Tech could curb drug traffic at Mexican border
Late last year marked an ominous milestone in the effort to keep illegal drugs from streaming across the U.S.Mexico border. In December, the Coast Guard seized 18,219 pounds of cocaine, including more than 5,500 pounds that were on a self-propelled semi-submersible.
The use of unmanned boats and submersibles allows drug trafficking organizations to exploit the open waters off the coast of Baja California and California in an increasingly sophisticated effort to evade law enforcement.
To counter this, the U.S. needs to fight fire with fire by leveraging new technologies — like unmanned, autonomous maritime surveillance assets — to help monitor coastal waters for unusual activities to help interdict smuggling activities.
With drug seizures reaching record levels at our nation’s borders and reports that the markets for cocaine and other illicit substances are booming, drug trafficking organizations will only continue to use maritime trafficking and employ self-propelled devices to bring their goods into the U.S.
For years, drug policy experts in the U.S. have talked about the “balloon effect” when discussing the struggles with drug eradication efforts. When you push down drug production in one region, it bulges somewhere else. The same theory applies to drug trafficking. The recent crackdown on smuggling across the land border with Mexico amid the ongoing migrant crisis is pushing traffickers to look for less-patrolled routes.
While overland trafficking routes can be patrolled via aerial surveillance and checkpoints, and San Ysidro and other ports of entry allow officials to search vehicles queuing up at the border, the vastness of the Pacific Ocean, the scope of manpower needed to effectively monitor it, and the lack of ability to check every ship entering U.S. waters means illicit substances can more easily slip into the country.
This is where new and emerging technologies can give anti-drug forces an edge over narcotraffickers without their having to invest in more personnel or weaponry.
Take, for instance, unmanned surface vehicles and the latest generation of ocean buoys. At a fraction of the cost of having manned ships and helicopters patrol the waters along the U.S. and Mexican border, these platforms can autonomously monitor the ocean, provide real-time data and actionable intelligence to the Coast Guard and other law enforcement agencies, and help them make better decisions about when and where to deploy their forces.
Autonomous solutions help reduce the costs and, more importantly, the risks associated with combating drug trafficking by helping ensure that military and law enforcement better know what situation they’re going into.
These technologies are already being used by the U.S. Navy, with its Task Force 59 aggressively integrating uncrewed systems and artificial intelligence in maritime theaters around the globe. The Navy already announced earlier this year that it was expanding its use of these technologies to include the 4th Fleet — which includes Latin America — in efforts to fight drug trafficking and illegal fishing.
U.S. officials can also use these technologies to combat the drug trade at its source in places like Ecuador, which over the last few years has become ground zero for the international drug trade and its accompanying violence as cartels look for newer, less-surveilled routes to transport their products to the U.S. With Ecuador’s ports allowing for furtive entries into the eastern Pacific, the country now needs all the help it can get if it hopes to rein in the drug trade as the country’s armed forces are struggling against a better-armed, betterfunded opponent while dealing with corruption within their own ranks.
Whether it be in Ecuador or along the maritime border between the U.S. and Mexico, autonomous solutions can play a key role in fighting the flow of drugs on the streets of San Diego and the rest of the country by making monitoring such a large battlefield easier.
Philipp Stratmann is the president and CEO of Ocean Power Technologies, a company focused on maritime surveillance that operates autonomous ocean drones and buoys and is based in Monroe Township, New Jersey.