a good day, maybe some partnerships, and you are spreading them around, you know, we put some energy towards--at the JIATF, we put some energy in that eastern Caribbean route, but when, you know, you are in the teens, percentagewise, versus knowing 80 percent of it's moving in either side of the Central American isthmus there, it is sort of a--it is sort of their decision. But that said, there's a lot of challenges in Puerto Rico with increasing violence. Puerto Rico has a homicide rate five times that of here in the States. Domestically it is about 5 per 100,000 people. I think it is 25 per 100,000 there, weapons coming in. So we are very in tune with that. The Coast Guard has been working Operation Unified Resolve there, and I will defer to Admiral Michel for specifics there, but as we at the Southern Command are working with the new DHS joint task force, working with other participants there, working with NORTHCOM, because NORTHCOM really, from a geographic combatant commander standpoint, knows the Puerto Rico region, we are looking at how do we bring some energy to that challenge. Politically, that has been a very hot area, so we are aware of that. So there is success there, and there is challenge there, and we are trying to attenuate that with a finite amount of bandwidth. Admiral Michel. If I could just add a couple of points here. One thing we watch very carefully is Venezuela. I think you have seen Venezuela has got some stability issues, and unfortunately, the traffickers are exploiting that, so we have seen what Admiral Schultz mentioned there about additional flows coming out of Venezuela, and a lot of those impact the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico and the eastern Caribbean, so we are going to have to watch that very carefully. Also adding onto Admiral Schultz, the standup of the Secretary of Homeland Security's new unity of effort joint task forces, of which Puerto Rico and southern Florida are all captured within what is called Joint Task Force East, which is actually dual hatted with our land area commander up in Norfolk, but they bring the entire DHS family together, so CBP, ICE [U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement], Coast Guard, the other supporting elements, all in the unity of effort format, along the lines of JIATF, if you know the way that they work, where they truly have a unified chain of command. This is not a sort of coordination element. This is real command and control from the Department of Homeland Security, and we are looking for great things from them along those vectors stretching into Puerto Rico and also south Florida. We are also watching the Cuba situation like we always do. Right now the Cuban Government is pretty good counterdrug, but we are going to have to see if that changes over time, but we watch that very carefully, sir. Mr. Curbelo. Since you mentioned Cuba, and with the chairman's dispensation because it doesn't have to deal specifically with drug trafficking, but we have seen a spike in migrant movement from Cuba to the United States. Do you attribute that to something specifically, and do you feel that you are prepared at this time for a potential mass migration of them? Admiral Michel. We did see a spike here at the end of last year and into the beginning of this year, and when we interviewed the migrants, they said we heard that the wet foot/ dry foot policy was going to be changing, so we want to make sure we got there. We have had a public relations campaign out there telling people that that is not true and making sure that they understand what the facts are. And here over the summer, I think it has been relatively stable within kind of historic norms. And as always, we are ready for a mass migration, sir, and we watch that all the time and watch very carefully indicators and warnings both there and also in Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and those vectors where we have got some issues percolating. So we watch that very carefully, but we are ready with our Homeland Security Task Force Southeast, which is specifically designed to deal with these mass migration events. Mr. Curbelo. Thank you both. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Mr. Hunter. I thank the gentleman. We are going to keep going here. We had really great participation today. You get more and more popular the more you come back, people start to like you. We will have full subcommittee here in a couple of years. Let me ask you about the NSC [National Security Cutter] really quick. You have a gap. You have a gap between now-- between this year and 2018 where you're not working on anything. Well, you are working on the OPC design stuff but you have a gap. There are some folks in this Congress and in this Senate that want to fill that gap for you with an extra NSC. What do you feel about that? And then if you would, not just say how do you feel about it, how would it--how would it affect drug interdiction ops; in SOUTHCOM, what would it do for you; could you use it? Could SOUTHCOM use it? I mean, you might have to take off your Coast Guard hat and put on your SOUTHCOM hat, and SOUTHCOM probably wants that ship. Admiral Schultz. Sir---- Mr. Hunter. But the Coast Guard may not. Admiral Schultz [continuing]. All day. Any ship, Coast Guard ship, Navy ship, is value add for the equation. Mr. Hunter. OK. Got that one. Admiral Michel. Easy for him to say. He doesn't have to pay the bills. But, no, the NSC is an incredible ship, sir. It is the most capable ship the Coast Guard has ever had. We are ecstatic with the NSC. And I just want to go on the record. Same time, it is not within our program of record, and we designed our program of record to be affordable and best meet our needs, and that ninth NSC is not a part of that. And we cannot allow that to interfere with our other programs because, for example, on the OPC, that is the workhorse of the fleet, much cheaper ship to operate, plus it is smaller and can get into some of the dock spaces and things that we have. The NSC is just a much bigger ship, and that is why it was not a part of the program of record. Not because it is a great ship, but it is not within our affordability characteristics. And, obviously, if someone were to give one of those to us--and I hope it would not interfere with the other things that we need in the system--then your Coast Guard stands ready to use that ship, sir. Mr. Hunter. If you get a ship like that, do you actually see the needle move, depending on how much you interdict based off of a ship like that that has as much capability as it has? Admiral Michel. Sir, that is the best ship available. I won't use the word ``Cadillac,'' sir, because I know you called me on that last time. But the NSC has the best sensor capabilities, the best command-and-control suite, operates the best helicopters, and is the best that we have in the fleet. It has got the endurance. It has got the speed. If you were to design a ship to work in this mission set, it would be the NSC. So it is the best that we can possibly bring to the fight, but it is also expensive. And its magnitude is more expensive than the OPC, which won't have as many capabilities but hopefully will have more of them. That kind of goes to Ms. Frankel's question of a balance between quality and quantity at a certain level, and we tried to do that in our program of record in addition to making sure the program is affordable. Mr. Hunter. The Coast Guard has built the Navy's littoral combat ship for them. And we are all very thankful. When we copy that and take it from you to give to the Navy, I think they will be appreciative. Admiral Michel. I wish they would send me a thank-you note, sir. Mr. Hunter. I want to get back if we could just really quick to when we were talking about levels of capability and your internal performance targets in the very beginning, right. Can you go through how you set those, just, you know, from the ground up for me? Admiral Michel. Well, the Office of the National Drug Control Policy sets what the national goal is, and it is---- Mr. Hunter. Forty percent? Admiral Michel. Well, it is 36 percent in 2015, 40 percent in 2016, and that is along the formulas we describe, their sort of known interdiction versus the known flow, and there are formulas that underlie each one. So they sent---- Mr. Hunter. Wait, let me ask, do they tie that to your capability, or do they just come up with that based on there is going to be more drugs coming across so we are going to up you 4 percent as our target or up the entire thing 4 percent? Admiral Michel. No, sir. It was actually a result of a study done a number of years ago that actually brought in some economists and some very smart people and came to the conclusion that if you could interdict 40 percent of the cocaine flow--and they were looking at the cocaine trade--that you could actually force the traffickers to change their business model in a radical method. And there is actually an intellectual basis for why that 40 percent was set that way. Then it was negotiated amongst the interagency partners as to what were achievable goals for each year in order to get to that 40 percent. And there were studies done specifically on what it would take for the maritime interdiction forces to get to that 40 percent. And the study, my recollection, and I looked at the study when I was in JIATF South is that they figured that we would need about 16 ships in order to do the 40 percent, at the time that study was done. Now, this was done a number of years ago. Now, some things have changed. The ships have gotten better. The technology has gotten better. The intelligence capabilities have gotten better. So 16 ships is probably an overstatement, in my opinion, up to this point, but even now, we are not fielding anything even approaching 16 ships in order to get down there at the 40 percent that need to be done. So there is analysis behind all that. And it is also run through an interagency negotiation process based on historical data. And that is where you come up with the Coast Guard's contribution. And when you look at that historical data for our contribution of the removal, it converts directly into our resource commitments to the fight and what we think we can provide to the fight and what type of capabilities we can provide to the fight. Again, there is pretty good historical data that over a number of years, that for each capital ship that is put downrange by the U.S.--and also some of our foreign, the high-end foreign partners--1 year of ship effort is about 20 metric tons removed. So you can kind of do the math from there. Now, part of it is beyond our control, you know, how much the traffickers plant, how much they move that year, what their production estimates, how much they decide to send to the U.S. and how much they decide to send to other global markets. So it is a difficult problem set, and recognize, the adversary does everything possible to keep all this from us. I mean, they want this all to remain in the dark. So it is based on our best estimates. Mr. Hunter. So your numbers going down from 18.5 percent to 13.8 percent over 5 years, that is based on what you had to do the job with. Is that how it goes? Admiral Michel. That is based on the Coast Guard commitment, yes, sir. That is what we sign up for in order to-- our portion of the national goal for the removal rate in the Western Hemisphere Transit Zone and then that converts into the number of assets we can put into the fight, which varies. Sometimes our assets get pulled off in different directions. Sometimes we can do more. Sometimes we can do less. Mr. Hunter. So what made it drop from 18 percent to 13 percent? Admiral Michel. Ship effort. It is pretty simple math from a Coast Guard perspective, sir. It is just--it is the number of ships and capable ships that are brought into the fight. Mr. Hunter. Let me ask you a question that I am just curious about: Has the Pacific shift for the Navy to Asia had any play at all in anything that happens in your AO [area of operation]? Admiral Michel. I will let Admiral Schultz jump in here, but just from a Coast Guard perspective, our admiral, Admiral Zukunft, talks specifically about this. And he understands the geostrategic perspective and understands the Navy gets pulled in a lot of different directions, and that is specifically why he committed additional Coast Guard resources to the Western Hemisphere Transit Zone. He said: This is an area where I can provide unique capability and be complementary to the other geopolitical moves that the combatant commanders are putting in place. Mr. Hunter. So just, if I could dovetail with that too, then does the Coast Guard see a place for itself in the Pacific, in the South China Sea, as opposed to the Navy? Because our fellow peer nation in that area uses their Coast Guard for that exact thing. Admiral Michel. I get asked that question all the time, sir. Unfortunately, with every single combatant commander, there is more demand out there and more relevance for the Coast Guard than there is Coast Guard. And our Commandant has been specifically asked to provide resources to not only PACOM [Pacific Command] but all the other combatant commanders. And right now his best judgment is our Coast Guard resources are going to be put in the Western Hemisphere Transit Zone because this is an area of regional stability and national security where the Coast Guard can provide unique benefit to the Nation. And that is his judgment. But it is a risk calculation, no question about it. The Coast Guard is increasingly relevant in the area, and when you see the bumping and all the other things going on, they are Coast Guard boats and typically not gray hulls doing that stuff, sir. Mr. Hunter. Admiral Schultz. Admiral Schultz. Congressman, the only thing I would add to that, you know, the pivot to the Pacific obviously is the demand signal there. I think there is also sort of the perfect storm of the decommission of the fast frigates from a budgetary standpoint. The Perry-class frigates, the last one is on patrol today. Once that ship finishes up her current JIATF patrol, we won't see any frigates here for the foreseeable future. The LCSs, littoral combat ships, which have been renamed the frigates, will probably not come to the SOUTHCOM AOR for 3 to 5 years here, given that pivot to the Pacific and the rate of recapitalization. Mr. Hunter. With that, the ranking member has no more questions. I have no more questions, unless you have any closing comments you would like to give. Mr. Graves of Louisiana. Mr. Chairman. Mr. Hunter. Oh, I am sorry. Go ahead. Gentleman from Louisiana. Mr. Graves of Louisiana. Thank you. Thank you very much. Admiral Schultz, you just talked about the decommissioning of the frigates, and as I recall, I believe you have three that are being decommissioned now that does affect your area of operation. I am just continuing this theme. You talked earlier about the inability to meet the Office of National Drug Control Policy's target of 40 percent. You are losing frigates. You are not budgeting for new capabilities. Your AC&I [acquisition, construction, and improvements] account is going down not up. Can you comment on the conditions on the ground and how it affects your mission? Admiral Schultz. Well, I would say from the SOUTHCOM commander's perspective, you know, capacity is the spigot, you know. We still operate with that 16 number that Admiral Michel talked about, three large cutters, which would be, you know, your National Security Cutter, your former High Endurance Cutters or maybe a cruiser, destroyer from the Navy. And 13, those would be your to be built OPCs, currently the Medium Endurance Cutters; those were the Perry-class frigates. So, at the end of the day, it is about capacity from a SOUTHCOM perspective. And, you know, that ship with a helicopter, with the ability to launch a small boat, the ability to move around agilely within the AOR, which translates to a Coast Guard cutter, a Navy ship, some of our high-end partners, you know, you associate a number about 20 million--or 20 metric tons, as Admiral Michel talked about. It is a math equation. Mr. Graves of Louisiana. I certainly don't want to get anybody in trouble here, but is there a way that you can carefully answer the question about, you have got a major loss of connectivity here. Again, heaping missions upon you, setting targets that I am confident if you were properly capitalized, you could achieve, yet they aren't providing the resources for you to actually do that. Where do you see the lack of connectivity here? Admiral Schultz. Well, I think, sir, the lack of connectivity is clearly budgetarily related. I think where we focus our efforts at Southern Command, I think where the Coast Guard does is, you know, how do you work as smart as possible within the workspace you have while you wait for the recapitalization of new ships? You know, we look at a resource like the Joint STARS, which flies maritime patrol capability. One Joint STARS flight equates to about 10 P-3 flights. It can surveil that much ocean on one mission here. We will fly that sometimes in conjunction with a B-52 or another type of bomber. Sometimes they will fly solely. We could fly a Joint STAR on the Caribbean base, and they could actually see traffic in the eastern Pacific. So there's the capacity piece on the surface side, which I talked about. There's other ways to, you know, stay in the game and work smarter with what you have here and pray for better days for more ships to come to the future. I would tell you, there is no bigger advocate to endorse the Coast Guard's recapitalization needs because of the challenges we have. And, again, it is transnational organized crime. Mr. Graves of Louisiana. Sure. Admiral Schultz. We can take the discussion down to just drugs, but it is about regional stability. And the Coast Guard presence down there, the Navy ships with LEDETs [law enforcement detachments], they are all about, you know, bringing some sanity to that challenge there. Mr. Graves of Louisiana. So you said it is Admiral Michel's fault? Admiral Schultz. Congressman, you said that, not me. I may need to go back and work for the Coast Guard. Mr. Graves of Louisiana. No, Admiral, look, I just want to be clear. Every hearing that we have, I think that a number of us are going to continue to pound that theme. There is a lack of connectivity here. You are being tasked with missions--we described you as a Swiss Army knife at the HASC hearing in regard to all the missions that are being heaped upon you. You are not being capitalized. There is a loss of connectivity between the work that you are being tasked with and the resources of the capitalization that you are being given. You have got a great workforce. The men and women of the Coast Guard--and I will put my oil spill comments aside for just a minute--are some great people that work incredibly hard. And I am confident, if given the proper resources, they could hit the targets that you put in place. I just want to make sure that you are continuing to beat the drum up your chain of command. We obviously are continuing to do the same thing. I am looking forward to the appropriations bill when it comes to the floor because I think we have got some priorities that need to be addressed. Let me ask you one last question. The chairman and Congressman Sanford both addressed the issue of when you have open lanes, you can send anything through them, whether it is aliens, whether it is drugs, whether it is a terrorist or weapons or what have you. I assume you would agree with that? Admiral Michel. Absolutely, sir. Just take a look at that picture of that self-propelled semisubmersible. My guess is that probably has a carrying capacity of maybe 5 to 7 metric tons of anything that you want, and it can approach the United States almost undetectable. Most of those SPSSs--now, they are kind of in version four of those things--3,500-, 4,000-mile range, you know, the fact that we have sort of through our consumption patterns allowed the creation of really a bad guy battle lab for the development of these dark highly mobile asymmetric maritime targets should concern everybody. Mr. Graves of Louisiana. And do you often see comingled loads, meaning drugs and aliens together and things like that? Admiral Michel. Actually, rarely. We do see comingled drug loads. So we just had a load of heroin and cocaine. But, interestingly, typically, you will either get a drug boat or you will get a migrant boat. Mr. Graves of Louisiana. OK. Admiral Schultz. And, Congressman, one thing the DEA has said publicly, I think it is 27 of 54 known terrorist organizations have proven links through drug trafficking. So there is clearly that nexus of, you know, transnational organized crime, illicit drug trafficking, and the potential for more nefarious activities. Mr. Graves of Louisiana. Sir. Thank you all very much. Thank you, Mr. Chair. Mr. Hunter. Thank you. One last question here. Marijuana, so say that you legalized weed throughout the entire country, right. Would that have any impact whatsoever on what you are doing? Admiral Michel. It is hard to say under what circumstance they would be legalized. As long as the traffickers can make a profit, they are going to be there. I mean, this goes to Mr. Sanford's question. You know, if they can undercut the marijuana market by growing marijuana overseas and putting it in the United States, even under a legalization scheme where you pay more, my guess is they would probably do it. I mean, that is--traffickers are going to make money. Mr. Hunter. Well, what would it do? Because you interdict more cocaine than anything else, right? But that is also what you are trying to interdict more of, correct? Admiral Michel. Absolutely. Cocaine really is the money product. And a lot of the problems in Central America, it is not because of marijuana that is being dragged across there. Most of the marijuana is being made in the U.S. or Mexico or somewhere like that. It is because of the cocaine trade that exists here, and it is so insidious because it is a very high- value, very small product. You have got to smuggle a lot of marijuana to make the same amount in cocaine, and that makes it more vulnerable, makes it more vulnerable to border tactics, like fences, makes it more vulnerable in the panga arena--I know that you are aware of--in San Diego and things. But the cocaine is incredibly dangerous. And once it gets past the JIATF forces and the Coast Guard forces down there, it is basically done. You are not going to get it. When I was JIATF South Director, the average cocaine seizure, which was pretty rare on the Southwest border, was 4 to 7 kilos. A major seizure was 40 kilos. That one semisubmersible that I showed you there, 3,000 kilos. And you got that on the water before it got into Mexico and corrupted that government official, killed that kid in the drive-by shooting, plus you have got witnesses and evidence that can actually get you to the kingpins, so the head of the network that set all that stuff in motion. So it is the beauty of maritime interdiction. And so traffickers will make money if there is money to be made, sir. Admiral Schultz. Congressman, I think when we had the conversation about the violence, the judges, you know, I think for my boss, General Kelly, when he is down there talking to the CHODs [chiefs of defense], the ministers of defense, the MODs, I think there is a certain level of credibility here, you know, when they look at him and say: Well, General, your country is legalizing marijuana. You know, how committed are you to this fight here? You know, we have got our frontline men and women, whether that is law enforcement folks, whether that is their military because they have to bring their military to establish some security, it creates a bit of a credibility gap that the U.S. Government is truly committed to the fight. Mr. Hunter. Last question I have. Have you seen full submersibles now? Because I think I was watching something, it was either ``Vice'' on HBO or some documentary, where they had the full submersibles. Admiral Michel. Yes, sir. As a matter of fact, I toured a fully submersible vessel that was seized by the Colombian Navy, with some help from the United States, at its construction site in Bahia Malaga, Colombia. I have toured that vessel. That vessel is capable of going from Colombia to Los Angeles unrefueled in a snorkeling state. We also seized a semisubmersible in San Lorenzo, Ecuador, in 2010. That is a fully submersible craft that can operate under the water. I can talk to you more offline about the operating characteristics, but that can carry 7 to 10 metric tons of anything that you want basically undetected from Ecuador to Los Angeles. Mr. Hunter. OK. So let's step away from SOUTHCOM totally. I am just curious, when does the Coast Guard realize that you got--you will have multinational, you know, terrorist organizations mixed with really easy to make full submersibles, where you can drop off anybody and anything, when do those two things come together for you? Admiral Michel. Well, I will let Admiral Schultz talk a little bit more about the terrorist connections, but the FARC [Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia], for example, which is declared a terrorist organization, is a drug-trafficking organization, and they are the ones who financed the semisubmersible construction, a large number of those things. So you already have that convergence, sir. It is already there. Mr. Hunter. But the FARC likes to have power and make money, right. They don't necessarily want to kill a million Americans so they can go see their God, right? That is the difference between radical Islam that I am talking about and bad crime organizations. Or, I mean, to a certain extent, I think I am correct there. Admiral Michel. I am not willing to put my trust in the FARC, sir. Mr. Hunter. OK. Admiral Schultz. And I think Congressman, you know, when you look at that convergence, I think if you look to Latin America, you know, within South America, you have upwards of 75, 80 cultural centers, Iranian cultural centers. I think you have a Lebanese Hezbollah center of gravity there where I think there is indications that they are raising tens of thousands, you know, tens of millions of dollars there. You know, is it just fundraising and money that goes back to Libya? You know, do they have other activities afoot? You know, do we have any connection to IJO type activities? You know, I think, we watch that. And one of our challenges at SOUTHCOM is we get a fairly small percentage of the overall DOD ISR. So our challenge is, we don't know what we don't know. But with what we have, we try to, you know, stay aware of the transnational organized crime, but we are also paying attention to, you know, what threats on the counterterrorism front are potentially, you know, to our southern flank there. Mr. Hunter. Would it be fair to say that you would be the first ones to know if some folks out of the Middle East started using these tactics? Admiral Michel. I think that that is fair to say, sir. The enterprise that we have arrayed here before you really is the early warning sensor for the entire sort of southern approaches to the United States. We are it. Mr. Hunter. Thank you very much. This is probably one of the most informative, interesting topics in hearings that we have had. So thank you both, gentlemen. Appreciate it. And, with that, we are adjourned. [Whereupon, at 3:33 p.m., the subcommittee was adjourned.] [GRAPHIC(S) NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]