“While defending our homeland and defeating adversaries in war remain the indisputable ends of seapower, it must be applied more broadly if it is to serve the national interest. We believe that preventing wars is as important as winning wars,” the report states. “There is a tension, however, between the requirements for continued peacetime engagement and maintaining proficiency in the critical skills necessary to fighting and winning in combat. Maritime forces must contribute to winning wars decisively while enhancing our ability to prevent war, win the long struggle against terrorist networks, positively influence events, and ease the impact of disasters.”

“… Seapower will be a unifying force for building a better tomorrow,” the report reads.

Key to maritime homeland security is the ability to learn about – and interdict – potential threats before they actually threaten U.S. lives, territory, or property. That involves collecting intelligence, knowing what is actionable, and then being able to swiftly and appropriately investigate or act upon that information.

There are many similarities between the Navy’s role of assuring access in the littorals of the world and the Coast Guard’s mission of maritime homeland defense. Both sea services are revitalizing their forces with a network-centric capability to control the maritime domain. The goal is a seamless spectrum of capability that is netted together to share and exploit sensor data with the other platforms with which they operate.

The strategy report cited the importance of defending the homeland far from home. “Maritime forces will defend the homeland by identifying and neutralizing threats as far from our shores as possible. From fostering critical relationships overseas, to screening ships bound for our ports, or rapidly responding to any threats approaching our coastline, our homeland defense effort will integrate across the maritime services, the joint force, the interagency community, our international partners and the private sector to provide the highest level of security possible. When directed, maritime forces will promptly support civil authorities in the event of an attack or natural disaster on our shores.”

For those threats that cannot be stopped overseas, U.S. forces – and in particular the Coast Guard and the Navy – must be able to intercept them on the open ocean, before they blend, with the thousands of commercial vessels, fishermen, or the tens of thousands of pleasure boats.

During interdiction operations, comprehensive interoperability among uniformed agencies, particularly in the areas of command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance (C4ISR), and logistics will be critical, as will the ability to exchange information between and integrate the different layers of access, jurisdiction, authorities, and capabilities of military forces and federal, state, local, and tribal civilian agencies.

Much of the Coast Guard’s detection, monitoring, interdiction, and apprehension operations are conducted with interagency partners. “… Coast Guard operational commanders work across the interagency to provide a robust presence in the U.S. maritime approaches by deploying patrol boats, pursuit-capable smallboats, medium range fixed-wing aircraft, and land-based AUF [airborne use of force] capable helicopters,” said former Coast Guard Commandant Adm. Robert J. Papp Jr., during testimony before a House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure and House Committee on Foreign Affairs joint subcommittee hearing titled “… Confronting Transnational Drug Smuggling: An Assessment of Regional Partnerships,” in April 2014.