Page 25: of Maritime Reporter Magazine (August 2024)

A Partner in the Service’s Ef orts to T wart

Narcotics and Human Smugglers

By Dr. Joe DiRenzo & Bert Macesker n 2011 the 210-foot Coast Guard of a research project in 2014, one inno- operational Coast Guard units to evalu-

Cutter VIGILANT was on patrol vation adapted the electronics found in ate the operational use.

in the Caribbean when it came GPS-tracking hunting dog collars with For example, in the Spring of 2020,

Iupon a suspected maritime narcot- a small ? oating buoy printed on RDC’s U.S. Southern Command began en- ics smuggler. As the chase ensued, the 3-D printer. Following that early proto- hanced counter narcotics operations in suspected smuggler jettisoned bales type effort, the RDC Science and Tech- the Western Hemisphere to disrupt the of what turned out to be cocaine. The nology Innovation Center (STIC) part- ? ow of drugs. The RDC took this oppor-

VIGILANT crew marked the position nered with the Naval Air Warfare Center tunity to help operational commanders on their radar and gathered the latitude to develop a custom-designed Automat- by packaging promising technologies and longitude for the bales, then went ic Identi? cation System (AIS) marker into easy-to-use Go-Kits and shipping in pursuit of the suspect vessel. After buoy. Twenty MOTTs, a MOTT User’s them to cutters at the speed of need. (See the suspect was apprehended, the VIGI- Manual, and a MOTT Technical Design picture of MOTTs next to the picture of

LANT returned to the original position Package were produced. The RDC did a Coast Guard canine equipped with in search of the bales, eventually ? nding all of that while continuing to work with RDC protective technology.) Included one. At that time, it was standard prac- tice to use paper plates to help track jet- tisoned contraband. The requirement to track and retrieve bales, which serve as evidence, is a critical part of the inter- diction process.

Following that mission, the cutter’s crew sent a message to both USCG

Atlantic Area and the Coast Guard Re- search and Development Center (RDC) asking for research to be conducted re- garding development of a mobile track- ing system that could be jettisoned and inexpensively serve as a moving beacon for the bales. The RDC took on the chal- lenge and developed multiple proto- types of the Maritime Object Tracking

Technology or MOTT. This included drift studies to determine tracking ob- ject characteristics like bale drift param- eters.

Over the next few years, the RDC developed prototypes and deployed them to major cutters in the Atlantic and Paci? c. Sometime after complet- ing early prototype evaluations as part www.marinelink.com 25

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