May 25, 2021 — President Joe Biden sketched out the business case for a larger U.S. Coast Guard last week, addressing new graduates at the U.S. Coast Guard Academy in New London, Connecticut. But that busy future may not get the cash it needs to become reality.
The mismatch between rhetoric and resources—always a challenge with the “can-do” Coast Guard—is particularly stark in the battle to constrain depredatory deep-sea fishing. Motivational speeches are nice to hear, but as Joe Biden’s Pentagon embraces a high-tech vision for America’s national security, the unprecedented emergence of illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing as a major national security issue risks being overlooked, sunk under a hail of hypersonics, artificial intelligence and robots that big defense contractors with big pockets really, really want the U.S. to pursue.
For some of President Biden’s newly appointed Pentagon leaders, disinterest in illegal fishing may well be a case of “not invented here.” And that’s a shame. One of the bigger surprises of the Trump administration is that illegal fishing managed to go “viral” during one of the most environmentally unfriendly administrations in American history. The policy focus was developed behind the scenes, ignored as high-level Trump administration officials focused on almost everything else but the sea. The issue was quietly advanced via a low-key confederation of oft-ignored professionals in the State Department, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the U.S. Coast Guard, elements of the Department of Defense as well as certain intelligence agencies.