Baja Oleada was considered highly successful at the beginning. But the smugglers refined their patterns and operations. A cat-and-mouse game between smugglers and the Coast Guard continued for the next several years, with each side employing new strategies, tactics, and methods. Enforcement planners eventually decided that rather than continue tweaking Baja Oleada, a new, broader effort, Operation Tempestad, would be initiated in December 2011 with essentially the same goals, but a lot more flexibility to respond to changing trends.

Years of cooperative operations under Baja Oleada had fostered closer, faster intelligence processing and analysis and honed operations planning, allowing operational commanders to utilize intelligence on a real-time basis, rather than just putting assets into a region to protect it. Operation Tempestad, Spanish for “storm,” also increased emphasis on the smugglers’ overall supply chain, with more focus on arrival zones in addition to departure and maritime transit zones that were the focus of Baja Oleada.

The shift from Baja Oleada to Operation Tempestad might be compared to the difference between placing a police station in a troubled neighborhood in hopes that criminals would then avoid the area, and deploying mobile police units able to respond whenever and wherever criminal activity was detected or intelligence showed it was likely.

“For the time, I think Oleada was the right approach. Tempestad is an expansion, widening our approach to make the most of the resources at hand. We have to take a more holistic approach, looking at what threats to address with what assets. In the past, we had the luxury of a shotgun approach; now we are more surgical,” said Camp, who oversaw the change, including the implementation of regular reviews and assessments of operational success.

Camp went on to say that there were some fantastic upgrades and innovations in their intelligence efforts and they used them to their best advantage. Gone are the days when the service would patrol in areas where they thought criminal activities were likely, but ended up with few hits. The Coast Guard doesn’t have the assets to do that these days.

Another major difference is the scope of interagency cooperation, which increased significantly as Operation Tempestad expanded the operational focus to U.S. coastal waters, ports, and other access points.

Tempestad involves many more partner agencies, with Coast Guard sector commands having a lot more involvement in the day-to-day operations of the cutters and aircraft. Typically, tactical control may be shifted down to the sector level so that they can engage their local port partners and get more resources on scene when necessary.

The greater flexibility of Operation Tempestad, enhanced intelligence from broader interagency involvement and access to and use of assets – Coast Guard and partner – means authorities can identify and counter changing trends within targeted criminal operations as they happen, rather than responding after the fact.

Operation Tempestad also increases the Coast Guard’s ability to be unpredictable.

“I think the Coast Guard as a whole is always trying to adjust to the changing threat and putting a certain level of unpredictability into our security operations,” Fazio added. “We can’t cover every foot of shore and border all the time, but a little bit of unpredictability and the flexibility to place resources when and where needed can go a long way.”

As they became familiar with the “zone defense” of Baja Oleada, the criminal gangs employed their own brand of unpredictability, changing the types of vessels used, routes taken, and other factors with the goal of simply going around patrol units.

Operation Tempestad’s more holistic, district-wide, comprehensive approach to all counter-smuggling within the 11th District met the changing threat. Traditionally, the maritime routes used by smugglers had involved crossing from Baja California into San Diego. Today there are landings as far north as Santa Barbara and everywhere in between.

Also, the maritime threat ranges from open-hulled pangas – traditional Mexican fishing boats – to pleasure boats that blend in with the recreational crowd, to the use of personal watercraft in San Diego.