By Wilder Alejandro Sanchez

The Southern Tide

Multinational exercise Tradewinds 2022, the Caribbean’s premier military exercise, will be co-hosted by Belize and Mexico and will take place on May 7-21, 2022. This is a great opportunity to promote greater interoperability among the two host nations, the United States, and Canada, as well as partners from the greater Caribbean.

Tradewinds 2021 and 2022

Tradewinds is a U.S. Southern Command (SOUTHCOM)-sponsored combined joint exercise aimed at enhancing the collective ability of regional constabularies and defense forces to combat transnational criminal organizations as well as conducting humanitarian assistance and disaster relief operations (HA/DR).

Tradewinds 2021 took place in Guyana, which had also helped boost U.S.-Guyana relations at a time when Venezuela’s territorial ambitions have grown. About 1,500 U.S. military, partner nation security, and civilian personnel participated in Tradewinds 2021, in addition to platforms like U.S. Coast Guard Cutter Winslow W. Griesser (WPC-1116).

As for Tradewinds 2022, the upcoming exercises are still in the planning stage. The Mexican Naval Secretariat (Secretaria de Marina: SEMAR) has already held a meeting in Quintana Roo with representatives from Tradewinds participants in order to plan the maneuvers – Mexico will organize the naval portion of the maneuvers while Belize will be in charge of the land-based operations. Parallel to Tradewinds, the multinational exercise North American Maritime Security Initiative (NAMSI)  2022, between the navies of Canada, Mexico, and the United States, will also take place.

At the time of this writing, there are no reports about which land, naval, and aerial assets will be deployed by the participating navies in Tradewinds 2022. It can be expected that the co-hosts, Belize and Mexico, will deploy a significant number of units, including patrol vessels, interceptor vessels, and maritime patrol aircraft, not to mention personnel like marines. Approximately 1,500 personnel, civilian and military, will participate, representing 20 nations, in addition to the co-hosts and the United States.

A Great Opportunity for Mexico

This author has covered Tradewinds previously for CIMSEC in “Tradewinds 2018 and the Caribbean’s Maritime Security Challenges”, an article that highlighted the importance of these maneuvers for the region. A retired senior officer from the Dominican Republic’s navy explained to CIMSEC that Tradewinds is “an excellent way to increase interoperability between defense forces and security agencies throughout the Caribbean.” The retired officer added that Tradewinds has a history of being “successful at promoting communication, training against organized crime, [and] carrying out HA/DR operations” between the participating agencies and forces.

For the Mexican navy, Tradewinds 2022 presents a unique opportunity not only to promote interoperability between the other participants, but also to demonstrate the service’s capabilities to organize large multinational exercises. Anecdotally, Tradewinds 2022 will be the first time that Mexico co-hosts these exercises since they commenced in 1984. In an interview with CIMSEC, Christian J. Ehrlich, director of Mexico’s Institute for Strategy and Development Research and the founding director of the Riskop consultancy company, explained that Tradewinds is an ideal opportunity for Mexico, particularly the navy, to “continue the evolution of its doctrine. By this I mean expanding the service’s operations from mostly coastal activities to achieving greater capabilities.” For example, Tradewinds will help Mexico “evolve and evaluate its current command and control doctrines regarding this type of operation,” Ehrlich noted.

NAMSI has similarly become a key initiative that is helpful to the three participating navies. In his written testimony for a 2012 hearing at the House Committee on Homeland Security Subcommittee on Border and Maritime Security, then-U.S. Coast Guard Deputy for Operations Policy and Capabilities Rear Admiral William Lee described NAMSI in the following way:

“[The exercise] provides an operational relationship between SEMAR, NORTHCOM, the Government of Canada, and the Coast Guard and coordinates standard procedures for communications, training, procedures, and operations. Since the inception of NAMSI in December 2008, there have been 24 joint cases yielding 62,816 pounds of narcotics seizures.”

While it remains unconfirmed whether this is the first time that NAMSI and Tradewinds are occuring simultaneously, in any case, this presents a great opportunity for Caribbean defense forces. As Ehrlich explained, while these two exercises are different, the themes are generally similar, as their aim is to prepare personnel to face similar threats. “The other participants of Tradewinds can observe the NAMSI maneuvers and learn about the agreements [between Canada, Mexico, and the U.S.]. This could lead to greater interoperability between Caribbean states following the NAMSI model,” he added.

Finally, Tradewinds 2022 will ideally lead to greater interoperability and connections between the Mexican navy with fellow navies and coast guards from the English-speaking Caribbean. While the Mexican navy has sent platforms to previous iterations of Tradewinds, and diplomatic relations are overall cordial, there is a lack of close navy-to-navy relations. Hopefully, Tradewinds 2022 can be the stepping stone for change and stronger naval relations between these services. “The objective of Tradewinds is to increase ties between the English-speaking Caribbean with Canada, Mexico and the United States. [The latter three countries] already have various defense protocols and agreements to promote interoperability,” Ehrlich noted, adding that Tradewinds 2022 could lead to a common doctrine among the participants.

Tradewinds and SOUTHCOM

SOUTHCOM and the U.S. Coast Guard have numerous defense initiatives with Caribbean forces, like Shiprider agreements, transfers of naval technology, and regular bilateral exercises. For example, Freedom-variant littoral combat ship USS Milwaukee (LCS 5) and Jamaica Defence Force (JDF) Coast Guard offshore patrol vessel HMJS Alexander Bustamante conducted maritime maneuvers on February 9.

What makes Tradewinds 2022 particularly important for SOUTHCOM is that these will be the first major exercises that the Command will help organize under the leadership of Army General Laura Richardson, its new commander. General Richardson has already met with Central American and Caribbean defense commanders; during the 2022 Central American Security Conference, held in early February in Belize, the general noted that she looked forward to “discuss[ing] disaster relief and regional security challenges, and strategiz[ing] about how we can leverage annual exercises like Tradewinds and CENTAM Guardian to show just how Integrated and Intertwined we are.” Therefore, Tradewinds will be a great opportunity for the new SOUTHCOM commander to examine how her Command and U.S. partners in the Caribbean work together in the field.

The waters of the Caribbean are far from peaceful—well-known security threats include combating drug trafficking, as well as piracy and human trafficking. There are also environmental crimes like illegal, unreported, and unregulated (IUU) fishing as well as efforts to improve joint responses to natural disasters, which are becoming deadlier and more destructive due to climate change. Hopefully, Tradewinds 2022 will continue to increase interoperability and strong ties among the Caribbean nations, both island states as well as the mainland, to prepare the region to better face common threats together.

Wilder Alejandro Sánchez is an analyst who focuses on international security and geopolitics. The views expressed in this article belong to the author alone and do not necessarily reflect those of any institutions with which the author is associated. Follow him on Twitter: @W_Alex_Sanchez.

Featured Image: Multinational vessels participating in exercise Tradewinds 2021 conduct a photo exercise (PHOTEX) off the coast of Guyana June 18. Tradewinds 2021 is a U.S. Southern Command sponsored Caribbean security-focused exercise in the ground, air, sea, and cyber domains, working with partner nations to conduct joint, combined, and interagency training focused on increasing regional cooperation and stability. (Credit: U.S. Southern Command)

By James Martin and Jasper Campbell

The U.S. Coast Guard has pivoted towards sustained operations in the Western Indo-Pacific Ocean. The Commandant of the Coast Guard, Adm. Karl Schultz, recently outlined significant plans for the region in several speeches and strategic documents.¹ The strategy focuses on working with regional partner nations in an effort to “make the United States the partner nation of choice.” Adm. Shultz cites illegal, unreported, and unregulated (IUU) fishing as a chief concern, along with preserving the rules-based order.² He notes that this paradigm shift, further articulated in the Coast Guard’s IUU Fishing Strategic Outlook, was “not intended to be a counter China Strategy…however China happens to be one of the biggest perpetrators of IUU fishing and IUU fishing is a global threat.”³ This pivot represents one of the most fundamental shifts in missions, one that places them directly in the same conversation as strategic competition.

On its face, the IUU Fishing Strategic Outlook necessitates sustained operations in the far reaches of the Western Pacific. However, in order to achieve the Commandant’s vision for becoming the partner of choice, the Coast Guard only need look 50 miles east of Florida to the Bahamas.⁴ The Bahamas is an archipelagic nation beleaguered by competing fisheries claims, including some coming from U.S. commercial and recreational fishermen. It presents a ready-made test bed for partner building and enforcing fisheries violations without the tyranny of distance. It has the further benefit of strengthening partnerships with the nation that enjoys the closest maritime boundary to the United States outside of Mexico and Canada, and where Chinese economic influence is finding a foothold.⁵ It is an environment where small U.S. Coast Guard cutters or “patrol boats” are uniquely suited to sustained law enforcement operations in shallow littorals.

The Problem

The Bahamas is comprised of over 600 banks and cays, stretching some 100,000 square miles.⁶ Its porous and remote maritime borders are a significant challenge for law enforcement, perhaps the most ready illustration of which is the rampant illegal fishing on the southern edge of the Bahamas by Dominican Republic fishermen.⁶ Dominican fishermen deploy from large, 150-175-foot long motherships in small dinghies and dive using homemade air compressors to harvest as much lobster, conch, and grouper and snapper species as possible. It is estimated that these illegal poaching ventures return to port with over 70,000 pounds of ill-gotten seafood in a single trip, and that they account for 35% of the known Bahamian lobster export of 12.5 million lobsters per year.⁷

As many as 65 other foreign countries have commercial fishing fleets that use Dominican ports as a starting point for illegal incursions into Bahamian waters.⁶ Illegal fishing ventures are often a nexus for other illicit activities, such as human smuggling and narcotics trafficking. In addition to the obvious deleterious economic impacts, IUU fishing precipitates second order economic effects, such as deterring tourism in the southern Bahamas from recreational boaters and anglers who are eager to avoid association with illegal activity.⁷ Meanwhile, farther north, a different illegal fishing threat starves the Bahamian economy. The Florida Fish and Wildlife commission estimates that as many as 50 recreational boats per day cross the Florida Straits to the Bahamas.⁸ Many are well within their rights to catch fish in Bahamian waters and transit back to Florida, provided they have cleared Bahamian customs and abide by specific regulations on how the catch is kept.⁸ Unfortunately, while most boaters maintain the correct permits and clear customs, in effect, paying the Bahamians their due for harvesting their natural resources, a great many do not.

It is well known in South Florida boating circles that South Florida-based commercial and recreational fishermen shoot across the Florida Straits to remote portions of the Great Bahama Bank, south of Bimini, to fill their coolers. While this perfidy is well known by word of mouth, no official studies on the scope of the problem exist. Consequently, enforcement mechanisms are left wanting. Occasionally, a returning fisherman may run afoul of a Coast Guard cutter on patrol, but most boaters make the 50-70-mile trip completely undetected by Bahamian or U.S. law enforcement. Because of the flagrant violations in the Southern Bahamas, “white collar” fisheries violations in the Northern Bahamas from U.S. citizens go largely unpoliced. With a surface force of merely eleven ships and a workforce operating at one-third capacity due to COVID-19, the Royal Bahamian Defense Force (RBDF) cannot adequately enforce the competing IUU fishing fronts.^7,9 Along with debilitating natural disasters, such as Hurricane Dorian in 2018, IUU fishing undermines Bahamian maritime sovereignty and compounds economic fragility.

Becoming the Partner of Choice

While the Coast Guard’s IUU Fishing Strategic Outlook is global in nature, the constructs it will need to employ in order to achieve success have not been tested on a global scale. Capital assets such as the National Security Cutters (NSC) and soon-to-be active Offshore Patrol Cutter (OPC) possess the endurance and crew capacity to support multi-month deployments across affected regions. However, much of the effort required to address IUU fishing will invariably fall on small, capable patrol assets due to the shallow littoral environments that characterize the fishing grounds of the Western Pacific and Oceania. These environments cannot facilitate the same robust logistics chains on which the Coast Guard relies to sustain and maintain cutters in the United States or at its more remote facilities in Bahrain or Guam. Sustained IUU enforcement operations in regions like the Western Pacific require nimble assets such as the Coast Guard’s Fast Response Cutter (FRC) to traverse dense transit and fishing regions. These expeditionary style deployments will likely require refueling and resupplying in under-supported local ports for several months at a time, which can be extremely taxing for both crew and cutter.¹⁰

Within this context, it stands to reason that the Coast Guard should look to regional opportunities like the Bahamas to develop the familiarity necessary to adequately support these operations in distant waters. Bahamian waters are ideal for testing the operational schemas on which the Coast Guard will rely to affect successful IUU enforcement operations globally. The first step towards affecting this outcome is to establish a legal framework to allow Coast Guard cutters persistent access to Bahamian waters. A ready framework for this might be the existing Operation Bahamas Turks and Caicos (OPBAT), a multi-agency framework spearheaded by the U.S. Coast Guard that allows Coast Guard aviation assets and other Department of Homeland Security agencies to assist with counter-narcotics, migrant interdictions, and Search and Rescue missions in the Bahamas.¹¹ U.S. Coast Guard cutters would ideally be paired with RBDF ship riders, imbuing them with Bahamian law enforcement authorities. With such authorities, U.S. cutters would be able to conduct routine patrols deep into Bahamian waters to execute IUU fishing enforcement operations. The interception of a September 2020 illegal fishing venture by the Coast Guard and RBDF venture is cause for celebration.¹² Despite this success, joint enforcement efforts are sporadic at best. In order to effectively prosecute the IUU fisheries mission, efforts must be sustained and repeatable.

Fortunately, Coast Guard District Seven, encompassing the Southeastern United States, is home to 18, soon-to-be 20 Fast Response Cutters by 2022.¹³ With 64 planned FRCs, if the IUU fishing demand signal in the Bahamas indicates more are needed, more could be allocated to District Seven. A wealth of assets and short transits will be a boon to addressing illegal activities in the Bahamas and will build the necessary service “muscle memory” for counter IUU operations in archipelagic zones reminiscent of Pacific Island nations. Key Florida Coast Guard hubs in Miami and Key West are a short transit away and could serve as critical risk mitigators, allowing the Coast Guard flexibility to facilitate sustainment deep into Bahamian waters. ‘1.0 Coverage,’ similar to the Coast Guard’s congressional mandate for a high-endurance cutter to be retained in the Bering Sea at all times, could provide a similar force laydown model.¹⁴ It would provide enough operational flexibility to identify knowledge gaps and develop tactics in countering the IUU scourge.

This concept of operations can be implemented immediately; the assets necessary are in place and nothing needs to be procured. The only necessary action item is reaching a memorandum of understanding with the Bahamian government to allow cutters access to their territorial waters. There are, of course, objectors to the Coast Guard’s presence in the Western Indo-Pacific, whether because of imperialist optics or the notion that the Coast Guard should focus on guarding U.S. coasts instead of worrying about other nation’s problems.¹⁵ However, at a fundamental level, shoring up the maritime sovereignty of Western Indo-Pacific nations only strengthens U.S. national security in the region. If predatory distance water fleets are allowed to make wanton incursions into territorial waters to harvest a country’s natural resources, it undermines their sovereignty and exacerbates food insecurity. Further, it normalizes illegal behavior.

This same thinking applies to the Bahamas. By helping Bahamians shore up their maritime sovereignty with IUU fishing initiatives spearheaded by the Coast Guard, the United States will have a stabilizing effect on the Bahamian economy and security. Due to the persistent presence counter IUU operations require, they will have second order effects in deterring other illegal activities that the Coast Guard has expertise in prosecuting, such as counter narcotics trafficking and human smuggling. The United States has a vested interest in discouraging these illegal activities before they are able to proliferate through the perforated banks and cays that comprise the Bahamas. These illegal ventures make their way to the Western Bahamas, where detection windows are drastically reduced; only a 50-70 mile run across the Florida straits separates the United States from the Bahamas. The third order effects of “harvesting an easy win” in the Bahamas is that it infuses Coast Guard activities in the Western Indo-Pacific with legitimacy, bolstered by obvious and replicable success close to home.

Conclusion

With the specter of strategic competition, the mandate of the Coast Guard’s IUU Fishing Strategic Outlook requires expertise not only in the distant waters of the Western Indo-Pacific but also much closer to home in the Caribbean basin. In the Bahamas, the U.S. Coast Guard can establish a proof of concept in executing counter IUU operations without contending with the tyranny of distance or a lack of assets. This approach will deter illegal maritime activity in a nation that shares a porous maritime border with the United States, shoring up Bahamian maritime sovereignty while bolstering U.S. national security. If the Coast Guard spearheads a counter IUU fishing initiative in the Bahamas, competitors and allies alike will soon be put on notice that the Coast Guard has mastered expeditionary IUU fisheries enforcement.

Lieutenant James Martin is a Coast Guard Cutterman who has served aboard three Coast Guard cutters, including as commanding officer of the USCGC Ibis (WPB-87338). He holds a bachelor’s degree with honors in naval architecture and marine engineering from the U.S. Coast Guard Academy.

Lieutenant Jasper Campbell served on active duty for six years in the afloat and C5Icommunities. He is currently on a sabbatical, launching a technology startup, and hopes to return to sea in 2023 upon resuming active duty. He holds a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from the U.S. Coast Guard Academy.

References

1. https://www.forbes.com/sites/craighooper/2020/09/27/in-a-new-initiative-the-us-coast-guard-targets-illegal-fishing/

2. https://www.uscg.mil/Portals/0/Images/iuu/IUU_Strategic_Outlook_2020_FINAL.pdf

3. https://cimsec.org/sea-control-219-uscg-commandant-admiral-karl-schultz/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Sea-Control-CIMSEC+%28Sea+Control%29

4. https://warontherocks.com/2021/10/the-bahamas-a-close-but-unfamiliar-u-s-partner/

5. https://scholarship.law.duke.edu/delpf/vol28/iss2/5/

6. http://rbdf.gov.bs/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/Maritime-Security-Plan-2021.pdf

7. https://ideas.ted.com/an-encounter-with-poachers-in-the-bahamas/

8.https://myfwc.com/fishing/saltwater/recreational/bahamas/

9.  https://www.damen.com/en/news/2013/04/patrol_vessels_for_royal_bahamas_defence_force

10. https://content.govdelivery.com/accounts/USDHSCG/bulletins/2a93090

11. https://www.dea.gov/press-releases/2015/09/09/opbat-assists-25-million-drug-bust-bahamas

12. https://www.atlanticarea.uscg.mil/Our-Organization/District-7/Units/

13. https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/publications/United%20States%20Coast%20Guard%20-%20Bering%20Sea%20and%20Arctic%20Region%20Coverage_0.pdf

14. https://blog.usni.org/posts/2020/09/21/the-u-s-coast-guard-should-guard-the-u-s-coasts

Featured image: the U.S. Coast Guard and Royal Bahamas Defence Force crew interdict two Dominican Republic-flagged ships illegally fishing off Diamond Point, Great Bahama Bank, September 17, 2020. (Credit: Royal Bahamas Defence Forces)