Q: Could you tell us a little bit about the fact that the drug trade is moving out into the Pacific? What does that mean for the Coast Guard?
Loy: Well, the interdiction challenge is sort of an ever-present challenge and, of course, the bad guys, because of the enormous profits that are taken from that business, have a way of attempting to find the soft spots in our armor, whatever that might be. Our challenge is to sort of get inside their mental discipline and be there when they show, rather than to try to chase them where they happen to be at the moment.
The Pacific has an enormously greater challenge because of distances, and the natural choke points that the Caribbean offers clearly provides tactical opportunities for us to deploy forces accordingly. So we have to depend much more on the Department of Defense as their intelligence apparatus and the detection and monitoring responsibilities that they have under the law. And over the course of this past year, we have had just growing production out of that partnership and it has now been reflected in these numbers that we announced yesterday which record an annual record for our service.
Q: Do you expect those to keep going up?
Loy: Well, we would like to think that, first and foremost, that Plan Colombia, the president's initiative to assist the country of Colombia over the next several years, deal internally with the production end of that business such that there is not as much on the high seas for us to worry about interdicting.
The national drug policy of the nation, as prescribed each year by General McCaffrey, is a sort of a three-legged stool. It's about source country reductions in production, it's about transit zone interdiction, and it's about demand reduction in our own nation, which is an enormously important part of the profile as well, and we hope to continue to work hard on all three areas.