Q&A

Port and Cargo Security: How Is the U.S.A. Doing Now?

Stephen E. Flynn of the Council on Foreign Relations is the Ira A. Lipman Senior Fellow for Counterterrorism and National Security Studies. Flynn recently spoke with CSO Senior Editor Joan Goodchild about how the US is doing when it comes to port and cargo security

By Joan Goodchild, Senior Editor

The biggest challenge in maturing our efforts to improve supply chain security involve things that lie largely outside the scope of what individual companies can do and what government officials can do. Even one as powerful as the U.S. government. This is because global logistics operate in what is essentially a transnational environment where direct contact with government authorities is limited and where the capabilities, and integrity, of those government authorities are very uneven. What is required is that the security regimes operate much like the modern safety and quality regimes where there are industry-wide efforts to develop standards, like ISO, and to police those standards, like classification societies such as Bureau Veritas, American Bureau of Shipping, and auditors, where governments play essentially a spot-check role.

In my experience, the evolution of container security has been constrained not because there is active resistance from the private sector. I continue to find interest and concern that more needs to be done among many responsible companies. The problem lies with the fact that the development of the regime continues to be too government-centric in its design and execution. That is, CBP has largely tried to maintain control of setting the global requirements and it has been reluctant to accept third party policing mechanisms to verify those standards are being kept.

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